The Fall (13 page)

“Of course not.”

“I knew he wasn’t coming,” she continued in that matter-of-fact tone. “Before you phoned, I knew. Next weekend: he’s coming
next weekend. I hoped you wouldn’t contact him…”

I shrugged. I felt a whole mess of things, the sensation that I had somehow betrayed him, for one: a feeling of adolescent
guilt that would soon enough drain away through the holes in what moral principles I had. And something else: the acute sensation
of focused desire that was, I realized later, sexual love. I wanted her now, again.

“I thought it might be fun, just the two of us together. Like this. You don’t mind?”

“I don’t mind at all,” I assured her.

She smiled. We saw connivance in each other’s eyes. “What would Diana say? What would Diana say if she knew?”

“She’s never going to know, is she?”

“No, she’s not.”

That morning we went to the Tate Gallery. It was like establishing an alibi after a crime, hoping that the prosecution wouldn’t
see that the times didn’t quite fit, that there was a whole night that had not been accounted for. We took the
88
bus and sat there up on the top deck, pretending to be mother and son and hoping that somehow this deception would erase
the other one. In the gallery she wanted to find the Laurencins. “You remember the portrait in Gilead House?”

I did, vaguely. A portrait of a girl, painted with soft colors, mauve and purple and pink, her eyes like two black coals.
She wanted to see the ones in the Tate collection, and eventually we found one and stood in front of it with critical expressions.
“What do you think? Is mine an original?”

“What does it matter what I think? You need an expert.”

“Be my expert.”

I shrugged. “Assume the worst.”

She nodded agreement. “Assume the worst. I think that’s what I always do.” We moved on, the question of authenticity unresolved
but the worst definitely assumed. That evening we went to the cinema —
Billy Liar
as promised — and when we came back to the house we went to separate beds in separate rooms. But in the dark, when I was nowhere
near asleep, when I was wondering about Jamie and about Caroline, about what had happened and what might happen, and was assuming
the worst, the door to the room opened. I could see her standing there in the narrow rectangle of light from the hallway upstairs.
Just her silhouette. Rather small. Narrow, naked legs. Narrow, naked hips and flanks. Naked.

“Robert,” she whispered.

“Yes.”

“Can I come in?”

“Of course you can.”

And this time it was quite different, for this time what we did was quiet and soft and thoughtful. “I love you, Caro,” I whispered
to her at one point, and in the darkness I felt the small sorrowful birdcall of her laughter in my ear as she denied it: “You’ll
fall in love with a beautiful girl of your own age. You’re not in love with me.”

But, with all the mournful insistence of a forsaken lover, the word
loveliness
comes to my mind when I think of her. Not a word we have much time for these days,
loveliness.
She
was
lovely. In my memory she remains lovely. Her face was lovely. Her body was lovely. All was loveliness, a litany of loveliness.
The soft, remorseful presence of her in my narrow bed that second night, loveliness. That weekend the word itself seemed delimited
by her. Nothing that was not her was lovely. It was she who defined the limits and the boundaries of my adolescent aesthetic.
I was, quite simply, in love with her. “No, you’re not,” she said.

As Caroline had told me, Jamie was due in London the next weekend. Over the phone he told me there was a party at the house
of a friend of his on Saturday. I could go along with him if I liked.

“Have they invited me?”

He laughed at that. “It’s not that kind of party.”

So I traveled up to the city again and made my way through now familiar streets to the mews where the Matthewsons lived, and
when I rang Jamie opened the door. It was the first time I had seen him since the day of the slate quarry. He was changed,
of course. He was taller and stronger with the hard edge of physical maturity. His chin was rough like a man’s, and his grip,
as we shook hands, was tough.

“It’s been a long time,” he said.

“Yes, it has.” We were awkward together, wary of each other, childhood friends who hadn’t yet been proved to have anything
in common. He was quietly, sarcastically older than me, smiling at my naïveté and condescending to my ignorance. Not the kid
who had swarmed up the vertical cliff face, not the fourteen-year-old who had knelt down in front of the quarry guard in the
shadows of the hut, the victim whom I had, in some sense, rescued. This was an adult, with an adult’s armor of confidence.
We talked about the party. “Maybe we’ll fix you up with a bird,” he suggested. “Is that what you’d like?”

“I’m okay,” I assured him.

“You mean you’ve got a girl? Or you prefer boys?”

“Oh, piss off. I’ve got a girl. Sort of.”

“Sort of? What the hell’s sort of?”

“There’s a girl at home…”

“Who? Bethan?” He laughed at the memory. “Not Bethan,” I assured him. In the background Caroline smiled at my embarrassment.

