Authors: Elizabeth Jane Howard
Falling (18 page)
‘You’re a loner,’ he’d said to her once, when she had demurred about a holiday with other people. She remembered denying this, and his stroking her arm and saying,
‘Of course you are. Brought up alone with your aunt, no parents, you poor darling, and then that prison-like life with ghastly old Stach, and choosing writing for your career – what
could be more lonely than that?’ Indeed, what? she thought now. She had not particularly wanted to go by herself to Mexico, really it had seemed a sort of challenge. Other people went on
holidays by themselves and clearly enjoyed it: why shouldn’t she? But that first evening in Mexico City, sitting in a corner of the dark little bar attached to her hotel and drinking
margaritas, she had instantly wondered why she had come. After dinner with a book, she had picked up some leaflets about sightseeing at the desk and taken them upstairs. She must concentrate on
doing things.
There was a splendid museum, and those amazing pyramids to see that could be reached by bus. She would see and do everything within reach of the city. That evening, as she was undressing,
something odd happened. The floor seemed – not exactly to slide or tilt, but to shift temporarily in an uncertain manner, giving her the sudden feeling that it could not be trusted. She stood
motionless in the bedroom, and just as she was beginning to think she had either imagined it, or it was the result merely of the high altitude and the tequila she had drunk, it happened again. This
time it didn’t seem to be just the floor, but more as though the whole building was minutely resettling itself. This was so frightening in a way beyond any of her experience that she rang
down to the desk. It was a relief when a soft voice the other end answered.
‘Señora?’
‘Er, my room seemed to have – a sort of – well, it seemed to
move
– I don’t know what—’
‘Nothing, Señora. A little tremor – very small.’
‘You mean an
earthquake?’
‘It is nothing. You can have no fear. It is a natural thing from time to time.’
Natural!
She thanked the man, then said, ‘Should I perhaps come down?’ She had heard that this was what people did in earthquakes.
‘If you wish.’
‘It’s not necessary?’
‘Ah, no, Señora. It is nothing.’
So she had gone to bed.
Well, she had not had the chance to find out whether she could meet the challenge of a holiday by herself. It had lasted less than twenty-four hours; after that she became an accident, a
patient, an invalid.
After she had spent a week in the Cedars Sinai, Katya called her. ‘I didn’t know where you were!’ Her voice sounded accusing.
‘I’m so sorry, darling. I did write a postcard when I got here, and asked the studio to call you.’
‘They did and I was out and they left a message saying you’d fallen off a pyramid but they didn’t tell me where you were. I thought you were still in Mexico and then I thought
you might be back in England, but there was no reply from your flat so I tried your cottage and a man answered and said he thought you were in America.
He
hadn’t got your address
either.’
‘What man?’
‘Your gardener. He was seeing to the damp or something. Anyway, Ma, how are you?’
‘Getting on. But my foot seems to take ages to heal. I can hobble about on crutches now, which is nice. How’s Edwin?’
‘I hardly ever see him. He comes home after the children are in bed, eats some food and falls asleep over the telly news.’
Her voice warned Daisy that further questions about Edwin were undesirable.
‘And the children?’
‘Thomas has gone to prep school – awfully homesick, but Edwin insists he should stay, and Caroline wants to learn the
saxophone.’
‘Goodness!’
‘She’s only six – it seems a ridiculous instrument to me. And it’s awfully hard to find a teacher, stuck out in the wilds as we are.’ There was a pause, and then
she said, ‘I do wish you’d
told
me where you were. I’ve been worrying about you.’
This crumb of comfort (mattering to somebody) contracted to something more like a bit of grit in an oyster (it was entirely her selfish fault that Katya had been worried).
‘When are you coming back?’
As soon as they’ll let me. I’ll write to you, darling.’
‘OK.’
Will you write back? With your news and things?’
‘Oh, Ma, you know I never have any news. It’s utterly boring here.’
‘I’d just love a letter from you.’
All right. But you know I was never much of a one for letters.’
