Daniel Martin (33 page)

She murmured, ‘Don’t stop. I like it. ‘Snice.’

Which might have come better from me; I spent a brief five seconds examining the moral implications of what was about to happen—then turned out the light and began to examine the physical ones. She was no more innocent than her sister, of course; and at least in the dark, a good deal less prudish.

I regretted my weakness the next morning. Marjory had left the bed, I could hear them both in the kitchen and I knew they had to be faced, which I did with an unassumed dry diffidence. They sat silently at the kitchen table, biting their lips. Then Miriam slid a little look up at me.

“Oo gets top marks then?’

‘Equal first.’

They exchanged looks, then began to giggle; recovered, and that was it. Somehow guilt and embarrassment, all the possible consequences, could not survive with them. I had the sense to let them dictate matters, to observe whatever taboos they felt were still necessary. No other reference was ever made to ‘marks’; I never had them ‘both together’, either. Out of bed I was to show no favouritism indeed, they rather avoided all physical contact with me or insisted that it was shared, that I held each hand in a cinema, whatever it was. Watching television they would usually sit together away from me, like sisters of a much younger age; but they’d been brought up in a tough school, regularly left alone at nights when they were still very small. Despite their nagging, they still liked to feel each other very close.

I remember them talking one day of sharing toys, dolls, their closeness then; and understood a little better how they could share so without jealousy the grownup toy they had found in me.

That was principally it, of course. We somehow hit on a blend of reciprocal curiosity, affection and physical pleasure that was totally free of love. Even the physical pleasure was mostly mine, I suspect; at separate times they both confessed they liked best the lying in the dark and talking. They would often have talked all night, if I hadn’t stopped them. They had been starved all their lives of confession, had never met a professional word-man before, someone who could coax, listen, correct them without hurting them. Marjory especially had a lovely fresh sense of recall, school outings, theatres they had played, music-hall characters, tricks of the trade, relatives. She was a better mimic than Miriam.

One evening they did their former act for me in the living-room; some quite deft footwork in the dancing, but the one song they tried made them break up… and mercifully. Neither had been in tune; and the sad ghost of a dead art, a dying form of entertainment hung over it all. On top of that, I now felt a clear responsibility for them. The first draft of the script had gone off, and the scene into which I had put them I had decided to use both had been passed in principle, but I still couldn’t promise them the parts till the production team came over and casting began. I had warned them, and they hadn’t seemed to care; but I cared. Their agent was pestering them to ‘fill in’ with some of the old work, but they weren’t interested, they used to talk about modelling, cabaret, all sorts of silly ideas; and I became less and less sure I shouldn’t be backing their agent. Deep in both of them there was a driftingness, a fecklessness; or perhaps I should say a courage of the kind Brecht immortalized. As long as they had the price of a cinema ticket and a bag of chips, and somewhere to kip, they would survive. It used to irritate me at times, but I also knew it was a middleclass irritation, a conditioned one.

We lived like that for seven or eight weeks. Then I had to go to New Mexico, where the director-to-be of my script was finishing a Western, to discuss some rewrites. I told them they could stay on in the flat while I was away, and they said they would. But it was not very much of a surprise when I came back late one afternoon just before I was due to leave to find them gone. It had been in the air. Laid out on my desk was an Old Etonian tie they must have seen it in some posh tailor’s and decided I’d like the pattern and a pair of dreadful Siamese cufflinks. I hadn’t taught them everything and I was a little hurt that they hadn’t noticed I never wore cufflinks. Nicer was a bunch of chrysanthemums and nicer still a scrawled note: We’ll never love no one ‘arf as much. I had edged them out of double negatives; and they’d learnt to spell ‘half’ like that from my script. That note, I still have.

