Daniel Martin

by John Fowles

‘Where?’

  ‘To the idea that what’s wrong inside you can be solved by sacrificing everything to social conscience… helping the under privileged. All of that. At least I’d claim for my solution that it’s much nearer home. I’ve betrayed the only two things for which I ever had any talent. Handling words, and loving one single other human being wholly.’ He added, ‘And that last one, you share.’ Strangely, it must seem very strangely in view of what he next said, there came to him the memory of that remote, endlessly stopping andante variation in the Goldberg; silences, and what lay behind them. ‘You murdered something in all three of us, Jane. Largely without knowing it, and perhaps murder is an unkind word. But you made certain choices, developments, impossible. We’re sitting surrounded by what you did to us. Out there.’

  That last harshness visibly set her back again; killed whatever hopes she may have harboured of keeping the conversation within bounds. He went on.

  ‘I can’t forgive that analogy of the prison you used. I’d much rather you said you didn’t trust me. At least that would be honest.’

  She leant back a little, again shook her head. ‘I don’t have to look outside myself for lack of trust.’

  ‘I think the difference between us is that there’s a part of you I don’t understand. That I’m even happy in a way not to understand. While for you I’m something in a cage. Only too easy to label.’

  ‘You know how to live with yourself, Dan. I don’t.’

  ‘For which I get a black mark.’

  ‘That’s not fair.’

  He looked down with a wry smile. ‘It doesn’t have to be. My condition is traditionally excused.’ But even that plea for a shade less seriousness went unheard. He sensed that something in her was receding, not only from him, but in time, to well before his knowing of her; to an eternal unforgivingness, refusal to listen. He spoke more gently. ‘Perhaps that’s the real difference. Only one of us is in love with love.’

  ‘In a fit state for it.’

  ‘It’s not communion, for heaven’s sake. States of grace aren’t required. Or absolution.’ She said nothing. ‘We’re two very imperfect beings, Jane. An egoist and an idealist. Not the Platonic dream at all. But that doesn’t mean we couldn’t give a great deal to each other.’ Still she would not speak. ‘Then we’re back to animal facts.’

  He knew there was something panic-stricken in her, despite the stillness of her pose and expression; doubling and doubling, trying to escape.

  ‘You make it so difficult for me.’

  ‘Then let me make it easier. I’d much rather it was something physical than what you’re seeming to suggest.’

  He felt she was weighing the possibility of that as a loophole; which told him that it could not really be so. At last she looked up, across the room.

  ‘I didn’t go to sleep for hours in Aswan. If I felt nothing in that way, I wouldn’t have talked about prison.’

  ‘Then what in God’s name is it?’

  ‘I suppose God himself. In a peculiar sort of way.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Whatever made me glad, the next morning, that nothing had happened.’ She added, ‘I know I should have been lying to you. It wouldn’t have been for the right reason.’

  ‘Then out of what?’

  She paused, still unwilling to go on; but knew she must now.

  ‘You’ve had lots of sexual experience, I don’t suppose you can imagine what it’s like for someone who hasn’t had very much. How you… store the memory of what little you have had. This was one reason I hesitated so much over coming. Knowing… ‘but she broke off.

  ‘Knowing what, Jane?’

  ‘That old feelings might return.’ Now she went on quickly before he could speak. ‘It’s partly Anthony, Dan. I’m not really over that yet. I don’t mean the death. The living with him. All the failures there.’

  ‘But I suspect he half hoped this would happen.’

  ‘For reasons I can’t accept. Even if his ridiculous scheme of metaphysics was true, he has to do his own penance.’

  ‘But you’re behaving exactly as if it is. As if he’s watching us, and you have to spite him.’

