Daniel Martin

by John Fowles

  ‘I gave her a lift home. She asked me up to meet her mother. Just a drink. That was all. Half an hour.’

  ‘Which you forgot to mention.’

  ‘I seem to remember you were too full of the horrors of motherhood for any normal conversation that evening.’

  She digested that. ‘Do you usually give her lifts home?’

  ‘She’s running a production office, for God’s sake. She’s usually the last to leave. No.’

  ‘You seem to know an awful lot about her.’

  ‘As I have a perfect right to. She’s also good at her job. And a nice human being.’ He took a breath. ‘Liking her is not infidelity, Nell.’

  She had gone back to staring out of the window. Dan sat on the end of the bed.

  ‘I suppose you tell her all about the paranoiac little English bitch you made the mistake of marrying.’

  ‘That’s so cheap I’m not going to answer it.’

  There was a silence; it was rather like a medieval joust. After each tilt she had to think up some new trick of attack.

  ‘You’re cutting me absolutely out of your life. I know nothing about you any more. Sidney rang this afternoon.’ Sidney was Dan’s new agent. ‘About the American offer. I don’t even know what the American offer is.’

  ‘It’s another possible script. Nothing’s settled yet. And I haven’t cut you out of my life. You’ve done that yourself.’

  ‘You’re becoming something I don’t understand.’

  ‘Because you don’t want to grow up. You want nothing to change.’

  She gave a bitter sniff. ‘Of course. I simply adore this ghastly white elephant of a flat and being cooped up in it every day while you go off and… ‘

  ‘Then let’s move. Let’s get a house. An au pair. A nanny. Whatever you want.

  ‘As long as I leave you in peace.’

  ‘I see. I drop everything so that you can have someone to row with all day long.’

  She spoke in a quieter voice. ‘I don’t know why Anthony and Jane can live such an affectionate and civilized life together and we’

  ‘Oh—fuck Anthony and Jane.’ But when he went on, it was more evenly. ‘If anyone’s having an affaire, it’s you. With them.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Well it’s true. If you wanted to marry a don and live among the dreaming spires, then why the hell… ‘

  ‘Because you were different then.’

  ‘So were you.’

  ‘You started it.’

  And so on, and so on. It ended in her tears, and a new batch of resolutions. But they had no consistency. She rang up her friend, and started reading again; but then got bored with that. First, she would stick it out at the flat; then we had a brief phase of house-hunting, only to discover that prices were beginning to rise; and neither of us ever felt certain we really liked what we looked at. Once again her heart became set on somewhere in the country—that became the priority. She blamed London, in some moods, for everything that had gone wrong.

  Perhaps the greatest irony was that the incident brought Andrea and myself an important step closer to what finally took place. I felt had to warn her about what the wretched Vladislav was doing and somehow I couldn’t bring myself to do so in the office. I had to wait several days, but then Nell and Caro and I went down to Wytham for the weekend and Nell decided to stay on till the Wednesday or rather, in pursuit of one of the new resolutions, did not want to stay on, but I talked her into it. So I took Andrea out to dinner one evening. I didn’t mislead her, I told her I had something rather difficult to say. I think she must have guessed, though she was shocked when she knew, very apologetic, wanted to meet Nell to explain… but Nell had made me promise not to do what I was doing. She had rather rapidly promoted the ‘Polish cow’ to ‘poor woman.

