The Ebony Tower-Short Stories - John Fowles, Page 7

  'That's all really. Oh except at the end, Tom had gone away to fetch his camera, we'd left our rucksacks outside. Henry tells me I'm a very attractive "gel", he wishes he was younger. I laughed, said I wished I was older. And suddenly he took my hands. Kissed one. All rather corny. It happened so quickly. Tom came back, took some photos. Then Henry suddenly asked if we'd like to stay to lunch. But we felt it was just a nice gesture--one was meant to refuse. Silly. He never makes nice gestures. Without a reason. Perhaps I sensed that already, something in his eyes. And I knew Tom wanted to get on. Anyway, it sort of ruined everything. You know how it is, when you turn someone down because you don't think it matters and realize too late that it does.' She glanced sideways down at the fir-tree. 'I suppose we left the impression that we'd been doing it just for jokes. That we weren't really interested in him. Which was true in a way. He was just a famous name. It was so stupid. Just celebrityhunting.' She paused a moment. 'It was strange. Even as we walked away, I felt bad. I wanted to go back.'

  She said nothing for a moment. The Freak had spread her elbows out on the ground and lay with her face couched and turned towards the Mouse.

  'Two terms, nine months later, I'm not happy in London. It's all over with Tom. I feel I'm getting nowhere at the College. It's not their fault. Just the way I am.' She picked at the grass again. 'You meet someone famous, you start seeing their work in a different way. Noticing t. I kept remembering that day in August. How mean we'd been to what was basically just a poor old tongue-tied rather lonely man. Oh and... all sorts of other things. To do with my own work. One day I just sat down and wrote him a letter. About myself. Saying I wished we'd stayed to lunch. Not walked out like that. And if by any chance he needed domestic help. A paint mixer. Anything.'

  'He remembered who you were?'

  'I sent him one of the photos Tom took. Henry and me standing together.' She smiled to herself. 'It was the sort of letter that starts sending shivers of embarrassment down your spine the moment you've posted it. I knew he wouldn't answer.'

  'But he did.'

  'A telegram. "Can always use a pretty girl. When?"

  The Freak said, 'Dear old him. Straight to the bloody point.'

  The Mouse pulled a face at David. 'I came very innocently. Of course I knew about his past. His reputation. But I thought I could handle it. Keep a strictly grand-daughterly sort of role. Or just walk out, if it got impossible.' She looked down. 'But Henry's got one rather extraordinary quality. A kind of magic. Apart from his painting. The way he can... dissolve things in you. Make them not seem to matter. Like this, I suppose. Learning not to be ashamed of one's body. And to be ashamed of one's conventions. He put it rather well once. He said exceptions don't prove rules, they're just exceptions to rules.' She evidently felt herself at a loss for words. She smiled up. 'We can't explain it to anyone. You have to be us to understand.'

  The Freak said, 'Anyway, it's more like nursing.'

  There was a little silence. David said, 'And how did you come here, Anne?'

  The Mouse answered. 'It began to get a bit much for me. No one to talk to. We shared a flat in Leeds. Kept in touch, I knew Anne wasn't very happy doing her ATD. So as soon as she finished that.'

  'I came for one week. Ha ha.'

  David grinned at the girl's couched face.

  'At least more interesting than teaching?'

  'And better paid.'

  'He can afford it.'

  The Mouse said, 'I have to give it back to him. There's no arrangement. He just throws bundles of money at us. A hundred pounds. Two. If we go into Rennes with him, we hardly dare look at clothes. He always wants to buy them.'

  'He's sweet really,' said the Freak. She turned on her back. The dark-ended boy's breasts, the tuft of reddened hair; she raised a knee and scratched just above it, then let it fall.

  The Mouse said, 'Working with him's very strange. He never loses patience with a painting. Even a drawing. You know, I'll hate what I've done sometimes. You rip it up? Henry'll throw things away. But always with a sort of regret. He gives work a kind of sacrosanct quality. Even when it's not going well. Everything he isn't with people.' She paused, then shook her head. 'And he hardly talks in the studio. Almost as if he's dumb, as if words would spoil everything.'

  The Freak spoke to the sky. 'Well the way he uses them.' She mimicked the old man's voice. '"Are you bleeding or something?" I ask you.' And she reached a hand skyward as if to push the memory away.

  'He has to compensate.'

