The Fall (12 page)

“A watch.”

There was a pause. “A
watch?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t that rather extravagant?”

“Is it?” I could picture her behind the reception desk in the hall, smiling distractedly at guests as they went out to find
something, anything to eat in Llandudno on a Friday evening. Nothing like
boeuf bourguignon.

“But you’ve already
got
a watch.”

“Not like this one.”

“What’s it like? Is it expensive?”

“It’s a watch. Swiss. It’s all right. Fabulous, actually.”

There was a silence. “What are you doing?”

“Doing? Having supper. Dinner.”

“That’s nice.” Another pause. Then, “Can you talk?”

“Of course I can.”

“I mean,
she’s
not there near you?”

She.
My mind caught its foot in the word and stumbled. “Well, yes, of course. But it makes no difference.” It made a hell of a
difference. She was standing right beside me, almost close enough to hear my mother’s tinny voice in the earpiece, certainly
close enough to impart her perfume to the conversation. It made a difference all right.

“He’s not there, is he?”
my mother’s voice insisted in my ear.

“Who’s not?”

“Jamie. Jamie’s not there.”

“What do you mean?”

She whispered the words. Perhaps she thought she might be overheard:
“I’m not a fool.”

“Of course you’re not —”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“He’s not
there.
Is he?”

“Couldn’t be apparently.”

“So you’re on your own, just the two of you?”

“I suppose so.” There was another silence. “Mum? Are you there?”

“Yes, I’m here,” she said. “I don’t like you there on your own.”

“What do you mean?”

Another pause. “With Meg.”

“What do you
mean,
Mum?”

“I mean
just you be careful”.

“Of course I will, Mum. Of course I will.” Then the line went dead. I replaced the receiver with care and looked around at
my hostess.

She raised her eyebrows. “Well? How is Diana?”

I shrugged. “She’ll recover.” Quite what I meant, I don’t know; but that’s what I said. There was a silence. It was the silence
before an avalanche, a silence punctuated with whisperings — of snow, of fracture and fragmentation, of the awful imminence
of disaster. Then Caroline laughed. Laughter is the most dangerous thing. People have died laughing. I guess avalanches have
been caused by laughter. Apart from sex (and that’s often doubtful) the only thing two human beings can be certain of sharing
is laughter. Caroline laughed, and I followed her. Caroline Matthewson, forty-something years old, and Robert Dewar, barely
sixteen, an incongruous couple no doubt, laughed together. And of course within a few seconds of this shared laughter, she
had put out her hand to touch my arm, and I’d held her arm in return, and then both her arms, and then quite suddenly, but
not unexpectedly, we were holding each other’s arms and stepping inside the circle of intimacy that is drawn around every
human being, and the laughter had stopped.

“She’ll recover,” I repeated. And she lifted herself up on her toes and touched her lips against mine as though to stop me
prolonging the joke.

This was not the first time I had ever kissed a woman. There had been a few others: a sallow, shallow girl who, on the fringes
of a school dance, had condescended to have my tongue stuck into her mouth; a cousin I had once pretended to like; the sister
of a school friend who had come to a summer camp; that kind of temporary, expedient arrangement. But there had never been
anything of this nature, never this faint brush of what seemed like silk, never the pressure of this sleek pulp, and the small
bud of a tongue that grew at the opening and pushed its way between my lips and touched my own tongue, and then drew back
as though to invite me in. Never this intimate connection, eyes closed, head twisted as I had seen it done in the films, my
head turned one way, hers the other, making what seemed a perfect fit. There was the savor of
boeuf bourguignon,
of garlic and wine, mushrooms and shallots (she had explained the recipe to me) — a bitter, complex, foreign taste.

After what seemed an age, she released me and laid her cheek against mine. “Oh, dear,” she whispered. “Perhaps we shouldn’t
have done that. What do you think?”

“I think it’s all right.”

She pulled back and looked up at me. “Do you?”

“Yes, I do.” I did. I felt ill with the certainty that everything was all right.

“Robert, I didn’t mean this to happen. I really don’t know. Whatever would Diana say? Or Jamie. Perhaps…”

“Perhaps what?”

“I’ve no idea what perhaps.”

“Neither have I.”

We laughed again. Laughter seemed the easiest thing. “I was going to suggest a film. That we go to a film, or something.
Lawrence of Arabia
perhaps. If you haven’t seen it.”

“You mentioned
Billy Liar.”

“Or that. But perhaps we should stay in. What do you think?” She picked up the bottle of wine and our two glasses from the
table. The bottle was almost empty, but my cup was brimming over.

“Perhaps we should,” I said. “Stay in, I mean.”
Perhaps
seemed to dominate our small and claustrophobic world. A whole world of perhaps, a whole universe of possibilities. On the
stairs going up to the sitting room, she stumbled for a moment. Suddenly and surprisingly she seemed rather vulnerable, a
fragile figure, no longer quite in control of matters. “Do you want some music? I went round to the record shop and bought
what’s just come out.” She knelt beside the record player, her dress taut across her thighs, and scrabbled through a pile
of discs, tossing them this way and that. “What do you think?”

Of what? I thought a dozen things, but few that I could put into precise words. The music hammered out, the Rolling Stones
just wanting to make love to you, baby. She got to her feet. What did I think of what? What did I think of her standing there
in the middle of the room reaching around the back of that dress? Was that the question? Did she need help? That’s what I
thought. What does a single woman do when she needs help zipping or unzipping her dress? Had Helen Gurley Brown said anything
about it? I’d read her book. Someone had brought it to school, and we’d flicked through it to find the bits about sex. Hair
is sexy, lots of it, but not around your nipples. Things like that.

