Daniel Martin

by John Fowles

  ‘Someone over there?

  ‘She teaches history at Harvard, it seems.’

  ‘You’re being very brave about it.’

  She shook her head. ‘I’ve told Roz. Now you. So I don’t even have to feel very humiliated. And there was the age thing. It was never really on.’

  I thought of her having nursed this news all through the weekend; and began to forgive her some of her calculatlng distances.

  ‘Men are shits.’

  ‘At least honest ones. In this case.’

  ‘Even so.’

  She shrugged, and I left a sympathetic silence.

  ‘Have you thought any more about the future?’

  ‘Not really, Dan.’ She twitched at a horsehair that had poked through the fabric on the arm of the settee. ‘That’s not quite true, I’m half thinking of selling the house and moving to London. A flat perhaps. Somewhere smaller.’

  ‘That sounds fine.’

  ‘And nearer Roz.’

  ‘That’s a good idea.’

  ‘What does she think?’

  ‘She’s all for it.’

  ‘Then why not?’

  ‘I suppose doubting whether I could make a new life there for myself.’

  ‘You’ve abandoned the other idea?’ She looked at me, rather revealingly unable to remember what the other idea had been. ‘Following in the footsteps of dear old Lenin’s widow?’

  ‘Not absolutely.’

  There was a reluctance, a brevity in her voice. ‘Jane, if you don’t want to talk about it, you know… I funderstand.’

  She smiled, still hesitated, then came to a decision; but spoke to the fire. ‘You please mustn’t take what I said that evening too literally, Dan. I do have very strong leftward feelings at the moment. But I’m not at all sure of the best way to use them. Roz is trying to push me into taking some sort of extramural P. P. E. degree. Or a teacher-training course.’

  ‘But you’re not called?’

  ‘In a way, very much. As long as it wasn’t at Oxford.’

  ‘A lot of women seem to do it nowadays.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘A counterargument?’

  ‘No, of course not.’ She looked down, then glossed that. ‘Roz’s motives get a tiny bit transparent at times. I hate feeling I’m both a problem mother and just one more blow for the cause.’

  ‘Except that it’s a good cause? And you do have a problem.’

  She said nothing for a moment. ‘May I put my feet up?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She kicked off her shoes and stretched her legs along the settee, then made a face across at me. ‘Varicose veins.’

  ‘Oh God.’

  ‘I’ve had them for years. Not even worth operating on. They just ache sometimes.’ She went on quickly, back to her psychological self, staring down at her lap. ‘I suppose it’s a burden of frustration. Having got yourself into a state where nothing seems sensible enough. You know? Your heart aches for a huge step and you can’t face any of the little ones. You lose your head, as I did that dreadful evening with you. Say things you don’t really mean.’

  ‘But the heart wants to mean?’

  She reached an arm on the couch-back, leant her head against her hand, stared again at the fire. ‘I just feel our society has got blind. So selfish. It’s all I can ever see nowadays. And the only people who could change anything, change it intelligently, absolutely nothing about it. Refuse to give up anything Share anything. It seems almost beyond politics. A kind of universal blindness. Which means you turn to anyone who appears to begin to see. The Maoists, the Communists, anyone.’

  ‘But isn’t the trouble if you throw out all the bad freedoms, the good ones go with them?’

  ‘I know I’m in a dream-world. Especially on the historical evidence.’

  ‘The only place where I thought that wretched Fenwick character had a point was on biological grounds. That we can’t evolve without at least some freedom to go our own peculiar way.’

  She stretched the arm along the back of the couch; still hypnotized by, or finding sanctuary in, the fire.

  ‘I heard a Marxist economist lecture a month or two ago. About the production costs of the British food industry. The ludicrous proportion of the whole that’s taken up by advertising and packaging. Apparently it’s even worse in America.’

  ‘No one would argue over that. A bad freedom.’

  ‘But no one does argue, Dan. Except the extreme left. That’s the real horror.’

  ‘Perhaps you should stand for Parliament.’

