Daniel Martin (54 page)

I doubted if Anthony had ever truly realized the role he was meant to play. He had possessed intellectual gifts of fidelity, honesty and tolerance in many things; but no natural capacity for emotion, let alone passion. He had come himself from a happy and normal family background how could he have shared her secret, even with a far better balance between thinking and feeling? Jane would have retreated again behind a new mask, much drier, cooler, smoother-armoured, far less penetrable, until it formed a crust that could not be broken which might explain her apparent calm over the loss of her friend at Harvard. He must have been, however different in outward personality, another form of Anthony, a liaison entered upon almost as a perverse proof on her side that the original problem remained insoluble.

I began to see a chain of dim points, the first faint outline of her constellation, the inner destiny I had never perceived in our past: the silences, the pretence that she had no conventional faces left (a claim her behaviour denied all the time), the constant to-and-fro between the woman who argued every step and the woman who declared herself unreasonable; who asserted, then backed down; who had no hope for herself, but would not accept hopelessness in anyone else. Then there was that one revealing phrase about the heart aching for a huge step and the bizarre political step she had proposed as a substitute… and its constantly hinted motive, universal worry, universal concern, her revised lay version of the old Christian escape from practical responsibility. I had heard my father, not two miles from that room, preach too often about universal love and the brotherhood of the church ever to have had much time for rhetorical and abstract sympathy of that kind.

The comparison between Jane and my father is not fair, of course. She didn’t preach, but had it dragged out of her; and was far more aware than he had ever been of the difference between creed and action, doxa and praxis. Yet just as I had been so deeply formed by antipathy, so had she. My father had talked love, but seldom been able to show it in the flesh; hers had simply not shown it at all. And her case had been worse on the distaff side. I could hardly accuse the mother I had never known of not loving me. But Jane’s had shadowed all her life until recently: a woman who had essentially never quitted the shallow, well-heeled 1920s of her youth.

This says what took less time to think… or to feel, because it was more an emphatic insight than anything very consciously arrived at. It was a somewhat odd and paradoxical experience, in fact; a feeling that despite all the outward differences that had to be absorbed in meeting after so many years the changed ways, views, appearance, the loss of sexuality, all the alienations of intervening circumstance despite all of this, I perhaps saw her better now than ever before. Vanity played its part: one of those rare moments when one can concede more depth of understanding as opposed to confirmation of prejudice to growing older. I felt a kind of dry tenderness of time; its wheels, that we should be come together again in that silence; hardly a present sisterliness in her, but at least a memory of it. Of course the ghost of that one carnal knowledge of her, though long become far more an emotional memory, did still faintly haunt the air, as the Reeds would for evermore haunt the house we sat in. But I knew something in Jane’s presence satisfied some deep need in me of recurrent structure in both real and imagined events; indeed, married the real and imagined; justified both.

Our silence.

And withdrawing. I spoke, guessing at where her mind had wandered. ‘If I were a doctor, I think I’d recommend something very traditional and simple. Like a holiday.’

‘That’s what my real doctor says. I suspect just to get me out of her hair for a few weeks. Poor thing.’

‘She knows…?’

‘About Anthony and me? Yes. She’s divorced herself. We’ve grown quite close friends over the years. She’s made rather a speciality of unhappy North Oxford wives.’

‘Too close for you to take her advice?’ She shrugged. ‘I’m sure it’s excellent. In itself.’ She made another face. ‘If it didn’t seem so like chapter one in a woman’s magazine story. Our lonely heroine looking for Mr Right at the nearest ski-resort.’

‘Such cynicism.’

‘Cowardice, Dan. I don’t think I could face that sort of experience at the moment.’

I waited, watching her; hesitated, then joined her in staring at the fire.

‘I have a wild idea, Jane. It’s just come to me. Really off the top of my head. Would you be prepared to listen to it?’

‘I thought I had the corner in wild ideas.’

