The Ebony Tower-Short Stories - John Fowles

by John Fowles

  'The princess thought of all those years in the forest, when she'd been so happy. And how unhappy she was now. So in the end she came back here, to this tree, to ask the wise old owl what she should do. There he was up there, sitting on that branch, with one eye shut and the other open. She told him what had happened. How she had lost Prince Florio for ever. Then the owl told her something very wise. That if the prince really loved her, he wouldn't care whether she was a princess or not. He wouldn't mind that she hadn't any clothes or jewels, or a palace. He would just love her for herself. And until he did that, she would never be happy. He said she mustn't go looking for him any more. She must wait till he came to find her again. And then he told her that if she was very good, and very patient, and would do what he said, then he could do one last piece of magic. Neither the prince nor she would ever grow older. They would stay seventeen for ever, until they met again.'

  'Was it very long?'

  Catherine smiles down. 'It's still. All these years and years. They're both still seventeen. And they've never met.' The oriole calls again, going away downstream. 'Listen.'

  The little girl twists her head, then looks back up at her aunt.

  Once more, the strange trisyllabic flute. Catherine smiles.

  'Flo-ri-o.'

  'It's a bird.'

  Catherine shakes her head. 'The princess. She's calling his name.'

  A shaded doubt; a tiny literary critic--Reason, the worst ogre of them all--stirs.

  'Mummy says it's a bird.'

  'Have you ever seen it?'

  Emma thinks, then shakes her head.

  'She's very clever. You never see her. Because she's shy about not having any clothes. Perhaps she's been in this tree all the time. Listening to us.'

  Emma casts a suspicious glance up into the thorn-tree.

  'It doesn't end happily ever after.'

  'You know when I went away before lunch? I met the princess. I was talking with her.'

  'What did she say?'

  'That she's just heard the prince is coming. That's why she's calling his name so often.'

  'When will he come?'

  'Any day now. Very soon.'

  'Will they be happy then?'

  'Of course.'

  'And have babies?'

  'Lots of babies.'

  'It is happy really, isn't it?'

  Catherine nods. The innocent eyes search the adult ones, then the little girl slowly smiles; and the body moves like a smile, she rises, a sudden affectionate little tomboy, twists and straddles across Catherine's outstretched legs, slides and clings, forces her aunt down on her back, kissing her mouth, little pressed lips then giggles wildly as Catherine rolls her away and tickles. She squeaks, squirms; then lies still, eyes brimming with suspense and mischief, the story already forgotten, or so it seems; a new small pint of energy to spend.

  'Fou-ound you!' chants Candida at the top of her voice, standing beside the boulder that has masked them from the path below.

  'Go away,' says Emma, clinging possessively to Catherine as she sits up. 'We hate you. Go away.'

  Three o'clock. Paul has woken, he leans on his elbow beside Bel, who is now on her back, and reads The Scholar Gipsy aloud. Bel stares up into the leaves and branches of the beech-tree. Paul's voice just reaches Sally, in the sun. Peter lies beside her, in his shorts. The three children are down by the river again, their occasional voices counterpointing the quiet drone of Paul's reading. Catherine is nowhere to be seen. It has become a strange day, in which the heat and stillness seem prolonged beyond their proper zenith. In the distance, somewhere down the valley, there is the sound of a tractor, but it is hardly audible above the faint rush from the Premier Saut, the hum of insects. The beech-leaves are motionless, as if cast in translucent green wax and set under a huge bell-glass. Staring up into them, Bel has the delicious illusion that she is staring down. She thinks about Kate, or thinks she is thinking about her, as Paul reads; only occasional lines, small heightenings and shifts in his voice, impinge. It is a kind of easy guilt; to be made surer of one's own contentment. Bel believes in nature, in peace, drift, illogically in both the inevitable and a beneficent order of things; not in anything so masculine and specific as a god, but much more in some dim equivalent of herself watching gently and idiosyncratically behind all the science and the philosophy and the cleverness. Simple, poised, flowing like the river; the pool, not the leap ruffled or ruffling on occasion only to prove that life is not, or need not be... and how nice a fabric would be of those leaves, green petals of Victorian words, how little changed, only the uses of words and even then only as the years changed the beechleaves, not at all really.

