Daniel Martin (22 page)

I then alternated between moods of not caring a tinker’s curse and less frequent ones of regretting the world I had cut myself off from. I didn’t miss Nell at all except in minor domestic ways. But then Andrea moved in, and even that need was cancelled. I did miss Caro, though disgracefully little, if I am honest; I think the major loss seemed to be of Anthony and Jane. It told me something of why I had married Nell in the first place; but it did not help what is it in Langland about love being lighter than a linden-leaf, more piercing than the needle’s point? my sense of rejection.

I had parted with Anthony on the understanding that mine was the next move. The weeks passed, I did nothing. I can’t pretend it was Andrea’s fault; she was un-possessive, she made no demands on the future. But that virtue in her did not make returning to Nell any more attractive. In the end it was Nell who moved, by means of a solicitor’s letter. I did not defend the action. Nell was ice-cold in court she came alone, without Anthony or Jane and I think did not look at me once throughout the proceedings. If I looked at her, it was almost out of curiosity. She seemed already of the past, like a character from a forgotten play. I had intended to have a word with her afterwards, to ask after Caro, to establish some kind of truce now that the divide was final; but my first attempt towards that was cut dead. It never even came to words. I hadn’t pressed for access while the legal machine was rumbling on, but now I had it officially. Caro had had her third birthday, and I wanted to see her. I wrote and asked Anthony what to do about it, it was eventually arranged that I should go down to Wytham. Nell would not be there.

So I drove down one day to find that Anthony had also funked a meeting. The door was opened by Jane. There were her own two children and Caro, whom she successfully used throughout my hours there as a foil to anything but a very cool and armoured politeness. She claimed that Anthony had a noon tutorial and a busy afternoon, and Wytham was too far to get back for lunch. I felt defeated long before I left. Every endeavour I made to get us off the trivial and immediate was rebuffed. Did she think I was totally to blame? It was for me to judge. But she must have some opinion? What good would there be in her telling it? Not the tiniest reference was made to that summer day in our past. I was tempted to bring it up; but I knew it would receive nothing but a snub. I had not used it properly, I was unspeakable. So I nursed the grotesque unfairness of her blaming me for a sin she had first taught me to commit. It was almost as if my worst infidelity had been to her, not Nell. I knew she was putting on an act, she couldn’t be as calm and collected as she was pretending; yet something in her was not embarrassed, and that irritated me most. She was like some heroine from Jane Austen, a Fanny Price, deeply certain that she lived by some central moral tradition and deeply oblivious of the fact that the failure of anyone else to live by it might represent more than a contemptible lack of taste.

I discovered a little about Anthony and herself, how they were looking for a house in the city and about Nell. She, it seemed, had got a part-time job cataloguing in the Taylorian and might take a flat in the house, if they could find one large enough. I wondered if Anthony really wanted that, given his past secret feelings about Nell, but I couldn’t ask. A few facts were being given, not the realities behind them. She went off shopping after lunch with her own two children and left me for an hour with Caro. It seemed a very long hour, alone with a child I had grown a stranger to, in a house from which I was banned in everything except physical fact. The telephone rang, but I didn’t answer it. Jane said it would probably have been Anthony, when she returned. I tried to make her sorry for me over Caro, the difficulty I had had in keeping her amused, which was answered by something about children living in the present, and trying to preserve that; then that she was ‘afraid’ they all felt the less I saw of Caro at this stage, the better. We had to gear ourselves to her need of me, not mine for her. Jane said, She’ll look for you one day, I expect. That was the nearest I came to a kind word.

If she baffled me conversationally, she confused me in an even more frustrating way psychologically. Of the four of us we two had changed most, but in diametrically opposite directions. All her old flashes of teasing, of frankness, of intuitive warmth, seemed to have been extinguished. I was finding Andrea quite exceptionally pleasant to live with: we had no rows, but enough friendly arguments to stop existence becoming saccharine. She cooked well, she made love well, she had a perfect tact about my work, went out to do her own in the morning and came back every evening to help me with mine if I wanted or to tell me the latest gossip, if I wanted that. She was also, in a Continental rather than an English way, a genuine culture addict. I saw more new exhibitions and went to more concerts in a month with her than in a year previously with Nell. Yet for all this I left Wytham once again knowing that I wished I had married Jane. I can’t explain it. I hated her that day. Outwardly and consciously I left feeling deeply humiliated and telling myself that Anthony had turned her into a cold and lifeless female prig. I made up my mind I would never visit Caro in such circumstances again (and didn’t, from then on I met her in Oxford itself or Nell brought her to London).

