Daniel Martin (25 page)

‘I think it might hurt him.’

‘Nell knows?’

Her lips pressed together.

‘We’ve had a couple of shouting-matches about it. One only three days ago. She’s managed to pick up all Andrew’s sillier views of life. None of his humour and tolerance. He treats all this as a joke. Nell takes it as a personal affront, I’m afraid.’

‘You have my sympathies there.’

But that evoked no response, or only a very tangential one.

‘The house, you’ll see, it’s quite large, I shan’t really need it all. I’d like to see it used in some way when this is over.’ She gave another dry look across the room. ‘Perhaps I’ll just be Lenin’s widow all over again. Everyone’s joke landlady. Pamphlets for breakfast, propaganda for supper.’

‘Well. It’s what Oxford’s famous for.’

‘Except I think this lost cause is only counted so among the timeserving intelligentsia. The monstrous regiment of academics turned media men.’ She paused. ‘I’m afraid I’ve come to regard TV and Fleet Street liberalism as the nastiest rightwing conspiracy yet.’

‘Audience corrupts. Even more than power.’

‘I don’t see why the cleverest have to be the most corrupt. And devote so much of their cleverness to perpetuating social and genetic advantage.’

‘You ought to go abroad more often, Jane. They’re just mannikins. Bantams on a midden.’

‘But I don’t live abroad. Your midden happens to be my country.’

‘And mine. But touché.’

My smile was barely returned. Underneath those exchanges we had begun to annoy each other, perhaps both sensing that we took each other too lightly, though in different ways. The waiter came with more coffee, which she refused. I didn’t really want any myself, but I took some all the same, to keep her sitting there. He went away, there was a silence. I avoided her eyes when I finally spoke.

‘Am I included in this general anathema?’

‘Why should you think that?’

‘Because I’ve just met someone who was glad to see me.’

She was silent a moment, then she said, ‘Perhaps women change more than men.’ But she shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. I am truly and immensely grateful for your coming.’

‘Even though I’m a semi-expatriate and capitalist lackey.’

She looked down, and her voice dropped. ‘You’re putting very unfair words into my mouth.’

‘But you wish silence had never been broken.’

She took a breath. I knew she was tempted to snub me again; yet that behind the poised woman and her weapons lay someone very far from balance. She stared down at her empty coffee-cup, as if the answer lay in its bitter grounds.

‘I don’t know what Anthony has said to you, but I can guess they concern things I regard as very private. That have far more to do with the present than the past. That’s simply all, you must believe me.’ She hesitated, and then there was suddenly an undertone of something much more natural. ‘I can’t at the moment take the past, Dan. In any shape or form.’

She had used my name, at last, for the first time; and for the first time I clearly saw a strain. She was mortal after all. I left a pause.

‘Anthony kept going on about the two of you having ruined my marriage. By implication, my life. I pointed out that you have no right to give yourselves that kind of guilt. I haven’t not enjoyed my life, Jane, for all its faults and failings and I was always fully capable of ruining my own marriage. And I did. That’s one thing. The other is that he hoped you and I would become friends again now. My own instant conclusion is that there’s an appalling lack of corrupt and conscienceless men in your life. I think you need at least one. I’ve also got Anthony to report to tomorrow. And Caro. I’d like it to be that some hope, however small, was established.’

She had stared down through that and for a long moment she continued to do so, but there was a trace of a rueful smile, some sort of admission of defeat.

‘Nell did warn me.’

‘Of what?’

‘What she called your vicious habit of calling everyone’s bluff but your own.’

‘You used to have quite a low handicap at that game yourself.’

‘I seem to have grown out of practice.’

‘I can’t understand why you should wish to continue what was always an inhumanity.’

‘It’s nothing to do with you personally. But with a use to which I feel you’re being put. Quite unjustifiably.’

‘Isn’t one definition of fascism the belief that you have a right to judge for other people?’

I detected what I had sensed with her husband, an insecurity, almost a gauche anxiety when faced with someone from another world… all very well to despise and dismiss it, as I felt sure she did very probably on artistic as well as political grounds and all very well to despise her own enclosed academic world, her city: but it was where she lived, and she was not used to people, to situations, to men who had dropped, or could drop, the local sign-system, the conventions she knew best.

Her eyes down, she murmurs, ‘I’m no longer the person you knew, Dan. I’m sorry for not hiding it better. It’s not your fault at all.’

