Daniel Martin by John Fowles Page A

came in dribs and drabs, with endless pauses, and not what we’d thought we’d ordered anyway, but delicious. I pumped him discreetly, his past. Learnt he was divorced, one daughter only three years younger than me and trespassers keep out. I did. But his career, his plays, why he’d stopped writing them, movies, America… he talked a lot and I responded and he listened when I began unloading all my own naive feelings about California. I knew we had a wavelength, something I’d doubted before. He came in for a nightcap when we got back to my apartment. Ten minutes later he pecked my cheek and left. I wanted him to. Which doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a lovely evening and a great relief.
    Shooting began, locations, and I hardly saw him then. Just very occasionally he would appear, he’d already started on the Kitchener script. But then he was there one day during the sequences at Malibu and we had a talk between takes. I was getting pissed off, they seemed to need so long to set things up and Bill never seemed satisfied until we’d done three takes more than necessary. I used to get driven straight home after shooting and then stay in, go to bed at eleven, ten sometimes. A model young actress. But compared to dressing up and going out and being a sex-object and wildly bored I started turning down everything. I had a courtesy meal with Bill and his wife, but I think that was all for a whole week. It was strange, I rather enjoyed it. Cooking the bits I’d scribble Martha to buy when she came in to clean. Or sometimes I’d stop off in the studio car and pop into a health-food place or a delicatessen. Kitchen around a bit, watch the inane TV. Read. Write home like a schoolgirl. It was Dan’s fault. I was trying too hard to prove California was unreal, not me.
    Some of which (not that last bit) I found myself telling Dan between takes at Malibu. We were paddling, like elderly trippers at Southend. The stills man took a photo of us I’ve kept. Both staring at the sea at our feet. I suppose I was trying to tell him my simple Anglo-Scottishness was stronger than this alien culture. And honestly no, I didn’t feel lonely at all. Yes, of course I’d ring if… and suddenly knowing I was lonely. That was where the digs illusion broke down. The other girl I’d have had to chatter with and moan to. It was a kind of bottling up, that was why I was writing so many letters. It was just someone to talk to, no more than that. I’d stopped the jack-and-jill, I was getting on perfectly well as a temporary nun.
    I said, I’ve discovered a sensational health-food store.
    He gave me a side-look. Is that an invitation, Jenny?
    It hadn’t really been. Then suddenly was.
    Tonight? If I promise to leave by ten?
    I knew I had to come to a decision, as soon as I’d said yes. It had all been very guarded, casual, space for withdrawal on both sides. But I knew ‘check’ would be attempted. I thought about it a lot, that is, about a whole aspect of Dan I haven’t mentioned before the fact that he has a name. On the other hand, knowing that by the highest standards he never quite got there, that his plays are really rather square, that among my generation in the theatre there are a dozen other writers we are more interested in, more “with’… which he knows, though it’s always been a taboo subject between us. He assumes I despise him theatrically, at best a sort of toleration. And perhaps I always assumed too much that he didn’t really care. Then something else: the fact that, in (silly) terms of having your name in the papers, I’ve always before gone down rather than up for my men. I’d known for some time that that wasn’t healthy. As if it wasn’t enough to give my delightful body-and-soul to them, but there had to be the press cuttings as well.
    It was partly vanity. Handing out the privilege of sleeping with Jenny McNeil in return for her privilege of despising them for not having made it—which is exactly how Timothy