by John Fowles
‘It helped me get through those years, Jane. In retrospect.’
‘They hurt?’
‘Not nearly as much as they should have. Just once intolerably. The first time I brought her down here.’
‘Yes, I do remember that. I heard Nell’s side of it. It upset Caro as well.’
‘It was very strange. We suddenly realized who we were. It went both ways. Also as you predicted.’
‘The infallible Pythia of Wytham.’
‘Long forgiven. And repaid through Caro.’
‘I was so unbearably sure of myself then.’
‘We all were. In one way or another.’
A hundred yards away, down the road, we saw Paul look back, with a vague reproach, towards us. I heard Jane shift.
‘I think we’re due for another lecture. If you could stand it.’
We found Paul set back to discover that things at ground level were a lot more confusing than in an air-shot; but I suggested we walk on and eventually we came to a bend in the lane that we could see on his photograph, and we knew where we were. The deserted upland, brown earth covered in flints, Jane being dutifully interested, Paul holding forth again, a flock of lapwing wheeling over our heads, the soft green Dorset countryside to the south in the pale sunlight, my being treated as human by Paul, suddenly he sought interest and agreement from me rather than his mother, as if any man was better than her. I rewrote history. I had married Jane, he was our son, we had such outings all the time… at least I wondered how different we two adults might have been by then, if we had spent our lives together. I might have been a better writer, or at least a less transient playwright; and perhaps she would have gone on to the career that once beckoned the stage. But I rather doubted whether I should have made her a better woman.
There was some clue in that reference to her well-to-do an largely foreign childhood, not that I hadn’t heard the pros and cons of it discussed often enough in the old days. Jane, and perhaps Nell as well, had always been destined to search for the reality behind the tailor’s dummy; and were probably thereby equally destined to unsatisfactory marriages of one kind or another. It just have been an unconscious factor in Jane’s choice of Anthony. Their mother had always been something of an elegant cipher, far too used to status and money and the petrified hierarchies of the old embassy life ever to abandon their underlying principles. She had not been a fool, in fact rather a dry and amusing woman for her kind, but she was supremely egotistical at heart, a fact that her generosity as a grandmother in terms of presents and money had not concealed from either of her daughters. Nell was much more like her something I had noted again during that weekend; but some streak of the same intense respect for self inhabited Jane as well. It didn’t really matter that she must now despise her mother’s kind of life, whose second-marriage American phase had not differed essentially, give or take a culture, from its first; she still inherited a certain determination to see everything in her own way.
But at least it was a function of looking-for; her son, like his father, was very evidently absorbed by looking-at… he had that same obsessive singularity of purpose, seeing nothing now, or seeming to see nothing, but his field-systems. Any distraction, our stopping a moment to look at the lapwings, another few moments when Jane and I tried to work out from the map, what a hill across the valley with an earthwork on top of it was called, irritated him. One of Anthony’s stances in our student days had been an only partly pretended contempt for poetry, indeed for fine writing of any kind. I remember one of his epigrams: The metaphor is the curse of Western civilization. It had been no good pointing out that all language, even the most logical and philosophical, is metaphorical in origin, it was the rhetorical use of metaphor that was evil… he even tried to condemn Shakespeare once for having written Hamlet instead of clinically forestalling Freud by three hundred years. He wasn’t serious, of course, merely dazzling us with arguments for the impossible. But he had a much more genuine hatred, almost a fear, what could not be collected, classed, precisely defined, noted; I mentioned earlier his obsession with the Dactylorchis group of British wild orchids, which hybridize with bewildering frequency—I think the fluid frontiers between their species seriously upset him, and they were rather less a botanical challenge than nagging flaw in his would-be highly ordered nature of things. Paul consciously or unconsciously, was in his footsteps. Perhaps that was what Jane had really meant by ‘another key’.
This very ancient earth, first turned before the Saxons came, its flints broken and rebroken and broken again by the ploughshare by countless anonymous generations even more obscure than my Pueblo Indians in the Jemez, seemed to say this silently for me… was a cold, austere, rather sad place. It would have done, as Jane pointed out, perfectly for a Tess turnip-hoeing or stone-picking. It was also rich with time, the mother of metaphors. Science was like the camera there: a prison.
