We All Fall Down

by Rosemary Friedman

  Vanessa watched the stars popping one by one through the velvet curtain that was now drawn across the sky, and sighed.

  “What are you doing next Wednesday?”

  “I’d rather like to go over to Walmer.”

  “What’s at Walmer?”

  “Walmer Castle, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  In the cool breeze of the soft summer night within sight and sound of a gentle sea that whispered to the shore, the man and the girl walked in silence again to the small white block of flats that stood upon the cliff top.

  At the door Vanessa said: “Will you take me to Walmer with you on Wednesday?”

  “Delighted. I didn’t know you were interested.”

  In the light from the door Vanessa looked at his serious face, his eyes blinked solemnly, his broad shoulders bent a little as though beneath the weight of his thoughts.

  Suddenly he smiled. Vanessa, now completely sunk, closed her eyes.

  “I’m very interested,” she softly.

  “Good. We must leave early and do the moat as well. Good night, Vanessa.”

  “Good night.”

  In the flat, Vanessa found her parents playing gin-rummy.

  “My trick,” Arthur said.

  “Daddy, can I be off on Wednesday afternoon this week?”

  “No, dear. That’s Barrington-Dalby’s day. You’ll have to lend a hand with the ice-creams as well as the candy-floss. Your deal, Vera.”

  “Oh, Daddy, just this week.”

  “Out of the question. Come on, Vera.”

  “Why on earth can’t she have the afternoon off?” Vera said. “You’re getting as carried away with that café as if it were your bread and butter.”

  “She agreed to help. She can’t just go gallivanting off whenever it suits her. A job’s a job. She has to realise it sooner or later. She’s free on Thursday so I don’t know what all the fuss is about.”

  Vera patted Vanessa’s hand. “You look very pretty tonight, dear, and it’ll be all right for Wednesday. I’ll come and take your place.”

  Arthur looked at his daughter. “Thoroughly spoiled,” he said, but there was pride in his eyes. He added up the figures on the scorer by his side.

  “That’s half-a-crown you owe me,” he said to Vera.

  Eleven

  Arthur and Louise had got on together from the very beginning. Expecting to meet some ‘refeened’ type, coming as she did from Vera’s hairdressing salon, Arthur had been agreeably surprised to meet the quiet, genuine warmth that was Louise. Had it not been for her good sense and efficiency he would have found it difficult to get ‘Le Casse-Croûte’ going at all. Helpful and willing as were Honey, Basil, Howard, Vanessa and Victor, they had not a business head between them, and it was many weeks before they were able to give the correct change or add up the items on people’s trays without the help of their fingers. Louise, accustomed to dealing both with people and with money, took them all beneath her wing. When Vanessa stood with temporarily paralysed brain before her till, trying to subtract five and sevenpence-halfpenny from a pound, she would look round to find Louise, ready to help, behind her; when Howard pondered while the delivery man, whistling through his teeth with impatience, waited, how many blocks of strawberry, or nut-crunch or coffee ice-cream he was going to need, Louise would appear from nowhere, sweep an eye over his neatly stacked fridges and say, “What about two dozen of each and three of the strawberry to be getting on with, Howard?” and, of course, those were the very words Howard had been struggling to find.

  In the first days Louise had thanked Arthur for giving her, through his wife, the opportunity to come to Whitecliffs.

  “I’m extremely glad that she had the good sense to ask you,” Arthur said, as together they sorted through great stacks of cracked crockery, grimy legacy from ‘Joe’. “You’re the only one with any sense.”

  “The others are children,” Louise said. “Let them be children,” and although Howard was as old as she, and Basil not so very much younger, Arthur understood what she meant. For many years now Louise had had to be the breadwinner for her small family; she knew what it was to have others dependent upon her, to be responsible. He understood that at times, for a woman alone, the burden must seem very great. In the first days at Whitecliffs, Louise’s face, with its London mask, had been drawn, hard and pale, the lines deep from nose to chin. Now her face had a warm glow, the skin a tang of the wind and the sea, the lines were less harsh, the features softer.

  On her free afternoon she sat at the dressing-table in her mother’s room combing her hair.

  “Where are you off to now?” the old lady asked.

  “I’m taking the Gurney children to the concert party. I’ll be back by the time you’ve had your rest,” Louise said.

  “I don’t know why you have to go out on your afternoon off. It’s bad enough that you work all the week and leave me with nothing to do.”

