The Ebony Tower-Short Stories - John Fowles

by John Fowles

  'I'd like to write books. Maybe I will one day.' Then, 'How many words is a book?'

  'Sixty thousand is the normal minimum.'

  'Lot of words.'

  'I haven't found you short of them.'

  He glanced up briefly from his work.

  'Not how you expected. Right?'

  'I won't attempt to deny that.'

  'Yeah. Well...'

  But again he fell silent, winding the tape. He had found a pair of scissors somewhere, and now he severed the end round my left ankle, and moved to the other foot.

  'I'd tell it how it really is. Not just this. Everything. The whole scene.'

  'Then why don't you try?'

  'You're joking.'

  'Not at all. Crime fascinates people.'

  'Sure. Lovely. Then look who comes knocking on my door.'

  'You'd have to disguise actual circumstances.'

  'Then it wouldn't be how it is. Right?'

  'Do you think Conrad--'

  'He was Conrad, wasn't he?'

  I heard the snip of the scissors that showed my final limb was secured; then he pulled outwards on my legs to ensure that the tape did not give.

  'Anyway. Several years. Yes? That's a lot of time.'

  He stood and stared down at his work. I had the uncomfortable feeling that I had now become a parcel, a mere problem in safe packaging. Yet there was a relief, too. No violence could take place now.

  He said, 'Right.'

  He went into the kitchen, but came back almost at once with a length of washing-line and a kitchen knife. He stood in front of me, measuring off a couple of arms' widths, and began to cut and saw at the cord with the knife.

  'Maybe you? Write about me--how about that?'

  'I'm afraid I couldn't write about something I don't begin to understand.'

  With a sharp tug he finally detached the end he wanted. He passed behind the chair, and I heard his voice from above my head.

  'What don't you understand?'

  'How someone who is apparently not by any means a fool can behave as you are.'

  He laced the washing-line through the slats at the back of the chair. His arm came over my shoulder and led it round my chest and under my other arm.

  'Back straight, will you?' I felt the line tighten. Then the free end was passed round again. 'Thought I explained all that.'

  'I can understand young people who go in for left-wing violence--even when they disrupt public life. At least they are acting for a cause. You seem to be acting purely for your private profit.'

  In saying that I was, of course, hoping for some more substantial clue to confirm my hypothesis over Richard. But he didn't rise to the bait. I felt him knotting the cord behind the chair. Then once again he came in front of me and looked me over.

  'How's that?'

  'Extremely uncomfortable.'

  He stood watching me a moment. Then there came another of his pointed fingers.

  'Man, your trouble is you don't listen hard enough.'

  I said nothing. He contemplated me a moment further.

  'Now I load up. I'll be back to say tara.'

  He picked up a large grip from beneath the window on the lane, and went to the front door, which I could partly see through the living-room doorway. He propped it open with the grip, then disappeared for a moment into the sitting-room. He came out of there with something pale and square under his arm, I think a carton box; picked up the grip, then went on out into the night. The front door swung gently to. There was silence for nearly a minute. Then I heard the faint sound of a car door being closed. The wicket-gate squeaked, but he did not come straight into the house. I saw why, when he did reappear. He showed me my glasses, which he put on the table.

  'Your pebbles,' he said. 'Still in good nick. Sure you don't want a brandy?'

  'No thank you.'

  'Electric fire?'

  'I'm not cold.'

  'Right. Just got to gag you then.'

  He picked up the tape and the scissors.

  'There's no one within earshot. I could shout all night.'

  He seemed to hesitate a moment, then shook his head. 'Sorry, man. Must do.'

  I now watched him peel and cut four or five lengths from the tape, which he laid in a row on the table beside us. When he reached forward with the first of them I instinctively jerked my head aside.

  'This is totally unnecessary!'

  He waited. 'Come on. Let's end as we began.'

