Daniel Martin (56 page)

‘I can think of worse things millionaires do.’

Dan grinned at the dryness in her voice.

‘Presumably they do it to remind themselves how far they’ve come. At least I’ve grown to suspect that I did it to learn how little I’ve left.’ He added, ‘Which is probably why I have more sympathy for Andrew than you.’

‘I’ve never laughed at that side of his love for Compton. It’s what we so lacked in childhood. Belonging somewhere.’

‘At least Nell has it now.’

‘Yes. I envy that, too.’

He glanced at her and she pressed her lips together in a rueful acknowledgment that not all sisterly differences were merely political. Then she asked Dan, a shade too quickly, as if they had been sinking too far below the surface of things, whether he’d seen Albicocci’s film of Le Grand Meaulnes.

They ran over the last hill and came steeply down beside the limekilns with the farm in sight on its first slope opposite.

Her train was on time at Newton Abbot, a couple of hours later. Dan attempted to buy her ticket, but that was not allowed; so he saw her on board a second-class carriage and then stood on the platform smiling up at her in the corridor window.

‘Thank you so much, Dan. And for being so patient.’

‘You think about these ten days in Egypt. I just need a word, and hey presto.’

He had not attempted to persuade her directly again, but he had talked about Egypt, the Nile, during lunch; and elicited a tiny fact. Several years before she and Anthony had thought of doing a similar cruise; but it had come to nothing. Now she looked down into his eyes, trying to find words. He spoke before she could open her mouth.

‘I shall most certainly hold it against you.’

She smiled, still searching his eyes for some confirmation of her own doubts; a final pretence of defencelessness now, as if she had been unfairly teased.

She said, ‘I love your farm.’

‘Prove it by coming again. Whenever you want.’

A whistle blew, and she thanked him once more. The train began to move, and she raised a hand, a rather pale, self-contained, politely receding female face, which seemed at this very last moment to have something puzzled and regretful about it as if she had come knowing who Dan was, but was not now so sure.

He watched the train go, long after she had withdrawn from the window to regain her seat, already trying to think of excuses for why, when she finally refused to come to Egypt be should have decided the trip dispensable for himself as well.

Phoebe had come in with them to Newton Abbot to do some shopping, and he had half an hour to wait in the car-park near the market where he had arranged to pick her up. He sat smoking, not really seeing anything he looked at. A part of him knew only too well that Jane was right to shy at the idea. It was less the loss of time, the script was taking shape, was back on schedule, he could do some work in Egypt, and in any case Malevich had given him the extra lease on contract than Jenny. She was not as open-minded about other women as he had suggested. Face to face, he could have convinced her; or even if she had met Jane, knew all the circumstances; but over a telephone, and thousands of miles away, was another matter. She wouldn’t like the smell of it, and he would have to be very clear why he was taking pity on someone who for years had been a stranger, whom indeed he’d never talked to Jenny of, except in the vaguest terms; and even then, that final night, in ones Jenny had instantly bridled against. He had said more about her in one or two of the telephone calls since Anthony’s suicide, but Jenny had proved much more inquisitive about his reactions to Nell… and concerning Caro.

So what could he say to her? There was the plea that he wanted to show he was not too grand and internationally successful to ignore an old friendship, to want to seal a family reconciliation. Gratitude for the help to Caro that, he had fortunately already mentioned. But this was about all. He could defuse the inevitable sexual suspicion but not admit the other truth, that this obscure ex-sister-in-law was someone whose spirit remained not quite like that of any other woman he had ever known; that there are some people one can’t dismiss, place, reify… who set riddles one ignores at one’s cost; who, like nature itself, are catalytic, inherently and unconsciously dissolvent of time and all the naturalist tries to put between himself and his total reality.

He thought back again to the morning, that drive in the rain, to what had been said, and not said. It was almost a heuristic quality. Even when she was being thoughtless, she made him think. It may have been connected with that opacity of temperament, it was certainly connected with her role in his past; but increasingly he knew it was of value to him, to both of him, Daniel Martin and Litton Wolfe. His metier had forced him for so long to think in terms of visual symbolisms, of sets, locations, movements, gestures; the seen actor and actress. This psychologically obscure creature belonged, or had grown to belong, to another art, another system the one he was trying to enter.

Above all he had to distinguish his real self from his putative fictional one; and though his training in an adamantly third-person art and angle of vision might seem to facilitate such auto-surgery, he felt deeply unsure about it. There too he had an apprehension that Jane could help, that the ‘making him think’ was essentially a making him look at himself through her eyes. And through her opacity… it struck him that she was also unique in not mirroring him clearly; did not reflect what he saw, the less thinking, less perverse and perhaps less distorted glass of more ordinary minds. It remained that somewhere he did not feel right to her, whatever outward returns of old familiarity had began to show. She still, as she always had, disturbed images, changed voices, recast scenes; as Jenny did also, in her different way more artificially, calculatedly, aggressively, and as a kind of intimate extension of her professional determination not to be typecast.

In fact he felt all this more than he thought it; felt an interweaving of strands, both of and of far beyond that last twelve hours, an obscure amalgam of rain, landscapes, pasts, fertilities, femalenesses, all of which could perhaps have been derived from that one wet gravestone, his unknown mother’s, he had stared at briefly that morning; and which would certainly have been so derived by the verdigrised old sage in bronze that Dan had passed with no more than an amused glance, in Dorchester that previous afternoon.

But I didn’t derive it so myself, in the implacable first person of the moment, because a much more prosaic femaleness was suddenly standing at the passenger seat door and gently capping on the glass. And Phoebe brought a more prosaic reality. It was so unlikely that Jane would accept, and I would thus be spared my white lying.