  “You know you like to go to bed all the afternoon, Mother. I’ll be back by the time you wake up. Anyway you look much better for the sea air, and I do think you’re rather enjoying it here if you’d only admit it. Miss Price was telling me about those two ladies you meet every morning for coffee.”

  “Miss Price talks too much. She never stops,” she said of her companion.

  “She’s good company. It was clever of Mr Dexter to find her.”

  Her mother sniffed. She liked Miss Price.

  “When are we going home?”

  “I don’t know. I like it here. I like the café and everyone in bathing suits and bare feet, and no smell of perfume all day, and not having to wear a dark suit all the time, and the air.”

  The old lady said nothing.

  “I’m glad I came, anyway,” Louise went on. “I feel younger, healthier. You can go on doing the same thing too long, you know.”

  “You only think about yourself. Nobody ever considers me.”

  Louise, looking at herself in the mirror, at the hair no longer chic, from the sea air, in which the grey was steadily encroaching upon the blonde, thought that she had probably not thought of herself enough, and wondered whether things would have been different if she had. It was difficult now to believe, it seemed so long ago, that there had been another Louise, a Louise who laughed and was gay and did not spend all her free time making Ovaltine and filling hot-water bottles and steaming fish and fetching shawls and listening to grumbling so incessant that most of it she didn’t hear, but was only aware of like a tap that dripped and dripped and dripped. She had been big and blonde and shy when she left school and, so everyone said, beautiful, with the classic grace of a Greek statue. She had worn her hair back from her face and in a knot at the back of her head, and this she supposed and helped achieve the effect, although in those days it had been an unconscious effect, and one she had in no way striven for. Her father had been a stockbroker, and they had lived in Bournemouth where she had been born, and where in their lovely house among the pine trees her mother, younger then, of course, had nagged not only about her Ovaltine and the television picture, but how untidy were Louise and her father; and why Louise didn’t put the music away when she had finished with the piano, and why Louise and her father didn’t fold the newspapers and plump the cushions when they got up, and empty the ashtrays, and hang their coats up more tidily, and wipe their feet and not leave the doors open because of the draughts. Only then there had been two of them, Louise and her father, and together they laughed it off, and teased her mother that she’d really like them to walk around with no shoes on her highly polished floors, and come in and out through the keyhole. And occasionally her mother had laughed, too, at her own obsessions, but not too often and not with very much conviction. When Louise had left school there had been no need for her to earn her living, and she had occupied herself with work on charitable committees and two afternoons a week at a local crèche among babies which she loved and before whom she was able to lose her intolerable shyness. She went to dances, one or
two, with nice, selected young men, but mistaking her shyness for haughtiness they didn’t call again. Louise didn’t care; she was a happy girl and, because of her strict upbringing, young for her age, and wasn’t yet worried about getting married. She was twenty-two when the war came and the Air Force descended upon Bournemouth and slept six in a room in the luxury bedrooms of the big hotels, and often in the bathrooms and ballrooms as well. And there was barbed wire along the front, and concrete blocks, and they blew big holes in the two piers, and the charity committees and the crèches became suddenly unimportant. Louise had joined the WAAF, and told her parents afterwards. She scarcely heard her mother’s grumbling about being left alone all day in the big house among the lonely pines, while her father was in town all day, or what she was to do if there was an air raid or the Germans came, bayonets pointed, scrambling over the barbed wire on the beach. In the Air Force, she moved for the first time since she had left school amongst people of her own age. They were not people her mother would have selected, and at first they shocked Louise herself a little. She learned to speak a new language, to live among a coarseness and immorality to which she was not accustomed, and to lose her shyness. She found a new Louise, not prim, but laughing and gay, she had not dreamed existed, and a young pilot, taller even than herself, with whom she fell madly, and for the first and only time, in love. He worshipped her, pulled the pins from her hair until it fell in a golden cascade round her shoulders, and called her Lulu.

  One wintry November day which she would always remember, when the sea was rising in great waves that swamped the promenade, the sky grey and the wind howling through the pines, she had brought him down to Bournemouth to meet her parents. They had stood kissing on the doorstep, and when her mother opened the door their faces were pink with the cold and love, and they were laughing.

  “Your father’s had a stroke, Louise,” her mother said. “We tried to get you.”

