The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (12 page)

"Do but think," he had once
said to her, "how disgracefully plebeian a name Smithson is."

"Ah indeed--if you were only
called Lord Brabazon Vavasour Vere de Vere--how much more I should love
you!"

But behind her self-mockery
lurked a fear.

He had first met her the
preceding November, at the house of a lady who had her eye on him for one
of her own covey of simperers. These young ladies had had the misfortune
to be briefed by their parents before the evening began. They made the
cardinal error of trying to pretend to Charles that paleontology absorbed
them--he must give them the titles of the most interesting books on the
subject--whereas Ernestina showed a gently acid little determination not
to take him very seriously. She would, she murmured, send him any interesting
specimens of coal she came across in her scuttle; and later she told him
she thought he was very lazy. Why, pray? Because he could hardly enter
any London drawing room without finding abundant examples of the objects
of his interest.

To both young people it had
promised to be just one more dull evening; and both, when they returned
to their respective homes, found that it had not been so.

They saw in each other a
superiority of intelligence, a lightness of touch, a dryness that pleased.
Ernestina let it be known that she had found "that Mr. Smithson" an agreeable
change from the dull crop of partners hitherto presented for her examination
that season. Her mother made discreet inquiries; and consulted her husband,
who made more; for no young male ever set foot in the drawing room of the
house overlooking Hyde Park who had not been as well vetted as any modern
security department vets its atomic scientists.
Charles passed his secret
ordeal with flying colors.

Now Ernestina had seen the
mistake of her rivals: that no wife thrown at Charles's head would ever
touch his heart. So when he began to frequent her mother's at homes and
soirees
he
had the unusual experience of finding that there was no sign of the usual
matrimonial trap; no sly hints from the mother of how much the sweet darling
loved children or "secretly longed for the end of the season" (it was supposed
that Charles would live permanently at Winsyatt, as soon as the obstacular
uncle did his duty); or less sly ones from the father on the size of the
fortune "my dearest girl" would bring to her husband. The latter were,
in any case, conspicuously unnecessary; the Hyde Park house was fit for
a duke to live in, and the absence of brothers and sisters said more than
a thousand bank statements.

Nor did Ernestina, although
she was very soon wildly determined, as only a spoiled daughter can be,
to have Charles, overplay her hand. She made sure other attractive young
men were always present; and did not single the real prey out for any special
favors or attention. She was, on principle, never serious with him; without
exactly saying so she gave him the impression that she liked him because
he was fun-- but of course she knew he would never marry. Then came an
evening in January when she decided to plant the fatal seed.

She saw Charles standing
alone; and on the opposite side of the room she saw an aged dowager, a
kind of Mayfair equivalent of Mrs. Poulteney, whom she knew would be as
congenial to Charles as castor oil to a healthy child. She went up to him.

"Shall you not go converse
with Lady Fairwether?"

"I should rather converse
with you."

"I will present you. And
then you can have an eyewitness account of the goings-on in the Early Cretaceous
era."

He smiled. "The Early Cretaceous
is a period. Not an era."

"Never mind. I am sure it
is sufficiently old. And I know how bored you are by anything that has
happened in the last ninety million years. Come."

So they began to cross the
room together; but halfway to the Early Cretaceous lady, she stopped, laid
her
hand a moment on his arm,
and looked him in the eyes.

"If you are determined to
be a sour old bachelor, Mr. Smithson, you must practice for your part."

She had moved on before he
could answer; and what she had said might have sounded no more than a continuation
of her teasing. But her eyes had for the briefest moment made it clear
that she made an offer; as unmistakable, in its way, as those made by the
women who in the London of the time haunted the doorways round the Haymarket.

What she did not know was
that she had touched an increasingly sensitive place in Charles's innermost
soul; his feeling that he was growing like his uncle at Winsyatt, that
life was passing him by, that he was being, as in so many other things,
overfastidious, lazy, selfish ... and worse. He had not traveled abroad
those last two years; and he had realized that previously traveling had
been a substitute for not having a wife. It took his mind off domestic
affairs; it also allowed him to take an occasional woman into his bed,
a pleasure he strictly forbade himself, perhaps remembering the black night
of the soul his first essay in that field had caused, in England.

Traveling no longer attracted
him; but women did, and he was therefore in a state of extreme sexual frustration,
since his moral delicacy had not allowed him to try the simple expedient
of a week in Ostend or Paris. He could never have allowed such a purpose
to dictate the reason for a journey. He passed a very thoughtful week.
Then one morning he woke up.

Everything had become simple.
He loved Ernestina. He thought of the pleasure of waking up on just such
a morning, cold, gray, with a powder of snow on the ground, and seeing
that demure, sweetly dry little face asleep beside him--and by heavens
(this fact struck Charles with a sort of amazement) legitimately in the
eyes of both God and man beside him. A few minutes later he startled the
sleepy Sam, who had crept up from downstairs at his urgent ringing, by
saying: "Sam! I am an absolute one hundred per cent heaven forgive me damned
fool!"

