Daniel Martin (53 page)

‘You have made a conquest. I’ve just been asked why we can’t live in a place like this.’

‘Perhaps that’s the answer. Cultivate your garden.’

She sat down again, and once more put her feet up. Yes, all right, she’d have a whisky. There was another shift of mood; brisker, determined to leave her discontented self behind. She spoke to where I stood at the drinks cupboard at the end of the room.

‘I do envy you. Being in touch with nature and all that.’

‘It is a relief from people.’

I looked out of Paul’s window. ‘The peace. All that darkness, things asleep.’

I came back with the glasses.

‘But unreal?’

‘A little.’

‘Still quite cheap to buy.’

She smiled, toasted me silently. ‘Get thee behind me.’

‘Anyway, I’m about to discover how unreal it is.’ I sat down in my rocker. ‘I’m going to give myself a year off after this current script.’

‘And live here?’

‘If Ben and Phoebe don’t drive me mad.’

‘How will you spend your time?’

I bent to replace a log-end that had fallen out on the hearthstone ‘God knows. Probably in sheer relief at not having to think cinema for a while.’ Now I hesitated. ‘I have a ghost of a notion I might try a novel.’

She was surprised.

‘Really?’

‘Unreally. It’s rather like your dream of standing for Westminster.’

She sat again with an arm cocked on the back of the couch; the whisky in her lap, in a quite unconscious imitation of Mme Ramier; for some reason, perhaps just at the change of subject, more alert, amused.

‘Do you have a subject?’

‘Just a ragbag of ideas that never got into my other work. The facts behind the glamorous movie scenes. That sort of thing. Hardly original. And potentially very tedious.’

‘Then it wouldn’t be like anything else you’ve written.’

I smiled down at my glass. ‘You’re disappointing me, Jane. I was hoping you might argue me out of it.’

‘Why on earth should I do that?

‘I thought the novel counted as ego-perpetuating bourgeois decadence.’

For a tiny moment she was inclined to take offence. Her eyes rested on mine, but then she looked down and murmured, ‘You’re breaking our agreement.’

‘Rather more putting a serious question flippantly.’

‘Then I don’t understand it.’

‘Whether it isn’t a form of self-indulgence.’

‘I should have thought that depends on the end-product.’

‘Obviously… and when it’s so uncertain?’

‘Have you read Lukacs?’

I shook my head. ‘Why?’

She bowed her head. ‘I just wondered.’

‘Tell me.’

She shrugged.

‘Only because he’s rather wise on… well, all art, but particularly the novel. Its proper and improper uses.’

‘According to the canon?

She looked up again. ‘He was a very great humanist, Dan.’

‘I must confess I haven’t read him.’

‘Not very brave when the Stalinist screws were put on. Not a mad martyr a la Solzhethtsyn. Like most of us, really. Just wanting something better… inside the system.’ She looked down, as if ashamed to be so positive; then spoke more gently, like a guest. ‘I think you’d like him. He’s very intelligent. Behind all the isms.’

‘It’s whether I could rival the supreme honesty of a novel I saw in California recently. It was called The Life and Times of Jonathan Doe.’

‘I haven’t… ‘

‘It consisted of a title page and two hundred blank sheets. All rather nicely bound.’

That made her laugh, but she wouldn’t accept such diffidence; having written so many scripts must help, if only with the dialogue.

‘It’s the bits between I fear. All the stuff the camera does for you. And finding an angle. A place to hide.’

‘Why must you hide?’

‘I couldn’t just write a novel about a scriptwriter. That would be absurd. A novelist who wasn’t a scriptwriter might do it. But I’m a scriptwriter who isn’t a novelist.’

‘Until you try.’

‘I’m slightly tempted to use someone like Jenny McNeil. Seeing it all through her eyes. If I ever could get inside a young female mind.’

‘She sounds very intelligent.’

‘A lot too much to be a good actress.’

‘I would once have taken deep offence at that.’