We went to the party in Caroline’s car, the battered mini that she used in the city. Jamie drove. From the exalted heights
of university, he quizzed me about school, offered me advice, suggested where I might go next, advised me against places that
were no good. He talked about the climbing he’d been doing, the Scottish winter routes, the ice climbing that was far ahead
of anything anywhere else in the world. He seemed a generation different from me, driving through London like this, in command
of the traffic, in command of his own life. After a pause he glanced at me. “How did you get on with my mother last weekend?”

I didn’t know how to answer. I didn’t know how you could deal with a thing like that, your mother opening her legs to a mere
kid who was supposed to be some kind of friend of yours. I looked away, out of the window at the passing streets. “All right.”
The city was dark and wet and awash with Christmas lights. “Swinging London” they might be calling it, but it was a tawdry
place.

“She’s lonely,” he said. “Ever since my father died, I guess. Well, she has boyfriends, of course. But never to substitute
him. Sometimes I feel…”

“What?” I dared to look at him and saw in his face contours that I perceived as hints of Caroline — her mouth transformed into
something male and hard, her brow given weight and blunt-ness, his eyes, which, in some intangible way, were hers.

“Oh, I don’t know. She’s searching for him all the time.”

“What was he like?”

“My old man? I hardly remember him. He was my father, and I was just a kid.” He smiled. “Anyway, you’re almost in the same
boat, aren’t you? How often do you see your father?”

I shrugged. He was somewhere in Scotland, with another wife and three children. “Never. My mother and he are estranged.”
Estranged.
I’d learned the useful word. I’d even looked it up in the dictionary and found that it fit, almost every meaning that the
dictionary gave fit this particular case, including the obsolete ones. “I get a Christmas card from him, that kind of thing.
At least I used to.”

The house where the party was taking place was in Hampstead. The front door was open, and there were figures silhouetted against
the light. The noise of people and music spilled out into the evening. Someone shouted, “Here’s Jamie!” as we got out of the
car, and people came out to see whether it was so. He appeared at ease in all this confusion, at ease and vaguely distracted,
as though none of it mattered. I was introduced to people and handed an open bottle of beer. There were bottles littered around
the floor inside the house and a pall of cigarette smoke in the sitting room. One of the bedrooms reeked with the exotic scent
of marijuana. The bathroom contained a large bath with a similarly large girl asleep in six inches of water. People wandered
in and peed and pressed the flush and wandered out without taking any notice of her. “Letitia is cooling down,” someone remarked
airily. It seemed ever such a good joke.

I soon lost Jamie, of course. I pushed among the bodies and tried to pretend that I wasn’t a solitary sixteen-year-old among
people who all seemed older. The music all around us was the Beatles, but there was something else in the air, a sense that
this kind of music, the jangling harmonies, the silly falsettos, was already passé. The harsh rhythms of the Rolling Stones
and the Animals were taking its place. Someone had brought an LP by an American folksinger, and in one of the upstairs rooms
there were people sitting around listening to a song called “Oxford Town.” The voice of the singer was slurred and rough and
tuneless, and he wasn’t singing about Oxford, England. His Oxford was in Mississippi, a place of guns and clubs and tear gas.
One of the girls was weeping. A girl in boots and miniskirt said to me, “Oh, fuck, let’s go and listen to some
music,”
and pushed her way out of the room, pulling me with her. Her name was Eve. She wore pale lipstick and heavy eye shadow and
had her hair cut short and sharp in what had once been an Eton crop and was now a Mary Quant. “You’re a friend of Jamie’s
aren’t you?” Eve asked me. “You know, I fancy him like mad?” We stepped over people in the corridor, went on a search for
beer. “We went out for a while, and then he dumped me.”

Downstairs we began to dance. The music there was something fast, but she put her arms around my neck and swayed from side
to side as though it were slow, and I didn’t mind. I thought of Caroline. Eve was bigger and softer, her breasts pushing against
the thin stuff of her dress. Her belly pressed against me. “You’re all right,” she said vaguely, as though she wasn’t sure
whether I’d asked her opinion or not. “But Jamie’s better.”

“Better how?”

“Looking,” she said bluntly. “And older. How old are you?”

“Eighteen,” I lied.

“You don’t look it.”

We shuffled around each other. At one point she lifted her face to be kissed. There was the taste of tobacco. Her tongue coiled
around mine.
Slugs mating,
I thought. There was much debate about whether a girl should have her eyes closed or open when kissing. Open seemed ill-mannered.
Closed seemed as though she might be thinking of someone else. John Lennon, maybe. Like a diver underwater I opened my eyes
to look and discovered Eve’s eyes wide open, hard and blue and looking directly back at me. She pulled away and frowned, as
though I had done something wrong. “I always keep my eyes on a man,” she said.