The French Lieutenant’s Woman

by John Robert Fowles

  He did something that night he had not done for many years. He knelt by his bed and prayed; and the substance of his prayer was that he would find her; if he searched for the rest of his life, he would find her.

  55

  “Why, about you!” Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. “And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?”

  “Where I am now, of course,” said Alice.

  “Not you!” Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. “You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!”

  “If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you’d go out—bang!—just like a candle!”

  “I shouldn’t!” Alice exclaimed indignantly.

  Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (1872)

  Charles arrived at the station in ridiculously good time the next morning; and having gone through the ungentlemanly business of seeing his things loaded into the baggage van and then selected an empty first-class compartment, he sat impatiently waiting for the train to start. Other passengers looked in from time to time, and were rebuffed by that Gorgon stare (this compartment is reserved for non-lepers) the English have so easily at command. A whistle sounded, and Charles thought he had won the solitude he craved. But then, at the very last moment, a massively bearded face appeared at his window. The cold stare was met by the even colder stare of a man in a hurry to get aboard.

  The latecomer muttered a “Pardon me, sir” and made his way to the far end of the compartment. He sat, a man of forty or so, his top hat firmly square, his hands on his knees, regaining his breath. There was something rather aggressively secure about him; he was perhaps not quite a gentleman… an ambitious butler (but butlers did not travel first class) or a successful lay preacher—one of the bullying tabernacle kind, a would-be Spurgeon, converting souls by scorching them with the cheap rhetoric of eternal damnation. A decidedly unpleasant man, thought Charles, and so typical of the age—and therefore emphatically to be snubbed if he tried to enter into conversation.

  As sometimes happens when one stares covertly at people and speculates about them, Charles was caught in the act; and reproved for it. There was a very clear suggestion in the sharp look sideways that Charles should keep his eyes to himself. He hastily directed his gaze outside his window and consoled himself that at least the person shunned intimacy as much as he did.

  Very soon the even movement lulled Charles into a douce daydream. London was a large city; but she must soon look for work. He had the time, the resources, the will; a week might pass, two, but then she would stand before him; perhaps yet another address would slip through his letter box. The wheels said it: she-could-not-be-so-cruel, she-could-not-be-so-cruel, she-could-not-be-so-cruel… the train passed through the red and green valleys towards Cullompton. Charles saw its church, without knowing where the place was, and soon afterwards closed his eyes. He had slept poorly that previous night.

  For a while his traveling companion took no notice of the sleeping Charles. But as the chin sank deeper and deeper—Charles had taken the precaution of removing his hat—the prophet-bearded man began to stare at him, safe in the knowledge that his curiosity would not be surprised.

  His look was peculiar: sizing, ruminative, more than a shade disapproving, as if he knew very well what sort of man this was (as Charles had believed to see very well what sort of man he was) and did not much like the knowledge or the species. It was true that, unobserved, he looked a little less frigid and authoritarian a person; but there remained about his features an unpleasant aura of self-confidence—or if not quite confidence in self, at least a confidence in his judgment of others, of how much he could get out of them, expect from them, tax them.

  A stare of a minute or so’s duration, of this kind, might have been explicable. Train journeys are boring; it is amusing to spy on strangers; and so on. But this stare, which became positively cannibalistic in its intensity, lasted far longer than a minute. It lasted beyond Taunton, though it was briefly interrupted there when the noise on the platform made Charles wake for a few moments. But when he sank back into his slumbers, the eyes fastened on him again in the same leech-like manner.

  You may one day come under a similar gaze. And you may—in the less reserved context of our own century—be aware of it. The intent watcher will not wait till you are asleep. It will no doubt suggest something unpleasant, some kind of devious sexual approach… a desire to know you in a way you do not want to be known by a stranger. In my experience there is only one profession that gives that particular look, with its bizarre blend of the inquisitive and the magistral; of the ironic and the soliciting.