Any old letter will do.’ She paused, then added as lightly as she could, ‘I’m feeling a bit cut off. Lonely.’
‘That makes two of us.’ But she sounded placated.’ OK. I’ll write.’
After the call, she reflected that Katya had never forgiven her for leaving Stach, for having that fundamental piece of news sprung upon her. She had tried to be gentle and straight about it,
but she had clearly not found the right way. Perhaps there was no right way of doing that, any more than there was a right way of being left. She thought of that last time with Jason, when he had
come back for his briefcase and she was in the middle of her grief about him. He had been so gentle to her, so comforting and then, when they were in bed, she had wildly thought that Marietta was a
bad dream – over and done with. It had been nothing of the kind. Making love to her was his way of saying he was sorry; pity had dominated the scene, pity so unobtrusively administered that
she had not recognized it until he had put on his clothes and left. But she had been happy for that last time (barely an hour although it had seemed much longer). How easily she had been taken
in!
Two days later, she got a letter forwarded from the studio. The envelope did not have Katya’s writing on it – nor Anna’s, nor indeed any hand that she recognized.
Dear (I don’t know whether to address you as Mrs Redfearn or Miss Langrish),
I thought you might like to know that your garden is planted now – with roses, anyway, and a few bits and pieces that I have acquired from the folks round here. It does not amount to
much at present, but it looks as though its hair has been combed – kempt, if that is the right word. Since Miss Blackstone kindly sent a key to the cottage I have been able to light a
fire every few days and generally see that frost and damp do no damage. It is as well that I did so, because there was evidence that someone had tried to break in through a back window,
although I could find no damage. Caretaking for you has been a great pleasure for me, as my life (for reasons I will not trouble you with) has been rather bleak of late. You know that feeling
(or perhaps you don’t) when one moves to a new area and has to start one’s life all over again. The superficial things settle themselves quite quickly, but the ones that really
matter do not. I am very much on my own and not, I think, designed to be so. Enough of that.
I hope you will not mind, but I have been reading some of your books. I have, of course, taken the greatest care of them, but it was such a temptation to someone who lives on a public
library and does not always know what to read without a good browse. The sight of your shelves filled with volumes most of which were entirely new to me was too much. I had not, for instance,
read any plays at all except for some Shakespeare, and this has been a revelation to me. I realize now that you are a playwright which I did not know when we met (forgive me for not
acknowledging your fame), and at first I found plays quite difficult to read. There is so much inference in them that novels are often without, but once I had recognized this, and read them
at a different pace, a great deal became clear. Plays seem to make one
see
people as well as hear them, to place them, as it were. How often in novels has one wondered where the hell
the characters
are
while they are talking to each other and the moment you start wondering that, the reality or momentum is diminished. Also I see how much more poignantly plays can
make a social point than novels seem to manage. This is especially true in reference to women, their status in the world, their rights or the lack of them and how they are treated by society
and men in particular. Of course social values have changed since Ibsen’s day, but the true position of women, in my view, has not. Lip service is paid. The vote and the divorce
becoming acceptable are only the tip of the iceberg.
Oh dear! I fear I may be boring you with this dissertation. The thing is that if we were face to face, I should know what
you
thought about these matters and much else, but we are
not.
I have to say this because I have lived long enough to know that withholding is simply another form of dishonesty. When I saw you coming in at the gate of your garden I felt an
extraordinary sense of kinship – not precisely that I had always known you (I would not presume to anything so brash), but that I
ought
always to have known you. That first
impression has never left me. Forgive this, or ignore it as you will. I have no one to talk to. My present life – quite uncharacteristic of the rest of it – precludes company of
any interest at all.
I have a request to make, which I hope you will treat kindly. I should so very much like to read some of
your
plays if that is possible. Do you, by any chance, recollect whether you
have any copies of them in the boxes not yet unpacked? (By the way, if you feel that these boxes
should
be unpacked, of course I should be delighted to do it for you. I am fighting the
battle of the winter damp here, and possibly whatever is in the boxes would be better for an airing.) What a wordy parenthesis! I fear I am rather given to them. Naturally, you may want to do
this for yourself, and the last thing I want is to invade your privacy in
any way.
