Daniel Martin

by John Fowles

  When they did, Nell pressed my hand after our token kiss-on-the-cheek with more warmth than for a long time past. Then I had Andrew’s grip, and that ancient sizing and amused stare. He was wearing a dark grey suit and our old college tie, and only his weather-bronzed face seemed rural. He had side-whiskers now, and was balding; a central strand of wheaten hair, a little reticulation of beetroot veins under pouched eyes, those curious, faintly glaucous eyes… an example of that cross between the Saxon peasant and the Viking that has become over the centuries one of the well-bred English faces; Viking in the raids on convention, Saxon in the fundamental placidity and contentment. It was clear that, as in history, the Saxon had tamed the Viking. He had brought a magnum of Taitinger, and began to chaff Rosamund.

  ‘Still bedding down with that frightfully clever what’s-his-name fella?’

  ‘Andrew, do you mind?’

  Nell cried across the room. ‘Darling, he’s trying to be discreet and refined!’

  I caught Jane’s eyes assaying my reaction. Then the telephone was ringing upstairs again.

  Andrew interested me: how good such people were to have in such situations their style, panache, natural command. Though the only one of us who was formally dressed, he was by far the least funereal. He got the champagne cooled and opened, managed to suggest without offence that it was all rather a caper, lovely to be here together with all the crosstalk and the Gisèle sun coming through the window.

  I had never seen him like this, with Nell’s side of the family, and the last lingering unlikelihood in the marriage soon disappeared. Of course he had never been a quarter of the languid fool he used to pretend to be as an undergraduate, living in a manner that was already totally outdated except among his rich clique (heavy with memories of fathers who had been up in the Evelyn Waugh period); and he must have seen through the county, as a bride-market, far more thoroughly than any of us ever realized. guessed that he had somehow made a choice of which traditions arid rituals were worth keeping and which could be dismissed; live like a squire, work like a farmer, think like a free man… and make out you are only the first. It functioned. There must have been some sense in which he had married below himself; but one saw why. He needed this more open, tolerant world quite as much as his title and his outward role in life.

  He and I, and Nell came with us, strolled out into the garden while lunch was laid at the table where we’d been sitting. They were more serious then. Nell, as always, was probing, inquisitive, suspicious. Why, why, why, what had Anthony said to me, what did I think, what had I guessed… all of which I sidestepped. I might have been a little franker with Andrew alone; with Nell I felt determined in silence. Fortunately Andrew’s presence meant she couldn’t delve too deeply into the past. Then we discussed Jane, and things grew a shade more honest. Yes, we had talked. I’d gathered the marriage had had its problems… the Catholic thing. And yes, she’d told me about the Communist Party ‘nonsense’.

  ‘It’s purely emotional,’ said Nell. ‘Just being bloody-minded. She’ll drop it now he’s dead. She needed a safety-valve, that was all. I tried to tell her. But of course she won’t listen to me about anything these days.’ She went on before I needed to answer. ‘At least half of it’s this ridiculous Women’s Lib nonsense she’s picked up from Roz.’

  I smiled. ‘Obviously not from you.’

  ‘My dear man, fetes to the left of me, fetes to the right. I do good like nobody’s business. When I’m not playing six maids, a nanny, and his lordship’s valet. I mean, I’d have a case, I do need liberating. Andrew, stop smirking.’

  She was still quite pretty for her age, still had her quickness; but something in her once much more occasional than constant that had always been both insecure and insensitive had got worse. If her sister had forgotten how to play conventional roles, Nell had remembered only too well.

  Andrew said, ‘Ought to marry again.’

  Nell made a duck’s mouth at me. ‘Ye olde country saw.’

  ‘Not an argument against it, dear girl.’

  ‘But darling, she is. She’s fallen in love with stewing.’

