Falling (5 page)

He had been delighted by the birth of Katya, who was named after his mother – shot by the Russians for harbouring a Jew only weeks before the end of the war in Europe. Whenever Katya
cried, he picked her up and walked her up and down, crooning to her in Polish, exclaiming upon unknown – to Daisy – family resemblances and predicting a fairytale future of health,
wealth and happiness for his daughter. ‘The eyes are like my sister’s!’ His sister had been raped by five Russian soldiers and had died years later in an asylum. Whenever, even
now, she thought about Stach’s family, or rather lack of it, since all of them one way or another had been destroyed, she felt a rush of protective love for him. The Poles had really been
sold down the river at Yalta, their heroism, hardship in no way recompensed, and she felt it was up to her to try and make it up to him. Katya was all his family now, and then, in those early weeks
of their daughter’s life, she had thought that perhaps all would become well – that love would find a way. But it gradually became clear that hers certainly would not and that his
– if it existed beyond physical adventure – would always be distracted. This situation was compounded by the fact that Stach earned money only spasmodically and was likely to have
parted with most of it before it reached her. It was then that she had started to look for work that she could do at home and sometimes found it. She read plays for a new company that had started,
and when Katya was old enough to go to nursery school she cleaned the house of a film director and his French wife. In the evenings, when usually Stach was out, she wrote a novel about a young
woman who married a foreigner and had a small baby. Nobody wanted to publish the novel. One editor did actually offer to see her, and she went to the office trembling with hope. After waiting in a
passage that contained the switchboard and its operator, she was fetched by a tired-looking man who conducted her to what seemed like an enlarged cupboard that contained two chairs and a table with
an unsteady mountain of typescripts. When they were both seated, he offered her a cigarette and plunged straight in.

‘Is this your first novel?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, a jolly good start anyway.’ He cleared his throat. ‘You did say in your letter that you wanted an opinion?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘Well, you have a very good ear for dialogue. Really excellent.’

There was a pause, so long that she said, ‘But nothing else much?’

‘I wouldn’t say that, exactly. It’s more to do with – I mean, take your heroine’s husband. He’s a bit of a caricature of a foreigner, isn’t he? I mean,
just because he’s Polish it doesn’t follow that he’d get drunk and sing in the street or keep
on
having all those affairs with girls. I mean, she wouldn’t stay with
him, would she, if he was as awful as that?’

She gave a small, acquiescent shrug: ‘I suppose not.’ Not in a novel, anyway, she thought on the bus home as she grappled unavailingly with the chasm between art and life. The point
was not whether she had drawn a good likeness in her portrait of Stach (who
was,
she knew, an almost operatic character), it was that she had not made him seem credible. But other thoughts
came out of that meeting. Why
did
she stay with Stach if he was, as Mr Milnethorpe had suggested, as awful as that? At first she shied away from consideration of this uncomfortable question,
but it returned at odd and unexpected intervals, trapping her each time into some negative admission. One, she didn’t stay with him because she loved him; two, she didn’t stay because
of Katya; three, she didn’t stay because of money. She didn’t stay because any of it was fun, and she most certainly didn’t stay in order to prevent her family from saying they
had told her so. Marriage to Stach had brought all the social isolation, domestic responsibility and lack of freedom associated so often with the state, but without the attendant compensating joys
of chronic intimacy, companionship and, of course, a regular sex life. None of these did she have.

After many essays into work with some glamour attached to it (he was, after all, a war hero) he had settled for the last two years into driving cabs or cars for various companies. Every now and
then he slipped up, drank too much too near a job and got sacked. But most of the time he had a remarkable discipline about his drinking, which he explained he had learned from flying. You did not
drink before you took a plane up, but you made up for it at other times. But sitting in cabs was extremely hard on his back, and this was another reason why he had to lay off. This did not
necessarily mean that she saw more of him; it was then that he conducted his affairs.

