Daniel Martin (26 page)

‘Will you be all right, Jane?’

‘Yes. Really. Please don’t worry.’ She looked down at the bed between us. ‘I do hope the mattress isn’t too hard.’

‘My dear, it’s not the hardness of mattresses that worries me.’

She met my eyes for a moment, and I wasn’t smiling. She looked down again at the bed.

‘One survives as one can.’

‘At least Anthony was frank with me.’

She turned away to a window. The curtains were already drawn, but she pulled them a little closer, then fiddled with their edges. She had taken off her suit coat, and there was something in the way she stood, the flagrantly unnecessary fussing with the curtains, that was childishly mulish; willing, that is, to be argued out of it.

‘He did tell me that all wasn’t well between you.’ I waited for her to answer, but she said nothing. ‘Whatever else he meant by this terrible thing, it can’t have been that you and I have nothing to say about it.’ I tried a more practical approach. ‘Anyway, we surely have to decide what’s to be said tomorrow. Publicly.’ At last she turned from the window, though she wouldn’t look at me.

‘You must be so tired.’

‘I’m still on California time. And please sit down.’

There was a Windsor chair by a table-desk in the corner of the room behind her. She looked round at it, as if she were the stranger there, then moved, turned the chair a little; and sat in it, sideways to me, her arms folded.

I sat on the end of the bed, turned away from her.

‘May I tell you what he said to me?’

‘If you think it will help.’

I leant forward, elbows on knees, and chose my words very carefully: his self-accusing mood, his feeling that he had denatured her real personality during their marriage; my objections; his asking me how I should know the reality of the situation after all these years, and my obviously not being able to answer that. I stopped, there was a silence.

‘Did he give a reason for telling you all this?’

‘He said you’d told him about us. Before the two of you got married.’

There was a telltale hesitation, though her voice was quiet.

‘Yes. That’s true. I did.’

‘I wish I’d known.’ She said nothing. ‘He rather suggested everything that went wrong had stemmed from that.’

‘From my telling him? Or our not telling you?’ I think he meant both. The general hide-and-seek that went ‘We did discuss telling you. There seemed reasons not to at the time.’

‘What were they?’ Silence. I drew a breath. ‘Jane, everyone is going to wonder about the timing of this. We can’t not talk about it now.’

There was a further pause, but then she spoke.

‘Your relationship with Nell?’

‘Nothing else?’

‘I suppose self-preservation on my part. I felt I’d betrayed you a little. And Anthony. He was so much happier pretending to forgive you in secret. Not having to face up to the fact that he could never forgive you in reality.’ She hesitated a moment, then went on. ‘One always finds good reasons for doing what one wants.’

‘He kept on talking about correcting a design failure. I think the underlying idea was of some mythical true marriage between you and me that he’d… prevented.’ Again she refused my invitation to comment. ‘Almost as if you were some locked cupboard to which I had the only key. My feeling was very strongly that he was not only living in the past, but he’d blacked out on all subsequent reality. I did try to suggest that. But I don’t think he really heard.’

I waited for her to agree or disagree. The door was ajar, and I heard the French girl as she went on her way to the floor above. A door up there shut quietly, and we heard faint footfalls on the ceiling over our heads; as once before, in very different circumstances.

At last Jane said, ‘Part of him never grew up, I’m afraid.’

‘I didn’t realize the lines were so broken. Broken at all, in fact.’

‘Ours grew into one of those marriages where the partners survive by hoarding secrets from each other. Forbidden areas.’

‘It seems such a change from the beginning.’

‘I think our supposed total frankness in those days was always rather… ‘ but she did not finish the sentence.

‘There doesn’t seem much supposed about the total frankness that drove you to tell him about us.’

‘Except that from then on our marriage was based on a secret I’d kept from him.’

‘But not for very long.’ She said nothing. ‘When did you tell him?’

‘When we were in the States. That summer.’

‘He took it badly?’

She shook her head, in a kind of ancient despair; let out a breath. ‘He was as innocent as a newborn child, all his life, about the workings of his own unconscious. It set a pattern. Of course we didn’t see it at the time. One never does. But slowly, over the years, telling each other what we truly felt about anything became like I suppose, like throwing away trump cards. Not the done thing at all.’

‘But you guessed why he wanted me to come?’

‘I suspected you’d be in some way asked to pick up the bill for his penance.’

‘That’s putting it very harshly.’

‘You haven’t had to spend most of your life listening to Catholic doubletalk.’ I smiled, still with my back to her. ‘Which your new faith is free of?’

‘At least theirs is mostly about social salvation. Not private.’

I remembered what he had said about all improvement in the world starting from the individual. It must have been at least in part a retrospective admonition to himself; and perhaps also a reaction to a hopelessness in the woman I was with. But I didn’t want us to wander off into some general discussion.

‘Obviously there’s a straightforward reason for what he did. I suppose people will swallow that.’

‘They’ll have to, won’t they?’

She was saying every sentence, and especially that last one, as if it were potentially final, the matter closed. I found some cigarettes and offered them, expecting her to refuse, and to seize the chance to take herself off; but she accepted one. I stood and lit it for her; then sat on the bed again, facing her this time; and now, staring at the foot of the curtains, she spoke without being prompted.

‘We managed. We weren’t unhappy in the day-to-day. There was quite a lot we did agree on. The children.’

‘He said something else. That he was eternally grateful to you.’

She had a sere smile. ‘That’s called kissing the cross. In the trade.’

‘I won’t take that.’

She said nothing for a moment.

‘I made him suffer, Dan. Terribly.’

You never discussed separating?’

‘Several times. Before the illness.’

There was the sound of a crawling car outside, and I felt certain it must be a visitor for the house. It even stopped but then we heard it go slowly on.

‘And what prevented you?’

