Daniel Martin (82 page)

‘And promptly entered an even worse one.’

‘I’m arguing for your instincts. Not your actions. And trying to suggest that once more you’re making a wrong decision on right feeling.’

‘Dan, I’m simply trying not to hurt someone I’m very fond of.’

‘You may be trying. But you’re not succeeding.’

She hesitated, her voice dropped. ‘Because of what you say. My formidable past record of wrong choices.’

‘Did you mean what you said on Kitchener’s Island? About my having helped you over what you’ll do when we get back?’

‘You know I meant it.’

‘I can’t understand why you’ll listen to me there. Yet not over this.’

‘Because I do value your opinions of life in general.’

‘But not of you. Or us.’

‘You’re romanticizing what I am. Or not understanding what I’ve become.’

‘No man and woman ever fully understand what they’ve each become. If that condition has to be fulfilled, the two sexes ought to be living on different planets. It’s an untenable thesis.’

‘But the pain it might cause isn’t, is it?’

‘Only if you grant it more probability than happiness.’

Her head was bowed. ‘It isn’t a deficiency in you. You must believe that.’

‘I think you’re lying. Perhaps out of decency. But still lying.’

‘Why?’

‘Caro told me something you’d said about me recently. About my being someone in permanent flight from his past. From all enduring relationship.’

She took a tiny breath. ‘She shouldn’t have told you that.’

‘Perhaps. But she did.’

‘It was meant to make things easier for her. Not to blame you.’

‘I’m sure. And I’m not disputing the diagnosis.’

‘I didn’t suggest you were in flight from her.’

He tilted his beer. ‘But you are afraid I might soon, once more, be in flight from you?’

‘I do wish she hadn’t told you that.’

He looked at her. Something in her face was shrouded and embarrassed, at a loss as to how she should explain it away; asked to be let off this unpleasant hook he had kept stored for use.

‘But since she has?’

‘My fear is much more that I should make it only too justifiable.’

‘That’s a kind of morbid false modesty. Assuming disaster before it’s happened.’

‘I’m sorry. The fear is very real.’

‘I wish we could kill this notion of yours that secretly I mean to corrupt you in some way. I accept absolutely what you are. What you want to be.’ He took a breath. ‘And not only because I want to. I couldn’t make you in my image. Not in a thousand years.’

She shook her head, as if in despair at all these cross-purposes. ‘If it was just a matter of tolerance between us…’

‘That is something.’

‘Which I fully recognize.’

Once more they came to a baffled halt.

‘It’s not only the past, Jane. I have had to get to know you again. What you’ve become. I feel very close even to that.’ He waited, then forced an answer. ‘Don’t you recognize this at all? Some kind of elective affinity?’

‘Yes. Sometimes.’

‘What I was feeling in Egypt was that for the first time in years I was undergoing a flight towards something. I haven’t illusions about us. I know we’ve a formidable list of misunderstandings to sort out. If you could just accept that on my side I’m prepared to contribute endless patience. Sympathy. Love, whatever you want to call it. I want to write, but I can write anywhere. I just want to be beside you. With you. Wherever you are. Even if it never improves very much on this. I’d still rather have that than nothing. Than not at least having tried.’ He left a silence, but she seemed imprisoned now in a far deeper one. He spoke less urgently. ‘I can really see only two possibilities. One is that the old physical rapport between us no longer means anything to you. In which case—of course, I’ll shut up. One can’t dispute things like that.’

‘And the other?’

‘Means you are just as much in flight as you claim I am. In a different direction, but no more honestly.’

‘Where?’

‘To the idea that what’s wrong inside you can be solved by sacrificing everything to social conscience… helping the under privileged. All of that. At least I’d claim for my solution that it’s much nearer home. I’ve betrayed the only two things for which I ever had any talent. Handling words, and loving one single other human being wholly.’ He added, ‘And that last one, you share.’ Strangely, it must seem very strangely in view of what he next said, there came to him the memory of that remote, endlessly stopping andante variation in the Goldberg; silences, and what lay behind them. ‘You murdered something in all three of us, Jane. Largely without knowing it, and perhaps murder is an unkind word. But you made certain choices, developments, impossible. We’re sitting surrounded by what you did to us. Out there.’

