Falling

Am I in love? It is three weeks now since we went to bed; we have been lovers for twenty-one days and nights. He has continued to love me with the same wholehearted emotion and kindness and I have graduated from what I, somewhat defensively, described as some sort of old virgin to what he has described as a normal sensual woman for whom sex has become a joyous necessity. Indeed, I think I have become more sexual than he, but when I said this to him, he laughed and said it was because I had been starved for so long. ‘Not just of sex,’ he had added, ‘but of everything that goes with it. My greatest pleasure is giving you pleasure.’

I am afraid that I do not give him enough back, but I have noticed that he often makes me want him and then withholds his favours – teases me – and that he certainly enjoys that. Sometimes he starts that game in the afternoon and then we go upstairs, but more often he deliberately excites me hours before he will take me to bed. I have begun to enjoy this game. It is wonderful to want him and to have no shame, no self-conscious reservations at all. ‘You trust me now, don’t you?’ he said yesterday. And I do. Even when he hurt me a little at the beginning, he was so aware of it and so tender . . . Those are the moments when I do feel love for him.

We still have what he calls bedtime stories and I have learned much more about him, and when I tell him stories, more about myself.

The second night it was his turn and he told me about his very first love – when he was still a boy at school – for a beautiful little girl called Lily. He said it was a case of worship from afar: she was the daughter of the local doctor, older than he. He used to pick bunches of flowers for her, and once he sent her a chocolate biscuit (a birthday biscuit, he hardly ever had them) wrapped up in a note with a poem he had written to her. She never answered and quite soon after that she went away. He said he watched her leaving the house with her parents – she was going to a boarding-school – and then he went into the woods and sobbed his heart out. Poor Henry! He was so isolated, so lonely, and then his father refusing to let him stay on at school but making him work as a gardener’s boy. Still, I suppose it grounded him with skills to become a garden designer, which he did entirely self-taught. He has made the most detailed and careful drawing of the extensions, and we have discovered that we do not need planning permission for them, so we took the drawing and had it photocopied and sent it to two builders who are local – one very near, the other near enough.

I am utterly lazy. I do no work at all. The weather has been the best that June can offer, which is so ravishing that all I want is to be out in the country or the garden. I do read for my Bronte idea and he encourages me. ‘I would never want to stop you working,’ he said, several times. One evening, we went to a cinema in the town, and ate popcorn and held hands in the dark, and afterwards we went to a curry restaurant that had hard seats and hot flock paper. It was almost empty. Henry said he would pay, but he had paid for the cinema seats, so I said he must let me do my share. The bill had vodka on it – a double one – and I said that it was wrong because we had only drunk lager, but he said that he had had a quick drink while I was in the loo.

On the way home he suddenly said, ‘When we’re married, I’ll take you to India, give you a ride on an elephant.’

I said that we were not going to be married.

He leaned over and put a hand on my breast. ‘Have you not come round to the idea? Just a little?’

I don’t know why (and it was the only time in these weeks) but I felt a tremor – a chill. I said I had told him that I did not want to marry anyone. I had had enough of marriage.

‘That is because they weren’t the right men for you.’

I said nothing. We did not say anything at all after that all the way home.

When we were back in the cottage he came up to me and put his arms round me. ‘Darling, we’ll do whatever you want.’

That night he asked me to tell him about Jass. I had avoided this particular story, because I was not sure that I could bear to talk about it – and also because it now seemed so different. I could no longer remember the good times with Jass – had come to distrust them, to think that I had invented them at the time, and that now, trying to unravel the truth about him to Henry might destroy this happiness that I have found with him, and turn me back into the frozen, mistrustful creature that I seem to have been for so long.

But he got it out of me. He asked the right questions, he listened, he made no judgements, and when telling him made me weep it was because it felt like such a weight off me or, rather, it shrank to a size that meant there was no weight. I loved him then. Confidence is such heady stuff; I felt like Othello.

