by John Fowles
‘And you’ve given up the theatre completely?’
‘Nothing new to say. Or perhaps just unable to adapt myself to the fashionable new ways of saying it.’
‘Isn’t the cinema the same? The same problems?’
Our first courses came. I have spent a good deal of my life observing people’s minute but betraying gestures, and I noted the quickness with which she picked up the spoon for her melon. I decided that at least one assumption she might be making about me needed destruction.
‘In my branch of it it’s a little like being an industrial executive. Maintaining the standard of a staple product? Which is entertainment. Vehicles for current stars. The odd dose of truth one tries to smuggle in is incidental. Just part of the packaging. Status comes from box-office record. At most, craft.’
She delved into her melon. ‘And you’ve settled for that?’
I extracted the backbones from my grilled sardines.
‘I have all sorts of excuses, Jane. But Anthony’s just seen through them. He called me a defeatist. Then a romantic pessimist.’
She was faintly amused. ‘And Becket was duly cursed.’
I smiled and tried to catch her eyes, but they were studiously intent on the melon. ‘You don’t agree?’
‘Oh yes. But not for Anthony’s reasons.’
‘Then why?’
She shrugged. ‘Just that literary melancholia so often precedes fascism. Rousseau, then Napoleon. Chateaubriand and the Restoration. The Twenties.’
‘Rabelais remains a god?’
Another brief smile: nervous and dismissive.
‘I’d forgotten about that.’
‘But he came to pass?’
‘A misunderstanding of him.’
I had meant the permissive society; but I wasn’t sure what she meant.
‘He certainly entered my life again last night. Do you remember Barney Dillon?’
She paused a moment over her melon. ‘She’s told you?’
I gave her a surprised look. ‘You knew?’
‘I was up in town for a day last week. We had lunch together.’ She went on scooping out the flesh. ‘She’s always rather tended to tell me things she’s afraid to tell her mother.’ I realized she meant to apologize for pre-empting the confession, but I detected a buried reproof.
‘You’ve told Nell?’
‘She asked me not to. How did you react?’
‘As calmly as I could manage.’
‘I shouldn’t worry. She’s very sensible.’
‘You can’t approve of it?’
She hesitated.
‘You should see some of the young men Rosamund shacks up with. I’ve learnt that disapproving doesn’t help.’
‘He’s such a damned phony. I can’t tell you.’ I told her about the flight from New York, the meeting at Heathrow: Barney’s devious silence.
‘I haven’t met him for years.’
‘You must have seen him on the box.’
‘Occasionally. He seems rather good at that. As they go.’ She finished the melon. ‘That was delicious.’
I knew, unless she had changed profoundly, she couldn’t really think thus of him, or no more sincerely than she had said ‘delicious’ of the melon. She was merely using an old Oxford trick to snub me: always contradict people who show their emotions in order to goad them into showing more. Perhaps she guessed from my silence that I wasn’t buying it, because she went on.
‘If they really need help, they come.’
‘If only I could understand what she sees in him.’
‘If not a fool. In spite of Nell’s attempts to turn her into one.’
I lit a cigarette between courses, a bad habit Jenny had got me out of during our liaison. ‘At least I begin to see why she likes you so much.’
‘The feeling is mutual.’
A cool common sense, perhaps; but it appeared to be implying that I couldn’t accuse Barney of my own nature and crimes. I changed the subject to her own children. Rosamund had left Cambridge and was now a research assistant in the B. B. C., and coining down to Oxford every weekend. Her younger sister Anne was having a year in Italy as a part of her language course; Anthony had insisted she go through with it. And the benjamin, Paul, whom I’d never seen, was a fifteen-year-old boy at Dartington. I knew from Caro that he was a tricky child ‘he never says a word’ was the description of hers that had stuck. I did not get a clean picture of him from his mother: he had emotional and academic problems, but she seemed to regard it as a passing phase… or perhaps as one more little opportunity to show me I was a stranger, not a family friend. Then there was talk about Compton, about Oxford and how it had changed. I even dragged a little out of her about her own life, her committees and good causes; but not a word about Anthony, except in passing, or their marriage. The punctilious lack of curiosity in her as to what we had said became more and more chilling.
