by John Fowles
And also a little recompense, since outwardly he did try quite hard for a while to be more concerned for Nell. In July he handed in the finished version of The Red Barn to his new agent, waited to have his first reaction (warm and excited), then drove off with her for a holiday in France. They idled down to Provence, eked out four weeks there, then idled back. It was a success from the start: the weather, the food, the countryside, the sex, the suddenly discussible feeling that they had drifted apart during those previous months. Dan telephoned back to London from Avignon; both theatre producers who had by then read the play wanted it… he and Nell had the most expensive dinner of their then lives that evening, and came to other decisions over it. Nell would stop working and go in for motherhood, they would find a bigger flat or a small house as soon as they got back. However, that was delayed beyond the three weeks Nell’s holiday allowance originally planned. She sent her letter of resignation from a drowsy little port, charmingly free of the vulgar mob, called St Tropez.
I think Dan might at some point during that happy month have confessed to the Curzon Street coupling, but he had some buried terror as to how confession might then run on; or he clung to his secrets. In truth he remained intensely selfish. But the sun gave Nell a new body, contraceptives were abandoned, the heat made them both continuously randy… if he still surreptitiously eyed other female bodies, it was without envy. They ran out of money (both permitted and illegal) and had to make do on the way back with fleapits and cheaper and cheaper picnic meals; but even that had been fun. For months afterwards the experience remained their true honeymoon; and not only because Nell proved to have conceived first time round. What the holiday also proved, alas, was that they could be happy (as at Oxford) only in the unreal, not the real. But neither of them saw that then.
The Red Barn was, I think, if not genuinely new, at least fresh. It was probably lucky that I had only the sketchiest notion at the time of what Brecht was getting at. I came on the idea by pure chance, happening one day to pick up a contemporary account of the William Corder trial. All Maria Marten had meant to me before was the type exemplar of ham rural fustian. But I saw at once that there was an entertaining historical play to be disinterred. It had taken me some time to realize that William was the central character, not Maria; and I did take enormous pains over the dialogue. But the play’s success was a team job: it had the best series of sets of its year, five fat and a number of good small parts. The cattle were with it from the start.
The anatomy of first major success is like the young human body, a miracle only the owner can fully savour… and even then, only at the time. Dan, at any rate, went through that following winter in a state of smug euphoria, well above the flak from minor setbacks. The only serious professional disappointment was the failure to get a New York production going; but in the New Year the play went on in Sweden and West Germany, with negotiations for rights in progress with several other countries. The private clouds on the horizon did not seem very important at the time.
Though the 99-year lease I bought of the Notting Hill flat was probably the best business deal I ever did, unaided, in my life, Dan and Nell began having doubts as soon as they moved in. It was partly that miserable drive to keep up with the Joneses that is endemic in the show-business world. They started to feel they had quite unnecessarily undersold themselves. The sort of people they now began to mix with all lived in so much nicer surroundings and so much more stylishly above their income, in many cases. They had seen small houses in St John’s Wood, in Islington, in Fulham, and then promptly compared them unfavourably with the cottage at Wytham. A cottage there was on the market and they secretly hankered after that at the same time as they found a dozen reasons for its impossibility. For the first time in his life Dan now had an accountant: the cost of the lease in London meant they could not sanely afford the price of the cottage. Everything in the new home had finally to come from Heal’s and they ran up huge bills. That did not prevent Nell from frequently blaming him later for not buying what they could not afford.
She had a tetchy pregnancy and took increasingly against the flat. One day it would be too large, the next it was ‘mad’ not having realized a garden for the baby ought to have been the priority. Increasingly she resented being left alone, increasingly she harked back to our ‘dear little’ mews. Cooking had never amused her, and in the last months of her pregnancy we took to going out almost every evening. I came to learn it was a way of avoiding rows. I mustn’t exaggerate, she shared some of Dan’s euphoria over the play, there was the baby… most of the time it was merely a feeling that the flat was probably a mistake, but not one of primary importance. Caro was born on April 10th, and for a time other problems were forgotten. Dan had completed the first draft of his next play; and in the same week that he became a father he signed for his second film-script.
I suppose the most terrible marriages are where the child is the wedge (or is used as the wedge) that splits the stone. Caro proved difficult, she seemed to run the gamut of all the ills that babies can make themselves heirs to, and she exhausted Nell both nervously and physically. I think I bore my share, I worked at home during the first draft. But somehow Caro became tacitly like the flat itself: a good idea at the time, but only too often an apparent mistake in the actual experience. Then there was a certain amount of sisterly rivalry—Jane, pregnant again herself, had turned into a model mother, and Nell felt obliged to run in that race. I tried to persuade her to give up one of the two spare bedrooms we had to an au pair girl anyone to keep her company, even some out-of-work actress. But Nell would neither cope nor admit that she could not cope; later she claimed that it was solely fear of what would happen when she took herself off to Wytham.