Dan hesitates, then reaches across the white cloth and touches her hand lightly. She says nothing. He beckons for the waiter.

Outside we found that the mist, not quite echoing what had just happened between us, had thickened. It was very nearly dense fog, and there was hardly any other traffic about. I knew we were crawling up the Banbury Road, but I lost all sense of distance. Jane edged along in second, peering intently at the nearside kerb. We talked a little, spasmodically, about her new political convictions. I didn’t argue, merely prompted gently. She became self-deprecating even apologetic; as if it were a matter of aesthetics, the flower-arrangement of British political life needed a red branch somewhere in it; as if the universal post-war rejection of Communism in Britain were a kind of unfair social ostracism; then perhaps with more reason as if it were a matter of chemistry, equal valencies. If Russia needed its Solzhenitsyns, then Britain needed them too, in reverse. There was also an element of middle-aged women’s liberation, a need to shock both herself and those around her, a reaction against premature widowhood and all its threatened emptinesses. And I had finally a strong whiff of Oxford eccentricity. I wondered if she had any idea what a decision like hers would have meant in America, where the iron really bit.

We turned off the Banbury Road into a side-street. At last Jane swung the car out and turned in over a kerb-ramp into a garden. She parked short of a garage beside the house. I rescued my overnight bag from the rear seat, and waited while she locked the doors. There were lights on in a semi-basement, and I could see a kitchen as we walked over the gravel. There were also lights above, on the ground floor, shafting the mist. Victorian brick and white woodwork, steps up, a tiled porch.

Jane stands looking for keys in her handbag. But a blurred shadow appears through the coloured glass panes of the front door and it opens before she can get them out. A thin young French girl in a black jumper and jeans. She wears gold-rimmed glasses, pigtails tied with two red ribbons, and a face out of Phèdre.

I couldn’t follow the rapid exchange in French, but the girl was clearly in some sort of Gallic agony at having failed to get hold of us earlier. She would hardly let us into the hail. It was striking, with Pompeian red walls and a grotesquely massive set of carved Victorian banisters, painted white, beside the staircase. I glimpsed some nice paintings; a spectacularly florid cast-iron hat-stand, also painted white. An old Jane lurked in that subtly theatrical red and white space, though I didn’t note that at the time. The girl demanded all our attention. Eventually Jane put an arm round her shoulders to quiet her. I asked what had happened.

‘The hospital have been trying to get in touch.’ She made a little grimace of apology at such fuss. ‘Dan, this is Gisèle.’

The girl gave me a nervous, silent bob.

‘I’d better see what it’s all about. Do go and have a nightcap. I won’t be a moment.’

She gestured to the girl to look after me. There was a table with a telephone on it beside the stairs.

‘Did they say…?

‘Sometimes he can’t sleep. He likes me to read to him.’ Her eyes flicked, for my benefit, towards the face behind her. ‘We’re a tiny bit alarm-prone.’ She smiled. ‘There’s some Armagnac. Do help yourself.’

I went into the room after the French girl. It stretched the depth of the house, two original rooms knocked into one, with a vaguely proscenium-shaped arch left between them. Many books, more engravings and paintings, some pleasant old furniture, a grand piano at the far, garden end which reminded me that Jane had once played passably. A lit alcove of ancient pottery; bits of Tanagra mounted on plastic cubes, a small Greek kylix. A line of invitation cards on a mantelpiece, an old Oxford form of snobbery; a modern terracotta head of a boy among them, I presumed the son.

A crowded room. Not that I took much of all this in: the French girl had turned and closed the door. She seemed very anxious that I should know she was still upset.

‘Did they tell you what it was?’

She stared at me, then shook her head. ‘Je m’excuse, monsieur. Je suis…’ then she shook her head again. I offered her a cigarette. ‘Non, non… I am okay.’

I had in fact already half guessed what it was; or at least what I hoped it might be: a change of heart in Anthony, a hearing, on reflection, after we had left, of what I had been trying to say; a sudden need to break his self-imposed silence with his wife.

Jane’s voice came from outside, too low to be distinct. I stood by the fireplace, the girl still stood by the door, like some kind of watchdog. She waved a hand, managed a bit more English.

‘If you like to drink something…’

‘Fine. Don’t worry. I’ll help myself.’

