Mantissa

by John Fowles

  She kisses his shoulder again, with a sigh. “I tried.”

  “You succeeded.”

  She holds him a little closer. “At least it shows how right I was to come to you in the beginning.”

  “That’s very generous of you, darling.”

  She leaves a slight pause.

  “Even though I’ve never really told you why.”

  “Of course you have, darling. A dozen times, during our rest periods. How you’ve always admired my sensitivity over women, how you realized I had literary problems… all the rest of it.” She silently kisses his shoulder. He stares at the ceiling. “You mean there was some other…?”

  “It’s nothing, darling.”

  “Tell me.”

  “You mustn’t be offended.” She smooths a hand across his chest. “It’s because I feel so close to you now. I hate having the smallest secret from you.”

  “Come on. Tell me.”

  She clings a little more. “It’s simply that I don’t think you’ve ever quite realized how attractive what you call your literary problems always were… are… to a girl like me.” She brushes her fingers across his right nipple. “I’ve never told you this, Miles, but I felt it the very first time we met. Of course you didn’t know it was me, I was hidden inside whoever it was you were trying to imagine. But, darling, I was watching you all the time.”

  “And?”

  “Thank heavens, I thought, here at last was a boy who would never get it right, not in a thousand years, and already half knew it. All through your adolescent phase, when you kept battering your head against a brick wall, pushing out those… darling, this is difficult, I know well-meant and you were doing your best, and I did try to help, but let’s face it, hopelessly wild and inaccurate attempts to portray me – all through that for me truly horrid and frustrating period, I kept faith in you. Because I knew you’d see the light one day and realize it was as absurd as a one-legged person trying to be an Olympic athlete. And then at last this lovely, lovely secret thing between us could happen.” She breaks off, then gives a little sniff of amusement. “You were so funny as Staff Sister. You do her better every time. I wanted to laugh out loud.” He says nothing. “Miles, you know what I’m trying to say.”

  “Yes. Perfectly.”

  Something in his voice makes her lean up quickly again on an elbow and search his face anxiously. She reaches out a hand and caresses his cheek.

  “Darling, people in love must be honest with each other.”

  “I know.”

  “You’ve just been absolutely frank about Nurse Cory’s breasts. I’m only trying to reciprocate.”

  “I realize.”

  She pats his cheek.

  “And you have always had such a rare talent for not being able to express yourself. That’s so much more attractive and interesting than just being clever with words. I think you undervalue yourself terribly. People who know what they mean, and can say so, are ten a penny. Never having a real clue about either makes you almost unique.” She contemplates him with a tender solicitude. “It really is why I came to you to be real, darling. Why I feel so safe with you. It’s knowing that even if you ever did by any chance – which heaven forbid and I know you never would – welsh on our little deal and tried to write all this down, you couldn’t do it, not once in a million years. As a matter of fact I did at one time consider other writers, but none gave me quite the rock-bottom feeling of security that you can.” She watches him a moment, then bends across him, her eyes brimming with sincerity, her mouth poised just over his. “Miles, you know like this you can have me whenever you want” – she kisses his mouth – “and however you want. And if it was the other thing, and you could write it all down, I just couldn’t be with you at all. I’d have to go back to being a shadow on the brain-cell stairs, a boring old ghost in the machine, and I can’t bear the thought of being only a thought to you.” She kisses him again, but this time her lips stay almost touching his. “And you’re much, much better at this sort of thing, anyway.”

  A last and longer kiss, and she sinks back to her former position, cheek against his shoulder, right leg raised across his. He stares at the domed ceiling, then speaks.

  “Just as a matter of contemporary fact, quite a lot of people –”

  “Darling, I know. And I understand completely if you’d rather believe them.”

  He takes a breath. “I do think I’m entitled to point out that you yourself have never actually had to write a line in your life and you’ve no idea how damned –”

  “Darling… forgive me. There is one other tiny little secret I’ve been keeping from you.”

  “What?”