  I murmured, ‘Then Andrew could be right.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake. I wouldn’t be against it. Honestly, Dan strictly between ourselves, any normal woman would have walked out on Anthony years ago.’ I felt like reminding her that she had once used this supposedly model marriage to belittle our own, but she was going on. ‘You know, there was a time when she was coming and staying with us a lot and I knew perfectly well what was going on, but… oh well, it’s all history now. It’s the way she’s always been.’ She looked round, accusing the backs of the houses. ‘It’s this dreadful inbred city. She’s never grown out of it. Don’t you think?’

  ‘I’ve just had three months in California, Nell. It seems rather civilized after the dream-world over there.’

  ‘Are you back for long?’

  ‘As long as I can make it.’

  ‘Andrew and I… we thought you might like to come down to Compton with Caro for a weekend or something.’ She widened her eyes, a familiar old signal that she was being terribly sincere, and murmured, ‘if you could stand the squareness. But please.’

  ‘I’d love to. That would be fun.’

  Andrew said, ‘Jolly good.’ Then, ‘Do you shoot, Dan?’

  ‘Only dice. And that neither well nor often.’

  ‘Splendid. We’ll get out the old backgammon board.’

  ‘Oh Andrew, for God’s sake.’ She raised her eyebrows at me. ‘At the last totting-up I owed him eight hundred thousand pounds.’

  ‘A little over my limit.’

  Andrew flicked an eyelid, over her head. ‘Play for pennies, actually.’

  Nell asked how Caro had seemed. She knew of course that she was working for Barney, and we discussed the pros and cons of that: it was clear that, being the slave of a system herself, she saw the new job favourably. No doubt the association added an agreeable little vicarious feather to her local social hat. I told them about the new flat, and sensed a small struggle in Nell between being secretly pleased that I was forsaken and alarmed that Caro was striking out on her own. She thought she was ‘rather silly’ to have dropped Richard. But when I said I thought she needed something better than, a charming young clot, I saw something in Andrew’s, if not Nell s, eyes that agreed. Inevitably she asked if there was ‘someone else’. Caro was being so cagey. I played innocent; I’d try to find out. We were called in for lunch. It was much more enjoyable than I had anticipated, mainly thanks to Andrew; and bizarre, since I felt that they were surreptitiously using me for a celebration. There was some kind of suppressed relief at its all being over with Anthony and it had to be expressed through a surrogate; and by carefully not mentioning him, or what he had done. I was a little the prodigal son, informally reaccepted into their world; and it was much more a love-feast than a wake. On my side there was my knowing that I had missed their company more than I had ever admitted: the banter, the trivial news about other relations, children, the crosscurrents the lost familiarity of it all, in both the literal and the normal sense of the word. I had become too used to one-to-one relationships, even with Caro; to artistic or commercial or sexual codes of behaviour; everything but this loose, warm web of clan. It was, after all, a modest secular equivalent of that night-bathe at Tarquinia so many years before.

  Rosamund drove me to the station about three, on her way down to Reading to meet her brother. As soon as we moved off I’d been reminded during the lunch that I was technically her godfather I spoke.

  ‘You seem to have a stunning relationship with your mother, Roz.’

  ‘You’ve been talking?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She’s had rather a rough time these last years.’

  ‘So I understand.’

  ‘Does she seem changed to you?’

  ‘Only at first.’

  I asked her what she thought of her mother’s extraordinary prospective leap to the left if it was no
t straight backwards. Rather surprisingly she seemed to share Nell’s view of it, though with a better understanding and much more sympathy.

  ‘I think it’s been mainly struggling for survival. It’s so stupid she never had a career. That’s not preaching Lib, just what she is, really. I even have to pretend I enjoy my own job less than I really do. I mean she’s glad for me, but it’s also what she ought to have done. And she knows it.’ After a moment, she went on. ‘I used to blame my father. But there’s something in her I don’t really understand. We do talk a lot, but there’s always that final block. She sort of slides off into commonplaces. Starts justifying what she is. I think she gets frightened if she looks back too much.’

  ‘She’s not alone in that.’

