Falling (46 page)

And they let her talk, ask questions, go over things, discuss: they never showed impatience or tried to divert her. The hardest thing had been just writing the brief note to him saying that it
was the end, she did not wish either to see or hear from him again. Anthony had taken the note with him. He had driven down with a friend. They had taken her key. She had wanted to know what
happened – everything about it – and they told her.

‘We arrived about eleven, and let ourselves in. He was still in bed.’

‘In my room?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you gave him my letter?’

‘Not then. I told him to get up, put his clothes on and there was a letter from you in the kitchen. He came down pretty fast. We watched him open it. He read it twice and said what on
earth had happened, he couldn’t understand it. I have to hand it to him, he looked the picture of shocked innocence. Then he said that something must have happened to you, that you must have
been
made
to write such a letter – he could think of no earthly reason . . . He started to work up some indignation, said that we were all snobs, didn’t think he was good enough
for you, it was all a class plot. You loved him, he knew it, whatever we might think.’

There was a pause, and then he said, ‘Do you really want me to go on?’

‘I need to know.’

‘Well, then it seemed the time to tell him his cover was blown – that we knew that Charley was not dead, and several other things. He went completely silent. He was looking at Giles
and I could see that he reckoned it wasn’t worth going for me. So then I said he was to pack up and we would put him on a train: he’d got twenty minutes to get his stuff together. I
introduced Giles then – as Detective Inspector Cairns. That was a good move – it really shook him. You remember Hazel said he was afraid of the police? She was dead right. He said he
hadn’t got anything to pack his things
into.
I found a big blue canvas thing and said he could take it, but we’d be watching what he put into it. He said most of his stuff was in
the shed outside except for some clothes in your room. I cleared them out, while Giles went with him to the shed. That was it.’

‘You took him to the station? Where did he go?’

‘That was quite funny. He said he hadn’t got enough cash for a ticket, so I bought him a one-way ticket to Edinburgh. He was going to have to change to get on to the express, but he
wasn’t going to be able to change the ticket. We saw him on to the first train. “I hope you’re pleased with yourself,” he said, as he climbed on, but he was frightened of
Giles – he didn’t say a word all the way to the station. That was it, Daisy darling. That’s how it was.’

‘Do you think he’ll go back there – to the cottage?’

‘I think it very unlikely. We went back and packed up your things and found your passport, which wasn’t where you said it was, but we had to wait anyway for the builder to change the
locks – just in case. I got his keys off him, by the way. No, I don’t think he’ll go back. But I think you might as well keep away for a while. We did ask the local police to keep
an eye on the place.’

‘I don’t want to go back.’

‘Sell it,’ Anna said. ‘That would be the best thing. People like Henry are unpredictable. They’ve got no moral brakes: they can’t see why they shouldn’t do
exactly what they feel like doing at any time. I wouldn’t like to think of you alone there. Katya hopes you’ll come back to the flat with her – help her get sorted out.’

That seemed mildly sensible – something to do.

There were many conversations: after the practical narrative there were other things she had to resolve. She needed these facts of the matter – the manner – of his going, to help her
feel that it was over. For, on another level, it was very hard
not
to have confronted him, hear what he had to say, not to have asked him
why
it had seemed worth all the trouble he
had taken to bamboozle, to con her, why he had told so many lies that did not even seem necessary. ‘It’s what I can’t understand,’ she kept saying to Anna. ‘He
didn’t
have
to say that Charley was dead. He didn’t have to say that Daphne was his half-sister. And so many other things.’

‘He wanted your attention. He wanted you to be sorry for him.’

‘But why me? I’m not an innocent young girl of the kind he seemed to go for. And he can’t have thought that
I
was an heiress or anything like that.’

Anna said, ‘I don’t think it was simply money he was after. He wanted that, of course, enough anyway for him to be idle, but I think he was also pretty set on sexual power:
that’s what all the tales we uncovered had in common.’ She added, almost tentatively, ‘You said he was very good at sex.’

‘Yes.’

There was a silence while each of them thought about that in different ways.

‘I think also,’ Anna said, when they were walking down to the taverna to eat, ‘that he had ceased to
know
what was true. I think Anthony was quite right about
that.’