  “Well… as a matter of historical fact, right at the beginning, for several centuries after the alphabet first came into being, my literary sisters and I had problems. You see, darling, it didn’t actually catch on terribly fast. Of course we were all frightfully green still at inspiring. But it was almost as if everyone were blind or deaf. It was partly the ghastly Clio again. From the start she did what she’s done ever since – sucked up to the people in power, the famous. She’s a quite shameless snob, on top of everything else. And she’d sold practically all that lot on the idea that the alphabet was the inland revenue’s best friend. That was the only way they could see it. Goody-goody, now we can nail the tribute-dodgers. All it was used for were those ridiculous lists of oxen and honey-pots and wine-jars and ‘Dear Sir, I am in receipt of your unsatisfactory clay tablet of the tenth ult.’… you know. So the rest of us had rather a brilliant idea. You mortals obviously needed an example, something to show you there was equally good money and all sorts of other perks in literary accounts as well as their boring old financial ones. So we agreed we’d each do a sample of our own thing, just to point the way. To cut a long story short, Miles, I did once scribble a little something down.”

  “Which has conveniently disappeared, no doubt?”

  “No, darling. I saw a copy in a bookshop only the other day.”

  He stares at the ceiling. “Tell me.”

  “I wrote it under a pseudonym, of course. And it’s lost its original title.”

  “I’d like to know.”

  “The original title? It’s such a shame, it fitted my theme so well.” She leans up on an arm and looks down at him. “Miles, of course it doesn’t apply to you, but actually I called it Men, Will They Ever Grow Up? Or just Men, for short. Don’t you think that’s clever?” He gives her brightly inquiring face a sideways stare. She looks down and runs a finger along his biceps. “It wasn’t perfect, by any means. I realize now I never made my basic message clear enough. I rather overestimated my readers’ intelligence, I’m afraid. Half of them still haven’t grasped what it’s about. Even today.”

  He stares at the ceiling again.

  “Just tell me the modern title.”

  “Actually, darling, I’ve got yet another ghastly sister. She’s just like Clio, another frightful snob. They always side together. Her name’s Calliope, she’s supposed to be in charge of epics. And her example was the most killingly dull thing you ever saw. Not a single bit of decent sex or a laugh from beginning to end. So just to put her silly nose out of joint I took one of her rotten hero characters, and wrote Men about him. To show his sort up for what they really are.”

  “Will you please tell me the proper title.”

  “Darling, I just have.”

  “The one we know it by today.”

  She begins drawing little circles on the sheet with a finger.

  “Darling, I feel shy. I’ve never before told anyone it was really by me. It was terribly primitive and naïve in many ways. I got all the places muddled up, for a start.”

  “It had a lot of locations?”

  She hesitates, still tracing the circles. “It did actually.”

  “So it was about a voyage?”

  “I suppose sort of.”

  “And I don’t suppose for a single moment that by some extraordinary chance this voyage
started just after the sack of Troy?”

  “Darling, I’d really rather not say.”

  “And is slightly better known as the Odyssey?”

  She sits quickly up and away and covers her face in her hands.

  “Oh God, Miles. How awful. You’ve guessed.”

  He puts his hands beneath his head and stares up at the ceiling. She looks anxiously back at him, then impulsively turns and leans across his body.

  “Darling, you mustn’t feel jealous just because my one clumsy little attempt at writing has become a kind of fluke best-seller.”

  He stares up into her concerned eyes. “I thought this was meant to be our rest period.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “How you have the nerve to call me more impossible than you are… and just because I make one small remark in passing about breasts… it’s absurd. Every classical scholar since scholarship began knows Homer was a man.”

  She sinks abruptly down into her former position, against his shoulder.

  “Oh Miles, I’ve hurt you.”

  “Obviously he was a man. He was a genius. If you ask me, you’re the one who’s jealous.”

  “I wish now I’d never brought it up.”

  “I think it’s a good thing you did. It just shows the level your mind works at. If you’d ever actually read the damned thing, you’d have realized the only reason Ulysses went back to Ithaca is because he didn’t know where the hell else to pick up another boat and crew. And Homer had his bloody wife’s number, for a start. All that weaving bit. Everyone knows why female spiders fancy males.”

