by John Fowles
‘Oh sure. I’m just ordinary.’
Dan smiled. ‘Not worth answering. You’re much luckier. Jenny’s condemned either to independent men and long separations or dependent men who become mere Mr McNeils.’
‘And she hasn’t realized that yet?’
‘Realizing and accepting are two different things.’
Caro looked down again. ‘As I’m discovering. His wife’s found out about us.’
‘Oh God.’
‘It’s all right. Apparently she’s resigned to it. She even told him I was an improvement on the last.’ She gave Dan a twisted little smile, and lit another cigarette from a packet of Gauloises. She had begun to smoke more than he liked.
‘How did she find out?’
‘I thought you might know, actually.’ She must have seen that Dan didn’t understand what that meant. It had sounded almost like an accusation. ‘There was a snippet in Private Eye last week?’
For a brief moment Dan became his Victorian great-grandfather, a severe face on a wall. Fortunately she was avoiding his eyes, and he spoke gently.
‘What did it say?’
‘A year or two ago he wrote a piece in favour of marriages, lovers, being the same age. You know how he writes, it wasn’t very serious. Just arguing a line for fun. They lifted a quote from that. Then something about’… she stopped, as if to get right lines she now knew by heart… ‘ “the piece is causing grave concern to his current twenty-year-old secretary”—they couldn’t even get the age right—”who has cast modesty to the winds under the bizarre illusion that Boring Bernard is the only upright man in Fleet Street”.’ She added, ‘They’re so foully below the belt sometimes.’
‘Were you named?’
‘No.’ She added, ‘We’ve tried to keep it secret. But they’re always going for him. Private Eye.’
The nasty thought crossed Dan’s mind that Barney was not above leaking the information himself; but it was fairer to say that once he would not have been above leaking it. At any rate he had made part of his reputation as a student journalist, as Dan had had reason to know on more than the one occasion previously mentioned, precisely on such gossiping innuendo. Barney, in a Fleet Street now dominated by his own Oxbridge generation, could hardly cry outrage at something he had helped set in motion.
‘Is he upset?’
‘For me.’ She had another thin smile. ‘He says he wishes the days of the horsewhip weren’t over.’
‘If he wants it to make the headlines.’
‘He’s desperately sorry about it.’
Dan ventured a tentative step further.
‘He’s not talking of…’
‘Of what?’
‘Leaving her for you?’
She stared down. ‘Daddy, I’d rather not discuss it.’
As so often in the past, the ‘daddy’ was a tacit reproach; a reminder that he had long ago forfeited at least some of the prerogatives of that relationship. She had—Dan had been thinking till then how rapidly she was leaving her earlier self behind—suddenly reverted to the past. Her cheeks had gone a little pink and she would not look at him; but did not quite know where else to look. For a moment they were back to the days when he would probe too far, or too obviously, into her feelings about Nell and Compton—only to realize, too late, that he had trespassed across some invisible boundary in her mind.
‘Then question withdrawn.’
She said nothing for a few seconds. ‘It came up over the weekend. He was depressed about the interview. He keeps on talking about getting out of the rat-race. Writing a sort of autobiography. Dillon’s History of a Very Small World—he jokes about it. And he can’t really. He hasn’t got the money.’
Dan had to give a slightly sour inward smile at that ‘sort of biography’; and wondered whether he was being told to reflect on his own good fortune.
She added, ‘I’m not star-struck or anything. I went wandering round the Latin Quarter on my own yesterday afternoon while he was doing his interview. All those students and people my own age. I did a bit wonder what I was losing.’ Then, as if she were giving her father too much rope, she said, ‘He is terribly sweet to me. Patient. Not like some people.’
But that definite dig went with a mocking slide of her eyes.
‘That’s because I know you’re much brighter than you sometimes pretend.’
‘You hope.’
‘Know.’
