Falling (30 page)

I did not reply to this – told her I would be in the kitchen if she wanted me. I had used the moment and that was enough.

For a week, my declaration lay between us like a piece of no man’s land. During it, I looked after her (the nursing contracted to that after the first day or two, when Dr Blake ceased his
daily visits). He had shown me how to change the dressing on her head; had shaved some of her beautiful hair round the stitched wound and the bruise faded from blue-black to grape colours, purple
and then green. She became accustomed to me, and I, in turn, was punctilious about her privacy.

I would bring her a basin of hot water and her washing things, then tell her that I would be in the kitchen and come only if I was called. She had grazed and cut her right hand so badly that she
was unable to use it at all that first week, and I also took off the plasters and swabbed and cleaned the wound; a good deal of dirt had got into it and it was slow to heal. I took care to talk of
impersonal matters when I was ministering to her, whether it was brushing her hair or touching any part of her in my capacity as nurse. None the less, I was now so finely tuned to her reactions
(and sometimes apparently contrary responses) that I could sense and sometimes even see her regarding me with a kind of tentative speculation. I knew then that she wanted me to reiterate my
feelings for her in order that she could further dismiss them – could convince me and intrigue herself. She was both distrustful and enticed.

The first intimation that I was making progress occurred when Anna rang her to ask how she was getting on. I had been on a shopping expedition (we were now living largely on cold or ready
prepared food from the supermarket), and as I went through the back door to the kitchen I could hear her on the telephone.

‘. . . not serious at all. Henry got a very nice local doctor who patched me up in no time. No, honestly not, I’m just a bit stiff, that’s all. I’ve been very well looked
after. What? It was the path – you know, the one Henry made. There was a lot of rain and I slipped trying to run in because the telephone was ringing. It’s sweet of you, but really
I’d much rather wait a week or two until I’m completely mobile. Then we can go out and do things. Well, I haven’t sent it because when I read it I could see things that need
rewriting. No, only one copy here. Of course I will. I’ll ring you in a day or two.’

She had heard me return and the tone of her voice had not changed – there had been no confidences that she would not have wanted me to hear. But I also gathered that she clearly did not
want
her friend to come to the cottage – now, at once, or even for some time. This was a very good sign. It must mean that she wanted to be alone with me to find out – what? What
I felt for her? Certainly, but also something of what she felt for me. For she felt
something,
I was sure of that. Her gratitude for my support had graduated from formality to small jokes
about the ritual that had evolved. For instance, on one occasion when I took her to the lavatory I had remarked how this everyday and normal practice got left out of fiction. ‘And not simply
left out,’ she had said, ‘but characters are frequently put into situations where it would be literally impossible.’ After that, it got called ‘doing something never done in
books’.

‘I don’t think,’ she had said, ‘that it in the least matters people
not
writing about it happening. What they shouldn’t do is not take it into account when
their heroine is left alone in a cave for days unable to move, that sort of thing. They don’t need to
dwell
on it, simply take it into account.’

One evening, after she had had her first shower and was going to spend her first night in her bedroom, she said, ‘By the way, you’d better call me Daisy. If you’d actually been
a nurse, you would have been calling me that on sight.’

I said nothing.

‘Why are you smiling?’

‘Was I?’

‘Yes. You know you were.’

‘Pure pleasure. Well, I think, Daisy, it’s time you went to bed.’

She agreed. I noticed that she was still in a good deal of pain, and that movement was difficult for her. She also had intermittent headaches, although she claimed that they were getting better.
She never complained, and always seemed surprised when I knew.

‘I notice everything about you.’

‘Why do you? Perhaps I mean how?’

‘You know that. I told you days ago.’

‘What?’

She was determined to get me to repeat myself. How fascinating the most innocent vanity can be!

We had reached her bedroom and I released her arm as she sat on the edge of the bed.

‘Love,’ I said. ‘Love is
not
blind. It reveals everything, if you look. I
look
at you: it’s all I have to do.’

She was sitting on the bed feeling for her hairbrush in the dressing-gown pocket. She began, clumsily, to brush her hair with her left hand, then stopped and said, without any expression at all,
‘I’ve told you – you can’t possibly love me. You don’t know me.’

