Cliffs of Fall

by Shirley Hazzard

  “I must go soon,” she said.

  “Yes, it’s getting colder,” Greta said. “I’ll just finish this and we’ll go in.”

  “I mean to America.”

  Greta looked up. “Elizabeth darling, it’s only the end of September. Don’t think about it for a week or two. You aren’t able to go yet. I don’t mean because you’re sick—I mean because you’re … not yourself.”

  She said: “I make no progress.”

  “Toward what?”

  “Toward him,” she said.

  Elizabeth was allowed to stay up for dinner, which they were to have early on her account. When Cyril came home, he kissed her and, having ascertained that she felt better, declared she had never looked worse. She thought she looked odder than she otherwise might because of her deep tan, which made a curious glaze over her pallor. Her hair hung lankly down on her shoulders in separate dark tails. “I’ll wash it tomorrow,” she said, pushing it back behind her ears. “If I feel up to it.”

  They were in the kitchen, Greta standing by the stove and Cyril taking down glasses from a shelf. Elizabeth was sitting, still in Cyril’s woollen dressing gown, at the kitchen table, with her back to the window. It was almost fully light, although behind her the sky was reddening and the Jura darkening. Leaning her cheek on her hand, she felt more peaceful than she had all day. With her left hand she made a space for Cyril to put the glasses down among the places laid on the table.

  “What would you like to drink?” Cyril asked Greta.

  “No,” she said absently, stirring the soup. “I mean, not a real drink. Just Perrier—something like that. Put some syrup in it, if there is any.”

  “Disgusting,” he said. He found a bottle of raspberry syrup and made a pink, foaming concoction for her with mineral water. “What an infantile taste,” he remarked, setting it down at her elbow. Greta smiled without looking at him, took a long drink, and put the glass down again. She went on placidly stirring.

  “What would you like?” Cyril asked Elizabeth, coming back to the table.

  “The same,” she said. It occurred to her that she had been thirsty all day. She could hardly take her eyes off the red glass on the stove.

  “God,” he observed, putting an inch of syrup in a glass and reopening the bottle of Perrier.

  “I’m so thirsty,” she said. She reached out her hand to take the drink from him.

  Greta looked round abruptly. “But, Cyril, what are you doing? She can’t have that—she’s been sick. Have some sense.” She put the spoon down on the stove and looked at him reproachfully. Cyril made a face of comic apology to Elizabeth and turned away with the full glass in his hand.

  Elizabeth kept her hand outstretched for a moment longer. Then she withdrew it and propped up her cheek again. The room, the white tabletop, the forks and knives, glasses and plates swam in her tears. The only motion of concealment she made was to turn her face a little into her palm, half covering her mouth. Otherwise, she wept resistlessly and almost silently, without attempting to find her handkerchief or even take her napkin from the table to wipe her eyes. She went on crying—for a long time, or so it seemed—while the Stricklands stood still in the middle of the kitchen, watching her, and not looking in the least astonished that a grown woman should cry because she was refused a glass of raspberry soda.

  The sign, high up in the main hall of the airport, was decorated with an enormous cardboard watch and said in English

  WELCOME TO GENEVA PATEK PHILIPPE

  “Anyone would think they were expecting some foreign dignitary,” said Cyril.

  Elizabeth smiled, and put her hand in Greta’s. They were sitting on a sofa covered with hard red plastic. Unnerved by the climate of departure, they spoke disjointedly and were rigidly silent when a flight was announced. Elizabeth had buttoned up her black coat and put a scarf around her neck. Like most of the people in the airport, she looked inordinately sunburned for the raw gray day.

  “At least, there’s no fog,” Greta said. “Though the bise is still blowing.” The drear, chilly wind had gone on for days. “Do you have your pills?”

  Elizabeth touched her handbag. “I took one just before we set out. There are only three left, but I’ll be able to get more tomorrow.”

  “I hate the idea of your going back to work.”

  “It’s the best thing, isn’t it?”