She was wearing a dove-grey corduroy trouser suit with a Liberty shirt, which suited the natural rather high colour of her complexion; and her long hair. It wasn’t a very photographable face, as Dan had discovered in the course of family snapshots… a conventional face, just as she was no more than a conventionally not unpretty girl; always a much younger girl lurked in it, as it had in her mother’s at the same age. And just as he had secretly liked the rare—increasingly rare, alas—childlike side in Nell in the old days, he recognized a same feeling about their daughter. He had a sudden wish that he was taking this slim little problematic and obstinate creature beside him to Egypt; and said it.
She grinned. ‘I wish I was free to come.’
‘You’re not too unhappy?’
She shook her head, very positively. ‘I think I feel happier nowadays than I ever have in my whole life before.’ She shrugged. ‘Which proves I’m not very bright.’ That amused Dan, and she bridled a little. ‘When everything else is in such a mess.’
‘You mean the world?’
‘It’s all we ever hear at work.’
‘Newspapers live on doom and disaster. Good for circulation.’
‘The awful thing is I know I rather like it in a way. Nothing being certain. Living from day to day. Everything that Compton isn’t.’ She gave Dan a dry look. ‘I didn’t tell you, I got a real talking-to from mummy and Andrew after you left last Sunday. They were perfectly nice. Just incredibly square. As if you were done for if you didn’t have your whole life planned and secure for ever.’
‘The opposite theory also has its drawbacks.’
‘It’s just sometimes. I read a piece we’re running in the colour supp. next week. About nurses. It made me feel how ridiculous it is that I should get paid more than they do. And have all the fun as well.’
‘Nursing’s like acting. A vocation.’
‘It’s still not fair.’
‘Do I smell your Aunt Jane?’
That in turn amused her. She said with a mock primness, ‘I begin to see what she’s on about.’
‘Good.’
‘Well you haven’t had to hear all the anti-propaganda I have.’
‘True.’
Now he was queried.
‘Did she talk a lot to you at Thorncombe?’
Yes.
‘What about?’
‘You. Paul. Politics. Everything.’
‘I couldn’t believe it when you first told me about Egypt.’
‘Why not?’
She shook her head. ‘I suppose I’ve always thought of you living in two totally separate worlds. That could never meet.’
‘We once met almost literally every day of our life, Caro. At your age. We’ve even been on holiday before. We all spent a summer in Rome once.’
‘It’s just that you’ve never seemed very interested in her.’
He hesitated, then covered hesitation with a smile. ‘I didn’t only lose your mother when we divorced, Caro. Lack of interest doesn’t always mean lack of memory. Rather the reverse, in fact… sometimes.’
‘Does she seem very changed to you?’
‘Outwardly. Not deep down. I felt she’s been living in a world where only bad things happen. So a good happening might make a change. That’s all.’ He smiled again. ‘Amateur head-shrinking, really. And to show I’m grateful for all the help she’s given you.’
‘Did you tell her that?’
‘In Oxford. The night Uncle Anthony died.’
Caro was silent a moment, avoided his eyes.
‘Daddy, why did he kill himself that n
ight of all nights?’
She asked it as if she knew that she was now the one crossing forbidden boundaries. Dan stared across the restaurant.
‘He was a teacher all his life, Caro. I think it was a kind of lesson.’
‘Who to?’
‘Perhaps to all of us. On taking responsibility for your past.’
‘What responsibility?’
‘For having hated, lied, deceived. When we could all have tried to understand a little better.’
‘But why did he wait till you were there?’
‘Perhaps because I needed it more than most.’
‘But he hadn’t seen you for years.’
‘Some things don’t change about people.’
Again she was silent.
‘Did Aunt Jane need it as well?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘You’re being very cagy.’
‘Because I don’t want to spoil what you quite rightly admire in her.’
She considered that a moment. ‘Is it something about their marriage? I realize I always rather took it for granted. I was sort of presuming it was good one day with Roz. I felt I’d said something silly then.’
