by John Fowles
Dan was leaning now against the wall by the glass door; for once Anthony was avoiding his eyes, speaking to the grey hospital floor.
‘But mainly wrong.’
Anthony smiled up. ‘But at least she’s partly right in thinking that my motives are essentially selfish. I’m really asking you to do something that I failed to do myself, Dan. And I know. Impossibly. After all these years not, alas, knowing you any more. Simply guessing. Praying. Now that you have been given the missing card.’
And for a few moments, but once again moments of that hinged, geometric nature that destroys time and conscious notion of sequences the two men sought something, a mystery and an understanding of it, in each other’s eyes. A code of intercourse was being broken, another proposed; and Dan, if he could not grasp its full significance consciously, knew that, whatever the state of Anthony’s specific faith, he retained a far deeper one in a universal absolute. His seeming obliviousness to time, interval, to all the outward rest, was in fact a mere function of that: what I ask is timeless… a preposterous, but true, demand of personal moral being. You may wonder at me, laugh at me, despise me for professing both a faith and a discipline the world increasingly despises: but that is neither who I am at this moment nor why we are here. Perhaps it was the proximity of death; yet it seemed to Dan as if he had always been mistaken in one assumption: that this man was a philosopher merely by intellect and a cast of mind. Underneath, and movingly, lay something very primitive and simple, of the innocence of childhood; and also of true adulthood, of that other philosopher who had once preferred hemlock to a lie.
‘Anthony, of course. If trying will help…’
‘But I ask the impossible?’
‘I didn’t mean that.’ He looked down at his sherry. ‘Just that well, it’s rather up to Jane, isn’t it? She must have many far closer friends now.’
‘What she needs is someone who both knows her and doesn’t. Who can remember what she once was. She’s become very withdrawn, Dan. I think not only with me.’ He considered his next sentence in his mind, then spoke. ‘Perhaps the most profound breach in our marriage has been over the question of whether we have some control over our lives or not. One reason I can’t talk with her about all these matters is that our marriage has become the standing proof that my case has no validity. I preach in an empty church, which proves my sermons are worthless. We’re reduced now to a tender convention. Dying husband, dutiful wife.’
Dan went and sat on the end of the bed, and stared at the foot of the wall beneath the window.
‘I didn’t know about all this, Anthony.’
‘How could you? We’ve largely hidden it. Even from our own children. Certainly to the world at large.’
‘Have you tried recently to… ‘
‘I forced her to lie for years over her true religious beliefs. Which began the closing-in process. I won’t now do it over something much more important. She also has a formidable pride. I’m not prepared to blackmail that, either.’
‘Then judgment without trial?’
‘On the contrary. Trial without judgment.’
‘Does she know you were going to tell me this?’
‘She must… yes, in a sense, she must know. But I’d prefer you to keep it to yourself now, Dan. In fact, I insist.’ Dan said nothing, feeling more and more out of his depth; caught in a game he had almost forgotten how to play; aware of that woman sitting out there, knowing and not knowing. Anthony went on. ‘This must sound very peculiar. But I insist for, how shall I put it, tactical reasons? On the supposition that you are prepared to forgive us both.’
‘You know there’s no question about that.’
There was another silence.
‘I am also profoundly grateful to have been allowed to share my life with her. At another level. I speak in terms of what you both sacrificed. The act may have been immoral, but what followed my gratitude is partly the selfishness of a beneficiary of your decision. But it does exist.’
Dan smiled. ‘One satisfied partner is above average for the course.’
‘But below average in a serious match. Even in golf, I believe.’
Something very peculiar had happened to his sense of time. For Dan they had become strangers, with very different histories and even cultures now. For Anthony, it was still as if they were the closest of friends; and over the years he had acquired no replacements.
Again Dan smiled at him; then glanced at the Mantegna reproduction over the bed.
‘I begin to understand why you have that hanging there.’
Anthony’s mouth made a brief quirk.
‘Very bad taste. Even my witty Jesuit friends are not amused.’ But he would not be distracted; braced himself back and looked across the room. ‘Dan, you once said something to me that I’ve always remembered. You’d spotted some nice orchid I’d walked right past insectifera? I can’t recall now, but we were telling the girls about it that evening. Your nose for them. And you said that I knew only how to look at orchids not for them. Do you remember that?’ Dan shook his head at the questioning eyes. ‘Well. When I think of the vain thousands of words I’ve wasted, both orally and in print, on abstract propositions and philosophical angel-counting. Instead of… ‘ he shrugged.
Dan remembered Barney: this pandemic of self-depreciation.
‘I won’t wear that. Quite apart from anything else you’ve taught hundreds of young men to think.’
‘Only as I think myself. I thank heaven for the stupid ones. At least they escaped contamination.’
‘Balls.’
‘Precisely. In another sense. The academic glass-bead game.’
He had his hands in his dressing-gown pockets, and again he braced himself back a little against the chair, as if he felt discomfort, perhaps pain, despite his disclaimer. He smiled drily sideways at Dan.
