The Fall (55 page)

She felt herself blush. “I remember standing in the garden and looking at the stars. Looking for something familiar.”

“Orion.”

“And you said that it wasn’t visible at the moment…”

“We were standing on it.”

“That’s it. Standing on Orion. The thought terrified me.”

“You didn’t seem terrified.”

“I never do,” she said.

The house was out of the mountains, in a softer valley. They drove across the river by a narrow stone bridge and picked their
way through a town, and then climbed up through the hills on the far side, through fields and woods, around narrow curves
and into small, hidden valleys. He brought the car to a halt where there was barely room for two vehicles to pass, where there
was a slate wall and a slope of grass where sheep grazed. Always sheep in this country, their bleat like a perennial complaint.
A gate, with a sign, the paint blistered and flaking, saying
GILEAD HOUSE,
a gravel drive with weeds growing down the middle, and then the house itself tucked back into the hillside against a patch
of woodland — slate-gray stones and a slate roof and the windows and doors picked out in white. “That’s the place,” he said.

“It’s lovely.”

“Needs a lot of work done.”

He got out to open the gate, and they drove through onto the rough track and up to the front of the house. There were some
breaks in the cloud, errant shafts of sunlight touching features of the hillside, the fields of luminous green, the dark woods.
“Gilead,”
she said. “Isn’t it biblical?”

“Part of it was some kind of chapel,” Guy said. “Let me show you round.”

And then the words rose out of her memory, from somewhere, a Sunday-school lesson, perhaps. She had this memory for words,
for lines, for the oddments of literature. “‘Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?’” And she thought of
Alan, of course, who most assuredly was a physician
not
there.

“How very clever of you.” Guy was searching in his pockets for the key. “Where’s it from?”

“Isaiah, I think. Or maybe Jeremiah.”

The front door — wide and ponderous as a chapel door — opened onto a dark hallway. There was the sour and flinty smell of dust.
They looked into desolate rooms, shuttered and dark. A few bits and pieces had been left by whoever had last lived here: a
broken chair in a corner, a wicker table, a plank, a tea chest. The rooms still had gaslights on the walls, and bellpulls
to summon servants from behind the moth-eaten green baize door. The kitchen had slate flagstones on the floor and a large
black range set into one wall. In the scullery there was an ancient mangle, like an instrument of medieval torture.

Guy worried about whether the place was too big, whether it would be possible to heat it, whether it would make a home.

“It will be wonderful,” she assured him.

“Do you think Meg will like it?”

Diana laughed. “That’s a different matter.”

A staircase led upward into the shadows of the first floor. At the halfway landing was a tall window of painted glass: a knight
and his lady, bordered with sinuous vines, dull with dust. “Arthur and Guinevere,” Guy said.

“Why not Lancelot?”

“Maybe it is Lancelot.”

The treads creaked and flexed under their feet as they went upstairs. A long passage led past the bedrooms. There were cobwebs,
dust, the minute scratchings of vermin in the wainscot. Inside the empty rooms, shafts of light cut through cracks in the
shutters and revealed swarms of dust motes. “Are there ghosts?” she wondered out loud.

“There are always ghosts,” he assured her.

The house was set into the hillside, so at the far end of the passage, French windows looked onto some kind of upper garden.
More words came to her.
Down the passage that we did not take, toward the door we never opened.
Where were they from? The win-dowpanes were bleary with grime. She cleaned a patch and peered out onto weed-ridden gravel
paths and low box hedges, an attempt at a formal Italian garden here in the cool Welsh summer. Guy struggled with the lock
and finally got the key to turn. He pushed the door open with difficulty and moved aside for her to go out. It was one of
those moments of confusion: she stepped forward and halted in the doorway; he was following her out and bumped against her
as she stopped. She stood still on the edge of the daylight, with him against her, his hands on her shoulders.

They remained like that for a while. She could feel him shivering, as though with cold. She remembered another occasion, that
same tremor. She remembered so much that was compressed into so short a time. “Guy,” she said. Her tone was neutral. She might
have been doing no more than calling his attention to something out there in the watery sunlight of the garden, out there
among the hedges and the gravel paths and the dark holm oaks on the hillside.

“Oh, Porpoise,” he said quietly, “what have we done? What the hell have we done?”

She had a sudden sensation of something like nausea, something like panic — a sense of desolation so powerful that for a moment
she wondered whether she would be able to bear it. She closed her eyes and put her hand up to her throat. She was going to
fall. He gripped her shoulder as though to hold her steady. “What shall we do, Porpoise?” he whispered in her ear. “What the
devil shall we do?”

Her hand moved from her throat to his cheek, to hold him against her. Things were plain: there was no way out, no escape,
no solution. It was like a terminal disease. You tried to comfort the patient, of course, but you mustn’t raise false hopes,
you mustn’t tell lies. She spoke to the empty garden, the rank hedges, the weed-ridden paths: “There’s nothing we
can
do, is there?” she said.

“Why ever did you write me that letter? Why did you break things off?”

Whatever happens now will be irrevocable, she thought. Every error, even the tiniest slip will have its consequences. It was
like climbing, like that rock climbing she did with him all those years ago: the tiniest slip might be fatal. Carefully, so
as not to disturb anything, she said, “I had no choice. You were married. We couldn’t go on. And now we both are, to different
people.”

“So what do we do? Nothing?”

She turned to face him. “What else do you suggest, Guy? We break up two marriages in order to try a third? And then how long
would that be, and what strain would it put on us, and would we even survive? You’ve even got a child…”

“We love each other, don’t we?”

