Falling (6 page)

So there had been good times, of course there had, but as she grew older the good times seemed to become tied to the subsequent bad ones with shorter and shorter links. And now she could not
recall her early days with Jason without pain, because every time she thought of him – the first time she saw him at a drinks party on someone’s boat at Chelsea, for instance –
that last awful evening when she had made him come round for a drink and
tell
her to her face that he was leaving, came back and engulfed all other remembrance of him.

They had married three months after meeting, flouting all caution, advice from friends and, for her at least, one or two very faint internal messages of warning. She was forty-five, and he was
seven years younger, although he had an appearance – not unlike Rupert Brooke – that had an agelessly heroic quality about it and which made him look even younger. They had married in a
register office and were given a small lunch party at Prunier by Jason’s agent. Katya was a witness, unsmiling, withdrawn. She had not wanted to come to the lunch; it was only when Daisy had
said, ‘Don’t, if you really don’t want to, but I shall miss you awfully,’ that Katya had relented. Nothing that Jason said to her dissolved Katya’s hostility, and yet,
Daisy thought now, it hadn’t been because she was close to her father and resented this remarriage on his behalf. She hardly ever saw Stach and spoke of him as though he was some sort of
emotional outpost in her life – a boundary that she had neither time nor inclination to reach. But she had always been against Jason, and he, early sensing that she was impervious to his
charm, wasted no more of it upon her. Katya had been twenty-two when Daisy had married Jason and this had accelerated her flight from home and her mother. They had been painfully estranged until
Katya’s sudden marriage to Edwin.

It was while she was away that Jason’s career moved from being successful to his becoming a star. He played the grownup Pip in a six-part drama for television of
Great Expectations,
and at the end of the six weeks of its showing people recognized him in the street. He was interviewed and photographed and asked to appear on chat shows, and offers, mostly within the range of
downright horrible to bizarre, began to flow in. He had been most sweetly excited by his success, very much including her in it. It was true that she had adapted the book, but apart from one, quite
idle, suggestion that it might be worth auditioning him (they were looking for a new face to play Pip), she had no hand in his getting the part. He liked to say afterwards that it had been her
great influence, which initially had made her cross because she felt strongly about nepotism in any shape or form. He had teased her out of this. ‘The point, my darling girl, is that I
wouldn’t have got it if I’d been absolutely
no good.
So graft doesn’t come into it. You just got me the chance.’ Other chances came – not through her –
but they agreed that they should be turned down, although as the winter slowly warmed and lightened to spring, he became fidgety and anxious.

‘Perhaps I won’t get a decent offer. Perhaps one has to take some of these awful jobs while one is waiting.’

‘Only if we couldn’t eat. We eat,’ she reminded him. ‘Anyway – think of them! That fatuous notion of producing
Lear
with a thirty-year-old Lear suffering
from Alzheimer’s. What happens to the daughters, for God’s sake?’

‘They were to be his sisters.’

‘But
why?.’

‘Oh, I agree.
Why?’

‘You haven’t carried spears in respectable productions for years to have to do that.’

‘Nor been various characters’ best friend. Have you noticed how
dull
best friends always are in plays? I suppose it started with Celia in As
You Like It,
and went on
to Horatio.’

‘He’s not so bad.’

They were lying in bed on a Sunday morning.

‘Anyway, you were never Celia,’ she said, shifting luxuriously so that her head lay in the crook of his shoulder. They had made love earlier and her limbs felt becalmed.

‘Yes, I was, at my school. We did a play every year and they kept on casting me in the women’s parts. It was being blond that did it. They had a Dickensian idea of
heroines.’

‘You,’ he said later, ‘would never have done. Apart from being the wrong colour, your hair is like a sort of royal bird’s nest. How about me making some hot
chocolate?’

‘Yes, please.’

Happiness, comfort and joy: remembering now, she had to recognize that the good time had lasted for nearly two years. It had not been so fleeting as afterwards she had imagined. For the whole of
the rest of that year and most of the next she had been so happy with him that nothing else had seemed to matter at all.