That last harshness visibly set her back again; killed whatever hopes she may have harboured of keeping the conversation within bounds. He went on.

‘I can’t forgive that analogy of the prison you used. I’d much rather you said you didn’t trust me. At least that would be honest.’

She leant back a little, again shook her head. ‘I don’t have to look outside myself for lack of trust.’

‘I think the difference between us is that there’s a part of you I don’t understand. That I’m even happy in a way not to understand. While for you I’m something in a cage. Only too easy to label.’

‘You know how to live with yourself, Dan. I don’t.’

‘For which I get a black mark.’

‘That’s not fair.’

He looked down with a wry smile. ‘It doesn’t have to be. My condition is traditionally excused.’ But even that plea for a shade less seriousness went unheard. He sensed that something in her was receding, not only from him, but in time, to well before his knowing of her; to an eternal unforgivingness, refusal to listen. He spoke more gently. ‘Perhaps that’s the real difference. Only one of us is in love with love.’

‘In a fit state for it.’

‘It’s not communion, for heaven’s sake. States of grace aren’t required. Or absolution.’ She said nothing. ‘We’re two very imperfect beings, Jane. An egoist and an idealist. Not the Platonic dream at all. But that doesn’t mean we couldn’t give a great deal to each other.’ Still she would not speak. ‘Then we’re back to animal facts.’

He knew there was something panic-stricken in her, despite the stillness of her pose and expression; doubling and doubling, trying to escape.

‘You make it so difficult for me.’

‘Then let me make it easier. I’d much rather it was something physical than what you’re seeming to suggest.’

He felt she was weighing the possibility of that as a loophole; which told him that it could not really be so. At last she looked up, across the room.

‘I didn’t go to sleep for hours in Aswan. If I felt nothing in that way, I wouldn’t have talked about prison.’

‘Then what in God’s name is it?’

‘I suppose God himself. In a peculiar sort of way.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Whatever made me glad, the next morning, that nothing had happened.’ She added, ‘I know I should have been lying to you. It wouldn’t have been for the right reason.’

‘Then out of what?’

She paused, still unwilling to go on; but knew she must now.

‘You’ve had lots of sexual experience, I don’t suppose you can imagine what it’s like for someone who hasn’t had very much. How you… store the memory of what little you have had. This was one reason I hesitated so much over coming. Knowing… ‘but she broke off.

‘Knowing what, Jane?’

‘That old feelings might return.’ Now she went on quickly before he could speak. ‘It’s partly Anthony, Dan. I’m not really over that yet. I don’t mean the death. The living with him. All the failures there.’

‘But I suspect he half hoped this would happen.’

‘For reasons I can’t accept. Even if his ridiculous scheme of metaphysics was true, he has to do his own penance.’

‘But you’re behaving exactly as if it is. As if he’s watching us, and you have to spite him.’

‘I have to take no notice of what he wanted.’ She appealed to him; or at least her head turned a little. ‘And of what something female in me also wants.’ She looked down again. ‘When you took my hand in the car just now, I wanted to cry. I know it must seem absurd. So much of me would rather be… not like this.’ She fingered the rim of her glass, letting the silence grow. Outside, the pariah was barking again. But then she continued. ‘It’s as if the one part of you you don’t want to be the acted part, the part that wants to give, to say yes, for some terrible reason still insists on denying the rest. What you expect from me is like something I’m told exists, I know exists, but in a country where I can’t go. I lay awake that night in Aswan trying to be someone different. Telling myself this man has always attracted me, so why not. As an adventure. As it happened before. But I knew I couldn’t.’ She waited, but now he was silent. ‘It’s partly because I can’t think of you objectively like that… as “this man”.’ She hesitated again. ‘I was given a little test on the boat. I was propositioned one evening by Alain in a nice, discreet, traditional French way. As one makes an opening bid at bridge. But I looked across the room at you. If you could only understand the reason it would have been like betraying you then is the same reason behind now.’

