Falling (17 page)

I spent Christmas day in the cottage; cooked myself a meal – a piece of steak and Brussels sprouts, a small packet of oven-ready chips and a Christmas pudding of the size made for one. I
had treated myself to a hot bath and a clean outfit. Ahead of me was a small packet of Dutch cigars with my Nescafé.

Outside it was pouring with rain. I thought I might even spend the night in the cottage. What was
she
doing on this day? I tried to imagine her, in Californian – or perhaps Mexican
– sunshine, by somebody’s swimming pool, wearing a white one-piece bathing-suit over her golden skin, her beautiful hair damp and drying, springing slowly to life in the hot air. But
what company would she be keeping? I’m too old for hypothetical jealousy: I furnished her with a kindly woman friend, somebody she had known for years, like Miss Blackstone. She was wary of
men, I knew that; would not be likely to respond easily to any bronzed Tarzan. By now I had got through the steak, and was on my way to the kitchen to collect my pudding when the telephone rang. It
gave me the kind of shock that makes one nearly drop things and stagger like someone in a farce. It had never rung before except that first day in the cottage and I had become unused to telephones
anyway. My first instinct was to let it ring, which it did. Then I thought it was certainly a wrong number, and as it continued insistently, I went and answered it. ‘Hello?’

‘Daisy?’

‘She’s not here, I’m afraid.’

‘Who is that?’

‘I’m just the caretaker.’

‘Well, where
is
she? She was due back from the States a fortnight ago. She’s not in her flat. So where
is
she?’

The voice was treble, sounding almost shrill as she repeated the question.

‘Who is that speaking?’

‘Her daughter. I had to get
this
number from Directory Enquiries. Anyway, that’s not your business. She never told
me
about a caretaker. How do I know you’re not
a burglar, or a squatter or something?’

I laughed convincingly. ‘My name’s Henry Kent, and I’m definitely neither of those things, but thank you for asking.’

‘She
was
in hospital in Mexico. She fell down some awful Mexican pyramid and broke her left shoulder and her left foot. But she told me she was due back anyway. I’ll try the
hospital again. They said she’d checked out.’

‘Doesn’t Miss Blackstone know where she is?’

‘Probably, but she doesn’t answer her phone – away for Christmas like most people. It’s my fault, I didn’t call her back when she asked me to. Oh, Lord! It’s
all my fault!’ She sounded almost childishly dramatic, but her distress was evident and she seemed distinctly more friendly.

‘I’ve been wanting to know where she is,’ I said. ‘There are one or two things here that need her attention. Do you think when you find out, you could call again and give
me her address? I could arrange to be here whenever it suited you to call.’

‘I could probably help you there. What sort of things? Is the place leaking or falling down or something? She bought it so suddenly she probably didn’t have it surveyed.’

‘No, the place is quite sound as far as I know. It just gets damp if left to itself. That’s why I’m here. Lucky you caught me really. I do hope your mother is all right. I
shouldn’t think Mexico is a very good country to be ill in.’

‘What an extraordinary thing to say! How do you think Mexicans manage?’ Then, before I could answer that, she said, ‘Why am I talking to you so much anyway?’

‘I can’t think,’ I said. I knew perfectly well why, but she would not like me knowing. Any charm that I possessed needed to be a mutual discovery.

‘You’ve got a rather nice voice, reassuring.’

‘What a kind and surprising thing to say, Mrs . . . ?’

‘Moreland. Katya Moreland.’

‘Well, Mrs Moreland, if you
do
hear from your mother, perhaps you would let me know. I’m usually here between eleven and twelve in the mornings. Just an address that I could
write to. I mustn’t keep you any longer. I hope you have a wonderful Christmas.’

Ringing off precluded her asking me any more,
why
I wanted to get in touch with her mother. But something told me that Katya Moreland was a much softer touch than Miss Blackstone, and
provided she – Katya – didn’t consult Miss Blackstone about what I should or should not know of Daisy’s whereabouts, I was pretty sure she would tell me.

