by John Fowles
She stares out over the river. ‘I know what you mean. Like things in dreams.’
‘It’s all I can remember about that day now. The whole summer.’
She leans back against the willow-stem beside her, turned a little towards him, her head tilted back. She has left her dark glasses in the punt. After a moment she closes her eyes. He glances at her face, those eyelashes, that mouth, the grave girl under the sometimes outrageous one. She murmurs, ‘On the banks of the gentle stream.’
‘I know.’
And silence falls between them. Two more punts pass on their way downstream back towards Oxford. The clouds are thickening, a steep, opaque rain-mountain coming from the west, over the Cunmor Hills. The sunlight disappears. He looks up at the sky.
‘Are you cold?’
She shakes her head, without opening her eyes. Overhead a huge American bomber, a Flying Fortress, roars slowly down westward below the clouds on its way to land at Brize Norton. Perhaps Andrew is right, it carries the murderer: he chews gum, in a baseball hat, watching a panel of instruments, up there. The thing is two miles away, a mere speck, when she speaks.
‘Maybe it’s right. That we should have found it.’
He turns, to see her eyes open, watching him.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Just… the way we’ve all lived these last three years. And reality. ‘It’s been the most marvellous three years of my life.’
‘And mine.’
‘Meeting Nell… and you. Anthony.’ He stares at his feet. ‘All that.’
‘But has it been real?’
He leans back on an elbow, tears off a grass-stalk, bites its end. ‘I thought you and Anthony were very real.’
She is silent a moment.
‘I was revising Rabelais last night. Pals çe que voudras.’
‘Since when was that a sin?’
‘Perhaps what we want isn’t what is. Or ever could be.’
‘But we’ve done what we want. At least part of it.’
‘Inside something which is… literary? Like the Abbaie de Théme. Not anything real at all.’
He cocks a thumb back. ‘If you’re saying that’s reality… honest to God, some Carfax tart who got picked up by’
‘Like your rabbit in the reaper?’
‘But that’s not us.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure.’ He grins drily up. ‘Anthony would be deeply shocked if he heard you talking like this.’
‘Perhaps that’s a fault in Anthony.’
‘I shall tell him every word you said.’
She smiles gently, then bends forward, buries her head against her clasped knees; speaks into the peasant skirt.
‘I’m just scared that these will have turned out to be the happiest years of our lives. For all four of us. Because we’ve been in love, we’ve grown up, we’ve had such fun. No responsibilities. Playacting. Games.’
‘We’ve still had the fun.’
Now she props her chin on her hands, and surveys him. Then without warning she stands and walks back to the champagne bottle and picks it up by the golden neck. She brings it beside him, then once again without warning swings her arm and tosses the bottle out into the river. It splashes, sinks, bobs back to the surface a moment, then sinks again, and for good.
He stares up at her. “Why did you do that?’
Looking at the river, at the place where the bottle sank, she says, ‘Are you and Nell going to marry, Dan?’
He searches her oblique face.
“Why on earth do you ask that?’
She kneels beside him, avoiding his eyes. ‘I just wondered.’
‘Has Nell said we aren’t?’
She shakes her head. ‘You both seem so secretive about it.’
‘Do you realize you’re the first girl I’ve been out alone with, apart from Nell, for at least eighteen months?’ He pushes her arm lightly. ‘Oh Jane, come on, love, for Christ’s sake… you may be transatlantic orphans, but you don’t have to play the heavy sister. I mean why else should I be so desperately looking for a job here next year?’
She slips him a little oblique smile. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Nell feels marriage and final years don’t go together. So do I. And getting formally engaged is’ He breaks off, covers his eyes. ‘Oh Christ. A brick. The man has dropped a brick.’
‘So vieuxjeu?’
‘Oh God.’
‘No. Be honest.’
‘You know what I meant.’
‘We’re freaks?’
‘Of course not. Just that… well, you’re not Nell. And Anthony’s not me.’
She bows her head in acceptance. ‘I see.’
