Falling (35 page)

Am I in love? It is three weeks now since we went to bed; we have been lovers for twenty-one days and nights. He has continued to love me with the same wholehearted
emotion and kindness and I have graduated from what I, somewhat defensively, described as some sort of old virgin to what he has described as a normal sensual woman for whom sex has become a
joyous necessity. Indeed, I think I have become more sexual than he, but when I said this to him, he laughed and said it was because I had been starved for so long. ‘Not just of
sex,’ he had added, ‘but of everything that goes with it. My greatest pleasure is giving you pleasure.’

I am afraid that I do not give him enough back, but I have noticed that he often makes me want him and then withholds his favours – teases me – and that he certainly enjoys
that. Sometimes he starts that game in the afternoon and then we go upstairs, but more often he deliberately excites me hours before he will take me to bed. I have begun to enjoy this game.
It is wonderful to want him and to have no shame, no self-conscious reservations at all. ‘You trust me now, don’t you?’ he said yesterday. And I do. Even when he hurt me a
little at the beginning, he was so aware of it and so tender . . . Those are the moments when I do feel love for him.

We still have what he calls bedtime stories and I have learned much more about him, and when I tell him stories, more about myself.

The second night it was his turn and he told me about his very first love – when he was still a boy at school – for a beautiful little girl called Lily. He said it was a case
of worship from afar: she was the daughter of the local doctor, older than he. He used to pick bunches of flowers for her, and once he sent her a chocolate biscuit (a birthday biscuit, he
hardly ever had them) wrapped up in a note with a poem he had written to her. She never answered and quite soon after that she went away. He said he watched her leaving the house with her
parents – she was going to a boarding-school – and then he went into the woods and sobbed his heart out. Poor Henry! He was so isolated, so lonely, and then his father refusing to
let him stay on at school but making him work as a gardener’s boy. Still, I suppose it grounded him with skills to become a garden designer, which he did entirely self-taught. He has
made the most detailed and careful drawing of the extensions, and we have discovered that we do not need planning permission for them, so we took the drawing and had it photocopied and sent
it to two builders who are local – one very near, the other near enough.

I am utterly lazy. I do no work at all. The weather has been the best that June can offer, which is so ravishing that all I want is to be out in the country or the garden. I do read for my
Bronte idea and he encourages me. ‘I would never want to stop you working,’ he said, several times. One evening, we went to a cinema in the town, and ate popcorn and held hands in
the dark, and afterwards we went to a curry restaurant that had hard seats and hot flock paper. It was almost empty. Henry said he would pay, but he had paid for the cinema seats, so I said
he must let me do my share. The bill had vodka on it – a double one – and I said that it was wrong because we had only drunk lager, but he said that he had had a quick drink while
I was in the loo.

On the way home he suddenly said, ‘When we’re married, I’ll take you to India, give you a ride on an elephant.’

I said that we were not going to be married.

He leaned over and put a hand on my breast. ‘Have you not come round to the idea? Just a little?’

I don’t know why (and it was the only time in these weeks) but I felt a tremor – a chill. I said I had told him that I did not want to marry anyone. I had had enough of
marriage.

‘That is because they weren’t the right men for you.’

I said nothing. We did not say anything at all after that all the way home.

When we were back in the cottage he came up to me and put his arms round me. ‘Darling, we’ll do whatever you want.’

That night he asked me to tell him about Jass. I had avoided this particular story, because I was not sure that I could bear to talk about it – and also because it now seemed so
different.
I could no longer remember the good times with Jass – had come to distrust them, to think that I had invented them at the time, and that now, trying to unravel the
truth about him to Henry might destroy this happiness that I have found with him, and turn me back into the frozen, mistrustful creature that I seem to have been for so long.

But he got it out of me. He asked the right questions, he listened, he made no judgements, and when telling him made me weep it was because it felt like such a weight off me or, rather, it
shrank to a size that meant there was no weight. I loved him then. Confidence is such heady stuff; I felt like Othello.

But I no longer love him simply when we are making love. I love him at quite ordinary moments – or I have begun to – particularly when we sit in the evenings each reading. He
is reading the Brontës alongside me; at least he is reading the novels – with the exception of
Jane Eyre
– for the first time and I love his perception, his sharp
appreciation and his willingness to discuss what he reads. I cannot talk about the play that I want to write since the idea is too new and uncertain for exposure to anyone at all, but to talk
of their lives and their work is a wonderful stimulus and I am fascinated by how – coming so fresh to them as he does – he is so quick to pick on salient points of mystery and
interest. The distinctions between their ‘family’ voice and the unique originality of each sister, for instance.

He knows that I keep a diary from time to time, and that it is a piece of writing that is entirely private to me. He said that he understood this the more because he had often written what
he described as notes about his life that he would not want to show to people.

He has told me a good deal more about his present wife. He seems to dislike her intensely, but most of what he has to say about her makes her sound merely dull. She works as a
physiotherapist in a large hospital, I think in Northampton, but he seemed vague about that – said she had moved or had been thinking of moving. When I asked about his house, and what
would happen to it if she moved, he said that he had bought it in her name and therefore it was legally hers. He added that she had burned everything that had personally belonged to him after
he left. He discovered this when he had gone back to collect more things – ‘clothes, books’. He said they ended with nothing to talk about, and that she resented people
coming to the house as ‘they always made so much work’. He said that she disliked sex and had never wanted children. Before I could ask (and I’m not sure whether I would
have done) he said that he married her on the rebound, to assuage the awful loneliness after Charley died. I suppose that this is a much-used answer to what is, after all, an impertinent
question, but it does not really
answer
it. It only answers the general without giving any reason for the particular. Why did he choose Hazel? There must have been something about her,
but I did not feel that I should ask what. He had said at another time that she was cold and mercenary, and surely some of those traits must have been apparent? Even if she tried to conceal
them, I would have thought that somebody with his perceptions would have divined their presence. He said that the whole affair had shown him so clearly that it was against his nature to marry
for any kind of expediency. ‘People with romantic natures, like you and me, should only marry our own kind, and there are fewer of us about.’ When I asked what distinguished the
romantic from anyone else, he went into a list that began with us being risk-takers and ended with our having hard centres like some chocolates; ‘compared to romantics, the others are
like a bunch of violet cream’.

When I asked whether all his women had been romantics, he said no – and that that was how he’d learned his need for them. ‘You get a lot of sentimental people posing as
romantics,’ he said. I said I didn’t think that they were necessarily posing; they might really think that they were or, more likely, not consider the matter at all.