Daniel Martin (13 page)

‘I’ve ordered Scotch. Yes?’

‘Fine. Tell me about Caro. I thought you’d left the paper.’

‘We pissed and made up.’ He shrugged. ‘Just a new column. Keep my hand in.’ He slid me a sour grin. ‘I’m so bloody famous now. I can remember the days when I was lucky to get the corner of a table. Now it’s an office and secretary.’

‘Is she any good?’

‘Splendid. Taken to it like a duck to water.’

‘I’m glad.’

‘Holds the fort and all that. Bosses me about. Even learning to spell.’ I smiled. ‘She’s sensational. Really.’

He seemed very eager to be nice. But my mind was already reaching ahead to Caro. Though I couldn’t recall ever having talked of Barney to her, perhaps Nell had, and I wondered for a moment if she had known, or half guessed, that he was not someone I liked the thought of her having to work for; whether there wasn’t a little element of revenge for my infidelity with Jenny. We began to taxi. I asked what had brought him over to the States.

‘Piece on the elections. Usual crap.’ He screwed up his mouth. ‘This fucking country. It kills me. They just never seem to grow up. You must find that?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Of course, on the Coast…’ he shrugged, then probed. ‘I thought you were doing a script out there.’

‘I’m coming back to see Anthony Mallory, Barney. Caro’s…?’

‘Yes, she told me. Bloody awful.’ He paused. ‘I thought…’ He broke off, then smiled. ‘Sorry, not my business.’

He obviously thought what Caro must have told him: that Anthony and I hadn’t communicated for years. I explained the situation, and we talked about Anthony, and cancer, for a little while.

‘Oh well, be a nice surprise for Caro. You have a very admiring daughter. You know that?’ He squeezed his nose. ‘Actually, Dan, before I forget, she asked me to give you a ring. Send you her love and tell you about the new job. I’ve been so goddam busy and then today I decided to cut out early and had to cram fifty-nine’

‘That’s okay. I’ll tell her.’

We waited for takeoff, at the runway end. The engines roared up in test, and he was silent a moment. He gave a little puff of self-amusement.

‘Jesus, I hate this form of locomotion.’

‘Intimations of mortality?’

‘Is it all worthwhile, I ask myself.’

‘Come on. We’ve survived.’

‘Oh sure. In five thousand pages of fish-and-chip wrapping.’

‘Balls.’

He stared bleakly down the cabin, then pulled his mouth to one side and shrugged. ‘When I look back.’

‘From the top of your profession?’

‘Big deal. As they say.’ We began to run. ‘Actually I’ve been here about a TV show as well. They have a crazy idea I might be the new David Frost. I told them, I don’t even want to be the old David Frost.’ I duly grinned. ‘Seriously. I’m running away at the moment. Supposed to be having lunch with one of the putative sponsors tomorrow. Sit with him through the pilot.’ We took off. He stared past me out of the window. ‘It’s going to kill me, if it goes through. Kills me at home, that fucking series.’

‘I thought you were very good. When I’ve watched.’

‘Who switched it on the second time?’

I smiled again. At least it was nice to be back where undertones were not missed.

‘You try over here. There’s not much competition.’

I stared out at Manhattan rising in the distance; the termite towers. He loosened his seatbelt.

‘Caroline tells me you’re on an epic.’

‘Hardly. Historical. Kitchener.’ I said, ‘And doomed before it starts.’

‘Yes?

Yes?

‘We’re off the record, Barney.’

‘Of course, dear boy. Just curious.’

The stewardess came with our whiskies. Barney gave her a smile and a ‘Bless you’. We talked movie business for a few minutes. I felt he was acting all the time. He sat listening, staring down at his glass, swilling the ice-cubes round, unnaturally deferential; as if he would rather be chatting up the stewardess. Then he began to talk again about television, its ephemerality, the ‘stupefying quantity of horseshit’ his own programmes involved. It was a trauma, or ordeal, I had long been through myself the tyranny of the mass audience, the need to suppress instinct, education, subtlety and a dozen other things in favour of the bedrock truth of the human condition: that the majority is ignorant and wants, or at least pays money, to be treated as a moron. Audiences are shmucks, as a celebrated old Hollywood director once put it succinctly to me, and shmucks hate brains. Then Barney went on about the horrors of now being recognized everywhere he went; but no one walks into that blind. All art, from the finest poetry to the sleaziest strip-show, has the same clause written in you will henceforth put yourself on public show and suffer all that that entails. Still, I felt some sympathy for him; and a certain wry amusement, at finding myself in Jenny’s role now. Perhaps he sensed it. We had a couple more whiskies, and he raised his glass.