  She clings. “Miles, you’re going to make me cry. Rather like Penelope, actually.”

  He takes a breath. “All right, he had to give her a certain kind of sloppy sentimentality. I suppose even then one had to throw some sort of bone to one’s female readers.”

  “Please don’t say ‘female’ as if it were a swearword. And please put your arm around me again.”

  He does not move for a moment or two; but then does, with that quick understanding of feminine irrationality that so marks the masculine mind, take his right arm from beneath his head, and encircles her back again; a moment or two later still, he pats it.

  “Okay. I’ll believe you gave him one or two ideas. Circe and Calypso, and so on.”

  She kisses his shoulder. “Thank you, darling. That’s very open-minded of you.”

  They lie in silence, after this minor disagreement. But eventually he breaks it, though in a carefully neutral tone.

  “We still haven’t decided about next time.”

  “Yes we have. Less talk. More action.”

  “One place we might insert something is when you turn your head aside in that bored and disgusted manner and say, ‘I wish you’d just bang away.’ ” He pauses. “I thought perhaps next time I would.”

  “It sounds delicious, darling. Would you like me to pretend to go on being bored and disgusted, or the reverse?”

  “That’s up to you.”

  She clings. “It doesn’t matter about my stupid female feelings. I want what you want. You’re the man.”

  “You’re supposed to be the immortal.”

  “Darling, I truly don’t mind.”

  “I insist.”

  “All right. I’ll pretend to enjoy it.”

  “I don’t want you to pretend anything.”

  She is silent a moment.

  “I always know when you’re angry with me.”

  “I’m not angry with you in the least. It’s merely that… well, that all this does need organization. One can’t improvise without forethought.”

  “Yes, darling.”

  “One doesn’t sit down in a restaurant without having a look at the menu first and planning one’s meal.”

  “I know, Miles.”

  “I’m simply saying that we do have some responsibility towards that three point three recurring.”

  “Darling, I know.”

  “Apart from anything else, you’ve got endless thousands of years more of this ahead of you. Whereas I –”

  “Miles.”

  He leaves a silence.

  “We kept a steady four or five per variation up to ten. We’ve gone totally to pieces in the teens and twenties.”

  “You are blaming me.”

  “Absolutely not. Just a little more concentration. On both sides.” He goes on before she can speak. “Apart from anything else, there are all sorts of… narrative alternatives we haven’t fully explored.”

  “Such as?”

  He stares at the ceiling. “I thought I might take the initial treatment from Nurse Cory this next time. For instance.”

  There is a silence. “Miles, I can tell you as a woman myself that she –”

  “I find it a shade odd that she was good enough for the greatest poet in world history, but apparently not good enough for me.”

  “If you find a distinctly provincial someone else’s brief engouement with a bit of brothel exotica shipped in from the Barbadoes four hundred years ago…” She breaks off. “I realize I’m only a goddess.”

  “You’ve just given her a whole new dimension for me. That’s all.”

  “I thought the old dimensions were quite enough.”

  He leaves a silence.

  “I’m not going to argue. It was merely an idea. If you’re too grand to impersonate what seems to me a delightfully human and fun-loving member of an underprivileged race… there’s no more to be said.”

  Now it is Erato who leaves the silence.

  “Just the initial treatment?”

  “As a matter of fact we could make it…”

  “Make it what?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “No, please say.”

  “Well, it could be her throughout. I mean she could be you. A black muse again. Just to get the average up a bit.” She says nothing. “It’s not that I wouldn’t miss you.”

  “Do you have any other ideas, Miles?”

  “Apart from suggesting that in future you wear slightly less hard-pointed shoes when you kick my defenseless body, no.”

  A moment, then she leans up. Her face is once more all contrition, looking down at his.

  “My poor sweet. I think it was just that you moved a tiny fraction, and I couldn’t quite stop.”

  “For the twenty-ninth time.”

  “Oh Miles, I haven’t! Show me where it is. Let me kiss it better.” He touches his lower ribs. She leans across and kisses the place better; then straightens and looks reproachfully down at him.

