by John Fowles
"Except that this wasn't a painting. It was a girl with as much morality as a worn-out whore from the Place Pigalle."
She let a little silence pass, the elegant drawing-room reprove, then said quietly, though with a feminine irony, "Strong words."
I turned on her. "Look, I begin to wonder how much you know, First of all, your not so virgin daughter —"
"I know precisely what she did." She sat calmly facing me; but a little more erect. "And I know precisely the reasons behind what she did. But if I told you them, I would tell you everything."
"Shall I call those two down there? Tell your son how his sister performs — I think that's the euphemism — with a Negro?"
She let silence pass again, as if to isolate what I said; as people leave a question unanswered in order to snub the questioner.
"Does a Negro make it so much worse?"
"It doesn't make it any better."
"He is a very intelligent and charming man. They have been sleeping together for some time."
"And you approve?"
"My approval is unasked for and ungiven. Lily is of age."
I grinned sourly at her, then looked out at the garden. "Now I understand why you grow so many flowers." She shifted her head, not understanding. I said, "To cover the stink of sulphur." She got up and stood with one hand on the mantelpiece, watching me as I walked about the room; still calm, alert, playing me as if I was a kite. I might plunge and flare; but she held the string.
"Are you prepared to listen without interrupting?"
I looked at her; then shrugged assent.
"Very well. Now let us get this business of what is and what is not sexually proper out of the way." Her voice was cold; a fierceness. "Because I live in a Queen Anne house do not think I live, like most of the rest of our country, by a Queen Anne morality."
"Nothing was further from my mind."
"Will you listen?" I went and stood by the window, my back to her. I lit a cigarette; I felt that at last I ought to have her in a corner; I must have her in a corner.
"How shall I explain to you? If Maurice were here he would tell you that sex is perhaps a greater, but in no way a different, pleasure from any other. He would tell you that it is only one part — and not the essential part — in the relationship we call love. He would tell you that the essential part is truth, the trust two people build between their minds. Their souls. What you will. That the real infidelity is the one that hides the sexual infidelity. Because the one thing that must never come between two people who have offered each other love is a lie."
I stared out over the lawn. I knew it was prepared, all she was saying; perhaps learnt by heart, a key speech.
"Are you daring to preach to me, Mrs. de Seitas?"
"Are you daring to pretend that you do not need the sermon?"
"Look —"
"Listen to me." If her voice had held the least sharpness or arrogance, I should not have done so. But it was unexpectedly gentle; almost beseeching. "I am trying to explain what we are. Maurice convinced us — over twenty years ago — that we should banish the normal taboos of sexual behavior from our lives. Not because we were more immoral than other people. But because we were more moral. We attempted to do that in our own lives. I have attempted to do it in the way I have brought up our children. And I must make you understand that sex is for us, for all of us who help Maurice, not an important thing. Or not the thing it is in most people's lives. We have more important things to do."
I would not turn and look at her.
"Before the war I twice played roles somewhat similar to Lily's with you. She is prepared to do things that I was not. I had far more inhibitions to shed. I also had a husband whom I loved sexually as well as in the other more important ways. But since we have penetrated so deep into your life, I owe it to you to say that even when my husband was living I sometimes gave myself, with his full knowledge and consent, to Maurice. And in the war he in his turn had an Indian mistress, with my full knowledge and consent. Yet I believe ours was a very complete marriage, a very happy one, because we kept to two essential rules. We never told each other lies. And the other one . . . I will not tell you until I know you better."
I looked around then, contemptuously. I found her calm vehemence uncomfortable; the madness erupting out of calm. She sat down again, on her throne.
"Of course, if you wish to live in the world of received ideas and received manners, what we did, and what my daughter did, is disgusting. Very well. But remember that there is another possible explanation. She may have been being very brave. Neither I nor my children pretend to be ordinary people. They were not brought up to be ordinary. We are rich and we are intelligent and we mean to live rich, intelligent lives."
