Daniel Martin

by John Fowles

  He began eating, and we passed on to American food; then other things, leaving Caro in parenthesis, the match duly drawn. I felt depressed, secretly angry at not having been angrier, at having been so determined not to lay myself open to attack, and brought under scrutiny as a parent. I saw myself, too, in Jenny’s father’s place. She was a late and youngest child and her parents, her father was a doctor in Cheshire, were both in their early sixties. We had never really discussed all that, either. They knew about us, she assured me they were broadminded, they wanted her to lead her own life. Someone stopped by our table on his way out, another face from television, though its owner was better known as a columnist. I had read a piece by him only that morning, written with the mordant wit that was his trademark—and his downfall. Over the years he had downed too much to have his moments of saeva indignatio taken very seriously. I was introduced, there was a little barbed backchat between him and Barney a different and somehow much more real Barney, on guard, on duty, wearing his fencing-mask. Apparently the man was to appear shortly on Barney’s programme, the thrust and parry was mainly about that. Barney asked me what I thought of him, when he went off. I said something about finding him a shade wasted: a potential Junius who had sold out to his own lesser gift.

  ‘I want to have a go at him on that.’

  ‘Without forewarning him?’

  ‘He knows he’s good enough to have it asked why he isn’t better.’ It was said drily. Then Barney shrugged. ‘Anyway, who could be a Junius in a culture that’s forgotten how to read?’

  ‘But he hasn’t done too badly out of it?’

  ‘Oh sure.’ Once again he was dry. ‘The best we have.’

  I smiled; and wondered whether that famous putting-down Barney had just appropriated, of a bad prime minister by a jealous rival, was not the single most English remark of the post-war years; behind all our discourse, and well beyond the political. What had gone wrong was less people than climate; less men than milieu and the particular one we were in, that day, seemed most to blame. At all those tables, other men like us and there really did seem, though it must have been fortuitous, an absence of younger or older faces other middle-aged men hustling each other or preparing to hustle the world outside, in some ultimate treachery of the clerks.

  Dan knew he had no right to stand aside, since the commercial cinema must certainly be counted as one of the audience-manipulating media; but he felt a nausea. So many other students he had known at Oxford had been sucked down into this world, with all its illusions of instant power; were in politics now, in television, on Fleet Street; had become cogs in the communication machine, stifled all ancient conviction for the sake of career, some press-lord’s salary. Barney had gone on to mention one of the other undergraduates who had shared their lodgings, who had then been a good deal further to the left than the rest of them; and who had spent the last fifteen years in the Beaverbrook empire… had stayed a socialist in private, according to Barney. Dan remembered him well, he had been rather an Orwellian figure, an austere and sardonic young odd-man-out, despising both of them. They had used to call him Krupskaya’s darling, he had pleased their landlady. Barney said it was a matter of compartments.

  ‘The one union you’d better be fully paid up with if you want to stay on Fleet Street is the Amalgamated Society of Schizophrenics.’

  ‘He never felt like that.’

  ‘Oh, he thinks he still gets a message through.’

  ‘On that paper?’

  ‘Simple. Kid yourself the kind of tiny nuance your pro friends pick up rings a bell throughout the length and breadth of the suburbs.’ He slid me a look. ‘And sheer professionalism. You mustn’t underrate that. I know one paper last year where part of the course for their tyro subs was analysing the brilliance of friend Goebbels’s work in the Thirties.’

  ‘I think I’ve heard enough.’

  ‘Maybe you have the quaint old belief that people buy newspapers to be informed.’

  ‘Just amused?’

  ‘Not even that. Excused. From boring things like thinking for yourself.’

  ‘Is this why you switched?’

  ‘To telly? God knows. Lolly. A probably misguided notion I can do the three-card trick as well as the next man. And let’s face it, it is where it is. To kill two clichés with one lie.’ He went on less cynically, as if he suddenly saw he was countermanding the image he had presented when we were discussing Caro. ‘There’s honestly not much option nowadays, Dan. Heaven help the poor sod who can’t stake himself a claim on the tiny screen. He’ll never make it to the top.’