We had finally, an hour later, almost to drag Paul away. He was quite evidently content to spend all day, and night, tracing the old ridges and whatnot over the fields. But I promised that I’d drive him over into Dorset again one day, perhaps in the summer, and give him more time to measure and explore. It would have been quicker to return to the A4, but I suggested we go by the southern route, via Dorchester, which Jane didn’t know; and soon we were going past Hardy’s statue, mournful and traffic-disapproving as ever, and climbing up into the coastal hills past Maiden Castle and across what is for me one of the frontiers of that mysterious entity, the West of England… the first glimpse of silvery Lyme Bay reaching down to Start Point and, on days clearer than this, of Dartmoor on the western horizon; the first smell of home. Paul, dull old champaign England at last left behind, the green and closed, dense with retreat, ahead.
We stopped and had a cup of tea in the last ‘foreign’ town, Bridport; then we were into Devon, the first deep-red fields… a pearly sunset, all lemons and greens, the sun sinking fire into vapour, the squat dusk silhouette of Exeter Cathedral on its hill. It was dark by the time we were going through Newton Abbot, the nearest town of my childhood, every street and corner known, and better known still, every bend and hedge and barn on the road up out of it and away. Then Paul was in the headlight, undoing the gate from the lane for me; and up by the house the front door opened, they must have been listening for the sound of the car: old Ben and Phoebe waiting, as if they were the real hosts For nearly a year after I had bought the farm and the builders done their job, it was empty when I was away from it. The already derelict garden grew increasingly unkempt. During one absence the roof leaked over one of the bedrooms and brought half a ceiling down with it, a wretched mess. I had had one of the barns behind the house converted into living accommodation, I didn’t quite know what for, perhaps as a studio, perhaps as a den for Caro and her school-friends… and somehow the place never got used. There was the strong feeling of a white elephant, of a silly auction bid come home to roost. Then I had a script, three months’ work, and I decided to do it at Thorncombe; and face a few property-owning responsibilities at the same time.
Many of the older people in the village remembered me, though I rarely shopped or went there at all. I could hear the church bells occasionally, and that was enough. But one evening, soon after I was installed for my three months, I went to the village pub to buy some cigarettes. An old man there knew me. He had briefly helped look after the vicarage vegetables in the Thirties—and I suddenly, if dimly, remembered his face. He had disappeared in the war, someone else had done the digging. In fact Ben was the son of the bowlegged old man with the heartsease in his hat from my wartime harvest-field. Now he was in his sixties.
I bought him a pint of cider, and asked him, after the usual chat, if he still did a bit of gardening. He played Devon canny, he wasn’t up to heavy work any more, he didn’t know, he had a back, he’d have to ask the missus, maybe he’d cycle over one day. I did raise the question of money, but ‘bless you, it weren’t that’. It was, of course. It always is, in Devon and when I p
ressed, he shook his head in disapproval at my folly. ‘T’ain’t like the ol’ days, rate’s gone up something terrible’; which neatly skewered both my father’s past parsimony and the present real deciding factor. But I think also e was deathly curious to see what this odd cup of foreign tea, ‘ol’ Parson Mart’ns son’, had done with the place.
He turned up the next afternoon, as promised, and clicked his tongue over the state of the garden, though he thought the house and barn were a proper neat job; accepted another glass of cider in the kitchen. I made the second gesture he had been waiting for, a marked contribution to the local inflationary spiral, and clinched by insisting that he counted bicycling time into wage-time. Old Ben knows a sucker when he sees one, both in a rosebush and on the tree of life. Thus I acquired a part-time gardener… and a rather sad village history. He and his wife, Phoebe, had no children, his two brothers and a sister had all left the village; and he had a drink problem. I learnt later from Phoebe that he was also a rough character in his cups, she had twice left him in the past. My father must have known all this, and been playing practical Christian; or perhaps, as I did, he simply grew to like the man. He was a slow worker, but very thorough: in spite of his demon, palpably honest; and devoted to his wife.
