Daniel Martin by John Fowles Page B

estimated, the best she was likely to get. But that was a nonsense passing time must explode. I had no right to encourage such an illusion; and I had categorically no wish to pick up the emotional tab when it was shattered.
    I suppose the experience with Nell formed me there, no doubt on a predisposed Freudian pattern. Living with a woman has always seemed to me an artificial situation, pseudo-dramatic in nature; that is, an area where invention and concealment are as important as reality and honesty. I have always needed secrets. I write that clinically, not vainly. I live in front of too many wrong decisions, I cannot rid my life of them, the least I can do is to hide them from my lady guests… that is the practical theory, at any rate. Perhaps I had grown to like Abe and Mildred so much simply because they were clear proof that the theory is inadequate; that better relationships can exist. They are two people who have principally defined my own Englishness by their lack of it. I once outraged them both by arguing that most English anti-semitism, like most English anti-Americanism, sprang out of sheer envy. They did not like simple evil explained as complex loss, or failure to evolve. You poor sons of bitches, snarled Abe, deprived of the gas-ovens… but that wasn’t the point.
    We took off. After a minute, by craning back, I could even make out Burbank and the roofs of the Warner lot stages, under one of which Jenny must have been facing the first take of the day. I did feel a guilt then, tenderness, a protectiveness. She would never be an outstanding actress, as the middle-aged woman I had spoken to the previous night might once conceivably have been, and I knew she hadn’t fully accepted that as yet: the closed options, the compromises to come.
    East, at altitude, over the deserted mountains of North Arizona and the toy gash of the Grand Canyon: there had been talk between Jenny and myself of driving back overland when her work was done. But that was a foregone experience I didn’t regret, since there was another chasm beside that of age. The life we led in Los Angeles had allowed us to overlook it, turn it into another toy gash of no more than a trivial passing significance; but in another context, on the ground, I knew it would always have presented a much more formidable obstacle. It was my fault, in the sense that I had effectively reduced it to the status of one more secret about my past though in this case, not only with Jenny.
    Anthony and I originally moved from cursory acquaintance being of the same year at the same college and with a shared staircase to our rooms—to friendship precisely because of this ‘secret’. I was already engaged in burying or suppressing it, but it was still close enough in my past to be partially uncovered.
    The summer term of 1948, our first university year: by chance I went into his sitting-room one day. Our shared servant was retiring and I was collecting for a leaving present for him. On Anthony’s desk I saw a flower in a jam-jar a stem of the Man Orchid, Aceras. A few moments later we discovered a common interest, though within it, as largely a memento, an echo of former days. With him it was far more serious; as with so much in his life, such an interest could be only methodical, deeply pursued, or nonexistent. Scientifically I had learnt enough botany as a schoolboy to find my way round the old copy of Bentham and Hooker we had at home; and I had in my teens fallen prey a little to the orchid mystique. I disclaimed anything more with Anthony, and thereby disclaimed the whole buried continent that nature had been for me in my adolescence. I was ashamed of it already, and nothing in his obviously much greater expertise encouraged me to reveal the truth then or later.
    I had always thought Anthony priggishly above the rest of us, a typical Greats scholar. He dressed rather formally, and there was a kind of studied quickness, a purpose, when he walked across the quad that