Daniel Martin (7 page)

‘Need someone.’

She turns from the couch and sits in an armchair, hunched forward, head bowed. ‘I feel frightened already.’

‘That proves I’m bad for you. And always would be.’

‘I’ve got to decide about the new part.’

‘You know what I think. He’s a good man. He’ll get the script up. You should do it.’

‘And take myself off your hands.’ She says, ‘I’d know you were waiting. You’d be there.’

‘I shall be. For as long as you want. You know that.’ He searches for a placebo. ‘And you can move into the Cabin. Abe and Mildred would love that.’

‘I might. And don’t change the subject.’ She draws on the cigarette, blows out smoke, then looks up at him. He still stands by the telephone. ‘I notice you’re not admitting that I’m also the best you’re likely to get.’

‘You’re shopping for bargains.’

‘You hide. That’s even worse.’

‘What do I hide?’

‘Your past.’

‘Not cool. The past.’

‘That’s a stupid, slick, evasive, answer.’ She spaces the adjectives, like little whiplashes. He turns away. ‘So is a great deal of my past.’

‘Stage point. Not a real one.’ He says nothing. ‘And so’s most of everyone’s past. I don’t know why you imagine yours is so peculiarly awful.’

‘I didn’t say awful. Unpurged.’ He goes and sits on the couch, at right angles to her chair. ‘It’s not a matter of statistics, Jenny. Or even individual history. Purely of personal awareness.’ She will not help. He says, ‘I misled you, it wasn’t really a feeling of emptiness I had this afternoon. Much more the opposite. Like having eaten too much. Undigested deadweight. A millstone.’

She contemplates the end of her cigarette.

‘What did your ex-wife say that annoyed you?’

‘That thing in the Express. Couldn’t resist a dig.’

She stares at the carpet. ‘Is it the same for you?’

‘Is what?’

‘Still hating. I heard you say it. It’s all so far away.’

‘Will this seem far away, twenty years from now?’

‘Whatever happened, I shouldn’t want to hurt you any more.’

She will not look at him; and he watches her face for a moment, the tenacious thwarted child in it, the jealous young adult; and feels a strong need to take her in his arms, to thaw this ice but suppresses it, notes and commends himself for suppressing it. He regards the last of the more than two fingers of the Laphroaig.

‘We had all our values wrong. We expected too much. Trusted too much. There’s a great chasm in twentieth century history. A frontier. Whether you were born before 1939 or not. The world, time… it slipped. Jumped forward three decades in one. We antediluvians have been left permanently out of gear, Jenny. Your generation knows all about the externals. The visual things. What the Thirties and Forties looked and sounded like. But you don’t know what they felt like. All the ridiculous dècors of the heart they left us encumbered with.’

She does not answer for a long moment.

‘Hadn’t you better ring the airport?’

‘Jenny.’

‘It’s not a chasm, Dan. It’s a deliberate barricade you erect.’

‘To protect both of us.’

She stubs out the cigarette.

‘I’m going to bed.’

She stands and crosses the room to the bedroom door; but stops there and looks back at him.

‘You’ll please notice that I meticulously, scrupulously, do not slam the door.’ And once through she sets it, with an ostentatious precision, half ajar. Then she glances up again at him.

‘Okay? Old-timer?’

She vanishes. He sits in silence for a few seconds, then finishes the whisky. Then he goes to where his jacket lies and takes out a pocketbook, through which he leafs as he walks back towards the telephone. He dials a number and, waiting for an answer, stares back across to the bedroom door which like that other door, like reality itself, that ultimate ambiguous fiction of the enacted past, seems poised eternally in two minds; inviting, forbidding, accusing, forgiving; and always waiting… for someone at last to get the feeling right.

The police car dropped them at the top of the North Oxford road where Dan had his digs. The sky had clouded over completely, and there was already a spatter of rain. They walked quickly between the lines of solid Victorian houses, staid and donnish, too trite to be real. The wind had loosened some leaves. Autumn came drear and viciously premature. They said hardly a word until they were in his room.

It was the best bedsitter in the house, first-floor back, overlooking the garden; but equally chosen for its landlady, a Woodstock Road Marxist who, having somehow got herself on the approved list, allowed her student lodgers freedoms unusual for the time. One put up with erratic meals and Communist Party pamphlets for the rare privilege of being able to do what one liked both with and in the privacy of one’s room. Dan’s exhibited what passed for advanced taste in 1950. He had some private money besides his government grant and the Art Nouveau craze was still twenty years from ubiquity. Small portables in the style could be picked up for a shilling or two in any junkshop.

