Daniel Martin

by John Fowles

  Mr and Mrs W. Reed

  My father took it gently from my hands, and read the words.

  ‘Most kind. You must write and thank them.’

  He handed the book back. ‘There. Now I must get on with my sermon.’

  I was back at the door before I summoned up enough courage, or sense of outrage, to speak.

  ‘Can’t I even go over and say goodbye?’

  He had sat at his desk and made some pretence of settling to work, but now he looked up across the room at me.

  ‘No, my boy. You may not.’ He stopped any further protest by going on so calmly, neutrally, his eyes back on his papers. ‘I understand Nancy is going to her aunt near Tiverton tomorrow. For a holiday.’ I stared at him with a total incredulity, unable to move. He glanced up again and surveyed me for a moment. I have great confidence in your intelligence, Daniel. As also in your sense of what is right and wrong. The matter is closed. I wish you goodnight.’

  It was monstrous, of course; the matter had never been opened, I went straight to my room without saying goodnight to Aunt Millie, consumed with the most un-Christian hatred and impotent despair that can ever have seethed inside that house’s walls. The cruelty, the stupidity, the vile meanness of adults! The shame, the humiliation! If only he had raged against me, if only he had given me a chance to rage back! The duplicity of Mrs Reed, the cunning of her! The agony of not knowing, and never knowing, what was happening to Nancy at that moment, her tears, her… I would steal out, I would go to the farm in the night, stand below Nancy’s window, we would run away together. I thought a thousand things; and knew I was trapped by convention, by respectability, by class, by Christianity, by the ubiquitous wartime creed of discipline and self-restraint as the ultimate goods. But the worst of all was knowing that I had asked for this terrible disaster. I believed in God again that night; he had my father’s face and I cried with my loathing of his power.

  I came to see later that it was really my father who was to be pitied… perhaps even admired, in his trusting me to condemn myself and find my own way out of the consequent Slough of Despond. I think Mrs Reed must have put the matter diplomatically; not accused us of more than an illicit meeting, a stolen kiss or two. Whether she simply read Nancy’s face, whether Bill Hannacott sneaked on us in some way to her, I was never to discover. But if the charges had been more serious, my father would not have felt free to burke the issue. I suppose he must have been aware what he was doing by giving me no comfort, so pointedly not asking me, then or ever, what I felt about Nancy; for all his faults he was not a sadist. I suspect he regarded all sexual feeling as childish misbehaviour, something one grew out of as one ‘matured’. To be fair, both he and Aunt Millie, whom he must have spoken to that same night (since she showed no surprise at this abrupt end to my labouring) did their best to ignore my melancholy and sullenness and to Chivvy me out of it.

  I sneaked back once or twice to Thorncombe, spying on the valley and the farm from the surrounding woods; and saw not a sign of Nancy. Only Old Mr Reed had been in church the day after the dreadful ukase. I had walked back to the Vicarage the moment the service was over. I thought the whole village must know (as they very probably soon did, Bill Hannacott and rural tongues what they were). I longed for a letter from Nancy, but none or none that I was allowed to see. The one consolation of lug back to school was that she might write to me there, as I had once suggested. But I was too scared to write to the farm myself in case my letter would be intercepted, and it was silly to suppose she should not feel the same. No letter came.

  That following Christmas, perhaps to make certainty twice sure my father took his first holiday of the war. He and Aunt Millie and I went up to their other sister and her family in Cumberland. She was married to a solicitor at Carlisle: two of their children were away fighting, there was another son just about to go; and then their youngest child, Barbara, who was six months older than myself. I hadn’t seen her since 1939; she was very shy, but not unpretty; quite without the warmth and provocation of Nancy, yet I found her increasingly attractive in the fortnight we spent with them. We didn’t kiss, except under the mistletoe, but we agreed it would be nice to write to each other, to become pen-pals. I thought of Nancy, and Thorncombe, less and less. I did not return home that Christmas, but went straight back to boarding-school.

