The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (13 page)

"Madam!"

She turned, to see him hatless,
smiling; and although her expression was one of now ordinary enough surprise,
once again that face had an extraordinary effect on him. It was as if after
each sight of it, he could not believe its effect, and had to see it again.
It seemed to both envelop and reject him; as if he was a figure in a dream,
both standing still and yet always receding.

"I owe you two apologies.
I did not know yesterday that you were Mrs. Poulteney's secretary. I fear
I addressed you in a most impolite manner."

She stared down at the ground.
"It's no matter, sir."

"And just now when I seemed
... I was afraid lest you had been taken ill."

Still without looking at
him, she inclined her head and turned to walk on.

"May I not accompany you?
Since we walk in the same direction?"

She stopped, but did not
turn. "I prefer to walk alone."

"It was Mrs. Tranter who
made me aware of my error. I am--"

"I know who you are, sir."

He smiled at her timid abruptness.
"Then ..."

Her eyes were suddenly on
his, and with a kind of despair beneath the timidity.

"Kindly allow me to go on
my way alone." His smile faltered. He bowed and stepped back. But instead
of continuing on her way, she stared at the ground a moment. "And please
tell no one you have seen me in this place."

Then, without looking at
him again, she did turn and go on, almost as if she knew her request was
in vain and she regretted it as soon as uttered. Standing in the center
of the road, Charles watched her black back recede. All he was left with
was the after-image of those eyes--they were abnormally large, as if able
to see more and suffer more. And their directness of look--he did not know
it, but it was the tract-delivery look he had received--contained a most
peculiar element of rebuffal. Do not come near me, they said.
Noli me
tangere
.

He looked round, trying to
imagine why she should not wish it known that she came among these innocent
woods. A man perhaps; some assignation? But then he remembered her story.

When Charles finally arrived
in Broad Street, he decided to call at Mrs. Tranter's on his way to the
White Lion to explain that as soon as he had bathed and changed into decent
clothes he would ...

The door was opened by Mary;
but Mrs. Tranter chanced to pass through the hall--to be exact, deliberately
came out into the hall--and insisted that he must not stand upon ceremony;
and were not his clothes the best proof of his excuses? So Mary smilingly
took his ashplant and his rucksack, and he was ushered into the little
back drawing room, then shot with the last rays of the setting sun, where
the invalid lay in a charmingly elaborate state of carmine-and-gray deshabille.

"I feel like an Irish navigator
transported into a queen's boudoir," complained Charles, as he kissed Ernestina's
fingers in a way that showed he would in fact have made a very poor Irish
navvy.

She took her hand away. "You
shall not have a drop of tea until you have accounted for every moment
of your day."

He accordingly described
everything that had happened to him; or almost everything, for Ernestina
had now twice made it clear that the subject of the French Lieutenant's
Woman was distasteful to her--once on the Cobb, and then again later at
lunch afterwards when Aunt Tranter had given Charles very much the same
information as the vicar of Lyme had given Mrs. Poulteney twelve months
before. But Ernest- ina had reprimanded her nurse-aunt for boring Charles
with dull tittle-tattle, and the poor woman--too often summonsed for provinciality
not to be alert to it--had humbly obeyed.

Charles produced the piece
of ammonitiferous rock he had brought for Ernestina, who put down her fireshield
and attempted to hold it, and could not, and forgave Charles everything
for such a labor of Hercules, and then was mock-angry with him for endangering
life and limb.

"It is a most fascinating
wilderness, the Undercliff. I had no idea such places existed in England.
I was reminded of some of the maritime sceneries of Northern Portugal."

"Why, the man is tranced,"
cried Ernestina. "Now confess, Charles, you haven't been beheading poor
innocent rocks-- but dallying with the wood nymphs."

Charles showed here an unaccountable
moment of embarrassment, which he covered with a smile. It was on the tip
of his tongue to tell them about the girl; a facetious way of describing
how he had come upon her entered his mind; and yet seemed a sort of treachery,
both to the girl's real sorrow and to himself. He knew he would have been
lying if he had dismissed those two encounters lightly; and silence seemed
finally less a falsehood in that trivial room.

It remains to be explained
why Ware Commons had appeared to evoke Sodom and Gomorrah in Mrs. Poulteney's
face a fortnight before.

One needs no further explanation,
in truth, than that it was the nearest place to Lyme where people could
go and not be spied on. The area had an obscure, long and mischievous legal
history. It had always been considered common land until the enclosure
acts; then it was encroached on, as the names of the fields of the Dairy,
which were all stolen from it, still attest. A gentleman in one of the
great houses that lie behind the Undercliff performed a quiet Anschluss--with,
as usual in history, the approval of his fellows in society. It is true
that the more republican citizens of Lyme rose in arms--if an axe is an
arm. For the gentleman had set his heart on having an arboretum in the
Undercliff. It came to law, and then to a compromise: a right of way was
granted, and the rare trees stayed unmolested. But the commonage was done
for.

Yet there had remained locally
a feeling that Ware Commons was public property. Poachers slunk in less
guiltily than elsewhere after the pheasants and rabbits; one day it was
discovered, horror of horrors, that a gang of gypsies had been living there,
encamped in a hidden dell, for nobody knew how many months. These outcasts
were promptly cast out; but the memory of their presence remained, and
became entangled with that of a child who had disappeared about the same
time from a nearby village. It was--forgive the pun-- common knowledge
that the gypsies had taken her, and thrown her into a rabbit stew, and
buried her bones. Gypsies were not English; and therefore almost certain
to be cannibals. But the most serious accusation against Ware Commons had
to do with far worse infamy: though it never bore that familiar rural name,
the cart track to the Dairy and beyond to the wooded common was a de
facto Lover's Lane. It drew
courting couples every summer. There was the pretext of a bowl of milk
at the Dairy; and many inviting little paths, as one returned, led up into
the shielding bracken and hawthorn coverts.