He eyes her, then sits up. ‘Jane, is this why we’re out together?’
‘In a sort of way.’
‘You absurd old thing.’
‘Mother hen.’
‘Anthony knows?’
‘He suggested it.’
He gives a sniff of amusement towards the hills.
‘I get it. When he comes back tomorrow, he’s going to sneak off alone with Nell. It’s a bloody conspiracy.’
‘Converting the heathens.’
‘I suppose he can’t help it. I must say I thought better of you.’ She smiles. He adds, ‘I wonder where they’ll find their corpse.’
‘Idiot.’
He leaves a pause. ‘On the matter of secrets… are you going to let him convert you?’
‘I haven’t made up my mind yet, Dan.’
‘You ought to have met my father. That would have put you off the whole shoot for life.’
‘Should one judge faith by people?’
‘I still hope Anthony doesn’t succeed.’
“Why’s that?’
He stares across the river at the clouded west. ‘You don’t know what it’s like. Not even Anthony. Living in the shadow of a church. It forces you to hide so much, you can’t imagine if you haven’t been through it. The unreality of it. Like what you were saying about Oxford. Only far worse. Not even the fun.’ He stared across the river at the dark hills. ‘I could become a thousand things, but I’ll never be a Christian again as long as I live.’
Spoken like a true Oedipus complex.’
Their eyes meet, and they smile, then both look down, with that acute self-consciousness of young adults, ever sensing new situations, new knowledges, new awarenesses; drowned in self-interest, blind to all but each new moment’s tendrils. He looks at his watch. ‘They should have got through by now. I’ll go and look.’
He walks back into the field a few yards out from the willows, scanning eastward for dark figures. After a moment she comes beside him, searching also. She speaks without looking at him.
‘I think Nell’s very lucky, Dan. That was something else I wanted to say.’
‘No luckier than Anthony.’
She whispers, ‘All these lucky living people.’ And then, before he can decide what a certain wistful dryness in her voice can have meant, she speaks more normally and points. ‘There!’
At the far end of the field, further to the south than they had expected, five figures appear from the willows: two in uniform, three in civilian clothes. The two uniformed men carry waders slung over their shoulders. Another man carries a rolled-up stretcher. Another has a black box slung over his shoulder. Daniel waves, and one of the uniformed men gravely raises an arm in acknowledgment.
Watching them walk through the sea of buttercups, he says, ‘Why did you throw that champagne in the river?’
He glances at her beside him. She looks down into the grass at their feet.
‘It just felt right.’
He puts an arm round her shoulders and kisses the side of her head. She remains staring at the grass.
‘Why did you do that?’
He smiles. ‘For the same reason.’
An Unbiased View
This isn’t what I promised to write, just before you ran away. But it’s still pure fiction. Of course
.
About Mr Wolfe. Not you.
It was at Claridge’s. A first-floor suite full of Louis-something furniture. Not too bad, perhaps the three of them cancelled one another out and for once there was at least a pretence they were looking for actress rather than lay potential. I knew Dan was slightly drunk and I wasn’t impressed. Or I was disappointed. After the script. He hardly said a word, not even when we were introduced. A kind of bored leer (he must have been drunk, he normally never puts on like that with total strangers). Bill and the man Gold did the chat. I sensed Dan was trying to dissociate himself. So why was he there? I think I thought he was rather pathetic, really. Like some character out of Hemingway. Or the man in Under the Volcano. You can see I’m tough and wise and sensitive and virile and literary and lost and totally above all this because I’m drunk.
Terribly dated.
At one point I mentioned I’d been in one of his plays. We’d done it for two weeks in Birmingham as a run-in for the main season, a little pretence of honesty before the crap started. I said how well I’d liked it. Actually I hadn’t much, it’s one of his weakest (I now know, having read and reread them all), but I wanted to say something. I knew Dan couldn’t be for much in the decision, that he must be there mainly out of courtesy. Perhaps I was already sorry for him.
He said, Good.
It was the only time I found him interesting. He said ‘good’ like: You stupid, pretentious bitch. As if I were some Chelsea nit-head.
