Daniel Martin

by John Fowles

  When he got to the corner himself, he saw a collapsed wall made it easy to clamber down nearer the water. She was sitting on one end of the drum of a fallen column, in the thin shade of a sunt tree, her back to him, looking at the curving reach of the water to the south. He scrambled down to join her.

  ‘Isn’t this a delectable place, Jane?’

  She nodded. But something in the way she nodded, and did not turn, both contradicted his light tone and warned him. He came beside her. She gave an embarrassed downward glance towards his feet, then looked back at the view. After a moment a hand came up and she touched her eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s nothing.’ She shook her head, to dismiss his solicitude. ‘Its all being over. And thinking of Anthony. How he would have liked it here.’

  He sat down beside her on the drum of stone, then asked gently, ‘Why now?’

  She had said nothing.

  Then without warning her right hand had reached out and taken his, as if she were apologizing for turning female. She would have withdrawn it, but he caught it and made it lie still, under his own now, resting on the stone between them. They stayed like that for a few moments. He pressed the hand, felt a small movement of response; then saw her look down at the hands, as at things detached from the rest of their bodies. And suddenly he knew that something else was being said—in that way she looked down, as in that original gesture of reaching. He felt moved, yet strangely frozen. It was in those moments’ silence, simplicity; in their very tentativeness. Part of him wanted to put an arm round her shoulders, but he knew that the instinct was in some way, echoing the curious swiftness of the cruise, too late when it was perceived; either done spontaneously, or not at all.

  ‘My dear, he wouldn’t want it.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And we could easily make this an annual thing.’

  She smiled, as he had meant her to, and quoted Eliot to the river.

  ‘“I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.”‘

  ‘In a manner of speaking.’

  They heard voices behind them, some of the French at the corner of the terrace. She withdrew her hand, but they did not turn; sat in silence again, in the dappled shade. Three snow-white egrets flew across the river, but Dan saw them without thinking. It had been in that downward look at the joined hands. It had been a declension, out of the theatre of their behaviour on the cruise into something undeclared not only between them, but also in each separately; and describable in the other sense of declension… a feminine look, not a neutrally companionable one. Almost reluctant, admitting nothing but its brief existence; yet there.

  It had glossed that ‘its all being over’, which had meant not just the cruise, the experience. He knew it had referred mainly to the past, and not to any specific past possibility, but all past possibility; what she knew he knew was lost for ever; but there was also some tinge in it, if only derived from the fact that it had been given in the now, of a present regret… for what had been rediscovered, for what, beneath all the change, had remained. Perhaps he had read too much into it. Yet what it really revealed was something in himself: the arm that had wanted to move, the knowledge that he hadn’t honestly examined why he wanted the cruise to continue, that he shared this sadness at its ending; that he would miss this daily closeness, mind, intuition, shared age and experience, the restoration of the old empathy, far more than he was prepared to admit. It came so oddly without the usual clear knowledges of physical attraction; all those still stayed stubbornly attached to the thought of Jenny, and not just out of fidelity. It was far more a matter of that sense of incompleteness—the extent to which it would increase when they went their different ways, a glimpse of a reality in the old Platonic myth, an echo of the old Rabelaisian one, Pals ce que voudras… it also frightened him.

  He found his cigarettes. She took one and they smoked, both staring out at the river. The tears were quite ended now, as she proved when she broke the silence.

  ‘I was also crying because I suddenly realized I was glad to be alive again, Dan. After what seems rather a long time.’

  ‘I prefer that.’

  ‘It was your stopping to watch that bird… we had an absurd row in Greece three years ago—our last proper holiday alone together. Because he’d held us up with his botanizing one afternoon, when all I wanted was a beach and somewhere to swim. He was so happy and I was so unreasonable.’

  ‘Are you sure he wasn’t being unreasonable as well?’

  ‘I sat under a tree reading. I only took it out on him later. He wasn’t to know.’ She flicked ash from her cigarette. ‘Behind our screens.’

  ‘An accepted part of every civilized marriage?’

  She smiled, but sadly, then took a breath.

