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.
I went down to see Kemp. She took my announcement coldly. I wondered if she knew about Jojo, because I could see a stony glint of contempt in her eyes as she shrugged off my excuse—that I had decided to rent a cottage in the country.
“You taking Jojo, are you?”
“No. We’re bringing it to an end.”
“You’re bringing it to an end.”
She knew about Jojo.
“All right. I’m bringing it to an end.”
“Tired of slumming. Thought you would be.”
“Think again.”
“You pick up a poor little scob like that, God only knows why, then when you’re sure she’s head over fucking heels in love with you, you act like a real gentlemen. You kick her out.”
“Look—”
“Don’t kid me, laddie.” She sat square and inexorable. “Go on. Run back home.”
“I haven’t got a bloody home, for Christ’s sake.”
“Oh yes you have. They call it the bourgeoisie.”
“Spare me that.”
“Seen it a thousand times. You discover we’re human beings. Makes you shit with fright.” With an insufferable dismissiveness she added, “It’s not your fault. You’re a victim of the dialectical process.”
“And you’re the most impossible old—”
“Dah!” She turned away as if she didn’t care a damn, anyway; as if life was like her studio, full of failures, full of mess and disorder, and it took her all her energy to survive in it herself. A Mother Courage gone sour. She went to her paints table and started fiddling.
I went out. But I had hardly got to the top of the stairs to the ground floor when she came out and bawled up at me.
“Let me tell you something, you smug bastard.” I turned. “You know what will happen to that poor damn kid? She’ll go on the game. And you know who’ll have put her there?” Her outstretched finger seared its accusation at me. “Mister Saint Nicholas Urfe. Esquire.” That last word seemed the worst obscenity I had ever heard pass her lips. Her eyes scalded me, then she went back and slammed the studio door. So there I was, between the Scylla of Lily de Seitas and the Charybdis of Kemp; bound to be sucked down.
I packed in a cold rage; and lost in a fantasy row with Kemp, in which I scored all the points, I lifted the Bow plate carelessly off its nail. It slipped; struck the edge of the gas-fire; and a moment later I was staring down at it on the hearth, broken in two across the middle.
I knelt. I was so near tears that I had to bite my lips savagely hard. I knelt there holding the two pieces. Not even trying to fit them together. Not even moving when I heard Kemp’s footsteps on the stairs. She came in and I was kneeling there. I don’t know what she had come up to say, but when she saw my face she did not say it.
I raised the two pieces a little to show her what had happened. My life, my past, my future. Not all the king’s horses, and all the king’s men.
She was silent a long moment, taking it in, the half-packed case, the mess of books and papers on the table; the smug bastard, the broken butcher, on his knees by the hearth.
She said, “Jesus Christ. At your age.”
* * *
So I stayed with Kemp.
78
The smallest hope, a bare continuing to exist, is enough for the antihero’s future; leave him, says our age, leave him where mankind is in its history, at a crossroads, in a dilemma, with all to lose and only more of the same to win; let him survive, but give him no direction, no reward; because we too are waiting, in our solitary rooms where the telephone never rings, waiting for this girl, this truth, this crystal of humanity, this reality lost through imagination, to return; and to say she returns is a lie.
But the maze has no center. An ending is no more than a point in sequence, a snip of the cutting shears. Benedick kissed Beatrice at last; but ten years later? And Elsinore, that following spring?
So ten more days. But what happened in the following years is silence; is another mystery.
* * *
Ten more days, in which the telephone never rang.
Instead, on the last day of October, All Hallows Eve, Kemp took me for a Saturday-afternoon walk. I should have suspected such an uncharacteristic procedure; but it happened that it was a magnificent day, with a sky from another world’s spring, as blue as a delphinium petal, the trees russet and amber and yellow, the air as still as in a dream.
Besides, Kemp had taken to mothering me. It was a process that needed so much compensatory bad language and general gruffness that our relationship was sergeant-majored into something outwardly the very reverse of its true self. Yet it would have been spoilt if we had declared it, if we had stopped pretending that it did not exist; and in a strange way this pretending seemed an integral part of the affection. Not declaring we liked each other showed a sort of mutual delicacy that proved we did. Perhaps it was Kemp who made me feel happier during those ten days; perhaps it was an aftermath of Jojo, least angelic of angels, but sent by hazard from a better world into mine; perhaps it was simply a feeling that I could wait longer than I had till then imagined; whatever it was, something in me changed. I was still the butt, yet in another sense; Conchis’s truths, especially the truth he had embodied in Lily, matured in me. Slowly I was learning to smile, and in the special sense that Conchis intended. Though one can accept, and still not forgive; and one can decide, and still not enact the decision.
