Falling (23 page)

I wrote several notes to Daisy as I grew more and more anxious about her reaction to my letter, but something stopped me from sending them – some sense that if I had put my foot in it, any
follow-up would only make it worse.

Then, one morning, as I was taking the opportunity between showers to lay out some pieces of York stone to see if they were enough to make a decent pathway to the front door, I heard a car
approaching. It was slowing, and I knew it was coming to the cottage. For a split second I thought it might be Daisy, but if so she was not in her own car. I resisted the temptation to stand up and
see what was going on, reckoning that steadily pursuing my job would make the better impression.

The car had stopped, I heard the door slam, and the sound of the latch on the garden gate. Then I stood. I was the caretaker, after all.

It wasn’t Daisy.

‘You must be Henry Kent,’ said a voice I recognized.

‘And you are Mrs Moreland.’

‘How did you know?’

Looking at her, I would have known anyway from the photographs. A youngish woman with a wealth of dark hair scraped from her forehead and arranged in coils at the back of her head. She had green
eyes and a wide mouth that became very attractive when she smiled. ‘I recognized your voice from our telephone conversation.’

‘I’ve driven miles. Any chance of a cup of coffee or tea or anything?’

‘I believe there is some Nescafe.’

‘Oh, good! I’ll get it, you needn’t bother. I’ve got a key.’

‘The door is open anyway. I’ve been airing the place. It hasn’t got a damp course.’

She walked into the cottage without replying. I wondered how she had got a key.

Then she called, ‘Do you want one?’

‘Thanks.’

I followed her to the kitchen. My lunch was lying on the table and I saw her looking at it.

‘I usually eat in here when I’m gardening. It’s either too cold or too wet outside.’ I was aching to ask
the
question, but something warned me not to seem too
eager. It was not until the kettle had boiled and we were stirring the coffee in our mugs – we had sat at the table to do this – that I said, ‘And how is your mother?’

‘I don’t know exactly. But she called her agent saying that she wanted to come straight down here when she gets back, and Miss Blackstone called me because she couldn’t get
away to come down here this week and could I have a look at the place and see whether it is feasible for her to come. My ma is not the most practical person. Anna says she’s still quite lame,
and I want to look at things like the staircase and the bath to see if she can manage. How far is the nearest shop? Because I don’t know whether she can drive, and she obviously can’t
walk far with shopping and stuff. I suppose there are taxis?’

‘I could drive her.’

She looked at me appraisingly.

‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Size me up.’ I could see that she was doing this, and did not want her to get too serious. ‘I’m sixty-five,’ I said. ‘I’m
caretaking a boat on the canal for friends. Just a temporary situation. I walk past this cottage most days on my way to the village. When I saw it was taken I asked your mother if she wanted a
gardener. That’s all there is to it really. Then when she was away for so long, she asked if I’d keep the cottage aired for her. I admire your mother very much – have always been
interested in writers, although I can’t say I’ve known many of them. But reading and gardens have been my life.’

I watched her listening to this, which was easy, since I always find it better to look people straight in the eye: they seem to find it reassuring, and I have a better notion of how I am being
received.

She had a very expressive face. I could see questions forming in her mind only a second before I knew what they were.

‘Yes, I have been married – am in fact in the process of trying to get a divorce, but my wife, since she is sitting in my house with my property and money at her disposal, is in no
hurry. Fair enough, I suppose, since she married me for what I had rather than anything that I am.’

‘Oh.’ After a moment, she added, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Not your problem. I’m perfectly all right. I don’t need much, and the money your mother pays me just about makes everything work.’

‘Were you brought up in the West Country?’

‘You’ve got sharp ears.’

‘Where?’

‘Wiltshire. Those were the early years. After the war I got a job in Kent.’

There was a short silence; then, I said, ‘I feel as though I’m being interviewed.’

‘If you feel that, you’re probably right.’ She pushed back her chair and stood up. ‘I’m going to have a look upstairs.’

I washed up our mugs and, without thinking, lit a cigarette. Better smoke it outside, I thought. I knew somehow that she did not smoke. The path was going to turn out nicely. I guessed the stone
had been bought for it by the previous owner.

