Falling (38 page)

I passed an hour or so thinking about sex, about Daisy and about sex with her. It was becoming clearer and clearer to me that somehow I would have to get her to marry me: there could be no real
security for me until that was achieved. It meant, of course, that I must get on with getting divorced from Hazel, from whom I had heard nothing since it had been mutually agreed that matters would
be put in hand by our respective solicitors. I had requested legal aid for my side of the affair; she, I knew, had employed, or was going to employ, the husband of a friend of hers at work. Of
course I had not heard anything because for four weeks now I had not been to the post office in town to collect any letters. This was chiefly because until today I had always been with Daisy except
for when I took her to the train and my mind was too full of getting rid of the boat in the short time that her absence made possible. I packed up my carrier-bag and walked back to the high street
to the post office.

There was a letter from Hazel. It was quite short and consisted of the complaint that her solicitors had heard nothing from mine, with the consequence that nothing was happening. Would I kindly
do something about this at my earliest convenience.

The letter was three weeks old. I tore it up and put it in the litter bin. Then I went in search of a telephone box to ring the solicitors. I asked to speak to Mr Noon, who was in court that
day. Could I in that case have a word with Mr Knight? On being asked, I gave my name and after a long pause I was told that Mr Knight was not in the office and that Mr Mawning, who had dealt with
the preliminaries of my application for legal aid, was on holiday. Perhaps I would leave a number and Mr Noon would call me back? I didn’t want to do that, so I said I would ring again.

I could write another letter to them. It then occurred to me that I had been remiss about checking on the
poste restante
at the village post office. Hazel was the only person I had given
the town post-office address to, as I did not want her to know my whereabouts in case she took it into her head to turn up and make trouble.

By the time I’d caught the five o’clock bus, I’d started to worry about what I was going to find when I got back to the cottage. Nothing, I decided, that I could not handle in
the end. If Katya was having some crisis and Daisy got caught up in it, it was simply up to me to be the loyal, the faithful supporter. In spite of Daisy’s denial, it seemed likely to me that
Katya had left her husband for someone else, in which case she would want to be with them rather than here with Daisy and me.

There was a letter from the solicitors – from Mr Noon himself, enclosing a form that required detailed information about my income. This one was a mere week old. It was tiresome because I
most certainly did not want to let the authorities know about the money I got from Daisy, particularly since it had increased twice since the original modest payment. But withholding this
information meant that I would have to ask Daisy to bear me out if enquiries were made, and I did not want to do that either. I had an uncomfortable feeling that she would regard this as some kind
of fraud, and be shocked. I put the letter in the carrier-bag and resolved, with the exceptions of the shirts and my book, to hide it away before going into the cottage.

I trudged the mile from the village imagining what exactly Daisy would have said to Katya about me.

‘You’ve no idea how much I love him. He makes me feel so at
ease.’

‘You may think it is sudden, but it feels to me as though it has been happening slowly – ever since I met him. It is amazing to be so loved. Oh, darling, I hope [Tom, Dick, or Harry]
is as good for you.’

‘Henry thinks love is the most important thing in the world. A lot of people say that sort of thing, but with Henry it is real. He says that nothing else matters more. But, then, he is a
very unusual person. I never realized how much one needs to
trust.
I’d stopped trusting nearly everyone until I met him.’

‘I know you’ll like him when you know him. He has so many qualities that most people probably never see. And he is the most wonderful lover.’

No – I did not think she would say the last. Her shyness would intervene. Just as well. The less anyone was privy to that part of her life with me, the greater would be my power. I did not
want anyone to talk or shame her out of her lust for me, although naturally, I would never call it that to her. To her it was love.

As soon as she saw her, she knew that Katya was in serious trouble. There was something defiantly breezy about the way in which she walked down the platform towards her,
smiling, but when Katya got close she saw that she was simply trying to smile.

‘Hello, Ma.’

Katya stopped in front of her – absolutely not wanting to kiss or touch her. Daisy tried to take one of her cases.

‘No. I can easily manage.’

