Authors: Elizabeth Jane Howard
Falling (21 page)
July.
I thought that writing about it would help. It doesn’t. My mind and heart seem to have seized up. If they are to function at all, if I am to think or feel, it will
only be about him. Every ordinary thing is an unbelievable effort. Getting up in the morning (one of the worst), having a bath, making coffee. I sit and make lists of what
should
be
done and then can think of no reason for doing any of it.
There was a piece in the paper this morning about a boy who had lost his dog, and it was found poisoned, but he carried it two miles to a vet – it was a half-grown Labrador –
and he was nine, and the vet saved it. I cried about that all morning. Anything makes me cry. The dog recovered. What was there to cry about?
August.
Anna agrees that I should move out of this flat. She has been so patient with me. We went for a weekend to a cottage she rented in the country – somewhere new to me
where I had never been, in East Anglia. The sun shone all the time, and the cottage had a garden that reminded me of Jess and I told Anna how much Jess had meant to me, the first time I had
been able to tell anyone who seemed to recognize what that had been like. That was the first time since he left when I did not think of him for a whole day. I told her that, and she said,
‘Good,’ but it didn’t seem to me good. I said that if I could forget him so quickly, it must show that I had not really loved him. She asked whether that would matter. It
shook me. I said of course it must matter. We had been for a long walk and were sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea. There was a silence. I said, ‘Surely you agree with that?
Surely you believe in love?’
‘Sure. But I don’t think that feeling has to be permanent to be real. It is real while it is there. And things change. You have an heroic idea of love; you are romantic about
it. It doesn’t always bear the weight of ideals. Ideals seldom take the other person into account. Pass the fags, would you?’
‘So – you mean I expected too much of him?’
‘Possibly. Or too much of yourself.’
I said, ‘It’s difficult to believe that someone loves you if they lie to you.’
‘It certainly is. But Jason didn’t
always
lie to you. I’m sure of that. It was not like someone cold-bloodedly deciding to make you for what it was worth to him.
That would be intolerable. He made you very happy. And truly I think he would have made a success – become a star – whether you had been there or not. That wasn’t the point
for him. He loved you – and then he fell in love with someone else.’ Somehow from her this did not sound brutal.
I said, ‘I see what you mean, and you’re probably right. The fact remains that I don’t think I could ever trust anyone again if they said that they loved me.’
She shrugged. ‘It’s a choice, isn’t it? I mean, if one spent one’s life worrying about being run over, one would never go out. I don’t think that would suit
you. You can choose what you learn from experience, like anything else. Or you can choose
not
to learn.’ She made a curious snorting sound that was nearly a laugh. ‘Look at
me. I was knocked over once, and now I never go out.’
Later I asked her if she would tell me about that, and she said, ‘Sometime,’ which was clearly not to be then.
I am sitting in bed in the cottage writing this. We go home tomorrow, and Anna is taking some time off to help me find a flat. I do love her. That won’t change. But it was the first
conversation I’ve had about Jason that didn’t make me cry – even afterwards, like now.
For several months of the diary there was nothing very interesting.
I took Anna to see the flat in Blomfield Road this morning. It consists of two top floors of a house that looks on to the Regent’s Canal and has two quite large and
two smaller rooms plus a kitchen (very small) and a bathroom (adequate). At the back there is a large garden that belongs to the people below, but it is nice to see it. I can only buy a short
lease, but Anna was enthusiastic about it and infected me with resolution and some excitement. I can start a new life there.
Some weeks later:
My last night here. It is another kind of end that recalls the worst one. I shall be living somewhere where he has never been, that he will never see. Anna is quite right
about making this change of scene, but it is an uprooting – a tearing of him out of my heart. Sentiment? I think this is how people often describe unacceptable feeling in others. When I
think of him now – not as often and not for so long – the pain is still there. I have become used to a celibate life – that ache only returned some weeks ago when I saw him
across the room at a film awards party. I saw his head above the crowd – turned away from me – and felt a sudden thudding movement in the bottom of my spine, not like Katya when
she moved inside me with those tentative velvety tappings, more of a single shocking kick that left me trying to breathe. I wanted him: I would have done anything to have him. It went: he
turned away, someone gave me a drink and then I think he saw me and he moved out of sight.
