Daniel Martin (79 page)

‘I also have normal female feelings, Dan. If that was…’

‘The only obstacle?’

‘If I was less… confused.’

‘I don’t like the implication that I’d confuse you further.’

‘I didn’t mean that.’

‘The last thing I’d want is to stop you living as you like. However, wherever. Being a teacher. An active Marxist. Anything. I’d just like us to try living together. For better or for worse.’

‘But you can’t do that if you have no confidence at all that it would be better.’ She went on before he could object. ‘Quite apart from anything else, at my age of life…’

‘You’re not being honest. You know perfectly well half the men on the cruise…’

‘Beside someone like your friend.’

‘That’s not the comparison I’m making. And since when was it a time when women needed solitude?’

Beyond her he saw one of the barefoot Nubian servants come out for a moment on the terrace and look down towards them. Though the man made no offer of service, Dan waved his hand sideways, dismissing him. Jane glanced down to see what he signalled at; almost, he sensed, as if she were seeking help. He asked belatedly if she wanted another brandy.

‘No thanks.’

But she said nothing more. The servant went back indoors. High in the darkness over the river there was a thin trisyllabic call, piercing the stasis between them.

Dan said drily, ‘Special effects.’

‘What was it?’

‘A sandpiper. Looking for somewhere warmer to live.’ He nearly added, Poor fool. Jane stared down at the table, very much as if she was too frightened to speak, to leave, to do anything. Her face was in shadow, but the edge of a bar of light from inside, through one of the shutters, caught the silver comb in her hair. He found a tone of resignation. ‘I suppose it’s that third person who’s always with us. Between us.’

‘Anthony?’

‘Our familiar compound ghost.’

‘Which also joins us?’

‘As crossbeams join girders. Making sure they never touch.’

‘But I am touched, Dan.’

He stared out into the darkness. ‘It doesn’t feel right?’

‘It’s felt right several times during these last few years that I should have taken an extra dose of sleeping tablets. There was a period… just after Peter took himself off to Harvard… when I thought the only good reason not to do it was that it would have meant some kind of victory for Anthony. I’m not defending that. But it felt right.’

‘But if your instinct was wrong there…’

She sat with her hands in her coat pockets, hunched, head bowed.

‘There’ve only been three men in my life—of whom you’re one. The end product of all three relationships has been more pain than anything else. In our case, pain to you. In my last… adventure, pain to me. With Anthony I suppose a drawn match. I can’t not presume that the fault lies in me.’

‘And no pain for you, in our case?’

‘Of course. At the time.’

‘And we never gave our relationship a chance.’ She said nothing. ‘I simply can’t understand why your sense of guilt about it has to be kept alive in this absurd way. Why must self-hatred be more important than… what I feel we could still be?’

‘It’s not self-hatred… much more self-doubt. I can’t control it. If it was just a matter of some freely takeable decision… ‘ but she broke off.

‘Then?’

‘I think even then it would seem like a daydream a much younger me is too selfish to give up. When the reality’s a middle-aged woman who talks about teaching, simple little plans for doing good and keeping herself busy—and who secretly doubts her ability to go through with them almost as soon as she’s spoken.’

‘Why can’t these doubts be shared between us? Lived between us?’

He felt a growing frustration, as if all that really lay between them was a pane of glass; but unbreakable glass.

‘It’s nothing in you. You must believe me. I know you’re a very gentle and understanding man…’ Then she said, ‘If I need anyone it’s someone quite new, who probably wouldn’t be sweet and gentle at all… someone who could carry me off and make me leave all my old world behind. Not set me right back in the heart of it.’

‘I’ve lived in exile too long to take nonsense like that. You can’t leave old worlds behind. It’s not on.’

‘I’m not trying to defend what I am.’

‘Then you’re simply being perverse.’

‘I know I must sound that.’ She added, ‘Am that.’

In his mind he circled, trying to find a breach; a door in the wall.

‘You’ve tried to escape by joining outside things. And it hasn’t worked. I’ve never even tried. And that hasn’t worked, either. Which leaves us much closer than you imagine.’ He waited, then went on. ‘You can’t talk about my so-called success as if that makes a difference between us. I know you meant it kindly this afternoon, but it’s insulting, Jane. To all we both know we once believed in. And still try to believe in our fashion. When I decry it like that, all right, it is a privileged pessimism. But I know how the intelligent world judges what I am, and so do you.’ He paused, to see if she would speak, but she didn’t. ‘You keep on talking as if you’ve changed completely. I can’t tell you how little the part of you I always loved best hasn’t. That night at Oxford after the suicide it was suddenly still there again. It’s been with us on the cruise. It’s here now.’ He managed another smile at her. ‘I really wouldn’t go on like this with anyone else in the world.’ He added, ‘Because I know no one else would understand.’ She was still staring down at the table. Again he waited, and again she refused to speak. ‘Does this mean nothing to you?’