She remembered now, as she lay in the dark, the first time that she had experimented with the idea of leaving him. It had been after she had reread her novel and decided that there was nothing
she wanted to do to it. I might as well put it in the dustbin, she had thought, get on with something else. That had been the moment. Yes, why
not
get on with something else? And now for
something completely different . . . Such thoughts had at first to be disowned but this did not get rid of them. She agonized over his probable despair and helplessness: he could not sew on a
button or boil an egg – in spite, she thought, beginning to laugh at herself, of being in close proximity for nearly twelve years with someone who was constantly doing such things . . . Oh,
really! But the end, when it came, was sudden and painless. He announced one evening that he was going to be away for a couple of weeks and she told him not to come back. He had stared at her in
silence then said, ‘Whatever you like, of course.’ As he was stuffing the shirts she had ironed into a bag, he had said, ‘I understand you are jealous. I cannot blame you for it.
But with me, as you know, these things do not last long. It will all change and be better, you will see.’

From this she gathered that he did not believe that she meant what she said. It had been in July, and she had taken Katya out of school a week early and gone to her aunt’s house in
Brighton. From there she had written him a letter addressed to the flat reiterating her decision to leave him. She would not try to prevent him from seeing Katya; she did not wish to return to the
flat except to collect the rest of her and Katya’s clothes, and from now on he was financially responsible for it. Her aunt, an antique dealer who lived in a small, elegant Regency house
filled with exquisite furniture, seemed neutral about these arrangements.

And then Stach suddenly appeared and said, enough of this nonsense, he had come to take them home. It was August, early evening; not quite the end of a stifling day that now threatened thunder,
and she and Aunt Jess, having washed salad and deadheaded the petunias, were just settling down to a bottle of white wine in the pretty garden when the doorbell rang.

‘She’s forgotten her key again. All right, Daisy, I’ll get her.’ Aunt Jess adored Katya and thought that she was often too hard on her. She heard a man’s voice and
recognized that it was Stach’s, and then he was in the room making his announcement.

When she did not immediately answer, her aunt said, ‘Has it occurred to you that she may not want to do that?’

‘Everything occurs to me, but I do not always take notice.’

She realized then that he had been drinking – not a great deal, she guessed, but enough to face them with bravado.

‘Well, I don’t want to. I wrote to you about it and said what I meant.’

He stared at her for a moment, then said histrionically, ‘And what about my daughter? What about my child? You
cannot
be so heartless as to take her away from me.’

‘I said I wouldn’t stop you seeing her, but she will live with me.’

‘I wish to see her. I wish to ask
her
about that.’

‘Stach, you can’t. You’ve no right to upset her with ideas like that when you know perfectly well that it wouldn’t be practical for you to look after her.’

She was getting sucked into familiar black holes of conflict and unreason.

She remembered again how grateful she had been for Aunt Jess’s presence and the knowledge that her support was unequivocal. It wasn’t that she always thought I was right about
things, she just loved me. She recalled trying to explain what this had meant to her – several times and to different people – after Jess had died, and she had discovered what a lonely
business mourning could be if there was nobody who had known the person, and how trying to talk about it to strangers simply made her miss her aunt more.

It would never go, she thought, as she sat up in bed to turn off the light. She had read, or someone had said to her, that grief diminished with time, but this was not her experience. Her sense
of loss had remained life-sized and as fresh as it had been nearly twenty years ago. After Jess died she had no family left, no home where she had been and could in some sort still be the child.
She was in the front line, with Katya but nobody else. Her parents had both died in a car accident when she was not quite three – she could not honestly remember them. It had been Jess
Langrish, her father’s sister, who had taken her on. She would get up and go into the kitchen and make tea. At her age it did not matter whether one slept a great deal or not.

She was nearly as old now, she thought, as Jess had been when she died of cancer aged sixty-four. She was sixty, a grandmother – Katya had married a doctor and lived in the West Country
– and she earned a surprising (to her) amount of money. Now, she could easily have afforded to keep Jess’s house, which had been left to her with its contents, but the legacy had
coincided with Katya starting at university, and debts, due to being more or less out of work for the previous year as she had been spending as much time as possible with Jess, ultimately nursing
her. At the time she had told herself that perhaps it was as well that the house had to go: it contained so much of Jess and her life with Jess that she might have found that she could not bear the
place without her. She kept some of the contents – the furniture, pictures, china, things she had remembered all her life – and when Katya married she gave some of them to her.

