The Magus - John Fowles [283]
saw a round-cheeked face, no makeup, a fringe of brown hair pigtailed at the back, thick eyebrows, very dirty fingernails holding a fag end. When the lights went on and we waited for the next feature she tried, with a really pitiable amateurishness, to pick me up. She was dressed in jeans, a grubby grey polo-necked sweater, a very ancient man's dufflecoat; but she had three queer asexual charms--a face-splitting grin, a hoarse Scots accent and an air of such solitary sloppiness that I saw in her at once both a kindred spirit and someone worthy of a modern Mayhew. Somehow the grin didn't seem quite real, but the result of pulling strings. She sat puppy-slumped like a dejected fat boy, and tried very unsuccessfully to dig out of me what I did, where I lived; and then, perhaps because of the froglike grin, perhaps because it was a lapse so patently unlikely to lead to danger, so patently not a test, I asked her if she wanted a coffee. So we went to a coffee bar. I was hungry, I said I was going to have some spaghetti. At first she wouldn't have any; then she admitted she had spent the last of her money on getting into the cinema; then she ate like a wolf. I grew full of kindness to dumb animals. We went on to a pub. She had come from Glasgow, it seemed, two months before, to be an art student. In Glasgow she had belonged to some bizarre Celtic-Bohemian fringe; and now she lived in coffee bars and cinemas, "with a wee bitta help from ma friends." She had packed art in; the eternal provincial tramp. I felt increasingly sure of my chastity with her; and perhaps that was why I liked her so much so fast. She amused me, she had character, with her husky voice and her grotesque lack of normal visual femininity. She also had a total absence of pity about herself; and therefore all the attraction of an opposite. I drove her to her door, a rooming house in Notting Hill, and she evidently thought I would be expecting to "kip" with her. I quickly disillusioned her. "Then we'll no see each other again." "We could." I looked at her dumpy figure beside me. "How old are you?" "Twenty-one." "Rubbish." "Twenty." "Eighteen?" "Ge' away wi' you. I'm all of twenty." "I've got a proposition to make." She sniffed. "Sorry. A proposal. Actually, I'm waiting around for someone... a girl... to come back from Australia. And what I'd very much like for two or three weeks is a companion." Her grin split her face from ear to ear. "I'm offering you a job. There are agencies in London that do this sort of thing. Provide escorts and partners." She still grinned. "I'd awfia like you juist to come up." "No--I meant exactly what I offered. You're temporarily drifting. So am I. So let's drift together... and I'll take care of the finances. No sex. Just companionship." She rubbed the inside of her wrists together; grinned again and shrugged, as if one madness more was immaterial. So I took up with her. If they had their eyes on me, it would be up to them to make a move. I thought it might even help to precipitate matters. Jojo was a strange creature, as douce as rain-- London rain, because she was seldom very clean--and utterly without ambition or meanness. She slipped perfectly into the role I cast her for. We slopped round the cinemas, slopped round the pubs, slopped round exhibitions. Sometimes we slopped round all day up in my flat. But always, at some point in the night, I sent her slopping back to her cubbyhole. Often we sat for hours at the same table reading magazines and newspapers and never exchanging a word. After seven days I felt I had known her for seven years. I gave her four pounds a week and offered to buy her some clothes and pay her tiny rent. She accepted a dark blue jersey from Marks and Spencers, but nothing else. She fuffilled her function very well; she put off every other girl who looked at us and on my side I cultivated a sort of lunatic transferred fidelity towards her. She was always equable, grateful for the smallest bone, like an old mongrel; patient, unoffended, casual. I refused to talk about Alison, and probably Jojo ceased to believe