  '"Maidens who from the distant hamlets come To dance around the Fyfield elm in May..."'

  How all coheres.

  She began to listen to the great poem, one she knew almost by heart; past readings of it, sometimes she read, its private history in her life with Paul, its ramifications, memories; how one could live in it, if only Catherine, maidens in May... if only it hadn't to be all Hamlet, that wretched intellectual sob-story, all walls and winds and winter puns. Wilful flights from all simplicity. Absurd, to cast oneself as Hamlet; Ophelia perhaps, that one couldn't help at times. But the other needed such a perverse will, a deliberate choice. When Bel was at Somerville there had been an attempt at it: a female Hamlet. Absurd. One kept on thinking of pantomime principal boys, instead of Sarah Bernhardt as one was meant. Plots, drama, farfetched action: when there are lovely green poems to live by, men one suffers to read them and shall tonight perhaps, if one still feels like it, be mounted by. Absurd. If only one had cut out that thing in the Observer about how to dry leaves, glycerine was it, and keep their colour. And how to calm Candy down, that dreadful stridency.

  '"Still nursing the unconquerable hope, Still clutching the inviolable shade, With a free onward impulse brushing through, By night, the silver'd branches of the glade--Far on the forest skirts, where none pursue......

  She sleeps.

  A stanza or two later Peter rises, looks down at Sally, at her back, she has undone the top part of her bikini, one can see the side of a white breast. He picks up his short-sleeved shirt, his sandals, walks down barefooted to where the children are. He finds the poetry-reading distinctly pretentious, vaguely embarrassing; and is bored, the way people slump around, the way Sally lies there drugged in the sun; the slowness. A ball to chuck around, anything, any outlet for normal energy. The children also bore him. He stands and watches.

  Sally best, the rest of her bikini stripped off, behind a bush: a good quick ram. But she's a conventional girl, and shyer than she looks... just mouldable, as all his girls since his departed wife have been; and with the price--not very clever, not very unexpected, not dry and percipient at all; when one came down to it, hopelessly out of her depth with Bel and her bloody sister. One should not have brought her. Just easy to have around. To lay and be seen with. Like certain programmes. One deserved, one wanted more.

  At least Tom seems happy to be bossed about by the cocksure elder daughter, poor little bastard; she does for a stand-in for his mother. Peter pulls on the shirt and looks back beneath the beech. Paul's blue back, the procumbent Bel, collapsed cream dress, two pink-soled feet... let's face it, one fancied her, one didn't know why, but always had. Peter turns away upstream. He leans against the first boulder for a moment to fasten his sandals, then goes on, up into the trees, the choked ravine, above the Premier Saut, where Catherine wandered earlier. He even climbs down to where she sat and stares at the pool; thinks about swimming. Maybe a little too fast. He throws a twig into midpool. Definitely too fast. He unzips his shorts and urinates in the water.

  He climbs back to the path, then up off it through the steep belt of trees towards the cliffs above. He comes out in the open. The land tilts up, patches of thorny scrub and broom, divided by long runs of stony scree. He begins to scramble up the nearest, fifty, then a hundred yards, to where he can look back over the trees and the boulders d
own to the clearing and the river: the small shapes of the children by the water, Sally lying as he left her, Paul and Annabel under the beech, cream and blue, doing their highly civilized thing. He feels for a cigarette, then remembers he has left them behind on the picnic-cloth; wonders why he bothered. The heat. He turns and stares up at the cliff that towers above, grey and a reddish ochre, one or two overhangs already casting shadow in the westering sun. Angles. Death. He scrambles on, another hundred yards, to where the land becomes vertical, a wall of stone.

