The Magus - John Fowles [255]
said the clerk. And that was that. And what did I care? Why should I go on searching for her? But I waited in all the evening after my visit to the estate agent, hoping for another message. The next day I moved to the Russell Hotel, so that I had only to stroll out of the entrance and look across the square to see the house, to wait for the windows on that black third floor to light. Four days passed, and no lights; no letters, no phone calls, not the smallest sign. I grew impatient and frustrated, hamstrung by this inexplicable lapse in the action. I thought perhaps that they had lost me, they did not know where I was, and that worried me; then it angered me that I was worried. The need to see Alison drowned everything else. To see her. To twist the secret out of her; and other things I could not name. A week passed, a week wasted in cinemas, theatres, in lying on my hotel bed and staring at the wall, waiting for that implacably silent telephone beside me to ring. I nearly sent a cable to Bourani with my address; but pride stopped that. At last I gave in. I could stand the hotel and Russell Square, that eternally empty flat, no longer. I saw a place advertised on a tobacconist's board. It was a scruffy attic "flat" over two floors of sewing rooms at the north end of Charlotte Street, on the other side of the Tottenham Court Road. It was expensive, but there was a telephone and, though the landlady lived in the basement, she was an unmistakable Charlotte Street bohemian of the 1930's vintage: sluttish, battered, chain-smoking. She managed to let me know within the first five minutes I was in the house that Dylan Thomas had once been "a close friend"--"God, the times I've had to put him to bed, poor sod." I didn't believe her. "Dylan slept (or slept it off) here" is to Charlotte Street rather what the similar claim about Queen Elizabeth used to be to the country inns of England. But I liked her--"My name's Joan, everyone calls me Kemp." Kemp's intellect, like her pottery and paintings, was a mess; but her heart was in the right place. "Okay," she said at the door, after I'd agreed to take the rooms. "As long as I have your money. Bring in who you want when you want. The last boy was a ponce. An absolute sweetie. The bloody fascists got him last week." "Good Lord." She nodded. "Them." I looked round, and saw two young policemen standing on the corner. I also bought an old MG. The body was bad and the roof leaked, but the engine seemed to have a year or two of life left. I took Kemp out to Jack Straw's Castle on a grand inaugural run. She drank like a trooper and talked like one, but in every other way she was what I wanted and what I needed: a warm heart and a compulsive gossip about herself, who accepted without suspicion my explanation of my joblessness; partly reconciled me, in her bitter-warm way, to London and being English; and--at least to begin with--stopped me from being, whenever I felt it, too morbidly abandoned and alone. A long August passed, and I had fits of acute depression, fits of torpid indifference. I was like a fish in stale water, stifled by the greyness of England. Just as I looked back, Adam after the fall, to the luminous landscapes, the salt and thyme of Phraxos, I looked back to the events of Bourani, which could not have happened, but which had happened, and found myself, at the end of some tired London afternoon, as unable to wish that they had not happened as I was to forgive Conchis for having given me the part he did. Slowly I came to realise that my dilemma was in fact a sort of _de facto_ forgiveness, a condonation of what had been done to me; even though, still too sore to accept that something active had taken place, I thought of "done" in a passive sense.
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I thought in the same way of Lily. One day I nearly crashed, breaking hard at the glimpse of a girl with long blonde hair walking down a side street. I swerved the car into the curb and raced after her. Even before I saw the plain face I knew it was not Lily. But if I had rushed after the girl in the side street it was because I wanted