by John Fowles
‘Who was he?’
‘The seducer in Clarissa. Richardson.’
Silence fell on them, of the worst kind; of the blind alley, the nothing more to say. There was something far more sullen and unconceding in her than Dan had foreseen, as if the return to her home environment had discharged an emotional static she had always carried in California; and left her, behind her looks, clothes, career and all the things other eyes in that room might see in her, small and flat and resentfully forlorn. He also knew what the end of roles sometimes did to actresses, and that her mood was partly dependent on circumstances beyond his responsibility. Yet he felt miserable, knowing he could not comfort her in the only way that might have worked. She broke the silence, in a fittingly mundane and dispirited voice.
‘Do you want something to eat?’
‘If you like—a sandwich?’
‘I’ll have smoked salmon if they’ve got it. It’ll get so crowded soon.’
‘Another Guinness?’
She shook her head. ‘Jut a coffee.’
Dan went and waited at the bar for the sandwiches to be served. He saw Jenny go to the ladies’, past her friend at the other end of the long room; she bent and said something very briefly to her as she passed, ignoring the young men. He tried to read the signatures under the celebrity photographs; most of them seemed to be of faces he had never seen before. When Jenny came back—he was already sitting again—she plumped down with a little air of new-gained resolve.
‘I only wanted to see you once more. To let off steam.’ She squeezed lemon over her smoked-salmon sandwiches. ‘If we ever meet again, you’ll just be that peculiar mixed-up writer man I once had an affaire with.’
‘I shall keep you much closer than that.’
She started eating.
‘Was Egypt interesting?’
He should have called that shameless shift of tone and subject; instead, he followed it. The pub began to be crowded. Dan knew she wasn’t really listening; perhaps listening to his voice, but not his words; to their past, not their present. She was showing him now he would be got over, it would be got over. Our time’s slick comedown from Forster’s Only connect… only reify. Then two girls came and sat in the chairs on the other side of their table. Dan and Jenny were silent for half a minute, unwillingly listening to their chatter. Then she said abruptly, ‘Shall we go?’
She pulled on her outdoor coat, suede patchwork, an extravagance she had dithered over for days in Los Angeles; picked up her basket. Dan followed her out to the pavement and the open air. Passers-by, traffic crawling up towards Hampstead. It was a fine day, presaging spring, a clear sunlight on everything. She held her wicker basket with both hands in front of her, and faced him, a brittle smile.
‘Well. It was kind of you to spare me an hour. Mr Martin.’
He stared at her for a long moment, and she looked down.
‘There’s another opposite to how things ought to be, Jenny. How they ought not to be.’
She gave a minute shrug, but still stared down.
‘I haven’t your gift for tasteful dialogue.’
It was strange, Dan suddenly recalled talking with her on the beach at Malibu one day, the day she had written about: the same kind of aggressive shyness, even though it had been much more buried then… as if it was used, almost deliberately, to precipitate something better. There was something else, a much remoter ghost at his shoulder, his father’s; all those years of seeing pastoral care in action, and never understanding it, despising it for all the inanities it generated, boring old parties one had to be polite to, endless chitchat over nothing… but a greater humanity than this. And a much closer ghost, ghost only in not actually being there, also watched him watching himself—stood beside him and told him that however much the needle veered, it was never as far from true course as this.
‘Is there somewhere in the open we could walk for a bit?’
‘The Heath. We could take a cab.’
‘Okay. Let’s do that.’
They stood in silence at the kerb for a minute; then a taxi stopped at his outstretched arm. Jenny told the driver where they wanted, but once inside they sat in silence again. He took her hand, but she stared out of her window. Another battle with tears was taking place; Dan gripped a little harder. She did not in fact cry.