‘It means I feel more and more guilty.’

‘I didn’t intend to provoke that.’

Silence came again. There had been something in her answer, a hint of wistful reproach, a genuine plea for his forgiveness; for him to… something for which there was no accepted English verb… to long-suffer her.

‘You’ve had so much freedom, Dan. You choose prison just as I’m trying to leave it.’

‘My dear girl, all my freedom’s done has been to land me somewhere out there in the desert. You’ll find out. It’s not the way to Kitchener’s Island.’

“Where neither of us could ever really live. Alas.’

‘Then subtract all the romantic nonsense. But why should it have to be prison?’

‘Because love is a prison.’

He smiled in the darkness. ‘So if I felt less, the proposition would be more tenable?’

‘I’m not nearly as independent as you imagine. That’s why I feel I have to cling to what little I have.’

He leant back, folded his arms. ‘I sometimes wonder if you ever really left the Church.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Self-denial and celibacy as the road to good works?’

‘It was the other road that seemed the self-denial.’ She searched for, then found words. ‘If all I needed was somewhere to close my eyes and feel protected… ‘

‘But the imagery’s wrong, for God’s sake. The last thing I want you to do is to close your eyes. You seem to forget the knight is just as much in distress as the damsel.’ He knew her silence disagreed, that perhaps here was where she remained most adamant. He leant forward again. ‘Men like me can always find sex and new female minds to play with. What I need from you is that something inside you, between us, that makes half-living, half-loving like that impossible. It’s not a function of intelligence, Jane. Jenny McNeil knows she’s being used, she’s as objective and open about it as… as any intelligent girl of her generation. Brutally honest about how she sees me. But then goes on letting herself be used. Which relegates me to the status of interesting experience. In terms of your new religion, she and I both reify each other. Become characters in a fiction. Forget how to see each other totally. So we invent roles, play games, to hide the gap. I meet you again, I suddenly see all this, what was wrong from the beginning, why you were the one woman who might have led me out of it.’ He paused a moment. ‘I didn’t really expect you to say yes. But I’ve felt these last few days that we two are behaving like someone else’s—or something else’s—creatures. Behaving as all that was always wrong in our past expects. Not saying what we really think. Not really judging for our true selves. I just wanted to give us both the chance. That’s simply all.’

She sat as if frozen; and must by then have been physically chilled, as Dan could tell from his own body. He glanced at her, and something in the way she sat, her hands still inside her coat pockets, contrived to seem both obstinate and defenceless. He left a moment, then abruptly stood and went round the table and stood by her with his hands out.

‘Come on. Before I freeze you to death both ways.’

She took her hands slowly out of her pockets, let him draw her up, but then made them stand there a moment. He was not allowed to see her face.

‘If I could only explain … ‘

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘It’s not in you. It is in me.’

She pressed his hands, and they stood a moment longer. Then she withdrew her own and put them back in her pocket. They turned and began to walk back towards the doors into the hotel. But just before they came to the light from them, she stopped; and for the first time since that conversation had begun, she looked him in the eyes.

‘Dan, don’t you think I ought to fly straight to Rome tomorrow?’

He smiled. ‘If you want me never to forgive you.’

She searched his eyes, unsmiling, then looked down, unconvinced.

He said, ‘Anyway. It wouldn’t be fair to the Assads. Now they’ve made all the arrangements.’

‘It’s just… ‘

‘And I thought someone said something about unlimited friendship.’

She did at last, though reluctantly, bow her head in acceptance. He took a step towards her, put his hands on her shoulders, kissed the still-bowed head.

‘You go on up. I want a drink. Just one. Alone.’

‘I feel I should buy you the whole bar.’

‘Now you’re being vain. Go on.’

She went, but at the doors turned back a moment to look at him where he stood in the semi-darkness. It was a look of doubt, as if she still wanted to ask if he was sure she should not fly to Rome the next day; and paradoxically also a little that of someone unfairly dismissed, of a child being sent to bed. Then she passed through the doors. He turned away and stood by the balustrade at the edge of the terrace for a brief while, enough time for her to claim her room-key and disappear. He did not really want a drink, but simply to avoid the embarrassment of a goodnight in the corridor, with its solemn brass pots and aspidistras, outside their rooms. He felt oddly calm, almost assuaged, as if a burden had been lifted from his shoulders. It had been said, and something between them, if not his—or Eliot’s—compound familiar ghost, had been removed.