  I am sure I should have struggled if he had used force. But he was like some bored nurse with a recalcitrant patient. In the end I closed my eyes and turned my head to face him. I felt the plaster pressed obliquely against my grimly resentful mouth. Then it was smoothed down on my cheeks; then the other lengths. I felt near panic again, that I should not be able to breathe through my nose alone. Perhaps he had something of the same fear, for he watched me closely in silence for several moments. Then he picked up the knife and scissors and went into the kitchen. I heard them replaced in a drawer. The kitchen light was switched off.

  I am going to state what followed as baldly as possible. I could not in any case find adequate words to describe what I suffered.

  I had every reason to suppose that he was now going to leave me to my miserable vigil. He would walk out, and that would be the last of him. But when he came back from the kitchen he stooped by the dresser and opened one of its bottom doors. Then he stood up with an armful of the old newspapers Jane kept there for lighting the fire. I watched, still baffled by what he was doing--I had said I wasn't cold--as he knelt at the hearth of the old chimney that ran half the length of the wall beside me. He began to ball and crumple the newspaper on the central hearthstone. Through this, and all that followed, he did not once look at me. He behaved exactly as if I had not been there.

  When he rose and disappeared through to the sitting-room, I knew... and did not know--or could not believe. But I had to believe when he returned. I recognized only too well the red covers of the large ledger in which I had my master plan and longhand drafts of various key passages; and the small brown rectangular box that held my precious card-index of references.

  I strained violently at my wrists and ankles, I attempted to cry out through the tape over my mouth. Some kind of noise must have emerged, but he took no notice.

  Monstrously, I was obliged to watch as he crouched and set my four years of intermittent but irreplaceable work on the hearth beside him, then calmly leant forward, lighter in hand, and set fire to two or three ends of the newspaper. When it began to blaze he quietly fed batches of typescript to the flames. There followed a thick folder of photostated documents--copies of manuscript letters, of contemporary reviews of Peacock's novels that I had laboriously traced down, and the like. I made no further sound, I was beyond it--what was the use? Nothing would stop him now from this bestial and totally gratuitous act of vandalism. It is absurd to speak of dignity when one is bound hand and foot, and I felt tears of helpless rage only too close at hand; but my last resort was to suppress them. I closed my eyes for a few moments, then opened them again at the sound of pages being torn from the ledger. With the same insufferably methodical calmness he fed them to the mounting holocaust, whose heat I now felt through my clothes and on my face, or what was left bare of it. He retreated a little and started tossing new fuel forward rather than dropping it on the pyre as hitherto. The reference cards were shaken out and fluttered down to be consumed. After a while he reached for a poker that lay beside the fireplace and pushed one or two merely charring sheets and cards to where they also caught flame. If only I had had that poker in a free hand! I would happily have smashed his skull in with it.

  Still without looking at me, he went back to the sitting-room. This time he returned with the ten volumes of my copiously annotated Collected Works and various previous biographies and critical books on Peacock that I had brought with me and piled on the table. They all had countless slips of paper jutting out, their importance had been only too conspicuously
declared. They too were consigned one by one to the flames. He waited patiently, juggling the books open with the poker when they seemed slow to catch. He even noticed that my copy of Van Doren's Life was broken-Spined and duly wrenched it apart to aid it on its way. I thought he would now wait till every page, every line of print was burnt to nothingness. But he straightened when he threw the last volume on the top of the rest. Perhaps he realized that books burn much less easily than loose paper; or relied on them to char and smoulder away through the night; or did not care, now that the major damage had been done. He stared down for a long moment into the hearth. Then at last he turned to me. His hand moved, I thought he was going to strike me. But all I was presented with, a foot from my face, as if to make sure that even someone as 'blind' as I was could not mistake the gesture, was the yellow hand clenched into a fist--and incomprehensibly, with the thumb cocked high. The sign of mercy, when there was no mercy.

  He must have left his hand in that inexplicable position for at least five seconds. Then he turned away and went to the door. He cast a last look round the room, seemingly without anger, a mere neat workman's check that everything was left in order. I think I was not included in his glance.