‘You mean, it’s not his fault?’

‘That’s an interesting speculation, isn’t it?’ Anthony, who’d been walking behind them on the narrow path, now joined them. ‘I mean, in one way everything
that a person is or does is
them,
and basically they have to take responsibility for whatever happens. Fault is usually just an accusation from someone at the receiving end who hasn’t
got what they wanted. But, on the other hand, if someone really has a fault running through them – in the geological sense – then people talk about anything from madness to diminished
responsibility. I think with the Henrys it is a bit of both. They could indulge their fault, or resist it – lay off it – be aware. Two things that seem common to psychopathic
personalities are indolence and not having any friends. We couldn’t find evidence that Henry had a single friend.’

The nights were the worst. She would lie down, and try to read herself to sleep, would find almost at once that she had not known what she had been reading; would take a sleeping pill and turn
off the light and try to play some familiar piece of music through her mind. But the music would be soon drowned out by a fearful jungle of memories and the sensations that had accompanied them
– times with him like small pieces of film that would freeze at the salient point: his kissing her for the first time in the car after the cat was killed; his gentleness to her that first
night; his hand on her breast.

‘You are beautiful, do you know that?’ and she
did
know it then completely, for the first time in her life. His stream of endearments when he picked her up from the path; his
face asleep beside her in the moonlight – how she had wanted him, how she ached now for things to be as they were. How could she still feel this?

But she did. Knowing that it had all been a fraud, a sham, did not quench or vanquish what she had felt. If she tried to imagine what his private thoughts of her must have been while he was
making love to her she was overwhelmed with shame. He had made a vain fool of her, which must at times have amused him. She could not help imagining the coarse and cynical generalisations
that he must have made, as people do generalize when they dislike or have contempt for the particular (‘women are always like that – etc.’). Then she would be rescued from
humiliation by the reflection that trusting someone – something that had never come easily to her since Jess had died – must make for vulnerability. It had to be a risk, and if one
wanted something very much, commensurate risks had to be taken. He had made her recognize afresh how desperately she had wanted not to live the rest of her life alone, to be first in
somebody’s affections, to have a last chance to grow into the loving friendship that can flourish from chronic intimacy. Marriage: but she had not wanted to marry him; why was that? Was it
some dimly felt but deep warning that somehow all was not well? No, part of the shock was that she had had no inkling: she had not wanted to marry anyone, but again, yes, she could recall the faint
chill when he pressed her to marry him. So somewhere, however deeply buried and unconsciously expressed, there was an instinct for self-preservation.

All this could flood through her and only minutes would have passed, and then the jagged fragments of film would resume, lingering now on painful detail, till it was as though he was in the room
with her, had just spoken; she could turn her head and there would be his arm reaching out for her. The idyll had not become a mirage – it was before the lies and she had been alive, so much
alive and well. And then she had to weep – cry until her throat ached and her eyes had become dry and burning and she could feel nothing but an anonymous despair. Then sometimes she could
sleep, but more often she would get up, go on to the terrace, drink water, smoke a cigarette, stare out at the rocks dark above the sea that was sometimes illuminated, sometimes simply a different
dark. She would try then to prepare herself for the resumption of loneliness, the discipline of work, the making-the-most, the small pleasures, the satisfaction of having the secondary wants to
compensate her primary need.

When she thought of Anthony and Anna, her gratitude for their loving kindness would make her cry again, simpler tears, and it was good to think of them. They could so easily have not taken her
seriously, have not taken the trouble, have been impatient with her sensibility, have not listened or given so much of their time. Anthony had mysteriously cancelled his travelling plans; Anna had
suddenly brought her holiday forward. They had arranged everything – a different scene hedged by their protection and care. She thought how much she loved them, and although any feeling
beyond a very small degree brought tears, there was comfort; with so much affection it was not an airless desert.

Often, in those nights, she thought of Katya. It was odd how Katya seemed to occupy a separate part of her mind, but that had always been so. They had been through so many of the familiar
stages; of guilt, of inadequacy, of incomprehension, of distrust, yes, and on Katya’s part, anyway, of disapproval, that it was a wonder they had survived together as they had.