‘Well, here’s to Caroline, anyway.’ He drank, then said, ‘She seems to have survived the divorce pretty well.’

‘By some miracle. It’s been nice getting to know her this last couple of years.’

‘You probably didn’t miss much. Speaking from bitter personal experience.’

‘I’ve forgotten’

‘Three boys. The oldest won’t speak to me, the middle one can’t, and the youngest does. He’s the one I hate.’

He’d said that before, no doubt in El Vino’s.

‘And beyond the epigram?’

‘Margaret’s problem, really. I’ve opted out. I felt pretty much the same about my own old man. They don’t bother to hide it. I suppose that’s progress.’

I tried to remember Margaret; a small woman with a smile that tried too hard, and who said nothing unless spoken to; never seemed quite to want to be where she was. She hadn’t been at Oxford, and I knew very little about her.

Barney stared again down the cabin. ‘Roll on the Republic. Let some other poor bastard bring the little horrors up.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘My fault. Never enough time. Or the patience.’ He took a breath, and another mouthful of whisky, then changed the subject. ‘You’re coming back here as soon as…?’

‘No, I’ll finish the script at home.’

He gave me one of his old smiles: knowing and searching.

‘Is it really home for you now?’

‘England? Good lord, yes. I’ve got a small farm down in Devon.’

‘Caroline told me. Sounds nice.’

We drifted then to the state of Britain. Of course I had recognized symptoms I shared: doubts and disillusions, grasped for apples turned to wax, dreams become ashes. But I would never have come out with that to him. You can practise self-deprecation and get away with it with those you love; but not with those you despise. I decided he was anxious that I shouldn’t say too much about the past to Caro. He too wanted a favourable report: he had problems, he didn’t take himself too seriously.

They started bringing round the meal and I used that, my not having slept and not feeling hungry, to break off the conversation. He was very anxious we should have lunch one day soon if I was in London. I made the right noises. Then I lay down. Sleep came deep and dreamless, like all slumbers of the damned.

They had one golden period. Anthony heard of an empty flat in Rome and the four of them spent six weeks in it during the high summer of the year that followed their last as students. The three graduates had gone down only in the academic sense. Anthony was now teaching at Worcester and Dan was stage-managing at the Playhouse; on a pittance, and really living on the eight hundred a year he had inherited. Anthony and Jane had married in December. She was four months pregnant by the time they went to Rome. Their wedding had been formal and formidable, with a full panoply of relatives; Dan was best man. Jane had been officially received into the Church a month previously. In the new year they moved into a cottage at Wytham. Dan and Nell had had a much simpler registry-office ceremony as soon as Nell had taken her Finals, and Rome was their token honeymoon. A year before Dan would not have believed it possible that he could go through with such an arrangement. But much had changed in the interval.

He would have liked not to see Jane for weeks after their acte gratuit. But that very next afternoon he was working in his room when she appeared with Anthony. It happened so fast, as of course she had intended, that he had no time to dread the meeting. Their names as the discoverers of the corpse (whose murderer was never found) were already in the morning newspapers. Anthony seemed wrily amused, wanted to hear Dan’s side of it. He had to be treated normally… as Nell already that day had had to be treated normally. She knew he was cramming and had arrived just after breakfast on her bicycle, on her way to her first lecture. She had been easy to deceive. She showed no suspicion, merely a shocked excitement, so ghastly, so extraordinary, their idyllic little cut…

He found he could look at Jane without embarrassment. He even felt a belated pity for Anthony, and discovered how easy it was to pull wool over trusting eyes; and began to condone himself. It had been a comedy, a ten minutes’ madness. He felt himself running away, already devaluing the reality, even comparing Jane physically to Nell, telling himself he really preferred Nell, he wasn’t jealous. But then Anthony left the room a moment to go to the bathroom, and they were left alone. It was a warm day, she was sitting propped on the windowsill over the garden, and Dan was lying on the bed. They said nothing and avoided each other’s eyes, and the truth behind the comedy was there. Then suddenly she swung her legs to the ground and came across to the bed. He stared up into her eyes.

She said slowly, ‘If it were done.’

‘Okay.’

‘Well?

‘All right. She came round this morning.’

And he stared until she had to turn away. She put both hands on the mantelpiece and stared down at the unlit gas-fire.

‘Are you angry with me?’

‘Do you remember how that Macbeth speech ends?’

‘No.’

‘“Then we’d jump the life to come.”‘

She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it. There was a long moment.

