The Ebony Tower-Short Stories - John Fowles

by John Fowles

  'Do you think you ever convinced your father at all? In the days when you did argue with him?'

  'No.'

  'He never seemed shaken in his beliefs? Fed up in any way with the political life?'

  'Extraordinary though it may seem, also no.'

  'But he knew you despised it?'

  'I'm just his son.'

  'His only son.' - 'I gave up. No point. One just makes one more taboo.'

  'What other taboos did he have?'

  'The usual fifty thousand.' Peter flicked his eyes round the room. 'Anything to keep reality at bay.'

  'Won't it all be yours one day?'

  'That remains to be seen.' He added, 'Whether I want it.'

  'Was there a taboo about sex?'

  'Which aspect of it?'

  'Did lie know the nature of your relationship with Miss Dodgson?'

  'Oh for God's sake.'

  'I'm sorry, sir. 'What I'm trying to get at is whether you think he might have envied it.'

  'We never discussed it.'

  'And you formed no impression?'

  'He liked her. Even though she's not quite out of the right drawer, and all that. And I didn't mean by taboos expecting his son--, The sergeant raised his hand. 'Sorry. You're not with me. Whether he could have fancied girls her age.'

  Peter stared at him, then down at his sprawled feet.

  'He hadn't that kind of courage. Or imagination.'

  'Or need? Your parents' marriage was very happy, I believe.'

  'Meaning you don't?'

  'No, sir. I'm just asking you.'

  Peter stared at him again a long moment, then stood up and went to the window.

  'Look. All right. Maybe you don't know the kind of world I was brought up in. But its leading principle is never, never, never show what you really feel. I think my mother and father were happy together. But I don't really know. It's quite possible they've been screaming at each other for years behind the scenes. It's possible he's been having it off with any number of women. I don't think so, but I honestly don't know. Because that's the world they live in and I have to live in when I'm with them. You pretend, right? You don't actually show the truth till the world splits in half under your feet.' He turned from the window. 'It's no good asking me about my father. You could tell me anything about him and I couldn't say categorically, that's not true. I think he was everything he outwardly pretended to be. But because of what he is and... I just do not know.'

  The sergeant left a silence.

  'In retrospect--do you think he was deceiving you all through that previous evening?'

  'It wasn't a police interrogation, for Christ's sake. One wasn't looking for it.'

  'Your mother has asked in very high places that we pursue our inquiries. We haven't very much to go on.'

  Peter Fielding took a deep breath. 'Okay.'

  'This idea of a life of pretence--did you ever see any awareness of that in your father?'

  'I suppose socially. Sometimes. All the dreadful bores he had to put up with. The small-talk. But even that far less often than he seemed to be enjoying it.'

  'He never suggested he wanted a life without that?'

  'Without people you can use? You're joking.'

  'Did he ever seem disappointed his political career hadn't gone higher?'

  'Also taboo.'

  'He suggested something like it to someone in the House of Commons.'

  'I didn't say it wasn't likely. He used to put out a line about the back benches being the backbone of parliament. I never really swallowed that.' He came and sat down again opposite the sergeant. 'You can't understand. I've had this all my life. The faces you put on. For an election meeting. For influential people you want something out of. For your old cronies. For the family. It's like asking me about an actor I've only seen on stage. I don't know.'

  'And you've no theory on this last face?'

  'Only three cheers. If he really did walk out on it all.'

  'But you don't think he did?'

  'The statistical probability is the sum of the British Establishment to one. I wouldn't bet on that. If I were you.'

  'I take it this isn't your mother's view?'

  'My mother doesn't have views. Merely appearances to keep up.'

  'May I ask if your two sisters share your politics at all?'

  'Just one red sheep in the family.'

