The French Lieutenant's Woman / Любовница французского лейтенанта. Джон Фаулз

ma'm.”

      “It cannot concern Miss Woodruff?”

      “Would that it did not, ma'm[77]. But I fear it is my duty to tell you.”

      “We must never fear what is our duty.”

      “No, ma'm.”

      “She has taken to walking, ma'm, on Ware Commons[78].”

      Mrs. Poulteney's mouth did something extraordinary. It fell open.

      10

      The Undercliff, a mile-long slope caused by erosion, makes one of the strangest coastal landscapes in Southern England. It is very steep: flat places are as rare as visitors in it. But this steepness pulls its vegetation towards the sun; and this fact gives the area its botanical strangeness – its wild trees rarely seen growing in England; its enormous ashes and beeches; fern that grows seven, eight feet tall; its flowers that bloom a month earlier than anywhere else in the district. It has also, like all land that has never been worked or lived on by man, its mysteries, its shadows, its dangers. Strange as it may seem, it was less solitary a hundred years ago than it is today. There is not a single cottage in the Undercliff now; in 1867 there were several, lived in by gamekeepers or woodmen. Now the Undercliff is in a state of total wildness.

      It was this place that Charles had entered when he had climbed the path from the shore; and this same place was called Ware Commons.

      When Charles had quenched his thirst and cooled his brow with his wetted handkerchief he began to look around him. He forgot science and enjoyed nature. A distant woodpecker drummed in the branches of some high tree. When he turned he saw the blue sea, now washing far below.

      He started thinking about man and nature. Eventually science won, and he began to search for his tests. He found a pretty fragment of fossil scallop, but the sea urchins evaded him. He had no luck. An hour passed, and his duty towards Ernestina began to outweigh his lust for echinoderms[79]. He looked at his watch, and made his way back to where he had left his rucksack. Some way up the slope, with the declining sun on his back, he came on a path and set off for Lyme. The path climbed and curved slightly inward beside an ivy-grown stone wall and then forked without indication. He hesitated, then walked some fifty yards or so along the lower path. But then he came to a solution to his problem, for yet another path suddenly branched to his right, up a steep small slope, and from which he could plainly orientate himself. He therefore pushed up through the bramble shrubs to the little green plateau.

      It opened out very pleasantly, like a tiny alpine meadow. Charles stood in the sunlight. Then he moved forward to the edge of the plateau.

      And there, below him, he saw a figure.

      For one terrible moment he thought he had come upon a corpse. But it was a woman asleep. Charles's immediate instinct had been to draw back out of the woman's view. He did not see who she was. He stood at a loss, looking at but not seeing the fine landscape the place offered. He hesitated, he was about to leave; but then his curiosity drew him forward again.

      The girl lay in deep sleep, on her back. Her coat had fallen open over her blue dress with a small white collar at the throat. The sleeper's face was turned away from him, her right arm thrown back, bent in a childlike way. There was something very tender and yet sexual in the way she lay; it awakened Charles's memory of a moment from his time in Paris. Another girl, whose name now he could not even remember, perhaps had never known, seen sleeping so, one dawn, in a bedroom overlooking the Seine.

      He moved round the plateau, to where he could see the sleeper's face better, and it was only then that he realized whom he had come upon. It was the French Lieutenant's Woman. Part of her hair had become loose and half covered her cheek. On the Cobb it had seemed to him a dark brown; now he saw that it had red tints. The skin below seemed very brown in that light, as if the girl cared more for health than a fashionably pale complexion. A strong nose, heavy eyebrows, the mouth he could not see.

      He stood unable to do anything but stare down, tranced by this unexpected meeting, and overcome by an equally strange feeling – not sexual, but fraternal, perhaps paternal, a certainty of the innocence of this creature, of her being unfairly outcast. He could not imagine what could drive her to this wild place.

      He came at last to the very edge of the rampart above her, directly over her face, and there he saw that all the sadness was gone; in sleep the face was gentle, it might even have had a smile. It was precisely then that she awoke.

      She looked up at once. He was detected, and he was too much a gentleman to deny it. So when Sarah rose to her feet, gathering her coat about her, and stared back up at him, he raised his hat and bowed. She said nothing, but fixed him with a look of shock and confusion. She had fine dark eyes.

      They stood thus for several seconds. She seemed so small to him, standing there below, as if, should he take a step towards her, she would turn and rush out of his sight.

      “A thousand apologies. I came upon you by chance.” And then he turned and walked away. He did not look back, but went down to the path he had left, and waited half a minute to see if she was following him. She did not appear. Very soon he marched firmly away up the steeper path.

      11

      At about the same time Ernestina got from her bed and took her diary from her dressing table. In the morning she wrote: “Did not see dearest Charles. Did not go out, tho' it is very fine. Did not feel happy.”

      Aunt Tranter's house was small, and she had heard Sam knock on the front door downstairs when he brought flowers; she had heard Mary open it – a murmur of voices and then a suppressed laughter from the maid, a slammed door. The suspicion crossed her mind that Charles had been down there, flirting; and this was one of her deepest fears about him.

      She knew he had lived in Paris, in Lisbon, and traveled much; she knew he was eleven years older than herself; she knew he was attractive to women. His answers to her playful questions about his past conquests were always playful in return; and that was the rub[80]. She felt jealous. But the matter of whether he had slept with other women didn't worry her much. It was really Charles's heart of which she was jealous. That, she could not bear to think of having to share.

      When the front door closed, Ernestina tried to control herself, then she rang the bell and soon afterwards, there were footsteps, a knock, and the door opened to let in Mary bearing a vase with a fountain of spring flowers. The girl came and stood by the bed, smiling.

      Of the three young women who pass through these pages Mary was, in my opinion, by far the prettiest. She had pink complexion, corn-colored hair and wide gray-blue eyes. Not even the dull Victorian clothes could hide the seductive plump figure.

      Mary's great-great-granddaughter, who is twenty-two years old this month I write in, much resembles her ancestor; and her face is known over the entire world, for she is one of the more celebrated younger English film actresses.

      Mrs. Tranter liked pretty girls; and pretty, laughing girls even better. Of course, Ernestina was her niece, and she worried for her more; but Ernestina she saw only once or twice a year, and Mary she saw every day. The girl had a warm heart; she returned the warmth that was given.

      Mary was not faultless; and one of her faults was a certain envy of Ernestina, who became the favorite of the household when she arrived from London; but the young lady from London came also with trunkfuls of the latest London and Paris fashions, while she had only three dresses. She also thought Charles was a beautiful man for a husband; too good for a pale creature like Ernestina. This was why Charles had the benefit of those gray-and-blue eyes when she opened the door to him or passed him in the street. Each time he raised his hat to her in the street she mentally cocked her nose at Ernestina[81].

      Mary placed the flowers on the bedside commode.

      “From Mr. Charles, Miss Tina. With 'er complimums.” Mary spoke in a dialect known for its contempt of pronouns and suffixes

77

I wish it would not

78

Веркоммонз – малолюдное место свиданий парочек.

79

Иглокожие – морские донные животные.

80

но в том-то всё и дело

81

мысленно делала нос Эрнестине