The Magus - John Fowles [286]
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 lipservice 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 X's, 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 Nescaf�nd eating damp biscuits. As usual, I had forgotten to buy any bread.