‘I’m sorry. This must seem singularly like self-pity. It’s just that everyone makes too many allowances for the dying. As if the soft centre is what one needs.’
‘You also know perfectly well that looking-at is a much more important activity than looking-for.’
‘Perhaps with orchids. Not with self. I have looked at myself. All my adult life. But as I am. Not as I might have been, or ought to have been. That’s what permitted me to turn you into the living exemplar of all that Jane and I had supposedly risen above.’
His self-distaste was in his voice; and his face.
‘All right. By impossibly high Christian standards, you lacked charity. That doesn’t mean the basic judgment was at fault.’
‘But the standards of judgment were.’ His eyes were on Dan’s. ‘And your accepting the sentence so meekly proves it.’
‘Why?’
‘My dear fellow, a judge who tried a case, that of your play ,so clearly involving his own interests would be a disgrace to justice. Especially when a previous private decision of his—one you were unaware of—had very much helped cause the crime in question. That you now have the kindness to tell me the sentence was right proves your comparative innocence.’
‘But who provoked that original private decision? And why do you think it only happened once? That we backed out almost as soon as we’d walked in?’
‘Because you incorrectly assumed I was the injured party.’
Dan shook his head. ‘Something much simpler. I wasn’t good enough for Jane. And she wasn’t bad enough for me.’
‘I think I might very well have convinced you otherwise. And even if it were true, you still might have benefited each other far more deeply than…’ but he stopped at the second term of the comparison.
Dan swilled the last of the sherry in the bottom of the glass. Anthony was not to be deprived of his arrows; and the present archer left a silence. The martyr gave another curt rictus of self-mockery.
‘All this deathbed melodrama. I did also very much just want to see you again. Hear about your life.’
‘The Oscar in the loo?’
‘Not all ashes, surely?’
‘There are worse philosophies.’
‘Until you do your accounts.’
‘One moaner is quite enough in this room.’
Dan smiled down from his reproof. ‘I suppose I’ve become like Jane. A determinist. More or less opted out.’
‘Opting out is not compatible with determinism.’
‘Unless one’s a born taker of the easier road.’
‘That’s defeatism. Not determinism.’
‘One can choose one’s bit of flotsam. But it’s all going in the same direction?’
Anthony raised a finger.
‘I detect Saint Samuel a Becket and his fancy French nonsense. Arrant romantic pessimism.’
‘Now you’re being hard on Becket.’
‘No harder than Pascal would have been. Or Voltaire, for that matter. Mutatis mutandis.’
‘I suppose not.’
‘I had one of my most serenely self-satisfied Oxford colleagues trying to sell ecological disaster to me the other day. It seems I’m quite extraordinarily lucky to be able to walk out of such a flop. I told him he was at perfect liberty to join me.’
Dan laughed. ‘But that he won’t doesn’t necessarily disprove his case?’
‘You must allow me the suspicion that the play isn’t really half so bad as the doomsters pretend. After all, the one evil thing in creation is also the one thing that can think.’ He gave Dan one of his quizzes. ‘I’m still defeated by the conundrum of God. But I have the Devil clear.’
‘And what’s he?’
‘Not seeing whole.’ He stared at the floor. ‘One of my students a year or two ago informed me that the twentieth century was like realizing we’re all actors in a bad comedy at precisely the same moment as we realize that no one wrote it, no one is watching it, and that the only other theatre in town is the graveyard.’
‘What did you say to that?
‘That he should drop philosophy and take up your profession.’
‘Unkind.’
‘Not at all. You’re locked up in the untenable dream, we’re condemned to the tenable proposition. The word as game. The word as tool. Just as long as the one doesn’t pretend to be the other.’
‘You never play with your tools?’
‘Oh I couldn’t deny that we have self-abuse in common.’
And they smiled, I think for the first time completely without reserve, perhaps because they had both recalled an old kind of dialogue, a fondness for such puns, wordplay; because they knew this first meeting was drawing to an end… and if they hadn’t, on either side, found what was expected, there was something: an unchangingness behind all the outward shifts of circumstance. Time lay quiescent, if not defeated. Anthony straightened again.
‘Dan, I can’t tell you how essential this has been for me. What a gift you’ve brought.’
‘For me as well.’
‘I do have the strangest kind of optimism about the human condition. I can’t explain it. It’s… well, I think a little more than mere faith. There is something sillier than the theory of perfectibility.’
‘Imperfectibility?’
Anthony nodded. ‘Just that we shall come through. In spite of all our faults. If only we learn that it must begin in ourselves. In the true history of our own lives. Instead of putting the blame on everything else under the sun.’ He gave Dan a faintly mischievous look. ‘I sometimes think I shall bequeath a last mystical catchphrase to the world. Turn in.’ A moment, then he pulled at his rug and said, ‘And I better had. Going trite is even worse than going maudlin.’
‘You’re allowed an aria.’ He didn’t know what that meant. ‘Old Hollywood jargon. There’s a famous Goldwynism. “Cut that goddam speech, arias went out with Shakespeare.”‘
Anthony’s head lifted, he approved. ‘I must remember that.’ He sought Dan’s eyes. ‘You do understand what I’ve been trying to say, Dan?’
