Daniel Martin (16 page)

‘What are you in a panic about?’

She said it with a strange mixture of shyness and aggression. But it touched me, it defined so precisely the gap between us. I thought of Jenny’s dry impatience before the same line. Even allowing for the three years or so of difference in age, Jenny was a much shrewder and less dependent girl; but I half sensed what could drive fathers and daughters to incest… that need to purge the spoken of the spoken, to institute a simplicity in place of an obscuring complexity. ‘That’s something we’ll talk about another day. Or night.’ I could see from her face that she felt she was being fobbed off. ‘Caro, Jenny’s had a lot of experience. She’s acquired a kind of… armour? I don’t want you hurt. Used. That’s all.’

We seemed to have reached an impasse. Caro was sublimely ignorant of Freud—and of classical tragedy, for that matter. I could imagine, given the narrow limits of her cultural world and the British mania for television, that Barney had more mundane attractions for her. He was a household name in his way; and just as for the masses he wore a liberal intellectual’s face on camera, I could guess that the Pagliacci face he showed Caro in private would be convincing enough. It would have been child’s play to seem both glamorous and vulnerable to such an innocent who probably felt in addition out of her depth, in need of a protector. If my own bill of health was cleaner it was only because Jenny had an innate scepticism and the resolution to inflict it when the sobs grew too loud.

‘Will you tell him you’ve spoken to me?’

‘I’ll have to, won’t I?’

Then more silence. Mine was spent in strangling impossible questions: what’s he like in bed, have you brought him here, how widely known is it… she was pretty enough to have made it a physical thing, but there must have been a dozen other girls in that building with her looks—and with a comfortable superiority in what constitutes attraction, at least for men like Barney, out of bed. I felt angrier and angrier, almost like picking up the telephone and having it out with him there and then. In the end I got up and went to the whisky again. I wanted to put my arm round her, but it seemed wrong; cheating.

‘Why have you told me this, Caro?’ She looked down into the fireplace and said nothing. ‘You could have gone on in secret.’

‘And not bothered you?’

‘That’s a foul hit.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Then tell me.’ Still she was silent. ‘Do you want me to do something about it?’

‘Just understand me, I suppose.’

‘And give you my blessing?’ She turned away.

‘Why did Jenny McNeil fall in love with you?’ I felt the force of the petard then.

‘Love’s hardly the word.’

‘Then whatever word you do use.’

‘So you can use it back?’ It was too harsh, and I went on quickly. ‘She was simply a bit thrown by the life out there. Feeling lonely. And hardly short of experience with younger men.’ I said, ‘Who aren’t all like Richard, you know.’

‘I realize that.’

‘I’m not angry, Caro. As long as you’re happy.’

‘I was. Until today.’

‘I’ll get over it. You must show me a little grace.’

She nodded, then turned and sat on the arm of a chair. ‘I’d better tell you something else.’

‘What?’

‘I spent this afternoon looking for flats. I think I’ve found one I can afford.’

I did want to be angry with her then, I’d very much have liked to be an American Jewish or a working-class father, anything other than feeling caught in that dreadful English middleclass trap of never showing or saying what you really feel. I certainly saw that I was to be taken at full tilt… or not at all.

‘I’m going down to Thorncombe as soon as possible.’

‘I think I’d rather.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Near Parliament Hill. Kentish Town, really.’ That’s pretty grubby, isn’t it?’

‘It’s quite a nice house.’

‘You must let me’

‘I’ve saved a lot. Living here.’

We had a little argument about that, but she was adamant; and I realized that ‘Kentish Town’ was partly symbolic; not only her father was being rejected. I also remembered that it was on the way to Muswell Hill. The place fell vacant in a couple of weeks, it seemed. It was furnished, but she wanted to ‘borrow’ a table and one or two other things. Perhaps she wanted to give me at least one small chance to feel still needed. Then there was a silence, too little and too much to say. She stood and took her last fence; came and stood in front of me, leant forward clumsily and kissed me on the cheek. She let me hold her for a few moments. Then she turned and left the room. Cut.

