Daniel Martin (23 page)

‘No argument.’

‘But only because even if you had known what drove me to write my letter, writing your play would have remained wrong. That doesn’t quite let me out, however.’ Dan searched the drawn face. It looked down and then up at him again. There was a faint dry quiz in the eyes. ‘Before we married, Jane told me that you and she had been to bed together. That was always the joker in the pack.’

Dan bent his head. ‘Oh God.’

The voice was light. ‘Oxford philosophy has in many ways deservedly become every clever writer’s favourite Aunt Sally. We do rather tend to waste time over the modern equivalents of how many angels can stand on a needle’s point. I should quite understand if you regarded all this as very ancient history. Hardly worth crossing the street to discuss, let alone your real journey.’

‘I had no idea.’

‘As we intended.’ Dan’s mind struggled to get back to the ancient history; and the light this strange new fact threw over it. His instinctive first reaction was a blend of outrage and absurdity: how much they must have had to hide, and how condescending their silence had been. Anthony went on. ‘Let me add at once that you are forgiven for that now, with all my heart. I wish I could say you were forgiven at the time. But you weren’t.’

‘It was just… ‘

‘I know. And that she was mainly to blame. And I was to blame. If anyone was innocent it was you.’

‘That’s letting me off too lightly.’

‘It doesn’t matter now, Dan. Sexual mores are very transient. My students have taught me that.’ Once again he smoothed the rug over his knees. ‘If Jane had been less honest… or was dealing with someone who prized his own sophistries less highly. Who had such a capacity for straining at intellectual gnats and swallowing emotional camels.’

‘If you blame yourself, I think you’re still being guilty of that.’

That brought him short a little. There was an acknowledgment of it in his gentler voice.

‘Mind has dominated our marriage, Dan. And all its toys. Not flesh. Or heart.’ He put his hands back in his dressing-gown pockets. ‘That’s what enabled us to keep our secret. What obliged you to marry Nell. Must take some of the blame for your writing of that play. For this silence between us all these years.’ He said nothing for a moment. ‘By appearing to condone you, I made sure that I never could. At that time.’

‘I don’t see how you could do anything but hate me.’

‘I think I felt envy most. In retrospect.’

‘Envy?’

‘Inasmuch as you represented another life-principle.’

‘Betrayal?’

‘Let’s say human fallibility.’

‘That’s a virtue?’

‘A corrective. To the would-be pure in spirit.’

‘Now I don’t understand.’

‘My main contribution to our marriage has been intellectual arrogance. Jane’s has been the patience to tolerate it.’

‘That hardly squares with her leaving the Church.’

‘She gave me a complete freedom of choice in the beginning. I need never have seen her again. There are more ways of being arrogant than demanding conformity of religious belief. Mine was to suppress all the instinctual side of her nature. To persuade her that even the most ridiculous decisions can be justified by mind.’

‘Now you’re making her your fool.’

He had another humourless smile, as if he had Dan cornered.

‘My victim.’

‘But… your marriage hasn’t been a failure.’

‘How should you know? After all these years?’

‘Because I can’t believe she’d have lived a lie. She’s not that sort of person. Her dropping the faith proves it.’

‘I rather think that was a poor substitute for dropping her husband.’ Dan was suddenly back at the Randolph, listening to various unread messages in Jane’s tone of voice, those tinges of cynicism, indifference which he had put down as much to Oxford, playing English, as to anything biographical. ‘The very fact that what I am saying is partly conjecture, that is, that I don’t know if Jane would fully echo these views, does rather prove my point.’

‘Isn’t there a simple remedy for that?’

‘If it weren’t so well-known that truth is bad for the dying.’ He added, ‘And as have had to learn, some diseases are beyond simple remedies.’

Though he spoke without bitterness, the accusation was implicit.

‘You’re being very hard on her.’ Anthony said nothing. ‘Surely one knows these things? By instinct. Intuition.’

