Daniel Martin (45 page)

‘Dan, do you think I’m naughty? Should I leave them here?’

It was something to do with that young family, their being native Americans, their brave air of a happy poverty; not with me.

‘I don’t think they’ll be missed.’

‘I so want something to remember these two days by.’

She looked up into my eyes then, with a serious, almost childlike, candour she sometimes had in private. I smiled, since she did not.

‘Then pack them up. If we’re going to catch that plane.’ It was so sad, these sudden bad vibes between us, and not being able to say anything, or rather saying anything but what we ought to have been saying, knowing I’d lost Dan, but not why. Guessing and trying to guess why. Then being frightened. Actually I felt angry, realizing I wish I’d spoken. It’s the most terrible feeling of all, suddenly realizing you don’t know someone. I suspect men like it, or don’t mind it, or don’t notice it. But it destroys women, you’ve no idea. I thought it was that couple with their baby, but I didn’t know.

And you didn’t know what those two days meant to me, because I was thinking all the time, this is what being married to him would be like, on our own, and I knew I’d never want to travel with anyone else, and the nature thing, honestly I was beginning to learn, at least not to want to fight you over it, at least to begin to understand what it was to you… you don’t realize how close to you I’d felt all that second day, the first as well. That’s why I wanted sex, but not just sex. That’s why I laughed at your ravens. You understand so many outer things about women, but I sometimes think none of the inner ones at all. Or perhaps it’s even worse, you know them and pretend you don’t. You know I don’t really know what I think, who I am, where I’m going. That girls like me do really, deep down, need protection societies.

When you withdraw like that, and just ban me.

I wanted to ask you to marry me. I can remember the exact moment, it was when we got back in the car, and you were looking at the map to find the road. No I didn’t, I wanted to cry. I mean, we should have settled it there, one way or the other. We were both cowards. You’ve corrupted me terribly in some way, perhaps the way the English have always conned the Scots. Suggesting your way is somehow subtler, more sophisticated, works better in the end, and our silly Gaelic honesty is just provincial.

There. I’ve written nothing for five minutes, I’ve been crying, just out of spite. Hatred of you. Hatred that you aren’t younger. That you’re so far away. That I shan’t be able to tell you this when we speak next over the phone.

You knew. You should have said something.

Westwards we were on our way by half past ten, despatched in a soup of good feeling and a new resolution. The past was forgotten, we were civilized people now; they must all come and spend a night at Thorncombe, with Caro and myself doing the honours; and I was even, in a moment aside with Nell, commissioned (‘it’s because she won’t talk about it with anyone’) to try to knock some sense into Jane’s recalcitrant head. A shade too much, this philadelphian mood, and partly due to the presence of the various children; and I might have been dry about it with Jane as soon as we left. But I had Paul beside me to do the map-reading, or to pretend to do it, and we were obliged to continue playing parts.

We set off into one of those clear-skied but misty, intensely still winter days not too misty to make driving difficult, but dissolving every view into greyness a mile or two away; the sunlight was endlessly gauzed, the overhead sky only dimly blue. I enjoyed its Englishness: when half of what can be seen is always veiled, can only be imagined The whole day was to have Englishness, roots, at its centre or at least softly looming at all its edges. Paul, after an initial shyness he seemed to wake up every morning with that problem to conquer, proved vulnerable on his current hobbyhorse; though at times he became a little incoherent, suddenly finding himself at brinks where his information abruptly ended, he had acquired an impressive knowledge for a fifteen-year-old, and as far as my own very near total ignorance could tell of medieval agriculture. He did tend to produce facts in a would-you-believe-it kind of way, like the old Ripley strip-cartoon; but facts he possessed… about ‘closed’ and ‘champaign’ (hedged and unhedged) England, manorial systems, the team, plough design and ploughing techniques, rigs and lands and lynchets. He had a folder with him, where it was all drawn. I kept having to snatch glances down as I drove; obviously a very neat painstaking child, not a bad draughtsman, and with a much maturer handwriting than his outward behaviour would have led one to expect. I asked him why he had grown so interested in the subject; a mistake, I ought to have known it is not a question, however tactfully it is put, adults can ask without suggesting concealed condescension. He hesitated a moment.

‘Just I find kings and queens and all that stuff a drag.’

‘So did I. But we never had a choice.’

I told him about the horrors of my own boarding-school then; and Jane joined in from behind… how lucky he was to be his age, we hinted, and at an enlightened place like Dartington. He showed a certain macabre interest in the canings and all the rest I had had to undergo in my own adolescence; and then with a certain puritanical perversity commented that a bit more discipline wouldn’t hurt some of his friends at Dartington. I had a feeling that this was an oblique reproach of his parents for having sent him there; that he wasn’t so ‘difficult’ as they thought. But it may have been a disguised olive-branch to his mother. He reminded me a lot of Anthony: a certain deep stubbornness, which he hadn’t yet learnt to handle, and which certainly didn’t seem redeemed, in however embryonic a form, by his father’s sense of ironic humour but which would probably make him a genuine scholar one day, and possibly a formidably arrogant one. I hadn’t forgotten how he had smashed poor Penny’s returns at the ping-pong table. He was rather pathetically in need of winning something.

Jane didn’t say very much, just enough to coax him if he had forgotten something, or not explained well enough… a shade too much maternal anxiety there, and Paul sensed it; but this time made me his ally, not the scapegoat.

We turned off the A30 at Shaftesbury and went south to find Grimstone Down without difficulty, Paul had done his homework and sat in the Volvo and ate the sandwiches Nell had insisted on giving us. Paul was so eager to start looking that he left us before we finished. We watched him a moment, book in hand, already searching for his Celtic fields.

‘Thank you for being so patient, Dan.’

‘He really has got it up.’

