The Ebony Tower-Short Stories - John Fowles

by John Fowles

  He stood and held out a hand. 'You're on.'

  They walked towards the trees of Kenwood House. She kept obstinately to her bargain. Her 'theory' must wait till they had their tea. So they talked more like the perfect strangers, hazardmet, that they were; about their respective jobs, which required a disillusioning on both sides as to very much of the supposed glamour and excitement attached to them. She admitted, when he revealed that he knew about the children's stories, to a general literary ambition--that is, a more adult one. She was trying to write a novel, it was so slow, you had to destroy so much and start again; so hard to discover whether one was really a writer or just a victim of a literary home environment. He felt a little bit the same about his own work; and its frustrations and endless weeks of getting nowhere. They rather surprisingly found, behind the different cultural backgrounds, a certain kind of unspoken identity of situation. He queued up behind his witness at the tea-counter, observing the back of her head, that tender skin above the curve of the dress, the starchy blue stripes in its mealy whiteness; and he knew he had to see her again, off-duty. He had no problems with girls. It was not a physical thing, a lack of confidence sexually; not even a class or a cultural thing; but a psychological thing, a knowledge that he was--despite the gaffe, but even the gaffe had been a kind of honesty--dealing with a quicker and more fastidious mind in the field of emotions and personal relationships... that, and the traditional ineligibility of his kind for her kind, with the added new political bar, if the intelligence was also progressive, that he had referred to as a leprosy. Something about her possessed something that he lacked: a potential that lay like unsown ground, waiting for just this unlikely corn-goddess; a direction he could follow, if she would only show it. An honesty, in one word. He had not wanted a girl so fast and so intensely for a long time. Nevertheless, he made a wise decision.

  They found a table to themselves in a corner. This time she accepted a cigarette.

  'So let's have it.'

  'Nothing is real. All is fiction.'

  She bit her lips, lips without make-up, waiting for his reaction.

  'That solves the case?'

  'Lateral thinking. Let's pretend everything to do with the Fieldings, even you and me sitting here now, is in a novel. A detective story. Yes? Somewhere there's someone writing us, we're not real. He or she decides who we are, what we do, all about us.' She played with her teaspoon; the amused dark eyes glanced up at him. 'Are you with me?'

  'By the skin of my teeth.'

  'A story has to have an ending. You can't have a mystery without a solution. If you're the writer you have to think of something.'

  'I've spent most of this last month--'

  'Yes, but only in reality. It's the difference between I haven't many facts, so I can't decide anything--and I haven't many facts, but I've simply got to decide something.'

  He felt a little redressment of the imbalance--after all a fault in this girl, a cerebral silliness. It would have irritated him in someone less attractive in other ways; now it simply relieved him. He smiled.

  'We play that game too. But never mind.'

  She bit her lips again. 'I propose to dismiss the deus ex machina possibility. It's not good art. An awful cheat, really.'

  'You'd better...

  She grinned. 'The god out of the machine. Greek tragedy. When you couldn't work out a logical end from the human premises, you dragged in something external. You had the villain struck down by lightning. A chimney-pot fell on his head. You know?'

  'I'm back on my feet.'

  'Of course the British Museum thing may have been pure coincidence. On the other hand the vanished man might have been really determined to see that girl. So I think the writer would make him--when he found she wasn't in the readingroom after all--telephone the publishers where she works. There's a blank in her day. Between just after half-past five, when she left work, until about eight, when she met Peter Fielding to go to a rather ghastly party.'

  And suddenly he felt more seriously out of his depth. He was being teased--which meant she liked him? Or he was being officially mocked--which meant she didn't?

  'They met then?'

  She raised a finger.

  'The writer could have made them meet. He'd have to make it a kind of spur-of-the-moment thing. Obviously it could have been much better planned, if the missing man had had it in mind for some time. He'd have to say something like... I've just broken under all the hidden pressures of my life, I don't know who to turn to, you seem quite a sympathetic and level-headed girl, you-'

  'This level-headed girl would be telling me all this?'

