Daniel Martin

by John Fowles

  He was too old to work Thorncombe by the time the war came, and that was done by his son, who was nondescript by comparison, a rather taciturn, soft-spoken man in his early fifties. He had a wife and three daughters, the youngest of whom was the Nancy I had once liked to watch covertly in Sunday School and who was so good at staring out. The elder two, the twins, Mary and Louise, helped their parents run the farm as soon as the war started. They were regarded as odd by the village, always dressed more like men than women, except at church; eternally in breeches, jumpers and shirts, a pair of wiry, brown-faced agricultural Amazons, though they were slightly built. Their skill and toughness and general air of self-confidence intimidated me before I really knew them—I thought they were very unattractive, as girls.

  The Reeds had a fine herd of Guernseys and made the best cream in the district; still brewed their own cider; poultry; the mother was a crack beekeeper as well, my father wouldn’t touch any other honey. Although the farm was at a far corner of the parish, and of course they didn’t come into the category, we could meet on equal social terms, we had quite a lot to do with them. There was church business, Mrs Reed was also a leading light in the Mother’s Union which meant that messages had often to be taken out there. Then during the war, food… my father shook his head at such scandalous defiance of the Holy Laws of Rationing, but there was a surreptitious trade in cream, butter, eggs, chickens, ‘fat rabbit’ (illegally killed pork), all over the village. We did well from several quarters. There was an air of the tithe in kind about it, as Aunt Millie claimed. But our main supply line ran from Thorncombe. I was in love with the place long before that. It was isolated, orcharded in a little valley of its own, backed up against a steep wooded hillside and facing southwest. A simple whitewashed house, with just one touch of distinction, a plain but massive stone porch with the date 1647 carved on it. I was attached to that porch and its simplicity even as a small boy; it, too, had faith. And the house inside as well, always with that characteristic Devon smell, rich and sweet, of old cow-dung and hay and beeswax; and it was comfortable, immensely lived in. There was some good china, solid old furniture, a lack of the cheap-bargain trash, the linoleum and oilcloth so prevalent in the average farmhouse of the area. At Thorncombe life wasn’t centred round the kitchen, though it was used for ordinary meals. Perhaps it was the preponderance of women in the household. It always made me strange to myself, in those days. There was the class thing, the way Mrs Reed always made a fuss of me, gave me tea, lemonade, a glass of cider when I was considered old enough; the vicar’s son, the honoured guest; and Daniel suddenly conscious that he didn’t sound natural or rather, that this was one place where it permanently worried him that he didn’t. Then it had some mysterious warmth, some inner life, some grace that we lacked at the Vicarage, although ours was a bigger, more spacious home, with an infinitely finer garden. That must have been partly the girls, an unconscious dream of sisters, of a true mother, not poor Aunt Millie; partly the analogous aura of sexuality; and living close to animals, the earth, to the tangible, not the spiritual. I always looked forward to going out to Thorncombe. My father made me share my unskilled labour among as many different farmers as asked for it during the wartime harvests, which riled me secretly. I was for the Reeds first, and everyone else afterwards.

  And Nancy.

  The agonies of Nancy.

  I virtually forgot her for two years when I went to boarding-school. I knew she had gone on to the local grammar-school in Newton Abbot, was a daygirl there. I saw her on holiday, in church. She seemed rather gauche and fat and to have grown much shyer, to have mislaid her old tomboy self, it was difficult to get a glance now from her eyes, let alone a stare. I was no better. I had heard too much sex talk in the dormitory and taken most of it literally. Mine was not a particularly queer school, but queer undercurrents were rife and they disturbed me. I had to lie and supposed I was the only one who had to about my own sexual experience. Of course I had kissed girls, of course I had touched their tits of course… the full distance one was excused, that was for later, but my real total inexperience was shameful. I found one or two other boys attractive, and I hated it; being blasphemous was one thing, but secretly perverted was another. I blamed home not without some justice; the other boys all seemed to have sisters and sisters had girlfriends and dances and wizard parties… while all I got was the odd tennis afternoon with dull and standoffish creatures who seemed far more interested in hockey and ponies and each other than in walks in the shrubbery. Not that even that was on, given the phalanx of adult chaperones who generally supervised such occasions. I was terribly scared of being laughed at, too, if I did make some timid advance… or if a fuss was made, and Father or Aunt Millie heard. School at least drove girls out of mind. We met none, saw none who were remotely attainable. There was work, and the feel of a shared repression and impossibility. But on holiday at home I was condemned to my own resources and Portnoy’s complaint.

