Daniel Martin (77 page)

‘Are you sure it wasn’t me?’

‘Of course not.’

She gave him a look under her eyebrows, searching; belatedly aware how sullen he was, but even that belatedness irritated him; then pressed his hand once more and released it.

‘Sleep well, Dan.’

‘And you.’

He stood in his room a few seconds later; through the shutters, there came the faint, obsessive sound of Arab music from some café loudspeaker on the waterfront to the north. He got undressed slowly, put on pyjamas and a dressing-gown; then opened the shutters and stood smoking, wallowing a little in an attack of the traditional twentieth-century nausea: the otherness of the other. Everything was other: one’s faults, one’s situations, one’s blindnesses, weaknesses, sullennesses, boredoms. They stood as un-possessed, as alien, as indifferent as the tired furniture in a tired room. He looked at his watch. It was just after eleven.

He went to get a yellow pad out of his suitcase, with the intention of sketching out the scene where Kitchener encountered his ka in the guise of an ancient monument. But then, seeing the Lukacs book lying there, he took that out as well, and turned to a passage he had read on the boat and marked, since he had seen a relevance in it to Kitchener. It was in the disquisition on Walter Scott.

The ‘hero’ of a Scott novel is always a more or less mediocre, average English gentleman. He generally possesses a certain, though never outstanding, degree of practical intelligence, a certain moral fortitude and decency which even rises to a capacity for self-sacrifice, but which never grows into a sweeping human passion, is never the enraptured devotion to a great cause.

And having read that, Dan’s eyes flicked to another passage, a little earlier in the essay, that he had also marked.

Scott ranks among those honest Tories in the England of his time who exonerate nothing in the development of capitalism, who not only see clearly, but also deeply sympathize with the unending misery of the people which the collapse of old England brings in its wake; yet who, precisely because of their conservatism, display no violent opposition to the features of the new development repudiated by them.

Mirrors: he knew why he had marked those passages and who was really being defined, and it was neither Scott nor Kitchener: but his own sense of defeat. He might have turned a page and seen how Lukacs defended Scott and average heroes against the Romantic and demonic type of protagonist brought into popularity by Byron. But he had already read that, and seen in it nothing but literary criticism: not a partial defence of what he was, what England was. It was Kitchener’s secret, perhaps; that driving ambition, that lack of decency (or manipulation of other people’s decency) in pursuing it; that ability to do, to ride roughshod.

Daimon: choosing oneself. Dan stared across the room. He saw himself as being like someone with a deep feeling for an art, but no creative talent for it; what one felt occasionally before great composers and executants in music, great painters, what he had once or twice felt before great acting performances on screen, on the stage: the ability to assert the primacy of one’s own genius which was in turn a recognition of the extent of one’s own inability and—in Dan’s case—a contempt for his own safe, aided, compromising and communal art. His one hope had lain in the theatre, and he had stifled that; in retrospect it now seemed almost at birth.

He suddenly saw the proposed novel as a pipedream, one more yearning for the impossible.

The terror of the task: that making of a world, alone, unguided, now mocked, like some distant mountain peak, mediocrity in his dressing-gown. He could never do it. Never mind that what he felt was felt by all novelists, all artists, at the beginning of creation—that indeed not feeling the terror was the worst possible augury for the enterprise; never mind that he held one very good guidebook in his hand… he could not do it. Above all he could not do it because his thoughts were metaphors; not really about artistic creativity, but the face he had said good night to in the corridor outside.

The cobbler and his last: taking sanctuary in his certain degree of practical intelligence, Dan put Lukacs aside, sat down and began working on his scene. Half an hour later he was rereading the three pages he had filled. He started striking out dialogue. Gradually it became clear that the gist could be conveyed in the way Kitchener rode up, in his gaze and face, the way he rode away; he needed to say nothing himself. It could all be done in the silence of other voices, was better so.

