Daniel Martin (9 page)

We took off. After a minute, by craning back, I could even make out Burbank and the roofs of the Warner lot stages, under one of which Jenny must have been facing the first take of the day. I did feel a guilt then, tenderness, a protectiveness. She would never be an outstanding actress, as the middle-aged woman I had spoken to the previous night might once conceivably have been, and I knew she hadn’t fully accepted that as yet: the closed options, the compromises to come.

East, at altitude, over the deserted mountains of North Arizona and the toy gash of the Grand Canyon: there had been talk between Jenny and myself of driving back overland when her work was done. But that was a foregone experience I didn’t regret, since there was another chasm beside that of age. The life we led in Los Angeles had allowed us to overlook it, turn it into another toy gash of no more than a trivial passing significance; but in another context, on the ground, I knew it would always have presented a much more formidable obstacle. It was my fault, in the sense that I had effectively reduced it to the status of one more secret about my past though in this case, not only with Jenny.

Anthony and I originally moved from cursory acquaintance being of the same year at the same college and with a shared staircase to our rooms—to friendship precisely because of this ‘secret’. I was already engaged in burying or suppressing it, but it was still close enough in my past to be partially uncovered.

The summer term of 1948, our first university year: by chance I went into his sitting-room one day. Our shared servant was retiring and I was collecting for a leaving present for him. On Anthony’s desk I saw a flower in a jam-jar a stem of the Man Orchid, Aceras. A few moments later we discovered a common interest, though within it, as largely a memento, an echo of former days. With him it was far more serious; as with so much in his life, such an interest could be only methodical, deeply pursued, or nonexistent. Scientifically I had learnt enough botany as a schoolboy to find my way round the old copy of Bentham and Hooker we had at home; and I had in my teens fallen prey a little to the orchid mystique. I disclaimed anything more with Anthony, and thereby disclaimed the whole buried continent that nature had been for me in my adolescence. I was ashamed of it already, and nothing in his obviously much greater expertise encouraged me to reveal the truth then or later.

I had always thought Anthony priggishly above the rest of us, a typical Greats scholar. He dressed rather formally, and there was a kind of studied quickness, a purpose, when he walked across the quad that I’d always found affected. He seemed to have few friends. On the other hand (one must put it in such childish terms) he didn’t wear glasses or hunch nor did he belong to that equally disagreeable faction, the hearty. He was slightly taller than me, with very regular features and vaguely challenging eyes though I think that was simply because he had the curiously un-English habit of looking you in the face when he talked to you. I now found, as we talked about orchids, that they could also be amused and friendly eyes. He wanted to know more; where I had botanized, how serious I was. I was flattered, I suppose—this apparently fastidious and already reputedly brilliant young professor in embryo had time for me. He once said, years later, when I’d been ribbing him about a newspaper report of some flagrantly fake stigmatization in Italy, ‘I’m surprised you don’t believe in miracles, Dan. How else did we meet?’

He took me out to Watlington one day very soon afterwards; and that led to other days, and other knowledges of each other. But we first surmounted the barriers between us across orchids. Barriers there were; we were very different young men, even in college and University terms. I was already writing for magazines, had one foot in the university theatrical door; wore a frivolous (and very false) persona, did an absolute minimum of academic work. I knew a lot of people, I would have said I had a lot of friends, but they were almost all like myself, at Oxford to mix, to prink and prance, to enjoy themselves, bound far less by real affection and interest than by a common love of the exhibitionistic. My own personality had undergone a very thorough revolution since adolescence, and even since my arrival at Oxford after war service. I had rejected so much. I was writing myself, making myself the chief character in a play, so that I was not only the written personage, the character and its actor, but also the person who sits in the back of the stalls admiring what he has written. All my other ‘friends’ were also more or less on stage; the difference with Anthony was that he sat beside me in the stalls.

