Falling (22 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Jane Howard
The young bounder, Sigmond Kesler he was called, had naturally married her for her money, which she was singularly slow in discovering since she fell wildly in love with him. ‘He was the
first man in my life,’ she would explain. When I met her, she had been married for three years and was intensely miserable. Sigmond, who seemed only to have bedded her twice during this time,
was clearly involved with someone else, although even this did not occur to Charley until well after I was sure of it. ‘He works so hard, he’s hardly ever home and in the last year his
firm keep making him go abroad and of course he can’t take me ‘cos it’s business so I sit all day in this huge house in Bishop’s Avenue [which I learned was somewhere in
London] with nothing to do but take the dogs out on the Heath. Daddy says people have to work hard if they want to prove themselves and I should be proud of him. I am, of course, but I hardly see
him, and he says he gets asthma if we sleep in the same room.’
She used to come home to stay at Lawn Court for weekends and sometimes longer when her husband was abroad. Lawn Court was the place I had got when I was invalided out of the Navy after the war
– to my intense relief, I have to say. I have never got on well with other men and being cooped up in, successively, a corvette, an MTB and one of the few Steam Gun Boats had been a nightmare
of boredom punctuated by fear. At least in corvettes they had had a cook who had gone through the rudiments of training; in the other two it was a useless rating who had neither the cunning nor the
intelligence to get out of the job. I suffered – as many of us did – from seasickness. I was trained as a gunner, and by the time I’d been transferred to the MTB I was pretty
handy with an Oerlikon. But when I was moved to the Steam Gun Boat flotilla I was promoted to coxswain. This, I well knew, with the captain and his number one, was the most dangerous job in gun
boats since we all aimed to knock out the people on the bridge after torpedoes had lost their surprise value. The advantage to the Steam Gun Boats was that they were silent, whereas you could hear
the MTBs from either side, miles away. However, the SGB only needed one bullet in her system of pipes that conducted the steam to become crippled or immobile. I imagine that was why not more of
them were built. I copped it in a night action off Newhaven, and after hospital was given a desk job in Weymouth, which only lasted a few weeks before I was demobbed. All this, I realized as I
recalled it, was good material for a letter to Daisy, but the question whether I should tell the story of Charley was another matter. I thought about this as I finished the clearing up and finally
fell upon my bunk in my clothes, dog tired. At least, I thought before I dropped off, I had made Charley happy for a time; happy in a way she had never been and was never likely to be again.
The next morning I moved the boat. The trouble with the non-towpath side of the canal was that it consisted of very steep slippery banks studded with brambles and overhung by trees. I had the
devil of a job hauling myself up and got badly scratched in the process. Going down such a bank in the dark was going to be dangerous and unpleasant. As I walked to the cottage I remembered the
narrow-boat moored a quarter of a mile the other side of me. Its owner possessed a very small canoe that he sometimes used to go up rivers unnavigable by his boat. He was away – and did not
usually make use of his boat until summer. If he came down earlier, I would see smoke coming out of his funnel and could take the boat back apologising and saying I had had an emergency. I unlashed
the canoe from the top of the cabin and paddled my way back up the canal. There were some convenient reeds that grew in a largish clump on the towpath side and I could pretty well conceal the canoe
in them; in any case, I would remove the paddles.
Problem number one solved, the next thing was to see to the cottage and remove any signs of undue occupation. This did not take so long as I had feared. I relaid the fire and carried out the old
ash that had accumulated to spread over the garden. It was one of those clear blue days that herald spring. Primroses were out and there were some daffodils in her garden. I must remember to tell
her that. I washed up a few mugs and plates and tidied up the kitchen. Finally I went upstairs to inspect the rooms there. The bedrooms seemed all right. The bath needed a clean, but by now the
urge to write to Daisy was overwhelming me. I must somehow make more headway with intimacy before her return, and, as I came down the stairs, the cottage seemed a far more inviting place to write
in than the boat. So I lit the fire I had so carefully laid and settled down before it with a mug of Nescafe. I would write the letter, then take it to the village to post and do my weekly shop for
supplies, which were running very low.
