Falling (8 page)

She tried to recognize that he must always – in some sort – have been acting a part (lying) and was choked with bitterness, but when she tried to believe that he had once loved her,
that some of the things he had said, some parts of their time together had been truly felt and meant, grief submerged her utterly and she cried till her throat ached.

About a month later, his agent rang her. He began by saying how sorry he was ‘about the whole business’, and she heard herself agreeing that it had been – was – a pity.
Then he said that Jason wondered whether she had had his letter. Oh, yes, she had received it. She did not say that she now knew it by heart. Ah. Well, Jason had been a little worried, because he
hadn’t had any reply. She said nothing, waited. He
was
a bit anxious to know how she felt about a divorce. Of course, he could get one anyway in time, but he was rather keen to get on
with it – tidy everything up sort of thing.

There was nothing about divorce in his letter, she said. She was beginning to feel a cold anger at having to talk about any of it with someone she hardly knew (cold anger made a nice change). He
was talking again, as though he didn’t believe her but was making allowances – extraordinary, Jason had sworn . . .

‘If he wants to talk about divorce, he can do it face to face. Tell him that. Tell him I don’t want any more letters or other people telling me what he wants.’ And she
rang off.

All very fine, but she soon discovered that she had simply manufactured an unbearable suspense for herself.
Would
he turn up? She realized from the rest of his behaviour that he would
find it very difficult to face her. On the other hand, she suspected that his, or possibly, oh, yes,
Marietta’s
desire to get married would force him to come. Her feelings for him were
by then so grievous that she was entirely divided about what she wanted. She knew that there was no future for her with him; she felt a miserable contempt for his moral cowardice (among other
things); and she loved him more than she had ever loved anyone in her life.

The days – once she had willed herself to get up – were not so bad: she could cram them with action. She decided to move just to get away from the place where she had lived with him,
so she had to start flat-hunting again and force herself to care where she lived. She packed up his clothes and a few other possessions to send round to his agent. There were surprisingly few of
the latter: half a dozen paperbacks, some scripts, his squash racquet, an expensive camera and an album half-full of pictures of them. Their married life in half a small book. If she packed this
last in the case, he would surely throw it away. It was not, she told herself, that she wanted the album; she simply didn’t want it to be destroyed. Why not? Given the situation, why on earth
not?

She had been kneeling on the floor because she had pushed all these things into the bottom drawer of the chest. Now she sat, with her back against the end of the bed, to go through the album for
the last time. Then she would either pack it up with everything else for him, or destroy it herself.

The pictures were pretty evenly divided between ones of them separately, with a few taken of both of them by a friend or passer-by. There were four to a page, and he had written below each one:
‘Avignon’, ‘The ferry to Le Havre’, ‘Kensington Gardens’, ‘Siena’ and so on. She stared at each picture of him, trying to see past his holiday
happiness, his astonishing good looks – so much more endearing because he seemed hardly aware of them, his apparent glowing affection for her . . . but he was an actor, she reminded herself:
he may never have been more than sexually enthralled – if even that. He may just have been fascinated by
her
infatuation. She may have been no more than an adoring audience of one. The
trouble about betrayal was partly the terrible difficulty of knowing when it had begun. It was like liars who destroyed the currency of any words: once you knew that they had lied about anything,
you had no way of knowing that there had ever been any truth, or if there had, where it had ended. She realized drearily that she was crying again, crying and hating him. What was the point of
keeping the pathetic little book, and why should she give him the privilege of destroying it? No doubt, as soon as he got back his camera, he would start a new album with Marietta. She thought for
a moment of destroying the camera (it had been her first birthday present to him) but the idea quickly disappeared: she had no heart for spite or destruction. She wrapped the camera in bubble-wrap
and put it in the case. The album went into the drawer where she kept her underclothes, buried under a pile of nightdresses – just for the present, she had told herself, until I move, until
I’ve made up my mind . . .

He
did
turn up in the end. With almost no warning – rang rather late the night before and asked if he could come at six o’clock the following evening.

Nights had been pretty bad ever since Anna had told her about him – even with sleeping pills she would wake suddenly at three or four in the morning, become instantly and entirely awake,
craving him, body and mind. She would lie, staring into the dark above where his imagined face looked down upon her. She would touch her breasts with his imagined, well-remembered hands, repeat his
endearments that surrounded her name – and then, just as she seemed to have conjured him up, he was gone and she was saturated with his absence, all the fires hissed out by a tidal wave of
reality. She was staring into the dark and there was no one there. But when she woke the night before he came she at once remembered that he was arriving at six o’clock – a mere eleven
and a half hours away. The thought that if he came, if they talked face to face, he might not want to leave her, kept up a kind of impish nagging – why not? It had been known to happen: many
husbands had abandoned a mistress for their wives and not for reasons of guilt! – rather, that the more serious affection had been recognized. It was not impossible. Not
absolutely
impossible, but very unlikely, she thought, trying to shred the hope.

He was nearly a quarter of an hour late, and apologized profusely: ‘Really sorry – I got hung up on the phone and then the traffic was awful.’ He dumped a brand new briefcase
on the hall table and walked past her in the narrow passage and she smelt a citrus aftershave – nothing like his old one.