  I was saved by the younger Mr Reed. Just before I returned for the summer holidays that year, he strained his back lifting a gate to its hinges. He was ordered off all heavy work, an order he promptly ignored, like any decent working farmer the world over; and duly paid the consequences, a fortnight in bed, and at least four more in a chair. We had received too much kindness from the family over illegal food for my father to be able to refuse Mrs Reed’s suggestion that she needed my help that summer more than anyone else in the parish. I arrived home to find the matter cut and dried. I was hired out for thirty bob a six-day week, which even for those times was slave labour.

  But the sixteen-year-old slave didn’t care. Those previous Easter holidays he had met Nancy only once and in the far from erotic setting of a Mothers’ Union tea-party at the Vicarage; but it had been enough. He and she had been set to handing round the cups and saucers to the assembled logorrhoea of ladies. Her fair hair was done in something approximating the Betty Grable style, which he liked; and if she lacked the svelteness of a Deanna Durbin (his current ideal woman), the dark blue satin short-sleeved party dress she wore, puffed at the shoulders, flared skirt, showed that ‘rather fat’ was unjust. A shade plump perhaps; but very clearly breasted and waisted; and he’d grown fast, he was an inch taller than her. She was shy, probably for class reasons, and they hardly talked.

  He wondered if he dared ask her out into the garden, but so many messes… and he couldn’t think of a good excuse. She had lavender-blue eyes, arched eyebrows, long lashes, a face that might have been too round-checked without the eyes, but somehow suited them as it was. She sat demurely by her mother after a while and he had to be content with stealing glances. But that night… He was head over heels in love with her after just one day’s happy slavery at Thorncombe; awful, terrible, unable to look at her when she was beside him, unable to think of anything else when she wasn’t; and the endless banal questions over supper at home. Yes, Old Mr Reed had showed him how to scythe, he’d scythed half the orchard, all the nettles, it was terribly skilled really. The impossibility of telling them even that, the old man showing him how to set his hands, the rhythm, the slow-and-easy, not-too-much-lad, who labours longest labours best, the old man leaning on his walking-staff beneath the apple-branches, smiling and nodding. The art of whetting. How hard it all was, look at the blisters on his hands. They had brought a chair out for the old man to sit and watch, by the beehives. He told that, but not of the girl who came with their ten o’clock bait, cake and tea, and gave him one smile. She wore a red scarf, she was covered in flecks of down, plucking chickens in the dairy; but those shy eyes, a subdued awareness of him, that one curve at the corner of the pressed lips. Then ‘dinner’. Pasties and potato-cake (Mrs Reed was half-Cornish). Then mucking the byre out with Louise, dung to the midden, spreading straw. Then this, then that, Aunt Millie smiling, his father approving.

  To bed at nine, dead with sleep, just two minutes to recall the untellable worst, the end of the day. Collecting eggs, alone with her, holding the basket while she del
ved in the boxes, watching her profile, the stink of the henhouses, the clucking, her soft voice to the hens, as if he wasn’t there, but knew he was; less shy in that, if still not with her eyes. Suddenly feeling how small she was, how frail, how female. Sensing a sudden erection, using the basket to hide it, ducking more than he need under the roof. Better outside, hunting down the hedge for the wild layers; the slanting sun, an angle of skin through her cotton blouse when she bent; then finally to the barn where an old Rhode Island Red called the Loony laid up in the straw, ‘if the bloomin’ rats haven’t got ‘em’. The hen ran in circles on the cobbled floor, in outrage and alarm. Nancy clambers down with two eggs, puts on a broader accent than her usual one.