I said without turning. "Lucky you."
"Of course. Lucky us. And we accept the responsibility that our good luck in the lottery of existence puts upon us."
"Responsibility!" I wheeled round on her again.
"Do you really think we do this just for you? Do you really believe we are not . . . charting the voyage?" I stared back at her, then turned away. She went on in a milder yoice. "All that we did was to us a necessity." She meant, not self-indulgence.
"With all the necessity of gratuitous obscenity."
"With all the necessity of a very complex experiment."
"I like my experiments simple."
"The days of simple experiments are over."
A long silence fell between us. I was still full of spleen; and in some obscure way frightened to think of Alison in this woman's hands. As one hears of a countryside one has loved being sold to building developers. And I also felt left behind, abandoned again. I did not belong to this other-planet world. She came behind me and put her hand on my shoulder and made me turn.
"Do I look an evil woman? Did my daughters?"
"Actions. Not looks." My voice sounded raw; I wanted to slap her arm down, to get out. "Are you absolutely sure our actions have been nothing but evil?"
I looked down. I wouldn't answer. She took her hand away, but stayed close in front of me. "Will you trust me a little — just for a little while?" I shook my head, but she went on. "You can always telephone me. If you want to watch the house, please do. But I warn you that you will see no one you want to see. Only Benjie and Gunnel and my two middle children when they come home from France next week. Only one person is making you wait at the moment."
"She should tell me so herself."
She looked out of the window, then sideways at me.
"I should so like to help you."
"I want Alison. Not help."
"May I call you Nicholas now?" I turned away from her; went to the sofa table, stared down at the photos there. "Very well. I will not ask again."
We faced each other.
"I could go to a newspaper and sell them the story. I could ruin your whole blasted . . ."
"Just as you could have brought that cat down across my daughter's back."
I looked sharply back at her. "It was you? In the sedan?"
"No."
"Alison?"
"You were told. It was empty." She met my disbelieving eyes. "I give you my word. It was not Alison. Or myself." She smiled at my still suspicious look. "Well. Perhaps there was someone there."
"Who?"
"Someone . . . quite famous in the world. Whose face you might have recognized. That is all."
Tendrils of her sympathy began to sneak their way through my anger. With a curt look, I wheeled and walked towards the door. She came after me, snatching up a sheet of paper from the top of the desk.
"Please take this."
I saw a list of names; dates of birth; Hughes to de Seitas, February 22, 1933; the telephone number.
"It doesn't prove anything."
"Yes it does. Go to Somerset House."
I shrugged, pushed the list carelessly in my pocket and went on without looking at her. I opened the front door with her just behind me; and she came down the steps aft
er me. I got in and she stood by the car. I gave her a quick glance up and reached for the ignition key, but her hand stopped my arm.
"I shall be waiting."
"You'll have to wait then." I stared balefully up at her. "Because I'll see Alison in hell before I come to you again."
Her hand stayed, as if she wanted to say something more. I stared at the dashboard. The moment her hand lifted I switched on. As I went out of the gate I saw her in the mirror. She was standing there on the step in front of the open door, and her arms were raised in the Ka gesture.
73
Yet even then I knew I was pretending to be angrier than I really was; that just as she was trying to break down my hostility by charm, I was trying to break down her charm by hostility. I didn't in the least regret being ungracious, rebuffing her overtures; and I more than half meant, at the time, what I said about Alison.
Because this was now the active mystery: that I was not allowed to meet Alison. Something was expected of me, some Orphean performance that would gain me access to the underworld where she was hidden . . . or hiding herself. I was on probation. But no one gave me any real indication of what I was meant to be proving. I had apparently found the entrance to Tartarus. But that brought me no nearer Eurydice.
Just as the things Lily de Seitas had told me brought me no nearer the permanent mystery: what voyage, what charts?
