Daniel Martin (31 page)

He has a mistress. Her name is Loss.

All this is bound up with what I’ve learnt about America.

I have to imagine a secret Dan who actually likes loss, both all he’s lost in the past and all he has still to lose. In some way to him loss is a beautiful, fertile thing. I don’t mean he wallows in it or moans about it (that would reveal too much), but he’s discovered that he’s much happier as a self-appointed loser than as a winner. It was there during the phone-call when his ex and her sister spoke to him. A kind of excitement as he sniffed a lovely old loss-area. Now what’s happened is that I too have become a potential loss-area. That’s why he’s so tender, so outwardly understanding: he’s really saying, quite literally, get lost. The more I think of it, the more creepy it becomes. Like some strangler caressing a girl’s neck and quietly weeping because he’s going to kill her in a few minutes.

I half believe the man is such a fool he thinks this is rather romantic. When all it really is is Romantic with a big R, straight out of my unfavourite period in literature.

One’s misled, but only because he isn’t standing over a stormy sea or racing round the Blethering Heights in a wild Byronic hairdo. But that’s truly what he is: a professional melancholic, and enjoying every minute of it. He didn’t ask me to marry him up in the Mojave, he asked me to refuse to marry him. I feel livid now that I didn’t say yes. Just to have called his bluff.

It enrages me to think that I even once saw him as Mr Knightley to my Emma. I must have been mad.

What I’ve decided I like about America (you were like dark glasses, I’ve seen so much more since you left) is that they simply don’t understand this awful English attachment to defeat and loss and self-negation. I hated the Prick two days ago. He came in feeling depressed about something, and my God, didn’t he let us know it. Almost his best performance yet. But at least he wanted to do something about it, wasn’t hiding it. The stiff upper lip is absurd, henceforth disown it completely. I will not be a vase and ashes on someone’s mantelpiece.

You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed. It’s a nation of automata piling down the freeways in search of a life that isn’t worth having anyway. What a joke that word is: freeway. Then their obsession with doing things by the book—if the book says this or that makes you happy, you must be happy. You suddenly realize how astoundingly free (or at least suspicious of other people’s recipes) society is at home. That’s why I fell in love with Dan. He seemed free in an unfree culture, and I was scared. Partly because I know California is the future and England is already a thing in a museum, a dying animal in a zoo. No pride left (or what pride there is, in the wrong things) and so all intent on dying nice and quietly. Wrinkle City time. I was hating America (or this part of it) and feeling hopeless about home. Nowhere to go except him.

Then slowly tiny things dawn on you and you see you’ve got America a bit wrong: that perhaps all the stupidity and the tastelessness and the inequality and the violence and the conformity are just the price of keeping a national energy alive. They exploit themselves so foully in many minor ways, ones we’d never tolerate at home. That day you took me round Fisherman’s Market, just to show me how they’ve bred their fruit and vegetables to fit Madison Avenue notions of what they ought to look like. Huge red A-for-apple apples tasting like sugary sponge. Gigantic insipid tomatoes, huge flavourless lettuces. The heresy that size and looks are everything, all other values nothing. Which you see in the way the brainwashed ones talk, entertain, behave. Idiotic cheap models of how successful people should dress, speak, furnish their houses.

The woman who told me she had to drive thirty miles in wherever-it-was for what she called ‘butcher’s meat’, as if it was some fantastic delicacy like genuine Beluga or French truffles. That lovely decal. Supermarkets save time. But for what?

I know Mildred cooks like an angel, and there are good restaurants. But you keep thinking, thank God for Europe and tiny little Uflambitjo tradesmen… who are really craftsmen, and respected as such. I know some people here know. Abe, I went at him about this the other day and he made a natch joke about it: If Americans ever figure out how they sell themselves so much they don’t need and don’t want, they’ll all try to emigrate back to Europe.

And yet there’s a sort of forwardness, an independence, a lack of servility. A hope. At least the will, if not the means. The way they use English, instead of letting it use them. Things we have no notion of. So I begin to see it as a choice of how you pay the bill. At home we do it by being apathetic and hierarchical, by clinging to the past. Here they do it by looking forward to a dream world, where everyone succeeds, everyone’s rich and happy. Horrors like the supermarkets and the freeways and the smog and the sprawl are just incidents on the road there. The wagon-trail myth. Today’s problems aren’t problems, but proofs of tomorrow’s new frontier. You drive on, at all costs. With us, you make do with what you are. They’re eternally stuck in the first few pages, when we reached the last chapter ages ago.

