Mantissa

by John Fowles

  She casts a look towards the door, then once more turns away. There is a silence. She draws up her legs a little, turns away a fraction more.

  “I’m cold.”

  He goes and fetches the green bathrobe; returns to the bed and drapes it roughly over her shoulders. Then he sits down again on the chair. She says nothing, but then, with a curious slowness, as if she hopes he may not notice, she lets her body sag and her face sink down into the pillow. The silence grows. Her left hand moves surreptitiously up from under the bathrobe and touches her eyes. There is a faint, stifled outbreath. He stands and goes to the bed again, half extends a hand towards her shoulder, but then changes his mind. Another stifled outbreath. He sits on the side of the bed, his back to her, untouching; but speaks more neutrally.

  “We’re not being very consistent.”

  Her voice is almost a whisper, on the brink of breaking.

  “It’s because you’ll never admit you’re wrong about anything. You’re so unkind to me. You don’t know how alone I feel.”

  “We were both enjoying it. Until you –”

  “I can’t enjoy it when I have no status at all. When I don’t even know who I’m really supposed to be. When I know it may end at any moment.”

  “I had no intention of ending it.”

  “Well how was I to know?”

  “It was perfectly jolly teasing.”

  “No it wasn’t. You were needling me all the time. Just taking advantage of my helplessness.”

  “Now you’re being paranoiac.”

  “I’m not.” He feels her shift, and glances around. She is looking at him over the bathrobe, her eyes still wet; and personifying every hurt and helpless female face, caught between reproach and appeal for sympathy, since time began. “I didn’t even exist at all a few hours ago. I’m as innocent as a newborn baby. You don’t realize.”

  It is a face even more beautiful and seductive in tears than in its other states. He turns rather sharply away.

  “I didn’t start it.”

  “But you did. You gave me that whole impossible spiel about the satyr to deliver and then promptly told me I was lying. That I’m as chaste as a go-go dancer. You know, it’s like being a pimp, then accusing one of your girls of being a whore.”

  “I take the expression back. Consider it erased.”

  “I suddenly felt, what am I doing here letting this total stranger humiliate and insult me like this – distort what I really am. I mean I know I’m technically nothing. But what I begin to feel I would be if I wasn’t. My true, serious nature.”

  “I’ve already admitted I’m wrong about her. Erato.”

  “I don’t care about her. I care about me.”

  “All right.”

  “I’m not like that. I know I’m not.”

  “I’ve said all right.”

  “It was so crude. So blatant.”

  “I’m prepared to admit that making you so incredibly beautiful was a mistake on my part.”

  “You don’t begin to understand what women like me are about.”

  “I realize I should have given you a heavy chin, fat legs, a squint, acne, bad breath… I don’t know. Whatever would have given your true serious nature a chance to shine through.”

  There is a silence.

  “It’s too late for that now.”

  “I don’t see why. I was just thinking. I’ve already changed your appearance twice. Full consultation this time, of course. You could tell me the specific ways in which you’d like to be totally unattractive to men.”

  “You only changed my clothes. Not my basic body. It would seem absurd.”

  “I could always drag in a deus ex machina. Let me think. We leave here together, we drive away, we have a terrible car crash, you are crippled and hideously disfigured for life, once more I suffer a major amnesia, ten years later we meet again by chance and I fall in love with you in your wheelchair. For purely spiritual reasons, of course.”

  He steals a look back at her face. It is turned away, against the pillow. The tears are over, but it has something of the grave inturnedness of a child’s, after a tantrum; that sad first consciousness of what adulthood will bring. When she speaks it is in a quiet, cool voice.

  “I rather thought you were trying to preserve the classical unities.”

  “With Erato, yes. But now we’ve dropped her…”

  “It seems terribly contrived to me. A car crash.”

  “Then how about one of those splendidly inconclusive endings?”

  Again she is slow to answer.

  “I’m not quite sure what you mean.”

  “Here we are. It hasn’t worked. We show how splendidly mature and contemporary we are by agreeing it hasn’t worked. We dress, we walk out… I begin to see it, I like it. We walk out, we leave the hospital, we cross the forecourt, we stop in the street. Just a man and a woman, in a world where nothing works anyway. We can’t even find the two taxis we need. Not that we’d really mind, we’d both be so enormously relieved at the thought that we were never going to see each other again. You’d say ‘Well…’ and I’d say something trite in reply, like ‘Well’ as well. We’d smile briefly and wryly at our banality, then shake hands. Turn our backs, walk quickly away in opposite directions. Perhaps I might sneak one last glance back, but you’d already have disappeared for eternity among the passing throng and the stench of traffic pollution. I wouldn’t have to spell out a moral. I go into a future mercifully without imagination. You go into a future mercifully without existence. How does that sound?” But he goes on before she can answer. “The critics would love it. They adore downbeat endings. It shows how brave they are, leading upbeat lives themselves.”

  She says nothing for a long moment. Then she raises herself on an elbow, and touches a last small wetness from her eyes.

  “I suppose you couldn’t imagine some cigarettes – and a lighter and ashtray?”

  He stands, like some remiss host. “Of course. Any particular brand?”

