Daniel Martin (30 page)

Back at home, when they had kissed each other good night, he couldn’t sleep; and he had to wait until the time-difference allowed Jenny to be back at the Cabin. Caro had seen the telegram; that at least need not be hidden. So he booked a call, then read into the small hours until it was put through.

The line was poor, and they seemed every mile of the real distance apart. Mildred and Abe had been sweet, ‘all you ever said about them’. She’d thought she’d ‘quite enjoy’ his being gone, but she didn’t, she needed someone to nag. He let that part of it, and her little bits of other news, come first. Then he told her his own.

‘Dan. How ghastly for you. Just this last night?’

‘But why?’ this again Dan was plunged into the prevarication business; and this time with someone who knew him better than the other two young women of his day. He temporized rather than prevaricated; theorized as he had theorized to Caro, to her mother and stepfather.

‘But to make you go all that way and then… Dan, you’re not telling me everything.’

‘No. Not really. Not quite all.’

‘Then what?’

‘I’ll tell you all about it. But not now. It’s just… some sad old birds come home to roost.’

‘You once told me any story could be told in five lines.’

‘This isn’t a story, Jenny. One day. I promise.’

‘I know your promises.’

‘But not how much I’m missing you.’

‘Sweet talk.’

‘I wish it was.’

‘This is hardly the way to drop me in the ashcan.’

‘I’m aware of that, too.’

‘If only I could see your face.’

‘Just tired.’

‘Is it terribly late?’

‘Two thirty.’

‘Oh God. You poor thing.’

She asked about Caro. He said she was fine, and silently charged the truth there also to a later settling. Then there was questioning about Jane, Nell, what it had been like meeting them again.

‘Anthropologically interesting?’

‘In a way. All sweetness and light. On that side.’

There was a little break, then she said, ‘Hey, by the way I’m trying to do what I promised.’

‘Which promise?’

‘About us. Trying to write it down.’

He had forgotten. ‘Seriously?’

‘I probably shan’t send it to you.’

‘You shouldn’t take me at such absurd face values.’

‘I’m rather enjoying it. I’m not sure I shan’t write a novel myself.’ She said, ‘I don’t know why people make such a fuss about it. You just write down what you remember. What you felt. And it’s all there.’

‘All?’

‘Enough. I doubt if your horrid yellow pads and pencils have ever been put to better use.’

‘Someone’s asking to be put across my knees.’

‘Yes please. Any time.’

They rang off a minute later; a less flippant minute. Her last words were, ‘I’m not ready yet. I need you still.’ It was not a plea; simply from a part of her, the Scottish part perhaps, that didn’t tease or rebel, but took a sober, almost clinical, view of what she could do, and couldn’t.

Dan went to the window and stared out at the London night. A movement in the street below, four storeys down, opposite, caught his eye. There was a row of shops, and it was apparently the night their rubbish was collected. Dustbins, cardboard boxes, black plastic sacks stood on the pavements outside their doors. A nocturnal tramp was bent over one of the piles; rummaging quietly, almost fastidiously, like someone picking over lots at an auction sale. Beside him stood an ancient hoodless perambulator. Dan went back to his desk, took a pair of binoculars from a drawer, switched out the light, then returned to the window and focused down on the man. He wore a black homburg hat that had lost its band, an overcoat tied with string, a pair of gumboots. His face was invisible beneath the hat, turned away as he scavenged; but he was obviously an old man. He came up from a cardboard box with three or four wire coat-hangers, examined each in his mittened hands, for defects, then placed them in the pram beside him. There was something obscurely comic about him, contented and professional, grateful the city was asleep, the street deserted as if he was merely following a regular routine with these shops at this time of the week; and something Victorian, anachronistic, almost timeless. He was both very real and, under the streetlights, on the empty stage of the night, theatrical. Beckett again, and waiting for Godot.

