Daniel Martin (29 page)

Rosamund drove me to the station about three, on her way down to Reading to meet her brother. As soon as we moved off I’d been reminded during the lunch that I was technically her godfather I spoke.

‘You seem to have a stunning relationship with your mother, Roz.’

‘You’ve been talking?’

‘Yes.’

‘She’s had rather a rough time these last years.’

‘So I understand.’

‘Does she seem changed to you?’

‘Only at first.’

I asked her what she thought of her mother’s extraordinary prospective leap to the left if it was not straight backwards. Rather surprisingly she seemed to share Nell’s view of it, though with a better understanding and much more sympathy.

‘I think it’s been mainly struggling for survival. It’s so stupid she never had a career. That’s not preaching Lib, just what she is, really. I even have to pretend I enjoy my own job less than I really do. I mean she’s glad for me, but it’s also what she ought to have done. And she knows it.’ After a moment, she went on. ‘I used to blame my father. But there’s something in her I don’t really understand. We do talk a lot, but there’s always that final block. She sort of slides off into commonplaces. Starts justifying what she is. I think she gets frightened if she looks back too much.’

‘She’s not alone in that.’

‘I suppose one can’t win. One day I shall curse myself for not having had children younger.’

‘At least you’ll have done what seemed wise at the time.’

‘Didn’t you?’

‘Do I have to answer that?’

She smiled, then slowed down and stopped to let a string of uniformed schoolgirls pass over a crossing. Her question came abruptly.

‘Do you know why he did it?’

I left a little silence. ‘I think it was an act of charity. At least in intention.’

‘It’s only these last two or three years I’ve realized how totally unsuited they were to each other.’

‘I doubt whether totally unsuited people last that long, Roz.’

‘All right. But if it hadn’t been for us… ‘ She moved off again. She meant, us children.

‘They did set themselves fiercely high standards. They’re never very easy to live up to.’

‘I’ve never understood why they had to be so savagely applied to you.’ She said, ‘I hear about worse stabs in the back every day of my life.’ A moment, then her tone changed. ‘Are forgotten goddaughters allowed to ask very personal questions?’

I flinched inwardly. ‘Of course.’

‘Was there any truth in that play you wrote?’

‘It’s just how it seemed at the time. One against three.’

‘I really meant something between my father and Nell.’

We were rapidly getting into dangerous waters. ‘No truth at all. Malice, I’m afraid.’

She was silent for a few seconds.

‘It’s so strange. All these years. You’ve been so completely taboo. I half expected horns and a cloven hoof.’

‘I did wear them once.’

She grinned, but I suspected she knew she hadn’t been honestly answered, and I jumped in before she could dig further.

‘Are you glad she’s going to remarry?’

That got a sharp look. ‘You have been talking.’

‘Most of last night.’

She turned down towards the station. ‘He’s… very charming. Very alive. I’m all for it. Even my father would have been, in a funny kind of way. The last time I saw him on Sunday he kept going on about it.’

‘Her remarrying?’

‘Not specifically. Her needing a new life.’ She added, ‘I almost wish now I’d told him.’ She turned to me again. ‘Did you ever understand your parents?’

‘I only knew one.’

‘I forgot.’

‘And I’m just, very dimly, beginning to understand him.’

‘I suppose understanding them would make things terribly dull.’

‘I rather suspect that goes for life in general.’

She smiled, she accepted that; happy career-girl.

Three hours later Dan was passing on her love to Caro, along with the other news. To begin with Caro was rather flagrantly solicitous, as if she were partly to blame for what had happened. But though she was curious as to how he had ‘found’ Jane, she was not as inquisitive as he expected over the suicide itself. She wanted to know how her mother had been, as well. The conversation in the garden was duly reported and the invitation to Compton. All this was as she drove Dan north through Maida Vale to see her flat. So many of his conversations that day seemed destined to be shifting, both literally and metaphorically. Too full of his own news, Dan was slow to realize that his daughter was hiding something. But Compton led them to what had hitherto been avoided.

‘Daddy, you don’t have to nag at me. I know I should tell her.’

‘The longer you leave it…’

‘It’s just… ‘

‘Just what?’

‘I can’t face doing it over the ‘phone. She never lets me get a word in edgeways, anyway. She hardly hears what I say. It’s always the latest Compton disasters.’

‘Mothers get envious of daughters. Feel they’ve been deserted. That’s quite common.’

She said nothing for a moment.

‘Were they always like that? Mummy and Aunt Jane?’

‘Like what?’

‘So different.’

‘You must put some of the blame on me. What happened between us.’

‘That’s Aunt Jane’s line.’

‘We do both know what she went through.’

‘You don’t know what I go through. She really liked Richard. He was so revoltingly safe. She’d have had me married off to him on the spot.’ She braked with an unnecessary sharpness to let another car draw out of a side-road. ‘I know what she’ll do. She’ll blame it on herself. For ever letting me out of her sight. And poor Andrew. He’ll get it.’

‘Then it’s not your problem. And I think he gives as good as he gets. ‘I don’t know how he stands her sometimes.’

‘Caro.’

‘It’s only because I feel guilty about her.’

‘You must sick it up.’

‘And because my ears have been burning all day.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘The problem daughter.’

‘We all agreed they’re much more interesting than the straight ones.’

He had said it lightly, to make her smile. But whatever had been building up, or waiting, now broke surface. She did not smile, but drove a little way in silence. Dan glanced at her.

‘What is it?’

‘Nothing.’ But a second or two later she spoke again. ‘I told Bernard today that I’d told you.’

‘And?’

‘He asked me to say he was sorry about… you know.’

‘It was difficult for him. I can see that.’

