Falling (12 page)

‘What would you do?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘To show your gratitude. What would you do?’

She thought for a moment. ‘You can have half my pocket money for the whole term. I get sixpence a week, so it would be quite a lot. How’s that?’

‘Well, I might do it if you also promise to show me the whole upstairs of the house.’

‘Oh,
that
again! You’ve seen most of it. I can’t think why you find it so interesting.’

‘I haven’t seen your father’s apartment.’

‘Apartment!
It’s only a bedroom and dressing room and bathroom and small study. And room for the nurse when she stays. What’s interesting about any of that?’

‘It interests me.’

‘All right. I’ll take you. As soon as they’ve gone to France.’

But, of course, it turned out that she was going to school
before
they left. She was too honest not to tell me this and when I said all right, no deal, she offered me three-quarters of
her pocket money. ‘I have to keep a bit or the other girls will laugh at me, which they will anyway.’ She was never far from tears these days. ‘Oh, Hal! Please just say you will
look after him and I’ll do anything you want in the Christmas holidays.’

But I stuck to seeing her father’s rooms as part of the bargain. As they would one day be mine, it was only natural that I should want to take a serious look at them. We quarrelled and I
avoided her for nearly a week. I knew she would mind this because she seemed to have no friends, excepting two cousins who came for a fortnight once a year. She admired them deeply and was
terrified of them, but their visits, much looked forward to, were always a disappointment. I knew that if I kept out of her way she would seek me out, and she did.

In summer, or whenever it was warm enough, I used to spend much of my time up a particular tree at the edge of the wood overlooking the park. If I climbed high up in it, I could see a long way:
the kitchen gardens, the glasshouses winking and glittering in the sunlight, the blue face of the clock set in its small tower on the stable block, one end of the lake and the paddock where Daphne
schooled, as she put it, her pony. But lower down the tree was a broad branch that slanted upwards at just the right angle for my back, and here I used to read for hours. I heard her coming from
some way off, there was nothing of either stealth or grace about her movements.

‘Hal! Where are you? Hal! I bet you’re up that tree as usual.’

How did she know that this was my special tree? I’d never told her. The idea that she had been following me about irritated me. I did not answer her. Then, suddenly, when I looked down,
there she was, immediately below me, staring straight up into my face.

‘Go away. This is my tree.’

‘It isn’t. All the trees belong to Papa.’

‘They won’t when he’s dead.’

‘How horrible you are. He’s not going to die. That’s why Mummy is taking him to the South of France for the winter. To get him better.’

There was a silence. ‘I was going to tell you something very nice, but I’m not sure if I will now.’

She would; I knew she would. All the same, I made an effort. ‘I didn’t mean to be beastly about your father. I keep forgetting that he’s different from mine and you mind about
him.’

Her face cleared. ‘That’s all right. I know you have an awful time at home, with your stepmother and – everything.’

‘How do you know?’ I had never told her.

‘Mummy said,’ she answered carelessly. ‘She says your father is an excellent gardener, but an unfeeling man.’

‘What else did she say?’

‘Nothing. I can’t remember anything. Do you want me to tell you the nice news?’

‘If you want to.’

‘Mummy is taking Papa out to lunch next Sunday. And the nurse has got the day off.’

‘Oh!’

‘So it will be all right now about Blackie, won’t it?’

‘You bet.’

Memory is the most fascinating unreliable business. It is not only what one forgets (and certainly for me, large pieces of my life are lost in the fog of boredom that was their
chief characteristic) it is how
much
one remembers of any particular incident. I can remember that conversation in the wood with Daphne with remarkable clarity but, curiously, the impression
that her father’s rooms made upon me is vague. I know that I was disappointed in them: they seemed gloomy and austere rather than opulent and mysterious, which I had imagined them to be
before I saw them. And yet I had longed to see these particular rooms, and conversations with Daphne nearly always bored me.

I thought about this as I trudged along the icy towpath to the bridge, where I had last seen Daisy in her car – a flash, pale face, no hat, tip of cigarette glowing in the dark, gone
almost before I could show that I had seen her – and then down the winding road that led past the cottage to the village. I was taking all my dirty washing to Mrs Patel’s small
supermarket where she also did laundry and dry cleaning. It was the day on which I collected my money from the post office, and while there I picked up any post. I had the usual dull list of
necessities to buy (again at Mrs Patel’s), and then I had the possibility of an hour or two in the pub, where I could either eat and drink moderately, or drink more and give up the idea of
food. Perhaps there would be a letter, or at least a postcard, from Daisy, although the chances of this seemed slimmer as the weeks went by and she did not answer my suggestion that I should buy
roses for her garden. I decided that if there was nothing – either from Daisy or Miss Blackstone – I would put my plan of getting into the cottage into operation. I had been waiting for
a hard frost and here it was. I had not, at this point, determined upon more than gaining access with a view to discovering more about Daisy. My excuse, if anyone noticed that I had broken in, was
that the pipes had frozen and I was concerned about flooding when the frost broke. The cottage was so isolated that it seemed unlikely that anyone
would
notice, and I wondered why I had been
so cautious for so long.