  Now he works back along the foot of the cliff, above the scrub and talus below. There is some kind of goat-track, ancient droppings. The cliff wears round, away from the river; the heat seems greater. He stares down at the children, wondering whether to call to them; some war-whoop, something to break it all up. One didn't really care what people thought, cutting through other people's crap was what one was about; getting things done, flannelling here, riding roughshod there; have the game played by one's own quick rules. The great thing about producing, the pressure, one never stayed long, one moved around; one sucked the juice, then attacked the next. Still, one was a guest. One liked old Paul, for all his going on. One envied old Paul; very nicely, as what in essence one would like one day for oneself, did Bel. Those eyes that toyed, teased, smiled; and never quite gave. She was so unobvious. The dryness, the mock simplicity that took no one in; fifty Sallys in her little finger; and a smashing pair of tits, that dress last night.

  A trim-bodied man of below average height, he turned and gazed up at the cliff over his head, and wondered comfortably if he was safe from falling rock.

  The erotic sun. Male sun. Apollo, and one is death. His poem once. One lies in one's underclothes, behind dark glasses and fast-closed lids, aware of process, wretched moons; hidden and waiting. It must be close. One thought of it even with Emma, since he is there, also waiting, every moment now. That is why one can't stand other people, they obscure him, they don't understand how beautiful he is, now he has taken on the mask; so far from skeleton. But smiling, alive, almost fleshed; just as intelligent, beckoning. The other side. Peace, black peace. If one didn't see Emma's eyes, if one hadn't, when she said we hate, breathed yes yes yes. We hate. Barren. Had clutched at anything but this: the cowardice, waiting, wanting-not-daring.

  Death. One had lied to the ox, it wasn't at all being unable to escape the present; but being all the futures, all the pasts, being yesterday and tomorrow; which left today like a fragile grain between two implacable, immense millstones. Nothing. All was past before it happened; was words, shards, lies, oblivion.

  Why?

  Childish. One must cling to structures, sure events. The interpretation of signs. One's own was alpha, one is precious (oh yes), rare, one sees. With all one's precious faults, one sees. One has committed a terrible crime, which proves one sees, since no one else admits its existence. One sawed the branch one was sitting on. One fouled one's own nest. One transgressed proverbs. Ergo one must prove one sees. One saw, that is.

  Tenses.

  Pollution, energy, population. All the Peters and all the Pauls. Won't fly away. The dying cultures, dying lands.

  Europe ends.

  The death of fiction; and high time too.

  Yet still one lies, as in a novel by an author one no longer admires, in an art that has become obsolete, feeling erotic and self-defiled; as if one had done it before one had, knowing it planned, proven, inevitable. As he took one once, in a churchyard; and wrote Having among graves. One did not like: the poem, not the having.

  Ilfaut philosopher pour vivre. That is, one must not love.

  Tears of self-pity, hand hidden in the furtive hair. The transfer of epithets. Burn dry and extirpate; ban; annul; annihilate. I will not return. Not as I am.

  And Catherine lies, composing and decomposed, writing and written, here and tomorrow, in the deep grass of the other hidden place she has found. Young dark-haired corpse with a bitter mouth; her hands by her sides, she does by thinking of doing; in her unmatched underclothes, black-shuttered eyes.

  Where all is reversed; once entered, where nothing leaves. The black hole, the black hole.

  To feel so static, without will; inviolable shade; and yet so potent and so poised.

  There was still not the merest breath of wind, as Peter, now as bored with his half-hour sojourn in the wilderness as he had been when driven to seek it, made his way back down towards the others. They and the river dropped out of sight as he descended a slope of loose stones towards the herd of elephantine boulders, which reached back some way towards the cliffs. One didn't realize how large they were until one was down among them. Here and there the spaces between were choked with scrub. One had to go back, find easier passages. It was like a natural maze, though the cliffs behind meant one knew roughly what direction to take. He had misjudged the distance, the goat-path must have angled further away from the river than he realized. Then he nearly trod on a snake.

  It was gone almost before he saw it. But some sort of pattern on its back? He was almost sure. It must have been an adder. It would certainly be an adder when he got back to tell them. He managed to tear a sideshoot off a straggling shrub, and went more cautiously, rustling the green besom ahead of him as if geigering for mines. Then suddenly his little five-minute ordeal was at an end. He came on a path that led downhill towards the river; it was faint and sinuous, but it had purpose. He saw the top of Annabel's beech some two or three hundred yards below. The path flattened, wound through the massive boulders, which glittered faintly, they held mica, in the sun. Then, through a shadowed space between two of the megaliths, downhill, some forty feet away, he saw Catherine.

