by John Fowles
'I agree that wealth is unfairly distributed.'
'But not with my way of doing something about it.'
'Society wouldn't survive very long if everyone shared your views.'
Again he shifted; then shook his head, as if I had made some bad move in a game of chess. Suddenly he stood up and replaced the chair, and began to open the drawers of the chest. His examination seemed very cursory. I had placed some loose coins and my keys on the top and I heard him finger them apart. But he pocketed nothing; meanwhile I prayed silently that he would overlook the absence of a wallet. It was in my coat, on a hanger behind the door, which opened, and was now opened, against the wall--and was therefore hidden. He turned to face me once more.
'That's like, if everyone did themselves in tomorrow, there wouldn't be a population problem.'
'I'm afraid I don't see the parallel.'
'You're just saying words, man.' He moved nearer the window and stared at himself in a little Regency mirror. 'If everyone did this, if everyone did that. But they don't, do they? Like if the system was different, I wouldn't be here. But I'm here. Right?'
As if to emphasize his hereness, he lifted the mirror off the wall; and I gave up playing Alice to this Wonderland of nonsequiturs. I am what I am may be all very well in its most famous context, but it is not a basis for rational conversation. He seemed to accept that I was silenced by his refutation of the categorical imperative, and now moved to a pair of watercolours that hung on the back wall of the room. I saw him unhook and pore over each in turn, for all the world like some prospective bidder at a country auction. He eventually put them under his arm.
'Across the way--anything there?'
I took a breath. 'Not so far as I know.'
But he disappeared with his 'goods' into the other room. He was careless of sound now. I heard more drawers being opened, a wardrobe. There was nothing I could do. A dash downstairs to the telephone, even with my vanished glasses on, would not have had the faintest chance of success.
I saw him come out and stay bent over a shape on the landing, some bag or grip. There was a rustling of paper. At last he straightened and stood in the doorway of my own room again.
'Not much,' he said. 'Never mind. Just your money, and that's it. Sorry.'
'My money?'
He nodded towards the chest of drawers.
'I'll leave you the change.'
'Haven't you taken enough?'
'Sorry.'
'I have very little with me.'
'Then you won't miss it. Right?'
He made no threatening gesture, there was no obvious menace in his voice, he simply stood watching me. But further prevarication seemed useless.
'Behind the door.'
He pointed his finger at me again, then turned and swung the door to. My sports jacket was revealed. It was absurd, but I felt embarrassed. Wanting to save the bother of finding a bank in Dorset, I had cashed a cheque for fifty pounds just before I left London. Of course he found the wallet and notes at once. I saw him take the latter and flip through them. Then, to my surprise, he came and dropped one on the end of the bed.
'Fiver for trying. Okay?'
He tucked the rest of the money away in a hip-pocket, then fingered idly on through the wallet. At last he took out and scrutinized my banker's card.
'Hey-hey. It's just clicked. That's you on the table down there.'
'On the table?'
'All that typing and stuff.'
The first three chapters had been typed out, and he must have looked at the title page and remembered my name.
'I came here to finish a book.'
'You write books?'
'When I'm not being burgled.'
He went on through the wallet.
'What kind of books?'
I made no reply.
'What's the one downstairs about then?'
'About someone you won't have heard of and please can we get this disgusting business over and done with?'
He closed the wallet and threw it down beside the five-pound note.
'Why you so sure I know nothing?'
'I did not mean to suggest that.'
'You people always get people like me so wrong.'
[tried to hide my mounting irritation. 'The subject of my book is a long-dead novelist called Peacock. He is not greatly read these days. That is all I meant to say.'
He watched me. I had transgressed another new commandment, and I knew I must be more guarded.
'Okay. So why you writing a book about him?'
'Because I admire his work.'
'Why?'
'It has qualities I think our own age rather lacks.'
'Such as?'
'Humanism. Good manners. A strong belief in common...' it was on the tip of my tongue to say 'decency'... 'sense.'
'Me, I like Conrad. He's the greatest.'
'Many people share your view.'
'You not?'
'He's a very fine novelist.'
'The greatest.'
'Certainly one of the greatest.'
'I have a thing about the sea. Know what I mean?' I nodded in what I hoped was a suitably approving manner, but his mind was evidently still on my snub over writers he would not have heard of. 'I see books lying around sometimes. Novels. History. Art books. I take 'em home. Read 'em. Like I bet you I know more about antiques than most dealers. See, I go to museums. Just to look. I'd never do a museum. Way I see it, you don't just do a museum, you do every other poor sod who goes to look.' He seemed to expect some answer. I gave another faint nod. My back was aching, I had sat so tensely through all this nonsense. It was not his manner, but the tempo he set: andante when all should have been prestissimo. 'Museums is how it ought to be. No private ownership. Just museums. Where everyone can go.'
'As in Russia?'
'Right.'
Literary men are, of course, perennially susceptible to the eccentric. Endearing is hardly the adjective to apply to someone who has just parted you from forty-five pounds you can ill afford. But I have a small skill at mimicking accents--for telling anecdotes that rely on that rather cruel ability--and I was beginning, beneath fear and exasperation, to savour one or two of my tormentor's mental and linguistic quirks. I gave him a thin smile.