Six hours later, ten o’clock on a chilling London winter morning, a dank mist over everything outside: I had finally got some sleep, though not nearly enough by the time Caro was tapping on my door. Lying there, I felt the next stage of the Iong journey disorientation: I had never left London, California was a dream. I must have had depressive real dreams, anxiety ones, though I couldn’t remember them, perhaps because the real anxieties flooded back with the grey daylight: Caro’s news, the coming ordeal later that day at Oxford, I must try to ring Jenny, then David Malevich, all that mail waiting, my accountant, my dentist… a great deal too much reality.

Caro helped. I was given the full treatment for breakfast, no Continental nonsense; a dry look askance from the electric stove. She was trying, she said, to make up for ‘last night’, and reconciliation was easy. She told me more about the flat, across the table while I ate, and I tried to accept it as a natural thing: wanting to strike out on her own, live like other girls. We didn’t mention Barney at all. I started questioning her about Jane and Anthony. Over the last two years I had got her to talk, if not quite openly, at least unemotionally about Compton and its inmates, but the same wasn’t true of her Oxford relatives. I knew a little of what had happened to the three children, Caro’s cousins; but I had no very clear picture at all of what Jane and Anthony themselves had become. Though she hinted at a certain puzzlement with Anthony, he could be so dry, you didn’t always understand whether he was being serious or funny, I had detected a strong affection in her for both of them. They’d always treated her exactly as if she were their own daughter, she felt that. She thought Aunt Jane had ‘gone off’ the Catholic thing, but, it was ‘sort of something’ one didn’t talk about. She was terribly efficient, lots of committees and things, much more practical than Mummy; an awfully good cook, I’d love their house. Uncle Anthony was still dotty about orchids, there was one he’d found at Compton two or three years before, but she couldn’t remember its name.

I took the impression, amid all her chatter, that Jane had changed much more than Anthony. What memories I had of her on the domestic side were of a distinctly slapdash approach to food, nor could I associate her with worthy committees and leftwing causes I gathered that latter detail from something Caro dropped in about Andrew: how he sometimes called Jane her ‘Red aunt’… though no doubt the faintest shade of pink would seem red to him. My final picture was of a brisk, well-organized and self-possessed woman who contrasted rather favourably in Caro’s eyes with the temperament and occasional bossiness of her own mother.

She took herself off just after eleven, giving me messages for them in Oxford. I promised to ring her that night, we’d have a whole evening together as soon as I could get back. We kissed. Then I stood at the window and watched her slight figure cross the misted street below and walk up towards the Underground station. She turned and waved, and I waved back.

Then I went and looked in her room—the one she’d had as a baby, though it had been two or three times redecorated since then. It was rather sad, in some way like Jenny’s apartment in Los Angeles; depersonalized and temporary, a shade too tidy, as if she were still living in a hostel. No litter of clothes, of cosmetics, none of the junk one might have seen in the room of a student of her age. No books. A painting of an old carthorse, worn and frameless, that we had bought off a stall in the Portobello Road one Saturday morning just before I left for California. There were some snaps of the family down at Compton stuck in the side of her dressing-table mirror; and I saw one of the Cabin at Abe’s that I had sent her. I suppose I was looking for some positive evidence that Barney came to the flat… or letters, I don’t know. But I opened no drawers. I was really looking for Caro.

Perhaps her room at Compton was the same; her other room I knew, down at Thorncombe, was certainly so. That whole enterprise I had also had to count, at least with respect to her, as a failure; another, if more complicated, hoist from my own petard.

