Daniel Martin by John Fowles

second sight.
    Like so many pretty, and far from stupid, girls in the business she was in a slight dilemma incipiently crucified by her own good looks. It is not perhaps the kind of crucifixion the ordinary girl can have much sympathy for; nevertheless, it exists… and Jenny had the camera image that conforms too closely to current notions of what is sexually desirable in young women to escape. A certain leggy fragility, an elegant insouciance, a well-boned, fine-mouthed, candid-eyed eager frankness about the face… a nice ongoing kid, the lens said, searching as well as enticing to go to bed with; a twentieth-century princess, provoking very nearly the same dream as the real princesses who had once languished in their walled castles and haunted another age besotted with the concept of the unattainable.
    She had done a little modelling work at home, and knew well enough how to get herself up to kill, and to ‘project’, vanities she didn’t always resist. Even tired, with her completely natural face, she couldn’t always lose that air of vacuous distinction and effortless beauty that highly photographable women, the Shrimptons and Twiggies of this world, acquire. She was conscious of it, of course; and had a special clown’s grimace for when she knew I had caught that look. I remember another evening, we’d been to a party and she had looked ravishing even with some expert competition, and I said so when we got home. She went straight into the bathroom and washed her face off. When she came out she said, ‘I forbid you to like me for that.’
    This problem of being her own young woman, not just the chauvinistic male world’s dream of the type, distorted her in another way: her frostiness with men who took her at the obvious surface valuation was sometimes painfully gauche and indeed misled me in the beginning. It was right for the part, that aloofness; but in private I found it rather silly, all this gazelle-like shying-away from the slightest wrong approach, even though she grew to hide it better. Another self, both warmer and less assured, I caught only glimpses of in the early days. None of us could really get near her, and it was hard to tell what was genuine and what was being tried out in pursuit of a working persona in a very alien environment.
    It was Bill who warned me that she might be withdrawing too much. By then the thought of giving her a shoulder to rest on was not just a matter of production need or simple human charity, yet there did remain an element of calculation… which remained in substance, even if it changed in nature. She did need me, or someone like me, in Los Angeles; but it remained very open whether she needed me anywhere else. This doesn’t mean that we had not achieved a very real affection. I could have fallen heavily for her, and become intolerably possessive; but I had sinned in that area often enough before to know that to take one’s partner’s independence as a challenge is the straight road to disaster. Wanting her was bound up with the notion of changing her, and I liked her too well as she was. Just as ‘I believe in God’ is generally a synonym for ‘I believe in not thinking’, only too frequently ‘I love you’ is a euphemism for ‘I want to own you’. I sincerely wanted to leave Jenny in the public gallery of her own freedom; and at the same time I was still also in love with both her body and her independence.
    The tears were partly spoilt-child tears, glycerine drops; and also more genuine ones. I gave way to the blackmail. We’d forget the whole evening, it had never happened. She’d fly back as soon as she was released. It was just a temporary separation. Training, she said; and I let it pass.
    Then I had driven back to Bel-Air, which is not where any Englishman in Los Angeles can normally afford to live and where I lived purely by kindness and an old friendship. An early script I did for Columbia failed to meet with studio approval and they brought in Abe