I telephoned Hackney, but they weren’t there; and were still not there every time I tried in the two days before I had to leave for the States. Nor could their agent help. A fortnight later, when I came back, I tried him again. I had in the meantime sold the idea of at least testing Miriam and Marjory to the producer and director. But to my horror the agent told me they’d just left for Germany to join a dancing troupe, some nightclub in Munich. He assured me it was ‘straight up’, he strictly didn’t export for the white slave trade, and that he’d let them know the film possibility was much firmer now. He even gave me their address, and I wrote to it. But I never had an answer; and when casting started they still couldn’t be traced. They had left the troupe in Munich only three days after they joined it. Their mother thought they were in Italy, but ‘they never wrote’. Something tired and resigned in her voice gave me a final guilt: I had helped wean them and now she was bereft. I changed their two scenes in the script. I’ve never seen or heard of them since.

They were the two most civilized feminine creatures I have ever known; and I can hear them sniff-and-giggle if they ever read this. They had in retrospect a stunning honesty, and a tact, and an intelligence. Our relationship could never have lasted much longer than it did. But I remember it now as a glimpse of an ideal world, perhaps even of a future: not in some odious male chauvinist sense, the access to two bodies, the indulging in the old harem fantasy, but because it was so free of all the encumbrance, the suppuration, the vile selfishness of romantic love. For two months we made it: without spite, without tears, without possessiveness; with nothing, really, but human profit. And it was mainly their doing, not mine.

Jenny picked up some silly psychology game at work one day, and made me play it. If one had to pick three partners for an eternal desert island, which sex they would be?

‘Three women.’

‘I knew you’d say that.’

‘Then you needn’t have asked.’

‘Balanced men say one man and two women.’

‘Certainly better for mixed doubles.’

‘What you don’t know is that three women means you hate women. You want to see them destroy one another.’

‘I once knew two who never would. That leaves me only one to find.’

‘It jolly well wouldn’t be me.’

‘Then that leaves us two to find.’

But she wasn’t mollified. ‘Who were they?’

‘Angels in disguise.’

‘You’re making them up.’

‘One day I shall make you up.’

‘What makes you think you’re not doing that already?’

‘Against the rules.’

‘What rules?’

‘Of the present tense.’

‘Pig.’ I smiled, but she didn’t. ‘I keep having to revise what I hate about you most. I’ve now decided it’s the loathsome way you use other people’s games to play your own.’

And I recalled then something one of the two sisters, I can’t remember which, had once said to me.

‘What I like about living with you’s the way you make it all like a game. Like it doesn’t matter. ‘Slong as we’re all happy.’

An apparent compliment, at least inside the walls of Jane’s once admired abbey; but I had remembered it because it had hurt, faintly, even then. The frustration I felt when they disappeared may have been partly that of thwarted generosity, of not fulfilling the offer I had used to seduce them. Time may have made it partly a source of pleasure, as Jenny was to claim. Yet there has always been a sense in which those two have haunted me, as the dead haunt, making missed opportunities eternal and making even this exorcism by the written word a vain and empty thing. It is not that I wish it had never happened, or that I do not accept that it had had to end. I simply wish they knew they never really left.

I gave them a little money, a temporary haven, a few facts about life. In return I received, though I did not see it at the time, a lasting lesson on the limitations of my class, my education and my kind. I have called them ‘Miriam’ and ‘Marjory’ here, but I suspect better names could have been found among those of nine far more famous sisters: Clio and Thalia, perhaps.

‘You mean Christ, Dan, what you been doin’ all your life? Your age… and you never been to the bloody dogs!’ She grimaces across me at Marjory, mouths like a gossiping old backyard mum. ‘It’s ‘is books. ‘E loves ‘is books.’ Marjory mouths silently back. Miriam sprawls forward across the kitchen table on an elbow. I am no longer there. ‘Shall we take ‘im then? Just for jokes? ‘Course we’d ‘ave to make ‘im promise not to talk posh. Case they chuck ‘un outa the stadium.’ Marjory puffs, stifling a giggle. Miriam tilts her head, surveys me with a blithe mock ignorance. ‘D’you reckon you could be’ave like an ornery ‘ooman bloke, Dan? Just for one evenin?’

