The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (3 page)

He returned from his six
months in the City of Sin in 1856. His father had died three months later.
The big house in Belgravia was let, and Charles installed himself in a
smaller establishment in Kensington, more suitable to a young bachelor.
There he was looked after by a manservant, a cook and two maids, staff
of almost eccentric modesty for one of his connections and wealth. But
he was happy there, and besides, he spent a great deal of time traveling.
He contributed one or two essays on his journeys in remoter places to the
fashionable magazines; indeed an enterprising publisher asked him to write
a book after the nine months he spent in Portugal, but there seemed to
Charles something rather infra dig.--and something decidedly too much like
hard work and sustained concentration--in authorship. He toyed with the
idea, and dropped it. Indeed toying with ideas was his chief occupation
during his third decade.

Yet he was not, adrift in
the slow entire of Victorian time, essentially a frivolous young man. A
chance meeting with someone who knew of his grandfather's mania made him
realize that it was only in the family that the old man's endless days
of supervising bewildered gangs of digging rustics were regarded as a joke.
Others remembered Sir Charles Smithson as a pioneer of the archaeology
of pre-Roman Britain; objects from his banished collection had been gratefully
housed by the British Museum. And slowly Charles realized that he was in
temperament nearer to his grandfather than to either of his grandfather's
sons. During the last three years he had become increasingly interested
in paleontology; that, he had decided, was his field. He began to frequent
the
conversazioni
of the Geological Society. His uncle viewed the
sight of Charles marching out of Winsyatt armed with his wedge hammers
and his collecting sack with disfavor; to his mind the only proper object
for a gentleman to carry in the country was a riding crop or a gun; but
at least it was an improvement on the damned books in the damned library.
However, there was yet one more lack of interest in Charles that pleased
his uncle even less. Yellow ribbons and daffodils, the insignia of the
Liberal Party, were anathema at Winsyatt; the old man was the most azure
of Tories--and had interest. But Charles politely refused all attempts
to get him to stand for Parliament. He declared himself without political
conviction. In secret he rather admired Gladstone; but at Winsyatt Gladstone
was the arch-traitor, the unmentionable. Thus family respect and social
laziness conveniently closed what would have been a natural career for
him.

Laziness was, I am afraid,
Charles's distinguishing trait. Like many of his contemporaries he sensed
that the earlier self-responsibility of the century was turning into self-importance:
that what drove the new Britain was increasingly a desire to seem respectable,
in place of the desire to do good for good's sake. He knew he was overfastidious.
But how could one write history with Macaulay so close behind? Fiction
or poetry, in the midst of the greatest galaxy of talent in the history
of English literature? How could one be a creative scientist, with Lyell
and Darwin still alive? Be a statesman, with Disraeli and Gladstone polarizing
all the available space?

You will see that Charles
set his sights high. Intelligent idlers always have, in order to justify
their idleness to their intelligence. He had, in short, all the Byronic
ennui with neither of the Byronic outlets: genius and adultery.

But though death may be delayed,
as mothers with marriageable daughters have been known to foresee, it kindly
always comes in the end. Even if Charles had not had the further prospects
he did, he was an interesting young man. His travels abroad had regrettably
rubbed away some of that patina of profound humorlessness (called by the
Victorian earnestness, moral rectitude, probity, and a thousand other misleading
names) that one really required of a proper English gentleman of the time.
There was outwardly a certain cynicism about him, a sure symptom of an
inherent moral decay; but he never entered society without being ogled
by the mamas, clapped on the back by the papas and simpered at by the girls.
Charles quite liked pretty girls and he was not averse to leading them,
and their ambitious parents, on. Thus he had gained a reputation for aloofness
and coldness, a not unmerited reward for the neat way--by the time he was
thirty he was as good as a polecat at the business--he would sniff the
bait and then turn his tail on the hidden teeth of the matrimonial traps
that endangered his path.

His uncle often took him
to task on the matter; but as Charles was quick to point out, he was using
damp powder. The old man would grumble.

"
I never found the right
woman."

"
Nonsense. You never looked
for her."

"
Indeed I did. When I was
your age ..."

"
You lived for your hounds
and the partridge season."

The old fellow would stare
gloomily at his claret. He did not really regret having no wife; but he
bitterly lacked not having children to buy ponies and guns for. He saw
his way of life sinking without trace.

"
I was blind. Blind."

"
My dear uncle, I have excellent
eyesight. Console yourself. I too have been looking for the right girl.
And I have not found her."
 
 

What's done, is
what remains! Ah, blessed they
Who leave completed tasks
of love to stay
And answermutely for them,
being dead,
Life was not purposeless,
though Life be fled.
--
Mrs. Norton, The Lady
of La Garaye (1863)

Most British families
of the middle and upper classes lived above their own cesspool...
--
E. Royston Pike, Human
Documents of the Victorian Golden Age

The sergeant major of this
Stygian domain was a Mrs. Fairley, a thin, small person who always wore
black, but less for her widowhood than by temperament. Perhaps her sharp
melancholy had been induced by the sight of the endless torrent of lesser
mortals who cascaded through her kitchen. Butlers, footmen, gardeners,
grooms, upstairs maids, downstairs maids--they took just so much of Mrs.
Poulteney's standards and ways and then they fled. This was very disgraceful
and cowardly of them. But when you are expected to rise at six, to work
from half past six to eleven, to work again from half past eleven to half
past four, and then again from five to ten, and every day, thus a hundred-hour
week, your reserves of grace and courage may not be very large. A legendary
summation of servant feelings had been delivered to Mrs. Poulteney by the
last butler but four: "Madam, I should rather spend the rest of my life
in the poorhouse than live another week under this roof." Some gravely
doubted whether anyone could actually have dared to say these words to
the awesome lady. But the sentiment behind them was understood when the
man came down with his bags
and claimed that he had.

