Daniel Martin (68 page)

‘What are they talking about?’

‘I can’t really hear with that thing pounding away. I think it’s about modern art. Painting.’

‘Dear old Frogs.’

‘One disputes. One is very logical. One shows off one’s rhetoric. Above all one is much more civilized than that ludicrous Anglo-Saxon couple opposite.’ She nudged his arm. ‘What a pity you didn’t bring a bowler hat.’

‘Are you sure you wouldn’t rather be with them?’

‘Absolutely. And I’m going to bed.’

She gave him a little smiling look, and touched his hand; then stood.

‘I’m not staying here alone. That boy looks dangerously bored to me.’

But outside the lounge he let her go down to the cabins on her own. He felt unsleepy, and went out on deck again to smoke a last cigarette. But he turned back inside as soon as it was finished. The night, the stars, the onwardness, were somehow depressing now; monotonous, meaningless. He saw, through the glass doors of the lounge as he passed down to his cabin, that the French group had dispersed. Only the Queen and his companion remained. They sat on opposite sides of the table. The older man seemed to be reproaching him for something; and the boy, who was facing the door, stared sullenly down at the table between them.

The six days of their cruise were to flow almost indivisibly one into the other, as the placid yet perpetual river itself swam past its banks. The Nile and its landscapes they grew quickly to love—to love again, in Dan’s case. Its waters seemed to reach not merely back into the heart of Africa, but into that of time itself. This was partly the effect of the ancient sites, and of the ancient ways of life of the fellaheen villages and fields they saw as they passed: the minarets and palm-groves, the women with their water-jars, the feluccas, the shadufs and saqiyas—the great gaunt pole-dippers, the waterwheels ringed with earthenware pots and driven by a donkey or an ox; but its origin lay in something deeper, to do with transience and agelessness, which in turn reflected their own heightened sense of personal present and past… a thing they both agreed they felt.

The river moved and the river stayed, depending on whether one saw it with the eye or the mind; it was the Heraclitean same and not the same. It was the river of existence, and it reminded Dan of those magnificent opening verses in Ecclesiastes, of which most people remember only the phrase ‘Vanity of vanities’, but which had always, perhaps revealingly, seemed to him—it had been a favourite lesson choice of his father’s—unintentionally comforting. The earth abideth for ever; and there is no new thing under the sun. They both noted these Biblical echoes, how often they had sudden memories of the misunderstood yet haunting imageries of childhood. They decided it was because the river, like the Bible, was a great poem, and rich in still relevant metaphors.

These usually had some visual objective correlative, of course; but just as there are passages in the Bible that must touch even the most convinced atheist, the Nile did seem to possess a metaphysical charm beside its more obvious physical ones. It cleansed and simplified, it set all life in perspective. The memory of its hundreds of generations, its countless races—all that had eternally vanished beneath its silt—sobered and dwarfed, cut the individual down to less than the tiniest granule of sand in the endless desert that haunted the skylines behind the cultivated valley. Yet so many of the great stream’s moods and lights and vistas were ravishingly beautiful, especially at dawn and dusk; and seemed to justify the very life its ageless indifference, its mere geographical being, denied. Jane and Dan found themselves not entirely able, despite the poverty, the bilharzia, the thalassaemia, and everything else, to pity this antediluvian peasant world.

A group of women bathing, like classical Greek statues under their wet outer garments, or watering, or washing clothes at the river-edge, would look up, laugh, retreat from the inrushing wake as the opulently white ship passed. At first, when this happened, they felt a guilt, as if they were part of some royal cavalcade cantering through a medieval hamlet, or looking out of the windows of some moving Versailles. Before the inevitable battery of cameras when they were close inshore some of these women would turn their backs, or with a Moslem dignity, both simple and grave—and sometimes faintly mischievous, since the younger girls would flagrantly peep, evoking harem and zenana, through their latticed fingers—veil their faces with crossed hands until the intruders had passed. And then there came what was almost an envy of the simplicities of life in this green and liquid, eternally fertile and blue-skied world; just as some denizen of an icier, grimmer planet might look on, and envy, Earth. Before certain such idyllic pastoral scenes, one’s own over-complex twentieth-century existence could seem like a passing cloud-shadow; a folly, a mere result of climatic bad luck. Jane recalled Montesquieu—and they wondered whether all Western ‘progress’ wasn’t just a result of having to fill in a historical wet afternoon. One morning, when they were leaning over the rail in sunlight, she decided on an adjective for the river. It was wise; both in itself and to what it bore.