  The light went out. I heard the front door open, then close. The wicket-gate squeaked, and then that too was shut. I sat distraught, with the flames and malevolently licking shadows; with the acrid smell, surely the most distressing of all after burnt human flesh, of cremated human knowledge. A car door was shut, an engine started--a manoeuvring, a changing of gears as he turned in the lane, a flicker of headlights on the drawn curtains. Then I heard the car pull away up the hill away from the village. In that direction the lane (I knew, since the taxi that had brought me the previous evening had taken it) eventually joined the main road to Sherborne; and passed nowhere in the process.

  I was left to silence, catastrophe and the dying flames.

  I shall not labour the agonies of those next nine or ten hours; Of watching that fire die away, of increasing discomfort, of raging anger at the atrocious blow that had fallen. I refused all thought of building on the only too literal ashes before me. The world was insane, I no longer wished to have anything to do with it. I would devote the rest of my life to revenge, to tracking that sadistic young fiend down. I would comb every likely coffee-bar in London, I would make Maurice and Jane give the most exact description of everything that had been stolen. I would ruthlessly pursue my suspicions over Richard. Once or twice I dropped off, only to awaken again a minute or two later, as though from a nightmare--only to learn that the nightmare was the reality. I moved arms and legs as much as I could to keep my circulation going. Repeated attempts to loosen either bonds or the gag failed completely; and so did my efforts to shift the chair. Again I cursed Jane, or the matting she had had lain over the stone floor. The legs refused to slide on it, and I could not get any sort of purchase. I knew numbness, and then great cold made all the more bitter for my having refused his offer to prevent it.

  An intolerably slow dawn crept through the curtains. Soon afterwards an early car passed down towards the village. I made a vain attempt to shout through my gagged mouth. The car swept on and out of hearing. Once more I tried to edge the chair towards the window, but made barely a yard of distance after a quarter of an hour of effort. A last jerk of frustration nearly overbalanced the chair backwards, and I gave up. A little later I heard a tractor coming up the lane, no doubt from the farm. Again I made every attempt to cry for help. But the machine dragged slowly past and up the hill. I began then to be seriously afraid. Whatever confidence I had invested in the young man had been completely lost in those final minutes. If he could do that, he could do anything. To break his promise about telling the police would be nothing to him.

  It eventually occurred to me that in edging forwards, towards the front of the cottage, I was making a mistake. There were knives in the kitchen behind; and indeed I found it easier to proceed backwards, as I could exert a better pressure with the soles of my shoes. I started to inch my way back towards the kitchen. There was an edge of rush mat that proved hideously difficult to negotiate. But by eleven I had at last crept through into the kitchen--and felt very near weeping. Already I had had to pass water as I sat; and try as I would, I could not get my fingers up to any drawer where cutlery was kept. I was finally reduced to an inert despair.

  Then at last, soon after midday, I heard another car approach--the seventh or eighth of the morning. But this one stopped outside the cottage. My heart leapt. A few moments later I heard a knock on the front door. I cursed myself for not having followed my original plan of movement. There was a further knock, then silence. I seethed at the stupidity of country policemen. But I did the man an injustice. Very soon afterwards there was a concerned official face staring at me through the jagged hole in the glass of the kitchen door.

  And that was that.

  Nearly a year has passed now since that moment of rescue, and I will be brief over the factual aftermath.

  The constable who released me proved kind and efficient indeed I had nothing but kindness and efficiency from everyone else that day. As soon as he had cut me free, he insisted on providing the immemorial English answer to all the major crises of existence. Only when he had watched me down two cups of his dark brown tea did he return to his car and radio in a report. I had hardly changed into clean clothes before a doctor arrived, very soon followed by two plainclothes men. The doctor declared me none the worse, and I then had a long questioning from the detective sergeant. The constable went off meanwhile to telephone Maurice and Jane from the farm.

