We All Fall Down

by Rosemary Friedman

  “That’s not what I meant, Vanessa. What I’m trying to say is that I’m more than fond of you, and it would take very little effort on my part to love you very much, to ask you to marry me. Don’t you think I could be happy with you as my wife? Couldn’t any man?”

  “Well?” Vanessa’s face was tilting up towards him, her voice barely audible.

  Howard picked up his pipe again and, standing up, went over to the window.

  “Well, one day, Vanessa, the honeymoon would be over. You’d wake up one morning to find yourself married to a middle-aged man with a paunch, a bald patch growing larger week by week, and an income that was not very adequate. You’d still be young, Vanessa, very young, probably in your early twenties, and you’d look at your friends with their slim, handsome husbands with full crops of hair, with youth and enthusiasm and time on their sides, and above all with hope.”

  “You talk as though you have one foot in the grave.”

  “Perhaps I haven’t made myself clear. When you’re young, Vanessa, at the foot of the mountain, as you are, you have the excitement of the climb ahead of you; some days you’ll get on fast, on others not so fast, but always you’ll have the strength and enthusiasm to pull yourself to the top if only to see what lies on the other side. At eighteen it might be anything, anything at all. But you see, Vanessa, I’ve reached the top of the mountain; I can see what’s on the other side and it isn’t particularly exciting. If I married you I’d be taking away from you the most exhilarating years of your life: the years of striving, fighting, hoping, surging forward, upward, perhaps even to the stars. It wouldn’t work, Vanessa. It simply wouldn’t work.”

  “I wouldn’t want the stars, Howard, if I had you.”

  “You think you don’t, but you must. At eighteen we are all unreasonable enough to imagine that we are going to make the world conform to our dreams. When you reach the age, the age of maturity and reason, you realise you haven’t a hope in hell of altering the world; that it is you who have to conform to it.”

  “I only know I love you.”

  “I wish I could accept your love. It’s not so simple. It’s common for girls of your age to fall in love with men of my age. We’re always very flattered. You admire our sophistication, our knowledge of the world, our smooth manners, the fact that we are masters of the situation at parties, in restaurants, in all aspects of social life. An older man knows how to treat women, you say, to make her feel loved, wanted. But shouldn’t we by now, Vanessa? Wouldn’t it be surprising if a bachelor of over forty were not an expert in flattery? Hasn’t he had enough practice? But you see, Vanessa, these qualities which at eighteen seem so desirable and not to be found in your contemporaries, this sophistication, this man-of-the-worldliness are not qualities at all. They are a veneer a man acquires with very little trouble, and when you come to touch it, it crumbles. The fact that a man knows all the best night-clubs and exactly how much to tip the head waiter won’t help you at all when your child is crying in the night, when you’re sick and need comforting, when you’ve no help and the housework is piling up, when you’re despondent and depressed and things seem to be going wrong.”

  “But if that man loves you?”

  “It takes more than love. It needs tenderness and affection and tolerance to meet the vicissitudes of married life, and these are things which must be planted like a seed and which must grow. Beside them, those other things which make girls like you believe themselves in love with men like me, look awfully insignificant.”

  “Are you trying to say that just because a man is forty-three he is incapable of showing tenderness and affection?”

  “Not at all. But marriage, the kind of marriage you are still young enough to make, needs roots planted in fertile soil, mutual roots. My roots have withered long ago. I’ve formed convictions, habits. I know which things are important to me, which not: it’s too late to change. When you marry you will decide these things together with your husband, so that the same things are important to both of you; you will have the same set of values. If you haven’t you’re doomed. A marriage like any other edifice must have foundations, Vanessa.”

  “Suppose I agreed with what you said but was willing to slide gently down the other side of the mountain with you? Suppose I expected nothing, other than to love you?”

  “Love cannot live in a vacuum. Nothing can. It has to be fed, watered.”

  “What does all that mean to us, to me?” Vanessa said.