Exactly how the ill-named
Mrs. Fairley herself had stood her mistress so long was one of the local
wonders. Most probably it was because she would, had life so fallen out,
have been a Mrs. Poulteney on her own account. Her envy kept her there;
and also her dark delight in the domestic catastrophes that descended so
frequently on the house. In short, both women were incipient sadists; and
it was to their advantage to tolerate each other.

Mrs. Poulteney had two obsessions:
or two aspects of the same obsession. One was Dirt--though she made some
sort of exception of the kitchen, since only the servants lived there--and
the other was Immorality. In neither field did anything untoward escape
her eagle eye.

She was like some plump vulture,
endlessly circling in her endless leisure, and endowed in the first field
with a miraculous sixth sense as regards dust, fingermarks, insufficiently
starched linen, smells, stains, breakages and all the ills that houses
are heir to. A gardener would be dismissed for being seen to come into
the house with earth on his hands; a butler for having a spot of wine on
his stock; a maid for having slut's wool under her bed.

But the most abominable thing
of all was that even outside her house she acknowledged no bounds to her
authority. Failure to be seen at church, both at matins and at evensong,
on Sunday was tantamount to proof of the worst moral laxity. Heaven help
the maid seen out walking, on one of her rare free afternoons--one a month
was the reluctant allowance--with a young man. And heaven also help the
young man so in love that he tried to approach Marlborough House secretly
to keep an assignation: for the gardens were a positive forest of humane
man-traps--"humane" in this context referring to the fact that the great
waiting jaws were untoothed, though quite powerful enough to break a man's
leg. These iron servants were the most cherished by Mrs. Poulteney. Them,
she had never dismissed.

There would have been a place
in the Gestapo for the lady; she had a way of interrogation that could
reduce the sturdiest girls to tears in the first five minutes. In her fashion
she was an epitome of all the most crassly arrogant traits of the ascendant
British Empire. Her only notion of justice was that she must be right;
and her only notion of government was an angry bombardment of the impertinent
populace. Yet among her own class, a very limited circle, she was renowned
for her charity. And if you had disputed that reputation, your opponents
would have produced an incontrovertible piece of evidence: had not dear,
kind Mrs. Poulteney taken in the French Lieutenant's Woman? I need hardly
add that at the time the dear, kind lady knew only the other, more Grecian,
nickname.

This remarkable event had
taken place in the spring of 1866, exactly a year before the time of which
I write; and it had to do with the great secret of Mrs. Poulteney's life.
It was a very simple secret. She believed in hell.

The vicar of Lyme at that
time was a comparatively emancipated man theologically, but he also knew
very well on which side his pastoral bread was buttered. He suited Lyme,
a traditionally Low Church congregation, very well. He had the knack of
a certain fervid eloquence in his sermons; and he kept his church free
of crucifixes, images, ornaments and all other signs of the Romish cancer.
When Mrs. Poulteney enounced to him her theories of the life to come, he
did not argue, for incumbents of not notably fat livings do not argue with
rich parishioners. Mrs. Poulteney's purse was as open to calls from him
as it was throttled where her thirteen domestics' wages were concerned.
In the winter (winter also of the fourth great cholera onslaught on Victorian
Britain) of that previous year Mrs. Poulteney had been a little ill, and
the vicar had been as frequent a visitor as the doctors who so repeatedly
had to assure her that she was suffering from a trivial stomach upset and
not the dreaded Oriental killer.

Mrs. Poulteney was not a
stupid woman; indeed, she had acuity in practical matters, and her future
destination, like all matters pertaining to her comfort, was a highly practical
consideration. If she visualized God, He had rather the face of the Duke
of Wellington; but His character was more that of a shrewd lawyer, a breed
for whom Mrs. Poulteney had much respect. As she lay in her bedroom she
reflected on the terrible mathematical doubt that increasingly haunted
her; whether the Lord calculated charity by what one had given or by what
one could have afforded to give. Here she had better data than the vicar.
She had given considerable sums to the church; but she knew they fell far
short of the prescribed one-tenth to be parted with by serious candidates
for paradise. Certainly she had regulated her will to ensure that the account
would be handsomely balanced after her death; but God might not be present
at the reading of that document. Furthermore it chanced, while she was
ill, that Mrs. Fairley, who read to her from the Bible in the evenings,
picked on the parable of the widow's mite. It had always seemed a grossly
unfair parable to Mrs. Poulteney; it now lay in her heart far longer than
the enteritis bacilli in her intestines. One day, when she was convalescent,
she took advantage of one of the solicitous vicar's visits and cautiously
examined her conscience. At first he was inclined to dismiss her spiritual
worries.