Falling (16 page)

‘Right. Well, the thing is, I haven’t just got my dress allowance. Mummy gives me two pounds a week to buy food with as well. Plus I’m allowed to use her account at
Fortnum’s up to five pounds a month. So really it’s much more than my forty-two pounds a year. There. Oh, I’m so glad I told you.’ She looked at me anxiously. ‘You
aren’t going to be cross, are you? I’ll never do anything like that again.’

For a moment I was completely at a loss, hopes dashed. She wasn’t properly rich, simply richer than I was, which made me think bitterly about that. I had been working on her family’s
estate for four years now. I was no longer a mere gardener’s boy but a capable gardener, though hardly meeting my father’s knowledge and experience, and my wages were thirty pounds a
year, twelve pounds less than the money Daphne was
given
to buy clothes with. And if I stayed where I was, no doubt in the fullness of time (another twenty years or so) I would be earning as
much as my father – over sixty pounds a year – because I would have the inherited advantage of a tied cottage, that dark and cramped Lodge we were supposed to be grateful for.

‘Oh, Hal! You
look
angry. Please don’t be. Let’s go to bed.’

‘I’m not angry.’ It was the easiest thing to say. ‘I’m not in the least angry with you,’ I said again. ‘Hurry up, there’s a good girl.’ She
took far longer than I to get to bed as she spent minutes in the bathroom putting some stuff up herself to stop her getting pregnant. We’d experimented with French letters, but neither of us
liked them.

I
was
angry, though. Not with her, but with the general unfairness of life. Why should she be able to do exactly as she pleased, travel, be waited on hand, foot and finger, never expected
to do a stitch of work, while I had the prospect of years of toil before me in return for a bare living? But why was I being so fatalistic about my future? Why should it,
need
it, run along
the narrow tramlines dictated by my father? It was all very well if I’d been only the average country working-class boy, but I wasn’t. Due to my years of reading I knew far more
than anyone I had yet met. I was also intelligent enough to know what I did not know, or at least to have some idea of it. These feelings, plus the intuition that occurred easily when I was alone
with a woman, added up that night to my being unusually rough with Daphne. She loved it. There is always a touch of masochism in women, if you know how to find it.

It became more and more of a strain being with one person from morning to night. She expected me to talk to her all the time; she never wanted to read or go off on her own to do anything. I
think I would have found this difficult with anyone – but at the time I thought it was due to some lack or failing in Daphne. She was not much more than a schoolgirl, and freshness and
innocence had to be equated with ignorance and a generally unformed mind. How priggish that sounds as I write it now! At the time I used my intellectual superiority to bolster my lack of confidence
in every other direction.

I did try once, casually, to discuss my future with her, but she did not understand me at all; she saw it entirely in terms of herself. ‘We’ll think of something nice for you,’
she would say, snuggling up to me – insinuating herself into my arms. ‘In any case, when I’m twenty-one I’ll have loads of money and you needn’t do anything. Or you
could be some sort of director in a bank or in the City like Daddy used to do.’ Even I could see that this was a mere child’s-eye view of life.

‘What about the next four years?’ I asked, with little hope of a sensible reply.

‘Well, we won’t be able to see each other much while I’m doing my Season, because Mummy will be in London with me and there’ll be dances and things all the time. But
don’t worry, I shall never look at anyone but you.’

‘And after this Season?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. We’ll think of something. My parents spend nearly all their time abroad, so I can do pretty much as I like.’

The week came to an end and she saw me off at the railway station.

‘Come up next weekend.’

‘I can’t. I don’t
get
weekends off. Just one day.’

‘Come up for that, then. Oh, do.’

‘I’ll try.’

‘How will you be able to tell me if you can or can’t?’

‘I’ll ring you.’

‘When? I must be in for it. When?’

We settled for eight o’clock on Wednesday evening.

Just as the train was leaving, she gave me a pound.

‘For your ticket.’

I was on the train then and she was standing on the platform by the window.

‘Kiss me.’

She stood on her toes and held up her face. Her mouth was bruised from last night’s love-making. As I kissed her I felt the salt of her tears. ‘There.’

‘Again,’ she said, like a child, but the train had started to move. ‘Hasn’t it been an amazing week?’

‘Amazing,’ I said. I saw her wipe her face with the back of her hand and she tried to smile. She was walking with the train.

‘Goodbye, my most darling Hal.’

‘Goodbye, sweetheart.’

She started to run, then gave up. She waved and I knew she had started to cry again. I waved back and sank into my seat. Relief seeped out of me like sweat.

Throughout that winter I tried to make decisions. I went to London to see Daphne. I did a deal with my father, which resulted in my getting a whole weekend once a month; the other visit had to
be for the day. My father had mellowed – or weakened: it was the winter when his arthritis began to incapacitate him and he depended more upon my physical strength. I think he must have been
in a good deal of pain most of the time, but he never complained – to me, at any rate, though his temper was shortish with Mrs Greenwich. He was only forty-two and he was terrified of losing
his job ‘On account of the Lodge goes with it, boy.’ So was my stepmother, who made efforts to confide in me and also to ask for my help. ‘If you were to tell him he should see a
doctor, he’d go,’ she said. ‘He thinks the world of you.’

This seemed to me to be merely a blandishing lie, and I refused to respond to it. She treated me now with all the conciliatory attention that I knew arose from her being a little afraid of me
and at the same time finding me attractive (I was, she kept saying, the spitting image of my father). I might look like him, I thought, but I damn well wasn’t going to lead a life where I
remained hard up and dependent upon the whims of the Carterets. I tried to have a conversation with Daphne about my father’s situation. ‘But he’s the head gardener!’ she
said. ‘They’d never turn him away. Especially now they’re selling plants and things. And when he gets too old to work, he’ll be able to retire like people do.’