  She lay on her back, beside another huge boulder. Her body was almost hidden in the long early summer grass; so nearly hidden he might have missed her. What had caught his eye were her red espadrilles, perched up on a stone behind her head.

  'Kate?'

  Her head turns and rises very quickly over the grass, to see him standing between the two boulders and smiling down. Accusing, craned, like some startled bird. He raises a pacifying hand.

  'Sorry. Thought I'd better warn you. I've just seen an adder.' He nods. 'Just back there.'

  Still the dark glasses stare, then she sits up on one arm, looks briefly round, then looks back at him with a little shrug. None here. He sees she is not in the bikini of that morning, but her underclothes, which do not match: a white bra, dark maroon lower down; not as she would wish to be seen. The dark glasses say it is his fault that there ace adders. He is eternally an intruder; a subtractor.

  'Suppose you haven't got a cigarette on you?'

  She hesitates, then reluctantly reaches sideways and raises a packet of Kent from the grass. He throws away the branch and comes down to where she is. She stays propped on one arm, her legs curled away. He sees the folded Levis and pink shirt she has been using as a pillow. She offers the packet up, then reaches again towards the red Greek shoulder-bag and hands up a lighter; both, small white box and orange polythene cylinder, without looking at him.

  'Thanks. You?'

  She shakes her head. He lights the cigarette.

  'Sorry if I was tactless after lunch. I honestly didn't mean it to sound like charity.'

  She shakes her head again, looking at his feet. It doesn't matter; please go away now.

  'I can imagine how... 'but imagination apparently fails him in mid-sentence. He passes back the lighter and the cigarettes. She takes them silently. And he gives up, a little helpless gesture of the hands.

  'Didn't mean to disturb you. Just the adder.'

  He is already turning away when she moves; her arm, almost with the rapidity of the snake. The fingers catch him just above the bare ankle, the briefest clutch, but enough to stop him. Then the hand reaches beside the pile of clothes and picks up a tube of sun-cream. She holds it up towards him, then tips it towards her back. It is a change of attitude so sudden, so unexpected, so banal, so implicitly friendly despite the expressionlessness o
f her face, that he grins.

  'Of course. My forte.'

  She turns on her stomach and lies on her elbows. He sits beside her, well well well, and unscrews the cap from the tube; a little protruding tongue of café-au-lait. She shakes her dark hair forward, then raises a hand to make sure it is free of her shoulders; lies there, staring down at her pile of clothes, waiting. He eyes her averted face and smiles to himself. Then he squeezes a small worm of the cream on to his left palm.

  'How much per square foot?'

  But her only answer is a minute shrug. He reaches across and begins to rub the cream on her left shoulder, then down towards the blade. There are faint impressions of grass, from when she was lying on her back. The skin is warm, drinks the cream. He takes away his hand and levels the palm for another worm. As if she has been waiting for his momentary loss of contact, she sinks forward, flat, then twists back her hands and unfastens the bra. He sits arrested, halfway through the squeeze; as if he has come to an unexpected fork in a road; as someone arguing will suddenly see a concealed refutation of his own case in his previous statement. He squeezes. Silence. She leans up on her elbows again, her chin propped on her hands, staring away.

  He murmurs, 'You've got very smooth skin.'

  But now he understands, he knows she won't answer. He begins to massage cream into the shoulder nearest him, more this time, then down to where the skin has been puckered, slightly wealed, by the straps of the bra. She shows not the least response to his circling palm, though he rubs more firmly, more slowly, down each side, down the centre to the small of the back. When he stops to press out more cream, a sweet scent, faintly of roses, patchouli, she sinks forward and flat again, her face turned away, cushioned on her hands, elbows out. He rubs backwards and forwards above the dark purple band that divides her body.

  'Good?'

  She says nothing; not the slightest sign. The heat, the supine body. He hesitates, swallows, then speaks in an even lower voice.