Daniel Martin (24 page)

Dan went and sat on the end of the bed, and stared at the foot of the wall beneath the window.

‘I didn’t know about all this, Anthony.’

‘How could you? We’ve largely hidden it. Even from our own children. Certainly to the world at large.’

‘Have you tried recently to… ‘

‘I forced her to lie for years over her true religious beliefs. Which began the closing-in process. I won’t now do it over something much more important. She also has a formidable pride. I’m not prepared to blackmail that, either.’

‘Then judgment without trial?’

‘On the contrary. Trial without judgment.’

‘Does she know you were going to tell me this?’

‘She must… yes, in a sense, she must know. But I’d prefer you to keep it to yourself now, Dan. In fact, I insist.’ Dan said nothing, feeling more and more out of his depth; caught in a game he had almost forgotten how to play; aware of that woman sitting out there, knowing and not knowing. Anthony went on. ‘This must sound very peculiar. But I insist for, how shall I put it, tactical reasons? On the supposition that you are prepared to forgive us both.’

‘You know there’s no question about that.’

There was another silence.

‘I am also profoundly grateful to have been allowed to share my life with her. At another level. I speak in terms of what you both sacrificed. The act may have been immoral, but what followed my gratitude is partly the selfishness of a beneficiary of your decision. But it does exist.’

Dan smiled. ‘One satisfied partner is above average for the course.’

‘But below average in a serious match. Even in golf, I believe.’

Something very peculiar had happened to his sense of time. For Dan they had become strangers, with very different histories and even cultures now. For Anthony, it was still as if they were the closest of friends; and over the years he had acquired no replacements.

Again Dan smiled at him; then glanced at the Mantegna reproduction over the bed.

‘I begin to understand why you have that hanging there.’

Anthony’s mouth made a brief quirk.

‘Very bad taste. Even my witty Jesuit friends are not amused.’ But he would not be distracted; braced himself back and looked across the room. ‘Dan, you once said something to me that I’ve always remembered. You’d spotted some nice orchid I’d walked right past insectifera? I can’t recall now, but we were telling the girls about it that evening. Your nose for them. And you said that I knew only how to look at orchids not for them. Do you remember that?’ Dan shook his head at the questioning eyes. ‘Well. When I think of the vain thousands of words I’ve wasted, both orally and in print, on abstract propositions and philosophical angel-counting. Instead of… ‘ he shrugged.

Dan remembered Barney: this pandemic of self-depreciation.

‘I won’t wear that. Quite apart from anything else you’ve taught hundreds of young men to think.’

‘Only as I think myself. I thank heaven for the stupid ones. At least they escaped contamination.’

‘Balls.’

‘Precisely. In another sense. The academic glass-bead game.’

He had his hands in his dressing-gown pockets, and again he braced himself back a little against the chair, as if he felt discomfort, perhaps pain, despite his disclaimer. He smiled drily sideways at Dan.

‘I’m sorry. This must seem singularly like self-pity. It’s just that everyone makes too many allowances for the dying. As if the soft centre is what one needs.’

‘You also know perfectly well that looking-at is a much more important activity than looking-for.’

‘Perhaps with orchids. Not with self. I have looked at myself. All my adult life. But as I am. Not as I might have been, or ought to have been. That’s what permitted me to turn you into the living exemplar of all that Jane and I had supposedly risen above.’

His self-distaste was in his voice; and his face.

‘All right. By impossibly high Christian standards, you lacked charity. That doesn’t mean the basic judgment was at fault.’

‘But the standards of judgment were.’ His eyes were on Dan’s. ‘And your accepting the sentence so meekly proves it.’

‘Why?’

‘My dear fellow, a judge who tried a case, that of your play ,so clearly involving his own interests would be a disgrace to justice. Especially when a previous private decision of his—one you were unaware of—had very much helped cause the crime in question. That you now have the kindness to tell me the sentence was right proves your comparative innocence.’

‘But who provoked that original private decision? And why do you think it only happened once? That we backed out almost as soon as we’d walked in?’

‘Because you incorrectly assumed I was the injured party.’

Dan shook his head. ‘Something much simpler. I wasn’t good enough for Jane. And she wasn’t bad enough for me.’