  ‘I have to take no notice of what he wanted.’ She appealed to him; or at least her head turned a little. ‘And of what something female in me also wants.’ She looked down again. ‘When you took my hand in the car just now, I wanted to cry. I know it must seem absurd. So much of me would rather be… not like this.’ She fingered the rim of her glass, letting the silence grow. Outside, the pariah was barking again. But then she continued. ‘It’s as if the one part of you you don’t want to be the acted part, the part that wants to give, to say yes, for some terrible reason still insists on denying the rest. What you expect from me is like something I’m told exists, I know exists, but in a country where I can’t go. I lay awake that night in Aswan trying to be someone different. Telling myself this man has always attracted me, so why not. As an adventure. As it happened before. But I knew I couldn’t.’ She waited, but now he was silent. ‘It’s partly because I can’t think of you objectively like that… as “this man”.’ She hesitated again. ‘I was given a little test on the boat. I was propositioned one evening by Alain in a nice, discreet, traditional French way. As one makes an opening bid at bridge. But I looked across the room at you. If you could only understand the reason it would have been like betraying you then is the same reason behind now.’

  ‘And supposing I’d come, at Aswan?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have had time to think about it. But now I have.’

  He contemplated his glass.

  ‘You can always tell a really bad film-script when the story depends on missed opportunities.’

  ‘But ours has. You said just now I killed a choice in all of us. I can’t risk doing that again.’

  ‘Then we’ve learnt nothing all these years. Except how to make deserts even more barren still.’

  ‘I really shall cry, if you talk like this.’

  ‘I might well join you.’

  But he reached his hand, as if to stop such nonsense, and took hers. After a moment she returned its pressure. The joined hands lay on the rug between them.

  ‘The one mystery to me is how I can have fallen twice in my life for such an impossible bitch of a woman.’

  ‘At least we can agree on that.’

  He banged her hand gently against the rug, but then let silence come. Both his tenderness and his irritation deepened: the tenderness because he knew what lay behind her refusal was also what he loved in her, the not being like any other woman in his life, despite the fact that this uniqueness came so strongly tinged with Anthony’s old argument from absurdity—though it was less credo now than nego quia absurdum; and the irritation not only because she had admitted both nature and reason were on his side, but also because it offended some archetypal sense in him of right dramatic development—they had come to the end of the world, and not, at last, to be able to meet there denied that remote but all-powerful place in the unconscious from where his deepest notions of personal destiny came. He could have tried for years to imagine a better place and failed to create what one day’s hazard had brought; so apt, so stripping of the outer world, so crying the truth of the human condition. He stared across at the particle of the human condition opposite, his head now sunk sideways, deep on a lapel of the old European jacket he wore over his galabiya: Tiresias, Moslem style.

  Stalemate. But he would not relinquish her hand. He felt a more general irritation, against their history, their type in time. They took themselves, or their would-be moral selves, so seriously. It had indeed all been summed up by the mirrors in his student room: the overweening narcissism of all their generation… all the liberal scruples, the concern with living right and doing right, were not based on external principles, but self-obsession. Perhaps the ultimate vulgarity lay there: in trying to conform to one’s age’s notion of spiritual nobility—as if, though one laughed at the notion of an afterlife, on
e was not just an animal with one brief existence on a dying planet, but still had an immortal soul and a judgment day to face. And when what one wanted was so innocent, private, small: he felt tempted to put this to Jane. But then, perhaps knowing it was a lost cause, skipped the argument for the conclusion. He turned his head and looked at her.

  ‘Jane, why don’t we behave like two normal human beings and make it one room tonight?’

  ‘Because it wouldn’t solve anything.’

  He murmured with a mock tartness, ‘Speak for yourself.’ But she was beyond response, even the faintest smile. He pressed the hand, and spoke in an even lower voice. ‘You know it’s not that. I’d just like to hold you. Be close to you.’

  She stared at the floor-almost through it, at something far beyond. He squeezed her hand again, but it was lifeless. He could detect no softening of the bleak perversity in her face, though it did have a sadness; a kind of ultimate being cornered, yet still an inability to surrender.