A minute or two later he went up to his room, and forced himself to pack for the morning. Nothing had happened, it was all a dream, an imagined scene. Yet something in him also listened for a tap on his door, a standing there, a solution that would need no words; as it would happen in a script, where the brevity of available time trumped the sluggish recalcitrance of reality; yet also feared it now, knew it would be wrong, too easy.

He experienced a strange conflict of feelings—like some equation too involved for his knowledge of emotional mathematics to solve. The pique of rejection, the trivial consolation that at least the barrier was apparently not physical, the irrelevance of that, the absurdity of her presenting refusal as some sort of kindness to him, the terrible fixity of her preconceived notions both of him and of herself, the growing physical desire he felt, the gauche suggestion about flying straight to Rome, how far apart they remained, how close they really were, Jenny, Caro… he gave up. Perhaps it was best as it was, left a secret between them, a cancelled possibility.

In darkness, bed, that eternal nocturnal re-entry into the womb, he lay for a minute or two staring at the ceiling; then smiled wanly to himself, a kind of metaphysical smile, potential being making peace with actual being. One would survive, being English; knowing to the furthest roots of one’s existence that it was all, finally, a comedy, even when one was the butt, and the great step in the dark only from terra firma to banana-skin.

He woke up, much earlier than he wanted, at dawn. He lay there for a few minutes, in the silence of the hotel, the grey light through the shutters, trying to re-summon sleep. But he remembered at once what he had done the previous night, and now felt nothing but a condemned man’s distress. The long day ahead, all the travelling, the leaving behind. He had a sad old memory of waking up on last mornings of holidays, at home, in the vicarage; all that his wretched school uniform, carefully pressed the previous day by Aunt Millie and now hanging on a chair, waiting to be assumed, had represented.

In the end Dan got up and opened the shutters and the windows. The air was sharp, the sun had not yet quite risen: a great stillness, voiced only by the occasional raucous cry of inland gulls out towards Kitchener’s Island. It was a time of day Dan always enjoyed in late spring and summer at Thorncombe; the last stars, the first green light, the untrammelled birdsong; the night-bathed coolness, refreshedness, the pristine dominance of nature before man sullied the world. He stood before its Egyptian equivalent: the smell of verdure, water, the Nile landscape. Somewhere down in the hotel garden, by the bank, a warbler ‘recorded’ softly—its sub-song, not that of the breeding season. Of some unknown species, it chattered and fluted to itself, a smoky, princely, invisible babble, seemingly full of the contentment Dan himself did not feel; enviably able to remain. He craned out and looked down at the terrace where they had sat the previous night. He could even see the table to his right: the two chairs pushed back, the two brandy-glasses still waiting to be cleared.

A minute or two later the first sun struck the tops of the taller cliffs across the river, below the pure sky; the restless golden edge of day. An early car hooted from the other side of the hotel, facing the town. Then two men rowed past beneath where Dan stood, fishermen, nets piled in the bows of their small boat, and the suspension of time was lost. All moved again, into predestined pattern.

An hour later he knocked nervously, on Jane’s door. She called, and he went in. She was dressed, latching a suitcase on the bed, and she smiled at him in the doorway; a shade too normally, as if nothing had happened.

‘My watch has stopped—are we late?’

‘No. I was just going down for breakfast.’

‘I’ll leave the rest. It won’t take a moment.’

She was wearing trousers, a dark green polo-necked jumper. She turned and reached for the suit jacket from a chair, but only to put it over an arm; then stopped, in an oddly histrionic way, as if to say she mustn’t pretend that things had not changed; with her hands joined in front of her, the coat hanging between them; head down, a little pose of repentance.

‘Am I forgiven?’

‘No.’

She looked at him, and he managed a smile. Her look across the bed lasted, as if she was not to be let off so lightly. She came round the bed, but stopped again short of him; seemed to wait for new words, but found only the simple ones she had used before.

‘It’s not you, Dan.’

‘Neither of us. Two other people.’

She searched his face for a long moment, gave him a still faintly doubting smile back, then lifted her jacket to put it on. He took and held it up while she turned and slipped it on; but laid his hands a moment on her shoulders, so that she would stay turned away.

‘You know how I feel now. I won’t bring it up again. I promise. Let’s at least hold on to what we’ve gained.’

She stood motionless a moment, then raised a hand and pressed his where it lay on her left shoulder.

