by John Fowles
I think of Jenny, her simplicity and careless grace, the way she slips out of clothes into nakedness, into sexuality, as easily as a seal into water. The fuss of those days, the multiple guilts and ignorances Rabelais has won with a vengeance now; and everything is much tamer. No uniforms and uniformity to exorcise; no id to release; no tense long years between puberty and the full exploration of what puberty brings. No doubt we gained in one way; so much had to be sublimated for so long that at least we acquired the rudiments of a genuine culture. Jane and I were five years younger than our children, at the equivalent age, in terms of sexual precocity and its physical and linguistic expression; but five years older in most other things. That is one more chasm.
Our surrender to existentialism and each other was also, of course, fraught with evil. It defiled the printed text of life; broke codes with a vengeance; and it gave Dan a fatal taste for adultery, for seducing, for playing Jane’s part that day. It might seem good, as great yet immoral art can be good; good in sacrificing all to self; but we didn’t realize the non-exchangeability of life and art. In reality that day Dan did not understand what was happening; that as he had been led in, so must he be led out.
They lay clasped afterwards, in a state of delayed shock, far more Candide and Cungonde than would-be young intellectuals. Then they lay on their backs, side by side and hand-in-hand, and stared at the ceiling.
Dan said, ‘What are we going to do?’
She pressed his hand. ‘Nothing.’
‘We can’t… ‘ but he did not finish the sentence.
After a silence she said, ‘I do love Anthony. And Nell loves you.’
‘But we love each other.’
Again she pressed his hand. ‘We could have loved each other.’
Their fingers were interlaced, and he squeezed.
‘We can’t pretend this hasn’t happened.’
‘We must.’
‘But it would be such a lie. Such a parenthesis.’
He was silent. He wanted to look at her, but could not; could only stare at the ceiling above.
She said, ‘Our secret. They mustn’t ever know.’
‘It’s like living with dynamite.’
‘That’s why it had to be exploded. I’ve been terrified Nell will see.’
For the first time, then, he felt used. But he had forgotten what she had said on the river: about the real and pathetic future that faced them.
‘It’s not fair.’
Again there was a silence. Then she said, ‘When we came back here, I arrived at a sort of decision. That I’d let you make love to me if you wanted. But if that happened, I would marry Anthony… as a Catholic.’
He did look at her then.
‘But that’s mad.’ He sought for words. ‘In those terms, you’ve just committed a mortal sin.’
‘For which I must now do penance.’ She had a small smile, but she held his eyes, and he knew it was not being said lightly. She added, ‘And you.’
‘All our lives?’
‘May I have a cigarette?’
He turned and reached for them and lit two, then passed her one. She sat up, out of the bedclothes, and he put his arm round her. She leant her head against his cheek.
‘I also decided I should never feel guilt about this. Ever.’
‘But you’ve just said we must do penance.’
‘I’m sorry, I know it’s not logical. I’m not ashamed of having wanted you. But I would be if I couldn’t stop. If wanting you became more important than hurting Nell and Anthony.’
‘You didn’t even enjoy it very much.’
‘I did. It was just how I imagined.’
He said, ‘Okay for a rehearsal.’
She pressed her head back against his and ran a hand down his thigh beneath the bedclothes, then pinched the skin gently. He lifted a hand and cupped the small breasts together, then moved it up to turn her face and body. But they had hardly begun to kiss and Dan to feel, though he was never to know, that everything was still in the balance when there was the sound of the front door being slammed below. Dan had locked that of his own room but they were instantly terrified, staring at the wooden panels as if a figure might burst through them, like a shape in a movie cartoon. It flashed through his mind that it might be Nell, after all; and she would wait until Lenin’s widow returned home and ask her to let her in. Never so frightened, before or since: but the footsteps were too fast and heavy. They did stop outside the door, and knock, then try the handle: then accepted defeat and went on upstairs. The two in the bed heard the steps cross the ceiling, from the room above. It was Barney Dillon, the student who lived upstairs.
