The Ebony Tower-Short Stories - John Fowles

by John Fowles

  There comes next an enigma; the fact that his unforgivable act was preceded by a surprisingly mild, almost kind, course of behaviour. When he said he did not want to hurt me physically, I believed him. It was not said ambiguously, as some kind of threat by paradox. He meant, I am virtually sure, exactly what he said. Yet that cannot square with the vicious cruelty (to a powerless older man) of what he finally did. I tended at first to read a cold calculation into his behaviour: from the start he was kind only to deceive--or at least from the moment when he linked me with the book downstairs. But now I simply do not know. I would give a very great deal--I think even an absolution, if that were a condition of putting the question--to know when he truly decided to do it. My unfortunate moment of condescension in the bedroom annoyed him; and my questioning of his motives, compared to that of genuine young political revolutionaries, also no doubt stung. But neither seemed, or seems still, to have merited quite such savage retribution.

  Then there is the other enigma--of that distinct air of reproach at my behaviour he showed at the very beginning. I have some guilty conscience here, because this is the first time I have told the truth about it. I claimed to the police, and to Maurice and Jane, that I was surprised asleep in bed. No one blamed me for not trying to resist--in that, intruder and victim have been in a minority of two. I am still not sure that I really blame myself. What regrets I have depend on my crediting his own assertion: that if I had only made a noise, he would have decamped. In any case it makes no sense that he burnt my book because I failed to attack him. Why should he punish me for making things easy? And what in his actual behaviour, with its very apparent touchiness, suggested that standing up to him would have helped prevent what happened? Supposing I had been sarcastic and insulting, what you will... should I have got off any better?

  I have tried to list what he might have hated in me, both reasonably and unreasonably: my age, my physical puniness, my myopia, my accent, my education, my lack of guts, my everything else. I must certainly have seemed precious, old-fashioned, square, and all the rest of it, but surely all that could not have added up to much more than the figure of a vaguely contemptible elderly man. I can hardly have stood for what he called Them, the 'system': capitalism. I belonged to a profession he seemed to have some respect for--he liked books, he liked Conrad. So why could he not like--or rather, why did he have to hate me? If he regarded my book on Peacock in the puritanical kind of way of the New Left Review, as mere parasitism on a superseded bourgeois art form, he would surely have said so. And he was not even remotely like an intellectual Marxist.

  To Maurice and Jane this quasi-political is the most convincing explanation. But I think they are a little biased by the trauma in their own family that Richard has caused. I regard it as no true analogy with my young man at all. He at no time linked me personally with 'Them'. He showed no interest in my political views. He attacked something quite plainly apolitical: my book.

  There remains strongly with me the impression of a better mind than his language suggested, as if he half knew he was talking nonsense and was partly doing so to test me: if I gave him so much rope to play the clown, then I deserved to be made a fool of in my turn. But I suspect that this is being overcomplicated. At heart, what he said and how I reacted to it had no importance. In hindsight I can imagine quite other courses our conversation might have taken, and yet ended with the same dire result.

  I must mention one other theory of Maurice's: that the boy was some kind of schizophrenic and that the effort and stress of being restrained with me built up until the more violent side of his personality had to be displayed. But after he must have made the decision, he was still pressing brandy on me and offering to put on the fire for warmth. This seems altogether too conscious for schizophrenia. Besides, at no point did he offer me personal physical violence or suggest that the point of the exercise was to show me that he had such a side. I was bound and gagged. He could have punched me, slapped my face, done what he liked. But I am convinced that my body was always safe from him. What was under attack was something else.

  Now there is, I believe, an important clue in that curious last gesture--the aggressive cocked thumb thrust in my face. Very plainly it was not meant to convey its classical significance: no mercy was being extended. Equally obviously it cannot have carried its most common modern meaning: 'everything is all right'. I noticed it used frequently by the demolition workmen opposite my flat when I returned to London--a spectacle that I found now carried a certain morbid fascination for me, since death and destruction were much on my mind; and I was struck by the variety of meanings they extracted from the cocked thumb. It said simply 'yes', when noise made shouting difficult; or 'I understand, I will do what you want'; it could also rather paradoxically convey both the instruction to carry on (if, for instance, held continuously raised to a backing lorry-driver) and that of 'stop--perfect' (when suddenly raised in the same manoeuvre). But what was lacking in all these uses was aggression. It was not till some months later that I saw the light.