She did not look like, or seem to be at all like, her mother. She had arrived in a duffel jacket but had taken it off in the cottage to reveal a plaid shirt with pockets over each ample breast,
and a full skirt that was tightly belted. It was easy to imagine her without any clothes at all – a practice, I must admit, that I have often employed. Apart from any sexual frisson, or
otherwise, it can bring insights that are sometimes useful. It was important to get Katya to like me, or to trust me enough to consider me favourably.

‘Mr Kent!’

She was sitting on the arm of the sofa rummaging in her shoulder-bag.

‘It’s really quite nice,’ she said, ‘but there are one or two things that need doing. I thought if I made a list you could find a builder or a handyman to do it all. Only
it needs doing quickly, because she might turn up any time now.’

‘Tell me what you want. I could probably do it.’

It turned out that she wanted a rail put in for the staircase. ‘It’s pretty steep, and she ought to have something to hang on to,’ and some similar rail for getting in and out
of the bath. ‘And I think she ought to have a phone in her bedroom.’

I said I couldn’t do the telephone, but the rails would be easy, except that the nearest DIY shop was ten miles away.

‘If I took you there, we could buy the stuff today, only we must go now, because I’ve got a long drive home.’

I said that would be fine. We locked up the cottage and left.

She had an old Volvo, rather battered, the back littered with children’s clobber. She was a good driver.

‘We didn’t measure the staircase.’

‘I did.’

‘You are very practical, aren’t you? I’m most impressed.’

‘I’m practical for other people, not particularly for myself. I’m always losing things and forgetting things, stuff like that.’

She made two more remarks about her mother between long intervals of silence.

‘My mother needs looking after in that kind of way. And there isn’t anyone to do it for her. Except Anna, of course. But Anna only has a certain amount of time for that kind of
thing. She
thinks
she’s awfully practical and realistic, all that sort of thing, but she isn’t really.’

‘You sound like a very good daughter.’

‘Oh, no!’ Then she said, ‘I’m better
about
her than I am
to
her.’

She did not seem disposed to talk, so I confined myself to telling her the way.

After we had bought all the rails and screws etc., she said she wanted to go to a supermarket to buy stores for her mother. ‘There is a fridge, isn’t there? Is it working?’

‘I think so.’

She bought a load of stuff – cocoa, tea, a tin of drinking chocolate, ‘Ma has always been crazy about chocolate,’ butter, packets of salami and ham, eggs and bacon, ‘if
she doesn’t come back in a week you’d better eat them’, onions and garlic and tins of tomatoes, sardines and anchovies, packets of spaghetti, and rice and muesli, and honey and
morello-cherry jam, ‘my father loved it, we always had that when I was a child’, loo paper and washing-up stuff and six bottles of red wine, ‘she only drinks wine and she
doesn’t like white’, three bars of very dark chocolate and some electric lightbulbs, ‘the one in her room by the bed is bust’. Then she bought two egg sandwiches and some
oranges. ‘I’ll have a quick bite before I start for home.’ We drove back, unloaded everything and I said I would go to the boat to fetch my tools while she had her lunch.

‘You don’t have to. You haven’t had your lunch.’

So we sat again at the kitchen table, and she made tea and we ate our sandwiches – mine were Spam. She rang to arrange for an extension of the telephone, and I said I would make sure to be
at the cottage all of the day that the engineers were supposed to come. By then she was much more at ease with me – curious. She kept asking me questions about what work I had done or did. I
told her about being a garden designer.

‘But how did you
learn
about gardens?’

‘I worked on a big estate when I was a boy. They had everything there. A succession of stove houses, a lake and water garden, high-walled kitchen garden, borders, parterres, orchards,
shrubbery, the lot.’

‘It sounds like Rackham.’

I was astonished by this. ‘How did you know?’

She shrugged. ‘Just guessed. There aren’t so many places like that left now, are there? Though people say it’s become rather run down. And the National Trust didn’t want
it because the house is really rather grotesque. Simply huge but without any architectural distinction, Edwin says. He’s interested in that sort of thing. And then you went to Kent, you
said.’

‘Yes. Another large place, but the people weren’t short of money to keep
that
up.’

‘Where was that?’

