Daniel Martin (87 page)

‘Except you.’

It was said so humourlessly that Dan had to smile… and to think what they did not have in common: how much easier, if he were inventing it, Jenny’s dialogue would have been. He was hiding so many very recent memories of Jane, and hiding now a certainty that destroyed the small hope he knew still lay buried in the girl beside him—though he knew also that it had not prompted their meeting, but had arisen, against her will, certainly against her original intention, as soon as it took place. It defined her nature far more than it flattered his vanity.

‘I suppose you’ve told her all about me.’

‘All about why I never deserved you.’

‘I wish you’d write a script about a woman who kills a man out of rage at the phoniness of his decency. I could do that now.’

‘The actress in you.’

‘I didn’t think you believed there was anything else.’

‘I wouldn’t be here now if I believed that.’

‘It’s almost as if you want me to become a hard-faced little ambitious bitch.’

He left a silence, then spoke.

‘Why do you think the friends of your friend over there keep sliding looks at us? The boys?’ She said nothing. ‘They fancy you for your looks, Jenny. But even more for what you’re becoming. You’re condemned to be a sort of goddess. Still, even today. An untouchable vestal virgin. What every girl wants to be, what every man wants to have. It doesn’t matter that they know you’re not a virgin. Very soon you’ll be sacrosanct in the popular imagination. You know the alternatives. You turn your back on that, refuse to play ikon. Or you accept its cost.’

‘I make a last phone-call and he’s too important now to answer.’

‘Wrong culture. You’ll never be Monroe. And fate settled that score.’ Again she said nothing. ‘You can’t have both, I’ve been there too long. I know.’

‘I won’t give up what I am.’

‘Then you can only choose which kind of new-style vestal virgin you’ll be. Remembering you’re in the sickest art of them all. Where even the best have been buggered almost before they’ve got their foot through the door. Where cretins have always ruled, and always will. Where the stock model for every relationship is that between a ponce and a whore. You know all this. And why.’

‘I think you have been there too long.’

‘I’m only making a plea for you not to give up what you are. But it doesn’t come for free.’

‘I used to make nice bright clean decisions about things. All you’ve done is hopelessly confuse me.’

‘That’s growing up. Not me.’

‘I was growing up perfectly well before we met.’

‘I’m not going to be cast as the Lovelace in your life.’

‘Who was he?’

‘The seducer in Clarissa. Richardson.’

Silence fell on them, of the worst kind; of the blind alley, the nothing more to say. There was something far more sullen and unconceding in her than Dan had foreseen, as if the return to her home environment had discharged an emotional static she had always carried in California; and left her, behind her looks, clothes, career and all the things other eyes in that room might see in her, small and flat and resentfully forlorn. He also knew what the end of roles sometimes did to actresses, and that her mood was partly dependent on circumstances beyond his responsibility. Yet he felt miserable, knowing he could not comfort her in the only way that might have worked. She broke the silence, in a fittingly mundane and dispirited voice.

‘Do you want something to eat?’

‘If you like—a sandwich?’

‘I’ll have smoked salmon if they’ve got it. It’ll get so crowded soon.’

‘Another Guinness?’

She shook her head. ‘Jut a coffee.’

Dan went and waited at the bar for the sandwiches to be served. He saw Jenny go to the ladies’, past her friend at the other end of the long room; she bent and said something very briefly to her as she passed, ignoring the young men. He tried to read the signatures under the celebrity photographs; most of them seemed to be of faces he had never seen before. When Jenny came back—he was already sitting again—she plumped down with a little air of new-gained resolve.

‘I only wanted to see you once more. To let off steam.’ She squeezed lemon over her smoked-salmon sandwiches. ‘If we ever meet again, you’ll just be that peculiar mixed-up writer man I once had an affaire with.’

‘I shall keep you much closer than that.’

She started eating.

‘Was Egypt interesting?’

He should have called that shameless shift of tone and subject; instead, he followed it. The pub began to be crowded. Dan knew she wasn’t really listening; perhaps listening to his voice, but not his words; to their past, not their present. She was showing him now he would be got over, it would be got over. Our time’s slick comedown from Forster’s Only connect… only reify. Then two girls came and sat in the chairs on the other side of their table. Dan and Jenny were silent for half a minute, unwillingly listening to their chatter. Then she said abruptly, ‘Shall we go?’

She pulled on her outdoor coat, suede patchwork, an extravagance she had dithered over for days in Los Angeles; picked up her basket. Dan followed her out to the pavement and the open air. Passers-by, traffic crawling up towards Hampstead. It was a fine day, presaging spring, a clear sunlight on everything. She held her wicker basket with both hands in front of her, and faced him, a brittle smile.

‘Well. It was kind of you to spare me an hour. Mr Martin.’

He stared at her for a long moment, and she looked down.

‘There’s another opposite to how things ought to be, Jenny. How they ought not to be.’

She gave a minute shrug, but still stared down.

‘I haven’t your gift for tasteful dialogue.’

It was strange, Dan suddenly recalled talking with her on the beach at Malibu one day, the day she had written about: the same kind of aggressive shyness, even though it had been much more buried then… as if it was used, almost deliberately, to precipitate something better. There was something else, a much remoter ghost at his shoulder, his father’s; all those years of seeing pastoral care in action, and never understanding it, despising it for all the inanities it generated, boring old parties one had to be polite to, endless chitchat over nothing… but a greater humanity than this. And a much closer ghost, ghost only in not actually being there, also watched him watching himself—stood beside him and told him that however much the needle veered, it was never as far from true course as this.

‘Is there somewhere in the open we could walk for a bit?’

