The Ebony Tower-Short Stories - John Fowles

by John Fowles

  'I know all sorts of tricks.'

  He held out the empty glass.

  'I'll try to imagine them. While I'm shaving.'

  She clasped her hands over her heart and threw her eyes up. Then she moved and took the glass. She stood over him a moment.

  'I think old Di's crazy.' She reached out a finger and dabbed his nose. 'You're almost dishy. For a born square.'

  And there was a second Parthian shot. Her head poked back round the door.

  'Oh, and I couldn't help noticing. Quite well hung, too.'

  Her kindness, frankness; God bless the poor in taste. But that little touch of warmth and affection faded so fast, almost before her footsteps died away. David lay back in his bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to understand what had happened, where he had gone wrong, why she had condemned him to this. He felt drowned in disillusion, intolerably depressed and shaken. The unendurable day ahead. Her body, her face, her psyche, her calling: she was out there somewhere in the trees, waiting for him. It was impossible, but he had fallen in love; if not with her wholly, at least wholly with the idea of love. If she had stood in the door that moment, begged him not to leave, to take her away... he didn't know. Perhaps if they had gone to bed together, if he had just had her naked through the brief night, the sense of failure, of eternally missed chance, would have been less brutal.

  But he knew even that was an illusion. A final separation then would have been impossible. Even if he had gone away to Paris, as he must now; perhaps from anywhere else he could have gone away for good, but here... they would have had to meet again. Somehow, somewhere.

  He had escaped that. But it felt like a sentence, not a pardon.

  By midday, when he had driven a third or so of the two hundred and fifty miles to Paris, he had still not recovered. All but the automaton who drove down the endless miles of route nationale remained at Coët. The old man had continued at his most affable over breakfast, David really must come again and bring his wife, must forgive him his faults, his age, his 'maundering on'... he was even wished well in his own painting; but that did not compensate for the bitter knowledge that the token acceptance of the invitation was a farce. He was banned for life now, he could never bring Beth here. They shook hands as he stood by the car. He kissed Anne on both cheeks, and managed to whisper a last message.

  'Tell her... what we said?' She nodded. 'And kiss her for me.'

  The ghost of a dry grimace. 'Hey, we're not that desperate.' But her brown eyes belied the flipness; and it was the last time he had felt like smiling.

  The journey had begun badly: not three hundred yards after he had closed the gate on the private road to Coët, something orange-brown, a mouse, but too big for a mouse, and oddly sinuous, almost like a snake, but too small for a snake, ran across the road just in front of his car. It seemed to disappear under the wheels. David slowed and glanced back; and saw a minute blemish on the dark tarmac of the deserted forest lane. Something, a faint curiosity, a masochism, a not wanting to leave, any excuse, made him stop and walk back. It was a weasel. One of his wheels must have run straight over it. It was dead, crushed. Only the head had escaped. A tiny malevolent eye still stared up, and a trickle of blood, like a red flower, had spilt from the gaping mouth. He stared down at it for a moment, then turned and went back to the car. The key of the day had been set.

  All along the road to Rennes he looked for a figure by a parked white Renault. He did not completely lose hope until he got on the autoroute that bypassed the city to the south. Then he knew the agony of never seeing her again. It seemed almost immediately like a punishment. Her disappearance that morning proved it: he had the blame. His crime had been realizing too late; at the orchard gate, when she had broken away; and he had let her, fatal indecision. Even back in the house, something in him, as she had known, had asked not to be taken at his word. He had failed both in the contemporary and the medieval sense; as someone who wanted sex, as someone who renounced it.

  His mind slid away to imaginary scenarios. Beth's plane would crash. He had never married. He had, but Diana had been Beth. She married Henry, who promptly died. She appeared in London, she could not live without him, he left Beth. In all these fantasies they ended at Coët, in a total harmony of work and love and moonlit orchard.

