The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (14 page)

"Yes. I am to walk in the
paths of righteousness." For one appalling moment Mrs. Poulteney thought
she had been the subject of a sarcasm; but Sarah's eyes were solemnly down,
as if she had been pronouncing sentence on herself; and righteousness were
synonymous with suffering.

"Then let us hear no more
of this foolishness. I do this for your own good."

Sarah murmured, "I know."
Then, "I thank you, ma'm."

No more was said. She turned
to the Bible and read the passage Mrs. Poulteney had marked. It was the
same one as she had chosen for that first interview--Psalm 119: "Blessed
are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord." Sarah read
in a very subdued voice, seemingly without emotion. The old woman sat facing
the dark shadows at the far end of the room; like some pagan idol she looked,
oblivious of the blood sacrifice her pitiless stone face demanded.

Later that night Sarah might
have been seen--though I cannot think by whom, unless a passing owl--standing
at the open window of her unlit bedroom. The house was silent, and the
town as well, for people went to bed by nine in those days before electricity
and television. It was now one o'clock. Sarah was in her nightgown, with
her hair loose; and she was staring out to sea. A distant lantern winked
faintly on the black waters out towards Portland Bill, where some ship
sailed towards Bridport. Sarah had seen the tiny point of light; and not
given it a second thought.

If you had gone closer still,
you would have seen that her face was wet with silent tears. She was not
standing at her window as part of her mysterious vigil for Satan's sails;
but as a preliminary to jumping from it.

I will not make her teeter
on the windowsill; or sway forward, and then collapse sobbing back onto
the worn carpet of her room. We know she was alive a fortnight after this
incident, and therefore she did not jump. Nor were hers the sobbing, hysterical
sort of tears that presage violent action; but those produced by a profound
conditional, rather than emotional, misery--slow-welling, unstoppable,
creeping like blood through a bandage.

Who is Sarah?

Out of what shadows does
she come?
 
 

For the drift of
the Maker is dark, an Isis hid by
the veil ...
--
Tennyson, Maud (1855)

So perhaps I am writing a
transposed autobiography; perhaps I now live in one of the houses I have
brought into the fiction; perhaps Charles is myself disguised. Perhaps
it is only a game. Modern women like Sarah exist, and I have never understood
them. Or perhaps I am trying to pass off a concealed book of essays on
you. Instead of chapter headings, perhaps I should have written "On the
Horizontality of Existence," "The Illusions of Progress," "The History
of the Novel

Form," "The Aetiology of
Freedom," "Some Forgotten Aspects of the Victorian Age" ... what you will.
Perhaps you suppose that a novelist has only to pull the right strings
and his puppets will behave in a lifelike manner; and produce on request
a thorough analysis of their motives and intentions. Certainly I intended
at this stage (Chap. Thirteen--unfolding of Sarah's true state of mind)
to tell all--or all that matters. But I find myself suddenly like a man
in the sharp spring night, watching from the lawn beneath that dim upper
window in Marlborough House; I know in the context of my book's reality
that Sarah would never have brushed away her tears and leaned down and
delivered a chapter of revelation. She would instantly have turned, had
she seen me there just as the old moon rose, and disappeared into the interior
shadows.

But I am a novelist, not
a man in a garden--I can follow her where I like? But possibility is not
permissibility. Husbands could often murder their wives--and the reverse--and
get away with it. But they don't.

You may think novelists always
have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter
One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But novelists
write for countless different reasons: for money, for fame, for reviewers,
for parents, for friends, for loved ones; for vanity, for pride, for curiosity,
for amusement: as skilled furniture makers enjoy making furniture, as drunkards
like drinking, as judges like judging, as Sicilians like emptying a shotgun
into an enemy's back. I could fill a book with reasons, and they would
all be true, though not true of all. Only one same reason is shared by
all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world
that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism,
not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent
of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning)
is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey
us that they begin to live. When Charles left Sarah on her cliff edge,
I ordered him to walk straight back to Lyme Regis. But he did not; he gratuitously
turned and went down to the Dairy.

Oh, but you say, come on--what
I really mean is that the idea crossed my mind as I wrote that it might
be more clever to have him stop and drink milk ... and meet Sarah again.
That is certainly one explanation of what happened; but I can only report--and
I am the most reliable witness--that the idea seemed to me to come clearly
from Charles, not myself. It is not only that he has begun to gain an autonomy;
I must respect it, and disrespect all my quasi-divine plans for him, if
I wish him to be real.

In other words, to be free
myself, I must give him, and Tina, and Sarah, even the abominable Mrs.
Poulteney, their freedom as well. There is only one good definition of
God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist. And I must conform
to that definition.