‘And supposing I’d come, at Aswan?’

‘I shouldn’t have had time to think about it. But now I have.’

He contemplated his glass.

‘You can always tell a really bad film-script when the story depends on missed opportunities.’

‘But ours has. You said just now I killed a choice in all of us. I can’t risk doing that again.’

‘Then we’ve learnt nothing all these years. Except how to make deserts even more barren still.’

‘I really shall cry, if you talk like this.’

‘I might well join you.’

But he reached his hand, as if to stop such nonsense, and took hers. After a moment she returned its pressure. The joined hands lay on the rug between them.

‘The one mystery to me is how I can have fallen twice in my life for such an impossible bitch of a woman.’

‘At least we can agree on that.’

He banged her hand gently against the rug, but then let silence come. Both his tenderness and his irritation deepened: the tenderness because he knew what lay behind her refusal was also what he loved in her, the not being like any other woman in his life, despite the fact that this uniqueness came so strongly tinged with Anthony’s old argument from absurdity—though it was less credo now than nego quia absurdum; and the irritation not only because she had admitted both nature and reason were on his side, but also because it offended some archetypal sense in him of right dramatic development—they had come to the end of the world, and not, at last, to be able to meet there denied that remote but all-powerful place in the unconscious from where his deepest notions of personal destiny came. He could have tried for years to imagine a better place and failed to create what one day’s hazard had brought; so apt, so stripping of the outer world, so crying the truth of the human condition. He stared across at the particle of the human condition opposite, his head now sunk sideways, deep on a lapel of the old European jacket he wore over his galabiya: Tiresias, Moslem style.

Stalemate. But he would not relinquish her hand. He felt a more general irritation, against their history, their type in time. They took themselves, or their would-be moral selves, so seriously. It had indeed all been summed up by the mirrors in his student room: the overweening narcissism of all their generation… all the liberal scruples, the concern with living right and doing right, were not based on external principles, but self-obsession. Perhaps the ultimate vulgarity lay there: in trying to conform to one’s age’s notion of spiritual nobility—as if, though one laughed at the notion of an afterlife, one was not just an animal with one brief existence on a dying planet, but still had an immortal soul and a judgment day to face. And when what one wanted was so innocent, private, small: he felt tempted to put this to Jane. But then, perhaps knowing it was a lost cause, skipped the argument for the conclusion. He turned his head and looked at her.

‘Jane, why don’t we behave like two normal human beings and make it one room tonight?’

‘Because it wouldn’t solve anything.’

He murmured with a mock tartness, ‘Speak for yourself.’ But she was beyond response, even the faintest smile. He pressed the hand, and spoke in an even lower voice. ‘You know it’s not that. I’d just like to hold you. Be close to you.’

She stared at the floor-almost through it, at something far beyond. He squeezed her hand again, but it was lifeless. He could detect no softening of the bleak perversity in her face, though it did have a sadness; a kind of ultimate being cornered, yet still an inability to surrender.

How that silence might have been broken he was not to know, because Labib—and by then it began to seem mercifully—reappeared and came to them. If they would sit; their meal was ready. They stood, and though they chose a table on the other side of the room from his, they felt more exposed, within earshot. The younger man served. A lamb stew on a small mountain of pilaf, very simple yet not unappetizing… a flavour of cumin, other exotic herbs, and the rice was good. Dan had another beer. They sat facing Labib, who ate the same meal twelve feet away. He seemed pleased to show off his English. The old man with the squint had woken up, between servings the waiter sat by him again; and the cook came and sat by the stove. For once Labib was prepared to concede something not absolutely bad about Syria—he had known the cook before, when he worked in a hotel in Damascus. They should go to Damascus, the souk was very good, very cheap, many folk-dresses, jewellery… Jane answered far more than Dan, playing the polite diplomat again, her father’s daughter, across the space between their tables. It was as if nothing had been said; but they avoided each other’s eyes.