  'Only if she was quite sure it couldn't be proved. Which she might. Given that at this late date the police have apparently never even suspected such a meeting.'

  'Correction. Found evidence of.'

  'Same thing.'

  'All right.'

  'So he might just have made her pity him? This seeming hollow man pouring out all his despair. A hopelessness. Terribly difficult to write, but it could be done. Because it so happens the girl is rather proud of her independence. And her ability to judge people. And don't forget she really hasn't any time at all for the world he's running away from.' The real girl played with her plastic teaspoon, looked up at him unsmiling now; trying him out. 'And there's no sex angle. She'd be doing it out of the kindness of her heart. And not very much. Just fixing up somewhere for him to hide for a few days, until he can make his own arrangements. And being the kind of person she is, once she'd decided it was the right thing to do, nothing, not even rather dishy young policemen who buy her cups of tea, would ever get the facts out of her.'

  He stared at his own cup and saucer. 'You're not by any chance...?'

  'Just one way the writer might have played it.'

  'Hiding people isn't all that easy.'

  'Ah.'

  'Especially when they've acted on the spur of the moment and made no financial arrangements that one can discover. And when they're not spur-of-the-moment people.'

  'Very true.'

  'Besides, it's not how I read her character.'

  'More conventional?'

  'More imaginative.'

  She leant away on an elbow, smiling.

  'So our writer would have to tear this ending up?'

  'If he's got a better.'

  'He has. And may I have another cigarette?'

  He lit it for her. She perched her chin on her hands, leant forward.

  'What do you think would strike the writer about his story to date-if he re-read it?'

  'He ought never to have started it in the first place.'

  'Why?'

  'Forgot to plant any decent leads.'

  'Doesn't that suggest something about the central character? You know, in books, they do have a sort of life of their own.'

  'He didn't mean evidence to be found?'

  'I think the writer would have to face up to that. His main character has walked out on him. So all he's left with is the character's determination to have it that way. High and dry. Without a decent ending.'

  The sergeant smiled down. 'Except writers can write it any way they like.'

  'You mean detective stories have to end with everything explained? Part of the rules?'

  'The unreality.'

  'Then if our story disobeys the unreal literary rules, that might mean it's actually truer to life?' She bit her lips again. 'Leaving aside the fact that it has all happened. So it must be true, anyway.'

  'I'd almost forgotten that.'

  She set out her saucer as an ashtray.

  'So all our writer could really do is find a convincing reason why this main character had forced him to commit the terrible literary crime of not sticking to the rules?' She said, 'Poor man.'

  The sergeant felt the abyss between them; people who live by ideas, people who have to live by facts. He felt obscurely humiliated, to have to sit here and listen to all this; and at the same time saw her naked, deliciously naked on his bed. Her bed.
Any bed or no bed. The nipples showed through the thin fabric; the hands were so small, the eyes so alive.

  'And you happen to have it?'

  'There was an author in his life. In a way. Not a man. A system, a view of things? Something that had written him. Had really made him just a character in a book.'

  'So?'

  'Someone who never put a foot wrong. Always said the right thing, wore the right clothes, had the right image. Right with a big r, too. All the roles he had to play. In the City. The country. The dull and dutiful member of parliament. So in the end there's no freedom left. Nothing he can choose. Only what the system says.'

  'But that goes for--'

  'Then one has to look for something very unusual in him. Since he's done something very unusual?' The sergeant nodded.

  She was avoiding his eyes now. 'All this dawns on him. Probably not suddenly. Slowly. Little by little. He's like something written by someone else, a character in fiction. Everything is planned. Mapped out. He's like a fossil--while he's still alive. One doesn't have to suppose changes of view. Being persuaded by Peter politically. Seeing the City for the nasty little rich man's casino it really is. He'd have blamed everything equally. How it had used him. Limited him. Prevented him.'

