by John Fowles
‘Nick boy,’ said Kemp, I need a cup of the bloody national beverage.’
And that too should have warned me; her manes all drank coffee.
So we went to the tea pavilion, stood in a queue, then found half a table. Kemp left me to go to the ladies’. I pulled out a paperback I had in my pocket. The couple on the other side of the table moved away. The noise, the mess, the cheap food, the queue to the counter. I guessed Kemp was having to queue also. And I became lost in the book.
In the outer seat opposite, diagonally from me.
So quietly, so simply.
She was looking down at the table, not at me. I jerked round, searching for Kemp. But I knew Kemp was walking home.
She said nothing. Waited.
All the time I had expected some spectacular re-entry, some mysterious call, a metaphorical, perhaps even literal, descent into a modern Tartarus. And yet, as I stared at her, unable to speak, at her refusal to return my look, I understood that this was the only possible way of return; her rising into this most banal of scenes, this most banal of London, this reality as plain and dull as wheat. Since she was cast as Reality, she had come in her own, yet in some way heightened, stranger, still with the aura of another world; from, but not of, the crowd behind her.
She was wearing a delicate-patterned tweed suit, autumn flecked with winter; a dark green scarf, tied peasant-fashion, round her head. She sat with her hands primly in her lap, as if she had done her duty: she was here. Every other move was mine. But now the moment had come I could do nothing, say nothing, think nothing. I had imagined too many ways of our meeting again, and yet none like this. In the end I even stared down at my book, as if I wanted no more to do with her—then angrily up past her at a moronically curious family, scene-sniffing faces across the gangway. She did at last give me a little, lancing look; of only a fraction of a moment, but it caught the face I had really meant for the ones opposite.
Without warning she stood and walked away. I watched her move between the tables: her smallness, that slightly sullen smallness and slimness that was a natural part of her sexuality. I saw another man’s eyes follow her through the door.
I let a few stunned, torn seconds pass. Then I gave chase, pushing roughly past the people in my “way. She was walking slowly across the grass, towards the east. I came beside her, and she gave the bottom of my legs the smallest token glance. Still we said nothing. I felt so caught unawares—it was even in our clothes. I had lost all interest in what I wore, how I looked … had taken on the cryptic colouring of Kemp’s and Jojo’s worlds. Now I felt uncouth beside her, and resented it; she had no right to reappear like some clothes-conscious and self-possessed young middle-class wife. It was almost as if she wanted to flaunt the reversal in our roles and fortunes. I looked round. There were so many people, so many too far to distinguish. And Regent’s Park. That other meeting, of the young deserter and his love; the scent of lilac, and bottomless darkness.
‘Where are they?’
She gave a little shrug. ‘I’m alone.’
‘Like hell.’
We walked more silent paces. She indicated with her head an empty bench beside a tree-lined path. She seemed as strange to me as if she had indeed come from Tartarus; so cold, so calm.
I followed her to the seat. She sat at one end and I sat halfway along, turned towards her, staring at her. It infuriated me that she would not look at me, had made not the slightest sign of apology; would not say anything.
I said, ‘I’m waiting. As I’ve been waiting these last three and a half months.’
She untied her scarf and shook her hair free. It had grown again, as when I first knew her, and she had a warm tan. From my very first glimpse of her I realized, and it seemed to aggravate my irritation, that the image, idealized by memory, of a Lily always at her best had distorted Alison into what she was only at her worst. She was wearing a pale-brown shirt beneath the suit. It was a very good suit; Conchis must have given her money. She was pretty and desirable; even without … I remembered Parnassus, her other selves. She stared down at the tip of her flat-heeled shoes.
I looked out over the grass. ‘I want to make one thing clear from the start.’ She said nothing. ‘I forgive you that foul bloody trick you played this summer. I forgive you whatever miserable petty female vindictiveness made you decide to keep me waiting all this time.’
She shrugged. A silence. Then she said, ‘But?’
‘But I want to know what the hell went on that day in Athens. What the hell’s been going on since. And what the hell’s going on now.’
‘And then?’
‘We’ll see.’
She took a cigarette out of her handbag and lit it; and then without friendliness offered me the packet. I said, ‘No thanks.’
She stared into the distance, towards the aristocratic wall of houses that make up Cumberland Terrace and overlook the park. Cream stucco, a row of white statues along the cornices, the muted blues of the sky.
A poodle ran up to us. I waved it away with my foot, but she patted it on the head. A woman called, ‘Tina! Darling! Come here.’ In the old days we would have exchanged grimaces of disgust. She went back to staring at the houses. I looked round. There were other seats a few yards away. Other sitters and watchers. Suddenly the peopled park seemed a stage, the whole landscape a landscape of masquers, spies. I lit one of my own cigarettes; willed her to look at me, but she wouldn’t.
‘Alison.’
She glanced at me briefly, but then down again. She sat, holding the cigarette. As if nothing would make her speak. A plane leaf lolloped down, touched her skirt. She bent and picked it up, smoothed its yellow teeth against the tweed. An Indian came and sat on the far end of the bench. A threadbare black overcoat, a white scarf; a thin face. He looked small and unhappy, timidly alien; a waiter perhaps, the slave of some cheap curry-house kitchen. I moved a little closer to her, lowered my voice, and forced it to sound as cold as hers.