‘Not quite.’ I stood. ‘Just let me get a little more Dutch courage. You won’t…?’

She shook her head, and I went away to the cupboard, and began talking.

‘I have to go to Egypt for a few days soon. About the script. Cairo, then down to Aswan. They run rather a jolly one-week cruise down the Nile. From Luxor.’ I turned and smiled back at her. ‘Why don’t you come?’

She stared at me for a moment, as if I couldn’t be serious.

‘Purely, in all senses of the word, as an old friend.’

She let out a breath.

‘Dan, I couldn’t possibly. I didn’t mean…’

I topped my whisky with water. ‘Why not?’

She put her legs to the ground, leant forward, clasping her hands.

‘Because… a thousand reasons.’

‘You haven’t been there?’

‘No.’

‘It’s just sitting in the sun on a nice old boat. Doing the tourist bit if you want to. Resting, reading. I shall be busy writing and seeing people most of the time.’

‘It sounds heavenly. But I… ‘

‘Only ten days.’ She had rapidly retreated into convention; wore that rueful and amused face of indulgent mothers faced with preposterous ideas from their offspring. I returned toward her. ‘I did the cruise with Andrea once. It’s very relaxing, very peaceful. The climate’s a dream at this time of year.’ I went and stood in front of the fire, back to the bishop. ‘Discount airfares. Your dragoinan for free. You’ll never get such a bargain.’

‘I really couldn’t, Dan. Honestly.’

‘But you’ve just said’

‘Not to be taken so literally.’

‘Give me one of these thousand reasons.’

‘The children.’ She shrugged. ‘Everything.’

‘May I go and ring Roz and see what she thinks?’

‘I’ve more or less promised to go and see Anne in Florence.’

‘Nothing easier. Stop off at Rome on the way back.’

This geographical common sense seemed for a moment to shake her; or at least to force her to search for better reasons.

‘Everyone would think I’d gone mad.’

I smiled. ‘Some of them think that already.’

‘I’d feel I was running away.’

‘That is mad. You’ve earned a break.’ She folded her arms on her knees, sat hunched forward, staring at my feet. ‘What you said to me in Oxford. About what one missed if one hid behind one’s years.’

‘Dan, it’s most terribly sweet of you to suggest it. But I… ‘ She gave up, as if the ‘terrible sweetness’ was beyond further words and my suggestion beyond serious discussion. I sat down again in my rocking-chair.

‘It’s not because of anything Anthony said. I simply think it would do you good. A new experience for you. And I’d love to have a companion.’

She spoke gently, yet I sensed a relief that I had raised an obvious objection.

‘I’m hardly the person you should be with.’

‘If Jenny was here, and she knew you, she’d be urging you to go. That’s not a problem.’ But something in her face remained dubious. ‘You must know from Roz. Their generation don’t go in for false propriety.’

She made a sideways movement of her head. ‘I really do have so much to do.’

‘That can’t wait a couple of weeks? The production office can do all the arranging. You’d only have to sign a visa form.’ She said nothing. ‘Look, Jane, I know what I owe you over Caro. If you’d think of it as a small token of gratitude. From both of us.’

‘There’s nothing to feel grateful for. I did it because I’m very fond of her.’

‘I know that. And also what we both feel.’

She lay back again on the couch and stared up at the bishop, then raised her hands to the sides of her neck, smoothed them forward, clasped her cheeks a moment; it was like that gesture she had made the night Anthony died, in her Oxford living-room… a loss for more than words.

‘If I wasn’t what I am, Dan. I just don’t feel I have the right to oh dear.’

‘To what?’

She took a breath. ‘In view of…’

‘The past?’

‘A little.’

‘Surely we’re both old enough now to be able to smile at that.’

‘But you have work to do.’

‘You forget I’m a first-class dodger of all unwished-for encumbrance. I’ve had a lifetime of practice at it.’

‘Dan, I’m touched. But I really can’t. I know I can’t.’