The novelist is still a god,
since he creates (and not even the most aleatory
avant-garde
modern
novel has managed to extirpate its author completely); what has changed
is that we are no longer the gods of the Victorian image, omniscient and
decreeing; but in the new theological image, with freedom our first principle,
not authority.

I have disgracefully broken
the illusion? No. My characters still exist, and in a reality no less,
or no more, real than the one I have just broken. Fiction is woven into
all, as a Greek observed some two and a half thousand years ago. I find
this new reality (or unreality) more valid; and I would have you share
my own sense that I do not fully control these creatures of my mind, any
more than you control--however hard you try, however much of a latterday
Mrs. Poulteney you may be--your children, colleagues, friends, or even
yourself.

But this is preposterous?
A character is either "real" or "imaginary"? If you think that, hypocrite
lecteur, I can only smile. You do not even think of your own past as quite
real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with
it ... fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf--your book,
your romanced autobiography. We are all in flight from the real reality.
That is a basic definition of Homo sapiens.

So if you think all this
unlucky (but it is Chapter Thirteen) digression has nothing to do with
your Time, Progress, Society, Evolution and all those other capitalized
ghosts in the night that are rattling their chains behind the scenes of
this book ... I will not argue. But I shall suspect you.

I report, then, only the
outward facts: that Sarah cried in the darkness, but did not kill herself;
that she continued, in spite of the express prohibition, to haunt Ware
Commons. In a way, therefore, she had indeed jumped; and was living in
a kind of long fall, since sooner or later the news must inevitably come
to Mrs. Poulteney of the sinner's compounding of her sin. It is true Sarah
went less often to the woods than she had become accustomed to, a deprivation
at first made easy for her by the wetness of the weather those following
two weeks. It is true also that she took some minimal precautions of a
military kind. The cart track eventually ran out into a small lane, little
better than a superior cart track itself, which curved down a broad combe
called Ware Valley until it joined, on the outskirts of Lyme, the main
carriage road to Sidmouth and Exeter. There was a small scatter of respectable
houses in Ware Valley, and it was therefore a seemly place to walk. Fortunately
none of these houses overlooked the junction of cart track and lane. Once
there, Sarah had merely to look round to see if she was alone. One day
she set out with the intention of walking into the woods. But as in the
lane she came to the track to the Dairy she saw two people come round a
higher bend. She walked straight on towards them, and once round the bend,
watched to make sure that the couple did not themselves take the Dairy
track; then retraced her footsteps and entered her sanctuary unobserved.

She risked meeting other
promenaders on the track itself; and might always have risked the dairyman
and his family's eyes. But this latter danger she avoided by discovering
for herself that one of the inviting paths into the bracken above the track
led round, out of sight of the Dairy, onto the path through the woods.
This path she had invariably taken, until that afternoon when she recklessly--as
we can now realize-- emerged in full view of the two men.

The reason was simple. She
had overslept, and she knew she was late for her reading. Mrs. Poulteney
was to dine at Lady Cotton's that evening; and the usual hour had been
put forward to allow her to prepare for what was always in essence, if
not appearance, a thunderous clash of two brontosauri; with black velvet
taking the place of iron cartilage, and quotations from the Bible the angry
raging teeth; but no less dour and relentless a battle.

Also, Charles's down-staring
face had shocked her; she felt the speed of her fall accelerate; when the
cruel ground rushes up, when the fall is from such a height, what use are
precautions?
 
 

"My idea of good
company, Mr. Elliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people, who
have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company."
"You are mistaken," said
he, gently, "that is not good company--that is the best. Good company requires
only birth, education, and manners, and with regard to education is not
very nice."
--J
ane Austen, Persuasion

It so happened that the avalanche
for the morning after Charles's discovery of the Undercliff was appointed
to take place at Marlborough House. There was nothing fortuitous or spontaneous
about these visits. There could not be, since the identities of visitors
and visited spread round the little town with incredible rapidity; and
that both made and maintained a rigorous sense of protocol. Mrs. Poulteney's
interest in Charles was probably no greater than Charles's in her; but
she would have been mortally offended if he had not been dragged in chains
for her to place her fat little foot on--and pretty soon after his arrival,
since the later the visit during a stay, the less the honor.

These "foreigners" were,
of course, essentially counters in a game. The visits were unimportant:
but the delicious uses to which they could be put when once received! "Dear
Mrs. Tranter, she wanted me to be the first to meet ..." and "I am most
surprised that Ernestina has not called on you yet-- she has spoiled us--already
two calls . . ." and "I am sure it is an oversight--Mrs. Tranter is an
affectionate old soul, but so absent-minded ..." These, and similar mouthwatering
opportunities for twists of the social dagger depended on a supply of "important"
visitors like Charles. And he could no more have avoided his fate than
a plump mouse dropping between the claws of a hungry cat--several dozen
hungry cats, to be exact.