“Nick?”
“Mm.”
“Come on.”
“Come on where.”
“You know.”
“No.”
She stood there in the door for a silent minute. She liked to mull over her gambits.
“I want you to.” It struck me that I’d never heard her use the verb “to want” in the first person before. -
“Jojo, we’re chums. We’re not going to bed together.”
“It’s only kipping together.”
“No.”
“Just once.”
“No.”
She stood plumply in the door, in her blue jumper and jeans, a dark stain of silent accusation. Light from outside distorted the shadows round her figure, isolated her face, so that she looked like a Munch lithograph. Jealousy; or Envy; or Innocence.
“I’m so cold.”
“Get under the blankets then.”
She gave it a minute more and then I heard her creep back to bed. Five minutes passed. I felt my neck get stiff.
“I’m in the bed. Nick, you could easy sleep on top.” I took a deep breath. “Can you hear?”
“Yes.”
Silence.
“I thought you were asleep.”
Rain pounded down, dripped in the gutters; wet London night air pervaded the room. Solitude. Winter.
“Could I come in a wee sec and put the fire on?”
“Oh God.”
“I won’t wake you at all.”
“Thanks.”
She slopped into the room and I heard her strike a match. The gas phutted and began to hiss. A pinkish glow filled the room. She was very quiet, but after a while I gave in and began to sit up.
“Don’t look. I havna any clothes on.”
I looked. She was standing by the fire pulling down an outsize man’s singlet. I saw, with an unpleasant little shock, that she was almost pretty by gaslight. I turned my back and reached for a cigarette.
“Now look, Jojo, I’m just not going to have this. I will not have sex with you.”
“I didn’t fancy to get into your clean bed with all m' clothes on.”
“Get warm. Then hop straight back.”
I got halfway through my cigarette.
“It’s only 'cause you been so awfla nice to me.” I refused to answer. “I only want to be nice back.”
“If it’s only that, don’t worry. You owe me nothing.”
I slid a look round. She was sitting on the floor with her plump little back to me, hugging her knees and staring into the fire. More silence.
She said, “It isn’t only that.”
“Go and put your clothes on. Or get into bed. And then we’ll talk.”
The gas hissed away. I lit another cigarette from the end of the last.
“I know why.”
“Tell me.”
“You think I’ve got one of your nasty London diseases.”
“Jojo.”
“I mebbe have. You don’t have to be ill at all. You can still carry all the microbes round with you.”
“Stop it.”
“I’m only sayin' what you’re thinldn'.”
“I’ve never thought that.”
“I don’t blame you. I don’t blame you at all.”
“Jojo, shut up. Just shut up.”
Silence.
“You juist want to keep your beautiful Sassenach coddies clean.”
Then her bare feet padded across the floor and the bedroom door was slammed—and sprung open again. After a moment I heard her sobbing. I cursed my stupidity; I cursed myself for not having paid more attention to various signs during the evening—washed hair done into a ponytail, one or two looks. I had a dreadful vision of a stem knock on the door, of Alison standing there. I was also shocked. Jojo never swore and used as many euphemisms as a girl of fifty times her respectability. Her last line had cut.
I lay a minute, then went into the bedroom. The gasfire cast warm light through. I pulled the bedclothes up round her shoulders.
“Oh Jojo. You clown.”
I stroked her head, keeping a firm grip on the bedclothes with the other hand, in case she made a spring for me. She began to snuff. I passed her a handkerchief.
“Can I tell you somethin'?”
“Of course.”
“I’ve never done it. I’ve never been to bed with a man.”
“Jesus.”
“I’m clean as the day I was born.”
“Thank God for that.”
She turned on her back and stared up at me.
“Do you not want me now?”
That sentence somewhat tarnished the two before. I touched her cheek and shook my head.
“I love you, Nick.”
“Jojo, you don’t. You can’t.”
She began to cry again; my exasperation.
“Look, did you plan this? That fiat tire?” I remembered she had slipped out, allegedly to go upstairs, while Kemp was making the cocoa.
“I couldna help it. That night we went to Stonehenge. I didna sleep a wink all the wa' back. I juist sat there pretendin'.” Tears in her eyes again.
“Jojo. Can I tell you a long story I’ve never told anyone else? Can I?”
I dabbed her eyes with the handkerchief and then I began to talk, sitting with my back to her on the edge of the bed. I told her everything about Alison, about the way I had left her, and I spared myself nothing. I told her about Greece, I told her, if not the real incidents of my relationship with Lily, the emotional truth of it. I told her about Parnassus, all my guilt. I brought it right up to date, to Jojo heseif and why I had cultivated her. She was the strangest priest to confess before; but not the worst. For she absolved me.
If only I had told her at the beginning; she would not have been so stupid then.
“I’ve been blind. I’m sorry.”
“I couldna help it.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Och. I’m only a teenage moron from Glasgow.” She looked at me solemnly. “I’m only seventeen, Nick. It was all a fib.”
“If I gave you your fare, would you—”
But she was shaking her head at once.
There were minutes of silence then and in it I thought about pain, about hurting people. It was the only truth that mattered, it was the only morality that mattered, the only sin, the only crime. Once again I had committed the one unforgivable: I had 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?”