  Now could I use you?

  Now what could I do with you?

  It is precisely, it has always seemed to me, the look an omnipotent god—if there were such an absurd thing—should be shown to have. Not at all what we think of as a divine look; but one of a distinctly mean and dubious (as the theoreticians of the nouveau roman have pointed out) moral quality. I see this with particular clarity on the face, only too familiar to me, of the bearded man who stares at Charles. And I will keep up the pretense no longer.

  Now the question I am asking, as I stare at Charles, is not quite the same as the two above. But rather, what the devil am I going to do with you? I have already thought of ending Charles’s career here and now; of leaving him for eternity on his way to London. But the conventions of Victorian fiction allow, allowed no place for the open, the inconclusive ending; and I preached earlier of the freedom characters must be given. My problem is simple—what Charles wants is clear? It is indeed. But what the protagonist wants is not so clear; and I am not at all sure where she is at the moment. Of course if these two were two fragments of real life, instead of two figments of my imagination, the issue of the dilemma is obvious: the one want combats the other want, and fails or succeeds, as the actuality may be. Fiction usually pretends to conform to the reality: the writer puts the conflicting wants in the ring and then describes the fight—but in fact fixes the fight, letting that want he himself favors win. And we judge writers of fiction both by the skill they show in fixing the fights (in other words, in persuading us that they were not fixed) and by the kind of fighter they fix in favor of: the good one, the tragic one, the evil one, the funny one, and so on.

  But the chief argument for fight-fixing is to show one’s readers what one thinks of the world around one—whether one is a pessimist, an optimist, what you will. I have pretended to slip back into 1867; but of course that year is in reality a century past. It is futile to show optimism or pessimism, or anything else about it, because we know what has happened since.

  So I continue to stare at Charles and see no reason this time for fixing the fight upon which he is about to engage. That leaves me with two alternatives. I let the fight proceed and take no more than a recording part in it; or I take both sides in it. I stare at that vaguely effete but not completely futile face. And as we near London, I think I see a solution; that is, I see the dilemma is false. The only way I can take no part in the fight is to show two versions of it. That leaves me with only one problem: I cannot give both versions at once, yet whichever is the second will seem, so strong is the tyranny of the last chapter, the final, the “real” version.

  I take my purse from the pocket of my frock coat, I extract a florin, I rest it on my right thumbnail, I flick it, spinning, two feet into the air and catch it in my left hand.

  So be it. And I am suddenly aware that Charles has opened his eyes and is looking at me. There is something more than disapproval in his eyes now; he perceives I am either a gambler or mentally deranged. I return his disapproval, and my florin to my purse. He picks up his hat, brushes some invisible speck of dirt (a surrogate for myself) from its nap and places it on his head.

  We draw under one of the great cast-iron beams that support the roof of Paddington station. We arrive, he steps down to the platform, beckoning to a porter. In a few moments, having gi
ven his instructions, he turns. The bearded man has disappeared in the throng.

  56

  Ah Christ, that it were possible

  For one short hour to see

  The souls we loved, that they might tell us

  What and where they be.

  Tennyson, Maud (1855)

  Private Inquiry Office, Patronized by the Aristocracy, and under the sole direction of Mr. Pollaky himself. Relations with both the British and the Foreign Detective Police.

  DELICATE AND CONFIDENTIAL INQUIRIES INSTITUTED WITH SECRECY AND DISPATCH IN ENGLAND, THE CONTINENT AND THE COLONIES. EVIDENCE COLLECTED FOR CASES IN THE DIVORCE COURT, &C.

  Mid-Victorian Advertisement

  A week might pass, two, but then she would stand before him… The third week begins, and she has not stood before him. Charles cannot be faulted; he has been here, there, everywhere.

