The French Lieutenant's Woman (14 page)

I cannot imagine what
Bosch-like picture of Ware Commons Mrs. Poulteney had built up over
the years; what satanic orgies she divined behind every tree, what
French abominations under every leaf. But I think we may safely say
that it had become the objective correlative of all that went on in
her own subconscious.

Her outburst reduced
both herself and Sarah to silence.

Having discharged, Mrs.
Poulteney began to change her tack.

"You have
distressed me deeply."

"But how was I to
tell? I am not to go to the sea. Very well, I don't go to the sea. I
wish for solitude. That is all. That is not a sin. I will not be
called a sinner for that."

"Have you never
heard speak of Ware Commons?"

"As a place of the
kind you imply--never."

Mrs. Poulteney looked
somewhat abashed then before the girl's indignation. She recalled
that Sarah had not lived in Lyme until recently; and that she could
therefore, just conceivably, be ignorant of the obloquy she was
inviting.

"Very well. But let
it be plainly understood. I permit no one in my employ to go or to be
seen near that place. You will confine your walks to where it is
seemly. Do I make myself clear?"

"Yes. I am to walk
in the paths of righteousness." For one appalling moment Mrs.
Poulteney thought she had been the subject of a sarcasm; but Sarah's
eyes were solemnly down, as if she had been pronouncing sentence on
herself; and righteousness were synonymous with suffering.

"Then let us hear
no more of this foolishness. I do this for your own good."

Sarah murmured, "I
know." Then, "I thank you, ma'm."

No more was said. She
turned to the Bible and read the passage Mrs. Poulteney had marked.
It was the same one as she had chosen for that first interview--Psalm
119: "Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law
of the Lord." Sarah read in a very subdued voice, seemingly
without emotion. The old woman sat facing the dark shadows at the far
end of the room; like some pagan idol she looked, oblivious of the
blood sacrifice her pitiless stone face demanded.

Later that night Sarah
might have been seen--though I cannot think by whom, unless a passing
owl--standing at the open window of her unlit bedroom. The house was
silent, and the town as well, for people went to bed by nine in those
days before electricity and television. It was now one o'clock. Sarah
was in her nightgown, with her hair loose; and she was staring out to
sea. A distant lantern winked faintly on the black waters out towards
Portland Bill, where some ship sailed towards Bridport. Sarah had
seen the tiny point of light; and not given it a second thought.

If you had gone closer
still, you would have seen that her face was wet with silent tears.
She was not standing at her window as part of her mysterious vigil
for Satan's sails; but as a preliminary to jumping from it.

I will not make her
teeter on the windowsill; or sway forward, and then collapse sobbing
back onto the worn carpet of her room. We know she was alive a
fortnight after this incident, and therefore she did not jump. Nor
were hers the sobbing, hysterical sort of tears that presage violent
action; but those produced by a profound conditional, rather than
emotional, misery--slow-welling, unstoppable, creeping like blood
through a bandage.

Who is Sarah?

Out of what shadows does
she come?
 

13

For the drift
of the Maker is dark, an Isis hid by the veil ...
--
Tennyson, Maud (1855)

I do not know. This
story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create
never existed outside my own mind. If I have pretended until now to
know my characters' minds and innermost thoughts, it is because I am
writing in (just as I have assumed some of the vocabulary and "voice"
of) a convention universally accepted at the time of my story: that
the novelist stands next to God. He may not know all, yet he tries to
pretend that he does. But I live in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet
and Roland Barthes; if this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the
modern sense of the word.

So perhaps I am writing
a transposed autobiography; perhaps I now live in one of the houses I
have brought into the fiction; perhaps Charles is myself disguised.
Perhaps it is only a game. Modern women like Sarah exist, and I have
never understood them. Or perhaps I am trying to pass off a concealed
book of essays on you. Instead of chapter headings, perhaps I should
have written "On the Horizontality of Existence," "The
Illusions of Progress," "The History of the Novel

Form," "The
Aetiology of Freedom," "Some Forgotten Aspects of the
Victorian Age" ... what you will. Perhaps you suppose that a
novelist has only to pull the right strings and his puppets will
behave in a lifelike manner; and produce on request a thorough
analysis of their motives and intentions. Certainly I intended at
this stage (Chap. Thirteen--unfolding of Sarah's true state of mind)
to tell all--or all that matters. But I find myself suddenly like a
man in the sharp spring night, watching from the lawn beneath that
dim upper window in Marlborough House; I know in the context of my
book's reality that Sarah would never have brushed away her tears and
leaned down and delivered a chapter of revelation. She would
instantly have turned, had she seen me there just as the old moon
rose, and disappeared into the interior shadows.

But I am a novelist, not
a man in a garden--I can follow her where I like? But possibility is
not permissibility. Husbands could often murder their wives--and the
reverse--and get away with it. But they don't.

You may think novelists
always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future
predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of
Chapter Thirteen. But novelists write for countless different
reasons: for money, for fame, for reviewers, for parents, for
friends, for loved ones; for vanity, for pride, for curiosity, for
amusement: as skilled furniture makers enjoy making furniture, as
drunkards like drinking, as judges like judging, as Sicilians like
emptying a shotgun into an enemy's back. I could fill a book with
reasons, and they would all be true, though not true of all. Only one
same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real
as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot
plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know
that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a
planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead
world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us
that they begin to live. When Charles left Sarah on her cliff edge, I
ordered him to walk straight back to Lyme Regis. But he did not; he
gratuitously turned and went down to the Dairy.