  I saw Nancy just once, in church, that next Easter holidays. If part of me felt sorry for her not least because Aunt Millie had written during the previous term to say that Old Mr Reed had died—another and meaner part now found her provincial and farmery and plump beside my slim little middleclass cousin from Carlisle. We had been writing long letters and kept wishing we could see each other again. I had learnt my lesson and let them know at home I was ‘hearing’ from cousin Barbara. It was evidently approved; during those holidays Aunt Millie asked if I would like her to suggest Barbara spent part of the summer with us. I said yes, at once.

  So she appeared at the Vicarage that following August. We cycled about together, did some harvesting, played tennis. I did not see Nancy once. Something seemed to have gone out of the Reeds’ religiosity with the old man’s death. Mr and Mrs Reed still appeared in church, but the girls were never with them now. I still hate going past the farm and avoided it as much as I could when I went out with Barbara. The face I dreaded meeting in that lane was no longer Bill Hannacott’s… not that I ever got very far with Barbara. Her shyness and niceness in the flesh proved far stronger than certain veiled emotion that had flavoured (or I had read into) some of her letters. Five years later she was to cause a great family to-do by ‘turning’ Catholic (not Anthony and Jane’s sophisticated kind) soon after becoming a nun. Her distaste for the flesh was already apparent beneath a very timid desire for young male friendship; I had no erection problems with her, though we kissed once or twice at the end of her stay. I needed to prove to myself that I had ‘overcome’ Nancy. She must have known ‘Mr Martin’s niece’ was at the Vicarage, poor girl.

  That autumn I had news from home that did shock me deeply. Thorncombe was up for sale. Mary was to marry, young Mr Reed had never fully recovered, he had the chance of a smaller farm near another of Mrs Reed’s sisters, outside Launceston, they were taking the cattle with them… all the motives and details I didn’t care about… but Thorncombe without the Reeds! I couldn’t imagine it, in some way it seemed a worse denial of natural order than all the far greater upheavals going on in the outer world. I think I first began to get my guilt about them then; some sense I have never quite lost of having been the precipitating cause of all their disintegration, the old man’s death, the leaving the farm where they seemed to belong immutably, unimaginable elsewhere… it wasn’t only Nancy. I couldn’t see Mrs Reed in another byre and dairy, Mary or Louise perched on the tractor in any other fields, any other figure but Old Mr Reed’s, bowlegged gaiters and gold watch, thorn-plant and white moustache, about the garden and the yard. For the first time in my life I realized how profoundly place is also people. I could live a thousand years in this house where I write now, and never own it as they did; beyond all artifice of legal possession.

  One last shot.

  Many years later, as they used to say in the old subtitles… the early September of 1969, to be precise. I was down at the farm for a fortnight, alone one afternoon, Ben and Phoebe had gone into Newton Abbot shopping. I came out of the front door and saw a man leaning over the gate down by the lane. There was a car parked behind him. I shouted down, he seemed lost. He opened the bale without answering and started walking up, so I went to meet him halfway. I could see he was a townee, he wore a lapelled cardiganwith a zip, and looked like one of the countless Midland and North-country grockles that invade the West every summer.

  A tall, thin man of about my own age, with hair plastered back over a bald patch and a gold tooth: he was grinning, a shade embarrassed.

  ‘Sorry to disturb you an’ all that.’ He had a faint Cockney accent He jerked his thumb back to the Cortina. ‘The wife use
d to live here. Years ago. Too shy to ask if she can come and have a dekko.’

  I hardly recognized her, she’d got so heavy-limbed and stout, her tinted hair done back and up in a kind of bouffant style, like a pub landlady, in a pathetic last attempt at attractiveness. She was in absurd crimson-red pants with a gilt-buttoned navy blazer draped round her shoulders; just the eyes, they’d lost to the bloated cheeks below, but there was still a wash in them of that old azure-violet, the germander speedwell blue. She was hideously embarrassed. I realized at once that she must have known I owned the farm now, something had drawn her back to it, but she hadn’t really wanted to see me. Her no-nonsense husband had forced the issue. He was self-assured, and patently determined to let me know he was quite as good a man as the next. A foreman at Dagenham, it seemed; ‘nice little place’ in Basildon New Town, did I know it? He was very clearly used to handling the shop-floor and a fat wage-packet. They’d been touring down in Cornwall, ‘giving the old Continent a rest’ this year. Nancy still had a trace of a Devon accent, but she was so worried about intruding, so anxious to be nothing but correctly polite… it was painful.

