Daniel Martin (20 page)

In return, that evening, I talked a little about my own marriage. It was not moaning, I even justified Nell’s attitude and a good deal more to Andrea than I secretly did to myself. I suppose outwardly the evening must have seemed to confirm that any other relationship than that of colleagues and good friends was impossible. I kissed her on the cheek and pressed her hand when I took her home; then got in the taxi and went off. I could imagine going to bed with her by then, but not in the manner of my two previous adulteries. Neither her temperament nor our working relationship would have allowed a brief liaison.

When she killed herself in 1962, it depressed me for weeks. I hadn’t seen her then for several years and it took me some time to understand why it seemed a much greater loss, and guilt, than outward circumstances warranted. It wasn’t even a feeling that if our eventual two years together had ended in marriage instead of force of circumstance, or mutual refusal to disrupt our ways of life, then she would never have ended her existence. I knew her too well by then and the depressive streak in her nature. It was far more a feeling that she had had the last word about all our private lives, all our profession, all our age. God really had been a frustrated and paranoiac alien; and we had all been members of that seedy Polish Veterans’ club he had wasted his life drunkenly managing off the Bayswater Road. I never came face to face with Vladislav, but I have seen him ever since she died; implacably behind each scene of the great illusion.

People in the carriage began to stir and shift. I saw streetlamps mistily reflected in black water. We drew, in our scrupulously maintained English silence, into the most English of all cities. Mother Oxford, Venus-Minerva, triple-haunted, hundred-tongued; Shakespeare’s Verona and every student’s Elsinore since moulding-time began. Not a city, but an incest.

I recognized Jane at once, as I stood in the throng waiting to get through the ticket barrier. I waved and she raised a hand briefly in return; as if we hadn’t seen each other merely for a few days, instead of sixteen years. A woman of forty-five in a long leather coat, fur-trimmed at neck and hem; bareheaded, no bag, hands in pockets; the face seemed much, much older, but she had retained something of that old discreteness, some aura of difference from everyone around her. Even if she had been a total and chance-glimpsed stranger, I should have looked at her twice. An elderly passenger ahead of me spoke to her as he passed. I saw her smile. They exchanged words for a few moments. It was that leather coat, it had a faint flamboyance, a staginess. She didn’t seem to have gone grey, her hair must have been tinted, though it was less dark than I remembered, a shade more auburn; quite long, fastened loosely with a silver comb at the back. She retained a slightly Spanish air, always part of her Gestalt in my memory. In every other way she looked a stylish don’s wife, very much in her own city.

She was still talking to the other passenger when I reached the ticket inspector. But she excused herself then, and he went on. She didn’t move, she had only the smallest smile as I came to her. At the last moment she lowered her eyes. There was a bizarre moment when neither of us seemed to know what to do. She still had her hands in her pockets. Then she took them both out and reached them to me.

‘I’ve forgotten my lines.’

I pressed the extended hands, then rather awkwardly leant forward and kissed her cheek.

‘No lines needed.’

She did look me in the eyes then; a hint of an old irony or perhaps a question, I couldn’t tell.

‘You haven’t changed.’

‘Nor have you. You look stunning.’

‘Wrong participle.’

In close-up she looked her age. There were lines of tiredness as well as of natural years. She wore no makeup. I sensed too a hidden fear. She was very uncertain of who I was. We both smiled, the way strangers do at their own stiffness.

‘The car’s outside.’

‘Fine.’

She turned and led the way out into the night.

‘I’m… we’re so grateful, Dan.’

‘I was due back. Honestly.’

She glanced down at the wet pavement, then bowed her head in reluctant acceptance. We walked over to where she had parked her car. She faced me across its roof.

‘Can you stand seeing him this evening?’

‘Of course.’

‘I thought you might like a drink first. We could stop off at the Randolph.’

‘Marvellous. And I’m taking you to dinner afterwards.’

‘I’ve got something in. The au pair…’

‘I insist.’

Again there was a tiny clash of wills; and again she resolved it with a shrug of concession.

