Falling (15 page)

Once she said, ‘You can’t imagine how badly I wanted to write to you when I was in Switzerland. How
badly!’
and her eyes filled with immovable tears that stayed, like
crystal, in her eyes. I think it was then that I leaned forward, kissed my two fingers and put them – lightly, caressingly – on her mouth. I don’t know what made me think of such
a thing, I had never done it before, but it suddenly seemed right. These intuitions or certainties or whatever they are have come to me a number of times. I have never been able to
command
them – they simply occur, or they do not, but the effect is always electric. She put her hand over her mouth and closed her eyes for a second and when she opened them they were stars.
‘Oh, Hal! Do you . . .’ Then she couldn’t say any more.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You know I do.’ I wasn’t sure at the time what it was that I was supposed to be sure of, but I guessed that it was right to sound positive.

We turned our attention to the chicken pie that had been cooling on our plates and, perhaps becoming aware that we had been attracting attention from other tables, we set about small talk in
what I believe we both thought was a thoroughly sophisticated manner.

‘What were you doing in Switzerland?’

‘Being finished. You know, learning a bit of another language – in this case, French – and how to make choux pastry and arrange flowers and interview servants and do a proper
placement at table. Oh, yes, and dancing, and we played quite a lot of tennis, and walked about with books on our heads to improve our deportment.’

‘Did it?’ I wasn’t going to let on that I had very little idea what on earth she was talking about.

‘Of course not. The whole thing was a farce. Except you get to know some girls who you wouldn’t otherwise have met. Not at school, I mean.’

‘And are you finished now? Whatever that may mean.’

‘Supposed to be. The next thing is a Season in London.’

‘How is your father?’

‘Not well. Much the same, but not the same, if you know what I mean.’

By now we’d reached the pudding. It was called peach Melba and was only quite nice. The waiter came to ask whether we wanted coffee.

‘Do you?’

I shook my head. I wanted to get out of the place now.

We didn’t go to the cinema, we went for a long walk away out of the town, up steep chalky little lanes that seemed to go on for ever. I kissed her by a stile that began a footpath, and she
seemed to melt into my arms.

‘Oh, Hal! My darling Hal!’

There was something touching about her inexperience and her passion. When I asked her whether she loved me, she put her arms round the back of my neck.

‘Love you? I’ve always loved you. From the very first time I saw you – in the hall when you came to see my mother.’

‘I don’t seem to remember you being very loving then,’ I said.

‘I couldn’t have told you. I
looked
so awful – I
knew
exactly how awful. I was afraid you’d laugh at me, like everyone else. But I used to lie and think
about you in bed and wish—’ She had started to blush.

‘What? What did you wish?’

‘That you were with me. I used to dream about being grown up and our being married and going riding together and having parties at home—’

Without thinking, I interrupted her. ‘I used to dream that sort of thing.’

‘Did
you, darling? Oh, Hal! Isn’t that funny and stupid that we both felt the same and never said?’

I agreed that it was. I couldn’t – obviously – tell her exactly what my thoughts had been about either her or her house. She was not at all like Lily Palmer. Even on that first
day, when we found that the footpath ended by a wood and lay down in its shelter, even then I didn’t altogether realize what I was in for. I thought that because she lay down when I asked her
to, allowed me to strip off her clothes until she was shivering from the shade and excitement, and she offered me her mouth and all of her silky skin, that she had done it before. It wasn’t
until I tried to penetrate her that I discovered that she was a virgin. I stopped, but she said, ‘Go on. I want you to. I
want
you to.’ So I did. I felt bad about hurting her and
tried to make it up by a lot of sweet words. I probably said a whole lot of things I shouldn’t have, but anything nice I said to her delighted her so much and elicited such a stream of
reciprocal endearments and flattery that it was hard to resist.