It seemed a childish question. “I suppose we do,” she agreed. “We must, mustn’t we, after all this time?”

“Yes, we must.”

They stood there helplessly, facing each other, feeling peculiarly childish, for childhood is when you are helpless; adults
are meant to act for themselves and know when to act. And paradoxically, amid all this helplessness, she felt contentment.
The boundaries were precisely drawn, and within those narrow boundaries, the boundaries of this moment, she was free. “I suppose
I’ve never not loved you. I suppose it was that ridiculous thing that they have in the films — love at first sight, that moment
when I saw you coming down off the mountain toward me.”

“And me. The same.” He touched her face, as though to convince himself of the reality, to fix the memory in his mind. His
finger traced the curve of her jaw, the subtle contours of her cheek and her lips. “I’ve got my stuff in the car,” he said.
“I was going to camp here. Doss down in one of the rooms. For God’s sake, there are enough of them.”

“I’m booked in at the hotel.”

“It doesn’t matter, does it?”

“Not really.” She followed him down the stairs, out of the front door to collect things from the car. It didn’t matter at
all. They were like children having some kind of adventure, playing at camping, playing it for real but knowing that it was
not serious, that it wouldn’t last, that at the end the adults would call them in from play and they would have to dismantle
the tent. From the trunk of the car they got his Primus stove, some cooking pots and tins of food, and an old tartan traveling
rug. Then they searched the house and discovered a couple of chairs and, in one of the back rooms, an old mattress, which
they struggled with up the stairs. They chose a room on the first floor, looking out on the top garden. There was a broken
sofa, an old table, some empty trunks, and, with its baize torn and threadbare, an old snooker table. Most of the rooms had
gas fires, but this one had an open fireplace with a black cast-iron mantelpiece, something from the early years of the century
with sinuous Art Nouveau curves. “Let’s make a fire,” Diana suggested.

“We don’t need a fire in this weather.”

“But let’s have one anyway.”

Firewood was easy. They collected it along the edge of the woods at the back of the house. It was damp, but not sodden; in
one of the outbuildings they found a pile of kindling, put aside by some previous occupant for a fire that had never been.
“Maybe the chimney’s blocked,” Guy said. But the fire drew, the flames roared and crackled in the grate, and the dusty and
desolate room suddenly acquired a warmth: ash gray transformed into warm ocher. Vague disquiet transformed into happiness.
He turned to her and put his arms around her. She didn’t care what might happen. Alan might phone the hotel and discover that
she was not yet in, but how could that matter? The remainder of her life might be a misery, but how would that stand against
this fragment of joy snatched out of time and context?

When they made love later that evening, she did it with ease. She knew exactly how. She knew how to open herself for him,
how to give every bit of herself to him, body and soul, without shame. It wasn’t like when she was with Alan. With Alan she
felt awkward, almost as though he were a stranger even after all these years. But this was different, a great, racking, consuming
possession, physical sensation elevated to the spiritual, lust made love, her whole body penetrated by his so that for those
few moments they seemed not to be two people, but one and the same.

Afterward they lay together in front of the fire and he bent his head and kissed her, and she laughed with the impossibility
of it all, with the excitement and the anticipation, and the sensation that she had somehow recovered Guy from the dead.

“What are you laughing at?” he asked.

“I’m not laughing
at
anything,” she retorted.

“That sounds like Alice.”

“It’s not, you fool. It’s just true. I’m laughing
with
something: happiness, to be precise. For the moment, I’m happy.”

“So am I,” he agreed. He lay back beside her, looking up at the ceiling. The firelight sculpted his face in shifting planes
of gold and black. “But then what?” he asked. “What about tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow I’ll be unhappy.”

“Unless we meet again, like this.”

She felt a small stirring of excitement, or something like excitement. Fear, perhaps. “Again?”

“Why not?”

Fear. It
was
fear. This encounter with Guy was a lapse; anything else would be betrayal. This would soon be in the past, and she had long
ago discovered that time was a great palliative, as soothing to the conscience as any biblical balm of Gilead. But to meet
again would call for planning, and plans were in the future. Time had no power to assuage the guilt of what was yet to come.

Guy turned his head and looked at her. His smile was lopsided by the pull of gravity, giving it a wry, ironic slant. Or maybe
that was there in his expression anyway. “Let’s face it,” he said. “Meg’s never going to come here, is she? Oh, for a visit,
yes, perhaps — the chatelaine surveying her possessions. But she’s never going to
live
here. This will be my place. And yours. Our place.”

“What would that make me? Your mistress?”

“I’m not going to get into that argument. You know the answer.”

“Well, what about this one? You might be able to deceive Meg, but I couldn’t possibly betray Alan. Not in that manner. Not
systematically, not make assignations. I couldn’t do it.”

“That begins to sound very much like hypocrisy.”

“Maybe I am a hypocrite. Maybe we both are.”

He moved toward her and touched her cheek. “Don’t start an argument,” he said quietly. “Not now.” He stroked the soft pulp
of her lips, as though to soothe her momentary anger. “What’s the alternative?” he asked. “That we walk away from each other
tomorrow morning and never meet again? Is that what you want?”

“I don’t know, Guy. I just don’t know.”

“And one day years later we meet up. Maybe by pure chance, or maybe Meg arranges a meeting. A get-together, for old times’
sake. And we look at each other and realize that the greatest thing in both our lives never happened. Is that what you want?”

“I told you,” she said. “I don’t know what I want.”

He bent to kiss her. She found that she wanted him again. There was that terrifying desire rising in her once more. “Yes,
you do, Porpoise,” he said as he lifted his lips from hers. “You know very well.”