Increasingly I knew I was being tolerated for Anthony’s sake, purely out of courtesy. The more we talked, the clearer it became that we had nothing in common, not even a former ‘sin’ and an inability to forgive it. The ‘bequest’ was revealed as ridiculous, based as it patently was on, if not a misconception, a severe underestimate of how Jane valued me. It now began to be something to be stored and told to Jenny when next we met. Not keeping her in my life came rapidly to seem an impossibility. This and the previous scene had to be told, and she was now the only one who understood my language. The dialect here was hopelessly archaic.
Or so I was thinking by the time the coffee came; and a silence, one of those silences more revealing than any words. I made one last attempt.
‘Are you going to go on living in Oxford, Jane?’
‘I’m not sure. All my friends are here now. Andrew’s suggested Compton, but I… Nell and I are both against it. He doesn’t quite realize our capacity for getting on each other’s nerves.’ She had been smoking, and now she stubbed out the cigarette; and seemed to speak to the ashtray. ‘I’m also thinking of joining the Communist Party.’
She didn’t look at me, but she must have been aware of the fatuously surprised face I showed for a moment. For another moment or two I took it as some metaphorical crack about Nell and Andrew. But then she suddenly looked me in the eyes, with a tight little smile, as if she knew I knew you can’t deliver such information so casually and inconsequentially without having saved it up and timed it.
‘Are you serious?’
‘I’m flirting with the Maoists and the International Marxists as well. They’re much more fashionable, of course.’ Then she said, ‘Anthony isn’t to know, by the way. I’ve not decided yet. It’s as much… I suppose intuitive as intellectual.’
‘Because it feels right?’
‘Just slightly less wrong than the other alternatives.’
‘It certainly makes a change from the usual order of conversion.’
‘I know it’s rather unreal here. At Oxford. They’re much more sophisticated than elsewhere in the country.’
‘Russia?’
She had a thin smile. ‘People in glass houses?’
‘But… I mean, fine, with backward peasant societies. But we’re hardly that now.’
‘Just a backward capitalist one?’
‘Still conditioned to certain freedoms?’
She took another cigarette, and leaned forward for me to light it.
‘I haven’t any Joan-of-Arc illusions. I hate violence. And dogma. I know they seem to be the prerequisites of change. I couldn’t even follow the Catholic party line. I’m not pretending I have a good record in that way at all.’
‘But?’
She traced the rim of her coffee-saucer with a fingertip.
‘I suppose I have a perhaps very naive dream of an intelligent Marxist society. A system that could one day translate theory into something viable locally… what Mao’s done for China.’ She looked up across the room. ‘It’s partly the futility of university life. The smugness of it. The impracticality.’ She gave
herself a dismissive smile. ‘I don’t really know. It’s probably just a foolish illusion that the Left needs people who feel as well as think.’
I watched her, she was looking down again, and remembered how good an amateur actress she had been in the old days. She had been acting ever since I arrived, was still acting, but the role had changed. I suspected the attitude to me hadn’t; it might seem like a rapprochement, an attempt at explaining what lay behind her mask. But it was really putting up another fence a private version of an iron curtain.
‘Is this a common thing here nowadays?’
‘I’m not being trendy, if that’s what you mean.’
‘But how much the reverse?’
‘I can think of four—no, five avowed S. C. R. Marxists. One of whom I can’t stand.’
‘And Anthony doesn’t realize at all?’
‘He knows I have strong leftwing sympathies. He shares some of them. I don’t think he’d be very surprised.’
‘Then why don’t you tell him?’
‘I think it might hurt him.’
‘Nell knows?’
