by John Fowles
They lay embraced like that for half a minute or more, then he kissed her. She responded, yet he felt, if not a physical shyness, a reserve still. He released her a little and they lay like two children, noses almost touching.
‘What took you so long?’
‘When I was a Catholic, we used to call it praying.’
But there was a smile in her eyes and mouth, and he smelt perfume as well, a more secular vanity.
‘For both of us?’
‘Mainly for you.’
He smoothed down the side of her body beneath the bedclothes. ‘You’re still so nice like this. You haven’t changed.’
‘No memory.’
‘Every memory.’ He found a hand, laced fingers through it. ‘Haven’t you?’
‘Not physically.’
‘Emotionally?’
She stared for a long moment into his eyes.
‘Do you remember that night at Tarquinia? When we had our night-bathe and all had to sleep in the same room?’
‘Very vividly.’
She looked down.
‘I remembered it then.’
‘Tell me.’
‘I knew I was still in love with you.’ Her eyes stayed down. ‘I tried to tell Anthony when we got home. But I couldn’t. Then to confess it. But I couldn’t do that, either. I couldn’t decide which was the worse sin. Still feeling it, or thinking it a sin to feel it.’
She looked up into his eyes again then, with a strange mixture of gravity and timidity, almost as if Dan were the Anthony, or her unsought priest, of that time; and he knew that for some incomprehensible reason this was not a secret that brought them together, but remained a barrier; as if what was once suspect and illicit must always remain so.
The wretched dog began barking again somewhere outside, and he thought once more of T. S. Eliot: oh keep the Dog far hence… but couldn’t stop to remember how it went on, conscious only of this oddly virginal, willing-unwilling body he felt and held; held against so many recent contradicting public images of her—the don’s wife, the poised, the discreet, the middle-aged Englishwoman… and now so disconcertingly reduced to a nakedness in more ways than the literal.
‘The sheets are damp.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Do you want me just to hold you?’
The head shook, and she closed her eyes. Her feet did feel cold, but not the rest of her body. She let herself be pulled to him, her head once more buried against his neck. In spite of her passivity he sensed an inner turmoil, a teeming race in the darkness of her mind. Half a minute passed, but then, in response to a movement he did not try to control, her hand slipped from his waist to the small of his back, and a moment later her head shifted, lifted, for him to kiss her; and she was no longer virginal. She yielded, at least to Eros; to being kissed, caressed, aroused, rediscovered. Somewhere beneath them a tired bedspring creaked, when he came on top. She let her arms fail sideways, but a leg bent, tenting the bedclothes, then splayed a little as Dan crushed her; as if there was indeed a physical longing for this, but her arms and hands could not sanction it.
It seemed to him, as they let sexual feeling dominate the next few minutes, that someone else was aroused, had taken over her body. It was not that she remained passive; the arms did rise and the hands caressed in return; but that in some paradoxical way made it seem a ritual, a concession to physical convention. For once in his life he would have liked his partner to talk, to know what she felt. He had pushed back the bedclothes and his own eyes, now accustomed to the dark, kept searching her face for answers; and even when they were joined, failed to get them. Her body excited him more than he expected—in the dim light from the fire it still looked, was young: slender-armed, small-breasted… and that side of it came almost as a last secret she had kept, an added unfairness.
Yet it did not take place as he had dreamed, did not reach that non-physical climax he wanted, fused melting of all further doubt. She had been wiser in not expecting it; though he still felt obscurely cheated by her not trying to create what she had not expected. But nor, finally, was she merely indulging him, comforting him. For a brief while she was the female animal; possessive, wanting possession to endure. It came to him, immediately afterwards, when he was still lying half across her, that the failure could have been put in terms of grammatical person. It had happened in the third, when he had craved the first and second.
It left, too, a sad, sour little presentiment of age, of the death of the illusion that they could find each other as simply as this. It was too small, too short, too childlike a thing. Perhaps that was why he had always preferred, in more recent years, younger women: Jennies too green not to stay one with the myths of their bodies.
He moved beside Jane, lay on an elbow, an arm across her. She had opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling. That they were dry, still immersed in an inner self, seemed a final small confirmation of what he had just thought. It was beyond his power to change what she had said. It seemed almost as if she had let him ‘make love’ only to demonstrate that a real love could never be made between them. In the end he whispered.
‘What are you thinking?’
She smiled, then turned her face to him in the bluish light.
‘How I wish tomorrow would never come.’
There was at least a tenderness in her look, a confession of a kind. ‘Which means you’re glad now has?’
‘You were so nice.’ She reached and found his hand.
‘You feel a little warmer?’ She nodded, still smiling. ‘Why did you change your mind?’
‘Because I wanted you to know it wasn’t this.’
He raised their joined hands, kissed hers. ‘I’m not going to accept just one proof. Now I’ve discovered what a sexy thing you are.’