  ‘I suppose one can’t win. One day I shall curse myself for not having had children younger.’

  ‘At least you’ll have done what seemed wise at the time.’

  ‘Didn’t you?’

  ‘Do I have to answer that?’

  She smiled, then slowed down and stopped to let a string of uniformed schoolgirls pass over a crossing. Her question came abruptly.

  ‘Do you know why he did it?’

  I left a little silence. ‘I think it was an act of charity. At least in intention.’

  ‘It’s only these last two or three years I’ve realized how totally unsuited they were to each other.’

  ‘I doubt whether totally unsuited people last that long, Roz.’

  ‘All right. But if it hadn’t been for us… ‘ She moved off again. She meant, us children.

  ‘They did set themselves fiercely high standards. They’re never very easy to live up to.’

  ‘I’ve never understood why they had to be so savagely applied to you.’ She said, ‘I hear about worse stabs in the back every day of my life.’ A moment, then her tone changed. ‘Are forgotten goddaughters allowed to ask very personal questions?’

  I flinched inwardly. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Was there any truth in that play you wrote?’

  ‘It’s just how it seemed at the time. One against three.’

  ‘I really meant something between my father and Nell.’

  We were rapidly getting into dangerous waters. ‘No truth at all. Malice, I’m afraid.’

  She was silent for a few seconds.

  ‘It’s so strange. All these years. You’ve been so completely taboo. I half expected horns and a cloven hoof.’

  ‘I did wear them once.’

  She grinned, but I suspected she knew she hadn’t been honestly answered, and I jumped in before she could dig further.

  ‘Are you glad she’s going to remarry?’

  That got a sharp look. ‘You have been talking.’

  ‘Most of last night.’

  She turned down towards the station. ‘He’s… very charming. Very alive. I’m all for it. Even my father would have been, in a funny kind of way. The last time I saw him on Sunday he kept going on about it.’

  ‘Her remarrying?’

  ‘Not specifically. Her needing a new life.’ She added, ‘I almost wish now I’d told him.’ She turned to me again. ‘Did you ever understand your parents?’

  ‘I only knew one.’

  ‘I forgot.’

  ‘And I’m just, very dimly, beginning to understand him.’

  ‘I suppose understanding them would make things terribly dull.’

  ‘I rather suspect that goes for life in general.’

  She smiled, she accepted that; happy career-girl.

  Three hours later Dan was passing on her love to Caro, along with the other news. To begin with Caro was rather flagrantly solicitous, as if she were partly to blame for what had happened. But though she was curious as to how he had ‘found’ Jane, she was not as inquisitive as he expected over the suicide itself. She wanted to know how her mother had been, as well. The conversation in the garden was duly reported and the invitation to Compton. All this was as she drove Dan north through Maida Vale to see her flat. So many of his conversations that day seemed destined to be shifting, both literally and metaphorically. Too full of his own news, Dan was slow to realize that his daughter was hiding something. But Compton led them to what had hitherto been avoided.

  ‘Daddy, you don’t have to nag at me. I know I should tell her.’

  ‘The longer you leave it…’

  ‘It’s just… ‘

  ‘Just what?’

  ‘I can’t face doing it over the ‘phone. She never lets me get a word in edgeways, anyway. She hardly hears what I say. It’s always the latest Compton disasters.’

  ‘Mothers get envious of daughters. Feel they’ve been deserted. That’s quite common.’

  She said nothing for a moment.

  ‘Were they always like that? Mummy and Aunt Jane?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘So different.’

  ‘You must put some of the blame on me. What happened between us.’

  ‘That’s Aunt Jane’s line.’

  ‘We do both know what she went through.’

  ‘You don’t know what I go through. She really liked Richard. He was so revoltingly safe. She’d have had me married off to him on the spot.’ She braked with an unnecessary sharpness to let another car draw out of a side-road. ‘I know what she’ll do. She’ll blame it on herself. For ever letting me out of her sight. And poor Andrew. He’ll get it.’