  ‘I think they must be right, the young. About the antiquatedness of the institution.’

  ‘Their theory also has its price.’

  She left another silence.

  ‘Have you ever missed it?’

  ‘Sometimes.’ But that seemed not enough of an answer. He looked down. ‘Not often. If I’m honest.’ He added, ‘And once burnt, twice shy. Laziness. The other kind of relationship becomes a habit.’

  ‘And the freedom?’

  ‘To be an aging Don Juan?’

  She murmured, ‘That lovely innocent young man I knew at Oxford.’

  ‘Beyond salvation now.’ She glanced at him, but he avoided her eyes, knowing why she looked. ‘I’m only smiling because you know perfectly well he was never innocent. Lovely, perhaps.’

  She too looked down at the ground, then said slowly, almost as if to herself, ‘I always remember you as innocent.’

  ‘Unlike you?’

  ‘I was so frightened of my real feelings.’

  Before he could answer there came, from behind them, a wail from the ship’s horn. It was time to return.

  ‘That’s still a kind of innocence.’

  ‘It never seemed it. Even then.’

  ‘I think you’re playing Cassandra backwards. My memory of you’s quite opposite. That you always did show real feelings. When it mattered.’ He said, ‘Or much more than the rest of us ever managed.’

  ‘Emotions. They’re not the same.’ But then she said, more lightly, ‘I’m trying to say thank you, Dan. That is a real feeling.’

  There was another peremptory wail from the ship. She stood and reached out a hand with a composed smile… long live convention, the foolishness was over. He pressed it as he stood, and they started back for the boat.

  He remained disconcerted. There was something disturbing in the conversation, as in the look; that had not been in any of their previous conversations. She put on dark glasses, and they strolled back through the ruins towards the entrance. A row of crocodile-headed divinities, Alain coming up to greet them, some joke Jane smiled, and answered for them both; she seemed fully recovered from her little bout of sentiment, as lightly guarded as always. Dan had a sense of missed chance, he should have put his arm round her shoulders, at least closed that space… this ludicrous emotional no-man’s-land they had decreed between them, which perhaps their conversation had been directed, on her side, after the holding hands, to reconstitute. It had been like accidentally seeing a woman in her underwear through a bedroom door. Even though the undressing had been of a very different kind, he could not deny that, just as with the hands, it had held an erotic charge for him.

  Later, when the ship was on its way again, and they sat on deck before lunch—their Czech friend and Alain were sitting with them—he found himself constantly contemplating Jane in secret… or at least if not literally so, then mentally. Alain was flirting with her again, in English, it was all innocent, she must come to Paris and let him take her to all the new boîtes and restaurants—and Dan let himself slip into the young Frenchman’s imagined place. Perhaps that was at the root of it: a resentment on her side, though almost certainly unconscious, that Dan had so scrupulously not acknowledged what other males around them did: that sh
e wore her age well, she retained an attraction. It had worried him slightly from the beginning, which was why he had been careful with conventional compliments about clothes, about how she looked.

  On the other hand he was very clear that whatever else that gesture, that revealing, had meant, it had not been an invitation. And it was absurd because of Jenny; because of the memory of what Jane had told Caro, her view of him as someone in flight, eternally fickle; because of a thousand things.

  So much bound them apart, and not least sheer ignorance of each other’s secret feelings and emotions—as her very distinguishing between the two words had once more proved. Yet Dan fell, in his habitual hypothetical way, to imagining what, if he proposed when they transferred from the ship to the hotel in Aswan that they take a double room, her reaction might be. The only speculation involved was over how she would refuse: with anger, with disbelief, with irony, perhaps even with affection. What was certain was that she would refuse—or he knew nothing of women. He wondered if what nagged at him was merely her impossibility—or their joint impossibility. He remembered that she had had an affaire quite recently; and he could, just, imagine her having an affaire, a night, with Alain, if he himself had not been there—a letting him into her bed if he insisted enough. But that would never do for them. And he knew, in some strange way, that even if she might, out of some part of herself so hidden that he had not even guessed at its existence, out of some brief conquest of feeling by emotion, not have refused, he would have felt betrayed.