  He had achieved this ubiquity by hiring four detectives—whether they were under the sole direction of Mr. Pollaky, I am not sure, but they worked hard. They had to, for they were a very new profession, a mere eleven years old, and held in general contempt. A gentleman in 1866 who stabbed one to death was considered to have done a very proper thing. “If people go about got up as garrotters,” warned Punch, “they must take the consequences.”

  Charles’s men had first tried the governess agencies, without success; they had tried the Educational Boards of all the denominations that ran Church schools. Hiring a carriage, he had himself spent fruitless hours patrolling, a pair of intent eyes that scanned each younger female face that passed, the genteel-poor districts of London. In one such Sarah must be lodging: in Peckham, in Pentonville, in Putney; in a dozen similar districts of neat new roads and one-domestic houses he searched. He also helped his men to investigate the booming new female clerical agencies. A generalized hostility to Adam was already evident in them, since they had to bear the full brunt of masculine prejudice and were to become among the most important seedbeds of the emancipation movement. I think these experiences, though fruitless in the one matter he cared about, were not all wasted on Charles. Slowly he began to understand one aspect of Sarah better: her feeling of resentment, of an unfair because remediable bias in society.

  One morning he had woken to find himself very depressed. The dreadful possibility of prostitution, that fate she had once hinted at, became a certainty. That evening he went in a state of panic to the same Haymarket area he visited earlier. What the driver imagined, I cannot suppose; but he must certainly have thought his fare the most fastidious man who ever existed. They drove up and down those streets for two hours. Only once did they stop; the driver saw a red-haired prostitute under a gaslight. But almost at once two taps bade him drive on again.

  Other consequences of his choice of freedom had meanwhile not waited to exact their toll. To his finally achieved letter to Mr. Freeman he received no answer for ten days. But then he had to sign for one, delivered ominously by hand, from Mr. Freeman’s solicitors.

  Sir,

  In re Miss Ernestina Freeman

  We are instructed by Mr. Ernest Freeman, father of the above-mentioned Miss Ernestina Freeman, to request you to attend at these chambers at 3 o’clock this coming Friday. Your failure to attend will be regarded as an acknowledgment of our client’s right to proceed.

  Aubrey & Baggott

  Charles took the letter to his own solicitors. They had handled the Smithson family affairs since the eighteenth century. And the present younger Montague, facing whose desk the confessed sinner now shamefacedly sat, was only a little older than Charles himself. The two men had been at Winchester together; and without being close friends, knew and liked each other well enough.

  “Well, what does it mean, Harry?”

  “It means, my dear boy, that you have the devil’s own luck. They have cold feet.”

  “Then why should they want to see me?”

  “They won’t let you off altogether, Charles. That is asking too much. My guess is that you will be asked to make a confessio delicti.”

  “A statement of guilt?”

  “Just so. I am afraid you must anticipate an ugly document. But I can only advise you to sign it. You have no case.”

  On that Friday afternoon Charles and Montague were ushered into a funereal waiting room in one of the Inns of Court. Charles felt it was something like a duel; Montague was his second. They were made to cool their heels until a quarter past three. But since this preliminary penance had been predicted by Montague, they bore it with a certain nervous amusement.

  At last they were summoned. A short and choleric old man rose from behind a large desk. A little behind him stood Mr. Freeman. He had no eyes but for Charles, and they were very cold eyes indeed; all amusement vanished. Charles bowed to him, but no acknowledgment was made. The two solicitors shook hands curtly. There was a fifth person present: a tall, thin, balding man with penetrating dark eyes, at the sight of whom Montague imperceptibly flinched.

  “You know Mr. Serjeant Murphy?”

  “By reputation only.”

  A serjeant-at-law was in Victorian times a top counsel; and Serjeant Murphy was a killer, the most feared man of his day.

  Mr. Aubrey peremptorily indicated the chairs the two visitors were to take, then sat down himself again. Mr. Freeman remained implacably standing. Mr. Aubrey shuffled papers, which gave Charles time he did not want to absorb the usual intimidating atmosphere of such places: the learned volumes, the rolls of sheepskin bound in green ferret, the mournful box-files of dead cases ranged high around the room like the urns of an overpopulated columbarium.