‘I think it had its problems. Mainly of temperament. Views on things.’
‘I’m so stupid. I never guessed.’
‘No one was meant to. I understand Jane turned to Roz a great deal in the last years. That’s why she wouldn’t have agreed.’
‘I always feel such an empty-headed little nit with her.’
Dan signalled for the bill to be brought.
‘You can face this supper tomorrow?’
‘Yes. Of course. I do like her really.’ By which, Dan suspected, she really meant ‘envy’.
‘I think you’ve got her rather wrong.’
She seemed to accept that it might be so, but a dissatisfaction remained.
‘That’s why I’ve always been so fond of Aunt Jane. She’s the only one of the university graduates I seem to be surrounded by who doesn’t rub it in.’
‘The only one?’
‘You’re joking. You’re the worst.’
‘I try very hard not to be.’
‘That’s what makes it so obvious.’
‘I’ll take lessons in Egypt.’ She gave him a bitten smile, then looked down, as if he were now the ingenuous one. ‘What does that Cheshire cat smirk mean?’
She still kept it. ‘You need more than lessons.’
‘Then what?’
‘That would be telling.’
The waiter brought the bill, and Dan had to occupy himself with it. Caroline stood and looked for her coat, then waited for him by the door. He eyed her as he came up.
‘Telling what?’
‘What I know about you and you don’t.’
They moved outside. ‘Hopeless case?’
‘Why you are.’
‘Don’t I have a right to know?’
‘Not yet.’ And she took his arm then, flagrantly changed the subject. ‘Hey, you haven’t asked about my flat.’
Two or three minutes later he was kissing her goodnight by her Mini; then waving her on her way. He went to bed himself as soon as he had returned home. But in spite of having, finally, enjoyed his hour with Caro, his earlier depression remained. He kept thinking of all the things that had to be done the next day. He had arranged to meet Jane briefly at the Egyptian Consulate the next morning to see about the visas, she was travelling up to Roz’s from Oxford that evening. And then Caro—he began to write one of his instant scenarios: in which the worst came to the worst, Barney left his wife and persuaded her to live permanently with him. He even added a development (and if she really wanted, why not?) in which he stopped playing Sidney Carton and settled into some similar permanent arrangement with Jenny. He tried to imagine the friendship between the two girls he had said he hoped for… but the scenario died when it came to a plausible relationship between Barney and himself. Somehow he saw that too clearly through Jane’s truth-seeking, and Nell’s cynical, eyes.
He had to see his London agent that following afternoon. A month before, in Hollywood, he had turned down a script for after the one on Kitchener, and discountenanced any further approaches. But he knew at least two more nibbles concerning other properties were now waiting, they had to be decided on. There, the folly over Egypt helped; it made resisting whatever blandishments his agent intended to try an easier matter. He would stick to his original plan: Kitchener, then retreat, Thorncombe, peace; a long green spring and summer. Egypt, and Jane, he must regard as an initiatory ordeal: a gratuitous one, but unavoidable now.
It was also, and more than partly, the old lone wolf, the hater of encumbrance in him; of the effort, the energy and time and diplomacy involved in walking the tightrope between all these contradictory female faces and forces in his present life. And perhaps an added attraction of the notion of a year’s retreat to Thorncombe was its certain echo of that very ancient male dream embodied in Mount Athos and its monasteries. He had just spent long days on the Kitchener script, but aware that it was less out of true conviction than a subdued exasperation to get the thing over and done with. Ideas for his novel had kept on breaking from behind the page before him. He felt like someone who had done quite enough field research, who now longed to get back to the laboratory, to draw the conclusions.
Then he did something absurd. He got out of bed and found his notebook in his jacket pocket. There he jotted down not something profound about intimations of approaching changes of key in human minds, but the words: Remind Ben—mange-tout peas.
He had remembered they were one of Jenny’s greeds.