With the orchids, I took his view: one must keep such interests to oneself and fellow-enthusiasts, and not bore other people with them. He wasn’t a nature-lover at all, I didn’t realize that at the time. He just happened to be a crack field botanist which goes also, I suspect, for his subsequent professional work as a philosopher. But I’ve never had the patience (or the mental equipment) to read his books. When he became a don, philosophy became like botany, he wouldn’t talk about it any more to the lay world. Another even more important realization came much later: that he was a kind of father-substitute, though we were almost exactly the same age. The idea would have outraged me at the time, and killed the friendship, as I believed I had consciously ‘killed’ the spirit of my father and his antiquated world. I do not know if Anthony realized this. He was certainly sufficiently astute to have done so, though he had no time for Freud. I am trying to say that he was good for me in the sense that he resurrected, if only very tenuously and intermittently, a self or an unresolved dilemma I had foolishly tried to dismiss; and nefarious in the sense that our relationship was set in a minefield.

In our orchid-hunting I never really rose above the role of shikari: I found the game, he shot it. The thrill for me was finding the rare ones, my first (and last, alas) Monkeys near Goring, a solitary Fly under a sun-shot white-beam at the edge of a Chiltern beech-wood. His heaven was a wet meadow full of dull old Dactylorchids: counting and measuring and noting down the degree of hybridization. I wanted to find the flowers, he wanted to establish some new subspecies. I lived (and hid) poetic moments; he lived Druce and Godfery. My solitary boyhood had forced me to take refuge in nature as a poem, a myth, a catalysis, the only theatre I was allowed to know; it was nine parts emotion and sublimation, but it acquired So an aura, a mystery, a magic in the anthropological sense. I have spent years of my adult life ignoring it, but the long traumas of adolescence stamp deep. It still takes very little, a weed in flower at the foot of a concrete wall, the flight of a bird across a city window, to reimmerse me; and when I am released from deprivation, I can’t stop that old self emerging. I feared driving across America with Jenny simply because I knew we should pass so many places where on my own I should have stopped; not as a serious naturalist would have stopped, though I might have pretended that, but as a bitter and repressed child once hid in the green Devon countryside.

All that side of me remained completely overborne in Anthony’s antiseptic presence; nor did I see his single-mindedness then as a defect—it simply proved the hidden softness and greenness in myself. Lying about it all began with him… and with Nell and Jane, too.

I knew Jane only very slightly during that first year; she was already talked about, had already made a hit in the OUDS, whereas I knew myself still very immature. Nell hadn’t appeared then. One day at the Kemp, wanting to show off to Anthony, I introduced him to her. She was groaning about Descartes, some essay she had to write; Anthony began to explain. I had to go to a tutorial and I left them, secretly amused that two such unlikely people should have found anything in common. It didn’t happen overnight. I think he took her out a couple of times before term ended. They spent the long vacation apart, but apparently they wrote letters; and by the end of the calendar year, they were paired off. And Nell had arrived, my consolation prize. She was prettier than Jane, and the later sexpot persona was still hidden behind the fresh-woman’s reserve. I thought we were perfectly matched, the four of us. I enjoyed, when access was granted, Nell’s naked body very much, and throughout the second year that obscured my real feelings.

During our two remaining summers as students the two girls often came on our orchid expeditions; and always mocked us in their different ways. I mustn’t make Anthony sound humourless, but he had everything neatly compartmented in his life. All obsession was bad taste. He seldom laughed at himself, but he would always laugh at the girls’ teasing. ‘I think I’ll just sketch this labellum’ became a kind of in-joke among us. I was never quite sure what it meant, but it always made us twist with secret laughter. We used it most against other people. In a way it made Anthony the odd man out; and hid the truth. That is, I was the real outsider. For the girls, nature was an occasion for drifting walks and idle picnics, listening to the nightingales on Otmoor while Anthony and I botanized; for him, a crossword puzzle, a relief in concrete objects from abstract ideas. And for me all I would never regain.

When much later, after the divorce and the vitriol, I felt that I had finally set this side of myself in perspective, the solution seemed simple. But putting down new roots, after all that had happened, in an early landscape was much more difficult than I had imagined. I got bored at the farm in Devon, I grew lonely, I found the magic I remembered had somehow disappeared and that the nature of actuality verged on the repetitive and monotonous. I had of course failed to see how much the past magic had depended on past deprivation; and the present deprivation was of all that I had constructed to take its place. I began my peripatetic existence, working more and more away from Thorncombe. Only frequent exile made the place possible.

