Daniel Martin (27 page)

‘Shall you marry?’

‘I think that’s the general idea.’

‘It sounds a very good one.’

‘He’s several years younger than I am. I… you know. One’s time of life. All that.’ She paused a moment. ‘He was Anthony’s student originally. They’ve gone rather different ways philosophically, but there’s always been that Oedipal undertone. The Jocasta thing.’

‘And you share the same politics?’

‘He’s quite active in the local Labour Party.’ She added, ‘He doesn’t take my flight further left very seriously. You know what dons are like any deviation from their own views becomes a tutorial situation. Silly students getting uppish again.’

I smiled. ‘But obviously you like him?’

‘Yes, very much. He makes me laugh, he writes very funny letters. Comparing the horrors of Harvard to our own brand. To Anthony as well. Very often I hear everything twice over.’ Then she said inconsequentially, ‘Sometimes I think I never want to hear the word ethics again as long as I live.’

‘I don’t think the total lack of them I’m familiar with makes things any simpler.’

‘Just this feeling that the real informing spirit of Oxford remains the posh prep school. Preternaturally clever little boys playing at being adults.’

‘But nothing stands in the way now? Even ethically?’

‘Only my instinct that he’d be much better off with someone younger. Not me.’

‘That’s his decision. And speaking from contemporary experience, there are problems that way too.’

There was a tiny grain of mischief in her voice.

‘Nell will be pleased to hear that.’

‘Then I forbid you to tell her.’

She smiled.

‘If you’d keep this other skeleton in the cupboard quiet.’

‘Of course.’

‘He offered to give up this year at Harvard. But I made him go.’

‘Why on earth don’t you go out and join him? When the conventions have been observed?’

‘I’ll have to see how Paul takes it.’

‘Problems?’

‘On one side, fully capable of facing them rationally. It’s the emotional sieve, he tends to suppress everything there. I suppose in imitation of his parents. It would have been easier if I’d had another girl. He’s rather modelled himself on his father.’

‘And rejected you?’

‘In the way fifteen-year-olds do.’

‘He’ll get over that.’

‘As long as I don’t seem to be rejecting him.’

‘He gets on with your friend?’

‘Yes. Rather well.’ She smoothed her trousers. ‘It’s simply the potential shock of having to accept him as a stepfather. On top of everything else. We’ve had awful problems with his schooling. He’s a weird child hopeless at any subject that bores him. Won’t even try. Totally intractable. Anything to do with history, quite the reverse. A horrid little monomaniac.’

‘You mustn’t sacrifice your own happiness to him.’

Her brown eyes appraised mine; and for a moment there was an old light in them. She looked drily down.

‘I think you’re going to like Rosamund.’

‘Her view?’

She nodded. ‘I am aware of it. It’s a matter of… finding the right time?’ She glanced at her wristwatch. ‘And talking of time.’

It was half past one, but for a moment neither of us moved. I stared at the floor.

‘You’re not angry with me for forcing this on you, Jane?’

‘I’m angry for having to force it on you.’

‘I suspect all that’s being forced on me is something that was long overdue.’ She said nothing. ‘What went on in those years. I have the strangest idea that if we’d all stayed close, it wouldn’t have turned out like this. I don’t know… in some peculiar way we complemented one another. Even Nell.’ Still she was silent, but it was a silence that had lost its hostility. ‘It’s all been such a comedown since. As you predicted.’

‘All woe?’

‘No. Of course not. But far too many artificial substitutes.’

There was another silence then, but she broke it finally by standing and pushing the chair back true to its table; then stopped a moment there and spoke to the wooden top. ‘The situation is really very drab and ordinary, Dan. In spite of what’s happened tonight.’ She picked up the ashtray, took it back to the chest-of-drawers, spoke there again with her back to me. ‘You’ve caught me at such a bad time. I think I’ve managed to retain some sort of sense of humour.’ She turned with a smile. ‘I’m just not managing to show it at the moment.’

‘I haven’t forgotten you as Lydia Languish.’

‘Fifty million years ago.’ She moved to the door, awkwardly, and aware of it. ‘I said we’d be at the hospital about ten.’

‘You’d better wake me.’

She nodded, hesitated over saying something, or perhaps over doing something: a kiss on the cheek, a token embrace; decided not to.

‘Sleep well.’

‘And you.’

The door closed on her. After a moment Dan went and stared in the little mirror over the chest-of-drawers. He looked as tired as he felt. But five minutes later, in bed, in darkness, he knew sleep was in no hurry to come. Yet he felt relaxed, as he would sometimes after a good day’s work relaxed, though one’s mind is still alive and reviewing; as if he had refound some old charge of curiosity about existence, of irony, enigma, secret purpose. He should perhaps have felt sorrow for Anthony, and some guilt, but even that seemed to have a richness. He felt saturated, diverse; if not justified by self, at least justified in temporary destiny, hazard. He had never, at least since leaving Nell, been fond of adding complexity to an already quite sufficiently complex life, and in some way the fact that he knew, as he lay there, that he no longer wished he had never come to Oxford proved this re-entry into the past had answered some previously unseen lack.