Her lips pressed together.
‘We’ve had a couple of shouting-matches about it. One only three days ago. She’s managed to pick up all Andrew’s sillier views of life. None of his humour and tolerance. He treats all this as a joke. Nell takes it as a personal affront, I’m afraid.’
‘You have my sympathies there.’
But that evoked no response, or only a very tangential one.
‘The house, you’ll see, it’s quite large, I shan’t really need it all. I’d like to see it used in some way when this is over.’ She gave another dry look across the room. ‘Perhaps I’ll just be Lenin’s widow all over again. Everyone’s joke landlady. Pamphlets for breakfast, propaganda for supper.’
‘Well. It’s what Oxford’s famous for.’
‘Except I think this lost cause is only counted so among the timeserving intelligentsia. The monstrous regiment of academics turned media men.’ She paused. ‘I’m afraid I’ve come to regard TV and Fleet Street liberalism as the nastiest rightwing conspiracy yet.’
‘Audience corrupts. Even more than power.’
‘I don’t see why the cleverest have to be the most corrupt. And devote so much of their cleverness to perpetuating social and genetic advantage.’
‘You ought to go abroad more often, Jane. They’re just mannikins. Bantams on a midden.’
‘But I don’t live abroad. Your midden happens to be my country.’
‘And mine. But touché.’
My smile was barely returned. Underneath those exchanges we had begun to annoy each other, perhaps both sensing that we took each other too lightly, though in different ways. The waiter came with more coffee, which she refused. I didn’t really want any myself, but I took some all the same, to keep her sitting there. He went away, there was a silence. I avoided her eyes when I finally spoke.
‘Am I included in this general anathema?’
‘Why should you think that?’
‘Because I’ve just met someone who was glad to see me.’
She was silent a moment, then she said, ‘Perhaps women change more than men.’ But she shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. I am truly and immensely grateful for your coming.’
‘Even though I’m a semi-expatriate and capitalist lackey.’
She looked down, and her voice dropped. ‘You’re putting very unfair words into my mouth.’
‘But you wish silence had never been broken.’
She took a breath. I knew she was tempted to snub me again; yet that behind the poised woman and her weapons lay someone very far from balance. She stared down at her empty coffee-cup, as if the answer lay in its bitter grounds.
‘I don’t know what Anthony has said to you, but I can guess they concern things I regard as very private. That have far more to do with the present than the past. That’s simply all, you must believe me.’ She hesitated, and then there was suddenly an undertone of something much more natural. ‘I can’t at the moment take the past, Dan. In any shape or form.’
She had used my name, at last, for the first time; and for the first time I clearly saw a strain. She was mortal after all. I left a pause.
‘Anthony kept going on about the two of you having ruined my marriage. By implication, my life. I pointed out that you have no right to give yourselves that kind of guilt. I haven’t not enjoyed my life, Jane, for all its faults and failings and I was always fully capable of ruining my own marriage. And I did. That’s one thing. The other is that he hoped you and I would become friends again now. My own instant conclusion is that there’s an appalling lack of corrupt and conscienceless men in your life. I think you need at least one. I’ve also got Anthony to report to tomorrow. And Caro. I’d like it to be that some hope, however small, was established.’
She had stared down through that and for a long moment she continued to do so, but there was a trace of a rueful smile, some sort of admission of defeat.
‘Nell did warn me.’
‘Of what?’
‘What she called your vicious habit of calling everyone’s bluff but your own.’
‘You used to have quite a low handicap at that game yourself.’
‘I seem to have grown out of practice.’
‘I can’t understand why you should wish to continue what was always an inhumanity.’
‘It’s nothing to do with you personally. But with a use to which I feel you’re being put. Quite unjustifiably.’
‘Isn’t one definition of fascism the belief that you have a right to judge for other people?’
