The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (39 page)

It is really two rooms, a
small sitting room and an even smaller bedroom, both made out of one decent-sized
Georgian room. The walls are papered in an indeterminate pattern of minute
bistre flowers. There is a worn carpet, a round-topped tripod table covered
by a dark green rep cloth, on the corners of which someone had once attempted--evidently
the very first attempt--to teach herself embroidery; two awkward armchairs,
overcarved wood garnished by a tired puce velvet, a dark-brown mahogany
chest of drawers. On the wall, a foxed print of Charles Wesley, and a very
bad watercolor of Exeter Cathedral--received in reluctant part payment,
some years before, from a lady in reduced circumstances. Apart from a small
clatter of appliances beneath the tiny barred fire, now a sleeping ruby,
that was the inventory of the room. Only one small detail saved it: the
white marble surround of the fireplace, which
was Georgian, and showed
above graceful nymphs with cornucopias of flowers. Perhaps they had always
had a faint air of surprise about their classical faces; they certainly
seemed to have it now, to see what awful changes a mere hundred years could
work in a nation's culture. They had been born into a pleasant pine-paneled
room; now they found themselves in a dingy cell.

They must surely, if they
had been capable, have breathed a sigh of relief when the door opened and
the hitherto absent occupant stood silhouetted in the doorway. That strange-cut
coat, that black bonnet, that indigo dress with its small white collar
... but Sarah came briskly, almost eagerly in.

This was not her arrival
at the Endicott Family. How she had come there--several days before--was
simple. The name of the hotel had been a sort of joke at the academy where
she studied as a girl in Exeter; the adjective was taken as a noun, and
it was supposed that the Endicotts were so multiplied that they required
a whole hotel to themselves.

Sarah had found herself standing
at the Ship, where the Dorchester omnibuses ended their run. Her box was
waiting; had arrived the previous day. A porter asked her where she was
to go. She had a moment of panic. No ready name came to her mind except
that dim remembered joke. A something about the porter's face when he heard
her destination must have told her she had not chosen the most distinguished
place to stay in Exeter. But he humped her box without argument and she
followed him down through the town to the quarter I have already mentioned.
She was not taken by the appearance of the place--in her memory (but she
had only seen it once) it was homelier, more dignified, more open ... however,
beggars cannot be choosers. It relieved her somewhat that her solitary
situation evoked no comment. She paid over a week's room money in advance,
and that was evidently sufficient recommendation. She had intended to take
the cheapest room, but when she found that only one room was offered for
ten shillings but one and a half for the extra half-crown, she had changed
her mind.

She came swiftly inside the
room and shut the door. A match was struck and applied to the wick of the
lamp, whose milk-glass diffuser, once the "chimney" was replaced, gently
repelled the night. Then she tore off her bonnet and shook her hair loose
in her characteristic way. She lifted the canvas bag she was carrying onto
the table, evidently too anxious to unpack it to be bothered to take off
her coat. Slowly and carefully she lifted out one after the other a row
of wrapped objects and placed them on the green cloth. Then she put the
basket on the floor, and started to unwrap her purchases.

She began with a Staffordshire
teapot with a pretty colored transfer of a cottage by a stream and a pair
of lovers (she looked closely at the lovers); and then a Toby jug, not
one of those garish-colored monstrosities of Victorian manufacture, but
a delicate little thing in pale mauve and primrose-yellow, the jolly man's
features charmingly lacquered by a soft blue glaze (ceramic experts may
recognize a Ralph Wood). Those two purchases had cost Sarah ninepence in
an old china shop; the Toby was cracked, and was to be recracked in the
course of time, as I can testify, having bought it myself a year or two
ago for a good deal more than the three pennies Sarah was charged. But
unlike her, I fell for the Ralph Wood part of it. She fell for the smile.

Sarah had, though we have
never seen it exercised, an aesthetic sense; or perhaps it was an emotional
sense--a reaction against the dreadful decor in which she found herself.
She did not have the least idea of the age of her little Toby. But she
had a dim feeling that it had been much used, had passed through many hands
... and was now hers. Was now hers--she set it on the mantelpiece and,
still in her coat, stared at it with a childlike absorption, as if not
to lose any atom of this first faint taste of ownership.

Her reverie was broken by
footsteps in the passage outside. She threw a brief but intense look at
the door. The footsteps passed on. Now Sarah took off her coat and poked
the fire into life; then set a blackened kettle on the hob. She turned
again to her other purchases: a twisted paper of tea, another of sugar,
a small metal can of milk she set beside the teapot. Then she took the
remaining three parcels and went into the bedroom: a bed, a marble washstand,
a small mirror, a sad scrap of carpet, and that was all.

But she had eyes only for
her parcels. The first contained a nightgown. She did not try it against
herself, but laid it on the bed; and then unwrapped her next parcel. It
was a dark-green shawl, merino fringed with emerald-green silk. This she
held in a strange sort of trance--no doubt at its sheer expense, for it
cost a good deal more than all her other purchases put together. At last
she pensively raised and touched its fine soft material against her cheek,
staring down at the nightgown; and then in the first truly feminine gesture
I have permitted her, moved a tress of her brown-auburn hair forward to
lie on the green cloth; a moment later she shook the scarf out--it was
wide, more than a yard across, and twisted it round her shoulders. More
staring, this time into the mirror; and then she returned to the bed and
arranged the scarf round the shoulders of the laid-out nightgown.