I said, trying to remind him I was a cut above mere drama school, And my tutor at Sussex was an admirer of yours. (Well, he had once mentioned Dan’s name.)
He slid his eyes at the other two.
He said, I think the girl really wants the part.
They grinned, and I had to smile. That left him not smiling, and carefully avoiding my eyes, the mean bastard.
He once said to me later, You know why I spend so much time paring dialogue? Because I loathe actors. Those were always two things about him. He wasn’t a playwright, a dramatist turned script. writer. All he did, I write dialogue. Once he put it: I’m a dialogue installer and repairman. Another time: At least most screen-actors never learn to act. That was my sin, that day.
They’d run the two previous parts already picked me, it seems. It wasn’t much more than a formality. He claimed he was very drunk at Claridges’, not slightly drunk, and couldn’t remember anything. So he’d better not alter this.
A bit more than medium height, greying a little at the fringes. The hair cut more American than British. Trend-conscious American executive. Bill’s wild locks and Mexican moustache made Dan look very passé. He always had that faint air, very much that male type physically, of the Duke of Windsor when he was still young. Rather a sullen-shy face, but the body not gone to fat. A good mouth, his best feature. His eyes too fixed and pale, I never really went for them, despite their occasional sexiness. A sort of challenge, they always stared a little. When he was bored, he used it consciously, as if he was somewhere else, and wished you were. It was a rudeness I rather got to like, probably because I learnt how to control it. If it was aimed at me, I knew how to kid him out of it. And useful, if it was aimed at someone who bored me as well. As they often did, obviously. Agreeing on what’s a bore is a main reason the thing happens.
I’ve just reread that last paragraph and it’s too based on that first meeting. I make him too stony, too static. And he wasn’t a heavy drinker at all. He moved lightly, he was never physically clumsy. Sometimes I wished he was, it was as if he’d studied not being clumsy, how to be deft. Contradicting what he felt about acting. So usually he’d come on a shade too urbane (this is in public). The much-travelled man of the world and all that. On the other hand (as he knows) I hate men who can’t handle hotels, restaurants, waiters success life, if you have to lead it. I suppose doing it well inevitably means roleplaying. A good escort, as publicity would say.
I still can’t define his essence. Something in transit, hardly ever altogether with you. I used to think it was the age thing, but it was much more than that, not just those moments when he slipped on his father, his uncle face, like the time he first talked marriage, up in the Mojave. When I explained why not, he went young again. Absurd. He got the faces in exactly the wrong order. If he’d asked me young, it might have been so different. I was falling in love with him (or the idea of him) then, on the brink of losing my cool, I knew it would come up and I knew the answer would come from way beyond a prepared decision, if he chose the right moment. Out of instinct, the time and the place and the mood. He’d never have muffed it so badly in a script.
Not just in transit. Self-contained. Very planned and compact, like his handwriting. Like a good leather suitcase in an airport lounge, neatly locked, waiting to be taken somewhere else, with a destination label you can’t quite read. Or when you could go closer and did read, it was just the name and the airport the other end, and you hadn’t heard of either. To begin with I found this very attractive. Not quite being able to read him, which also meant knowing it couldn’t last, he was passing. Realizing he was (and not just in the literal sense) deeply divorced. Homeless, permanently mid-Atlantic and in spite of the way he clung to his Englishness in accent and idiom, the kind of parenthesis he always let you see round his Americanisms, and his queer old patriotism—what I thought of sometimes as his Visit-Britain self, chatting with picturesque old gaiters in an oak-beamed country pub and quaffing your tankard of ale (that kind of phony vision of what is really trendy weekenders swilling vodka below walls covered with Hong Kong horse-brasses). I used to get mean about that, a nasty little Seventies bird: if he loved it so much, why was he here?
That was a place we didn’t meet. I’ve never been a country girl (thank Christ, says she). It shocked him that I didn’t despise Los Angeles on sight. Or want to go back to the boring old Mojave desert.