Daisy looked at Katya for only a moment before they started to walk together out of the station, but there were all the signs she’d ever known: her eyes, revealing nothing but a kind of
feline glassiness, the skin beneath them smudged with lack of sleep, or tears, or both; her mouth – so charming when she was really smiling or simply happy – compressed into a sullen
shape. Daisy had seen her thus at six, when they discovered her guinea pig mysteriously dead in his cage; at sixteen when she had come back from staying with her father and eventually told her that
she had arrived at the Ealing flat to find him in bed with his current girlfriend; at twenty-six (or thereabouts) when she thought Edwin was going to marry somebody else. There is no age to grief,
she thought: it makes its mark regardless of time, makes the young look old. She remembered so well when Katya was six, that same green glassiness of her eyes that seemed like the gallant sophistry
of someone far older, but now, in that fleeting glance, she saw the wounded child of six.

‘Have you come alone?’

‘Yes. Henry has gone out for the day to leave us in peace.’

‘Oh. Would he otherwise be about all the time?’

‘Well, he has been staying at the cottage – looking after me. I had a bit of a fall on the garden path. I’m fine now.’

They had reached the car. Katya got into the front seat in silence. Then, as they drove out of the town and Daisy was wondering what was the best way of saying, ‘Let’s talk when we
get home,’ Katya said, ‘He seemed to have rather a crush on you. A bit of a fan.’

‘Did he? Well, he’s a tremendous reader.’ She didn’t at all want to talk about Henry at this moment. ‘I really want to know what’s going on with you, darling,
but I thought we might get home first. Or not?’

‘There’s nothing much to know, really. I’ve left Edwin and I told you that.’

‘Yes, but you didn’t tell me why.’

‘Why? The usual reason.’

‘You’re in love with someone else?’

‘Oh, Ma! You would think that!’

There was an uncomfortable silence, while the other usual reason occurred to Daisy.

‘When I rang up he said you were in France – having a holiday.’

‘True. But it’s quite possible, you know, to go to France minus a lover. People do it all the time. Sorry, Ma. Sorry I said that. I’m feeling – a bit on edge,
that’s all.’

‘That’s all right.’

After that Katya asked her, without curiosity, what she’d been doing, what she was writing and so forth. Daisy told her that she was doing research for a play, and then that she had not
been doing very much since the fall. It had made her rather lazy.

‘Are you all right now?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘That’s something – anyway.’

She did not say it as though she thought it was very much. The rest of the journey was more or less silent, except when Katya asked her how far the cottage was from the railway station, and on
being told ten miles, said what a long way.

It was not until they were settled in the sitting room – cooler with the doors and windows open than outside – and Katya had accepted a glass of iced coffee, which she put untasted
on the floor beside her, that she seemed to be screwing herself up to talk.

‘Have you got a cigarette?’

‘I didn’t know you’d taken up smoking.’

When she had lit it, Katya said, ‘Well, I have, in the last few months. It helps to get through the day, doesn’t it?’ With her left hand she was pushing hairpins back into the
precariously untidy coil on the top of her head. She still wouldn’t look at Daisy.

‘Katya – please tell me.’

Katya made an unsuccessful attempt at shrugging.

‘You might as well know: everyone will in the end anyway. Edwin is involved with someone else. There’s nothing new about that. He always has been – ever since I had Caroline,
anyway.’ She gave a mirthless laugh. ‘I’ve had all that for nearly seven years. But they’ve always been someone else’s wife up till now. Now, he lighted on someone
unmarried, ten years younger than me, and he’s got her pregnant and they want to marry. Or –
she
wants to marry him. He
says
he doesn’t want to marry her, but of
course she’s been a patient of his so there would be a hell of a row, and if he gets out of marrying her, she’ll go for him and then he’ll get struck off – or could be. He
might be anyway, I suppose.’

Katya looked at her properly for the first time with unguarded misery.

‘The point is I just don’t – I
can’t
love him any more. He’s just a liar and a cheap, weak philanderer – like Dad. I couldn’t believe anything he
said to me ever again.’

At least, and at last, she was beginning to cry, or rather tears gushed in irregular little spurts from her eyes.