‘What about Kemp?’
‘Nicko, please don’t interrogate me. Please don’t.’
My name; a tiny shift. But she was still set hard and silent.
‘Are they watching? Are they here somewhere?’
An impatient sigh.
‘Are they?’
‘No.’ But at once she qualified it. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Meaning you do.’
Still she wouldn’t look at me. She spoke in a small, almost a bored, voice.
‘It’s nothing to do with them now.’
There was a long pause.
I said, ‘You can’t lie to me. Face to face.’
She touched her hair; the hair, her wrist, a way she had of raising her face a little as she made the gesture. A glimpse of the lobe of an ear. I had a sense of outrage, as if I was being barred from my own property.
‘You’re the only person I’ve ever felt could never lie to me. Can you imagine what it was like in the summer? When I got that letter, those flowers
She said, ‘If we start talking about the past.’
All my overtures were in some way irrelevant; she had something else on her mind. My fingers touched a smooth dry roundness in my coat pocket: a chestnut, a talisman. Jojo had passed it to me wrapped in a toffee-paper, her pawky joke, one evening in a cinema. I thought of Jojo, somewhere only a mile or two away through the brick and the traffic, sitting with some new pick-up, drifting into her womanhood; of holding her pudgy hand in the darkness. And suddenly I had to fight not to take Alison’s.
I said her name again.
But coming to a decision, determined to be untouched, she threw the yellow leaf away. ‘I’ve returned to London to sell the flat. I’m going back to Australia.’
‘Long journey for such a small matter.’
‘And to see you.’
‘Like this?’
‘To see if I… ‘ but she cut her sentence short.
‘If you?’
‘I didn’t want to come.’
‘Then why are you her
e?’ She shrugged. ‘If it’s against your will?’
But she would not answer. She was mysterious, almost a new woman; one had to go back several steps, and start again; and know the place for the first time. As if what had once been free in her, as accessible as a pot of salt on the table, was now held in a phial, sacrosanct. But I knew Alison. I knew how she took on the colour and character of the people she loved or liked, however independent she remained underneath. And I knew where that smooth impermeability came from. I was sitting with a priestess from the temple of Demeter.
I tried to be matter-of-fact. ‘Where have you been since Athens? At home?’
‘Perhaps.’
I took a breath. ‘Have you thought about me at all?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Is there someone else?’
She hesitated, then said, ‘No.’
‘You don’t sound very certain.’
‘There’s always someone else—if you’re looking for it.’
‘Have you been looking for it?’
She said, ‘There’s no one.’
‘And I’m included in that “no one”?’
‘You’ve been included in it ever since that… day.’
The sullen profile, that perverse stare into the distance. She was aware of my look, and her eyes followed someone who was passing, as if she found him more interesting than me.
‘What am I meant to do ? Take you in my arms? Fall on my knees? What do they want?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Oh yes, you damn well do.’
Her eyes flicked sideways at me, and she looked down. She said, ‘I saw through you that day. That’s all. For ever.’
‘I made love to you that day. Also … in a sense … for ever.’
I watched her breathe in, as if on a pent-up scorn; waited for her to say something, anything, even the scorn; quelled my own growing anger with her, tried to sound calm.
‘There was a moment on that mountain when I loved you. I don’t think you know, I know you know. I saw it. I know you too well not to be sure you saw it too. And remember it.’ I added, ‘And I’m not talking about bodies.’
Again she waited to answer.
‘Why should I remember it? Why shouldn’t I do everything I can to forget it?’
‘You know the answer to that, too.’
‘Do I?’
I said, ‘Alison
‘Don’t come closer. Please don’t come closer.’
She would not look at me. But it was in her voice. I had a feeling of trembling too deep to show; as if the brain cells trembled. She spoke with her head turned away. ‘All right, I know what it means.’ Her face still averted, she took out another cigarette and lit it. ‘Or it meant. When I loved you. It meant everything you said or did to me had meaning. Emotional meaning. It moved me, excited me. It depressed me, it made me … ‘ she took a deep breath. ‘Like the way after all that’s happened you can sit there in that tea place and look at me as if I’m a prostitute or something and—’
‘It was a shock. For God’s sake.’
I touched her then, my hand on her shoulder, but she shook it off. I had to move closer, to hear what she said.
‘Whenever I’m with you it’s like going to someone and saying, “Torture me, abuse me. Give me hell. Because—”
‘Alison.’
‘Oh you’re nice now. You’re nice now. So bloody nice. For a week, for a month. And then we’d start again.’
She was not crying, I leant forward and looked. In some way I knew she was acting, and yet not acting. Perhaps she had rehearsed the saying this; but still meant it.
‘As you’re going back to Australia anyway
I spoke lightly, without sarcasm, but she twisted a glance at me, as if my crassness was monstrous. I made the mistake of beginning to smile, of calling her hand. Suddenly she was on her feet. Crossing the path, she walked out under the trees on to the open grass. After a few steps there she stopped.