I was bitterly sarcastic to Andrea about my reception, when I got back to town; too bitter, as she soon pointed out. I suppose I felt failed and fallen. Like Lucifer: I will exalt my throne above the stars of God… and set it among the stars of Hollywood. It continued to feel like that on occasion for several years more; a hollow ambition masking a just exile.

But my major sin was still to come, though I had had the thing in mind well before that visit to Wytham actually took place. I have no excuse whatever for what I did now, that is. At the time I saw reasons: the need to analyse it all, exorcize it, the belief that my treatment of this not very original situation was new in its depth and frankness, had a general application. A negative justification might have been that the film-script business, with its ready-found themes, was already making me lazy in invention. I did start the play with everyone fairly well disguised, and of course it remained so in terms of backgrounds and minor details. I made Anthony a public-school master in the West of England, myself an up-and-coming painter, Jane and Nell school-friends, not sisters. Anthony became a young Establishment Tartuffe, Jane his yes-saying wife; Nell, against my will, I had for dramatic reasons finally rather to flatter showing her ‘honestly’ torn between art and convention, whether or not to forgive the infidelity that sparked the action.

A number of rows with the painter were almost verbatim from our own; and a final scene, with the Anthony-figure justifying his interference to the now wifeless painter by a display of impervious self-righteousness was, as he must have recognized at once, a blatant parody of that first meeting we had had when Nell left me. It was technically one of the better scenes in an otherwise bad play, which aggravated its injury. Andrea failed me for once, letting sympathy cloud her usually clear view of what went and what didn’t. But I doubt if she could have stopped me: I was hell-bent on letting them know what I really felt and that I had much more power to take public revenge than they might imagine.

The play got very guarded reviews. There was a general complaint that the schoolmaster and his wife were caricatures, that the whole thing was too static in action, too one-sided in plot. One or two criticisms, including Barney’s shakedown, were sharply hostile. But the review I most feared and craved, like some tyro urban guerrilla with his first bomb, had already come. By a malign chance (not one I was responsible for or could avert) Oxford had been on the Out-of-town run. I have kept the letter, which is dated January 9th, 1957. Two evenings ago Jane and I saw The Victors here in Oxford.

I think the title is bad. It seemed to us a defeat of every human decency. It is not just a question of the vicious travesty of our true relationship that you have seen fit to put on the stage; or the fact that you know many people will immediately recognize, or think they recognize, the real names behind your totally (and I must presume deliberately) inadequate attempt to conceal them; not even of the incomprehensible way you have discharged most of your bile on Jane and myself—and over matters you must know have no foundation whatever in our actual behaviour. What shocks me far more than all this is your apparent desire to demonstrate that you are not responsible for your actions and that your inability to be faithful to Nell was accordingly her and our fault, not yours. This argues such a hopeless corruption of any normal sense of morality and I am certainly not writing as a Catholic or a philosopher, but simply as someone who once believed himself your close friend that very possibly this letter will mean nothing to you. I have serious doubts now as to whether you have any personal honesty or powers of self-judgment left.

No doubt all art has to be based on life; and no doubt much of it has to be based on life in the form of the artist’s own experience. I can also see that some such experience might justify public revenge. What I cannot see is how any responsible artist can use his art to transfer his own clear guilt, and in a closely circumstantial manner, to the innocent. Even if Jane and I were not Catholics, with Catholic views on the subject of marriage, the notion that we should have intrigued to make Nell leave you is ludicrous. In fact what advice we gave, right up to the divorce, was precisely the opposite of what you pretend we maliciously worked to achieve. The buried motive you imply at one point (that the pedagogic buffoon supposed to be myself is in love with the painter’s wife) is still more odious proof of your outrageous need to pervert reality. You are also gravely mistaken if you think that I am envious of your successful career. Whatever inclinations I might have had there could in any case not have survived this revelation of its effects on your character.

We have searched our consciences, gone through our more recent behaviour to you, and we still do not understand why we have deserved this. We no longer feel anger, but pity. I don’t know if it was something always inherent in your nature, or something in your present way of life, but our conclusion is that somewhere you have taken a very wrong road. We cannot believe that a part of you does not know this and that you will, if you ever recover your senses, bitterly regret that you ever wrote such a childishly vindictive essay in distortion.

We cannot answer you in kind or in public, we cannot sue you for libel, we can only suffer in silence. You knew that too, from the beginning. And what are we to tell Caroline, and our own children, when they are old enough to read and understand your play? ‘Genius forgives all’ is a dubious proposition at the best of times. And I do not think you come into that category.