But I no longer love him simply when we are making love. I love him at quite ordinary moments – or I have begun to – particularly when we sit in the evenings each reading. He is reading the Brontës alongside me; at least he is reading the novels – with the exception of Jane Eyre – for the first time and I love his perception, his sharp appreciation and his willingness to discuss what he reads. I cannot talk about the play that I want to write since the idea is too new and uncertain for exposure to anyone at all, but to talk of their lives and their work is a wonderful stimulus and I am fascinated by how – coming so fresh to them as he does – he is so quick to pick on salient points of mystery and interest. The distinctions between their ‘family’ voice and the unique originality of each sister, for instance.

He knows that I keep a diary from time to time, and that it is a piece of writing that is entirely private to me. He said that he understood this the more because he had often written what he described as notes about his life that he would not want to show to people.

He has told me a good deal more about his present wife. He seems to dislike her intensely, but most of what he has to say about her makes her sound merely dull. She works as a physiotherapist in a large hospital, I think in Northampton, but he seemed vague about that – said she had moved or had been thinking of moving. When I asked about his house, and what would happen to it if she moved, he said that he had bought it in her name and therefore it was legally hers. He added that she had burned everything that had personally belonged to him after he left. He discovered this when he had gone back to collect more things – ‘clothes, books’. He said they ended with nothing to talk about, and that she resented people coming to the house as ‘they always made so much work’. He said that she disliked sex and had never wanted children. Before I could ask (and I’m not sure whether I would have done) he said that he married her on the rebound, to assuage the awful loneliness after Charley died. I suppose that this is a much-used answer to what is, after all, an impertinent question, but it does not really answer it. It only answers the general without giving any reason for the particular. Why did he choose Hazel? There must have been something about her, but I did not feel that I should ask what. He had said at another time that she was cold and mercenary, and surely some of those traits must have been apparent? Even if she tried to conceal them, I would have thought that somebody with his perceptions would have divined their presence. He said that the whole affair had shown him so clearly that it was against his nature to marry for any kind of expediency. ‘People with romantic natures, like you and me, should only marry our own kind, and there are fewer of us about.’ When I asked what distinguished the romantic from anyone else, he went into a list that began with us being risk-takers and ended with our having hard centres like some chocolates; ‘compared to romantics, the others are like a bunch of violet cream’.

When I asked whether all his women had been romantics, he said no – and that that was how he’d learned his need for them. ‘You get a lot of sentimental people posing as romantics,’ he said. I said I didn’t think that they were necessarily posing; they might really think that they were or, more likely, not consider the matter at all.

She stopped writing there because of toothache. It was the middle of the morning and Henry had gone to his boat, which he had not done for some days. She realized, as she made a cup of tea to drink with her paracetamol, that in fact a tooth had been troubling her for some time. She had had twinges with hot or cold drinks, and once when she had tried to bite an apple. But now it seemed to need no such excuses, settled into a dull, throbbing ache that subsided briefly from the painkillers, but returned with renewed vigour three hours later. Henry had returned while she was asleep on the sofa, and was sitting reading in the chair by the fireplace when she awoke.

‘I can see you have,’ he had replied when she told him of her toothache. ‘Your poor face is all swollen on the left side. Shall I ring up that doctor and ask where the nearest dentist is to be found?’

But she had a fear of strange dentists. She rang Mr Ponsonby in London, who actually answered the telephone, as he said his secretary had ‘flu. ‘Come round now, if you like. You might have to wait a bit, but I’ll fit you in.’

She explained that she was in the country. It would take her about three hours to get to him.

‘Oh. Well, try and make it before six thirty if you can.’ ‘Oh, I can. I will. Thank you so much.’

An hour later, she was sitting in the train. She had rung Anna, who was free and delighted to have her for the night; she had packed a rucksack and taken more paracetamol and tied a silk scarf over her head to shield her face. It was an abscess, she was fairly sure, and she dreaded the possibility of losing the tooth far more than the pain.

Henry had – of course – driven her to the station. He had been concerned and helped her in every way he could think of.

‘I shall miss you this evening,’ he said in the car. ‘That’s not exactly true. I shall miss you from the moment I can no longer see the train until I see the train tomorrow arriving with you in it. What time will you come?’

On the platform he kissed her very carefully on the good side of her face. ‘Oh, darling! I hate to see you in pain. I wish I was coming with you.’

