Authors: Elizabeth Jane Howard
Falling (20 page)
At this point, alarmed by how
much
I had written, I stopped and read it over. On the whole I was pleased. The story had all the improbability of truth. I thought for a moment, then
added:
The letter contained directions to a house near Sevenoaks in Kent. The coincidence of the county and my name had some irony. In the envelope was a hundred pounds in
five-pound notes. I never saw Daphne again.
Another pause, and then I finished:
Heavens, how much I have gone on! I cannot think what has possessed me to write so much. That is not true. I wanted to tell you what I have never told anyone. [This was
perfectly true.] I wanted to
confide
in you and one cannot do that without a deal of trust. How I wish that you would or could trust me!
I crossed this out, but in such a way as to leave it legible with the effort of curiosity. People always read crossed-out lines or words in letters if it is at all possible.
I won’t bore you with this story any more. The miseries of disastrous first love must be, I suppose, that one is young and consequently resilient, but at the time,
of course, the misery was apparent and the resilience imperceptible. Do we all choose the wrong person when we are young and how much does it teach us? I feel that I know so much more now
that I am older, but have no wish to live in the slipstream of my own life. Are these questions you could answer, because I cannot?
I was hers sincerely, Henry K.
I had decided that I would put off reading her plays until I had quite finished with the tea chests. This was partly because I was afraid that I might not like or understand them and would find
it difficult to write to her about them, and partly because I was hoping for an answer to the above letter before I wrote again about anything.
So I tackled the most boring chest – the one with the typewriter and stationery. But when I had disposed of them, and was about to discard the chest, I noticed that there was a large
envelope tied with dirty white tape lying at the very bottom. The envelope was not sealed and it was simply a matter of untying the tape. There was a treasure trove within. A bundle of letters, a
small photograph album and a five-year diary. It was of cracked red leather and was locked, but the strap was badly frayed, and very little persuasion would break it. I began with the letters. Some
were in envelopes, some not, and they were in three thin bundles, held together by elastic bands, which in some cases had snapped.
I looked first to see who they were from. The oldest-looking (paper yellowed, ink faded) were from the Jess whose picture I had seen already and who turned out to be an aunt. Apart from two
postcards they were undated but clearly written to Daisy when she was a child, in the forties. Jess had a hand whose regularity concealed its illegibility and after struggling with one or two, I
put them aside for later. The next bundle was a miscellany. There were letters from her daughter written from school: ‘Need I go on trying to play the violin? I am absolutely no good at it
and simply loathe the teacher’; ‘We’ve had minced mice and frogspawn twice this week – honestly the food gets worse and worse and Lavinia was sick before she could even get
to the lav’; from Edinburgh:
I do wish you would stop worrying about me. I am perfectly able to look after myself. In any case, I am not interested in getting a man, getting married and breeding and
all that boring stuff which some people here seem to want. I want to go and
do
something, change things, have a proper career. I am sick and tired of the way men treat women and I
shall jolly well see to it that I’m not dependent in
any way
on them. You ought to agree about that, at least, considering your experiences with Papa. It must be a relief to be
your age and not have to worry about that sort of thing. Look at Aunt Jess. She’s perfectly happy without ever having had a man in her life.
Another one said:
I’m sorry if I sounded too hard and beastly to you. I know you do care about me and I know you miss Jess even more than I do. The trouble with you is that you are
too
trusting and gentle. I think you see things in a kind of romantic haze. But for goodness sake don’t try and find a man to take Jess’s place. I seem to be the realistic
one in our family and it makes me feel quite protective of you even though I can see it makes me sound irritable and tactless. I think it’s jolly good that you are taking to writing and
it doesn’t matter if you don’t get famous or rich because soon I shall be earning my living and be able to pay you back. I do realize that you have given up a lot for me. Lizzie
and I want to go to India when we’ve done our finals so I shall start getting holiday jobs to save up.
Finally, a postcard that simply said: ‘Oh – all
right
– if you really want me to, I’ll come.’
There were two letters from Anna Blackstone but they seemed to be entirely about writing and I left them.
The third bundle was a collection of notes, sometimes only a couple of lines. They all had a daisy drawn at the top and were signed ‘devoted’, or ‘distracted’,
‘delirious’, ‘distraught’ – and once ‘dejected – J’. ‘Just to tell you I love you more than yesterday and not as much as tomorrow.’ One
read: ‘P.S. Could you
possibly
collect my dinner jacket from the cleaners?’
It’s so lovely to have moved on from carrying a spear to a torch – for that cat of yours, of course. But I suppose Sykes would
prefer
a spear with a
sardine on the end of it. He only loves you because you feed and flatter him, whereas I – I would love you,
shall
love you till you are so old your poor lit le hands will be too
weak to open a tin of Jellymeat Whiskas . . . Tell him that. Tell him you’re merely his housekeeper, while
I
am your lover, your husband, your friend, your admirer for life. G.
F. Jason.
That was the longest of them, but then, when I turned to the diary and gently pulled the frayed strap until it broke, one letter slid out from its pages. It was on airmail paper and felt as
though it had been folded and unfolded many times. The first sentence told me all. ‘This is the most difficult letter I’ve ever had to write in my life,’ it began. He was ditching
her with a brutality that must have felt worse because it was clearly unconscious. Poor Daisy! It is always interesting to see how people justify painful behaviour by explanations of how hard they
find it – in this case how hard he
and
Marietta found it. If it was so hard, why did they do it? I read on. They did it because of the intensity of their love, of which there was much
description. How much Daisy must have wanted to know about that! As I read, I recollected that I had seen this Marietta in a sit-com series on television some years ago: a tiny little creature in a
mini-skirt, huge eyes, pointed breasts and beautiful legs. And, of course, far younger than Daisy.
