The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (47 page)

It was only when they were
already drawing through the eastern outskirts of the city that Charles
felt a sense of sadness and of loss, of having now cast the fatal die.
It seemed to him astounding that one simple decision, one answer to a trivial
question, should determine so much. Until that moment, all had been potential;
now all was inexorably fixed. He had done the moral, the decent, the correct
thing; and yet it seemed to betray in him some inherent weakness, some
willingness to accept his fate, which he knew, by one of those premonitions
that are as certain as facts, would one day lead him into the world of
commerce; into pleasing Ernestina because she would want to please her
father, to whom he owed so much ... he stared at the countryside they had
now entered and felt himself sucked slowly through it as if down some monstrous
pipe.

The carriage rolled on, a
loosened spring creaking a little at each jolt, as mournfully as a tumbril.
The evening sky was overcast and it had begun to drizzle. In such circumstances,
traveling on his own, Charles would usually have called Sam down and let
him sit inside. But he could not face Sam (not that Sam, who saw nothing
but gold on the wet road to Lyme, minded the ostracism). It was as if he
would never have solitude again. What little was left, he must enjoy. He
thought again of the woman he had left in the city behind them. He thought
of her not, of course, as an alternative to Ernestina; nor as someone he
might, had he chosen, have married instead. That would never have been
possible. Indeed it was hardly Sarah he now thought of--she was merely
the symbol around which had accreted all his lost possibilities, his extinct
freedoms, his never-to-be-taken journeys. He had to say farewell to something;
she was
merely and conveniently
both close and receding.

There was no doubt. He was
one of life's victims, one more ammonite caught in the vast movements of
history, stranded now for eternity, a potential turned to a fossil.

After a while he committed
the ultimate weakness: he fell asleep.
 
 

Duty--that's to
say complying
  With whate'er's expected
here . ..
With the form conforming
duly,
Senseless what it meaneth
truly . . .
'Tis the stern and prompt
suppressing,
  As an obvious deadly
sin,
All the questing and the
guessing
  Of the soul's own
soul within:
'Tis the coward acquiescence
  In a destiny's behest
. . .

--
A. H. Clough,
"Duty" (1841)

She did not rise when Charles
entered, but gave him a long reproachful look from under her eyelashes.

He smiled.

"I forgot to buy flowers
in Exeter."

"So I see, sir."

"I was in such haste to be
here before you went to bed."

She cast down her eyes and
watched her hands, which were engaged in embroidery. Charles moved closer,
and the hands rather abruptly stopped work and turned over the small article
at which they were working.

"I see I have a rival."

"You deserve to have many."

He knelt beside her and gently
raised one of her hands and kissed it. She slipped a little look at him.

"I haven't slept a minute
since you went away."

"I can see that by your pallid
cheeks and swollen eyes."

She would not smile. "Now
you make fun of me."

"If this is what insomnia
does to you I shall arrange to have an alarm bell ringing perpetually in
our bedroom."

She blushed. Charles rose
and sat beside her and drew her head round and kissed her mouth and then
her

closed eyes, which after
being thus touched opened and stared into his, every atom of dryness gone.

He smiled. "Now let me see
what you are embroidering for your secret admirer."

She held up her work. It
was a watch pocket, in blue velvet--one of those little pouches Victorian
gentlemen hung by their dressing tables and put their watches in at night.
On the hanging flap there was embroidered a white heart with the initials
C and E on either side; on the face of the pouch was begun, but not finished,
a couplet in gold thread. Charles read it out loud.

"'Each time thy watch thou
wind' ... and how the deuce is that to finish?"

"You must guess."

Charles stared at the blue
velvet.

"Thy wife her teeth will
grind'?"

She snatched it out of sight.

"Now I shan't tell. You are
no better than a cad." A "cad" in those days meant an omnibus conductor,
famous for their gift of low repartee.

"Who would never ask a fare
of one so fair."

"False flattery and feeble
puns are equally detestable."

"And you, my dearest, are
adorable when you are angry."

"Then I shall forgive you--just
to be horrid."

She turned a little away
from him then, though his arm remained around her waist and the pressure
of his hand on hers was returned. They remained in silence a few moments.
He kissed her hand once more. "I may walk with you tomorrow morning? And
we'll show the world what fashionable lovers we are, and look bored, and
quite unmistakably a marriage of convenience?"

She smiled; then impulsively
disclosed the watch pocket.

"'Each time thy watch thou
wind, Of love may I thee remind.'"

"My sweetest."

He gazed into her eyes a
moment longer, then felt in his pocket and placed on her lap a small hinged
box in dark-red morocco.

"Flowers of a kind."

