by John Fowles
She gave up her racket to her father, who showed a brisk game of higher class. He was clowning a bit, but I could see Paul took it very seriously. Then Caro came down; they were ‘getting sloshed’ upstairs and it was time to join them. I went with her, and on the way she asked demurely if we’d had a nice game of snooker.
‘I always rather liked him, Caro. Much more than your mother and Jane did, oddly enough when we were all undergraduates.’
She pulled a face. ‘It’s all universal love upstairs, as well. I feel I don’t know anyone any more.’
‘I expect we’ll manage a good row before we go.’ I gave her a look. ‘Just as long as you aren’t the cause of it.’
‘I’ve made a bedtime appointment.’ She grimaced again. ‘I don’t know what I dread most. Her hating Bernard. Or her wanting to ask him down.’ But she went on quickly. ‘I’m sorry she asked the Fenwicks. Actually he’s quite amusing. A bit of an old rake. It’s his third marriage.’
It turned out Caro had even met the tyro Sam Goldwyn whose Venture I was to advise on. He had been at Eton with Richard; ‘just like him, really, only stupider’. She then rather contemptuously revealed, as if she knew I would be ashamed that she’d even met such people, that he was a lord. Which at least relieved my conscience about not saying the truth.
We had, despite the formal surroundings, an agreeable enough supper. Nell’s Italian housekeeper, who evidently knew how to cook, brought the dishes in, but left us to serve ourselves; and the presence of the three children kept the talk on a safely anodyne level. I talked farming and rural things with Andrew. Jane chatted to Nell about all the people she’d heard from, Caro listened with one ear to them, with another to her half-sister, who was clearly in the full throes of the pony mania she had once suffered from herself. Even Paul was forced to join in a little.
But as always happens when people are being studiously on their best behaviour, there was once again a faint, though not unpleasing air of unreality over the occasion. Perhaps it was partly the house, the deep silence outside, that curious air the traditional English upper classes, in their traditional backgrounds, manage to give of being in a play by someone else of being so used to such surroundings that they no more own them than actors own a theatre set. Rather absurdly give, since no class is in fact more tenacious of its property. Yet in all outward ways the only true member of the upper classes there, Andrew, was the most natural. Exhibiting another trait of the species, he managed to suggest that he supposed we all lived more or less like this.
From time to time I caught Caro giving me looks, trying to guess what I was thinking; and more surprisingly, though more discreetly, Jane as well… as if she were speculating about whose side I was really on; who I really was, after all these years. I even suspected she hid an inward amusement, to see the grasshopper brought to bay like this, made to do his duty. Yet however convincingly she played the familiar guest in her sister’s house, there remained something intensely guarded about her, not natural in itself, and not natural in regard to her own old nature. It wasn’t quite the usual Oxford guardedness, of a fundamentally sceptical mind dissembling behind obedience to the conventions of circumstance; but something deeper, more fraught, perhaps really the reverse, what Roz had suggested, a faith dissembling behind scepticism. It was enhanced by Nell, never one to let silences grow. Jane said less as the meal wore on, and that did recall one still-centred aspect of her old self. She continued to intrigue me; and to repel as well… I glimpsed that other less attractive aspect, of a superior moral judgment, of eternally denying her real self to lesser mortals. It underlay her new dogma, and her old, was far more perennial than them, was perhaps what she unconsciously sought in them… a justification for something not very far removed from the Oxford Movement’s theory of reserve, in fact. Their value as dogmas was less intrinsic than that their abstruseness, their mysteries, their esoteric jargon, kept the ordinary herd conveniently at bay.
