“I’m clean as the day I was born.”
“Thank God for that.”
She turned on her back and stared up at me.
“Do you not want me now?”
That sentence somewhat tarnished the two before. I touched her cheek and shook my head.
“I love you, Nick.”
“Jojo, you don’t. You can’t.”
She began to cry again; my exasperation.
“Look, did you plan this? That flat tire?” I remembered she had slipped out, allegedly to go upstairs, while Kemp was making the cocoa.
“I couldna help it. That night we went to Stonehenge. I didna sleep a wink all the wa’ back. I juist sat there pretendin’.” Tears in her eyes again.
“Jojo. Can I tell you a long story I’ve never told anyone else? Can I?”
I dabbed her eyes with the handkerchief and then I began to talk, sitting with my back to her on the edge of the bed. I told her everything about Alison, about the way I had left her, and I spared myself nothing. I told her about Greece, I told her, if not the real incidents of my relationship with Lily, the emotional truth of it. I told her about Parnassus, all my guilt. I brought it right up to date, to Jojo herself and why I had cultivated her. She was the strangest priest to confess before; but not the worst. For she absolved me.
If only I had told her at the beginning; she would not have been so stupid then.
“I’ve been blind. I’m sorry.”
“I couldna help it.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Och. I’m only a teenage moron from Glasgow.” She looked at me solemnly. “I’m only seventeen, Nick. It was all a fib.”
“If I gave you your fare, would you—”
But she was shaking her head at once.
There were minutes of silence then and in it I thought about pain, about hurting people. It was the only truth that mattered, it was the only morality that mattered, the only sin, the only crime. Once again I had committed the one unforgivable: I had hurt an innocent person. It needed clearer definition than that, because no one was innocent. But there was a capacity in everyone to be innocent, to offer that something innocent in them, perhaps to offer it as clumsily as Jojo had, even not to offer it innocently, but with darker motives. But there remained a core of innocence, a purely innocent will to give something good; and this was the unforgivable crime—to have provoked that giving and then to smash, as I had just had to smash, the gift to pieces.
History had in a sense smashed the ten commandments of the Bible; for me they had never had any real meaning, that is any other than a conformitant influence. But sitting in that bedroom, staring at the glow of the fire on the threshold of the door through to the sitting room, I thought that at last I began to see a commandment. The missing link; though no link was ever missing, but simply unseen. And after all, not unseen by Lily de Seitas. I had had it whispered in my ear only a few weeks before; I had had it demonstrated to me in a way at my “trial”; for that matter I had even paid lip-service to it long before I went to Greece. But now I felt it; and by “feel” I mean that I knew I had to choose it, every day, even though I went on failing to keep it, had every day to choose it, every day to try to live by it. And I knew that it was all bound up with Alison; with choosing Alison, and having to go on choosing her every day. When Lily de Seitas had whispered it in my ear I had taken it as a retrospective thing, a comment on my past; and on my anecdote. But it had been a signpost to my future. Adulthood was like a mountain, and I stood at the foot of this cliff of ice, this impossible and unclimbable: Thou shalt not commit pain.
“Could I have a fag, Nick?”
I went and got her a cigarette. She lay puffing it; intermittently red-apple-checked, watching me. I held her hand.
“What are you thinking, Jojo?”
“Sposin’ she…”
“Doesn’t come?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll marry you.”
“That’s a fib.”
“Give you lots of fat babies with fat cheeks and grins like monkeys.”
“Och you cruel monster.”
She stared at me; silence; darkness; frustrated tenderness. I remembered having sat the same way with Alison, in the room off Baker Street, the October before. And the memory told me, in the simplest and most revealing way, how much I had changed.
“Someone much nicer than I am will one day.”
“Is she like me at all?”
“Yes.”
“Oh aye. I’ll bet. Puir girl.”
“Because you’re both… not like everybody else.”
“There’s only one of everyone.”
I went out and put a shilling in the meter; then stood in the doorway between the two rooms. “You ought to live in the suburbs, Jojo. Or work in a factory. Or go to a public school. Or have dinner in an embassy.”
A train screamed to the north, from Euston way. She turned and stubbed the cigarette out.
“I wish I was real pretty.”
She pulled the bedclothes up round her neck, as if to hide her ugliness.
“Being pretty is just something that’s thrown in. Like the paper round the present. Not the present.”
A long silence. Pious lies. But what breaks the fall?
“You’ll forget me.”
“No I won’t. I’ll remember you. Always.”
“Not always. Mebbe a wee once in a while.” She yawned. “I’ll remember you.” Then she said, minutes later, as if the present was no longer quite real, a childhood dream, “In stinkin’ auld England.”
77
It was six o’clock before I got to sleep, and even then I woke up several times. At last, at eleven, I decided to face the day. I went to the bedroom door. Jojo had gone. I looked in the kitchen that was also a bathroom. There, scrawled on the mirror with a bit of soap were three Xs, a Goodbye, and her name. As casually as she had slipped into my life, she had slipped out of it. On the kitchen table lay my car pump.
The sewing machines hummed dimly up from the floor below; women’s voices, the sound of stale music from a radio. I was the solitary man upstairs.
Waiting. Always waiting.
I leant against the old wooden draining-board drinking Nescafé and eating damp biscuits. As usual, I had forgotten to buy any bread. I stared at the side of an empty cereal packet. On it a nauseatingly happy “average” family were shown round a breakfast table; breezy tanned father, attractive girlish mother, small boy, small girl; dreamland. Metaphorically I spat. Yet there must be some reality behind it all, some craving for order, harmony, beyond all the shabby cowardice of wanting to be like everyone else, the selfish need to have one’s laundry looked after, buttons sewn on, ruts served, name propagated, meals decently cooked.
I made another cup of coffee. Cursed Alison, the bloody bitch. Why should I wait for her? Why of all places in London, a city with more eager girls per acre than any other in Europe, prettier girls, droves of restless girls who came to London to be stolen, stripped, to wake up one morning in a stranger’s bed.
Then Jojo. The last person in the world I had wanted to hurt. As if I had kicked an emotionally starving mongrel in its poor, thin ribs.
A violent reaction set on me, born of self-disgust and resentment. All my life I had been a sturdy contra-suggestible. Now I was soft; remoter from freedom than I had ever been. I thought with a leap of excitement of life without Alison, of setting out into the blue again… alone, but free. Even noble, since I was condemned to inflict pain, whatever I did. To America, perhaps; to South America.
Freedom was making some abrupt choice and acting on it; was as it had been at Oxford, allowing one’s instinct-cum-will to fling one off at a tangent, solitary into a new situation.
Hazard, I had to have hazard. I had to break out of this waiting room I was in.
I walked through the uninspiring rooms. The Bow chinoiserie plate hung over the mantelpiece. The family again; order and involvement. Imprisonment. Outside, rain; a gray scudding sky. I stared down Charlotte Street and decided to leave Kemp’s, at once, that day. To prove to myself that I could move, I could cope, I was free.