Like all self-conscious writers Dan had always associated success in work with the breaking of established codes; or to be more precise, with keeping a balance between the expected, obeying his craft, and the unexpected, obeying the main social function of all art. Another of his grudges against his own particular mètier was that it put so much more value on the craft than the code-breaking side; that even the smallest departure from the cinematic established and sanctified had to be so fiercely fought for. He had never been a literary experimenter, an avant-gardist; but he would not have been a writer if ordinary expectation, life as it is, had satisfied his deeper psychological bent. And now this seemed very near the heart of it to him he felt that life itself had backed his view: had broken codes he might have flinched at breaking if he had been inventing the situation, had performed a kind of magic not with causality, but the timing, precipitation and conjunction of the results of causality. It was like an unsettling of fixed statistical probability, a release from mire, a liberation, a yes from the heart of reality to the supposed artifice of art.

He knew it when his mind, drifting at last towards sleep, drifted also to the Kitchener script. Perhaps its recalcitrance was really a challenge; and now the challenge assumed the face of a relief. He would meet it, he would solve, given this lead, the problems somehow. Perhaps his relief had a more selfish and personal strand, at the thought of his also hazard-granted escape from the kind of existence that had apparently soured and finally dominated this Oxford house. He thought of Jenny; of how distant she was, and mercifully, from all that was symbolic and archetypal in a boy’s bedroom. In England, Oxford; the involute and its academy; middle class and middle age. He went to sleep.

Mr Specula Speculans snores there now; so it must seem. But even the humblest dialogue-fixers and life-inventors must have such moods, however inapt, however callously oblivious of other human suffering, to survive. They live not life, but other lives; drive not down the freeways of determined fact, but drift and scholar-gipsy through the landscapes of the hypothetical, through all the pasts and futures of each present. Only one of each can be what happened and what will happen, but to such men they are the least important. I create, I am: all the rest is dream, though concrete and executed. Perhaps what Dan always wanted of his looking-glasses was not his own face, but the way through them. This kind of mind is self-satisfied only in the sense that one must suppose God is self-satisfied in an eternity of presents; in his potentiality, not his fulfilment. A perfect world would have no room for writers: vampires who sleep with a slaked smile while philosophers fall from windows, men and women are tortured, children starve, the world dies of its own greed and stupidity. It is even worse than that. If Dan did smile in his sleep that night it was because his unconscious seemed to believe that a perfect world would have room for no one else.

I was woken just before nine by Gisèle’s voice outside the door. My ‘daughter from London’ was on the telephone. When I came down to the hail, Jane, in a housecoat, passed me the receiver with her hand over the mouthpiece.

‘I’ve told her what’s happened.’

‘Bless you.’

I announced myself to Caro, and watched Jane disappear downstairs.

‘Oh daddy. How terrible for you.’

‘Less for me than…’

‘Is she…?’

‘She’s being very brave.’

‘I couldn’t believe it when she first told me.’

‘I know.’ I gave her my own brief, and very censored, account of what had happened: our meeting, he’d given no clue, he must have decided on it for some time.

‘It seems so strange. Almost as if he was just waiting.’

‘I think he was in a way, Caro.’ I hesitated, abruptly realizing for the first time the practical problems of explaining or rather, not explaining, what had really happened. ‘Seeing me must have seemed his last piece of unfinished business. You mustn’t think of it as an act of despair. I suspect it was much more one of relief. Peace, if you like.’

She mulled over that for a moment.

‘Aunt Jane says you’ve been marvellous.’

‘That wasn’t how it sounded.’

‘We’ve talked. You were right.’

‘I’m glad.’ She paused, ‘At last.’ Then, ‘At least that.’

‘You needn’t rub it in.’

‘I wasn’t.’

‘And you—how are things?’

She hesitated. ‘I went to see the flat again yesterday evening. Now it makes me feel I’m walking out on you.’

‘Which proves you aren’t. Go on. You take it.’

‘I did say I would, actually. I’ve got first refusal till tomorrow. But… ‘

‘No buts. They want some money?’

‘Just the first month’s rent.’ There was a pause. ‘I rang originally because… actually a telegram’s just come for you.’

‘Have you opened it?’

‘I thought I’d better.’ The further pause gave the game away. ‘From Jenny?’

‘Do you want me to read it out?’

‘Please.’ She must have had it in front of her. ‘It says, “Tibou China” is that right? “misses you but has me now stop please call your tonight Jenny”.’ Caro added, ‘if that makes sense.’