But she remained different; she reminded me slightly of one or two women writers I had known of a withholding, not exactly male, but springing from an independence of feeling that was also not female; that came perhaps in their case from the experience of the retreat into the imagination, but which in isolating them from the commonalty of their sex, isolated them too from the other. I felt confirmed in seeking some clue in Jane that might be central to what I wanted to write myself; but less and less sanguine of success. She had evidently ended by baffling Anthony. She was not the sort of woman ever to be understood empirically, logically—indeed that was part of the problem, that she could discuss herself lucidly and frankly, and yet still live in a darkness… not merely inscrutable, but almost calculatedly twofaced; although that suggests hypocrisy, and this was perhaps simply a matter of self-preservation, of knowing the feelings of the ‘dark’ self would destroy too much if allowed to show. This interpretation was backed by something more concrete I noticed about her: how everything she said, at least that evening, seemed to be in inverted commas, in some subtle way distinguished from some hypothetical sentence she might have more truthfully said. I knew she must be making an effort, like all the rest of us, so in a sense this was unkind. But I was left with a strange impression, denying the parallel with a woman writer, of someone with a profound mistrust of words; who waited for something better.
I found Nell alone when I came down to breakfast. Apparently Penny was already out in the stables, Andrew was amusing his son for an hour, Jane and Caro were not yet up, and Paul was off somewhere on his solitary own. The sky had cleared overnight, there was sunlight outside, and a gracious vista. That was hardly the adjective for Nell’s eyes when she had poured me coffee.
‘It’s lucky I’ve sworn to be all smiles this weekend. Even if it kills me.’
‘Caro?’
‘When you’d gone to bed.’
I tried to look contrite.
‘I have been going at her to tell you, Nell.’
‘Don’t worry. You’ve been cleared.’
‘I was presented with a fait accompli. That night I came back.’
‘It’s not your fault.’ She lit a cigarette. ‘Or both our faults.’
‘I think she also has some of our virtues.’
She breathed smoke down her nostrils; there was an old glint of aggression in her eyes, a challenge.
‘We are getting soft in our old age.’
‘More honest.’
‘And as a matter of academic interest…?’
‘I think she’ll survive. As we have.’
‘In our fashion.’
I glanced drily round the elegant dining-room, but she refused the invitation to take herself more lightly, and stared down at the polished rosewood of the table between us.
‘I know you think I’ve tried to turn her into a daft deb.’
‘That’s selling yourself short. And over Barney I’m at least equally to blame.’
‘Except that she doesn’t apparently think so.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘She seems to adore the job. London. I had to bear the full brunt of that last night. As if all I’d ever been was some kind of prison governess.’
‘She knows she’s been naughty. I’ve had the same treatment. Been reminded of all my sins.’
‘Which are they?’
‘Still treating her as a child. Not being frank with her.’
She left a silence, then spoke with a candour that took me by surprise.
‘What infuriates me is that she told Jane first.’
‘I gather Jane’s long been the person she goes to to discuss what she feels about us both.’
‘I am her mother.’
‘I’m not trying to excuse her over this, Nell.’
‘Is it so unreasonable?’
‘Of course not.’ I felt tempted to remind her that she had hardly told her own mother ‘all’ before we married; but held my tongue.
‘I just don’t understand what goes on with her generation.’
&n
bsp; ‘You’ve told Andrew?’
She mimicked his voice. ‘Living it up a bit, isn’t she?’ I smiled, but she did not smile back. ‘I feel conspired against.’
‘Not by me.’
‘I have done my best.’
‘I know.’ Her eyes remained doubting. ‘Look, Nell, for God’s sake, I can’t stand the man… she told you I had lunch with him the other day? At his request?’
‘She mentioned it.’
‘At least he convinced me it’s not just a cold-blooded seduction. He’s become a jaundiced TV idol who knows his world is sick and that he’s trapped in it… you know. But I think we have to believe he has something she needs. Unlikely as it may seem.’
‘She says there’s no question of marrying.’
‘I got that from him as well.’
I told her more of what he had said to me about his own marriage. Through the window behind Nell I saw Paul walking across the gravel, head down. She stubbed out her cigarette, and then I received her wide-eyed look: ‘I can face anything.’
‘Do you blame me?’
‘For what?’
‘Letting you have so little say in her education.’