  “I have a feeling I’d be rather fond of Turkish, actually.”

  “Some grass?”

  She shakes her head quickly. “No no. I’m sure I’ve been through that phase.”

  “Right.”

  He gives three quick snaps of thumb and finger. Instantly an onyx ashtray, a gold lighter, a silver cigarette-box appear on the bed beside her; so instantly, that she starts back a little. She picks an oval cigarette out of the box. Leaning across, he picks up the lighter and holds the flame out for her. She breathes out smoke, then holds the cigarette away with cocked wrist. “Thanks.”

  Clutching the bathrobe across her breasts, she shifts and sits upright; then tucks it securely under her armpits. He bends solicitously.

  “Anything else?”

  She gives his inquiring face a shy, faintly rueful glance. “Well actually… would it be asking too much? As a matter of fact I seem to be the teeniest bit nearsighted.”

  “My dear girl, you should have said. Any particular sort of frame?”

  She inhales on her cigarette, staring at the door, then breathes the smoke out; another shy glance at him.

  “I think I’d usually wear those blue-tinted ones with large circular lenses. Just a thin gold rim. Opticians call them ‘Jane Austen,’ I believe.”

  “Like this?”

  His hand holds out the glasses.

  “That’s super. Most kind.” She puts them on, adjusts the earpieces, then looks up at him with an embarrassed smile. “So silly. All these ridiculous petty details.”

  “Not at all. Anything else?”

  “Only if it wouldn’t be any trouble.”

  “Please.”

  “It’s just this green.” She touches the bathrobe. “I suspect it’s not quite me.”

  “Choose.”

  “Something wine-dark? The color of mulberry juice? I don’t know if you remember that passage in Proust… oh that’s lovely. Perfect. Exactly what I had in mind. Thank you so much.”

  “Coffee?”r />
  “No.” She waves the cigarette sideways. “This is fine.”

  “No trouble. Just another couple of lines.”

  “Really. Thanks all the same.”

  She smokes for a few moments in silence, contemplating her bare feet below the hem of the new robe. He sits on the chair. At last she looks up with a diffident smile.

  “Miles, I don’t want to start another argument – may I call you Miles?”

  “Please.”

  “You were kind enough a minute ago to suggest that even though I don’t really exist, I might from now on be allowed some say – I think you said consultation – in our relationship.”

  “Absolutely. What you said about certain elementary freedoms… point taken.”

  “Except – I mean forgive me for harking back to a hatchet we’ve both agreed to bury, but you do still rather seem to be laying down the law about our mutual future.”

  “That was the last thing I intended. It was simply an idea. Wide open to discussion. You don’t like it?”

  She smooths the robe.

  “It’s just that I should have thought you would have made your point more validly by regarding what’s happened so far as a kind of surrealistic preamble – if you like a reversal of normal narrative development – to a very different kind of relationship between us in a much more realistic external context.” She smooths the robe again over her legs. “One where we would meet quite normally and develop a casual sort of friendship. I mean, obviously well this side of ever going to bed together. We’d perhaps go to the theatre occasionally. Discuss books. Visit art exhibitions. That sort of thing.”

  “Ah.”

  “I’d just like to suggest that since all the boring bed scenes would have taken place in the fantasy preamble, you could then institute a much cooler and more contemporary tone and concentrate on the really serious and adult things. Our cultural backgrounds. Politics. Issues like abortion and street violence. Nuclear disarmament. Ecology. Whales. White bread. Whatever it was that prevented us from fully committing to each other.”

  “The subtler nuances of so much liberal Angst?”

  “Precisely.”

  “You see a… cultural background for yourself?”

  “I think I’d like to be… well, perhaps a graduate in English? Cambridge? I feel I might have written one or two commercially not very successful but in certain circles quite widely respected books of poetry. Something like that. I’d probably be an associate editor with one of the literary magazines.”

  “A very laid-back, fastidious, morally scrupulous sort of girl?”

  “If you don’t think it’s too vain. Too improbable.”

  “Not at all.”

  She looks modestly down. “Thank you.”

  “And me?”

  She taps the cigarette into the onyx ashtray. “Well, I rather see you as one of those well-to-do businessmen with vaguely artistic interests. Not quite knowing what to make of me, or my milieu, or anything really, outside your office. And making money. I suppose I mean baffled, even frightened by me and my greater sophistication, the much more intellectual world I work in. You know?” She adds quickly, “Purely to form a realistic contrast with this. Of course.”

  “I see.”

  She looks at him a moment through her blue-tinted lenses, then raises a hand and touches down her tousled hair, then tucks the robe discreetly in again.

  “Miles, I’d just like to say one thing, while we are being more open with each other. I feel I was rather unnecessarily emotional and outspoken a few minutes ago. I do have some sympathy with your problems. Especially as I realize I constitute one of them. I know the overwhelming stress the prevailing capitalist hegemony puts on sexuality. How difficult it is to escape.” She draws up her knees and sits with her legs slightly curled, sideways, beneath the purple robe. Then she gives him a frank, if faintly owlish, look through her spectacles. “I’m trying to say, of course do do it your way. If you feel mine’s too difficult for you. It well may be.”