Yet having driven Phoebe and her shopping-baskets home, I went straight to telephone Roz at her office. I knew she worked at the Kensington House branch of the B. B. C. My luck was in. They tracked her down; and yes, she could talk. How was the weekend? I told her briefly about that, then got down to brass tacks.

‘Roz, I’ve just put your mama on the train in a slightly shocked state. I’ve got to go to Egypt for a few days, about the script, and I’ve rather brashly suggested she comes and does a week’s cruise down the Nile. She told me about the end of the affaire. I’ve been left feeling I shouldn’t make such immoral propositions. In spite of having very carefully made it clear that I wasn’t.’

I had feared hesitation, another shocked reaction. It was refreshingly quick.

‘But it sounds smashing. Why won’t she…?’

‘I’ve asked her to talk it over with you, that’s why I’m ringing. She seems to think she’s too much of a social leper to be travelled with.’

‘Oh she is so stupid.’

‘And the expense.’

‘She’s not even remotely hard up.’

‘Then what would people think.’

‘I know what that means. All her miserable Oxford lefty chums.’

‘And I suspect worried about Paul.’

‘It’s high time Paul was less worried about. Anyway, I can cope with him.’

‘I don’t want to force her, Roz. But I can’t help feeling it would do her good. Perhaps she just needs a push.’

‘Don’t worry. She’ll jolly well get it. And I think it’s terribly sporting of you. It’s just what she needs.’

‘If you could let her bring it up. I don’t want her to feel… you know.’

‘Of course.’

‘It’s ten days, two weeks at most. She can stop off and see your sister in Florence on the way back.’

She said nothing for a moment. ‘Fairy godfathers.’

‘Guilty ones.’

‘If she doesn’t go, I shall offer myself as a substitute.’

‘I could certainly use a trained research assistant.’

‘Are you really sure you want an old drag like Jane? I’d be much more useful.’

We pursued this treacherous teasing a sentence or two, then I went into more detail on the trip; and by the time she rang off, Jane was going… at gunpoint if necessary.

I knew there was a slight risk in invoking Roz’s aid—that it might bring Jane to reveal things her daughter didn’t know, and lend her refusal more emotional validity. She had also built up a life so firmly founded on original mistakes and wrong decisions that their removal must seem a threat; and I guessed that I remained (whatever comparative innocence I was granted to my face) the seeming cause of a far-reaching accident… like a mistake on a chart, forgivable inasmuch as it arose from an ignorance on the cartographer’s part, but still blamed for all that ensued. Such blames can assume formidable importance in the underlying structure of a mental life, and that was probably what most troubled Jane. To come must mean partly to pretend. Yet this could also prevent her from telling Roz the truth, and so make her arguments for not coming all the weaker.

Meanwhile, I took refuge in Kitchener; read back over what had been written to date; jettisoned one draft scene, and rewrote it; saw a chance to use a flashback inside a flashback, and possibly a flashback inside that as well; a Chinese-box gimmick, but with possibilities. Then I forced myself to analyse the problem of cramming Curzon and India, seven years, into twenty minutes of screen time. Eight hours later, near midnight, I hadn’t solved the problem, but I did begin to know where to concentrate my energies. In India Curzon and Kitchener were like a pair of rhinoceroses, two ponderous and monomaniacal ambitions arrived, by reciprocal double-dealing, on a collision course. Dramatizing the actual clash of horns in India wasn’t the difficulty; but conveying the furious establishment string-pulling the two men indulged in at home. However, by the time I took myself to bed, I thought I saw a way through that. I did now and then wonder what was happening in London at Roz’s flat, and kept half an ear open for the ring of the telephone. But I didn’t really expect it, knowing that my own combination of wiles and forthrightness had failed and that Jane was not a person to be bullied, even by her daughter.

Before I was to have that mystery solved, another was set. The telephone did ring, but at seven the next morning, the Tuesday. I was asleep, but Phoebe was up to answer it, and woke me. It was Jenny. Her second ‘contribution’ had arrived in London three or four days before; and been discussed. Now she was in the Bel-Air cabin, just about to go to sleep. Like Roz, she wanted to know how the weekend had been, what it was like being back at Thorncombe, what time it was, the weather… all, as I very soon began to suspect, to hide something else. There was a silence.

‘Is something wrong?’

‘Yes.’

She was silent again. ‘Jenny?’

‘I’d have caught a plane home if you hadn’t answered.’

“What is it, for God’s sake?’

‘I don’t know how to tell you.’

‘Something at the studio?’

‘No, it’s us. Not work.’

‘You must tell me what.’

‘I’ve written something.’

I relaxed, even smiled to myself. ‘I thought it must be at least an orgy down at Malibu.’

‘Oh God. Why did you have to say that?’

‘Come on. You write jolly well. I enjoy it. I don’t mind all the home truths.’

‘It’s not really about you this time. It’s not true, Dan. You mustn’t believe a word of it.’

‘What is it about then?’

‘I posted it this morning. I spent the whole weekend writing it.’ Then she said, almost violently, ‘Promise you won’t believe it.’

Dan looked uncomfortably towards the kitchen door. It was not quite closed, and Phoebe’s usual radio was not on.

‘I believe everything you write.’

There was yet another silence. ‘You don’t know. And don’t tease.’

‘Then I don’t believe a word you write.’

‘I want you to burn it unopened.’ I said nothing. ‘It’s my period. I went slightly mad. Trying to convince myself I don’t need you.’

‘Is something wrong at work?’

‘Please promise you’ll burn it. Unopened.’

And at last something about her voice, the constant pauses, changes of direction, struck me.

‘Have you been smoking, Jenny?’

‘I feel so miserable.’

‘It won’t help.’

‘I know.’ She said, ‘It’s all imagination. I made it up.’

‘Is Mildred down at the house?’

‘I don’t want Mildred. I want you.’