The drinks were on a console table in the rear half of the room. I poured a Scotch. The girl stayed by the door, abandoning all pretence that she was not listening to what went on outside. I moved down beside the piano and looked out over the fog-hidden garden at the rear of the house. Perhaps it was the brooding isolation there, the blanketed silence, but I had a feeling of dislocation. A swivelling Jacobsen egg-chair stood by the window, with a book lying on its seat: Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. I could see little markers, Jane was evidently reading it, and I picked the volume up. Many passages had been marked in pencil, some heavily, with double vertical lines beside them. ‘For each individual is the synthesis not only of existing relations, but of the history of these relations.’

‘Structure ceases to be an external force which crushes man, assimilates him to itself and makes him passive, and is transformed into a means of freedom, an instrument to create a new ethical political form and a source of new initiatives.’ Those last eleven words had been further underlined in the text. I leafed idly through the pages, trying to find some written comment; but there were none… or just one passage. It had an additional exclamation mark beside it. ‘The philosophy of praxis is consciousness full of contradictions, in which the philosopher himself, understood both individually and as an entire social group, not merely grasps the contradictions, but posits himself as an element of the contradiction and elevates this element to a principle of knowledge and therefore of action.’

I replaced the book, feeling the girl might think I was prying; but she seemed oblivious of me, and stood hidden, still by the door, behind the side of the arch joining the two rooms. I began to look at other books on the shelves that lined the walls, serried and silent regiments of philosophy and would-be human wisdom. Then there was the little ping from outside of the receiver being replaced. I saw the girl move away from the door. But we heard the sound of another number being dialled, and a few moments later, Jane’s low voice again. The conversation didn’t last very long. Again the receiver went down. Total silence followed. The French girl looked through the arch to where I stood, as if it was all my fault; then away. I let the silence run a few moments more, then put down my glass and with what tried to be a pacifying smile, went out into the hall.

Jane was standing only a foot or two from the front door, quite motionless, her back to me, her hands in the pockets of her outdoor coat, staring into the night. She must have heard me come out, but she didn’t turn.

‘Jane?’

Still she didn’t move. I went a step or two closer.

‘Has something happened?’

Her head did shift a fraction round towards me then. I saw the faintest smile, for all the world as if I had just said something silly.

‘Apparently soon after we left. He managed to get out on his balcony.’ She faced the night again. ‘And over the rail.’

‘You don’t…’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Dead?

‘They think it would have been instantaneous.’ She gave a minute shrug. ‘By the time they found him…’

I went a step closer, trying to understand how her shock did not match mine; I think more, almost, in shock at that than at this thunderbolt.

‘Jane?’

“Who was that man on Scott’s last expedition?’

‘Captain Oates. ‘ She gave the ghost of a nod. I heard the girl in the doorway behind me, and went and took Jane’s arm.

‘For God’s sake come and sit down.’

‘I’m all right, Dan. I’ve just rung my doctor and told her not to worry.’ She touched my hand, but only to release her arm, then turned and smiled back at the French girl who spoke first.

‘Je ne savais pas comment ‘Oui, oui. Il n’en voulait plus. C’est tout.’

The girl, with a far better sense of occasion than Jane, covered her face in her hands. Jane went and took her shoulders, then kissed her lightly on the head and murmured something. The girl looked up, I don’t know whether in amazement at this Anglo-Saxon sangfroid or in horror at Racine reduced to… Jane turned to me.

‘I think I need some tea.’

‘You need something stronger than that.’

‘No, I’d rather… ‘ she smiled at Gisèle. ‘Go on.’

The girl went hesitantly away, another dubious look at me, still as if I were in some way to blame. She disappeared down past the staircase to the basement, and I followed Jane into the living-room.

‘I can’t believe it.’

‘I know.’

‘Did they say…?’

‘The nurse who saw him to sleep said how relaxed he seemed. He was talking about you.’

She stooped and took a cigarette from a box, then the light I held out for her.

‘Had he ever…?’

She drew deeply on the cigarette, breathed the smoke out.

‘No. Not once.’

‘And no note?’

‘They can’t find anything.’

She turned away to the mantelpiece, and stared down at the hearth. It was made with a coal fire, but hadn’t been lit.

‘It couldn’t have been a mistake? If he was drugged?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. They…’

‘But why this of all nights?’

She said nothing, stayed without moving, then walked towards the bayed front windows of the room. I was left staring at her back.

After a moment she ran both her hands back over the sides of her hair, then pressed the back of her neck a moment, beneath the silver comb, as if she were sitting up in bed, waking out of some nightmare.

‘It’s not your fault, Dan. In any way at all.’