Dan wrote a second draft, only a page long now. He knew it was the kind of scene that would be the first to go if there was a time problem; and there would be a time problem. But he circled that one phrase as he re-read the new draft: in the silence of other voices.

Then he went to bed, able to sleep at last.

They did not enjoy their day at Abu Simbel.

The civilian airport at Aswan had been taken over by the military, and they were driven many miles out into the desert, it seemed halfway back to Luxor, to find the temporary replacement. The flight south, over the moonscape and amoeba-shaped islands of Lake Nasser, the limitless rippling dunes of the Nubian desert, was spectacular enough; and at first sight, the resurrected temples also. But very soon they seemed factitious, a quite literally monumental waste of effort and money. Dan felt it most strongly inside the artificial hill raised to buttress—once more—the megalomania of Ramses II. Inside, it was a vast iron-plated cupola, a maze of steel ladders, generators, machinery… yet more misguided ingenuity, Ramses redoubled. It reminded him of a stage on a movie-lot; of the expensive artifices of his own profession.

They snatched a quick packed lunch by the water’s edge, facing a horizon studded with brutal iron-grey kopjes; then were rattled back in an old bus to the desert airstrip; after the flight, the tedious drive back to Aswan. It seemed a lost day to Dan, and he began to fear Syria, the possibility of the same boring and dusty journeys to nowhere for nothing.

However, he hid his feelings better than he had the evening before. Jane helped, at least by playing the perfect travelling companion in a more literal sense than Dan had meant—by making light of the day’s minor setbacks and disappointments. Secretly this cautious, solicitous role grated almost as much as the argumentative one of the previous day. It was all very well knowing she was being nicer than she need as a sort of penance; but there was something intolerably distancing in all this discreet consideration for him. It seemed to him much nearer gentility than a true gentleness. But he could not complain.

They finally got back to the hotel about half past four, and had tea. When he asked her at the end of it whether she felt like a last-leg visit to the island before dinner, he half wanted her to refuse, to let him go on his own, so much had her presence beside him that day resembled an absence.

‘Do you want to go alone?’

He very nearly betrayed himself. But then he remembered the tears at Kom Ombo, and what happened if one turned on Eurydice during her ascent from the underworld.

‘No. But if you’ve had enough…’

She was smiling. ‘I was rather hoping you’d suggest it. I prefer that as a last memory.’

There was a thin veil of high cirrus over the sky, but it was warm. The usual breeze seemed less, and a lethargy hung in both sail and landscape. When they came under the lee of Elephantine Island, the two boatmen—they had failed to find Omar again—began to row. But their destination seemed, in spite of their growing familiarity with it, even more delicious in its airy peace, its birds and water, after the dead landscapes they had driven through and flown over earlier in the day: a remarkable place, it had an almost human personality, vaguely feminine, at somehow touching variance with the character of the man whose name it bore. It also remained English in some mysterious way, behind the exotic palms and trees and flowers; green, a place to dream in. They had both been a little shocked at dinner the day before to detect indifference in Alain and his friend, as if to them the island was just one more jardin public. The two Frenchmen had been much more enthusiastic about a Bisharin village they had visited.

Now Jane and Dan strolled for a while, talking about French taste, its obsession with the formal, style as thought. Dan felt at last more relaxed, in sanctuary again. They sat to rest Jane’s leg, it was aching, on the steps of a crumbled jetty at the southern end of the island, over the water, in the thin declining sun and listless air.

Jane leant back, her hands clasped round a knee, looking at the water below them.

‘I came to a decision last night, Dan.’

It was unexpected, and he glanced at her. ‘Yes?’

She shrugged. ‘Nothing very momentous. But I think I’ll definitely try for a teacher-training course when I get home. If I can find a place. She gave him a smile, as if she hoped this modest crossing of the Rubicon would please him. He remembered he had backed the idea when it had come up at Thorncombe. But now, for some reason, he read a rejection in it, yet another translating of ‘different values’ into practice—and saw her behaviour that day in a new light. Perhaps she had simply felt the contented peace of a resolution taken.

