The Ebony Tower-Short Stories - John Fowles

by John Fowles

  She stands, and he stands as well, searching her eyes behind the dark glasses.

  'We'll talk it all out, Kate. When they've gone.'

  Without warning she embraces him; and feels him flinch at the suddenness of it, this clutching at him. Her head is buried a moment against his shoulder, his arms come gingerly round her. He pats her back, then touches the top of her head with his mouth. Embarrassed, poor man. And she is already thinking: bitch, actress, calculatrix--why have I done this? And fool: what bishop carries gelignite--or would hand it over in his cathedral?

  Dear ox. The brute part, to kill so capital a calf.

  She leans away and grins up at his baffled eyes; then speaks like a green girl.

  'Lucky Moslems.'

  Annabel sits with her back to the beech-trunk; presiding mothergoddess, hatless and shoeless and slightly blowsy. Candida, who has drunk more than a glass of wine, lies sprawled asleep with her head in her lap. Every so often Bel touches her hair. Sally has moved away, to be in the sun; back to the grass, a bottle of Ambre Solaire by her side. Intimations of its scent wander to where the two men are, Peter on his elbow facing Paul, who still sits up. The two younger children are down by the water, building a pebblcdam. Catherine sits propped on one arm, between Peter and Annabel, watching a small brown ant struggle through the grass stems with a crumb of bread. They have the wineglasses full of thermos coffee now.

  Paul is adumbrating an angle for the programme, the curious middleclassishness of English relations with France, how ever since the days of the milord and the grand tour the typical English visitor here has always been educated and reasonably well-off and of course conservative and how the resultant reported image has been of fastidious good living, food and wine snobbism and all the rest, a good place to forget all the disadvantages of living in a deeply puritanical country, though ça va de soi the puritanical side also allows one to despise their politics and their ridiculous Napoleonic centralized bureaucracy profoundly at the same time from a different part of oneself, so no wonder we had a reputation for perfidiousness, we don't realize the arch-centralist nation of Europe is England, he means who else kowtows to London notions of life as the British do, catch your Frog doing that, who else conforms so absurdly in the manner we behave and speak and dress, take the way the French only care about the quality of the food and the cooking, whereas all we care about is whether the other diners are dressed properly and the bloody table-setting looks nice and clean, we confuse terribly 'Listen,' says Bel. 'There's an oriole.'

  And for a moment, Paul stops. They hear the liquid whistle from across the river.

  Be! says, 'You never see them.'

  'Go on,' says Peter. He reaches for a cigarette, belatedly offers one to Catherine, who shakes her head. 'This sounds interesting.'

  Paul means we confuse quite ludicrously a notion, a myth of a centralized France, ever since Versailles, and the actual contempt of the Frenchman for anything that stands in the way of his individual pleasure. When we at home with our belief that we're terribly free and democratic and politically independent are actually the most god-awful nation of conformers when it comes to personal pleasure. That's why (rising to the improvised paradox) every French government is inherently fascist and the actual French nation inherently incapable of accepting fascism for long; while our love of conforming is so all-pervasive, so ideal a culture for a fascist takeover, that we've had to evolve the whole constitutional gallimaufry (one of his odd words) and God knows how many other public safeguards against our real natures.

  'I'd love to tie this in somehow,' says Peter.

  Another thing, says Paul, pouring himself the last of the Gros-Plant in Candy's glass, Peter having waved his hand at it, another result of France not being a country where workingclass people from home ever come, no package tours, and one couldn't say any more it was a proletarian hatred of dirty foreign food and filthy Latin sex, take the way (ah, the ways one takes) they flocked nowadays to Majorca and the Costa Brava and Italy and Yugoslavia and God knows where else, but much more a hatred of a country you had to be educated and sophisticated to enjoy, something you left to the bloody snobs and middle-class hedonists, or at least that was the ridiculous image of the place that had got about and as he was going to say before he got sidetracked, he's drunk too much, it also explained the corollary French illusion about England as a nation of fanatical stiffupper-lipped and bowler-hatted monarchomaniacs who lived for horses and dogs and le sport and the famous cold-blood and all the fucking rest of it. Take a ch‰teau they knew only a few miles away and could Peter guess what had pride of place in the bloody drawing-room? A framed letter from the Duke of Edinburgh's secretary thanking the count for his condolences on the death of His Royal Highness's father-in-law. You know, says Paul. One gives up.