She had come to me one Easter in the early 1960s, for a whole week. She was just eleven, and we’d never spent such a long time alone together. I felt trepidation about it, and so must have she. We had a very sticky first day together in London; and then somehow we got on to grandparents. It seemed suddenly to dawn on her that there were two on my side that she had never met. I told her a little about my life at her age, and I saw a spark of interest, a curiosity that was new in our relationship. There and then I abandoned the programme I had vaguely in mind for our week in London: the museums, the kids’ films and theatres. I proposed on the spot a trip down to Devon, her ‘grand ancestral tour’. She was faintly shocked at first, with the odd gravity of little girls, but then took to the idea with such excitement that I kicked myself for not having thought of it earlier. I had been there only once, on a rather similar trip with Aunt Millie some six years before, since my father had died. I suppose it had been nagging at my unconscious for several years. But now it abruptly assumed the same attraction for me as it evidently did for Caro. It was still for jokes, really; I had the place in perspective, or so I considered. Every year I sent the present incumbent five pounds to have my parents’ graves tended; and I was fool enough to think I could push the place into oblivion at such a price.

So we went to the church and stood by the graves of her grandparents. She looked both embarrassed and sad… and I made her giggle a little, the sermons, where I had to sit so many Sundays, the Apostles and Elders on the rood screen, the Cumaean Sibyl, the fusty absurdity of it all. Though something, at the graves, had made me feel sad, too. For the first time in years I remembered the wild oxlips and the Quaker’s Bonnet primroses that had once always carpeted my mother at that time of spring.

We called at the Vicarage. That looked much the same outside; but the old kitchen-garden had gone, and all its fruit-trees. Now a new village hail and half an acre of tarmac stood in its place; and for a moment that seemed a worse desecration than if they had bulldozed the church itself. Round the house some of the old garden remained, though it was obviously now in far less skilled hands. But the Osmanthus still flourished, the Myrtle, the Trichodendron had branches full of hanging red buds… and I was even able to show off to Caro and the current vicar’s wife over the names.

I had booked us into a hotel at Torquay, but I drove Caro there for my sake, not hers by way of Thorncombe. That was how I learnt it was for sale. It was already empty and I made the fatal mistake of letting her talk me into a poke round. Rather to my surprise, in view of the grand country-house she lived in herself, she loved it; I was touched… for reasons she knew nothing about, though as we wandered in the yard and peered through windows I told her a little of the people who had once lived there. She wished I lived in a place like this, she could have a pony, I could go to church again we had already made an enormous leap in those days away, and she was timidly learning how to tease me—I laughed, and teased her gently back, perhaps I’d buy it just for her. She knew I wasn’t even remotely serious, and so did I, although I had incidentally learnt she did not like my living in London. On the way out I noticed the date of the auction on the board by the lane.

Nor had I forgotten it, or the secret depths of the day, when I had seen her into bed that same evening. I sat down in the lounge over a book, but not reading. As with all significant places on that emotion-charged map of childhood and adolescence we carry round with us in later life, my first sight of Thorncombe after so many years had been disappointing. It had lost all its green secrecy, its hiddenness, its charm; it seemed dwarfed, trite; perhaps because I was with Caro, and she was enthusing innocently but trivially over something a little sacred. There were other factors, of course: I too was tired of London, for over a year I had been travelling. I began to feel the need of somewhere to retreat, to rest up… I was tempted. But then I saw all the disadvantages, the futility of pretending that I was not now rootless by choice as well as career; the idiocy of returning where one was still remembered, as I had discovered over a cup of tea at the Vicarage, by a very different self. By the time I went to bed, with Caro asleep on the other side of the room, I had dismissed the whole idea.

The next day we drove further west, but we kept a small joke going about the place. I would have to buy it if she really wanted it; and she pretended she did. I knew it was nothing as a practical wish, but very far from without meaning as regards ourselves. I caught her looking at me once or twice, strangely, and blushing when she was caught; and I knew what that was about as well. We returned to London, she went off home, and I missed her a great deal more than ever in the past. I kept seeing her standing beside me in the churchyard, not knowing what to make of those two yellow-lichened stones; and saw myself in her.