We smiled, looked down. My own smile was even then partly at my duplicity, from my knowing that Jenny’s was not the only architectures head I must try to penetrate. Tensions, poles; the mysterious of secret reality. I poked the logs together, then threw on some new ones. ‘Not serious. Merely a touch of your own disease.’

‘I must say you seem remarkably free of the symptoms.’

‘I feel my life’s been rather like the lanes round here… going the long way nowhere between high hedges. It isn’t that I haven’t enjoyed the hedges. But there comes a time when you want to look over them. Get your bearings, I suppose.’ She waited, the listener now. There was the sound of a car, one of the rare ones that used the lane at night. I remembered that other car that had passed in the Oxford night; and let the sound of this one die away. ‘A little peck at one’s liver. The whole culture’s, really.’

‘Prometheus in the Augean Stable?’

I opened my hands. ‘And where the hell one would start. A Russian like Solzhenitsyn he’s got his dragon on every street-corner. It’s where you find it in a society drifting slowly downstream into oblivion.’

‘Anthony would have said that the terms of your statement answer it.’

‘The drifting? But that’s not an external thing like an inhumane political system. Just in the nature of history and its ends.’

She mimicked the don’s wife.

‘History doesn’t have ends. History is the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.’

‘Sartre?’

‘Marx.’

‘I wonder if he could have imagined a nation with only its past to live for.’

‘Perhaps that’s where the solution is.’

‘How?’

‘Our moral tradition. Belief in personal conscience. Instead of being tied like an old boot behind American and E. E. C. capitalism.’ It was my turn to wait; and once again I sensed a struggle in her between retiring and going on. It was not unlike trying to persuade a wild animal to feed from one’s hand; the patience one needs sometimes, watching birds. She hopped, shyly. ‘I’m reading another very interesting Marxist at the moment. Gramsci.’

‘Yes, I saw you were.’ She glanced up. ‘It was in your living room.’ I smiled. ‘And once again only a name, I’m afraid.’

‘He tried to evolve a socialism for the Italian situation. ‘

‘And failed?’

‘In terms of Mussolini and his own Communist Party, totally. But he’s having his revenge now. In the modern C. P. I.’

‘And he’s relevant?’

‘Not in practical terms to the British situation. But I find some of his ideas sympathetic.’ She was staring into the fire again. ‘He’s really another of the Marxist anti-jacobins… a humanist, underneath the jargon. There’s a thing he labelled ideological hegemony.’ She followed that with the faintest suggestion of a wince, but went on. ‘By which he meant a sort of all-pervasive organizing principle in bourgeois society a belief-system that more and more takes the place of the overt police state… totalitarianism proper. It permeates all society, supports the established system through the mind the unconscious. It works by what Marxists call mystification. Confuses all power relations, all major issues, the way people see events. Prevents them from judging them. Everything becomes reified, human beings become commodities, to be bought and sold. Mere objects, market research statistics, things to be manipulated by images and all the rest. Which means that socialist intellectuals and activists have nothing to work on in the ordinary consciousness. They become inorganic, they’re either driven into isolation on the political sidelines, or if they do get power, forced to follow the old Leninist heresy. Government by force and apparatus.’ She paused, then ended rather pathetically. ‘Unfortunately he’s far better at defining that than explaining how one could create a counter-hegemony. The evil, not the cure.’

All of which was said with a continuing shyness, tentativeness; it was less Gramsci than his exegetist that interested me as always, far less the political than the biological view of life: not what she said, but why she was saying it; why I was allowed to hear what had been so firmly banned the previous evening at Compton. It seemed a compliment yet I wondered; perhaps it merely implied, once that my political indifference and ignorance needed reprise. I’m a victim of it in a way. ‘Buying the American view of Country. From over there it does sometimes seem a hopelessly in-turned and stagnant place.’

‘Because they say so?’

‘Because they are themselves. Nine-tenths of the energy may be misapplied, but it still represents a power to choose that we seem to have lost. All right, history may be the actions men, but we’ve surely lost all emotional belief in the proposition.’

‘Gramsci would claim that’s a function of the hegemony.’