  She smiled. ‘La Pasionaria of the detergent counter?’

  ‘Seriously. Local government, anyway.’

  ‘I have thought about it.’ She added, ‘As schoolgirls dream of winning Wimbledon or dancing with Nureyev.’

  ‘You can project. That’s half the battle.’

  ‘Could project.’

  ‘It would come back.’

  Again she was silent a moment, searching for words. ‘It’s the battle in myself that has to be won first. When I knew Anthony was going to die, I had a sense of release. So many things I was going to do. It’s almost as if they’ve all died with him. I feel a terrible lack of energy. Not physically. All this useless, diffuse anger churning inside me, and knowing I just let it churn. Never do a thing about it. Just go on leading my same old life.’

  ‘You’re not giving yourself any time.’

  ‘But I don’t have that feeling any more, of release.’ She had folded her arms now, sat propped against the far inner corner of the couch, staring at her stockinged feet. ‘I have a rather sympto-longing to renounce all my money. I can’t in fact, obviously it’s morally in trust for the children.’

  ‘Symptom of what?’

  ‘I suppose of disgust with what I am. Wanting to have it all take out of my hands.’ She grimaced to herself. ‘I know it’s all ominously like what drove me into the Church.’

  I was tempted to go back to that, but knew, or guessed, that the past was not at issue.

  ‘Perhaps what you need to renounce is some of the idealism.’

  My sympathy had to be acknowledged, but she gave the impression that I had failed to realize the complexity of her case and her predicament.

  ‘It’s like waking up twenty-five years too late to what you are.’

  ‘We all have to face that.’

  She looked up and across the coffee things at me: those always rather Socratic dark brown eyes.

  ‘But you do have an interesting career, Dan. It really is rather different for us. My kind of woman. At my age.’

  ‘But you also have more potential freedom now. I’m stuck with what I’ve learnt to be good at.’

  Again she smiled at the kindness, not the validity of the argument; then shrugged.

  ‘I suppose becoming a Labour Party activist would really be the most sensible thing. Our present man in Oxford is hopeless.’ There was another silence, then she looked at me again. ‘Do you ever regret having been an arts graduate?’

  ‘And social drone?’

  ‘Being left helpless in front of economists and people like that. Eternal amateurs.’

  ‘I once got up American corporation law in two days. Enough to kid the public, anyway.’

  She grinned. ‘That’s very wicked.’

  ‘It’s not a cheat. An audience likes to feel the details are right but that’s not what it’s all about. It’s a character’s general plausibility as a human being. I’m sure the same’s true or politics. Getting the details a bit wrong can even add to that. Look at Heath and Wilson.’

  ‘Or Johnson and Nixon. They’ve all been too concerned to be right to be plausible. There is a place for honest innocents.’

  ‘Not a category I belong to.’

  ‘I shouldn’t be so sure.’

  Our eyes met a moment, as though she wasn’t prepared to take that contradiction as lightly as I said it. But then she turned and put her legs to the ground again.

  ‘I’d b
etter just see if Paul’s turned out his light.’

  She bent and slipped on her shoes, then went away upstairs. It was strange how she shifted, or had shifted as we talked—-something still to uncover, to reveal, despite the apparent frankness; shifted in her age, from being it fully to someone younger… shifted in her voice, in the hints of the student revolutionary behind the dry self-dismissal of a woman in her forties; even in her body, a certain kind of studied formality, elegance, in some movements, a domestic simplicity in others; a kind of uneasy battle between the widowed mother of three and the eternal ghost of a much younger self. She was away for five minutes, and I got up to put some more logs on the fire; then stood in front of it and stared at the bishop, who contemplated me with his usual air of disapproval. Perhaps he discerned the possibility that had sprung into my mind after her unvexed news from the Bermoothes; and left me torn between an instinct and a common sense; or to be more exact, between an instinctive idea, it had certainly come from nowhere conscious, and an inability to see how it could be expressed. The conflict was not resolved when Jane returned. She was pressing a reproachful grin out of her mouth.