On the short journey to the Randolph she told me, clinically, almost indifferently, what the medical situation was with Anthony. What was initially a primary cancer of the stomach had become general; palliative surgery had failed. He was already surviving beyond the original prognosis. We exchanged news about her children, other relations, Caro. I said nothing about Barney. During these banalities I was far more aware of a secret happiness than a sadness; all those forgotten I had not seen Oxford for sixteen years, either—and yet not forgotten streets and buildings, the woman driving beside me; but something much deeper than that, the strange reversals of time, of personal histories… moments that you are glad, for once, to have survived to. Perhaps the presence of death always does that. Lost values regain meaning, to be still alive becomes the fundamental luck each ordinary, compromising day manages to bury.

We found a table at the Randolph. She took her Russian-looking coat off: a trouser-suit, a plain cream shirt, a brown-black bull’s-eye agate in pinchbeck at its neck. She seemed taller and thinner than I remembered; perhaps it was just the clothes. I ordered her a Campari and a large Scotch for myself. The waiter had hardly turned his back before I brought the small talk to an end.

‘I’ve imagined today a good many times over the years, Jane. But never quite like this.’ She stared at the table in front of us. ‘It was all my fault. I just want to get that out of the way.’

She murmured, ‘All our faults.’ Then, ‘That’s one of the few articles of faith Anthony and I still agree on.’

‘You’re not a Catholic any more?’

The smile was more natural. ‘It has been a long time, hasn’t it?’

‘I spent last night pumping Caro.’

Still she smiled, though she looked down again.

‘I lapsed years ago, I’m afraid.’

‘And Anthony not?’

‘He’s taken the last rites. What they call the Sacrament of the Sick nowadays. I think.’ She must have realized how odd that vagueness sounded. ‘The crows visit him, anyway.’ Then she said, ‘It’s become one of those areas of non-communication over the years. What they say every decent marriage needs.’

The waiter came with our drinks. I noted that double recourse to ‘they’; and had a few moments to discard the illusion that envied marriages must be flawless.

‘And the children?’

‘Have taken after their godless mother.’

‘I didn’t realize.’

She sipped her Campari. I had waited to see if she would make a toast out of it. But I wasn’t to be given such an obvious, if trite, clue to her real feelings. She began to puzzle me, perhaps because I had come with so many preconceptions… or misread Caro’s view of her. On the one hand I had expected more of a brisk maturity, on the other I had imagined a greater warmth. That permanent faint smile I had always associated with her seemed to have disappeared; and so had all her ancient vitality that mute electricity, disturbance, Poetry with which she had always charged even the most trivial Meeting; in a hurried wave across a crowded street, a smile between other heads at a party. ‘What I began to feel was a deep reserve, and I didn’t know what it hid.’

‘I suppose if faith can take blows like this, it must be real.’

‘He’s always been rather good at deriving certainty from incompatible events.’ She added, ‘Or truths.’

‘The ultimate absurdity?’

‘Something like that.’ She made an effort to be more communicative. ‘He hasn’t been morbid about it rather brave, actually. Very philosophical indeed. For a philosopher. But it’s much closer to him now than anything else. The real dialogue is all with that.’ She made a little grimace. ‘The eternal verities or something.’

‘That’s understandable?’

‘I suppose so. Chacun a sa mort.’

‘Did he say that or you?’

She gave a token grin. ‘He’ll die an Oxford man. All ironies intact.’

I examined that grin.

‘My guess is he’s not the only one who’s being brave.’

She shrugged. ‘Nell thinks I’m being very hard about the whole business.’ Again I watched her face in profile, her searching for words a foreigner might understand. ‘She’s become rather odiously conventional and Daily Telegraphish over these last years.’

‘So I’ve gathered from Caro.’

‘A pillar of the county. I think we underrated Andrew.’

‘He was never as silly as he made out.’

‘I remember you used to say that.’

‘She’s been happy with him?’

Again a cursory smile: as if such things didn’t matter. ‘I think as much as it’s in her nature to be.’

‘I’m glad.’

But my eyes remained avoided. We both watched a group of students sitting across the room. They made our small dandyisms of the late 1940s look very puny indeed. I was increasingly set back by her; she was so unforthcoming, disconnected, as if she wanted me to deduce, without saying it, that I was not here by her choice. I could have done with a little more of the conventionality she had just accused Nell of. I made another attempt to bridge everything that lay between us.

‘What does he want of me, Jane?’

‘Just to rewrite the past a little?’

‘What does that mean?’

She hesitated.

