Daniel Martin

by John Fowles

‘We managed. We weren’t unhappy in the day-to-day. There was quite a lot we did agree on. The children.’

  ‘He said something else. That he was eternally grateful to you.’

  She had a sere smile. ‘That’s called kissing the cross. In the trade.’

  ‘I won’t take that.’

  She said nothing for a moment.

  ‘I made him suffer, Dan. Terribly.’

  You never discussed separating?’

  ‘Several times. Before the illness.’

  There was the sound of a crawling car outside, and I felt certain it must be a visitor for the house. It even stopped but then we heard it go slowly on.

  ‘And what prevented you?’

  ‘Oh, the usual thing. A sort of shared guilt. You know, one’s made so many mistakes that splitting up just seems… one more? And the children.’ She half glanced towards the head of the bed. ‘Paul especially. He’s rather had to bear the brunt of it. The girls understand. Rosamund knows all about it, she’s been a… great help. Very intelligent about everything.’

  ‘Why did you tell him about us?’

  She shook her head, she no longer knew. ‘The Church? I had all their rubbish about sin and absolution floating about in my head. Anthony on truth. I hadn’t realized then that Anthony on truth was always really Anthony on masochism.’ But she said that less bitterly, almost wrily. ‘It was probably the wrong choice. But I don’t think it matters. It wouldn’t have been any different if I’d fully matched his immaculate conception of me. It’s had much more to do with temperaments… emotions. Perversities, perhaps.’ She grimaced. ‘We’re not very unusual. Almost the standard North Oxford marriage.’

  ‘He talked about hating me for years.’

  ‘You mustn’t take Catholic eggheads’ judgments on themselves too seriously. It’s their speciality, moral mountains out of molehills. His never very secure masculine nose was left permanently a little out of joint. That’s all. And it did give him a lovely chance to play Jesus Christ and the woman taken in adultery.’ She stood up and fetched an ashtray from a chest-of-drawers by the door, then set it on the bed beside me before she sat again. ‘What you said at dinner. Having only yourself to blame for the breakup with Nell. It was the same for us.’

  ‘I’m not letting Nell off scot-free.’

  ‘Of course not. It takes two.’ She stared at her hands, at the curl of cigarette smoke that rose from them. ‘It’s all very well for him to lie on his deathbed and say he’s eternally grateful to me. It was something that didn’t get said very often in this house.’ She shook her head again. ‘It’s so dishonest. If you’re not presently grateful, what is the point?’ Now I was the one who waited. ‘We came to know the danger areas too well. I had a period of shouting at him. But we grew too civilized for that. Too lazy. One can spend two hours in Hedda Gabler. Not ten years.’ After a moment she said, ‘You get so sick of brooding all your life away over your own problems.’

  ‘Yes, I know what you mean.’

  Very gently, discreetly, from upstairs came the sound of radio music. I saw the French girl writing frantically home; or in some diary. And out of nowhere the past was with us, former selves, almost uncannily, in a silence that was not like the other silences of that night, but an ancient remembered kind of silence, very characteristic of her more serious side. An old empathy down through the body of the years, and tinged with sadness, futility, like some old garment one had once loved, but could never wear seriously again: I wasn’t even sure that she was not manipulating me, hiding a shift of defensive position under the guise of true confession. My inquisitiveness had to be defused, she had conceded that; and was doing it by presenting a very banal version of events. I had never had any belief in the ‘noble’ theory of tragedy: that only the falls of the great can achieve such status. But just as childhood memories get grossly magnified in absent adult memory all return is a form of bathos I knew I’d been guilty of cherishing a kind of noble legend of our joint past. Yet there lingered, perhaps because Anthony had just done something so far from banal, a feeling of half-truth in all that she said.

  ‘Nell knows the situation?’

  ‘By inference.’ She leant back. ‘Not for lack of interrogation. Though mercifully she’s dropped all that since the illness. I think she’s tried to pump Roz, but…’

  ‘I’ve been through that. With Caro.’