Oh, but you say, come
on--what I really mean is that the idea crossed my mind as I wrote
that it might be more clever to have him stop and drink milk ... and
meet Sarah again. That is certainly one explanation of what happened;
but I can only report--and I am the most reliable witness--that the
idea seemed to me to come clearly from Charles, not myself. It is not
only that he has begun to gain an autonomy; I must respect it, and
disrespect all my quasi-divine plans for him, if I wish him to be
real.

In other words, to be
free myself, I must give him, and Tina, and Sarah, even the
abominable Mrs. Poulteney, their freedom as well. There is only one
good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to
exist. And I must conform to that definition.

The novelist is still a
god, since he creates (and not even the most aleatory
avant-garde
modern novel has managed to extirpate its author completely); what
has changed is that we are no longer the gods of the Victorian image,
omniscient and decreeing; but in the new theological image, with
freedom our first principle, not authority.

I have disgracefully
broken the illusion? No. My characters still exist, and in a reality
no less, or no more, real than the one I have just broken. Fiction is
woven into all, as a Greek observed some two and a half thousand
years ago. I find this new reality (or unreality) more valid; and I
would have you share my own sense that I do not fully control these
creatures of my mind, any more than you control--however hard you
try, however much of a latterday Mrs. Poulteney you may be--your
children, colleagues, friends, or even yourself.

But this is
preposterous? A character is either "real" or "imaginary"?
If you think that, hypocrite lecteur, I can only smile. You do not
even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild
it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it ... fictionalize it, in a
word, and put it away on a shelf--your book, your romanced
autobiography. We are all in flight from the real reality. That is a
basic definition of Homo sapiens.

So if you think all this
unlucky (but it is Chapter Thirteen) digression has nothing to do
with your Time, Progress, Society, Evolution and all those other
capitalized ghosts in the night that are rattling their chains behind
the scenes of this book ... I will not argue. But I shall suspect
you. I report, then, only the outward facts: that Sarah cried in the
darkness, but did not kill herself; that she continued, in spite of
the express prohibition, to haunt Ware Commons. In a way, therefore,
she had indeed jumped; and was living in a kind of long fall, since
sooner or later the news must inevitably come to Mrs. Poulteney of
the sinner's compounding of her sin. It is true Sarah went less often
to the woods than she had become accustomed to, a deprivation at
first made easy for her by the wetness of the weather those following
two weeks. It is true also that she took some minimal precautions of
a military kind. The cart track eventually ran out into a small lane,
little better
than
a superior cart track itself, which curved down a broad combe called
Ware Valley until it joined, on the outskirts of Lyme, the main
carriage road to Sidmouth and Exeter. There was a small scatter of
respectable houses in Ware Valley, and it was therefore a seemly
place to walk. Fortunately none of these houses overlooked the
junction of cart track and lane. Once there, Sarah had merely to look
round to see if she was alone. One day she set out with the intention
of walking into the woods. But as in the lane she came to the track
to the Dairy she saw two people come round a higher bend. She walked
straight on towards them, and once round the bend, watched to make
sure that the couple did not themselves take the Dairy track; then
retraced her footsteps and entered her sanctuary unobserved.

She risked meeting other
promenaders on the track itself; and might always have risked the
dairyman and his family's eyes. But this latter danger she avoided by
discovering for herself that one of the inviting paths into the
bracken above the track led round, out of sight of the Dairy, onto
the path through the woods. This path she had invariably taken, until
that afternoon when she recklessly--as we can now realize-- emerged
in full view of the two men.

The reason was simple.
She had overslept, and she knew she was late for her reading. Mrs.
Poulteney was to dine at Lady Cotton's that evening; and the usual
hour had been put forward to allow her to prepare for what was always
in essence, if not appearance, a thunderous clash of two brontosauri;
with black velvet taking the place of iron cartilage, and quotations
from the Bible the angry raging teeth; but no less dour and
relentless a battle.

Also, Charles's
down-staring face had shocked her; she felt the speed of her fall
accelerate; when the cruel ground rushes up, when the fall is from
such a height, what use are precautions?
 

14

"My idea
of good company, Mr. Elliot, is the company of clever, well-informed
people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call
good company."
"You
are mistaken," said he, gently, "that is not good
company--that is the best. Good company requires only birth,
education, and manners, and with regard to education is not very
nice."
--
jane
Austen, Persuasion

Visitors to Lyme in the
nineteenth century, if they did not quite have to undergo the ordeal
facing travelers to the ancient Greek colonies--Charles did not
actually have to deliver a Periclean oration plus comprehensive world
news summary from the steps of the Town Hall--were certainly expected
to allow themselves to be examined and spoken to. Ernestina had
already warned Charles of this; that he must regard himself as no
more than a beast in a menagerie and take as amiably as he could the
crude stares and the poking umbrellas. Thus it was that two or three
times a week he had to go visiting with the ladies and suffer hours
of excruciating boredom, whose only consolation was the little scene
that took place with a pleasing regularity when they had got back to
Aunt Tranter's house. Ernestina would anxiously search his eyes,
glazed by clouds of platitudinous small talk, and say "Was it
dreadful? Can you forgive me? Do you hate me?"; and when he
smiled she would throw herself into his arms, as if he had
miraculously survived a riot or an avalanche.