Falling (10 page)

Anyway, she’d left me, and I left her, and the reason I remember that evening so well is that it was the first time that I realized that I was on my own in life: nobody was going to care
for me better than I could care for myself.

I was right about my father. He regarded me at best as a duty, at worst as a nuisance. Quite soon after the funeral, he engaged Mrs Greenwich to come in, clean and generally housekeep. She was
supposed to come only three times a week, in the mornings when I was at school, but she was soon there more often, and after a few months – March, it was – she took to coming in most
evenings to give my father and me our tea. There was much more to eat and the kitchen was always warm because she never let the stove go out, but I did not like her. One evening at tea after she
had tried to talk to me and got nothing back, she turned to my father. ‘He’s the spitting image of you to look at, isn’t he? Pity he hasn’t your nature.’

My father was sitting at the table with his shirtsleeves rolled up. He was packing tobacco into his pipe and did not reply for a moment. Then he glanced at me with utter indifference before he
said, ‘He bin troubling you, then?’

‘Oh, no! He couldn’t trouble
me
,’ and she, too, looked at me – with power in her eye. ‘I only meant he’s backward in coming forward, if you know what I
mean.’ I remember that phrase with particular clarity because I
didn’t
know what it meant.

As the evenings became lighter, she would accompany my father on his evening visit to the glasshouses and they would be out for more and more hours. I didn’t care. When they had gone, I
would go through the larder picking at anything that took my fancy. I was careful how I took things, leaving the carcass, or loaf, or sugar bowl looking undisturbed. Then I would carry my spoils up
to my room and read while I ate. I had my mother’s box of books under my bed – having dragged it there when my father was at work. I only took out one book at a time, as I didn’t
want my father to know that I had taken the box, although, looking back on it, I don’t think he would have cared if I had. To begin with I read and reread the children’s books that my
mother had read me and some that she hadn’t got to. They were heavy, old-fashioned books with many illustrations that I enjoyed.
Children of the New Forest, Treasure Island, Five Children
and It, Black Beauty
were some of them. I can’t remember the order in which I read them, but by the time I was eight I was reading Dickens, Somerset Maugham and Mrs Henry Wood. I
understood only half of what I read, but that didn’t spoil the stories for me at all. In fact, it made them last longer, because each time I went back to a book, I understood more. By then my
father had married Mrs Greenwich and she was called Mrs Kent by the teachers at school, and whenever it was fine enough I got away from the Lodge and spent my free time roaming the park, which
seemed enormous, and the woods round it, and sometimes the gardens where my father worked as head gardener. There was an orchard, a nut wood, a big kitchen garden and the famous glasshouses –
seven of them, ranging from cool to almost tropical. I left the flower gardens alone, because they were in sight of the Big House and I didn’t want to get caught by my father or anyone
else.

When she was first married, Mrs Greenwich – as I always thought of her – made some efforts to be friendly to me, but she soon gave that up. I could not bear her to touch me, always
remembering the humiliation of her tearing off my clothes and putting me in the sink. I think she must have realized that my father had no feelings for me and that therefore she would not gain
favour with him by making up to me. I did not make friends with the boys at school as I hated the games they played and their tree-climbing, their fights and dares with each other to jump off walls
or knock on people’s doors and run away.

I had my own games and – to begin with, indeed for some years – I did not need anyone to play with me. Looking back, it is hard to remember precisely when the main game, as I called
it, began, but it certainly did not start until I had visited the house, and
that
happened when I was about eight.

My father came home unexpectedly in the middle of the afternoon or, rather, he was brought back in a cart. He’d hurt his leg in some accident with a ladder and could not put his foot to
the ground. Somebody up at the Big House had bound it up for him. I was told to hold the pony’s head while the boy and Mrs Greenwich helped him into the kitchen.

‘Hal can go for the doctor,’ Mrs Greenwich was saying as I came in.

‘No need. Her ladyship has called him.’ My father was lying on the narrow settee and his face twitched – I thought from pain, but it was a fleeting, secretive smile.

‘Undo these,’ he said, touching the crêpe bandage beneath his rolled-up trouser leg. ‘It doesn’t ‘arf throb.’