A week before the auction I caught a train to Newton Abbot, hired a taxi, went to the agents, then straight out to Thorncombe. It was a grey afternoon, and it began to drizzle while I was there. The tired ghosts, the empty rooms. I went to bed that night in the Newton hotel more or less certain that I was on a wild-goose chase. But the next day dawned brighter, I gave it one last chance. I wandered round the orchard, went up the hill through the beech-woods behind, and some of the old magic crept back. I did not want the thirty acres of pasture that went with the place, but the agent had told me they could easily be sold off later, or let for keep. The buildings needed a lot of money spent on them. A hideous row of breezeblock pig-houses had to be got rid of, an equally unsightly Dutch barn. But I began to see how the old farmhouse with its still splendid doorway and the two ancient stone barns behind could be converted.

It wasn’t entirely romantic nostalgia that finally made me put my money down; but quite as much a kind of anger that so much had been allowed to go to rack and ruin. I had detected an apologetic note even in the agent’s voice. Too much land had been sold off to attract serious farmers; too much else was ruined for it to attract private buyers. Meanwhile it stood rather like an old farm dog not a chance simile, I could remember just such a dog from the summer when my whole being had lain in that house and how sure its place had been there an old walleyed Welsh collie called True, and as safe from the shotgun as an aged human being. Then I told myself it was simply a cutting job, a potentially good scene that needed the blue pencil and a rewrite. And Caro: this money says I love you.

Of course she had come to stay, even spent holidays there, brought friends, and her own pony down in a loosebox from Compton; but by that time puberty and her smart boarding-school had fatally adulterated the innocence of eleven. In some strange way it had seemed even to distance us. I sensed that for her it was at best an amusing little place, at worst rather dull and her stepfather’s vocabulary ‘plebby’; and then I so obviously wasn’t very serious about it myself. Caro never belonged there, had never, beyond that brief first passion, which had really been with discovering herself my daughter, been in love with it. We had used it a little more during that last year or so, but I still felt she came under duress. It was not home. She had not been once on her own, in my absence.

I had, when she finished her secretarial course, seriously thought of taking her with me to California. But there was the remembrance of the fiasco over Thorncombe, the need for her to find her own feet and work for a living (or at least go through the motions) in London; a not wanting to plunge her into such a totally alien environment and culture, where I should inevitably have to leave her on her own a lot; the then attachment to Richard and last but not least the problem of Nell, who I knew would fight the idea tooth and nail. My final decision had also been selfish: the lupine hater of encumbrance in me, if it did not foresee Jenny, did script other situations where Caro might be a nuisance. I think that if she had only hinted that she would have liked to come… but she didn’t.

And now I went into the living-room and stood staring at the mist outside, trying to decide whether to risk Oxford by car or to take a train. There had been fog warnings on the radio, according to Caro. The meeting began to loom large. It was not that I couldn’t imagine what might happen, be said and felt. As at so many potentially fraught junctures in my life I could invent too many variations, almost as if I lived the event to its full before its limited reality took place. All writing, private and mental, or public and literal, is an attempt to escape from the conditioned past and future. But the hyperactive imagination is as damaging a preparation for reality as it is useful in writing. I knew I wouldn’t say the things I was already rehearsing; and couldn’t stop rehearsing.

In the end I made a practical American in me lose patience with the introverted Englishman and rang the R. A. C. weather centre. They did not recommend journeys by car; so I found out the train times. Then, without giving myself further time for thought, I dialled the Oxford number Caro had given me. The voice of a girl with a foreign accent answered. Mrs Mallory was out. But as soon as I said my name she was less formal. Mrs Mallory was at the hospital, but she had said I might call. She was expecting me, a room was prepared. I tried to explain that a hotel would do… but no no, she expect you here. The young lady, or her English, sounded peremptory about that, so I told her what train I was catching; and that I should be with them soon after six.

Breaking silence I arrived at Paddington early and had a first-class compartment to myself, but it filled before we started. Something about those five other masked faces, buried in their evening newspapers and magazines, at last landed me back in England: that chosen isolation, that hatred of the other, as if we were all embarrassed at having to share our means of travel, even though it was first-class, with someone else. When we drew out of the station the elderly woman opposite glanced up at the ventilation window. It was slightly open. A minute later she glanced again. I said, ‘shall I shut it?’