  Howard leaned against the window-sill. “It means that everything we should be doing together and for the first time I shall have done before. I should be stealing from you something it’s impossible to replace, your youth, your hopes, your dreams. They are very necessary. And there’s another thing; you won’t think it important but I promise you it is. I’m not earning a remarkable living and I don’t suppose I ever shall. I have accustomed myself to the idea that I shall never be a rich man, and have folded away my dreams of costly possessions together with my hopes of an outstanding career at the bar. You have been brought up surrounded by everything that money can buy.”

  “I wouldn’t mind not having any, Howard.”

  “It doesn’t matter not having any money when you’re young. When you’re old it’s not so good. While I’ve been at Whitecliffs I’ve come to terms with the situation. I’ve thought extremely carefully, and have come to the conclusion that although I would have accepted gladly all the things I was going to buy had there been gold on the top of my mountain, I have perhaps discovered something more worth while. I’m going to stay in Whitecliffs, Vanessa. There’s more honesty. You don’t have to smile at people who might be influential, give lunch to solicitors you hate the sight of, mouth pity to those for whom you have no pity, see the latest play by the best bad playwright of the year so that you can hold your own att cocktail-parties, say in one hundred words what could be said in ten, join clubs not because you want to but because you must, ask old so-and-so out to dinner because old so-and-so asked you. It’s not just that I want to be different, that I don’t want to conform; believe me, Vanessa, it’s easier to conform. It’s just that I’m fed up with all the hypocrisy we have to live with.”

  “Outside is a lonely place, Howard.”

  “What’s that you said?”

  “It’s from a poem I once read.”

  “I’d rather be lonely than wallow in all that dirt. I can’t thank your father enough for helping me to get sufficiently far away from it all for me to see.”

  “What is there for you down here?”

  “Fresh air for the mind and the spirit. I’ll find something to do. You see, Vanessa, you wouldn’t want to be married to a crank.”

  “Don’t sling mud at yourself. I think you’re a very fine person.”

  “It has taken me more than forty years to decide how I will come down the other side of the mountain. I couldn’t let you decide while you are still on the nursery slopes, going up.”

  “I’m sorry I made myself so cheap.”

  Howard left the window, and going over to Vanessa took her hands and pulled her up. When she was facing him he said: “You’ve paid me the biggest compliment I’ve ever had. You have everything, Vanessa, a girl could wish for, brains, beauty, youth, and you offer it all to me. Nothing you ever did, Vanessa, could make you cheap.”

  Vanessa looked into his eyes. “I think we could be happy, Howard.”

  “I wouldn’t do it, Vanessa. Someone else could give you so much more. Moonlight and roses, Vanessa.”

  “I don’t want moonlight and roses, Howard!” Vanessa raised her voice.

  Howard moved away from his pipe. “You wouldn’t want to marry someone who doesn’t love you.” He didn’t look at her.

  “That’s not what you said before.”

  “I say it now.”

  “It isn’t true.”

  “It’s true.”

  “You talk about hypocrisy. Prove that you don’t love me, prove it!”

  “The onus of proof i
s on you. You made the allegation that I do.”

  Vanessa picked up a cushion from the chair and threw it across the room at him. He didn’t move when it hit him. “Stop being so confoundedly pompous! ‘Onus of proof’! We’re discussing love. Love!”

  “Don’t shout, Vanessa, the walls are thin.”

  “All right, I won’t,” and Vanessa lowered her voice. “I won’t shout and I won’t throw a cushion again. That was childish. Will you do one thing for me, Howard? Just one?”

  “What is it, Vanessa?”

  “Promise to do it?”

  “If I can.”

  “You can.”

  “All right.”

  “Kiss me.”

  He looked steadily at her across the room. “Of course, Vanessa.”

  She came across to him and lifted her face. Howard took her head in his hands and bending, kissed her forehead.

  “Not like that, Howard.” She put her arms round his neck and drawing him down to her pressed her lips on his. She was offering everything but he did not answer. Vanessa dropped her arms and moved away. She didn’t look at him.

  “I’d better go. Thanks for the Chopin.”