I didn’t meet her till a month later. His bicycle had a puncture one day and I gave him and it a lift into the village in the car. She was gossiping with another old girl at the front gate of their tiny cottage as we pulled up and insisted I came in for a cup of tea, a typically Devon-faced little woman, younger than him, still faintly girlish, squirrelishly inquisitive, in spite of the grey hair. I took to her at once, even to her innocent curiosity ‘Ben says ‘tis all so pretty what you done, Mr Martin.’ I said it might be pretty, but it wasn’t very clean, I wished (because I’d already tried to find one) all the village girls didn’t go off to Newton Abbot for work nowadays. Nothing was said to that, except the usual comment on the decline of village mores, but the seed must have germinated because a few days later Ben turned up with a proposition. They had a neighbour who drove into Newton every day for his job; and who would bring him and Phoebe over in the morning and pick them up when he came back. She had done maid’s work once, she’d clean the old place up proper. She got bored at home. It really was a tiny half-cottage, like a doll’s house.
I came to know the simplicities and subtleties of their two souls very rapidly; though she was outwardly philosophical about that, Phoebe’s inability to have children had deeply scarred her somewhere. There was a kind of underlying metaphysical bitterness fl her that balanced her general disposition to mother anything. She was the boss, too, despite Ben’s occasional violence—I very soon heard about all that as well, how he had broken her arm once, how they’d had to lie to the doctor, how he’d kill himself, dreadful old rotgut he would drink… and they were a mine of village gossip as well, and slowly linked me closer to the place. I’m sure everything about me equally got carried back there. I told them enough about my past since leaving the village and my present to satisfy their curiosity, and they met Caro. Phoebe took to cooking me a hot lunch when she came. Her kitchen notions were very simple, and she boiled every green vegetable to a mash, but I came to look forward to it. Rather rapidly she began to take charge of the domestic side of things; and the house was much, much cleaner. She was long-lapsed chapel, but her devil remained dirt. When I had to go away, we agreed she would continue coming once a week to give the place a dust, while Ben kept on as usual with the garden. I left the keys with them without fear.
This went on for two years or more. Then one day when I was there again they came in great distress: their cottage had been condemned. They didn’t own it, of course, and paid an absurdly low weekly rent for it, a few shillings; but the owner wasn’t contesting the order… had even initiated it, according to Phoebe, to be rid of them. It wasn’t even sure they could be rehoused in the village, a bureaucratic cruelty that infuriated me so much that I went into Newton Abbot the next day prepared to have someone’s blood; but met my match in a clerk obviously used to handling people like me. It was not quite as bad as Ben and Phoebe thought; they couldn’t have a council house because they were for families, but old people’s homes were planned for the village, and they would have priority there. She even showed me a list, with their names newly pencilled in.
So I took them on. They could have the converted barn rent-free, and we’d come to an agreement over the work they did. I made them go away and think about it for a day or two; and had the pleasure when they diffidently said that if I was sure, then ‘yes’, of knowing that for once in their ill-starred lives something had turned out well. Phoebe once said to me, about their lack of children, ‘if us only knew what ‘twas we done wrong, why the Lord had to punish us so.’ My father at least would have been pleased with the blow struck against the God of Methodism.
It wasn’t quite a decision I’d never regretted. Their personal and functional failings I grew to live with: that is, Phoebe’s cooking and Ben’s drinking. He did now confine it, at least when I about, to Saturday nights; and I got used to the clatter of upset pails, the bangs and dangs and bumps and buggers, as he negotiated the last stretch home. One such Saturday I’d gone to bed and heard through the open window his drunken singing, strangely solitary and forlorn, down the hill opposite the farm; he was almost poetical then. He always walked to the village for these weekly sprees, being rarely in a state on his return to manage even that primary mode of transport without difficulty; on at least one occasion (so Phoebe told me) he spent the night sprawled in some hedge in a drunken stupor, and didn’t get home till dawn. Luckily it was summer. But he tamed the garden, began to grow lovely vegetables, and all the simple cottage flowers. Plants were a little like the children he’d never had, and he doted on them.
Phoebe also came gradually to accept that garlic and onion and suchlike exotic fancies did not drop one dead at the first mouthful, and learnt, except in occasional reversions, to cook vegetables and meat something short of total extinction. And she kept the house beautifully.