‘Actually he’d like you to have lunch with him one day.’ That took Dan so completely by surprise that he hesitated fatally. ‘There is his side of it.’

‘Which I know.’

She hesitated; then crashed through her fence.

‘You’re so good at forcing people to give wrong impressions of themselves.’

‘From bitter personal experience?’

‘You do lead people on.’

‘To lying about themselves?’

‘That’s the whole point. He wasn’t lying.’

‘I was asking in general.’

‘I never know what you really feel.’

‘I thought I’d made it plain in the present case.’

‘When I told Aunt Jane, all she said was, Are you happy?’

‘Darling, you’re not being consistent.’

‘I know I’m not consistent.’

It was said almost fiercely, and Dan left a pause.

‘Do you want me to meet him?’

‘It doesn’t matter. It was just an idea.’

After a few moments he saw her eyes blink, as she watched the road ahead. He let her drive a hundred yards, then looked again.

‘Pull in. There’s a space ahead.’

She obeyed, parked, switched off the engine, then sat with her head bowed, like a disobedient child. He took her hand and pressed it, and felt a pressure back.

‘This is so silly, Caro.’

‘I know.’

‘If your mother and I get overprotective about you, it’s very largely because we made such a mess of loving each other.’

‘It’s just I’m so tired of… ‘

‘Of what?’

‘If I love one of you back, it always seems to be betraying the other.’

‘That’s our stupidity. Not something wrong in you.’ He pressed her hand again. ‘Is this why you didn’t tell me you’d already told Aunt Jane?’ She nodded. ‘Then let’s get one thing straight. I’m not jealous of your relationship with her. Or with Andrew. I’ve nothing but gratitude for the way both of them have helped. And even your mother and I are getting less stupid. She really was falling over herself to be nice to me today.’

‘Oh God.’

‘It’s all right. I did the squirming for you.’

She managed the shadow of a smile, then reached with her free hand towards a box of tissues under the dashboard.

‘If the thing with Bernard makes you happy, then I won’t argue about it.’

‘He was annoyed that I told you.’

‘He has no right to be.’

‘I don’t mean with me. Not really annoyed. Just… I suppose embarrassed.’

‘That you were honest?’

‘I don’t use words very accurately. It’s not that he didn’t understand. That wretched meeting you on the flight.’

‘As long as he didn’t suggest that someone trendier would have kept their mouth shut.’

She shook her head. ‘It was my doing something he felt he ought to have done himself. That’s really why he wants to see you.’

Dan still held her hand. ‘And you want me to?’

‘I know it must seem pointless.’ She hesitated. ‘Daddy, he’s not trendy at all under the surface.’

‘Then tell him all right. If he really wants to.’

She pressed his hand, and took a breath.

‘What did you and Aunt Jane decide about me?’

‘That deciding about you wasn’t on.’

‘Beyond salvation?’

‘Our interference.’

‘I bet it was all Freud and Marx and God knows what else.’

‘I’ll tell you when it’s over.’

‘I’d rather know now.’

‘That’s not fair. You’d be able to prove us wrong.’

She did, again, smile briefly at that; a fall, but back in the saddle now.

‘It’s realizing that someone does seem to need you. I wouldn’t go bed with him to begin with. I thought it was just… the usual.’

‘Go on.’

‘I mean need you for… nonfamily reasons.’

‘I understand’

‘I did think about it. What you’d all feel.’

‘You mustn’t worry about that. It’s the oldest madness in the species. Parents thinking the product of their own genes will somehow be everything that they failed to be themselves.’

‘It all sort of hit me today.’ She sighed. ‘Mummy’s really going to blame you, you know that.’

‘I shan’t let her, Caro. This whole business of your working in London was agreed between us.’

‘I wouldn’t blame you for wishing I was different.’

‘My dear child, I wish almost everything was different, starting with myself. But we have to make the best of what we are. And you and I could have done worse these last two years—you’d at least grant that?’

‘You know.’

‘You mustn’t think everything can be said in language. That because we keep up a kind of teasing relationship that that’s all I really feel. Phrases like “I love you” always secretly mean a sort of uncertainty. That’s the only reason I don’t say them. And also because I know you know this.’

‘I do deep down.’

‘Then hold to that.’ He leant and kissed the side of her head. ‘Now shall I drive?’

‘No, I’m okay.’ She pressed his hand a last time and reached for the ignition; stopped, turned and put her arms round Dan’s neck for a moment; then went back to starting the engine.

He was shown round the flat. It, and its district, did not appeal to him much; but it seemed reasonably clean, the price not too outrageous, and there were no two ways about Caro having set her heart on it. So Dan gave his imprimatur, and Caro her cheque for the first month’s rent, and they went on up to Hampstead Village and had dinner. All through it Dan underwent a tug-of-war between affection and… not quite boredom, but a malaise. Inevitably the past was with them, and his memories of Anthony; but so much remained that still had to be censored. There was a point where he felt almost like telling her, as Jane had told her own daughter, at least part of the truth. So much prevarication, so much standing on dignity, on the assumption that younger generations can never understand older ones; almost as if children were brought into the world only in order that their parents might have secrets from them and surely the kind of secrets whose unfolding might have been of much more real value than the stale old outward teachings of experience that were sheltered behind. Judging it more creditable to pass on general theory than practical reality began to Dan, that evening, to seem more and more like a smug papal infallibility, an attitude that reason and honesty mocked at every turn. He had felt it with Rosamund, earlier that day; she had asked a sensible and honest question. I once went to bed with your mother, and your father knew it and could never forget it. So simple, so many doubts and enigmas cleared at a stroke; having thought which, Dan went carefully on maintaining his daughter’s myth of the past.