Pyramids and Prisons
Dan developed, during the six-hour flight to Cairo, further doubts about the days ahead; or at least wondered if he had not underestimated the difference between an evening alone with someone and the kind of companionship now in prospect. Jane also seemed to be caught unawares by reality: they were too trivially, tritely solicitous towards each other to be natural. She had been far more at ease the day before, when they had met to get their visas—only briefly, for she had gone off, once the formalities were completed, to meet Roz and do some last shopping; and later, when they had met again at Roz’s for the family supper. It had gone well, Roz had put herself out to be nice to Caro, who had responded and perhaps learnt from the brisk way her cousin handled her mother, teased her over her still-latent financial and other qualms. Indeed, she had been more at ease earlier that very morning, before the takeoff. Roz had driven them to Heathrow, and kept the reality at bay.
Now they sat side by side, eating their lunches. She ate more of hers than he did. Dan had long ago preferred to go hungry rather than face most airline food; while there was a tiny air about Jane of being determined to have her money’s worth, like any true tourist. What conversation they had later was mainly about what they were reading: in Jane’s case, the old Blue Guide he had brought along. He was once more jumping through the biography of Kitchener he was using, to refresh his mind about one or two locations he must visit. He was already a little on the defensive there, explaining what it was about the old man that intrigued him. He felt Jane’s show of interest was diplomatic rather than genuine; as usual, she was forming her own opinions behind what he said. They talked for a while about the technicalities of film production. He suspected that this too was a sop to his vanity, her proof to herself as much as to him that she was not going to be critical of his way of life, but dutifully, or gratefully, concerned to know it better.
They were much more like chance embarrassed strangers than he had foreseen; perhaps on neither side able to forget the misleading impression given by the ring on her wedding finger.
And perhaps because he had had, soon after takeoff, a reminder that they were separated by more than private and personal things, for all their sitting side by side. There had been a first break in their conversation, and he had asked if she had brought plenty to read; then passed her the Blue Guide. As if she had forgotten, s
he stooped to the travelling bag by her feet and came out with a paperback and handed it to him with a small smile.
‘You don’t have to if you don’t want to.’
It was an anthology, Lukacs on Critical Realism, issued by some small leftwing publishing house.
‘That’s sweet of you, Jane.’
‘Since he was mentioned.’
‘I’ll read it where I can concentrate. On the boat.’
She glanced down at the book as he fingered through it, almost with a dismissiveness, now it had been presented.
‘There are bits.’
‘I’m sure. I shall look forward to it.’ He smiled. ‘Actually I must read for Cairo a bit now.’
She did seem to be genuinely eager for the experience of Egypt. It had been most noticeable when they met outside the consulate the previous morning. The first thing she had said, with a smile, was that it wasn’t too late for him to say no; and then that she would still get a visa, because she was ‘so hooked’ that she couldn’t not go now—even if it had to be alone. There at least he detected in her a readiness to be amused, the tentative resumption of an old and more extrovert self.
The two hours’ advance in local time meant that it was near sunset when they landed at Cairo. Malevich’s London office had already arranged a programme for Dan the next day, and had asked for him to be met, but he was not too sanguine that they would be; and even less so when they cleared immigration and customs and finally emerged into the seething and galleried central hail of the terminal—so much turmoil, so many faces of every shade of brown, the immediate plunge into a non-European world, and at first sight one principally indifferent to chaos and dirt. The place had the feel of a country at war, of an upset hive. Dan glanced at Jane beside him, as they were besieged by taxi-drivers and hotel touts. She smiled, but he could see this chorus of alien, demanding voices, the primeval mob, had set her back.
Then someone was sharply calling Dan’s name, and they turned. A tall, bald man stood by a pillar. He was well-dressed, in a light mackintosh and dark suit; he had a moustache, a broad, flat face, faintly hooded eyes, a kind of aristocratic disdain for the less fortunate beings around them. But when he saw he had guessed right, he smiled, raised his hand, and came quickly forward.
