Daniel Martin (73 page)

Jane murmured, ‘Who is “they”, professor?’

He gave her another look, as if she were teasing him again.

‘I think you and Mr Martin know, madame.’ He left a moment’s pause, and there was a glint, both of latent irony and of conspiracy, in his old blue eyes. ‘There are many languages on this planet. Many frontiers. But in my experience only two nations.’

In the silence, they heard the faint continued throbbing and pounding of the drums from the forward lounge; and knew he did not mean East and West, and even less his Germany, or their England.

The boat’s constant progress, the transience of each landscape-it might in many ways be a delightfully indolent way of travelling, but it had mysteriously heightened some obscure metaphysical pressure in Dan. It was all very well the Herr Professor talking about time being an illusion, but time seemed both ever-present and distorted on that southward journey. It gained a strange brevity: the cruise had hardly begun before it was nearly ended, almost as if there was a cheat about it, a temporal sleight of hand.

His malaise came from a blend of that and of an even vaguer awareness of shifts in the equilibrium of his life, beyond what he could consciously detect. But more and more he knew these shifts were in response to a sense of incompleteness that was also one of predestination. This lay behind, or deeper than, the effects of experiencing the Nile and the events and meetings of the cruise. He still clung to his inmost grain of conviction—that freedom, especially the freedom to know oneself, was the driving-force of human evolution; whatever else the sacrifice, it must not be of complexity of feeling, and its expression, since that was where, in social terms, the fundamental magic (or chink in the door) of mutation inside the nucleic acid helix took place. All through that long last conversation with the Herr Professor he had secretly watched Jane’s face, to see whether she was recognizing this implicit support being given to his case. But when the old man had left them, soon after the summary but touching reduction of the Tower of Babel to two tribes, he had not pressed it home. They had talked about him, not of what he had been saying; of whether he ventured upon such a line with his fellow-nationals on board. Dan had sensed that Jane, though approving of the old man’s humanity, was not convinced. It was too like quietism. Western mankind was an unruly child, and could not be spared its leftwing rod.

The net result of all this was that Dan found himself wishing—though not overdoing a good thing was such a salient feature in his practical philosophy of pleasure—that the cruise were longer: another week, perhaps. It also suspended, postponed all decision. One waited and one watched; one did not have to act. Already he saw he had spent those days balanced between outward enjoyment and inward anxiety—or enjoyment in the now, anxiety about the future… a worry beyond normal worries, a fear of its arrival. It even worried him that he could not clearly ascribe this premonitory anxiety to anything. He did not need the passage he had marked from Lukacs to feel that it was self-indulgent, unnecessary. In simple fact he felt a little bewitched by what these few days on the Nile seemed to have done to him: both calmed and unsettled.

But the Herr Professor had without knowing, without Dan himself seeing it, given the scales a small tip; then something happened that at last allowed him to perceive what he had been sailing upstream towards. It was not Aswan; but he only fully began to admit what it really was on their very last stop, the morning of the afternoon they were to arrive there.

This last halt was for a brief visit to the temple-complex at Kom Ombo. Set in a desert landscape on a low promontory over the Nile, it had a Greek quality; an isolation, a posedness, a sun-baked peace reflected in the blue water. It was much more as the other temple sites ought to have been: both beautiful in itself and beautifully framed. For some reason Dan had no memory of it from his previous visit.

The ship moored close by and they strolled across the sand. A band of mischievous Bedouin children ran and danced along the ridges of the dunes around them, and bronze-collared doves cooed in the acacias by the waterside. This time Dan and Jane did not even go through the motions of listening to their guide. The stone pavements and terraces over the river were too pleasant to stroll on. Then Dan was given an ornithological treat. He looked through his field-glasses at a robin-like bird hopping in the shade by the river’s edge. It was a very handsome little creature, a blue-throat, the first of the species he had ever seen. He stopped a minute or two to watch it, and Jane went idly on to sit at the corner of the terrace overlooking the river, facing upstream. Then she changed her mind and went out of sight, somewhere lower.