  The Freak clicked her tongue in agreement. 'Oh I know. Poor old bastard. Must be terrible, really.' She turned sideways, on an elbow, looked at the Mouse. 'It's strange, isn't it, Di? He's still quite sexy, in his funny old way.' She looked at David. 'You know, when I first... you think of blokes your own age and all that. But he must have been sensational. When he was young... and oh, Christ, you ought to hear his stories.' She pulled another clown's face at David. 'On the good old days. What was that thing the other night, Di?'

  'Don't be silly. They're just fantasies.'

  'I bloody well hope so.' - The Mouse said, 'It's contact. Not sex. Memories. The human thing. What he was trying to say last night.'

  David detected a difference between the two girls. One wanted to play down the sexual side, the other to admit it. He had a sudden intuition that the Freak was using his presence to air a disagreement between them; and that in this context he was on her side.

  'That housekeeper and her husband must have broad minds.'

  The Mouse looked down at the grass. 'You mustn't tell anyone, but do you know how Jean-Pierre spent the late 'forties and 'fifties?' David shook his head. 'In prison. For murder.'

  'Good grief.'

  'He killed his father. Some family quarrel about land. French peasants. Mathilde housekept for Henry when he came back to Paris in 1946. He knew all about Jean-Pierre. I've got all this from Mathilde, actually. Henry can do no wrong. He stood by them.'

  The Freak sniffed. 'And more. With Mathilde.'

  The Mouse queried David. 'That rather heavy model he used in some of the first post-war nudes?'

  'My God. I never realized.'

  'Even Mathilde doesn't talk about that side of it. Just that "Monsieur Henri" gave her faith to live. To wait, she says. She's also the one person Henry never but never loses his temper with. The other day he flew off the handle at dinner with Anne about something. Marched out into the kitchen. Five minutes later I go in. There he is. Eating with Mathilde at the table, listening to her read out a letter from her sister. Just like a vicar with his favourite parishioner.' She had a small smile. 'One could be jealous.'

  'Does he draw you two?'

  'His hand's too shaky now. There are one or two of Anne. A lovely joke one. You know that famous Lautrec poster of Yvette Guilbert? A parody of that.'

  The Freak ran fingers up through her fizz and towards the sky. 'And he did it so fast. Can't have been thirty seconds. Minute at most, wasn't it, Di? Fantastic. Honestly.'

  She turned back on her stomach, chin on hands. Deep scarlet nails.

  The Mouse eyed David again. 'Has he discussed your article with you?'

  'Only to claim he's never heard their names. Beyond Pisanello.'

  'Don't believe him. He's got an incredible memory for paintings. I've kept some of the sketches he does. He's trying to tell you about some picture and you don't quite know which one he means--and then sometimes he'll draw them. Like Anne says. Like lightning. Almost total recall.'

  'That restores my morale a bit.'

  'He'd never have agreed to your doing the book if you hadn't been reasonably near the truth.'

  'I was beginning to wonder.'

  'He's always so much more aware of what he's doing than you think. Even at his most outrageous. I took him into Rennes one day, before Anne came, to see Death in Venice. I had some dotty idea the real Henry would rather like it. The visual part of it, anyway. He was good as gold for the first twenty minutes. Then that heavenly-looking boy appears. N
ext time he's on the screen Henry says, Pretty gel, that--done many pictures, has she?'

  David laughed; and her eyes were full of light, laughter. She was suddenly her age, not grave at all.

  'Impossible, you can't imagine. He starts arguing about whether it's a girl or a boy. In a loud voice. In English, of course. Then we're on bumboys and modern decadence. The people around us start telling him to shut up. Then he's off with them in French. He didn't know there were so many queers in Rennes and... 'she put an imaginary pistol to her head. 'There was nearly a riot. I had to drag him out before the flics were called in. All the way home he told me that what he calls the kinema began and ended with Douglas Fairbanks Senior and Mary Pickford. Totally obtuse. He hasn't seen ten films in the last twenty years. But he knows all about it. Like--you last night. The more reasonable you are, the less he hears.'

  'But it's an act?'

  'In a curious way, it's a sense of style. There's even something honest in it. You know, he's sort of saying I'm not going to be your age. I'm old, I am what I am, I don't want to understand.'

  The Freak said, 'Like the way he talks. He keeps telling me I behave like a flapper. And you laugh, you say, Henry, flappers went out with lace-up corsets and camiknickers. For Gawd's sake. But it just makes him worse, doesn't it, Di?'

  'But it's not as stupid as it sounds. He knows we've got to have something to laugh at. To hate in him, really.'