  The sergeant gave him a thin smile. He questioned on; and received the same answers, half angry, half indifferent--as if it were more important that the answerer's personal attitude was clear than the mystery be solved. Jennings was astute enough to guess that something was being hidden, and that it could very probably be some kind of distress, a buried love; that perhaps Peter was split, half of him wanting what would suit his supposedly independent self best--a spectacular breakdown of the life of pretence--and half wishing that everything had gone on as before. If he was, as seemed likely, really just a temporary pink, his father's possible plunge into what was the social, if not the political, equivalent of permanent red must be oddly mortifying; as if the old man had said, If you're really going to spit in your world's face, then this is the way to do it.

  When the sergeant stood to go, he mentioned that he would like to see the girl-friend, Isobel Dodgson, when she returned to London. She had been in France, in Paris, since some ten days after the disappearance. It had seemed innocent enough. Her sister had just had the expected baby and the visit had apparently been long agreed. Even so--someone else's vision of a brilliant coup--Miss Dodgson and the comings and goings of her somewhat motley collection of French in-laws had been watched for a few days--and proved themselves monotonously innocent. Peter Fielding seemed rather vague about when exactly she would return. He thought it might not be for another week, when she was due back at her job at a publisher's.

  'And she can't tell you anything you haven't heard ten times already.'

  'I'd just like to see her briefly, sir.'

  Jennings went on his way then, with once more next to nothing, beyond the contemplation of an unresolved Oedipus complex, for his pains.

  He descended next, by appointment, on Tetbury Hall itself; though before he gave himself the pleasure of seeing its beamed and moated glory, he called on a selected handful of the neighbours. There he got a slightly different view of his subject, and an odd consensus that something thoroughly nasty (if unspecified) had happened. Again, there was praise without reservation for the victim, as if De mortuis was engraved on every county heart. Fielding was such a good master of hounds, or would have been if he hadn't been so often unavoidably absent; so 'good for the village'; so generally popular (unlike the previous member). The sergeant tried to explain that a political murder without any evidence for it, let alone a corpse, is neither a murder nor political, but he had the impression that to his listeners he was merely betraying a sad ignorance of contemporary urban reality. He found no one who could seriously believe for a moment that Fielding might have walked deliberately out of a world shortly about to enter the hunting and shooting season.

  Only one person provided a slightly different view of Fielding, and that was the tweed-suited young man who ran his farm for him. It was not a world Jennings knew anything about, but he took to the laconic briskness of the thirty-year-old manager. He sensed a certain reflection of his own feelings about Fielding a mixture of irritation and respect. The irritation came very clearly, on the manager's side, from feeling he was not sufficiently his own boss. Fielding liked to be 'consulted over everything'; and everything had to be decided 'on accountancy grounds'--he sometimes wondered why they hadn't installed a computer. But he confessed he'd learnt a lot, been kept on his toes. Pressed by Jennings, he came up with the word 'compartmentalized'; a feeling that Fielding was two different people. One was ruthless in running the farm for maximum profit; another was 'very pleasant socially, very understanding, nothing snobbish about him'. Only a fortnight before the 'vanishing trick' happened, he had had a major planning get-together wit
h Fielding. There had not been the faintest sign then that the owner knew he would never see the things they discussed come to fruition. Jennings asked finally, and discreetly, about Mrs Fielding--the possibility that she might have made her husband jealous.

  'Not a chance. Not down here, anyway. Be round the village in ten minutes.'

  Mrs Fielding herself did not deny the unlikelihood. Though he had mistrusted Peter, the sergeant had to concede some justice to the jibe about keeping up appearances. It had been tactfully explained to her that Jennings, despite his present rank, was 'one of our best men' and had been working full time on the case since the beginning a very promising detective. He put on his public-school manner, made it clear that he was not out of his social depth, that he was glad of the opportunity to meet her in person.

  After telling her something of what he had been doing on the case, he began, without giving their origins, by advancing the theories of Miss Parsons and the Labour M. P. The notion that her husband might have realized what he had done and then committed suicide or, from shame, remained in hiding, Mrs Fielding found incredible. His one concern would have been for the anxiety and the trouble he was causing, and to end it as soon as possible. She conceded that the inevitable publicity might irreparably have damaged his political career--but then he had 'so much else to live for'.