  Futile, they would have disgraced an adolescent; and they compounded his bleakness, for it was also a kind of shock, though the reality of those first few minutes after she had left him had already sunk into his unconscious, that this could happen to him, could disturb and upset him so deeply; and what it said of a past complacency. It defined so well what he lacked. His inadequacy was that he did not believe in sin. Henry knew sin was a challenge to life; not an unreason, but an act of courage and imagination. He sinned out of need and instinct; David did not, out of fear. What Anne had said: just to spite the old bastard. He was obsessed with means, not ends; with what people thought of him, not what he thought of himself. His terror of vanity, selfishness, the Id, which he had to conceal under qualities he called 'honesty' and 'fairmindedness'... that was why he secretly so enjoyed reviewing, the activity pandered to that side of him. The ultimate vanity (and folly, in an artist) was not to seem vain. That explained the high value he put in his own painting on understatement, technical decency, fitting the demands of his own critical-verbal vocabulary--the absurd way he always reviewed his own work in his imagination as he painted it. It all added up to the same thing: a fear of challenge.

  And that was precisely what had happened to him: a challenge, and well beyond the moral and sexual. It had been like a trap, he saw this now as well. One sailed past that preposterously obvious reef represented by the first evening with the old man, and one's self-blindness, priggishness, so-called urbanity, love of being liked, did the rest. The real rock of truth had lain well past the blue lagoon.

  The further he drove, the less inclined he felt to excuse himself. There was a kind of superficial relief at being able to face Beth more or less openly--but even that seemed a consolation prize awarded the wrong man. He had finally stayed 'faithful' by benefit of a turned key. And even that, the being technically innocent, that it should still mean something to him, betrayed his real crime: to dodge, escape, avert.

  Coët had been a mirror, and the existence he was returning to sat mercilessly reflected and dissected in its surface... and how shabby it now looked, how insipid and anodyne, how safe. Riskiess, that was the essence of it: was why, for instance, he was driving much faster than usual. Between the towns the roads were comparatively empty, he was making ample time, the wretched plane didn't land till after seven. One killed all risk, one refused all challenge, and so one became an artificial man. The old man's secret, not letting anything stand between self and expression; which wasn't a question of outward artistic aims, mere styles and techniques and themes. But how you did it; how wholly, how bravely you faced up to the constant recasting of yourself.

  Slowly and inexorably it came to David that his failure that previous night was merely the symbol, not the crux of the matter. He remembered the old man's crude and outlandish pun on the word Mouse; if one wanted signs as to the real nature of the rejection. Bungling the adventure of the body was trivial, part of the sexual comedy. But he had never really had, or even attempted to give himself, the far greater existential chance. He had had doubts about his work before; but not about his own fundamental nature, or at any rate that there was not in it the potential wherewithal to lay the ghost that profoundly haunts every artist: his lastingness. He had a dreadful vision of being in a dead end, born into a period of art history future ages would dismiss as a desert; as Constable and Turner and the Norwich School had degenerated into the barren academicism of the midcentury and later. Art had always gone in waves. Who knew if the late twentieth century might not be one of its most cavernous troughs? He knew the old man's answer: it was. Or it was unless you fought bloody tooth and fucking nail against some of its most cherished values and supposed victories.

 
Perhaps abstraction, the very word, gave the game away. You did not want how you lived to be reflected in your painting; or because it was so compromised, so settled-for-the-safe, you could only try to camouflage its hollow reality under craftsmanship and good taste. Geometry. Safety hid nothingness.

  What the old man still had was an umbilical cord to the past; a step back, he stood by Pisanello's side. In spirit, anyway. While David was encapsulated in book-knowledge, art as social institution, science, subject, matter for grants and committee discussion. That was the real kernel of his wildness. David and his generation, and all those to come, could only look back, through bars, like caged animals, born in captivity, at the old green freedom. That described exactly the experience of those last two days: the laboratory monkey allowed a glimpse of his lost true self. One was misled by the excess in vogue, the officially blessed indiscipline, the surface liberties of contemporary art; which all sprang from a profound frustration, a buried but not yet quite extinguished awareness of non-freedom. It ran through the whole recent history of art education in Britain.