We want no answer to this: no excuses, justifications, what you will. I have informed Nell that neither Jane nor myself will in any circumstances act again as intermediaries or provide a meeting-place for you and your daughter. From now on you will please deal with Nell’s solicitor about such arrangements. We cannot put any other interpretation on the play than that you intended to drive us to this. We are only too clearly dead for you; and from now on you must be dead for us.

It was handwritten and signed with his full name. I passed it straight to Andrea we were having breakfast and watched her face as she read. It stayed impassive when she looked up.

‘Surprised?’

‘Not really.’

‘Will you answer?’

‘Ears of stone. No point.’ She glanced back at the letter. ‘Of course they followed the party line over a reconciliation. But I bet you they got it through to Nell what they really thought about me.’ She still looked at the letter, as if it convinced her rather better than I did. ‘He’ll have loved composing every word of that little commination.’

‘What’s a commination?’

‘Ash Wednesday. God’s curse on all sinners.’

I told her then, because I so desperately needed to have at least one person on my side, about Jane. That gained me a partial absolution; in time, because we discussed it a lot, an almost total one, so far as Andrea was concerned. I think that in some way she equated Jane’s ‘duplicity’ with her own husband’s use of the same religion to justify his terrifying egomania.

For many years now I have accepted that Anthony was right. I deserved nothing else, and especially as he knew nothing of what had happened between Jane and myself. Only two years previously I had had to have it out with Caro, why I had written the wretched thing; it had proved useful, both as a test to myself that I had acquired objectivity and in opening up a previously forbidden area between us.

The Victors killed one other thing besides a friendship. I did write two more plays, but my heart was in neither of them. It is not only human kind that cannot bear too much reality.

It is absurd to speak of a feeling of estrangement so soon after meeting someone from whom one has been estranged for years; yet that was what Dan felt with Jane. His sense of discomfort was not lessened when they arrived at the hospital. She switched off the engine, then reached under the dashboard for a book. She held it on her lap a moment.

‘I’ll take you up, Dan. But Anthony wants to see you alone.’ She didn’t look, but she must have realized that he was taken aback. Once more his imagination had let him down: he had seen Anthony in bed, Jane on one side, himself on the other at, least that inducement to reunion, celebration of old times.

‘Why don’t we meet at the restaurant? I can get a cab or something.’

‘No really… ‘ She raised the book, she had come prepared to wait. Then she turned and opened her door, to cut any further discussion short. He wondered why she had left the announcement so late. Plainly something about it embarrassed her, like his very presence. She began talking a little too circumstantially, as they walked towards the entrance from the car-park, about how good the hospital was. Dan felt more and more like a soldier being pitched into battle without proper orders.

They got into a lift and rose to the third floor; down a corridor to a crossroads of them. A sister sat at a desk, writing. As Jane went forward, she looked up, smiled in recognition, but Dan couldn’t hear what was being said. Jane was to go in first and warn Anthony that he was there. He watched her disappear down one of the side-corridors Two men in dressing-gowns passed, arguing about a chess-game. He wanted to smoke, but there was a sign forbidding it behind the sisters’ desk. She had returned to her writing. Once more Dan began rehearsing sentences he knew he probably wouldn’t say; and stared at a notice-board, without registering a single thing its pieces of paper meant. There was some absurd echo of childhood, waiting outside the headmaster’s study. He wished he hadn’t come. It was a scene he would have avoided in a script. A last he heard Jane say his name.

He followed her down the side-corridor. She stopped some yards short of an open door at the end.

‘In there.’

‘Right.’

‘Not too much commiseration. It doesn’t help.’

‘I’ll try.’

She hesitated.

‘Well. I’ll leave you to it.’

Still she hesitated, as if she knew she should say more. But then with a nervously formal smile, as if she had done her part, delivered her parcel, she turned back to the open space where the corridors met.

Anthony was not in bed, but sitting in a wheelchair by the window; a closed glass door beside it led out to a small balcony. A thin man in a blue silk dressing-gown, a dark-green tartan rug round his bottom half. The face gave Dan a shock, he hardly recognized it. Anthony had always looked a little older than he really was, Dan’s own age, but now he seemed like a man of sixty. He had lost no hair, but it had greyed with a premature completeness. His cheeks were sallow and wasted. He looked very tired, there was a ghost of a more famous Anthony Eden about him, and only the eyes and the smile resurrected the person Dan had once known so well. He went without speaking to where the dying man sat and took his outstretched hand. It was retained. There was a moment’s silence, a shared emotion, an immediate and mutual recognition of what had been so lacking with the woman outside.