I heard a zip go. Apparently you didn’t need help. Apparently you could do it by yourself, even when you were slightly unsteady
on your feet, as Caroline was, even when you are skipping on one foot in order to kick off the shoe that’s on the other foot.
You can do both these things at the same time. I watched her shoes go rolling across the carpet. Her dress was suddenly loose
at the front, leaning forward like an opera diva taking a bow. “Do you want this?” she asked. “Please, Robert, say if you
don’t.”

I tried to appear relaxed about it all, as though this had happened so often that it was rather tiresome. “I’m fine. Don’t
worry about me.”

And then there was a soft rush of sound, and the dress lay like a hemorrhage around her feet and she was standing there in
her underwear. Golden satin. You don’t forget these things. “Do you like me like this?” she asked.

Caroline. Jamie’s
mother,
for Christ’s sake. My own mother’s once-upon-a-time best friend. It was extraordinary how many different things I could think
at the same time. The wife of the famous mountaineering hero Guy Matthewson. The sight of her was branded into my mind, an
image I’d never forget. I knew that. This moment would always be there in memory — Jamie’s mother there in the middle of the
sitting-room carpet undoing her golden satin bra and stepping out of her golden satin knickers, and asking “Do you like me
like this?” and surely not expecting no for an answer. I swallowed something sticky and obstructive, and said, “Yes,” which
was only the truth. I remember, with all the obsessive interest of a sixteen-year-old, that although she was blond, her pubic
hair was dark, almost black. And, for a glimmer of a moment, I thought that she had a great deal more of it than Bethan.

After a while we went through to her bedroom. She left the doors open so that the music would come through from the sitting
room, but pretty soon there was just the staccato noise of the pickup going around and around on the inside track —
flip-flip, flip-flip, flip-flip,
on and on. The Beatles hadn’t yet had the idea of putting something, anything, even gibberish, on that inside, eternal track,
and neither of us was planning to go and change the record. In the bedroom she helped me off with my clothes as though I was
still young enough to need assistance with the buttons, and perhaps I was. I was shivering, I remember that, shivering as
if I was dying of cold. “This is your first time, isn’t it?” she whispered.

I didn’t deny it.

“It’s like riding a bike,” she said.

“A
bike?”

She giggled. As though she were sixteen as well. “Once you’ve learned, you never forget.”

We laughed. Her breasts were soft and pink, and there for me to touch.

“And…”

“And?”

“You must keep pedaling. Or else you’ll fall off.”

Laughter blended with extreme tenderness. Laughter and sex is not a bad combination. We lay down on the bed, and she did everything
necessary, opening for me and pulling me onto her and showing me how it went inside; and after the storm — my storm, not hers — she
stroked my head as though to comfort me, as though she had just done me a great hurt. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry,
Robert, I’m sorry.”

I told her there was nothing to apologize for. Nothing whatever. I made that quite clear to her.

Morning was different. Morning is always different. Morning is for remorse. I woke to find the room bathed in an anemic London
daylight.

Caroline was still asleep. She lay amid the knotted sheets, her legs splayed shamelessly: white buttocks and loose flesh,
pink-gray creases and folds, a crest of dark hair. Her face was crumpled against the pillow. Her smudged mouth was half open,
and there were flakes of lipstick peeling from her lips. I could hear the rasp of air as she breathed. She looked her age,
like a fairy-tale character suddenly revealed for what she was, a young girl transformed into a middle-aged woman.

Jamie’s mother,
I thought.
Christ alive!

Clothes were strewn all over the floor and across a chair: women’s clothes, things of silk and nylon, lace and satin, all
the unknown territory of woman spread out here for me to look at; and my own clothes, dull and sordid things that you might
see in a Laundromat. Slipping off the bed, I tiptoed to the bathroom. As I stood there peeing, I realized that I reeked of
her just as she, presumably, reeked of me. Even our scents were shared. What occurred to me vividly was this sharing, this
physical sharing of scent and saliva and semen. I looked at the crumpled thing that was my penis, and as I finished urinating
it began to stir again so that when I came back into the room I had an erection once more.

Caroline was awake and sitting up in bed. She had a handful of sheet grabbed up to cover her breasts. Her face was fragmented
and rough-edged like the postcard she had sent, the weeping, fractured face of Dora Maar. “Robert, dear,” she said. “I think
you’d better give me some time to myself.”

I was naked and erect in front of her, and she just sat there with the sheet clutched against her front, telling me to leave
the room. “Please, Robert,” she said. Then she got up from the bed, pulling the sheet with her as a kind of shroud, and went
past me into the bathroom. I heard the key turn in the lock.

I was confused of course, aware that barriers had been hastily erected, like the Berlin Wall that they’d hurriedly slammed
together out of planks and barbed wire just a few years earlier. I just didn’t want the subsequent consolidation with cement
and breeze blocks and arc lamps. I took my things and went downstairs. I could hear her moving about overhead, the shower
running, the lavatory flushing. I washed and dressed and went into the kitchen to find some breakfast.

When she finally came down, she barely gave me a glance. She turned to the coffee machine and began spooning grounds into
the filter. She was wearing jeans and a brassiere. From behind she looked young, years younger than she had looked lying in
bed, years younger than she was. Twenty-five, say. “I hope you don’t mind all this.” She said it almost casually, while facing
away from me.

“No.”

She plugged the coffee machine in. Her movements were clumsy, and she missed the connection the first time. “Damn it,” she
said, as though the problem resided in the plug or the socket, in the design of things. “I’m sorry, if you do.”

“I said I don’t.”

“Because if you want to go…”

“I don’t.”

She glanced around. “That’s fine, then.” Her smile was hard and sharp, like a knife. “Jamie must never know.”