My anger carried me through the next day; but the day after that I went to Somerset House and found that every fact Lily de Seitas had given me to check was true, and somehow this turned my anger into a depression. That evening I rang up her number in Much Hadham. The Norwegian girl answered the phone.
"Dinsford House. Please, who is it?" I said nothing. Someone must have called, because I heard the girl say, "There is no one to answer."
Then there came another voice.
"Hello. Hello."
I put down the receiver. She was still there. But nothing would make me speak to her. The next day, the third after the visit, I spent in getting drunk and in composing a bitter letter to Alison in Australia. I had decided that that was where she was. It said everything I had to say to her; I must have read it twenty times, as if by reading it enough I could turn it into the definitive truth about my innocence and her complicity. But I kept on putting off posting it, and in the end it spent the night on the mantelpiece.
* * *
I had got into the habit of going down and having breakfast with Kemp most mornings, though not those last three, when I had carried with me a scowl against the whole human condition. Kemp had no time at all for the kitchen, but she could make a good cup of coffee; and on the fourth morning, I badly needed it.
When I came in she put the Daily Worker down — she read the Worker "for the truth" and a certain other paper "for the fucking lies" — and sat there smoking. Her mouth without a cigarette was like a yacht without a mast; one presumed disaster. We exchanged a couple of sentences. She fell silent. But during the next few minutes I became aware that I was undergoing a prolonged scrutiny through the smoke she wore like a merciful veil in front of her Gorgon-like morning face. I pretended to read; but that didn't deceive her.
"What's up with you, Nick?"
"Up with me?"
"No friends. No girls. Nothing."
"Not at this time of the morning. Please."
She sat there dumpily, in an old red dressing gown, her hair uncombed, as old as time.
"You're not looking for a job. That's all my fanny."
"If you say so."
"I'm trying to help you."
"I know you are, Kemp."
I looked up at her. Her face was a disaster. She had long ago let it go to rack and ruin. It was pasty, bloated, with the eyes permanently narrowed against tobacco smoke; somehow like a mask in a Noh play, which in an odd way suited the Cockney resonances that loitered in her voice and the hard anti-sentimentality she affected. But now, in what was for her an extraordinary gesture of affection, she reached across the table and patted my hand. She was, I knew, five years younger than Lily de Seitas; and yet she looked ten years older. She was by ordinary standards foulmouthed; a blatant member of what had been my father's most hated regiment, one he used to consign far lower even than the Damned Socialists and the Blasted Whitehall Airy Fairies — the Longhaired Brigade. I had a moment's vision of his standing, his aggressive blue eyes, his bushy colonel's moustache, in the door of the studio; the unmade divan, the stinking old rusty oilstove, the mess on the table, the garish sexual-fetal abstract oils that littered the walls; a tat of old pottery, old clothes, old newspapers. But in that short gesture of hers, and the look that accompanied it, I knew there was more real humanity than I had ever known in my own home. Yet still that home, those years, governed me; I had to repress the natural response. Our eyes met across a gap I could not bridge; her offer of a rough temporary motherhood, my ffight to what I had to be, the lonely son. She withdrew her hand.
I said, "It's too complicated."
"I've got all day."
Her face peered at me through the blue smoke, and suddenly it seemed as blank, as menacing, as an interrogator's. I liked her, I liked her, yet I felt her curiosity like a net drawn round me. I was like some freakish parasitic species that could establish itself only in one rare kind of situation, by one precarious symbiosis. They had been wrong, at the trial. It was not that I preyed on girls; but the fact that my only access to normal humanity, to social decency, to any openness of heart, lay through girls, preyed on me. It was in that that I was the real victim. There was only one person I wanted to talk with. Till then I could not move, advance, plan, progress, become a better human being, anything; and till then, I carried my mystery, my secret, around with me like a defense; as my only companion.
"One day, Kemp. Not now."
She shrugged; gave me a stonily sibylline look, auguring the worst.
The old char who cleaned the stairs once a fortnight bawled through the door. My phone was ringing. I raced up the stairs, lifting the receiver on what seemed the dying ring.