She loved his even, sanguine temperament, his physical beauty, his jokes, his imitations of people and animals, his clowning mime, all thrown off with spontaneous ease, his charming, light, true
singing voice, his greed about chocolate, anything chocolate, his passion for every kind of game and his determination to win every one that he played. In company he treated her with tenderness and
courtesy; alone, he would tease her, take her off and then, in the midst of these games, drop it all to declare his love and the degree of it for her. ‘For
you,
my amazing beauty, I
think you were made for me. Nobody has ever come so near to being everything I want in the ways that you are. Think if you’d never gone to that party, I might never have found you.
Wouldn’t that be sad?’ He would elaborate on this theme: ‘Or you might have been on your way to the party when you were waylaid by some bewitching chap who carried you off to some
handy lair or other while I was stuck on that boat knocking back warmer and warmer gin and tonics (do you remember how quickly they ran out of ice at that party?). And all I would get would be the
headlines, “Ravishing Playwright Carried Off by Wealthy Plutocrat.” At least the pictures of you don’t look painfully like you. So I wouldn’t have absolutely known what I
was missing.’ Every time he indulged these fantasies,
she
imagined what it would have been like
not
to have met him,
not
to have fallen in love with him. She would have
been slogging along, working fairly hard, being her own personal staff, with the exception of Anna – secretary, cook, housekeeper, accountant – much as she did now. She would have taken
comfort from and sometimes refuge in various friends: there are always some people who quite enjoy an unattached free person who is more likely to be available to them. She would give herself small
treats like massage – the only way of getting touched – or buying expensive clothes like her lovely poppy jacket. She would treat herself to an opera or a gardenia in a pot, or a bottle
of good scent. Once she had tried a winter weekend break in Venice by herself, but in spite of (she thought) strenuous and thoughtful efforts to enjoy herself, she had not succeeded. It had been
beautiful and bitterly cold and she had felt loneliness in a general manner and on a scale hitherto unknown to her. ‘I can’t go on like this!’ ‘For the rest of my
life?’ Getting back to her silent, empty flat had actually been a relief. It was full of her things, her life, was hers. Here, it seemed to say, she could be allowed choice and chance. People
wrote her letters, rang her up here. But the fantasy of a life without Jason had been all very well; she need only imagine it when she chose to; it simply pointed up the wondrous relief of life
with
him.

There had been two years of unalloyed happiness. And then, suddenly, there had been his contract with Paramount, and Marietta. They seemed to happen at the same time, but afterwards she realized
that Marietta must have occurred some time before the contract. They had been to a party after a first night and across the room she saw this small, birdlike creature in a mini-dress of dark red
velvet, arriving on the arm of a fat, bearded man whose face seemed vaguely familiar. She noticed the girl because she was looking at her; there, for a second, they held each other’s gaze,
then the girl put up a small white hand and patted the man’s beard, laughing at him. She had turned to Jason.

‘Who is that?’

‘Who?’

‘That girl. Over there. She was looking at us.’

‘Was she? Oh – that’s Marietta Reed. Friend of Bernard’s. Didn’t you meet her at that Boat Race lunch?’

She was deflected. ‘That’s Bernard? Good Lord, when did he grow that beard?’

‘He grew it for Falstaff. He’s had it for ages. You can’t have been at his lunch.’

‘I had an abscess on a tooth, you remember? You went without me. And then you stayed so long and I was famished and there was nothing to eat in the flat.’

He was about to reply when Bernard was upon them: delighted to see her – to see both of them. Been on tour and they were opening in London next week – oh, this was Marietta Reed.
She’d been in Ireland making a picture. There – introductions made. His beard tickled like a fir tree.

Marietta said, ‘How do you do?’ She had the slightly common vowel sounds of the truly upper class.

‘Very well, thank you,’ Jason was saying. ‘This is Daisy, my wife.’

‘Oh, yes. I recognized you. I thought
Great Expectations
was stunning.’

She was tiny. Everything about her seemed miniature, except her eyes, which were huge and velvet and the colour of bitter chocolate.

