Daniel Martin (52 page)

‘Real bright kid,’ said her husband. ‘None of your hippie nonsense.’

I showed them round the inside, and she came to life a little, though she found it all too beautiful, stock compliments, Marvellous what I’d done; but something in her eyes was also seeing the past. I tried to coax her, make her remember where furniture had been, what rooms had been used for in the old days; then round the barns, the converted one Ben and Phoebe now lived in, where we had stood in the dark corner that last day. Very nice, she kept saving; hardly seems possible.

I gave them a drink back in the house, we talked casually about the general past, changes in the village, the rashes of bungalows; but not a single reference to the secret past. I wouldn’t have minded if she’d just for one moment seemed sad, nostalgic; paid just one tiny tribute, even mocking, to that ‘tragedy’ in our adolescent past. But she sipped her Dubonnet and played resolutely genteel second fiddle to her husband. I had only one minute alone with her, when he asked for ‘the gents’.

‘Has life been good to you, Nancy?’

I hadn’t used her Christian name till then.

‘Oh well, can’t complain.’ She pursed lips to her cigarette. ‘Harry’s done very well. Considering.’

‘You haven’t missed the old life?’

‘Not the same now, is it? All chemicals and machinery. Not like the old days.’ She looked out of the window. ‘Good riddance, if you ask me. The way we had to work. Don’t know how we stood it, really.’

‘I’ve never tasted cream like your mother’s since.’

‘Given all that up now. Not worth it with Holsteins and Friesians.’ She said, ‘All seems so long ago somehow.’

I smiled. ‘All of it?’

Just for a second her eyes drifted and cautiously met mine, then looked away with a prim little smile. ‘You don’t smell those rotten old cows now. That’s one thing I’ll remember till the day. I still get a whiff sometimes. Like a ghost.’

‘I wouldn’t fancy that.’

I stood to refill her glass, but no, she really wouldn’t, thanks very much. Then she wanted to know about the carpet. I told her about copal matting. Her husband came back.

I found it all vaguely amusing at the time; it hasn’t really distressed till now, when I set it down. It was my fault, I played my comprehensively son, a kind of inversion of that scene when he so comprehensively outmanoeuvred me in his study; if only I had broken through the wretched plastic shell of that meeting, through her frightened gentility and my equally odious urbanity. We think we all grow old, we grow wise and more tolerant; we just grow more lazy. I could have asked what happened that terrible day; what did you feel, how long did you go on missing me? Even if I’d only evoked a remembered bitterness, recriminations, it would have been better than that total burial, that vile, stupid and inhuman pretence that our pasts are not also our presents; that what we did and felt was in some way evil and absurd… immature. Ban the green from your life, and what are you left with?

I walked down to their car with them. They must call in again if they were ever down this way, Phoebe would always give them a cup of tea if I wasn’t there; walk round the fields again. I could see they thought I was merely ‘being polite’, condescending perhaps, though I tried sincerely not to be; but I had been to Hollywood, I had actually met film-stars, I couldn’t really mean it. I can’t have, since they have never taken up the invitation.

We shook hands, I was thanked everso for sparing the time.

‘I think you’ve done it all beautiful.’ She gave the house one last look back. ‘I really wouldn’t have known it. Inside.’

Oh my England.

I found a stock-dove’s nest, and thow shalt have it.

The cheesecake, in my chest, for thee I save it.

I will give thee rush-rings, key-knobs and cushings,

Pence, purse, and other things, bells, beads and bracelets,

My shepehooke, and my dog, my bottell, and my bag yet all not worth a rag:

Phillida flouts me.

Phoebe had lit a fire in the living-room, supper was on. I showed Jane and Paul to their rooms, and then round the house, which seemed tiny after Compton, and unsure of itself; perhaps, though Phoebe had done her best, just insufficiently lived in.

I had begun by attempting a very simple and exorcizing decor, all wood and white walls; but the place was much too old to tolerate the fashionable Finnish starkness I first tried to impose on it. I introduced more clutter, the odd print or painting that took my fancy, pieces of Victorian furniture picked up in local antique shops. One day I had disinterred the old canvas of my episcopal great-grandfather from the junk-cupboard in the London flat where Nell had long ago relegated it, and had it cleaned and relined. It now hung over the fireplace, disapprovingly grave, one of those portraits whose eyes seemed to follow you everywhere. I had turned a deaf ear to Caro’s and most other people’s horror of the thing. As a painting it was certainly not good enough to occupy the place of honour, and not quite bad enough to be amusing; which very probably represented its subject’s true worth. But I had come to feel affectionate about the unremitting sternness of that gaze; and there were other family relics I had reinstated, one or two silhouettes and miniatures of forgotten ancestors, a favourite photograph of Aunt Millie and my father taken in 1938… the house would no longer have pleased an art director, but it felt (at least until I had, as that evening, to see it through other eyes) more like a home.