What could one deduce today from photographs of that room? Theatrical interests: a pinned-up collection of pre-1914 music-hall and musical-comedy star postcards (which he still has somewhere and occasionally adds to), a toy theatre rather too prominently on a small table by the window over the garden, above the mantelpiece an original Gordon Craig set-design sketch (then his proudest possession, foolishly given much later to the woman cited in his wife’s divorce action), a framed playbill with his own name on (as joint librettist of the revue the previous winter), a batch of masks from a production of Anouilh’s Antigone (hardly fin de siecle and already announcing a suspect eclecticism). Academic interests: a case of English literature texts and a cartoon on the wall showing Professor Tolkien being trampled underfoot by a Russian Stakhanovite bearing a lettered banner, on closer examination an undergraduate porting the runic proclamation: Down with Anglo-Saxon. (Of priceless value since The Lord of the Rings, but unfortunately burnt only three weeks from where we are, to be precise on the last day of the owner’s Final Schools, along with the abominable Beowulf and a number of other ancient printed instruments of torture all in revenge for the third-class degree frequently admonished and duly received.) Family background and personal life: difficult, yet the very paucity of evidence tells a tale. No family photographs, I seem to remember, though there was one, a blurred snapshot of an old stone doorway with the illegible (but he knew it by heart) date 1647 above, that half came into that category; and there were very probably on display some stills of the various other OUDS and ETC productions Daniel had had a hand in; and there was certainly one, misty-edged and studio-posed, of Nell on the table used for a desk—and at present cluttered with all the evidence of panic cram. The most striking effect was of a highly evolved (if not painfully out-of-hand) narcissism, since the room had at least fifteen mirrors on its walls. True, they had been collected for their Art Nouveau frames, or at least allegedly; but no other room in Oxford can have provided such easy access to the physical contemplation of self. This little foible had been cruelly lampooned (if it wasn’t that at Oxford any lampooning is less cruel than none) in an undergraduate magazine the previous term. There had been a list of ‘characters’ in the manner of La Bruyère. Daniel was dubbed Mr Specula Speculans, ‘who died of shock on accidentally looking into a mirror without its glass and thereby discovering a true figure of his talents in place of the exquisite lineaments of his face’.

It must be remembered that this callow attempt at a personal decor existed against—or because of a background of austerity, rationing, and universal conformity. Britain was still deep in a dream of siege. Of its time, it was daring. People who went to parties in it were honoured, and told less fortunate friends about it afterwards. An added piquancy was the well-known landlady downstairs, who raged against the viper she had taken to her bosom and the bourgeois decadence of his fancy pots and pieces and his general attitude to life—or so Dan liked to pretend to his guests. The truth was that the elderly comrade, despite her eccentricities, was no fool and knew her young men, and their potentialities for the cause, a good deal better than they knew themselves. Not one whom Dan had shared that house with, and who had like him in later life achieved some public notice, had become a Communist; but rather more remarkably none had become a Conservative, either.

Jane knew the room too well to notice it at all that afternoon. She went to the window and stared down at the garden. After a moment, she pulled off the red headscarf and shook her dark hair loose; but still stood there holding the scarf, brooding.

‘Do you want a drink, Jane?’

She turned and smiled faintly. ‘Tea?’

‘I’ll go and fill the kettle.’

When he came back from the bathroom with it, he found her standing in the corner where he kept his exiguous kitchen.

Only dried milk.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘I could pinch some fresh off old Nadya Constantinovna.’

‘No really.’

‘She’s out.’

‘Honestly.’

And she came with two cups and a teapot, spoons, and knelt by the fireplace. He put the kettle on the little electric coil he used for heating water, then went to the corner and fetched the dried milk, tea, sugar. Then he sat down on the rug opposite her and watched her measure out the black leaves into the pot.

‘Is Nell coming round?’

He shook his head. ‘Essay night.’ She nodded. He sensed that she did not want to talk. Yet the feeling of emptiness in the silent house, in the day, in the time of day, made the vacuum embarrassing to him.

‘Shall I put the fire on?’

‘If you like.’

The gas-fire phutted at his match, began to flame blue and gold; sparks of incandescent pink. The kettle started to add its slow voice. They echoed a kind of deep purr in Dan, for all his slight unease and Jane’s silence. Already his dialogue-inventive mind, the monster that then still seemed a joyous gift, was secretly rehearsing various amusing ways of telling what had happened: that pompous half-education of the policemen’s voices, Andrew’s impossibly blasé behaviour, that Ianded at Anzio, old man’… and then something else, not only the event, the grey buttocks like uncooked tripe, the reported maggots seething in the hair (which Dan would claim for his own eyes too) but having been with Jane, the idol of her year, the almost celebrated already.

All of young Oxford knew she must one day be more famous, truly famous, with those gifts (much more serious than just taking off Rita Hayworth, her Vittoria in The White Devil had proved that beyond doubt) and looks. She sat, one arm back, leaning sideways a little, staring into the gas-fire. Deep down it wasn’t her vivacities, her powers of mimicry, her mobility, all she could be on stage; but what her face showed just then, a sort of pensive inwardness. She was very much two people, one had long ago realized that, much more complicated than Nell; which was what matched her, against all superficial probability, with Anthony, who was in so many ways the antithesis of them all the Greats scholar from Winchester, already halfway to becoming a don, applied, logical (in all except his religious beliefs, at that time almost as much a dandyism as collecting Art Nouveau mirror-frames); rapidly analytical and aphoristic. Young Oxford men who were mature, like Mark, in terms of war and death were two a penny; everyone knew the story of the proctors’ bulldog who had clapped hands on a student caught drinking in a pub—only to find that his victim was the young colonel whose batman he had been during the war. But Anthony had a different maturity, an apparently much surer knowledge of who he was and what he intended to be. He was widely envied Jane, but their relationship seemed incongruous only to people who knew neither of them well. Behind the masks their complementarity was striking.