And Tsankawj. Oh God. But I can’t deal with that now.
I remember the day, early on, it was night actually, he first came out about his country retreat at home. All the time he was describing it, the landscape, Devon, the wildlife, his childhood as if all that was why it meant so much to him, I sensed something else. What he really needed was not the place, but an excuse to talk about it. He hardly ever lives there, it’s really just a hobby, something he’s acquired on the way to what he actually is. Which of course he knows or rather, since he’s as scared of not seeming to see his own paradoxes as a good chess-player of exposing his queen, he thinks he knows. He said it once, when we were talking about Citizen Kane (he may alter this if I’ve got it wrong): how the great masterstroke was the Rosebud symbolism, how the worst corruption of the corrupt practitioners of a corrupt art was the notion that you could buy back innocence. Like a Mafia contribution to the local priest as if that would save you if there really were a Heaven and it truly judged. I didn’t tell him I couldn’t see why being objective about his pseudo-farm let him out, either.
But I didn’t dislike him for it. He never realized he wasn’t ugly when he was fallible.
And his father being a vicar (I hadn’t then realized The Empty Church was autobiographical). I laughed, I just couldn’t believe it. I didn’t really believe it till the day we were out driving down to Marineland and got into a freeway crawl, and he started singing hymns. Guying them, all their Christian nonsense. But he’d remembered so many. That was another moment I loved him. He was fun to be with sometimes.
So the self-contained thing was really just a symptom of his inability to relate to anything but a place where he didn’t have to relate, except verbally, and after a few Dettols. I never got far beyond even that secret. To his real ones, like Caroline. I hated the way he used to talk (before I had it out with him) about her, by implication so dismissively, contemptuously, as if she were some useless secretary he was stuck with at home, instead of his own daughter. All right, so her mother’s screwed her up and given her values he despises. But it was transparent that in fact he was just hurt, resentful… and not o
nly about the past, having lost her, but also about having got hooked on me, the incest bit (but what did he think he sometimes was for me?), and hating it and loving it.
Then all the murk behind his broken marriage. I gave up trying to penetrate that. And his other women, his quite grotesque evasiveness about that, if I got nosey. As if I might be offended, as if that kind of past ever made a man less attractive. I shouldn’t call him a smart leather suitcase. He’s really an old split parcel, done up with fifty thousand clumsy knots. He outrages all my Scottishness.
All this was summed up on that weird last evening (the second-sight thing was nonsense, but it was strange, Dan, I did feel something was going to happen to us). When you, I mean he, talked of chasms. And I told him he meant barricades. I hope he’ll think very hard about that, if he ever reads this.
I’m running and running him down, but all this actually made us more equal. I never realized so clearly before that ‘old’ minds are also young minds in old bodies. (Unkind, I mean nice no-longer-young bodies.) There were increasingly times when I felt older. I was older. When that extraordinary call came, he was like a child, a small child, a small boy who is frightened and excited and trying to hide both by being ‘mature’. Somebody truly, actually, for God’s sake really wanted him. He felt set free, I could feel it. I was very angry, which I hid. Not that he decided to go, but had the nerve to drag me in as a pretext. I don’t know why I should sometimes have been worried about using him. At least I’ve been open about it.
I look back now and I see that its all happening, something like it, was inevitable. After Tim and I broke up and I ran wild, it was kind of in the air. It had to be someone like Dan, in the end. This was an element I brought in from the first (though it wasn’t calculated, I’m really saying he’s also taught me to be more honest). It had had to happen, it had a kind of dialectical inevitability, therefore it must one day change to something else. That ‘therefore’ was always around. Made it a stage, in both senses.
It was Harold, in the Birmingham days, who gave me the clue. He said: All good actresses are whores. Because on top of the normal need to experience, we have a professional duty to experience. I was conscious of that long before Dan. I was very conscious of it when I split with Timothy. Even at the worst of it, our fighting and screaming, a secret little Jenny-doll sat in my brain licking cream. That first screen part was full of the cream she’d been licking, if I’m frank.