Jane rang Dartington to see about bringing Paul back; while I found the old deed-map with the field boundaries for him. Then I produced the little presents I’d bought Ben and Phoebe from America, a bottle of Bourbon for Ben knowing that with whisky his respect for money overcame his love of alcohol and some allegedly Navajo placemats for Phoebe, bought in transit in New York and (I suspect) manufactured there… but anything garish and suitably exotic pleased her. She had no visual taste whatever; even Ben complained about the collection of gewgaws she had amassed in their own quarters. No daytrip for her was complete without some ghastly new piece of tourist china.

We had supper—not one of her best, though Jane and Paul were polite about it. He was to be handed back at ten the next morning but was desperate to get out and have a look at the fields before he left. So we agreed to that. He was markedly easier, perhaps because of the day, but also because Jane had evidently taken our little conversation about fussing to heart. She prompted him less, and he talked more. I told them about the old days, working at Thorncombe as a boy; about being the vicar’s son, the antiquated social system; and watched Jane’s eyes slide covertly towards Paul once or twice, as if to see what he really thought of this prodigal uncle returned to the fold.

She sent him off to bed at half past nine, and we took our coffees in front of the fire. Some successor of the Reeds had blocked up the wide old chimney with its bread-oven, but I had had the suburban tiles and the backing rubble out again. I sat to one side, in a rocking-chair, Jane on the couch in front of the hearth, in the trousers and navy-blue polo-necked sweater she had worn all day. I had laughed when she asked if she should change. Now she delivered judgment.

‘I think you’ve made a conquest.’

‘I’ll give him the phone-number. It’s really very close.’

‘I should be careful. You may find you’ve acquired a limpet.’

‘I’ll warn him I must work. For a few weeks, anyway.’ I said, ‘And you must come and stay longer, Jane. Seriously. And let me meet your friend.’

She stared into the fire and didn’t say anything for a moment; then smiled wrily. ‘My ex-friend, Dan.’ She avoided my surprised eyes. ‘I’m afraid.’

‘But I thought.. you said he’d written.’

‘Yes. He did. He’s…’ she sought for suitably old-fashioned, dismissive words… ‘he’s formed a new attachment.’ She added lightly, ‘Not to worry. These things happen.’ Then at last she did permit herself a less clinical, or more feminine, moment. ‘Especially to Peter.’

‘I don’t think much of his sense of timing.’

‘Apparently it’s been going on for some months. And it did rather have to be now or never. He was very contrite. Self-accusing.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘It wasn’t altogether a surprise. My only regret is that I didn’t do the dear-Johning myself.’ She took a breath. ‘Fidelity was never his strong point. I think it’s something to do with philosophy. You spend so much time in a ratified stratosphere that you have to compensate when you descend from it. Be an ordinary mortal.’

‘Someone over there?

‘She teaches history at Harvard, it seems.’

‘You’re being very brave about it.’

She shook her head. ‘I’ve told Roz. Now you. So I don’t even have to feel very humiliated. And there was the age thing. It was never really on.’

I thought of her having nursed this news all through the weekend; and began to forgive her some of her calculatlng distances.

‘Men are shits.’

‘At least honest ones. In this case.’

‘Even so.’

She shrugged, and I left a sympathetic silence.

‘Have you thought any more about the future?’

‘Not really, Dan.’ She twitched at a horsehair that had poked through the fabric on the arm of the settee. ‘That’s not quite true, I’m half thinking of selling the house and moving to London. A flat perhaps. Somewhere smaller.’

‘That sounds fine.’

‘And nearer Roz.’

‘That’s a good idea.’

‘What does she think?’

‘She’s all for it.’

‘Then why not?’

‘I suppose doubting whether I could make a new life there for myself.’

‘You’ve abandoned the other idea?’ She looked at me, rather revealingly unable to remember what the other idea had been. ‘Following in the footsteps of dear old Lenin’s widow?’

‘Not absolutely.’

There was a reluctance, a brevity in her voice. ‘Jane, if you don’t want to talk about it, you know… I funderstand.’

She smiled, still hesitated, then came to a decision; but spoke to the fire. ‘You please mustn’t take what I said that evening too literally, Dan. I do have very strong leftward feelings at the moment. But I’m not at all sure of the best way to use them. Roz is trying to push me into taking some sort of extramural P. P. E. degree. Or a teacher-training course.’

‘But you’re not called?’

‘In a way, very much. As long as it wasn’t at Oxford.’

‘A lot of women seem to do it nowadays.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘A counterargument?’

‘No, of course not.’ She looked down, then glossed that. ‘Roz’s motives get a tiny bit transparent at times. I hate feeling I’m both a problem mother and just one more blow for the cause.’

‘Except that it’s a good cause? And you do have a problem.’

She said nothing for a moment. ‘May I put my feet up?’

‘Of course.’

She kicked off her shoes and stretched her legs along the settee, then made a face across at me. ‘Varicose veins.’

‘Oh God.’

‘I’ve had them for years. Not even worth operating on. They just ache sometimes.’ She went on quickly, back to her psychological self, staring down at her lap. ‘I suppose it’s a burden of frustration. Having got yourself into a state where nothing seems sensible enough. You know? Your heart aches for a huge step and you can’t face any of the little ones. You lose your head, as I did that dreadful evening with you. Say things you don’t really mean.’