  How that silence might have been broken he was not to know, because Labib—and by then it began to seem mercifully—reappeared and came to them. If they would sit; their meal was ready. They stood, and though they chose a table on the other side of the room from his, they felt more exposed, within earshot. The younger man served. A lamb stew on a small mountain of pilaf, very simple yet not unappetizing… a flavour of cumin, other exotic herbs, and the rice was good. Dan had another beer. They sat facing Labib, who ate the same meal twelve feet away. He seemed pleased to show off his English. The old man with the squint had woken up, between servings the waiter sat by him again; and the cook came and sat by the stove. For once Labib was prepared to concede something not absolutely bad about Syria—he had known the cook before, when he worked in a hotel in Damascus. They should go to Damascus, the souk was very good, very cheap, many folk-dresses, jewellery… Jane answered far more than Dan, playing the polite diplomat again, her father’s daughter, across the space between their tables. It was as if nothing had been said; but they avoided each other’s eyes.

  Two dishes of yoghurt followed, and a bowl of oranges; then Turkish coffee. They discussed tomorrow with the driver. He wanted to be on his way back by midday. There was the museum to see, the baths, the tombs, the dead city itself.., too much, they must rise with the dawn, at seven, if they wanted to see it all. He had heard a weather report on the wireless. The mist was not expected, but there would be cloud, perhaps rain. Tomorrow seemed already fraught with the press of time, with duty and gloom, by the time he had finished. Then he mentioned that there was an old French guide they could read if they wanted. He made the old man find it.

  They retreated with the dog-eared pamphlet to their sofa behind the stove. His table cleared, Labib stayed where he was and began some kind of backgammon game with the cook. They played not with dice, but cards. The other two men moved and watched, made quiet comments; the occasional small clack of moved counters. Meanwhile Jane translated the guide book for Dan’s benefit, as if glad of this excuse to take sanctuary in something third, pedantic, stale; as if this small service might forgive her her sins. He listened to her voice, not what she was saying. If one part of him felt inclined to snatch the guide out of her hands and throw it across the room, yet another was in some way tranced by the strangeness, the suspense, the being there. He glanced at his watch. It was still not nine. It seemed they had been there for days, not in fact, less than three hours. She came to the end of her reading. There were exclamations from the four men, grins—some coup, some stroke of luck, for the cook against Labib; a new game was begun.

  ‘Shall we take a sniff outside?

  ‘If you like. It is rather overpowering, this heat.’

  They stood, and Jane went through to their bedrooms while Dan explained to Labib what they intended.

  The driver pointed. ‘Not that way. In ruin. Bad dogs.’ And he bit fingers against a thumb, to show what he meant.

  ‘That way?’ Dan pointed towards the road. That way, it seemed, was all right. Labib spoke to the younger man, who went and fetched a torch.

  Dan found Jane with her Russian coat on, tying a headscarf, in the doorway of her room. There was a reek of paraffin.

  ‘Oh Christ.’ He went past her, into the stench. ‘You can’t sleep in this.’

  ‘It’ll be all right. I’ll open the window.’

  ‘And freeze to death.’

  ‘Not with all those blankets.’

  Outside they found the wind had dropped, although a bitter dankness hung in the air. In spite of Labib’s reported forecast, the mist had descended. Serpentine swathes of it wafted in the torch-beam, impelled by some ghostly breath. They moved past the black shape of the Chevrolet and down back towards the road, speculating about the mysterious dogs… perhaps he had meant jackals, neither of them was quite sure if they were found here. Dan had intended to argue again, but changed his mind; for her, now, to speak. But it was soon clear that she did not want to return to that.

  Nor would she allow silence. She played the perfect travelling companion again: set the immediate between them.

  To the north the sky remained faintly lighter, but around them brooded darkness and the scattered, veiled debris of a lost civilization: crumbled walls, a colonnade, a bank littered with shards. It was the weather, they decided; it took all the serene aura out of classical antiquity, reduced it to its constituent parts, its lostness, goneness, true death… and the contrast of the reality with the promise of the name: Palmyra, with all its connotations of shaded pools, gleaming marble, sunlit gardens, the place where sybaritic Rome married the languorous Orient. It was much more like Dartmoor, Scotland; the Connecticut where Jane and Nell had spent their schoolgirl wartime years.

  They came to the harder surface of the road from Horns and walked a little way down that, but the vapour-laden cold was terrible. Somewhere in the mist to their right a sharp-eared dog, invisible but seemingly quite close, perhaps the same one they had heard earlier, began to bark with intense suspicion. They turned, defeated, menaced by the canine voice. It followed them sporadically, a soul caught between anger and despair, all the way back to the Hotel Zenobia.