This letter has gone on long enough – too long probably. Sorry about that. I have always been a great one for letters and at the moment I have no one to write to.
That is not quite true. The only person I felt I wanted to write to is yourself.
I hope that your work is going well in Hollywood. I imagine you in violent sunshine having parties with all sorts of famous and glamorous people who are your far more intimate friend
than,
Yours sincerely,
Henry Kent
HENRY
Her first letter to me arrived sooner than I had expected. It was written on the hospital paper and was addressed to the cottage. I did not open it at once, but put it on the
kitchen table and sat before it, devouring her writing of my name on the envelope. As I stared at her spidery handwriting, her appearance and her voice returned to me – her pale complexion,
her wonderful hair that sprang from her forehead, her rare smile that transformed her mouth and dissolved the wariness in her eyes that sometimes in the last months I had remembered to be grey and
sometimes bluer than grey, and then her unexpectedly high, clear voice that sounded so much younger than it was.
I opened the letter, still hearing her voice as I read it. It was short.
Dear Mr Kent,
It was kind of you to write to tell me about the garden. I suppose that as the spring approaches it would be sensible to get some seeds to plant to fill up the beds you have made. I cannot
send you the money for them, but if you write to Miss Blackstone she will arrange for the money to buy them. It sounds feeble of me not to send you money from here, but I am still virtually
immobile and have not anyone to run errands for me at the moment.
I had a silly accident in Mexico and broke my leg rather badly – or rather my foot which has meant having quite a lot of surgery which I am, with maddening slowness, recovering
from.
No, I do not mind you borrowing my books. I am sure you are careful with them from the way you write about what you have read. And I am anyway grateful to you for your care of my new
place, about which I often think with longing. Hospital life, even if one can hobble about a bit, contracts one’s world in a curiously inexorable manner. I feel I am in danger of
becoming institutionalized – cut off from work and, indeed, almost everything else.
So I do understand what you mean when you say that moving to a new area means that only the superficial things become settled. I feel very much on my own here – none of the glamorous
parties you imagine for me.
Yes, I think it would be as well to unpack the remaining tea chests. I had thought that I should have done them before now, and as there is no immediate prospect of my being able to do so
I should be grateful for your help. There may be some typescripts of plays in there, but I cannot remember now what I packed for the country and what remained in London. If you find any, by
all means read them.
You do not mention Chekhov, but I imagine that is because you have not got to him. A treat in store: the best playwright, I think, since Shakespeare. Has to be read several times to get
the full impact, as apart from anything else he is a master craftsman and many of his points are very fine.
Thank you for writing. Yours sincerely,
Daisy Langrish
(I prefer to use my professional name as I am divorced.)
That was it. I read the letter again, more slowly, trying to glean her state of mind. Most of it was reserved and practical; she did not reveal herself, except with the phrase ‘I feel very
much on my own here’. I did not think that she would have written that unless it was severely true. And she was grateful to me for looking after her place of which she ‘often thought
with longing’. That, too, was promising. And she was to allow me to unpack her tea chests into which I had so far only tentatively burrowed.
The ‘silly accident’ sounded far more serious than she wished me to think. If her recovery was to be slow, and she was not able to walk or drive, I might eventually have the chance
of doing much for her when she did return. By then, through letters, I might have inspired enough confidence in me for her to convalesce in the cottage. This was an intoxicating thought, but it was
far ahead, and meanwhile I must somehow encourage her to feel that I was trustworthy. She had not replied to my remarks about how I had felt when I met her, but I sensed that, apart from a natural
reserve, she was shy and that great care must be taken or I would frighten her off. That evening I despatched a short note simply to ask her what kind of flowers she would like me to grow from seed
– what colours, particularly. I thanked her for her letter, and expressed my concern about her leg. I was hers sincerely.
