by John Fowles
It was a subject that had already come up that morning in Santa Fe, as I had stood watching her sort through countless trays of rings and bracelets and beads, her taste in agonized conflict with her hatred—half ancestral and half from the fierce determination not to be a mere spendthrift film-star of being fleeced. With one exception, a necklace for her mother, what she had wanted to buy out of liking she had refused to buy out of price.
‘There speaks a true Scot.’
‘Boo. They’d be much more personal.’
And she was on her feet, looking round, then saw more spoil a few yards away. I watched her kneel by it, begin scrabbling in the loose earth again, and almost at once she was showing me another large shard.
‘Look, it’s so pretty. Even nicer.’
She was like a small girl, obsessed by finding the wretched shards. sat there as she wandered further away, every so often kneeling.
I saw her pull off her pink headscarf at one place, and then when she stood again, she held it by the corners, an improvised bag.
I am still not quite sure what combination of factors it was that made me feel offended. The double attempt on her part to raise the banned topic of our future and a corollary feeling that it had be less raised seriously than as a disguised taunt; the little show of independence on the matter of nature; the feeling that she did not sense this place’s uniqueness, for her it was merely a variation on the others; a feeling of transience, un-recapturabilities, abysses, the worm in the rose; that it was against all probability that I would ever be here with her again a feeling that was more often a pleasure, since impermanence adds a zest to experience no fixed marriage can ever achieve but which now, in this vast Olympian landscape, seemed sour and bitter.
The two ravens’ calls became more frequent and I saw them attacking a red-tailed hawk, the noise even distracted Jenny and she turned from forty yards away to point the cause out to me that had encroached on their territory. Though the Americans term the bird a hawk, it is in fact a mere racial variant of the English buzzard, indeed indistinguishable at a distance, just as the mobbing behaviour was indistinguishable from similar scenes in any South Devon sky; which took me back to Thorncombe, my past there and my present, and the impossibility of weaving Jenny into any lasting future.
I am a people person; and I was so little one, in any deep way, that this must always even if there were not so many other obstacles stand between us. This minor coincidence, of seeing two species and a common behaviourism of the English countryside reproduced in a very foreign and remote one, somehow seemed to prove it; all my lasting relationships were with this world of quasi-arcane knowledge and experience… not merely of course in a natural history sense, but because I was fundamentally an observer and storer of correspondences like some iceberg, with nine tenths of what really pleased and moved me sunk well below the understanding of the people I moved among, and however intimately. I mustn’t suggest I thought of all this with some sort of guilt or regret; it was much more with a wistful vanity, a perhaps rather smug knowledge that I was much more profoundly English than Jenny realized; because it was less the outward manifestations that gave the game away than this peculiarly structured imagination, so dependent on undisclosed memories, undisclosed real feelings.
We are above all the race that live in flashback, in the past and future; and by a long blindness I had got myself into the one artistic profession where this essence of Englishness, this psychological and emotional equivalent of the flashback (or flash-forward, flash-aside) lay completely across the natural grain of the medium which was a constant flowing through nowness, was chained to the present image. Of course I had used flashbacks in scripts, and indeed was about to use them massively in the one on Kitchener, but I had never really liked them. It was part of the gospel I had imbibed (from Abe, among others) that they were intrusive, clumsy, a kind of bodge good carpenters strive, except in one or two rare cases like Citizen Kane, to avoid.
The tiny first seed of what this book is trying to be dropped into my mind that day: a longing for a medium that would tally better with this real structure of my racial being and mind… something dense, interweaving, treating time as horizontal, like a skyline; not cramped, linear and progressive. It was a longing accented by something I knew of the men who had once lived at Tsankawi; of their inability to think of time except in the present, of the past and future except in terms of the present-not-here, thereby creating a kind of equivalency of memories and feelings, a totality of consciousness that fragmented modern man has completely lost.
It was an idea, a flash-forward, that pronounced itself unattainable almost as soon as it arose and I can’t recall now whether I even thought at that moment in terms of the novel, or a novel. If my mind ran on anything practical, it was in terms of a return to the theatre… partly Jenny, she retained a strong love of the legitimate stage, and nagged at my pessimism about it. But I felt a discontent at how vastly out of reach of my actual craft this actual moment, Tsankawi, Jenny, the ravens and the hawk, all the steeped resonances, were; so infinitely beyond camera and dialogue and dramatic art, as unreachable as all the landscapes beyond the limits of my eye. In that most pure and open of places, I felt like a man in prison.
I had to attach these feelings to some present object of discontent; and I decided, quite unfairly, that it was Jenny’s shard-hunting.
Never mind that the things lay in thousands all over the top of the mesa, it was in some way sacrilegious, almost as vulgar as Abe’s inability to react to a strange environment except with wisecracks She was using the place, and she should have sensed she had no more right to its artefacts than she would have had to those in a church or a museum… or someone else’s house.