  An elegant woman walked past with a poodle on a leash.

  “We should have brought Aurélien,” said Greta. “He would have enjoyed it.”

  Elizabeth felt reconciled to the journey; like someone facing an operation, she only hoped she would behave well. She could not envisage her arrival or make plans for the resumption of her ordinary life. For over a week now, she had been managing to contend with each separate circumstance as it arose, and could look no further. The flight to New York at that time took sixteen hours, and she was ready to be overwhelmed by the prospect. Having taken the pill to stave off the worst of grief, she could not expect to sleep and must spend hours staring, upright, at the sky that was now to be associated with him always.

  “Attention,” the voice said. They got to their feet, and Cyril picked up her overnight bag. They walked past glass cases filled with clocks and watches, and metal stands stacked with chocolate boxes.

  “Would you like something?” Cyril asked her.

  “Nothing. Thank you. Really.”

  “Let me get you some chocolate.”

  “But they feed you all the time on these planes.”

  “You never know.” When he came back with the package in his hand, she was reminded of Etienne handing her the rough, useless flowers on the mountainside.

  At the gate, they embraced her. A young man in uniform examined her passport and her ticket and gave them back to her. She held them in her right hand, with the packet of chocolate. Every action now seemed to her to involve an important and costly effort, as though she were being presented with obstacles which she must continually surmount. Irrationally, she believed that her departure itself represented such an undertaking, and that it would have been possible for her to stay, protected, in the flat green garden between the two lines of mountains without ever fully acknowledging what had brought her there. It was almost like consenting to his death, she thought, walking into the railed enclosure with the other passengers.

  WEEKEND

  LILIAN, on waking, reached up her arm to pull back the curtain from the window above her bed. The cretonne roses, so recently hung that their folds were still awkward and raw-smelling, tinkled back on brass rings, and sunlight fell around the walls in honey-colored warpings. It was like being under water, she thought, bathed in that delicate light; she had forgotten these contradictions of spring in England—chill, dreary evenings like yesterday’s, and bright mornings full of early flowers. She pushed the blankets away and knelt up on the bed to look out the small, paned window. The outer air, the garden glittered; the meadows—for they could hardly be called anything less—unfolded beyond, crowned by a glimpse of the village and the fifteenth-century church. All as suitable, as immaculate as the white window sill on which her elbows rested.

  But the room was, of course, cold, and she sank back into the bedclothes. During the night, she had wakened several times to hear the wind rattling the windowpanes and had pushed herself further down the bed, trying to warm her shoulders. (The little electric radiator had been taken away during the day to dry the baby’s washing and had not been returned.) Going to bed last night, she had actually consoled herself with the prospect of departure—that it would be her last night in the house. And tonight, no doubt, back in London, she would wonder about the weekend, and comfort herself by telephoning Julie and by thinking out the long, loving letter she would write when she got back to New York. The letter, in her mind, was already some paragraphs advanced.

  Like some desolating childhood disappointment, she thought, this anxiety to get away when she had so longed to come here—so longed to see them, and to see Jul
ie most of all. Because, even though Ben was her own brother, it was to Julie she felt closer; Julie she had missed more in these two years away. Given only this weekend, Lilian felt the need to precipitate confidences—“Are you happy, is this really what you want?” she had almost asked Julie last night, coming upstairs. Which was nonsense, impertinence ; one couldn’t ask it, and in any case Julie would have laughed and told Ben afterward (“What ever do you think Lilian said to me?”). Married couples always betrayed their friends that way—probably for something to say, being so much together. And Ben, indifferent, would say: “How perfectly extraordinary,” or “I’m not in the least surprised,” or “Poor old Lilian.”