  At last, at the Chinese restaurant we went to, I was given the full story of Andrea’s marriage. She’d been in the WAAP during the war and her knowledge of Polish had made her posting and work obvious. She had fallen for Vladislav, married him in no time; his fundamental instabilities had seemed natural enough, part of the stress of scrambles, missions, swastikas stencilled beneath the cockpit. But peace, the deal with Stalin, had turned him anti-British; as did his failure to make it as a commercial airline pilot. He was already drinking heavily by then. Andrea had been dragged through the Polish thing and the Catholic thing and the expatriate thing; and had also discovered that she could never have children… all of which had left her with a kind of sad contempt for everything Polish (except her mother) and a continuing guilt over the rogue male she had married. Becoming what she was now had saved her life; or at any rate, her own sanity. Even then I sensed a much deeper despair than the cynical shell she sometimes wore at the office suggested. She felt trapped in some hopeless way. In effect she was both Nell and Dan: Nell, in leading a life that did not satisfy her full self; and Dan, in feeling she had been tricked into a wrong marriage. She told me she had had a number of affaires since the marriage died, but it had always seemed as if ‘some other woman’ was involved. One such liaison, it shocked me to learn (not its having happened, but my not having realized it) had been with Tony, a year before. He was married, with a family, it had all been conducted in great secrecy. They’re all rats in our business, she said, even the nicest.

  I mustn’t make Andrea sound too coolly objective about herself or too stolid and sexless physically. She was what the French call une belle laide; someone whose charm grew very slowly on you. The body misled, especially beside the twenty-year-old birds producers hire to make their coffee and soothe their eyes and egos. But the face was really rather striking and the eyes were remarkable, incomparably the finest I have ever known well. This produced a little advantage for her, since they were always the thing one wanted most to look at. She was not a woman it was easy to keep at a distance, there was something of the conscious femme fatale about her. Perhaps it was a compensation for the purely physical attractions prettier women can use. She certainly knew she possessed more magnetism than most men realized when they first met her. Then she was older than I was and not only in the literal sense—perhaps something vaguely maternal about her body… I don’t know.

  In return, that evening, I talked a little about my own marriage. It was not moaning, I even justified Nell’s attitude and a good deal more to Andrea than I secretly did to myself. I suppose outwardly the evening must have seemed to confirm that any other relationship than that of colleagues and good friends was impossible. I kissed her on the cheek and pressed her hand when I took her home; then got in the taxi and went off. I could imagine going to bed with her by then, but not in the manner of my two previous adulteries. Neither her temperament nor our working relationship would have allowed a brief liaison.

  When she killed herself in 1962, it depressed me for weeks. I hadn’t seen her then for several years and it took me some time to understand why it seemed a much greater loss, and guilt, than outward circumstances warranted. It wasn’t even a feeling that if our eventual two years together had ended in marriage instead of force of circumstance, or mutual refusal to disrupt our ways of life, then she would never have ended her existence. I knew her too well by then and the depressive streak in her nature. It was far more a feeling that she had had the last word about all our private lives, all our profession, all our age. God really had been a frustrated and paranoiac alien; and we had all been members of that seedy Polish Veterans’ club he had wasted his life drunkenly managing off the Bayswater Road. I never came face to face with Vladislav, but I have seen him ever since she died; implacably behind each scene of the great illusion.

  People in the carriage began to stir and shift. I saw streetlamps mistily reflected in black water. We drew, in our scrupulously maintained English silence, into the most English of all cities. Mother Oxford, Venus-Minerva, triple-haunted, hundred-tongued; Shakespeare’s Verona and every student’s Elsinore since moulding-time began. Not a city, but an incest.

  Rencontre

&n
bsp; I recognized Jane at once, as I stood in the throng waiting to get through the ticket barrier. I waved and she raised a hand briefly in return; as if we hadn’t seen each other merely for a few days, instead of sixteen years. A woman of forty-five in a long leather coat, fur-trimmed at neck and hem; bareheaded, no bag, hands in pockets; the face seemed much, much older, but she had retained something of that old discreteness, some aura of difference from everyone around her. Even if she had been a total and chance-glimpsed stranger, I should have looked at her twice. An elderly passenger ahead of me spoke to her as he passed. I saw her smile. They exchanged words for a few moments. It was that leather coat, it had a faint flamboyance, a staginess. She didn’t seem to have gone grey, her hair must have been tinted, though it was less dark than I remembered, a shade more auburn; quite long, fastened loosely with a silver comb at the back. She retained a slightly Spanish air, always part of her Gestalt in my memory. In every other way she looked a stylish don’s wife, very much in her own city.