I am not now defending this obviously very strained analogy. I even told myself at the time that my irritation was absurd; and even if it had some faint justification (a notice down by the road did ask people not to remove any manmade object from the site) the proper response was to suggest gently to Jenny that some places had earned their unrifled peace. She would have understood, especially if she knew it meant something to me. But naturally or unnaturally being English I had no sooner given her a black mark than I determined to say nothing about it… that is, I used the incident to award myself a good one: not for pretending to condone her, of course, but for having once more concealed my own hiding-place in the trees.
And it was not really about Tsankawi at all. From Jenny I was secretly demanding an even more impossible reaction: to the fact that I was a lot more in love with her than with anyone else for many years. Never mind that I was quite sure that it would never work out, that it wasn’t fair to her, that we were doing the right thing, that I had very carefully set a sort of subjunctive mood between us that could only view a lasting relationship, and any discussion about it, as in bad taste if not treated as a hypothetical game; I still wanted her to read what was hidden. She was quite right. When I asked her to marry me in the Mojave, it was done in a way to invite refusal; almost out of curiosity, to see how she would answer. I even approved the half-mocking, half-affectionate way she said no. But I suppose I was also looking, as all men do, for a sacrifice of her real self, or at least of all the parts of it that conflicted with the more concealed elements of my own.
The continuing temptation to cozen her, to explore the possibility of a marriage, to lie and suggest she could be a wife, have children, live with me and lead an acting career, was strong enough for me to deserve some credit for having resisted it. One of the perennial lunacies of the film world lies in the contract squabbling that goes on over just this matter of credit in the titles, who cedes whom, how large the lettering, how long the footage; and the case that day was analogous. Jenny was not giving my renunciation enough billing; and looking back, I suspect the real offence in the shard-collecting was that she did not show enough respect to the lost civilization of me. I was the potsherds, and all they apparently meant to her was ornament, cheap gifts to sisters and friends.
She came back some twenty minutes later, with her pink scarf bulging, and squatted by me to show what she had found. She’d decided they would look even prettier framed in silver. I teased her about this abrupt departure from canniness. Deception was easy, and she was absorbed in composing her pendants, laying out little rows of threes and fives, changing them, mulling over her hoard. But then we lost our solitude. A young couple appeared from below, and Jenny rather guiltily covered her finds with her scarf. They passed close by us, a wave and a hi. The young man had their child on his back, carried papoose-style; his rather severe-faced young wife ahead, in a long hippie skirt. They had a nice feeling of closeness, unpretentiousness, simplicity; of research students, perhaps, or from some intelligent commune. But they intruded, and not only on the place. I saw it in Jenny’s eyes as well, as she watched them walk away. She did something rather strange then. She uncovered the shards and stared down at them.
‘Dan, do you think I’m naughty? Should I leave them here?’
It was something to do with that young family, their being native Americans, their brave air of a happy poverty; not with me.
‘I don’t think they’ll be missed.’
‘I so want something to remember these two days by.’
She looked up into my eyes then, with a serious, almost childlike, candour she sometimes had in private. I smiled, since she did not.
‘Then pack them up. If we’re going to catch that plane.’ It was so sad, these sudden bad vibes between us, and not being able to say anything, or rather saying anything but what we ought to have been saying, knowing I’d lost Dan, but not why. Guessing and trying to guess why. Then being frightened. Actually I felt angry, realizing I wish I’d spoken. It’s the most terrible feeling of all, suddenly realizing you don’t know someone. I suspect men like it, or don’t mind it, or don’t notice it. But it destroys women, you’ve no idea. I thought it was that couple with their baby, but I didn’t know.
And you didn’t know what those two days meant to me, because I was thinking all the time, this is what being married to him would be like, on our own, and I knew I’d never want to travel with anyone else, and the nature thing, honestly I was beginning to learn, at least not to want to fight you over it, at least to begin to understand what it was to you… you don’t realize how close to you I’d felt all that second day, the first as well. That’s why I wanted sex, but not just sex. That’s why I laughed at your ravens. You understand so many outer things about women, but I sometimes think none of the inner ones at all. Or perhaps it’s even worse, you know them and pretend you don’t. You know I don’t really know what I think, who I am, where I’m going. That girls like me do really, deep down, need protection societies.
When you withdraw like that, and just ban me.
I wanted to ask you to marry me. I can remember the exact moment, it was when we got back in the car, and you were looking at the map to find the road. No I didn’t, I wanted to cry. I mean, we should have settled it there, one way or the other. We were both cowards. You’ve corrupted me terribly in some way, perhaps the way the English have always conned the Scots. Suggesting your way is somehow subtler, more sophisticated, works better in the end, and our silly Gaelic honesty is just provincial.
There. I’ve written nothing for five minutes, I’ve been crying, just out of spite. Hatred of you. Hatred that you aren’t younger. That you’re so far away. That I shan’t be able to tell you this when we speak next over the phone.
You knew. You should have said something.
Westwards we were on our way by half past ten, despatched in a soup of good feeling and a new resolution. The past was forgotten, we were civilized people now; they must all come and spend a night at Thorncombe, with Caro and myself doing the honours; and I was even, in a moment aside with Nell, commissioned (‘it’s because she won’t talk about it with anyone’) to try to knock some sense into Jane’s recalcitrant head. A shade too much, this philadelphian mood, and partly due to the presence of the various children; and I might have been dry about it with Jane as soon as we left. But I had Paul beside me to do the map-reading, or to pretend to do it, and we were obliged to continue playing parts.