‘I think I might very well have convinced you otherwise. And even if it were true, you still might have benefited each other far more deeply than…’ but he stopped at the second term of the comparison.

Dan swilled the last of the sherry in the bottom of the glass. Anthony was not to be deprived of his arrows; and the present archer left a silence. The martyr gave another curt rictus of self-mockery.

‘All this deathbed melodrama. I did also very much just want to see you again. Hear about your life.’

‘The Oscar in the loo?’

‘Not all ashes, surely?’

‘Not if you live it from day to day. As I mostly have.’

‘There are worse philosophies.’

‘Until you do your accounts.’

‘One moaner is quite enough in this room.’

Dan smiled down from his reproof. ‘I suppose I’ve become like Jane. A determinist. More or less opted out.’

‘Opting out is not compatible with determinism.’

‘Unless one’s a born taker of the easier road.’

‘That’s defeatism. Not determinism.’

‘One can choose one’s bit of flotsam. But it’s all going in the same direction?’

Anthony raised a finger.

‘I detect Saint Samuel a Becket and his fancy French nonsense. Arrant romantic pessimism.’

‘Now you’re being hard on Becket.’

‘No harder than Pascal would have been. Or Voltaire, for that matter. Mutatis mutandis.’

‘I suppose not.’

‘I had one of my most serenely self-satisfied Oxford colleagues trying to sell ecological disaster to me the other day. It seems I’m quite extraordinarily lucky to be able to walk out of such a flop. I told him he was at perfect liberty to join me.’

Dan laughed. ‘But that he won’t doesn’t necessarily disprove his case?’

‘You must allow me the suspicion that the play isn’t really half so bad as the doomsters pretend. After all, the one evil thing in creation is also the one thing that can think.’ He gave Dan one of his quizzes. ‘I’m still defeated by the conundrum of God. But I have the Devil clear.’

‘And what’s he?’

‘Not seeing whole.’ He stared at the floor. ‘One of my students a year or two ago informed me that the twentieth century was like realizing we’re all actors in a bad comedy at precisely the same moment as we realize that no one wrote it, no one is watching it, and that the only other theatre in town is the graveyard.’

‘What did you say to that?

‘That he should drop philosophy and take up your profession.’

‘Unkind.’

‘Not at all. You’re locked up in the untenable dream, we’re condemned to the tenable proposition. The word as game. The word as tool. Just as long as the one doesn’t pretend to be the other.’

‘You never play with your tools?’

‘Oh I couldn’t deny that we have self-abuse in common.’

And they smiled, I think for the first time completely without reserve, perhaps because they had both recalled an old kind of dialogue, a fondness for such puns, wordplay; because they knew this first meeting was drawing to an end… and if they hadn’t, on either side, found what was expected, there was something: an unchangingness behind all the outward shifts of circumstance. Time lay quiescent, if not defeated. Anthony straightened again.

‘Dan, I can’t tell you how essential this has been for me. What a gift you’ve brought.’

‘For me as well.’

‘I do have the strangest kind of optimism about the human condition. I can’t explain it. It’s… well, I think a little more than mere faith. There is something sillier than the theory of perfectibility.’

‘Imperfectibility?’

Anthony nodded. ‘Just that we shall come through. In spite of all our faults. If only we learn that it must begin in ourselves. In the true history of our own lives. Instead of putting the blame on everything else under the sun.’ He gave Dan a faintly mischievous look. ‘I sometimes think I shall bequeath a last mystical catchphrase to the world. Turn in.’ A moment, then he pulled at his rug and said, ‘And I better had. Going trite is even worse than going maudlin.’

‘You’re allowed an aria.’ He didn’t know what that meant. ‘Old Hollywood jargon. There’s a famous Goldwynism. “Cut that goddam speech, arias went out with Shakespeare.”‘

Anthony’s head lifted, he approved. ‘I must remember that.’ He sought Dan’s eyes. ‘You do understand what I’ve been trying to say, Dan?’

‘Of course.’

‘I know Jane better than anyone else in the world. In spite of everything. She does need help. A Good Samaritan.’