‘Oh – not far from Sevenoaks. It wasn’t Knole. I don’t think you’d have heard of it. It was much smaller, more ordinary.’

‘You said it was large just now.’

‘Most places are smaller than Rackham. Isn’t it my turn now?’

‘For what?’

‘To ask questions.’

She looked surprised, then she smiled – a rather conscious, flirting smile. ‘Why not? It seems only fair.’

So, over the short time that was left before she went, I did glean a few pieces of information. I learned, for instance, that she didn’t like living in the country much, that the annual
family holiday to Brittany did not fulfil her desire for travel. I deduced that her marriage was going through a sticky stage, that she felt isolated and generally unsure of what to do with her
life.

‘In the country there seem only to be occupations – I want a
career.’
Later, she said, ‘I’m not creative like my mother, or I could sit at home and
paint
or something. She’s awfully lucky to have that. Although,’ she added, ‘she hasn’t been so lucky in other ways.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, I know he was my father, but I can see now that he can’t have been easy to live with. Impossible, really. He’s always falling in love with someone and then falling in
love with someone else. His last woman was nearly ten years younger than I am. And he drinks far too much and never has any money. His whole life is like a bad part for a good actor, if you know
what I mean. I can see now why my mother had to leave him, although I hated her for it at the time.’

‘Then she married an actor, didn’t she?’

‘She sure did. He was a shit, if ever there was one. I always knew he was, but she is so trusting. She thought it was the big romance of her life. As soon as he became a film star, he left
her for Marietta Reed – you know, the actress.’

‘That must have been hard.’

‘It was. She was about fifty when he left, and it seemed like the end of her life. Of course, in a way, it would be – one wouldn’t expect to find anyone else at her
age.’

‘Do you really think that?’

‘Not men. Men can always find someone. But women are up against all the much younger women who go for older men.’ She looked at me: cynicism suited her pale green eyes. ‘I bet
you could do it if you wanted to.’

‘Eh?’

‘Find some sweet young thing and chat her up. It doesn’t work the other way round.’

‘Cleopatra was much older than Antony.’

‘Oh, well. There have to be exceptions.’ She said this rather airily, as though they were only there to be dismissed.

Then she said she must leave and I went with her to the car.

‘Did she ask you to make this path?’

‘No. She asked me to do the garden, and the stone was stacked in the garage. It was obviously meant for a path.’

‘Well, you do take trouble.’

‘Thank you, ma’am. I aim to please.’

‘I should think most of the time you succeed.’

‘Will you let me know when your mother will be coming?’

‘If she tells
me.
How do I let you know?’

‘Supposing I say I’ll be at the cottage every morning between eleven and twelve? You could ring me.’

‘All right. Thanks for all you’re doing. Don’t forget the telephone engineers. I don’t like to think of her alone here without a phone by her bed.’

‘Of course I won’t.’

She seemed unsure of how to end our meeting, but after she’d found her car keys she held out her hand. I took it, brought it to within an inch of my lips, and then – meeting her eye
– I kissed it.

‘Heavens! Rather baroque of you!’

‘That’s what I am: baroque.’

When I could no longer hear the car, I went back to the kitchen. For a while, I simply sat at the table and thought about Daisy. I thought about the first time that I had seen her – in her
raincoat and boots and the man’s hat that had concealed her marvellous hair. I relived my initial surge of excitement, the memory of my first searching sight of that Elizabethan face, and the
next day lighting the fire for her while she came and went from the kitchen to the fire offering me tea, the tray laid on the embroidered cushion. I remembered her high, clear voice – her
taking off her hat. When I had exhausted my memories, I moved on to my imagination. Then she had removed the poppy-embroidered jacket after the fire got going, and now I removed the black
high-necked jersey: she held her arms obediently over her head while I peeled it off her. This was the moment when patience and no haste at all invariably paid off. I would not slide the shoulder
straps of her camisole or make any attempt to unhook her bra: I would talk gently to her of my admiration for her beauty, I would hold and kiss her hands, I would declare my love, but in tones so
protective and tender that she would feel reassured; lust would be concealed by awe and when I told her how I would give my life neither to hurt nor betray her, she would feel treasured and safe
and able to respond.