Falling Slowly Page 5

  We don’t know enough people, she told herself, as she fumbled for her keys. But then it is high summer and they are probably all away, the ones who used to visit. For they had once come, those women friends, had discussed their love affairs, and, finding little response, had finally gone off with one another. They had been left feeling shy, inhibited. Unspoken, there lurked the suspicion that they had fallen out of the race, were no longer regarded as competition. They felt unused, despite their anxiously gained experience. So that it was almost with pleasure that they welcomed Beatrice’s elderly acolytes. They were newly grateful for an opportunity to repair their dignity, a process which only seemed possible in an atmosphere of obsolete compliments. When all was said and done this company was preferable. Beatrice was soothed by it; men had not let her down, had played their part, had flattered her. Their parting kiss on her hand was reassurance that her world still turned.

  As Miriam entered the flat she heard voices coming from what Beatrice called the drawing-room, the door of which slightly ajar to reveal a broad masculine back in an armchair. This back, which she saw only briefly, struck her as brazen, as of brass, or rather of gold, shedding light, perhaps on account of the pale jacket sitting comfortably on the powerful shoulders. An equally powerful leg thrust out sideways from the chair. She could not see Beatrice, the stranger blocking her view, but she could smell her scent. As no voice summoned her she slipped into her bedroom, tidied her hair, and unfolded the Evening Standard, wishing that Beatrice had warned her of this visitor so that she could have had a quiet cup of coffee on the way home. This was one more reason to take the Lower Sloane Street flat, although she knew that she would never become attached to it, as surely one should become attached to one’s own space. For a brief moment she regretted Bramham Gardens, and even its dining annexe: she was hungry, and dared not make a noise in the kitchen, for fear of detracting from Beatrice’s presence. Kitchen noises and smells were somehow not compatible with that light-coloured, almost golden back.

  After a few minutes she heard Beatrice’s piano, and even Beatrice’s voice accompanying it. She was singing an old song, which they both loved, Au clair de la lune, and her voice was tentative but pleasing. Miriam had not heard it so devoid of emotion for a long time. She waited for the performance, for that was what it seemed to be, to finish, and then went resolutely into the kitchen and filled the kettle.

  ‘Miriam,’ called Beatrice. ‘Are you making coffee? Then do come and join us.’

  Miriam, who had been thinking longingly of a couple of fried eggs, the consumption of which now looked to be postponed indefinitely, sighed and made her way to Beatrice’s drawing-room, for she was clearly in command this evening. Beatrice looked bemused, as well she might, as the stranger unfolded his length from a chair which suddenly seemed flimsy, although it was normally one of her favourites, the chair the guest sat in. They had bought it from a second-hand shop in the Fulham Road, and had got it for a remarkably small price, since it was no longer one of a pair. The golden stranger – the light suit was now seen to be set off by a pale blue shirt – stretched out a sizeable hand and murmured, ‘Simon Haggard.’

  ‘Would you like some coffee?’ she asked, her voice low, and for some reason sounding intimate.

  ‘Yes, I should. Thank you.’

  As they drank their coffee she surveyed him discreetly. Beautiful, yes, but somehow masculine as well: the word handsome seemed too tepid, too indefinite. She took in a tanned skin, a broken nose, a head of bronze hair, and again the broad shoulders, the powerful legs. By contrast Beatrice was uncharacteristically subdued, did little to keep the conversation civilized, and beyond saying, ‘Simon has taken over from Max; he is my new agent, I suppose,’ turned her head away, her profiled cheek burning.

  So it was possible, then: a man could look like a hero. This did not mean that he would necessarily behave like a hero, but that much would be forgiven him. If a man looked like a hero it would be assumed that he was one. Greek gods were quite misleading, she thought, not for the first time; statues in museums could do quite a lot of mental damage.

  ‘I heard you singing,’ she remarked tamely to Beatrice. ‘I haven’t heard that song for a long time. How does it go on?’

  Beatrice moved to the piano without alacrity, and seated herself. ‘Only the last verse,’ she said, as if to herself.

  ‘Ma chandelle est morte,

  Je n’ai plus de feu.

  Ouvre-moi ta porte,

  Pour l’amour de Dieu.’

  The significance of these words struck Miriam with some force, She gave the stranger, whom she thought of as the stranger, for he was without precedent, a long hard look, and received a long hard look in return. Both averted their eyes as Beatrice returned to her chair. Her presence seemed to signify to Simon Haggard a sort of difficulty, yet surely this was only a routine courtesy: he could not help his looks, any more than Miriam, now conscious of her unpretentious shirt and skirt, could help hers. Yet there was a malaise, which none of them seemed able to dispel. Miriam got up to stack their empty cups onto the tray and made for the door, which he held open for her. It was, she saw, eight fifteen.

  ‘I must be going,’ he said. ‘Goodbye, Miss Sharpe, Beatrice. You’ll keep in touch?’ He paused. ‘If there’s anything you need …’ It was what people said after the coup de grâce.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she replied, almost negligently. She looked distracted, queenly, Miriam saw, unlike herself, as if she had salvaged some long-lost dignity. So might she have looked at the outset of her career, when she had had ambitions to take over the concert platform for herself.