‘Last time you said “at all”. “You don’t know me at all.” So something has changed.’

Her silence seemed to acknowledge this. ‘In any case, my knowing you does not make me dangerous.’

Before she could stop herself, she said, ‘It
could.
It might.’ Then she frowned. ‘I really don’t want to talk about any of this at all. I’m very grateful to
you for all your help. Good night.’

Of course I left her at once. We had reached an extremely tricky stage; she was – I knew – in some sort attracted to me. Tender attention had achieved much there; second to making a
woman laugh it is the surest way to touch her. Daisy, I knew, from all I had read that she had written (and in particular, her diary), was starved of this and therefore, unconsciously perhaps,
unable to resist it. On the other hand, her recovery had reached the stage when, at any minute, she might say that she no longer needed me to sleep in the cottage, and she might in other ways
assert her independence, none of which would be good news for me. Somehow I had to get her to acknowledge that something was happening between us, some brink, at least. I went down to the kitchen,
uncorked the half-bottle of wine left from supper and wrote her a letter.

I sat at the kitchen table for what turned out to have been nearly two hours composing it.

It was not to be long, nor in any way accusatory, but it was necessary to make clear to her that I understood certain things about her that in no way affected my feelings beyond engendering
extreme patience. We had been talking about trust last night (for that was what it would be), or rather
she
had been talking about
distrust.
She did not trust me and, while this was
painful, it did not alter anything I felt for her. Rather, it enhanced my love. Distrust did not come out of the air, it was born of painful experience, which I sensed had been hers.

I knew what it was like to be betrayed – none better – but one thing that I had learned from my – certainly unsuccessful – life was that while any experience must affect
me, no one of them should absolutely determine how I lived after it. If that were to be so, one’s life would contract to the nutshell that Hamlet had been so airy about. Infinite space was
nonsense in this context: one would never go out, one would never allow any new sensation, one would end up with the emotional structure of a moth (‘I am no entomologist, so this may be an
inaccurate analogy.’).

In short, I was asking that she look at me with a fresh eye; that she consider the possibility – even likelihood – of my meaning what I had said to her. Most people have told lies in
their lives, and I was no exception, but I would never lie to her, and I had never lied to anyone about love. I was not asking for anything more than that she should consider that I might be
honest. Was that too much to ask? In any case, even if it was, it would not alter my desire to be of service to her (back to sonnet number 57). I signed it simply, ‘Henry’.

The chief reason why I knew that it was worth risking this note was her repeated reaction to my telling her I loved her. On both occasions she had said that I could not because I did not know
her. If she had not been in the least interested in me, she would not have bothered with that, would simply have replied that she did not feel the same – did not care for me. But I was also
unsure whether she was aware of her interest and this note would make her have to consider that. Or
might
make her do so.

What is more exciting in life than this kind of pursuit – with the delicious frisson of attendant uncertainty (we have all failed from time to time)? I do not think it is true that people
abstain from conquest for love or money, rather that they court for love and
then
money. If we know how to order our lives, most of us settle for comfort after romance, or in many cases
after sex; romance utterly escapes many people. I folded the paper and put it on her breakfast tray.

It was nearly one o’clock by the time I got to bed and I fell asleep at once.

She woke in the night – suddenly – from a dreamless stupor, she was intensely alert. ‘Love,’ he was saying, ‘love is
not
blind. I
look
at you: it’s all I have to do.’ She was not only exactly recalling the intonation of his voice, she could see him; his eyes that would both darken and glow – which,
she now remembered, had happened several times before when he spoke of what he felt, or rather how he felt for
her.
When he said anything revealing about his past, his eyes would simply
darken – there was no glow at all; they became almost opaque. Love, then, still seemed important to him. She was touched by his candour and his courage. Here she stopped. Was she not
more
than touched, more than grateful? For over two weeks now he had tended her with a delicacy and kindness that was surely unusual in any man, only credible, indeed, if some kind of love
was involved. Perhaps he did love her, actually
love
her. The possibility, the faintest chance, that this might be so, might actually be real . . .