  And Louise had stopped smiling and, forgetting Johnny who had removed his peaked cap and was standing politely on the doorstep, had gone slowly up the stairs. And when she came down again she had wound her hair up into its knot and said, “Johnny, you’d better go,” and shutting the door behind him, knew with a sudden understanding how it would be. She had, the next moment, opened the door and called ‘Johnny’ into the wind but only the pines leaned towards her and the jeep had gone back towards the town. At first it had been just compassionate leave. But the only nurses available were old and not very efficient, and smoked in their bedrooms and left dirty dishes and their stockings in the kitchen, and her mother would not tolerate them. So she had had to leave the Air Force, and had written to Johnny because she could see no future for them. He had called once to see if she wouldn’t change her mind, but it had been uncomfortable because things were not the same any more, and though she thought her heart would break as she watched him sitting there like a blond god in his uniform, the wings across his chest, she knew that she no longer belonged to his world, and couldn’t laugh and drink and do crazy things because of the mixed-up world and death lurking in the skies he rode nightly. Her mother, for once, had shown a spark of understanding, and for comfort said: “Your father needs you, Louise, you know that. The boy will most probably be killed, anyway. They all are.” But Johnny had not been killed. He had survived the war and been decorated and had become something of a hero and married a beautiful girl from South Africa where he had gone to live. And looking at their wedding picture in the evening paper, which she still kept in her stocking drawer, Louise had cried unashamed tears for what might have been, and her own foolishness. Yet she knew that because of her upbringing, had she the same decision to make again she would have made the same choice. Her father had been five years dying. While Holland was occupied and France fell and even Bournemouth received its solitary bomb she ran up and down stairs with drinks and bottles and appetising food, prepared from meagre rations, and clean linen and newspapers from which she read that this was their ‘finest hour’ during which she was carrying bedpans. Her father lay helpless, undemanding. He spoke often of his appreciation for what she did, and from his words she drew her strength to carry on. Her mother fussed and moaned and nagged, and left most of the work to Louise. Her chief concern was that the sickroom should be tidy and the sheets straight for the visitors who rarely came. Her father slipped eventually, almost imperceptibly, from half-life to death. Had he lived another week he would have known the war had ended. Because he had been so long ill there was no money left and they sold the house in the pines, and because Louise’s mother wouldn’t consider a flat, ‘a hole in a box, Louise’, they had taken the small, semi-detached house in the suburbs so that Louise could commute, night and morning in the rush hour, uncomfortably to the job she had found. It had not been easy either, with no training or qualifications, and all the men and women coming out of the Services. The Mayfair hairdressing salon liked her though, for her statuesque appearance and obvious good breeding, and had put her behind the desk in the reception, where she remained. They did not regret their decision, and Louise was satisfied that each week she took home a wage packet sufficiently large to support her mother and herself. She had even, unknown to her mother, who would, she had no doubt, have found some other use for the money, managed to save a small amount each week which had now grown into a comfortable little security for her own old age which she had no reason to suppose would be otherwise than lonely. Because of her mother, whose demands for her company were incessant, Louise had no friends of her own, and had long ago given up any thoughts of marriage.

  Tying her hair into the knot she made without thinking day after day, year after year, she wondered if her mother ever considered, ever thought, that she might once have wanted a life of her own. She knew that she never did. She was too selfish, and she realised that probably by her own acquiescence she had encouraged her in her egotism. With the offer to come to Whitecliffs Louise had recognised the opportunity she would never have consciously striven for, to get away from the daily grind a little; away from the shop and the dreary semi-detached and the pictures on Fridays and the television she watched and hated; to consider, as she should have done long ago, if there was anything else she would be happier doing. Already she was feeling the benefit of the change of air, she felt lighter, happier, younger even, and free from the City dirt.

  Her make-up didn’t take long. Her blonde skin was still good, and here at Whitecliffs she didn’t trouble with the eye-shadow, the mascara and the pencil she had to apply so laboriously for the necessary degree of sophistication in the salon. Her lipstick was pale and she did not bother with the lip brush.

  “What about my tea?”

  “I’ll be back for that, Mother. The show only lasts about an hour.”

  “I could’ve gone with you.”

  “You wouldn’t enjoy it. It’s very noisy and for children.”

  By the time her mother was in bed and properly supplied with her tablets, her glasses, her water, her book and her clean handkerchief on the bedside table, Louise was almost late. The Gurney children were at the open doorway of their flat in a dither of excitement. They wore blue jeans and striped T-shirts, and the one with the missing teeth said:

  “We’ll mith the beginning, Louithe. We’ve been thtanding here for hourth and hourth and hourth.”