No: except for that one time, I have become used to the idea that nobody will ever kiss or touch or come into me again. I have
not
become used to the idea that I shall neither love
nor be loved by anyone again in my life. I think the world must be full of secret suffering of this kind – like arsenic or malaria it stays in the body, accumulates or recurs without
control. I think of all the women who have lost men through murder and war – and my loss seems parochial, petty (even possibly my own fault?) in comparison. But I know what their loss
is. I know how people allow or allot you time for mourning, and then want you strapped back into lives more or less like themselves, where different things matter and not so much.
I flipped through the remaining written pages to see whether Jason had been supplanted, but there was no sign of this. Then, mindful of the time when Miss Blackstone had descended upon the
cottage without warning, I cleared up the boxes and stowed their contents away so that I could continue with them when I liked. It was March now: a blustering wind and driving clouds. I had to pay
my daily visit to the boat. This was becoming more and more of a chore, but there were two good reasons for keeping an eye on it: the owners might possibly return – also without warning
– and if and when
she
returned I would have to revert to living there. I locked up the cottage, having carefully surveyed it as a stranger might for signs of my occupation, was
satisfied that there were none, and trudged up the lane to the bridge where I could join the towpath.
I could see that there was something wrong with the boat when I was yards away from her. The hatch doors were open, one of them swinging back and forth in the wind. Someone had broken in.
Children, I thought, boys probably. They had eaten some of the stores – biscuit packets, chocolate papers. Drawers and lockers had been opened but I could find little missing excepting my
penknife (kept with the cutlery), a torch and a fountain pen that I never used. My papers and books had been left untouched, which was something, indeed the most important thing to me. It occurred
to me, however, that if they thought the boat abandoned, they might well be back. There was a padlock for the doors of the saloon, but I had become lazy about using it and the Yale lock had been
easy for them to break. I set about repairing this, and setting the shanks for the padlock more securely. It seemed sensible to spend the night there with the lamp on in the cabin, to which end I
cleaned out and relit the stove (they had made an attempt to light it and it was choked with charred paper). Then I realized that I had neither my sleeping-bag nor anything much to eat and this
meant a trip to the cottage.
It was dark when I set out, the wind had slackened, it was becoming extremely cold and I cursed the interlopers as I trudged along without my boat torch. Perhaps, the next day, I would look at
whether mooring on the non-towpath side of the canal would provide me with greater safety. I had become used to the comforts of the cottage and dreaded nights in the damp boat.
When I reached the cottage, another surprise awaited me – a letter from her. I saved it to read when I had collected the sleeping-bag, a tin of corned beef and some potatoes, and what
remained of a bottle of whisky that I had treated myself to the previous week.
I waited until I had peeled the potatoes and opened the corned beef before I poured the whisky and sat at the saloon table to read the letter.
Dear Mr Kent,
Thank you for your most interesting letter. What an extraordinary story! I hardly know what to say about it, except that the whole affair must have been so painful for you. You describe
the scene with Lady C so well that I almost felt that I was a witness, as though – I hope you will forgive me for saying it – I was at a play. But I can see all too well that it
was no play to you. Just a tragic coincidence which neither you nor the poor girl can have had any idea of. I suppose I can only hope that long since you did find someone whom you could marry
or live with and love. The happily-ever-after theme seems to me to be one of those slick universal unlikelihoods that deceives us all. It would be almost a relief to me if you could tell me
that you did find someone. In answer to your question about whether, when we are young, we all choose the wrong person, I can only say that I suppose many of us must do that. I certainly did.