We set off into one of those clear-skied but misty, intensely still winter days not too misty to make driving difficult, but dissolving every view into greyness a mile or two away; the sunlight was endlessly gauzed, the overhead sky only dimly blue. I enjoyed its Englishness: when half of what can be seen is always veiled, can only be imagined The whole day was to have Englishness, roots, at its centre or at least softly looming at all its edges. Paul, after an initial shyness he seemed to wake up every morning with that problem to conquer, proved vulnerable on his current hobbyhorse; though at times he became a little incoherent, suddenly finding himself at brinks where his information abruptly ended, he had acquired an impressive knowledge for a fifteen-year-old, and as far as my own very near total ignorance could tell of medieval agriculture. He did tend to produce facts in a would-you-believe-it kind of way, like the old Ripley strip-cartoon; but facts he possessed… about ‘closed’ and ‘champaign’ (hedged and unhedged) England, manorial systems, the team, plough design and ploughing techniques, rigs and lands and lynchets. He had a folder with him, where it was all drawn. I kept having to snatch glances down as I drove; obviously a very neat painstaking child, not a bad draughtsman, and with a much maturer handwriting than his outward behaviour would have led one to expect. I asked him why he had grown so interested in the subject; a mistake, I ought to have known it is not a question, however tactfully it is put, adults can ask without suggesting concealed condescension. He hesitated a moment.
‘Just I find kings and queens and all that stuff a drag.’
‘So did I. But we never had a choice.’
I told him about the horrors of my own boarding-school then; and Jane joined in from behind… how lucky he was to be his age, we hinted, and at an enlightened place like Dartington. He showed a certain macabre interest in the canings and all the rest I had had to undergo in my own adolescence; and then with a certain puritanical perversity commented that a bit more discipline wouldn’t hurt some of his friends at Dartington. I had a feeling that this was an oblique reproach of his parents for having sent him there; that he wasn’t so ‘difficult’ as they thought. But it may have been a disguised olive-branch to his mother. He reminded me a lot of Anthony: a certain deep stubbornness, which he hadn’t yet learnt to handle, and which certainly didn’t seem redeemed, in however embryonic a form, by his father’s sense of ironic humour but which would probably make him a genuine scholar one day, and possibly a formidably arrogant one. I hadn’t forgotten how he had smashed poor Penny’s returns at the ping-pong table. He was rather pathetically in need of winning something.
Jane didn’t say very much, just enough to coax him if he had forgotten something, or not explained well enough… a shade too much maternal anxiety there, and Paul sensed it; but this time made me his ally, not the scapegoat.
We turned off the A30 at Shaftesbury and went south to find Grimstone Down without difficulty, Paul had done his homework and sat in the Volvo and ate the sandwiches Nell had insisted on giving us. Paul was so eager to start looking that he left us before we finished. We watched him a moment, book in hand, already searching for his Celtic fields.
‘Thank you for being so patient, Dan.’
‘He really has got it up.’
‘I wish he could discover some other key. Between being a sulk and being a bore’. I was in the front, half twisted towards Jane in the back, but I looked through the windscreen to where her son was standing, trying to orientate himself.
‘As long as he finds a girl with a sense of humour.’
‘Some hope.’
‘I don’t know. He’s not bad-looking.’
‘It’s not that. His hatred of being laughed at.’ She added, ‘Roz thinks I fuss about him too much.’
‘Well… speaking from sad experience.’
�
�I thought you never knew your mother.’
‘My substitute one. Her fussing prevented me from realizing how much I owed her. Until it was too late.’
‘That’s still better than never at all.’
I glanced back, amused. ‘I always used to envy you two. So cool and casual about being Foreign Office orphans.’
‘We had to be, to survive. All those nannies, screens of servants. Even when we were en poste with them. My father was just someone in evening dress who kissed us goodnight.’ She began gathering up the debris from our lunch. ‘I was sorting through some old photos the other day. There was one of him in all his ambassadorial finery. Quite impossible to shed a tear over… even of anger. Like a tailor’s dummy.’ She said lightly, ‘I think I’d rather fuss.’
‘But it’s not the only alternative?’
‘I do try not to.’
‘I’m hardly one… with Caro on my conscience.’
She left a little pause. ‘We had a talk on the way back, Dan. After we left you yesterday afternoon.’ I had her brown eyes for a moment, then she looked down. ‘I’m going to play a more discreet role in future.’
‘With Caro’s consent, I hope?’
‘Yes, she… agreed.’
‘I’ve tried to follow your advice with her these last ten days.’
‘I felt very bad about that afterwards.’
‘Don’t be silly. You’ve been right from the very beginning about that day at Wytham.’
‘I’ve forgotten.’
‘You said she might need me one day. But not then.’ I smiled.
‘For which I hated you at the time.’
‘It sounds insufferable. I had forgotten.’
‘You were right.’
‘I had no right to say something like that.’
For a moment, what had lain behind that day at Wytham was in the air, but unbreachable.