Here she had to stop – the enormous simplicity of such an idea struck her like a freak wave, winding her, making her incapable of any thought until her breath came unsteadily back, and she
was able to make attempts at consideration, only to be confronted by a rabble of conflicting notions. He was an incurable romantic; he was isolated and lonely, parched for intimacy, for
companionship, probably for sexual excitement or comfort or both – in one sense there might be nothing personal to her about his obvious needs. He was an attractive man with, clearly,
considerable experience of these things. What was unusual about him was that deprivation had not destroyed his belief, or seemed not to have done. Seemed – how much did he seem and what else
was he? And then, so suddenly that it made her laugh at herself, she thought, And where am I in all this? How do
I
feel? I am behaving as though I do not exist except as an observer of
someone else. It is ridiculous at my age to let even the idea of someone loving me make me invisible.

She was hungry – no, ravenous. Not ravenous for romance but simply for something to eat. She put on the lights. It was nearly four o’clock, but she longed for digestive biscuits, or
cheese, or toast and Marmite. She got out of bed, slipped on her dressing-gown and crept silently, carefully, in her bare feet down the stairs. It was not until she had found the packet of biscuits
and the wedge of Stilton in the larder, and poured herself a mug of milk from the fridge, that she noticed the letter propped against the empty toast rack on the breakfast tray he had laid. She had
been going to take her food back to bed; now she sat at the table and read the letter.

She read it twice; the first time at the speed that intense curiosity engenders; the second time very slowly and with frequent interruptions as she recalled things that he had said and the way
he had said them to her. ‘In any case, my knowing you does not make me dangerous . . .’ and her replying, before she could stop herself, that it might. Of course it might. For years now
she had kept herself emotionally anonymous for safety’s sake. She no longer yearned over Jass, but she had determined never to let anyone else get so near. She had not liked being alone, but
the alternative threatened her with the possibility – likelihood, even – of unendurable pain that would still have to be endured. Those months and months after she had last been with
Jass when she had woken each morning not knowing how to get through the hours and hours of interminable day, when she had lived on cigarettes and sleeping pills and wild agonising fancies that none
of it was real – that one day he would turn up and she would fall easily back into his arms, his heart, his life. In the end, she had had to accept that this would never happen. Marietta had
a child; there were pictures in newspapers, scraps in gossip columns and posters all over London. She had become used to these huge, blown-up crude versions of his face, and body, attired variously
in evening dress, animal skins, a naval uniform, a raincoat and a slouched black Homburg depending upon the film. What she eventually came to
know
was that their last encounter had occurred
entirely from his feelings of guilt and pity. He had not loved her – probably he had never loved her, any more than Stach. She had loved him, but that is never enough: unrequited love is as
though the two people exist in a different element and one of them is stifled by the richness of the air.

Oh, well. Why should all this come back –
again
– so long after it had seemed laid to rest? Because this man was saying that he loved her, understood her, knew she had been
betrayed . . . Well, of course he might have deduced that from newspapers. But, then, he was saying the same thing – almost – that Anna had said. That if one succumbed to bad or sad
experience and resolved never to be exposed to a repetition, one would not cross a road for fear of being run over. ‘I would never lie about love.’ Oh,
that
resonated with her:
it had been a single certainty – something that she knew she could not lie about. He was simply asking her to trust him; he could hardly know that this was no small plea. But, then, he
did
seem to know. She thought again of how he had cared for her during these weeks since her fall – how gentle, even tender he had been, how he had never encroached upon her privacy
but had seemed always to anticipate her needs. And he had been a good companion. They had had many and varied conversations about books and poetry and plays. When she thought about what he had told
her of his life, particularly his awful childhood in that dank cottage with an indifferent father and a stepmother who resented him, he
did
seem a most unusual and admirable man. Nothing
seemed to have come easily to him, yet he had virtually educated himself, had retained principles and integrity that many people more fortunate than he were without. It seemed churlish not to say
that she would trust him; she owed him at least that. She decided to put the note back on the tray: she did not want to have to talk about it first thing in the morning when she was in bed. She
cleared up the remains of the food and rinsed the milk mug so that there would be no trace.