  ‘You have made a conquest. I’ve just been asked why we can’t live in a place like this.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s the answer. Cultivate your garden.’

  She sat down again, and once more put her feet up. Yes, all right, she’d have a whisky. There was another shift of mood; brisker, determined to leave her discontented self behind. She spoke to where I stood at the drinks cupboard at the end of the room.

  ‘I do envy you. Being in touch with nature and all that.’

  ‘It is a relief from people.’

  I looked out of Paul’s window. ‘The peace. All that darkness, things asleep.’

  I came back with the glasses.

  ‘But unreal?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘Still quite cheap to buy.’

  She smiled, toasted me silently. ‘Get thee behind me.’

  ‘Anyway, I’m about to discover how unreal it is.’ I sat down in my rocker. ‘I’m going to give myself a year off after this current script.’

  ‘And live here?’

  ‘If Ben and Phoebe don’t drive me mad.’

  ‘How will you spend your time?’

  I bent to replace a log-end that had fallen out on the hearthstone ‘God knows. Probably in sheer relief at not having to think cinema for a while.’ Now I hesitated. ‘I have a ghost of a notion I might try a novel.’

  She was surprised.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Unreally. It’s rather like your dream of standing for Westminster.’

  She sat again with an arm cocked on the back of the couch; the whisky in her lap, in a quite unconscious imitation of Mme Ramier; for some reason, perhaps just at the change of subject, more alert, amused.

  ‘Do you have a subject?’

  ‘Just a ragbag of ideas that never got into my other work. The facts behind the glamorous movie scenes. That sort of thing. Hardly original. And potentially very tedious.’

  ‘Then it wouldn’t be like anything else you’ve written.’

  I smiled down at my glass. ‘You’re disappointing me, Jane. I was hoping you might argue me out of it.’

  ‘Why on earth should I do that?

  ‘I thought the novel counted as ego-perpetuating bourgeois decadence.’

  For a tiny moment she was inclined to take offence. Her eyes rested on mine, but then she looked down and murmured, ‘You’re breaking our agreement.’

  ‘Rather more putting a serious question flippantly.’

  ‘Then I don’t understand it.’

  ‘Whether it isn’t a form of self-indulgence.’

  ‘I should have thought that depends on the end-product.’

  ‘Obviously… and when it’s so uncertain?’

  ‘Have you read Lukacs?’

  I shook my head. ‘Why?’

  She bowed her head. ‘I just wondered.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Only because he’s rather wise on… well, all art, but particularly the novel. Its proper and improper uses.’

  ‘According to the canon?

  She looked up again. ‘He was a very great humanist, Dan.’

  ‘I must confess I haven’t read him.’

  ‘Not very brave when the Stalinist screws were put on. Not a mad martyr a la Solzhethtsyn. Like most of us, really. Just wanting something better… inside the system.’ She looked down, as if ashamed to be so positive; then spoke more gently, like a guest. ‘I think you’d like him. He’s very intelligent. Behind all the isms.’

  ‘It’s whether I could rival the supreme honesty of a novel I saw in California recently. It was called The Life and Times of Jonathan Doe.’

  ‘I haven’t… ‘

  ‘It consisted of a title page and two hundred blank sheets. All rather nicely bound.’

  That made her laugh, but she wouldn’t accept such diffidence; having written so many scripts must help, if only with the dialogue.

  ‘It’s the bits between I fear. All the stuff the camera does for you. And finding an angle. A place to hide.’

  ‘Why must you hide?’

  ‘I couldn’t just write a novel about a scriptwriter. That would be absurd. A novelist who wasn’t a scriptwriter might do it. But I’m a scriptwriter who isn’t a novelist.’

  ‘Until you try.’

  ‘I’m slightly tempted to use someone like Jenny McNeil. Seeing it all through her eyes. If I ever could get inside a young female mind.’

  ‘She sounds very intelligent.’