‘I’ve given up milk,’ he said, when she began pouring the coffee, ‘on a low-fat diet.’ He was tanned and all his clothes were new. She watched him glance round the
familiar room. He had not, so far, met her eye.

‘You wanted to see me,’ he eventually began.

‘I think it was you who wanted to see me.’ She had lit her cigarette with a tolerably steady hand while he told her that he had given up smoking. His blond silken hair had been
bleached and streaked, which gave him an oddly theatrical appearance.

‘Daisy, you know I’m really sorry about what has happened.’

‘Surely not!’

‘For you, I mean.’

It was easy – and pointless – to make him flounder. She felt like Eurydice. He would not look at her, but all hope had died and it would make no difference whether he looked at her
or not.

‘. . . but I could probably ante up something. A few thousand if that would help.’

She stared at him in a silence so long that eventually he did meet her eye.

‘I’m sorry I can’t make it more, but you
have
got the flat.’

I had the flat before I even met you, she thought, but stopped herself saying so: she would not be drawn into a squalid little argument about money.

‘I don’t want any money, thank you!’ She stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Or compensation, I suppose you might call it. I assume you came here because you want a
divorce.’

‘Well – yes, it would be—’

‘Right.’ She wanted him to go now – as quickly as possible. ‘I’ll find a lawyer and get in touch through your agent.’

‘You are being awfully good about all this. I’m really—’ He had got up from his chair and she could feel his relief: he would go back to wherever he was staying with her,
and say, ‘My God, it was so
embarrassing
! Thank God it’s over.’ Things like that.

He had reached the front door, which he opened. A cruising taxi saved him further embarrassment – how do you sign off with someone who has just agreed to divorce you?
‘Taxi!’ he shouted. It stopped, and blowing her a breezy kiss, he was gone. She shut the door as he got into the cab.

In the silence, impregnated by the citrus scent, her knees buckled and she collapsed in the narrow passage. She wanted to be sick, or faint, become unconscious in some way, anything, but not to
cry.

This time it was as though any previous weeping had been a mere suggestion of grief: she was racked by a fit of sobbing that only with sheer physical exhaustion began to subside. She thought of
Marianne Dashwood whose sensibility had up until now always provoked her. At least I can remember that sort of thing, can think a bit again . . .

The doorbell rang. It was laundry day. She could open the door and seize the box. Or simply shout through the letterbox to the man to leave it on the doorstep.

But when she did this, it was Jason’s voice that answered.

‘Terribly sorry, but I left my briefcase.’

She turned back to the hall table. Then she caught sight of her face in the mirror – blotched, swollen, her nose running, her eyes encased in puffy lids that felt scratchy when she
blinked. She picked up the case – all shiny leather and gold initials. She could open the door enough to shove it at him, but not wide enough for him to see her.

It didn’t work out like that. He had been leaning against the door, so when she opened it, he almost fell into the hall. He took the case, began to explain, apologize. ‘Sorry, only
it’s got two scripts that I have to return without fail today . . . Why –
Daisy
! Whatever’s the – oh – darling, oh, my poor love, look at you!’ His arms
were round her: she was engulfed by his tender concern.

‘Oh, do go!’

‘Can’t leave you like this.’

‘Yes, you can. Go on.
Go!’

His arms tightened round her. Then, with one hand, he stroked the hair from her forehead, bent his head and kissed her for a long time – what seemed like the lifetime of their knowing each
other, only it was as though they were moving backwards from this painful end to the elysian beginning.

‘Hang on. I must get rid of the cab.’

She was trembling.

I stopped here, and read the letter. The sentence about seeding the grass was clumsy and I changed it. ‘But as regards seeding, it has either to be done before the November frosts, or we
should have to wait until next March/April, depending upon the weather.’

Phew! That was the money bit over. I had thought this to be the stickiest part of the letter but, in fact, the personal note (which I had been looking forward to writing) proved far
stickier.

‘The cottage seems very empty without you.’ ‘The place seems simply to be waiting for its owner.’ Both managed to be at the same time dull and presumptuous. I was not,
you must understand, having trouble with choosing and phrasing what to write in this first letter because I was unused to writing: most of my spare time is spent writing a journal of sorts that
contrives to blend reality with my imagination – pronounced unusually powerful by my teacher at primary school when I was seven. No, I was having trouble precisely because I knew the pitfalls
– knew how uncertainty represses and distorts communication. I knew that, at times like this, it was necessary to ask myself what it was precisely that I wanted to say – what impression
did I want to give and why?

I wanted her to reply to me. To this end, I had asked questions, but I knew that she might well get Miss Blackstone to relay her wishes – they seemed to be in regular touch. So, how could
I make sure that
she
would reply? I wanted also that she should like me, should recognize that I am not the usual run. What would make her like me? Trust. I could clearly recall that the
first time our eyes met hers were full of wary defence; she was not accustomed to trusting people. I must disarm her, but so gradually that she would be hardly aware of it. I was beginning to feel
really sorry for her: that kind of distrust was nearly always the consequence of some previous, grievous ill-treatment (from a man – they are invariably the culprits). I would protect her
from any further crude and brazen attacks while laying siege to her heart. If she had been lied to, betrayed, abandoned, I would make it up to her; she would become the sole object of my affection,
my concern and care.

I wrote: ‘It may seem extraordinary to you (it does in part to me) but I honestly wish that I knew you better.’