As he might, though less concisely, have put it at the time; in simple fact he was in love with her. That was why he was embarrassed. For some months, at least two terms, he had known this; and that he was trapped. His future marriage to her sister was broken long before that day. Webster’s immortal line: strange geometric hinges. His sense of guilt ought to have been attached to Nell; but in fact it was much more orientated towards Anthony, and not at all, or very little, because on that particular occasion Anthony had granted himself a weekend’s break (some monastery in Gloucestershire that went in for the instant retreat) from his final grind.

Dan still felt a baffled privilege, to have got on so well with Anthony—baffled because he still couldn’t really understand what the brilliant Wykehamist saw in him. He knew much better what he had himself taken from the relationship the contact with a much more fastidious and incisive intellect, with a psyche far more certain of both external and internal values, far less easily corrupted by new ideas and the ephemeral. In a way, Anthony was Oxford; Dan was merely a visitor. He had learnt far more from him than from his tutors, if the truth were known. But there was that one great flaw: he could never quite shake off a deep, though carefully hidden, conviction that it was a friendship between unequals.

In fairness to Dan, and to historical accuracy, it must be said that in terms of undergraduate prestige—so closely connected with undergraduate notoriety—his feeling of inferiority would have seemed odd to his contemporaries. He was a far better known, and perhaps even envied, student of his time than Anthony; of that group who escape academy and achieve more than a mere college reputation and who, later, in retrospect, give their whole university generation its characteristic stamp. But like Jane, he was also two people, though far less prepared, or able, to admit it than she. Perhaps it was mainly in his secret feelings towards Anthony that he did admit it; and in those towards Jane. He was even a little jealous of her gender, her young womanhood, which he felt allowed her both a more natural and a more mature attitude; she could both mock and be affectionate in ways he could not. They would, in fact, usually take the same side in any argument against Anthony, conspiring in guying him gently if he became too outrageously the young don. But it was a stage alliance, would-be worldly-wise thespians sniping at intellectualism; and hid the truth of where the real affinities lay.

So Dan watched this apparent proof, the prize he had not won and, to complicate matters, which had even seemed partly stolen from him, since he had known Jane before Anthony, had even first introduced them, had really only held back before that introduction because he was in awe of her. Now he took what consolation he could from this substitute intimacy, in the softly hissing silence. The sky seemed to grow darker, strangely dark for midsummer. It began to rain outside, more heavily. The kettle boiled and Jane leant across and lifted it; filled the pot. She was still filling it when she asked her astounding question.

‘Do you and Nell go to bed together, Dan?’

Her intent, down-looking face.

‘Darling… ‘ he gave a little puff of shocked amusement; of pure shock, really. She did not smile, but set the kettle on the hearth before the fire. He had one virtue, I suppose, he read other people’s moods fast; caught their intonations, usages, changed millimetres of mouth and eye-shape; but only the moods, not the intentions.

He murmured, ‘Hasn’t Nell…?’

‘Sisters don’t always talk about things like that.’ She put a spoonful of milk in each of the two cups. ‘You mean you do?’

‘Doesn’t everybody?’

Again, they didn’t, and far from it, in those days; and the comparatively few that did kept up a convention of secrecy about it. But Dan had never been a young man to keep his hard-earned and very far from innate sophistication under a bushel. One has to have some substitute for honesty.

‘Anthony and I don’t.’

He couldn’t understand why she should want to tell him. Knowing Anthony’s views, he had not supposed that they did; both he and Nell had decided quite definitely that they didn’t.

‘The Catholic thing?’

She passed him his cup; little flecks of undissolved white powder floated on top.

Yes.

‘It means a lot to him.’

‘Yes.’

‘Under the squibs and epigrams.’

She smiled faintly, but for the second time that day she seemed to be reproaching Anthony. A shifting of deep grounds, a sudden mystery, a hinge’s first faint creak. She sipped her tea.

‘I’m not a virgin, Dan. There was someone else. In my first year. Before I met Anthony.’

Which pierced something hitherto virgin between them.

‘He knows?’

She made a wry grimace. ‘This is rather why I’m telling you. It’s a sort of rehearsal.’

‘Oh Gawd.’

‘It’s so stupid. If I’d only told him at the beginning. Then it seemed too late. I’m sort of trapped now. It’s not what I did. But that I haven’t told him before.’

He offered her a cigarette, lit a spill and held it out, then lit his own.

‘And he’s never thought to ask?’

‘For someone so intelligent, he’s rather bizarrely trusting. He assumes things about people he’d never assume about a theory of logic or a syllogism.’ She drew on the cigarette. ‘At least that’s what I used to think.’

‘And now?’

‘I wonder if he isn’t rather frightened. Which frightens me every time I try to screw my courage up to tell him.’

‘You’ll have to tell him some time.’