Daniel Martin (86 page)

Finally they were driven to a valley in the hills to the east, above the plain, the cemetery of the old town. They visited a tower-tomb, a kind of four-storey columbarium, though stacked with stone sarcophagi, not urns. Even here, the guide told them, the Roman eye for business had triumphed—spaces in the best tombs had been excellent speculative ventures and had been bought and sold like contemporary flat-leases. A warren-like catacomb he also took them to had fetched especially high prices, since it was agreeably central-heated; somewhere close underneath ran the sulphur springs. Jane translated to the old man what Dan said of Forest Lawn in California. The old man’s tortoise eyes crinkled. Plus a change… they could not tell him anything new about human folly.

Soon after noon—they had deposited the old guide back at the museum—they were climbing out of the Palmyra plain on their long way back to the Lebanon; and listening to Labib expatiate once again on the Syrians’ stupidity in not making more of the place… better roads, better hotels, a casino, an airstrip. When he fell silent, they risked a covert glance of knowing better. Dan, resigned now to being left in ignorance, moved his hand and took Jane’s. After a few moments he gently rubbed a thumb across her knuckles. He had had all of their second breakfast to realize, and other occasions when she had taken off her gloves, but even usually observant men are peculiarly blind at times. He looked sharply down at the hand. The impression was still pinkly on the skin of the wedding-ring finger, but the band of gold was no longer there.

He gave Jane an almost reproachful look. She contemplated her own ringless finger; while he saw her sitting in the desert, staring down at the hidden ground. There was something in her face, both self-deprecating and shy, as if she wasn’t quite sure it was her own hand. But when she looked up and met his eyes, though it was only very briefly, he knew he received his answer and his resolution. She looked away out of her window, and he through the windscreen, but their grip tightened. Nearly half a minute passed before she spoke, still staring out of the window. ‘Do you think she will be shot?’ He pressed her hand again. ‘Not now.’

At the hour when one day ends and the next has not begun at the hour when time is suspended you must find the man who then and now, from the very beginning, ruled your body you must look for him so that someone else at least will find him, after you are dead.

GEORGE SEFERIS: Fires of St John

Dan watched Jenny standing at the bar, longer than she needed to buy the drinks. The place had only just opened and it was, as she had promised, nearly empty; her local, her ground, this northern part of London had always been foreign to him. The wall behind the bar was covered with signed photographs of television and show-business personalities; good wishes, facetious messages; illegible scrawls, illegible talents. Jenny had told him once in Los Angeles that the pub was an informal theatrical agency… where you congregated on Sunday mornings, if you lived in the area and hadn’t quite made it; or even if, like her, you had made it, but retained a belief that you were nicer if you sometimes pretended you hadn’t. Dan had not liked the sound of it then, and did not like the reality of it now; but he knew she had partly chosen it for that very reason.

The man she talked to, the landlord, evidently knew all about her, and was being brought up to date. She turned from him with a smile, some last remark over her shoulder, and came back to the table with the drinks. A solitary young man at the far end of the bar watched her cross to where Dan sat. She was wearing Californian clothes still; a jeans suit, flat shoes; a crocheted skull-cap of lilac, blue and white wool; no make-up. It made her look less conscious, more simple, more of an open-air girl, than she really was.

She put the glasses down: his whisky, her half-pint of draught Guinness, then sat on the padded bench beside him.

‘It’s only Glenlivet. He doesn’t stock Dettol.’

He smiled. ‘Dettol’ was her nickname for Laphroaig, which she knew he liked, though he had asked simply for Scotch.

‘You seem very at home here.’

‘Sorry.’

Dan smiled again; and tried again.

‘I hear the studio are high.’ She gave a little shrug. ‘Bill rang the other day.’

‘Me too.’

‘You’ve signed and sealed for the new one?’

‘Not quite. David’s waiting for the good news to get round. So he can screw a bit more from them.’ David was her agent.

‘But you will?’

She said nothing; then, ‘Dan, please don’t be like this.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like “like what”.’ She said. ‘I’m not your daughter.’ She added quickly, ‘Which reminds me.’ She bent to a basket beside her, and passed a small cardboard box without looking at him. ‘I thought you might like to give her this. You needn’t say it’s from me.’

He took the lid off, and opened a fold of jeweller’s lint. Inside that lay a silver chain, with one of the Tsankawi shards, framed in a rim of silver, hanging from it as a pendant.

‘That’s very sweet of you, Jenny.’