‘That’s got nothing to do with what’s just happened.’
‘But it was a mistake?’
‘I plead the fifth amendment.’
She retreated into dryness. ‘I was simply trying to work out if I have one Bolshie in the house, or two.’ She added, ‘Your daughter’s always been rather silent about that.’
‘I try to believe in simplicity, Nell. Rather as lapsed Catholics try to regain faith It’s more a longing than a reality.’
‘Do you think I don’t miss it too sometimes?’
‘There are always prices.’
‘I know what Jane thinks of me. The way we live.’
‘My impression is she’s not too sure of what she thinks of anything.’
She got up and turned away to a window; there was an elaborate Victorian wire plant-holder there, and she fiddled a moment with one of the houseplants it contained.
‘I know she’s been useful as a sort of family ombudsman. It’s just the way she plays Minerva to us ordinary mortals.’ She began rather petulantly snipping away the browning flowers from some succulent. It was a childishly revealing fragment of behaviour; chopping off awkward heads, trying to suggest she was a harassed housewife; but finally, and absurdly, suggesting the mind of the lady who once thought brioches and bread were the same thing. ‘I sometimes think she takes us at the silliest face value. As if we didn’t have constant anxieties about keeping this place up. All of that.’
‘It’s an old illusion of people who live outside palaces.’
‘Palaces!’ She gave the embittered sniff of inside knowledge. ‘You ought to see the estimate we’ve just had for repairing the roof.’ I smiled, but she turned from her flowers and caught my expression. ‘All right. But what is the answer, Dan? To let the rain in?’
I was saved the trouble of finding a reply, for Jane appeared with Caro. I didn’t know till afterwards that Caro had placed a ban on all public discussion of the matter; which lost Nell the good point I gave her for changing the subject when they came in.
I wasn’t alone with Jane, and then only briefly, till after lunch. We were all to go for a walk, and she and I were waiting outside and ready before the others. She leant in the weak sunshine against the stone balustrade in front of the house, in a pair of borrowed gumboots; she had never been much of a countrywoman, and she somehow contrived to make it clear that in that she had not changed. She smiled as I came up to her.
‘I hope you don’t feel over-organized.’
‘It makes a change.’
‘Vie de campagne!’
Andrew had taken me before lunch on a long tour of the house and the farm buildings in what had once been the stable block. We had discussed Caro’s news. His reaction was, of course, shrewder than Nell had suggested. In his own way he took my view: one could only keep one’s fingers crossed. He had no particular feelings against Barney; ‘can’t stand any of those TV-johnnies, if I’m honest’; and exonerated me from any taint of conspiracy. He said something about the dangers of mollycoddling young animals; then that horses need a fall or two. Although he didn’t openly criticize Nell, I had gained the impression (as in retrospect what she had said to me at breakfast confirmed) that a point he had long argued now stood proven. Our talking did not diminish my respect for him. He had that formidable easygoingness of the landed farmer; half out of knowledge of his social position, perhaps, but also half out of his familiarity with natural process. It was a virtue of privilege that became a privilege of virtue of a kind.
‘You know Caro’s crossed her bridge?’
‘Only too well.’ She looked down at the gravel. ‘I’ve been severely reprimanded for coming between mother and daughter.’
‘She’s an idiot.’
Jane smiled, said nothing. I leant beside her on the balustrade, facing the house, and broke the silence.
‘You forget places like this exist.’
‘If you’re lucky.’
‘You do very well. The hair shirt doesn’t show.’
She smiled again. ‘It’s not the house. What houses like this do to people.’
‘Possess them?’
‘Embalm them, I think.’ She stared up at the bland front. ‘Caro uses a word to me about Nell sometimes. Rather more double-meaning than she realizes. Mummyish.’ Then, ‘I’m being catty.’
‘I can’t quite work out why I mind it all so much less in Andrew.’
‘He was born mummified. At least it’s natural in him.’
‘Steady, comrade.’
