Daniel Martin (57 page)

‘I thought we agreed… ‘ I was going to say something about smoking, but she interrupted. ‘Promise you’ll burn it. I swear it’s not true.’

‘Then it won’t hurt.’

‘I’ve been such a mess today. I couldn’t think of anything, I kept on forgetting lines. If only I hadn’t posted it.’

‘You must calm down.’ A longer silence. Then a forced, more formal voice. ‘Is it nice? Your little grey home in the west?’

‘I saw the first primroses this morning. Wished you were here.’

‘Damn you.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Your famous imagination has failed you for once. You don’t realize primroses seem like another planet.’

‘Only seem.’

‘Dan, I don’t want to be in this fucking awful game any more.’ She very rarely used such language. ‘I wish you’d go down and see Mildred.’

‘I’m all right.’ She said, ‘Just ashamed.’

‘You shouldn’t take things so seriously. Me, least of all.’

‘You’ve got your awful calm-the-star-voice.’

‘It is what I’m trying to do.’ The silence this time was so long that in the end I said her name again. ‘I was just trying to think liberated. Great. You gotta believe.’

‘I need a translation of that.’

‘Why I have to tell myself so many lies.’

‘That’s not confined to your sex.’

‘Are you sure you aren’t on the moon?’

‘Why do you say that?’ Another silence. But then suddenly her voice was near normal. ‘Tell me something you’re looking at where you are. Anything.’ I hesitated. ‘Please.’

‘I’m a couple of feet from an excruciatingly bad watercolour of my father’s church and the village. By someone called Eliza Gait. Dated 1864. I think it’s an adaptation of a religious print. It has “The Lord watches over all” written in a sort of black rainbow across the sky.’

‘It sounds ghastly.’

‘Eliza ran short of space in her sky, so “over all” looks like one word. God watches an overall. That’s why I bought it.’

‘I thought you despised camp.’

‘Not when I feel affection for it.’

‘Is that meant to put me in my place?’

‘Don’t be so touchy.’

‘You keep sounding exactly how I was afraid you’d sound.’

‘I’ve been back here barely thirty-six hours and I’ve already thought a hundred times, is she going to like it?’

‘What I wrote, it’s because I don’t really know you. I just think I know you.’

‘Are you sure it isn’t that you don’t always know yourself?’

‘That as well.’ She said in a quieter voice, ‘Promise to burn it when it comes.’

‘Okay.’

‘I’m the one with the rather neat italic writing.’

‘I do just remember.’

‘Swear.’

‘Sworn.’

‘Cross your heart.’

‘You cross it. It’s somewhere there beside you.’ Silence. ‘I want you to sleep now.’

‘What are you going to do with your day?’

‘Work on the script. And think of you sleeping.’

There was the last silence of the many that studded that conversation.

‘Pick me a primrose. I love you.’

The receiver had gone down before Dan could answer. He contemplated trying to get a line back to California, to ring the house and ask Mildred to go up and see if Jenny was all right; but then decided she was sane enough to do that for herself if she really needed a shoulder to weep on; and that it was better to book a call for when she woke up, later in his own afternoon in England. So he did that.

It had been doubly unfortunate. He had had Egypt, and Jane, on his conscience as soon as he heard Jenny’s voice; but had waited to gauge her mood before confession, since it was not yet strictly necessary, though he had decided it was wiser to let her know what was in the wind, perhaps to pretend he was consulting her first. But of course she had made even that very dubious way of easing his conscience impossible. It was not quite the first time he had heard her so. Earlier on there had been a bad day at work, bitterness, tears not unexpected, since he knew, perhaps better than she did, the extent to which actresses live on their nerves; and the mistake of thinking they were doing anything more than using premenstrual depression to toy with the part of the common Eve—and having toyed, to revert very rapidly to their usual abnormal role. But the call had unhappily emphasized the artificiality of their relationship. As always, Thorncombe had already made him retreat into the past, his lost domaine, his other world, and it had not needed her voice to remind him of the new distance between them; almost the distance of the imagined from the real.

It was not fair to Jenny not even fair to himself, since he had felt a protective desire for her as she spoke; and had not lied, merely exaggerated, over the number of times he had thought of her since his return to the farm. He cherished the idea of her there, at the same time as he knew it was, in any but a visiting way, the least conceivable of their futures: how bored she would be, if she gave up her career for this ‘nowhere’ and yet still, adolescently, dreamt situations in which, by some miraculous change of nature, she happily accepted such a life. He was also missing her physically: her casual grace, presence, voice and movement near him, as well as her naked body.

He had long considered himself disabused of the notion that much-photographed faces must axiomatically be accompanied by altogether more amusing, profound and human personalities than those of the rest of mankind; when off the screen, or stage, all the evidence, public and private, demonstrated the very reverse. But he wondered now if he was not still a little its victim; gulled by Jenny’s intelligence into forgetting how desirable she was by more ordinary male standards and would have remained, with far less interesting a private personality. He was like someone who had captured a princess, only to discover himself captured in return by her title and all that was attendant on it; silken skeins, of course, but fundamentally absurd. For some reason the long-distance call had seemed far more indulgent at Thorncombe than those in London. A folly had hovered over it, almost something from Restoration comedy, a mannered obliviousness to ordinary reality, the careless pounds and dollars spent on a complex technology to establish that they were simply in need of each other. It did not jibe at all with the feeling Dan had had on his morning walk with Paul; or with a tiny incident from later that previous day: the very small matter of Jane’s electing to travel second-class, not first.

Shaved and dressed, Dan stood for a moment at his bedroom window, staring out down over the orchard; and wrily remembered Midas again. Sometimes having everything is closer to having nothing than the unsuccessful will ever imagine.