I remember, do you, Dan arguing with me that the uniqueness of the Anglo-Saxon race-mind was its mania for equality. Claiming it can be seen right back, even in feudal times. Magna Carta, Parliament, the common law and all the rest. But with us it reached its zenith in the seventeenth century. Cromwell and the Commonwealth. We had our chance then, and funked it. Or rather, those who wouldn’t funk it took the chance over with them to America. Of course the American soul has become hopelessly mixed. But there’s still something about it of the other English road. Dan said once, This is where Cromwell never died. I laughed, I could see the old boy standing beside Sunset in his iron top and leather boots. Sorry, folks. Dan didn’t think it was funny.

But what I don’t see (to the point at last) is how he can believe this and yet secretly remain so English, of the English who queued up to cheer Charles II back ashore. If only he could pick up a little of the American faith in themselves. In the present, however bad. If I had a magic wand, I’d wave it over his head and leave him just as he is, but American. It’s a shame, really. He was born into the wrong culture. He makes me feel so free, by comparison. I don’t think this is just the age thing. Mildred said something shrewd about him. She’d said, Dan’s the most English Englishman I ever met. And I said, But he isn’t typical at all, really. She shook her head: Honey, he’s just learnt to hide it. That’s all.

We’ve talked a lot about him, by the way. I sense she wants to tell me things she knows and I don’t. Other women, perhaps. And she wants me to tell her things I know. We fence, but affectionately. She has great tact. The official state of play is just a temporary separation. I don’t want anyone else’s opinion on us, however well-meant.

I’m more than half writing to myself, you know that. Telling you all this nonsense you first told me. But vain thing, you’ll know what that means as well. I don’t really mean it about dark glasses.

I miss you so much. Every hour of every day. And night.

Next morning. I will send this, after all. I’ve just asked the two quails, and they said it makes no sense but if I loved you, I should.

This was yet to come, of course. But one little Jenny-coined epithet needs a gloss. It derives from a story Dan told her, perhaps the saddest and most revealing of all native American jokes.

A Brooklyn boy gets a job as a stable-lad in a plush Long Island mansion. Each morning he saddles a horse and leads it round to the front of the mansion and waits for the daughter of the house to come down the steps and go for her ride. He falls in love with her so badly that he begins to mope, to eat nothing. One day the stable-master takes the boy on one side. The boy tells him what it’s all about; how the girl never speaks to him, never looks at him, seems unaware he exists.

‘Listen,’ says the older man, ‘you gotta do sump’n with dames they have to notice.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like paint her horse orange. She has to notice that. You get talking. Then you’re in.’

That night the boy paints the horse bright orange from nose to tail. The next morning he saddles it up, then leads it round to the steps in front of the house. The girl comes down, stops, stares at the horse, then at the boy holding it.

‘Someone’s painted that horse orange!’

‘Yeah. Me. Let’s fuck.’

It is, of course, the women in Dan’s life; not the men. Perhaps there was always some cunning streak of homosexuality in him, even though he had never, since his first years at boarding-school, felt any physical attraction towards the gay world. But in his relationships with his own sex there had always seemed an incompleteness: even with Anthony, with Abe, with a handful of other men he had known well over the years. He had very rarely sought male company for pleasure, perhaps because it threatened his always precarious sense of uniqueness. He saw himself too easily in other masculine faces, mannerisms, machismos, ambitions, failings; his own sex always seemed to lack the variety and unpredictability of women, they could be told, whereas all interesting women had to tell themselves, slowly and subtly if they were really to please him; and not consciously so, but in their nature.

One can’t dissociate the kind of man he is from the vulgarest kind of vanity, the Casanova aspect of the beast; from the notched tally, the quite literal cocksureness; but his real attitude there was at least partly, he would say centrally, botanical, botanical in his twist of the word, not the normal and proper sense, such as Anthony had demonstrated. It was not categorizing and counting, but searching. He liked looking for women who would interest him, for new specimens; or more accurately, he expected the events, hazards and situations of his professional life to provide encounters. He was even rather passive about this, rarely making the first move, but letting the new face and psyche display itself to him before he showed his own cards. He had never slept with a prostitute or at least with a clear professional; and the two women he had coupled with only once have both been mentioned. That side of a relationship had never seemed an end in itself; and he had always despised, or more latterly, pitied, the men for whom he knew it was.

He was arguably not even looking for women in all this, but collecting mirrors still; surfaces before which he could make himself naked or at any rate more naked than he could before other men and see himself reflected. A psychoanalyst might say he was searching for the lost two-in-one identity of his first months of life; some solution for his double separation trauma, the universal one of infancy and the private experience of literally losing his mother. He had in the past applied Freudian theory, insofar as the subject can be his own analyst, to his own history. But the trouble there was that he had always led a reasonably happy sex-life. Whatever Freudian horrors and truths he might arrive at by the book seemed denied by reality: he was neither dissatisfied nor guilt-ridden as he was. He enjoyed both his comparatively casual and his longer-lasting affaires; he occasionally felt sad when they were over, but never for very long. Very simply, he enjoyed the process of knowing each. Indeed, as he grew older, this pleasure became less and less dependent on sexual involvement; almost more fun, that one had to decipher a Caro or as just now, a Jane, without the benefit of the closer context.