‘I married him because he seemed the absolute opposite of Dad.’ She took out a sodden handkerchief from the sleeve of her shirt and rubbed her eyes with it. ‘I
so hate
not loving him! All these years I’ve loved someone – sometimes just put
up
with them because of loving – and they never really existed. You can’t
imagine
how
that feels.’

Daisy
could
imagine it, of course, but somehow, immediately to say so might sound to Katya like competition. She desperately wanted to be or do anything possible for her, and that meant
feeling her way. Their relationship had always been an emotional see-saw. Much of the time, Daisy knew she felt guilty because she had never loved Katya in the way that Jess had loved
her
– had, indeed, loved Katya. Jess’s love, for both of them, was like the sun: you did not need to look at it to know that it was there, lighting and warming every part of their lives.
While Jess was alive, there had been no need for them to explore or test their relationship. Not that Jess ever usurped Daisy’s position: it was simply that she loved both of them
unconditionally. When Jess died, Daisy thought they discovered (though not necessarily at the same time) that they did not love one another like that. They were challenging, distrustful, critical
and, with all this, desperately needy. Daisy could hear people saying that the responsibility for their relationship was far more hers than Katya’s, and in a sense that was – or had
been – true. But Katya was by then eighteen and for any relationship to continue with some reality there has to be a fulcrum of equality: dependence of one cannot be the order of the day. All
the same, Daisy felt that she’d failed to be the person that Katya wanted and needed for most of her childhood. Katya blamed her for Stach’s disappearance, and Daisy felt guilty of
perhaps not so much depriving her of a father but of choosing the wrong father in the first place. She resented Katya not understanding how utterly bereaved she felt by Jess’s death, or that
the wrench of selling Jess’s house in Brighton and much of what it contained was to send her to university. By then Katya had a carapace of almost wilful indifference to anything her mother
did or said, which continued for five years until Daisy told her that she was going to marry Jason when, after an initial explosion of hostility, Katya turned up at Daisy’s flat one day to
make amends. She said she had begun to realize that her leaving Stach had been a necessity: that nobody could stand living with someone so childish and unpredictable (although long before Daisy
left him he had seemed pretty predictable to her). Katya also said that her outburst about Jason had come out of worrying that he might be the same sort of person who would behave in the same way.
‘Women are known to pick the same sort of men,’ she had told Daisy, ‘and you are such a
truster.’

All those memories flooded back. ‘Darling, it is awful for you, and I can imagine it.’

Katya came into Daisy’s arms then, and cried until she could cry no more.

Finally, when Daisy made her a tomato sandwich – food that from her earliest days she would eat when she would eat nothing else – Katya said, ‘I can remember telling you when I
fell in love with Edwin – well, not then, but when he asked me to marry him. I remember saying how strong and certain he was, how honourable and trustworthy, and how much he loved me. How can
I have been such a fool? So taken in?’

‘I can remember telling you how much
Jass
loved me – how perfectly suited we were. And I’m sure both of us only said the half of it.’

‘Both bad pickers,’ Katya said, and her eyes began to fill again.

Daisy gave her a cigarette.

‘Or,’ Katya said a moment later, ‘perhaps it isn’t a question of choosing at all. Perhaps they’re all the same.’

‘No, they’re not,’ Daisy said, too quickly. She met Katya’s enquiring eye just as she felt herself starting to blush. ‘What about the children? We haven’t
talked about them at all.’

This was a completely successful deflection, not that Daisy regarded the poor little things as only that but it had felt necessary that Katya should unload some of her misery about Edwin before
they got down to all the consequences.

‘Oh, Ma, of course that’s awful. Awful for them anyway, and awful because I honestly don’t know what to do.’

They spent most of the afternoon discussing what she should do, about herself and about the children. She asked Daisy if she could borrow the flat in London: the children’s holidays were
coming up and she thought that if she had them with her on her own, she would be able to explain things better to them. Edwin had apparently offered to keep them in the country and was adamant
about Thomas continuing at his prep school where he was very homesick. ‘I never wanted him to go in the first place, but there isn’t a lot of choice where we are, and Caroline has only
just started primary school. It would be easy to move her.’