  'To forgive in him.'

  The Mouse opened her hands.

  There was a little silence. The autumnal sun beat down. A butterfly, a Red Admiral, glided past and fluttered momentarily above the camber of the Mouse's back. David knew what had happened; a sudden nostalgia for the old art-college relationship. That need for frankness, chewing the fat; testing one's tutor for general humanity, seeing how far he was prepared to come off it; not just confessing, but using confession.

  The Mouse spoke to the grass. 'I hope all this isn't shocking you.'

  'I'm delighted you're both so intelligent about him.'

  'We sometimes wonder about that.' She added, 'Whether we aren't what he's nicknamed us.'

  He smiled. 'You don't seem very timid to me.'

  'Except I ran out.'

  'But you said you were learning more.'

  'About life. But...

  'Not your work?'

  'I'm trying to start from the beginning again. I don't know yet.'

  'That's not mouselike.'

  The Freak said, 'Anyway, who cares. I'd rather fight old Henry than forty bloody kids.'

  The Mouse smiled, and the Freak pushed her shoulder.

  'It's all right for you.' She looked at David. 'Honestly, I was a bloody mess. As a student. The drug thing. Not the hard stuff. You know. Sleeping around. Di knows, I got involved with so many rotten bastards. Honestly.' She pushed the other girl's leg with a foot. 'Didn't I, Di?' The Mouse nodded. The Freak looked past David to where the old man slept. 'I mean at least with him it's not being just laid and where's the next chick. Least he's grateful. I'll never forget one bloke. He'd just... YOU know, big deal. You know what he says?' David shook his head.

  '"Why you so bloody skinny?"' She hit her head. 'I mean, honest to God, I think of what I used to put up with. And poor old Henry with tears in his eyes when he finally makes it.' She looked down then, as if she knew she had said too much, then suddenly grinned up at David. 'Make your fortune with News of the World.'

  'I think the rights are yours.'

  For a long moment she gave him a look: both questing and quizzing. She had brown eyes, the most attractive things in her small face. They also had a directness, a kind of gentleness if you looked closely at them; and David realized that he had in that forty minutes since lunch begun to learn her. He guessed at an affectionateness beneath the flip language, and an honesty--not the Mouse's kind of honesty, which was an emancipated middleclass one based on a good mind and proven talent, but something much more working-class, something that had been got the hard way, by living the 'bloody mess'. The friendship, the rapport became comprehensible; there was both an identity and a complementarity. It must have been something to do with their nakedness, the sun and water and low voices, the silent lostness of the lake behind; but he felt drawn on into a closer and closer mesh with these three unknown lives, as if he had known them much longer, or the lives he did know had somehow mysteriously faded and receded in the last twenty-four hours. Now was acutely itself; yesterday and tomorrow became the myths. There was a sense of privilege too; almost metaphysical, that he had been born into an environment and an age that permitted such swift process--and more banal, that career should-grant such opportunities. One's friends, if they could see one now. He did then think of Beth.

  He had looked down from the Freak's eyes, and there had been a little silence. And then the Mouse glanced round (but not quite casually enough, as if confession had got too near the bone) at the water and then at her friend.

  'I'm going to swim again.'

  'Okay.'

  The Mouse turned and sat up, back to David. The Freak smiled at him.

  'Be our guest.'

  He had foreseen this; and decided what to do. He glanced back at where the old man lay.

  'If I shan't provoke anything.'

  She raised her eyebrows, Groucho Marx style; a little wriggle.

  'Only us.'

  The Mouse reached out and smacked her bottom lightly. Then she stood and walked down towards the water. A silence, the Freak lay on, staring at the grass. Finally she spoke in a lower voice.

  'Waste, isn't it?'

  'She seems to know what she's doing.'

  She gave a dry little smile. 'You're joking.'

  He watched the Mouse wading into the water; Diana, slimbacked and small-rumped; something underfoot, she stepped sideways before going deeper.

  'You think you should leave?'

  'I'm only here because she is.' She looked down. 'In a funny sort of way Di's the odd one out. Old Henry and me, we kind of live from day to day. Know what I mean. We couldn't be innocent if we tried. Di's the other way round.'

  The girl in the water plunged and began to swim away.

  'And she doesn't realize?'

  'Not really. She's stupid. The way clever girls are sometimes. Okay, she sees through old Henry. The person she can't see through is herself.' The Freak was avoiding his eyes now; there was almost a shyness about her. 'If you could try and get her to talk. Maybe this evening. We'll get Henry off to bed early. She needs someone from outside.'