When he got to the corner himself, he saw a collapsed wall made it easy to clamber down nearer the water. She was sitting on one end of the drum of a fallen column, in the thin shade of a sunt tree, her back to him, looking at the curving reach of the water to the south. He scrambled down to join her.

‘Isn’t this a delectable place, Jane?’

She nodded. But something in the way she nodded, and did not turn, both contradicted his light tone and warned him. He came beside her. She gave an embarrassed downward glance towards his feet, then looked back at the view. After a moment a hand came up and she touched her eyes.

‘I’m sorry. It’s nothing.’ She shook her head, to dismiss his solicitude. ‘Its all being over. And thinking of Anthony. How he would have liked it here.’

He sat down beside her on the drum of stone, then asked gently, ‘Why now?’

She had said nothing.

Then without warning her right hand had reached out and taken his, as if she were apologizing for turning female. She would have withdrawn it, but he caught it and made it lie still, under his own now, resting on the stone between them. They stayed like that for a few moments. He pressed the hand, felt a small movement of response; then saw her look down at the hands, as at things detached from the rest of their bodies. And suddenly he knew that something else was being said—in that way she looked down, as in that original gesture of reaching. He felt moved, yet strangely frozen. It was in those moments’ silence, simplicity; in their very tentativeness. Part of him wanted to put an arm round her shoulders, but he knew that the instinct was in some way, echoing the curious swiftness of the cruise, too late when it was perceived; either done spontaneously, or not at all.

‘My dear, he wouldn’t want it.’

‘I know.’

‘And we could easily make this an annual thing.’

She smiled, as he had meant her to, and quoted Eliot to the river.

‘“I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.”‘

‘In a manner of speaking.’

They heard voices behind them, some of the French at the corner of the terrace. She withdrew her hand, but they did not turn; sat in silence again, in the dappled shade. Three snow-white egrets flew across the river, but Dan saw them without thinking. It had been in that downward look at the joined hands. It had been a declension, out of the theatre of their behaviour on the cruise into something undeclared not only between them, but also in each separately; and describable in the other sense of declension… a feminine look, not a neutrally companionable one. Almost reluctant, admitting nothing but its brief existence; yet there.

It had glossed that ‘its all being over’, which had meant not just the cruise, the experience. He knew it had referred mainly to the past, and not to any specific past possibility, but all past possibility; what she knew he knew was lost for ever; but there was also some tinge in it, if only derived from the fact that it had been given in the now, of a present regret… for what had been rediscovered, for what, beneath all the change, had remained. Perhaps he had read too much into it. Yet what it really revealed was something in himself: the arm that had wanted to move, the knowledge that he hadn’t honestly examined why he wanted the cruise to continue, that he shared this sadness at its ending; that he would miss this daily closeness, mind, intuition, shared age and experience, the restoration of the old empathy, far more than he was prepared to admit. It came so oddly without the usual clear knowledges of physical attraction; all those still stayed stubbornly attached to the thought of Jenny, and not just out of fidelity. It was far more a matter of that sense of incompleteness—the extent to which it would increase when they went their different ways, a glimpse of a reality in the old Platonic myth, an echo of the old Rabelaisian one, Pals ce que voudras… it also frightened him.

He found his cigarettes. She took one and they smoked, both staring out at the river. The tears were quite ended now, as she proved when she broke the silence.

‘I was also crying because I suddenly realized I was glad to be alive again, Dan. After what seems rather a long time.’

‘I prefer that.’

‘It was your stopping to watch that bird… we had an absurd row in Greece three years ago—our last proper holiday alone together. Because he’d held us up with his botanizing one afternoon, when all I wanted was a beach and somewhere to swim. He was so happy and I was so unreasonable.’

‘Are you sure he wasn’t being unreasonable as well?’

‘I sat under a tree reading. I only took it out on him later. He wasn’t to know.’ She flicked ash from her cigarette. ‘Behind our screens.’

‘An accepted part of every civilized marriage?’

She smiled, but sadly, then took a breath.