  ‘Then it’s not your problem. And I think he gives as good as he gets. ‘I don’t know how he stands her sometimes.’

  ‘Caro.’

  ‘It’s only because I feel guilty about her.’

  ‘You must sick it up.’

  ‘And because my ears have been burning all day.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘The problem daughter.’

  ‘We all agreed they’re much more interesting than the straight ones.’

  He had said it lightly, to make her smile. But whatever had been building up, or waiting, now broke surface. She did not smile, but drove a little way in silence. Dan glanced at her.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing.’ But a second or two later she spoke again. ‘I told Bernard today that I’d told you.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He asked me to say he was sorry about… you know.’

  ‘It was difficult for him. I can see that.’

  ‘Actually he’d like you to have lunch with him one day.’ That took Dan so completely by surprise that he hesitated fatally. ‘There is his side of it.’

  ‘Which I know.’

  She hesitated; then crashed through her fence.

  ‘You’re so good at forcing people to give wrong impressions of themselves.’

  ‘From bitter personal experience?’

  ‘You do lead people on.’

  ‘To lying about themselves?’

  ‘That’s the whole point. He wasn’t lying.’

  ‘I was asking in general.’

  ‘I never know what you really feel.’

  ‘I thought I’d made it plain in the present case.’

  ‘When I told Aunt Jane, all she said was, Are you happy?’

  ‘Darling, you’re not being consistent.’

  ‘I know I’m not consistent.’

  It was said almost fiercely, and Dan left a pause.

  ‘Do you want me to meet him?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. It was just an idea.’

  After a few moments he saw her eyes blink, as she watched the road ahead. He let her drive a hundred yards, then looked again.

  ‘Pull in. There’s a space ahead.’

  She obeyed, parked, switched off the engine, then sat with her head bowed, like a disobedient child. He took her hand and pressed it, and felt a pressure back.

  ‘This is so silly, Caro.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘If your mother and I get overprotective about you, it’s very largely because we made such a mess of loving each other.’

  ‘It’s just I’m so tired
of… ‘

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘If I love one of you back, it always seems to be betraying the other.’

  ‘That’s our stupidity. Not something wrong in you.’ He pressed her hand again. ‘Is this why you didn’t tell me you’d already told Aunt Jane?’ She nodded. ‘Then let’s get one thing straight. I’m not jealous of your relationship with her. Or with Andrew. I’ve nothing but gratitude for the way both of them have helped. And even your mother and I are getting less stupid. She really was falling over herself to be nice to me today.’

  ‘Oh God.’

  ‘It’s all right. I did the squirming for you.’

  She managed the shadow of a smile, then reached with her free hand towards a box of tissues under the dashboard.

  ‘If the thing with Bernard makes you happy, then I won’t argue about it.’

  ‘He was annoyed that I told you.’

  ‘He has no right to be.’

  ‘I don’t mean with me. Not really annoyed. Just… I suppose embarrassed.’

  ‘That you were honest?’

  ‘I don’t use words very accurately. It’s not that he didn’t understand. That wretched meeting you on the flight.’

  ‘As long as he didn’t suggest that someone trendier would have kept their mouth shut.’

  She shook her head. ‘It was my doing something he felt he ought to have done himself. That’s really why he wants to see you.’

  Dan still held her hand. ‘And you want me to?’

  ‘I know it must seem pointless.’ She hesitated. ‘Daddy, he’s not trendy at all under the surface.’

  ‘Then tell him all right. If he really wants to.’

  She pressed his hand, and took a breath.

  ‘What did you and Aunt Jane decide about me?’

  ‘That deciding about you wasn’t on.’

  ‘Beyond salvation?’

  ‘Our interference.’

  ‘I bet it was all Freud and Marx and God knows what else.’

  ‘I’ll tell you when it’s over.’

  ‘I’d rather know now.’

  ‘That’s not fair. You’d be able to prove us wrong.’