Falling (2 page)

The months of that winter passed. To begin with, I sent out one letter at a time, but the answers, when they came, were uniformly so disappointing (and sometimes there was no answer at all) that
I took to writing about three a week, and sending them off by the same post. Twice I went to London to meet women whose replies had seemed hopeful and endured two separate hours drinking tea in the
Charing Cross Hotel.

The first woman, a widow, kept asking impertinent questions about my past career with a barely concealed view to discovering my means. When I said that I had retired, she accused me of
insincerity about my age, which I had never told her in the first place. It was clear to me in the first five minutes that we would have nothing going for each other. But feeling it would be rude
to say so, I stuck it out until she made some remark about my not seeming to have much of the ambition she liked in a man, but she supposed that at my age I must make do with some hobby. Her look
of patronising indulgence filled me with rage. I said that I had probably one of the finest collections of pornography in the country, and that I specialized in bums rather than breasts (both of
hers were outsize). She left me at once, to pay for the tea – ridiculously expensive – and get the bus home.

The second woman seemed at first sight more promising: she was younger, better-looking and becomingly nervous, but she had a tiresome laugh that punctuated everything either of us said. She
seemed to have lived all her life with a mother who had demanded all her spare time – she worked as a dental nurse – and who had disapproved of any boyfriends. Her mother had recently
died, and she had been left the house. She was in some ways pathetic, but she did not attract or inspire me, and our meeting ended with my saying I had to catch my bus and would write to her.
‘You won’t, though, will you?’ she said, and then just as I was beginning to feel sorry for her, she laughed again.

Going back to the boat, I felt that the whole notion of finding someone in this manner was hopeless, and I knew that I deserved something better than the kind of woman who placed advertisements
for friendship or marriage.

I wrote no more letters; instead I concentrated upon my Helen, proliferating the happy times we had had, adding innumerable small touches to her appearance and behaviour until she was more real
and more dear to me than any woman I had known.

So I passed my second autumn on the boat. I had finished George Eliot by the time the winter set in, and was casting about in the library for a new subject. I ended up by taking one novel each
by Iris Murdoch, Virginia Woolf, Ouida and Elinor Glyn – an odd bag you might say, but I like to cast my net as widely as possible, and I’m no intellectual snob. I mention this
particular trip to the library only because it was on that evening that, walking back from the village, I noticed the cottage. It was not that I had never seen it before; it had always been an
unremarkable part of the landscape of the familiar walk from boat to village and gave every sign of being uninhabited. Now I observed the cottage because there were lights on; I could see
that one of the rooms had red walls, which made a rosy glow in the grey autumn dusk, and the contrast between this picture-postcard cosiness and my damp and generally cheerless abode impressed me.
If my life had not been so studded with misfortune,
I
could have owned such a place – more modest than my original ambitions had dictated, but better by far than my present lot.

That evening, while I consumed what was left of a tinned steak and kidney pudding, I did find myself sinking into a depression, which began with a resume of my present condition: in my sixties,
living on the state, homeless, or shortly to become so (the owners had written to say that they were returning sooner than expected), and without a lover, let alone a companion of any kind. How had
I come to this? When I thought back to my youth and remembered how easy it had been to get any girl who interested me interested in me, it seemed extraordinary that I should end up alone. Women of
all ages had succumbed to my attentions. If I had married Daphne, might things have been different? Or perhaps if I had
not
married Hazel success might have shone. But it had never done that
for more than a few weeks, or perhaps months. I could not understand why, when I possessed a talent that from my observation of them was given to few men, I should not have landed myself with all
the emotional and other security so necessary to someone of my nature. It was true that, years ago, in the Daphne days, I had had hopes and dreams far beyond any that I might entertain now. I was,
though I say it myself, extremely good-looking. I was bright. My English teacher at school told me that I should try for university; she thought, if I worked, I had a good chance of a scholarship.
But Daphne had intervened, followed – mercifully as it turned out – by the war. It was really my father who persuaded, or rather bullied, me into learning his trade but to me there has
always been something menial about being a gardener, which no quantity of upper-class, middle-aged ladies in green wellingtons can dispel. However much they yap on about old-fashioned shrub roses
and white gardens, I know that someone else does the double digging, the muck-spreading, the hedge-cutting, the seed-thinning, the potting-up and other countless tasks that are made wearisome by
their repetition. My father ‘put me through it’, to use his phrase, and this meant that I did all those things. It used to take me ages to get my hands clean enough to meet Daphne.