Her dark eyes stared gently into his. There was something in them that was both maternal and unchanged. She was still the girl who had never understood him, or herself; eternally tempted by him, eternally uncertain, almost as if their sexes were reversed, and he Eve, she recalcitrant Adam; but aware now of the pain she caused. He knew finally, he couldn’t say quite how, but it was in the eyes, that nothing had changed. She was not convinced; or convinced only—that was what she had really been thinking—that this could not remove some profound incompatibility between them. Her eyes closed.
‘Tired?’
‘Mm.’
‘I’ll turn the stove out.’
He bent over and kissed her mouth. Her arm came round him and held him close a moment, as if to ask forgiveness for what he had just read in her eyes. Then he got out of bed and extinguished the stove; undid the shutters and set one of the windows an inch or two open. Meanwhile Jane had pulled the bedclothes back. He came beside her again. They kissed briefly once more, then she turned her back. He slipped an arm under her neck to where the hand could bend down and rest on her breasts; then reached the other hand over her waist, to her stomach, and pulled her close. Her own hands came and lay on his, as if to keep them there. He began to feel, as they gathered warmth, knew each other awake in the darkness, that this innocent, silent nakedness was a nearer, deeper thing than the love-making; they were more coupled, thus, than when he had literally possessed her. The scent, light touch of her hair, enfolded body, those hands on his… it was an enigma to him that she still could not see her fears were groundless, her scruples nonsensical, her obsession with solitary independence totally foreign to her real nature; that something far more profound than hazard, than the coincidences of destiny, willed this.
Perhaps twenty minutes later he realized she had gone to sleep. He quietly removed his now stiff arm, then turned away. It must have woken her a little. After a moment he felt her turn as well and lay a hand, instinctively, like a sleeping wife, across his hips; as if, in some dream, he was the one who escaped.
The Bitch
Dan was deeply asleep when the knocks came on the door. He called, or groaned, from where he lay. There was an obscure mutter, footsteps went away.
A cold first light came through the shutters. For a few moments, still half-asleep, he had completely forgotten where he was; he lay trying to conform the room to his bedroom at Thorncombe, in a familiar maze between sequence-despising dream and coherent reality. Then he was aware that he was not wearing pyjamas. He remembered. Yet for a few moments more he continued lying as he was, knowing he had only to turn, to reach back a hand. Something in whatever he had dreamed seemed to have washed his mind free of anxiety; in that shared stillness, silence, dawn, he would always regain her. He reached back a hand. But it met bedclothes, not the smooth, warm, female skin it expected. He turned sharply on an elbow, fully awake now.
There was no one there: an indentation in a pillow, the blankets carefully pulled up. Her coat had also gone from the chair. He thought perhaps she had slipped out to the bathroom, but then felt where she had lain; without warmth, she couldn’t have left only a minute or two before. He stared down at where she had been, then across at the closed door. The air was cold on his shoulders, but even colder in his heart. He tried to suppose it might be some curious respect for the conventions, but already sought other reasons. Love, let alone tact or affection, could not have left him to wake up like that. Something else had to be shown, and brutally. It was almost as if she wanted to trick him into thinking he had imagined that previous night. But he could still smell traces of her perfume.
He got out of bed and pulled on the raincoat he had brought. Outside the door stood a bucket of water, steaming slightly in the cold. There was none outside Jane’s room. He went across, knocked, then opened the door. Her bag stood packed beside the bed, her coat lay across the foot of it, but otherwise the room was empty. He went back to his own and threw the shutters open. And that too was a shock. The mist had risen, as promised, though the tops of the hills around the plain before him were only just clear of a grey ceiling of cloud. But he hardly noticed that.
The plain itself, which ran for two miles or more, was so extraordinary: an endless vista of ruins and isolated heaps of rubble, like a city stricken in some ancient nuclear holocaust and half buried again in sand. Forbidding square towers stood on a skyline to the west, above the plain. The scattered ruins were a heavy grey, tinged with russet and ochre. There was not a house, a tree, a figure in sight. One could not believe that the night had hidden so much, such a unique landscape, so chilling, so hopeless, so static, so vast; so without forewarning, so far, in its desolate immensity, beyond Herculaneum or Pompeii or any other ancient site Dan had ever seen. Indeed for a moment or two his reaction was purely professional: an amazement that this unforgettable scene had never been used by any filmmaker, did not form a part of every educated person’s common visual memory. He looked for Jane closer to the hotel, but could not see her. The entire landscape was lifeless.
He went to the bathroom and washed and shaved; then returned to his room and dressed. Her disappearing seemed more and more unforgivable, inhumane; as if they could not even share the first sight of the dead city outside. He went through into the room with the stove. She was sitting at the table where they had had their supper the evening before, a brass coffeepot beside her. There was no one else there. She smiled across at where he stood for a moment, and held his eyes as he crossed to the table. He stood again a second there, searching her expression. Reading his own, it assumed apology.
‘I woke early. I couldn’t sleep.’
‘How long have you been up?’
‘An hour.’
He sat down, waited for some gesture, a reached hand. But she lifted the pot and poured him coffee, as if a banal domesticity could hide reality. It was so unexpected that it made him, quite against his will, fall in with it.
