We All Fall Down

by Rosemary Friedman

  Thus prepared, he had called for Petal at the agreed time at Merrydown Park. She had never looked more desirable. She was wearing a transparent pink blouse, beneath which he could see her underwear, and a tight black skirt. The skirt was very short, and when she bent to pick up the darts he could see her legs, in sheer stockings, well up above the knees. She had seemed neither pleased nor displeased to see him. When she had picked up her white jacket and come out from the side of the stall with it slung over her shoulders, they had walked together through the amusement park to the exit. By the winkle stand stood the group of Teddy boys. One of them said, his eyes piggy beneath lowered lids, “I’ve warned yer, Petal,” and Petal, without looking at him, had taken Victor’s arm and tossed her head. Victor said: “Warned you about what?” and Petal said, “Oh, nothing,” and because she was squeezing his arm in hers and leaning the side of her body against him he had said no more about it. By the time they reached ‘Le Casse-Croûte’ Petal had made it obvious that she was aware of his intentions, and if one could judge by her behaviour appeared to be looking forward to it. She hadn’t been taken in for a moment by the story he had told her about wanting to dance to the records, for as soon as they had gone into the front part of the café, where the self-service counter was, she had taken off her blouse and her brassière, and her breasts silhouetted in the moonlight had driven him almost crazy. Then Petal said: “Let’s have some music, Vic,” and he had turned to the record-player and was sorting out the records, holding them to the window and peering at them to see the titles, when he heard a scuffle behind him and somebody said: “Put your clothes on, you damned tart,” and as he turned round he remembered seeing the glint of a blade and the room seemed to be full of broad-shouldered, dark suits and he caught the flash of a yellow sock before he was fighting for his life and listening to his own grunts and Petal screaming. He hadn’t been scared, he remembered, only too busy hitting out to right and left, and trying to kick and butt with his head, and spit all at the same time; then there had been the sudden, unbearable pain in his eye and the light had gone on for a second, but he couldn’t see anything because of the blood and that was the last he remembered until he woke up this morning. And they wanted him to tell all that to the police; not likely! It wasn’t exactly that he minded the police knowing, it was only right, after all, that his attackers should be punished, but he would die of shame if the whole sordid story got to the ears of his mother and father, as it most assuredly would.

  He opened his eye. Doctor Gurney was still sitting there watching him. “It was as I said,” he said; “I went to borrow some records. True, I did have a drink with this girl Petal…but that was a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Victor,” Doctor Gurney said. “The police went through your clothes. They found something that led them to suppose that you hadn’t gone to ‘Le Casse-Croûte’ with the intention only of playing records, and that you hadn’t gone there alone. I’m sorry about this, Vic. I understand how you must feel. But I rather think it all has to come out in the wash, you know.”

  “Oh, God,” Victor said. “I wish we’d never come to this place.” There was a tear in his eye. “Tell me what you would do, Doctor Gurney. What would you do if you were me?”

  “I should have to know all the facts first before I could advise you,” Doctor Gurney said. “If it would help you you could tell me in my professional capacity if you like.”

  “That means you can’t go round telling everybody?”

  “Not if you don’t want me to.”

  “In that case I’d like to tell you.”

  “Carry on.”

  Victor started on his tale. With his eye shut, not looking at Doctor Gurney, he did not find it too difficult to tell him about Petal; about why he had wanted Petal; about the desperate conflict that he was constantly aware of within his own body. At times his voice was muffled by the bandages and faded into unintelligibility as he spoke, and Doctor Gurney had to lean forward to catch his words. When he’d finished Victor opened his eye again and said “Well?” agressively.

  “Well, Vic, it’s not such an unusual story as you think. Every chap of your age goes through much the same emotional upset at one time or another. It’s nothing whatsoever to be ashamed of.”

  “What about Petal?”

  “Well, it’s a pity about Petal. I shan’t say anything at all about it, if you don’t want me to, but now that the police are on her track it won’t be very long before it all comes out. I’m afraid there’s no chance at all of you keeping it quiet. The only thing I suggest is that you tell your story before Petal has a chance to tell hers. She may decide to embellish it with all kinds of horrible details. Her boyfriends may even invent some entirely different story for her, putting you in a much worse position than you are now. It isn’t a crime, after all, Vic, to try to make love to a girl in an empty café.”

  “Not in the eyes of the law. It’s Mother and Dad I’m thinking of.”

  “Don’t worry too much about that. I admit it’s a little embarrassing, but one tends to forget that one’s parents have passed through exactly the same stage as you are passing through now; and not so very long ago. Your father was a young man once.”

  “Not Dad,” Victor said. “He’s always so right. Impeccable morals…that sort of thing… I can’t imagine him ever chasing girls.”

  “One never can. It’s the impression they give, have to give, to children. I’m afraid you’ll have to face up to it, Vic. It’s not the end of the world, fortunately, for you, and it won’t be as bad as you think.”

  “Will it be all over the newspapers? I’m going up to Cambridge in October.”

  “We shall have to see what we can do about that.”

  Victor lay silent for a moment, then he said: “If I could laugh, I would.”

  “Why?”