‘I feel like an intolerable spoilt child.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘All this way.’

‘I was coming back. No problems.’

Anthony searched his eyes. ‘It’s so fantastic to see you again, Dan. For once that wretched word is exact.’

‘I could use sadder ones.’

The sick man gave a curt shrug of amusement. ‘One begins by apologizing to everyone.’ He put on a voice. ‘“I say, I’m most frightfully sorry, but I understand I’m done for.’

‘Absurd.’ He smiled. ‘We become very vain, Dan. We take the sympathy for granted.’ He gestured. ‘Now do have a sherry. And forgive me for not being able to join you.’

Dan did not want any, hadn’t drunk sherry for years, but knew himself awkward standing there. On a table beside the door there was a tray with a bottle of Amontillado and glasses. The room was small, but there were flowers, books; over the bed, a cheap reproduction of Mantegna’s Saint Sebastian. It seemed hardly likely that the hospital would have put it there. The intention would be sardonic, not inspirational. He uncorked the bottle and poured his sherry.

‘Jane’s looked after you all right?’

‘I’m going to take her out to dinner. If I may.’

‘She’ll love that.’

Dan turned; and tried once more.

‘Anthony, I’ve had strict instructions not to… ‘

‘Then obey them.’ They both smiled at that old incisiveness. ‘I’m not in any great pain now. I’m only here to spare Jane various tedious chores. It can be rather tactless, cytogenesis.’

‘Okay. But I…’

‘Your being here speaks better than any words. Even from someone of your skill with them.’ He retained his former rapidity of speech; paused a little more now between sentences, that seemed to be all. Dan raised the glass.

‘Then to the good past.’

‘Amen to that. Now come and sit down.’

There was a metal and plastic chair, which left Dan sitting a shade higher. Anthony watched him, almost hungrily, smiling, his hands in his dressing-gown pockets. It was disconcerting: just in that first minute there was more affection, rapport, than in the previous hour with Jane outside. One at least of Dan’s fears was quenched. But he got to know that smile in what followed. It was fixed, more and more a mask; his own was the same, if for different reasons. Anthony’s eyes had kept their directness, their always strange need to observe yours. They seemed both sceptical and feverish, as if a last black flame burnt in the mind behind them. ‘So how’s the real world?’

‘As unreal as ever.’

‘No regrets?’

‘Thousands.’

‘But not professional. You’ve done extraordinarily well.’

‘In the movie world that’s prima facie evidence of eternal damnation.’

The smile was momentarily genuine.

‘Well. We’ve enjoyed them. The ones we’ve seen.’

‘One or two I don’t blush for. But I’ve made far more money than self-esteem.’

‘And you’ve got a lovely hideout flow? Where you were born? Caro’s told us about it.’

‘Just a farmhouse. I hardly use it.’

‘Good orchid country?’

It was so tired; like some forgotten joke.

‘Greenwings in one meadow. One quite nice colony of spiralis. When the sheep don’t get them. Early purples. That’s about the lot.’

‘You know aestivalis has reappeared on one of the New Forest sites?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘By some miracle.’ It was all teasing, fencing. ‘You remember that wild-goose chase?’

They had gone down to Hampshire in pursuit of the elusive Summer Lady’s Tress, one of the rarest British orchids. A long and azure weekend, interminable scrambling through bogs and over grass-tussocks; and not a sight of the plant.

‘Of course.’

‘But you’ve lost interest in all that now?’

‘I still botanize a bit when I’m down there.’

‘I’ve missed you at Watlington. No one else ever quite’

He smiled, as if to admit he was being foolish. Dan knew he meant to put him at his ease; but he wouldn’t leave him with his eyes; trying to decide who he had become, which way to move into the real conversation. Dan looked down at the sherry.

‘I’ve missed you in far more places than that, Anthony.’

At last Anthony looked down as well, then murmured, ‘Yes.’

There was a silence.

‘I’ve just told Jane I’ve long accepted I have only myself to blame for what happened.’

Anthony was silent a moment more; then smiling again. ‘Let’s at least thank heaven I didn’t take up the law.’ Dan queried him. ‘I’m told nine parts of a judge’s skill is in the sentencing. I doubt my abilities there.’

‘You shouldn’t. I deserved it.’

He was surveyed; almost savoured. ‘That’s another false inference from first appearances.’

Dan shook his head. ‘That at least I’ve got sorted out.’

Anthony watched him, then looked down and fiddled with the dark-green rug.