  'Does he speak English? Maybe we could use it.'

  Bel says, 'Working-class people don't come to France because it's too expensive. It's as simple as that.'

  Peter grins. 'You're joking. You don't realize what some of them earn these days.'

  'Exactly,' says Paul. 'It's a cultural thing. Here they assume the customer wants the best. We assume they want the cheapest.'

  'We did a programme on package tours a couple of years ago. Unbelievable, some of the reasons they gave. I remember one dear old bird in Majorca saying what she liked best was knowing they all got the same food and the same sort of room.'

  He slaps his head; as if his incredulity proves the old bird's stupidity.

  'My point. Damn the country where people are allowed to choose how they spend their money.'

  'If they have it,' reiterates Bel.

  'Nothing to do with money, for God's sake. I'm talking about being brainwashed.' He turns to Peter again. 'A French peasant, even a factory-worker, cares just as much about his food and his wine as someone much higher up the economic ladder. As regards pleasure, they're totally egalitarian. I mean, take the way they'll lash out for a wedding. Just your peasant farmer, your postman. Magnificent food, Peter, you can't imagine. And all the concern about it, the care, the going to the butcher and discussing the meat, and the patisserie and the charcuterie and all the rest.'

  Praise God for economical additives.

  Peter nods, then looks up with a glance that comprehends both Paul and Annabel.

  'Lucky people, then? One can't dodge that?'

  'One has a sense of privilege. Inevitably.'

  'But you seem to be arguing it should be scrapped. Do you really want the Manchester and Birmingham hordes here?'

  Be! grins. 'Good question. Ask Comrade Rogers.'

  He flaps a hand at his wife. 'Only because the package tour is precisely what France has not got to offer. It's where you still have to discover things for yourself.'

  'Which requires an educated mind?'

  'Just an open one. Not straitjacketed in the puritan ethic.'

  'I quite like this angle, too.' He smiles at Annabel. 'But how typical is he, Annabel?'

  'Oh, I think a fairly standard expatriate reactionary. Don't you, Kate?'

  Catherine gives a little smile, and says nothing.

  'Come on, sister-in-law. Defend me from stabs in the back.'

  'If one's happy, obviously one doesn't want things to change.'

  'But one can want to share it a little?'

  Be! answers for her. 'Darling, why not face it? You're the biggest armchair socialist there ever was.'

  'Thank you.'

  'A bottle of jolly, and you'll out-Mao everyone else in sight.'

  Peter sniggers. 'I say, what a lovely word, Annabe!. OutMao. I must remember that.'

  Paul wags a finger at Annabel; the awful Russian monk in him.

  'My sweet, the aim of socialism, as I understand it, is to raise humanity. Not to pull everyone down to the lowest common denominator dear to every capitalist heart.'

  And they go on, and they go on; one hates Paul like this, the holding forth, the endless expounder of grand cultural rhubarb. When all one see
s, somehow, is a tired rush of evening people, work-drained automata to whom one can be only profoundly lucky, above, chosen, helpless. To motivate, to explain them is the ultimate vulgarity and the ultimate lie... a kind of cannibalism. Eat butchered pork for lunch; then butchered other lives, chopped-up reality, for afters. The harvest is in. All that's left are the gleanings and leazings: fragments, allusions, fantasies, egos. Only the husks of talk, the meaningless aftermath.

  And dense enough without all these circling, buzzing words; unreal enough, oh quite unreal enough without the added unreality of all these hopping, seething, transilient male ideas and the knowledge that they were germs, they would breed, one winter evening mindless millions would watch their progeny and be diseased in their turn. One understood Bel's lazy irritation so well: not so much the pontificating, but to see him give way to it for so small a cause, such a worthless, shallow little prick; who saw nothing in trees but wood to build his shabby hutches of ephemeral nonsense from. To whom the real, the living, the unexplained is the outlaw; only safe when in the can.