Miriam has very clear grey-blue eyes. They taunt, they live, and I envy with all my heart every man who has had them since.

It began inauspiciously. Barney was already primed when we met at the restaurant and if I’d had any sense I should have turned straight round and walked out before we spoke a word. He wore an appropriately wry and circumstantial grin as I approached, but his eyes said something else. We met for a chess-game and however many sacrifices he might make on the surface, his strategy was not to lose it: at least to fight on for a drawn match. I was warned at once. He would use any too obvious anger I showed. We were to play with English pieces.

Anthony’s death at least took care of the preliminaries. This was three days after the little heart-to-heart with Caro, and the suicide had been reported briefly in the national papers. There had been a short obituary in the Times; and of course Barney would have heard all about it from Caro herself. He was a good enough newspaperman to have guessed that a story lay behind the public facts, but he was preternaturally uninquiring there, I suspected on Caro’s advice. It must have been damned awful for me, he could imagine what a shock… we ordered, and he asked for another double gin and tonic.

Once again I tried to see him through Caro’s eyes that is, tried to ignore a couple of discreet raised hands to other entering customers, chat with the head waiter, the reek of the expense-account life around us. It seemed a highly unnecessary place to meet; an uncharacteristic tautology. I did not have to be reminded that he was a successful ‘personality’ now.

He did finally broach the matter, though with his eyes on his glass, not in my direction. We were on a wall-bench, side by side.

‘I hope Caro’s told you how bad I feel about not telling you on the plane, Dan. I frankly didn’t know how to play it.’

‘I’m not blaming you for that.’

He gave and his old twisted smile. ‘But you are blaming.’

‘Wouldn’t you?

‘I suppose so.’ There was an awkward pause. ‘I’ve never exactly been top of your list of favourite people. I realize that.’ I refused the offer to deny the valuation. He took another mouthful of gin. ‘Look, Dan, the reason I felt we ought to meet…’

The waiter brought my smoked salmon—Barney had said he was trying to lose weight and he had to break off a moment. The place seemed full of people like us: klatsches of men, very few women, talking business, doing deals. Next to us on my side there was evidently a publisher and one of his authors: I heard talk of some disappointing American sale. It was ‘their’ fault, not the author’s… he was above transatlantic heads. I knew from the publisher’s orotund voice that he wouldn’t have known a transatlantic head if it had been sitting on the plate in front of him, but the pen seemed happy to imbibe the sepia.

‘It’s categorically not having a bit on the side. She’s the nicest thing that’s happened to me in years.’ I squeezed the lemon over the pink flesh, and trusted he noted the parallel. ‘I mean that. Very seriously.’

‘I think I’d be happier if she was just a bit on the side.’

He was silenced a moment. The publisher had high hopes of Germany. I began eating. ‘That’s hardly fair to Caro, is it?’

‘I don’t want her hurt, that’s all. She’s a good deal less sophisticated than she sometimes makes out.’

‘I wouldn’t like her so much if I wasn’t aware of that.’

‘Then you know what I mean.’

‘I’ve told her. She wants to forget the whole thing, she only has to say. She knows what I am, Dan.’ I began to resent this insidious lapping of my name against the stone in my face, and he may have sensed it. He said, ‘Perhaps better than you do. Behind all the shit.’

‘Dear man, I’m not concerned with what you are. Simply with what might happen to her.’

‘You seem pretty certain I must have a bad effect.’

The wine came and he tasted it impatiently. It was poured, set in the ice-bucket. I decided to move my bishop.

‘As you know, I’ve recently acquired a girlfriend who’s not much older than Caro. You’re not going to catch the pot calling the kettle black, Barney. But I know damn well that whatever they fall for, it’s not our youth and blue eyes. There must be something unhealthy in it. At least on their side.’

‘Hardly be for lack of choice, can it?’

‘That’s not the point.’

Neither of us wanted to be overheard, and all this part of the conversation was conducted in a tacitly conspiratorial way.