‘I appreciate that, Jane. I have read Marcuse. It just seems deeper than… than media manipulation, all the rest. I think most people here do actually sense the Gramsci thing. That’s part of the hopelessness. On the one hand we’ve decided history is a corrupt judge, has wrongly sentenced us, on the other hand we refuse to appeal. I’m not really arguing with you. I agree we’ve become almost totally the victims of social forces we can’t control. But it seems to me something more biological in origin. I don’t know. Blindness. Impotence. Old age. Not operable. In the nature of the process.’

‘And the young have to accept that?’

‘I’m not sure they have a choice. Cultures are like species, they decline and fall. Perhaps the racial Geist is also mortal.’

We were by then preferring not to look at each other; and there was a perceptible, if infinitesimal, tension. I knew I was being a man of little faith, a Job’s comforter; but it was also for tactical reasons, to provoke her into showing how genuine her own pessimism was.

She said, ‘I refuse to believe our children have no choice at all about the kind of world they live in.’

‘But the choice does get more and more limited?’

‘Perhaps physically. But not morally.’

Anthony’s ghost or something else that had been concealed, an identity beneath all their disagreement was suddenly very present between us. There was a lamp still on at the supper table at the far end of the room, but where we sat only the occasional flames and the red glow of the fire lit her face. She sat with her head slightly bowed, retreated into herself again… and I knew continued argument would drive her only further away. Once again the dreaded theory of reserve, our Englishness, was upon us.

‘It’s not that I wouldn’t like to believe as well.’

‘I realize.’

But she didn’t look at me. I stood up.

‘Let me get some more whisky.’

‘No really I… ‘ She glanced at her watch, one of those that has to be followed by a move or else be fated to suggest politeness conquering boredom. ‘Do you keep country hours?’

‘Not at all. But if you’re tired.’

‘Just a few more minutes. This fire’s so lovely.’

I gestured with my glass. ‘You’re sure?’

‘Absolutely.’

I went to get myself another Scotch, and looked surreptitiously back at her. She was staring into the fire again, absorbed by it. Her hair was without the silver comb she seemed to like to wear, or had worn, like some Tudor woman with a favourite jewel, as if it had some obscure talismanic value, on the other occasions I had seen her since the first; perhaps the lack of that, with the rather bulky sweater she was wearing, the apparent informality was what redeemed the distances elsewhere. It certainly wasn’t a sexual feeling, but much more one of mystery; to see her like this, both past and present. Though I knew that she felt something had been skated over, words had once again failed that the infallible Pythia, for all her self-mockery, was still making secret oracular judgments, I somehow didn’t wish her any other than she was: not predictable, not amenable, indeed in one way not too far from Nell’s little gibe. A slippery eel. I had questions I should have liked to ask: why she had refused the previous evening to discuss what she had not shied from on this; what new thoughts she had on Anthony’s death; how seriously she believed what she had said to Caro of me. But I knew I didn’t yet know her well enough as she had become.

I sat down again. She asked what wood it was we burnt and I told her: apple. With beech and cedar, one of the great trinity of logwoods. She shifted her head, as if she hadn’t heard that before; then was silent. I watched her watching the fire, then looked down, and let her have her silence. This obstinate privacy must have grown slowly all through those years with Anthony, and been partly formed by the deserts in their marriage; but reached further back past the champagne bottle thrown in the river, the giving herself to me… to the small girl who had somewhere never forgiven the lack of love at a crucial stage of her life. It explained that married rejection of her outward persona as a student, of what we had then thought of as her ‘natural’ talents her enthusiasm, acting, ‘style’, dependence. But they must always have been truly a mask, evolved to cover an earlier scar. The real secret behind her name had been that Anthony was also to be a convert, but to the needs that insecure and thwarted child. The attempt must have been foredoomed, and perhaps largely a product of all that silly talk about steps in the dark; perhaps she had even half sensed it, and yet made withdrawal impossible by putting on the Catholic chain. The unconscious demand had totally trumped all conscious judgment.