‘I had quite a talk with Nell last night. About you.’

‘Comparing notes?’

She swallowed the sarcasm, then spoke simply.

‘You are angry.’

He put his hands behind his head and stared up at the ceiling.

‘You seem to wish it had never happened now.’

‘Only if it leaves you bitter.’

‘So what did you and Nell decide? I’m good enough for her?’

They heard Anthony outside, his voice; and guessed that he must have bumped into the man who had the front room. They had been at Winchester together. Jane said nothing for a moment.

‘Dan, if I stop it now, I can still be happy with Anthony. If it went on… and Nell does want to marry you. Perhaps more than you realize.’ She gave him a little glance down from where she stood facing the mantelpiece. ‘We’ll always be closer in one way to each other than to them.’

‘Sheer dottiness.’

She smiled, then spoke more gravely. ‘In what we gave up for them.’

The door opened, and Anthony came briskly in. Jane turned to face him.

‘Darling, the poor boy wants to work. So do I.’

He hated her then. She had sounded just like Nell. The circumstances might justify her acting a bright normality, but that reminder of how well she could act tainted what had just gone before. There she had cast herself as wisdom, self-sacrifice, already trying out for her future role as a Catholic convert. Yet the strangest thing was that he felt that somewhere she did love him, understood him far more deeply than her sister, still wanted him physically more than Anthony. What had happened was like an attempt to break out of a myth of herself… into that of Rabelais; but that once proven false, too expensive morally, she found herself now double-chained in the old one.

But all this was long past by the time they went to Rome. Perhaps she contrived it at any rate they were not to see each other alone again before Final Schools began. Then they had the long vacation apart, the two girls having taken Anthony to the States to stay with their mother and stepfather. Dan was invited and could have gone, but he had already found reasons not to: he didn’t want to miss the job at the Playhouse, he had neglected Aunt Millie, he knew he was going to get a bad degree, he had an idea for a play… all of which hid the real reason why he remained proof to all Nell’s sulks and blandishments. He felt an inherent poison in the situation by then; an almost Jacobean claustrophobia, incest, and he knew only separation could purge it. He did have one very brief chance to discuss it with Jane; and she agreed, it would perhaps be better if he didn’t come. After a week or so he began to miss them. He felt himself orphaned all over again, emotionally as he was literally. Aunt Millie and Cumberland where she now lived with her married sister, Dan’s other aunt reminded him only of what his own family could not give him. The long letters that began to arrive from Nell were some compensation, though she teased him about ‘dates’ and ‘beaux’ on Cape Cod, where they were holidaying. Secretly he took offence, but that did not survive ten minutes when she came back; ten seconds… her arms had gone round him on the platform at Oxford, then her mischievous whispered voice in his ear: Where’s the nearest bed?

From then on, what seemed like a small miracle had taken place. Jane and he tacitly avoided being left together. Sometimes he searched her eyes, when they were unobserved. She would smile gently, and look down. Nothing was to be said, the matter was eternally closed. It had something to do with her conversion, which subtly altered the relationship among all four of them. It was not that they talked about it, the same principle applied as with the orchid-hunting, its discussion was strictly for initiates. But over that winter something died in Jane; more and more he saw her surrender in his room as something slightly hysterical; an over-cerebral girl trying for a part she did not want, or trying to reproduce in real life one she had occasionally played, the revue sex-clown.

He suspected at first that her withdrawnness was also acted, over-identification with her new role. The commitment to Catholicism seemed continuingly absurd; he could not see why it was necessary at all. He had never understood that part of Anthony instinctively even if he could have explained it intellectually. Perhaps there was some element of sexual jealousy, but he felt he genuinely resented this enslavement to what he saw as sophistry, an abstruse confidence trick… to the flaw in the other man, not his virtue.

On that side the most surprised, oddly enough, had been Nell. It gradually became clear that her own nature had needed Jane’s more flamboyant old self as a complement. It was almost as if she had been led by her sister into a cul-de-sac, and was now left to find her own way out. For a time, that winter, she played the spoilt child to their more adult selves. She kept complaining to Dan. She had that frightful Madonna face on again all evening, why have we all got so dull, honestly I don’t know her any more… but something in Nell was eventually mollified, especially when the marriage took place and the newlyweds moved out to Wytham. Dan was always busy at the theatre in the evening and Nell went out there often to be with Jane. They went furniture-hunting, things like that; became as close, though much more privately, as when Nell had first arrived and they earned their university nickname. The Catholic ‘thing’ was accepted, and became unimportant.