  'Well of course... I'll try.'

  'Okay.' She was silent a moment, then she pushed abruptly up and knelt back on her heels. A grin. 'She likes you. She thinks your work's sensational. It was all an act. Yesterday afternoon.'

  'She told me.'

  She appraised him a moment, then stood; for a second guyed the modest Venus, one hand over her loins, the other over her breasts.

  'We shan't look.'

  She went to the water. David stood and got out of his clothes. He came alongside the Freak when the peaty water was round his waist. She flashed a smile at him, then swarmed forward with a little scream. A moment later he dived in himself and swam out after the distant head.

  Five hours later the same head faced him across the dinner table, and he was beginning to find it difficult to think of anything else. She had appeared only briefly before dinner, she was busy in the kitchen with the Freak; and now she had changed into a black shirt and another long skirt, striped browns and a burnt orange; night and autumn; and done her hair up in a way that managed to seem both classically elegant and faintly dishevelled. There was just a tiny air that she was out to kill; and she was succeeding. The more he learnt her, the more he watched her, the more he liked her; as temperament, as system of tastes and feelings, as female object. He knew it, and concealed it... not only to her, partly also to himself; that is, he analysed what he had so rapidly begun to find attractive about her-why that precise blend of the physical and the psychological, th
e reserved and the open, the controlled and the (for he had also begun to believe what the Freak had said) uncertain, called so strongly to something in his own nature. Strange, how these things hit you out of the blue, were somehow inside you almost before you could see them approaching. He felt a little bewitched, possessed; and decided it must be mainly the effect of being without Beth. They lived so close, one had forgotten what the old male freedom was like; and perhaps it was most of all a matter of having to have some personal outlet for his feelings about the whole day. He had enjoyed it enormously, when he looked back. It had been so densely woven and yet simple; so crowded with new experience and at the same time primitive, atavistic, timeescaped. Above all he felt accepted, almost one of the household now.

  With the girls his credentials had been established by his swimming with them; he had realized afterwards that that had been needed--to prove he was a sport, on the Freak's level; that he condoned a choice at the Mouse's more thinking one. He had caught up with her some hundred yards from the shore. They had chatted a little about the lake, the temperature, the niceness of it, as they trod water some ten feet apart. He saw the Freak go back on shore. Breasley seemed still asleep under the firtree. They had swum slowly back together, towards the thin figure drying herself. He came out of the water beside the Mouse, and the Freak had handed him her damp towel. The sunlight, the trees, the intuition of watching eyes; what faint shadows of embarrassment he still felt had very little to do with the girls... or only with the whiteness of his skin beside theirs.

  He had not dressed at once, but sat propped back on his arms beside his clothes, drying off a little more in the sun. The two girls lay on their backs, their heads towards him as before, feet to the water. The deep peace of the lake, the serene isolation; or not quite, at the end of the furthest vista there was a tiny movement, an angler, a line being cast, a speck of peasant blue. He said nothing. He felt a kind of mental--an abstract?--randiness; a sinuous wave of the primeval male longing for the licitly promiscuous, the polygamous, the caress of two bodies, sheik. dom. That wickedly casual remark from the old man about what the two girls needed bred daydreams; time out of responsibility... such a shiftingness of perception, what one was, what one suppressed. Not much more than twelve hours ago he had very nearly dismissed and condemned them as beneath his notice; and now what had been lazily hypothetical during lunch had grown, even then, so much closer, more precise in its potentialities, more imaginable. It was like the days or weeks one might have spent on a painting, bringing it up, refining it, all compressed into a few hours. One knew why, of course. The hurtling pressure of time, prosaic reality--that long drive to Paris, he had to be there, or almost there, by this same hour the next day. Perhaps it constituted the old man's real stroke of genius, to take an old need to escape from the city, for a mysterious remoteness, and to see its ancient solution, the Celtic green source, was still viable; fortunate old man, to stay both percipient and profoundly amoral, to buy this last warm solitude and dry affection with his fame. David glanced back. Still he slept, as if dead. The way the two silent girls lay meant nothing prevented his long survey up and down the lines of their bodies; as perhaps they knew. Their tacitly sparing his modesty--more talk would have meant facing him--was also their secret advantage. He had a knowledge of a brutality totally alien to his nature: how men could rape. Something both tender and provocative in that defencelessness stirred him deeply.