  She tapped ash from her cigarette.

  'Did you ever see his scrapbooks?'

  'His what?'

  'They're in the library down at Tetbury. All bound in blue morocco. Gilt-tooled. His initials. Dates. All his press cuttings. Right back to the legal days. Times law reports, things like that. Tiniest things. Even little local rag clippings about opening bazaars and whatnot.'

  'Is that so unusual?'

  'It just seems more typical of an actor. Or some writers are like that. A kind of obsessive need to know... that they've been known?'

  'Okay.'

  'It's a kind of terror, really. That they've failed, they haven't registered. Except that writers and actors are in far less predictable professions. They can have a sort of eternal optimism about themselves. Most of them. The next book will be fabulous. The next part will be a rave.' She looked up at him, both persuading and estimating. 'And on the other hand they live in cynical open worlds. Bitchy ones. Where no one really believes anyone else's reputation-especially if they're successful. Which is all rather healthy, in a way. But he isn't like that. Tories take success so seriously. They define it so exactly. So there's no escape. It has to be position. Status. Title. Money. And the outlets at the top are so restricted. You have to be prime minister. Or a great lawyer. A multi-millionaire. It's that or failure.' She said, 'Think of Evelyn Waugh. A terrible Tory snob. But also very shrewd, very funny. If you can imagine someone like that, a lot more imagination than anyone ever gave him credit for, but completely without all the safety valves Waugh had. No brilliant books, no Catholicism, no wit. No drinking, no impossible behaviour in private.'

  'Which makes him like thousands of others?'

  'But we have a fact about him. He did something thousands of others don't. So it must have hurt a lot more. Feeling failed and trapped. And forced--because everything was so standard, so conforming in his world--to pretend he was happy as he was. No creative powers. Peter's told me. He wasn't even very good in court, as a barrister. Just specialized legal knowledge.' She said, 'And then his cultural tastes. He told me once he was very fond of historical biography. Lives of great men. And the theatre, he was genuinely quite keen on that. I know all this, because there was so little else we could talk about. And he adored Winston Churchill. The biggest old ham of them all.'

  A memory jogged the sergeant's distracted mind: Miss Parsons, how Fielding had 'nearly' voted Labour in 1945. But that might fit.

  He said, 'Go on.'

  'He feels more and more like this minor character in a bad book. Even his own son despises him. So he's a zombie, just a high-class cog in a phony machine. From being very privileged and very successful, he feels himself very absurd and very failed.' Now she was tracing invisible patterns on the top of the table with a fingertip: a square, a circle with a dot in it. The sergeant wondered if she was wearing anything at all beneath the dress. He saw her sitting astride his knees, her arms enlacing his neck, tormenting him; and brutality. You fall in love by suddenly knowing what past love hadn't. 'Then one day he sees what might stop both the rot and the pain. What will get him immortality of a kind.'

  'Walking out.'

  'The one thing people never forget is the unsolved. Nothing lasts like a mystery.' She raised the pattern-making finger. 'On condition that it stays that way. If he's traced, found, then it all crumbles again. He's back in a story, being written. A nervous breakdown. A nutcase. Whatever.'

  Now something had shifted, little bits of past evidence began to coagulate, and listening to her became the same as being with her. The background clatter, the other voices, the clinging heat, all that started to recede. Just one thing nagged, but he let it ride.

  'So it has to be for good?'

  She smiled at him. 'God's trick.'

  'Come again.'

  'Theologians talk about the Deus absconditus--the God who went missing? Without explaining why. That's why we've never forgotten him.'

  He thought of Miss Parsons again. 'You mean he killed himself?'

  'I bet you every penny I possess.'

  He looked down from her eyes.

  'This writer of yours--has he come up with a scenario for that?'

  'That's just a detail. I'm trying to sell you the motive.'