"Hello. Nicholas Urfe."
"Oh, good morning, Urfe. It's me. Sandy Mitford."
"You're back!"
"What's left of me, old man. What's left of me." He cleared his throat. "Got your note. Wondered if you were free for a spot of lunchington."
A minute later, a time and place fixed, I was reading once more my letter to Alison. The injured Malvolio stalked through every line.
In another minute there was no letter; but, as with every other relationship in my life, pounded ashes.
* * *
Mitford hadn't changed at all, in fact I could have sworn that he was wearing the same clothes, the same dark blue blazer, dark gray flannels, club tie. They looked a little more worn out, like their wearer; he was far less jaunty than I remembered, though after a few gins he got back some of his old guerrilla cockiness. He had spent the summer "carting bands of Americans" round Spain; no, he'd received no letter from Phraxos from me. They must have destroyed it. There was something they hadn't wanted him to tell.
Over sandwiches we had a talk about the school. Bourani wasn't mentioned. He kept on saying that he'd warned me, and I said, yes, he'd warned me. I waited for a chance to broach the only subject that interested me. Eventually, as I'd been hoping, he made the opening himself. "Ever get over to the waiting room?"
I knew at once that the question was not as casual as he tried to make it sound; that he was both afraid and curious; that in fact we both had the same secret reason for meeting.
"Oh God, now I meant to ask you about that. Do you remember, just as we said goodbye . . ."
"Yes." He gave me a tightly cautious look. "Never went to a bay called Moutsa? Rather jolly, over on the south side?"
"Of course. I know it."
"Ever notice the villa on the cape to the east?"
"Yes. It was always shut up. I was told."
"Ah. Interesting. Very interesting." He looked reminiscently across the loung
e; left me in suspense. I watched him lift, an infuriating upward arc, his cigarette to his lips; the gentleman connoisseur of fine Virginia; then fume smoke through his nostrils. "Well that was it, old boy. Nothing really."
"But why beware?"
"Oh it's nothing. No-thing at all."
"Then you can tell me."
"I did, actually."
"You did!"
"Row with collaborationist. Remember?"
"Yes."
"Same man who has the villa."
"Oh, but. . ." I flicked my fingers . . . "wait a moment. What was his name?"
"Conchis." He had an amused smile on his face, as if he knew what I was going to say. He touched his moustache; always preening his moustache.
"That's right. But I thought he did something rather fine during the Resistance."
"Not on your nelly. Actually he did a deal with the Germans. Personally organized the shooting of eighty villagers. Then got his kraut chums to line him up with them. See. As if he was all brave and innocent."
"But wasn't he badly wounded, or something?"
He blew out smoke, despising my innocence. "You don't survive a German execution, old boy. No, the bugger pulled a very fast one. Acted like a traitor and got treated like a bloody hero. Even forged a phony German report on the incident. One of the neatest little cover-up jobs of the war."
I looked sharply at him. A dreadful new suspicion crossed my mind. New corridors in the labyrinth.
"But hasn't anyone . . .?"
Mitford made the Greek corruption gesture; thumb and forefinger.
I said, "You still haven't explained the waiting-room business."
"His name for the villa. Waiting for death or something. Had it nailed up on a tree in Frog."
His finger traced a line. "Salle d'attente."
"What happened between you?"
"Nothing, old boy. Absolutely nothing."
"Come on." I smiled ingenuously. "Now I know the place."
I remembered as a very small boy lying on the bough of a willow over a Hampshire stream; I was watching my father casting for a trout. It was his one delicacy, casting a dry fly, posing it on the water as soft as thistledown. I could see the trout he was trying to coax into a rise. And I remembered that moment when the fish floated slowly up and hovered beneath the fly, a moment endlessly prolonged in a heart-stopping excitement; then the sudden swift kick of the tail and the lightning switch of my father's strike; the ratcheting of the reel.