  ‘Oh, do ‘ee be quiet, Loony!’ And she bends forward, kissing at the agitated russet bird.

  He says, ‘Nothing’s loony that lives here.’

  She comes and takes the other side of the handle of the basket he is holding, as if to see how many eggs there finally are.

  ‘It’s just a farm. Working.’

  ‘Don’t you like it?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Are you glad I’ve come to help?’

  Her bent head. ‘Course we’re glad.’

  ‘I meant you.’

  ‘If you’re not stuck up.’

  That shocks him. ‘Do you think I am?’

  ‘Used to be. At Sunday School.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to be.’ She says nothing. ‘I wanted to talk to you. At home. Last Easter.’

  She turns over a brown egg and rubs a speck of straw from its shell; then turns away into the wide barn door; gives him a quick shy look, and down.

  ‘Do you remember Bill?’ She gives a little nod backwards, to the north. ‘From out over. Bill Hannacott?’

  He knows rather than remembers the Hannacotts; they are chapel, not church. They have a farm the other side of the main road.

  ‘Not really… I know who you mean.’

  She crosses her arms, in a way her mother does, speaks to the ground.

  ‘We’re in the same class now.’ What could be more delicately put? Yet at the time it seemed brutal, catastrophic, an atrocious letdown after the promise that day. Imminent zenith to realized nadir, all in two seconds. He saw her with Bill Hannacott down and back every day to Newton; in class; giggling hand in hand. Stupid! As if it alI were some secret island, nonexistent without him, unknown to anyone but him. He felt his background again, intolerably, now it alienated from this simple world she lived in, how he was condemned always to do the rural equivalent of slumming. Perhaps it should have devalued her in his eyes, this fancy for some clodhopper from ‘out over’; but it didn’t, it made her ten times more desirable.

  He followed her with the egg-basket to the dairy, where Mrs Reed was and insisted at once he went off, it was ‘after his time’. He went for his coat in the orchard. But as he came back past the farm, Nancy ran from the side with a paper bag in her hands, up to him.

  ‘Mum says to take to Miz Martin. ‘Cos you worked so hard.’

  Six of the brown eggs lying on a handful of straw.

  ‘Oh… thanks awfully.’

  ‘Now doan’ee drop ‘em.’

  Again that mocking exaggeration of accent. He looks hurt.

  And just for a moment she has a strange little doubtful look that somehow isn’t about eggs; that is curious, and puzzled. Then she turns, waves her hand back to his ‘See you tomorrow?’ as she runs to the dairy.

  He sleeps on that look.

  He doesn’t get much else for… how long, I can’t remember now, but it must have been two weeks or more, the beginning of harvest. He discovered that Nancy was the spoilt pet of the family, most of her work was helping her mother round the house, in the dairy, with the meals. Usually he was out with one or both of the twins. Mary was engaged to a young man from the other side of Tomes, exempted because of his farming; Louise was also ‘walking out’. They were twenty-one, far too old for him, and in a way he found them easier to be with, though at first he felt they thought he was just a nuisance, they so often told him to do things and then moved to do it themselves at his slightest bewilderment or clumsiness. Neither of them talked much. They lived for the farm, for getting the work done, for proving that they could run it quite as well as the sons their parents must originally have hoped for. It was the first time he had really done the countless jobs besides harvesting at a farm demands. He learnt to use hook and hoe, how to hoy the cothset gins for rats, there was a plague that summer; the coming hardness of some of it the poetry of it too.

  One late afternoon he went up on the tractor behind Louise with the hay-mower to cut the top ley clear of its nettles and thistles. He followed after her with a pitchfork, heaping the cut stems for later burning. But when it was done, she unhitched the mower and let him drive the tractor round the field, a waste of time and rationed fuel he knew delightedly was also an acceptance that he was useful after all, that he began to rate as one of the family. Louise had Nancy’s blue eyes; a ruddy skin, a slow laconic smile. He liked her better than her twin sister, in spite of the identity of looks. He began to admire and like them both, really; their asexual toughness and briskness and know-how was so much easier to cope with than Nancy’s ambiguities.

