Falling (13 page)

During these years, my fantasy – I suppose you would have to call it – about living as the master of the house in the park had dwindled, largely, I think, for lack of nourishment.
After she began going to boarding-school, I saw almost nothing of Daphne. She brought school-friends back for the holidays and had no time for me. She had graduated from the fat pony to horses, and
went riding with these friends, played tennis with them, and, on the few occasions when I encountered her, was distinctly cool. Her parents spent more and more time abroad, and the house was often
closed down: linen blinds on the windows and fewer servants. There was a new butler, who was unwilling to allow me access to the library. As Lady Carteret was away on the occasion when he refused
to allow me in, there was nothing I could do, and pride and a feeling of resentment prevented me from persisting. I had learned to use the travelling library that came to the village once a month
and that had to do. I acquired odd bits of money from poaching and bought a second-hand bicycle, which enabled me to take the rabbits or pheasants to the neighbouring market town where I could flog
them to a stall that sold such provender. I constructed a sort of game larder in the woods where I could store what I caught and this became my chief enterprise when I was not at school or doing
chores for my stepmother or reading. As I grew taller and older, she ceased bullying me – even attempted some sort of rapprochement to which I responded with a bland indifference.

I got caught out about the poaching very soon after Mr Wakefield paid his visit. It was just before the end of my last term at school, and the gamekeeper who caught me went to my father and told
him I’d be up before the magistrates for it. My father was furious. It seemed that I had let down the family, by which he meant himself and the family he worked for, the Carterets. He
bawled me out, but I was too big – nearly as tall as him by now – to thrash. He must have done some deal with the gamekeeper – who, of course he knew – because he said I
would be let off by the magistrates if I was under his eye, to which end I was to be employed as a gardener’s boy, under him. The idea of the magistrates so terrified me – I imagined
myself in court and going to prison for years and years – that I agreed to this humiliating alternative. So began the long drudgery, of double-digging, wheeling barrowloads of muck to the
kitchen garden, watering, hoeing, spraying, cleaning flower-pots after bedding-out, sweeping paths and hedge-clippings, weeding, mowing the narrow strips of lawn that edged the herbaceous borders
and clipping the edges afterwards on both sides, raking leaves and gravel – think of any dull garden work and you may be sure that I was ordered to do it.

There were two other gardeners under my father and they got the more interesting jobs, such as layering, taking cuttings, and planting, while I had simply to mix up the compost to my
father’s recipe of sand, peat and the compost made on the estate and put it in endless rows of small pots for my betters to fill. My humiliation was complete when Lady Carteret, her daughter
and some guests came one day to the cool greenhouse where I was disinfecting pots. Lady Carteret said good morning to me, then told her daughter to do the same. ‘Good morning, Hal,’
Daphne said, in a voice that imitated her mother, and made me realize how patronising they both were. She, Daphne, looked much the same, a bulky, graceless adolescent, and at that moment I actually
hated her.

‘He’s the head gardener’s boy,’ she added, to one of the guests. ‘His father has worked here all his life.’

‘Awfully feudal,’ one of the guests said, and someone g
ⁱ
gg
^led
.

I felt my face and ears going red, looked up and saw Daphne staring at me. When our eyes met, mine smouldering with rage, she began a long painful blush. Then she silently mouthed
‘Sorry,’ turned away and followed her mother. I thought about this afterwards, but didn’t understand why she had changed so suddenly from patronage to apology.

My father worked me hard, for a wage of five shillings a week, which was increased to seven and six after two years. The work and fresh air improved my physique; I graduated from a gawky boy to
– I have to say it – a handsome young man. I knew this chiefly because of Lily Palmer.

Lily was three years older than me, which was part of her charm. When you are fifteen, someone of eighteen seems awfully mature and I was flattered by her interest in me. She was the daughter of
the pub keeper. We met in the evenings to go for walks, and from the first walk she let me kiss her and touch her ripe, inviting breasts. Quite soon we were frantic for some private shelter where
we could explore each other further. It was she who found the deserted barn and led me to it one early spring evening. Half of the roof had gone and the great pair of doors hung crazily upon their
broken hinges.

Inside there was the mouldy smell of old hay and a kind of dusty light, which decreased at the end to dusk. She took my hand and when we reached the dusky end she flopped down on to the ground,
pulling me with her. It was odd: I remember noticing then that although it seemed that she was in charge of the situation, it was I who possessed the power. She was unbuttoning her mac to reveal a
pink satin blouse that also had buttons.

‘You can take it off, if you like,’ she said.

‘Get out of that mac, then,’ I said, and she did, bundled it into a pillow and lay back with her arms behind her head and I saw her breasts move as she did so.

‘Have you ever done it before?’

I shook my head. My mouth was dry.

‘Go on, then,’ she said. She had a fringe of dark brown hair nearly hiding her eyes, which were also dark brown and fixed upon my face with an expression that, at the time, was
enigmatic to me. I know now – I knew almost at once – that it meant she wanted me to do anything I liked to her, but could not ask. Some instinct, one of the most useful I have ever
possessed, guided me to take my time over everything, undressing her, petting her, exploring her body with my hands and mouth and then fucking her for as long as I could hold out. I could tell by
her eager mouth as juicy as a ripe plum, her hard nipples and the warm flood from between her legs that I was doing well. I repeated the performance until we were both temporarily exhausted. She
fell asleep at once, her hair damp on her forehead, her mouth slightly open as though she had just finished singing something. I did not look at her for long. We had not said a word throughout the
exercise. We seldom said much anyway, and we had neither of us indulged in the sickly hypocrisy of exchanging vows of love. It was, it always was with her, pure, straightforward lust. After that
first time, we didn’t bother with the walk together, simply met in the barn on her days off – she worked for her father. I discovered that I could drive her into a frenzy by delaying
everything just a little more than she expected. Then she would cry and call out my name and beg me to do the next thing. I enormously enjoyed the feeling of power this gave me. I did sometimes
wonder where, if at all, love came into it. I had, after all, read a good deal about love, or at least lovers or people who went about saying they were and talking about it, but after some months
with Lily, I honestly began to wonder whether it wasn’t simply some literary convention, designed in more prudish – say, Victorian – times to conceal the true animal feelings that
it was clear to me most people possess. Lovers in books were continually telling each other how beautiful they were, or how good, or whatever; they went in for downright flattery before declaring
their love for the owner of such beauty and virtue. I can honestly say that I never thought Lily good-looking. I have difficulty in recalling her face at all now, and her body was only remarkable
to me because it was the first put at my disposal. If this sounds callous, it is not. I’m sure that that is how she thought of me.

