Daniel Martin (28 page)

‘That’s silly.’

‘I felt you were offended.’

‘Only that you aren’t more against it.’

She looked away, searching for the right words. ‘I think she has to escape from Nell. From Compton, all of that. And she can’t do it through you… without hurting her mother.’

‘I do realize that.’

‘I’m trying to say children like her don’t have many roads from what they are to what they’d rather be. I know what you must feel about him, but that’s really not the point. I think it’s a kind of lesson she has to learn. I’m sorry, I should have said all this at dinner last night.’ She hesitated, then went on in a lighter voice. ‘And her real love-affaire of these last two years has been with you. That’s not a guess.’

‘Which makes me feel even more to blame.’

‘It’s a small break for freedom.’

‘Out of the frying-pan.’

‘But she has so little room to manoeuvre. She’s surrounded by adults she has to get in perspective. And whom she’s terrified of offending. And you really mustn’t discount Andrew. That bond. The reverse of the traditional situation has happened there. The more she’s reacted against Nell, the more he’s become the mediator. Her ally.’

‘I’ve guessed that. I am grateful.’

‘As long as you realize it’s created another conflict. She put it very naïvely but touchingly to me the last time we met. She said, If only you all believed in the same things.’

‘Poor kid.’

‘You don’t mind me saying this?’

‘Of course not. I wish I knew if she was fed up over what’s happened in California.’

‘We didn’t really talk about that. But I don’t see why she should be.’

I stared down at the table. ‘I’ve been very naughty, Jane. Over Jenny. She’s rather too close to what I’d have liked Caro to have been. She’s literate, she reads, she thinks… ‘ I shrugged.

‘And also found you more interesting than men her own age?’

‘I know I haven’t a foot to stand on. I suppose it’s just Caro’s particular choice of guru.’

‘Can you blame her for taking him at the general valuation? He’s quite well seen nowadays. In all senses.’ She tilted her head at my sceptical look. ‘Yes, of course. A servant of the system. But that may be a part of the lesson she needs.’

‘And telling Nell?’

‘I suggested this morning that she left that to you.’

‘Well it wasn’t. I was once more ordered to keep my mouth shut.’

She smiled. ‘Then you must let her do it in her own good time.’

‘I can see she picked a lousy father. But a perfect aunt.’

She looked out of the window. ‘I nearly broke down two years ago, just after Roz started at the B. B. C. I ran away to London and did what decent mothers are never meant to do, threw myself sobbing into my daughter’s arms and told all. She was marvellous. So much more mature than I was at her age.’ She played with the handle of her cup, then gave me the moral. ‘I suspect one loses a lot if one hides too much behind one’s years.’

‘She knows about… you haven’t told me his name?’

‘Peter. Yes. She greeted that breathtaking confession by telling me that if I hadn’t been such an old square I’d have found a lover years ago.’

I grinned, and saw in her eyes a spark of an old animation, a love of sending things up; but then she looked down, though she was still smiling. Through all of this I had been increasingly aware of a defect of imagination on my part. I knew what she had said of Andrew must apply to her as well. That however badly she had treated me, it had been repaid handsomely in her attitude to my daughter; that her ‘tiny special relationship’ was something much more important than that. I recalled a little incident from the beginning of Caro’s life. Rather inconsistently, since we had held their own first child at the font, Nell and I had refused to have Caro baptized; and though Anthony and Jane hadn’t argued over that, there had been some complaint about our depriving the baby of its natural godparents. It had all been got over lightly enough, but I could still remember Jane saying she intended to be her godmother whether we liked it or not. I began belatedly to realize that she had been it to a degree few fully titled godmothers felt necessary in practice. I deduced too that I was perhaps less strange to Jane than she had first led me to believe… often seen through Caro, at least. But just as I knew Caro’s understanding of Jane, at least as transmitted to me, was very partial, I wondered how accurate my own portrait had been. It seemed clear I was being told if gently, that I hadn’t thought hard enough about Caro’s problems. I felt tempted to justify myself. But I also knew Jane was on much sounder grounds there than with her views on politics and our past. My judgment shifted during that closer conversation over the coffees: we were back with that old touchstone of ‘feeling right’. She had felt very wrong to me through most of the evening before. But now I recognized something in her that had not, at least in this matter, changed. She might hide and hide, speak in cipher, betray her true self; but she was still capable of a tenacity of right-feeling, that strangest of all intransigences, both humanity’s trap and its ultimate freedom. It was not unlike as it was with Jenny when she was to put down her feelings about America; that is, I left the coffee-bar secretly chastened, or revised, concerning my too-easy first sentence upon Oxford and its modes and mores. In a way too it was a practical demonstration of Anthony’s last small contradiction of me. No true change except in ourselves, as we are. A rarefied idealism, perhaps; but I no longer felt so sure it was provincial.