A day or two afterwards the
unadulterated fool had an interview with Ernestina's father. It was brief,
and very satisfactory. He went down to the drawing room, where Ernestina's
mother sat in a state of the most poignant trepidation. She could not bring
herself to speak to Charles, but pointed uncertainly in the direction of
the conservatory. Charles opened the white doors to it and stood in the
waft of the hot, fragrant air. He had to search for Ernestina, but at last
he found her in one of the farthest corners, half screened behind 'a bower
of stephanotis. He saw her glance at him, and then look hastily down and
away. She held a pair of silver scissors, and was pretending to snip off
some of the dead blooms of the heavily scented plant. Charles stood close
behind her; coughed.

"I have come to bid my adieux."
The agonized look she flashed at him he pretended, by the simple trick
of staring at the ground, not to notice. "I have decided to leave England.
For the rest of my life I shall travel. How else can a sour old bachelor
divert his days?"

He was ready to go on in
this vein. But then he saw that Ernestina's head was bowed and that her
knuckles were drained white by the force with which she was gripping the
table. He knew that normally she would have guessed his tease at once;
and he understood that her slowness now sprang from a deep emotion, which
communicated itself to him.

"But if I believed that someone
cared for me sufficiently to share..."

He could not go on, for she
had turned, her eyes full of tears. Their hands met, and he drew her to
him. They did not kiss. They could not. How can you mercilessly imprison
all natural sexual instinct for twenty years and then not expect the prisoner
to be racked by sobs when the doors are thrown open? A few minutes later
Charles led Tina, a little recovered, down the aisle of hothouse plants
to the door back to the drawing room. But he stopped a moment at a plant
of jasmine and picked a sprig and held it playfully over her head.
 

"It isn't mistletoe, but
it will do, will it not?"

And so they kissed, with
lips as chastely asexual as children's. Ernestina began to cry again; then
dried her eyes, and allowed Charles to lead her back into the drawing room,
where her mother and father stood. No words were needed. Ernestina ran
into her mother's opened arms, and twice as many tears as before began
to fall. Meanwhile the two men stood smiling at each other; the one as
if he had just concluded an excellent business deal, the other as if he
was not quite sure which planet he had just landed on, but sincerely hoped
the natives were friendly.
 
 

In what does the
alienation of labor consist? First, that the work is external to the worker,
that it is not a part of his nature, that consequently he does not fulfill
himself in his work but denies himself, has a feeling of misery, not of
well-being . . . the worker therefore feels himself at home only during
his leisure, whereas at work he feels homeless.
--
Marx, Economic and Political
Manuscripts (1844)

And was the day
of my delight
  As pure and perfect
as I say?
--
Tennyson, In Memoriam
(1850)

As he was talking, or being
talked to, by the woman on the grass outside the Dairy, her husband came
back from driving out his cows. He was a bald, vast-bearded man with a
distinctly saturnine cast to his face; a Jeremiah. He gave his wife a stern
look. She promptly forewent her chatter and returned indoors to her copper.
The husband was evidently a taciturn man, though he spoke quickly enough
when Charles asked him how much he owed for the bowl of excellent milk.
A penny, one of those charming heads of the young Victoria that still occasionally
turn up in one's change, with all but that graceful head worn away by the
century's use, passed hands.

Charles was about to climb
back to the path. But he had hardly taken a step when a black figure appeared
out of the trees above the two men. It was the girl. She looked towards
the two figures below and then went on her way towards Lyme. Charles glanced
back at the dairyman, who continued to give the figure above a dooming
stare. He plainly did not allow delicacy to stand in the way of prophetic
judgment.

"Do you know that lady?"

"Aye."

"Does she come this way often?"

"Often enough." The dairyman
continued to stare. Then he said, "And she been't no lady. She be the French
Loot'n'nt's Hoer."

Some moments passed before
Charles grasped the meaning of that last word. And he threw an angry look
at the bearded dairyman, who was a Methodist and therefore fond of calling
a spade a spade, especially when the spade was somebody else's sin. He
seemed to Charles to incarnate all the hypocritical gossip--and gossips--of
Lyme. Charles could have believed many things of that sleeping face; but
never that its owner was a whore.

A few seconds later he was
himself on the cart track back to Lyme. Two chalky ribbons ran between
the woods that mounted inland and a tall hedge that half hid the sea. Ahead
moved the black and now bonneted figure of the girl; she walked not quickly,
but with an even pace, without feminine affectation, like one used to covering
long distances. Charles set out to catch up, and after a hundred yards
or so he came close behind her. She must have heard the sound of his nailed
boots on the flint that had worn through the chalk, but she did not turn.
He perceived that the coat was a little too large for her, and that the
heels of her shoes were mudstained. He hesitated a moment then; but the
memory of the surly look on the dissenting dairyman's face kept Charles
to his original chivalrous intention: to show the poor woman that not everybody
in her world was a barbarian.