Dear Miss Langrish,
Thank you so much for your wonderful letter. What marvellous news that you are better and may come home! You have been away for so long, and in such unfortunate circumstances, that I can
easily imagine how much it must mean to feel that you will be free at last. The only time that I have been in hospital for any length of time (after I stopped a bullet on the bridge of a gun
boat in 1944) I remember feeling more and more imprisoned.
There are daffodils, ‘daffodils, that come before the swallow dares and take the winds of March with beauty’. So much better than Wordsworth, don’t you think? At least, I
remember that the first time I read that line it brought tears to my eyes. But perhaps you think that men should not cry. In that case I am one of the lesser men.
But back to the spring, March is going out like a lamb – the gales have subsided to zephyry breezes, the hawthorn flowers and willows by the canal have become luminescent with fresh
breaking leaf. Primroses and violets are out and the wild cherry (I won’t mention Housman, but one can quite see why the spring inspires poets, it is so obviously on the move).
Oh, what pleasure it gives me to write to you! And how much more I want to say than I do say. I do agree with you that we imagine we know, or may even in some sort
become,
other
people by perceiving them. I think it is always in moments of grief and loss that we thoroughly recognize that we are essentially alone. The paradox is that I don’t believe we are meant
to be. We make so many efforts to join others or to become part of something outside ourselves, and when efforts are so universal and continuous, there must be a strong argument for saying
that they spring from a natural cause. I see that this isn’t altogether clear. By natural, I mean instinctive and self-preserving. Am rather rusty at this sort of thing. I read and try
to think, but it is so long since I have had anyone worth talking to.
Thank you for your most understanding comments about my distant love. As you say, the whole thing does sound rather like a play. Coincidence, however, is far more connected to life than
art, don’t you agree? It always seems to me that writers have to work awfully hard to explain away or rationalize a coincidence to stop the reader from feeling that it is needed as a
kind of escape route – a back door in the plot. And yet, everybody experiences them more than once in a lifetime.
You say most kindly that you hope I found someone I could marry and live with and love. I did find such a one, but the happiness was short-lived. Looking back, I suppose that this does not
really matter; the important part of any experience is its quality rather than its duration.
I must confess to having fallen in love with somebody who was married. I have to say quickly now that not only was she deeply unhappy when I met her, she had never had a moment’s
happiness since she married the man her parents had chosen for her because he was extremely rich. Poor Charley! She had always been delicate as a child and afraid of her father, particularly,
who always expected more of her than she could achieve. They lived in the country, and he wanted her to ride in horse shows, to excel at tennis and dancing, to be amusing and docile. Above
all, he wished her to marry well. Charley was extremely shy; she once told me that she found it very difficult, and sometimes impossible, to enter a room full of people. She suffered badly
from asthma and terrible migraines and was thus often unable to do what her parents wished.
She married – when she was just eighteen – chiefly because she wanted to escape her father’s tyranny.
Here I stopped to consider. I wanted to avoid any suggestion of ‘a scene from a play’, as this, like coincidence, could only be effective if rarely employed. Coincidence! Of course
– the most economical way of telling my tale as briefly and poignantly as I could manage.
I won’t bore you with the details of this distressing saga; merely say that, shortly after her marriage, Charley discovered that her husband regularly visited
another woman, and that her function was to be his hostess and the mother of his children. Poor girl – she failed miserably in the former and suffered two miscarriages after which she
was advised not to make any further attempts in that direction. She hated being alone in the London house so much that she was reduced to returning to her parents for weekends. That was how
we met.
Her husband refused to divorce her. When she told me this, I took the plunge. We eloped – an old-fashioned word but I can think of no other – and for nearly a year we were
entirely happy. It was then that I began designing gardens and was, unexpectedly, successful.
