Cliffs of Fall

by Shirley Hazzard

  “I just want you to understand.”

  “Well of course I understand,” he said crossly. “How could I help it?”

  She had not thought of understanding as an involuntary acquisition. “I meant—to be kind.”

  “Damn it, I am kind,” he responded, raising his voice. After a moment he said, less harshly: “Aren’t I?”

  “Not really, no.” Sensing a passing relaxation of his annoyance, she struggled for words, as if speaking on a long-distance call with only moments to reach him. Giving this up, she turned her face toward the window and wiped her eyes again, this time with the back of her hand. I do cry rather a lot, she conceded.

  The Sunday-evening traffic was heavy, and the road not wide, and they moved along slowly. From a car that had drawn level with them, a little girl was watching Nettie curiously. Clem drove for a while in silence. Eventually, he turned his head once more and said: “Look, pull yourself together. We can talk about it at dinner.”

  Nettie clasped her hands in her lap. “I want to go straight home,” she told him, as she might have said: “I am going to die.” “To my place.”

  Clem watched the traffic again, frowning. He allowed it to move past him, to the great disappointment of the child in the neighboring car, who was swept ahead and disappeared, still gazing at them, around a bend in the road. At the next intersection, he put his arm out to signal and turned the car off the main road.

  “What are you doing?” Nettie asked, as aloof as curiosity would allow.

  He did not reply. They passed, still slowly, through a shopping center and a housing development. Presently they came into a suburban street lined with trees and with large, unfenced gardens. Clem drew the car in to the curb, and switched off the engine. Two boys were riding bicycles down the sidewalk, and a man washing his car turned to look at them in the fading light. Nettie stared into her lap.

  Clem put his arm along the back of the seat without touching her. “Now what’s all this about?” he asked her.

  She smiled faintly. “You sound like a policeman.”

  “But, darling, what ever is it? I only said the weekend seemed no worse than usual, and you tell me you never want to see me again.”

  What cowards men are, she thought. “It can’t be that incomprehensible,” she said.

  His fingers touched the back of her neck. She inclined her head further, away from his hand. The tears returned to her eyes. An Irish terrier ran up to the car from a nearby garden and began to bark at them. The man washing his car called sharply: “Casey!”

  “Don’t cry.” But this time it seemed that he said it for her sake and not his own.

  “No,” she said, apologetically, the tears now falling for his sympathy. “I’m sorry, I suppose it’s the strain.”

  “Well, of course,” he replied, quite gently. “Of course.”

  “You don’t know how isolated one feels. You have so many—attachments.”

  “You make me sound like a vacuum cleaner.” He smiled. With his other hand he lifted a strand of damp hair back from her cheek.

  She went on. “Perhaps it is all ordinary—what one should expect. I have only this to go on, so I don’t know. It seems terrible. Because you are—have lived longer,” she emended gracefully, “you have a clearer idea of what will happen. I can’t see anything but a disaster … if this were carried to its logical conclusion.” Her voice trembled.

  His hand moved patiently along the exposed slope of her neck. “Life,” he remarked, “is not strong on logical conclusions. Perhaps fortunately. But I do forget about your age. Because you are the youngest of us, you are the most important. And May would agree with that.” (Her position seems to have been completely reversed, Nettie noted.) “You have no experience to guide you. As you say, I know so much more.”

  She smiled again. “‘I said an elder soldier, not a better.’”

  He turned her toward him and drew her head against his shoulder. She did not resist or relax, and he sat with his arm around her. “Are you really going to leave me?”

  She sighed. “Does it look like it?”

  “On the contrary. I don’t know what’s going on in here.” He touched her head.

  “Casey! Come here!” shouted the man with the hose.

  “Shall we move on before this dog loses all its illusions?” he asked her.

  “But we haven’t decided anything.”

  “We can talk about it at dinner.” He released her. She sat up straight and put her hands to her hair. “You look all right,” he told her, starting the engine. At the sudden sound, the dog barked again. Clem swung the car round in the middle of the street, and they returned the way they had come.

  Now he is driving too fast, Nettie observed. She took a mirror out of her purse. She did not look back at the square receding gardens and white houses. We disturbed their Sunday evening, she thought, and upset their dog. When she lifted her head, they had already reached the main road. “My eyes are all red,” she said.

  “If you want to wash your face, we could go home first.”

  “We may never get there if you drive like this.”

  “Are you frightened?”

  “No, but I suppose I don’t want you to get killed,” she said.

  He smiled and slowed down. But when she next looked at him, his face was very serious—very sad, she realized with a little shock, Clem’s sadness seeming far more incongruous, far less bearable, than her own. “What are you thinking?” she asked him.

  “I was thinking,” he replied, “if I died, how bad it would be for you. No one would understand that you were the person most to be comforted.”

  The telephone bell, which had been ringing in her sleep, woke her at last. When she lifted the receiver, it continued to vibrate indignantly in her grasp, like a baby that has been left crying in the dark. She opened her eyes. The room was scarcely light, the first sun thinly outlining the drawn blinds. She tried to think who she was—she could have been any one of a dozen people.