'In spite of what they do to thieves there?'
'Man, I wouldn't do this there. Simple as that. You have to hate, yes? Plenty to hate here. No problem. Okay, so they've screwed a lot of things up. But least they're trying. That's what people like me can't stand in this country. Nobody's trying. You know the only people who try in this country? The fucking Tories. I mean, there's a bunch of real pro's. Blokes like me, we're peanuts beside them.'
'My friends who own this cottage are not Tories. In fact, very far from it. Nor am I, for that matter.'
'Big deal.'
But he said it lightly.
'We hardly qualify as a blow for the cause.'
'Hey, you trying to make me feel guilty or something?'
'Just a shade more aware of the complexities of life.'
He stood staring down at me for a long moment, and I thought I was in for another bout of his pseudo-Marcusian--if that is not a tautology--nalveties. But suddenly he pulled back the wrist of one of his yellow gloves and looked at a watch.
'Too bad. It's been fun. Right. Now. I have way-way-way to drive, so I make myself a cup of coffee. Okay?--You, you get up, take your time, put on your clothes. Then you trot downstairs.'
My briefly lulled fears sprang back to life.
'Why my clothes?'
'I have to tie you up, man. And we don't want you to get cold waiting. Do we?'
I nodded.
'That's a good boy.' He went to the door, but turned. 'And sir--coffee too?'
'No thank you.'
'Cuppa? I'm easy.'
I shook my head, and he went downstairs. I felt weak, more badly shaken than I had realized; and I knew what I had just experienced was the comparatively pleasant part of the process. I now
had to endure hours of being tied up, and I didn't see how I was to be released. Wanting no disruption, I had done nothing about having my mail forwarded, therefore no postman was likely to call. Milk, as Jane had warned me, I had to go and fetch for myself at the farm. I could not imagine why anyone should come anywhere near the cottage.
I got up and started to dress--and to review what I had deduced of the new-style Raffles downstairs. His fondness for his own voice had at least allowed me to form some dim impression of his background. Wherever he originally came from, I felt fairly sure that his normal milieu was now London--a large city, at any rate. I could detect no clear regional accent. That might have argued a less working-class origin than his grotesque language suggested; but on the whole I felt he had climbed rather than fallen. He had very plainly wished to impress on me that he had some pretentions to education. Indeed I could believe that he had, say, passed his A-levels and even perhaps had a year at some Redbrick university. I saw in him many of the defence mechanisms, born of a sense of frustration, that were familiar to me from some of my own friends' children.
Maurice and Jane's own younger son had (to the intense mortification of his parents, who in characteristic Hampsteadliberal fashion were nothing if not tolerant to the youth revolution) recently taken to showing many of the same airs and ungraces. Having dropped out of Cambridge and the 'total futility' of studying the law--his father's being a solicitor no doubt made that renunciation doubly agreeable--he had announced that he was going to compose folk-music. After a few months of increasing petulance (or so I understood from his parents) at not achieving instant success in that field, he had retired--if that is the word--into a Maoist commune run by some property millionaire's fly-away daughter in South Kensington. I recite his career a little flippantly, but the very genuine and understandable distress of Maurice and Jane at the mess Richard was making of his young life was not a laughing matter. I had had an account of a bitter evening when he first walked out on Cambridge, in which he denounced their way of life and everything to do with it. Their two lifetimes of fighting for sane good causes, varying from nuclear disarmament to the preservation of the plane-trees in Fitzjohn's Avenue, were suddenly thrown back in their faces--their chief crime (according to Jane) being the fact that they still lived in a house they had bought when they first married in 1946 for a few thousand and which now happened to be worth sixty or more. Their kind have become the stockin-trade of every satirist about, and no doubt there is a dissonance between the pleasant lives they lead in private and the battle for the underprivileged they conduct in public. Perhaps a successful solicitor should not have a fondness for first nights, even though he gives his legal knowledge free to any action group that asks for it; perhaps a Labour councillor (as Jane was for many years) should not enjoy cooking dinners worthy of an Elizabeth David; but their real worst crime in Richard's eyes was to think that this balanced life was intelligently decent, instead of blindly hypocritical.
Though I sympathized with Maurice's outrage and his accusations of selfish irresponsibility, perhaps Jane was more accurate in her final diagnosis. She argued, I think correctly, that though épater la famille formed an element in the boy's downfall, the real cancer in him and his like was an intransigent idealism. He was so besotted--or bepotted--by visions of artistic glory and a nobly revolutionary way of life that the normal prospect before him was hopelessly rebarbative. As Jane had rather neatly put it, he wanted Everest in a day; if it took two, he lost interest.
My own specimen of youth in revolt had merely solved his problems a little more successfully--by a kind of perverted logic one could say more convincingly--than young Richard with his Little Red Book. At least he supported himself financially, in his fashion. The sub-sub-Marxism was a joke, of course; a mere trendy justification after the act, as Marx himself, dear old middle-class square that he was, would have been the first to demonstrate.