I was also trapped by a far more spurious myth and magic, since all this coincided with growing success in the film world, which presented me with a renewed opportunity akin in essence if not in detail to my reaction to Oxford to wear a mask and invent a character… once more to write myself. I let myself be dazzled by the gilt chimeras of the career: that happiness was always having work, being in demand, belonging nowhere, the jet life, the long transatlantic phone-call about nothing. I became one third American and one third Jewish; the one third English I camped up or suppressed, according to circumstances. Jenny is right: I used it as a weapon when I was bored, and disowned it when I was amused; demoted it to a Cinderella role. It was vilely exploited by the other two of me.

I even thought of getting rid of Thorncombe, I used it so little. It distressed me when I returned after long infidelities, and seemed to show those mute reproachful eyes that forsaken gardens and buildings acquire. I would see the way some tree or shrub I had planted had grown, and long for that close daily knowledge of the little world around one that only peasants understand. Then I would once more fall in love with the place. It came less to matter that I knew that within a fortnight I should feel restless again. Thorncombe felt right; and I was wrong.

Perhaps all this is getting near the heart of Englishness: being happier at being unhappy than doing something constructive about it. We boast of our genius for compromise, which is really a refusal to choose; and that in turn contains a large part of cowardice, apathy, selfish laziness but it is also, I grow increasingly certain of this as I grow older, a function of our peculiar imagination, of our racial and individual gift for metaphor; for allowing hypotheses about ourselves, and our pasts and futures, almost as much reality as the true events and destinies. Other races look at themselves in the mirror, and either live with the reflection or do something practical to improve it. We paint an ideal, or a dream, self on the glass and then wallow in the discrepancy. Nothing distinguishes us more clearly from the Americans, nothing characterizes better the very different ways we use our shared language the way they use it as a tool, even when they are being poetic, and the way we treat it as a poem, even when we are using it as a tool; and it is the same with the enormous semantic subtleties of middleclass English intonation and the poverty of nuance in even the most intellectually sophisticated American equivalent.

These two dialects seem to me two reactions to the same thing: the craving for freedom. The American myth is of free will in its simple, primary sense. One can choose oneself and will oneself; and this absurdly optimistic assumption so dominates the republic that it has bred all its gross social injustices. Failure to succeed proves a moral, not a genetic, fault. ‘All men are born equal’ becomes ‘No decent society can help those who fail to stay equal’. The myth becomes so pervasive that it even ends up as the credo of those, the underprivileged, who most need to disbelieve it. I have seen it in even the most intelligent liberals there, people like Abe and Mildred, impeccably sympathetic in their attitude to things like Medicare, Black anger, environmental control and all the rest; yet still they hanker after the old and other American dream of freedom to cash in on other people’s inequality. From the beginning Americans came to America to escape two things: political tyranny and fixed odds in the struggle for life, and they have never realized that the two aims are profoundly hostile to each other—that the genetic injustice of life is just as great as the old European economic injustice. Their system dealt with the latter by assuming an equal dispensation of energy, talent and good luck to all men; and now they are smashed hard on the reef of the far deeper injustice.

All this was of course also the English assumption in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But we have long abandoned it. Injustice and inequality are in the nature of things, like Virgil’s tears, and we have extrapolated freedom from all living reality. It is a thing in the mind, a Utopia we secretly retreat to from our daily ordinary world; just as I have always lived far more in the mind at Thorncombe than in reality. That is what permits in England our extraordinary tolerance of national decay, of muddling through; our socializing conservatism and our conservative socialism. Our society, and its actual state, is nothing; merely the dead real world, not the living imaginary one; and that is why we have evolved a language that always means more than it says, both emotionally and imaginatively. With the Americans it is the reverse: they mean and feel far less than they have the habit of saying. In both cases, it is to the same end: to find a place to be free. The outward cynics may live in the States; but the fundamental ones, the true quietists, live in Britain.