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.