‘Yes, that’s fine.’

‘Who’s Tibou China?’

‘One word. Tibouchina. It’s a shrub that grows outside the Cabin. Jenny’s moved in. That’s all.’

‘I thought it must be a Pekinese or something.’

‘A Brazilian. I’ll take you to Kew one day and show it to you.’ She murmured. ‘All these plants and women in your life.’

‘Only one for real. Her name begins with C.’

‘I bet.’

‘Will you be in this evening?’

‘If you want me to.’

‘Not if…’

‘You have priority.’

‘I’ll catch a train this afternoon. Let’s go out to dinner somewhere.’ Another hesitation. ‘Would you come and see the flat?’

‘Of course. Let’s do that. Don’t be horrid to mummy. She can’t help it.’

‘Ill try.’

‘And what you promised. Not telling her yet. Please.’

Now I hesitated. ‘But you have told Jane?’

‘I had to have someone.’

‘I’m not getting at you, Caro. Just she’ll be hurt if…’

‘I can’t handle you both together.’

It wasn’t the time to argue. ‘Okay. Don’t worry.’

‘And all I didn’t say to Aunt Jane.’

‘She understands.’

A moment, then there was a kiss down the line; then disconnection.

Fifteen minutes later I was shaved and dressed and down in the kitchen. It was still misty outside, but clearing, already a hint of blue sky on its way. The weather, it seemed, rejected mourning. Another large room, a dead forest of varnished pine, all the equipment at the garden end, a round table at the front: Jane sitting at it, the girl busy making coffee. There were some opened letters, the Times and the Guardian; but not the Morning Star, so far as I could see.

‘Caro feels she was inarticulate.’

‘Not at all. She was sweet. Do you want bacon and eggs, Dan?’

‘Just coffee.’

Apparently she had already rung her daughter in Florence; and spoken to the school, then to Paul himself, in Devon. Anne was flying home as soon as she could. Paul, who hadn’t been told the manner of his father’s death, had seemed to take it reasonably well. And now she was preparing a list of other people to ring. Her hair was loose, she looked less tense, almost as if she had slept well. Perhaps it was the girl, having to act a little in front of her. The kitchen was agreeably domestic after the theatrical hall and living-room upstairs: cottagy, rural in comparison.

‘I like the house. I didn’t have time to say that last night.’

‘You should see Gisèle’s home in Aix.’

She had retreated again into the mundane; into being English, talking about anything except what must have been uppermost in her mind; denying, it occurred to me, all the psychological laws of art… or at any rate, my art (‘Her ravaged face shows the horror of the previous night’). Gisèle’s family lived in a lovely eighteenth-Century hotel, her father taught at the university in Aix. She was musical, it seemed; of near-professional standard at the violin. But reality soon returned, in dark grey trousers all I glimpsed as I followed Jane’s sudden look up to the front garden outside.

‘Oh God. Here are the crows.’

‘His priest?’ She closed her eyes and nodded. ‘Shall I see him?’

Would you mind? I simply…’

‘Of course. I’ll say you’re not dressed yet.’

I stood up. The front doorbell rang.

‘If you could just ask if he gets a Christian burial. Or a stake through his heart at the nearest crossroads.’

I smiled and turned to go upstairs, but she stood and came after me, lowering her voice, as if Gisèle must be spared such obscenity. ‘Dan, one detail from last night. They said he had a crucifix in his hand when they found him. You’d better feed that to his holiness.’

I stared at her a moment, trying to discover why I hadn’t been told this before. But the bell rang again. I touched her arm and went to answer it.

He was a young man, with a trace of a Scottish accent and much more than a trace of knowing what the invisible mistress of the house thought of him. He expressed his formal condolences, he quite understood; of course, of course, Mrs Mallory would not feel up to seeing anyone. I would have got rid of him on the doorstep, if it hadn’t seemed not quite the place for the question I had to ask or perhaps it was just that no one born into a vicarage and its divine simplicities can ever see a priest without seeing an adult child as well.

We sat in the living-room and I explained about Anthony and the crucifix: how there may have been a loss of faith in his own courage, but not in his church. The priest lowered his head and murmured, ‘The poor man.’

‘This won’t prevent his being buried according to the…?’

‘Oh no. We’re… long past that stage.’ He gave me a nervous smile. ‘I don’t even have to obtain a dispensation. I can assure you there will be no difficulty at all. In this case.’ He made a little explanation of the new doctrine on culpability. But then he said, ‘I take it you think a verdict of suicide will be returned?’

‘It was hardly a balcony one could have fallen from by mistake.’