Jane told me more about Rosamund on the way back… and the girl herself, whom I hadn’t seen, except in the very occasional photograph, for so many years, came out as soon as we drove up to the house and parked behind her own small blue Renault. She was tall, taller than her mother, long-haired and long-limbed, a shade too lanky and strong-mouthed to be very attractive physically, but there was a frankness about her that I liked. She resembled her father, much more his face than Jane’s. The two women clung to each other a long moment, then Rosamund turned and took my hand. I made her lean forward and kissed her on the cheek. She said, ‘I’m so glad you were here’; with a good straight look, it meant the words.

I very soon learnt that she was the practical member of the household; a brisk production-assistant efficiency was initiated. Paul must be put on the train, and she’d meet him herself at Reading. Phone-calls had started coming in, and Jane was set to answering some of those that needed it. I was given a drink down in the kitchen, while the two girls busied themselves with the lunch. The smell of food, we were to have the brace of pheasant I had rejected the night before. Rosamund talked about herself, not Anthony; her life in London working at the B. B. C. Then a grey Jaguar drew up outside, above us. I glimpsed the bottom halves of Nell and Andrew. Jane opened the door upstairs to them, and they didn’t appear for a few minutes.

When they did, Nell pressed my hand after our token kiss-on-the-cheek with more warmth than for a long time past. Then I had Andrew’s grip, and that ancient sizing and amused stare. He was wearing a dark grey suit and our old college tie, and only his weather-bronzed face seemed rural. He had side-whiskers now, and was balding; a central strand of wheaten hair, a little reticulation of beetroot veins under pouched eyes, those curious, faintly glaucous eyes… an example of that cross between the Saxon peasant and the Viking that has become over the centuries one of the well-bred English faces; Viking in the raids on convention, Saxon in the fundamental placidity and contentment. It was clear that, as in history, the Saxon had tamed the Viking. He had brought a magnum of Taitinger, and began to chaff Rosamund.

‘Still bedding down with that frightfully clever what’s-his-name fella?’

‘Andrew, do you mind?’

Nell cried across the room. ‘Darling, he’s trying to be discreet and refined!’

I caught Jane’s eyes assaying my reaction. Then the telephone was ringing upstairs again.

Andrew interested me: how good such people were to have in such situations their style, panache, natural command. Though the only one of us who was formally dressed, he was by far the least funereal. He got the champagne cooled and opened, managed to suggest without offence that it was all rather a caper, lovely to be here together with all the crosstalk and the Gisèle sun coming through the window.

I had never seen him like this, with Nell’s side of the family, and the last lingering unlikelihood in the marriage soon disappeared. Of course he had never been a quarter of the languid fool he used to pretend to be as an undergraduate, living in a manner that was already totally outdated except among his rich clique (heavy with memories of fathers who had been up in the Evelyn Waugh period); and he must have seen through the county, as a bride-market, far more thoroughly than any of us ever realized. guessed that he had somehow made a choice of which traditions arid rituals were worth keeping and which could be dismissed; live like a squire, work like a farmer, think like a free man… and make out you are only the first. It functioned. There must have been some sense in which he had married below himself; but one saw why. He needed this more open, tolerant world quite as much as his title and his outward role in life.

He and I, and Nell came with us, strolled out into the garden while lunch was laid at the table where we’d been sitting. They were more serious then. Nell, as always, was probing, inquisitive, suspicious. Why, why, why, what had Anthony said to me, what did I think, what had I guessed… all of which I sidestepped. I might have been a little franker with Andrew alone; with Nell I felt determined in silence. Fortunately Andrew’s presence meant she couldn’t delve too deeply into the past. Then we discussed Jane, and things grew a shade more honest. Yes, we had talked. I’d gathered the marriage had had its problems… the Catholic thing. And yes, she’d told me about the Communist Party ‘nonsense’.