She remembered that Bernard had suggested they have supper together, and Jason had refused. ‘Rather be with you,’ he’d said; the sort of thing he said so often that she had
almost stopped hearing him. They went to their local Indian restaurant and talked about the Hollywood offer. Initially, he was to go over to make one picture with the studio reserving a fairly
open-ended option. ‘I won’t have to
live
there, will I?’ he had said. He always seemed to expect her to have the answers to that sort of thing.

‘I shouldn’t think so. Not unless they keep on and
on
wanting you to do things for them. Which they probably will.’

There was a pause, then he said, ‘I’ll miss you, darling. Horribly.’

‘I could come out and join you.’

‘Oh, no, I don’t think so. I think I’ve got to find my feet first.’

In retrospect, that evening was full of minute warning signals, and she had observed none of them.

‘After all,’ he said, ‘I shan’t be there long. And if I’m not with you, you’ll get stuck in with the play.’

Hours later: ‘I distract you, don’t I?’

They were home, naked and in bed, and he lay propped on one elbow, his free hand caressing the back of her neck.

‘No, no. You don’t at all.’

‘Oh,
don’t
I?’ His hand slid round from her neck to her left breast, and instantly her whole body was alerted.

‘Have I – inadvertently – started a small bush fire?’

She could not answer. She ached for him and blushed to ache – something that had never happened to her with Stach. With Jason, he had only to reach out and touch her and she would start to
tremble, and the frequency and familiarity that marriage had engendered had simply refined and accelerated the process. The knowledge, that evening, that he was about to go away, be out of reach
for weeks at least, only sharpened her nervous excitement to a point where she felt it could be assuaged.

The night before he left for America they went to the Ritz. He arranged it – it had been his idea and he had wanted it to be a surprise. He had chosen well: a beautiful room, a bowl of
yellow roses and a bottle of champagne; nectarines in a silver dish and autumn evening sun filtering through the muslin curtains that shrouded them from the park. The setting for a honeymoon night,
she had thought, but they had been married for two and a half years, and just as she was thinking that there was something contrived about the scene, he had said, ‘A touch of unreality is
what I was aiming at. Very good for one, don’t you agree?’

She watched him, intent upon opening the champagne, the usual lock of silky yellow hair falling across his cheekbone, his beautiful hands untwisting the wire over the cork and easing it out of
the bottle with momentous care . . . out! He was pouring it into the flutes, bringing hers to her. He looked so beautiful, so much all of a piece that she felt momentarily overwhelmed that
something so dazzling existed and, more, that she knew him and he loved her, that tears rushed to her eyes.

‘Daisy! Darling!’

‘It’s all right – perfectly all right.’

‘I know what it is.’

She looked up into his eyes, the colour of woodsmoke, bent so tenderly upon her.

‘Do you really?’

‘Listen. Either it will be six weeks like they said, or if it turns out to be longer, you’ll join me.’

He did not even ask her if he was right about the tears. She raised her glass. ‘Here’s to the star.’

They both drank and then he tilted the glass towards her. ‘And here’s to
my
star.’

They finished the champagne, and went down to dinner, and she saw how – it seemed to her – every woman in the room noticed him, and then her and then him again, although he seemed
unaware of any of it. It hadn’t always been like this, but she supposed that from now onwards there would be more and more of it.

He ordered all her favourite food and an extremely expensive bottle of claret, which they had with grouse after the vodka with their blinis: far more than they usually drank, but somehow the
evening never took off. It was as though each of them was waiting for whatever was happening to be over – there was a railway-station air to the dinner.

Back in their room, the sight of her artistically laid-out nightdress on the turned-down bed made her long to be at home, in their rather grotty, dark little flat that they were always going to
move from when they had the money. Tomorrow night she would be back there – sleeping alone. Indeed, they might already have spent their last night there together, it having been agreed that
she should find a new place for them while he was away. The flat had been hers before she met Jason, but it now seemed completely to be
theirs
– she hated to think of it without him.
She began to dread being alone there, but then, there he was, arms round her, asking her what was the matter, no, he knew that something was, what was it, tell him, if she loved him she could tell
him anything.