  The old solicitor looked severely up.

  “I think, Mr. Montague, that the facts of this abominable breach of engagement are not in dispute. I do not know what construction your client has put upon his conduct to you. But he has himself provided abundant evidence of his own guilt in this letter to Mr. Freeman, though I note that with the usual impudence of his kind he has sought to—”

  “Mr. Aubrey, such language in these circumstances—”

  Serjeant Murphy pounced, “Would you prefer to hear the language I should use, Mr. Montague—and in open court?”

  Montague took a breath and looked down. Old Aubrey stared at him with a massive disapproval. “Montague, I knew your late grandfather well. I fancy he would have thought twice before acting for such a client as yours—but let that pass for the nonce. I consider this letter…” and he held it up, as if with tongs “… I consider this disgraceful letter adds most impertinent insult to an already gross injury, both by its shameless attempt at self-exoneration and the complete absence from it of any reference to the criminal and sordid liaison that the writer well knows is the blackest aspect of his crime.” He glowered at Charles. “You may, sir, have thought Mr. Freeman not to be fully cognizant of your amours. You are wrong. We know the name of the female with whom you have entered into such base conversation. We have a witness to circumstances I find too disgusting to name.”

  Charles flushed red. Mr. Freeman’s eyes bored into him. He could only lower his head; and curse Sam. Montague spoke.

  “My client did not come here to defend his conduct.”

  “Then you would not defend an action?”

  “A person of your eminence in our profession must know that I cannot answer that question.”

  Serjeant Murphy intervened again. “You would not defend an action if one were brought?”

  “With respect, sir, I must reserve judgment on that matter.”

  A vulpine smile distorted the serjeant-at-law’s lips.

  “The judgment is not at issue, Mr. Montague.”

  “May we proceed, Mr. Aubrey?”

  Mr. Aubrey glanced at the Serjeant, who nodded grim assent.

  “This is not an occasion, Mr. Montague, when I should advise too much standing upon plea.” He shuffled papers again. “I will be brief. My advice to Mr. Freeman has been clear. In my long experience, my very long experience, this is the vilest example of dish
onorable behavior I have ever had under my survey. Even did not your client merit the harsh judgment he would inevitably receive, I believe firmly that such vicious conduct should be exhibited as a warning to others.” He left a long silence, then, for the words to sink deep. Charles wished he could control the blood in his cheeks. Mr. Freeman at least was now looking down; but Serjeant Murphy knew very well how to use a flushing witness. He put on what admiring junior counsel called his basilisk quiz, in which irony and sadism were nicely prominent.

  Mr. Aubrey, in a somber new key, went on. “However, for reasons I shall not go into, Mr. Freeman has elected to show a mercy the case in no way warrants. He does not, upon conditions, immediately have it in mind to proceed.”

  Charles swallowed, and glanced at Montague.

  “I am sure my client is grateful to yours.”

  “I have, with esteemed advice…” Mr. Aubrey bowed briefly towards the serjeant, who bobbed his head without taking his eyes off the wretched Charles “… prepared an admission of guilt. I should instruct you that Mr. Freeman’s decision not to proceed immediately is most strictly contingent upon your client’s signing, on this occasion and in our presence, and witnessed by all present, this document.”

  And he handed it to Montague, who glanced at it, then looked up.

  “May I request five minutes’ discussion in private with my client?”

  “I am most surprised you should find discussion necessary.” He puffed up a little, but Montague stood firm. “Then very well, very well. If you must.”

  So Harry Montague and Charles found themselves back in the funereal waiting room. Montague read the document, then handed it drily to Charles.

  “Well, here’s your medicine. You’ve got to take it, dear boy.”

  And while Montague stared out at the window, Charles read the admission of guilt.