All of which Jenny is to get slightly wrong: his mistress was not loss so much as that he expected the loss of all his mistresses, and in more or less direct proportion to his discovery of them. There were always, inevitably, elements of callousness, selfishness, self-secrecy. One cannot tell another human being: I’ve examined you, experienced you, learnt from you, and it’s been amusing and interesting, but now I’d like to move on, without some infliction of pain.

A novel is written in the two past tenses: the present perfect of the writer’s mind, the concluded past of fictional convention. But in terms of the cramped and myopic fictional present… if Jenny accuses Dan (has still, of course, in the chronology of this reconstruction, hardly put pencil to paper, let alone had Dan read the result) of a love of loss, she is being disingenuous, since she knows he likes her too much to hurt her; that if she insists, they continue. Above all she knows he knows that behind her reproaches lies a very old-fashioned little nucleus of personal vanity; a myth of permanence. She will not be one of a chain, she will last. Because Dan like Britain herself has a sharp sense of the relativity of all supposed absolutes, she supposes him defeated—for which she mustn’t be blamed, since he wears that mask at times. Yet it is much more a mask of excuse, a sacrificial pawn, than an emblem of some deep truth, or true presentiment in him.

My other two sisters: a fable.

I met them in London at the party following a private showing in the late 1950s, a year after I had split, true to pattern but amicably with Andrea. The film had nothing to do with me, I was simply there as a casual friend of the director, and I had come meaning to stay no longer than courtesy required for the usual drinks and hyperbole afterwards.

However, some of the cattle were there as well, including two girls who had had small parts in one sequence. They couldn’t act, but they photographed well, and I had caught a glimpse of something piquant. It so happened that I had come to the showing with a script problem of my own. I was halfway into that early attempt at a cross-racial love-story that was finally released (with a compromise ending I foolishly let myself be talked into) as Dark Encounter. It was to be shot here, to get the Easy money. I had down a very long scene between these two main characters that needed breaking—an interlude, some little bit of side-play that broke tension and might also snag the white hero’s otherwise too smooth progression towards his black girl; something to remind him that pigskin also has its charms.

After the two girls had done their short scene, during the showing, my mind had wandered off the screen, or through it, to my own embryo picture. I saw a way of using them, then several ways; a potentiality of development. Minor characters in scripts are rather like knights in chess: limited in movement, but handy in their capacity for quick turns, for fixing situations. I hadn’t noticed what the final credits revealed as two sisters before lights went out, but I was interested to see them there afterwards and promptly got myself into conversation with the more available.

Her name was Miriam, though she wasn’t Jewish; but as Cockney as the Mile End Road, a fact that had been coached out of her voice in the two or three lines she had spoken during the film. She had an oddly delicate face, a slim little body, rather striking clothes; and an equally pretty blend of naïvety and suspicion. All this was before the London working-class came into their own, and the type was very fresh, at least to me. I was much more familiar with vacuous young starlets from the Home Counties (or who at least aped that background) asking to be tossed to the nearest fat old shark in Wardour Street and whose only notion of a Cockney accent was to replace an impeccable middleclass a by an impeccable middleclass i. Miriam was making some attempt at gentility, but her real voice kept breaking through.

Whatever else, she wasn’t stale flesh. She wanted to know who I was, at first wouldn’t believe me (‘You’re all such bloody liars in this business’); then more than made up for it (‘Oh fantastic d’you reelly write that?’). It was all career-furthering, of course, and in someone less engaging I should have fled a mile from it. But she amused me. I got her to talk about herself and discovered she was very far from new to show business or at least one branch of it. Both her father and mother had worked the halls; and so had she and her sister. She pretended to be shocked that I had never heard of the Fairy Sisters. It had been dancing and a bit of crooning, ‘only we couldn’t reelly do neether, you know, it was criminal we even got paid’ a sniff and a gauche grimace ‘sometimes.’ I gathered it had been mostly summer seaside work, concert parties. Their agent had got wind of the two bit parts in the present film, and they had been taken on. I presumed at the usual fee, since I noticed her younger sister across the room seemed permanently attached to the producer’s side: a man I knew was a well-known old goat. From time to time she threw covert glances across at where Miriam stood with me. I had from both an impression of innocence, behind the knowingness.

I decided I could use Miriam, and perhaps her sister as well; and even that it would be a pity also not to try to use this chips-and-vinegar voice rather more than I had at first envisaged. A better director might get a better performance. I was attracted, too; she had a kind of homemade style, a rather prescient one, as it turned out, in terms of clothes and class. I said there might be a bit of work in the script I was doing, couldn’t promise anything, but maybe we could have lunch together She fluttered her eyelashes. ‘Yeah. And…?’