  He followed her down the little hallway and opened the door for her.

  “Good night, Howard.” Her voice was flat, defeated.

  “Good night, Vanessa.”

  When she had gone he went back into the little sitting-room and played the last few minutes of the nocturne they had been listening to. When it had finished he removed the record, put it into its sleeve and then, on its own, in a drawer. He knew that it would be some time before he played it again. When he did he knew that the familiar melody would be irrevocably linked with the image of a girl in pink who had lifted her face so trustfully to his own. With what was an effort, for Howard, he picked up his pipe, refilled it, then clenching it hard in his teeth, took Nietzsche’s Antichrist from the bookcase and began to read at the place he had marked with a toffee paper.

  Twenty-four

  On Saturday morning as Louise went into the hairdresser’s, after a sleepless night during which she had decided to take the plunge and have her hair cut off, Vera came out. They met on the rubber mat in the doorway of the shop and Vera, a chiffon scarf over her newly-set hair, nodded, mumbled, “Good morning,” and hurried off down the High Street. Louise stared after her. There was something funny about Mrs Dexter this morning. It wasn’t just the fact that Maison Barbara had made her hair too blue, almost violet, in fact, nor that they had given her a wave on her forehead almost deep enough to sail a boat in. No, there was something else, Louise thought, and then she realised: Vera looked as if she had been crying. That was odd, and it accounted for the fact that Vera had not stopped to speak to her. There was nothing she could do now. She turned towards the glass door of the shop and, pushing it open, stepped into the embracing warmth and perfume of Drene shampoo and setting lotion for the transformation with which she was going to dazzle Harry.

  In front of the shop at a semi-circular desk a girl, her hair in tight sausage-curls, busy filing her nails, said “Yes?” and blew on her fingertips to remove the debris. Louise didn’t answer. They could at least give her a clean overall, she thought, and teach her to say “Good morning, madam.” My goodness, two weeks in my salon and I’d make something of her. Not a bad looking little girl if she was taught to make up properly and took that disagreeable expression off her face. No stockings, too, and those grubby toes hanging out of her sandals. Dear, dear, some people have no idea at all.

  “You gottanerpointment?” the girl said. This time she looked at Louise.

  “Yes. For eleven thirty.”

  The girl flickered a lazy eye over the appointment book. “Pat!” she yelled into the back of the shop. A girl with a pony-tail, looking no more than fifteen, slouched out of a cubicle.

  “Shampoo’n set, Pat.”

  “I’m having it cut,” Louise said. “Your manageress is going to do it for me.”

  “Number three,” the girl at the desk said, “and tell Mrs B. Has anyone been out for the doughnuts?”

  “I’ll go in a jiff,” Pat said, and Louise followed her into a cubicle in which there was hair on the floor and soap in the basin.

  Vera made her way down the High Street. She passed the baker’s with its congress tarts, the wool shop with its knitting patterns, the men’s shop with its khaki-coloured shorts hanging in rows outside. She neither noticed them nor made odious comparisons with the shops to which she was accustomed. She walked slowly and looked straight ahead. It was true she had been crying and she had good reason to cry. The world of Vera Dexter had come apart at the seams. Nothing had gone right, she thought, since Willie Boothroyd’s death, and now it seemed that nothing ever would. Victor had been bad enough, but that she had been able to share with Arthur; this last shock was something with which she was quite alone. It almost wasn’t fair. It had come so suddenly, too. She had been tidying up the flat this morning in her dressing-gown, so that it was straight before the daily woman came, when the bell rang. Vanessa and Arthur were at the café and she was by herself. She had opened the front door expecting to see Mrs Jessell and had found Doctor Gurney in the hall.

  “Arthur’s gone,” Vera said. “He went a long time ago.”

  “I know. I wanted to speak to you. May I come in?”

  “Of course. It’s not about Victor? He’s all right?”

  “Victor’s getting along nicely, yes.”

  In the sitting-room, Vera sat nervously on the arm of the chair and watched Doctor Gurney, who stood by the window.