‘Perhaps I’ve spent too long with that verb “to know” to trust it very much. I’m merely saying that if my blind obsession with things of the mind has in some profound way a way even Jane herself may not be fully aware of curtailed, censored, what you will, her true nature, then… ‘ but he uncharacteristically caught back whatever he was going to say. Dan was presenting some problem he had not foreseen. He went on in a much less incisive voice. ‘I don’t want to die without having done something about it.’

‘But what you call censoring is the price of any lasting relationship. And people like Jane don’t just lie down and let themselves be mutilated out of recognition.’

That amused him. ‘You ought to go and dine at one or two high tables here.’

‘Career deformation. That’s not the same.’

‘Simply less severe than marriage deformation? Which is the greater sin? Adultery or adulterating?’

Dan opened his hands. ‘My dear man, it’s in the rules of the game. Because I wouldn’t observe them, wouldn’t let Nell adulterate me, that’s why we broke up. You know that as well as I do.’

‘All right. And if you had kept the marriage intact by letting her pattern your behaviour? Would you have been happier?’

‘How on earth can I tell?’

‘By telling me whether you’ve constantly regretted the divorce.’

Dan looked down at his sherry glass. ‘If I haven’t, it’s only because I’m congenitally unfaithful to women.’

‘Whereas I have been congenitally, as you put it, faithful to one woman. Is there so much difference? At least you’ve rationed out your exploitations.’

Dan remembered an old gibe about Oxford: that the most characteristic don in its history was Lewis Carroll. He couldn’t quite hide his feeling that they were getting very near pure nonsense.

‘Anthony, look, I’ve had barely an hour to get to know Jane again. I can see she’s changed. But she doesn’t strike me as a deformed person at all. And I know from Caro. She adores Jane. I can imagine what it’s like for you, how the temptation to be harsh with oneself and… ‘ he was getting a shade too near exasperation, and he controlled it. ‘You know what I’m trying to say.’

‘Terminal paranoia?’

‘Of course not. But one can be over-scrupulous?’

There was a little silence. Dan felt an unreason in that wasted face, an obstinacy, almost an irritation at being deflected from this long-nursed doubt.

‘Would you have married Jane, if I’d broken things off at the beginning?’

‘That’s an impossible question. And you must know it.’

‘But you were in love with her?’

‘I desired her. As I’ve desired dozens of other women since.’ Anthony’s eyes observed intently, too intently for comfort, and Dan lowered his own and shrugged. ‘I’m not a Casanova, Anthony, but I have slept around a good deal. I really do have an irredeemable liking for the impermanent.’ Still Anthony said nothing, and he was reduced to raising his glass. ‘May I have another?’

‘Please.’

Dan stood up and went back to the table with the sherry. ‘And anyway, there was always Nell.’

‘Is there someone now?’

‘Yes.’ He glanced wrily back. ‘And young enough to be my daughter.’

‘I’m considered very square these days. I haven’t seduced a single student.’ Dan smiled, and he went on. ‘You feel no responsibility towards her?’

‘Of course. And especially in warning her what I am.’

‘Then you’re showing greater honesty than I ever have.’

The door opened and a young nurse stood there. She said nothing, simply gave Anthony a mock-severe warning look. He said, ‘Not yet.’ She nodded indulgently and disappeared.

‘You’re sure…?’

‘No, no. Just nannying.’

Dan went with his glass and looked out through the glass door; nearer to Anthony, but turned half away. A car passed, then two students on bicycles, in the mist-filled street below; the roofs of Oxford, a city that seemed several centuries behind the one he had just left in California. He thought again for a moment of Jenny, of how much more he would have liked to be having dinner with her than with the woman outside; with the unspeakable past. He felt psychologically stifled; the claustrophobia of academic life, of the something beneath all its sophistications, its brains, that remained eternally adolescent, as chlorotic as a plant denied sufficient light and privileged, unhardened by the realities of the world outside. That also stood for the whole of England.

‘You said something about correcting a design failure.’