‘I can’t do that. Not if they did it up at the house—’

‘Do it, Milly. Do as I say.’

I was about to slip away, when my father called, ‘You!’

I stopped and looked back at him. His face was pale and his usual lock of heavy black hair fell across the side of his forehead. It was the same colour as mine and grew in the same way.

‘You go up to the house and ask for Mr Billings and tell him I won’t be up tonight. He’ll have to stoke and shut down on his own. You could offer to help him. You go
round the house to the back door, the one near the stables.’

I had never been allowed into the house and was excited.

‘You go straight there and you come straight back,’ Mrs Greenwich told me. I always agreed with her and did the opposite, and sometimes this was tiresome because I didn’t
particularly
want
to do the opposite thing – it had become a point of honour.

It was a mild evening in early spring and the drive was the best part of a mile. It was not a made-up road, and there were weeds and streaks of grass above the ruts. Each side were beech trees
that were full of the furry buds that break to sharp tender green so suddenly. It was the kind of thing I noticed about the place long after I had left it; I wasn’t noticing or thinking about
them
then,
I was thinking about my reception at the house, how I could coax someone to give me some cake and even a drink of lemonade, a luxury only tasted at Sunday-school outings, but
likely, I thought, to be drunk every day at the house. It was so large it felt to me like a village, a place rather than one dwelling. It was built on three sides, like an E without the middle bar,
and set back from the open side was another courtyard with stables, and coachhouse and garages and lofts and places where outdoor staff slept.

You could only see the front of the house from one part of the drive, the rest of it was curves with park or woods each side of the beeches. Eventually there was a fork, and I went left, which
led to the back where the stables were.

There were several black-painted doors into the house and I picked the ones at the centre, which were a pair, and turned the big iron door knob to open one. Then I was standing in a
stone-floored passage, rather dark with many doors. At the end I could see there was a staircase and I ran towards it. By now I was determined to see as much of the house as possible. The staircase
was funny, it went in a corkscrew, and I ran up the shallow stone steps, at the top of which was a door covered with green cloth and what looked like giant drawing-pins stuck in patterns on it. I
pushed this open and found myself in an enormous tall square room. It had a large fireplace and was full of doors, and animals’ heads sticking out from the walls. I was just about to try one
of the doors when out of another one came a girl. She was about my age, wore riding clothes and had two pigtails that stuck out behind her black velvet hat.

‘Who are you?’

I was struck dumb. I was afraid if I told her, she would tell me to go away.

She walked up to me and stared steadily. Her face was covered with powdery yellow-brown freckles: it was quite round and not at all pretty, I thought.

‘What do you want?’

‘I’m looking for Lady Carteret.’

‘She’s in the morning room. I’ll take you if you like.’

‘Thank you very much.’

I followed her to the other side of the room, which opened into a smaller room full of furniture and mirrors and pictures.

‘Oh! She must have gone to the library.’

We went through another door into a very long room that had windows all down one side and books all over the other. I had never seen so many books in my life; there must have been thousands of
them – millions, even, I thought. They were on shelves from floor to ceiling.

‘Mummy! Here’s a boy to see you. He hasn’t got a name.’

At the far end of the room there was a fireplace with logs burning and settees. On one of them lay a woman, with short golden hair like a cap round her head, who wore a lilac dress and a long
rope of pearls. Her pointed shoes matched her dress: I had never seen lilac shoes before and they struck me as extraordinary.

‘It’s Mr Kent’s little boy, isn’t it? Of course, I’d know you anywhere. Daphne, do go and change out of those hideous riding clothes before tea. Daphne! I mean
it.’

‘Kent’s a stupid name for a person,’ she said, as she went. ‘Kent is a county in England. That’s what it is.’

When she had gone, Lady Carteret sighed and then looked at me as I stood before her. ‘Such a little hoyden.’

I kept silent. I didn’t know what hoyden meant: I didn’t even know for sure whether she meant her daughter or me.

‘And how is your father? Has Dr Maclaren been to see him?’

I shook my head.

‘But your stepmother is there, and I’m sure she is a tower of strength?’

She
said
but she also sort of asked it and I felt vaguely afraid of some sort of trap.

‘I don’t know.’