Jane turned and put her arms round Dan and gave him one quick, wild kiss; pushed away, stared him in the eyes for a long moment. Then she was out of bed, dressing; and he the same. They straightened the bedclothes, all in a fevered silence. From upstairs there was the sound of a radio, the faint beat of music; more footsteps. They felt, or at any rate Dan felt, both relieved and still frightened. It could have been Nell; and it could still be Nell. He also felt already defeated, deceived, almost as if Jane had conspired to bring this interruption. She was brushing her hair, intent on her face in one of his mirrors. Then she was holding out her hands and taking his.
‘I must go. In case he comes down.’
‘But’
‘Dan.’
‘I’m never going to be able to hide it.’
‘You must.’
‘There’s so much we haven’t said.’
‘And couldn’t ever. It doesn’t matter.’
She kissed him again; and again was the one who broke it off. She stood for a moment with her head buried against his neck. Then she said, ‘Please see if the coast’s clear.’
He cautiously unlocked the door. They tiptoed downstairs, Jane with her shoes in her hand. She slipped them on at the front door, while he looked out down the street.
‘It’s okay.’
But she hesitated, then looked down from his face. ‘I’ll go round and see Nell later.’ Nell’s and her own cottage were very close. She added, ‘Unless you want to.’
He shook his head. By which he really meant, I don’t know how you… though he saw the necessity. She raised her eyes and met his.
‘If I can help it now, it’s because I couldn’t before. Do you understand that?’
He said nothing, he was still trying to understand. But in the end he nodded. Her eyes were strange, they had almost a despair, a searching for something he could not give. She leant forward, kissed him impulsively on the mouth. The next moment she was slipping quickly out of the door. He closed it, and remained staring for a moment at the latch; trying to imagine what he had barred from his future, what punishment this crime would exact; his own dissociated hand on the final lock.
He tiptoed back upstairs and went along to the bathroom. When he went back to his own room, he shut the door loudly, so that it could be heard upstairs, if Barney was listening. Everything there seemed inalienably changed, strange to him; most of all, his own face in his mirrors; yet suddenly he felt a strange amusement, he even smiled at himself. After all, it was fantastic, incredible, really rather marvellous; terribly avant-garde and adult; and left nothing, for it was so like Jane to be so intense and dramatic about the future, definitely decided. It had happened, that was the essential; and all kinds of buried feelings of inferiority towards Anthony lay mysteriously but profoundly alleviated. Once more Dan had begun to write himself.
And so well that he found, after ten minutes or so, as if for a first test, the poise, the chutzpah, to go up and see Barney Dillon.
Returns
I had an hour to wait at Kennedy for my flight to London. I ought to have spent some of it ringing David Malevich, who I knew was in New York, about the Kitchener script. But I felt too tired, too remote from the present. So I gave myself the prospect of one more transatlantic call about nothing, and sat in the departure-lounge bar. The surfer surrendered to the wave, indifferent to w
hat happened for as long as the journey lasted; something in me wished it would last for ever. Again, Jenny, in that simile I had not yet read and which indeed she hadn’t yet written was halfway right. I did feel like a suitcase with illegible labels, safe for as long as I was locked. I managed one practical thing between the whisky sours. Not trusting her mother, I sent a cable to Caro saying I was on my way.