  But he liked best the milking. It embarrassed him, too. He had too much imagination, it was too near suckling and masturbation, too erotic. Yet like them, nice. They showed him how to do it, but he never really got the strange wristy knack of it, just the right pressure and timing. Mrs Reed would be through three cows before he had finished one. The girls called her a show-off, muttered endlessly about the folly of not having installed machinery before the war and her continuing pigheadedness over it. She would smile and milk. No cow of hers would ever have rubber teat-holders instead of hands at its udders; and her dairy proved why. Daniel was usually put to lugging the pails to the churns and the separator, which gave him time to stand and watch the byre of female things at work; those smells and lights and shadows and murmuring voices among themselves and to the cows. The quick spurt of the first milk on the zinc. Like the woodlark.

  There were times alone with Nancy; egg-collecting, once or twice she came to help him bring in the cows. They spent an hour one afternoon in the orchard, picking the first eating apples for Louise to drive into market the next morning, Daniel up the tree, Nancy below to take the full haversacks he handed down and transfer them to the boxes. One tipped over before she could reach up to grip it and she screamed and twisted aside and fell in the grass under the shower of Beauty of Bath. Astoundingly, they laughed. At ground-level they picked side by side and talked, shyly, politely, about her school and his, the war. Her parents wanted her to be a schoolteacher, but she didn’t know. For the first time in his life he found himself talking almost like a socialist. How snobbish his school was, how he hated it really: she said nothing but she seemed to understand. They did not talk about Bill or other boys and girls, or love, or anything like that. He was still the vicar’s son and she, the farmer’s daughter.

  His father came out sometimes on his rounds. Daniel hated that, to be reminded who he was, even if it brought flattery. He came from one of the fields one day to find his father talking under the porch with Mrs Reed and Nancy. ‘Now if only your school ports were as good as the encomium I’ve just had from Mrs Reed, Daniel, I should be the happiest father in the country.’ Why did he have to use words like that? Nancy was biting her lips at me. And it wasn’t fair. I always got rather good reports.

  We all had the midday meal together in the kitchen, with Old Mr Reed, Grandpa, at the head of the table. I think he liked me there, to have someone to reminisce to. He’d been a Regimental Sergeant-Major in the Devonshires in the First World War, all his medals were under a glass frame, on green velvet, in the living-room. I could see he bored the girls sometimes; or perhaps they were afraid he would bore me. But there was a great deal of love and tolerance in that room. It remains his room. I still eat in it, though it is no lo
nger the kitchen; though none of the old furniture remains, something of the Reeds still does. Mrs Reed always sat opposite the old man, in her husband’s absence upstairs, at the other end of the long ash-wood table. Then the two twins side by side, and Nancy and I opposite them.

  One day we were still at table drinking tea, there was always a pot of tea at the end of the meal, when my dreaded rival appeared in the door. I knew he was due to come, a huge beech had fallen in a gale the previous winter on the hill behind the farm, and had to be sawn into manageable lengths with the two-man crosscut before they could be dragged down to the circular saw in the yard. Bill had promised to come and help do it when he could get away from his father’s farm. He was a big seventeen-year-old, terribly ungainly, a much coarser stock than the Reeds; at all of that already ignominious breed, the grammary. He bobbed to the old man, Mrs Reed, the twins, Nancy. There was a brightness in his eyes as he looked at her. I was introduced, and had my hand wrung. He had a cup of tea before we started work. There was farm gossip, when they were going to ‘cut’ out over, Mr Reed upstairs. He said nothing directly to Nancy, just those little bright looks. He ignored me, I couldn’t tell what she was thinking, whether she was proud of him or thought he was talking too much. I thought he was talking too much, and I bitterly envied him his ease, his knowingness, his being of their same earth.