The Fall (11 page)

“And I’ll miss you,” I whispered. It was a statement of great daring, hovering on the edge of confession. Then she kissed
me softly on the very corner of my mouth. There was the dampness of her saliva, like a secret promise.

A
UTUMN, THE ANTICLIMAX
of the year, the season of my birthday and the coming of the age of consent. I received a card from my mother as well as
a shirt with a tab collar that she had bought at some boutique in Liverpool — Lord John or King Cool or something. There were
some records and a few other cards, from grandparents, from an aunt and uncle, from godparents. And a postcard, days late.

Dearest Robert,

I know it’s your birthday because you made a point of telling me the exact date, and even so I’m late! So, happy late birthday.
I have also bought you a present. If you would like to take up my invitation to come up to town, I’ll give it to you. Next
weekend? Let me know. Jamie will be here.

Love, Caroline

From the other side of the card a woman’s face looked up at me: a woman in tears, her face broken up into jagged planes like
shards of broken glass. She held a tattered handkerchief to her cheeks. The printed rubric said
“Woman Weeping, portrait of Dora Maar:
Pablo Picasso.” It was, I guessed, her idea of a joke.

I phoned her number, just to check. Her voice was distracted, as though she wasn’t sure whom she was speaking to. Yes, it
was okay that weekend. Fine. Even though…

“Even though what?” She seemed remote and uninterested. I felt the intricacies of mixed emotions, worse at sixteen than at
fifty, worse at sixteen than at any other age probably.

“Nothing. It’s okay if you want to come.”

“How do I get there?”

“You’ve got the address, haven’t you? Find the place in the A to Z. I can’t possibly
explain
.” Disappointment as a counterpoint to excitement, reality as a counterbalance to fantasy: a dizzying seesaw. Why should she
be interested in me, for God’s sake? Anyway, I was going to see Jamie, wasn’t I? Jamie, who had been a friend long ago and
in a different lifetime. What would he be like, having put on as many years as I had but having in the meantime crossed the
threshold of adulthood? He was now at university. He had, so he had written, been climbing on Ben Nevis with the university
mountaineering club.
Not like Snowdon,
he had written
. More like the Alps. See you in London some time.
A man. A university student, grown-up and self-assured, with the experience of sailing in the West Indies and climbing in
the Alps behind him. I was going to see him, and what did it matter that his mother sounded indifferent on the phone? Shit,
she was an
adult,
and I was just a kid.

I went up by train on Friday evening. I was, I thought, looking pretty good: that shirt my mother had sent for my birthday,
my hair as long as they would allow it at school and brushed forward something like the Beatles did it, my trousers flared,
my boots elastic-sided. “Chelsea boots” was what they were called. Sitting there among the rush-hour crowd on the Circle Line,
I felt part of the city. There were mods, there was a greaser or two (you tried not to make eye contact), there were dolly
birds in short skirts and long eyelashes, there was scandal and outrage and the caustic laughter of the young and the silent
shock of the adults. I got off the Tube at Sloane Square and walked along King’s Road, where the shops looked good, the crowds
looked good, where life itself looked pretty good on that Friday evening with the weekend stretching ahead.

I pulled out the map and checked the street. A couple of turns and there it was, a small backwater of quiet with a narrow
house shouldered in between others in one of those mews, all bright white paint and bay windows and geraniums on the window
ledges. Backwater Mews, Chelsea. A van was delivering a chest of drawers a few doors down. Cats sat and watched. I checked
Caroline’s letter just to make sure of the number and found the name beside the doorbell:
Matthewson.
I pressed the button and listened.

While I waited a car drove into the mews and a couple got out, talking in brassy voices and laughing at something. Were they
laughing at me? It was a cold evening, but I felt hot, all the heat of adolescence. Then a voice spoke, a small electronic
imitation of Caroline’s trapped behind the aluminum grille of the intercom: “Is that you, Robert? Come on in.”