Caroline at least had become a less menacing fault, in both the geological and the self-blaming sense, in my life. For so many years she hadn’t seemed my daughter, merely something I had once given Nell and was ungraciously allowed to see again from time to time. Repressed suspicion haunted our brief encounters. Nell had conditioned her to see me as the rat; and on my side I saw far too much of the mother in the child. She even took after her mother physically, though not mentally not that that was unmixed consolation. If she lacked Nell’s sharp tongue, she also seemed to lack every other kind of intellectual acuity. The country world she had followed Nell into when she remarried, the riding, the wretched boarding-school for upper-class fools she had been sent to (Nell’s choice, my expense)… none of that helped. Through her teens I tried, too hard, to inject some culture, some rudimentary awareness that not all human decency resided in the rural-Tory view of life. But she seemed impervious, or just embarrassed. Then two years before Nell and I had had to face the problem of a career for her. There was no chance of her getting into the most indulgent university. She didn’t want to go abroad. In the end we settled for a secretarial course run for similar poor little rich girls in Kensington. I began to see a great deal more of her then; and at long last discovered someone I could like, under the veneer of debby silliness. There was an embryonic independence, in which, vainly, I saw my own genes at work; an affectionateness, and a marked new attitude towards me. I learnt more about Nell and Andrew and her hitherto shrouded life at Compton. She was no cat, and it was largely reading between the lines. But it was clear that living in London, even though it was in a hostel run like a prison-camp, had woken her up to the fact that she’d been partly brainwashed at home; and especially over me. We had a long-delayed little father-daughter affaire, in short. I was allowed to tease her out of some of her follies and she teased me out of some of mine. She had boyfriends, there was nothing unhealthy about it. One day she spontaneously brought up the absurdity of our meetings when she was younger the stiffness, the boredom and we kept laughing, remembering yet one more ghastly weekend or afternoon. It was marvellous: like seeing a capsized boat right itself, and knowing that no serious damage had been done that in a way there was almost an advantage in the long being capsized.
That previous summer she had finished her course and after a holiday, got herself a job. She had had a choice of several and took the one I advised with… let’s call it the Sunday Timeserver. The others were all in the City and I preferred her to do something with more human interest than share-prices and learning business jargon. She had no writing ability at all, but life however humble on a big newspaper seemed less likely to bore her. There was by then a more permanent young man. I knew they were going to bed together and that marriage was likely one day; so it was just a matter of keeping her occupied and getting her some experience of life outside Gloucestershire and Kensington. She fancied a flat of her own, but I suggested she take over mine while I was in California. It was the flat in Notting Hill Nell and I had graduated to at the end of our marriage; old-fashioned, but large, and on a 99-year lease. It seemed silly not to use it. So Caro moved in, and a month or two later I moved. She didn’t write very often, but when she did she kept up a pretence of awfulness at not having found anywhere else to live: a pretence that hurt. It defined much that remained not quite natural in our relationship. It was the same with money, over which she was careful (a virtue she must have picked up from her stepfather). She had refused to let me continue her allowance when she started work, on all sorts of excellent grounds (the ‘fortune’ I had already had to ‘fork out’ on her education, and so on), yet I felt frustrated. Jenny was quite right: I did complain far more about these minor flaws than allow the major assets in our new knowledge of each other.
The thought of soon seeing her again was a genuine pleasure, though it was accompanied by an equally genuine guilt, since I had stayed a good deal longer than I originally intended in America. I knew Caro must know why. Jenny had been mentioned once or twice in my letters, but not the full extent of the relationship. News of that must have reached her by now, and I anticipated a trace of jealousy. She hadn’t written at all for the last three weeks. On the other hand she was her own mistress now, and in a much more open world, and I counted on the ill wind at Oxford that blew me home to help us together again.
The flight was called. I boarded and promptly spread myself over three seats. But I could see it was going to be mercifully uncrowded: we were due in London at 2 a.m., not when the wise normally arrive. I tried to decide which I wanted most: the meal, or sleep. I decided it was sleep, and I sat waiting for the takeoff.
All my adult life I have believed that nothing controls our destinies beyond our genes and external events. The manifold ways so many Californians try to escape from rational causation: the dotty religions, the chasing after Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, any crank, the fifty thousand therapy centres and deep-meditation ranches, the astrology, the mania for ESP and drug mysticism… all that had never provoked anything in me but contempt or a laugh. I had already been badly shaken that previous evening; and now the god of coincidence decided to kick me while I was down.
A last passenger came into the cabin. I glanced towards the aisle as he passed, and he down towards me. He had run to fat a little, was balding fast, but still that same vaguely louche, vaguely quizzical smile—though for the tiniest beat the face wished, too late, that it hadn’t looked down and seen me. Only the surprise was genuine, and on both sides.