  At least I found that I was not mistaken in believing that I had a story to dine out on. 'The cheeky devil!' and similar comments interrupted all my account. The burning of my book completely nonplussed the sergeant--had I, like, any enemies? I had to disillusion him as to the lengths to which the London literary mafiosi will go to gain their foul ends; but that the cottage had been 'chosen' surprised him rather less. The kind of crime, and of criminal, was increasingly frequent. I even detected a certain grudging admiration. These 'random loners' were smart customers, it seemed; never 'did a job' near where they lived, but based themselves on some big city and exploited the new mania for the weekend cottage. The sergeant confessed it was difficult to know where to look. It could be London... or Bristol, Birmingham, anywhere. He blamed it all on the motorways and the new mobility they allowed the 'villains'.

  Of Richard, on reflection I said nothing. I felt I owed it at least to Maurice and Jane to discuss the matter with them in private first--the constaole had spoken to Jane in Hampstead, and she had sent her commiseration, with the assurance that they would come down at once. Then the farmer and his wife appeared, full of apologies for not having heard anything; then a telephone engineer... I was grateful for all the coming and going, which at least took my mind off the blow I had suffered.

  Maurice and Jane arrived by car, soon after seven, and I had to go through my story all over again. Ignorant of my personal loss until they arrived, they were kind enough then to treat their own misfortune as nothing beside mine. I introduced my suspicion as regards Richard as obliquely as possible, but I did not spare them the details of the political philosophizing I had received. In the end I saw Jane look at Maurice, and knew that four had been reached. A few minutes later Maurice took the bull by the horns and was on the telephone to his son in London. He was diplomatic--naturally he didn't accuse him of concious complicity--but as firmly probing as a good solicitor should be. He came away from the receiver to say that Richard swore he had never even mentioned the cottage--and that he (Maurice) believed him. But I could see he was troubled. When the sergeant appeared again a little later to take a full list of what had been stolen, I heard Maurice lay the matter before him. I understand the 'commune' was subsequently raided, but nothing more incriminating was found than the inevitable cannabis. No young man there matched my description who had not a sound alibi; and nothing resulted from this line of inve
stigation.

  Nor indeed from any other in the weeks and months that followed; it has remained, in public terms, no more than an unsolved minor crime. I cannot even claim that it has irreparably affected my writing self. I spent a month of misery--I suppose in something very like a profound sulk--which no one who had known what the book meant to me was allowed to alleviate. But I hadn't taken everything to do with it to Dorset. A carbon of the first three typed-out chapters had remained in London; and I found that my memory was a good deal better than I had previously suspected. Some kind of challenge was involved. I decided one day that my friends were right and that the Peacock could be reconstituted; and already I am more than halfway on the road to doing just that.

  This must seem a very flat end to my adventure. But I have not quite finished what I want to say. There is a sense in which what I have so far written is no more than a preamble.

  Just as my reconstituted Peacock cannot be quite the same as the one that was torn, so to speak, from the womb, I cannot be sure that I have reproduced the events of that night with total accuracy. I have tried my best, but I may have exaggerated, especially in the attempts to transcribe my persecutor's dialogue. He did not perhaps employ the idiot argot of Black Power (or wherever it derives from) quite as repetitively as I have described; and I may have misread some of his apparent feelings.

  But what concerns me far more than one or two minor misinterpretations or inaccuracies of memory is my continuing inability to make sense of what happened. I have written it down principally to try to come to some sort of positive conclusion. What haunts me most can be put as two questions. Why did it happen? Why did it happen to me? In essence: What was it in rue that drove that young demon to behave as he did?

  I cannot regard it merely as some offbeat incident in the war between the generations. I cannot even see myself as typical of my generation and (in spite of what I may have said in my first weeks of anger) I do not think he is typical of his--or to be more precise, I do not think that that last unforgivable action is typical of his. They may despise us; but young people in general seem to me much more averse to hating than we were at their age. Everyone knows their attitude to love, the horrors of the permissive society and all the rest of it; very few have noted that in devaluing love, they have also rather healthily devalued hate. The burning of my book was in some way linked to the need--presumably on both sides--for anathema. In that I believe he was very far from typical.