Daniel Martin (34 page)

‘He never felt like that.’

‘Oh, he thinks he still gets a message through.’

‘On that paper?’

‘Simple. Kid yourself the kind of tiny nuance your pro friends pick up rings a bell throughout the length and breadth of the suburbs.’ He slid me a look. ‘And sheer professionalism. You mustn’t underrate that. I know one paper last year where part of the course for their tyro subs was analysing the brilliance of friend Goebbels’s work in the Thirties.’

‘I think I’ve heard enough.’

‘Maybe you have the quaint old belief that people buy newspapers to be informed.’

‘Just amused?’

‘Not even that. Excused. From boring things like thinking for yourself.’

‘Is this why you switched?’

‘To telly? God knows. Lolly. A probably misguided notion I can do the three-card trick as well as the next man. And let’s face it, it is where it is. To kill two clichés with one lie.’ He went on less cynically, as if he suddenly saw he was countermanding the image he had presented when we were discussing Caro. ‘There’s honestly not much option nowadays, Dan. Heaven help the poor sod who can’t stake himself a claim on the tiny screen. He’ll never make it to the top.’

Dan really wanted to go, as they sat talking over the coffee; yet also enjoyed, secretly, this ancient English game of hiding in the trees and judging the world outside. He was reminded, too, of Jane’s contempt for the ‘timeserving intelligentsia’. Her repressed violence had seemed naive, faintly comic; but now, helped by his personal animus, he felt himself nearer to her view than he had admitted. He had no belief in her cure for the disease, but he began to second the diagnosis. When the history of the period came to be written, the communications industry would have to go in the dock. Somewhere in Britain a conduit between national reality and national awareness of it had been fatally blocked. One might argue that it was inevitable, too predicated by factors beyond human control, for any one section of society to take the blame; and certainly the public who allowed the block to take place, and to endure, had also to be charged. But Dan had a vision of a clogging spew of pundits and pontificators, editors and interviewers, critics and columnists, puppet personalities and attitude-hucksters, a combined media Mafia squatting on an enormous drug-heap of empty words and tired images, and conjoined, despite their private rivalries and jealousies, by one common determination: to retain their own status and importance in the system they had erected.

His was the most familiar of all twentieth-century dilemmas, of course: that of the man, the animal, required to pay in terms of personal freedom for the contempt he felt at the abuse of social freedom—and unable to do it. It was like being caught between two absurd propositions: between ‘Better dead than Red’ and ‘Any freedom is better than no freedom’; between the sickness of fear and the sickness of compromise. One feels a pervasive cancer at the heart of one’s world; but still prefers it to the surgical intervention that must extirpate the attacked central organ, freedom, as well as the cancer.

Barney had migrated to brandy by then. The restaurant was already emptying, yet for some reason Dan sat on, listening mainly, prompting a little, and avoiding argument. Barney had returned to his own dilemma: how no one really listened any more, nothing registered, an audience of fifteen million was an audience of no one, the speed of forgetfulness was approaching the speed of light, the letters he got, the cranks who misunderstood the simplest things that were said. He even dragged Caro back in, how he felt she was the first person ‘in years’ who actually did listen to and understand him: the cost of being a cynosure of the cretins and the Aunt Sally of the fastidious.

Dan knew what was being stated: that when everyone wanted instant fame and significance, the lasting kinds were unattainable. Perhaps theirs really had been the unlucky generation. They had just caught the last of the old Oxford, which had trained them to admire and covet the enduring accolade of history, acre perennius as the supreme good… and just as the essential corollary, all the stabilizing moral and religious values in society, were vanishing into thin air. Reality had driven them, perhaps because they were pitched willy-nilly into a world with a ubiquitous and insatiable greed for the ephemeral, to take any publicity, any celebrity, any transient success as a placebo. Barney’s world had even fixed the rules of the game to make such shoddy prizes easier to gain and to bestow, and tried to cover the fixing, so that to criticize the glamorization of the worthless, the flagrant prostitution of true human values, the substitution of degree of exposure for degree of actual achievement, now invited an immediate accusation of elitism and pretention, of being out of touch. It infested all the morbid areas in their culture, the useless complications and profit-obsessed excesses of capitalism, the plastic constructs: telly-land, pop-land, movie-land, Fleet Street, the academic circus, the third-rate mortalized by the fourth-rate… Dan thought grimly of a bit of jargon he had read somewhere in California. The cosmeticization of natural process. But Barney had said it. The real function was not to amuse; but to excuse from thinking.