She unwrapped the third and
smallest parcel; but this was merely a roll of bandage, which, stopping
a moment to stare back at the green-and-white arrangement on the bed, she
carried back into the other room and put in a drawer of the mahogany chest,
just as the kettle lid began to rattle.

Charles's purse had contained
ten sovereigns, and this alone--never mind what else may have been involved--was
enough to transform Sarah's approach to the external world. Each night
since she had first counted those ten golden coins, she had counted them
again. Not like a miser, but as one who goes to see some film again and
again--out of an irresistible pleasure in the story, in certain images
...

For days, when she first
arrived in Exeter, she spent nothing, only the barest amounts, and then
from her own pitiful savings, on sustenance; but stared at shops: at dresses,
at chairs, tables, groceries, wines, a hundred things that had come to
seem hostile to her, taunters, mockers, so many two-faced citizens of Lyme,
avoiding her eyes when she passed before them and grinning when she had
passed behind. This was why she had taken so long to buy a teapot. You
can make do with a kettle; and her poverty had inured her to not having,
had so profoundly removed from her the appetite to buy that, like some
sailor who has subsisted for weeks on half a biscuit a day, she could not
eat all the food that was now hers for the asking. Which does not mean
she was unhappy; very far from it. She was simply enjoying the first holiday
of her adult life.

She made the tea. Small golden
flames, reflected, gleamed back from the pot in the hearth. She seemed
waiting in the quiet light and crackle, the firethrown shadows. Perhaps
you think she must, to be so changed, so apparently equanimous and contented
with her lot, have heard from or of Charles. But not a word. And I no more
intend to find out what was going on in her mind as she firegazed than
I did on that other occasion when her eyes welled tears in the silent night
of Marlborough House. After a while she roused herself and went to the
chest of drawers and took from a top compartment a teaspoon and a cup without
a saucer. Having poured her tea at the table, she unwrapped the last of
her parcels. It was a small meat pie. Then she began to eat, and without
any delicacy whatsoever.
 
 

Respectability has
spread its leaden mantle over the whole country . . . and the man wins
the race who can
worship
that great goddess with the most undivided devotion.
--
Leslie Stephen, Sketches
from Cambridge (1865)

The bourgeoisie
. . . compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois
mode of production;
it
compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst,
that is, to become bourgeois
themselves.
In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
--
Marx, Communist Manifesto
(1848)

These new recruits to the
upper middle class were in a tiresome position. If they sensed themselves
recruits socially, they knew very well that they were powerful captains
in their own world of commerce. Some chose another version of cryptic coloration
and went in very comprehensively (like Mr. Jorrocks) for the pursuits,
property and manners of the true country gentleman. Others--like Mr. Freeman--tried
to redefine the term. Mr. Freeman had a newly built mansion in the Surrey
pinewoods, but his wife and daughter lived there a good deal more frequently
than he did. He was in his way a forerunner of the modern rich commuter,
except that he spent only his weekends there--and then rarely but in summer.
And where his modern homologue goes in for golf, or roses, or gin and adultery,
Mr. Freeman went in for earnestness.

Indeed, Profit and Earnestness
(in that order) might have been his motto. He had thrived on the great
social-economic change that took place between 1850 and 1870--the shift
of accent from manufactory to shop, from producer to customer. That first
great wave of conspicuous consumption had suited his accounting books very
nicely; and by way of compensation--and in imitation of an earlier generation
of Puritan profiteers, who had also preferred hunting sin to hunting the
fox--he had become excessively earnest and Christian in his private life.
Just as some tycoons of our own time go in for collecting art, covering
excellent investment with a nice patina of philanthropy, Mr. Freeman contributed
handsomely to the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge and
similar militant charities. His apprentices, improvers and the rest were
atrociously lodged and exploited by our standards; but by those of 1867,
Freeman's was an exceptionally advanced establishment, a model of its kind.
When he went to heaven, he would have a happy labor force behind him; and
his heirs would have the profit therefrom.

He was a grave headmasterly
man, with intense gray eyes, whose shrewdness rather tended to make all
who came under their survey feel like an inferior piece of Manchester goods.
He listened to Charles's news, however, without any sign of emotion, though
he nodded gravely when Charles came to the end of his explanation. A silence
followed. The interview took place in Mr. Freeman's study in the Hyde Park
house. It gave no hint of his profession. The walls were lined by suitably
solemn-looking books; a bust of Marcus Aurelius (or was it Lord Palmerston
in his bath?); one or two large but indeterminate engravings, whether of
carnivals or battles it was hard to establish, though they managed to give
the impression of an inchoate humanity a very great distance from present
surroundings.

Mr. Freeman cleared his throat
and stared at the red and gilt morocco of his desk; he seemed about to
pronounce, but changed his mind.

"This is most surprising.
Most surprising."

More silence followed, in
which Charles felt half irritated and half amused. He saw he was in for
a dose of the solemn papa. But since he had invited it, he could only suffer
in the silence that followed, and swallowed, that unsatisfactory response.
Mr. Freeman's private reaction had in fact been more that of a businessman
than of a gentleman, for the thought which had flashed immediately through
his mind was that Charles had come to ask for an increase in the marriage
portion. That he could easily afford; but a terrible possibility had simultaneously
occurred to him--that Charles had known all along of his uncle's probable
marriage. The one thing he loathed was to be worsted in an important business
deal--and this, after all, was one that concerned the object he most cherished.