She gave the pendant, or his examination of it, a brief sideways look.

‘Perhaps it will bring her bad luck as well.’

‘I’m not going to rise to that.’ He turned, leant, kissed the side of her head, then looked at the pendant again. ‘And of course I’ll tell her it’s from you.’

She said, gauchely, ‘I went a bit mad. I had too many made.’

‘It’s charming.’ He hesitated. ‘I bought you something in Egypt. But I didn’t have the face to bring it.’

‘What was it?’

‘Some old tomb-beads. You probably wouldn’t have liked them.’

She shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m going anti-jewellery anyway.’

He folded the lint back over the pendant. ‘Caro will love this.’

She sipped her Guinness.

‘Is she still…?’

‘He’s talking of getting a divorce now.’

‘And she?’

‘I’m down to crossed fingers.’

‘Is she pleased for you?’

‘She’s always been very fond of her.’ He went on, a shade too quickly and lightly. ‘It allowed her to kill two parents with one stone. The first thing she said was, I always knew you’d picked the wrong sister.’

Jenny did not smile. The interrogation proceeded. It was very tentative, and she did not look at him.

‘And your ex?’

‘She seems to have decided she can still speak to us. Since we were always two totally impossible people. As she delicately put it.’

‘What were you doing in Italy?’

‘We stopped off a day or two to see Jane’s younger daughter. She’s doing a language course in Florence.’

‘And wrote me my letter of dismissal.’

‘Of reasons why, Jenny.’

‘I knew. That postcard you sent from Aswan.’ She picked up her tankard of Guinness, but did not drink. ‘I just wish you’d told me what was happening before you left.’

‘I honestly didn’t know. You must believe that.’

‘You must have had some idea.’

‘Only that I was sorry for her. What I tried to explain in the letter.’

There came a longer silence. Jenny drank some of her Guinness, then stared across the room at the bar. Dan hated it, he had come determined not to allow this. But from the first moment, the first sight of her, she was already waiting for him, her aloneness in the empty pub, an outdoor coat and the basket beside her; the taut small smile, relief that he had appeared, resentment; a token kiss on the cheek, a banal exchange over her insistence (they were back in London now) that she should buy the drinks… any chance of being natural had vanished immediately in the artificial naturalness they had both assumed. She spoke, still staring across at the bar.

‘Every day I wonder what you’re doing. Even though I know what a devious, lying bastard you are.’

‘You promised we—’

‘I’m just telling you.’

He left a pause.

‘I sometimes wonder what I’m doing as well. If that’s any consolation.’ He was aware of her glance at his face, but did not return it. ‘It gets tough when you’re both older. All those bits of armour you’ve acquired and forgotten how to take off. The bastard knows what he’s lost in you.’

‘I don’t want your candy, Dan.’

‘I wish it was.’

She put down her tankard, sat back, folded her arms.

‘I’m going home tomorrow. Up to Cheshire.’

‘They know?’

‘I’ve pretended you’ve been the perfect gentleman. God knows why.’ But she made an immediate grimace down at the table. ‘You’re making me say all the lines I meant to cut.’ Then, ‘I only met here so that I’d be too ashamed to cry.’

‘You knew what I felt. Before I left.’

She unfolded her arms, put her hands on her lap, smoothed a hem of her jacket sleeve.

‘But you never knew what I felt. Deep down.’ She said in a lower voice, ‘Would it have made any difference if I’d written about Tsankawi first?’

He said nothing. He had come also determined to raise that as soon as possible, had even been given a perfect cue, with the pendant; and felt himself a coward, since he had guessed that his silence over it lay behind the brief telephone conversation that had preceded their meeting. She was back, she just wanted to see him once more; she wouldn’t be emotional; only an hour; somewhere neutral and public. Now she looked at him.

‘You did get it?’

‘Yes, Jenny. And bull’s-eye. Where it was aimed.’ She stared down, and he said gently, ‘The timing was appalling. I’m so sorry about that.’

‘And if it had been better?’

‘I think one day you’d have been far unhappier than you are he still looked down at her lap. ‘At least we’d have tried.’

‘My dear, you can’t short-cut experience. How you handle all this. Discovering it with someone your own age. Who’s also leaving.’

‘I went through all that with Timothy.’

‘No. You only think you did.’ He mulled over that for a moment; whether to argue directly or not.

‘If only you could have understood that stupid pretence of being honest about you wasn’t really about why I couldn’t love you. But not why I did.’ She said. ‘That’s the part of your letter that was so. wrong. That hurt most.’

