Daniel Martin (67 page)

Dan knew that the discreet distances of lunch could not last the whole cruise; and sure enough they had hardly sat down to dinner when the computer man announced that he was Mitchell Hooper, and this was his wife Marcia; to which Dan returned that ‘this’, in his turn, was Jane Mallory, and… he had hoped his own name would mean nothing to them, but he was destined to immediate disappointment. The girl gave him a quick look. ‘The movie-writer?’

‘I’m afraid so.

‘I read about your being here. There was a piece in the Cairo English newspaper yesterday morning. Kitchener, right?’

‘We hope. It’s very early days yet.’

Her husband eyed the girl, then grinned at the English couple. ‘This is going to make her trip. Oh boy.’

‘Mitch.’

He ignored her reproachful voice, and went on grinning. ‘She’s the movie and books buff. I’m just a scientist.’

‘We’re on holiday. That’s all. Like you.’

‘Sure. Great.’

Dan’s voice had been a little too anxious to kill any further questioning, and Jane stepped in with a subtler diversion. She looked at the girl.

‘Could you manage to follow the guide?’

‘Kind of… you know. So so.’

‘If I can help.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Did you enjoy it?’

The girl raised her eyes. ‘Unbelievable.’ Then, ‘Didn’t you think?’

‘I was very impressed.’ Jane smiled. ‘Not to say overwhelmed.’

‘Oh I know, I was just saying to Mitch before you came. It’s all too much to take in.’

‘Yes, it is rather.’

The waiter came with the first course, and they broke off the conversation. For the merest fraction of a second Jane’s eyes met Dan’s, though with a studious correctness of expression. Perfidious Albion had struck again; and the key of duplicity was set. They talked, or Jane and Dan listened, between courses. The American couple came from Joliet, near Chicago, but ‘Mitch’ had worked for a couple of years in California. They liked Cairo, Egypt, the Egyptians. You just had to learn their methods. Like the man said, if you had no patience when you came, you learnt it; and if you came with patience you lost it. Mallesh, did they know that word?

Apparently it meant ‘sorry, it can’t be helped’; kismet. You had to learn to live with that. It was ‘the way their society was structured’. They didn’t want to go back to the States, they thought perhaps he’d try for another year here, or maybe Lebanon, they were really sold on Lebanon; or Europe some place. They didn’t know, they were playing it by ear.

Dan and Jane went up on deck after the meal. The desert air was sharp, especially in the slipstream of the ship’s passage, but tolerable.

They leant over a rail in the lee of the superstructure and watched the dark, silent shores slip by. Occasionally one glimpsed the white shadow of a house or a villa caught in the ship’s lights; here and there a dim-glowing point, as of an oil-lamp; the stars, the quiet rush of the water. They discussed their table companions.

‘I used to hate my mother, she used to be so cutting to them sometimes. But I don’t know if it isn’t more honest than playing games.’

‘You mustn’t expect subtlety from the backwoods of Illinois.’

‘I’m not blaming them, Dan.’

‘Just us.’

‘In a way.’

‘If anything stands accused, I suspect it’s the ridiculous notion that advanced technology produces richer human beings. When it’s become only too clear that the contrary is true. I think those two half know it. They’re on the defensive about something.’

‘Yes. I felt that.’

‘Probably about wanting out. I suppose we’re lucky. Being of a race where you’re born out.’

She stared at the bank three hundred yards away. ‘You forget what being English means. Until situations like this.’

‘I think I’ve become a tiny bit of a patriot in my old age. Perhaps it’s having spent so much time over there.’

She was amused. ‘Little Britain?’

He murmured. ‘If you hadn’t given me that lovely present…’

‘But we have just been Little British. At least they were being honest.’

‘According to an inadequate scale of values.’

‘But we hide ours as if we’re ashamed of them.’

He stared down at the water. ‘I’m a highly principled lady Marxist? I won’t tolerate the glorification of the individual in any day or age? Do you think they’d buy that?’

He glanced, and saw the faintly impatient curve in her mouth.

‘I thought we’d decided I was just a confused idealist.’

‘Equally beyond their ken.’ She said nothing. ‘They’ve paid hard-earned money to see this. The guidebooks say it’s great stuff. How can they think otherwise?’

‘It is great stuff, Dan.’

‘Now you’re being naughty.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you know that’s not what I’m talking about.’

‘I know they’re not very imaginative as tourists. I’m just thinking of being at school there. They always seemed to be much more open, at least in terms of personal taste. Saying what they feel.’

‘I’m not accusing them of not saying what they feel.’

‘But of not feeling enough?’

‘Not even that. Not knowing enough. Not being allowed to know enough. That Gramsci thing you talked about.’ He added, ‘Always doing it by the book.’

She was silent a moment. ‘Peter said something like that in one of his letters. How first you love the straightforwardness… then long for the curves.’

‘That’s my experience. The transparency’s fine. Until you begin to realize it’s less based on an intrinsic honesty than on a lack of imagination. All that so-called frankness about sex. They don’t know what they’re missing.’

‘Some must.’

‘Of course. The lucky few.’

‘Isn’t that the same everywhere?’

‘Probably. But the basic opportunities to join the few are so much greater there. If they could only see it.’

‘I suppose. If you look at it like that.’

‘The absurdity is that they’ve managed to turn themselves into the most culturally deprived people in the advanced West. Outside the big cities. Therefore the most insular. How else could they have picked a pig like Nixon for president? And on that huge majority?’

‘I do hate all that politics based on image.’

He waited a moment, but she seemed content to listen, staring at the shore. He shrugged.

