Daniel Martin (3 page)

He looks down at the carpet. ‘How long is it since you were spanked?’

‘But you can’t use your own name in a novel. Anyway, it’s so square. Who’d ever go for a character called Daniel Martin?’

He says, since they are used to back-references, sudden conversational jumps in either direction, but gently, ‘I really do, sometimes.’

She folds her hands on her lap, playing demure innocence now. ‘She’s only trying to make sure she gets the dedication.’

He stands. ‘If she isn’t in bed in one minute, she’s going to get what she really deserves. A massive flea in the ear for coming on set with bags under her eyes.’

Stridently, making them both start, the telephone on the table just behind her rings. Jenny grins, still on her knees, delighted.

‘Shall I speak to Mr Wolfe, or will you?’

He turns to go. ‘I should leave it. Probably some nut.’

But she says his name, not teasing; a tiny trace of fear at his suggestion. He stops, stands half-turned, looking at her indigo back as she twists and lifts the ivory receiver. He waits, then hears her say in her cool public voice, ‘Yes, he’s here. I’ll get him.’ And she holds out the receiver, biting her lips again.

‘Long-distance. From home. They transferred the call.’

‘Who is it?’

‘The operator didn’t say.’

He draws a breath and walks back to where she now stands; almost snatches the receiver from her hand. She turns away to the window. He confirms his name, and is asked to hold the line. He eyes the girl’s profiled face. She raises her hands and shakes her hair loose, knowing he is watching; as if she has just woken from sleep. She cannot press the smile out of her lips.

‘I shouldn’t get excited. A hundred to one it’s just some moronic Fleet Street tattle-monger short of a paragraph.’

‘Or my Highland great-grandmother.’

And she contemplates the midnight infinities of Los Angeles, insufferably English and amused. He reaches out, catches her arm, pulls her brutally towards him; and tries to kiss her with anger, but she is laughing too much.

In his ear, distances.

Then a voice; and unbelievably, as in a fiction, the door in the wall opens.

The wind blows the indolent arms of the willows sideways and ruffles the water of the long reach. The distant wooded hills to the west and the intervening meadowlands are stained with summery cloud-shadow. On the far side of the Cherwell a young man, an undergraduate, poles a punt upstream. In the bow seat, facing him, a girl wearing sunglasses reclines. She trails the fingers of her right hand through the water. He is twenty-three years old, and reading English; she is two years younger, and reading French. He wears army-surplus denim trousers and a navy-blue polo-necked jumper; she is in a dirndl peasant skirt, a dark green busily embroidered white and red; a white blouse and red Paisley headscarf. By her bare feet lie a rush basket, sandals and a strew of books.

The young man would pass, even today; all except his short hair would pass. But even then her full and folksy mid-calf skirt, the puffs in the short sleeves of the blouse, are dated; the colours too bravura, too eager to escape the accusation of bluestocking… and faintly irritating, because such a plea is unnecessary. She is, to use a student cliché of the time, very nubile; has both a sexuality and a distinction, a kind of warm elegance and consciousness of it that is almost an indifference. Her younger sister, for instance, dresses much better; wouldn’t be seen dead in a tatty old peasant skirt. But the girl in the punt takes greater risks, perhaps because she is engaged (though not to today’s gondolier), perhaps because she knows her standing, her reputation, is safely beyond the odd gaucheness, showiness, affectation. Only that previous winter, in fishnet tights and a long auburn wig and a student’s gown, she had brought the house down in an ETC revue sketch. If Rita read Greats… the Rita’s other name being Hayworth. And it hadn’t been all the clever cracks about Aspasia and heteirai or the climactic song (composed by the young man poling): Symposia were cosier when I wore my negligee; but the decided and visible oomph of the mimesis.

She has fine pronounced eyebrows, very clear, direct brown eyes complementing a hair that is almost black in certain lights; a classical nose, a wide and always faintly smiling mouth, even in repose; even now, as she watches her own fingers in the water; as if she is always remembering something amusing told her an hour before. She and her sister have a nickname all through the mens’ colleges. They are known as the Heavenly Twins, although they are not twins, but a year, both in age and study, and in many other things, apart. In their respective second and first years they sometimes dressed alike, and so a false parallel was drawn. Now their mark is made, and they have decided to be themselves.

