Daniel Martin by John Fowles Page A

Nathan to help me rewrite it. He had more or less given up the trade by then, but he was still on call for crises. I was piqued, and prepared not to like him one bit. But not all studio decisions are crass. The story needed the ‘doctor’, and I needed the lesson; I fell for the professionalism, and even more for Abe himself as I did for his wife Mildred when I came to know her as well. He might wear the full livery the old Hollywood forced on its educated slaves: be cynical, lugubrious, obscene, suspect the worst of everything and everybody but he failed abysmally to hide the fact that this persona was very largely a matter of Millerian mimicry (the evolution in a harmless species of the appearance of a dangerous one); and that underneath the waspishness lay a shrewd, humane and fundamentally tolerant mind. I had let him read every one of my scripts ever since. Even though the recipes of his own heyday no longer worked, he retained a very sure nose for the weak spots in the new ones and in much else besides.
    Mildred and he live in the wilder, less posh section of Bel-Air ‘where the quail still speak Spanish’. Theirs is not the opulent mansion the place is more famous for… not even a swimming-pool, though that is an invert ostentation; but a pleasantly ramshackle garden, incongruously studded with classical statues, the weatherproofed plaster props from some forgotten Roman epic, with the ‘cabin’ up the hill. Abe built it to write in himself, but he had long let me appropriate it when I was in town. It lacks one or two hotel amenities, but is buried in greenery and birds’ voices. I can be alone there, or with them down at the house. I don’t like Los Angeles, increasingly detest those famous hundred suburbs in search of a city. But Abe, Mildred and the Cabin would make hell itself tolerable.
    I had packed when I got back there, then snatched four hours’ sleep, to be woken by Jenny’s voice again on the telephone. Her own wakeup call had just come in. She was her normal self again; apologized for being ‘silly’. Need was reaffirmed. I would broach the matter of her taking over the Cabin. I would call from home as soon as I could.
    I went down to the house. Abe was already about and he gave me coffee, while I told him my news. Of course Jenny could take over the Cabin if she liked; whichever, he and Mildred would see she didn’t get too lonely. I wanted this for more than the obvious kind reasons, since Mildred and he represent a formidable combination of Jewish commonsense and New England frankness. Few secrets survive for long near them. Jenny needed to get to know them both out of my presence, to be their temporary shiksa daughter instead of my cute little British bird. I was hopeful that as soon as she revealed my view of our relationship, they would take my side. They approved of Jenny as a person, but not of cradle-snatching. They also knew my past much better than she did… and my faults.
    There was an element of doing a far, far better thing, killing two lapses with one exit but we really were viable only in a culture where nobody ever grows old (especially if they are rich and successful) and trading in well-screwed for younger flesh is an accepted way of life. I had known a number of father-daughter marriages there. The girls weren’t all the high-class platinum hookers of the old days; most were rather demure and reserved creatures, and some even had a sort of dignity, or perhaps it was just a smooth complacency at having sidestepped the tedium of being young and broke. It was the men who seemed to me more made the fools; and besides, Jenny had too much sense, too close an attachment to the freedoms of her generation, ever to deny herself the full potentialities of her future… and however hard I might have tried to subvert her from them. She had, or sometimes pretended with me that she had, a jejune notion that she’d seen it all; that I was, as she brutally (too brutally to be convincing)