‘You forget I’m an old hand at the unhealthy relationship. I’ve had a bloody lifetime at it.’

‘Your marriage?’

He drew a breath.

‘I believe that’s what some people call it.’

I ate my salmon. ‘Presumably something’s kept it alive.’

‘The usual happy blend of sadism and masochism.’

‘Come on.’

He left a pause. ‘You’re lucky, Dan. You’ve missed all that.’

‘All what?’

‘When you get beyond the hatred to the inertia. When you’ve metaphorically buggered each other so often that it’s become a way of life.’ I said nothing, and he tried again: a little more honestly. ‘It’s the kids. You know. At least she’s never taken it out on them. We made a deal. Her price for letting me go my own unsweet way. I’m not really complaining.’

‘I’ve forgotten how old the youngest is.’

‘Twelve. I’m hardly free yet, if that’s what you mean.’ He eyed me surreptitiously. ‘I’ve told Caro all about it. It may be a mockery, but if that’s the way Margaret wants her pound of flesh, it’s not something I feel I can welsh on.’

It was absurd: now he was defending his decency as a bastard.

‘I haven’t the least desire to see you make an honest woman out of Caro.’

‘I didn’t imagine you did, dear boy. I’m just trying to explain the situation.’

‘Your wife knows?’

‘That side of my life is my own business. Part of the treaty.’ He stared across the room, then leant back; began sacrificing again. ‘I got so pissed off with intellectual women at Oxford. I used to envy you. Your lot. Never quite making it with you. I sort of fell for Margaret by reaction. As if I really did believe the clever ones bored me. Instead of just wanting them. My old man was a railwayman, I don’t know if you remember.’

‘Vaguely.’

I remembered well, in fact. He had brought it up rather gratuitously in one of the interviews I’d watched.

‘All that Methodist bullshit. Marks you for life, once you’ve been through it. The myth of the nice little woman.’ He gave a subdued snort. ‘I didn’t get the other side of the message. It takes a nice little man as well.’

I finished eating and leant back; and joined him in staring across the crowded room.

‘You can hardly have picked on Caro for her brains.’

‘I’ve had the clever ones since then. Clever and nothing else.’ He paused. ‘I don’t want to sound offensive, Christ knows we all moan about our kids. But I don’t think Caro’s brainless by a long chalk. Okay, she’s disappointed you academically. But she’s got quite a gift for handling people. Getting their number. And I don’t just mean on the blower.’

‘I’m glad to hear it.’

I can’t have sounded it, and he left another small silence.

‘I don’t know if she told you, but she was out of her depth in the office at the beginning. I wanted to help her find her feet a little.’ I waited. ‘I’ve never gone in for the Fleet Street droit-du-seigneur game. That’s not how it happened. I would like you to believe that. I was… taken by surprise as well. I know what it must seem on the face of it.’ He glanced to see how it seemed on my face. ‘I fully understand you must feel you need this like a hole in the head. But between Caro and myself she gives me a lot, Dan. I hope I manage to give her something in return. Something that as a matter of fact I thought was dead in me.’

Once again he was silenced, as our Dover soles were brought and served.

‘As long as it’s not a desire to take a permanent lien on her life.’

‘You said yourself, we’re a little bit in the same boat. At least give me credit for sharing some of your feelings.’

There was a sharper edge in his voice.

‘Okay, Barney.’

‘That’s not at issue. If I could just get it across that I think she’s a smashing girl, that she’s made me very happy, that I don’t want to hurt her. That I didn’t pick on her. It came totally out of the blue. A two-way thing.’

Against my will, I began to feel he was trying to say the truth, at least as regards the unexpectedness. Perhaps there had always been something profoundly anomalous in him, atavistic, beneath the hardboiled persona… I knew there must be something more in his marriage, however slightingly he spoke of it, than what could be described by words like ‘deal’ and ‘treaty’. There also a parallel existed between us: his Methodist upbringing, my Church of England one. The shared rebellion, the enduring guilt at levels deeper than logic and reason can ever purge: it was an uncomfortable feeling, like finding oneself in the same cell, and for the same crime, as a man one repudiated on every other ground. I picked up my knife and fork.