They descended on Oxford with one other slight difference. They had lived abroad a lot, for their father had been an ambassador. He had died the year the war started; and their mother had remarried a year later to yet another diplomat, though this time he was an American. The two girls had spent the war in the United States, and an aura of that culture still clung about them a frankness, a trace of the accent (then, it later disappeared), a certain freedom other English girl students of their age, brought up amid rationing cards and the wail of sirens, lacked. They also had, though they were not ostentatious in that way, wealth. Their English parents had not been poor; and their American stepfather, though he too had children from a previous marriage, was reputedly far from poor. They were privileged in so many ways; and to have good brains and good looks on top of everything else seemed almost unfair. Neither had close female friends at the university.

The girl looks up to the young man at work.

‘My offer’s still open.’

‘I enjoy it. Honestly. I need the exercise. Revising like a maniac these last three days.’ He pushes on the pole, recovers it, stabs it forward till he feels the soundless thump on the river-bottom, waits till the onward motion of the punt brings it vertical, thrusts down, makes a little adjustment to the direction by using the trailing pole as a rudder. He grimaces down at the girl.

‘I’m going to plough. I feel it in my bones.’

‘Sez you. I bet you get a first.’

‘I’m leaving that for Anthony.’

‘He’s worried about ancient history. He thinks he may only get an alpha minus.’ She lowers her glasses professorially, guys gloom. ‘I’m vulnerable on Thucydides.’

He grins. She turns and watches the river ahead. Another punt comes downstream, with four other students in it, sophomores, a girl and three men. They look across at the pair in the upstream punt. One of the young men turns and says something to the girl; and all four look again, idly, casually, as would-be sophisticated passers glance again at local celebrities, Zuleikas and princes of the senior year. The cynosures make no comment; they are used to this.

A few hundred yards later the young man lets the pole trail longer than usual and wipes his forehead with the back of his hand.

‘I say, Jane, I’m getting hellish shagged. And starving. I don’t think the Victoria’s on.’

The girl sits up, solicitous.

‘Well let’s tie up here. I don’t mind.’

‘There’s a cut just ahead. We could go up there a bit. Be out of the wind.’

‘Fine.’

In a minute they come in sight of the cut, an old drainage dyke at right angles east from the river and running between two willow-hedged leys. The public footpath is on the other bank. At the mouth of the cut is an old peeling notice-board: Private. Landing forbidden. By order. But, as they discover when they head in to the mouth, another punt lies moored there. Two undergraduates sprawl at opposite ends of it, reading, an open bottle of champagne between them. The gold-foiled neck of another bottle pokes up, suspended by string, from the cooling green water beside the stern-seat. The taller student of the two, with a mop of blond hair and a faintly flushed face, glances up at the intrusion. He has strange vacuous eyes, a glaucous grey-green.

‘Good God. Jane darling. Daniel. Don’t one’s friends ever leave one in peace?’

Daniel slows his punt, grins down at the blond head, the textbook in hand.

‘You bloody sham, Andrew. You’re reading.

‘Well not quite really, dear boy. Rotten old governor. Bet me a hundred I won’t get through.’

Jane grins. ‘How sick-making. You poor thing.’

‘Rather fascinating stuff, actually, some of it. Isn’t it, Mark?’ The other student, an older man, grunts in dissent. ‘I say, do have a mouthful of fizz.’

Jane smiles again. ‘Unlike you, we really have come to work.’

‘How revoltingly plebby of you both.’

They grin. Daniel waves and poles on. After a few yards Jane bites her lips.

‘Now it’ll be all round Oxford we’re having an affiuire.’

‘Bet you it won’t. He’ll be too scared it’ll be all round the Bullingdon we saw him swotting.’

‘Poor Andrew.’

‘Rich Andrew.’

‘I always wonder what really goes on in that tiny head.’

‘He’s not such a fool as he sounds.’

‘Just a flawless imitation?’

He laughs, as he steers the punt through the encroaching paddles of water lilies, the flowering sheets of water dropwort. The wind shakes a little shower of white petals from a thorn-tree on the bank. The girl lifts a skein of dropwort and holds it up, so that a chain of drips slides beside the punt. Then she lets it fall.

‘Won’t this do?’

‘There’s a sort of pond a bit further up. Or there was last year. Nell and I used to come here.’ She gives him a studied look over the tops of her dark glasses. He shrugs and smiles. ‘Just for a quiet alfresco snog.’

‘How revoltingly pastoral of you both.’

He smirks. A sedge-warbler chatters ahead in the reeds, he swings the punt round a first projecting screen. Beyond, a much denser curtain of reeds and bulrushes stretches across the water.

‘Damn. It’s got overgrown. I’ll just have one bash.’

He sinks the pole and thrusts with all his weight at where there seems most water between the barring stems. The girl gives a little scream as they crash into the first green barrier, bows her head protectively in her hands. The flat prow pushes some three yards in, then hits a soft obstruction, rises slightly, stops.

