Daniel Martin (78 page)

‘I must have a bath and wash my hair before dinner. All that dust.’

‘Yes, so must I.’

But he did not move, stared down at the water. She gave him a scrutiny, a moment, then she silently stretched out a hand and gave his wrist, beneath the sleeve ot his coat, a squeeze of encouragement, sympathy, tacit appeal, he didn’t know, except that this time it was not meant to say more than affection and friendship. Even if he had wanted to reach and hold the hand there, it left his sleeve too quickly, the gesture once made. Again it was oxymoronic: offended him by its tact, its timing, touched him in its seeming to know and remember more than it revealed. They stood, and remounted the steps, and she wondered how much colder it would be in the Lebanon. He knew she meant to say that it was not really their last day, but all he heard from then on was other voices. The compromises of his life seemed to lie on him almost physically, like warts. He no longer knew quite what was happening or what he was doing.

But alone in his room back at the hotel he decided, finally, that he must give up this adolescent toying and dithering. It must demonstrate that he didn’t really know what he wanted. In a strange kind of way he knew much better what Jane felt; and that was certainly no encouragement. He had revealed too much already; if their old quickness at reading each other’s moods and meanings had started the rot, its clear failure to bring them closer ended it. She must know where he had once or twice been leading, and had not followed. He had had his moment of decision on the steps over the water, and let it pass. He even saw himself describing it all, with appropriate meiosis, to Jenny; making her jealous; and making her laugh as well. After all, he too could make resolutions.

So when Jane came down and found him at the bar, he was much more the equable self of the earlier days of their cruise. And as if to confirm his admission of defeat, Jane herself seemed more at her ease. They had dinner, and carefully avoided anything that might lead back to self-analysis and soul-searching; then went back to have coffee in the Old Cataract, in a long lounge beside the terrace over the garden. There were normally few other guests there, but it began to fill almost as soon as they had sat down. They saw faces they had seen in the dining-room, Russian faces, coming as if to some meeting. Then a plump middle-aged lady, in an old-fashioned evening dress, heavy bare forearms ending in strangely delicate hands, went to the grand piano that stood at one end of the room. A man helped raise the lid. She began to play at once, without any formality, but the sudden quietening of voices, the way the people around them shifted chairs to face the piano, made Dan and Jane realize that they had inadvertently gatecrashed an impromptu concert. The lady began with a Chopin mazurka. Dan had no practical knowledge of music, but she was obviously either a very gifted amateur or a professional on holiday. There was discreet applause from the surrounding tables when the first piece ended, and he glanced at Jane for her opinion. She pressed her lips together: she was taken. More people, East Europeans and Russians, engineers and their wives, one or two of what must have been Egyptian colleagues, gathered at the end of the room. They had to stand, since all the chairs round the other tables were now occupied. The pianist played another mazurka. When she finished, to longer applause, the man who had helped with the lid stood and spoke in Russian evidently what had been played, what was to come next.

Dan said, ‘I feel we’re a little bit de trop.’

‘I know. It’s just so nice to hear music again.’

‘Perhaps we could eavesdrop on the terrace?’

‘Yes.’

So they rose quickly and left, with a gesture from Dan to a standing couple near the door to take their vacated table.

‘I think I’ll go and get a coat.’

‘Fine. I’ll find us a couple of brandies.’

He went and did so, then took them out on the terrace and along the line of shutters to the one nearest the piano. There was a table there, and the window behind the shutter was open. The night, the faint smell of the river, stars, the filtered lamps from inside reflected in the exotic foliage below the balustraded terrace: Jane appeared, a dark figure, and walked down towards him, in and out of the latticed light. Inside, the lady was playing Chopin again.

‘It’s not too cold for you?’

‘No. It does seem much warmer tonight.’

She sat beside him.

‘She’s good?’

‘That lovely Russian touch. I think she must have been listening to Richter.’

They listened to her. After another Chopin piece, she played a Mozart sonata. There was applause, a little interval, a murmur of voices; then a hush, the man’s voice in Russian. The woman inside began to play Bach. Dan looked at Jane inquiringly, and she smiled.

‘The Goldberg. You’re excused, if you want to be.’

‘No, I’d like to. I haven’t heard it for years.’

They sat in the endless sound, the precise baroque complexity, so calculated, so European; in the African darkness. Dan’s mind drifted away after a while, into the night, the stars: saw the pair sitting down there, before a table, three feet apart, in what seemed to possess the lifelessness of sculpture, of waxworks, of unplayed instruments. And gradually there stole on him, both with the music and from outside it, a sense of release, a liberation from lies, including the one he had told himself before dinner. It was less that the music particularly moved him, he had never really enjoyed Bach, but it did carry a deep intimation of other languages, meaning-systems, besides that of words; and fused his belief that it was words, linguistic modes, that mainly stood between Jane and himself. Behind what they said, lay on both sides an identity, a syncretism, a same key, a thousand things beyond verbalization. Strangely, out of nowhere, out of the distant night of his own past, perhaps out of facing across the Nile to the desert where Saint Simeon lay, came Langland’s famous image, the tower on the toft, ‘Truthe is therinne’; of a truth on the long hill of their own two existences. It was not a wanting to possess, even uxoriously, but a wanting to know one could always reach out a hand and… that shadow of the other shared voyage, into the night. She was also some kind of emblem of a redemption from a life devoted to heterogamy and adultery, the modern errant ploughman’s final reward; and Dan saw, or felt, abruptly, for the first time in his life, the true difference between Eros and Agape.