  The Hoopers, or their presence, made him say very little at lunch. He worried, like a dog with an old bone, at those brief tears, that one downward look: had it reproached him, or warned him? Jane gave no clue now, it was as if nothing had happened. Any reference, she managed to suggest, would have been to exaggerate the incident. But he wouldn’t quite let her get away with that. She smiled at him as they waited for their dessert, her chin poised on her clasped hands.

  ‘You’re being very silent.’

  ‘That’s how men cry.’

  ‘What’s your woe?’

  ‘I smell the return of reality.’

  ‘There’s still your island. I thought that was why we were here.’ He tilted his head in reluctant acknowledgment: yes, one treat left. As if to cheer him up, she added, ‘And lovely memories.’

  He retreated behind a smile and a look aside; but then something, against his will, he was conscious that his smile had been too thin, made him seek her eyes again. In a way it was his equivalent of her look; certainly puzzled and questioning. Perhaps it seemed to her merely inquisitive, or contradicting the last words she had said. At any rate she gave a little interrogative shake of the head.

  ‘No?’

  He smiled more naturally. ‘I shall try to forget the food.’

  Their waiter came with the dessert, creamed rice sprinkled with cinnamon, and Jane began to eat at once, as if to tell him he was being unreasonable, spoilt indeed.

  The landscape changed as they neared Aswan, the Nile ran through desert. Limitless sands broken by harsh black basaltic outcrops, scorched by millennia of unrelenting sun, stood and waited, or so it seemed, for the great river to run dry. Tropical cabbage palms became the only trees along the banks, and desert ravens, recalling the Bible again, manna, as well as Dan’s more personal memories, were the only birds. The sun burnt down through a cool north wind.

  Aswan itself came as a shock, brutally interrupting an increasingly barren solitude. The town had changed considerably since Dan’s previous visit in the 1950s. Now it had the air of a boom city, with an imposing and traffic-filled waterfront, high-rise buildings, a monstrous new hotel complex on Elephantine Island. There were crowds of ferrying feluccas, motor-launches; and beyond, to the south, the blue sky was stained a pale yellow with the dust from the dam and its surrounding industries. The horizon there was festooned with wires and pylons, radar, all the ugly adjuncts of twentieth-century technology and war. Three MiGs tore low overhead as the boat came in to moor; and higher still the azure was lacerated with white con-trails.

  Dan and Jane remembered what they had heard at Assad’s party; what would happen if the Aswan Dam was breached, the terrible tidal wave that would destroy the whole length of the Nile Valley and half Cairo with it… and which made all bluster about total war with Israel a sour joke—the ‘final irrigation scheme’, as Ahmed Sabry had sardonically named this sword of Damocles. Aswan was the return of reality with a vengeance, and Dan loathed it. He had an abrupt sense of a voyage ended; and the end of the dream of a different voyage, far longer.

  Assad had wanted to put him in touch with the manager of a local studio, indeed offered to fly down himself, but Dan had declined. The studio facilities were not his business, there were obviously desert locations galore, and he merely wanted the feel of the place. He was even gladder now that he had been firm. They did not have to leave the ship until the next morning, when they would transfer for a couple of nights to the Old Cataract Hotel, dwarfed, he noted, by the ugly New Cataract beside it. On his own he would have moved ashore at once, but he knew that that would have offended Jane’s sense of economy; so he compromised and suggested they skipped the prescribed official tour that afternoon, but went under their own steam… or sailed, hiring their own felucca. He presented the idea as a professional necessity, he didn’t want to rush things. Jane seemed content.