  The men looked up grinning from their game, as if amused to see these foreigners so soon thwarted and brought to sanity. Jane stood warming herself at the stove, while Dan exchanged a few words about the dogs. They were domestic ones gone feral, it seemed, breeding in holes in the ground, in the ruins. Their waiter at supper raised hands, aping a rifle and pressing a trigger; something, perhaps merely humour, yet which appeared vaguely sinister, glistened in his eyes. He said something in Arabic in a low voice, and the other men smiled.

  ‘What did he say, Labib?’

  ‘He say, like Israel men. When he shoot dogs.’

  Dan gave the upturned faces a circumstantial smile. ‘They’ll wake us?’

  ‘Sure. Seven o’clock.’

  He turned back to Jane. ‘Unless you want to sit and read?’

  ‘No.’ She turned from the stove.

  ‘Let’s swap rooms.’

  ‘No, really…’

  ‘You can’t sleep in that stink.’

  ‘Then why should you?’

  She said goodnight to the men, and he added his own raised hand, then they went through into the corridor. She stopped at the closed door of her room, head half-down: as if she knew nothing she might say would be adequate.

  ‘At least let me turn the damn thing out for you.’

  She hesitated, then nodded and opened the door. The smell hit them at once. He drew a breath, then squatted beside the ancient stove and turned a tap on a fuel-pipe. It was wet with leaked paraffin. Another cogged wheel: the flame shone white a moment, then began to phut and smoke. He grimaced back up at her.

  ‘Do let me get them to open another room.’

  She was staring down at the floor, her hands in her pockets. He stood and went in front of her.

  ‘Jane.’

  Very slowly her gloved hands came out of her pockets,
then timidly reached for his. Her head, the green scarf she still wore, remained bowed as if ready to butt him away. He took the hands. Her voice was so low that he could hardly hear it.

  ‘It wouldn’t change what I said.’

  ‘But in spite of that?’

  ‘I feel so cold, Dan.’

  He smiled, the statement was almost insulting, as if this fraught giving-way was a matter of temperature and quite beyond his powers of remedy.

  ‘Any warmth. In a wasteland.’

  She stayed, as if already frozen; but then the gloved fingers clenched against his.

  ‘I’ll come in a minute.’

  He leant and kissed the top of the scarf, squeezed the leather fingers back in return; then left and went to the bathroom. Her door was shut when he returned down the corridor. His own room also smelt of paraffin, but not nearly so acridly as hers; and it was warm now. He stooped to turn the stove out, then changed his mind, undressed, switched off the light, got into the cold bed. The sheets felt rough, un-ironed, distinctly damp. A phosphorescence shone on the ceiling from the blue flame of the stove. He heard Jane go along to the bathroom, then back to her room. Her door closed, and there was silence. He thought of Jenny, betrayal; bridges, brinks, wastelands. The silence went on too long. It was five minutes now since she had gone back to her room across the corridor, far more than she could have needed to undress, and spoke a terrible reluctance. He began to dread some change of mind. He saw her sitting on the side of her bed, with all her clothes on, unable to move.

  He decided to give it a minute more; began to count; but then her door opened and closed very quietly. She came in. He leant up on an elbow, and at first sight thought, since she still wore her outdoor coat, that she had come to say she could not; then realized, as she turned to close the door, that it was being worn as a dressing-gown. She came quickly to the bed and in one swift movement discarded the coat and threw it over his own clothes on the one chair. A moment later she had slipped under the bedclothes he held extended. Her face sank against his neck as he immediately strained her close against him; and suddenly, in that first naked contact, although he also knew, something in that buried head, that he was being allowed this body, not given it, there was no time, no lost years, marriage, motherhood, but the original girl’s body. He had an acute and poignant memory, re-experience, of what it had been like, once, before so many other undressings and goings to bed had numbed it, to drop like this out of the intellectual, the public, into the physical and private… the strange simplicity of it, the delicious shock, the wonder that human beings bothered with any other kind of knowledge or relationship.