Five minutes later he paid off the taxi at the Whitestone Pond. Over the trees below, distant London lay spread, anaesthetized, soft blues and greys and pinks, deceptively of its past still, Constable’s London. They left the road and walked off down a gravel path; mothers and children, students, old men. A squirrel, woodpigeons. She listened in silence, just an occasional question. He was aware, now that it came to it, the first time in words, not only of the difficulty of putting flesh on such remote bones, but even of articulating them: a world of value-systems, prejudices, repressions, false notions of faith and freedom, that he sensed she could hardly comprehend. He tried to tell her all his letter had lacked the honesty to tell: the real enemy she had always been pitted against. The day of the woman in the reeds, and all that lay behind it. And a little of Aswan and Palmyra, too. All rather drily, matter-of-factly, as he might have outlined an idea for an original to a sceptical but shrewd producer like David Malevich—slighting it rather than selling it, casting Jane and himself as middle-aged fools… strictly for that trade, not the younger generation.
Jenny was silent when he finished. They had stopped and sat on a seat for a while; were now walking on again, out of the trees and down a slope towards the one which led up to Kenwood House.
“Why didn’t you tell me all this before, Dan?’
‘Because I’ve never told anyone, Jenny.’
She went a few steps without speaking.
‘You’re really in love with her?’
‘In need.’
‘Has she changed very much?’
‘Physically. Not otherwise.’
‘Soul-mates.’
‘Hardly. We disagree about too much.’
‘That doesn’t fool me.’
‘I’m not trying to. We do agree where it matters.’
Again they strolled steps in silence.
‘I can see there were always casting problems. With us pale shadows who offered for the part.’
‘I’d long ago put it beyond the realm of the playable.’
She slid him a look.
‘I wish I’d known. I’d have put on my long nightie and danced through the palm-trees on Sunset.’ She struck a little pose and put on an ingénue’s face. “You can’t arrest me, officer. I’m a figment in someone’s imagination”.’ She saw him grin, then suddenly came closer and slipped her hand through his arm. ‘I wish you’d get us all together. Then we could swap notes.’
‘I have got you all together.’
‘Like Bluebeard.’
‘Nonsense.’
She jerked his arm.
‘Only what you think we are.’
‘I won’t have the great secret of my life treated as a subject for unseemly levity.’
‘Diddums. Did the naughty girl laugh at him?’ He smiled. Her hand slipped down and found his. After a moment she said, ‘I only wanted to feel close to you once more.’
‘It’s not that I feel any closer to her, Jenny.’
‘But what?’
‘Perhaps we’re a little sorrier for each other. And with better reason.’
She looked down at the grass.
‘Is she in London now?’
‘In Oxford. She’s going to put her house on the market. She’s there about that.’
‘And you’ll play Darby and Joan in glorious Devon?’
‘I’ve given up trying to sell that to the women in my life. We’ll probably try to get a house here.’
‘And sell your farm?’
‘Just use it as before, Perhaps a bit more often.’ He said, ‘Jane wants to go into local politics.’ He smiled rather sheepishly at her. ‘You’re walking with a fully paid-up member of the Labour Party, by the way.
As of last week.’
‘Seriously?’
‘It doesn’t feel it. But we’ll see.’
He had not provoked the smile he intended, one of amused contempt; but one of amused curiosity.
‘Is she really very leftwing?’
‘We’re like two characters in a difficult play, Jenny. We know we both feel we want to do the parts. But we don’t know how we’ll get into them yet.’ He added, ‘Especially as neither of us has very much confidence in the director… or directors.’
‘That must be a very new experience for you.’
He smiled at her dryness. ‘Where writers count for even less. That’s the real problem.’
He knew she was half tempted to press him further; but then she decided not to relinquish the role she was now playing. For he also knew she was acting, though bravely; because she must.
‘I think you’d make a jolly good politician. With your skill at conning and lying.’
‘I may surprise you yet.’
She stole a look up at his face. ‘And really goodbye, screen?’
‘I don’t know. If a novel defeats me, I think I might risk my neck in the theatre again.’