  I have a small vice, I am rather fond of watching association football matches on television. Quite what I derive from this vacuous pursuit beyond the intellectual's sense of superiority at the sight of so much mindless energy devoted to the modern equivalent of the Roman circus, I am not sure. But what caught my attention one evening was a player running out of the 'tunnel' on to the arena who showed just this aggressive thumb to a band of screaming supporters in the stands nearby; one or two even responded in kind. The significance (the game had not started) was clear: our courage is high, we are going to beat the enemy, we shall win. The echo was very sharp. I suddenly saw my thief's gesture as a warning: a grim match was about to start, and the opposing team he represented was determined to win. He was effectively saying, you are not going to get away with this so easily as you think. It may seem that such a message might with much more cause have been mine to him. But I think not. Burning my papers was simply a supporting proof of the cocked thumb; what underlay both was a fear, or certainly a detestation of the fact that in this particular match I entered the field with the odds on my side. However improbably, in the actual physical circumstances, in some way I remained in his view the overdog.

  All this leads me to a tentative conclusion. I have very little evidence for it, and what I do I have already undermined by confessing that I cannot swear to its complete accuracy. But I think some of his linguistic usages (certainly recurrent, if not quite so much as I have suggested) are very significant. One was that use of 'man'. I know it is very common among young people. But it seemed just a shade deliberate in its application to myself. Though partly insulting in intention, I think it also disguised a somewhat pathetic attempt to level. It wished to convey that there was nothing between us despite the differences in age, education, background and all the rest; but in reality it showed a kind of recognition, perhaps even a kind of terror of all that did separate us. It may not be too farfetched to say that what I failed to hear ('Man, your trouble is you don't listen hard enough') was a tacit cry for help.

  The other usage is that of 'right' as a ubiquitous tag to all manner of statements that do not require it. I know it is also so commonplace among the young that it may be dangerous to see more in it than a mere psittacism--a mindless parroting. For all that, I suspect it is one of the most revealing catch-phrases of our century. It may grammatically be more often an ellipsis for Is that right?' than for 'Am I right?'--but I am convinced the psychological significance is always of the latter kind. It means in effect, I am not at all sure that I am right. It can, of course, be said aggressively: 'Don't you dare say I am wrong!' But the thing it cannot mean is self-certainty. It is fundamentally expressive of doubt and fear, of so to speak hopeless parole in search of lost langue. The underlying mistrust is of language itself. It is not so much that such people doubt what they think and believe, but they doubt profoundly their ability to say it. The mannerism is a symptom of a cultural breakdown. It means 'I cannot, or I proba
bly cannot, communicate with you'. And that, not the social or economic, is the true under-privilege.

  It is very important, or so I have read, when faced with primitive tribes, to know the significances they attach to facial expression. Many a worthy and smiling missionary died because he did not realize he was greeting men to whom the baring of the teeth is an unmistakable sign of hostility. I believe something of the same kind takes place when right-users face those who manage to get by without the wretched word. I won't be so absurd as to maintain that if I had interspersed my own remarks with a few reciprocal man's and right's the night would then have taken a different path. But I am convinced that the fatal clash between us was of one who trusts and reveres language and one who suspects and resents it. My sin was not primarily that I was middle-class, intellectual, that I may have appeared more comfortably off financially than I am in fact; but that I live by words.

