Falling

I am not in love – I am not. So what is it that is happening – in me, to me, about me? I am confused, incapable of thought ... Or if I have thoughts, they contradict one another as fast as they come. So I resort to my old habit of trying to write myself into clarity, or acceptance or comprehension – whatever is needed. He has gone to pump out the wretched boat, so I have some hours to myself that I need to sort things out. Already I seem to have two selves, two parallel lives, and I have no control over whether they will merge into one, or divide more and more widely until one is outdistanced by the other.

For instance, it was not he who asked if he might spend the night with me last night, I asked him. The moment that I said it I felt afraid, and the other part of me jeered and gabbled; what was the point of holding love dear, allotting it such significance, mourning its loss so greatly (as, indeed, I have done) if the slightest indication of its presence puts me to flight? It makes me nothing but words, a craven creature devoted merely to attitudes. You would not say, ‘Life is supremely valuable to me, but I don’t think I’ll have it now.’ That is poorly put. I suppose I mean that opportunity, like chance, is not necessarily a fine thing, but sometimes it is there. If I never trust anyone, there will be no one to trust. I might endure that, but how could I want it?

He seems to have no conflict at all. Ever since I have known him he has shown me nothing but the most gentle kindness. Last night he was the same. When he got into bed with me I was shaking so much that I was embarrassed by my own fear. He took me in his arms and said, ‘I’m not going to fuck you. I’m simply going to be with you.’

And that is what happened. He put the lamp on the floor so that the room was full of shadows and subdued light. I said that I had not been to bed with anyone for nearly ten years (this was some sort of apology for shaking so much). Much later, when I was naked, I heard myself trying to excuse my body – the stripes and blue veins on my breasts from feeding Katya, and he said that I was inside my stripes and that it was me he loved. ‘If you were marked all over, like a zebra, I should love you.’ All through the night he told me that he loved me – kissed me and touched me with real tenderness. Some time after the dawn chorus when I discovered, waking, that I had fallen asleep, I found him propped on one elbow looking down at me, and as I saw him, he smiled and as he began to kiss me again he covered my left breast with his hand and at once I started to tremble, but not from fear. But when I told him that I wanted him, he stroked my face and said, ‘You’re not ready yet.’

I felt such an amazing, such a sweet sense of relief, that there was time and that I could take it and that he understood my need, that I could have wept, but he sensed that too, and diverted me.

It was some hours later during that timeless night that I recognized and could accept his unconditional love, and then, for the first time in my life, I felt free to be nothing but myself. Years slipped away from me until I was ageless, without shame or my lifelong anxieties that I was not giving enough, pulling my weight, doing or being what might be expected of me, all the armour I had always used when someone was going through the motions of intimacy with what I now realized had always been a stranger. I did not feel a stranger to him, and the extent of his strangeness to me was simply as much a pleasure as a mystery.

When it was light, he went downstairs to make tea and he sat on the side of the bed while we drank it, and we talked, exchanging small desultory facts about ourselves. I asked him how he had come to have such a passion for reading, and he said that he supposed it was an escape. When I said it was clear that he didn’t read escapist literature, he said that escape didn’t equate with unreality, it was simply different. ‘Often,’ he said, ‘it seems more real than my own life. And far more variable.’

Then he said, ‘We must think of a way to celebrate this day.’

‘Haven’t you got to do the boat?’

‘Oh. Have I got to? Well, supposing I spend a couple of hours and then come back and, if you will allow me to, bath and shave and then take you out to lunch? Will that do?’

I agreed. I did not think that he ought to afford to take me to lunch, but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I said a pub by the canal somewhere would be nice.

Now he has gone to the boat, and I have bathed and dressed and here I am in the garden with my diary.

That awful boat! I had no idea what it was like and I certainly had not realized that he did not even own it. Poor man! It is hard to imagine how someone so sensitive and intelligent could stand such a life – the discomfort, the isolation, the squalor! I suppose that, until he gets his divorce, that wife will continue to sit in their house and he will have no money to buy anywhere else. And yet I don’t see how he can get the work that he is clearly so good at remaining where he is. No wonder he wanted to do my garden so much, although he has earned very little money from it. Perhaps, when I offered him more money for all that he has done for me during these past weeks, it was not nearly enough. If I had had nurses, or a housekeeper or, indeed, anyone living in, as he has been doing, it would have cost three times as much. Perhaps I should . . .

But here she stopped; somehow, after the last night, it would be invidious to offer him more money. It would seem as though – she felt herself blushing, something that seldom happened when she was alone. No, a man – anyone – who was poor and honourable must have pride, and not to respect that would be patronising and altogether offensive. He had never complained about his life, and what he had told her of it, coupled with what she now knew about him, engendered a kind of admiration for him that was new to her. In spite of neglect and cruelty in childhood, and then a series of dreadful – in the case of his Charley, tragic – events, he had somehow managed to keep his freshness of heart, almost a kind of innocence that touched her.

Whatever happens, I must not hurt him: he has surely had enough of that. I must be clear and honest, never lead him to think I care more for him than is true. But what is that? Well, if I don’t know, I should tell him so.

But then she thought that any kind of uncertainty about degrees of involvement – or love – seemed only to make the other person infer what they wished. So she must keep her uncertainty to herself.

What I do know, she thought later, as she shut up the diary, is that last night I wanted him. Pure lust, I suppose, something that I don’t think I have ever felt before in my life (I thought I loved Stach; I knew I loved Jass) but that is what it was. And while she could acknowledge that to herself, the idea of telling him made her . . . But she did tell him! She said she wanted him. And he could easily have translated that into her falling in love with him.