  ‘She’s got far worse since she became mistress of Compton. Little worlds where you must control everything, or you feel threatened.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘I really don’t know her any more. That side of her.’ She added, ‘She s been very good these last few months. It’s just this ghastly need to dragoon us all into her scheme of things.’

  ‘Insecurity. She would never admit it.’

  It’s not all her fault. I’ve lost the art of being what people want me to be. It’s become rather a nasty little habit. Destroying people’s expectations. As you must have noticed.’

  I smiled, partly at the fact that she wasn’t smiling herself.

  ‘Now you mention it.’

  ‘I tell myself I’m simply in search of lost honesty.’

  ‘Is that the right adverb?’

  ‘Then honestly in search of lost simplicity.’

  ‘Not a quality I ever associated with you.’

  ‘We all went to such a bad school.’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was another silence. I handed her the ashtray so that she could stub out her cigarette. She spoke in a brisker voice.

  ‘You’re so lucky to have lived in a world that knows it’s artificial. Ever since Freddie Ayer the mania you must have here is soccer. Heaven help you at a philosophical dinner-party if you can’t discuss Liverpool’s last match or the metaphysics of the four-three-four and the floating winger.’

  ‘You should hear a would-be intellectual film-producer discussing Levi-Strauss.’

  ‘At least he’s trying?’

  ‘A lot more than you can imagine.’

  We smiled down from each other’s eyes. The music upstairs had stopped, and the house, the city, lay in peace. I saw Anthony lying on his back, staring sightlessly, the ultimate cold of death; yet somehow still listening. Once more she folded her arms.

  ‘I think there’s something I’d better tell you, Dan. Which nobody else knows.’ She was staring down at her curtains again. ‘What you said just now about Anthony’s wanting us to be friends… it, well actually it gave me an enormous sense of relief.’ Her eyes rose to meet mine. ‘There’s been someone else. These last two years. We’ve tried to keep it very secret. But I was frightened Anthony might have guessed something.’

  ‘I think he’d have told me. And I’m delighted.’

  She gave a shrug, killing too much delight. ‘It’s all been rather complicated. He’s another philosophy teacher here. Not literally here at the moment. He’s spending a sabbatical at Harvard, for a book on William James.’

  ‘I’m sure you needn’t feel guilty.’

  ‘It’s just the… it’s so ludicrous, the kind of incestuous pattern things seem to fall into. We’ve all been close friends for years now. I know his ex-wife quite well. She’s remarried. She lives only just round the corner.’ She pulled a dry face. ‘One of those Iris Murdoch situations.’

  ‘Shall you marry?’

  ‘I think that’s the general idea.’

  ‘It sounds a very good one.’

  ‘He’s several years younger than I am. I… you know. One’s time of life. All that.’ She paused a moment. ‘He was Anthony’s student originally. They’ve gone rather different ways philosophically, but there’s always been that Oedipal undertone. The Jocasta thing.’

  ‘And you share the same politics?’

  ‘He’s quite active in the local Labour Party.’ She added, ‘He doesn’t take my flight further left very seriously. You know what dons are like any deviation from their own views becomes a tutorial situation. Silly students getting uppish again
.’

  I smiled. ‘But obviously you like him?’

  ‘Yes, very much. He makes me laugh, he writes very funny letters. Comparing the horrors of Harvard to our own brand. To Anthony as well. Very often I hear everything twice over.’ Then she said inconsequentially, ‘Sometimes I think I never want to hear the word ethics again as long as I live.’

  ‘I don’t think the total lack of them I’m familiar with makes things any simpler.’

  ‘Just this feeling that the real informing spirit of Oxford remains the posh prep school. Preternaturally clever little boys playing at being adults.’

  ‘But nothing stands in the way now? Even ethically?’

  ‘Only my instinct that he’d be much better off with someone younger. Not me.’

  ‘That’s his decision. And speaking from contemporary experience, there are problems that way too.’

  There was a tiny grain of mischief in her voice.

  ‘Nell will be pleased to hear that.’

  ‘Then I forbid you to tell her.’

