I got clumsily to my feet, and spent an embarrassing minute waiting at the entrance for the waitress to come and take my money. My shameful retreat was partly inspired by paranoia. The girl and her friend had come in after me, and had sat at a table where I couldn’t help watching them. It was absurd. I began to feel that every girl who crossed my path was hired to torment and test me; I started checking through the window before I went in to coffee bars and restaurants, to see if I could get a corner free of sight and sound of the dreadful creatures. My behavior became increasingly clownish; and I grew angrier and angrier with the circumstances that made it so. Then Jojo came.
It was during the last week of September, a fortnight after my last meeting with Lily de Seitas. Bored to death with myself, I went late one afternoon to see an old René Clair. I sat without thinking next to a humped-up shape and watched the film—the immortal Italian Straw Hat. By various hoarse snuffling noises I deduced that the Beckett-like thing next to me was female. After half an hour she turned to me for a light. I 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 gray 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 in her; accepted, in her accept-all way, that I was just “a wee bit cracked.”
Then one October evening I knew I wouldn’t sleep and I offered to drive her anywhere she wanted within a night’s range. She thought a moment and said, goodness knows why, Stonehenge. So we drove down to Stonehenge and walked around the looming menhirs at three o'clock with a cold wind blowing and the sound of peewits in the moon-drenched wrack above our heads. Later we sat in the car and ate chocolate. I could just see her face; the dark smudges of her eyes and the innocent puppy-grin.
“Why you grinning, Jojo?”
“'Cause I’m happy.”
“Aren’t you tired?”
“No.”
I leant forward and kissed the side of her head. It was the first time I’d ever kissed her, and I started the engine immediately. After a while she went to sleep and slowly slumped against my shoulder. When she slept she looked very young, fifteen or sixteen. I got occasional whiffs of her hair, which she hardly ever washed. I felt for her almost exactly what I felt for Kemp; great affection, and not the least desire.
One night soon after that we went to the cinema. Kemp, who thought I was mad to be sleeping with such an ugly layabout—I didn’t attempt to explain the true situation—but was glad I was showing at least one sign of normality, came with us, and afterwards we all went back to her “studio” and sat boozing cocoa and the remains of a bottle of rum. About one Kemp kicked us out; she wanted to go to sleep, as indeed I did myself. I went with Jojo and stood by the front door. It was the first really cold night of the autumn, and raining hard into the bargain. We stood at the door and looked out.
“I’ll sleep upstairs in your chair, Nick.”
“No. It’ll be all right. Stay here. I’ll get the car.” I used to park it up a side street. I got in, coaxed the engine into life, moved forward; but not far. The front wheel was flat as a pancake. I got out in the rain and looked, cursed, and went to the boot for the pump. It was not there. I hadn’t used it for a week or more, so I didn’t know when it had been pinched. I slammed the lid down and ran back to the door.
“I’ve got a bloody fiat.”
“Gude.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t be such a loon. I’ll sleep in your auld armchair.”
I considered waking Kemp, but the thought of all the obscenities she would hurl round the studio soon killed that idea. We climbed up the stairs past the silent sewing rooms and into the fiat.
“Look, you kip in the bed. I’ll sleep here.”
She wiped her nose on the back of her hand and nodded; went to the bathroom, then marched into the bedroom, lay on the bed and pulled her wretched old dufflecoat over her. I was secretly angry with her, I was tired, but I pulled two chairs together and stretched out. Five minutes passed. Then she was in the door between the rooms.