  Lilian’s room was in the old part of the house—seventeenth-century, Julie had said. Lilian allowed a century either way, for Julie’s imprecision and the exaggeration of the estate agent. She lay approving the uneven walls, the heavy beams of the roof, the sturdy irregularities of the window and door. The only furniture other than her bed was a new chest of drawers, a cane chair, and a small, unsteady table. On this table stood a china lamp and Poets of the Present, a frayed volume in which Thomas Hardy was heavily represented. The room—in fact, the whole house—looked bare. They needed so many things, Julie had said—practically everything—but for a while nothing more could be done; buying the house had taken every penny. On Friday, when Lilian arrived, Julie had shown her around, walking through the rooms with her hand in the crook of Lilian’s arm, separating apologetically at doorways. (All the rooms were at slightly different levels, and there was a step or two at each entrance——sometimes dropping, dangerously, beyond a closed door.) Julie’s shy, artless face, lowered so that strands of silky hair drooped on Lilian’s shoulder, had seemed tired, frail. Her sweater and skirt were aged, unheeded. Too much for her, Lilian thought, this house, and the baby, though I’m sure it’s lovely. “Lovely,” she had repeated later, in the nursery, over a mound of blue blanket. In the hallway, it was Lilian who linked their arms again.

  She pushed the bedclothes back once more, and lowered her feet to the cold, glossy floor. And Ben, she thought, shivering and resting her elbow on her knee and her chin on her hand. She found it hard to believe in Ben as Julie’s husband, Simon’s father, a member (as she supposed he must be) of the community, traveling up to London every morning of the week, and at home seeming settled and domestic, reading the evening paper with the air of one who must not be disturbed. She supposed that in his way he must love Julie, but she couldn’t really imagine him intimate with anyone. She thought of him as a source of knowledge rather than experience; a good, though not contemporary mind, a person rather than a man.

  “I adore you,” Ben said, without opening his eyes, “but why are you up so early?”

  Julie, at the mirror, uttered a strangled sound. She took a bobby pin from between her teeth and fastened up the last, escaping lock of hair. “I have to take care of Simon until the girl arrives. And think about lunch … And then, there’s Lilian.”

  “What about her?” Ben stretched out into the depression left by Julie’s body in the other half of the bed. His eyes, now open, were surprisingly alert. “Come and talk to me.”

  She came and sat beside him, reaching her arm across his body to rest her hand on the bed. “I just mean I have to think of her—make sure she’s not cold or anything.”

  “Difficult to see how she can be anything else, when we’ve got both the radiators.”

  “Oh, Lord! I forgot … . Don’t, darling, after all the trouble I took combing it.”

  “Why is it done differently?” He loosened another strand.

  “I don’t know—I suppose because Lilian eyes me as though I should Do Something with myself. She makes me feel that I look … married.”

  “Scarcely astonishing, in the circumstances.” He drew her elbow back so that, losing the support of her arm, she collapsed against his breast. She remained there, and he put his arm around her. “‘Old, married, and in despair’—is that the idea?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Too soon for that,” he observed, encouragingly. “But I know what you mean. Since she’s been here I can hardly read the paper without feeling that I’ve sold my immortal soul.”

  Julie giggled. “Don’t be awful.” She drew away from him and put her hands up to her hair, assessing the damage. “Do you think she’s happy? I get the feeling she doesn’t want anything—you know, doesn’t know what she should do with her life …” She opened another bobby pin with her teeth and replaced it at the back of her head. “We, at least know where we are.”

  “‘I am between water and stone fruit in India,”’ declared Ben, looking up at Lilian over the Times. “In eleven letters.”

  “Any clues?”

  “None.”

  “Pondicherry,” Lilian said, after a moment’s silence.

  Ben wrote. Pleased with herself, Lilian curled her legs up on the sofa and wondered if she should be in the kitchen, helping Julie. There were to be guests for lunch.

  “‘A secret’—blank—‘in the stream.’ Tennyson. Nine letters.”

  “No clues?”

  “Begins and ends with ‘s:”

  “Sweetness,” said Julie unexpectedly from the dining room. She appeared for a moment in the doorway and added: “In Memoriam,” polishing a glass with a dish towel.