‘I’ll try my best.’ Dan reached out and touched his sleeve, then stood up. ‘And I’ll come in tomorrow. Give you the full horrors of my world. Reject Spengler then, if you can.’

‘I should enjoy that.’

‘And don’t worry about the past, Anthony. The major design faults were in things. Life. Not us.’

‘As long as you’ll agree that the only remedies do lie in us. As we are. Not were.’

‘Done.’

The sick man extended a hand and Dan took it. Then, with a gesture that at last revealed a buried emotion, Anthony joined his other hand to those already joined. But his eyes, looking up into Dan’s, still intent, still smiling, stayed dry.

‘All we haven’t said.’

‘Spoken. No need.’

‘Then have a nice dinner.’

‘And you sleep well.’

‘Modern pharmacy solves that.’

He let go of the hand. Dan turned at the door.

‘Shall I ring for someone?’

‘No, no. They’ll come.’

He raised his hand: and still that smile. It had the faint air of a benediction or the air of a faint benediction; something as two-edged as the piece of artistic genius and morbid religiosity that hung over the bed.

He had already decided what I had become, and he did not want me to see. So I spent that last moment looking at him, not for him.

‘All right?’

‘Fine.’

‘I’ll just go and say good night.’

I waited where I had found Jane absorbed in her book, and felt myself left standing in more senses than one: the immediate clearest sentiment was of embarrassment at now having to face an evening with a woman who wished I hadn’t reappeared in her life, and whom I had more or less promised to lie to.

The revelation about Anthony’s complaisance in prehistory seemed on reflection less unexpected, less extraordinary, than this casting of me as the saviour of someone who very evidently didn’t want to be saved. I began to feel that I had been obscurely gulled, had allowed the pathos of his situation for all his rejection of that element in it to silence me. I ought to have argued more. He had had the advantage of surprise, and none of my own rehearsals had foreseen such a drastic change of basic premise… or anything but a very casual resumption of relations with Jane in the future.

Perhaps the illness and the drugs had unbalanced him; perhaps it was all some kind of tortuous revenge on his wife; perhaps he’d been pursuing the same line with other people. But she would surely have warned me beforehand, if that had been the case; and her behaviour hardly denied his diagnosis. I think the greatest shock lay in this possibility that an event I had always believed had disturbed my own life far more deeply than hers, but which I had in fact long relegated to the category of spilt milk, had finally, if Anthony was to be believed, affected her more deeply. But it was all so retrospective, so past; like going into a theatre and finding a production one had seen there half a lifetime before still on stage. Of course there was a sense in which he and Jane had continued to inhabit the theatre, the past must in that way have continued more present for them; but not for the first, or last, time that evening I had a feeling that I had landed among children or certainly among people whose values had remained bizarrely petrified. Yet I also knew a more subjective side of me had been moved by Anthony and resurrected from behind the hardening years a kind of greenness, but with the good as well as the bad aspects of that metaphor, what we had lost as well as what we had gained.

Jane was not long away, and then we were in the lift going down, side by side, facing the doors. There was a moment’s awkward silence.

‘How did you find him?’

‘Rather hair-raisingly brave about it all.’

‘As long as it wasn’t a complete waste of time.’

‘Of course not.’

There was no other word for what she had said but graceless. Her tone had effectively denied the token negative. I do indeed hold a resentful hand: now guess how strong it is. She looked in her bag for her car-key.

‘He’s asked me to let you have all his orchid books.’

‘That’s very sweet of him.’

‘They’re probably hopelessly out of date.’

‘I doubt it. And I’d still love to have them.’

‘I’ll look them out.’

The lift doors slid open. By the time we were in her car again, it was very clear that she wasn’t going to ask me what had been said. At least I was to be spared lying about that. Either she knew or she didn’t care. Anthony had at least convinced me that he wanted to dissolve the years of silence. She was very glad that they were still there; and proceeded to underline their existence by a determined, if outwardly bland, normality.