  Dan really wanted to go, as they sat talking over the coffee; yet also enjoyed, secretly, this ancient English game of hiding in the trees and judging the world outside. He was reminded, too, of Jane’s contempt for the ‘timeserving intelligentsia’. Her repressed violence had seemed naive, faintly comic; but now, helped by his personal animus, he felt himself nearer to her view than he had admitted. He had no belief in her cure for the disease, but he began to second the diagnosis. When the history of the period came to be written, the communications industry would have to go in the dock. Somewhere in Britain a conduit between national reality and national awareness of it had been fatally blocked. One might argue that it was inevitable, too predicated by factors beyond human control, for any one section of society to take the blame; and certainly the public who allowed the block to take place, and to endure, had also to be charged. But Dan had a vision of a clogging spew of pundits and pontificators, editors and interviewers, critics and columnists, puppet personalities and attitude-hucksters, a combined media Mafia squatting on an enormous drug-heap of empty words and tired images, and conjoined, despite their private rivalries and jealousies, by one common determination: to retain their own status and importance in the system they had erected.

  His was the most familiar of all twentieth-century dilemmas, of course: that of the man, the animal, required to pay in terms of personal freedom for the contempt he felt at the abuse of social freedom—and unable to do it. It was like being caught between two absurd propositions: between ‘Better dead than Red’ and ‘Any freedom is better than no freedom’; between the sickness of fear and the sickness of compromise. One feels a pervasive cancer at the heart of one’s world; but still prefers it to the surgical intervention that must extirpate the attacked central organ, freedom, as well as the cancer.

  Barney had migrated to brandy by then. The restaurant was already emptying, yet for some reason Dan sat on, listening mainly, prompting a little, and avoiding argument. Barney had returned to his own dilemma: how no one really listened any more, nothing registered, an audience of fifteen million was an audience of no one, the speed of forgetfulness was approaching the speed of light, the letters he got, the cranks who misunderstood the simplest things that were said. He even dragged Caro back in, how he felt she was the first person ‘in years’ who actually did listen to and understand him: the cost of being a cynosure of the cretins and the Aunt Sally of the fastidious.

  Dan knew what was being stated: that when everyone wanted instant fame and significance, the lasting kinds were unattainable. Perhaps theirs really had been the unlucky generation. They had just caught the last of the old Oxford, which had trained them to admire and covet the enduring accolade of history, acre perennius as the supreme good… and just as the essential corollary, all the stabilizing moral and religious values in society, were vanishing into thin air. Reality had driven them, perhaps because they were pitched willy-nilly into a world with a ubiquitous and insatiable greed for the ephemeral, to take any publicity, any celebrity, any transient success as a placebo. Barney’s world had even fixed the rules of the game to make such shoddy prizes easier to gain and to bestow, and tried to cover the fixing, so that to criticize the glamorization of the worthless, the flagrant prostitution of true human values, the substitution of degree of exposure for degree of actual achievement, now invited an immediate accusation of elitism and pretention, of being out of touch. It infe
sted all the morbid areas in their culture, the useless complications and profit-obsessed excesses of capitalism, the plastic constructs: telly-land, pop-land, movie-land, Fleet Street, the academic circus, the third-rate mortalized by the fourth-rate… Dan thought grimly of a bit of jargon he had read somewhere in California. The cosmeticization of natural process. But Barney had said it. The real function was not to amuse; but to excuse from thinking.

  And now he was maintaining that the only honest year of his professional life was the one he had spent on a provincial newspaper before coming to London. It was clear that he judged himself fallen between a wise mediocrity and a genuine reputation. Time. Fear of death, the wasted journey, which was part of the old Puritan fallacy: life is either a destination, an arrived success, or not worth the cost. The soap-bubble bursts, and looking back there seems nothing.