  ‘A lot too much to be a good actress.’

  ‘I would once have taken deep offence at that.’

  We smiled, looked down. My own smile was even then partly at my duplicity, from my knowing that Jenny’s was not the only architectures head I must try to penetrate. Tensions, poles; the mysterious of secret reality. I poked the logs together, then threw on some new ones. ‘Not serious. Merely a touch of your own disease.’

  ‘I must say you seem remarkably free of the symptoms.’

  ‘I feel my life’s been rather like the lanes round here… going the long way nowhere between high hedges. It isn’t that I haven’t enjoyed the hedges. But there comes a time when you want to look over them. Get your bearings, I suppose.’ She waited, the listener now. There was the sound of a car, one of the rare ones that used the lane at night. I remembered that other car that had passed in the Oxford night; and let the sound of this one die away. ‘A little peck at one’s liver. The whole culture’s, really.’

  ‘Prometheus in the Augean Stable?’

  I opened my hands. ‘And where the hell one would start. A Russian like Solzhenitsyn he’s got his dragon on every street-corner. It’s where you find it in a society drifting slowly downstream into oblivion.’

  ‘Anthony would have said that the terms of your statement answer it.’

  ‘The drifting? But that’s not an external thing like an inhumane political system. Just in the nature of history and its ends.’

  She mimicked the don’s wife.

  ‘History doesn’t have ends. History is the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.’

  ‘Sartre?’

  ‘Marx.’

  ‘I wonder if he could have imagined a nation with only its past to live for.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s where the solution is.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Our moral tradition. Belief in personal conscience. Instead of being tied like an old boot behind American and E. E. C. capitalism.’ It was my turn to wait; and once again I sensed a struggle in her between retiring and going on. It was not unlike trying to persuade a wild animal to feed from one’s hand; the patience one needs sometimes, watching birds. She hopped, shyly. ‘I’m reading another very interesting Marxist at the moment. Gramsci.’

  ‘Yes, I saw you were.’ She glanced up. ‘It was in your living room.’ I smiled. ‘And once again o
nly a name, I’m afraid.’

  ‘He tried to evolve a socialism for the Italian situation. ‘

  ‘And failed?’

  ‘In terms of Mussolini and his own Communist Party, totally. But he’s having his revenge now. In the modern C. P. I.’

  ‘And he’s relevant?’

  ‘Not in practical terms to the British situation. But I find some of his ideas sympathetic.’ She was staring into the fire again. ‘He’s really another of the Marxist anti-jacobins… a humanist, underneath the jargon. There’s a thing he labelled ideological hegemony.’ She followed that with the faintest suggestion of a wince, but went on. ‘By which he meant a sort of all-pervasive organizing principle in bourgeois society a belief-system that more and more takes the place of the overt police state… totalitarianism proper. It permeates all society, supports the established system through the mind the unconscious. It works by what Marxists call mystification. Confuses all power relations, all major issues, the way people see events. Prevents them from judging them. Everything becomes reified, human beings become commodities, to be bought and sold. Mere objects, market research statistics, things to be manipulated by images and all the rest. Which means that socialist intellectuals and activists have nothing to work on in the ordinary consciousness. They become inorganic, they’re either driven into isolation on the political sidelines, or if they do get power, forced to follow the old Leninist heresy. Government by force and apparatus.’ She paused, then ended rather pathetically. ‘Unfortunately he’s far better at defining that than explaining how one could create a counter-hegemony. The evil, not the cure.’

  All of which was said with a continuing shyness, tentativeness; it was less Gramsci than his exegetist that interested me as always, far less the political than the biological view of life: not what she said, but why she was saying it; why I was allowed to hear what had been so firmly banned the previous evening at Compton. It seemed a compliment yet I wondered; perhaps it merely implied, once that my political indifference and ignorance needed reprise. I’m a victim of it in a way. ‘Buying the American view of Country. From over there it does sometimes seem a hopelessly in-turned and stagnant place.’

  ‘Because they say so?’