‘I felt so dreadful last night. All I hate in my sex.’

‘I understood.’

Her hand dropped away, but she did not move.

‘If we were just…’

‘I know. Born heavies.’ He pressed her shoulders, then took his hands away. ‘Palmyra? Then we’re quits?’

There was an infinitesimal hesitation, then she bowed her head in acquiescence.

Four hours later they were coming down in the Ilyushin over Cairo. Dan’s mood had changed disastrously. Though they had talked, even smiled over one or two things, exactly as before, it seemed to Dan an increasingly hollow behaviour; behind their masks they were further apart than ever. They had been much closer only twenty-four hours before; yesterday began to seem like Eden before the apple of knowledge. Confined to remarks about what was directly in front of their eyes, their conversation demonstrated that everything else was fraught, dangerous, forbidden. In spite of his promise, he had several times to suppress things he wanted to say. Pride helped. He began to imagine her secretly longing now for the wretched trip to be over; to be free of him; to be changing straight for the flight to Rome.

They landed just after noon. Assad was there to meet them. Their flight to Beirut was not till five and it had been agreed they should all have lunch together, do some last shopping in the Mouski. Assad’s presence turned out to be more of a relief than Dan had foreseen, though it irritated him that it should be so. Jane and the Copt seemed happy to pick up the previously established relationship, the ghost of a flirtation; or at least Dan smelt that, in his hypersensitive mood. Assad’s smiles and eyes, an even darker brown than Jane’s, were mainly for her; and his questions. She was being no more than polite and Dan had no more right than he had cause to feel jealous. According to Alain, all well-to-do-Egyptians, however far beyond traditional Moslem polygamy in cultural terms, still allowed themselves younger mistresses, and he guessed at something like that with the Copt—some comfortable socially sanctioned arrangement where he had the best of both worlds, his cultivated and intelligent Lebanese wife (he had brought from her an ad hoc guide, typed in French, to the delights of the Lebanon) and his secretaries and local starlets as well. He saw himself in Assad, in other words, and he knew what his real irritation was about: his suspicion that Jane saw Assad in him.

It was also something to do with that equating love with prison. He brooded most deeply over that; its injustice was before his eyes.

She could enjoy this lunch, this chatter with Assad, only because he was at her side—was here only because of him. He called himself a male chauvinist, but the self-accusation came from liberal convention, not personal conviction. He remembered too what the Herr Professor had said about the German and English notions of liberty. Love might be a prison; but it was also a profound freedom.

They had a foul flight to Beirut. The plane was crammed with Mecca pilgrims, there was constant turbulence, constant cloud outside, people vomiting, a mysterious silence from the pilot’s cabin.., even Dan, seasoned air traveller though he was, felt anxious. He hid it for Jane’s sake. As usual, one saw the headlines, the future without one, the terminal incompletion; the bitter irony of dying at this point. He invented stories of far worse flights, as a substitute for holding her hand.

It had been raining heavily when they finally arrived in Beirut. The tarmac gleamed wet under the lights, and it was much colder, much closer to winter at home. It caught them both by surprise; as did the city itself, so much more European than oriental or African—the lights, the cliffs of lit hotels and flat-blocks, the traffic, with seemingly every other car a Mercedes; the wealth everywhere. They felt an abrupt nostalgia for the dirt and dust and poverty of Egypt; its shabby hotels, its inefficiency, its ancient humanity. Their new hotel was of the kind that makes all countries one, but in the wrongest way; distancing everything but the world of the expense account, the international executive. Dan telephoned Assad’s sister-in-law; everything was arranged. Their car and licensed driver—one was not allowed into Syria except under such supervision—would be in front of the hotel at eight the next morning. They were asked out, but he turned it down, without consulting Jane—or even telling her, when they met again before dinner, that he had done so.

They walked afterwards in the brilliant sea-front streets, shop-gazing. By this time Dan felt appallingly depressed—less, or so it seemed to him, because of Jane than because of some feeling of having lost all the perspective he had gained at Aswan. Obstinately, in spite of what she had said, it attached itself to Kitchener’s Island: a green place out of time, a womb, where all had seemed potential, something in the future as well as between Jane and himself melting, he had seen it too late, left it too late. Now they were back in the real contemporary world, consumer-obsessed, Gadarene, ephemeral, he could hardly bring himself to look in the shops they passed, felt the stiffness of his face; metaphysical humiliation, the world gone black and vulgar now, not comic at all.