It was wonderful to be told how beautiful I was, how my nearly black (till then I’d always thought of it as plain black) hair shone and sprang so attractively from the peak on my forehead,
how she loved the hardness of my body, the shape of my hands, the colour of my eyes, my – she called it ‘chiselled’ – mouth. Lily had never commented on my appearance or,
indeed, anything at all about me and Mrs Greenwich repeatedly made plain her horror of personal remarks. I discovered that I loved them; could not have enough. There was a kind of security that
seemed to come out of such uncritical appreciation. I remember one day her saying I was a prowler, and for a moment I thought she meant like a burglar or something, but not she. She’d meant
more like a ‘beautiful tiger’.

The first weeks we were both taken up with her love for me. The weather stayed fine and it was easy to find some sheltered spot in the woods round her home. We even accumulated the rough
material for a bed of sorts: a groundsheet, a couple of rugs and a cushion, all stowed away between whiles in a canvas camping bag. That was September and the first week of October. It was damp but
we were not cold. Daphne took to bringing Thermos flasks filled with soup or hot chocolate. Her parents had gone to the Riviera for the winter, she said, and she was supposed to be going to stay in
the flat in London in November. She was to continue having French lessons and was to have clothes made and spend Christmas in Scotland with cousins.

‘The ones who used to come and stay with you every year, who you were afraid of?’

‘Them, yes. But I’m not afraid of any of them any more. I have a much more exciting time than they do. I bet they’d die if they knew.’ The enforced secrecy thrilled her.
We had to be particularly careful where the servants in and out of the house were concerned.

I hated all that part of it. It was a nuisance and I felt humiliated by it. It was because of me, I knew, that it had to be secret. If Daphne had been being courted by one of her own kind they
would have been complacent.

‘Oh, no, they wouldn’t. They wouldn’t like me drinking hot chocolate under a rug with anybody.’

As October drew to a close, she became much exercised about how we were to meet after she’d gone to London.

At this point I was divided. I enjoyed sex with her, I enjoyed her being so much in love with me, but I was also becoming the tiniest bit bored with the sameness of it all. I had also become
preoccupied with how to bring about any public agreement or recognition of our relationship. The idea of marriage recurred regularly, partly because Daphne often spoke of it and always as though it
was a certainty – not an immediate one, but none the less certain. I would ask her casually one day whether, when her father died, her mother would be easier to get round.

‘Oh, no! My father is the easy one – he lets me have almost everything I want. It’s Mummy who is so rigid about everything.

‘But never mind,’ she said minutes later. ‘When I’m twenty-one I can do what I like. And that’s less than four years away.’

Four years! It seemed aeons to me. I began to wonder whether I might not, after all, be driven to doing some other work than gardening to earn more money and see the world.

It was more or less while this notion was taking uneasy shape in my mind that she produced her plan that I should apply to my father for a week’s holiday and spend it with her in the flat
in London.

‘I’ve more or less told Mummy that my friend Penelope is coming to stay with me – she does French as well – so she’ll let me stay there for as long as I
like.’

‘What will we do about the servants?’

‘There aren’t any, except when my parents are there. There’s just a char who comes in three mornings a week. We’ll go out while she’s there. Oh, Hal – it will
be such
fun!
You’ll be able to get a week off, won’t you? You said you’ve hardly ever had any holiday.’

It was easy. I simply told my father that I wanted a week off and that I was going to London where I’d never been. It seems extraordinary nowadays to think I’d lived all that time
stuck in one place. It is true that the likes of us didn’t travel as people do now, just went away once a year to the seaside. I only ever did that once because I couldn’t stand being
with Mrs Greenwich and my father all day, and I never had any money to go off on my own. After that one time I preferred having the Lodge to myself for a week and doing exactly as I pleased,
although I had to spend the day before they came back cleaning the place
^u
p.

London, the idea of it, had always frightened me. I imagined getting hopelessly lost. My idea of the place was perilously poised between palaces and parties for toffs and Dickens’s slums
and thieves, and I felt it was the latter in which I would become entrapped. Of course I didn’t let on any of this to Daphne, simply let her make the arrangements and tried to look calmly
enthusiastic. She was to go up first (‘We’d better not travel together in case I meet anyone on the train’), and I was to follow the next day. She would meet me at the station and
take me to the flat.