Then there was Anthony’s prestige; the handsomely achieved first his rapid passage into senior philosophical circles, the assurance of a fellowship as soon as he showed he could teach and fit in. It didn’t alter him at all, if anything he played down his enhanced authority en famille, but it, and a happiness he couldn’t quite hide, did affect them also. It proved Jane’s wisdom, or at least made her decision easier to understand. For Dan it brought twinges of career, as well as the other, jealousies. He did not envy academic glory, but he wanted success. A play he had secretly submitted to a London agency in December had been turned down by every management who read it. He carried that failure with him for months afterwards.

Then Nell had changed. Their relationship had never had or so it seemed to Dan the innate rightness and conviction of Jane and Anthony’s. They understood each other, they pleased each other in bed, they liked to be seen around together. But there was always in Nell a hint of shallowness, of fickleness, an impatience. She liked amusing parties, amusing people, flirting; what Jane had once called ogle-sprinkling. She had always used her good looks far more than her sister, to compensate for something she lacked. But Jane’s new sobriety began to affect her. She started working hard, and became serious in other unexpected ways: took to playing housewife in the Beaumont Street flat Dan had moved to. Marriage became inevitable. She grew, by comparison with her former self, whatever is the female equivalent of uxorious. Dan quite liked it; and when Jane was announced pregnant, whatever dim hankerings, or dissatisfactions, he still harboured disappeared. He finally accepted that Nell was his lot.

But by then, the spring, Dan had written his fourth or fifth play, I forget now. This time he had had the sense to dramatize a world he knew as opposed to ones spun out of an inexperienced imagination; and the sense to seek advice. By good luck one of England’s more famous and more thinking actors turned up at the Playhouse. Dan braved him with his play; was made to rewrite several scenes, and drop one or two. But then the kind man instituted himself fairy godfather for the script in London. By May Dan knew he had taken the first essential step towards being a professional dramatist. He had signed his first contract. The Empty Church did wonders for his morale, if not his bank-balance; and demolished whatever remaining doubts Nell may have retained about him. He even thought he detected a faint wistfulness in Jane at the news, and he was man enough to crow inwardly at the thought of that. But in sum it was a good year for all of them, full of promise, at a time when what you are doing for yourself seems much more important than what you do to, or have done to you by, other people.

None of us had ever been to Italy before; it was all new and amusing. We even loved the heat; adored the ramshackle but airy old tile floored flat; the endless siestas and sightseeings and picnics out in the Campagna. We couldn’t rush about, the heat and Jane’s pregnancy prevented that. Nell and I went off on our own occasionally, but we functioned well as a foursome, seemingly better than ever before. Between Jane and myself and of course in Rome we were from time to time obliged to be alone there was a total silence about the past. I thought we had become enormously mature, to be able to pretend so convincingly that it had never happened, to discuss a painting together or go round the corner shopping like two old friends. She was in awe a little of her own body, while Anthony had an acute crisis of first-child neurosis about her and its safety; but even that susceptibility to couvade seemed endearing and fallible. If we all laughed at his fussing there, he made us laugh in turn about the sillier Catholic side of Rome. They both wore their religion very lightly. Nell and I used to tease them about Sunday Mass: they would debate (putting it on for us) churches like a pair of gourmets over a Michelin guide. We used to celebrate our own mass while they were out, making love naked in the sun on the terrace. We decided they were incipiently square, but nice to know.

The real bible that summer, for all four of us, was Sea and Sardinia.

Imperial Rome, we agreed, was vulgar beyond belief. All good lay with Lawrence and the Etruscans. We pursued them wherever their sites lay in range. We were playing pagan, of course; and eternal Oxford aesthetes.

The climax and epitome of those blue-and-ochre weeks took place at Tarquinia. The tombs were still locked away from the public at that time, but Anthony pulled the name of one of his new Senior Common-Room friends on the curator and we were allowed a tour. It was early evening when we finished. It had been a memorable experience: in my case some kind of avatar of so many things I had derived from the Devon countryside as a boy. I felt it spoke more deeply to me, even though Anthony knew far more about the Etruscans in scholarly terms. I think it was also the first time I had a clear sense of the futility of the notion of progress in art: nothing could be better or lovelier than this, till the end of time. It was sad, but in a noble, haunting, fertile way.

We went back into the little town and sat about drinking wine holding forth, as one does at that age, about our feelings, how terribly moving it all was, how then suddenly decided that we would give ourselves the night there. We tried two or three hotels, but they were full of holidaying Italians.