  She smiled.

  ‘If you’d keep this other skeleton in the cupboard quiet.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘He offered to give up this year at Harvard. But I made him go.’

  ‘Why on earth don’t you go out and join him? When the conventions have been observed?’

  ‘I’ll have to see how Paul takes it.’

  ‘Problems?’

  ‘On one side, fully capable of facing them rationally. It’s the emotional sieve, he tends to suppress everything there. I suppose in imitation of his parents. It would have been easier if I’d had another girl. He’s rather modelled himself on his father.’

  ‘And rejected you?’

  ‘In the way fifteen-year-olds do.’

  ‘He’ll get over that.’

  ‘As long as I don’t seem to be rejecting him.’

  ‘He gets on with your friend?’

  ‘Yes. Rather well.’ She smoothed her trousers. ‘It’s simply the potential shock of having to accept him as a stepfather. On top of everything else. We’ve had awful problems with his schooling. He’s a weird child hopeless at any subject that bores him. Won’t even try. Totally intractable. Anything to do with history, quite the reverse. A horrid little monomaniac.’

  ‘You mustn’t sacrifice your own happiness to him.’

  Her brown eyes appraised mine; and for a moment there was an old light in them. She looked drily down.

  ‘I think you’re going to like Rosamund.’

  ‘Her view?’

  She nodded. ‘I am aware of it. It’s a matter of… finding the right time?’ She glanced at her wristwatch. ‘And talking of time.’

  It was half past one, but for a moment neither of us moved. I stared at the floor.

  ‘You’re not angry with me for forcing this on you, Jane?’

  ‘I’m angry for having to force it on you.’

  ‘I suspect all that’s being forced on me is something that was long overdue.’ She said nothing. ‘What went on in those years. I have the strangest idea that if we’d all stayed close, it wouldn’t have turned out like this. I don’t know… in some peculiar way we complemented one another. Even Nell.’ Still she was silent, but it was a silence that had lost its hostility. ‘It’s all been such a comedown since. As you predicted.’

  ‘All woe?’

  ‘No. Of course not. But far too many artificial substitutes.’

  There was another silence then, but she broke it finally by standing and pushing the chair back true to its table; then stopped a moment there and spoke to the wooden top. ‘The situation is really very drab and ordinary, Dan. In spite of what’s happened tonight.’ She picked up the ashtray, took it back to the chest-of-drawers, spoke there again with her back to me. ‘You’ve caught me at such a bad time. I think I’ve managed to retain some sort of sense of humour.’ She turned with a smile. ‘I’m just not managing to show it at the moment.’

  ‘I haven’t forgotten you as Lydia Languish.’

  ‘Fifty million years ago.’ She moved to the door, awkwardly, and aware of it. ‘I said we’d be at the hospital about ten.’

  ‘You’d better wake me.’

  She nodded, hesitated over saying something, or perhaps over doing something: a kiss on the cheek, a token embrace; decided not to.

  ‘Sleep well.’

  ‘And you.’

  The door closed on her. After a moment Dan went and stared in the little mirror over the chest-of-drawers. He looked as tired as he felt. But five minutes later, in bed, in darkness, he knew sleep was in no hurry to come. Yet he felt relaxed, as he would sometimes after a good day’s work relaxed, though one’s mind is still alive and reviewing; as if he had refound some old charge of curiosity about existence, of irony, enigma, secret purpose. He should perhaps have felt sorrow for Anthony, and some guilt, but even that seemed to have a richness. He felt saturated, diverse; if not justified by self, at least justified in temporary destiny, hazard. He had never, at least since leaving Nell, been fond of adding complexity to an already quite sufficiently complex life, and in some way the fact that he knew, as he lay there, that he no longer wished he had never come to Oxford proved this re-entry into the past had answered some previously unseen lack.