I stared down at my whisky.

‘Now I’m offended.’. ‘Please. That’s the last thing I want.’

‘I’m still not forgiven?’

., Now you’re being absurd.’

‘At least still to be feared—when bringing gifts?’

‘of course not. It’s just… ‘ She took another breath. After a moment she said, ‘I suppose it’s a kind of pride. Wanting to get through on my own.’

‘The idea doesn’t attract you at all?’

She hesitated, then said, ‘of course. In the abstract.’

‘Then you’re being quite unnecessarily puritanical.’

Again she was slow to answer. ‘I’m so frightened of losing what little ground I’ve made towards being a less self-centred being.’

‘Where on earth did poor old Rabelais go?’

‘I’m afraid he long ago lost patience with me.’ She watched the fire a long moment, then murmured, ‘Like everyone else.’

I disliked intensely the tinge in her voice, as if she knew she was being very unreasonable in casting herself again as Christ to my Satan, and half apologized for it, like an unwilling martyr to her own pigheadedness. It smelt Jesuitical, of both Oxford and her Catholic past; once again of seeing the ethics of situations rather more nicely than the common outside herd. But every war invents its new strategies, and I decided to snake a withdrawal.

‘Will you at least agree to sleep on it?’ I said, ‘And at least forgive me for having sprung it on you like this.’

‘I’m the one who needs forgiving.’

‘Just think about it for a day or two.’

She was cornered, of course, and could not quite refuse that; nor hide that she would have liked to.

‘It’s so kind of you, Dan, I…’

I stood up. ‘Not just kind. I have to go, anyway.’

‘You did say it was a wild idea.’

‘They’re often the most sensible.’ I gave her a small smile down. ‘Especially when one’s faced with circumventing an ideological hegemony.’

She looked up from where she sat, as if set back by such impudence, but couldn’t quite keep an acknowledgment of its partial justification out of her eyes. For a moment she stared down at the carpet; someone who could speak worlds, but knew her chance was past; then stood. I was carefully brisk… not to worry about the coffee-things. Phoebe would do that in the morning. I bid her goodnight at the foot of the stairs, killing any chance she might still have sought to do more eeling. She had everything she needed? Then sleep well.

I returned to put a guard in front of the fire, then went outside for a minute or two. It was very mild, one of those nights when there seems wind in the sky but not at ground level; a wrack, a delicate powdery drizzle out of the southwest, and the first hint of spring, a haunting green must in the air, something peculiar to Devon and the first two months of its year, the groves and orchards of milder climates, of the Canaries, stealing their tentacles through the grey winter. High overhead, a curlew cried, then another, answering, on their way down from Dartmoor to the flats of the Teign estuary; then a tawny owl, from somewhere among the beeches behind the house. The dense, traditional night. Then he began to wonder what he had done.

In the Orchard of the Blessed

If Dan had launched a strange ship on impulse, he had behaved much more habitually in another matter. The truth was that he was falling very rapidly in love with the idea of his novel. In his continuing reticence about it with Jane he had been playing English. In secret fact it was daily becoming though the experience was not altogether unlike that of a tobogganer who discovers he is on a steeper slope than he realized, that is, Dan also felt a growing trepidation less a possibility than a definite intention. He was still bare of a story or characters in any practical sense, but he began to see, dimly, a kind of general purpose or drift; in architectural terms, a site, if not yet the house, and even less the family, that would go on it. But then, as his vehicle gathered momentum, he also began to see what he suspected was a very ugly obstacle half-buried in the snow ahead.

He had already, without having admitted it to Jenny, borrowed her proposed name for his putative hero: the ghost of Altadena Drive, the pinfound ‘Simon Wolfe’. He didn’t like the name and knew he would never use it, but this instinctive rejection gave it a useful kind of otherness, an objectivity, when it came to distinguishing between his actual self and a hypothetical fictional projection of himself.