  “Hullo,” she murmured, pressing the receiver insecurely against her ear and lingering over the word.

  “Nettie,” said Clem.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked at once.

  Disconcerted by this abrupt understanding, he hesitated. “I’m going up to the house,” he said.

  “But this is Wednesday.”

  “I’m not going to the office. I’m going up to the house. May telephoned me late last night.”

  Nettie raised herself on her elbow. Her hand, holding the telephone, shook from the awkward position. “She knows, do you mean?”

  “From something she said, I think so.” For a moment, neither of them spoke.

  “It’s serious, isn’t it?” said Nettie, trying to compel her own responses. They were silent again, and then she said unhelpfully: “My dear.”

  “I’ll call you from the country,” he said. “After I’ve talked to May.”

  “What will you say to her?” Her words sounded in her own ears flat and forced. I have not realized it yet, she told herself remotely, as one who after an accident watches his own blood flow and feels no pain.

  “I will have to see how it is,” he said.

  “Do you want me to come?”

  “I think not.”

  “Call me as soon as you can.”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Remember …” she began.

  “What?”

  “About my love.”

  “Yes.”

  “No one will ever love you so much.”

  “No, I know,” he said with slight impatience, as if this were irrelevant. After a moment he added: “Yes. It has been worth it.” His tone was historic, she thought, like a farewell.

  She put the telephone down and lay back on the pillow. The lengthening, reddish light was already the light of a very hot day, but she shivered and drew the sheet up to her shoulders, and could not get warm. I suppose I will realize it quite soon now, she thought with detachment. He said: “It has bee
n worth it.” What has it been worth? What is to happen to me? What am I to suffer? Calamity has a generalizing effect, and as yet she could foresee her suffering only in a monumental way and not in its inexorable, annihilating detail. She considered her resources, ranging her ideas, her secrets carefully against the unapprehended future. But ideas don’t supplant feelings, she thought; rather, they prepare us for, sustain us in our feelings. If I understand why I am to be hurt, then does that really mean that it will hurt me less? I know that I risked—invited—this, wounded May. I have disturbed the balance. There is balance in life, but not fairness. The seasons, the universe give an impression of concord, but it is order, not harmony; consistency, not sympathy. We suffer because our demands are unreasonable or disorderly. But if reason is inescapable, so is humanity. We are human beings, not rational ones.

  She thought of Clem with a slight surprise, her predicament now seeming a thing itself, scarcely connected with him. If she instinctively wished for deliverance, it was for deliverance of an unfamiliar and pragmatic nature—much as a sailor on a sinking ship might hope to see the Coast Guard rather than his wife and children. Clem cannot help me, she thought; we are not contending with the same elements. He was amusing himself with me, really. He did not want to be inconvenienced in this way; the inconvenience will be the greatest of his burdens. (She felt this almost with gratitude, relieved of the additional weight of Clem’s grief.) They will make it up. They will be very solemn with each other, and May will use words like “relationship,” and they will make it up. For a while they will hold each other’s hands in public, and Clem will come home from the office on time. Once she has established her advantage, May will behave admirably toward me—she will be able to watch herself behaving admirably, like a person in a play. She will expect me to behave admirably back at her, but I have loved him too much for that. Or am at too great a disadvantage. Perhaps they will send me off somewhere, for a trip. (She even considered this possibility with a certain interest, wondering where she might go and what clothes she would need.) And Clem will manage to persuade himself that that is the best possible thing, that nothing could be better for me at this moment than to go ten thousand miles and be alone. He may miss me after a while, in the one particular way, but as long as he doesn’t have to see me he will be all right. She dwelt for a moment, still painlessly—almost, in fact, with a smile —on Clem’s resilience. Her eyes traveled listlessly around the room. I have nothing of his, she thought, nothing he gave me—not even a photograph, and he will look different now that he has stopped loving me. I couldn’t prove, if I had to, that he ever existed for me—it’s like that awful story about the walled-up hotel room in Paris. I shan’t be able to say his name to anyone, not even to say that I miss him. It is just as he once said, no one will be able to sympathize with what I’ve lost—but that sounds like a funeral: “Profound sympathy in your recent loss …” In any case, even if they knew about it, people wouldn’t sympathize. With a thing like this, they don’t sympathize unless you die. And that would be exceptional.

  The sun was up now, although the room was still half dark because of the lowered blinds. It will be hot for him on the road, she thought. If he left immediately, he will be well on the way by now. He should arrive before lunch. It is an hour since he called me, and still I feel nothing; perhaps, after all, it need not be so terrible. These things happen all the time, and people survive them; they are exaggerated in retrospect, and in literature. She closed her eyes. I have not even wept, and I always cry so easily. Perhaps I can sleep, and when I wake it will seem more distant than ever. But why am I so cold, she wondered again. Why can’t I get warm? She moved her arm, which had been rigidly clasped across her body, and felt it tremble. Beneath her, the bed was like stone.

  She had not even finished dressing when he arrived. She had meant, of course, to take especial care with her appearance but had slept, instead, right through the morning —probably from the exhaustion of the last few days. When she awoke, there was barely time to take her shower and put the coffee on; not even time to make her bed. It was only because his train was a little late that she managed to get into her clothes before the doorbell rang.