  I must very soon have appeared to the boy as one who deprived him of a secret--and one he secretly wanted to possess. That rather angry declaration of at least some respect for books; that distinctly wistful desire to write a book himself (to 'tell it how it really is'--as if the poverty of that phrase did not ab initio castrate the wish it implied!); that striking word-deed paradox in the situation, the civil chat while he went round the room robbing; that surely not quite unconscious incoherence in his views; that refusal to hear, seemingly even to understand, my mildly raised objections; that jumping from one thing to another... all these made the burning of my book only too justly symbolic in his eyes. What was really burnt was my generation's 'refusal' to hand down a kind of magic.

  My fate was most probably sealed from the moment I rejected his suggestion that I write about him myself. I took the wish at the time as a kind of dandyism, a narcissism, call it what you will--print as a mirror for the ego. But I think what he really invited--at any rate subconsciously--was the loan of some of this magic power... and perhaps because he could not really believe in its existence until he saw it applied to himself. In a sense he placed his own need in the scales against what I had called a long-dead novelist; and what he must have resented most was the application of this precious and denied gift of word-magic to no more than another obscure word-magician. I presented a closed shop, a select club, an introverted secret society; and that is what he felt he had to destroy.

  I do not say this was all, but I am convinced it was the heart of it. The charge against all of us, old and young, who still value language and its powers, is unjustified to be sure. Most of us have willy-nilly done our best to see that the word, its secrets and its magics, its sciences and its arts, survive. The true villains of the piece are well beyond individual control: the triumph of the visual, of television, the establishment of universal miseducation, the social and political (can any ancient master of language be groaning louder in his grave than Pericles?) history of our unmanageable century and heaven knows how many other factors. Yet I do not want to portray myself as an innocent scapegoat. I believe my young demon was right in one thing.

  I was guilty of a deafness.

  I have quite deliberately given this account an obscure title and an incomprehensible epigraph. I did not elect for the first without trying it out on various guinea-pigs. The general impression seemed to be that Koko must be some idiosyncratic spelling for the more usual Coco, and that the phrase therefore meant something to the effect of 'poor clown'. That will do for a first level of meaning, though I shouldn't like to see it attached to only one of the two participants--or for that matter to have the adjective taken in only one of its senses. Koko has in fact nothing whatever to do with Coco of the red proboscis and the ginger wig. It is a Japanese word and means correct filial behaviour, the proper attitude of son to father.

  My incomprehensible epigraph shall have the last word, and serve as judgment on both father and son. It comes with a sad prescience from an extinct language of these islands, Old Cornish.

  Too long a tongue, too short a hand;

  But tongueless man has lost his land.

  The Enigma

  Who can become muddy and yet, settling, slowly become limpid?

  --Tao Te Ching

  The commonest kind of missing person is the adolescent girl, closely followed by the teenage boy. The majority in this category come from working-class homes, and almost invariably from those where there is serious parental disturbance. There is another minor peak in the third decade of life, less markedly working-class, and constituted by husbands and wives trying to run out on marriages or domestic situations they have got bored with. The figures dwindle sharply after the age of forty; older cases of genuine and lasting disappearance are extremely rare, and again are confined to the very poor--and even there to those, near vagabond, without close family.

  When John Marcus Fielding disappeared, he therefore contravened all social and statistical probability. Fifty-seven years old, rich, happily married, with a son and two daughters; on the board of several City companies (and very much not merely to adorn the letter-headings); owner of one of the finest Elizabethan manor-houses in East Anglia, with an active interest in the running of his adjoining 1,800-acre farm; a joint--if somewhat honorary--master of foxhounds, a keen shot... he was a man who, if there were an--arium of living human stereotypes, would have done very well as a model of his kind: the successful City man who is also a country land-owner and (in all but name) village squire. It would have been very understandable if he had felt that one or the other side of his life had become too timeconsuming... but the most profoundly anomalous aspect of his case was that he was also a Conservative Member of Parliament.

  At 2.30 on the afternoon of Friday, July 13th, 1973, his elderly secretary, a Miss Parsons, watched him get into a taxi outside his London flat in Knightsbridge. He had a board meeting in the City; from there he was going to catch a train, the 5?2, to the market-town headquarters of his constituency. He would arrive soon after half-past six, then give a 'surgery' for two hours or so.