Watching him, Dan felt a strange sympathy, almost an urge to go down and talk to him, to play the modern Mayhew for a few minutes; find out how he lived, he felt, he philosophized—perhaps even ask him up for a cup of coffee. He knew it was not true charity or curiosity; but to regain reality in a day that had somehow cast Dan himself as unreal: too full of polite lies, unnatural smiles and urbanities, conventional middleclass behaviours. All through it he had felt like someone locked up inside an adamantly middleclass novel; a smooth, too plausible Establishment fixer out of C. P. Snow, not a lone wolf at all. What called down there was the reality of solitude; and for a moment Dan envied it as a rococo mechanical canary might envy a real bird singing in the woods outside the room where it silently and impotently stands waiting to be wound up again.

In spite of having just heard Jenny’s voice, of knowing Caro was asleep a few yards away, of all that day’s reconciliations, of having been so variously enmeshed and enwebbed in female minds and female sensitivities, Dan had an unaccountable sense of having hidden from something, or of failing to see something; of an incompleteness less defined by the banal enough polarity before his eyes of true poverty and privileged comfort than glimpsed through and beyond it… what Becket had glimpsed, behind his ambiguous symbolisms and ‘arrant romantic pessimism’: the loneliness of each, the bedrock of the human condition. I am what I am. What is, is. Dan imagined that he was looking at his lost real self down there, in that shadowy figure; a thing living on the edge of existence in a night street of his psyche; beyond conversation and invitation, eternally separate.

But then, as he watched, he was returned to theatre again. Another figure suddenly appeared, walking across the street from the pavement directly beneath where Dan stood. A policeman, he went up to where the old tramp worked. The man turned to face him. The helmeted constable went close, looked down into the pram, and the two stood talking. Dan watched, in suspense, waiting for the latter-day Bumble to appear. The tramp seemed to be speaking a lot, answering some interrogation. He lifted aside a bundle in the pram for the policeman to see something underneath, and they seemed to discuss it. The tramp even lifted it a little, so Dan could see: an old wall-clock, rejected time.

Then Dan saw the policeman’s hand go to an upper pocket and really did feel like playing the deus ex machina, opening the window and shouting down in protest at the absurdity of booking a harmless old man. But the policeman did not produce a notebook. Merely a packet of cigarettes, which he held out to the old fellow; who took one with a grateful nod, stored it carefully in his overcoat pocket, and touched his black homburg. Then the policeman walked on.

Which leaves our hero caged behind his window above, obliged to smile to himself, like an inefficient god who sees a lapse in his creation repaired by what he had forgotten to institute.

A Second Contribution: it’s silly to remember him by such an un-English flower, whose name I can’t even spell. I could ask Abe, but it doesn’t matter. I count how many have opened each day. Actually they’re a bit, don’t smile, to me like wild roses at home. In shape, if you forget that lovely colour. I’d give my soul to find a velvet or a corduroy of just that bluey violet. I’d wear it once a year, in memory of you. They make me want to smoke again. No I don’t. I have to be cruel now, and I’ve been looking forward to it.

Him. Mr Wolfe.

I liked Dan least here not literally here in the Cabin, of course. But in the house with Abe and Mildred. Those absurd pool games. The way he and Abe used to play Minnesota Fats and Paul Newman, hustling each other like mad for dimes and quarters, endlessly arguing about how much ‘English’ to use in their shots. I was cast by Abe as a feed, a Scottish fellow-sufferer. You never knew the only decent thing that ever came out of that damn country was a crooked way of hitting a pool-ball?

Mildred’s head round the door: Chow, people. Abe’s lugubrious Edward G. Robinson face: Eat, eat! You crazy? He just took me for all I’ve got. Mildred would look at me and roll her eyes upwards. When will they grow up. The boys. Abe: The trouble with broads is they have no imagination. And Dan stands there, purring at me, cue in hand: Isn’t this great, aren’t they lovely people?

I was always a generation behind, ten thousand generations behind, little sour-sweet Abe. Dan’s first more than casual description of him, on the way to my first evening here in Bel-Air I can still remember bits. Potentially great screenwriter, reformed alcoholic, knows everyone, made quite a pile, etc,
etc.
The punch-line was: And if you don’t love him by the end of the evening, you can walk by me by yourself. Strange, I never heard him go out on the limb like that for anyone. And stranger still that he didn’t know, even then, that in these matters I am my own young woman. Something trumped something there.