She did. The following Saturday she rang at half past eleven and gave me the address in Los Angeles. I posted the letter that evening.

‘Are you quite comfortable, Daisy?’

She nodded weakly and smiled. When they went away she shifted so that the weight was completely off her left shoulder, which intensified the cramp in the right one. While she waited for them to
tell her that the ambulance was ready to take her to the airport she reflected how much people harped on anything in short supply. Elizabethan poems about the lover’s perfumed breath, freedom
in places where there wasn’t any, truth allowed by politicians and governors to emerge in much the proportions that icebergs were visible, and comfort in hospitals – some relative
degree of it was constantly alluded to.

‘Quite comfortable’ had come to mean for her only that she was not wanting to scream from pain. People had lived for centuries with rotting teeth, lack of any choice about their
lives, in various travesties of democracy and only with what truth they could make out of the whole thing for themselves. And pain, like terminal illness and death, was shoved into the background
where everyone hoped it belonged and would stay. She started to consider what acceptable degrees of all these things
were
confronted, but then the amazing adaptability or resilience that she
had observed patients displaying in both of the hospitals she had been in intervened: it was impossible to gauge other people’s pain against one’s own. Talk of low thresholds, of
courage, of good behaviour or not complaining, of never wanting anything, varied hopelessly from patient to patient, so the word ‘relative’ wrote the whole thing off as insoluble.

The worst bit had been the fall and lying in scorching sun while various tourists milled helplessly about her. There was not a doctor on the pyramid and several well-meaning people tried
to help her to her feet until she fainted. She came to strapped to a stretcher in an ambulance that jolted and blared its way along the road, at a speed that took no account of the potholes.
Someone gave her an injection and the pain retreated.

The next thing she remembered was lying on a bed or trolley – something that had been moving anyway – in some passage or anteroom, with a nurse asking her questions in Spanish that
she did not seem able to answer satisfactorily. She managed her name and her date of birth, English, on holiday. No, she was not with anyone, she was alone. Where was she staying? She tried to
remember the name of the hotel, but could not.
‘Amigos, familias,’
the woman repeated, putting her face nearer and speaking loudly as though this would make her understand better
and produce them, but the thick lenses on her spectacles made her eyes menacing, and the gold rims glinted intolerably from the fluorescent lights.

Her head was throbbing, her mouth parched. She asked for water, but the woman shook her head,
‘Agua niente,’
and went away. Time passed and the pain seeped back – her
foot, her leg. It crept up her body, her left side. She tried to collect some saliva in her mouth to swallow and coughed – and felt as though she had been stabbed in the ribs. Her body was
covered by a sheet, she could not see it. Tears of shock began, but when she attempted to wipe them away her hand had blood on it. She tried to use her other hand to wipe her face, but that was
agonisingly impossible. She began to feel extremely afraid, and to steady herself tried to remember exactly what had happened when she fell.

The steps of the enormous pyramid were extraordinarily steep, she remembered. She had almost crawled up them, using her hands to pull herself up each one. It was very hot, and while she was
resting she looked up to see how far there was to go – miles, it looked like; she could not have climbed more than a third of the way. Then she looked down and experienced a moment of terror.
The ground looked horribly far away. Tourists arriving looked like dolls milling about toy buses. She could not climb down: even if she sat on a step her feet barely touched the step below: she
would have to jump, and there was nothing to hold on to. She felt the onset of vertigo paralysing her. She shut her eyes and willed herself to move and not to look beyond the step below. This
worked quite well but when she was four or five steps from the bottom a small gust of wind blew her hat off, and in trying to catch it, she lost her balance and fell. She kept trying to clutch at
the stone, to stop herself, but this seemed only to make her fall faster, until the ground below the first step met her with a different kind of force.