‘It wasn’t stupid. It was brave. And very perceptive.’

‘For an actress.’

‘For anyone of your age. He’s going to be very hard to find, Jenny. But you do know what you’re looking for.’

‘I’m all right, then.’

‘You know I didn’t mean that.’

Her face was growing more and more ungiving.

‘I wish you’d let me have them back.’

‘To destroy?’

‘That third one makes me flush every time I think of it.’

‘Because it was honest?’

‘Like masturbating on camera.’

‘Now you’re being ancestral.’

‘I know you still think it all happened.’

‘I never thought that. I also know it doesn’t matter whether it did or not.’ She took a breath, then looked up. ‘The only thing I did in real life was not to go out with them together again. I think they decided I was rather dull, anyway. British.’ She sipped more of her black beer, then her mind made one of its jumps. ‘Can you remember your first return here?’

‘That shock doesn’t stale with age.’

‘Missing all sorts of things over there you thought you despised. Rediscovering so many things here you’d always taken for granted. When I picked up the first milk-bottle outside my flat, I nearly kissed it.’ Then, almost without a break, she said, ‘I’ll never forgive you if you ever show them to anyone.’

He smiled. ‘I might borrow the general idea. As you said I could.’

‘I know your game. We’re all so much easier to live with when we’re just notions in your past. I think you’re the original male chauvinist pig.’

‘All writers are. Even women ones.’

She seemed to want to challenge that; but once more expended her disagreement on the far side of the room.

‘And where’s that at?’

‘Where I suspect it always will be. In contemplation.’

‘The script?’

‘Being typed out.’

‘Pleased?’

‘I enjoyed writing the final fade.’

‘As elsewhere.’

‘Not true.’

‘I suppose it’s what it does to all of us. Two months on this. Then two months on that.’ She gave Dan a look. ‘I don’t think you’ll ever have the patience for a novel.’ He knew what she really meant by ‘novel’; but not how to answer without hurting her. ‘I bet you’ll be back on scripts within six months.’

‘Not even a year?’

She shook her head, but in a way that made him, for the first time, look properly at her; then reach for her hand beneath the table.

‘This is why I didn’t want us to meet.’

She sat forward and put an elbow on the table, the other hand against her cheek, stared down at her Guinness. The pub was slowly filling, there were now eight or nine people at the bar.

‘I’m not going to cry. It’s so humiliating.’ She took her hand away from his, and sat back. ‘I can’t even face ringing up friends. Going home tomorrow. It’s having to talk about it. Pretending it doesn’t mean anything.’ She looked down. ‘If only you’d left me with some nice ordinary disease. Like syphilis.’

‘As opposed to?’

‘A man tried to pick me up on the plane coming back. It was jam-packed. He was sitting beside me.’

‘And?’

‘He was rather nice. Very interested in the arts. The theatre. A merchant banker, just been divorced. He told me all about it. She was an upper-class idiot. I’m supposed to be having dinner with him.’

‘Young?’

‘Early thirties.’

‘You liked him?’

‘He was rather sweet. Fun. He’d been on business in New York, he told me about some high-class call-girl they’d tried to fix him up with one evening. How they’d spent it just talking. They didn’t go to bed. She told him it happens all the time.’

‘Why are you telling me?’

‘Because I shan’t have dinner with him.’

‘Why didn’t he go to bed?’

‘He thought it might be some kind of blackmail hustle. And don’t change the subject.’

‘Tell me the symptoms then.’

A group of young people came in, three young men, two girls; one of the latter opened her eyes and mouth as she saw Jenny, who raised a hand. The girl made a dialling gesture, and Jenny nodded; then she told Dan they had been in rep. together, at Birmingham. She watched the group go to a table at the other end of the room; and went on, still watching them.

‘All the time I was on the plane I wished you were beside me. To tell me what to do. Find out what I felt.’

‘Then I was beside you.’

‘That’s like so many of your lines. How things ought to be. Not how they are.’ She asked something naive then; but of a naivety Dan had always liked in her. ‘Does she realize this about you?’

He saw one or two covert glances towards them from the group of young people who had just come in—towards Jenny, of course; success; and wondered whether they wondered why she spoke so seriously, her face down at the table.

‘You know me in cross-section, Jenny. She knows me historically. It comes to the same thing.’

‘Does she mind your coming to see me?’

‘Not at all. She was quite a good student actress herself at Oxford. You’ve more in common than you might imagine.’