Love Falls
Authors: Esther Freud
Love Falls
ESTHER FREUD
For my sister, Bella
Contents
‘I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned my friend Caroline,’ Lambert said as a thick white plate of kedgeree arrived at the table and was set down on the linen cloth in front of Lara, ‘but I had a letter this morning, and . . .’ He paused to acknowledge the arrival of his chops. ‘It seems she’s not at all well.’
‘Oh. I mean, no. I don’t think you have.’ Lara stared down at the slivers of browned fish, the gold yolk of the egg, the parsley sticking to the rice. She wanted to start but it seemed rude. ‘Is she very . . .?’ She never knew if you were allowed to mention age to people who were old. ‘Is she . . .’ She said it brightly. ‘Very old?’
‘Well . . .’ Her father took up a sharp knife and cut into the meat. ‘Not terribly. A few years more than me. Sixty-ish, maybe?’ He sighed. ‘Quite young.’
Lara nodded as she scooped up her first mouthful, the soft grains cinnamon and clove-scented, the tiny seeds of caraway cracking between her teeth, and wondered when, if ever, she would think of sixty-ish as young.
‘It made me wonder,’ her father continued while the waiter poured tea, ‘if I shouldn’t visit. She’s taken a house in Italy for the summer. She takes one every year, her late husband was Italian, and every year she invites me, but this time . . . this time I thought I actually might go.’
He looked down then, frowning, giving Lara a chance to observe him, see how this declaration was affecting him, a man who made it a point never to leave London, had not left it, as far as she knew, since before she was born. Why, she’d asked him once, do you never travel? And he’d shrugged and said why travel when you’re already in the best place there is?
For a while they ate in silence and then, still chewing, he fixed Lara with a look. ‘Have you ever been?’
‘Where?’
‘To Italy.’
Lara shook her head. She’d been to India with her mother on a bus, through Belgium, Germany, Greece and Turkey, through Iran (although they’d called it Persia to make the days pass faster) into Afghanistan and across the Khyber Pass. She’d been to Scotland too, had lived there for seven years, so maybe that didn’t count, but she’d never been to Italy.
He was still looking at her. ‘I thought maybe you’d like to come.’
‘With you?’
He nodded.
‘Really? I mean yes. I would.’
They smiled at each other – a seal on their pact, and then spirals of alarm, of dread, of delirious excitement shot through her body with such force that her appetite disappeared and finishing her breakfast seemed suddenly as arduous a task as being asked to plough a field.
Lara’s father, Lambert Gold, lived in a dark and thickly padded flat halfway up a wide, carpeted stairway. There was a small kitchen, a small sitting room, a large study, and a bedroom into which she’d only ever glanced, but which had a pale-green plant of such beauty growing up against one wall that it always surprised her, it seemed so out of keeping with the dark interior of the rest of the flat. Through the half-open door the heart-shaped leaves and twining stems seemed to be actually breathing, stretching towards the light, shivering very slightly in a breeze, the leaves always in spring colour, whatever time of year. This plant was the one thing that reminded her that Lambert had ever known her mother. She also had a plant, a lemon-scented geranium on a low table beside her bed, but unlike Lambert’s – for which she didn’t have a name – the geranium was forever changing, ageing, growing new shoots, darkening and lightening with the time of year. The stalk was gnarled and brown, the dead leaves dropped in a little curling pile on to the plate below, but when you rubbed against it a scent so rich and airy filled the room that it made you stop whatever you were doing, and breathe in.
Ever since she’d known her father, and it bothered Lara sometimes that she couldn’t remember the day they’d met, he’d been writing a history of Britain in the twentieth century. Some sections of it had already been published, a fact he railed against, because each time this happened it meant his work schedule was disrupted by requests for articles, interviews, letters to which he must reply. There was a sense about him that he was warding off interruption, must really, ideally, never be disturbed, so that it meant the few people who did see him felt themselves to be the chosen, and every second spent in his time was a gift bestowed.
Lambert’s real name was Wolfgang Goldstein. As a child he’d been known as Wolf, but he’d renamed himself three months after arriving in London, seeing his new name in print for the first time the day after his eighteenth birthday when he’d written an angry letter to
The Times
. Why did you choose Lambert? Lara asked him, wondering what she would call herself if her own name – Lara Olgalissia Riley – ever became more of a burden that it was worth, and he said he chose Lambert because it was less threatening than Wolfgang but still related, a sort of private joke to himself. He’d come across it in the obituary pages of the newspaper, William Lambert ‘Bertie’ Percival, a colonel in the army who’d died peacefully in his sleep. What had his letter been about? She always forgot to ask him – and when she did remember the moment was never right.
Lambert was fifteen when he first came to England. He’d been sent out of Austria in the year before the war, the precious only son of his parents, and as if this was to be his fate, to be precious, he’d been taken in and fostered by the Holts. Sir Anthony and Lady Anne had four grown children, a flat in Belgravia and a house in Dorset, where for his own safety Lambert spent the first years of the war, trawling through their ancient library, shaking the dust off books that had often not been opened for years. The Holts had doted on him, considered him a genius with his perfect English, his knowledge of music, theatre and art, and would sometimes invite their friends to consult him on his understanding of the politics that had made Austria and Germany so ready to rally behind Hitler in the war.