‘I wish you would. With a nice fat part for me.’ Then she said, ‘I so wish I was going back into that. Now. Next week.’
‘Then do it when the next film’s over. David’s a good agent, but he’ll run your life for you. If you let him.’
She gave a small nod. More steps without speaking. Then she took his arm again.
‘You will let us meet occasionally? Let me have a whiff of your rotten old mind. Even if it’s only so you can tell me what a lousy vestal virgin I’m becoming.’
‘Of course.’
‘We’ll walk here and then I won’t see you for another year.’
He made one of her own jumps.
‘As long as he sees through Jenny McNeil.’
‘I shall bring him to be vetted.’
‘He won’t stand for that. If he’s any good.’
‘Then I’ll use it as a test. If he knocks me to the floor at the very idea, I’ll know he’s all right.’
‘I should try this merchant banker.’ She shook her head. ‘Why not?’
‘I’m off nice straightforward men.’
They walked slowly up the slope to the cream façade of the house; wordless again, but she still kept her arm lightly linked through his. A few old people sat on benches in the winter sun and there was a dim roar of traffic from around the Heath. As they came to the steps up to the gravelled terrace before the house, she reached down and squeezed his hand, but mischievously.
‘I didn’t tell you how sweet Abe and Mildred were. When you junked me.’
‘Yes?’
‘He offered to divorce Mildred and marry me himself.’
‘In front of her, I hope.’
‘Of course. And you’re never to have the Cabin again.’
‘But you are?’
‘Any time I want.’
He pressed her hand. ‘I’m glad.’
After he had posted the letter in Italy, he had rung Mildred to warn her it was coming; and again, back in London, when he knew it should have arrived—and had. Mildred had said drily that she was doing his ‘dirty work’ for him, but he knew whose side she was really on. He said nothing now. They came to the terrace and walked to where a tunnel-arbour led beside the eighteenth-century house. Then Jenny suddenly pulled him to a halt, as if they had reached a mark on set.
‘I’m going to say goodbye now, Dan.’
She turned in front of him, mimicking a niece at the end of a treat. A smile, a look into his eyes. ‘Thank you for having me. In all senses. And I think the rewrite of this scene’s been so much better than the first draft.’
‘But how are you…’
‘If you walk through here and up the drive, you’ll be in Hampstead Lane. You can get a taxi there.’ She smiled again. ‘I’d rather walk home alone.’
They stood frozen a moment, then she moved. Her mouth hardly touched his, for the briefest second he was allowed to hold her against him; then she was walking away. He stood watching her, feeling obscurely tricked, even in some way hurt that it had been her decision—which told him that it had been one that still, somewhere deep inside himself, he had not absolutely taken. At the top of the steps down, fifty yards away, she glanced back at him, and extended a discreet arm with the hand cocked up slightly, as if they were just saying goodbye for a few hours and she was late for some next appointment. Her face had turned away before she could have seen his own hand raised in return. He watched her walk quickly down, the woollen cap, fair hair, patchwork coat, brown wicker basket, over the long slope of grass to the footbridge that led across a brook and up over another slope to the woods. She did not look back again. He moved a few yards and sat on an empty bench, and watched her still, a speck with a basket, until she had walked out of his life; then lit a cigarette and stared unseeingly at the tame, tranquil landscape in front of him.
He felt bereft beyond his calculation of it; almost cheated by the understanding of himself he had arrived at over the last two months, and which he had tried to convey to her; trapped in his own trap, turned someone he wasn’t. It was as if, having sucked the poison of her mood in the pub, he was left poisoned by it himself. In the end he stood and went through the hornbeam tunnel beside the house—but there, instead of walking up the drive to the road outside, on some impulse given realization by seeing two other people enter, vaguely remembering it was a public gallery, he went in himself. He walked round the place, not really looking at anything, until, by chance in the last room he came to, he stood before the famous late Rembrandt self-portrait.