‘The Heath. We could take a cab.’

‘Okay. Let’s do that.’

They stood in silence at the kerb for a minute; then a taxi stopped at his outstretched arm. Jenny told the driver where they wanted, but once inside they sat in silence again. He took her hand, but she stared out of her window. Another battle with tears was taking place; Dan gripped a little harder. She did not in fact cry.

Five minutes later he paid off the taxi at the Whitestone Pond. Over the trees below, distant London lay spread, anaesthetized, soft blues and greys and pinks, deceptively of its past still, Constable’s London. They left the road and walked off down a gravel path; mothers and children, students, old men. A squirrel, woodpigeons. She listened in silence, just an occasional question. He was aware, now that it came to it, the first time in words, not only of the difficulty of putting flesh on such remote bones, but even of articulating them: a world of value-systems, prejudices, repressions, false notions of faith and freedom, that he sensed she could hardly comprehend. He tried to tell her all his letter had lacked the honesty to tell: the real enemy she had always been pitted against. The day of the woman in the reeds, and all that lay behind it. And a little of Aswan and Palmyra, too. All rather drily, matter-of-factly, as he might have outlined an idea for an original to a sceptical but shrewd producer like David Malevich—slighting it rather than selling it, casting Jane and himself as middle-aged fools… strictly for that trade, not the younger generation.

Jenny was silent when he finished. They had stopped and sat on a seat for a while; were now walking on again, out of the trees and down a slope towards the one which led up to Kenwood House.

“Why didn’t you tell me all this before, Dan?’

‘Because I’ve never told anyone, Jenny.’

She went a few steps without speaking.

‘You’re really in love with her?’

‘In need.’

‘Has she changed very much?’

‘Physically. Not otherwise.’

‘Soul-mates.’

‘Hardly. We disagree about too much.’

‘That doesn’t fool me.’

‘I’m not trying to. We do agree where it matters.’

Again they strolled steps in silence.

‘I can see there were always casting problems. With us pale shadows who offered for the part.’

‘I’d long ago put it beyond the realm of the playable.’

She slid him a look.

‘I wish I’d known. I’d have put on my long nightie and danced through the palm-trees on Sunset.’ She struck a little pose and put on an ingénue’s face. “You can’t arrest me, officer. I’m a figment in someone’s imagination”.’ She saw him grin, then suddenly came closer and slipped her hand through his arm. ‘I wish you’d get us all together. Then we could swap notes.’

‘I have got you all together.’

‘Like Bluebeard.’

‘Nonsense.’

She jerked his arm.

‘Only what you think we are.’

‘I won’t have the great secret of my life treated as a subject for unseemly levity.’

‘Diddums. Did the naughty girl laugh at him?’ He smiled. Her hand slipped down and found his. After a moment she said, ‘I only wanted to feel close to you once more.’

‘It’s not that I feel any closer to her, Jenny.’

‘But what?’

‘Perhaps we’re a little sorrier for each other. And with better reason.’

She looked down at the grass.

‘Is she in London now?’

‘In Oxford. She’s going to put her house on the market. She’s there about that.’

‘And you’ll play Darby and Joan in glorious Devon?’

‘I’ve given up trying to sell that to the women in my life. We’ll probably try to get a house here.’

‘And sell your farm?’

‘Just use it as before, Perhaps a bit more often.’ He said, ‘Jane wants to go into local politics.’ He smiled rather sheepishly at her. ‘You’re walking with a fully paid-up member of the Labour Party, by the way. As of last week.’

‘Seriously?’

‘It doesn’t feel it. But we’ll see.’

He had not provoked the smile he intended, one of amused contempt; but one of amused curiosity.

‘Is she really very leftwing?’

‘We’re like two characters in a difficult play, Jenny. We know we both feel we want to do the parts. But we don’t know how we’ll get into them yet.’ He added, ‘Especially as neither of us has very much confidence in the director… or directors.’

‘That must be a very new experience for you.’

He smiled at her dryness. ‘Where writers count for even less. That’s the real problem.’

He knew she was half tempted to press him further; but then she decided not to relinquish the role she was now playing. For he also knew she was acting, though bravely; because she must.

‘I think you’d make a jolly good politician. With your skill at conning and lying.’

‘I may surprise you yet.’

She stole a look up at his face. ‘And really goodbye, screen?’

‘I don’t know. If a novel defeats me, I think I might risk my neck in the theatre again.’

‘I wish you would. With a nice fat part for me.’ Then she said, ‘I so wish I was going back into that. Now. Next week.’

‘Then do it when the next film’s over. David’s a good agent, but he’ll run your life for you. If you let him.’

She gave a small nod. More steps without speaking. Then she took his arm again.

‘You will let us meet occasionally? Let me have a whiff of your rotten old mind. Even if it’s only so you can tell me what a lousy vestal virgin I’m becoming.’

‘Of course.’

‘We’ll walk here and then I won’t see you for another year.’

He made one of her own jumps.

‘As long as he sees through Jenny McNeil.’

‘I shall bring him to be vetted.’

‘He won’t stand for that. If he’s any good.’

‘Then I’ll use it as a test. If he knocks me to the floor at the very idea, I’ll know he’s all right.’

‘I should try this merchant banker.’ She shook her head. ‘Why not?’

‘I’m off nice straightforward men.’

They walked slowly up the slope to the cream façade of the house; wordless again, but she still kept her arm lightly linked through his. A few old people sat on benches in the winter sun and there was a dim roar of traffic from around the Heath. As they came to the steps up to the gravelled terrace before the house, she reached down and squeezed his hand, but mischievously.