  “Because after all this I still haven’t slept with Petal.”

  “I wouldn’t worry too much about that. As a purely physical exercise it can be awfully disappointing.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Without some spiritual additive; love, tenderness, affection. It is, after all, or should be, a physical manifestation of these things. There’s no happiness, Vic, in these promiscuous relations. I think you’d find them a disappointment, a snare and a delusion. They promise more than they give.”

  “What do you suggest? It’ll be years before I can get married?”

  “I don’t suggest anything. It’s a problem you have to solve for yourself. I’m only giving you the facts and trying to point out that your failure with Petal wasn’t the disaster you think it was. She might very well have left you with some unpleasant reminder of her that it would have taken months to get rid of.”

  Victor groaned.

  “Pain?”

  “No.”

  “Sorry, Vic. I’m not trying to preach. I’d like to help. I’m sure you’ll find things easier up at Cambridge. You’ll be with others of your own age with the same problems. I’m convinced that you’ll find a better solution than Petal, or a collection of Petals. You might even find yourself too busy with exams, and rowing and debates and all the other things one does find oneself busy with to worry too much.”

  “Sublimate my desires?” Victor said mockingly.

  “I don’t mean that. Down here, though, at Whitecliffs, you have too little to think of. We all have.”

  “You don’t believe in leisure?”

  “If you’re mentally equipped for it. Few of us are. I accepted your father’s kind offer to come down here because of Johnathon’s chest condition. I can’t say, though, that having accepted, because of him, I didn’t become quite excited with the idea of no surgeries, no endless trail of people with their endless woes, always sick, always complaining. No jumping out of bed three or four times a week in the middle of the night, no appointments, responsibilities, panicky rings at the doorbell, telephone calls from dawn till dusk, bleeding fingers, broken legs and dislocated shoulders on the doorstep; no p
rescriptions to write, and no certificates and notes for work and the hospital; no work when you want to sleep, and no feeling like nothing more than a night’s sleep when you have to work; and, perhaps more than anything at all, I looked forward to seeing all day and every day people who were normal, healthy, not sick in body or in mind.”

  “And now?” Victor said, interested.

  “Now I know that we are all sick; only those who come to my surgery a little more so than those who don’t. The young children playing so happily on the beach, appearing so perfect, artists’ children in their beauty, have flat feet, allergic eczema, and wet their beds at night; the beautiful young models at the cocktail-parties, sculptor’s work, have piles and lumbar scolioses, and the young men asthma and athlete’s foot. The older men and women have arthritis and rheumatism and ulcers and indigestion and varicose veins and pains in the stomach and pains in the head, and if they’re very unlucky coronary thromboses and cancer, and often they are sick, too, in their minds.”

  “You talk as if there are no healthy people.”

  “There are no perfect people. If any of us were perfect we might forget who we were; our beginning and our end. We struggle as best we can. Here in Whitecliffs I’ve had time to think. The conclusion I have come to is that I should be at home, doing my job, helping those I can in their struggle.”

  “You sound as though you have to work with your bare hands. What about penicillin and X-rays and all those new things we’re always reading about?”

  “Don’t you think that in a hundred, in fifty years’ time all these ‘new’ things will be ludicrous, as were the methods of doctors fifty years ago when all their pneumonias and their puerperal fevers and their diptherias hadn’t a hope in hell? I believe I told your father that I regarded my work as no more vocational than that of a plumber. Perhaps I underestimated it a bit. It’s a privilege, in a way, to be able to help people. I don’t think we can get away from the fact that we are all responsible for each other. Speaking for myself, I shall be quite glad to get back onto my treadmill; I don’t think that there’s any happiness off it. In future, though, I shall put my feet down on the treads a lot more humbly. None of us can stand alone, Vic. Look at you, yesterday a strong, healthy young man, a great, arrogant stag on a mountain top, and today…well, if it hadn’t been for Doctor Potts and his friends you wouldn’t be here. We all have our place, Vic.”

  “You make life sound so serious.”

  “There’s pleasure, too, Vic. But alone it’s not enough. The party has to end; if not it becomes awfully tedious, and when the guests have gone home there has to be something else.” Doctor Gurney grinned. “What I’ve been saying is only, I suppose, a symptom of my age. When I was eighteen I was happily anaesthetised as you are, to care, worry, responsibility and all the other horrors of maturity. Stay that way, Vic. It doesn’t last so awfully long.”

  Vic said: “Thanks for talking to me. It makes me see things in better perspective. About Petal and all that…that I’m not the only one who ever… I suppose you wouldn’t care to tell Mother and Dad for me?”

  “I will if you’d like me to. I’m afraid the police will want it from you though.”

  “All right. All boys together, what?”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  “I say, you don’t think I’ll have to go through it all in court, do you? In front of all sorts of odd bods?”

  “You’re man enough, Victor. I shouldn’t worry.”

  “Perhaps I shan’t now. You have pointed out that there are worse things.”

  Doctor Gurney stood up and looked down the ward.

  “Far, far worse,” he said.