  She refused equally to accept that he was politically disappointed. He was not at all a romantic dreamer, he had long ago accepted that he lacked the singleminded drive and special talents of ministerial material. He was not good at the cut-andthrust side of parliamentary debate; and he spent rather too much time on the other sides of his life to expect to be a candidate for any Downing Street list. She revealed that Marcus was so little ambitious, or foolishly optimistic, that he had seriously considered giving up his seat at the next election. But she insisted that that was not out of disillusionment--simply from a feeling that he had done his stint. The sergeant did not argue the matter. He asked Mrs Fielding if she had formed any favourite theory herself during that last fortnight.

  'One hardly seems to have talked of anything else, but... 'she made an elegant and seemingly rather well-practised gesture of hopelessness.

  'At least you feel he's still alive?' He added quickly, 'As you should, of course.'

  'Sergeant, I'm in a vacuum. One hour I expect to see him walk through that door, the next...' again she gestured.

  'If he is in hiding, could he look after himself? Can he cook, for instance?'

  She smiled thinly. 'One hardly lives that sort of life, as you must realize. But the war. No doubt he could look after himself. As one does if one has to.'

  'No new name has occurred to you--perhaps someone from the distant past?--who might have been talked into hiding him?'

  'No.' She said. 'And let me spare you the embarrassment of the other woman theory. It was totally foreign to his nature to conceal anything from me. Obviously, let's face it, he could have fallen in love with someone else. But he'd never have hidden it from me-if he did feel...'

  Jennings nodded. 'We do accept that, Mrs Fielding. I actually wasn't going to bring it up. But thanks anyway.' He said, 'No friends--perhaps with a villa or something abroad?'

  'Well of course one has friends with places abroad. You must have all their names by now. But I simply refuse to believe that they'd do this to me and the children. It's unimaginable.'

  'Your daughters can't help in any way?'

  'I'm afraid not. They're here. If you want to ask them anything.'

  'Perhaps later?' He tried to thaw her with a smile. 'There's another rather delicate matter. I'm terribly sorry about all this.'

  The lady opened her hands in an acquiescent way--a gracious martyrdom; since one's duty obliged.

  'It's to do with trying to build up a psychological picture? I've already asked your son about this in London. Whether his political views weren't a great disappointment to his father?'

  'What did he answer?'

  'I'd be most grateful to have your opinion first.'

  She shrugged, as if the whole matter were faintly absurd, not 'delicate' at all.

  'If only he'd understand that one would far rather he thought for himself than... you know what I mean.'

  'But there was some disappointment?'

  'My husband was naturally a little upset at the beginning. We both were. But... one had agreed to disagree? And he knows perfectly well we're very proud of him in every other way.'

  'So a picture of someone having worked very hard to build a very pleasant world, only to find his son and heir doesn't want it, would be misleading?'

  She puffed.

  'But Peter does want it. He adores this house. Our life here. Whatever he says.' She smiled with a distinct edge of coldness. 'I do think this is the most terrible red herring, sergeant. What worst there was was long over. And one does have two daughters as well. One mustn't forget that.' She said, 'Apart from Peter's little flirtation with Karl Marx, we really have been a quite disgustingly happy family.'

  The sergeant began to have something of the same impression he had received from Miss Parsons: that the lady had settled for ignorance rather than revelation. He might be there because she had insisted that investigation went on; but he suspected that that was a good deal more for show than out of any desperate need to have the truth uncovered. He questioned on; and got no help whatever. It was almost as if she actually knew where her husband was, and was protecting him. The sergeant had a sudden freakish intuition, no more founded on anything but frustration than those Mrs Fielding herself had had during that first evening of the disappearance, that he ought really to be searching Tetbury Hall, warrant in hand, instead of chatting politely away in the drawing-room. But to suppose Mrs Fielding capable of such a crime required her to be something other than she so obviously was... a woman welded to her role in life and her social status, eminently poised and eminently unimaginative. The sergeant also smelt a deeply wounded vanity. She had to bear some of the odium; and in some inner place she resented it deeply. He would have liked it much better if she had openly done so.