I remember coming back that evening into the saloon from the galley where I had gone to make a cup of instant coffee and wondering idly what Daphne – or, indeed, any of the others –
would think if they saw how I lived now, and at once it was as though I was viewing the scene before me through other, actually critical eyes. It’s true that I have never been much of a one
for domestic life (the man who cannot find some woman to clear up and generally administer to him has hardly the right to call himself a man) but really, in this particular case of the boat,
I had let things go rather too far. I had fallen into the habit of waiting to do the washing-up until there was not a clean crock left. Anyone who has had to water a boat then boil any they want
hot will understand this point. But that autumn I had taken to eating off bits of the
Sunday Times
when I had run out of plates, or rinsing one mug whose pottery was heavily stained with
tannin, and otherwise drinking straight from cans. The place was a litter of paper, crumbs and minor congealed spillages of anything from Guinness to strawberry jam. The small carpet was filthy;
the windows clouded with paraffin fumes and condensation. The oil lamps were dull with the greasy black that results from untrimmed wicks. The galley was in a revolting state. In fact, the only
bits of the boat that I had kept clean were the toilet and basin (I have never been able to endure squalor in those areas). My books were covered in a scum of untouched dust. I knew, because every
time I returned to the boat and unlocked the saloon doors it assailed me, that the place smelt of paraffin, damp, unwashed clothes and tobacco. If I
did
find anybody, I thought, it would
have to be on her ground rather than mine. That I can rise above almost any material circumstances does not mean that I should expect others to do the same. It is not even a question of priorities:
for me love has always been the single most important influence in my life.

And now I have lost it – again! It is strange how one’s mind shies away from unbearable reality into past, quite trivial detail; into small pointless pieces of reminiscence or
speculation of what might have been if some minor aspect of a situation had been different – anything, I suppose, to protect oneself from more than a second’s endurance of pain as fresh
as it is relentless. I know that in the end the freshness will fade. If pictures of her slip across my inner vision with that soundless poignancy that makes one want to cry out, their recurrence
(it is curious how repetition is the chief habit of memory) will degenerate into a familiar ache. At the moment, however, the loss of her is too new for me even to contemplate the idea that it may
diminish. Worse – and how I recognize this! – I do not
want
it to: I clutch at my pain as the last straw of feeling I may ever possess before the Ice Age of a vegetable senility
sets in, such as I have seen so often in a vacant gaze, a trickle of mucus generated from mumbling jaws, the pointless fidgeting of veined and liver-spotted hands that smooth non-existent hair or
shabby clothes. Old age has become something that I dread – far more than death.

I can remember that when I was young, a boy, old age was something that I regarded with a kind of incredulous boredom. It could have nothing to do with me because I was never going to be like
that. My horizon then extended merely to my becoming dashingly adult, past the age when people could call me boy and boss me about. It is strange how, when we are very young, we equate growing up
with freedom; we think that having escaped parental bondage we shall live thereafter exactly as we please. The business of having to earn one’s living has not impinged. But when we have to
start doing
that,
old age shifts from its distance and settles nearer: at least it was so for me. And since then it has loomed, edged ever nearer, usually – as in that game that the
girls at school were so fond of called Grandmother’s Steps – when I was not looking. Shortly before I left Hazel I remember waking early – I had tried to turn over in bed and the
pain had woken me – looking at my watch and realising that I couldn’t see what time it was without my specs. Then I understood that at last old age had succeeded in creeping up on me,
had woken me with a tap on the shoulder.
I
was old; in good nick, but indisputably old.