‘Dan, alas, I haven’t much time… I have to be doped for the night in a little while.’

‘I’ll come in again tomorrow. As often as… ‘The condemned man nodded, but it was almost with an impatience.

‘I haven’t forced this huge journey on you for quite nothing.’

‘My dear man, you’ve forced nothing on me. Except regret that this ever happened.’

Again Anthony hesitated. Dan had a growing sense that he too was not at all as he had been imagined, perhaps because something in him had aged, or simply atrophied, that stayed almost boyish, unblunted, in the don; who now fiddled again with the rug, truing a line in its pattern to the line of his legs beneath. His hands were unhealthily white.

‘I’d like first, Dan, to assure you that easing my conscience has only a very secondary part and no part at all in my asking you to come here in what I wish to say. When I was first told, I was very frightened. Bitter? Having spent most of one’s life on linguistic analysis and ethical theory doesn’t help one damn little bit when it comes to it.’ He looked up at Dan with a humourless smile. ‘Nor does faith and theology. All you can feel at first is a crashing sense of injustice. Divine or natural makes no odds. You can’t think about the past. Only about the future you’ll never see. But that state of mind becomes so painful, and pointless, that you have or at least had to rationalize myself out of it. My own solution was to attempt an honest evaluation of my own life—my work, m marriage with Jane, everything. I’ve tried to strike a true balance. That has meant re-examining matters I’ve spent a great deal of time and only too successfully forgetting. And from there to considering whether anything can still be done about them. You’re with me?’

‘Of course. But you really mustn’t.’

‘No please. Just let me finish.’ He folded his arms. ‘Another notion you have to rid yourself of is that of punishment. I have sinned, therefore I die. They know all about that here. They’re very convincing on the carcinoma or at least my species of it as an example of pure hazard. But rather less so on the necessity for such a principle in the natural scheme. One’s reduced to the homely saw. It’s an ill wind.. that sort of thing. In this situation, very obviously the good it blows depends on the victim. Not without its humour, as a matter of fact I detect in myself a desire to do good in direct proportion to my increasing inability to do anything but think about doing good.’ They smiled, cautiously, still uncertain of each other. ‘I’m not indulging in self-abasement before the eternal throne. I daresay I’ve collected enough green stamps to satisfy Saint Peter. But that idea of a divine customs-and-excise man was never very plausible, was it?’

‘I’ve always had too much to declare to be able to afford to believe it.’

Anthony’s smile deepened momentarily. ‘In my case I’m afraid I should be tempted to argue the toss over certain articles. I think I could make out a case for some of my past mistakes having brought good in the end.’ He hesitated fractionally. ‘One of them was bullying Jane into the Church. Has she…?’

‘Just the fact. Not the reasons.’

‘She’s bearing up much better now as a convinced pagan than she would have as a lukewarm Catholic. Even I can see that.’ He sniffed. ‘I now head a family of apostates.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘No need. Let’s hope heaven takes credit cards in lieu of cash these days. We’re all in a bad way if it doesn’t.’

‘And your own beliefs?’

Dan realized, as soon as he had spoken, that it was a question better not asked: it sidetracked. Anthony hesitated, then there came the more natural smile.

‘I heard a lovely joke the other day. About the young priest in a very advanced seminary who went to his superior and said: “I have the most terrible sin to confess.” Whereupon he flung himself on his knees and covered his face in his hands.’ Anthony covered his own. ‘“Reverend father, I don’t know how to tell you this, but I can’t bear the cross of my guilt and shame any longer.”

‘“Yes, my son.”‘ Anthony looked up, with a naturally haggard and clownishly woebegone face. ‘“I’ve tried and tried, but I still have absolute faith in… Christ.’

Dan grinned. ‘And you’re in the same terrible condition?’

He pulled his nose. ‘Hardly. Enough to call myself a Catholic still. But I do promise you, Dan, you’re not here to ensure I have on a clean pair of spiritual underpants when the… accident happens. Nothing like that.’ He was trying to get down to an unbeliever’s level, and too hard, with that third attempt at a dismissive image; but Dan smiled dutifully. ‘It’s much more a matter of engineering. Of correcting a design failure.’ He added, ‘A little revenge on Madame Sosostris. And her wicked pack of cards.’

‘I understand.’

He contemplated Dan a moment: knowing, as Dan was soon to learn, that he didn’t.

‘You’re not so kindly here to be forgiven for that play. I can’t recall exactly what I wrote to you at the time, but I very much doubt if I should want to withdraw the substance of it. Even today.’