That running sore was bad
enough; a deeper darkness still existed. There was an antediluvian tradition
(much older than Shakespeare) that on Midsummer's Night young people should
go with lanterns, and a fiddler, and a keg or two of cider, to a patch
of turf known as Donkey's Green in the heart of the woods and there celebrate
the solstice with dancing. Some said that after midnight more reeling than
dancing took place; and the more draconian claimed that there was very
little of either, but a great deal of something else.

Scientific agriculture, in
the form of myxomatosis, has only very recently lost us the Green forever,
but the custom itself lapsed in relation to the lapse in sexual mores.
It is many years since anything but fox or badger cubs tumbled over Donkey's
Green on Midsummer's Night. But it was not so in 1867. Indeed, only a year
before, a committee of ladies, generated by Mrs. Poulteney, had pressed
the civic authorities to have the track gated, fenced and closed. But more
democratic voices prevailed. The public right of way must be left sacrosanct;
and there were even some disgusting sensualists among the Councilors who
argued that a walk to the Dairy was an innocent pleasure; and the Donkey's
Green Ball no more than an annual jape. But it is sufficient to say that
among the more respectable townsfolk one had only to speak of a boy or
a girl as "one of the Ware Commons kind" to tar them for life. The boy
must thenceforth be a satyr; and the girl, a hedge-prostitute.

Sarah therefore found Mrs.
Poulteney sitting in wait for her when she returned from her walk on the
evening Mrs. Fairley had so nobly forced herself to do her duty. I said
"in wait"; but "in state" would have been a more appropriate term. Sarah
appeared in the private drawing room for the evening Bible-reading, and
found herself as if faced with the muzzle of a cannon. It was very clear
that any moment Mrs. Poulteney might go off, and with a very loud bang
indeed.

Sarah went towards the lectern
in the corner of the room, where the large "family" Bible--not what you
may think of as a family Bible, but one from which certain inexplicable
errors of taste in the Holy Writ (such as the Song of Solomon) had been
piously excised--lay in its off-duty hours. But she saw that all was not
well.

"Is something wrong, Mrs.
Poulteney?"

"Something is very wrong,"
said the abbess. "I have been told something I can hardly believe."

"To do with me?"

"I should never have listened
to the doctor. I should have listened to the dictates of my own common
sense."

"What have I done?"

"I do not think you are mad
at all. You are a cunning, wicked creature. You know very well what you
have done."

"I will swear on the Bible--"

But Mrs. Poulteney gave her
a look of indignation. "You will do nothing of the sort! That is blasphemy."

Sarah came forward, and stood
in front of her mistress. "I must insist on knowing of what I am accused."

Mrs. Poulteney told her.

To her amazement Sarah showed
not the least sign of shame.

"But what is the sin in walking
on Ware Commons?"

'The sin! You, a young woman,
alone, in such a place!"

"But ma'm, it is nothing
but a large wood."

"I know very well what it
is. And what goes on there. And the sort of person who frequents it."

"No one frequents it. That
is why I go there--to be alone."

"Do you contradict me, miss!
Am I not to know what I speak of?"

The first simple fact was
that Mrs. Poulteney had never set eyes on Ware Commons, even from a distance,
since it was out of sight of any carriage road. The second simple fact
is that she was an opium-addict--but before you think I am wildly sacrificing
plausibility to sensation, let me quickly add that she did not know it.
What we call opium she called laudanum. A shrewd, if blasphemous, doctor
of the time called it Our-Lordanum, since many a nineteenth-century lady--and
less, for the medicine was cheap enough (in the form of Godfrey's Cordial)
to help all classes get through that black night of womankind--sipped it
a good deal more frequently than Communion wine. It was, in short, a very
near equivalent of our own age's sedative pills. Why Mrs. Poulteney should
have been an inhabitant of the Victorian valley of the dolls we need not
inquire, but it is to the point that laudanum, as Coleridge once discovered,
gives vivid dreams.

I cannot imagine what Bosch-like
picture of Ware Commons Mrs. Poulteney had built up over the years; what
satanic orgies she divined behind every tree, what French abominations
under every leaf. But I think we may safely say that it had become the
objective correlative of all that went on in her own subconscious.

Her outburst reduced both
herself and Sarah to silence.

Having discharged, Mrs. Poulteney
began to change her tack.

"You have distressed me deeply."

"But how was I to tell? I
am not to go to the sea. Very well, I don't go to the sea. I wish for solitude.
That is all. That is not a sin. I will not be called a sinner for that."

"Have you never heard speak
of Ware Commons?"

"As a place of the kind you
imply--never."

Mrs. Poulteney looked somewhat
abashed then before the girl's indignation. She recalled that Sarah had
not lived in Lyme until recently; and that she could therefore, just conceivably,
be ignorant of the obloquy she was inviting.

"Very well. But let it be
plainly understood. I permit no one in my employ to go or to be seen near
that place. You will confine your walks to where it is seemly. Do I make
myself clear?"