If it was plausible as a reaction, it was far less so as a movement, and especially the stopping. Something about the way she stood, the direction she faced … and then in a flash I knew for certain. Beyond her stretched the grass, a quarter-mile of turf to the edge of the park. Beyond that rose the Regency façade, bestatued, many and elegantly windowed, of Cumberland Terrace.
A wall of windows, a row of statues of classical gods. They surveyed the park as if from a dress circle. And Alison’s complicity—she had led me out of the tea pavilion, she had chosen the seat we sat on, now she stood in full view waiting for me to join her. But once too often: I got up and went and stood in front of her, my back to the distant buildings. She lowered her eyes. It was not a difficult part to play: that bruised face, very near tears, but not in tears.
‘Now listen, Alison. I know who is watching us, I know where he’s watching, I know why we are here. So first. I’m nearly broke. I haven’t got a job, and I’m never going to have a job that means anything. Therefore you’re standing with the worst prospect in London. Now second. If Lily walked down that path behind us and beckoned to me … I don’t know. The fact that I don’t know and probably never shall is what I want you to remember. And while you’re about it, remember she isn’t one girl, but a type of encounter.’ I paused a moment. ‘Third. As you kindly told me in Athens, I’m not much good in bed.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
I stared at the top of her head, and knew behind my own the blank upper windows of Cumberland Terrace; those white stone divinities. ‘Fourth. He said something to me one day. About males and females. How we judge things as objects, and you judge them by their relationships. All right. You’ve always been able to see this … whatever it is … between us. Joining us. I haven’t. That’s all I can offer you. The possibility that I’m beginning to see it.’
‘Can I speak?’
‘No. You now have a choice. And you’d better make it very fast. It’s me or them. But either way, for good.’
‘You have no right—’
‘I have as much right as you did in that hotel room in Greece. Which is every right.’ I added, ‘And for exactly the same reason as you had then.’
‘It’s not the same thing.’
‘Oh yes it is. You have my part now.’ I gestured back towards Cumberland Terrace. ‘They have everything to offer. But I’m like you. I have only one. I can’t even blame you if you made my mistake—think their everything is a much better choice than any future we might have. The only thing, is you’ve got to bet. In their sight. And now.’
She glanced up at the houses, and I too turned a moment. The afternoon sun made them gleam with light, that Olympian elixir of serene, remote, benign light one sometimes sees in summer clouds.
She said, as if she rejected both them and me, ‘I’m going back to Australia.’
I had a sense of an abyss between us that was immeasurably deep, yet also absurdly narrow, as narrow as our real distance apart, crossable in one small step. I stared at her psychologically contused face, her obstinacy, her unmanoeuvrability. There was the smell of a bonfire. A hundred yards away a blind man was walking, freely, not like a blind man. Only the white stick showed he had no eyes.
I began to walk towards the path that led to the south gate home. Two steps, four, six. Then ten.
‘Nicko!’
It sounded strangely peremptory, harsh; not in the least conciliatory. I checked momentarily and half looked round, then forced myself to move on. I heard her running, but did not turn until she was almost up to me. She stopped five or six feet away, breathing a little hard. She wasn’t pretending, she was going back to Australia—or at least to some Australia of the mind, of the emotions, to live the rest of her life without me. Yet she wouldn’t let me go like this. Her eyes were wounded, outraged. I was more than ever impossible. I took two steps back towards her, raised an angry finger.
‘You still haven’t learnt. You’re still playing to their script.’
&nbs
p; She held my eyes, returning every degree of my bile.
‘I came back because I thought you’d changed.’
I do not know why I did what happened next. It was neither intended nor instinctive, it was neither in cold blood nor in hot; but yet it seemed, once committed, a necessary act; no breaking of the commandment. My arm flicked out and slapped her left cheek as hard as it could. The blow caught her completely by surprise, nearly knocked her off balance, and her eyes blinked with the shock; then very slowly she put her left hand to the cheek. We stared wildly at each other for a long moment, in a kind of terror: the world had disappeared and we were falling through space. The abyss might be narrow, but it was bottomless. Behind Alison I could see people stopped on the path. A man stood up from his seat. The Indian sat and watched. Her hand stayed over the side of her face and her eyes were growing wet, certainly with the pain and perhaps partly also with a sort of incredulity.
The final truth came to me, as we stood there, trembling, searching, between all our past and all our future; at a moment when the difference between fission and fusion lay in a nothing, a tiniest movement, betrayal, further misunderstanding.
There were no watching eyes. The windows were as blank as they looked. The theatre was empty. It was not a theatre. They had perhaps told her it was a theatre, and she had believed them, and I had believed her. Perhaps it had all been to bring me to this, to give me my last lesson and final ordeal … the task, as in L’Astrée, of turning lions and unicorns and magi and other mythical monsters into stone statues. I looked away from Alison and at those distant windows, the facade, the pompous white pedimental figures that crowned it. It was logical, the perfect climax to the godgame. They had absconded, we were alone. I was so sure, and yet… after so much, how could I be perfectly sure? How could they be so cold, so inhuman—so incurious? So load the dice and yet leave the game?