What bothered me much more was their continual presence and gratitude. I suppose it counted as a very soft billet for them, and they were frightened of losing it, of growing too old to cope; and I, as usual, was a little frightened of the responsibility they represented. But the most difficult thing to bear was their simple frame of values. It is all very well, in theory, from a city life, to laugh at village parochialism, the yokel assumption that the rest of the world thinks and behaves like us here; but that is also to laugh at a philosophy that has carried generations of land people through bitter and savagely exploited times. Any Freudian could nail Phoebe’s obsession with polishing and the spick-and-span; but what entailed was a faith in certain elementary decencies of in method, habit, routine, as a prerequisite of conflict is a wisdom that only people who have spent their lives in plant-growing and animal tending can ever profoundly gain. They can’t put it in words, but they feel it. I saw it in his praise for his own plants and flowers was always grudging, there was always something not quite right; yet sometimes I would spot him staring at them or touching them. This wasn’t some elementary form of false modesty; simply his bone knowledge that if everything grew perfectly, the world and he had nothing to live for. He had really grasped a very profound truth: that failure is the salt of life.
It was the more carnal condiment in my own that was the great problem: not simply to make them accept that I was sleeping with someone I wasn’t married to, but that I had no intention of marrying and also that it was a matter, or series of matters, to be kept secret from my most frequent visitor, Caro. I did eventually take the bull by the horns and explain to Phoebe that there were other masculine sins besides Ben’s. If she was shocked it would have been more at my frankness than at the actual fact she hid it. It wasn’t their business, they owed me so much, live and let live… I was showered with all the old adages of village tolerance, rather along the lines of Aunt Millie’s eternal ‘P
erhaps it’s for the best’.
But if that gave me licence to live and love as I wanted, it didn’t quite surmount all hurdles. I sensed a lingering, though completely hidden, disapproval. Perhaps Ben and Phoebe were shrewd enough to work out that they were better off with a succession of mistresses, in both senses of the word, than with a permanent wife with a domestic mind of her own. But I knew their profound belief was that I ought to settle down instead of ‘carrying on’; and I took a little to judging friends, and not only the ones I shared my bed with, by Phoebe’s reaction… how much she would chat with them, how discreet or voluble she would be, how much put on her old maidservant self or show her real one. It was all rather absurd, perhaps; but people got a bad mark if they didn’t get on with Phoebe and learn to walk the delicate tightrope between giving her a hand in the kitchen and not taking possession of it. I was allowed to laugh lat her faults and more latterly, Caro, but other women had to learn to be diplomats.
I had once or twice rebelled under this gentle tyranny and contemplated easing them out of my life. But then there were all the times I was absent, and to think of them there was reassuring; the returns, the hearing of their hoarded quanta of news, gossip, the pleasures of an intense small world after a diffuse great one, their Devon voices… and the ghosts of all the others in that house.
Phillida
‘What a plague is love! how shall I beare it?
She will unconstant prove, I greatly feare it.
She so molests my minde that my wit fayleth.
She wavers with the wind, as the ship saileth.
Please her the best I may, she looks another way.
Alacke and weladay! Phillida flouts me.
In the vicarage days Thorncombe had been owned by a family called Reed. They were of that now nearly extinct class, the educated yeomanry. There weren’t many like them in the parish; plenty of uneducated yeoman farmers with thick accents and thicker grammar, but the Reeds were different. Though they all had the accent of the South Ha, they articulated clearly, without most of the dialect words. There were six in the family headed by a widowed grandfather, the senior churchwarden, ‘Old Mr Reed’, a great favourite of my father’s, constantly cited as an example of a ‘natural gentleman.’ The patronizing cliché is foul, but he really was a splendid old fellow, with an innate dignity and courtesy… almost a grandeur. With him, you could believe about the backbone of England. Elsewhere you played polite to those who lacked a standard accent; in his patriarchal presence you wanted to be it naturally. He was never ‘Old Reed’; he had earned his Mr. I remember him best for his lesson-reading. He knew many of the great passages of the Bible by heart, and he would recite them in a slow, deep voice straight from memory, not looking down at the lectern, with a simple conviction I never heard in my father… or in many far more accomplished actors in later life, for that matter. He is excepted for eternity from all I have ever hated in the Church of England. He was like a folksong, a folk-poem; Drake and Raleigh’s voice. My father might preach and practise faith, but Old Mr Reed was it.