It’s odd. You’d think my first week in London, my first time of living with a woman, my first real holiday, would be so sharply etched on my memory that I could recall every minute
of it. I cannot, now, recall even every day. It was a maze of impressions, embarrassments, a marathon of emotional entanglement that survived, I think, only upon Daphne’s unequivocal
admiration for everything I did and said and was. London seemed to me a place that could only be enjoyed with a good deal more money than seemed to be available. I had virtually none, and Daphne
surprisingly little.

‘I only have my dress allowance,’ she kept saying, and that didn’t seem to run to much more than the odd cinema and eating occasionally in Lyons Corner House, which I enjoyed,
but the rest of the time we had to go on boring shopping expeditions for food, which she then made a great fuss about preparing. The flat, in a Victorian mansion block in Knightsbridge, consisted
of one long passage with a series of dark rooms leading off it. It was full of furniture, but Daphne’s room had a decent bed.

Three of the mornings we had to get up early and she sent me out for three hours while the charwoman cleaned. It was November by now, and the choice for me was either walking about the streets
or sitting in a café making baked beans and a cup of tea last as long as possible. After the first morning spent like that, Daphne came with me and we went on a bus to see the Houses of
Parliament and Westminster Abbey.

‘Let’s go home,’ she said, quite soon after we’d wandered round the square. ‘It’s much nicer at home.’

What she meant was it was much nicer in bed. More of that later. We did go to a theatre, but we had to go in cheap seats because I didn’t have the right clothes. I didn’t have
enough
clothes, either. Two shirts were no good in London where the air was so filthy you needed a clean one every day. Daphne bought me one, and I washed the other two, but neither of us
was much of a hand at ironing them. The food shopping was in very grand shops where I always seemed to be bumping into ladies in fur coats or men with tightly furled umbrellas and bowler hats. I
felt they all despised me.

But perhaps it was the general feeling of inequality that weighed most upon me. I was poor and Daphne, although she was tiresomely short of ready cash, was rich. I was ill at ease and
uncomfortable in London, and she regarded it with familiarity as a place of pleasure. But the worst inequality – I see it now, of course, far more clearly than I did then – was this
business of love. Daphne was in love with me. I was the first man in her life, and whatever else she lacked, she was certainly whole-hearted. She not only loved me, she doubted whether anyone had
ever loved anyone else more and frequently told me so. Some innate shyness stopped her from enquiring too closely how far her love was reciprocated. I think she felt that enthusiasm in bed was how
men expressed their love and there it was easy, and pleasant, not to let her down. It was not difficult to give her pleasure and during that week I learned a great deal, not only about her body but
about female responses in general.

For instance, how much reassurance they seem to need about their physical charm, their preoccupation with their breasts – I have not once encountered a woman who tired of attention being
paid to
them
– and the need through patience to engender the opposite in a woman: by the end of the week I knew exactly how to make Daphne beg for it. But none of this made me
love
her: in fact, I was conscious of fleeting moments of contempt, dislike and boredom. Looking back on this I can see how much more these feelings disturbed me than I realized at the time.
Then
I simply thought myself incapable of love;
now
I know the very opposite to be the truth.

I think the first week in London was also the first time that I began seriously to consider my future. It came up when we were sitting in the kitchen, drinking Daphne’s favourite hot
chocolate.

‘Darling! I have a confession to make. Only I hope you won’t be cross with me!’

She stretched out her small plump hand and touched my wrist. ‘You remember we said that we would always tell each other the truth?’

I remembered her saying that
she
would, and nodded.

‘Well, I haven’t been completely honest about money. To begin with I thought it didn’t matter – because who cares about money anyway? – but now I realize that if
one is to be truthful it has to be about everything. That’s right, isn’t it?’

I agreed. I was beginning to feel excited. Perhaps she
was
actually rich and had been testing me.