  He had taken a train that got him to town about noon; it was the only possible one, on Sunday. The day before, when he telephoned her from the country, he had said: “I’ll leave the car with May and the children.” It was one of the things she had wondered about when she put the phone down, trying to discover what position he had taken with May. It had been a short and comfortless conversation, because the telephone at his summer house was on a party line. And yet, she thought, if he had something definite to tell her he could have driven to another town, called from a drugstore. She had by then passed two days of silence and suspense since he left town on Wednesday to talk to May, and the overstated nonchalance of the telephone conversation made her frantic. “But can’t you tell me anything?” she cried, as he prepared to hang up. After an admonishing silence, he had said only: “When I see you on Sunday.”

  She finished buttoning her dress and pushed her feet into a pair of sandals before she opened the door. Her face still glistened from the shower, her uncombed hair hung down her back, secured at the neck by a frayed ribbon; these things, absurdly, were uppermost in her mind as she turned the doorknob.

  Clem on the other hand, was neatly dressed in a light summer suit; his collar and tie had admirably withstood the long journey in a hot train. He seemed a little browner, and his eyes were bright and slightly reddened as though he had slept badly. He came in without speaking, and she closed the door after him. He was holding a brief case, which he put down in a corner of the tiny hall. When she turned from closing the door, he said her name, and put his arms around her with such intensity of feeling that she had no time to raise her own and stood within his embrace as if she did not submit to it. Love, however, was too strong for her, and she moved her cheek against the side of his head. I will have to know soon, she thought, what he has agreed to do.

  “I left the coffee on,” she said, unclasping his arms and stepping aside. She went into the kitchen without glancing at him, and turned the gas off. He came and stood in the doorway. She still could not look at his face, which she knew must explain everything to her. “Shall I make you some lunch?” she asked.

  “Just coffee.”

  She was lifting down the cups and saucers. “If you take the coffee in, I’ll bring the tray.” He stood back to let her pass, and she went into the living room and put the tray on a table in front of the sofa. “Thanks. Oh, not there; that won’t stand heat—yes, there, on the tile.” Sitting on the sofa, she poured his coffee and her own, and they drank in silence.

  “You haven’t had breakfast, then?”

  She looked at him now, over the rim of her cup. “I only just woke up.” In case that should sound unfeeling, she added: “I was exhausted.” She was suddenly reminded of her appearance. She put her cup down and raised her hand to her head. “I haven’t even done my hair.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  “Let me do it while you have your coffee. It won’t take a minute.” She started to rise from the sofa.

  “No, don’t go,” he said, taking her hand. She sat down again, still watching him. He held her hand in both of his for a moment, and then pressed it against his mouth and burst into tears.

  She let him put his head on her breast, withdrawing her hand so that she could take him in her arms. She leaned back on the sofa, slightly breathless from his weight and from the pressure of his head, which was quite hard. In spite of the discrepancy in their ages, she felt protective—almost dispassionate—as she held him and moved her hand consolingly up and down his shuddering spine. She also regarded him with a certain amount of vulgar curiosity—she had never seen a man weep before, and was young enough to consider it a monument in her experience. In addition, she was unable to rid herself of the notion that he wept for what he was about to say. Relieved of speculation, she found
herself invested, instead, with the kind of momentary self-possession that is summoned up in a doctor’s waiting room. She breathed, through the salt smell of his hair, the steam of the coffee and even regretted that her cup had to get cold. Her eyes, uptilted by her attitude, rested on the pale-green wall opposite her. She reflected that in love one can only win by cheating and that the skill is to cheat first. (Having coveted neither the advantage nor the skill, however, she had no justification for disputing—as she did—the defeat that confronted her.)

  He raised his head and shifted his position so that he too leaned back on the sofa, although his shoulder still pressed on hers. He held her right hand in his own, and with his left felt for his handkerchief and blew his nose. He closed his eyes, frowning, and she could see that he was studying how to begin. She tightened her clasp on his hand and said kindly, almost politely: “Don’t worry. Just tell me.”

  He opened his eyes and sat up a little. “How good you are,” he said.

  This struck her as the sort of compliment one pays to a child, to encourage its behavior in the desired direction. It comforted her not at all that her judgment of him should remain thus pitilessly detached—that she saw him, perhaps, more clearly and with less admiration than ever before. The insight was useless to her, trapped as she was in the circumstance of love. She knew that sitting there with her hands clasped about his and her eyes on his face she represented, accurately, a spectacle of abject appeal. In any case, it was a habit of hers—possibly through the fear of loss—to appear most propitiating when she most condemned.

  “Nothing has been decided,” he said, putting away his handkerchief with a faint air of getting down to business. “I can only tell you what we feel about it.”

  At the word “we,” she lowered her eyes and kept them fastened to the design of interlocking fingers in her lap. Aware of having somehow blundered, he had already lost the place in his text; it was asking too much of her that she should prompt him.

  After a pause, he said abruptly: “I think I told you I no longer loved my wife.”