‘I think they must be right, the young. About the antiquatedness of the institution.’

‘Their theory also has its price.’

She left another silence.

‘Have you ever missed it?’

‘Sometimes.’ But that seemed not enough of an answer. He looked down. ‘Not often. If I’m honest.’ He added, ‘And once burnt, twice shy. Laziness. The other kind of relationship becomes a habit.’

‘And the freedom?’

‘To be an aging Don Juan?’

She murmured, ‘That lovely innocent young man I knew at Oxford.’

‘Beyond salvation now.’ She glanced at him, but he avoided her eyes, knowing why she looked. ‘I’m only smiling because you know perfectly well he was never innocent. Lovely, perhaps.’

She too looked down at the ground, then said slowly, almost as if to herself, ‘I always remember you as innocent.’

‘Unlike you?’

‘I was so frightened of my real feelings.’

Before he could answer there came, from behind them, a wail from the ship’s horn. It was time to return.

‘That’s still a kind of innocence.’

‘It never seemed it. Even then.’

‘I think you’re playing Cassandra backwards. My memory of you’s quite opposite. That you always did show real feelings. When it mattered.’ He said, ‘Or much more than the rest of us ever managed.’

‘Emotions. They’re not the same.’ But then she said, more lightly, ‘I’m trying to say thank you, Dan. That is a real feeling.’

There was another peremptory wail from the ship. She stood and reached out a hand with a composed smile… long live convention, the foolishness was over. He pressed it as he stood, and they started back for the boat.

He remained disconcerted. There was something disturbing in the conversation, as in the look; that had not been in any of their previous conversations. She put on dark glasses, and they strolled back through the ruins towards the entrance. A row of crocodile-headed divinities, Alain coming up to greet them, some joke Jane smiled, and answered for them both; she seemed fully recovered from her little bout of sentiment, as lightly guarded as always. Dan had a sense of missed chance, he should have put his arm round her shoulders, at least closed that space… this ludicrous emotional no-man’s-land they had decreed between them, which perhaps their conversation had been directed, on her side, after the holding hands, to reconstitute. It had been like accidentally seeing a woman in her underwear through a bedroom door. Even though the undressing had been of a very different kind, he could not deny that, just as with the hands, it had held an erotic charge for him.

Later, when the ship was on its way again, and they sat on deck before lunch—their Czech friend and Alain were sitting with them—he found himself constantly contemplating Jane in secret… or at least if not literally so, then mentally. Alain was flirting with her again, in English, it was all innocent, she must come to Paris and let him take her to all the new boîtes and restaurants—and Dan let himself slip into the young Frenchman’s imagined place. Perhaps that was at the root of it: a resentment on her side, though almost certainly unconscious, that Dan had so scrupulously not acknowledged what other males around them did: that she wore her age well, she retained an attraction. It had worried him slightly from the beginning, which was why he had been careful with conventional compliments about clothes, about how she looked.

On the other hand he was very clear that whatever else that gesture, that revealing, had meant, it had not been an invitation. And it was absurd because of Jenny; because of the memory of what Jane had told Caro, her view of him as someone in flight, eternally fickle; because of a thousand things.

So much bound them apart, and not least sheer ignorance of each other’s secret feelings and emotions—as her very distinguishing between the two words had once more proved. Yet Dan fell, in his habitual hypothetical way, to imagining what, if he proposed when they transferred from the ship to the hotel in Aswan that they take a double room, her reaction might be. The only speculation involved was over how she would refuse: with anger, with disbelief, with irony, perhaps even with affection. What was certain was that she would refuse—or he knew nothing of women. He wondered if what nagged at him was merely her impossibility—or their joint impossibility. He remembered that she had had an affaire quite recently; and he could, just, imagine her having an affaire, a night, with Alain, if he himself had not been there—a letting him into her bed if he insisted enough. But that would never do for them. And he knew, in some strange way, that even if she might, out of some part of herself so hidden that he had not even guessed at its existence, out of some brief conquest of feeling by emotion, not have refused, he would have felt betrayed.