Then there were the other passengers, who also spoke parables of a kind. Dan and Jane derived a constant interest and amusement from observing them—and their own reactions to this polyglot microcosm on which they were temporarily marooned. If the Nile was human history, their ship was a pocket caricature of the human race, or at least the Western part of it. There was a certain mixing, after the first day, between the two main parties, the French and the East Europeans. During the cruising between sites, they shared a common mania for photographing and filming. When there were photogenic subjects on both banks, the crowded sun-deck became absurdly like a scene from a Tati film, as the tyranny of the lens and cries of excitement pulled the would-be Cartier-Bressons frantically from port rail to starboard, and back again.

Dan used his own Nikon very little, and only then for the kind of snapshots, of Jane, of the odd view, for her to show at home, that he might just as well have taken with an Instamatic. A lifelong avoider of other tourists, he had forgotten the extent to which every man is now his own image-maker. It was almost frightening, this obsession with capturing through one sense alone, and one that required (at least at the level Jane and he watched every day) so little thought or concentration: a mindless clicking. It encouraged the clicker not to think; not to imagine; not to remember; above all, not to feel. Perhaps it was the ultimate privilege, on that ship already loaded with unfair advantage of a cultural and economic kind: merely to duplicate seeing, to advertise in some future that one had been there. He said all this to Jane, who mocked him for being a traitor to his own medium.

The next day she came up to him at the site they were touring, with a pretended downward glance of contrition.

‘Dan, I know it’s most terribly vulgar and philistine, but I wondered if you could just duplicate my seeing. That frieze over there.’

He took the photo she wanted, but sniffed at her. ‘I’m still right.’

She smiled. ‘I didn’t say you weren’t.’

On deck during the cruising, all this photography, this comparing of cameras and impressions and backgrounds, gave an air of international comradeship. But the English pair found the East Europeans too guarded, on the defensive, the French too hedonistic and self-centred—duty obsessed the one group, pleasure the other. This wasn’t without exception. It soon got about that Jane spoke French, and some of the East Europeans spoke passable English. Everyone showed off about their knowledge of foreign languages.

There was a quiet Czech mining engineer, who had spent the war years in Scotland, and whom Dan and Jane got to like; and two young Frenchmen, a professional photographer and a journalist, who were doing an article on the cruise for some illustrated magazine. They both spoke fair English, and combined Gallic charm with a certain cynicism about life that Dan approved. There were very few young people on the cruise and these two rather took up with Dan and Jane, as if they were more amusing than their compatriots; or perhaps it was just to exhibit their anglophilia. They confirmed Jane’s initial guess at Luxor—the young journalist, Alain, contemptuously slashed the back of his fingers down his jaw when the subject came up one day. He found his own national contingent rasant, distinctly tiresome and boring and offensively conservative. Like most well-educated young leftists, he retained an unhealthy respect for style. But he shared Dan and Jane’s growing feeling that the fellaheen were as interesting as the ancient sites, and they forgave him. He and his colleague also shared their amusement over the preposterous Barge-borne Queen and his boyfriend. He was apparently a well-known art critic and man about fashionable Paris; he had known Jean Cocteau and never let anyone forget it. The boy, ‘Carissinio’—-Jane and Dan found they were not the only ones who bestowed nicknames—was Italian.

The French in fact interested them most, perhaps because of their marked greater individualism, the transparency of their self-centredness. It was hard to decide whether they were a nation left behind by, or in advance of, the rest of Europe. They could seem sometimes like antiquated peacocks beside the sober, solid East Europeans; individualists fighting a last lost guerrilla war against the necessary uniformity of the global future. At other times they seemed the epiphany of what the British themselves had been timidly trying to become over the last three decades—de-puritanized self-obsessed and self-indulgent… all that the word ‘British’, with its connotations of national duty and the sanctity of the done thing, had once proscribed. Occasionally Dan imagined this contemporary human comedy under Kitchener’s fierce blue stare. From that professional point of view he welcomed the experience, not least because he had already in his script ‘gone long’—in what he now suspected was a lucky hunch—on the Fashoda incident of 1898. Major Marchand, the intrepid French soldier-explorer who provoked it, had already taken his fancy, and he began to see him a little with their young journalist friend Alain’s mobile and dry-tongued face; and how he could present the whole confrontation as a twentieth-century pulling of the nineteenth-century lion’s tail. Britain and Kitchener had won the political issue, of course; but Dan began to see ways of making it clear that the imperialist cause was even then lost.