The trouble with you, she told herself angrily, is that, due to being sixty, you have old-fashioned schoolgirl notions about this kind of thing. You manage to be too old and too young in the same breath. And then she remembered how she had felt in the night when he had given her time; how she seemed to become no age at all. All those sensations and memories were but a few hours old and perhaps suited only to the privacy and nakedness of night.

At any rate, she suddenly felt extremely shy of meeting him when he came back from the boat, and took refuge in household chores, ironing her shirts in the kitchen with the back door open for it was going to be a very hot day. She ironed to music, a Mozart piano concerto – one of the late ones – but when she reached the slow movement she stopped ironing and abandoned herself to its slow, gentle insistence, had never noticed before how erotic this particular movement was. But perhaps it was not Mozart, it was her perception that had changed. Any minute now, she mocked, the slow, gentle insistence of the iron on your nightdress will have much the same effect.

‘It’s a series. They want you to make six programmes in pairs back to back.’

‘Oh. It’s one of those guess-who’s-written-this jobs. They want you as a team captain. You have two different people on your team for each programme and you play against the other lot. It’s a live audience, going out at six p.m. You’d need to stay the night, I should think. But if Anthony has a friend staying with him in your flat you could always stay with me.’

‘You can. But I know that that means you don’t want to do it. Easier to say now, wouldn’t it be? They don’t pay much,’ she added. ‘I’ll say you’re working. Which is true, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, soon. Let me finish the new play treatment first. Then you can read it and we can talk. You know how that gets me going.’ She could hear herself gabbling and she guessed that Anna could hear it too.

‘He’s working on his boat, but he still does a good deal for me. He’s not a serf,’ she added: the notion made her feel angry.

‘I tried yesterday. But it was awful.’ And she told Anna about the cat. It was a relief to have something of this kind to tell her – something where she was not withholding anything. But after she’d told about not actually killing the poor cat, and Henry having to finish it off, she fell silent.

‘How very upsetting. But it probably wasn’t your fault, Daisy, just awful bad luck. It might have happened to anyone.’

‘It must be true, then, mustn’t it? Nearly forgot. Anthony was asking about you.’

‘How you were. How you were getting on in the country. Whether you were ever coming back. He sent his love and said that, in spite of his loathing for rural life, he would brave it one weekend to see you.’

‘Oh. Good. Give him my love. As soon as I’ve finished this treatment, I’ll have a weekend party.’ Then she could hear Anna’s other line ringing, and Anna saying she must answer it.

It was an uncomfortable relief when she rang off. Daisy was not accustomed to withholding anything from Anna, but she knew she didn’t want to talk about Henry with her at all. Anna would not understand. Anna might take – probably would take – the view that Henry was not good enough for her. And we all know what that means, she told herself grimly. It was snobbery barely concealed by a kind of nannyish concern. She did not want to expose Henry to any of that. He was quite intelligent and sensitive enough to be acutely aware of any patronage from people who fancied themselves better born. Look what he’d endured from the mother of the first girl he had been in love with. She certainly didn’t want to put herself into a position with Anna, Anthony, etc., where even being defensive could appear as patronage.

What was the matter with her? Neither Anna nor Anthony were snobs – of course they weren’t. Anthony, particularly, was one of those people who was at home anywhere or nowhere, depending upon the observer’s point of view. He described himself as ‘a colonial gay’, had left South Africa when he was eighteen and never gone back. She had met him in his set-designing days when he had mounted her first television play and they had at once become friends, although his appearances in her life were widely spaced due to his roving nature: ‘My autobiography will be called Up Sticks’; he had once, when reminding her of it, added gloomily that at the rate things were going (his life was regularly punctuated by emotional crises) it could well end up as Up the Styx.

Anyway, shortly after the play he had gone to Paris because of a new love, and there he had taken to photography at which he became very good. When she met him some years later, he greeted her as though they had been meeting every day for weeks, with a kind of buoyant intimacy and delight that was infectious, and she felt as suddenly delighted to see him. He never seemed to have regular work, and had long since given up the camera for painting; had got into an art school and actually stuck it for two years. He was larky and graceful and always seemed to have very expensive clothes in spite of his earnings being spasmodic and dicey. ‘I incite generosity, darling,’ he had once remarked, when she had admired a particularly beautiful Versace jacket.

She would have to explain him a bit to Henry, if he did come. Would she have to explain Henry to him? Less likely, she thought, with affection. Anthony was very good at liking people, at harping, as he put it, on their finer points.

Anna’s call made her realize how thoroughly she had cut herself off from her London working world. It also made her wonder what was happening in Katya’s life. She had rung three times now and left messages. The first time somebody she did not recognize had said that Katya wasn’t back yet. The second time one of the children had answered and said that Mummy had gone to see a friend. The third time – in the evening – she had simply got an answering-machine. Now it occurred to her that Katya must have got at least one of the messages, and it was odd that she had not responded. She dialled the number and got the machine again. She thought then of ringing Edwin, but she didn’t even know the name of his practice. She set about Directory Enquiries – there could not be many medical practices in Dorchester – but when she finally got the right number she was told that Dr Moreland was visiting and would not be back until two when he would be taking surgery. She left a message asking him to ring his mother-in-law any time after six.

All this was a far cry from what was happening to her here – now – with Henry. Quite soon he would be back from his boat and she did not know how to meet him, how they would be, what they would talk about – ordinary things, as though nothing had happened between them? They had been naked and she had accepted his love without returning it – what could that mean to him? What could she say to him in recompense that would also be true? How could she pretend that everything was as it had been before she had tried to drive her car and killed the poor little cat? She was conscious of an unfamiliar simmering excitement, but it was encased in dread. She heard the gate click and looked wildly round for some immediate escape.

11

DAISY