  He was silent a moment, then sought her eyes. 'Unfortunately it's the details I have to worry about.'

  His own eyes were drily held. 'Then your turn. Your department.'

  'We have thought about it. Throwing himself off a nightferry across the Channel. But we checked. The boats were crowded, a lot of people on deck. The odds are dead against.'

  'You mustn't underrate him. He'd have known that was too risky.'

  'No private boats missing. We checked that as well.'

  She gave him a glance under her eyebrows; a touch of conspiracy, a little bathing in collusion; then looked demurely down.

  'I could tell you a suitable piece of water. And very private.'

  'Where?'

  'In the woods behind Tetbury Hall. They call it the lake. It's just a big pond. But they say it's very deep.'

  'How does he get there without being seen?'

  'He knows the country round Tetbury very well. He owns a lot of it. Hunting. Once he's within walking distance from London, he's safe.'

  'And that part of it?'

  'Some kind of disguise? He couldn't have hired a car. Or risked the train. By bus?'

  'Hell of a lot of changing.'

  'He wasn't in a hurry. He wouldn't have wanted to be anywhere near home before nightfall. Some stop several miles away? Then cross-country? He liked walking.'

  'He still has to sink himself. Drowned bodies need a lot of weight to stay down.'

  'Something inflatable? An air mattress? Car-tyre? Then deflate it when he's floated far enough out?'

  'You're beginning to give me nightmares.'

  She smiled and leant back and folded her hands in her lap; then she grinned up and threw it all away.

  'I also fancy myself as an Agatha Christie.'

  He watched her; and she looked down, mock-penitent.

  'How serious are you being about all this?'

  'I thought about it a lot in Paris. Mainly because of the British Museum thing. I couldn't work out why he'd have wanted to see me. I mean if he didn't, it was a kind of risk. He might have bumped into me. And you can't walk into the readingroom just like that. You have to show a pass. I don't know if that was checked.'

  'Every attendant there.'

  'So what I think now is that it was some kind of message. He never meant to see me, but for some reason he wanted me to know that I was involved in his decision. Perhaps because of Peter. Something for some reason he felt I stood for.'

  'A way out he couldn't take?'
/>   'Perhaps. It's not that I'm someone special. In the ordinary world. I was probably just very rare in his. I think it was simply a way of saying that he'd have liked to talk to me. Enter my world. But couldn't.'

  'And why Tetbury Hall?'

  'It does fit. In an Agatha Christie sort of way. The one place no one would think of looking. And its neatness. He was very tidy, he hated mess. On his own land, no trespassing involved. Just a variation on blowing your brains out in the gun-room, really.'

  He looked her in the eyes. 'One thing bothers me. Those two hours after work of yours that day.'

  'I was only joking.'

  'But you weren't at home. Mrs Fielding tried to telephone you then.'

  She smiled.

  'Now it's my turn to ask how serious you're being.'

  'Just tying ends up.'

  'And if I don't answer?'

  'I don't think that writer of yours would allow that.'

  'Oh but he would. That's his whole point. Nice people have instincts as well as duties.'

  It was bantering, yet he knew he was being put to the test; that this was precisely what was to be learnt. And in some strange way the case had died during that last half-hour; it was not so much that he accepted her theory, but that like everyone else, though for a different reason, he now saw it didn't really matter. The act was done; taking it to bits, discovering how it had been done in detail, was not the point. The point was a living face with brown eyes, half challenging and half teasing; not committing a crime against that. He thought of a ploy, some line about this necessitating further questioning; and rejected it. In the end, he smiled and looked down.

  She said gently, 'I must go now. Unless you're going to arrest me for second sight.'

  They came to the pavement outside the house in Willow Road, and stood facing each other.

  'Well.'

  'Thank you for the cup of tea.'

  He glanced at the ground, reluctantly official.

  'You have my number. If anything else...'

  'Apart from bird-brained fantasy.'

  'I didn't mean that. It was fun.'