  Her father was long dead. Mary still farmed, upcountry, in Somerset. She was just become a grandmother now. Her mother lived with them there, same age as the century. Louise had never married. And she herself? Had they children? Three, the oldest had just got into university.

  ‘Real bright kid,’ said her husband. ‘None of your hippie nonsense.’

  I showed them round the inside, and she came to life a little, though she found it all too beautiful, stock compliments, Marvellous what I’d done; but something in her eyes was also seeing the past. I tried to coax her, make her remember where furniture had been, what rooms had been used for in the old days; then round the barns, the converted one Ben and Phoebe now lived in, where we had stood in the dark corner that last day. Very nice, she kept saving; hardly seems possible.

  I gave them a drink back in the house, we talked casually about the general past, changes in the village, the rashes of bungalows; but not a single reference to the secret past. I wouldn’t have minded if she’d just for one moment seemed sad, nostalgic; paid just one tiny tribute, even mocking, to that ‘tragedy’ in our adolescent past. But she sipped her Dubonnet and played resolutely genteel second fiddle to her husband. I had only one minute alone with her, when he asked for ‘the gents’.

  ‘Has life been good to you, Nancy?’

  I hadn’t used her Christian name till then.

  ‘Oh well, can’t complain.’ She pursed lips to her cigarette. ‘Harry’s done very well. Considering.’

  ‘You haven’t missed the old life?’

  ‘Not the same now, is it? All chemicals and machinery. Not like the old days.’ She looked out of the window. ‘Good riddance, if you ask me. The way we had to work. Don’t know how we stood it, really.’

  ‘I’ve never tasted cream like your mother’s since.’

  ‘Given all that up now. Not worth it with Holsteins and Friesians.’ She said, ‘All seems so long ago somehow.’

  I smiled. ‘All of it?’

  Just for a second her eyes drifted and cautiously met mine, then looked away with a prim little smile. ‘You don’t smell those rotten old cows now. That’s one thing I’ll remember till the day. I still get a whiff sometimes. Like a ghost.’

  ‘I wouldn’t fancy that.’

  I stood to refill her glass, but no, she really wouldn’t, thanks very much. Then she wanted to know about the carpet. I told her about copal matting. Her husband came back.

  I found it all vaguely amusing at the time; it hasn’t really distressed till now, when I set it down. It was my fault, I played my comprehensively son, a kind of inversion of that scene when he so comprehensively outmanoeuvred me in his study; if only I had broken through the wretched plastic shell of that meeting, through her frightened gentility and my equally odious urbanity. We think we all grow old, we grow wise and more tolerant; we just grow more lazy. I could have asked what happened that terrible day; what did you feel, how long did you go on missing me? Even if I’d only evoked a remembered bitterness, recriminations, it would have been better than that total burial, that vile, stupid and inhuman pretence that our pasts are not also our presents; that what we did and felt was in some way evil and absurd… immature. Ban the green from your life, and what are you left with?

  I walked down to their car with them. They must call in again if they were ever down this way, Phoebe would always give them a cup of tea if I wasn’t there; walk round the fields again. I could see they thought I was merely ‘being polite’, condescending perhaps, though I tried sincerely not to be; but I had been to Hollywood, I had actually met film-stars, I couldn’t really mean it. I can’t have, since they have never taken up the invitation.

  We shook hands, I was thanked everso for sparing the time.

  ‘I think you’ve done it all beautiful.’ She gave the house one last look back. ‘I really wouldn’t have known it. Inside.’

  Oh my England.

  I found a stock-dove’s nest, and thow shalt have it.

  The cheesecake, in my chest, for thee I save it.

  I will give thee rush-rings, key-knobs and cushings,

  Pence, purse, and other things, bells, beads and bracelets,

  My shepehooke, and my dog, my bottell, and my bag yet all not worth a rag:

  Phillida flouts me.