‘Oh, the usual thing. A sort of shared guilt. You know, one’s made so many mistakes that splitting up just seems… one more? And the children.’ She half glanced towards the head of the bed. ‘Paul especially. He’s rather had to bear the brunt of it. The girls understand. Rosamund knows all about it, she’s been a… great help. Very intelligent about everything.’

‘Why did you tell him about us?’

She shook her head, she no longer knew. ‘The Church? I had all their rubbish about sin and absolution floating about in my head. Anthony on truth. I hadn’t realized then that Anthony on truth was always really Anthony on masochism.’ But she said that less bitterly, almost wrily. ‘It was probably the wrong choice. But I don’t think it matters. It wouldn’t have been any different if I’d fully matched his immaculate conception of me. It’s had much more to do with temperaments… emotions. Perversities, perhaps.’ She grimaced. ‘We’re not very unusual. Almost the standard North Oxford marriage.’

‘He talked about hating me for years.’

‘You mustn’t take Catholic eggheads’ judgments on themselves too seriously. It’s their speciality, moral mountains out of molehills. His never very secure masculine nose was left permanently a little out of joint. That’s all. And it did give him a lovely chance to play Jesus Christ and the woman taken in adultery.’ She stood up and fetched an ashtray from a chest-of-drawers by the door, then set it on the bed beside me before she sat again. ‘What you said at dinner. Having only yourself to blame for the breakup with Nell. It was the same for us.’

‘I’m not letting Nell off scot-free.’

‘Of course not. It takes two.’ She stared at her hands, at the curl of cigarette smoke that rose from them. ‘It’s all very well for him to lie on his deathbed and say he’s eternally grateful to me. It was something that didn’t get said very often in this house.’ She shook her head again. ‘It’s so dishonest. If you’re not presently grateful, what is the point?’ Now I was the one who waited. ‘We came to know the danger areas too well. I had a period of shouting at him. But we grew too civilized for that. Too lazy. One can spend two hours in Hedda Gabler. Not ten years.’ After a moment she said, ‘You get so sick of brooding all your life away over your own problems.’

‘Yes, I know what you mean.’

Very gently, discreetly, from upstairs came the sound of radio music. I saw the French girl writing frantically home; or in some diary. And out of nowhere the past was with us, former selves, almost uncannily, in a silence that was not like the other silences of that night, but an ancient remembered kind of silence, very characteristic of her more serious side. An old empathy down through the body of the years, and tinged with sadness, futility, like some old garment one had once loved, but could never wear seriously again: I wasn’t even sure that she was not manipulating me, hiding a shift of defensive position under the guise of true confession. My inquisitiveness had to be defused, she had conceded that; and was doing it by presenting a very banal version of events. I had never had any belief in the ‘noble’ theory of tragedy: that only the falls of the great can achieve such status. But just as childhood memories get grossly magnified in absent adult memory all return is a form of bathos I knew I’d been guilty of cherishing a kind of noble legend of our joint past. Yet there lingered, perhaps because Anthony had just done something so far from banal, a feeling of half-truth in all that she said.

‘Nell knows the situation?’

‘By inference.’ She leant back. ‘Not for lack of interrogation. Though mercifully she’s dropped all that since the illness. I think she’s tried to pump Roz, but…’

‘I’ve been through that. With Caro.’

‘She’s got far worse since she became mistress of Compton. Little worlds where you must control everything, or you feel threatened.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘I really don’t know her any more. That side of her.’ She added, ‘She s been very good these last few months. It’s just this ghastly need to dragoon us all into her scheme of things.’

‘Insecurity. She would never admit it.’

It’s not all her fault. I’ve lost the art of being what people want me to be. It’s become rather a nasty little habit. Destroying people’s expectations. As you must have noticed.’

I smiled, partly at the fact that she wasn’t smiling herself.

‘Now you mention it.’

‘I tell myself I’m simply in search of lost honesty.’

‘Is that the right adverb?’

‘Then honestly in search of lost simplicity.’

‘Not a quality I ever associated with you.’

‘We all went to such a bad school.’

‘Yes.’

There was another silence. I handed her the ashtray so that she could stub out her cigarette. She spoke in a brisker voice.

‘You’re so lucky to have lived in a world that knows it’s artificial. Ever since Freddie Ayer the mania you must have here is soccer. Heaven help you at a philosophical dinner-party if you can’t discuss Liverpool’s last match or the metaphysics of the four-three-four and the floating winger.’

‘You should hear a would-be intellectual film-producer discussing Levi-Strauss.’

‘At least he’s trying?’

‘A lot more than you can imagine.’

We smiled down from each other’s eyes. The music upstairs had stopped, and the house, the city, lay in peace. I saw Anthony lying on his back, staring sightlessly, the ultimate cold of death; yet somehow still listening. Once more she folded her arms.

‘I think there’s something I’d better tell you, Dan. Which nobody else knows.’ She was staring down at her curtains again. ‘What you said just now about Anthony’s wanting us to be friends… it, well actually it gave me an enormous sense of relief.’ Her eyes rose to meet mine. ‘There’s been someone else. These last two years. We’ve tried to keep it very secret. But I was frightened Anthony might have guessed something.’

‘I think he’d have told me. And I’m delighted.’

She gave a shrug, killing too much delight. ‘It’s all been rather complicated. He’s another philosophy teacher here. Not literally here at the moment. He’s spending a sabbatical at Harvard, for a book on William James.’

‘I’m sure you needn’t feel guilty.’

‘It’s just the… it’s so ludicrous, the kind of incestuous pattern things seem to fall into. We’ve all been close friends for years now. I know his ex-wife quite well. She’s remarried. She lives only just round the corner.’ She pulled a dry face. ‘One of those Iris Murdoch situations.’