He knew he was being burnt in the oldest of fires, but still could not understand where it had come from—like some medieval disease, the bubonic plague, that modern science had supposedly controlled out of all practical consideration; an infantile happy-ever-afterwards device from fairy tales, a ludicrous myth. It was almost as if that other great myth, destiny, was having its revenge on him for so many other affaires so coolly and calculatedly entered and enjoyed… he thought back to Jenny, the first weeks of that, how easy, balanced, amusing, agreeably exciting, all that seemed in retrospect. One stands beside a woman in front of a window of couture dresses and one wants to say, I need you beyond all my verbal capacity of defining need. Instead one plays pocket calculator, translating Lebanese prices into English pounds; hates her profoundly for this interest in gewgaws she patently exhibits only to fill a vacuum, a withdrawal… almost as if to show she is normal to the indifferent passers-by.

She must have known, of course; but said nothing. They returned to the hotel. Their rooms were side by side again, though they were spared the previous communicating door. Dan wanted, no, stated he was going to have a drink, and this time it was no subterfuge. If he didn’t mind, she felt tired… whether it was diplomacy or not, he couldn’t tell. She did look tired. There was just a moment, as she turned with her key, a circumstantial smile, when her eyes stayed on his: they showed both a probing and a solicitude, almost nurse-like, but impotent, which he loathed.

He did not go straight to the bar, but stood at a kiosk in the lobby, staring at the English-language newspapers, as if the outer world and its affairs might cure him. But they only repelled. He wished he could have reduced the slick, plastic edifice around him, and all in it, to a pile of smoking rubble… a wish, had he but known, that history was to realize only a year or two after he made it.

He found the American-style bar and sat at one end of it with a double Scotch on the rocks before him. Two girls in black dresses, they looked German or Scandinavian, sat at the far end. Occasional glances in his direction said what they were. He stared through the shelved array of bottles on the glass wall in front of him at his own face: sullen, impassive, humourless, a locked suitcase with a destination label one couldn’t read. He too felt tired, but not only physically; tired of himself, abominably alienated.

It was also an alienation from the distant dawn of that day, seven hundred miles and another world, an eternally lost world, to the south; and went with a corollary and overwhelming longing for the peace and solitude of Thorncombe. Retreat, to lick wounds, to discover what had gone wrong, not only with Daniel Martin, but his generation, age, century; the unique selfishness of it, the futility, the ubiquitous addiction to wrong ends… not only a trip to nowhere, but an exorbitant fare for it. All the thoughtless effort, attachment to trivia, which was really a sloth—mindless energy as a substitute for true intelligence. Perhaps this always attacked writers worst. Other men could take refuge, as his father had in the dogma of his Church, in the organization they were part of; share the guilt of the futility, the tedium of the treadmill, the horror of existence passed so, like caged animals.

The barren pursuit of false privilege: sitting, a shut-faced cosmopolitan, in an expensive bar, having only to turn, to mutter a word to the barman, to have the freedom of a body. The younger of the two girls had turned her back to him; and he could see it reflected in the mirror behind the bar. A tousle of Bardot-blonde hair, the back bare to the coccyx, bra-lessness flaunted, the ease with which, one movement of the hands, her dress would fall. He felt momentarily tempted to that, out of his oldest and worst self: to plummet in one hour back to where he belonged. Which Jane also knew, and perhaps feared worst. He ordered another double Scotch.

Like a spoilt child deprived of a toy, barred by his past and his present from feeling anything but eternally spoilt… excluded, castrated by both capitalism and socialism, forbidden to belong. Our hero, spurned by one side for not feeling happier, despised by the other for not feeling more despair; in neither a tragedy nor a comedy, but a bourgeois melodrama—that short-lived theatrical fad, as he sourly remembered, despatched into a deserved oblivion during the great crack-up of 1789.

Above all, he felt determined; and he knew he felt that in direct proportion to his obstinately growing recognition that in some way his freedom had lain in what might have been between Jane and himself… or if not freedom, some vital fresh chance; at the least, some true consolation. She had been like some radioactive particle slicing out of infinity and now away into it again: leaving nothing behind but a tiny damage to grow into an irreparable fault, the loss of the one good hope both heart and mind had needed. And twice in his life. The remembrance of a similar female particle that had sliced through his destiny came strangely to him out of the past: Nancy Reed. Perhaps that had been the essential predisposing event of his emotional lifeless a particle than a first crystal, preforming all future relationships in his life to its particular polyhedral shape… the illusory pursuit of a lost innocence, the seeking, or fascination, for situations that carried their own death in them from the beginning, that ensured an eventual determinism in the process… the appearance of it, whether it was really there or not.