When she came round it was to the ordeal of the sun and people with good intentions making things worse. Oh, well, I expect if it had been someone else who fell, I would have been one of them,
she thought. The desire to prove that someone is alive, to prod and try to move them, to wipe blood from obvious places, to deliver sustenance (a teenager offered her some bubble-gum), was
exhaustingly strong. After she passed out, she did not know what else they had tried to do.

The nurse returned with a doctor, a man in a white coat with a bushy grey moustache who looked extraordinarily like the novelist Marquez.

‘What happened to you?’

‘I fell down the steps of the pyramid.’ Her spirits rose because he spoke English.

‘You have no one here with you?’

‘No, I am alone.’

He pulled back the sheet and muttered some Spanish imprecation. ‘Why was the shoe not cut from her foot?’

There seemed to be no answer to this. She looked down. Her left foot was the colour of black grapes and so swollen that her sandal strap was almost invisible.

That was the beginning of it. She was wheeled away to a small room bright with lights and put on a table.

The doctor bent over her. ‘Do not be disturbed. I give you something for the pain while I am cutting.’

After the needle in her arm she waited, trying – as she always had with anaesthetics – to remember the exact moment when she lost consciousness, but she remembered nothing. When she
came round, she was in a room with two beds in it, but alone. The empty bed made her feel her isolation, not simply from other patients in the hospital, but from everybody in her life.

She was to spend ten solitary days there. After the evening of the first day the doctor came to tell her that she had broken her left arm so high into her shoulder that it could not be set
– must be left to recover on its own. She had also cracked a rib and nothing could be done about that, either. Her left foot was broken in several places; some surgery had been effected, and
that, too, would have to heal itself. ‘But your face, Señora, that was merely cut and, of course, bruised. There will be no lasting damage there. For all ladies of a certain age the
face is important, yes?’ By then she had remembered the name of her hotel where she had arrived the previous evening, and asked him to arrange for her luggage and passport to be sent to the
hospital. It was then that she realized that her bag – containing some Mexican money and her travellers’ cheques – had disappeared, had been left or stolen where she fell.

When her things arrived she at last had books to read. Movement, of any kind, was painful and, oddly, the cracked rib hurt most of all. After three days, she managed to get them to put her in a
wheelchair to reach the ward’s telephone, and she called the producer with whom she had been working. She got his secretary on a very bad line. Josh was away for a week.

Eventually, but not until after Josh’s return from his vacation, she got herself returned to Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles where they said that a mess had been made of her foot:
they would have to operate to remove an ill-placed pin, and she would be unable to walk for some time.

The second hospital, although the nurses spoke English, did not decrease her sense of isolation. She had no friends in Los Angeles, and her producer, although he visited her once or twice, was
deeply engaged upon another film. Other people she had been working with – the director of her piece and one or two others she had lunched with in the studio canteen – sent
flowers, called her and sent jokey cards wishing her a speedy recovery, all stuff that acquaintances might do, but there was no steady visitor, nobody whom she could look forward to seeing. Her
time was spent with physiotherapists, nurses who washed her and brought meals, and the various doctors who monitored her progress.

She tried to work on her script but found it strangely difficult. She could not concentrate, slept badly, and alternated between feeling cut off from people and wishing that she did not want to
be. For a time she thought that she was suffering from homesickness, but imagining herself back in London made her feel worse. Her days were passed in painful idleness: she was both bored and sorry
for herself, and disliking both these conditions did nothing to dispel them.

She was sixty-one, had failed with both of her marriages, had one daughter whom she felt despised her, had remarkably few friends. Friendship when she had been married to Stach had been out of
the question, she never had the time, or energy, for anything but trying to keep their heads above water. And although she had had many friends when she was married to Jason, it had been Jason, she
felt, and felt it more now, whom those people had wanted to see. She had been the also-ran of the couple, and it had not occurred to her that that mattered because she had been so happy with him:
it had seemed to her then simply the consequence of being half of a marriage. How often she had heard him say, ‘I’d adore to see Jonathan but Audrey
is
rather a pill, isn’t
she?’ She wondered now how many and how often people had said that of her and Jason.