‘I suppose I meant no more than what good might come from pointing it out.’ But he went on quickly, ‘No, that’s rather less than frank. It’s mere hypothesis, Dan. A kind of… hope against hope that you might one day find time to help disinter the person Jane might have been from beneath the person she now is.’ He stared up at Dan and for the first time, strangely, there was a tinge of formality in his eyes. ‘If you could consider becoming her friend again.’

‘Anthony, I wouldn’t be here if… I tried to get a message to you both. Through Caro. Months ago.’

Once again he had the impression that he had unnecessarily forestalled a direction Anthony was not going to take.

‘Yes, it… did arrive.’ He smiled. ‘You’re wondering why it wasn’t acted upon. Or why only now.’

‘A little bit, yes.’

‘Death’s rather like a certain kind of lecturer. You don’t really hear what is being said until you’re in the first row.’ He said, ‘it’s helped me to win my battle, Dan. Jane is losing hers.’ He hesitated. ‘She didn’t want you to come today. I don’t know if you’ve realized that.’

Dan looked down again out of the room: the dead street.

‘She blames me still over Nell?’

‘I don’t think that has anything to do with it. And blame is not the word.’ His voice was less incisive now. ‘She’s reacted to the past in a very different way from myself. I suspect you’ve become in some way an emblem of all that our marriage has lacked. The broken keel on which she now considers it was built.’ There was a moment’s pause then he went on. ‘You must excuse me, Dan. I’m not exposing the problem very coherently. I decided I wanted very much to see you about a month ago. It was partly Jane’s reaction when I broached the matter that made me realize how much she and I had hidden from each other over the years. None of this has been discussed openly between us. Her reluctance has purportedly been at the inconvenience it would cause you. The vanity of supposing you would even remember who we were.’ He added, ‘In which she may be partly right.’

Dan was leaning now against the wall by the glass door; for once Anthony was avoiding his eyes, speaking to the grey hospital floor.

‘But mainly wrong.’

Anthony smiled up. ‘But at least she’s partly right in thinking that my motives are essentially selfish. I’m really asking you to do something that I failed to do myself, Dan. And I know. Impossibly. After all these years not, alas, knowing you any more. Simply guessing. Praying. Now that you have been given the missing card.’

And for a few moments, but once again moments of that hinged, geometric nature that destroys time and conscious notion of sequences the two men sought something, a mystery and an understanding of it, in each other’s eyes. A code of intercourse was being broken, another proposed; and Dan, if he could not grasp its full significance consciously, knew that, whatever the state of Anthony’s specific faith, he retained a far deeper one in a universal absolute. His seeming obliviousness to time, interval, to all the outward rest, was in fact a mere function of that: what I ask is timeless… a preposterous, but true, demand of personal moral being. You may wonder at me, laugh at me, despise me for professing both a faith and a discipline the world increasingly despises: but that is neither who I am at this moment nor why we are here. Perhaps it was the proximity of death; yet it seemed to Dan as if he had always been mistaken in one assumption: that this man was a philosopher merely by intellect and a cast of mind. Underneath, and movingly, lay something very primitive and simple, of the innocence of childhood; and also of true adulthood, of that other philosopher who had once preferred hemlock to a lie.

‘Anthony, of course. If trying will help…’

‘But I ask the impossible?’

‘I didn’t mean that.’ He looked down at his sherry. ‘Just that well, it’s rather up to Jane, isn’t it? She must have many far closer friends now.’

‘What she needs is someone who both knows her and doesn’t. Who can remember what she once was. She’s become very withdrawn, Dan. I think not only with me.’ He considered his next sentence in his mind, then spoke. ‘Perhaps the most profound breach in our marriage has been over the question of whether we have some control over our lives or not. One reason I can’t talk with her about all these matters is that our marriage has become the standing proof that my case has no validity. I preach in an empty church, which proves my sermons are worthless. We’re reduced now to a tender convention. Dying husband, dutiful wife.’