He argued about it with Jane one evening: whether the acute new awareness of self—its demands, its privileges, its rights—that had invaded the Western psyche since the First World War was a good thing or a largely evil consequence of capitalist free enterprise, whether people had been media-gulled into self-awareness to increase the puppet-master’s profits or whether it was an essentially liberalizing new force in human society. Predictably Jane took the first, and Dan the second view. He thought it meant finally more honesty in human affairs, though he secretly told himself he could hardly argue anything else, given his lifelong (and altogether rather French) respect for his own decisions and desires; while Jane saw so many carrots dangled before donkeys. She couldn’t even see useful demolition being done, and he accused her of wanting a society as rigid as the old, if founded on different concepts of duty and national destiny. But it was a matter of her feelings about feeling: worship of self channelled all feeling inward, and that was suicidal in an age where the world clearly needed outwardness.

She wasn’t sure that even Kitchener was not preferable; at least he had showed concern (she had borrowed Dan’s biography), though in a wrong framework. She shared Dan’s contempt for imperialism, of course; but even that sprang from rather different grounds. To her the British Empire had dissipated a potentially good moral energy, and because it had fundamentally been based on power instead of justice, it had ruined our reputation for good. We had lost all hope of becoming an arbiter among nations.

Dan said, with a touch of malice, that he could live with the idea of Britain not being the Switzerland of the twenty-first century.

She smiled, and held her tongue. But he knew she meant that she thought there were worse roles to play.

Their own roles amused them, too; their Englishness, the polite faces they put on, the occasional spanners they threw in the works of foreign stock notions. Like all minorities they were willy-nilly arbiters of a kind, and this brought them closer. But their new acquaintances, the fact that it was rarely possible to have a table to themselves in the crowded lounge upstairs, meant that they actually had less time alone together. By tacit agreement they continued to forsake the bar before dinner. Dan had drinks brought to his cabin when his own whisky ran out. He began to enjoy their half hour alone then, when they could be themselves; and rather to dread the endless conversations after dinner. On his own he would have taken to retiring to his cabin as soon as the meal was over, but Jane seemed to enjoy the mixing more than he. She did not always say much, but he noticed how often she surreptitiously led conversations by a question, a polite disagreement. He accused her of it one night, when they went for a last stroll on deck, and she was faintly shocked, as if it might have been annoying him. It wasn’t her fault, it was Oxford’s, the Socratic method, seeing all the rest of the world as students… it was awful, she hadn’t realized; and she was noticeably rather silent the next evening. Dan deliberately took her place, asking the same kind of questions, venturing the same disagreements. At one point, after the most flagrant of these interventions, their eyes met. Hers had a certain dryness, of the woman unfairly provoked, almost as if he were being impertinent. But she said nothing afterwards.

Though it was discreet, expectable, both what he had predicted and what he had hoped, Dan was surprised by how quickly she entered the shipboard society around them; and understood better how Caro could have been deceived by an outward mode of behaviour. It also made a final nonsense of Jane’s claiming she had forgotten how to behave as other people wanted. He soon realized she had lost very little of her old expertise at suiting manner to circumstance. He knew it was not a conscious affectation—as the same diplomacy had once often seemed in her sister—so much as an interest in other human beings; but once or twice, before some vivacity with Alain, some show of interest with the more conventional of the French (where he knew little could really be felt), he returned her one of her own dry looks; though affectionately, less provoked than amused.

There were two quite pretty French wives, thirty-year-olds both married to elder husbands, but otherwise among in general similarly aged women in both contingents, Jane had little competition. Dan had soon been aware that he was envied her company, and not only for her emancipation and intelligence, but for his presumed access to her cabin. The mining engineer was also a recent widower, and Dan knew very well that he himself was not what so often drew the Czech towards them when they were all on deck together. In a different way it was the same with the two young Frenchmen; Alain especially very rapidly fell into that half-mocking, half-tender manner beloved of the males of his race. It was done quite flagrantly, even with a teasing air, sometimes, of friendly provocation towards Dan; asides in French, mock gallantries. Dan guessed, though he did not ask Jane, that she had explained the real situation there; and could not blame the dark-eyed and distinctly good-looking young man for assuming some licence. It was not serious. He used the same manner towards one of the two younger Frenchwomen, when her husband’s back was turned.