  She was still talking to the other passenger when I reached the ticket inspector. But she excused herself then, and he went on. She didn’t move, she had only the smallest smile as I came to her. At the last moment she lowered her eyes. There was a bizarre moment when neither of us seemed to know what to do. She still had her hands in her pockets. Then she took them both out and reached them to me.

  ‘I’ve forgotten my lines.’

  I pressed the extended hands, then rather awkwardly leant forward and kissed her cheek.

  ‘No lines needed.’

  She did look me in the eyes then; a hint of an old irony or perhaps a question, I couldn’t tell.

  ‘You haven’t changed.’

  ‘Nor have you. You look stunning.’

  ‘Wrong participle.’

  In close-up she looked her age. There were lines of tiredness as well as of natural years. She wore no makeup. I sensed too a hidden fear. She was very uncertain of who I was. We both smiled, the way strangers do at their own stiffness.

  ‘The car’s outside.’

  ‘Fine.’

  She turned and led the way out into the night.

  ‘I’m… we’re so grateful, Dan.’

  ‘I was due back. Honestly.’

  She glanced down at the wet pavement, then bowed her head in reluctant acceptance. We walked over to where she had parked her car. She faced me across its roof.

  ‘Can you stand seeing him this evening?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I thought you might like a drink first. We could stop off at the Randolph.’

  ‘Marvellous. And I’m taking you to dinner afterwards.’

  ‘I’ve got something in. The au pair…’

  ‘I insist.’

  Again there was a tiny clash of wills; and again she resolved it with a shrug of concession.

  On the short journey to the Randolph she told me, clinically, almost indifferently, what the medical situation was with Anthony. What was initially a primary cancer of the stomach had become general; palliative surgery had failed. He was already surviving beyond the original prognosis. We exchanged news about her children, other relations, Caro. I said nothing about Barney. During these banalities I was far more aware of a secret happiness than a sadness; all those forgotten I had not seen Oxford for sixteen years, either—and yet not forgotten streets and buildings, the woman driving beside me; but something much deeper than that, the strange reversals of time, of personal histories… moments that you are glad, for once, to have survived to. Perhaps the presence of death always does that. Lost values regain meaning, to be still alive becomes the fundamental luck each ordinary, compromising day manages to bury.

  We found a table at the Randolph. She took her Russian-looking coat off: a trouser-suit, a plain cream shirt, a brown-black bull’s-eye agate in pinchbeck at its neck. She seemed taller and thinner than I remembered; perhaps it was just the clothes. I ordered her a Campari and a large Scotch for myself. The waiter had hardly turned his back before I brought the small talk to an end.

  ‘I’ve imagined today a good many times over the years, Jane. But never quite like this.’ She stared at the table in front of us. ‘It was all my fault. I just want to get that out of the way.’

  She murmured, ‘All our faults.’ Then, ‘That’s one of the few articles of faith Anthony and I still agree on.’

  ‘You’re not a Catholic any more?’

  The smile was more natural. ‘It has been a long time, hasn’t it?’

  ‘I spent last night pumping Caro.’

  Still she smiled, though she looked down again.

  ‘I lapsed years ago, I’m afraid.’

  ‘And Anthony not?’

  ‘He’s taken the last rites. What they call the Sacrament of the Sick nowadays. I think.’ She must have realized how odd that vagueness sounded. ‘The crows visit him, anyway.’ Then she said, ‘It’s become one of those areas of non-communication over the years. What they say every decent marriage needs.’

  The waiter came with our drinks. I noted that double recourse to ‘they’; and had a few moments to discard the illusion that envied marriages must be flawless.

  ‘And the children?’

  ‘Have taken after their godless mother.’

  ‘I didn’t realize.’