‘On what? The Lodge isn’t his. It’s a tied cottage.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It means that you can only live in it while you work.’

‘Oh, darling, I think it’s sweet of you to mind about him so much, but of course he’ll be all right. He’ll have saved money, won’t he, all these years?’

I was conscious both of not really minding about my father, and of disliking her for her lack of concern.

She must have noticed the latter, because she put her arms round my neck. ‘I know Mummy thinks very highly of him. She’d never turn him out or anything beastly like that. And if she
did,
we could look after him somehow, couldn’t we?’

I agreed with this as the quickest way of not talking about it any more.

The next time I saw her was after King Edward had renounced the throne for Mrs Simpson. She was most indignant about that. ‘Poor King.’

‘He sounds mad to me.’

‘I think it’s fearfully brave of him. To give everything up for love!’ There were actually tears in her eyes.

‘It seems extraordinary to me. I bet he’ll regret it.’

‘Hal! I’d give everything up for you. Absolutely anything!’ There was a pause, and then she said, ‘But you wouldn’t for me, would you? We’re not the same
about that.’

‘I haven’t got anything to
give
up.’

‘But would you, if you had?’ It was the most overt approach she had made to the question of my love for her.

‘I don’t know, Daph. I haven’t thought about it. I’ve never
had
anything, you see. I’m a member of the working classes – unlike you.’ I saw her
face, and made another effort. ‘It’s not the same for a man anyway.’

By now I knew exactly how to change the subject and minutes later she was saying, ‘I know you do, really. It’s just that men find it harder to talk about it. That’s it,
isn’t it?’

Her parents came home for Christmas, and went with her to Scotland to stay with the cousins. She wrote to me from there and sent the letter to the Lodge, which occasioned repeated attacks of
curiosity from my stepmother. I did not read the letter until we had consumed our usual Christmas dinner of roast chicken, mashed potato and Brussels sprouts, followed by the small, leaden mince
pies she always made and third choice from a box of Black Magic with a good strong cup of tea. My father was presented every Christmas with a bottle of sherry and a bottle of Johnnie Walker whisky,
the latter not offered to us, although we all had a glass of sherry and there was brown ale with the meal.

Conversation at lunch had been conducted mainly by my stepmother, whose ruminations about the Duke of Windsor bored us both. After lunch, they listened to the King’s broadcast on the
wireless and I was able to escape to my wretched little room above. Since staying in the flat with Daphne I had become fully aware of how miserably cramped we were, jammed up in bad weather with
nowhere to be except the kitchen or in bed. I lay on my bed to read Daphne’s letter. There were four pages of dark blue paper with a picture of a castle at the top. She had written on both
sides of each page with extra bits down the margins. It was a mixture of Christmas in the castle and declarations of her love.

The letter ended with her longing for me to write to her. ‘We’ll be staying here over the New Year which is the main event in Scotland.’ Then, written down the
last margin: ‘So funny. People eat their porridge standing up and walking about. It’s supposed to happen because people used to be afraid of being stabbed in the back! I love you
– love, love, love.’ And then dozens of Xs.

I read this letter twice, and realized that I was quite unmoved. Love seemed to me an overrated business. But perhaps Daphne didn’t love me really – she was simply in love with the
idea of having someone to go to bed with. This notion relieved me: it meant that I could continue the affair if there seemed any point in it for me, feeling that after all she was getting what
she
wanted. But it didn’t clarify the future at all. I had two problems. How to get away from home, and what to do with myself when I did.

The key was encased in bubble-wrap. I read the letter three times on my way back from the village. It was good news in one way, but maddeningly uninformative. Why had her stay been unfortunately
extended, and for how long? And where exactly
was
she? If I wrote to her c/o Miss Blackstone how could I know whether the letter was read before it was forwarded? The answer to that was that
I couldn’t be sure. If I wrote to her, it would have to be in terms that were innocuous to Miss Blackstone, and I felt the time was coming when that would not be the sort of letter I wanted
to write.

I thought about all this while I ate a sandwich in front of the fire in the cottage and an idea began to form. For the past weeks I had been reading plays, which was a new experience. They
seemed as though they could be read much faster than a novel, but I quickly found that if they were any good this was not true. Plays had to be read more slowly, and with careful attention –
preferably at least an act at a time. Reading them made me realize how very little I had had to do with the theatre. Opportunities had been few and inclination timid. Faced with the choice, I had
chosen the cinema where, it was true, some plays had been turned into films, but this had very seldom meant that what one saw on the screen had much to do with what one read on the page. I longed
to talk to
her
about all of this. Possibly, I thought, it was one way of reaching her: a letter expressing my enthusiasm and ignorance, asking her advice and opinion on what I should read. I
must avoid admitting to having already read so much since it would imply illegitimate time spent in her cottage.

It took me several days to write the letter – partly, I suppose, because I was so anxious about sending it. Even if Miss Blackstone did not in some way veto it, it might still be regarded
as an impertinence by its recipient who would then have no more to do with me. Make or break, I said to myself, as I wrote draft after draft. Also, the roses arrived, as they so often do, when the
frost was at its worst; indeed, I had to contrive a small area where they could be heeled in for several days until we had something of a thaw. I planted them carefully, and covered round them with
straw a foot thick, which, of course, the wretched birds disturbed in their hunt for rare food. Cold weather made living in the boat both cheerless and tiring, so I took to spending more time in
the cottage, but this in turn meant that the small store of logs was running out and I was forced to spend four or five days with a logman, sawing for him in return for a load.