“What’s made you decide?’

‘I’ve been thinking about it quite a lot these last days.’ She added, ‘And something you said last night. About the world people want becoming the enemy of the world that exists. Selling the present short, as you put it.’

‘I’m not quite sure how you teach that.’

‘Nor am I. But I think it might be good for me to try to find out.’

She spoke with a kind of dull brightness, like that in the light around them.

‘Now I feel I’ve corrupted a revolutionary socialist.’

‘It was high time she was suborned. Not from socialism. But into something more realistic.’

He detected a patness in her voice, as if everything was clear now: a nice simple duty lay ahead, she need never bother him again. It was rather as if she had asked for a direction and was thanking him, with the careful politeness of urbans to rustics, for providing it before she drove on.

‘I thought I was sowing on stony ground. Last night.’

‘You must make allowance for the fact that I’m only just beginning to realize that I’ve always been under Anthony’s dominance intellectually. Even when I disagreed with him.’ She stared at the water swirling idly past the dilapidated foot of the steps on which they sat. ‘I’ve forgotten what it’s like being with someone who keeps suggesting he’s probably wrong.’ She said in a lighter voice, ‘Especially when he knows he’s generally not.’ She leant forward and picked up a long-toothed leaf by her shoe, began smoothing it. ‘I have an awful feeling I hurt you that first afternoon here, Dan. By different values I didn’t mean inferior ones.’

‘No. I understood.’

But of course, he had not; and felt something both shift and melt in him, away from resentment: into self-reproach, for having doubted her sensitivity to the unsaid.

‘I meant really to suggest doubt about my own. It’s like changing into a remote key. Not quite knowing how one does the modulation.’

‘Now I think something else is being sold short.’

She was smoothing the sides of the dead leaf, and he saw her smile; a shade wrily, she knew better, though she would not argue. Silence fell, as if they were doing no more than kill time, chat idly, waiting like the fellaheen for a train that would never come. He had a return of the sense of unreality, of being outside himself, that seemed to have infected him since their arrival at Aswan; only this time it was more or less conscious and strongly tinged with fatalism. He even asked himself—do I really want this resolved? Was it not merely some revenge of his childhood self, permanently unforgiving of its deprivations, on his adult philosophy of detachment? Perhaps that was why he had fled so long ago to the cinema, to its obsession with ‘moving somewhere’, with peddling opium to the intellectually deprived.

Anyone intelligent who went in for the medium commercially must have a profound desire to limit his commitments, to whore after shifting gods; and this secret infatuation for a deeper relationship with far more than the ambiguous woman beside him went against every practical lesson he had learnt from life. That with Jane it would, if carried to a conclusion, lead to a closing of all kinds of sexual and career and domestic options worried him a great deal less than the prospect of an irreducible obstinacy, a permanent psychological awkwardness she would bring. She was again wearing the ancient beads she had worn at Luxor; rubbed and un-rubbed facets, angles no one life could ever abrade.

It was all a little ridiculous, anyway; part of a reciprocal myth. Just as Jane no doubt saw him as far more worldly-wise than he was, so he saw her—still like some freshman unable to credit the old quip that every don is half a donkey—as the product of a finer honed moral world. He remembered the sitting beside another river so many years before… at least one had had the wit, the poetry, as well as the will, to take risks then.

‘So what shall you teach—the river between?’

She gave him a look, amused; then put on—but this time it was clearly put on—a faintly prim voice again. ‘I shall teach set texts and French grammar. Racine and Balzac and the agreement of past participles.’

‘Pearls before young swine.’

The smile lingered; then she admitted that she would really rather do primary-school teaching, but the course would be longer; and they discussed that for a while, the advantages of teaching children as against adolescents. It was a little to do with Paul, she felt he had not been well handled at his school in those years.