Then I began to wonder what all this can have meant to her; how much she had cared. Remembering two things at once – they cannot
be
at once but it feels like that – I thought
of the fact that there seemed to be no letters from her first husband, only one photograph and Katya’s allusion to what a time she had had with him, and also the look of wariness in
Daisy’s face that had been practically the first thing I had noticed about her. Perhaps she did not really like men, was afraid of them or could not respond sexually. None of this would be
her
fault
– she might simply have encountered two egocentric boors, an all-too-frequent occurrence for women in my experience. But somehow my instinct was that she
had
cared,
had been wounded, had suffered, and still bore the scars.
The diary began shortly before she met Jason, and at the beginning contained mostly notes about her working life, anxieties about Katya when she became so suddenly engaged, and a description of
the marriage to which her first husband – the Stach of the photograph – turned up so unexpectedly.
I was astonished how little his presence meant to me [she wrote], amazed at how one cannot even remember the water once it is well and truly under the bridge. He looked
exactly the same. I felt nothing at all except for some faint apprehension that he might embarrass Katya when he got drunk at the party afterwards. But she was so radiantly happy –
there was a kind of charmed circle of joy round her that kept her safe from smashed glasses and sentimental reminiscence.
But it was her relationship with Jason that I wished to know about, and I turned the pages until I reached her meeting with him. There was one brief note in March ’72.
This morning I met a most beautiful young man – an actor, of course. It was on Rodney’s boat, one of his Sunday-morning drinks parties. I thought nobody
looking like that could actually be good company – too eaten up with vanity and egotism and wanting to be a star. How wrong I was! He told me (when I asked) that he was out of work, but
after that said not another word about himself.
A few pages later there was no doubt that she was, had been, violently in love with him. The next two years of the diary contained very little: sometimes a page would be started, but it would
stop after a sentence or two. One of the few longer sections gave some explanation of this.
I had made a resolve to record everything – if not every day, at least once a week – but I am too absorbed to write anything more than my work. Here I should
need to write about my complete happiness and that is far harder to do than I had thought. I can say and know that it is there, filling all the time and thought and everything that I do with
him and without him. I am at once entirely happy in the moment, or whatever size the present is,
and
I never cease to look forward to the future – immediate, going out to dinner
with him tonight, or more distant, going to France in September. I look forward to his coming back if he has been out, to being able to remember what we did yesterday, to imagining the next
time that we shall make love. It is extraordinary how security and excitement go together; until now I had thought them mutually exclusive. But feeling so sure of my love and his love makes
quite ordinary life an adventure.
But I wanted to get to the break-up, and turned the pages quickly until I found it, in March 1975.
Anna told me last night. I am glad it was she. She did not, in any way, allude to her original doubts about him and our marriage. I know that she loves me and that there
is some comfort in that, but I am not sensible of it. I am not sensible at all. I feel as though a bomb has been dropped on me – from nowhere, for no reason, but somehow it has failed
to kill me. I am still alive with nothing left.
Then later,
How did it happen? Why did he lie to me so much and for so long? Sometimes it is horribly clear now that this would happen – endless signs that anyone else would
have noticed, but I did not. How can anyone cause such misery to someone they seemed to love? But perhaps he never did. When we met, he had nothing; he had been painting people’s
kitchens and getting occasional crowd work. If he once loved me and then for some reason stopped, why could he not tell me? Why leave me to find out how I might? But if he never loved me,
that would be an even harder thing to say. Is it that men are essentially different from women? He wanted me and that equated with love, and now he wants somebody else and so that is love
too.
On a separate page:
He is an actor – he would naturally be good at a performance.
And further on:
I am nearly forty-eight and he is forty-one. A crude explanation.
She
is in her twenties. I suppose that has much to do with it. Even after his letter I can revile
him, and the love and loss just go on as though he had never written it. I simply do not know how to become indifferent.
April.
I have made him agree to come and tell me face to face about it. I don’t know exactly why this seems so important to me, but it does. I am utterly divided about it
– don’t want him to know how much I am unhappy, and then I also want him to know
exactly
how unhappy he has made me. I want him to feel about that – to mind, to
care.
Madness, really. Pride is some sort of corset – it can hold one together, at least in front of him. I shall be quite calm, shall simply ask him what happened to us.
No. Don’t ask anything. Make him say what he feels. Leave it at that.
He may not come.
Perhaps – it is just possible – when we meet that all this will go away and we shall be back to our beginning.
He did come, just after I thought he might be going to ditch me about that as well. But he came – and it was awful and when he first went, I thought I was going to die, but of course
one doesn’t
die,
simply breaks down. And then he came back because he had forgotten his damned briefcase. And for that last hour with him – right until the end – I
thought that it had all been some frightful nightmare. I remember trying to say something of the sort to him – saying how much I loved him, and his putting his fingers on my mouth and
then kissing me to silence. And then he put on his clothes and left. It had been nothing but pity. Pity!
May.
I did not believe it was possible to be so unhappy. To long for him so unmercifully – to ache for his presence, his voice, his touching me – even though I now
know that expediency, lies and pity were all he had to offer. How can I love someone like that? Perhaps I don’t. Perhaps for me, too, it was some form of expediency – perhaps there is no such thing as unrequited love. Perhaps I have to weep and make anguish of this in order not to admit the
humiliation of such a failure, am too proud or arrogant to admit to the squalor of simply having been taken in.