  ‘I’ll see you out,’ she said, and was conscious of his eyes on her back as she walked to the door.

  ‘I’m rather worried,’ he murmured, catching up with her. ‘I don’t think she took in what I was saying.’

  ‘Why? What were you saying?’

  ‘I was telling her that her contract was not being renewed. Bookings have fallen off … Don’t think I’m happy about this. I hate this sort of errand. Max might have had the decency to deal with it before he left. But as I say, I don’t think she took it in.’

  They were out of the flat, by the lift. ‘Do you want to walk me a bit?’ he asked.

  ‘No. I must get back. What will happen to her now?’

  ‘Oh, I can get her some occasional work, playing the piano for ballet classes, that sort of thing.’

  ‘She won’t want that.’

  ‘Miriam!’ came Beatrice’s voice. ‘Miriam, where are you?’

  ‘I must go,’ she said hastily.

  ‘I’ll see you again, won’t I?’ Again the long hard look of complicity. She felt the shock, hoped that he did too.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said, and shut the door.

  Walking back down the corridor – it would need redecorating, she thought; she must see to it before she left (for now there was a point to leaving, to privacy) – she was aware of a desire for heat, light, noise, animation. She was aware of a need to make it up to Beatrice, not only for the new situation which had befallen her, but for the new situation in which she herself was somehow placed. There was no possibility, even at this stage, of turning aside.

  ‘Attractive, isn’t he?’ said Beatrice with a distant smile. She did not say, ‘I saw the look that passed between you,’ but the information was offered, and was received in silence. ‘That is how a man should look. Poor Jonathan,’ she offered, by way of conclusion.

  ‘Are you all right? What will you do?’

  ‘I’ll think about it. You won’t mind clearing up, will you? I’m going to bed.’ And she walked slowly, and again distractedly, from the room.

  Miriam listened for tears, but heard nothing. She found herself humming the song again, requesting a door to open. Yet despite the evening’s various shocks it was no longer Beatrice’s door she was willing to approach.

  5

  When she first saw the flat in Bryanston Square she was a little disappointed. She had expect
ed some sort of splendour, like the court of the Sun King, at the very least a full panoply of gracious living. Instead she saw, initially, a rather large rather dull room, with walls covered in tan hessian and incongruous and elaborate pale linen curtains, clearly devised and fashioned by a feminine hand. The bedroom too was austere, with tan and white stripes on the wallpaper and a very large bed occupying most of the space. It was quiet, or so it seemed to her, although outside the window a pneumatic drill punctured the becalmed atmosphere with its regular machine-gun rhythm. She thought fleetingly and briefly of her bedroom in Lower Sloane Street, where she slept so thankfully after her exertions. Except that after that first visit she had had a disturbing dream: she was speaking to Beatrice on the telephone, in a new lively manner to which she was glad to hear Beatrice respond. They arranged to meet, to go for a long walk. It was a Sunday afternoon in the dream, and she was eager to be out in the open air. She dressed and left the flat, only to realize, once she was halfway along some remembered street, that they had not agreed on a meeting place. This affected her with a moment’s sadness, for while she could, and would, turn round and go home, Beatrice would be condemned to wander all over London in search of her. This dream, she thought, did not disturb her unduly, but she telephoned Beatrice, ascertained that she was all right, not caring to enquire too deeply, and put down the receiver with a sense of duty done. It was only later in the day that she recalled the conversation, not Beatrice’s wry tones (for Beatrice knew) but her own enthusiastic manner, which contained intimations of every sort of betrayal.

  But why should she feel a traitor? She was simply following impulses which turned out to be not so very random after all. If her connection with Simon Haggard was casual, or rather random as opposed to casual, that was in order, as if they were two atoms in one of her former husband’s experiments, or two acquaintances destined to join, in an atmosphere of agreeable neutrality from which all moral censure was absent. Goethe had written a novel about this, she remembered; she had once urged Beatrice to read it, in order to correct her thinking, but Beatrice had found it repugnant, unwilling to contemplate unions so apparently loveless. Miriam was, she now thought, in a position to acknowledge the story’s wisdom, for what she enjoyed with Simon was surely an elective affinity? She knew the relevant facts: that he was married, that he had two young children, that his wife, a don at Lady Margaret Hall, lived mainly in their house in Oxford, that he went home to Norham Gardens at the weekend, using the flat only as a base in London from which to work. He had an office in Soho Square, but found it easy to get back to the flat for lunch, which was when she visited him. Despite his busy life, with its diverse attractions, he seemed to accept her, together with the fact that she did not burden him with her doubts and queries. She did not know how he felt; she only knew that when they exchanged their long silent glances they were both obliged to be sincere. That sincerity was their guarantee; the word love had not been spoken. She did not even apply the word to herself, for she was not in love, she reasoned. It was as if something more powerful had taken over. She was not in love; she was in thrall, to Simon, to his wife, to Norham Gardens, to Bryanston Square, to the whole panorama of his life and its attributes, and this was a condition from which longing and frustration were removed. She felt as if she were reading a book, a masterpiece containing all the best fictional ingredients, written in a language she had not known she understood. She thought that he appreciated her, found her compatible with preoccupations of which he never spoke. With his naked arms around her, after a brief sleep, he seemed older, heavier; his eyes searched hers for an answering look of understanding. Then he would sigh, before a dawning smile of reminiscence replaced the older, more troubled expression.