All that day to counteract panic I added up my assets: nothing wrong with my heart or blood pressure; memory not quite what it had been, but still pretty good. My hair was now a steel grey but
there was plenty of it. My teeth, apart from a small bridge, were my own, and the use of spectacles for reading was no indictment. And in spite of failing to make much of bed with Hazel (it does
take two to tango, and Hazel was no dancer of anything) there was nothing wrong with my equipment in that department either. But anyone meeting me for the first time would dub me old. They might
say
I was elderly – a kind of genteel pastel version of ageing – but what they would mean was that I seemed to them old.

I knew from experience that I could talk myself past this damning view. Wells was right when he said it did not matter to a woman what a man looked like as long as he could talk. And, I would
add to that, listen. Yet whichever way I looked at it, I had not all that much time in which to design a new and delightful life for myself. Give me the woman and I would fall in love with her, but
even I could not do this without an object for my affection.

These thoughts came back to me on that dank evening. I remember it in so much detail because it was the last evening I was to spend in that way. When I had drunk my coffee and smoked a cigarette
– the last in my pack – wishing I had the cash for some vodka, I boiled a kettle and washed up for as long as the water lasted. This only made everything else look worse, so I boiled
another kettleful and set to work upon the rest of the galley. It was four in the morning before I had finished and I fell on to my bunk without a thought for Helen, or indeed anyone else.

I slept late; the heavy white mist that makes the canal look as though it is smoking had almost dispersed. Condensation had dampened the outside of my sleeping-bag, and I lay for a few minutes
contemplating the familiar, boring and uncomfortable interval there must be between getting out of a warm bunk and sitting in the saloon with a scalding cup of tea. The thought of another winter in
the boat was not cheering. While I was pulling on my jeans and oiled-wool jersey the evil thought occurred to me that I
could,
actually, smarten up the boat and make a real effort to sell
her as mine. Then I could scarper with the money and start somewhere else. Naturally I did not pursue this idea: I am by nature rather more honest than most, but it is sometimes amusing to consider
notions that are so out of one’s behavioural orbit as to be fantastic.

I have nothing against fantasy
per se.
Indeed, it seems to me one of the most harmless ways of enriching one’s life. I can always remember as a child the shock of teachers or
parents accusing me of ‘day-dreaming’, as though this was some kind of offence. However, this particular morning – an ordinary, humdrum, end-of-Indian-summer Saturday morning
– required me to be dully practical. I had to water the boat. This involved hauling it about a hundred yards the other side of the first bridge, to the lock cottage whose owner had a hose
that reached to my water tank. I had also to do some shopping for food, and to fetch my laundry from the woman in the village. I made a shopping list of the usual things: eggs, bacon, sausages,
corned beef, potatoes, onions and carrots, a large loaf, tomatoes, milk and a jar of Nescafe. I also needed more cleaning materials; it looked like more than one trip.

I noticed as I passed the cottage that the curtains were drawn in the upstairs windows and that there was no sign of life. I also observed that the garden, what I could see of it, was a total
wilderness filled with sodden hay, nettles blackened by the frost, old man’s beard, thistles and even ragwort. Then at the far side of the cottage, past the hedge that surrounded its garden,
I noticed the most beautiful car I had ever seen. It was a two-seater, drop-head Mercedes, probably over twenty years old, its black canvas roof set off by the metallic green-grey bodywork. It was
a car that could only belong, I felt, to a rich romantic, a Gatsbyish car made for the privileged few. I could not help giving it a closer look. It was in excellent condition; its long sleek lines
polished, its chrome trim gleaming. Inside it had a walnut dashboard and black leather upholstery. Whoever owned that car was not short of a bob or two. It was probably some film director or pop
star, I thought: country cottages and expensive cars were all part of their equipment, and the state of the garden was just what one would expect from some
nouveau riche
townie. For the rest
of the walk I indulged myself with straightforward envy. It was not so much that I wanted particularly to
own
a car like that Mercedes, but that I wanted to be in a position to
choose
whether I owned one. The worst thing about poverty was the lack of choice. I imagined myself having to choose whether I would have either the cottage
or
the car – even that was a
choice wildly beyond my present means.