  That notorious diploma show where the Fine Arts students had shown nothing but blank canvases--what truer comment on the stale hypocrisy of the teaching and the helpless bankruptcy of the taught? One could not live by one's art, therefore one taught a travesty of its basic principles; pretending that genius, making it, is arrived at by overnight experiment, histrionics, instead of endless years of solitary obstinacy: that the production of the odd instant success, like a white rabbit out of a hat, excuses the vicious misleading of thousands of innocents; that the maw of the teaching cess-pit, the endless compounding of the whole charade, does not underpin the entire system. When schools lie Perhaps it was happening in the other arts--in writing, music. David did not know. All he felt was a distress, a nausea at his own. Castration. The triumph of the eunuch. He saw, how well he saw behind the clumsiness of the old man's attack; that sneer at Guernica. Turning away from nature and reality had atrociously distorted the relationship between painter and audience; now one painted for intellects and theories. Not people; and Jworst of all, not for oneself. Of course it paid dividends, in economic and vogue terms, but what had really been set up by I this jettisoning of the human body and its natural physical perceptions was a vicious spiral, a vortex, a drain to nothingness, to a painter and a critic agreed on only one thing: that only they exist and have value. A good gravestone; for all the scum who didn't care a damn.

  One sheltered behind notions of staying 'open' to contemporary currents; forgetting the enormously increased velocity of progress and acceptance, how quickly now the avant-garde became art pompier; the daring, platitudinous. It was-not just his own brand of abstraction that was a fault, but the whole headlong post-war chain, abstract expressionism, neo-primitivism, op art and pop art, conceptualism, photo-realism... ii faut couper la racine, all right. But such rootlessness, orbiting in frozen outer space, cannot have been meant. They were like lemmings, at the mercy of a suicidal drive, seeking Lebensraum in an arctic sea; in a bottomless night, blind to everything but their own illusion.

  The ebony tower.

  As if to echo his inner gloom, the sky clouded over as he approached the lie de France and the dull, stubbled plains round Chartres. Summer had died, autumn was. His life was of one year only; an end now to all green growth. Ridiculous, as he told himself at once. And yet the acute depression remained.

  He came at last to the outskirts of Paris. The business of finding where he needed distracted him a little from all this soulsearching. Soon after five he booked into a likely-looking hotel near Orly. They were giving Paris a miss, the destination in the Ardche was a friend's cottage, another long day's driving. But they might stop somewhere. He dreaded the tomorrow, either way.

  He had a shower and forced himself to re-read his draft introduction to The Art of Henry Breasley; while his impressions were still fresh, to see what needed changing, expansion, more emphasis. It was hopeless. Phrases and judgments that only a few days previously had pleased him... ashes, botch. The banality, the jargon, the pretence of authority. The reality of Coët rose again behind the tawdry words. He lay back on the hotel bed and closed his eyes. A little later he was on his feet and staring out of the window. For the first time in many years he had felt the sting of imminent tears. Absurd, absurd. He would die if he never saw her again. He searched for writing-paper, but there wasn't any in the room, it wasn't that kind of hotel, an endless one-nighter. He took out his note-pad: but could only sit and stare at it. Too much. Like messing on with a painting one knew was no good; that one could only walk away from, without looking back, to one's separate door in the night.

  Underlying all this there stood the knowledge that he would not change; he would go on painting as before, he would forget this day, he would find reasons to interpret everything differently, as a transient losing his head, a self-indulgent folly. A scar would grow over it, then fall away, and the skin would be as if there had never been a wound. He was crippled by common sense, he had no ultimate belief in chance and its exploitation, the missed opportunity would become the finally sensible decision, the decent thing; the flame of deep fire that had singed him a dream, a moment's illusion; her reality just one more unpursued idea kept among old sketchbooks at the back of a studio cupboard.

  But till then, he knew: he had refused (and even if he had never seen her again) a chance of a new existence, and the ultimate quality and enduringness of his work had rested on acceptance. He felt a delayed but bitter envy of the old man. In the end it all came down to what one was born with: one either had the temperament for excess and a ruthless egocentricity, for keeping thought and feeling in different compartments, or one didn't; and David didn't. The abominable and vindictive injustice was that art is fundamentally amoral. However hard one tried, one was hopelessly handicapped: all to the pigs, none to the deserving. Coët had remorselessly demonstrated what he was born, still was, and always would be: a decent man and--eternal also-ran.