  “I’d like to have a stab at it.”

  “I’m seriously not insisting.”

  “I think you’re being extraordinarily generous over the mess I’ve made of it.”

  “I know there has to be give and take.”

  “Except so far I’ve done all the taking.”

  She shrugs. “But as technically I don’t exist…”

  “But you do. You’ve just shown you’ve a will of your own.”

  She makes a little downward moue, self-deprecating. “Hardly a will, I’m afraid. Just a whisper of an instinct.”

  There is silence for a moment or two. Again she smooths the purple toweling.

  “This really is a heavenly color. I adore bruised purple.”

  “Good.”

  She pauses, then resumes the more serious train of their conversation.

  “I also don’t want you to feel guilty about the… taking. I’m not totally blind to biological realities. I’d hate you to think I’m just one more blue-stocking. Certain of your caresses – you must have realized. What you made me do in the beginning, in spite of myself I… something in me was stirred.”

  “I think that makes it even worse. I was simply taking advantage of your being normally female.”

  “I was just as bad. That story about the satyr…” She covers her eyes in self-distaste.

  “I provoked it.”

  “I know, but I embroidered it terribly. When I ought to have resisted telling it at all. I do hope you’ll always cut that particular passage out, if you ever… you know.”

  “It was all my fault.”

  “It takes two.”

  “You’re being much too hard on yourself.”

  “I honestly don’t think I am.” She goes back to smoothing the robe again, over her knee. “It was just the way you threw me in at the deep end. Sexually. It caught me off balance. I somehow simply realized, from the very first page of my existence, that I was basically rather a shy person, despite being apparently quite attractive to men.”

  “Very attractive.”

  “Seriously, I’d rather just be ‘quite.’ Not perhaps without a certain hint of underlying sensuality, but definitely nothing too voulu. The sort of person who has to be aroused very slowly and gently.”

  “I understand.”

  She keeps her eyes lowered. “What I really want to say is that I think I would be prepared to accept some compromise about the nature of our relationship in the eventual future, if you insisted. When we knew each other better.”

  “You mean the one where you’re the highbrow lady poet and I’m the crass businessman?”

  She gives him a quickly anxious look, full of aghast sincerity.

  “Please, I didn’t say that at all, Miles. Not crass. If you were that, obviously I… my character wouldn’t look at you. A perfectly nice man in his way. Just a little… limited and deformed by his milieu and profession.”

  “I’m not absolutely clear what compromise you had in mind.”

  “If you would prefer them to… well, to put it quite, quite baldly, have a rather more overtly physical relationship in the end.”

  “To make it?”

  “If you want to put it that way.”

  “I sort of saw her as too choosy for that.”

  “Oh I think she would be for a long time. Certainly for many chapters. Perhaps to the very end.”

  “The climax?”

  She looks down, but with the trace of a prim smile.

  “You’re incorrigible.”

  “It wasn’t intended.”

  “I’m sure it was. But never mind.”

  “I still can’t quite see how it would happen. Given the basic character premise.”

  “That’s really not for me to say. Your department.”

  “I want it to be yours as well.”

  She looks down. “It seems so absurd. Like teaching one’s grandmother to suck eggs. You must have had so much more experience. I feel so terribly conscious I�
�m only a few pages old.”

  “Never mind. You’re learning fast.”

  “Spare my blushes.”

  “Not at all. I mean it.”

  She leaves a little silence, then slips him a look.

  “You’re absolutely sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  She stubs out her cigarette. “Then just out of my head, very much off the cuff… I suppose some crisis in the relationship, your becoming more and more desperate for me, your wanting to leave your wife for me –”

  “Which wife is this?”

  She glances up, surprised. “I just imagined you’d be married. It’s how I see you.”

  “So long as I know.”

  She folds her arms and stares at the door. “Anyway, one hot summer night you come around to my Knightsbridge flat to thrash it all out one last time, why you love me, why I ought to love you, and so on, and by chance I’ve gone to bed early and have only a short nightdress on.” She hesitates a moment, then twitches at the robe. “Or this. Whatever. It’s very close, there’s thunder in the air, I don’t want to let you in, but you insist, and suddenly somehow everything boils over, your previous diffidence becomes dark desire, your manhood is at last inflamed, without a word you spring and tear the flimsy garment from my bare shoulders, I scream and struggle, I half escape, I manage to stagger to the French windows and out into the steamy pouring rain, you –”

  “It’s a ground-floor flat?”

  “Yes, of course. Obviously.”

  “I was just worried about the neighbors, if you scream.”

  “All right, I hiss low words of passionate hatred. I haven’t worked out all the minutiae, Miles.”

  “Sorry. I interrupted.”

  “It is the first time I’ve ever done this.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’ve forgotten where I was.”

  “Just outside the French windows. In the steamy pouring rain.”

  “I run onto the lawn, but you’re much too agile and strong, too animal, and you catch me and throw me on the soft turf, I twist and wrestle, you take brutal possession of me against my will, I weep as your pent-up lust ravages my deepest principles.” She leaves a little pause. “I’m only giving you the rough idea.”