‘Shall we leave it at this?’

‘Has Caro suggested anything different to you?’

‘No.’ I began to dissect the sole.

‘It was decent of you to come. I realize you didn’t want to.’

‘I loathe having to play the Victorian papa. In this context, it’s doubly absurd.’

‘One’s dear old home-grown Eumenides.’

‘If you want to put it that way.’

He was still smoking, drinking wine now, indifferent to his food, but watching me at mine. ‘She’s terrified of hurting you—you know that?’

‘I’m prepared to be hurt as long as she’s happy. I’ve no right to any other attitude. I’ve tried to tell her that.’

I had a feeling he’d have liked to go on, and we should have entered a discussion of Caro’s feelings about Nell and myself. But perhaps he guessed that I would not have allowed it.

‘How’s the sole?’

‘Excellent.’

‘They try. More than you can say for most these days.’

He began eating, and we passed on to American food; then other things, leaving Caro in parenthesis, the match duly drawn. I felt depressed, secretly angry at not having been angrier, at having been so determined not to lay myself open to attack, and brought under scrutiny as a parent. I saw myself, too, in Jenny’s father’s place. She was a late and youngest child and her parents, her father was a doctor in Cheshire, were both in their early sixties. We had never really discussed all that, either. They knew about us, she assured me they were broadminded, they wanted her to lead her own life. Someone stopped by our table on his way out, another face from television, though its owner was better known as a columnist. I had read a piece by him only that morning, written with the mordant wit that was his trademark—and his downfall. Over the years he had downed too much to have his moments of
saeva indignatio
taken very seriously. I was introduced, there was a little barbed backchat between him and Barney a different and somehow much more real Barney, on guard, on duty, wearing his fencing-mask. Apparently the man was to appear shortly on Barney’s programme, the thrust and parry was mainly about that. Barney asked me what I thought of him, when he went off. I said something about finding him a shade wasted: a potential Junius who had sold out to his own lesser gift.

‘I want to have a go at him on that.’

‘Without forewarning him?’

‘He knows he’s good enough to have it asked why he isn’t better.’ It was said drily. Then Barney shrugged. ‘Anyway, who could be a Junius in a culture that’s forgotten how to read?’

‘But he hasn’t done too badly out of it?’

‘Oh sure.’ Once again he was dry. ‘The best we have.’

I smiled; and wondered whether that famous putting-down Barney had just appropriated, of a bad prime minister by a jealous rival, was not the single most English remark of the post-war years; behind all our discourse, and well beyond the political. What had gone wrong was less people than climate; less men than milieu and the particular one we were in, that day, seemed most to blame. At all those tables, other men like us and there really did seem, though it must have been fortuitous, an absence of younger or older faces other middle-aged men hustling each other or preparing to hustle the world outside, in some ultimate treachery of the clerks.

Dan knew he had no right to stand aside, since the commercial cinema must certainly be counted as one of the audience-manipulating media; but he felt a nausea. So many other students he had known at Oxford had been sucked down into this world, with all its illusions of instant power; were in politics now, in television, on Fleet Street; had become cogs in the communication machine, stifled all ancient conviction for the sake of career, some press-lord’s salary. Barney had gone on to mention one of the other undergraduates who had shared their lodgings, who had then been a good deal further to the left than the rest of them; and who had spent the last fifteen years in the Beaverbrook empire… had stayed a socialist in private, according to Barney. Dan remembered him well, he had been rather an Orwellian figure, an austere and sardonic young odd-man-out, despising both of them. They had used to call him Krupskaya’s darling, he had pleased their landlady. Barney said it was a matter of compartments.

‘The one union you’d better be fully paid up with if you want to stay on Fleet Street is the Amalgamated Society of Schizophrenics.’