The door clicked open onto shadows. Caroline was standing in a doorway leading off the narrow hall. She was the same as when
I had last seen her that summer. Why had I expected her to be different? She was the same: same hairstyle, the same kind of
denim shirt. She was wearing a skirt now. Denim, like the shirt, just above the knee. Gray stockings. Looking younger than
I thought she ought to be. But that was the same as well.

“Robert,” she said. Almost an exclamation of surprise. “You must be tired. Did you have a good journey? You found the house
all right? Rather different from Gilead, isn’t it? You know I can’t make up my mind which I prefer? When I’m there I prefer
here, and when I’m here I prefer there.”

The place had fitted carpets, a luxury we didn’t have at home. There was a poster framed on the wall — an abstract painting,
a thing of swaths and swirls of color and the name Kandinsky and the date of an exhibition. The Museum of Modern Art in New
York. I’d never seen anything like that before, an advertisement framed.

I looked for Jamie.

“Just put your things down anywhere. We can deal with them later. You’ll have a drink? A glass of wine? I’ve got beer if you
want it. Wine’s all right?”

I hadn’t said a word. I’d just followed her through the door and into the kitchen and stood there watching her open the bottle
that she had taken from the fridge, and I hadn’t said a word. The cork came out with a decisive pop, as of things going off.
Fireworks. “It’s Californian,” she told me. “You can’t get it easily in London, but it’s really rather good. We always used
to drink it in the States. Chardonnay There’s a wine merchant in the Old Brompton Road who specializes in that sort of thing.
Now where are the glasses?”

The glasses were already out, two of them ready and waiting on the marble top, two large, long-stemmed, ellipsoid wineglasses,
twice as large as any I had ever seen. Only two of them. I could count. The wine was yellow, the color of piss.

“I’m awfully sorry about the mess up,” she said as she held a glass out for me.

I could count. I could count the glasses; I could sense the atmosphere. I wasn’t a fool. “Mess up?”

“Jamie’s not being here.”

“Not here?”

“Yes. Or rather,
no.
I told you when you rang, didn’t I? I’m really cross. He rang up to say he couldn’t come. Something about a group going to
the Lake District for the weekend. I wish…” She looked at me with a tired smile. What did she wish? “This climbing. Maybe
it’s in the blood, his father and everything. But that doesn’t make it any easier, does it? Didn’t he go climbing with you
once? In a quarry somewhere?”

What had he told her? I felt a moment of panic, the sudden, ridiculous thought that my past was about to catch up with me,
that she would ask me about what had happened and that I would be constrained to tell her what we had never told anybody,
about the guard and all that. That moment was, perhaps, the last glimmer of childhood guilt — before adult guilt took over.
“It was just playing around,” I said.

“That’s just what he says, and what his father used to say too. A game. A bloody silly game where people get killed.” There
was a silence. She made a wry face, a pout of disappointment, a small twist of resignation. “Anyway, Jamie couldn’t come,
and so here we are on our own. You don’t mind?”

I didn’t mind.

“You can put your things in his room, and then I’ll show you round.”

The tour of the house didn’t last long. It was not like Gilead House. On the ground floor, along with Jamie’s bedroom, were
the kitchen, dining room, and bathroom. Upstairs was the sitting room and her own bedroom. I caught a glimpse through the
half-open door: the colors blue and white, a red dress hanging like a bloody skin on a wardrobe door.

“That’s it,” she said. “Hardly a palace, but at least there’s no box room to clear out. It’s going to be a bit of a strange
weekend. Just us two, I mean. I hope you don’t mind. Perhaps we can go to a film or something. There’s this one called
Billy Liar
.”
'

She had prepared dinner. I had imagined going out with Jamie to a hamburger place or something. Bright lights, bright colors,
loud music. But I got
boeuf bourguignon
and candlelight. She even changed for dinner — the red dress that I’d glimpsed hanging on the wardrobe in her bedroom, red
satin gleaming in the candlelight like fresh blood. And there was my birthday present. It was there beside my plate, a small
packet wrapped in black paper and tied in a gold ribbon. “Did you think I’d forgotten?” she asked.