I hardly know how to tell you the rest. Browsing through your bookshelf I came upon Margaret Kennedy’s
Constant Nymph,
and there was the coincidence! My Charley died exactly
as that poor girl did – trying to open a window that had been stuck with paint. I could hardly believe it: that a novelist should have so exactly described what happened to me –
or, rather, to my darling Charley. Afterwards they said she had a faulty valve in her heart; that this might have happened at any time. She had always been a fragile, delicate creature,
although the asthma and migraines got very much better under my care. She brought out a spring of tenderness and a desire to protect that I did not know I possessed. And I, in turn, was
utterly beguiled, entranced by being so loved. But that was the end of it. I wonder now how I should have felt if I had read that novel
before
Charley died. The coincidence would have
struck me like a knife to the heart either way, I suppose.
I should tell you that subsequently I did marry – more or less on the rebound I think now. I married a woman who turned out simply to have wanted the status of marriage, who was
wrapped up in her career, who never stopped berating me for earning less money than she did. We parted nearly two years ago, after I discovered that she was seeing someone else and had been
lying to me about it. There was, is, no tragedy there. I simply made an awful mistake and have certainly paid for it, since she has stripped me of my house, its contents, and what money I
had. Money has never been a primary consideration for me, but I must confess to a feeling of dislocation: I knew, after Charley died, that I wanted more than anything in the world to have
someone to love and cherish, and I find myself without that blessing. So it is for many people: I would not wish you to think I think myself singular in any way. I think there must be many
people in the world who suffer from this loss – secretly and for the whole of their lives. Do you agree with this?
Please, if you can, give me some notice of your return to the cottage. I should so like to get it all warm and comfortable and ready for you. You have had such rotten luck that I should
like to do anything in my power to make your return here pleasant.
This letter, when I read it, seems far too full of my affairs. I have confided in you – something I have not done for a very long time. I note what you say about criticism saving one
from trust. You may criticize me as much as you please, but I
am
also to be trusted. If I knew more about you, my letters would be less egocentric. I cannot help my curiosity about
you, whether it be impertinent or no. It is entirely well meant. I would never betray you, as I sense you have been betrayed. I must stop before I make you angry.
Yours most sincerely,
Henry K
I was anxious about this letter – particularly after I had posted it. If I had gone too far, she might refuse to have anything more to do with me. I considered the possibility of writing
an abject note, asking her to ignore my letter (which, of course, she would not, so in a sense I would have nothing to lose), but in the end I decided against it. I collected my money, did my
shopping and returned to the boat.
The first two weeks of April passed in a humdrum manner. I finished cleaning the boat as much as I could bear, did a certain amount of gardening – but left some of the more arduous jobs so
that I would have good reason to be at the cottage when she came – and I read two of her plays. There was no reply to my letter and I began to feel afraid that I had gone too far too quickly.
I had kept copies of my letters – did not want to risk slipping up on some detail – and thought about her incessantly. The plays, less than her diaries, of course,
did
tell me
more about her, in a way, but I saw that my idea of fiction writers revealing themselves willy-nilly was simplistic. It was difficult to distinguish the self-revelation from the craft or art or
diktats of plot and character. But I discerned a kind of romantic disillusionment – a rebound from being a victim to feminism of a militant but shaky nature. And she could be very funny,
which somehow I had not bargained for. I only read two plays written for the theatre, because that was all there was; the bulk of the typescripts were drafts of these two works. One of them was
about the conflict of the heroine between her career and marriage. What was interesting about it was that she had presented the various choices and then enacted each of them. The consequences of
each choice were carried on in the subsequent scene, and in the end she had the tail of the serpent in its mouth. The other was a darker play based on the Orpheus-Eurydice myth but set at the turn
of the century. This, although it seemed to have an element of women’s rights about it, was at another level about the incompatibility of needs that seemed to haunt any love affair. It was a
play about the ultimate absence of trust, and that I found very interesting.