  He did see the two daughters briefly. They presented the same united front. Daddy had looked tired sometimes, he worked so fantastically hard; but he was a super daddy. The younger of the two, Caroline, who had been sailing in Greece when the event took place, added one tiny new--and conflicting--angle. She felt few people, 'not even Mummy', realized how much the country side of his life meant to him--the farm, it drove Tony (the farm manager) mad the way Daddy was always poking round. But it was only because Daddy loved it, it seemed. He didn't really want to interfere, he 'just sort of wanted to be Tony, actually'. Then why hadn't he given up his London life? Caroline didn't know. She supposed he was more complicated 'than we all ever realized'. She even provided the wildest possibility yet.

  'You know about Mount Athos? In Greece?' The sergeant shook his head. 'Actually we sailed past it when I was out there. It's sort of reserved for monasteries. There are only monks. It's all male. They don't even allow hens or cows. I mean, I know it sounds ridiculous, but sort of somewhere like that. Where he could be alone for a bit, I suppose.'

  But when it came to evidence of this yearning for a solitary retreat, the two girls were as much at a loss as everyone else. What their brother found hypocritical, they had apparently found all rather dutiful and self-sacrificing.

  A few minutes later, Mrs Fielding thanked the sergeant for his labours and, although it was half-past twelve, did not offer him lunch. He went back to London feeling, quite correctly, that he might just as well have stayed there in the first place.

  Indeed he felt near the end of his tether over the whole bloody case. There were still people he had down to see, but he hardly expected them to add anything to the general--and generally blank--picture. He knew he was fast moving from being challenged to feeling defeated; and that it would soon be a matter of avoiding unnecessary work, not seeking it. One such possible lead he had every reason to cross off his list
was Isobel Dodgson, Peter's girl-friend. She had been questioned in detail by someone else during the preliminary inquiry, and had contributed nothing of significance. But he retained one piece of casual gossip about her at the Yard; and a pretty girl makes a change, even if she knows nothing. Caroline and Francesca had turned out much prettier in the name than in the meeting.

  She came back from Paris on August 15th, in the middle of one of the hottest weeks for many years. The sergeant had sent a brief letter asking her to get in touch as soon as she returned, and she telephoned the next morning, an unbearably sultry and humid Thursday. He arranged to go up to Hampstead and see her that afternoon. She sounded precise and indifferent; she knew nothing, she didn't really see the point. However, he insisted, though he presumed she had already spoken with Peter, and was taking his line.

  He fell for her at once, in the door of the house in Willow Road. She looked a little puzzled, as if he must be for someone else, though he had rung the bell of her flat and was punctual to the minute. Perhaps she had expected someone in uniform, older; as he had expected someone more assured.

  'Sergeant Mike Jennings. The fuzz.'

  'Oh. Sorry.'

  A small girl, a piquant oval face, dark brown eyes, black hair; a simple white dress with a blue stripe in it; down to the ankles, sandals over bare feet... but it wasn't only that. He had an immediate impression of someone alive, where everyone else had been dead, or playing dead; of someone who lived in the present, not the past; who was, surprisingly, not like Peter at all. She smiled and nodded past him.

  'I suppose we couldn't go on the Heath? This heat's killing me. My room doesn't seem to get any air.'

  'Fine.'

  'I'll just get my key.'

  He went and waited on the pavement. There was no sun; an opaque heat-mist, a bath of stale air. He took off his dark blue blazer and folded it over his arm. She joined him, carrying a small purse; another exchange of cautious smiles.

  'You're the first cool-looking person I've seen all day.'