That same first evening, at dinner. Dan had told Abe he’d got the wrong director for some old movie I’d never heard of, and Mildred backed Dan. It was Nick Ray, not Abe’s John Somebody-else, Mildred told him he was getting senile. Dan bet a thousand dollars it was Nick Ray. Abe wouldn’t take the money, but only because ‘I don’t want to give you an excuse to take this charming young doll to burger joints for the next six weeks’. He turned to me and put his pudgy little paw on my wrist. ‘Jenny, the time has come when I have to explain a couple of things. My wife’s such a dumb.. head no one else ever married her. As for your lousy limey boyfriend he eats my food, he sucks my brains, he cheats at pool and he makes goo-goo eyes at my wife behind my back. He didn’t tell you that, hm?’ I played along, I said I didn’t know how he stood Dan as a lodger. ‘You think there’s another place in town that would take him?’ He wagged his finger at me. ‘You know he tried to kid his last girl his name was Sir Beverly Hills Hotel?’ Then: ‘Where do you think he buys his towels?’

Then he looked at Dan and his wife: ‘As I was saying, the reason Nick Ray took that picture… ‘ It happened all the time, at the beginning. Mildred and Dan even seemed to force him into corners so that I could watch him being a performing bear. All right, he was jolly, a nice little Jewish wisecracker. But it used to go on too long. After all, Mr Wolfe, who was it taught me to look for all that imagery in the local argot? The constant references to sodomy and copulation, to screwing and laying and pecking order (fuck-you order, yes?). And how one can’t treat everyone in sight as a prostitute and then expect to put out an unprostituted art. Or who was it told me Abe was so right that day he held forth on why they violined so much in the old days? Because the real private language and behaviour was so crude and coarse, men so cocksure and orange-horse about all women being their panty-dropping playground that they couldn’t act love on screen without seeming silly to themselves. So the men had to camp it up as etiquette-crazy beaux, and the women had to seem to be fooled by it, always swooning toe-to-toe on their marks, to compensate. It took freaks like Cagney and Bogart to break that up. And the Jewish need to handle what you possess. The ghetto hang-up; turning the audience into Cossacks, then telling yourself you had to please them at all costs. He was on about it last night how when he started the whole industry was run by Jews and yet a Jewish-looking actor couldn’t get a job ‘as understudy to a crowd extra’. The Cossacks wouldn’t have liked that. But the Jewishness kept creeping through. The poor shmucks, says Abe, they thought the goys were just Jews with pink skins and straight noses.

I’ve got sidetracked, but not really.

It wasn’t Abe, but Dan trying to keep up with him and swap meannesses. Not realizing it was square when Abe did it, but endearing, and anyway he couldn’t help himself. With Dan, just square. And horrid, when he used the same sort of language he pretended to have analysed and to despise. It was so much better when they discussed things, America, politics, whatever, seriously. And I could feel the real affection and respect they had for each other.

Mildred I liked all the way down the line from the beginning. Dan never realized, at least I suspect he doesn’t, how much she has put into that marriage. I guessed it before, and begin to know for sure now.

Dan has faults of perception. That’s what I learnt at Mildred and Abe’s. Not quite seeing what made them work was one of them. A lovely man round a dinner-table or over a pool-game must take it out on someone in private. Mildred told me in so many words: He always needed people, I guess I always needed him. His latest thing (by the way) is an innocent (Mildred is always there) pretending he’s crazy about me. But because Mildred is always there, there’s something not innocent about it that I can’t describe. Needling something in their past, not their present. I’m not sure if I’d have liked him as a young man.

Not quite knowing what makes me work is another blind spot, this is where I meant to begin. After the first shock, I didn’t mind Dan deciding he had to go, I didn’t even really mind his seizing on it as an excuse for a cool-off period. But I did mind his assumption that I’d see it his way, silly little temperamental female thing, as soon as he was gone. If he was bored with me or if I had shown I was bored with him, if one of us had to get hurt rather than go on shamming something we didn’t feel… no, it was the gall: that he must know what was best for both of us. Going all Sidney Carton and far-far-nobler-thing, as if I’d only a month between me and eternal spinsterhood. I’ve now decided what it is that drives him to behave like this. I had a first suspicion that he simply wanted out because I threatened to become a problem in England. His daughter and all the rest of it. But I think it’s more complicated and a lot worse than that.