And now he was maintaining that the only honest year of his professional life was the one he had spent on a provincial newspaper before coming to London. It was clear that he judged himself fallen between a wise mediocrity and a genuine reputation. Time. Fear of death, the wasted journey, which was part of the old Puritan fallacy: life is either a destination, an arrived success, or not worth the cost. The soap-bubble bursts, and looking back there seems nothing.

Dan knew that once again his sympathy was being wheedled in an oblique way; that he was also being manoeuvred, and more successfully than he allowed Barney to realize, into confessing his own self-disillusionment that they were in the same boat in more senses than the one he had admitted; but rather to his own surprise, when they finally stood on the busy Covent Garden pavement outside the restaurant and shook hands, his was not quite a merely token grip. He would never like Barney, he would never forgive him over Caro, but he suddenly felt too old to hate him. He had hardly turned away into a taxi when a memory of Thorncombe came to him: of a rabbit dying of myxomatosis that he had chanced on one evening in one of the fields, how he had stared at it, then walked on. He knew he should have dashed its brains out on the nearest gate-rail… but when one has the disease oneself?

He spent the rest of the day and evening alone at the flat. Caro was going straight from the office to a first night with Barney. Dan worked for a time on the Kitchener script, but his heart wasn’t in it; the depression that had begun at the lunch lasted. He would have liked to have rung Jenny, but the difference in time prevented that, and he knew he didn’t really want to discuss Barney with her. They had spoken again, and she knew what was happening there. He thought of ringing Jane in Oxford, but knew, or suspected, he would get little sympathy in that quarter, either. He couldn’t work, he couldn’t read, he couldn’t face the television. In the end he wandered aimlessly around the flat, trying to decide whether he should sell it. Perhaps Nell had been right, and there had always been something hostile in it, distancing and alienating, vaguely forsaken; then Caro’s imminent departure the last good reason to keep the place, and even that, now, had gone. No one loves me, no one cares.

He waited till midnight, but she did not show. Soon after that, he wrote the day off as a loss (quite wrongly, since to feel biologically determined, fundamentally futile, was at least to look at the face his culture spent so much effort on avoiding); and went to bed.

Caro appeared in a dressing gown. I had already finished my own breakfast. She looked at me with a half-guilty, half-shy smile, and for once refused a fence; moved to get herself some coffee. I asked her about the play, having just read an unenthusiastic review of it in the Times. It had been that sad, sour, Norwegian answer to Shakespeare’s Tempest: When We Dead Awaken.

‘I enjoyed it. It was fun.’ She saw my sceptical grin. ‘The evening. Not the play.’

‘Did Bernard?’

‘He thought the production was rather gimmicky.’

‘That’s what the Times says.’

‘Yes? We had a drink with him, actually. During the interval.’

This time I suppressed my smile at being made to feel provincial and a fool for not seeing that the past determination to protect her from the false glamours of my own world would make her leap at any other… and quite naturally. She came and sat down opposite me, nursing her coffee-mug; then did take her fence.

‘I hear we didn’t actually come to blows.’

‘All very civilized.’

‘He was grateful.’ She looked down. ‘Was the food all right?’

‘Yes. I was impressed.’

‘I had to bully them to get a table. It’s always so crowded.’

But then she was shy again, uncertain how to go on.

‘He didn’t change my feeling, Caro. We left it that… but he’s probably told you. As long as you’re happy.’

‘He said he talked too much.’

‘Not really. And it was interesting.’

She sniffed. ‘I can see I’m not going to do any better with you than I did with him.’

‘Nothing you don’t know already.’

‘I bet.’

‘Cross my heart.’

‘I bet you spent all yesterday evening tearing your hair.’

‘I did a little. But not about you. About the flat.’ She queried me. ‘Whether you’ll ever need it now. Whether I shouldn’t sell it and find something smaller.’

‘Just because I… ‘

‘It’s not that. I think I’m going to take a year off, Caro. As soon as the present script is finished. And live down at Thorncombe.’

‘Thorncombe!’ She tilted her head. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Nothing. Just wondering how you feel about keeping it on. I could also sublet until you wanted it.’

But she was suspicious now.

‘Are you sure this isn’t because I’m ratting on you?’

‘Don’t be silly.’

She gave me a look under her eyebrows.

‘You’ll go mad with boredom.’

‘Probably.’

‘What happened at Oxford?’

‘I’ve been toying with the idea for some time. And yes, a little. Even Bernard, a little.’

‘Why him?’

‘Wanting a sabbatical? We agreed that’s what we envied about academics.’