‘I wish you’d woken me.’
She smiled. ‘You were fast asleep.’
The smile was additionally absurd; it was even, and intolerably, a little that of the mistress of a situation, of a wife, of someone who had slept beside him for years. She passed him the bowl of sugar, but he caught her hand before she could withdraw it.
‘Jane?’
And as she had at Koni Ombo, she stared down at their two joined hands. She did return his pressure, but it was done conventionally; as a plea, not as a recognition. Her eyes rose to meet his, confirming it. They admitted the existence of the night; but beyond that, they seemed to him to concede nothing. He spoke again.
‘What’s happened?’
‘Nothing.’
He tightened his grip, but now her hand remained inert, without response.
‘Nothing?’
She looked down at the hands again, squeezed his, then released her own.
‘Yes, of course something.’
He took a breath, knowing the mood of his waking lay shattered; then stared at his coffee.
‘Why did you have to get up?’
‘A need to rehearse?’
‘For what?’
‘Rome and reality?’ She sought his eyes again. ‘After the tenderest of dreams, Dan.’
He felt outraged, and not least because she could now look him in the eyes as nakedly as she had met his body in the night; outraged like a man before a machine that will not function, although he has followed to the letter all the instructions for starting it. He thought of all his arguing and pleadings, both verbal and physical, and had an abrupt and hideously objective foreboding that he was dealing not with the psychological, but something pathological, conditioned beyond remedy. Already, perhaps even before the act, she had made up her mind to this: to give in order to prove that she could not. He knew he was on the very brink of a violent rage; perhaps even tears; but also that further pleading was useless. Perhaps she had done what she had done to make it so; and was certainly acting as she was now to prove it was so. We are civilized adults; but Dan felt a million miles from civilized adulthood. He stared at the tablecloth.
‘Why did you tell me last night about Tarquinia?’
‘To try to regain what I once did feel for you. When I had a whole being.’ In his silence she said gently, ‘Have you seen outside?’
‘Yes.’
‘That part of me can’t. For your sake.’
He left a pent silence; then burst out.
‘Christ, and you talk about the language of despair.’ She looked down, and he went bitterly on. ‘That’s what that bloody ring on your finger stands for. Eternal marriage to yourself. Undying love for your own mistakes.’
The old man appeared from the kitchen with a bucket of fuel for the stove, with the cook behind him. The latter gestured to see if they wanted more coffee, but Dan curtly shook his head; then picked up his cup and drained it: the bitter chalice. The two men went to the stove, and the old man riddled it, with the cook watching. They spoke in Arabic, evidently something about the stove. Dan and Jane, her head bent, sat in silence, waiting for the others to go. But when the fire had been attended to, they drew up wooden chairs and sat by it.
She said in a small voice, ‘Do you want more coffee?’
‘No. It tastes foul.’
She swallowed that rebuff, used the same voice. ‘Then may we go for a walk?’
Dan hesitated. ‘I suppose.’
‘I’ll go and get my coat.’
He waited till she had gone through to her room before he moved himself; and once inside his own, waited till he heard her return to the main room before he followed. He managed to explain to the two Arabs, by pointing at his watch, that they should tell Labib he and Jane would be back in an hour’s time. He had not appeared. Then they went out.
In the distance they now saw the date-palms of the modern oasis, and some flat roofs, but it seemed as if the modern town had retreated, lay in hiding, from the old. Its lifelessness was appalling, beyond all powers of humour or belittling. Now and then some species of lark would rise silently and fly out of their path across the sand; but there was nothing else. The wind had returned, the same bitter, penetrating cold, and they had to walk quickly to keep warm.
Dan’s face was set, shu
t, he would not look at her. When they had come out of the hotel she had pointed to the most conspicuous ruins.
‘I think that’s the Temple of Baal.’
‘Okay.’
He knew as they walked that she wanted to speak, and he was ready to bite off the first sound of her voice; or to continue the anathema. But perhaps she knew there was nothing more to say; she had asked for this, and she must bear it.
In any case, even at the best of times, their wordless march would not have been inappropriate. The vast plain, the endless ruins, were their own inexorable commentary, as well as one on what lay between two marchers. When they came closer to the square-walled temple enclosure, a flock of black birds rose; by a sour irony they were Dan’s totem-bird, a whole colony of them; and for once he saw them as the rest of mankind and Edgar Allan Poe have always seen them, not as symbols of freedom and survival, but as the harbingers of ill-omen and death. They did give Jane an excuse to speak.
‘What are they?’
‘Ravens.’
His tone forbade any further questions. They came to the temple and went inside. It had a massiveness more reminiscent of Egypt than Rome, a lingering smell of brutish heresy. Dan made it clear that it displeased and bored him, almost as soon as they entered. He watched the ravens circling overhead, croaking, then making a strange sound like dry bones clicking, a stick run down a lattice, while Jane wandered off for a minute on her own. He stood by the entrance gate, out of the wind, until she returned.
‘Enough?’