We walked north, across the Euston Road and along the Outer Circle into Regent’s Park. Kemp wore black slacks and a filthy old cardigan and an extinguished Woodbine, the last as a sort of warning to the fresh air that it got through to her lungs only on a very temporary sufferance. The park was full of green distances; of countless scattered groups of people, lovers, families, solitaries with dogs, the colors softened by the imperceptible mist of autumn, as simple and pleasing in its way as a Boudin beachscape.
We strolled, watched the ducks with affection, the hockey players with contempt.
; “Nick boy,” said Kemp, “I need a cup of the bloody national beverage.”
And that too should have warned me; her manes all drank coffee. So we went to the tea pavilion, stood in a queue, then found half a table. Kemp left me to go to the ladies’. I pulled out a paperback I had in my pocket. The couple on the other side of the table moved away. The noise, the mess, the cheap food, the queue to the counter. I guessed Kemp was having to queue also. And I became lost in the book.
Then.
In the outer seat opposite, diagonally from me.
So quietly, so simply.
She was looking down, then up, straight at me. I jerked round, searching for Kemp. But I knew where Kemp was; she was walking home.
All the time I had expected some spectacular reentry, some mysterious call, a metaphorical, perhaps even literal, descent into a modern Tartarus. Not this. And yet, as I stared at her, unable to speak, at her steady bright look, the smallest smile, I understood that this was the only possible way of return; her rising into this most banal of scenes, this most banal of London, this reality as plain and dull as wheat. Since she was cast as Reality, she had come in her own; and so she came, yet in some way heightened, stranger, still with the aura of another world. From, yet not of, the crowd behind her.
A dark-brown tweed suit. A dark-green scarf tied peasant-fashion round her head. She sat with her hands in her lap, waiting for me to speak, those clear eyes on mine. And it was impossible. Now it was here, I couldn’t change. I couldn’t look at her.
I looked down at the book, as if I wanted no more to do with her. Then angrily up past her at a moronically curious family, scene-sniffing faces at the table across the gangway. Then down at my book again.
Suddenly she stood up and walked away. I watched her move between the tables. Her smallness, that slightly sullen smallness and slimness that was a natural part of her sexuality. I saw another man’s eyes follow her out through the door.
I let a few stunned, torn moments pass. Then I went after her, pushing roughly past the people in my way.
She was walking slowly across the grass, towards the east. I came beside her. She gave the bottom of my legs the smallest glance. We said nothing. I looked round. So many people, so many too far to distinguish.
And Regent’s Park. Regent’s Park. That other meeting; the scent of lilac, and bottomless darkness.
“Where are they?”
She gave a little shrug. “I’m alone.”
“Like hell.”
We walked more silent paces. She indicated with her head an empty bench beside a tree-lined path. She seemed as strange to me as if she had come from Tartarus; so cold, so calm.
I followed her to the seat. She sat at one end and I sat halfway along, turned towards her, staring at her. Returned from the dead. Yet it infuriated me that she would not look at me, had made not the slightest sign of apology; and now would not say anything.
I said, “I’m waiting. As I’ve been waiting these last three and a half months.”
She untied her scarf and shook her hair free. It had grown longer, and she had a warm tan. She looked as she had when we had first met. From my very first glimpse of her I realized, and it seemed to aggravate my irritation, that the image, idealized by memory, of a Lily always at her best had distorted Alison into what she was only at her worst. She was wearing a pale brown man’s-collared shirt beneath the suit. A very good suit; Conchis must have given her money. She was pretty and desirable; even without… I remembered Parnassus. Her other selves. She stared down at the tip of her flat-heeled shoe.
I said, “I want to make one thing clear from the start.” She said nothing. “I forgive you that foul bloody trick you played this summer. I forgive you whatever miserable petty female vindictiveness made you decide to keep me waiting all this time.”
She shrugged. A silence. Then she said, “But?”
“But I want to know what the hell went on that day in Athens. What the hell’s been going on since. And what the hell’s going on now.”
“And then?”
Those gray eyes; her strangeness made them colder.
“We’ll see.”
She took a cigarette out of her handbag and lit it; and then without friendliness offered me the packet. I said, “No thanks.”
She stared into the distance, towards the aristocratic wall of houses that make up Cumberland Terrace and overlook the park. Cream stucco, a row of white statues along the cornices, the muted blues of the sky.