  His agent, who was invited to supper, would then drive him the twelve miles or so home to Tetbury Hall. A strong believer in the voting value of the personal contact, Fielding gave such surgeries twice a month. The agenda of that ominously appropriate day and date was perfectly normal.

  It was discovered subsequently that he had never appeared at the board meeting. His flat had been telephoned, but Miss Parsons had asked for, and been granted, the rest of the afternoon off- she was weekending with relatives down in Hastings. The daily help had also gone home. Usually exemplary in attendance or at least in notifying unavoidable absence, Fielding was forgiven his lapse, and the board went to business without him. The first realization that something was wrong was therefore the lot of the constituency agent. His member was not on the train he had gone to meet. He went back to the party offices to ring Fielding's flat--and next, getting no answer there, his country home. At Tetbury Hall Mrs Fielding was unable to help. She had last spoken to her husband on the Thursday morning, so far as she knew he should be where he wasn't. She thought it possible, however, that he might have decided to drive down with their son, a post-graduate student at the London School of Economics. This son, Peter, had talked earlier in the week of coming down to Tetbury with his girl-friend. Perhaps he had spoken to his father in London more recently than she. The agent agreed to telephone Mrs Fielding again in half an hour's time, if the member had still not arrived by then.

  She, of course, also tried the London flat; then failing there, Miss Parsons at home. But the secretary was already in Hastings. Mrs Fielding next attempted the flat in Islington that her son shared with two other L. S. E. friends. The young man who answered had no idea where Peter was, but he 'thought' he was staying in town that weekend. The wife made one last effort she tried the number of Peter's girl-friend, who lived in Hampstead. But here again there was no answer. The lady at this stage was not unduly perturbed. It seemed most likely that her husband had simply missed his train and was catching the next one--and for so
me reason had failed, or been unable, to let anyone know of this delay. She waited for the agent, Drummond, to call back.

  He too had presumed a missed train or an overslept station, and had sent someone to await the arrival of next trains in either direction. Yet when he rang back, as promised, it was to say that his deputy had had no luck. Mrs Fielding began to feel a definite puzzlement and some alarm; but Marcus always had work with him, plentiful means of identification, even if he had been taken ill or injured beyond speech. Besides, he was in good health, a fit man for his age--no heart trouble, nothing like that. What very tenuous fears Mrs Fielding had at this point were rather more those of a woman no longer quite so attractive as she had been. She was precisely the sort of wife who had been most shaken by the Lambton-Jellicoe scandal of earlier that year. Yet even in this area she had no grounds for suspicion at all. Her husband's private disgust at the scandal had seemed perfectly genuine and consonant with his general contempt for the wilder shores of the permissive society.

  An hour later Fielding had still appeared neither at the party offices nor Tetbury Hall. The faithful had been sent away, with apologies, little knowing that in three days' time the cause of their disappointment was to be the subject of headlines. Drummond agreed to wait on at his desk; the supper, informal in any case, with no other guests invited, was forgotten. They would ring each other if and as soon as they had news; if not, then at nine. It was now that Mrs Fielding felt panic. It centred on the flat. She had the exchange check the line. It was in order. She telephoned various London friends, on the forlorn chance that in some fit of absentmindedness--but he was not that sort of person--Marcus had accepted a dinner or theatre engagement with them. These inquiries also drew a blank; in most cases, a polite explanation from staff that the persons wanted were abroad or themselves in the country. She made another attempt to reach her son; but now even the young man who had answered her previous call had disappeared. Peter's girl-friend and Miss Parsons were similarly still not to be reached. Mrs Fielding's anxiety and feeling of helplessness mounted, but she was essentially a practical and efficient woman. She rang back one of the closer London friends--close also in living only two or three minutes from the Knightsbridge flat--and asked him to go there and have the block porter open it up for him. She then called the porter to give her authority for this and to find out if perhaps the man had seen her husband. But he could tell her only that Mr Fielding had not passed his desk since he came on duty at six.