Daniel Martin

by John Fowles

  A crowded room. Not that I took much of all this in: the French girl had turned and closed the door. She seemed very anxious that I should know she was still upset.

  ‘Did they tell you what it was?’

  She stared at me, then shook her head. ‘Je m’excuse, monsieur. Je suis…’ then she shook her head again. I offered her a cigarette. ‘Non, non… I am okay.’

  I had in fact already half guessed what it was; or at least what I hoped it might be: a change of heart in Anthony, a hearing, on reflection, after we had left, of what I had been trying to say; a sudden need to break his self-imposed silence with his wife.

  Jane’s voice came from outside, too low to be distinct. I stood by the fireplace, the girl still stood by the door, like some kind of watchdog. She waved a hand, managed a bit more English.

  ‘If you like to drink something…’

  ‘Fine. Don’t worry. I’ll help myself.’

  The drinks were on a console table in the rear half of the room. I poured a Scotch. The girl stayed by the door, abandoning all pretence that she was not listening to what went on outside. I moved down beside the piano and looked out over the fog-hidden garden at the rear of the house. Perhaps it was the brooding isolation there, the blanketed silence, but I had a feeling of dislocation. A swivelling Jacobsen egg-chair stood by the window, with a book lying on its seat: Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. I could see little markers, Jane was evidently reading it, and I picked the volume up. Many passages had been marked in pencil, some heavily, with double vertical lines beside them. ‘For each individual is the synthesis not only of existing relations, but of the history of these relations.’

  ‘Structure ceases to be an external force which crushes man, assimilates him to itself and makes him passive, and is transformed into a means of freedom, an instrument to create a new ethical political form and a source of new initiatives.’ Those last eleven words had been further underlined in the text. I leafed idly through the pages, trying to find some written comment; but there were none… or just one passage. It had an additional exclamation mark beside it. ‘The philosophy of praxis is consciousness full of contradictions, in which the philosopher himself, understood both individually and as an entire social group, not merely grasps the contradictions, but posits himself as an element of the contradiction and elevates this element to a principle of knowledge and therefore of action.’

  I replaced the book, feeling the girl might think I was prying; but she seemed oblivious of me, and stood hidden, still by the door, behind the side of the arch joining the two rooms. I began to look at other books on the shelves that lined the walls, serried and silent regiments of philosophy and would-be human wisdom. Then there was the little ping from outside of the receiver being replaced. I saw the girl move away from the door. But we heard the sound of another number being dialled, and a few moments later, Jane’s low voice again. The conversation didn’t last very long. Again the receiver went down. Total silence followed. The French girl looked through the arch to where I stood, as if it was all my fault; then away. I let the silence run a few moments more, then put down my glass and with what tried to be a pacifying smile, went out into the hall.

  Jane was standing only a foot or two from the front door, quite motionless, her back to me, her hands in the pockets of her outdoor coat, staring into the night. She must have heard me come out, but she didn’t turn.

  ‘Jane?’

  Still she didn’t move. I went a step or two closer.

  ‘Has something happened?’

  Her head did shift a fraction round towards me then. I saw the faintest smile, for all the world as if I had just said something silly.

  ‘Apparently soon after we left. He managed to get out on his balcony.’ She faced the night again. ‘And over the rail.’

  ‘You don’t…’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘Dead?

  ‘They think it would have been instantaneous.’ She gave a minute shrug. ‘By the time they found him…’

  I went a step closer, trying to understand how her shock did not match mine; I think more, almost, in shock at that than at this thunderbolt.

  ‘Jane?’

  “Who was that man on Scott’s last expedition?’

  ‘Captain Oates. ‘ She gave the ghost of a nod. I heard the girl in the doorway behind me, and went and took Jane’s arm.

  ‘For God’s sake come and sit down.’

  ‘I’m all right, Dan. I’ve just rung my doctor and told her not to worry.’ She touched my hand, but only to release her arm, then turned and smiled back at the French girl who spoke first.

  ‘Je ne savais pas comment ‘Oui, oui. Il n’en voulait plus. C’est tout.’

  The girl, with a far better sense of occasion than Jane, covered her face in her hands. Jane went and took her shoulders, then kissed her lightly on the head and murmured something. The girl looked up, I don’t know whether in amazement at this Anglo-Saxon sangfroid or in horror at Racine reduced to… Jane turned to me.

  ‘I think I need some tea.’

  ‘You need something stronger than that.’

  ‘No, I’d rather… ‘ she smiled at Gisèle. ‘Go on.’

  The girl went hesitantly away, another dubious look at me, still as if I were in some way to blame. She disappeared down past the staircase to the basement, and I followed Jane into the living-room.

  ‘I can’t believe it.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Did they say…?’

  ‘The nurse who saw him to sleep said how relaxed he seemed. He was talking about you.’

  She stooped and took a cigarette from a box, then the light I held out for her.

  ‘Had he ever…?’

  She drew deeply on the cigarette, breathed the smoke out.

  ‘No. Not once.’

  ‘And no note?’

  ‘They can’t find anything.’

  She turned away to the mantelpiece, and stared down at the hearth. It was made with a coal fire, but hadn’t been lit.