She had made tea and smoked a cigarette and her watch said half past three. Why did insomnia always seem to ally itself to pain and fear and grief? Why could she not lie in the dark revelling in
joyful or at least pleasant bits of the past? The answer or answers to that were neither reassuring nor complimentary to her nature. Her life seemed to have been composed more of difficulty than
ease, more of pain than pleasure, and while her losses were permanent – she did not wish either Stach or Jason back in her life and Jess was inexorably gone – her gains seemed always to
be temporary. But she knew, or had glimpsed, that this sense of having been short-changed went with a kind of greed that demanded of anything good that it should persist before it could be
appreciated. The only good memories she had were when she had lived entirely in their present, which became timeless if you were really in it.

She was back in bed and as she lay down she remembered climbing into Jess’s bed after a nightmare, and feeling Jess’s bony but wonderfully comforting arms round her and her voice,
full of endearments that were inexpressibly soothing, as she made her tell everything about the bad dream until it became puny and meaningless. Then, ‘Would you like a hot drink, pet?’
Aunt Jess would say, and she would say yes, and while Jess was away making it she would lie reiterating all the blissful affection: the words, ‘My pet, my little Daisy, my best girl, I love
you, all right, don’t you worry about that. I won’t let a single sea serpent into the house, they’d soon find they’d come to the wrong place, they would.’ Kisses,
hugs, strokings. ‘Your little feet are like ice!’ ‘Blow your nose, my sweetheart, you’ll feel better if you can breathe properly.’ ‘I won’t be long. You
lie there and think what you’d like to do on your birthday.’ She had been going to be seven, and happy then. And, of course, there had been other times when she was growing up –
particularly the wonderful first week in Brighton where Aunt Jess moved them when she was eleven. ‘Better schools for you, pet, and a very good place for my trade.’ And the sea! The
idea of living near the sea seemed a fantastic luxury. They had moved at the beginning of the Easter holidays. By noon the movers had dumped everything in the house, drunk tea provided by Aunt
Jess, pocketed their tips and left them standing in the kitchen that was littered with tea chests, muddy footprints on the black-and-white-check lino (it had been raining) and screws of grey
newspaper from the mugs that they had unpacked for the tea.

‘What do we do now?’

She remembered so clearly the way Aunt Jess had opened her mouth to say something then shut it; the way her expression had changed when their eyes met and then her saying, ‘I think before
we do anything else we should go and see the sea, don’t you agree?’ Oh, she
did!
She wanted to see it every day – to make the most of the marvellous chance. It had stopped
raining, but the streets were shiny and glistening in the sunlight. They had walked to the end of their road and turned right into a wider street that descended quite steeply towards the cloudy
green-grey sea at the bottom. When they reached the front they went down some steps that led to the beach.

‘Shall we bathe?’

‘It will be too cold, pet, but you can paddle if you like. I’m going to settle here for a bit.’ And she sat, with her back against a breakwater, and smoothed her sensible tweed
skirt over her knees.

The sea had been deeply cold: it seemed at once to go straight through her skin into her bones, although she could not go far into the water because the beach shelved so steeply and the waves
surged in different shapes and sizes. There was a lovely smell, which wasn’t exactly fish, or exactly salt or even seaweed but a bit of all three. Then, quite suddenly, the sun went in and it
seemed darker and another shower poured down. She went back to her aunt then as fast as she could, and put her wet bare feet into her shoes without the socks and they started back up the steps.
They were looking up the street they had come down, and at the top and a little to the left was a rainbow ‘It’s pointing to our house,’ Aunt Jess had said, and she felt as though
she had been stabbed with tremendous happiness, with joy, as though God had said, ‘What a good thing you have come to live here.’ She watched until the rainbow had dissolved, but by
then they were nearly home. Aunt Jess stopped at a fish and chip shop and bought them their lunch. Later in her life, after she had grown up, she would sometimes buy fish and chips simply to remind
herself of that blissful first day.