The Magus - John Fowles [288]
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 centre. 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 colours 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 naticnal 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