  Thorncombe

  Phoebe had lit a fire in the living-room, supper was on. I showed Jane and Paul to their rooms, and then round the house, which seemed tiny after Compton, and unsure of itself; perhaps, though Phoebe had done her best, just insufficiently lived in.

  I had begun by attempting a very simple and exorcizing decor, all wood and white walls; but the place was much too old to tolerate the fashionable Finnish starkness I first tried to impose on it. I introduced more clutter, the odd print or painting that took my fancy, pieces of Victorian furniture picked up in local antique shops. One day I had disinterred the old canvas of my episcopal great-grandfather from the junk-cupboard in the London flat where Nell had long ago relegated it, and had it cleaned and relined. It now hung over the fireplace, disapprovingly grave, one of those portraits whose eyes seemed to follow you everywhere. I had turned a deaf ear to Caro’s and most other people’s horror of the thing. As a painting it was certainly not good enough to occupy the place of honour, and not quite bad enough to be amusing; which very probably represented its subject’s true worth. But I had come to feel affectionate about the unremitting sternness of that gaze; and there were other family relics I had reinstated, one or two silhouettes and miniatures of forgotten ancestors, a favourite photograph of Aunt Millie and my father taken in 1938… the house would no longer have pleased an art director, but it felt (at least until I had, as that evening, to see it through other eyes) more like a home.

  Jane rang Dartington to see about bringing Paul back; while I found the old deed-map with the field boundaries for him. Then I produced the little presents I’d bought Ben and Phoebe from America, a bottle of Bourbon for Ben knowing that with whisky his respect for money overcame his love of alcohol and some allegedly Navajo placemats for Phoebe, bought in transit in New York and (I suspect) manufactured there… but anything garish and suitably exotic pleased her. She had no visual taste whatever; even Ben complained about the collection of gewgaws she had amassed in their own quarters. No daytrip for her was complete without some ghastly new piece of tourist china.

  We had supper—not one of her best, though Jane and Paul were polite about it. He was to be handed back at ten the next morning but was desperate to get out and have a look at the fields before he left. So we agreed to that. He was markedly easier, perhaps because of the day, but also because Jane had evidently taken our little conversation about fussing to heart. She prompted him less, and he talked more. I told them about the old days, working at Thorncombe as a boy; about being the vicar’s son, the antiquated social system; and watched Jane�
�s eyes slide covertly towards Paul once or twice, as if to see what he really thought of this prodigal uncle returned to the fold.

  She sent him off to bed at half past nine, and we took our coffees in front of the fire. Some successor of the Reeds had blocked up the wide old chimney with its bread-oven, but I had had the suburban tiles and the backing rubble out again. I sat to one side, in a rocking-chair, Jane on the couch in front of the hearth, in the trousers and navy-blue polo-necked sweater she had worn all day. I had laughed when she asked if she should change. Now she delivered judgment.

  ‘I think you’ve made a conquest.’

  ‘I’ll give him the phone-number. It’s really very close.’

  ‘I should be careful. You may find you’ve acquired a limpet.’

  ‘I’ll warn him I must work. For a few weeks, anyway.’ I said, ‘And you must come and stay longer, Jane. Seriously. And let me meet your friend.’

  She stared into the fire and didn’t say anything for a moment; then smiled wrily. ‘My ex-friend, Dan.’ She avoided my surprised eyes. ‘I’m afraid.’

  ‘But I thought.. you said he’d written.’

  ‘Yes. He did. He’s…’ she sought for suitably old-fashioned, dismissive words… ‘he’s formed a new attachment.’ She added lightly, ‘Not to worry. These things happen.’ Then at last she did permit herself a less clinical, or more feminine, moment. ‘Especially to Peter.’

  ‘I don’t think much of his sense of timing.’

  ‘Apparently it’s been going on for some months. And it did rather have to be now or never. He was very contrite. Self-accusing.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It wasn’t altogether a surprise. My only regret is that I didn’t do the dear-Johning myself.’ She took a breath. ‘Fidelity was never his strong point. I think it’s something to do with philosophy. You spend so much time in a ratified stratosphere that you have to compensate when you descend from it. Be an ordinary mortal.’