I need hardly say that I didn't at the time draw the kind of extended parallel with Richard I have just made. But I had thought of the boy as I stood putting my clothes on--and no sooner thought than implicated him. I had already wondered how the young man downstairs had known that Holly Cottage existed. The more I considered, the more improbable a place it seemed for the lightning to strike. Then he had apparently known the owners lived in London. He could have found that out at the farm or the local pub; but he seemed too fly to invite unnecessary risks of that sort. So why should he not have learnt about Maurice and Jane and their cottage from the horse's--to be precise, the rebellious colt's--mouth? I had certainly never seen anything vicious or spiteful in Richard and I couldn't imagine that he would have deliberately urged anyone to 'do' his parents' property--whatever he may have shouted at them in a moment of crisis. But he might have talked about it among his collection of would-be young world-changers... and I had evidence enough that my own young joker fancied himself as a political philosopher of the same ilk. He had also just revealed that he had a long drive ahead. That suggested London. The hypothesis shocked me, but it rang plausibly probable.
I was still trying to confirm it by some other chance thing he had let fall when I heard his voice from the foot of the stairs.
'Ready when you are, dad.'
I had to go down. I sought desperately for some innocent question that might help clinch my guess. But none came to mind--and even if I were right, he must have seen the danger as soon as I revealed myself a friend of Richard's parents.
I found him sitting by the solid old farm-table in the centre of the living-room. The front curtains were drawn. He had a mug of coffee in his hand, which he raised when I appeared. Beyond him I saw the lighted doorway through to the kitchen. i6 'Sure you don't want coffee?'
'No.'
'Nip of brandy then? There's some in the cupboard.'
His mixture of gall and solicitude once more made me take breath.
'No thank you.'
I glanced round the room. I saw two or three paintings were missing and I suspected that there was less china on the dresser beside which I stood than when I had last seen it.
'Better go through there then.' He nodded back at the kitchen, and for a moment I did not understand what he meant. 'Calls of nature and all that.'
Maurice and Jane had had a lavatory and bathroom added at the back of the cottage.
'How long do you...'
'Anyone due round in the morning?'
'No one at all.'
'Okay.'
He crossed to the corner of the room, and I saw him pick up the telephone directory there and leaf through it.
'Your phone's out, by the way. Sorry.'
He leafed on, then tore a page from the book.
'Right? I'll call the local fuzz round ten. If I wake up.' But he added quickly, 'Just a joke, man. Relax. I promise.' Then he said, 'You going or not?'
I went into the kitchen--and saw the door out into the garden. There was a jagged black hole in its previously smooth expanse of glass; and I secretly cursed my absent hostess for her sacrifice of period accuracy to domestic amenity. My own very present guest came and stood in the doorway behind me.
'And don't lock yourself in by mistake. Please.'
I went into the lavatory and closed the door; and found myself staring at the bolt. There was a narrow window that gave on the cottage's back garden. I could just have negotiated it, I suppose. But he would have heard me open it; and the garden had a thick banked hedge all round it--the only practicable exit was to come round to the front of the house.
When I returned to the living-room, I saw he had placed a Windsor chair in front of the open hearth, which he now offered to me. I stood by the doorway, trying to escape this last indignity.
'I am perfectly prepared to give you my word. I won't raise the alarm until you've had time for your... getaway, whatever it is.'
'Sorry.' He offered me the chair again, and held a ring of something up; then realized that I couldn't make it out. 'Sticky tape. It won't hurt.'
So
mething in me continued to bridle against this final humiliation. I did not move. He came towards me. His wretched nylon-masked face, in some way obscene, as if molten, made me take a step back. But he didn't touch me.
I pushed past him and sat down.
'Good boy. Now put your mits along the rests, will you?' He held up two strips of coloured paper he must have torn out of some magazine in readiness. 'Over your wrists, right? Then you won't get your hairs tweaked when the tape comes off.'
I watched him bend the paper round my left wrist. Then he began to tape it tightly to the chair-arm. In spite of myself I could not stop my hands trembling. I could see his face, even it was my impression--the shadow of a moustache under the nylon.
'I should like to ask one thing.'
'Go on then.'
'What made you pick on this house?'
'Thinking of taking it up, are you?' But he went on before I could answer. 'Okay. Curtains. Colour of paintwork. For a Start.'
'What does that mean?'
'Means I can smell weekend places a mile off. Nice classy piece of fabric hanging in a window. Twenty quid's worth of oillamp on the sill. Dozens of things. How's that, then? Not too bad?'
It seemed very tight, but I shook my head. 'And why this part of the world?'
He started on the other wrist. 'Anywhere there's daft gits who leave their houses empty.'
'You come from London?'
'Where's that then?'
Very plainly I would extract nothing of significance from him. Yet I detected a faint unease beneath the facetiousness. It was confirmed when he rather hurriedly changed the subject from his life to mine.
'Written a lot of books, have you?'
'A dozen or so.'
'How long's it take?'
'That depends on the book.'
'What about the one you're doing now?'
'I've been researching it for several years. That takes more time than the actual writing.'
He was silent for a few moments as he finished the taping of the other wrist. Then he bent down. I felt him push my left ankle back against the chair-leg; then the constriction of the adhesive tape began there.