‘We haven’t talked about you, Dan. Or the past. For many years now. I know he’s very anxious indeed to see you, but he hasn’t really… vouchsafed why.’ She went on in a quicker voice. ‘The trouble with being highly civilized people is that one has techniques for burying highly uncivilized truths. All I really know is that he grew very distressed when I tried to suggest we had no right to force this on you.’ She added, ‘That at least was… authentic.’

‘Then I’m on his side. I think you had.’

‘All this doesn’t mean I’m not very grateful you’ve come.’ For a moment I had her eyes, almost her old eyes; a candour, a self-mockery. ‘I’m not in a mood to see much hope or reason in anything at the moment. You mustn’t take any notice.’

Which of course made sure that I did: it was increasingly strange, as if our former relative status was now reversed so completely that some indication must be shown in every sentence and gesture. I was far too important and famous now, she seemed to be saying, to have serious time for a backwater being like herself.

‘It would be a miracle if you felt anything else.’

‘Perhaps.’ Her smile was very artificial, and she leapt, absurdly, to yet another apology. ‘Before I forget, Nell asked me to say she was sorry about what she said over the telephone. About your friend, she…’

‘I rose to the bait.’

‘I’ve only seen one of her films. I thought she was very good.’

‘She may go places. If she keeps away from people like me.’

‘Presumably she has views on that?’

I glanced across at the students opposite.

‘She belongs over there, Jane. I’m the wrong table.’

‘She wants to marry you?’

I shook my head. ‘I’m just shepherding her through her first experience of Hollywood. Trying to delay the inevitable.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Her believing in it.’

She smiled down, but once again there was a shade too much conventional politeness of response in it, a suggestion that her mind was somewhere else. I saw her glance surreptitiously at her watch.

‘Should we be going?’

‘He’ll have had his so-called supper by now.’

‘And ours? Where does one eat these days?’

We had a further short argument over that, Nell had brought a brace of pheasant from Compton on her last visit… but I made her give in, and on the way out I booked us a table at the Italian restaurant she recommended while she rang home to warn the au pair girl. Shouldn’t I stay at the Randolph? But it was her turn to be adamant. We set off for the hospital.

For once a camera would have done better; the queries in eyes, the avoided looks, the hidden reservations on both sides, the self-consciousness. I still retained an image of feminine wax stamped by Anthony and his views of life; but it seemed that some sad middle-aged variant of an original self, an independence now turned to an indifference, had taken the place of that. Nor did she conform to what I had expected from Caro; for some reason I was not being shown that face.

I knew I had to rediscover her, along with a system of communication: one that could be quite exceptionally devious, and hide a profound narcissism… and could also be sharply censorious. No town is further, when it wants to be, from the tame conversational norms of the rest of middleclass England, with all its conditioned evasions and half-finished sentences, its permanent poised flight to the inarticulate. I had lived for so long in exile, in a world whose only ‘test’ was one’s degree of craftsmanship in a given context, and aeons from this tiny society that lived essentially, for all its outward academic orientations, by ideal and abstract and frequently absurd notions of personal truth and behaviour.

I had also, behind the apparent deference, felt obscurely condescended to; the way intellectuals will condescend to peasants, make all kinds of urbane adjustment for their ignorance. It made me feel that I must come with a smell of the vulgar outside world I inhabited; that at least one reason she was not more explicit about what she really felt was that I was too tarnished and blunted by the second-rate minds of a second-rate world to understand. That could coexist with the fear that I was now the worldly-wise one, from well beyond this ivory castle with all its linguistic and ethical punctilios. Our little argument over eating out or in symbolized it. I demanded some recognition of what I had become; and she granted it, though it was silly. She had objected to the Italian restaurant as soon as she mentioned it, it was ‘so absurdly expensive’; as if to say that money ought to be a problem in our lives, we should never have progressed from studenthood.

So I felt baffled as we drove through the misty streets, and disappointed; and increasingly nervous knowing how far away the woman beside me was, and guessing her husband might be even further. Once again I had a sharp and sudden longing for the girl who was physically far away in Los Angeles and whom I had just demoted from reality to a good deed; not for her body, but for her franknesses and simplicities, her presentness. Film excludes all but now; permits no glances away to past and future; is therefore the safest dream. That was why I had given so much of my time and ingenuity to it.