  Twenty-one

  “Pot for four,” Basil said, keeping his eyes on the steaming jet of water from the still with which he was filling the large teapot. Next to him Honey reached beneath the counter and, picking up four cups and four saucers, stacked them on the tray which a woman with buck teeth held in front of her on the counter. With her left hand she stretched out for a small pink plastic bowl holding sugar lumps for four, and with her right she selected four tinny teaspoons. She took the milk jug, the teapot, now filled, and the water jug Basil had placed beside her, and put them on the woman’s tray. The woman moved on, sliding her tray with her, to Doctor Gurney at the cash register.

  “You needn’t worry about me, you know,” Honey said to Basil who had been avoiding her eyes all morning.

  Basil polished the coffee urn. “How do you mean?”

  “Because of Elisabeth. I understand. It didn’t mean a thing to me.”

  “You helped me over a very sticky patch. I feel grateful. I don’t like to just…well, just…now that I have Elisabeth… It seems so…”

  “I told you. It didn’t mean a thing to me.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I get bored very quickly. I like a change.”

  “You mean you were getting fed up with me in any case?”

  “There was no one else down here.”

  “You’re sure that’s how it was? I mean I should hate to feel…”

  “How else do you think?”

  “It doesn’t worry you at all?”

  “Not at all.” Honey’s eyes were looking downwards to the cups she was examining for chips or stains, but which she could not see for tears. “I’m a nude,” she said, “a show girl. In our business we’re used to having a giggle. We think nothing of it.”

  “‘Having a giggle’?”

  “That’s what we call it. You know, just fun. Not getting involved.”

  “So it’s quite all right?”

  “I’ve told you. I’m looking forward to seeing your Elisabeth.”

  “She’ll be down later.”

  “Is she as pretty as her photograph?”

  “Prettier. You’re pretty, too, Honey. In a different way.”

  In a different way, Honey thought, in a different way. If I lived to be a hundred, and was as beautiful as I knew how, I should never be pretty in the same way as Elisabeth Benwell is pretty. I was born in the wrong drawer.

  “I’d like to buy you a present,” Basil said. “I can’t run to anything frightfully elaborate. Is there anything you’d like?”

  “Will you give me exactly what I ask?”

  “If I can afford it.”

  “You can afford this.”

  “All right.”

  “I’d like you to give me nothing at all. Nothing. And please, please don’t thank me.”

  Basil looked at her. She was still looking downwards, her face almost buried in her hair, at the cups she was sorting. Basil put his hand out and removed a cup from the tray of those she passed.

  “There’s a chip in this one,” he said gently, and removing it put it on the hatchway to the kitchen.

  The café was open again. The concrete floor had been scrubbed, but there still remained soaked into its pores, the dark patch that had been Victor’s blood. They all tried not to look and from behind the counter it wasn’t difficult. Only when they first came in to open up, all together this time by mutual consent, Basil had looked quickly out of curiosity, and Louise and Honey, and then had quickly looked away. Vanessa, her memories of Wednesday still haunting her, had thought she might not be able to stand it again in the café, but looking at the floor it was only stained concrete and seemed to have nothing at all to do with her brother, and the café didn’t look the same either, with the sunshine streaming through the window and outside the beach and the white-topped sea and the children laughing. And behind her Howard had said: “How about helping me with the ice-creams, Vanessa? There’ll be a delivery soon and I really can’t remember what I have left.” And for about half an hour she had worked, her hands cold from the ice-boxes, beside Howard, and once she had caught him looking at her and had quickly looked away because his eyes said something she was waiting for him to say, and which he had not said. But the next moment he was discussing ‘nut crunch’ and ‘strawberry ripple’, and whether they had enough choco
late-bars for the ‘six-five special’, and had she not seen it for herself she might have wondered if he had ever looked at her like that at all.

  Things were the same, and yet they were not the same. Outside, the sea, a hundred yards away, embraced tiny children with its bouncing foam and sent them screaming onto the wet sand, then lured them back for more. Higher up, on the dryer beach, where one or two sand-flies danced among the seaweed, the mothers and fathers and aunties and uncles and grandmas and grandads still sat and talked and knitted, or stood self-consciously in shorts and played cricket or rounders, or dug castles and boats. Or had the numbers thinned a little, and some of the mothers, sunburned and refreshed, gone back to the kitchen sink and the endless meals and the washing on Mondays, and the fathers to the machines and the buses and the Hoffman presses, and the grandmas to baby-minding, and the grandpas with their shopping bags happily to the shopping? The sun, an unfathomable, golden orb in as clear a sky as one could have wished for, shone just as brightly, but was the air as warm? Wasn’t there, just recognisable, the first faintest, faintest hint of autumn in the air? The warmth just edged with a crispness, the merest edge of a notion that summer could not last for ever? The pedaloes waited down by the sea; only four of the twelve had been taken out. The man who hired them stood on his brown legs, in his woolly hat, smoking his pipe, looking towards the horizon; the deck-chair man in his black jersey sold chairs and tickets for the changing huts but leisurely; the queue outside the Corporation Café was not very long, the bare feet stood patiently on the concrete except for the odd child hopping about; on the promenade a small boy said to his friend: “You going up next term, Julian?”