  “Did you know Arthur hadn’t been feeling well?”

  “He said once or twice he had stomach-ache. There’s nothing wrong with Arthur, is there?”

  “I’m afraid there is. We had him X-rayed yesterday at the hospital.”

  “He didn’t tell me,” Vera said, not because it mattered but because she was suddenly nervous.

  The doorbell rang. “That will be Mrs Jessell. Excuse me while I let her in.” She fussed with Mrs Jessell for a moment telling her to be sure and wash the insides of the windows, not to forget the light-fitting and to do some potatoes for lunch. When she could think of nothing more to say she said: “Don’t forget to put some vinegar in the water when you polish the furniture,” and went back to Doctor Gurney.

  “I am afraid your husband is not very well,” Doctor Gurney said.

  “But he’s been so much better down here,” Vera said, “sleeping better, good-tempered; of course, he hasn’t been eating much but the change of air I thought…” She wanted to talk – to keep on talking. She felt that if she kept talking, anything at all, just to stop Doctor Gurney saying what she felt sure he was going to say. She could suddenly think of nothing else she could say. She fiddled with the satin tie of her dressing-gown.

  “I’m afraid the X-rays showed a growth in his stomach.”

  “A growth? You mean…”

  Doctor Gurney nodded. “Of course, one can’t be certain, but I believe there’s very little doubt. The surgeon who examined him and saw the X-rays said an operation could be attempted. I don’t think though that it will help your husband very much.”

  Vera stared. The pale grey curtains she had paid so much a yard for and had had so expertly made at Maple’s, the olive tapestry furniture, the dark grey carpet, the misted walls, all seemed unreal, or was it unimportant?

  “Of course, we must take him to London,” she said. “…another opinion…” That was what Arthur would say.

  “I’m afraid it isn’t going to help very much.”

  “Does Arthur know?”

  “No. That’s why I came. He mustn’t get to know either. In a man of your husband’s temperament it would be more than unkind to let him guess.”

  Vera took out her handkerchief. “I don’t think I’ve the temperament.” She began to cry and Doctor Gurney watched her.

  “Everything was so good,” she said, “and first Victor, now Arthur. It’s so sudden.
My husband, Arthur, has…”

  “Cancer,” Doctor Gurney said. “It isn’t a pretty name and it isn’t a pretty complaint, but I’m afraid you have to face it and you have to face it alone. I’ve told Arthur he has a stomach ulcer, and he was satisfied with that explanation of his pain. It’s up to you to make bearable what remains of his life. To make sure he doesn’t know what lies ahead. You have to act a part, and you have to learn your lines so well that Arthur never finds out you are acting. If you take my advice, you’ll tell nobody else at all, nobody. That way your husband will never know.”

  “I don’t know if I’m strong enough.”

  “Mrs Dexter, you have to be. All your married life your husband has been there for you to lean on. Now he has to lean on you. You mustn’t let him down.”

  Vera rubbed his eyes. “I wish we’d never come to this wretched place. Arthur, too, sees now how stupid it was. I wish poor Willie Boothroyd hadn’t died like that and upset Arthur. I wish we’d never left London. I shouldn’t have listened…”

  “It would have made no difference to your husband, Mrs Dexter.”

  “Perhaps if he’d gone to someone when he first had the pain…”

  “He’s only had it for a week or two. These things grow very rapidly. You may take my word for it that nothing more could be done than will be done.”

  “I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it. How long…?”

  Doctor Gurney shrugged. “Three months, six months, a year at the outside. I’ll do everything I can to help.”

  Vera stood up. “I made an appointment at the local hairdresser. I couldn’t get up to town this week because of Victor. I must just cancel it.”

  “Because of Arthur?”

  Vera nodded.

  “Then don’t. I expect he knows you’re going. He’ll wonder why. I know it’s difficult, but you must try to carry on as usual. Exactly as usual.”

  “Exactly as usual,” Vera said, and put away her handkerchief. “I’ll try.”