We got ourselves to the Italian restaurant, but again someone knew her. We stopped, she introduced me to the couple; my name, that was all, as if she would have been ashamed to go into the reason for my presence. There was a little exchange about Anthony. Then we went to our table across the room. She explained who they were: an English don and his wife, from Merton. I had the impression she would much rather have been sitting and talking with them a tit for my secret tat about Jenny. When the menu had been gone through and the food ordered, she asked me about my work. We chatted, she sat in her cream shirt with the agate brooch, elbows on the table, hands lightly clasped, the head calmly poised, considering everything in the room but my face. Slowly, almost reluctantly, I found myself accepting Anthony’s view: there was something obstinately elsewhere in her… more than that, snubbingly elsewhere. Despite her show of politeness, I soon began to smell the same contempt for my movie world as her husband had suggested she felt for his religious and philosophical ones. None of her questions seemed innocent.

‘And you’ve given up the theatre completely?’

‘Nothing new to say. Or perhaps just unable to adapt myself to the fashionable new ways of saying it.’

‘Isn’t the cinema the same? The same problems?’

Our first courses came. I have spent a good deal of my life observing people’s minute but betraying gestures, and I noted the quickness with which she picked up the spoon for her melon. I decided that at least one assumption she might be making about me needed destruction.

‘In my branch of it it’s a little like being an industrial executive. Maintaining the standard of a staple product? Which is entertainment. Vehicles for current stars. The odd dose of truth one tries to smuggle in is incidental. Just part of the packaging. Status comes from box-office record. At most, craft.’

She delved into her melon. ‘And you’ve settled for that?’

I extracted the backbones from my grilled sardines.

‘I have all sorts of excuses, Jane. But Anthony’s just seen through them. He called me a defeatist. Then a romantic pessimist.’

She was faintly amused. ‘And Becket was duly cursed.’

I smiled and tried to catch her eyes, but they were studiously intent on the melon. ‘You don’t agree?’

‘Oh yes. But not for Anthony’s reasons.’

‘Then why?’

She shrugged. ‘Just that literary melancholia so often precedes fascism. Rousseau, then Napoleon. Chateaubriand and the Restoration. The Twenties.’

‘Rabelais remains a god?’

Another brief smile: nervous and dismissive.

‘I’d forgotten about that.’

‘But he came to pass?’

‘A misunderstanding of him.’

I had meant the permissive society; but I wasn’t sure what she meant.

‘He certainly entered my life again last night. Do you remember Barney Dillon?’

She paused a moment over her melon. ‘She’s told you?’

I gave her a surprised look. ‘You knew?’

‘I was up in town for a day last week. We had lunch together.’ She went on scooping out the flesh. ‘She’s always rather tended to tell me things she’s afraid to tell her mother.’ I realized she meant to apologize for pre-empting the confession, but I detected a buried reproof.

‘You’ve told Nell?’

‘She asked me not to. How did you react?’

‘As calmly as I could manage.’

‘I shouldn’t worry. She’s very sensible.’

‘You can’t approve of it?’

She hesitated.

‘You should see some of the young men Rosamund shacks up with. I’ve learnt that disapproving doesn’t help.’

‘He’s such a damned phony. I can’t tell you.’ I told her about the flight from New York, the meeting at Heathrow: Barney’s devious silence.

‘I haven’t met him for years.’

‘You must have seen him on the box.’

‘Occasionally. He seems rather good at that. As they go.’ She finished the melon. ‘That was delicious.’

I knew, unless she had changed profoundly, she couldn’t really think thus of him, or no more sincerely than she had said ‘delicious’ of the melon. She was merely using an old Oxford trick to snub me: always contradict people who show their emotions in order to goad them into showing more. Perhaps she guessed from my silence that I wasn’t buying it, because she went on.

‘If they really need help, they come.’

‘If only I could understand what she sees in him.’

‘If not a fool. In spite of Nell’s attempts to turn her into one.’

I lit a cigarette between courses, a bad habit Jenny had got me out of during our liaison. ‘At least I begin to see why she likes you so much.’

‘The feeling is mutual.’