‘I wish he could discover some other key. Between being a sulk and being a bore’. I was in the front, half twisted towards Jane in the back, but I looked through the windscreen to where her son was standing, trying to orientate himself.

‘As long as he finds a girl with a sense of humour.’

‘Some hope.’

‘I don’t know. He’s not bad-looking.’

‘It’s not that. His hatred of being laughed at.’ She added, ‘Roz thinks I fuss about him too much.’

‘Well… speaking from sad experience.’

‘I thought you never knew your mother.’

‘My substitute one. Her fussing prevented me from realizing how much I owed her. Until it was too late.’

‘That’s still better than never at all.’

I glanced back, amused. ‘I always used to envy you two. So cool and casual about being Foreign Office orphans.’

‘We had to be, to survive. All those nannies, screens of servants. Even when we were en poste with them. My father was just someone in evening dress who kissed us goodnight.’ She began gathering up the debris from our lunch. ‘I was sorting through some old photos the other day. There was one of him in all his ambassadorial finery. Quite impossible to shed a tear over… even of anger. Like a tailor’s dummy.’ She said lightly, ‘I think I’d rather fuss.’

‘But it’s not the only alternative?’

‘I do try not to.’

‘I’m hardly one… with Caro on my conscience.’

She left a little pause. ‘We had a talk on the way back, Dan. After we left you yesterday afternoon.’ I had her brown eyes for a moment, then she looked down. ‘I’m going to play a more discreet role in future.’

‘With Caro’s consent, I hope?’

‘Yes, she… agreed.’

‘I’ve tried to follow your advice with her these last ten days.’

‘I felt very bad about that afterwards.’

‘Don’t be silly. You’ve been right from the very beginning about that day at Wytham.’

‘I’ve forgotten.’

‘You said she might need me one day. But not then.’ I smiled.

‘For which I hated you at the time.’

‘It sounds insufferable. I had forgotten.’

‘You were right.’

‘I had no right to say something like that.’

For a moment, what had lain behind that day at Wytham was in the air, but unbreachable.

‘It helped me get through those years, Jane. In retrospect.’

‘They hurt?’

‘Not nearly as much as they should have. Just once intolerably. The first time I brought her down here.’

‘Yes, I do remember that. I heard Nell’s side of it. It upset Caro as well.’

‘It was very strange. We suddenly realized who we were. It went both ways. Also as you predicted.’

‘The infallible Pythia of Wytham.’

‘Long forgiven. And repaid through Caro.’

‘I was so unbearably sure of myself then.’

‘We all were. In one way or another.’

A hundred yards away, down the road, we saw Paul look back, with a vague reproach, towards us. I heard Jane shift.

‘I think we’re due for another lecture. If you could stand it.’

We found Paul set back to discover that things at ground level were a lot more confusing than in an air-shot; but I suggested we walk on and eventually we came to a bend in the lane that we could see on his photograph, and we knew where we were. The deserted upland, brown earth covered in flints, Jane being dutifully interested, Paul holding forth again, a flock of lapwing wheeling over our heads, the soft green Dorset countryside to the south in the pale sunlight, my being treated as human by Paul, suddenly he sought interest and agreement from me rather than his mother, as if any man was better than her. I rewrote history. I had married Jane, he was our son, we had such outings all the time… at least I wondered how different we two adults might have been by then, if we had spent our lives together. I might have been a better writer, or at least a less transient playwright; and perhaps she would have gone on to the career that once beckoned the stage. But I rather doubted whether I should have made her a better woman.

There was some clue in that reference to her well-to-do an largely foreign childhood, not that I hadn’t heard the pros and cons of it discussed often enough in the old days. Jane, and perhaps Nell as well, had always been destined to search for the reality behind the tailor’s dummy; and were probably thereby equally destined to unsatisfactory marriages of one kind or another. It just have been an unconscious factor in Jane’s choice of Anthony. Their mother had always been something of an elegant cipher, far too used to status and money and the petrified hierarchies of the old embassy life ever to abandon their underlying principles. She had not been a fool, in fact rather a dry and amusing woman for her kind, but she was supremely egotistical at heart, a fact that her generosity as a grandmother in terms of presents and money had not concealed from either of her daughters. Nell was much more like her something I had noted again during that weekend; but some streak of the same intense respect for self inhabited Jane as well. It didn’t really matter that she must now despise her mother’s kind of life, whose second-marriage American phase had not differed essentially, give or take a culture, from its first; she still inherited a certain determination to see everything in her own way.

But at least it was a function of looking-for; her son, like his father, was very evidently absorbed by looking-at… he had that same obsessive singularity of purpose, seeing nothing now, or seeming to see nothing, but his field-systems. Any distraction, our stopping a moment to look at the lapwings, another few moments when Jane and I tried to work out from the map, what a hill across the valley with an earthwork on top of it was called, irritated him. One of Anthony’s stances in our student days had been an only partly pretended contempt for poetry, indeed for fine writing of any kind. I remember one of his epigrams: The metaphor is the curse of Western civilization. It had been no good pointing out that all language, even the most logical and philosophical, is metaphorical in origin, it was the rhetorical use of metaphor that was evil… he even tried to condemn Shakespeare once for having written Hamlet instead of clinically forestalling Freud by three hundred years. He wasn’t serious, of course, merely dazzling us with arguments for the impossible. But he had a much more genuine hatred, almost a fear, what could not be collected, classed, precisely defined, noted; I mentioned earlier his obsession with the Dactylorchis group of British wild orchids, which hybridize with bewildering frequency—I think the fluid frontiers between their species seriously upset him, and they were rather less a botanical challenge than nagging flaw in his would-be highly ordered nature of things. Paul consciously or unconsciously, was in his footsteps. Perhaps that was what Jane had really meant by ‘another key’.