‘That’s absurd. He’d die without his work.’

‘I feel like making a run for it while I’ve still got a chance of surviving. And now you’re such a liberated and urban young Woman.’

She eyed me. ‘You’re a meanie. You’ve been holding out on something.’

‘I won’t go unless I have your permission.’

She stared at me, then stood and got more coffee; then decided to make herself some toast. She spoke as she cut the bread.

‘I don’t know how Jenny McNeil stands you.’

‘Nor does Jenny McNeil. Sometimes.’

She put her slice of bread in the toaster.

‘One parent moaning about living in Outer Siberia is quite enough.’

‘I promise not to.’

She grimaced across the counter that divided the kitchen. ‘You don’t seem to realize how peculiar you are, your lot. Going around pretending what ghastly failures you are. Honestly, that play last night. I thought it was stupid. All that stuff about not having really lived. It’s so depressing.’ She went on before I could answer. ‘Did your father keep implying to you that his life was all one huge mistake?’

‘No.’

‘There you are then.’

‘But the first rule of his was that you never say what you really feel. Would you prefer that?’

‘Not if it was the only alternative.’ She stared down at the toaster. ‘That’s why I like Aunt Jane so much. She’s the only adult in my life who actually seems to have done something about it.’

‘About what?’

Her toast popped up, and she came back with it to the table.

‘What you’ve just said.’ She buttered, and I pushed the marmalade across. ‘She said something about you the other day. When we had lunch. When I was going on about the way you’ve always made me feel I ought to be ashamed of what you do.’

‘What did she say?’

‘How you’d always been two people.’

‘We’re all at least that.’

‘She said you seemed to have cut yourself from your past more than anyone else. Even when you were all still at university.’

‘I had a Victorian childhood, Caro. I had to get rid of it.’

‘Then she said you’d done the same to Oxford. When you left.’

‘There’s nothing very unusual about that. So do most graduates.’

‘Then mummy.’

‘That also happens.’

‘She wasn’t getting at you.’

‘I’m sure she wasn’t.’

She was taking an unconscionable time over spreading her marmalade, searching for words.

‘She was trying to suggest why I might be a problem for you. Something you can’t leave behind. Like everything else.’

‘My dear girl, I’m not going to Thorncombe to leave you behind. I shall raise blue murder if you’re not down there at least once a month.’

She began to eat, her elbows on the table. ‘Do you think she was right?’

‘I’m not sure I like all this psychoanalysis at breakfast.’

She gave me a very direct look.

‘Please.’

‘I could have involved you more in my working life. But I’ve never wanted you to like me for that.’

‘You say my grandfather banned emotion, but you… ‘ then she shook her head.

‘I what?’

‘I just wish you’d talk to me more. About you. Instead of its always being rue.’ She waved her toast. ‘You suddenly spring this thing about the flat and Thorncombe at me, and I feel I’m back at square one. This mysterious person who flits in and out of my life. And who doesn’t seem to understand I miss him now when he’s not there.’ She suddenly put her toast down and stared at it on her plate; set her hands on her lap. ‘Daddy, I’m really trying to tell you why I asked you to see Bernard. Why I told you. Aunt Jane didn’t realize what she said was rather a shock to me. I mean, I had felt you know. What we said in the car.’

‘Go on.’

She picked up the toast again, breathed out. ‘Just that I have a lot of past to get rid of as well.’

‘And I could help more?’

‘I do feel much closer to you now than to Andrew. But it’s absurd. I can still talk to him more easily.’ She gave a little nod to herself. ‘And I think it’s because I know him, and I don’t know you I feel I don’t know you. That somewhere you don’t want me to know you.’

I stared at the tablecloth between us. It was such a strange time and place for this attack… no, the wrong word; for this quite legitimate challenge. I had that sense of metaphysical cuckolding that must come at some point to all fathers: flesh of my flesh, but something beyond my genes, and her mother’s. And I remembered Barney’s compliment about her: getting people’s number.

‘Is this to do with my going to California?’

‘I did miss you.’

‘Did you want to come?’

‘I thought about it.’

‘You should have said.’

‘I felt you didn’t want me.’

‘I funked your mother. I thought about it, too.’

‘I assumed it was something to do with Jenny McNeil.’

‘Absolutely not. That happened there.’

And we were left, after this little tumble of confessions, in a silence, writing other scenarios. I stood, and touched her shoulder on the way to the coffeepot on the stove; and spoke again from there.