There
was
a letter, from Miss Blackstone, simply saying that Miss Langrish authorized me to buy what roses I thought necessary. It was clear that she was not going to write to me
herself.

By the time I got back to the cottage there had been a short but heavy hailstorm and it was bitterly cold with the promise of more frost. I chose a window at the back of the cottage, which
proved to be quite easy to force, and through the gap I was able to undo the latch on the larger casement window.

The cottage was also cold and had that faintly mossy smell associated with damp. The cold was of a different order. There was something still and settled about it, as though it had been
infecting the air ever since she had left.

The kitchen was tidy, some crockery left to drain by the sink, a crate of what turned out to be kitchen utensils still unpacked. The larder had fungi growing out of the wall near the floor.

The living room was much as I remembered. The fire had been doused judging by the clogged ash, and a dead bird lay uneasily upon the half-burned logs. Ah. Of course, it was not dead: it had
fallen down the chimney. I had seen it desperately trying to get out – what could I do but break in to rescue it?

The books that we had unpacked were ranged along the low shelves on the wall opposite the windows. I went to feel them: they, too, were damp. I decided to light the fire and eat the sandwich I
had bought from Mrs Patel when the room was warmer. In fact, a fire should be lit at least once a week, I thought, as I cleared up the bird and put paper and two firelighters in the hearth. But
even before I lit the fire I wanted to explore the floor above. At this point I still had the irrational notion that I might be disturbed and, if that happened, was afraid there would not be a
second chance to see everything.

I have no idea what I expected to discover. The narrow, rather steep stairs reminded me of the Lodge except that on a half-landing was a small bathroom, a luxury unknown in my childhood. A few
more stairs and there were three bedrooms to the right and left of them. One was slightly larger than the others and had windows in two aspects. This was clearly her room, since it contained more
furniture and a dressing-gown hung on the door hook. The walls were white and the floor was covered with rush matting; the bed had a patchwork quilt upon it in various shades of crimson, pink and
red. There was a chest of drawers but it contained almost nothing: some woolly socks, a navy-blue jersey of the kind that originated with fishermen, and in one of the two top drawers two silk
scarves. I picked one out to smell it and caught the faintest whiff of cloves.

The other bedroom had nothing in it of interest. I went back to her room to inspect the dressing-gown. It was a dark red of some woollen stuff – a man’s dressing-gown. Round the neck
were some strands of her fairy hair. I scraped the collar with my nail to collect one hair, which, when freed, immediately sprang into a corkscrew. I put it between the leaves of my pension book
and went down to light the fire.

That first time in the cottage, I did nothing but warm myself, eat my sandwich and browse through the books we had unpacked. They were mostly plays – a formidable collection, it seemed to
me. They were not a form of literature that I had ever explored. They ranged from Euripides to the present day. There were a lot of foreign plays, mostly in translation: Molière, Ibsen,
Chekhov, Schiller – names I had heard of but neither seen nor read. I noticed a good many Irish names – O’Neill, Dunsaney, Synge, O’Casey, Wilde, Shaw (I knew about the last
two). There were many unknowns: I remember Henry Arthur Jones for instance, because it seemed such an uninspiring name for a playwright, and A. A. Milne, who I only knew as the author of
Winnie
the Pooh
– a book that Daphne had shown me so many years ago. They were not arranged in alphabetical order, rather in some sort of chronology. By the time I got to Coward, Maugham,
Sherriff, Barrie, Albee, Miller, Bolt and Rattigan, it was too dark to read anything. I left the way I came, having doused the fire, and walked back to the boat by moonlight in a hard frost.

I went on through the whites to the apricots and yellows for a page or two.

Days passed and I continued my account of early life. I left a bit of a gap, because for several years after that conversation with Daphne before she went to school nothing much happened to me
except that after I reached fourteen and had passed my school certificate, the teacher of my form came to see my father one evening to suggest that I might continue my education. My father sent me
upstairs while they talked, but by lying on the floor and putting my ear to the gap between the floorboards I could hear a certain amount of it.

‘. . . the kind of boy who does not try at all at subjects that don’t interest him, but when they do, he shows considerable promise. He’s a bright lad, Mr Kent, and it seems a
pity that he should not go on to learn more. Get a better job when he’s grown if he does.’ I heard my father ask what I
was
any good at as he had not noticed that I seemed to be
good at anything. English – I wrote good essays and seemed interested in literature generally, had read a lot for a boy of my age . . . I heard my father snort at this: he did not even bother
to reply. There was a silence. Then I heard the sound of a chair scraping. My father said, ‘Thank you, Mr Wakefield, for your trouble. But the boy has a job to go to, so there’s no need
to worry about his future.’ Footsteps and the sound of the door being shut.

What job? I wondered. I had not particularly wanted to continue my schooling. I didn’t get on with the other pupils and a lot of it was boring, but the fact that my father didn’t
want me to, made me think again. I also had a fair idea that I wouldn’t want to do whatever job he had in mind for me, although, of course, it might entail leaving home, something that I had
begun to want a good deal.