But in the train she felt a sudden lightness – a relief at being alone, a state that she was used to and had been without for weeks now. It was lovely to be so watched, so responded to, so appreciated, but it was also remarkably peaceful to – as it were – stand at ease, to be anonymous and unobserved. It was simply that having an affair, living with, beginning to love another person, shifted everything else about life, and change, of any kind, while it was exhilarating, had also a certain amount of fatigue attached. My age, she thought – rather sadly. Once it would simply have been exhilarating.

None the less, in a taxi on her way to Anna’s, after a successful session with Mr Ponsonby (‘I don’t see any reason for you to lose this tooth’), who drained her abscess and administered some far more effective pills, she thought of Henry, alone in the cottage, heating up the shepherd’s pie she had made. She thought of how quietly he moved, how expressive were his eyes that seemed instantly to mirror her mood, the way he talked to her when they were making love, his unselfishness in everyday matters (‘You have it’, ‘I didn’t want to wake you’, ‘I thought you might prefer the shade’), and affection – desire for him – melded into something very like love. Shall I tell Anna? she thought. No, she would wait a bit before that.

It wasn’t until after two stiff Ricard en tomate – Anna’s new summer drink – and a rather dilatory and unfinished talk on her Bronte play, refusing Anna’s offer to take her out to dinner and settling for cold lamb and a green salad at home, that a comfortable silence prevailed, and they lay back in their respective battered old armchairs eyeing one another with discerning affection. She thought that Anna looked tired.

‘Ah. Well, don’t get rid of your London flat until you’ve spent a winter there.’

‘Oh, yes. And there’s something about me that cries out for people to look after.’

‘Daisy? What’s up? You look beautiful and happy, and I’ve only known you look like that when you are working really well, or when you are in love.’

Anna immediately pushed the bottle of wine towards her and there was silence while she concentrated upon pouring some. But when she had finished and taken a swig there was nothing for it but to meet Anna’s watchful eye.

‘As a matter of fact he does. But I don’t want to. I don’t want to marry anyone – else.’

‘Exactly! Well, I do. I know a very great deal. He’s not just a simple gardener’s son, you know.’

‘Daisy, darling, I’m not being a snob about him. I’m probably being one about you. I don’t care a damn who his father was. I care about whether he’s good enough for you. You are too like Jane Bennet. Of whom do you ever think ill? I’m the opposite: I think ill until otherwise convinced. So – tell me all about him.’

She had been going to begin with a biography, the wretched childhood, the childhood friendship that developed into his first love, but now she dropped all that. Anna could read the letter some time. She said: ‘The most important thing about Henry is his capacity to love. He’s the first person in my life who seems to love me whatever I am – ill or well. He couldn’t have done more for me after that fall, and he never presumed upon my helplessness. I mean he didn’t try to be with me all the time – you know, meals, et cetera. He stayed in the cottage because I needed someone there. He got the doctor, he dressed my wounds, he used to take me to the lavatory, but somehow it was all easy and all right.’

She looked at Anna, to see if she was being understood, but all she could tell was that Anna was listening.

‘The second thing – important thing – is that although he really has had a most difficult, sad life, he seems to be utterly without resentment. I know that if some of the things that have happened to him, had happened to me, I should be a mass of bitterness. He isn’t that at all.’

‘Oh, he discovered that the girl he loved first – Daphne – was actually his half-sister. He wasn’t even given the chance to say goodbye to her. Daphne’s mother simply packed him off to another job with the blackmail that if he didn’t take it he would get no other reference from her.’

‘Do you mean that the girl’s mother had had an affair with Mr Kent’s father?’

