Falling (11 page)

I found a place with a fallen tree to sit on while I ate the cake, which was black with raisins and currants and had a hot treacle taste that went up my nose: the best cake I’d ever had in
my life. How would I get a house like that? It must cost a lot of money. How would I get the money? I thought of Lady Carteret. Her husband had been an invalid since the war, and spent much of his
time in bed or a wheelchair. He’d been like that ever since I could remember and the only time I ever saw him was the occasion when he came to the school to give prizes. How had
he
got
any money if he was such an invalid? Perhaps Lady Carteret was the rich person. Perhaps it was really her house and he was simply living in it because they were married. And then a really brilliant
thought came to me. If Sir Carteret (even in a wheelchair) could marry Lady Carteret and live in such a grand manner for the rest of his life, why didn’t I marry Daphne and do the like?
Obviously this couldn’t happen for several years: even if Sir Carteret died from being so weak and never walking anywhere, Lady Carteret, who in any case looked younger, would probably live
for quite a long time. But once Daphne and I were married we could make her happier than she had ever been. ‘You are the perfect son,’ she would say, ‘there is no one I would
rather have living in my Big House. Daphne is a very lucky girl.’ This brought me up short. Daphne, with her pigtails and round freckled face, was hardly the golden-haired beauty I had in
mind as a wife. I decided to leave her out of the game until she got prettier.

But that was when I started the game – about my whole life when I was grown-up, living in the house and being master of the estate with dozens, possibly hundreds, of servants, with horses
and carriages and motor-cars, and perhaps a small private zeppelin. There would be grooms and gamekeepers and butlers (but not Harker) and gardeners (but I would retire my father to a little house
by the sea). There would be cooks and maids for all the indoor work and a nurse for Lady Carteret and fireworks at least once a month, and boating parties on the lake, and I might even start a
private zoo, and there would be balls to which everyone else who owned a large house would come, and dance to an enormous band, eat ices in summer and drink punch in winter, and girls would get
engaged to men in evening dress. I was able to furnish the game from information gained from the books in my mother’s box, and later, books lent me from Lady Carteret’s (or my) library.
For she was in this respect as good as her word. I returned the first volume of
Tom Jones
within the week and was allowed the second. On the next occasion that I met her, she asked if all
was well at home. I looked at her blankly, wondering what on earth she meant.

‘I mean,’ she said quite gently, ‘is your stepmother kind to you?’

Oh –
that.
I gazed mournfully at Lady Carteret and thought of Mrs Greenwich and in no time a couple of tears were rolling down my face. After that, Lady Carteret positively
encouraged me to come to the house and borrow books. She never referred to my stepmother again, but she gave me a florin on my birthday and another one when it was Christmas.

I kept my visits to the house very quiet at home and for a long time, probably more than a year – I had an instinct that neither my father nor Mrs Greenwich would like the idea, although I
was not clear what kind of objections they would make if they knew. By then, I never wanted them to know anything about me and as they were neither of them interested enough in me to be curious, it
was easy to keep my secret life – my books and stories and visits to the house, and rare meetings with Lady Carteret (she was often nowhere to be seen) – completely secret. So sure was
I at one point of their lack of interest in me that one term I played truant from school on the days that we had lessons I hated. This came abruptly to an end one summer evening when I came back
from what amounted to a whole day in and around the Big House instead of being at school. I was met at the kitchen door of the Lodge by my father, his shirtsleeves rolled up and a look in his eye
that I knew meant he was very angry.

‘You’re found out, you lazy monkey. Come here.’

‘I haven’t done nothing.’ I was frightened and I heard myself whining and knew it would make him angrier.

‘The one thing I won’t have you grow up to be is a liar. If I have to lam it out of you I won’t have that.’

He had seized me by my shirt collar and now dragged me into the kitchen.

‘Take off your trews. Look sharp!’