A poodle ran up to us. I waved it away with my foot, but she patted it on the head. A woman called, “Tina! Darling! Come here.” In the old days we would have exchanged grimaces of disgust. She went back to staring at the houses. I looked round. There were other seats a few yards away. Other sitters and watchers. Suddenly the whole peopled park seemed a stage, the whole landscape a landscape of masquers, spies. I lit one of my own cigarettes; willed her to look at me, but she wouldn’t. She was still punishing me; not now with absence, but with silence.
I had imagined this scene so often; and it was always in essence a melting, a running into each other’s arms.
“Alison.”
She looked at me briefly, but then down again. She sat, holding the cigarette. As if nothing would make her speak. A plane leaf lolloped down, touched her skirt. She bent and picked it up, smoothed its yellow teeth against the tweed. An Indian came and sat on the far end of the bench. A threadbare black overcoat, a white scarf; a thin face. He looked small and unhappy, timidly alien; a waiter perhaps, the slave of some cheap curryhouse kitchen. I moved a little closer to her, lowered my voice, and forced it to sound as cold as hers.
“What about Kemp?”
“We went to see her.”
“We?”
“Yes. We.”
“Have you seen them? All of them?”
“Nicko, please don’t interrogate me. Please don’t.”
My name; a tiny shift. But she was still set hard and silent.
“Are they watching? Are they here somewhere?”
An impatient sigh.
“Are they?”
“No.” But at once she qualified it. “I don’t know.”
I said, “Look at me. Look at me.”
And she couldn’t do it. Face to face she could not lie to me. She looked away and said, “It was the one last thing. One last time. It’s nothing.”
There was a long pause.
I said, “You can’t lie to me. Face to face.”
She touched her hair; the hair, her wrist, a way she had of raising her face a little as she made the gesture. A glimpse of the lobe of an ear. I had a sense of outrage, as if I was being barred from my own property.
“You’re the only person I’ve ever felt that about. That they could never lie to me. So can you imagine what it was like in the summer? When I got that letter, those flowers…”
She said, “If we start talking about the past.”
All my overtures were in some way irrelevant; she had something else on her mind. My fingers touched a smooth dry roundness in my coat-pocket: a chestnut, a talisman. Jojo had passed it to me wrapped in a toffee-paper, her pawky joke, one evening in a cinema. I thought of Jojo, somewhere only a mile or two away through the brick and the traffic, sitting with some new pick-up, drifting into her womanhood; of holding her pudgy hand in the darkness. And suddenly I had to fight not to take Alison’s.
I said, “Allie?”
But coming to a decision, determined to be untouched, she threw the yellow leaf away. “I’ve returned to London to sell the flat.” She looked briefly at me; she wasn’t lying. “I’m going back to Australia.”
Terrible; we were like total strangers.
“Long journey for such a small matter.”
“And to see you.”
“Like this?”
“To see if I…” but she cut her sentence short, as if by some previous resolution. Or advice?
“If you?”
“I didn’t want to come. They made me.”
“Made you?” I sounded unbelieving.
“Made me feel I ought to come.”
“Just to see me.”
“Yes.”
“So you’re here against your will.”
“You could call it that.”
“And now you’ve seen me.”
But she would not answer the implicit question. She threw me one quick look, a sudden flash of fierceness. But then went back to her silence. She was mysterious, almost a new woman; one had to go back several steps, and start again; and know the place for the first time. As if what had once been free in her, as accessible as a pot of salt on a table, was now held in a phial, sacrosanct. But I knew Alison, I knew how she took on the color and character of the people she loved or liked, however independent she remained underneath. And I knew where that smooth impermeability came from. I was sitting with a priestess from the temple of Demeter.
I tried to be matter-of-fact. “Where have you been since Athens? At home?”
“Perhaps.”
I took a breath. “Have you thought about me at all?”
“Sometimes.”
They had told her: Be like white marble, be oblique. But why?
“Is there someone else?”
She hesitated, then said, “No.”
“You don’t sound very certain.”
“There’s always someone else—if you’re looking for it.”
“Have you been… looking for it?”
She said, “There’s no one.”
“And I’m included in that ‘no one’?”
“You’ve been included in it ever since that… day.”
What Lily de Seitas had said: she is not a present being given to you; you must convince her you have the money to pay for her. I looked at Alison’s sullen profile, that perverse stare into the distance. She was aware of my look, and her eyes followed someone who was passing, as if she found him more interesting than me.
I said, “What is it?”
“What’s what?”
“What am I meant to do? Take you in my arms? Fall on my knees? What do they want?”
The Magus Page 67