  So they waited until the others had left, and then walked down the corniche to where a fleet of small feluccas waited; and to save argument let themselves be captured by the first boatman who approached them. He was a grave young man, in a white galabiya and black-banded headscarf, with a small boy at his side. His name was Omar, and he spoke a few very rudimentary words of English; beneath the dark skin he had strangely Anglo-Saxon features and rather pale eyes. There was a ghost of T. E. Lawrence about him. They tacked slowly into the wind as they headed north for the sandy cliffs on the uninhabited west bank, round the tip of Elephantine Island. The motion was pleasing, after the ship; its patience and gentleness. Kites glided overhead; then there were terns fishing, a falcon circling over the ochre cliffs, and a huge bird flapped off the buoy at the end of the island, an osprey. Dan began to feel happier as the busy town receded. He found their helmsman’s taciturnity pleasing. Kitchener’s island came in sight, upstream of them, green and dense with vegetation, and he knew that there at least he would not be disappointed. Jane, too, was obviously enjoying this new scenery.

  They landed and climbed up to see the rock tombs in the Kobbet el Hawa cliff, where the Herr Professor had had his strange first experience of timelessness. They had been too long occupied by nomads to show much more than pretty fragments and perversely, though he had complained so much at the royal sites, Dan now found himself missing their craftsmanship and finesse of detail. From outside the tombs they could look back over the mid-river islands and survey the mushrooming town to the east, the industrial landscape stretching behind it and to the south. It was like a huge scorpion, pincered, menacing the little oasis of blue and green at their feet; reminded Dan a little of Los Angeles, seen from Mulholland Drive—or indeed, from Jenny’s apartment. In some way this depressing sense of a spatial invasion transferred itself to his sense of personal time… how briefly they were there, how short the permitted entry into the oasis. The man who had guided them round the tombs pointed out various landmarks in the town, but Dan was lost in his own thoughts.

  Then he had a very peculiar few moments of disorientation. Perhaps there really was some genius loci, though his experience was not of timelessness, but of somehow being outside his own body, as if he were a camera, merely recording, at a remove from present reality. For a brief but abyss-like space he was not at all sure where he was, what he was doing. This landscape, this voluble guide, the way the wind moved this woman’s hair… it was like a mechanical trip in the normal current of consciousness, a black-out, an epilepsy, and he found it, during the few seconds it lasted, ominous, unpleasant; as if he, all aroun
d him, was an idea in someone else’s mind, not his own.

  He paid and tipped the guide, then followed Jane down the narrow path to where their felucca and its two attendants waited. He would have liked to try to describe to her what had just happened, but felt the old German had in some way pre-empted him; it would seem silly, like exclaiming over some experience of déjà vu, whose metaphysical strangeness could not be conveyed, and must always sound suspect to an outsider. The evanescence, the illusion of lost angle he had had the same feeling once or twice before, when he was tired, on film-sets. Nothing existed except as a record of another pair of eyes, another mind; the perceived world was as thin as an eggshell, a fragile painted flat, a back-projection… and behind, nothing. Shadows, darkness, emptiness.

  He watched Jane’s back, as she descended the steep slope just before him. She was wearing bell-bottomed jeans, a pale terracotta-coloured shirt beneath a kind of loose woollen cardigan-cum-coat, too long to be one, too short to be the other, that she had often worn on their forays from the ship. It was unashamedly sui generis, and managed to hit, more than anything else she wore, that blend in its owner between the ancient bluestocking’s indifference to clothes and a contradictory, but not altogether casual, respect for how personality is conveyed through choice of them. Then the rush-basket she was carrying—that touch of domesticity, of being on a shopping expedition as well: she was wearing the silver comb in her hair, but a dark strand had escaped.

  And once again Dan had a moment, like that one on the Dorset down, of imagining that they had married, had been married since the beginning; he saw his wife, not Anthony’s widow; a hand on her shoulder, a moment’s stopping, a replacing that escaped strand, an indulgent little marital nothing. Then he felt frightened again. Perhaps his brief experience above, which part of him was already dismissing as a curious trick of the brain-cells, a second or two’s lapse of those responsible for maintaining one’s normal state of consciousness—was premonitory; just as he had, a few moments before it happened, slipped from an outer spatial to an inner temporal analogy over the invading town, perhaps there had been some warning of an imminent greater slip, into something pathological, a madness, a declared schizophrenia… the ground levelled out and he came beside her, damning death and introspection.