He went down to his breakfast. It was still cloudy, but the rain had stopped in the night and there was now no wind. He listened to Phoebe’s chatter for half an hour, told her more about Jane, and Paul, and the other two daughters a little to cover the fact that he was not going to tell her who his telephone conversation had been with. Phoebe approved, though whether that was out of genuine liking for Jane and her son or because she felt he was at last producing some sort of family besides Caro, he could not tell. Then he strolled out in the garden, where Ben was already working, to be shown what had been happening in his absence: a ritual the weather and his visitors had prevented before that.

He walked slowly down the paths behind the old man, listening to his commentaries, the spring brocs were coming on not too bad, leeks had been fair enough, the ‘celery roots’ (like Phoebe in the kitchen Ben found difficulty over some of Dan’s more exotic demands, such as this bed of celeriac) seemed to like it… and there were the first of the new season’s plantings, the shallots already sprouting green from the red earth, and the heads of the broad beam. Talk of seed potatoes, which Ben must order soon: a familiar debate between flavour and crop, which was always decided the same way. Ben grew his own King Edwards and the rest for size and sanity, and Dan was allowed a row or two of his Catriona and Fir-apples, if they could be got, for showing off to his fancy London friends.

From there they progressed to the iniquities of the American vegetable-growing scene, a woeful story Ben never tired of hearing; perhaps some atavistic nineteenth-century peasant’s vision of the United States as the land of the blessed, where everything grew bigger and better, lingered in his mind, and it pleased Ben to have Dan demonstrate that he and his forefathers were wisest to have stayed put. They’ve declared the Cox and the Blenheim lost apples, says Dan; and Ben shakes his head in disbelief. He cannot really imagine a country where every man is not some sort of gardener, or at least understands the points of it (Dan is seldom actually seen spade in hand, I’m afraid).

They stand over another of Dan’s newfangled importations, a row of artichokes, their grey-green leaves already on the shoot. Neither Ben nor Phoebe will eat the heads, but the old man stoops and ruffles the leaves of the most advanced plant with an indulgent toleration for this foreigner. Like all gardeners he admires plants that show early, announce spring before winter is over; and Dan, too, has a pleasurable sense of seasons, of awakening. He thinks back again to Jenny, artifice, calls from California. Yes, the real inhabits here.

An hour later, he had returned to the unreal in his workroom, the telephone rang. It was Roz, she had just seen her mother off back to Oxford; and she thought her hash has settled. It had finally all boiled down to two contradictory things: to a matter of socialist principle, refusing to travel first class, and to Jane’s feeling it was not quite comme il faut what Nell might say. The latter objection Roz, in her usual manner, had solved by immediately ringing Compton. Nell (at least according to Roz) had laughed at Jane’s scruples; wished someone would ask her to loll about in the sun, it was a super idea, just what Jane needed… though Jane herself, it seemed, had still not been quite convinced.

‘She kept on talking about self-indulgence. I got really angry with her, she’s become so silly about it. I told her she wasn’t a socialist at all. Just a stuffy old spoilsport.’

‘What happened finally?’

‘She did concede she was rather tempted. I think she’ll come round. It’s just she gets so mulish when everyone starts telling her what to do was she like that when you first knew her?’

‘Rather like her elder daughter, actually.’

‘Hey, that’s not fair. I’m very suggestible.’ She said, ‘Anyway, she’s going to ring you when she gets home.’

And once again, he was thanked.

He then telephoned Malevich’s London office, to make sure that things could be arranged as quickly and easily as the producer had claimed. They could, at any rate as regards the visas and the travelling. The secretary he spoke to would see about the Nile cruise, and ring back; which she did, some twenty minutes later. There was a cruise starting from Luxor on Thursday week, and she had already reserved two single cabins. It was not fully booked, and they could be cancelled.

Dan went back to work. The Indian scenes began to take shape, to feed one another. Then there was suddenly a page of dialogue that came to life, that would be good to act. He ate the sandwiches that Phoebe brought him, and gave himself a break afterwards. He put on a Mozart record, the G minor symphony; and sat smoking, staring out of the window. It had begun to rain again. He went to the window and stared down at the rivulets of water on the drive up to the house, at the snowdrops that clustered round the two old rick-stones that bordered the path to the front door. The music behind him: he felt an abrupt wave of happiness, richness, fecundity, as if he was in advance of the actual season outside and transported two months on into full spring. The seed was swelling, the chink in the door widening a centimetre; though he still felt it was a selfishness, an unwarranted optimism. Perhaps it all came from the simplicities of his childhood. He needed complexity, multiple promise, endless forked roads; and simply, at this moment, felt he had them. Just as the green-gold music had, beneath the balance, the effortless development and onwardness, its shadows, so also was there a component of sadness in Dan’s happiness: he was happy because he was a solitary at heart, and that must always cripple him as a human being.

It had come to Dan often, working on Kitchener not only in reading the old man’s life but in researching all those other lives interwoven with his that their Britishness, their obsession with patriotism, duty, national destiny, the sacrifice of all personal temperament and inclination (though not personal ambition, of course) to an external system, a quasi-mythical purpose, was profoundly foreign to him, even though he was a mythmaker of sorts himself. Empire was the great disease… aut Caesar, aut nullus; and profoundly un-English. The whole nineteenth century was a disease, a delusion called Britain. The true England was freedom to be self, to drift like a spore, to stay unattached to anything, except transiently, but the drifting freedom. Very few were lucky enough, as Dan was, to be able to live that freedom in almost literal terms: live where they want and how they like… whence came the national evolution of the inner world and the stiff outer face that jealously guarded it. This Englishness was even, in retrospect, immanent in archetypal red-white-and-blue Britons like Kitchener. His face may have personified British patriotism and the Empire, but his inner soul was devious, convoluted, far more tyrannized by his own personal myth than the public one he appeared to be building.