‘Of course.’
‘I know Jane better than anyone else in the world. In spite of everything. She does need help. A Good Samaritan.’
‘I’ll try my best.’ Dan reached out and touched his sleeve, then stood up. ‘And I’ll come in tomorrow. Give you the full horrors of my world. Reject Spengler then, if you can.’
‘I should enjoy that.’
‘And don’t worry about the past, Anthony. The major design faults were in things. Life. Not us.’
‘As long as you’ll agree that the only remedies do lie in us. As we are. Not were.’
‘Done.’
The sick man extended a hand and Dan took it. Then, with a gesture that at last revealed a buried emotion, Anthony joined his other hand to those already joined. But his eyes, looking up into Dan’s, still intent, still smiling, stayed dry.
‘All we haven’t said.’
‘Spoken. No need.’
‘Then have a nice dinner.’
‘And you sleep well.’
‘Modern pharmacy solves that.’
He let go of the hand. Dan turned at the door.
‘Shall I ring for someone?’
‘No, no. They’ll come.’
He raised his hand: and still that smile. It had the faint air of a benediction or the air of a faint benediction; something as two-edged as the piece of artistic genius and morbid religiosity that hung over the bed.
He had already decided what I had become, and he did not want me to see. So I spent that last moment looking at him, not for him.
Jane
‘All right?’
‘Fine.’
‘I’ll just go and say good night.’
I waited where I had found Jane absorbed in her book, and felt myself left standing in more senses than one: the immediate clearest sentiment was of embarrassment at now having to face an evening with a woman who wished I hadn’t reappeared in her life, and whom I had more or less promised to lie to.
The revelation about Anthony’s complaisance in prehistory seemed on reflection less unexpected, less extraordinary, than this casting of me as the saviour of someone who very evidently didn’t want to be saved. I began to feel that I had been obscurely gulled, had allowed the pathos of his situation for all his rejection of that element in it to silence me. I ought to have argued more. He had had the advantage of surprise, and none of my own rehearsals had foreseen such a drastic change of basic premise… or anything but a very casual resumption of relations with Jane in the future.
Perhaps the illness and the drugs had unbalanced him; perhaps it was all some kind of tortuous revenge on his wife; perhaps he’d been pursuing the same line with other people. But she would surely have warned me beforehand, if that had been the case; and her behaviour hardly denied his diagnosis. I think the greatest shock lay in this possibility that an event I had always believed had disturbed my own life far more deeply than hers, but which I had in fact long relegated to the category of spilt milk, had finally, if Anthony was to be believed, affected her more deeply. But it was all so retrospective, so past; like going into a theatre and finding a production one had seen there half a lifetime before still on stage. Of course there was a sense in which he and Jane had continued to inhabit the theatre, the past must in that way have continued more present for them; but not for the first, or last, time that evening I had a feeling that I had landed among children or certainly among people whose values had remained bizarrely petrified. Yet I also knew a more subjective side of me had been moved by Anthony and resurrected from behind the hardening years a kind of greenness, but with the good as well as the bad aspects of that metaphor, what we had lost as well as what we had gained.
Jane was not long away, and then we were in the lift going down, side by side, facing the doors. There was a moment’s awkward silence.
‘How did you find him?’
‘Rather hair-raisingly brave about it all.’
‘As long as it wasn’t a complete waste of time.’
‘Of course not.’
T
here was no other word for what she had said but graceless. Her tone had effectively denied the token negative. I do indeed hold a resentful hand: now guess how strong it is. She looked in her bag for her car-key.
‘He’s asked me to let you have all his orchid books.’
‘That’s very sweet of him.’
‘They’re probably hopelessly out of date.’
‘I doubt it. And I’d still love to have them.’
‘I’ll look them out.’
The lift doors slid open. By the time we were in her car again, it was very clear that she wasn’t going to ask me what had been said. At least I was to be spared lying about that. Either she knew or she didn’t care. Anthony had at least convinced me that he wanted to dissolve the years of silence. She was very glad that they were still there; and proceeded to underline their existence by a determined, if outwardly bland, normality.
We got ourselves to the Italian restaurant, but again someone knew her. We stopped, she introduced me to the couple; my name, that was all, as if she would have been ashamed to go into the reason for my presence. There was a little exchange about Anthony. Then we went to our table across the room. She explained who they were: an English don and his wife, from Merton. I had the impression she would much rather have been sitting and talking with them a tit for my secret tat about Jenny. When the menu had been gone through and the food ordered, she asked me about my work. We chatted, she sat in her cream shirt with the agate brooch, elbows on the table, hands lightly clasped, the head calmly poised, considering everything in the room but my face. Slowly, almost reluctantly, I found myself accepting Anthony’s view: there was something obstinately elsewhere in her… more than that, snubbingly elsewhere. Despite her show of politeness, I soon began to smell the same contempt for my movie world as her husband had suggested she felt for his religious and philosophical ones. None of her questions seemed innocent.