The sad, proud old man stared eternally out of his canvas, out of the entire knowledge of his own genius and of the inadequacy of genius before human reality. Dan stared back. The painting seemed uncomfortable in its eighteenth-century drawing-room, telling a truth such decors had been evolved to exclude. The supreme nobility of such art, the plebeian simplicity of such sadness; an immortal, a morose old Dutchman; the deepest inner loneliness, the being on trivial public show; a date beneath a frame, a presentness beyond all time, fashion, language; a puffed face, a pair of rheumy eyes, and a profound and un-assuageable vision.
Dan felt dwarfed, in his century, his personal being, his own art. The great picture seemed to denounce, almost to repel. Yet it lived, it was timeless, it spoke very directly, said all he had never managed to say and would never manage to say—even though, with the abruptness of that dash, he had hardly thought this before he saw himself saying the thought to the woman who would be waiting for him on the platform at Oxford that evening; telling her also what had gone before, a girl and a past walking into winter trees, knowing she would understand. He had lied a little to Jenny, to make it easier for her. But that was his secret now, his shared private mystery; which left him with the imagining of the real and the realizing of the imagined. Standing there before the Rembrandt, he experienced a kind of vertigo: the distances he had to return. It seemed frightening to him, this last of the coincidences that had dogged his recent life; to have encountered, so punctually after a farewell to many more things than one face, one choice, one future, this formidable sentinel guarding the way back.
He could see only one consolation in those remorseless and aloof Dutch eyes. It is not finally a matter of skill, of knowledge, of intellect; of good luck or bad, but choosing and learning to feel. Dan began at last to detect it behind the surface of the painting; behind the sternness lay the declaration of the one true marriage in the mind mankind is allowed, the ultimate citadel of humanism. No true compassion without will, no true will without compassion.
Some young schoolchildren came in, a babble of voices. The peace was broken, and Dan moved away. But as he left the room, he turned a moment by the door and looked back at the old man in his corner. The children were restlessly gathered before the painting, while a harassed woman teacher tried to tell them someth
ing about it. But Rembrandt’s eyes still seemed to follow Dan over the young heads implacably; as many years before, when he was their age, his father had once unwittingly terrified him by insisting that Christ’s eyes followed… wherever you went, whatever you did, they watched.
That evening, in Oxford, leaning beside Jane in her kitchen while she cooked supper for them, Dan told her with a suitable irony that at least he had found a last sentence for the novel he was never going to write. She laughed at such flagrant Irishry; which is perhaps why, in the end, and in the knowledge that Dan’s novel can never be read, lies eternally in the future, his ill-concealed ghost has made that impossible last his own impossible first.
The End
The Highs And Lows Of Being John Fowles
Robert McCrum
Sunday November 13, 2005
The Observer
The life of John Fowles, which sadly ended in Lyme Regis on 5 November, offers a moving snapshot of English literary life that is close to a parable. Often described as ‘England’s first postmodernist’, an innovator scorned by the critics, by the end his career had mellowed into a pattern familiar to his literary forebears.
First, there was the decade of dizzying acclaim and creativity. From 1963, the year of his chilling first novel, The Collector, to The Magus (1965), to The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), Fowles had his moment in the sun like few of his generation. In retrospect, the innovations of his fiction seem much less significant than his more traditional gifts.
Still, an autodidactic experimentalist, Fowles gave provincial English readers a frisson of French literary theory, and they revered him for it. At the height of his powers in the mid-Sixties, he was a fashionable, but reclusive, member of swinging Britain.
But styles change. The Ebony Tower (1974), published in the afterglow of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, was a novella and some linked stories from a writer drained by his achievement. Daniel Martin (1977), a self-hating portrait of a British writer enslaved by Hollywood contracts, was a sad coda. Later, there was Mantissa (1982) and A Maggot (1985), but these were the embers from a much fiercer blaze. Most successful writers have their moment and then have to cope with indifference and neglect. Fowles experienced this fate in an acute form.