  ‘It couldn’t have been a mistake? If he was drugged?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. They…’

  ‘But why this of all nights?’

  She said nothing, stayed without moving, then walked towards the bayed front windows of the room. I was left staring at her back.

  After a moment she ran both her hands back over the sides of her hair, then pressed the back of her neck a moment, beneath the silver comb, as if she were sitting up in bed, waking out of some nightmare.

  ‘It’s not your fault, Dan. In any way at all.’

  ‘I wish you’d sit down.’

  ‘Really. I’m all right. I was prepared. It had to happen soon.’

  Yet something about her seemed totally unprepared; as if she had just missed a train and was lost in prospect of the person she would now fail to meet. She stood with her back turned, holding an elbow in one hand, the cigarette near her mouth with the other. I went beside her.

  ‘Come on. Let’s have your coat.’

  A moment’s hesitation, then she unbuttoned it and let me take it from her shoulders. There was something almost sullen in her averted face, far more like a woman who had just been mortally and irremediably offended than one who had received a profound shock. I put the coat over the back of a sofa and went down the room to where the drinks were. I could still see and hear him so vividly, and the most incomprehensible thing seemed that we hadn’t known, sitting there in that restaurant—that one could be eternally deprived of another human being so close in space, immediate in time. That odd phrase of his, ‘correcting a design failure’, returned with a ghastly and macabre irony. Absolving that ancient sin, or making sure I knew exactly what absolution entailed, had for some incomprehensible reason assumed more validity in his mind than the fresh ‘sin’ of suicide. He had been at death’s door, his self-awarded euthanasia had merely forestalled Atropos by a few weeks, but the timing… it was like being the victim
of a bad practical joke. I went back with a tumbler of brandy. Jane glanced at it, but shook her head.

  ‘You have it. I really don’t want any.’

  ‘Just a mouthful.’

  She gave in, she took a sip, but put the glass down at once on the window-ledge in front of her.

  ‘I’m so sorry you’ve been dragged into this. It’s unforgivable.’

  I said gently, ‘You must try to pity him a little.’

  She turned away to find an ashtray. Then she stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette with an unnatural care and persistence.

  ‘I pity us both, Dan.’

  For a moment then there was something more honest in her voice; a tinge of despair, of real feeling. But as if she regretted even that small concession to normal reaction, she immediately looked at her watch.

  ‘I must let Rosamund know. And Nell.’

  ‘I’ll ring Nell. In a minute.’

  She hesitated. ‘Perhaps. If you wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  She took a deep breath. ‘It’s the thought of all the fuss. The arranging.’

  ‘I should let Nell take care of all that.’

  ‘There’ll have to be an inquest, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘They wondered if you’d come to the hospital with me tomorrow morning.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of letting you go alone.’

  ‘I feel so embarrassed, I… ‘

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  She looked down, she was going to say something more, but Gisèle appeared with the tea-tray; and Jane seemed glad of the excuse to move and clear a space on the marble coffee-table in front of the fireplace. The girl made a gesture of willingness to go away, but Jane made her stay. I gave up; refused tea, went and collected my glass of whisky; then suggested I rang Nell.

  Out in the hall I prayed for it to be Andrew who answered; and after a long pause, the prayer was granted. It was a relief to hear ordinary reactions of shock and then solicitude: another male voice and mind. I put him off attempting to set out at once, though he said they were fairly free of fog at Compton. They would be in Oxford by lunchtime. No, she’d rather not talk to Nell tonight; yes, I’d tell her they were ‘shattered and heartbroken’. I’d hold the fort till they came. And yes, I looked forward to meeting him again too.

  I went back into the living-room and Jane took her cup of tea and my place at the telephone. The call went on for twenty minutes or more, during which I tried to make conversation with the French kid: where she came from, how long she’d been in Oxford Aix-en-Provence, a month, apparently Jane’s younger daughter had stayed with her family in France. I couldn’t imagine what she was thinking, these English with their phlegm, their stone-cold blood, their infantile questions about Cezanne and the ruin of the Côte d’Azur. But Jane seemed to have found a brisker, more normal self when she came back. Rosamund had cried, it seemed, then decided it was perhaps for the best… she too would be here for lunch. Then there were banalities: what food Gisèle should buy the next morning, where everyone would sleep, when and how to let Paul, and Anne in Florence, know, and… About half past twelve Gisèle went down to the kitchen with the tea-things and Jane took me up to my room, the absent Paul’s. I saw poster-diagrams: one of English building styles, another of medieval armour, with all the bits and pieces labelled and explained. A lot of books, rather an ominous lack of the usual decor one expects in a boy’s bedroom. History was evidently his thing, and I smelt a little don in the making. Jane looked cursorily round to see I had everything I might need. Again she was playing hostess; treating me like some academic stranger, far too distinguished or transient to be bothered with the trivial upsets of her private life.

  ‘Will you be all right, Jane?’

  ‘Yes. Really. Please don’t worry.’ She looked down at the bed between us. ‘I do hope the mattress isn’t too hard.’

  ‘My dear, it’s not the hardness of mattresses that worries me.’