She did that more and more as the summer wore on and I had to spend more time away from the flat. I would see her and the baby solicitously on to the train at Paddington; and then return rather too happily to the flat and my work. I usually went down to fetch her at the next weekend, but my periods of freedom assumed the aspect of holidays. She had travelled that Oxford line so much more frequently. Perhaps the real trouble started there: in the bond among the three of them and the children in Oxford, from which Dan was now partially excluded though it was not apparent to him then.
From this time on, I feel less guilty. Nell began to stew when she was in London and mull over the injustices of her new role. They rapidly grew far worse than the old ones at the publisher’s as with the mews, that tended to become a beautiful broken future instead of the disliked stopgap it had actually seemed to her at the time; and would suddenly seem again, with that illogicality I find the least endearing thing in the female sex, if I proposed the simple solution of asking her old employers for work she could do at home.
The hopeless downward progression of this kind of situation, especially when the two involved have more than their ration of intransigent selfishness, has become so familiar nowadays that I won’t spell out all the stages. Such changes in a person’s character, and in the character of a relationship, don’t announce themselves dramatically; they steal slowly over months, masking themselves behind reconciliations, periods of happiness, new resolves. Like some forms of lethal disease, they invite every myth of comforting explanation before they exact the truth.
I suppose nothing was more symptomatic of the hidden cancer than Nell’s reversed attitude to my film work. She began to resent it without distinction with some reason in the case of the first film when it appeared. The critics slated it, though two—one of whom was Barney Dillon—saved my embarrassment a little by excepting the script from their general thumbs-down. But the new script promised better, and I was enjoying the experience of working with Tony. He was not a great director by any stretch of the adjective, but not a fool, either, and a marked improvement on his predecessor.
The plot was based on an original idea of his, a psychological thriller, which we called The Intruder at the time, though it was released as Face in the Window. He knew what he wanted and
made me work to get it; and at the same time was open to ideas. I learnt a lot from him also on the business of demarcation lines. Nell took against my enthusiasm when I came back from sessions with him, and I began to hide it… if it still wasn’t spoken, it was implicit in her attitude that I had sold out, I was on the grab for quick success and cheap limelight. Anthony and Jane’s names were invoked one evening, when something had been spoken. They couldn’t understand why I should want to get involved in such a corrupt demimonde, why playwriting was not enough… or so she said. They certainly didn’t say so to my face, though I sensed a growing distance between us, a breakdown of vocabulary and shared values. The cinema also internationalizes; and I began to see them as obscurely provincial. Two forms of profound obstinacy were gearing up for battle; and I resented the fifth column Nell now formed in my own camp.
One evening, it must have been in July or August, I came home to find Nell and Caro had decamped to Wytham without warning. We had had a long row the previous night and she had still been asleep when I left for the office after breakfast. I went down and fetched her back at the weekend. Perhaps Anthony still knew nothing then, but I could see a questioning and reproachful light in Jane’s eyes. Nell had certainly talked to her. That made me very angry, though I managed to conceal it.
I was by then doing the second draft. Because there was some mess-up over the availability dates of one of the chief actors, there was a hurry to get the new film off the ground. I was given a room at the production office and a part-time secretary. Andrea was two years older than me and half-Polish, not really a humble secretary at all, but already well on her way to being one of the best production secretaries on this side of the Atlantic: a kind of regimental sergeant-major, though her breed must use tact and a cool head where the other struts and bellows. I liked her at once for her professionalism: impossible not to admire the speed and accuracy with which she typed out my drafts and would talk about them, sometimes suggest a useful cut, point out a weakness. She didn’t attract me physically, she had rather a heavy body and there was something about her of that accusing resignation of the career girl. I didn’t know then that she had been married, since she seldom talked about herself. The only thing Slavonic about her, or at least not English, were her eyes. They were very fine, very direct, almost jade-green, much lighter than hazel. It all happened very slowly; began merely as a feeling of relief, the contrast between never knowing how an evening with Nell would end and coming to rely on that useful, intelligent camaraderie in the office to give some point and sanity to daily life. She came sometimes when I went to show new scenes to Tony, who used to fire off his own suggestions faster than I could write them down, and I could see he felt the same about her as I did myself: that she was a pro to her fingertips and a good shrewd head to have at one’s side.
We had no relationship outside work. Usually she went out and bought me sandwiches, occasionally I took her out to lunch in one of the cheaper places near by. But finally I came to hear a little about her broken marriage. It had been to one of the Poles who had escaped to Britain and become a fighter ace. Peace had turned him into a sadistic drunkard and dabbler in expatriate politics. Now she lived with her Polish mother somewhere behind Marble Arch. Just how much of a monster he had been, and remained, to her in private I did not hear in detail until later, but that was already hinted at. She was a dry woman and had her share of the gallows humour that hangs over moviemaking like the smell of malt over a brewery; but she gave the impression that this was defensive, cryptic coloration. Something in her had been badly hurt by her marriage. I lost her when the production schedules and all the rest had to be got out, and I missed her. I was very careful not to talk much about her to Nell. They met once or twice and Nell didn’t like her, or professed not to; but she was beginning to dislike everyone on that side of my life by then and she evidently saw no cause for sexual jealousy.