  Dan knew that once again his sympathy was being wheedled in an oblique way; that he was also being manoeuvred, and more successfully than he allowed Barney to realize, into confessing his own self-disillusionment that they were in the same boat in more senses than the one he had admitted; but rather to his own surprise, when they finally stood on the busy Covent Garden pavement outside the restaurant and shook hands, his was not quite a merely token grip. He would never like Barney, he would never forgive him over Caro, but he suddenly felt too old to hate him. He had hardly turned away into a taxi when a memory of Thorncombe came to him: of a rabbit dying of myxomatosis that he had chanced on one evening in one of the fields, how he had stared at it, then walked on. He knew he should have dashed its brains out on the nearest gate-rail… but when one has the disease oneself?

  He spent the rest of the day and evening alone at the flat. Caro was going straight from the office to a first night with Barney. Dan worked for a time on the Kitchener script, but his heart wasn’t in it; the depression that had begun at the lunch lasted. He would have liked to have rung Jenny, but the difference in time prevented that, and he knew he didn’t really want to discuss Barney with her. They had spoken again, and she knew what was happening there. He thought of ringing Jane in Oxford, but knew, or suspected, he would get little sympathy in that quarter, either. He couldn’t work, he couldn’t read, he couldn’t face the television. In the end he wandered aimlessly around the flat, trying to decide whether he should sell it. Perhaps Nell had been right, and there had always been something hostile in it, distancing and alienating, vaguely forsaken; then Caro’s imminent departure the last good reason to keep the place, and even that, now, had gone. No one loves me, no one cares.

  He waited till midnight, but she did not show. Soon after that, he wrote the day off as a loss (quite wrongly, since to feel biologically determined, fundamentally futile, was at least to look at the face his culture spent so much effort on avoiding); and went to bed.

  Solid Daughter

  Caro appeared in a dressing gown. I had already finished my own breakfast. She looked at me with a half-guilty, half-shy smile, and for once refused a fence; moved to get herself some coffee. I asked her about the play, having just read an unenthusiastic review of it in the Times. It had been that sad, sour, Norwegian answer to Shakespeare’s Tempest: When We Dead Awaken.

  ‘I enjoyed it. It was fun.’ She saw my sceptical grin. ‘The evening. Not the play.’

  ‘Did Bernard?’

  ‘He thought the production was rather gimmicky.’

  ‘That’s what the Times says.’

  ‘Yes? We had a drink with him, actually. During the interval.’

  This time I suppressed my smile at being made to feel provincial and a fool for not seeing that the past determination to protect her from the false glamours of my own world would make her leap at any other… and quite naturally. She came and sat down opposite me, nursing her coffee-mug; then did take her fence.

  ‘I hear we didn’t actually come to blows.’

  ‘All very civilized.’

  ‘He was grateful.’ She looked down. ‘Was the food all right?’

  ‘Yes. I was impressed.’

  ‘I had to bully them to get a table. It’s always so crowded.’

  But then she was shy again, uncertain how to go on.

  ‘He didn’t change my feeling, Caro. We left it that… but he’s probably told you. As long as you’re happy.’

  ‘He said he talked too much.’

  ‘Not really. And it was interesting.’

  She sniffed. ‘I can see I’m not going to do any better with you than I did with him.’

  ‘Nothing you don’t know already.’

  ‘I bet.’

  ‘Cross my heart.’

  ‘I bet you spent all yesterday evening tearing your hair.’

  ‘I did a little. But not about you. About the flat.’ She queried me. ‘Whether you’ll ever need it now. Whether I shouldn’t sell it and find something smaller.’

  ‘Just because I… ‘

  ‘It’s not that. I think I’m going to take a year off, Caro. As soon as the present script is finished. And live down at Thorncombe.’

  ‘Thorncombe!’ She tilted her head. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Nothing. Just wondering how you feel about keeping it on. I could also sublet until you wanted it.’

  But she was suspicious now.

  ‘Are you sure this isn’t because I’m ratting on you?’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  She gave me a look under her eyebrows.

  ‘You’ll go mad with boredom.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘What happened at Oxford?’