Her face had a lot of different colours to it: blue on the lids of her eyes, dark blue on her eyelashes, white on her face except for pinks on her cheeks and a dark red mouth.

‘What is your name?’

‘Henry. But I’m called Hal. Usually.’

‘And do you want to be a gardener, like your father?’

‘I want to read books.’

She arched her very thin eyebrows, reached for a gold cigarette case and a cigarette and fitted it into a long green and gold holder.

‘Have you read all
your
books?’

She had lit her cigarette and blew out a gust of blue smoke. ‘I’ll tell you a secret. No. I haven’t read a quarter of them. Some of them are unreadable anyway.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Oh – sermons and histories of battles and fearfully dull journals of people travelling about and staying just as dull as if they’d stayed at home. And then, of course, there
are some quite well-known novels but the printing is old and all the Ss are Fs.’

‘Could I see? One of them?’

She uncrossed her ankles and sat up. Her stockings were silvery grey. ‘Why not?’

She showed me a book in two volumes called
The History of Tom Jones,
and it was true, the letters were different and made it look a bit like a secret language.

‘I could read this,’ I said.

‘All right. You may borrow it, one volume at a time.’

‘Could I really?’

‘If you promise to be very careful with it.’

‘I promise.’

She put a hand lightly on my head to push the lock of hair back. ‘I’m sure you keep all your promises. But you came to see me about something. Didn’t you?’

‘To tell Mr Billings that my father won’t be in tonight, he’ll have to stoke and shut down on his own.’

‘But surely you were meant to tell Mr Billings that – not me.’

‘I was looking for him when the girl found me. Honestly. I didn’t know where to find him.’

She walked to the fireplace and pulled an embroidered rope. ‘Harker will find him for you.’ When she left me there was a lovely waft of spicy smell. A man in dark clothes came
into the room.

‘Take this boy to Mr Billings, Harker, would you? And ask Mrs Tarrant to give him a nice slice of plum cake. And I’ve lent him the book. Goodbye, Hal. When you’ve finished that
volume you may come and collect the second.’

‘Thank you ever so much—’

‘M’lady,’ the man called Harker prompted.

‘Your lady,’ I said. He smiled in a superior way and I wanted to kick him but I didn’t want Lady Carteret to think I was a kicking sort of boy.

Mrs Tarrant was sitting in front of a large coal fire in a dark green room in the basement where I had come in. A portly man wearing an apron sat eating hot buttered toast at the table, on which
was a splendid tea. Harker repeated Lady Carteret’s message about a nice slice of cake.

‘Large,’ I said. The sight of all the food made me feel ravenous.

‘Her ladyship said nice,’ he said.

‘Nice means large,’ I said. We glared at each other.

‘I’ll cut it myself.’ Mrs Tarrant looked at me over her steel spectacles and I felt she was on my side. ‘You’re certainly like your father,’ she said.
‘Do you want to eat it here, or take it home with you?’

‘Take it home.’

‘If you please.’

‘Please.’ I kept my eyes on her when I said it, and saw her soften. It was interesting seeing how people changed depending on how you looked at them.

The cake was wrapped in a piece of greaseproof paper. I was offered a glass of milk, but I’ve never liked milk so I said my stepmother didn’t want me to have any. This was a mistake,
because Mrs Tarrant immediately filled an enormous glass.

‘You drink it down, dearie,’ she said, in tones so much on my side that they sounded positively ferocious.

‘Poor mite,’ I heard her saying as I left the room; ‘losing his mother like that! And that Mrs Greenwich I wouldn’t wish on anyone’s child.’

I walked out of the house and on to the drive in the dusk with my spoils. As soon as I was out of sight of the house, I remembered I’d forgotten to give the message. Who cares? I would eat
the cake – perhaps not all of it, but enough so that the rest would go in my pocket without a bulge.

There was a lot to think about. I went over the whole time with Lady Carteret. Was I going to be a gardener like my father? Not on your life. I was going to be somebody who
employed
gardeners like my father – who employed dozens of people, like the Carterets, and lived in a House, as opposed to a poky little Lodge. Even Mrs Tarrant’s sitting room was twice the size
of our kitchen.