  “Twenty across,” Ben resumed, but Lilian got up and followed Julie.

  The kitchen smelled of roasting lamb, and of floor polish and mint sauce. What an appalling stove, Lilian thought; surely they’ll replace it.

  “Do sit down,” Julie told her, pulling out a chair by the table. “We’ll be five for lunch—some neighbors called Marchant and the three of us. No, darling, thank you, there’s nothing; everything’s done. Unless perhaps you’d like to shell the peas.” She turned her attention to the meat. “It’s quite efficient, really, this kitchen—though, as you see, we had to put in a new stove.”

  Lilian began to break pods over a colander. “What are they like, your neighbors?”

  “The Marchants? We scarcely know them. They drove over one day, in a Volkswagen, to call—we’d been introduced by the previous owners of the house. And they asked us to dinner last week, but we couldn’t leave the baby. Seem all right—a bit dull.” Having basted the lamb, Julie slid it back into the oven and straightened up. She plunged the basting spoon into suds in the sink. “Nothing against them, really, apart from the car.”

  Arriving late in their Volkswagen, the Marchants brought with them a big, restless Dalmatian called Spot. Mr. Marchant was stocky and bald, with heavy glasses and a suit of limp tweed. Mrs. Marchant was slight and ginger-haired, and wore a green pullover and a gray flannel skirt. They stood for some minutes in the hall, commenting on improvements in high, authoritative voices, before they could be induced to enter the living room. Mrs. Marchant did not sit down at once, but moved across the room to stare at a picture before veering sharply away to the window. Rather, Lilian could not help thinking, like a small colored fish in an aquarium. Spot after a brisk canter around the furniture, flopped down to pant in a corner, where Ben was preparing drinks.

  Mrs. Marchant gave Lilian her divided attention. “You’ve just been—thank you, with a little water—to America?”

  “She lives there,” Ben said, stepping over the dog. “Out of the way, Fido.”

  “Spot,” corrected Mrs. Marchant, scenting disparagement.

  Mr. Marchant, who was a lawyer, produced some formidably documented views on the conduct of government in the United States. Congressional legislation appeared to him as a series of venal disasters—catalogued, Lilian felt, with a certain satisfaction.

  Julie was quietly interrogating the dog, now sitting at her feet. “Are you a good doggie?” Spot smiled, but kept his counsel.

  Unable to refute Mr. Marchant, and badly situated for conversation with Spot. Lilian kept silent. Perhaps it’s a system, something one gets used to again, she told herself —like doing t
he Times crossword puzzle.

  Mrs. Marchant was inclined to be tolerant. “The Americans who come over here seem pleasant enough, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, absolutely,” Ben agreed. He put out his cigarette, and added: “A trifle assiduous, perhaps,” before lighting another.

  Mrs. Marchant persisted. “But I’ve always got on well with them. We had four in our house—remember, Hugh? —during the war. Well-behaved boys. They read aloud in the evenings.” She nodded to reinforce this surprising memory.

  “Did they really?” Julie, who had risen, paused at the door of the dining room. “What?”

  Mrs. Marchant’s approval diminished. “Well, I was hoping for Wordsworth, which Daddy would have so loved—my father was living with us then. But instead they read an interminable thing about a whale—a whale, I assure you. I though we’d never see the back of that whale. But mercifully, when the good weather came, they opened the Second Front.”

  Lilian, glancing up in dismay, was astonished to find Julie’s face disarrayed with amusement.

  They sat down to lunch, and Ben carved the meat. Spot, having found his way under the table, squeezed back and forth among their legs, his firm, bristly sides heaving with cheerful interest, his tail slapping wildly. Julie looked pained, and once laid down her knife and fork as though she were about to speak—but didn’t. At last Mr. Marchant got up from the table, apologizing, and called the dog to the door.

  “Out, damned Spot,” he said, pointing. Everyone laughed except Mrs. Marchant, who had heard the joke a hundred times. The dog pattered out as if he had intended this all along.