When my shorts were round my ankles he pushed me down over one of the kitchen chairs and beat me with a leather strap. I’d shut my eyes, but the first stinging blow made me shout with pain
and at the same time I saw
her
– Mrs G – standing in her bulging flowered overall, arms folded over her huge bosoms (that’s what I called them in those days). My eyes moved
further up her body, past her double chin to her mouth. It was smiling. I knew without looking that it was watching me that was making her smile. I clenched my teeth and shut my eyes again and
stopped any noise coming out of me, and I was full of hatred for her that was louder and harder than the beating. I hated them both: my father for beating me in front of her, and her for being
there. But I was also really afraid that someone from the house had told my father about me, not that I had ever gone there, but how often, and even while he was beating me I was struggling to find
a convincing story that would appease him.

‘That’ll teach you never to play truant and lie to us no more. If I catch you at it again, there’ll be twice the bill to pay. You can go to your room now and you won’t
get no tea.’

I lurched past them – it hurt to walk – and climbed the stairs as fast as I could without running.

I fell asleep in the cabin writing that – woke in the small hours, stiff and cramped from my head being on the table. I woke because I was cold. Outside the cabin there
was a sharp hard frost and a windless silence. I climbed into my bunk fully clothed and fell asleep again as I remembered how, after that hiding, I hadn’t been able to sit down without pain
for a week. I woke early next morning – from the cold again. The stove was out because I’d run out of coal. I hadn’t cleaned the galley for weeks or taken clothes to be washed or
stocked up on tinned soups and sardines – in fact, I’d been so obsessed with my past and anxious about my future that the present, my day-to-day existence, was in danger of being
suffocated. I made a pot of strong tea and a bowl of instant porridge, and while consuming these, I read what I had written the night before.

It is an odd sensation to read about oneself. I cannot imagine what it must be like to read a biography, or even a short biographical piece written by an outsider. I suppose it can never be
entirely satisfactory, since one expects character to be gilded somewhat by the written word. Or perhaps the written word is more potent – a homeopathic analogy – simply by being set
down, whereas speech has all the diffusion of spontaneity and immediate audience, and therefore all writing has to be reduced, the currency of words deflated, in order that the reader should be
able to stomach them.

What I chiefly noticed about my childhood reminiscences was what I had left out. Some incidents, of course, were hardly of a nature to appeal to Daisy – my early interest in girls, for
instance, which had led to the unfortunate adventure in Park Wood where I had enticed little Mary Cotting and made her take off all her clothes. If I recounted the adventure at all to any woman, I
should dwell upon Mary’s long golden hair, her damp rosy mouth and her large, round blue eyes. I should not refer to her round, ash-white bottom and the damp rosiness contained therein, any
more than I should make note of the trail of oyster-coloured snot that seemed always to inhabit one nostril, nor would I wish to recall the way in which she whined when she tried to blackmail me. I
got the better of her there, frightened her so badly that she never said a word.

I had also left out the sense of despair, of being trapped, that I had endured for so long in the dark little Lodge that was crowded by two people who, I felt, would rather I had never been
born. I cannot recollect one moment when my father offered me any word or gesture of affection, when he showed the slightest interest in anything that I did; his anger about my truancy was the only
time he mentioned my school life.

Perhaps I should not have left this out of the account: women like to feel that they are pioneering with their affections for a man; if he is already sated with love, or sex, or affection from
others, she is less involved. I suppose this is the same philosophy that drives men to seek and prize virgins: theirs is the first imprint upon the driven snow; they cannot be compared with anyone
else. I have never felt like that. Encountering a virgin I have naturally always tried to do my best for her, but I would not seek them out.

I do not now know when I gave up the slightest attempt to win my father’s attention, but I’m aware that for some years my efforts became more oblique, the signals put out fainter,
and almost certainly in a language foreign to him. He clothed and fed me – or, rather, Mrs G did that, but with his money. He was not a demonstrative man: even with Mrs G he evinced no
particular feeling, although sometimes in the night, when I must have been thought asleep, I would hear the springs of the iron bedstead creak and, if I opened my door (which I did the first time
from curiosity), the heavings and shiftings that accompanied their coupling. I loathed Mrs G in a thorough, straightforward fashion. I hated the sight as well as the smell of her. I hated her for
always being there. I knew perfectly well that she disliked me back, but was too dishonest to say so and I despised her for that. If my father prized honesty so dearly, I thought, why did he put up
with this fat, craven liar?