  She sipped her Campari. I had waited to see if she would make a toast out of it. But I wasn’t to be given such an obvious, if trite, clue to her real feelings. She began to puzzle me, perhaps because I had come with so many preconceptions… or misread Caro’s view of her. On the one hand I had expected more of a brisk maturity, on the other I had imagined a greater warmth. That permanent faint smile I had always associated with her seemed to have disappeared; and so had all her ancient vitality that mute electricity, disturbance, Poetry with which she had always charged even the most trivial Meeting; in a hurried wave across a crowded street, a smile between other heads at a party. ‘What I began to feel was a deep reserve, and I didn’t know what it hid.’

  ‘I suppose if faith can take blows like this, it must be real.’

  ‘He’s always been rather good at deriving certainty from incompatible events.’ She added, ‘Or truths.’

  ‘The ultimate absurdity?’

  ‘Something like that.’ She made an effort to be more communicative. ‘He hasn’t been morbid about it rather brave, actually. Very philosophical indeed. For a philosopher. But it’s much closer to him now than anything else. The real dialogue is all with that.’ She made a little grimace. ‘The eternal verities or something.’

  ‘That’s understandable?’

  ‘I suppose so. Chacun a sa mort.’

  ‘Did he say that or you?’

  She gave a token grin. ‘He’ll die an Oxford man. All ironies intact.’

  I examined that grin.

  ‘My guess is he’s not the only one who’s being brave.’

  She shrugged. ‘Nell thinks I’m being very hard about the whole business.’ Again I watched her face in profile, her searching for words a foreigner might understand. ‘She’s become rather odiously conventional and Daily Telegraphish over these last years.’

  ‘So I’ve gathered from Caro.’

  ‘A pillar of the county. I think we underrated Andrew.’

  ‘He was never as silly as he made out.’

  ‘I remember you used to say that.’

  ‘She’s been happy with him?’

  Again a cursory smile: as if such things didn’t matter. ‘I think as much as it’s in her nature to be.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  But my eyes remained avoided. We both watched a group of students sitting across the room. They made our small dandyisms of the late 1940s look very puny indeed. I was increasingly set back by her; she was so unforthcoming, disconnected, as if she wanted me to deduce, without saying it, that I was not here by her choice. I could have done with a little more of the conventionality she had just accused Nell of. I made another attempt to bridge everything that lay between us
.

  ‘What does he want of me, Jane?’

  ‘Just to rewrite the past a little?’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  She hesitated.

  ‘We haven’t talked about you, Dan. Or the past. For many years now. I know he’s very anxious indeed to see you, but he hasn’t really… vouchsafed why.’ She went on in a quicker voice. ‘The trouble with being highly civilized people is that one has techniques for burying highly uncivilized truths. All I really know is that he grew very distressed when I tried to suggest we had no right to force this on you.’ She added, ‘That at least was… authentic.’

  ‘Then I’m on his side. I think you had.’

  ‘All this doesn’t mean I’m not very grateful you’ve come.’ For a moment I had her eyes, almost her old eyes; a candour, a self-mockery. ‘I’m not in a mood to see much hope or reason in anything at the moment. You mustn’t take any notice.’

  Which of course made sure that I did: it was increasingly strange, as if our former relative status was now reversed so completely that some indication must be shown in every sentence and gesture. I was far too important and famous now, she seemed to be saying, to have serious time for a backwater being like herself.

  ‘It would be a miracle if you felt anything else.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Her smile was very artificial, and she leapt, absurdly, to yet another apology. ‘Before I forget, Nell asked me to say she was sorry about what she said over the telephone. About your friend, she…’

  ‘I rose to the bait.’

  ‘I’ve only seen one of her films. I thought she was very good.’

  ‘She may go places. If she keeps away from people like me.’

  ‘Presumably she has views on that?’

  I glanced across at the students opposite.

  ‘She belongs over there, Jane. I’m the wrong table.’

  ‘She wants to marry you?’

  I shook my head. ‘I’m just shepherding her through her first experience of Hollywood. Trying to delay the inevitable.’