  One knew: Paul could have said that he wanted to exterminate the French, what you will, the exact opposite of what he had said, and the wretched little coffin-man would have nodded and pronounced his incredible's and fantastic's and looked for an angle.

  And one knew it was one's own fault: one should not have called Bel a despot. It was all to disprove that; so proved it.

  This: and the real trees, the two children by the water, the silent girl in the sun, turned on her stomach now, primped little white-and-indigo buttocks. The trees and scrub and surfacing boulders, the silent cliffs above, scorched lifeless planet, windless sun, the day going stale like the ends of the loaves from the lunch, no longer translucent and soaring, but somehow opaque and static; all the fault of the men's voices, the endless futile and unhygienic scratching-at-sores of soi-disant serious men's voices. Only women knew now. Even the vapid girl knew only the sun on her back, the grass and earth below her. Bel knew only herself and her sleeping child's head and her other child's small movements below by the river; what she gave to the conversation, even her little needling of Paul, was indulgence, from her role as the quiet hub; to keep the spokes turning a little. One had once seen Be!, a summer evening at home, just the four of them, needle Paul far more outrageously. He got up abruptly and walked out into the garden. An embarrassed little silence. Then Bel as abruptly getting up and leaving the room, going straight out, it was dusk, they had seen it all through the window, go straight to where Paul stood at the far end of the lawn. She made him turn and flung her arms impulsively round him. It had seemed almost like a lesson. They had watched from indoors, and he had smiled. They had never discussed it or mentioned it afterwards. One stored it with old beads and brooches; to weep over, that fashion and one's sense of presentable self had changed so much.

  If one were Bel; one's own, beyond all pride.

  Now Emma came slowly back up to where the four adults were, and stood beside her mother.

  'I want to lie like Candy.'

  'Darling, let her sleep. There's not room for you as well.'

  Emma sidles a look at her aunt, who reaches out a hand. The little girl kneels, then sinks and flops forward across her lap. Catherine strokes her fair hair, moves silky strands of it from her cheek.

  Paul leans on an elbow, and yawns. 'Now there's the most sensible one here.'

  Peter smiles sideways, up at Catherine. 'Sorry. Monstrous to be talking shop on a heavenly day like this.'

  'I enjoyed listening.'

  She touches the collar of the child's yellow blouse, avoiding his eyes.

  Paul grunts. 'And not agreeing with one word of it.'

  Catherine makes a little shrug and looks across the picnic cloth at him. 'Just thinking of what Barthes said.'

  Peter asks who Barthes is; as if, one feels, he thinks it is spelt Bart, and a Christian name. Paul explains. Peter clicks his fingers.

  'Someone was talking to me about him only the other day.' He sits up and turns towards Catherine. 'What does he say?'

  She speaks as if to Emma. 'He analysed tourist guides. In a book of essays. How they sell the notion that all utilitarian and all modern things are monotonous. The only interesting things are ancient monuments and the picturesque. How the picturesque has come to be associated almost uniquely with mountains and beaches in the sun.' She adds, 'That's all.'

  And beat that for incoherence.

  Paul says, 'The mountain bit started with the Romantics, surely.'

  She runs a finger down Emma's hair. It began with Petrarch; but one must not know too much.

  'I think he was trying to point out that lack of imagination in travelling comes mainly from the middle classes. The middleclass notion of what is beautiful. How guides will devote three paragraphs to some church in a town, and then dismiss the real living town itself in two lines.'

  Paul sinks back, on the other side of the picnic cloth, and puts his hands behind his head. 'For eminently good reasons, generally.'

  'If you think that thirteenth-century architecture matters more than twentieth-century reality.'

  'Why not? If one's on holiday.'

  She gives Paul's prone form a little look.

  'Then why do you hate the false images of the British and the French? They're exactly the same form of selected reality.'

  'Don't see why.'

  Inane. Provoke her a little, she's almost human. He is smiling.

  'You approve of bourgeois stereotypes of what's worth seeing on holiday. What's the difference between them and the bourgeois stereotypes of national character you dislike so much?'