Nell kept a faint smile. ‘It’s not politics, Dan. A little matter of free will. Every time I come here I go through a sibling nightmare.’
I glanced at her. ‘Not in a thousand years.’
She shrugged. ‘Oh… not in this form. But there are other kinds of… not escaping what one is.’
‘Your friend in America?’
‘No.’ She shook her head, though the negative had already been firm. ‘I suppose just my years.’
‘Shall I go and fetch you a walking-stick?’
Her lips pressed together.
‘I see Roz has found an ally.’
‘Of course. Tease the poor old thing on every possible occasion.’
‘Like a knot it would be much simpler to cut.’
‘Now you’re being an idiot as well.’
She acknowledged the reproof, but then, as if to administer one of her own and to justify her idiocy, slipped me a gently ambiguous side-look.
‘How wise you were to stay out of all this, Dan.’
‘That’s an odd adjective.’
‘Fortunate.’
‘Not to have had gangrene—merely amputation?’
‘I suppose I meant that in a way.’
She was staring at the gravel, as if my metaphor had frozen something in her, disinterred what she had not meant. Caro and her half-sister appeared, and we stood and strolled to meet them. I said nothing more, but her fortuitous reference to mummification had reminded me of that offer to go to Egypt or to be precise, that I could, if I cared to change my mind, pick up a telephone and in five minutes arrange to go there. Her remark about wisdom, though said without overt malice, held the now familiar warning. I had mummifying privileges as well; remained relegated, in her eyes, to some lower, blinder world. It seemed to me that here was where her real lack of freedom lay: in the incapacity to compromise. It was redeemed only, and only partly, by her incapacity to forgive herself least of all.
It was also related to Nell’s unanswered question: whether it really helped to let the rain in. Somewhere Jane clung to a deep intuitive belief, as she had once in Catholic doctrine, that all, at least in her own life, was determined, predestined; which had led her into the oldest fallacy of all, that any external change was better than no change… a credo no more tenable than her onetime whim
for the Rabelaisian dreamland where everything goes. All she had substituted for that and its Catholic successor and perhaps that change of horses had most to do with their common unattainability, so convenient a proof of despair in personal freedom was some egalitarian Utopia in which Compton would overnight become an old persons’ home, a holiday camp for trade union officials, heaven knew what… functions I wouldn’t have disapproved if they had been practicable, but that was not the issue. The only true and real field in which one could test personal freedom was present possibility. Of course we could all lead better, nobler, more socialist lives; but by positing them only in some future perfect state. One could so clearly only move and act from today, this present and flawed world.
Which was the lawn, crossing a ha-ha, the parkland beyond, blue and grey distances over the green, the two setters bounding and racing about, the casual train of us: Jane walked ahead between Caro and Penny, then Paul and Nell the latter perhaps determined to prove that two could play at sympathetic aunt, but the boy did seem a shade more amenable now with Andrew and myself bringing up the rear. Figures in a landscape, his landscape; the first of his line had ‘grabbed’ it, his word, we had talked about it during the tour after the Restoration. The baronetcy itself had come for staying true to the monarchy during the Commonwealth. Of course, in the manner of his kind, Andrew played all this down, as if his three centuries of ancestors, this same prospect, earth, trees his grandsires planted, meant nothing to him… that ultimate vulgar modesty of the very rooted and assured. I wondered how deep a hold it had on him, beneath the bland, dismissive surface, the man who talked with very clearly signalled inverted commas of ‘the peasantry’ and ‘playing squire’ and ‘her ladyship’.
By chance, later that afternoon, I was given some clue. We had walked a mile or so to a hill, where some forebear of Andrew had built a folly, a rather gloomy stone tower with pointed Gothic windows, but with a nice view over the gentle Gloucestershire valley south and the village. Nell had wanted to go back then, to get the dinner organized, but Andrew had a sick ewe, we could see the flock in a field below us, and the party split. I went on alone with him while the others returned to the house.
