Free Daniel Martin by John Fowles Page A

stupid, slick, evasive, answer.’ She spaces the adjectives, like little whiplashes. He turns away. ‘So is a great deal of my past.’
    ‘Stage point. Not a real one.’ He says nothing. ‘And so’s most of everyone’s past. I don’t know why you imagine yours is so peculiarly awful.’
    ‘I didn’t say awful. Unpurged.’ He goes and sits on the couch, at right angles to her chair. ‘It’s not a matter of statistics, Jenny. Or even individual history. Purely of personal awareness.’ She will not help. He says, ‘I misled you, it wasn’t really a feeling of emptiness I had this afternoon. Much more the opposite. Like having eaten too much. Undigested deadweight. A millstone.’
    She contemplates the end of her cigarette.
    ‘What did your ex-wife say that annoyed you?’
    ‘That thing in the Express. Couldn’t resist a dig.’
    She stares at the carpet. ‘Is it the same for you?’
    ‘Is what?’
    ‘Still hating. I heard you say it. It’s all so far away.’
    ‘Will this seem far away, twenty years from now?’
    ‘Whatever happened, I shouldn’t want to hurt you any more.’
    She will not look at him; and he watches her face for a moment, the tenacious thwarted child in it, the jealous young adult; and feels a strong need to take her in his arms, to thaw this ice but suppresses it, notes and commends himself for suppressing it. He regards the last of the more than two fingers of the Laphroaig.
    ‘We had all our values wrong. We expected too much. Trusted too much. There’s a great chasm in twentieth century history. A frontier. Whether you were born before 1939 or not. The world, time… it slipped. Jumped forward three decades in one. We antediluvians have been left permanently out of gear, Jenny. Your generation knows all about the externals. The visual things. What the Thirties and Forties looked and sounded like. But you don’t know what they felt like. All the ridiculous dècors of the heart they left us encumbered with.’
    She does not answer for a long moment.
    ‘Hadn’t you better ring the airport?’
    ‘Jenny.’
    ‘It’s not a chasm, Dan. It’s a deliberate barricade you erect.’
    ‘To protect both of us.’
    She stubs out the cigarette.
    ‘I’m going to bed.’
    She stands and crosses the room to the bedroom door; but stops there and looks back at him.
    ‘You’ll please notice that I meticulously, scrupulously, do not slam the door.’ And once through she sets it, with an ostentatious precision, half ajar. Then she glances up again at him.
    ‘Okay? Old-timer?’
    She vanishes. He sits in silence for a few seconds, then finishes the whisky. Then he goes to where his jacket lies and takes out a pocketbook, through which he leafs as he walks back towards the telephone. He dials a number and, waiting for an answer, stares back across to the bedroom door which like that other door, like reality itself, that ultimate ambiguous fiction of the enacted past, seems poised eternally in two minds; inviting, forbidding, accusing, forgiving; and always waiting… for someone at last to get the feeling right.
     
     

 

     

    Aftermath
     
     
    The police car dropped them at the top of the North Oxford road where Dan had his digs. The sky had clouded over completely, and there was already a spatter of rain. They walked quickly between the lines of solid Victorian houses, staid and donnish, too trite to be real. The wind had loosened some leaves. Autumn came drear and viciously premature. They said hardly a word until they were in his room.
    It was the best bedsitter in the house, first-floor back, overlooking the garden; but equally chosen for its landlady, a Woodstock Road Marxist who, having somehow got herself on the approved list, allowed her student lodgers freedoms unusual for the time. One put up with erratic meals and Communist Party pamphlets for the rare privilege of being able to do what one liked both with and in the privacy of one’s room. Dan’s exhibited what passed for