A cool common sense, perhaps; but it appeared to be implying that I couldn’t accuse Barney of my own nature and crimes. I changed the subject to her own children. Rosamund had left Cambridge and was now a research assistant in the B. B. C., and coining down to Oxford every weekend. Her younger sister Anne was having a year in Italy as a part of her language course; Anthony had insisted she go through with it. And the benjamin, Paul, whom I’d never seen, was a fifteen-year-old boy at Dartington. I knew from Caro that he was a tricky child ‘he never says a word’ was the description of hers that had stuck. I did not get a clean picture of him from his mother: he had emotional and academic problems, but she seemed to regard it as a passing phase… or perhaps as one more little opportunity to show me I was a stranger, not a family friend. Then there was talk about Compton, about Oxford and how it had changed. I even dragged a little out of her about her own life, her committees and good causes; but not a word about Anthony, except in passing, or their marriage. The punctilious lack of curiosity in her as to what we had said became more and more chilling.

Increasingly I knew I was being tolerated for Anthony’s sake, purely out of courtesy. The more we talked, the clearer it became that we had nothing in common, not even a former ‘sin’ and an inability to forgive it. The ‘bequest’ was revealed as ridiculous, based as it patently was on, if not a misconception, a severe underestimate of how Jane valued me. It now began to be something to be stored and told to Jenny when next we met. Not keeping her in my life came rapidly to seem an impossibility. This and the previous scene had to be told, and she was now the only one who understood my language. The dialect here was hopelessly archaic.

Or so I was thinking by the time the coffee came; and a silence, one of those silences more revealing than any words. I made one last attempt.

‘Are you going to go on living in Oxford, Jane?’

‘I’m not sure. All my friends are here now. Andrew’s suggested Compton, but I… Nell and I are both against it. He doesn’t quite realize our capacity for getting on each other’s nerves.’ She had been smoking, and now she stubbed out the cigarette; and seemed to speak to the ashtray. ‘I’m also thinking of joining the Communist Party.’

She didn’t look at me, but she must have been aware of the fatuously surprised face I showed for a moment. For another moment or two I took it as some metaphorical crack about Nell and Andrew. But then she suddenly looked me in the eyes, with a tight little smile, as if she knew I knew you can’t deliver such information so casually and inconsequentially without having saved it up and timed it.

‘Are you serious?’

‘I’m flirting with the Maoists and the International Marxists as well. They’re much more fashionable, of course.’ Then she said, ‘Anthony isn’t to know, by the way. I’ve not decided yet. It’s as much… I suppose intuitive as intellectual.’

‘Because it feels right?’

‘Just slightly less wrong than the other alternatives.’

‘It certainly makes a change from the usual order of conversion.’

‘I know it’s rather unreal here. At Oxford. They’re much more sophisticated than elsewhere in the country.’

‘Russia?’

She had a thin smile. ‘People in glass houses?’

‘But… I mean, fine, with backward peasant societies. But we’re hardly that now.’

‘Just a backward capitalist one?’

‘Still conditioned to certain freedoms?’

She took another cigarette, and leaned forward for me to light it.

‘I haven’t any Joan-of-Arc illusions. I hate violence. And dogma. I know they seem to be the prerequisites of change. I couldn’t even follow the Catholic party line. I’m not pretending I have a good record in that way at all.’

‘But?’

She traced the rim of her coffee-saucer with a fingertip.

‘I suppose I have a perhaps very naive dream of an intelligent Marxist society. A system that could one day translate theory into something viable locally… what Mao’s done for China.’ She looked up across the room. ‘It’s partly the futility of university life. The smugness of it. The impracticality.’ She gave herself a dismissive smile. ‘I don’t really know. It’s probably just a foolish illusion that the Left needs people who feel as well as think.’

I watched her, she was looking down again, and remembered how good an amateur actress she had been in the old days. She had been acting ever since I arrived, was still acting, but the role had changed. I suspected the attitude to me hadn’t; it might seem like a rapprochement, an attempt at explaining what lay behind her mask. But it was really putting up another fence a private version of an iron curtain.

‘Is this a common thing here nowadays?’

‘I’m not being trendy, if that’s what you mean.’

‘But how much the reverse?’

‘I can think of four—no, five avowed S. C. R. Marxists. One of whom I can’t stand.’

‘And Anthony doesn’t realize at all?’

‘He knows I have strong leftwing sympathies. He shares some of them. I don’t think he’d be very surprised.’

‘Then why don’t you tell him?’