‘It’s purely emotional,’ said Nell. ‘Just being bloody-minded. She’ll drop it now he’s dead. She needed a safety-valve, that was all. I tried to tell her. But of course she won’t listen to me about anything these days.’ She went on before I needed to answer. ‘At least half of it’s this ridiculous Women’s Lib nonsense she’s picked up from Roz.’

I smiled. ‘Obviously not from you.’

‘My dear man, fetes to the left of me, fetes to the right. I do good like nobody’s business. When I’m not playing six maids, a nanny, and his lordship’s valet. I mean, I’d have a case, I do need liberating. Andrew, stop smirking.’

She was still quite pretty for her age, still had her quickness; but something in her once much more occasional than constant that had always been both insecure and insensitive had got worse. If her sister had forgotten how to play conventional roles, Nell had remembered only too well.

Andrew said, ‘Ought to marry again.’

Nell made a duck’s mouth at me. ‘Ye olde country saw.’

‘Not an argument against it, dear girl.’

‘But darling, she is. She’s fallen in love with stewing.’

I murmured, ‘Then Andrew could be right.’

‘For heaven’s sake. I wouldn’t be against it. Honestly, Dan strictly between ourselves, any normal woman would have walked out on Anthony years ago.’ I felt like reminding her that she had once used this supposedly model marriage to belittle our own, but she was going on. ‘You know, there was a time when she was coming and staying with us a lot and I knew perfectly well what was going on, but… oh well, it’s all history now. It’s the way she’s always been.’ She looked round, accusing the backs of the houses. ‘It’s this dreadful inbred city. She’s never grown out of it. Don’t you think?’

‘I’ve just had three months in California, Nell. It seems rather civilized after the dream-world over there.’

‘Are you back for long?’

‘As long as I can make it.’

‘Andrew and I… we thought you might like to come down to Compton with Caro for a weekend or something.’ She widened her eyes, a familiar old signal that she was being terribly sincere, and murmured, ‘if you could stand the squareness. But please.’

‘I’d love to. That would be fun.’

Andrew said, ‘Jolly good.’ Then, ‘Do you shoot, Dan?’

‘Only dice. And that neither well nor often.’

‘Splendid. We’ll get out the old backgammon board.’

‘Oh Andrew, for God’s sake.’ She raised her eyebrows at me. ‘At the last totting-up I owed him eight hundred thousand pounds.’

‘A little over my limit.’

Andrew flicked an eyelid, over her head. ‘Play for pennies, actually.’

Nell asked how Caro had seemed. She knew of course that she was working for Barney, and we discussed the pros and cons of that: it was clear that, being the slave of a system herself, she saw the new job favourably. No doubt the association added an agreeable little vicarious feather to her local social hat. I told them about the new flat, and sensed a small struggle in Nell between being secretly pleased that I was forsaken and alarmed that Caro was striking out on her own. She thought she was ‘rather silly’ to have dropped Richard. But when I said I thought she needed something better than, a charming young clot, I saw something in Andrew’s, if not Nell s, eyes that agreed. Inevitably she asked if there was ‘someone else’. Caro was being so cagey. I played innocent; I’d try to find out. We were called in for lunch. It was much more enjoyable than I had anticipated, mainly thanks to Andrew; and bizarre, since I felt that they were surreptitiously using me for a celebration. There was some kind of suppressed relief at its all being over with Anthony and it had to be expressed through a surrogate; and by carefully not mentioning him, or what he had done. I was a little the prodigal son, informally reaccepted into their world; and it was much more a love-feast than a wake. On my side there was my knowing that I had missed their company more than I had ever admitted: the banter, the trivial news about other relations, children, the crosscurrents the lost familiarity of it all, in both the literal and the normal sense of the word. I had become too used to one-to-one relationships, even with Caro; to artistic or commercial or sexual codes of behaviour; everything but this loose, warm web of clan. It was, after all, a modest secular equivalent of that night-bathe at Tarquinia so many years before.