‘Heavens, no! There’s masses more. By then the war had started, and when he was eighteen, he was called up. The old couple who owned the place had no money, he said, to keep it up. The head gardener was well past retiring age, but they were never going to afford another one. He went back there to get a reference from them but they’d gone. The husband had died and the widow had sold the place to a couple from London. It had all been done up, and he went to see if they’d give him a job and they did, and this time he was the head gardener, with a cottage and a boy to help him. He said they were the opposite of the last owners, had a lot of money – the man was a banker and they wanted to turn the house and garden into a showplace. They put in a huge S-shaped swimming pool and—’

‘Oh, what happened was that he fell in love with their daughter. She – her name was Charley – was already married to a colleague of the father, who more or less bludgeoned her into it when she was too young to face up to him. Henry said she was paralysingly shy and her father had always bullied her and the man married her because she was an heiress. He was horrible to her, and she used to come home for weekends when he went abroad. Henry got to know her that way. He came across her crying in the swimming pool very early in the morning and he said that, although she never talked about it, he had the distinct impression that she was trying to get up the courage to drown herself. He took her back to his cottage and fried her a breakfast and got her to tell him about herself. That was how it began. Eighteen months later she ran away with him. Her husband refused to divorce her, and her father cut her off – would have nothing to do with her. Henry said they were always short of money, but that they were so happy it didn’t matter in the least. They had a tiny basement flat in Camden Town, and he worked as a jobbing gardener and started designing people’s small London gardens. She died very suddenly, a heart-attack. They had only been together for a few months, not quite a year. He wrote to the parents, but they did not even come to the funeral. That’s what happened.’

He adored her. He said the only comfort he could take was that he knew she had been so happy during those months.’

‘This was all a long time ago.’ Anna’s voice was gentle; she was well aware of Daisy’s tender heart.

‘Yes. I suppose it was. But he said it was the most awful thing in his life.’

‘Anyway,’ Daisy said, when she had finished blowing her nose, ‘he did marry someone else in the end. I don’t know how long after Charley but he said it was some kind of rebound. It was a complete flop. They’re supposed to be having a divorce. I don’t think that’s making him particularly sad. He just sort of wrote it off. But you see what I mean about not being resentful.’

‘No. You can bring things out to me.’ This was all ritual. Anna’s kitchen would hold only one person at a time.

When they were back in the two battered armchairs with coffee, Daisy said, ‘So now I’ve told you.’

‘I don’t – much. I’m just enjoying each day. And night,’ she added, and felt herself start to blush.

‘No. I don’t think he has any where we are. I do want you to meet him,’ she added, ‘I didn’t mean to sound meagre about it.’

Afterwards, in bed in Anna’s little spare room, she wondered why the idea of other people meeting Henry made her feel so defensive. Was she afraid that Anna would not like him? Or wouldn’t like him for the wrong reasons? She sensed that Henry was of the kind who was at his best when he was alone with one other person: she could not easily imagine him in company.

‘And you’ve been shopping, I see.’ He took the carrierbags from her as they walked along the platform.

‘If I bare my teeth, there is. He didn’t have to take it out. Such a relief!’

‘Oh, my darling love! I tortured myself last night with the idea you might not return.’

‘I would never do that! Just disappear.’ She was faintly shocked that he could fear such a thing.

‘Oh, well. One gets to imagining things on one’s own. Shall we stop for a drink at that pub near the river?’

They sat at what had become their table because this was their third visit. The garden was nearly empty, although the long table was laid for a dinner. Fairy-lights – unlit – were strung through the lower branches of the trees or pinned to the top of the trellis that edged the garden. Apart from a few unspeakable roses (Henry’s description), nothing much was grown, and the grass was worn rather than mown. It was the kind of place that needed furnishing with people, but apart from themselves and the pub’s cat – an opulent ginger who was walking petulantly on a long table laid for supper – there was only one other couple with a baby in a pram.

They sat silently for a while. She was very much aware that he was watching her, and her pleasure at seeing him was blurred by some sudden anxiety about how she should tell him that Anna was coming to stay.

‘I expect she’s against me. I’m not good enough for you, something of that kind.’

‘It’s not that, exactly,’ she began, and then – surprisingly – heard herself saying, ‘but it’s not easy to explain how one is in love.’

His expression changed. He took her hand and kissed it. ‘Oh, my dearest love! Of course we’ll wait until we’re home.’

When they were back he led her, her suitcase in one of his hands, her hand in the other, straight upstairs where he pushed her back on to the bed and, holding her shoulders so hard that she could not move her arms, he began to kiss her, stopping twice to say, ‘Can you tell me how you love me, my darling? Can you?’ But when she tried to speak he stopped her.