I detected what I had sensed with her husband, an insecurity, almost a gauche anxiety when faced with someone from another world… all very well to despise and dismiss it, as I felt sure she did very probably on artistic as well as political grounds and all very well to despise her own enclosed academic world, her city: but it was where she lived, and she was not used to people, to situations, to men who had dropped, or could drop, the local sign-system, the conventions she knew best.
Her eyes down, she murmurs, ‘I’m no longer the person you knew, Dan. I’m sorry for not hiding it better. It’s not your fault at all.’
Dan hesitates, then reaches across the white cloth and touches her hand lightly. She says nothing. He beckons for the waiter.
Outside we found that the mist, not quite echoing what had just happened between us, had thickened. It was very nearly dense fog, and there was hardly any other traffic about. I knew we were crawling up the Banbury Road, but I lost all sense of distance. Jane edged along in second, peering intently at the nearside kerb. We talked a little, spasmodically, about her new political convictions. I didn’t argue, merely prompted gently. She became self-deprecating even apologetic; as if it were a matter of aesthetics, the flower-arrangement of British political life needed a red branch somewhere in it; as if the universal post-war rejection of Communism in Britain were a kind of unfair social ostracism; then perhaps with more reason as if it were a matter of chemistry, equal valencies. If Russia needed its Solzhenitsyns, then Britain needed them too, in reverse. There was also an element of middle-aged women’s liberation, a need to shock both herself and those around her, a reaction against premature widowhood and all its threatened emptinesses. And I had finally a strong whiff of Oxford eccentricity. I wondered if she had any idea what a decision like hers would have meant in America, where the iron really bit.
We turned off the Banbury Road into a side-street. At last Jane swung the car out and turned in over a kerb-ramp into a garden. She parked short of a garage beside the house. I rescued my overnight bag from the rear seat, and waited while she locked the doors. There were lights on in a semi-basement, and I could see a kitchen as we walked over the gravel. There were also lights above, on the ground floor, shafting the mist. Victorian brick and white woodwork, steps up, a tiled porch.
Jane stands looking for keys in her handbag. But a blurred shadow appears through the coloured glas
s panes of the front door and it opens before she can get them out. A thin young French girl in a black jumper and jeans. She wears gold-rimmed glasses, pigtails tied with two red ribbons, and a face out of Phèdre.
Beyond the Door
I couldn’t follow the rapid exchange in French, but the girl was clearly in some sort of Gallic agony at having failed to get hold of us earlier. She would hardly let us into the hail. It was striking, with Pompeian red walls and a grotesquely massive set of carved Victorian banisters, painted white, beside the staircase. I glimpsed some nice paintings; a spectacularly florid cast-iron hat-stand, also painted white. An old Jane lurked in that subtly theatrical red and white space, though I didn’t note that at the time. The girl demanded all our attention. Eventually Jane put an arm round her shoulders to quiet her. I asked what had happened.
‘The hospital have been trying to get in touch.’ She made a little grimace of apology at such fuss. ‘Dan, this is Gisèle.’
The girl gave me a nervous, silent bob.
‘I’d better see what it’s all about. Do go and have a nightcap. I won’t be a moment.’
She gestured to the girl to look after me. There was a table with a telephone on it beside the stairs.
‘Did they say…?
‘Sometimes he can’t sleep. He likes me to read to him.’ Her eyes flicked, for my benefit, towards the face behind her. ‘We’re a tiny bit alarm-prone.’ She smiled. ‘There’s some Armagnac. Do help yourself.’
I went into the room after the French girl. It stretched the depth of the house, two original rooms knocked into one, with a vaguely proscenium-shaped arch left between them. Many books, more engravings and paintings, some pleasant old furniture, a grand piano at the far, garden end which reminded me that Jane had once played passably. A lit alcove of ancient pottery; bits of Tanagra mounted on plastic cubes, a small Greek kylix. A line of invitation cards on a mantelpiece, an old Oxford form of snobbery; a modern terracotta head of a boy among them, I presumed the son.