  Like all self-conscious writers Dan had always associated success in work with the breaking of established codes; or to be more precise, with keeping a balance between the expected, obeying his craft, and the unexpected, obeying the main social function of all art. Another of his grudges against his own particular mètier was that it put so much more value on the craft than the code-breaking side; that even the smallest departure from the cinematic established and sanctified had to be so fiercely fought for. He had never been a literary experimenter, an avant-gardist; but he would not have been a writer if ordinary expectation, life as it is, had satisfied his deeper psychological bent. And now this seemed very near the heart of it to him he felt that life itself had backed his view: had broken codes he might have flinched at breaking if he had been inventing the situation, had performed a kind of magic not with causality, but the timing, precipitation and conjunction of the results of causality. It was like an unsettling of fixed statistical probability, a release from mire, a liberation, a yes from the heart of reality to the supposed artifice of art.

  He knew it when his mind, drifting at last towards sleep, drifted also to the Kitchener script. Perhaps its recalcitrance was really a challenge; and now the challenge assumed the face of a relief. He would meet it, he would solve, given this lead, the problems somehow. Perhaps his relief had a more selfish and personal strand, at the thought of his also hazard-granted escape from the kind of existence that had apparently soured and finally dominated this Oxford house. He thought of Jenny; of how distant she was, and mercifully, from all that was symbolic and archetypal in a boy’s bedroom. In England, Oxford; the involute and its academy; middle class and middle age. He went to sleep.

  Mr Specula Speculans snores there now; so it must seem. But even the humblest dialogue-fixers and life-inventors must have such moods, however inapt, however callously oblivious of other human suffering, to survive. They live not life, but other lives; drive not down the freeways of determined fact, but drift and scholar-gipsy through the landscapes of the hypothetical, through all the pasts and futures of each present. Only one of each can be what happened and what will happen, but to such men they are the least important. I create, I am: all the rest is dream, though concrete and executed. Perhaps what Dan always wanted of his looking-glasses was not his own face, but the way through them. This kind of mind is self-satisfied only in the sense that one must suppose God is self-satisfied in an eternity of presents; in his potentiality, not his fulfilment. A perfect world would have no room for writers: vampires who sleep with a slaked smile while philosophers fall from windows, men and women are tortured, children starve, the world dies of its own greed and stupidity. It is even worse than that. If Dan did smile in his sleep that
night it was because his unconscious seemed to believe that a perfect world would have room for no one else.

  Webs

  I was woken just before nine by Gisèle’s voice outside the door. My ‘daughter from London’ was on the telephone. When I came down to the hail, Jane, in a housecoat, passed me the receiver with her hand over the mouthpiece.

  ‘I’ve told her what’s happened.’

  ‘Bless you.’

  I announced myself to Caro, and watched Jane disappear downstairs.

  ‘Oh daddy. How terrible for you.’

  ‘Less for me than…’

  ‘Is she…?’

  ‘She’s being very brave.’

  ‘I couldn’t believe it when she first told me.’

  ‘I know.’ I gave her my own brief, and very censored, account of what had happened: our meeting, he’d given no clue, he must have decided on it for some time.

  ‘It seems so strange. Almost as if he was just waiting.’

  ‘I think he was in a way, Caro.’ I hesitated, abruptly realizing for the first time the practical problems of explaining or rather, not explaining, what had really happened. ‘Seeing me must have seemed his last piece of unfinished business. You mustn’t think of it as an act of despair. I suspect it was much more one of relief. Peace, if you like.’

  She mulled over that for a moment.

  ‘Aunt Jane says you’ve been marvellous.’

  ‘That wasn’t how it sounded.’

  ‘We’ve talked. You were right.’

  ‘I’m glad.’ She paused, ‘At last.’ Then, ‘At least that.’

  ‘You needn’t rub it in.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘And you—how are things?’

  She hesitated. ‘I went to see the flat again yesterday evening. Now it makes me feel I’m walking out on you.’

  ‘Which proves you aren’t. Go on. You take it.’

  ‘I did say I would, actually. I’ve got first refusal till tomorrow. But… ‘

  ‘No buts. They want some money?’

  ‘Just the first month’s rent.’ There was a pause. ‘I rang originally because… actually a telegram’s just come for you.’