Katya’s efforts on her behalf had been far more than she had any right to expect. She had bothered to see if the cottage was suitable; she had gone with Anthony to see Daphne’s
mother; she had endured the awful day in Anna’s flat when they told her everything. And all this when her own life was in crisis; when she had been betrayed and faced a bleak and uncertain
future; when, in fact, she was in much the position that
she
had been in with Katya’s father. Only she had had Jess. I must become Jess for Katya, she thought now. To hell with the
mother/daughter relationship, I must become her steady friend. A small spark of resolution – if she’ll have me. We are very different ... I am by nature cautious and distrustful; Katya
is a passionate, impulsive creature – a dramatic person, her sensitivity often concealed by a breeziness that is deceiving, and her warmth can go undetected. Then she thought of her
daughter’s face in the flat when Anthony and Anna had been telling her everything; she had known then that Katya’s impulse had been to throw her arms round her, sob with her, revile
him, attempt any comfort she could give, and she had done none of it, because then it would not have helped at all. She had gone to buy the cigarettes instead. If she could make that effort for me,
there must be things I can do for her.

These thoughts, notions, ideas did not all come at once: they developed over those weeks of insomnia; they became something that she could work – through loss and shock – towards.
When she was cried out, exhausted by the repetition of misery, there was Katya. She had fantasies about her and Katya: they would live in the flat together; they would share their lives, share the
children; she would help Katya to find something interesting and rewarding to do – it would all be wonderful. And then, in the daytime, she would know that it would not be at all like that:
they would share the flat while it was expedient, etc. They would quarrel. Katya would make scenes – no, she would
induce
Katya to make scenes; there was collusion about
incompatibility. If she was unresponsive, Katya would sulk; she would pretend not to notice and Katya would shoutingly sulk, would bang about until she got some change out of the situation. But it
would be Katya who would do the making up; the hugs, the cups of tea in bed in the morning, the little jugs of well-chosen flowers on her desk . . .

But it wouldn’t be like that either. She thought of Jess yet again, and how Jess had always been to her. Accepting: she had been accepted for what and who she was without judgement or
questioning. She never went further in correction than making the pertinent suggestion. ‘Daisy, pet, how would you like to be that little boy?’ when Daisy threw some sand into (what was
his name?) Christopher Watson’s eyes. And she had suddenly become Christopher, rubbing his eyes and crying and she knew she would hate it, and that was the end of sand-throwing. She had no
parents that she could remember; Jess had been everything, and she had never felt conscious of loss, whereas Katya had had to contend with a father who abandoned her, and a mother who was certainly
no Jess.

She had many thoughts of this nature during those long nights; landmarks of childhood, treats, illnesses, holidays, loved and hated teachers, rainy days, learning to cook, toffee and pancakes,
playing Old Maid and Racing Demon with Jess, Jess teaching her to clean silver, to knit, to make a glass ring by rubbing her finger round the rim, to make lace on a cotton reel with pins, to ride
her first bicycle, to grow mustard and cress on a piece of flannel, to watercolour the black-and-white pictures in her Andrew Lang fairy books. Then there were absorbing hours of helping –
Jess was always repairing things she bought cheaply at auctions or sales: gluing the spines back on to books, making good the stucco on gilt frames, putting back little pieces of veneer on to
workboxes and the like, cleaning old canvases with soap and water and sometimes a touch of turps, mending pieces of china, sanding down tiny chips in glass. She was always allowed to help, to feel
that she was helping, and of course in the end she learned to be useful. She had not managed to give Katya that sort of childhood at all. Katya had gone – admittedly at her own request
– to boarding-school: that had been largely because life alone with her mother in the small, cramped flat had been dull and exclusive of friends or fun. She herself, she now recognized, had
been too exhausted by a failed marriage and Jess’s death, and the quest for how to earn her living, to have much over for poor Katya. She had
paid
for her and tried to keep things
going and no more. Hence her feelings of guilt and inadequacy, for both of which there was reason. But however much water flowed under the bridge, one was still left with the bridge.