‘I wish you’d sit down.’

‘Really. I’m all right. I was prepared. It had to happen soon.’

Yet something about her seemed totally unprepared; as if she had just missed a train and was lost in prospect of the person she would now fail to meet. She stood with her back turned, holding an elbow in one hand, the cigarette near her mouth with the other. I went beside her.

‘Come on. Let’s have your coat.’

A moment’s hesitation, then she unbuttoned it and let me take it from her shoulders. There was something almost sullen in her averted face, far more like a woman who had just been mortally and irremediably offended than one who had received a profound shock. I put the coat over the back of a sofa and went down the room to where the drinks were. I could still see and hear him so vividly, and the most incomprehensible thing seemed that we hadn’t known, sitting there in that restaurant—that one could be eternally deprived of another human being so close in space, immediate in time. That odd phrase of his, ‘correcting a design failure’, returned with a ghastly and macabre irony. Absolving that ancient sin, or making sure I knew exactly what absolution entailed, had for some incomprehensible reason assumed more validity in his mind than the fresh ‘sin’ of suicide. He had been at death’s door, his self-awarded euthanasia had merely forestalled Atropos by a few weeks, but the timing… it was like being the victim of a bad practical joke. I went back with a tumbler of brandy. Jane glanced at it, but shook her head.

‘You have it. I really don’t want any.’

‘Just a mouthful.’

She gave in, she took a sip, but put the glass down at once on the window-ledge in front of her.

‘I’m so sorry you’ve been dragged into this. It’s unforgivable.’

I said gently, ‘You must try to pity him a little.’

She turned away to find an ashtray. Then she stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette with an unnatural care and persistence.

‘I pity us both, Dan.’

For a moment then there was something more honest in her voice; a tinge of despair, of real feeling. But as if she regretted even that small concession to normal reaction, she immediately looked at her watch.

‘I must let Rosamund know. And Nell.’

‘I’ll ring Nell. In a minute.’

She hesitated. ‘Perhaps. If you wouldn’t mind.’

‘Of course not.’

She took a deep breath. ‘It’s the thought of all the fuss. The arranging.’

‘I should let Nell take care of all that.’

‘There’ll have to be an inquest, I’m afraid.’

‘Never mind.’

‘They wondered if you’d come to the hospital with me tomorrow morning.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of letting you go alone.’

‘I feel so embarrassed, I… ‘

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

She looked down, she was going to say something more, but Gisèle appeared with the tea-tray; and Jane seemed glad of the excuse to move and clear a space on the marble coffee-table in front of the fireplace. The girl made a gesture of willingness to go away, but Jane made her stay. I gave up; refused tea, went and collected my glass of whisky; then suggested I rang Nell.

Out in the hall I prayed for it to be Andrew who answered; and after a long pause, the prayer was granted. It was a relief to hear ordinary reactions of shock and then solicitude: another male voice and mind. I put him off attempting to set out at once, though he said they were fairly free of fog at Compton. They would be in Oxford by lunchtime. No, she’d rather not talk to Nell tonight; yes, I’d tell her they were ‘shattered and heartbroken’. I’d hold the fort till they came. And yes, I looked forward to meeting him again too.

I went back into the living-room and Jane took her cup of tea and my place at the telephone. The call went on for twenty minutes or more, during which I tried to make conversation with the French kid: where she came from, how long she’d been in Oxford Aix-en-Provence, a month, apparently Jane’s younger daughter had stayed with her family in France. I couldn’t imagine what she was thinking, these English with their phlegm, their stone-cold blood, their infantile questions about Cezanne and the ruin of the Côte d’Azur. But Jane seemed to have found a brisker, more normal self when she came back. Rosamund had cried, it seemed, then decided it was perhaps for the best… she too would be here for lunch. Then there were banalities: what food Gisèle should buy the next morning, where everyone would sleep, when and how to let Paul, and Anne in Florence, know, and… About half past twelve Gisèle went down to the kitchen with the tea-things and Jane took me up to my room, the absent Paul’s. I saw poster-diagrams: one of English building styles, another of medieval armour, with all the bits and pieces labelled and explained. A lot of books, rather an ominous lack of the usual decor one expects in a boy’s bedroom. History was evidently his thing, and I smelt a little don in the making. Jane looked cursorily round to see I had everything I might need. Again she was playing hostess; treating me like some academic stranger, far too distinguished or transient to be bothered with the trivial upsets of her private life.