How much we are taught by our mistakes depends, I suppose, on how much we want to learn from our own experience. I think the chief trap is that we imagine that we learn from perceiving other
people’s, and it is easy to forget that of necessity we view them from some distance (we cannot
be
them or
know
precisely how they feel) and that, what with this middle
distance, rose-coloured spectacles, and the defensive criticism we so often employ about other people, we cannot learn very much. We dub them foolish, irresponsible or selfish without much
consideration either of their needs or their ignorance. I
say
all this, but I do not live it. I can criticize with the best of them. Criticism saves one from trust, and that, I think,
is the hardest thing to have.
I think they are going to let me go quite soon now. I am having another X-ray next week and then they will say whether my bones have healed enough for me to go back to ordinary life
– which means coming home. I shall be very glad of it, and shall come down to the cottage as soon as I am able to drive.
Thank you for the snowdrop. I should have said this before. It was truly a charming thing to do and I keep it. I suppose I shall have missed them entirely, but perhaps there will be
daffodils?
My parents died in a car crash when I was three, but I was more fortunate than you since I had a wonderful aunt who cared for me and was as good as two parents. Your childhood sounds
entirely bleak. I am so sorry.
I am grateful for having such an experienced gardener as well as such a conscientious housekeeper. Thank you for that.
Yours sincerely,
Daisy Langrish
I read and reread the letter until I almost knew it by heart, so full was it of things I wanted to hear. She had begun to be interested in me, that was clear – she had started to confide
in me. And she was likely to return soon. What more could I ask? If all the things that might happen occurred in the right order, it would be easy to deal with them, to respond and give the right
impression. If Daisy, as I now thought of her, gave me due notice of her arrival, I could remove any signs of my occupation of the cottage but make it ready for her with a fire, the water heater
on, flowers, and the basic foodstuffs, which I could leave upon the kitchen table with a small handwritten note and a carefully itemized bill that would confirm her view of my scrupulousness and
honesty. If, on the other hand, she arrived without warning, I might be badly caught out. And supposing, having done that, she elected to pay me a surprise visit on the boat? This seemed unlikely,
but I am not given to dismissing the unlikely. In the morning, I must make a serious attempt to moor the boat on the other side of the canal. It would also be wise to clear the place up a bit in
case she sent Miss Blackstone to find me – another unwelcome thought. This meant a serious clear-up of my numerous papers, which must be locked away. The interlopers had paid no heed to them,
but Miss Blackstone was an observant person, and there were many things I did not want anyone observant to see. I set about this clearing up: over the years I had written a great deal – in
exercise books, on loose sheets of paper, and I too, like Daisy, had envelopes that contained photographs connected with my past life. I opened my last can of beer, lit one of my two remaining
fags, and tried not to get caught into reading or even looking at the stuff I was stashing away. But in the course of putting things in piles to be secreted in carrier-bags, a photograph of Charley
fell out, poor, plain Charley, looking her worst in tight white satin on the arm of the upper-class young bounder who married her. She had given it to me under the mistaken impression that as a
bride she had for once been looking pretty, and of course I had reassured her as to that, the words radiant, innocent and glamorous coming easily to my lips. ‘Oh, Harry! Do you really think
so? It was only because I was all dressed up.’ This, like so many of her remarks, was to encourage further reassurance. (God, how bored I used to get with providing that!)
Her parents – my employers – had managed to endow her with all of their least physically appealing characteristics. Her father was a short, barrel-ribbed little man with eyes too
close together for comfort and a slack mouth. Her mother had a pear-shaped face with a larger pear shape beneath it and legs like a piano’s. Poor old Charley had inherited most of this, plus
a mouthful of teeth that though regular were quite simply the wrong size for someone of five foot four. But the other thing her parents had endowed her with was a monstrously large amount of money
with the promise – she was an only child – of untold wealth to come. The diamond earrings she wore with the white satin were worth a fortune on their own.