Yet it arrived in him less with emotion than with a sense of freedom; and not freedom from circumstance, but from what was false and temporizing in it… in terms of that old Kierkegaardian catch-image of their student days, the ability to step and to prize the step above the fear of the dark. Not stepping became the supreme folly and cowardice; even if one stepped into nothingness and fell, even if one stepped only to find one must step back.

There came a very slow variation, which seemed, or was made to seem by the pregnant manner in which it was played, to hesitate, to suspend, to hang on the brink of silence. It appeared to Dan isolated from the rest, symbolic of things he had buried or was not even aware of in his own being; in all being, perhaps. He stayed in it mentally, after it had finished; and to the end.

There was long applause from inside, one or two cries; then the murmur of Slavonic voices.

Dan said, ‘That variation near the end. I don’t know why people think he lacks feeling.’

‘Yes. I’ve never heard it taken so slowly. But it seemed to work.’

‘The stars help.’

‘Aren’t they beautiful.’

And she looked up, as if she hadn’t noticed them till then. He had a last moment of weakness, or irresolution. Perhaps if she had gone on to say something else… but she did not, as if she still heard the music, wanted to recollect it in silence a few moments more.

He hesitated, unendurably, staring at the garden without seeing it, then took his step.

‘Jane, four days from now we shall have gone our separate ways. Does that distress you at all?’

‘You know it will. I’ve enjoyed—’

‘I’m not talking about that.’

Silence. She knew at once, of course; and said nothing.

He looked down at the table, at his empty brandy-glass. ‘I’ve become more and more aware these last two or three days that it’s going to distress me very much. You must at least have suspected that.’

There was a pause in Jane, not unlike one of those in the music they had just heard; a being suspended between logic and inspiration, conventional development and instinctive feeling. But the very fact that he already knew, in that telltale silence, what she would say, consoled him a little.

‘I have the very greatest affection for you, Dan.’

‘But no sense of the wheel having come full circle?’

There was, again, a fatal slowness in her answering; a need to choose her words.

‘I also have a very real sense of reconciliation.’ She added, ‘Far more than I’ve been able to express to you.’

‘That music. It made me feel the absurdity of this distance between us. When there’s all that frozen distance up there. I’m sorry, this is very trite, but…’ She waited, as if she half agreed; or once again, did not know what to say. She may have suspected, but she was still taken by surprise. He said, ‘I had no idea this was going to happen. You please mustn’t feel I’ve tricked you in some way.’

Out of the corner of his eyes, he saw her shake her head. ‘I feel I’ve tricked you.’

‘How?’

‘I have been on my best behaviour this last week.’

‘I’ve allowed for that.’

‘You can’t. Because you don’t know what goes on underneath.’

‘And as regards me?’

She murmured, ‘Unlimited friendship.’

‘I want you nearer than that. Not only that.’ He half turned and smiled wrily in her direction. ‘You did do this to me once. It is my turn.’ After a moment he said, ‘This can’t have come entirely as a surprise. You know what upset me yesterday evening.’

‘I knew you were upset.’

‘I know we disagree on many things. Intellectually… politically. It’s when you use that to hide something else. Where we do agree.’ He hesitated. ‘I honestly thought that long-ago day in Oxford was dead, when I suggested this. But I can’t forget it. It keeps on coming back now. It was what I was trying to say that first afternoon on Kitchener’s Island. I know we did it for all the wrong conscious reasons at the time. But something in it wasn’t wrong. I’ve only just fully realized that.’

She said gently, ‘I so want not to hurt you, Dan. I’m wrong to think of it like this?’

‘Wrong to suppose that what we were then is what we are now. What I am now.’

‘Which is?

‘I have so little to give.’

‘That exit’s closed. And not for you to judge.’ Such finality reduced her to silence; and Dan himself as well for a few moments. It was not that her initial reaction was unanticipated, though he felt some of the disappointment of the eternally optimistic amateur gambler faced with the realities of probability; of the swimmer who knew the sea would be cold, but still finds it colder than the foreknowledge. Yet his old capacity for seeing alternative presents helped. She had not been shocked, not walked away, not laughed; but sat and waited.

‘This business with Jenny McNeil?’

‘That really isn’t for me to judge.’

‘But am I talking in an empty room? You’ve felt nothing else?’

‘Women feel all sorts of things. That they know can’t survive the situation that gives rise to them.’ She added, ‘Or the ones they would give rise to.’

‘What Nell would think?’

‘Among many other things.’

‘I think she’d understand. Even approve. Oddly enough.’ That too was met with silence. ‘Jane, a great deal of what you really feel is totally hidden from me. I may have misread things completely. But I keep on imagining what it would have been like if we’d spent our lives together instead of the last few days. And it seems like something so much better than actual history.’

‘I think the thing you’re misreading is actual marriage. Especially to someone like me.’

‘And I think you’re misreading something very real between us. We couldn’t face it then, we’re still failing now.’

She hesitated, then spoke in a more placatory voice.

‘Dan, I really have been keeping up a front these last few days. I don’t mean that’s a bad thing. As some parts are good for an actress… help her see outside herself. I do feel much more able to face all kinds of ordinary things. It’s just what’s still boiling away underneath.’

‘Such as?’

‘Self-hatred. Guilt. Anger. Things without name.’

‘And I can’t help?’

‘You have helped. Very greatly.’

‘Then why can’t I be allowed to continue helping?’

There was another suspension.

‘Because I have no right to inflict all this on someone I… I do have emotions. Of course I haven’t forgotten that day, all those months, in Oxford.’

‘But it all happened to someone else.’

‘You were also someone else.’

‘For whom you now only feel friendship?’

‘For whom I can’t allow myself to feel more.’

‘That’s an evasion.’

A longer silence, like an indrawn breath; a being cornered.