But there were other things that I had left out of this first account, and I think this was because they were curiously difficult to convey. My secret life in and about the Big House had become
so much the major part of my life that in trying to impart it to a stranger, I didn’t know where to begin. I imagine that the Bronte family would have felt much the same about the
Gondals.

In the four years that followed my first visit, I managed – through enterprise, subterfuge and sheer pieces of luck – to see the greater part of the house, and got to know a great
deal about how life was conducted there. This meant that I actually saw what a grand bedroom looked like and my initial untutored notion of sleeping on a low, flat divan upon a golden throne had to
be modified. Nor did the bathrooms contain marble declivities filled with asses’ milk and spattered with rose petals that I had read about in my mother’s copies of Ouida: they were, in
fact, rather disappointing with dark green lino, steep baths with corroded claw feet and a basin with taps of brass rather than gold. ‘That’s the one the guests use on this
floor,’ Daphne said.

I had realized early that making friends with her was the only way I could see any of the upper floor (I never got to the attics). I had to work hard on Daphne to get her to show me anything,
apart from the stables and her pony. This meant spending hours in a small field beset with juvenile jumps and watching her endlessly going over them; it was very boring. When the weather was bad I
had to spend dreary afternoons helping her to clean her tack and admiring the rosettes she had won in local gymkhanas. She offered to teach me to ride, but I declined, and as there was only one
pony and she wanted to ride it she did not press me. But one day she actually said she liked me. ‘You are the only person who really wants to see me riding. That’s why.’

And then one day in the summer holidays I found her sobbing in her pony’s loose-box.

‘They’re sending me to a boarding-school! Next term. Oh, Hal! What shall I
do
?’

I couldn’t understand why she was so upset.

‘You can’t have ponies at boarding-school. I shall be away weeks and weeks without him. Mummy’s taking Papa to the South of France for the winter and Miss Poulter is going to
live in Broadstairs and there simply won’t be anyone in the house!’

‘Do you mean Mrs Tarrant and all of them—’

‘Of course there’ll be servants. I meant people.’

I remember staring at her. ‘Aren’t I a person?’

She looked at me consideringly, but she went a dark pink. ‘Actually, you are. You’re different from the others.’

‘I’m not your servant. I’m not anyone’s servant.’

‘No need to get in a bate.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You see? If you weren’t a servant’s child, you’d know that. Anyway, none of this is the point. The point is they’re making me leave poor Blackie with only Fletcher
to look after him.’ Her round face crumpled and she started crying again.

In the four years since I had first seen her, she had remained almost exactly the same, except for being several sizes larger. Her pigtails were long enough now for me to pretend they were reins
and drive her about the field. For some reason she liked this, and I enjoyed the sensation of mastery and the fact that I could hurt her if I chose, by suddenly tugging on the reins until she
gasped with pain. She was too fat, and she cried at almost anything, and got hiccups that wouldn’t stop, and bit her nails and got heat bumps in summer and chilblains in winter, both
unsightly in their different ways. I found her deeply unattractive and this sometimes made me bully her, but she had an unexpected sweetness of nature that always confounded me. ‘It’s
all right, I know you didn’t mean it,’ she would say, as she sniffed or wiped her eyes with the back of her hand or her flaming face resolved to its usual high colour.

‘The thing is I wanted to ask you a really important favour.’

‘What?’

‘Would you look after Blackie for me? It would only mean seeing him twice a day and, you know, giving him carrots and sugar and talking to him and seeing that his feet are all right and
stopping Mr Fletcher from trace-clipping him. Would you? I’d be ever so grateful.’