Lara’s mother Cathy had once met Lady Holt. It was a chance meeting. Cathy and Lambert were walking along Piccadilly towards Green Park, when Lady Holt, a stout woman with small piercing eyes, had swung out through the doors of Fortnum and Mason. Lambert had introduced them, said Cathy was a student of English literature at the college where he lectured, but Lady Holt had screwed up her eyes until they were almost invisible and glancing at Cathy’s pregnant tummy had asked if it wasn’t terribly tiring, studying so close to her time. ‘I’m surprised your husband allows it,’ she said.
Cathy looked at Lambert, and seeing he had no intention of enlightening his adopted mother, she stuttered and mumbled and shook her head. ‘No, it’s not tiring at all,’ she’d blushed.
‘But why didn’t Lady Holt think you were his girlfriend?’ Lara felt affronted – on her mother’s behalf, and – if you could be affronted on behalf of yourself while still in the womb – for herself too, but Cathy only laughed.
‘Your father always insisted he would never marry, never have children. Said he wasn’t fit. Well, at the time I didn’t believe him. I was only nineteen. But Lady Holt obviously understood him better.’
‘But why?’ Lara didn’t understand.
Cathy put an arm around her. ‘It hasn’t turned out so badly, has it?’ and she kissed the side of her head.
Lambert and Lara were travelling to Italy by train. The train, Lambert decided, would be more civilised, more comfortable than a plane – they could dine in style in the restaurant car, but they both knew the thirty-six hours of the journey would give him more time to adjust to the idea of leaving Britain. ‘We’ve got a very early start, so it may be easier if you stay the night at me,’ he suggested. ‘Then we’ll be sure we don’t lose each other at the station.’
‘Right,’ Lara agreed, as if this were all quite normal, and so, on a warm evening in July, three months after her seventeenth birthday, and one week before the Royal Wedding for which the whole of London was being swept and decorated and prepared, she heaved her bag up the steps of his Kensington block, rang the bell, and prepared to spend the first night of her life under her father’s roof.
‘Welcome, please, come in.’ Lambert nodded formally, his accent, for some reason, unusually pronounced, and for a moment they stood self-consciously together in the hall. ‘I’ve eaten,’ he said, as if this might be a worry, had better be made clear, and, even though she assured him she’d eaten too, he backed into the kitchen where he opened the fridge. It was tall and white, much larger than the one she and her mother owned, but much emptier too. There was half a lemon, a bottle of old milk and something flat wrapped in white paper.
‘I have some tongue?’ he offered tentatively.
But she told him she’d had macaroni cheese. ‘I ate with Mum,’ and she patted her stomach as if she really had.
There was no spare room at Lambert’s so instead he made up a bed for Lara on the sofa in his study with a sheet and a tartan rug he used to drape over himself when he was cold. But hard as they searched they could not find a pillow. Eventually they discovered that the leather seat of his armchair came away if you tugged at it hard enough and so they wrapped it in a towel and propped it up on the end of her make-shift bed.
Goodnight, they said, once Lara was in her nightie, having brushed her teeth and washed her face, and she tried not to listen as he took his turn in the bathroom. She read her book, shutting off her ears to the arc of his pissing, the clunk and roar of the flush, and then, some minutes later, the choking humorous gargle as he rinsed his mouth. She slept lightly, the ridges of the buttoned leather sofa making her dream she was at sea, shifting between one smooth wave and the next, and then too soon, but also after an endless buffeting, she heard the pull of the sitting-room curtains and felt bright sunlight stream in against her face.
‘Morning,’ Lambert greeted her, and seeing she was awake he moved off to the kitchen to fill the kettle.
It was wordless, their arrangement, seamless, as if they’d lived together all their lives. Lambert stayed in the kitchen while she pulled on her clothes. Then he, still in his dressing gown, shut the door into his bedroom, while Lara slipped into the bathroom, washed her face, examining it with microscopic scrutiny in the harsh morning light, grimacing at the dark round of a pimple lurking below the surface of her cheek. She brushed her hair, arranging it so that a strand fell over the spot, and then, dissatisfied, she fluffed it up so that it didn’t fall so flatly on her head. Don’t look, she told herself, still looking, knowing her attempts were hopeless, and despair settling like a black umbrella collapsing, she arranged her features into one of optimism, and forced herself away.
Lambert already had the tickets. How did he get them? It seemed inconceivable that he’d gone out and bought them – made his way to the station – stood patiently in a queue. Or maybe someone had done it for him? Someone practical, who knew about these things. Lara looked them over in the taxi. Two return tickets for the boat train, from Victoria Station right through to Pisa. All they had to do was find the platform, the train for Dover, their seats.