‘Bugger.’

Jane turns and looks forward over the side. And then as he tries to extract his pole from the mud her head flashes round, her mouth open, incredulous, horror-struck.

‘Daniel!’

She buries her face in her hands.

‘Jane?’

‘Go back, go back.’

‘What’s up?’

She twists away to the far side of the punt, her hand over her nose and mouth.

‘Oh I can smell it. Please go back.’

But he leaves the pole, steps forward over the slatted seatback, cranes beside her; and sees.

Just beneath the surface of the water, pushed down by the punt’s nose, a naked human buttock, greyish-white. There is an opening in the reeds where the back and head must lie. The bottoms of the legs are in the water, invisible beneath the punt.

Christ.

‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

He turns hastily, forces her head forward, down to her knees; then scrambles back to the rear of the punt, frantically jerks the pole out of the mud, nearly overbalances, recovers, begins levering back. The punt hesitates, then slides back free of the reeds. He sees the hideous, obscure shape bob slowly to the surface.

‘Jane, are you all right?’

She stays with her head down, but gives a small nod. He manoeuvres the punt awkwardly round, then thrusts it violently away back towards the river, round the first stand of reeds, then alongside the bank, jamming it secure with the pole. He kneels beside the girl.

‘Are you all right?’

She nods, then slowly looks up at him, and in a strange gesture takes off her dark glasses, and stares at him.

Oh Dan.

‘How bloody horrible.’

‘It…’

‘I know.’

For a moment they stare at each other’s death-riven incomprehension; their shattered morning world. He presses her hands, then looks back towards the mouth of the cut. ‘I’d better tell Andrew.’

‘Yes, okay. I’m all right now.’

He stares at her anxiously a moment more, then stands and jumps ashore. He runs through the long grass towards the river; looks back once. The girls sits with her head bowed on her drawn-up knees, as if to shut out sight.

‘Andrew! Andrew!’

Their two faces through the willow-leaves; he stands on the bank above them.

‘We’ve just found a body in the water.’

‘A what!’

‘A body. A dead body. I think it’s a woman. In the reeds.’

‘Good God.’

The student called Mark, who is several years older than the other two, tanned, a moustache, clear grey eyes, known only to Daniel as some obscure crony of Andrew Randall, who has obscure cronies everywhere, stands and steps ashore.

‘You’re sure?’

‘Absolutely. We ran right into it. Over it.’

Andrew comes beside them. ‘Where’s Jane?’

‘Just back there. She’s okay. Just shocked.’

Mark says, ‘We’d better go and see.’

‘Hang on, dear boy.’ Andrew scrambles back into the punt, rummages in a coat, comes out with a silver and leather flask. The three stride quickly back along the bank. Jane looks up. Andrew goes down beside her, uncapping the flask.

‘Try a drop of this, Jane.’

‘It’s all right now.’

‘Orders. Just a sippington.’

She takes the flask, swallows, chokes momentarily. Mark glances at Daniel.

‘You’d better show me where it is.’

‘It’s a bloody awful sight.’

The grey eyes are dry. ‘I landed at Anzio, old man. And have you ever seen a long-drowned sheep?’

‘For Christ’s sake, we were right on top of the ‘

‘Yes. Well let’s make sure.’

Daniel hesitates, then follows him down the bank to where the reeds stretch across the water.

‘About there.’ He points. ‘In the middle.’

Mark kicks off his shoes and climbs down into the reeds, parts them, then takes a cautious step forward. His leg sinks. He feels for footing further out. Daniel looks round. Jane is standing now in the long grass, watching from forty yards away. Andrew walks towards him, holding out the flask. Daniel shakes his head. The reeds close behind Mark, half-masking him, as he sinks above his knees. Daniel stares at a tuft of purple hyssop on the bank. Two shimmering blue demoiselle dragonflies with ink-stained wings flutter over the flowers, then drift away. Somewhere further up the cut a moorhen croaks. All he can see now is little interstitial glimpses of Mark’s blue shirt between the dense green stems that have closed behind his passage; the susurrus, the squelches and splashes.

Beside him Andrew murmurs, ‘Bet you a fiver she’s a tart. Our gallant American allies again.’ Then he says, ‘Mark?’

‘Roger. I’ve found it.’

But Mark says nothing more. He seems to spend an inexplicable time hidden there in the reeds, silent; occasionally a reed-head bends sideways. In the end he comes heavily back, then clambers up on the grass, wet to the loins, his feet cased in black mud, a stench of stagnancy; and something sweeter in the air, hideous. He grimaces at the two others, glances back towards where Jane is, speaks in a low voice.