  “Darling, you are so typically English, the way you bottle things up. Like Nurse Cory and her breasts.” She contemplates him for a reflective, though affectionate, moment. “You do remind me of someone sometimes.”

  “Who?”

  “Just someone I met a long time ago.”

  He gives her a suspicious look.

  “Who?”

  Still perched on an arm, she runs a hand gently down his chest, and makes a little smoothing circle around his navel.

  “I can’t even remember his name anymore. He was nobody. I only met him once. Actually I had a friend I used to share with my jolly sister Thalia. Called Charlie. He took me along. Strictly for jokes.”

  “Who was Charlie?”

  “Let me cuddle up again.” She resumes her previous position. “Mm, that’s so nice. Charlie was… oh God, my memory. If only there weren’t so many of them.” She taps a hand on his shoulder; then a final tap of triumph. “French.”

  “This happened in France?”

  “No, in Greece. Definitely in Greece.”

  “But Charlie isn’t –”

  Her right hand moves to silence his mouth. “Miles, I know. It’s my absurd system. Wait a minute. French… that’s it! I knew I’d get there in the end. Brekekekex, coàx, coàx. One of Charlie’s plays was about frogs.”

  He stares at the ceiling. “Why Charlie, for God’s sake?”

  “His real name’s so long
. I can never remember it.”

  “We’re in fifth-century Athens?”

  “Darling, I couldn’t swear to the date. But you’re quite right, it was Athens, and long before the discos and Onassises and things like that. And so long ago you mustn’t be jealous, but I really was terribly fond of Charlie, he was actually one of the only four Athenian men who weren’t raging queers, there honestly wasn’t much choice for a girl, and Thalia and I’d taken him a little idea for another play, with some quite nice female parts, which he developed rather brilliantly, though if I’m honest there was a crack about the women of Miletus that – but that’s another story. Anyway. We trotted off to see old Doodah. He lived in a simply appalling ground-floor flat near the market-place, absolutely no light, it was more like a cave than a flat, and just to make things worse he was sitting at the back of it crouched over a fire… even though it was a sweltering day. You can’t imagine. The silly old fool obviously couldn’t be bothered with us, he hardly gave me a glance when Charlie introduced me. Of course I was there incognito, so he didn’t know who I was. Not that I think he’d have taken any notice even if he had. All he really seemed to want to do was hold his hand in front of the fire and make idiotic shadow-patterns on the wall. As if Charlie and I were four-year-olds. It’s incredible, but apparently some kid had showed him how to make them only the day before. I could see at a glance he was nearly senile. He ought to have been in an old people’s home. Am I boring you?”

  He stares at the ceiling. “Go on.”

  “I mean, there is a limit to flapping birds and funny faces and wolf-heads. In the end Charlie and I got quite incredibly choked off with all of this, and just for a giggle Charlie suggested I took all my clothes off, I remember I was wearing a rather dinky little pale saffron number with a key-pattern frieze embroidered in red wool around the hem, it came from a darling Cephalonian boutique behind the Stoa, an amazing snip in a spring sale just the week before, straight off the rack and just my sort of chiton… where was I?”

  “About to take it off in front of –”

  “You know, just to see what my naked shadow looked like and give the poor old doddering creep a thrill – and do you know what actually happened? He snatched up a broom by the fireplace and started quavering the most unspeakable insults at poor Charlie. That if Charlie thought one of his chorus-girl pick-ups – those were his very words – was his – old Doodah’s – notion of the ideal woman he needed his vulgar little vaudeville head examined. Then he had the gall to tell me my nose was too long, my eyebrows weren’t properly plucked, my divine little chiton was three inches too short, my arms and legs too thin, my bottom didn’t stick out enough… of course that last thing gave the game away. He was like all the rest. His real notion of an ideal woman was an ideal boy. Charlie told him so to his miserable face. If he hadn’t jumped back he’d have got the broom across his head. We just had to run for it in the end. With old Doodah standing at his door and waving his wretched broom and shouting nonsense, how he’d have the Guardians, God knows what he thought they were, after us for invasion of…” She pauses. “He was a what-d’you-call-it.”