  “About ten minutes,” the elder one said. “Come on, we can run.”

  “Louithe ith too old,” Jennifer said.

  Amanda, going down the steps, looked back at Louise, apologising for her younger sister.

  “How old do you think I am, Jenny?” Louise said.

  Jennifer pushed open the glass doors. “About a hundred,” she said.

  “Don’t be silly, Jenny,” Amanda looked prim. “She’s not much older than Mummy.”

  “And how old is Mummy?” Louise asked.

  “Twenty-one. How old are you?”

  “Somewhere between the two,” Louise said, but she felt years younger already.

 
They took the bus along the front, and got off at the stop where the people were streaming over the green to the pavilion. On the bus Amanda told Louise that she had an inkspot on her pale blue skirt. Fastidious, as her mother had taught her to be, Louise was about to get angry and upset, when Amanda removed the metal ‘ink blot’ she had put on her lap. The two children produced in rapid succession from their pockets, a ‘bleeding finger’, a realistic looking, bent piece of metal which looked as if Jenny had a nail through her finger, ‘pretend soot’ and what Amanda called a ‘stinking bomb’ which Louise could only just prevent her throwing in the gangway of the bus. Laughing at their exuberance, Louise realised that it was too long, much too long, since she had laughed.

  They took their seats in the open-air pavilion, just as the band, in red jackets and white trousers, with red bow-ties, were happily and noisily playing the opening number. A skittish chorus of not-so-young ladies kicked up their legs and tap-danced with many coy shakes of their permed heads to the next number, and sang a soprano song of welcome whose last line only was intelligible ‘…and we hope you have a jolly good tiiiime’. They danced themselves out, their smiles fading before they left the stage.

  ‘Uncle Harry’, well-built and good-looking with very white teeth, trailed the microphone wires behind him and introduced himself to the children. Every time he said “‘Hallo” they had to call out “Hallo, Uncle Harry”. He said “Hallo”. The response was deafening. “I can’t hear you,” Uncle Harry said. “I asked you to shout, not whisper!” The children roared. “We’ll try again,” Uncle Harry said, showing all his teeth. “Hallo, children!” “Hallo, Uncle Harry!” The noise was incredible. “A little better that time,” Uncle Harry said. The children rocked in their seats, enslaved, spellbound. They sang, refrained from singing, uttered gibberish at his command. When he went off, trailing his wires behind him, having introduced Sophie who was going to sing ‘Only a Rose’, they sighed and clapped till their hands were sore. They suffered Sophie who had forgotten to remove the plum from her mouth and shied a little at the high notes, and applauded her politely. Encouraged, she remained to sing ‘Because’. There followed some slapstick comedy between uncle Harry and the dwarf of the company dressed in baggy sponge-bag trousers which he kept losing, then another piece by the orchestra during which the children sucked sweets or looked round for ice-cream. The next item was a children’s talent contest, and when Louise turned to ask Jennifer and Amanda if they wanted to take part she found the seats empty and children already on the stage with a cluster of others, mobbing Uncle Harry who chided them gently with jokes. With the aid of Sophie, a hard-looking cookie when she wasn’t singing, he created some sort of order, the stage microphone was lowered to the height of a four-year-old who sang ‘Baa-baa Black Sheep’ with her thumb in her mouth, and the competition was on. Jennifer began to recite ‘Albert and the Lion’ but had to be restrained at the twelfth verse, and Amanda, Tennyson’s ‘I come from haunts of coot and hern’ with such solemnity the audience was unable to refrain from giggling. The competition was eventually won, as the loudness of the applause indicated, by a sophisticated miss in a satin dress who confessed to seven but sang ‘Mad, Passionate Love’ with such feeling there could be no doubt as to the outcome. All the competitors received a stick of rock as a consolation prize, and justice having been done and seats resumed, the show went on. There was a sketch, in which Uncle Harry with knobbly knees and suspenders, was a fairy and the dwarf a policeman, then a jolly number from the band during which they stood up, sat down, juggled, joked among themselves and threw paper streamers at each other; then there was Sophie again, this time in a different frock, then the finale by the chorus who looked as if they wanted their tea. Finally Uncle Harry came on the stage and told the children, who were reluctant to go home, that he hoped they would come again, and there was a special concert for the Mummies and Daddies every night at eight o’clock, including a talent competition and lucky programme, and that was that.