He said, ‘Good God.’ Then he shuttered his hand quickly across his face, and said what I had said a few hours previously. ‘Ghosts.’ And I finally knew that day in Oxford did not want to die.
At the time one was proud to introduce him, despite the lopsided smile, always probing, like a leech, for exposed skin. Dillon the wit, the gossip, a pillar of Isis: in those days publicity was myrrh and frankincense, and Barney could dispense it. He was another of the mature ones, though in a very different way from Anthony; already in Fleet Street, already on the as yet unforeseen television screen, charming to the unknown and needle-sharp with the innuendo in the back of the known. Even then he had the knack of world-weary authority in his film and theatre reviews, of elaborate malice in his gossip column, of pathological egocentricity convincingly passed off as solid honesty in his more serious pieces. He was an amusing mimic, too.
Dan found him stretched on his bed. Barney also was in his last year. He winked up at Dan from his book, playing the spiv.
‘Sell you a pass for a flyer?’ Daniel grinned; held his line. ‘I’ll sell you a scoop for nothing.’
‘I buy it in cubes, mate. Not granulated.’
‘Seriously, Barney. Something fantastic… but—fantastic.’ Dillon stared at him; then smiled cautiously.
‘So give.’ A week later, this appeared in his gossip column: We have it straight from the hearse’s mouth that one of our budding Ben Jonsons is peeved beyond words a merciful release, some may think (not us, we like the lad). Seems he was absentmindedly propelling the wrong Heavenly Twin recently down a retired backwater when… okay, so you read the papers too. Why the peeve? The said backwater has a certain reputation, my friends, and has told more than one Nell in its thyme. The unfortunate pair claim they were there for a quiet read. Haven’t met such charming innocence since the girl who went to In Which We Serve to improve her tennis. These strolling players, when will they learn?
It was not the tone that offended Dan when he read it, but the brevity.
And now I was standing, a quarter of a century later, and taking his hand.
‘Barney. Long tim
e.’
‘Incredible. I was talking about you only yesterday.’
He shook his head, full of some bewilderment he couldn’t communicate, but wanted me to know he felt. He had a briefcase, a mac over one arm; a rather ostentatiously up-to-the-moment suit, studiously informal, an open-necked shirt.
He said, ‘With Caroline.’ He must have seen I was nonplussed. ‘On the blower. Hasn’t she told you?’
‘Told me what?’
‘She’s my secretary now. As of three weeks ago.’
‘But I thought you’d left…’
A stewardess came up and smiled at him. She evidently knew who he was.
‘We’re winding up the elastic. If you’d take your seat, Mr Dillon.’
‘Oh Christ. I’ll fucking well report you.’ He transferred his grin at her to me. ‘She knows I’m the all-time air coward. Super to see you, Dan. Just let me dump my stuff. I’ll explain.’
I watched him go down the plane and find an empty row of seats. The same stewardess hovered round him, and there was more badinage. If he hadn’t slept with her, he apparently wanted to suggest it. I noticed an English couple across the gangway; they also knew who he was, must have seen him on television.
There had been a period after Oxford when we had kept in fairly frequent touch… occasional dinners, parties, first nights. I was writing plays, and he was reviewing. He was very friendly about the first two plays, and did an almost gushing profile of me for a theatre magazine soon afterwards. Then for a time he moved to other fields, and we drifted apart. But he was back in the theatre column when my fifth play, the one about the breakup of my marriage, came on in London. He very comprehensively panned it. To give him his due, he delivered warning privately that I was about to be slaughtered; and made some sort of apology for having to do his duty and it was poorly reviewed elsewhere. I didn’t resent the technical side of his attack, I knew I had made a mess of things there; but I did resent his use of private information, the references to assimilated personal experience and the rest. It didn’t matter, at the time, that he was quite right; I felt, if not an old friendship, then at least an old acquaintance had been betrayed, and I decided to cross him off my list of people I wanted to know. In the nature of our two lapping worlds, we had met occasionally from time to time since. He had also done some film reviewing, and I couldn’t complain of unfair treatment when our paths had crossed in that way.