‘How else could Madison Avenue function? They have no built-in standards. Which makes them wide open to every huckster, literal or political, who’s around.’ Again he waited, then went on. ‘All the sales talk about total freedom being the greatest human good. Even though it’s as clear as the stars up there that for the last hundred years total freedom has meant the freedom to exploit. The survival of the sharpest at making a quick buck…’ He took a breath, then looked at her. ‘And this is absurd. You’re making me carry coals to Newcastle.’

Her head bowed, a ghost of a smile. She said nothing for a moment, and when she spoke, it seemed almost to herself, or to the night.

‘I wish we could find out why they don’t want to go back.’

This time his new resolution did not help: he felt deflated. He had been talking too much to please her, and in terms of the widest generalization; while she thought only of two people somewhere on that same boat—whose views he knew she must see were simplistic, whose language she had listened to, as he had, as a professional pianist listens to an untalented amateur; yet would not admit it.

‘I don’t think that would be too hard.’

She spoke as if to explain. ‘I was reading my booklet on the fellaheen before we had our drink.’

‘Yes?’

She hesitated. ‘How for five thousand years they’ve been given nothing, ignored, exploited. Never helped at all. Apparently not even been studied anthropologically until very recently.’

‘And?’

Again she hesitated. ‘What I really felt at Karnak today. Whether the way we lucky few live now is very different from those past lucky few. In terms of what’s really going on outside.’

There was something unusually tentative in her voice, as if she half expected his scorn.

‘But someone has to pour the symbolic waters, Jane. For the poor devils outside as well.’

‘Except that at the moment there’s an appalling and literal drought. I don’t see much use any more in symbolic waters.’

‘Civilization? Scholarship, art? Everything we both felt about the Herr Professor this afternoon. They all come from inside the walls. No?’

‘I’ve heard that argument so often at Oxford. The supposed barbarian hordes as justification for every kind of selfish myopia.’

‘I don’t defend that. But if you start regarding all complex feeling and taste as a crime, you surely also start forbidding all finer knowledge as well.’

‘If only it didn’t cost so much.’

‘But is the guillotine the answer? They do need the Herr Professors. Even us, in a way. As we are, for all our faults.’

Her eyes followed a winged white ghost, a disturbed egret.

‘I just wish that so many of that “us” didn’t deny the primacy of the need. See privilege as an axiomatic birthright.’

‘We can’t all be activists, Jane.’ She said nothing, and he went on. ‘I think certain intellectual climates also have to be preserved. Disciplines. Knowledges. Even pleasures. For when the revolution’s over.’

That seemed to silence her, finally, though he couldn’t decide whether it was because he was being conceded a point or because she gave up trying to convince him. But then he stole a look at her profile, and sensed something else. It did have a kind of withdrawnness, a thinking to herself in the night; but not what he was looking for, the smallest sign that she wished they were not having this conversation. Something else in it had already puzzled him: her tentativenesses, hesitations, veerings, silences. He had supposed she must be used to much more sophisticated discussions, viewpoints, arguments in such matters. Something of Anthony’s mind and manner of discourse must have brushed off on her through all those years, the outward as well as the inward of a philosopher’s widow. He had thought it perhaps a kindness to him, a dubious one, not very far removed from just that secret condescension she had accused them of showing to the young American couple.

But now, in their silence, it dawned on him that perhaps he was being kept less at a distance than he imagined, that precisely what he believed he was being denied was being granted: that is, she was revealing feelings, confusions, not intellect; longings, not propaganda. And he began to divine something else, that the more precise huge step she was unable to make was between a personal sympathy for her Marxist, or neo-Marxist, ideas and the public manifestation of them in practical, organized form. It was not difficult to trace her fears there back to her Catholic days; to see a parallel between the conflict of Marxism as a noble humanist theory and Marxism in totalitarian practice and the same conflict between personal Christianity and the dogmatic vulgarities and naiveties of the public Church of Rome. That must be the great stumbling-block in her: the fear of seeing personal feeling and judgment once more traduced. It was an important insight for Dan, for he was hiding something from her himself. Against expectation Lukacs had not sent him rapidly to sleep that previous night in Cairo; and his split feelings there had been very similar to the ones he had just ascribed to her—he had felt personally drawn and publicly sceptical, approved a number of general premises, doubted their political consequences. In the here and now he guessed at an undeclared but fundamental similarity of situation. It was strange, almost like an invisible hand reached out to touch and reassure him.

She spoke out of the blue.

‘Tell me about Andrea, Dan.’

He smiled down at the water. ‘That’s an odd change of subject.’

‘Not really. She’s another American couple I’ve only played games with. Or listened to Nell playing games with.’

‘You’re not cold?’

‘Not if we walk up and down. This air smells so clean.’

So they began to walk up and down the deck between the empty chairs, and he told her about Andrea: her faults, why he had liked her, why they separated, why he thought she had killed herself. Finally they went into the lounge and had a cup of tea, a shade self-mockingly, being staid old British; side by side on a wall-bench. But the conversation continued and shifted imperceptibly to what had gone wrong between him and Nell… at least in daily and psychological terms. They were both carefully objective, and he talked about himself as he talks here, in the third person; a rather blind and willful young man, still in full flight from his adolescence. He thought of telling her about his other and unforgivable infidelity with the British Open, but it was too near the knuckle, to the day of the woman in the reeds.

On the other side of the lounge the Barge-borne Queen seemed to have attracted a kind of court. Four or five of the other French passengers sat at a table with him. His young Ganymede, in an expensive-looking suit, with a black shirt open almost to the navel and a scarf tied winsomely round his neck, kept going to a jukebox in one corner. Dan and Jane fell at last into silence, watching this menagerie opposite.