  That last was the label that seemed to have been lurking for hours when it finally came to him. He was left staring at the petered rise, which he saw almost literally above the dreary sea of roofs, wet now in a drizzle, outside the hotel: the collapsed parallel of what he was beside the soaring line of all that he might have been.

  He got to Orly to find the flight was delayed for half an hour. There was fog at Heathrow. David hated airports at the best of times, the impersonality, herding, sense of anonymous passage; the insecurity. He stood by the window of the visitors' lounge, staring out into the flat distances. Dusk. Coët was in another universe; one and an eternal day's drive away. He tried to imagine what they were doing. Diana laying the table, Anne having her French lesson. The silence, the forest, the old man's voice. Macmillan barking. He suffered the most intense pang of the most terrible of all human deprivations; which is not of possession, but of knowledge. What she said; what she felt; what she thought. It pierced deeper than all questionings about art, or his art, his personal destiny. For a few terrible moments he saw himself, and all mankind, quite clear. Something in him, a last hope of redemption, of free will, burnt every boat; turned; ran for salvation. But the boats proof to all flame, the ultimate old masters, kept the tall shadow of him where he was; static and onward, returning home, a young Englishman staring at a distant row of frozen runway lights.

  The flight arrival was announced and he went down to where he could watch for Beth. He had brought her holiday luggage in the car, and she came out with the first passengers. A wave. He raised his hand: a new coat, surprise for him, a little flounce and jiggle to show it off. Gay Paree. Free woman. Look, no children.

  She comes with the relentless face of the present tense; with a dry delight, small miracle that he is actually here. He composes his face into an equal certainty.

  She stops a few feet short of him.

  'Hi.'

  She bites her lips.

  'I thought for one ghastly moment.'

 
She pauses.

  'You were my husband.'

  Rehearsed. He smiles.

  He kisses her mouth.

  They walk away together, talking about their children.

  He has a sense of retarded waking, as if in a post-operational state of consciousness some hours returned but not till now fully credited; a numbed sense of something beginning to slip inexorably away. A shadow of a face, hair streaked with gold, a closing door. I wanted you to. One knows one dreamed, yet cannot remember. The drowning cry, jackbooted day.

  She says, 'And you, darling?'

  He surrenders to what is left: to abstraction.

  'I survived.'

  Eliduc

  A Personal Note

  The working title of this collection of stories was Variations, by which I meant to suggest variations both on certain themes in previous books of mine and in methods of narrative presentation--though I should hate readers to feel themselves at a disadvantage because they are unfamiliar with my work or cannot swear hand on heart that they know the distinction between récit and discours. They may be reassured. One reason the working title was discarded was that the first professional readers, who do know my books, could see no justifications for Variations whatever... beyond a very private mirage in the writer's mind. I have deferred to their judgment and, beyond this mention of it, kept the illusion to myself.

  However, The Ebony Tower is also a variation of a more straightforward kind, and the source of its mood, as also partly of its theme and setting, is so remote and forgotten--though I believe seminal in the history of fiction--that I should like to resurrect a fragment of it. Besides, the unexplained mystery, as every agnostic and novelist knows, is black proof of an ultimate shirking of creative responsibility. I have a dead weasel on my conscience; and deeper still, a dead woman.

  As a student of French at Oxford, I read omnivorously, though much more out of ignorance than intelligence. I had very little notion of my real tastes, having swallowed the then prevalent myth that only one's teachers had a right to personal preferences. This is not an approach I could attempt to sell to any student today, but it did have one advantage. Likes and dislikes were eventually formed on a strictly pragmatic basis; I learnt to value what I couldn't, over the years, forget. One such obstinate survivor was Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes. A number of young thesis-writers have now told me they can see no significant parallels between Le Grand Meaulnes and my own novel, The Magus. I must have severed the umbilical cord--the real connection requires such a metaphor--much more neatly than I supposed at the time; or perhaps modern academic criticism is blind to relationships that are far more emotional than structural.