‘Caro, I suspect you have a notion that life gets simpler as you grow older because you can control it better. But for a lot of us it doesn’t. It just exhibits a repeated pattern, and all one can predict is the recurrence of the pattern. As if one was fed into a computer at birth. And that’s that. This is what begins to haunt people at my age. Bernard’s. Whether we can ever escape what we are.’ She said nothing, and I sat down again. ‘You’re asking me to pretend that I have no doubts about my life.. If I did that, then I think we really would be back at square one. Also I’m a writer. We’re traditionally very poor hands at one-to-one relationships in the flesh. Much better at inventing them for mythical other people. One reason I want to take this corning year off is to try to analyse all this.’ I looked down. ‘Perhaps on paper. I’m thinking of trying a novel.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Secretly. So please don’t pass it on. That’s an order.’

She smiled; a small girl’s inquisitive smile.

‘What would it he about?’

‘Tropes and metaphores.’

‘What are tropes when they’re at home?’

‘All the things I can’t tell straight.’

‘Why is it such a secret?’

‘Because I don’t know if I can do it.’

She gave me a mock reproving look. ‘So much for rectangular things.’

I grinned, she had harked back to a sarcasm I had once inflicted on her, in her more debutante days. She had asked me (with an air of accusation) why I knew ‘so much’ about ‘everything’. I had said something about the difference between truly knowing a lot and knowing a little about a lot; and how, anyway, most of my knowledge came from those ‘queer rectangular things with cardboard covers’ that were stacked on the shelves of the room around us; implying that such knowledge was there for anyone who unlike Caro picked up the knack of reading. Ever since, books had become ‘rectangular things’ in our private vocabulary.

‘And why are writers bad at relationships?’

‘Because we can always imagine better ones. With much less effort. And the imaginary ones grow much more satisfying than the real ones.’

‘Is that why you try to leave the real ones behind?’

‘I don’t know, Caro. Perhaps. The real trap when we dead awaken is not so much that we find we never really lived. But that we can’t write any more. You create out of what you lack. Not what you have.’

She watched me a moment, as if this elementary truth about art was new to her; then she glanced at the kitchen clock.

‘Oh God. I must go.’ She stood and transferred her breakfast things to the counter, but then gave me a smile down. ‘Can you remember what it was like? Trying to understand what everything’s about?’

‘Of course.’

‘I’m a pest.’

‘No.’

‘You’re not angry with me?’

‘Never.’

She hesitated, searching my eyes, then went away to dress. But she came in to the living-room a few minutes later, and across to the table where I worked. Then she stooped, with a wordlessness and quickness I liked, and kissed my cheek; and went back to the door, but turned there.

‘As a punishment for being such a miz, you’re going to have to eat my veal blanquette tonight.’

‘Do you want me to buy anything?’

She thought.

‘Indigestion powder?’ A grin. ‘You’re safe, actually. It’s one of Aunt Jane’s recipes.’

Then she was gone, and Dan was left to reflect undisturbed on the recipe-provider’s judgment on him. It was fair, but it rankled that she should have had to explain him so to his own daughter. No doubt it had been put tactfully, as Caro had suggested; and with even less doubt it would not have been put at all if she had realized Caro was to pass it on; but beneath the diplomacy he recognized that old compulsive attraction to systems of absolutes that had once driven Jane into the Catholic Church and now apparently threatened to push her halfway to Moscow… all that had caused the original schisms between them. Clearly she had been hiding it when they met or rather, hiding it increasingly as the meeting became on the surface more open and truthful. Somewhere Dan was still the responsibility-shirking grasshopper, she the dutiful ant.

But very soon after Caro had left he was already, partly proving his own argument to her about writers, thinking less of Jane in the flesh than of her uses, when reduced to certain moral attitudes, artistically; as an emblem of his own guilty conscience, perhaps precisely because of the feminine and characteristically English cast of her nature. The secret lay somewhere in what he had always liked least about her and Anthony: the streak of priggishness, of censorious insularity, of parochial ethics. Behind all that lay an essence of what he had to come to terms with, and let himself be judged by. He began to see the ghost of a central character, a theme, of a thing in the mind that might once more make reality the metaphor and itself the reality… a more difficult truth about the invention of myths than he had had the courage to tell Caro. Spending a page or two on it is not quite outraging verisimilitude, since that morning Dan did, for an hour, pushing Kitchener to one side—and very possibly some of the uncomfortable home truths just told start assembling a few notes on why he should leave the sanctuary of a medium he knew for the mysteries and complexities of one he didn’t.