  ‘I’ve been toying with the idea for some time. And yes, a little. Even Bernard, a little.’

  ‘Why him?’

  ‘Wanting a sabbatical? We agreed that’s what we envied about academics.’

  ‘That’s absurd. He’d die without his work.’

  ‘I feel like making a run for it while I’ve still got a chance of surviving. And now you’re such a liberated and urban young Woman.’

  She eyed me. ‘You’re a meanie. You’ve been holding out on something.’

  ‘I won’t go unless I have your permission.’

  She stared at me, then stood and got more coffee; then decided to make herself some toast. She spoke as she cut the bread.

  ‘I don’t know how Jenny McNeil stands you.’

  ‘Nor does Jenny McNeil. Sometimes.’

  She put her slice of bread in the toaster.

  ‘One parent moaning about living in Outer Siberia is quite enough.’

  ‘I promise not to.’

  She grimaced across the counter that divided the kitchen. ‘You don’t seem to realize how peculiar you are, your lot. Going around pretending what ghastly failures you are. Honestly, that play last night. I thought it was stupid. All that stuff about not having really lived. It’s so depressing.’ She went on before I could answer. ‘Did your father keep implying to you that his life was all one huge mistake?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There you are then.’

  ‘But the first rule of his was that you never say what you really feel. Would you prefer that?’

  ‘Not if it was the only alternative.’ She stared down at the toaster. ‘That’s why I like Aunt Jane so much. She’s the only adult in my life who actually seems to have done something about it.’

  ‘About what?’

  Her toast popped up, and she came back with it to the table.

  ‘What you’ve just said.’ She buttered, and I pushed the marmalade across. ‘She said something about you the other day. When we had lunch. When I was going on about the way you’ve always made me feel I ought to be ashamed of what you do.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘How you’d always been two people.’

  ‘We’re all at least that.’

  ‘She said you seemed to have cut yourself from your past more than anyone else. Even when you were all still at university.’

  ‘I had a Victorian childhood, Caro. I had to get rid of it.’


  ‘Then she said you’d done the same to Oxford. When you left.’

  ‘There’s nothing very unusual about that. So do most graduates.’

  ‘Then mummy.’

  ‘That also happens.’

  ‘She wasn’t getting at you.’

  ‘I’m sure she wasn’t.’

  She was taking an unconscionable time over spreading her marmalade, searching for words.

  ‘She was trying to suggest why I might be a problem for you. Something you can’t leave behind. Like everything else.’

  ‘My dear girl, I’m not going to Thorncombe to leave you behind. I shall raise blue murder if you’re not down there at least once a month.’

  She began to eat, her elbows on the table. ‘Do you think she was right?’

  ‘I’m not sure I like all this psychoanalysis at breakfast.’

  She gave me a very direct look.

  ‘Please.’

  ‘I could have involved you more in my working life. But I’ve never wanted you to like me for that.’

  ‘You say my grandfather banned emotion, but you… ‘ then she shook her head.

  ‘I what?’

  ‘I just wish you’d talk to me more. About you. Instead of its always being rue.’ She waved her toast. ‘You suddenly spring this thing about the flat and Thorncombe at me, and I feel I’m back at square one. This mysterious person who flits in and out of my life. And who doesn’t seem to understand I miss him now when he’s not there.’ She suddenly put her toast down and stared at it on her plate; set her hands on her lap. ‘Daddy, I’m really trying to tell you why I asked you to see Bernard. Why I told you. Aunt Jane didn’t realize what she said was rather a shock to me. I mean, I had felt you know. What we said in the car.’

  ‘Go on.’

  She picked up the toast again, breathed out. ‘Just that I have a lot of past to get rid of as well.’

  ‘And I could help more?’

  ‘I do feel much closer to you now than to Andrew. But it’s absurd. I can still talk to him more easily.’ She gave a little nod to herself. ‘And I think it’s because I know him, and I don’t know you I feel I don’t know you. That somewhere you don’t want me to know you.’