Shyly she pressed the little
clasp back and opened the box; on a bed of crimson velvet lay an elegant
Swiss brooch: a tiny oval mosaic of a spray of flowers, bordered by alternate
pearls and fragments of coral set in gold. She looked dewily at Charles.
He helpfully closed his eyes. She turned and leaned and planted a chaste
kiss softly on his lips; then lay with her head on his shoulder, and looked
again at the brooch, and kissed that.

Charles remembered the lines
of that priapic song. He whispered in her ear. "I wish tomorrow were our
wedding day."

It was simple: one lived
by irony and sentiment, one observed convention. What might have been was
one more subject for detached and ironic observation; as was what might
be. One surrendered, in other words; one learned to be what one was.

Charles pressed the girl's
arm. "Dearest, I have a small confession to make. It concerns that miserable
female at Marlborough House."

She sat up a little, pertly
surprised, already amused. "Not poor Tragedy?"

He smiled. "I fear the more
vulgar appellation is better suited." He pressed her hand. "It is really
most stupid and trivial. What happened was merely this. During one of my
little pursuits of the elusive echinoderm ..."

And so ends the story. What
happened to Sarah, I do not know--whatever it was, she never troubled Charles
again in person, however long she may have lingered in his memory. This
is what most often happens. People sink out of sight, drown in the shadows
of closer things.

Charles and Ernestina did
not live happily ever after; but they lived together, though Charles finally
survived her by a decade (and earnestly mourned her throughout it). They
begat what shall it be--let us say seven children. Sir Robert added injury
to insult by siring, and within ten months of his alliance to Mrs. Bella
Tomkins, not one heir, but two. This fatal pair of twins were what finally
drove Charles into business. He was bored to begin with; and then got a
taste for the thing. His own sons were given no choice; and their sons
today still control the great shop and all its ramifications.

Sam and Mary--but who can
be bothered with the biography of servants? They married, and bred, and
died, in the monotonous fashion of their kind.

Now who else? Dr. Grogan?
He died in his ninety-first year. Since Aunt Tranter also lived into her
nineties, we have clear proof of the amiability of the fresh Lyme air.

It cannot be all-effective,
though, since Mrs. Poulteney died within two months of Charles's last return
to Lyme. Here, I am happy to say, I can summon up enough interest to look
into the future--that is, into her after-life. Suitably dressed in black,
she arrived in her barouche at the Heavenly Gates. Her footman--for naturally,
as in ancient Egypt, her whole household had died with her--descended and
gravely opened the carriage door. Mrs. Poulteney mounted the steps and
after making a mental note to inform the Creator (when she knew Him better)
that His domestics should be more on the alert for important callers, pulled
the bellring. The butler at last appeared.

"Ma'am?"

"I am Mrs. Poulteney. I have
come to take up residence. Kindly inform your Master."

"His Infinitude has been
informed of your decease, ma'm. His angels have already sung a Jubilate
in celebration of the event."

"That is most proper and
kind of Him." And the worthy lady, pluming and swelling, made to sweep
into the imposing white hall she saw beyond the butler's head. But the
man did not move aside. Instead he rather impertinently jangled some keys
he chanced to have in his hand.

"My man! Make way. I am she.
Mrs. Poulteney of Lyme Regis."

"Formerly of Lyme Regis,
ma'm. And now of a much more tropical abode."

With that, the brutal flunkey
slammed the door in her face. Mrs. Poulteney's immediate reaction was to
look round, for fear her domestics might have overheard this scene. But
her carriage, which she had thought to hear draw away to the servants'
quarters, had mysteriously disappeared. In fact everything had disappeared,
road and landscape (rather resembling the Great Drive up to Windsor Castle,
for some peculiar reason), all, all had vanished. There was nothing but
space--and horror of horrors, a devouring space. One by one, the steps
up which Mrs. Poulteney had so imperially mounted began also to disappear.
Only three were left; and then only two; then one. Mrs. Poulteney stood
on nothing. She was most distinctly heard to say "Lady Cotton is behind
this"; and then she fell, flouncing and bannering and ballooning, like
a shot crow, down to where her real master waited.
 
 

And ah for a man
to arise in me,
That the man I am may cease
to be!
--
Tennyson, Maud (1855)

I said earlier that we are
all poets, though not many of us write poetry; and so are we all novelists,
that is,we have a habit of writing fictional futures for ourselves, although
perhaps today we incline more to put ourselves into a film. We screen in
our minds hypotheses about how we might behave, about what might happen
to us; and these novelistic or cinematic hypotheses often have very much
more effect on how weactually do behave, when the real future becomes the
present, than we generally allow. Charles was no exception; and the last
few pages you have read are not what happened, but what he spent the hours
between London and Exeter imagining might happen. To be sure he did not
think in quite the detailed and coherent narrative manner I have employed;
nor would I swear that he followed Mrs. Poulteney's postmortal career in
quite such interesting detail. But he certainly wished her to the Devil,
so it comes to almost the same thing.