The affair came to an end when I was nearly seventeen, because she was going to become engaged to a pig farmer and wanted the use of the barn to be sure that he would be a suitable husband.
‘Can’t tell till I try, can I?’ she said to me, and I, quite relieved to be shot of a situation that was becoming mildly monotonous, agreed.

She married him three months later, and five months after that she had a daughter. I did sometimes wonder whether I or the pig farmer was the father.

I read this first outside the post office, then several times more in the cottage, where I had taken to spending much time. Turning on the water heater had enabled me to have the luxury of
regular baths and I had also done a certain amount of cooking as an electric stove was infinitely less trouble than paraffin. I had even spent a night there during a snowstorm. To begin with I
simply revelled in the fact that she had written to me at all. I examined her rather elegant, spidery writing, perfectly legible but also pretty to look at as decoration of a page. The news that
Miss Blackstone would be coming down – time unspecified – was, however, alarming. I set about clearing up evidence of my occupation: turned off the water heater, cleared up the kitchen
and removed the large pile of ash from the sitting-room fireplace. But I felt it was essential to see her when she did come, and I also resolved to write to her about the dead/live bird that I had
had to rescue in case I had left any clues to my presence. I decided to send this at once, with a bill for the roses.

It seemed unlikely, since she worked, that Miss Blackstone would appear on a weekday, so I took to gardening – preparing the holes for the new roses with compost and manure – on
Saturday mornings. I took my lunch with me and ate it in the freezing garage, and stayed in the garden until it got dark at about four. I did the same on Sundays. It was on the third Saturday that
she arrived. I heard her car when I was wiring the wall where I intended to put one of the climbers. This entailed being up a rather rickety ladder discovered in the garage. Some of its steps were
missing and it was a hazard. I heard the car stop, the door slam and the gate latch open, and then an extraordinarily husky, seductive voice saying, ‘Please don’t let me give you a
fright.’

What a voice! It conjured voluptuous, tightly corseted women in Wild Western saloon bars, a brandy-sodden voice, a gin-and-too-many-cigarettes voice, the voice of the successful Other Woman in
certain romances; you could hardly imagine it speaking from any but a horizontal position and then only to men – might I, perhaps? I turned round on the ladder.

‘I take it you are Mr Kent. I’m Anna Blackstone.’

I said good morning, and turned to the wall again to climb down the ladder, trying to take in the extraordinary dichotomy of her voice and her appearance. She was dressed entirely in black
– trousers, a polo-necked sweater and a windjacket. Her iron-grey hair was cut short with an uncompromising fringe of the sort that always makes me think the owner is hell-bent on either a
scene or a seduction. Her figure – so far as I could see – was shapeless, a rectangle drawn from below the neck to above the knees, of the kind a child might make below one of those
heads with round eyes and a slice-of-melon mouth. I turned to face her again and she held out her hand. I wiped my own on my trousers before shaking it.

‘You got my letter?’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought I ought to let you know.’

‘About the bird?’

‘Well – about my breaking in because of the bird.’

She was looking round the garden. ‘Where are the roses?’

‘They haven’t come yet. I was late in ordering them because of not knowing which Miss Langrish would prefer and nurseries lift roses by rotation. They’ll come some time this
month. I’ve prepared all the holes, and I was just wiring up for the climber.’

‘Ah. Perhaps we’d better go inside. It must be marginally warmer.’

‘It’s the amount that you’d only notice as you walk in. The moment you’re in, it simply seems a different kind of cold.’

She gave me a fleeting, but penetrating glance. ‘Does it really?’

I must be pretty careful with her, I thought. She’s no fool.

Inside, she said, ‘Perhaps it would be a good thing if the fire was lit.’

‘Right.’ I had laid it, so that was easy.

While I was doing this she was walking round the room, touching the books as I had done.

‘It’s damp here, isn’t it?’

‘Well, I’m afraid anywhere left empty would be at this time of year.’

She did not reply, but went upstairs.

I heard her walking about above and then apparently not walking. Just as I was beginning to feel nervous, although I was certain that I had left no trace of myself in either of the bedrooms, I
heard her start coming down again. She stopped off at the bathroom; perhaps she was using the lavatory. I thought, good thing I’d turned the water off ... and then I heard the water flushing.
I’d
forgotten.
I had turned it off the first time, but put it on again because using the lavatory here was infinitely better than the antique Elsan in the boat.

I explained the last part of this to her when she came back into the sitting room. I didn’t say anything about the Elsan, simply that I had been taken short, as it were during the bird
incident. She stood by the fireplace, warming her hands and looking at me thoughtfully during my spiel. Then she said, ‘And the electricity? Is that on as well?’

‘I don’t know.’ I knew that I’d turned off the water heater, also knew that in fact it
was
on otherwise, but there seemed no point in saying so.