“I didn’t even think.”

“Well, open it.”

I fumbled with the wrapping and pulled out a box. I knew from the shape, half-knew anyway, guessed.
Tissot
it said in elegant script. Tissot was the name of a painter. Why that should occur to me at that moment, I have no idea.
“Tissot is a painter,” I said.

“Well, it’s not a painting, I’m afraid. It’s not really big enough.” She laughed, giggled almost, as though the amusement
inside her was threatening to run out of control. Was she laughing at me? “Go on, open it,” and I went on and opened it and
found there, lying prostrate on a bed of dark-blue velvet, a wristwatch. It had one of those gold bracelets, not a leather
strap like my old one. A piece of jewelry. She raised her glass. By now it was a Californian red, a Cabernet Sauvignon with
a full bouquet and a decisive aftertaste of black currants, so the label told me. “Happy birthday, Robert.”

How would I explain it? To my mother, to my friends, how would I
explain
it, for God’s sake? “I can’t,” I managed to say.

Her voice was gently mocking. “Can’t you? It’s not difficult. You wind it up, and it just sort of goes.”

I blushed, fumbling awkwardly with the thing. “I can’t accept it, I mean.”

“Why ever not?”

“Because it’s too much.”

“How much is my affair. It’s just a watch. To help you tell the time. I noticed that yours was a little battered, and I thought
you’d like another.”

Mine was an H. Samuel Everite, as advertised on Radio Luxembourg, which was the only radio station that ever played decent
music. Mine had been given to me by my mother for my thirteenth birthday. This was Tissot. Swiss. Twenty-one jewels, so it
claimed, and who was I to doubt it? I wound the watch up, and it began to go with a smooth, slick movement that I could only
just hear when I held it to my ear — like the hurrying away of time itself. I slipped it onto my wrist and looked at it quite
casually, as though it had always been there. It had gold hands.
Hands
was the wrong word. These were altogether sharper than hands, more piercing, more acute. Daggers, arrows. Time’s arrows.
I felt an uncomfortable mixture of gratitude and resentment, and underneath it all the faintly erotic sensation of having
been exploited. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Try, thank you.”

Should I offer to kiss her? Should I lean across the table and kiss her chastely on the cheek? Was this what she was expecting?
I glanced at my new watch and watched my dining companion watching me, and wondered if my armpits smelled and if my acne showed.
Beads of sweat gathered in a swarm on my forehead and crawled like insects down into my incipient sideburns. “Thank you.”

“I hope you’ll be very happy together,” she said with a smile. To my relief she got up to clear the plates away. I mopped
my brow and sipped my wine with its aftertaste of black currant, and glanced at the cool face of my watch, which smiled at
me smugly and told me that the time was nine-fifteen, at which point the telephone rang. It was my mother. I could hear Caroline
speaking to her out in the hall. “Robert’s right here,” she was saying. “I’ll pass you over. Lovely to hear you, Di.”

Is there, I wondered, anything quite so humiliating as mothers? I’d told her where I’d be for the weekend. It was my bloody
fault.

“Robbie?” said the voice on the far end of the line. “Is that you?”

“Of course it’s me.”

“How are you?”

“I’m fine.”

“How’s Jamie?”

I sweated the guilt of connivance. “Oh, he’s fine too. I guess.”

“It’s been a long time.”

“Yes.”

“And Meg?”

“Meg?”

Meg smiled conspiratorially at me. We both knew she was
Caroline.
Meg was dull and old-fashioned. Caroline was sparkling new.

“Jamie’s
mother
,” the voice said in my ear. “Whom do you think I meant?”

“Oh. Oh, yes. She’s fine. She gave me a birthday present.”

“How nice.”