  ‘What have you brought?’ he would ask.

  ‘Smoked salmon,’ she would answer, and, after an interval, ‘Pain de campagne. Boursin. Don’t go to sleep again.’

  ‘I’m not asleep.’

  ‘Apples. The first Cox’s.’

  For it was nearly autumn, and the skies were darker in the evening, when she did not see him. She went to Bryanston Square in the lunch hour, taking a picnic, for he never seemed to have any food in the house, claiming to eat out every day. It pleased her to devise little meals for him, although in every other respect she had no sentimental thoughts of domesticity. Their extraordinary conjunction, for which nothing in her life had prepared her, seemed both too abstract and too real to accommodate conventional thinking. Nor did she ask herself what the attraction was on his side. Those sincere, almost mournful gazes, when they lay in each other’s arms, gave her all that she needed in the way of reassurance, and if it was reassurance without the exchange of information, or rather of further information, over and above the essential facts, she assumed it was because they had both read, or were both reading from, the same text, that they met perfectly in the same experiment.

  It did not even bother her that she saw herself as slight and nondescript, for his refulgent looks did duty for both of them. She did not regret that they never went out together, were never seen as a couple. She could imagine the comments: ‘What on earth does he see in her? She must be older than he is.’ This was true: he was eight years her junior. But when they had eaten, and she had left him, she was aware, from glances, that her eyes were brighter, her mouth softer. It seemed to her that what they shared, that sense of being no longer strangers to each other, outweighed any more formal definition of their relationship. Even the word relationship seemed to her misplaced, with its smirking public overtones of possession. She felt that they were in some entirely private category, and she never doubted this. His real life, his life away from her, she discounted, preferring to relegate it to the pages she had not yet read, in the same beloved book. When they lay, facing each other, wordless, she knew all she needed to know, and even thought it appropriate that some things were unknown, or that she might in time discover them. That he was sunnily reticent, in a rather practised manner, did not disturb her. She had seen behind the reticence, discerned what was so carefully hidden. Some childishness may have lain there, or rather a nostalgia for total acceptance. She thought he knew that there were no limits to her acceptance.

  She even accepted the fact that he did not always want to see her. ‘I could come this evening,’ she had once said, to which he had replied, ‘Oh, better not. My brother’s in town. He’ll probably look in.’ Or, ‘I promised to take our au pair out to dinner. She always comes to London on her day off.’ She said nothing, merely adding the brother and the au pair to the appurtenances of the ideal family, which she was bound to admire, to enjoy. Such riches! She thought briefly and dismissively of her own bleak childhood home, and discarded it for ever, preferring to contemplate the house in Norham Gardens, with its noises and its casual company, as if it had stood since the beginning of time, as if Simon were both child and husband, as if his wife, Mary, had also always existed, as if both were the outcome of Darwinian natural selection, the stuff of normal life. Back in the London Library, and slightly less exalted, sobered somewhat by the inevitable aftermath of their lunchtime meetings – Simon, still naked, picking up his telephone messages, herself in the bathroom – she thought, contemplating the grey heads behind the newspapers, that very few lives were in fact so endowed, that many people were lonely, ill, that age made inroads, that much was unsought, undeserved. At the same time she longed for him again, and when with him she accepted what she thought of as the necessary mythology. It was essential for him to be happy, to be as happy as he looked. Her own part in the proceedings she took for granted.

  One evening, because the September weather was so beautiful, because the day had held the last heat of summer, and because the dusk smelt of fallen leaves, she made a sudden decision, hailed a passing taxi, and gave directions for Bryanston Square. The point of this decision, she thought, was to enjoy the evening, to prolong the particular joy they had known some hours earlier. It was almost reluctantly that she paid off the cab, feeling too remi
niscent to engage in a new conversation, but when she rang the bell, for she had no key, not thinking to ask for one, there was a scampering sound, and when the door opened a small boy, aged about six or seven, dressed in a white T-shirt and shorts, his feet bare, stood there, looking at her suspiciously.

  ‘This is Fergus,’ said Simon, smiling. ‘My son.’

  The child was beautiful, one more love object to be added to the list.

  ‘Have you had your supper?’ she asked.

  He nodded, and she realized that she had been about to commit an error, to remind Simon that there was a fruit cake in the fancy tin that she had bought that morning in Selfridges, and that she might, for the first time, be stretching her entitlements.

  ‘I saw a dinosaur,’ the child shouted suddenly.

  ‘Did you?’ She realized she sounded awkward. Nothing in her life had prepared her for conversation with children.

  ‘You saw a crane, Fergus. A big crane outside the window. It did look rather like a dinosaur, now that I come to think of it. And of course it was moving very slowly.’

  ‘Dinosaurs are distinct!’ shouted the child again.

  ‘Extinct,’ from the background.