Dan realized, of course, that all this was being presented as an apology, as her way of saying that this newfound affinity between them was more important than intellectual disagreement; that she was grateful for the holiday, for the objectivity she had gained and so on. But he had a sharp inner feeling that it was a decision almost as absurd as the ones she had aired at Oxford; simply swapping the role of world-changer for that of schoolmarm. She must have sensed his underlying disapproval, for after another silence came, she had gone back to holding her knees and staring across the river, she said, ‘I must do something, Dan. You can’t imagine how strongly I feel I’ve wasted my life and—’ but she broke off. ‘Not my life. But things I could have given life.’

‘We’ve all felt that, Jane.’ He added, And done that.’

‘But not quite with my consistency.’ He said nothing, and after a moment she challenged his refusal to comment. ‘You still think this isn’t the right answer?’

‘My dear girl, it’s up to you. If it feels… that famous instinct of yours.’

‘But?’

He murmured, ‘Chateau Laffite in a tin mug?’

‘That’s not fair to the tin mug. And an absurd overrating of the wine in question.’

He stared out over the river to the shadowed far shore.

‘I don’t know how people like us were meant to live this age, Jane. When it gives you only two alternatives… feel deprived or feel guilty. Play liberal or play blind. It seems to me that either way we’re barred from living life as it was meant to be. I think if I ever had another child, I would pray that it was subnormal.’

‘That’s a terrible thing to say.’

‘In a world where the future gets more horrible to contemplate every day?’ She gave him a sceptical look. ‘Oh yes. I travel. I write. I meet film-stars. I’m a very lucky fellow.’ He added, ‘The last of the ancient regime.’

His voice had been dry to the point of bitterness, and the delay in her answer underlined it.

‘Then it is a privileged form of pessimism.’

‘Of accidie. Powerlessness.’

‘It’s not very obvious, Dan. I think most innocent strangers would say you’ve acquired a rather formidable sense of balance.’

‘Alias the deadweight of inertia.’

‘Which still somehow manages to produce very literate scripts. Seen by millions of people.’

‘And forgotten by them. The next day.’

‘You’re being naughty.’

He smiled, half conceding the reproach. ‘It’s not very difficult for people who never take risks to seem balanced.’

‘But even to seem requires some kind of effort? I should have thought a courage also.’

‘I don’t think so. When it makes daily life easier. In an unbalanced world it can only be a kind of surrender.’

She seemed to examine that; then moved ground.

‘For so many years I’ve only known you through Caro’s eyes.’

‘As a lousy father.’

She said gently, ‘A difficult one.’

‘All those mirrors and masks in my room when I was a student. I think they just about summed it up.’

‘You should have tried the alternative. Surrounding yourself with book-lined walls. And minds.’

They were both staring across the water at a trading felucca. It moved slowly down beneath the sandy cliffs opposite, floating on the current. He gave Jane’s face a surreptitious glance. There was something both set and peaceful about it, keeping its own counsel; he did not know what she was thinking, yet he felt that unmistakable old empathy restored between them and knew she could not be totally unaware of it… that they sat on that remote, forever past, other river bank again. Forever barred, forever close. He remembered the phrase he had circled in his draft scene the previous night. Their truth lay in their silence, not the other voices of what they had just said to each other. He knew he wanted to speak, he was a man on a brink about to plunge: to make it explicit, she must feel it, she must know… yet something held him fatally back. Doubt of her, doubt of himself, fear of rejection, fear of response. Suddenly she tilted her head a little towards him, smiled.

‘You’re spoiling my good deed for the day.’

He had been right to stay silent.

‘What was that?’

‘Cheering you up.’

‘I hate last days in places.’

‘But you’ll be back when…?’

‘I doubt it. Anyway. I shall miss my perfect travelling companion.’ She smiled again, as if such flattery were no more grounded on reality than his self-denigration; glanced at her wristwatch; and then once more, as he both clinically and resignedly noted, used this mention of perfection to prove a mundane opposite.