He made love to her until she was too weak to move or to speak – past all urgency, all streaming, until she felt like an empty seashell, as though if he gathered her up and listened to her he would hear the echoes of past loving, the ceaseless waves with their peaks and their troughs that were now imprinted in her. Then there was one last time and even in the stupor of exhaustion she sensed that he had at last got what he wanted.

She must have fallen instantly asleep, because the next thing she was aware of was the room full of warm grey dusk, turned to a darker violet where the window reflected the sky. He was not there, but she could hear him moving below. She got out of bed – she was still tired and her limbs felt stiff – and crept quietly to the bathroom; she did not want him to see her naked, for some reason. Indeed, she thought, as she pulled her dressing-gown round her, she was afraid to see him at all – felt much as she had that first morning when she had tried to take the car and escape from having to face him. And yet this had nothing to do with the absence of love; rather, it felt as though she was so much in thrall to him now that she would not know how to find any separate self. How could she live this violently satiating life with him and be with other people?

But it would not always be like that, she thought; familiarity would breed something more companionable, or of a gentler nature, more acceptable to outsiders. His company, his averred and practised love for her, had made for a delicious intimacy. But intimacy a deux was very different from intimacy in front of other people – even friends: or perhaps especially friends. As she laved her face in very hot water, touching her bruised lips with a light finger, and was continuing this comforting appraisal, she was brought up sharp by the recognition of his lust – hitherto held within comparatively stringent bounds. He had always, until now, wanted her because he loved her so much. But that last time had seemed different – she had felt anonymous. When he called her from the kitchen, and she nerved herself to go down to him, there he was, bustling about, as gentle, as practical, as tender as before. He had warmed the pie (which he had not eaten the night before, he said, because he had been to the pub), and he had made her a special drink. The kitchen table was laid for supper.

He set the glass down beside her and then touched the back of her neck with fingers cold from the ice in the glass.

‘I know you feel shy,’ he said, ‘but you’re quite safe. Nothing has changed.’ And she saw that he was smiling at her, almost with benevolence.

She said how good the drink was – a vodkatini, perfectly made – and he replied that he had worked in a bar for three months, on a cruise ship.

He was full of small surprises of this nature that cropped up often during their bedtime stories as he called them. Now, because she didn’t want to talk about Anna coming to stay, she asked him about the ship.

‘Well, some of them are wonderful holidays, especially for the older passengers, and some of them are probably OK for the crew as well. But this was a downmarket affair: the ship was really too old for the job. She was filthy, overcrowded with as many passengers as they could squeeze into the small cabins. The tourist class had communal washing facilities, and as the toilets were almost always blocked, the floor was awash with sewage. The crew’s quarters were bug-ridden and the food was – well, if you saw the kitchens you wouldn’t have wanted the passengers’ food and we got what they couldn’t stomach, plus a lot of potatoes and macaroni. The captain was drunk a good deal of the time and left everything to his first officer, who was much younger and a real bastard. I knew nothing about cruise ships when I signed on, or I’d have chosen better.’

‘The Mediterranean. I thought I’d see a bit of the world, but of course I didn’t. You don’t get shore leave on a three-months’ stint. Don’t look so worried, darling, it did me no harm. Working one of the bars was a soft option, anyway, compared to being a steward or a waiter.’

‘One of the worst things about that time was the desperate divorcees – sometimes widows – who had expected a cruise would open up a whole new romantic life. When they couldn’t find it among the passengers, they turned on the crew. There they were, with their newly dyed hair, and their tight bright clothes and their banked-up anger – like the pancake makeup over their scalding sunburn, and their charm bracelets and nothing to do. They would hang about the bars for hours at a time – everyone drank too much anyway – and ten to one they would lie in wait for you when you came off duty. Fortunately most of the cabins were twin-bedded, but the ones who’d taken a cabin to themselves were a real menace.’

‘Oh! After Charley died.’ He looked at her and she noticed again how his eyes became opaque when he mentioned Charley. ‘I had to get away, you see.’

Soon after that they went to bed. ‘You’re worn out,’ he said. ‘I’m going to sleep in the other room tonight, and let you have a proper night’s rest.’

13

DAISY