  She met my eyes for a moment, and I wasn’t smiling. She looked down again at the bed.

  ‘One survives as one can.’

  ‘At least Anthony was frank with me.’

  She turned away to a window. The curtains were already drawn, but she pulled them a little closer, then fiddled with their edges. She had taken off her suit coat, and there was something in the way she stood, the flagrantly unnecessary fussing with the curtains, that was childishly mulish; willing, that is, to be argued out of it.

  ‘He did tell me that all wasn’t well between you.’ I waited for her to answer, but she said nothing. ‘Whatever else he meant by this terrible thing, it can’t have been that you and I have nothing to say about it.’ I tried a more practical approach. ‘Anyway, we surely have to decide what’s to be said tomorrow. Publicly.’ At last she turned from the window, though she wouldn’t look at me.

  ‘You must be so tired.’

  ‘I’m still on California time. And please sit down.’

  There was a Windsor chair by a table-desk in the corner of the room behind her. She looked round at it, as if she were the stranger there, then moved, turned the chair a little; and sat in it, sideways to me, her arms folded.

  I sat on the end of the bed, turned away from her.

  ‘May I tell you what he said to me?’

  ‘If you think it will help.’

  I leant forward, elbows on knees, and chose my words very carefully: his self-accusing mood, his feeling that he had denatured her real personality during their marriage; my objections; his asking me how I should know the reality of the situation after all these years, and my obviously not being able to answer that. I stopped, there was a silence.

  ‘Did he give a reason for telling you all this?’

  ‘He said you’d told him about us. Before the two of you got married.’

  There was a telltale hesitation, though her voice was quiet.

  ‘Yes. That’s true. I did.’

  ‘I wish I’d known.’ She said nothing. ‘He rather suggested everything that went wrong had stemmed from that.’

  ‘From my telling him? Or our not telling you?’ I think he meant both. The general hide-and-seek that went ‘We did discuss telling you. There seemed reasons not to at the time.’

  ‘What were they?’ Silence. I drew a breath. ‘Jane, everyone is going to wonder about the timing of this. We can’t not talk about it now.’

  There was a further pause, but then she spoke.

  ‘Your relationship with Nell?’

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘I suppose self-preservation on my part. I felt I’d betrayed you a little. And Anthony. He was so much happier pretending to forgive you in secret. Not having to face up to the fact that he could never forgive you in reality.’ She hesitated a moment, then went on. ‘One always finds good reasons for doing what one wants.’

  ‘He kept on talking about correcting a design failure. I think the underlying idea was of some mythical true marriage between you and me that he’d… prevented.’ Again she refused my invitation to comment. ‘Almost as if you were some locked cupboard to which I had the only key. My feeling was very strongly that he was not only living in the past, but he’d blacked out on all subsequent reality. I did try to suggest that. But I don’t think he really heard.’

  I waited for her to agree or disagree. The door was ajar, and I heard the French girl as she went on her way to the floor above. A door up there shut quietly, and we heard faint footfalls on the ceiling over our heads; as once before, in very different circumstances.

  At last Jane said, ‘Part of him never grew up, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I didn’t realize the lines were so broken. Broken at all, in fact.’

  ‘Ours grew into one of those marriages where the partners survive by hoarding secrets from each other. Forbidden areas.’

  ‘It seems such a change from the beginning.’

  ‘I think our supposed total frankness in those days was always rather…
‘ but she did not finish the sentence.

  ‘There doesn’t seem much supposed about the total frankness that drove you to tell him about us.’

  ‘Except that from then on our marriage was based on a secret I’d kept from him.’

  ‘But not for very long.’ She said nothing. ‘When did you tell him?’

  ‘When we were in the States. That summer.’

  ‘He took it badly?’

  She shook her head, in a kind of ancient despair; let out a breath. ‘He was as innocent as a newborn child, all his life, about the workings of his own unconscious. It set a pattern. Of course we didn’t see it at the time. One never does. But slowly, over the years, telling each other what we truly felt about anything became like I suppose, like throwing away trump cards. Not the done thing at all.’

  ‘But you guessed why he wanted me to come?’

  ‘I suspected you’d be in some way asked to pick up the bill for his penance.’

  ‘That’s putting it very harshly.’

  ‘You haven’t had to spend most of your life listening to Catholic doubletalk.’ I smiled, still with my back to her. ‘Which your new faith is free of?’

  ‘At least theirs is mostly about social salvation. Not private.’

  I remembered what he had said about all improvement in the world starting from the individual. It must have been at least in part a retrospective admonition to himself; and perhaps also a reaction to a hopelessness in the woman I was with. But I didn’t want us to wander off into some general discussion.

  ‘Obviously there’s a straightforward reason for what he did. I suppose people will swallow that.’

  ‘They’ll have to, won’t they?’

  She was saying every sentence, and especially that last one, as if it were potentially final, the matter closed. I found some cigarettes and offered them, expecting her to refuse, and to seize the chance to take herself off; but she accepted one. I stood and lit it for her; then sat on the bed again, facing her this time; and now, staring at the foot of the curtains, she spoke without being prompted.