  He has closed his eyes. 'If I can just have a brief nap, I shall think of a really crushing answer to that.'

  Bel says, 'How are the mighty fallen.'

  'Boo.' He crosses his hands over his stomach.

  Peter lies back on an elbow, facing her. 'Isn't this chap fantastically difficult to understand? I've been told.'

  'The general message is fairly plain.'

  Bel murmurs, 'Kate edited one of his books in English.'

  'Good God. Did you really?'

  'Not edited. Just proof-read it.'

  'She practically rewrote the translation.'

  'If that's how you describe one or two small suggestions.'

  She warns Be!, or tries to warn her. Her look is not met. One doesn't catch Bel like that.

  'So what is the general message?'

  She hesitates, then plunges.

  'That there are all kinds of category of sign by which we communicate. And that one of the most suspect is language principally for Barthes because it's been very badly corrupted and distorted by the capitalist power structure. But the same goes for many other non-verbal sign-systems we communicate by.'

  Peter chews on a grass-stalk.

  'You mean advertising--things like that?'

  'That's a particularly flagrant field of manipulation. A lot of private communication is also advertising. Misuse--or just clumsy use, of signs.' Too late to stop now, one is trapped. 'A sentence is what the speaker means it to mean. 'What he secretly means it to mean. Which may be quite the opposite. What he doesn't mean it to mean. What it means as evidence of his real nature. His history. His intelligence. His honesty. And so on.'

  Paul speaks from apparent sleep. 'Until everything about meaning matters except meaning. "Pass me the salt" becomes a pregnant sign-structure. And the poor bloody salt never gets passed.'

  Catherine smiles. 'Sometimes.'

  'Kraut,' grunts Paul. 'Not French.'

  Bel says, 'Shut up. Go to sleep.'

  Peter is making signals: I'm a serious fellow. He even speaks slowly.

  'This chap who was talking about him... isn't there something about the religion of the middle classes being the platitude?'

  'I think he said the ethos.'

  'Because originality is disruptive--right?'

  'It depends on the context.'

  Bel stares at her sister
's bowed head, speculating.

  'How?'

  'There are middle-class contexts where one is expected to sound original. Amusing. Even revolutionary. But the context is a kind of countermanding sign. It trumps.'

  Be! says, 'For example, how quickly you go to sleep after lunch when you have finished cursing the society that allows you to go to sleep after lunch.'

  Paul murmurs, 'I heard that.'

  Peter will not be distracted. 'So real originality has to be actively revolutionary? Right? That's what this chap was getting at.'

  'I think people like Barthes are more interested in making people aware of how they communicate and try to control one another. The relation between the overt signs, whether they're verbal or not, and the real meaning of what is happening.'

  'But you have to change society first, don't you?'

  'One hopes that's what more awareness does.'

  'But I mean, you know... if it's just picking up people's platitudes, it's just word-watching. Like bird-watching. No?'

  'I presume even ornithology has its uses.'

  'Hardly central though, is it?'

  'It would be if the bird was the basis of human society. As communication happens to be.'

  She sees out of the corner of her eyes, for through all this she has been looking down at Emma, that he nods. As if she has made a point. She realizes, it is very simple, she hates him; although he is fortuitous, ignorable as such, he begins to earn his right to be an emblem, a hideous sign. For he is not testing--or teasing Barthes and semiotics, but her. He means childish little male things like: why don't you smile at me, what have I done, please show respect when I watch my language because I know you don't like my language.

  Emma suddenly sits up, then goes to her mother and whispers in her ear. Bels holds her, kisses her cheek, she must wait.

  'Do you think this could be got across on telly?'

  'Could what...?'

  'This chap Barthes. What you've just been telling me.'

  'I should have thought it was essentially to be read.'

  'It wouldn't interest you? Sketch out a few ideas--I mean, if these sign things aren't all verbal, it might be fun to illustrate.' She casts him a quick look. He is prodding some insect in the grass with his stalk, head bent; long sandy hair. She looks back at Bel, who smiles gently, lethally, her arm round Emma.