‘But the heart wants to mean?’

She reached an arm on the couch-back, leant her head against her hand, stared again at the fire. ‘I just feel our society has got blind. So selfish. It’s all I can ever see nowadays. And the only people who could change anything, change it intelligently, absolutely nothing about it. Refuse to give up anything Share anything. It seems almost beyond politics. A kind of universal blindness. Which means you turn to anyone who appears to begin to see. The Maoists, the Communists, anyone.’

‘But isn’t the trouble if you throw out all the bad freedoms, the good ones go with them?’

‘I know I’m in a dream-world. Especially on the historical evidence.’

‘The only place where I thought that wretched Fenwick character had a point was on biological grounds. That we can’t evolve without at least some freedom to go our own peculiar way.’

She stretched the arm along the back of the couch; still hypnotized by, or finding sanctuary in, the fire.

‘I heard a Marxist economist lecture a month or two ago. About the production costs of the British food industry. The ludicrous proportion of the whole that’s taken up by advertising and packaging. Apparently it’s even worse in America.’

‘No one would argue over that. A bad freedom.’

‘But no one does argue, Dan. Except the extreme left. That’s the real horror.’

‘Perhaps you should stand for Parliament.’

She smiled. ‘La Pasionaria of the detergent counter?’

‘Seriously. Local government, anyway.’

‘I have thought about it.’ She added, ‘As schoolgirls dream of winning Wimbledon or dancing with Nureyev.’

‘You can project. That’s half the battle.’

‘Could project.’

‘It would come back.’

Again she was silent a moment, searching for words. ‘It’s the battle in myself that has to be won first. When I knew Anthony was going to die, I had a sense of release. So many things I was going to do. It’s almost as if they’ve all died with him. I feel a terrible lack of energy. Not physically. All this useless, diffuse anger churning inside me, and knowing I just let it churn. Never do a thing about it. Just go on leading my same old life.’

‘You’re not giving yourself any time.’

‘But I don’t have that feeling any more, of release.’ She had folded her arms now, sat propped against the far inner corner of the couch, staring at her stockinged feet. ‘I have a rather sympto-longing to renounce all my money. I can’t in fact, obviously it’s morally in trust for the children.’

‘Symptom of what?’

‘I suppose of disgust with what I am. Wanting to have it all take out of my hands.’ She grimaced to herself. ‘I know it’s all ominously like what drove me into the Church.’

I was tempted to go back to that, but knew, or guessed, that the past was not at issue.

‘Perhaps what you need to renounce is some of the idealism.’

My sympathy had to be acknowledged, but she gave the impression that I had failed to realize the complexity of her case and her predicament.

‘It’s like waking up twenty-five years too late to what you are.’

‘We all have to face that.’

She looked up and across the coffee things at me: those always rather Socratic dark brown eyes.

‘But you do have an interesting career, Dan. It really is rather different for us. My kind of woman. At my age.’

‘But you also have more potential freedom now. I’m stuck with what I’ve learnt to be good at.’

Again she smiled at the kindness, not the validity of the argument; then shrugged.

‘I suppose becoming a Labour Party activist would really be the most sensible thing. Our present man in Oxford is hopeless.’ There was another silence, then she looked at me again. ‘Do you ever regret having been an arts graduate?’

‘And social drone?’

‘Being left helpless in front of economists and people like that. Eternal amateurs.’

‘I once got up American corporation law in two days. Enough to kid the public, anyway.’

She grinned. ‘That’s very wicked.’

‘It’s not a cheat. An audience likes to feel the details are right but that’s not what it’s all about. It’s a character’s general plausibility as a human being. I’m sure the same’s true or politics. Getting the details a bit wrong can even add to that. Look at Heath and Wilson.’

‘Or Johnson and Nixon. They’ve all been too concerned to be right to be plausible. There is a place for honest innocents.’

‘Not a category I belong to.’

‘I shouldn’t be so sure.’

Our eyes met a moment, as though she wasn’t prepared to take that contradiction as lightly as I said it. But then she turned and put her legs to the ground again.

‘I’d better just see if Paul’s turned out his light.’

She bent and slipped on her shoes, then went away upstairs. It was strange how she shifted, or had shifted as we talked—-something still to uncover, to reveal, despite the apparent frankness; shifted in her age, from being it fully to someone younger… shifted in her voice, in the hints of the student revolutionary behind the dry self-dismissal of a woman in her forties; even in her body, a certain kind of studied formality, elegance, in some movements, a domestic simplicity in others; a kind of uneasy battle between the widowed mother of three and the eternal ghost of a much younger self. She was away for five minutes, and I got up to put some more logs on the fire; then stood in front of it and stared at the bishop, who contemplated me with his usual air of disapproval. Perhaps he discerned the possibility that had sprung into my mind after her unvexed news from the Bermoothes; and left me torn between an instinct and a common sense; or to be more exact, between an instinctive idea, it had certainly come from nowhere conscious, and an inability to see how it could be expressed. The conflict was not resolved when Jane returned. She was pressing a reproachful grin out of her mouth.