‘I’d be much more devious if I wanted that.’

‘Much more what?’

‘Straightforward.’

She sniffed. ‘I’ll bet.’ Then she said, ‘You wouldn’t catch me comin’ on me own.’

‘As many bodyguards as you like.’

She didn’t in fact take much persuading. We compromised, as regarded chaperones; her sister would be present. Her name was Marjory, but Miriam called her the Drag. Punctuality was not her strong suit, it seemed.

Either of them’s strong suit, as I was soon to learn. They appeared late, and without apology, for the lunch. They looked out of place, and they both knew it, were biting their lips and sniffing at each other as soon as they had sat down. I knew this hadn’t happened very often to them before. Under the not totally false pretence of needing to know their backgrounds better if I was going to write them in, I pumped them. They began to thaw. They had, for the world they were now in, a delicious lack of self-consciousness. It was all a game, fun, codding and being codded. I soon felt a little like an uncle giving two school-kids a treat. They enjoyed everything so: the food, the wine, the other people around us, the money being spent. They were also curious about me. I talked about Hollywood and dropped a few famous names, because I knew they wanted to hear them; and then went on to be more honest about the movie business than they can have been used to. I wasn’t promising anything definite. The younger sister, Marjory the Drag, who was perhaps the prettier of the two, was also the less loquacious; a hint of something drier, or more sullen, about her… at any rate, remaining more on her guard, rather as if she were the elder sister. She was nineteen, Miriam a year older.

There must have been some prearranged signal. But a shade too abruptly the Drag was gathering her things.

‘Sorry. I got a date.’

I asked who it was with, when she’d left. Miriam shrugged.

‘I dunno. Some bloke.’

I suggested the name of the producer.

‘That’s just nights.’

‘I’ve roughed out a scene. Would you like to come and read it?’

‘Yeah, okay. You promise you won’t laugh.’ There was no suspicion now; only a becoming modesty, and I had trouble not smiling.

On the way back to the flat in a taxi, she suddenly broke into what I was saying.

‘Honest, you don’t ‘ave to spiel. I been around.’

‘I’m not kidding you about the picture.’

‘I know.’ She gave one of her sniffs. ‘I ‘ad you checked out.’

‘Good.’

‘Couldn’t work out at the showin’ whether you was a crook or just bloody daft.’

‘And now?’

‘Obvious, innit? Now you know ‘ow dumb we reelly are.’

But that went with a pressed mouth and a grin that wasn’t dumb at all, and cut any amount of normal dialogue.

And that was that. We did go through a brief pretence of reading the scene—she wasn’t very good, but by then neither of our minds were on the script. When it came to it, she was out of her clothes and into bed before I was; and the same blend of opposites in her behaviour out of bed carried there as well. She contrived to be both gently prudish and very far from sexual ignorance; shy and inquisitive; cool and affectionate; both aware she was nice to go to bed with and a little bit puzzled as to why I should take the bother.

There was only one false note. We were still lying there, and she said, ‘D’you want me to ‘op it now?’

‘Do you want to go?’

‘Not if you don’t want me to.’

So I set about discovering her. She and the Drag still officially lived at home, in what I grew to think of, by the way they exaggeratedly pronounced it, as Orrible Acne. They wished they didn’t, there were always rows, less those of Cockney puritanism (‘I mean, they couldn’t, all accounts me dad’s been the randiest old bastard of em all’) than of professional fear. The parents did some kind of old-Style patter-and-song routine, got up as a pearly King and Queen, an act the two girls had once been part of. It was a sort of jealousy, she thought; an envy ‘cos we’re tryin’ to makes lives of our own’. And it was stupid, she’d been let into the bloody facts of life when she was fifteen, and they knew all about it, and who it was, and did nothing about it. It had been a member of an acrobatic team on the same bill. ‘I was soppy daft about ‘im, you know, didn’t give the poor bleeder a chance reelly. Me mum wanted to take ‘im to court, only I said I’d say that. You know, if ‘e’d… but fair’s fair, innit?’ There’d been a lot of blokes since, but they hadn’t lasted; she was growing out of Horrible Hackney and its young men. And her sister?

‘Oh Gawd. Honestly… ‘e’s such a bloody old pervert. ‘E fancies me as well. Know what I mean?’

‘I can guess.’

‘I told ‘im, get lost. Wish she would.’

After a moment she said, in a tone of briskly indifferent curiosity that was very characteristic, ‘Am I okay? You like me?’

I proved I liked her. Then we slept a little, and it was half past six. I was ahead of schedule on the script. We agreed that she’d stay the night, then we went to see a film and had a late supper. When we got back she telephoned her parents in Hackney; it was the briefest of calls. She wouldn’t be back; she was fine. With a friend. I know what I’m doing, mum. Then, Well, that’s ‘er business, innit? She put the receiver down and pulled a lugubrious face at me.