There was some final rewriting to be done when we started shooting, again down at Pinewood. Tony notoriously hated working with idle faces watching behind him, and I didn’t go to the sets very much. Andrea and I were often alone in the production office. I started going down there when it was no longer really necessary. Word gets round the film industry much faster than in any other artistic world; and the word was that this script was good, that Tony was pleased with it, that I was learning fast, I was reliable… I basked in that. I wanted to learn the other techniques of my new business, too. Secretly I even had dreams of directing myself one day.
I had about this, time with plenty of unhelpful advice from Nell, to face up to what I wanted to be. Another script was already in the offing. It was not really a dilemma. I knew (or thought I knew) that the cinema could never be as serious for me as the theatre. But it was fun, and it brought in the money. If I wanted to say something really personal and ‘important’, it could only be on the stage. A new play I had in mind (which eventually became The Production) would establish that: that I had the compromises, the false pressures and premises of the film world in perspective. But I felt I wasn’t ready for it for a while; and perhaps I was also a little scared insulting the goose that laid the golden script-fees. I was certainly too close to the present production to invent safely unrecognizable characters.
Above all there was the need to prove to Nell that she was wrong. When I took the third script, however, there was a marital lull. She seemed to accept that I was not going to give up this alternative career; and that if she couldn’t approve of it, she could at least approve the money it was bringing in. My new agent had seen to it that I was no longer in the bargain basement. I indulged Nell. I knew we were spending too much, but if it brought more peace at home I felt it was justifiable.
Then something predictive: one noon down at the studio Andrea seemed depressed a little, Dan asked her why, and she said it was her birthday, something about birthdays when you were a child… how you never quite grew up enough to treat them as ordinary days. Dan went straight to the canteen and bought a half-bottle of champagne. She laughed, they drank it. Then at lunch Dan announced the birthday to the others, there was more champagne… it was nothing. By chance afterwards he and she went back to the production office alone together. The empty half-bottle sitting on her desk: she turned and kissed him. It wasn’t the kiss, which was quick and affectionate, against his cheek, not his mouth, but a fractional hesitation of the embrace, a waiting, an equally brief look in her eyes before she turned away to make some phone-call. Dan knew she was saying the camaraderie was on her side a pretence. That was all. Someone came in, and the next day it was exactly as before.
Then a few nights later: Nell and Dan had just gone to bed and he made one of those gestures all husbands and wives evolve and recognize as a suggestion. It was very sharply rebuffed. He said sorry; as lightly as possible. But Nell lay stiff as a rake. After fifteen seconds of that she got angrily out of bed and lit a cigarette; another sort of preamble he had come to recognize only too well.
‘What is it this time?’
‘You know damn well what it is.’
‘That’s why I asked the question.’
She hated what she called his ‘B-movie sarcasms’. She said nothing, but ripped one of the curtains aside and stared out at the night.
‘I don’t know what you want out of life.’
‘I want a divorce.’
He had come home late and they had had to rush out to dinner with friends to be precise, with the girl who had got her the former job at the publishers and her husband. Dan knew she hadn’t enjoyed the evening, that she had been brewing over something, and had put it down to the other girl, the tittle-tattle about publishing: the illogical envy of a career she did not really want again. But this was something new.
‘Why?’
He waited, but she said nothing. He was suddenly very scared, he had some notion that Jane had been mad and… he asked why again.
‘You know why.’
‘That I deprived you of a job you loathed when you ac
tually did it?’
‘Oh for God’s sake.’ There was more silence. Then she said, ‘You’re a bloody good liar, I’ll give you that.’
‘I don’t begin to know what this is all about.’
‘It’s about the affaire you’re having with that Polish cow.’
He let out a breath outwardly of amused contempt for the accusation, inwardly of relief.
‘Okay. Let’s have it. Or was the letter anonymous?’
‘You admit it?’
‘I admit absolutely nothing. Except that I wish you were a Polish cow. Instead of a paranoiac little English bitch.’
‘Yes, you’d love that.’
Dan got out of bed to go to her, but she turned on him before he could reach her. He could see her face in the streetlights from below. It managed to look both frightened and venomous or obsessed. And it stopped him: the feeling that she had undergone some secret change of personality, that he no longer knew or understood her at all.
He said, ‘It’s not true, Nell.’
‘Her ex-husband telephoned me this afternoon. And told me a few facts about her. You’re apparently beating a well-trodden path. Suppose you know that.’
‘But the man’s a bloody lunatic. She’s already had to get a court order to stop him pestering her mother. The whole office knows that.’
They stood six feet apart, facing each other.
‘He sounded very sane to me.’
‘Well we’ll see what the law thinks. I’ll sue the sod for slander.’
‘He says it’s all over Pinewood. Everyone knows.’
But there was a slight climb-down in her voice.
‘Nell, the man’s deranged, for Christ’s sake. Apparently he started doing this with her mother last year. He’s a Catholic, he won’t give her a divorce, he… honest to God, how can you believe such rubbish?’
‘Because it could so easily be true.’ Dan turned away and found the cigarettes. He must have been angry, because he felt like agreeing with her—and telling her why. But she jumped on. ‘He saw you going into her flat last week.’