‘Yes, of course. I see. Most distressing.’ I told him that I had spent that last hour with Anthony; went on a bit, how he had seemed reconciled to his fate, what a surprise it had been, but (using what was apparently my interlocutor’s favourite adverbial phrase) of course in the circumstances… it was a touch absurd, justifying Anthony to this rather humourless young Scotsman. He seemed so ill-at-ease, so anxious not to offend, so unconsciously bunkered by his calling; a very long way, in sect as in character, from John Knox, and finally almost more in need of comforting than the widow downstairs.

He went at last, in another cloud of condolence. If Mrs Mallory would care to ring him about the Funeral Mass, if he could help in any other way… ritual; in a world already stifled with it.

I found Jane peeling potatoes when I returned downstairs. I told her what Father Buchanan had said, and she shrugged, as if she were disappointed at his tameness, although I was thanked for coping with him. She went away to dress and I glanced through the newspapers in the living-room, not really reading anything, for very soon I heard her voice outside on the telephone. It was light, brisk, forthright. Oh John, I thought I’d better ring to tell you that Anthony’s died… Susan, I’m afraid Anthony took his life last night and so on. It seemed to me she was overdoing the detachment. These bald announcements were evidently provoking the usual offers of help and sympathy—which gave her a chance to rebuff them: firmly, if politely. I began to wonder if our rapprochement of the night would hold, whether she regretted it now. In the little shelved alcove of classical antiquities near where I sat I saw two small Etruscan bronzes. Tarquinia, that moment there… it seemed as remote symbolically as it was historically.

A few minutes later we left for the hospital. Beneath her outdoor coat she was wearing a dark red shirt and a tweed skirt; no mourning for Electra, as for the sky. The mist had made way for a cloudless blue.

It was very discreet and English. Anthony’s doctor was there, he had already dealt with the identification formalities and some hospital bigwig and the staff sister concerned; agreement that no negligence was involved, no sign had been given… I was politely questioned as to Anthony’s apparent state of mind, and professed myself as shocked and mystified as everyone else. Then there was talk about the inquest, a suitable undertaker’s firm. A cardboard box with his belongings, a radio, the Mantegna reproduction, were handed over.

Jane showed no sign of strain until we were outside and in her car again.

‘I think if there was an airport here I’d ask you to drive me to it and put me on a plane for the far side of the world.’

She spoke quietly, drily, out of the windscreen at the hospital courtyard. But it was the kind of statement I had looked for in vain on our way to the hospital: an admission that the distances of the previous evening could not be restored. A uniformed man beside an ambulance chatted up a West Indian nurse in the sunlight. She kept grinning, splendid white teeth.

‘It’ll all be over very soon.’

‘Yes.’ She switched on, and we moved off. ‘I suppose they took our word for it.’

‘I’m sure.’

‘I don’t see why you have to be at the inquest.’

‘It must be part of the rules. And anyway. Now I have a friend in Oxford.’

‘Some friend.’

‘I’m so glad we talked last night.’

‘As long as I didn’t shatter too many illusions.’

‘You didn’t shatter anything. Or only frosted glass.’

She smiled. ‘You give me a nostalgia for America.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘I remember when I first came back here after the war. How closed everything seemed. As if everyone spoke in cipher.’ She took a breath. ‘And I was the only one en clair.’

‘I know the feeling.’ I slipped her a look. ‘And talking of America?’

‘I sent him a cable. First thing.’

‘He’ll come back?’

‘I asked him not to. Just yet.’ She added, ‘He’s got his research work. The fare. It would be silly.’

She stopped at a little row of shops, to pick up something she had forgotten to ask Gisèle to buy. I saw a small coffee-bar opposite, suggested we had a cup. I had a reason to have her to myself for a few minutes and so, it finally emerged, did she. I put mine point-blank, as soon as we had sat and ordered.

‘Will you come and stay at Thorncombe, Jane? It’s very near Dartington.’

She gave me a slightly embarrassed smile, then glanced down. ‘As a matter of fact I drove past it last spring with Paul. Caro had shown him where it was on a map.’ She murmured, ‘Unforgivable curiosity. It did look very sweet.’

‘Then you have no excuse. Seriously, whether I’m there or not. The old couple I’ve taken on are always happy to do the honours.’

‘Ben and Phoebe?’

‘Caro’s told you?’

‘They sound like Philemon and Baucis.’

‘If Ben didn’t drink himself blind every Saturday night. But that and his wife’s ways with green vegetables are the only real hazards.’

‘It would be nice.’

‘You must bring Paul over.’

‘He’d love that. Though I couldn’t promise it would be very apparent.’

‘I’ve had abundant training. When she was Paul’s age. Before she tumbled to Nell.’

‘I know she loves it now.’

‘She hardly ever goes there.’

Our coffees were brought. Jane stirred hers, then looked me in the eyes.

‘I have a tiny special relationship with Caro, Dan.’

‘I know you do. And I’m very grateful.’

‘I feel it would have been more tactful if I’d pretended I hadn’t known about Barney Dillon.’