“Would it help if you told me?”
Louise looked at him, her face gentle, and damp with tears, the new hairstyle disarranged. Because she didn’t care her face had lost its usual tense look, was animated… “I don’t want you to feel sorry for me.”
“I’m too busy tonight feeling sorry for myself.”
“All right. It was like this…”
Louise told Howard about Harry. She told him more. She told him about her mother, about when her father had been alive. She told him about Johnny. When she had finished, when the whole of her life was in his lap, Howard told Louise about himself. About his hopes and dreams about Vanessa. When neither of them had any more to say they were silent. Howard looked at his watch.
“Ten more minutes.”
“I like it here,” Louise said. “The place has a friendly atmosphere.”
“How strange you should say that!” Howard said.
“Why strange?”
“I’m thinking of buying the ‘Landscape’.”
“Buying it?”
“Yes. The man that owns it is selling up. I’m not going back to London, to the pretence, the deceit, the back-scratching, the lies. I’m going to run this road-house and at least be honest with myself.”
“Men have it all ways,” Louise said. “You signal to the driver of your treadmill; he stops it for a moment, you pick up your briefcase and umbrella and get off. Thanks to Mr Dexter I got off, too. In a few weeks, though, I shall be back at my reception desk and ‘Yes, Modoming’ and ‘No, Modoming’ to those sickening women until they say, ‘She’s a bit past it, poor dear’, and present me with free perms for life and get somebody younger, smarter.” She shrugged. “I have to live, and there’s Mother…”
“Time, if you please, gentlemen!” the bartender called.
Howard said: “I’ve got the car. I’ll run you home.”
They were silent on the journey. Outside Shore Court Louise said: “I’m sorry I made such an exhibition of myself. Will you forget it?”
“Our souls need airing occasionally. Please don’t worry. Louise?”
She was powdering her face in the moonlight. She knew her mother would be waiting up and she did not want her to see she had been crying.
“Yes?”
“Louise, I shall need a partner for the ‘Landscape’. I suppose you wouldn’t by any chance be interested…?”
“Are you serious?”
“Louise, I talked to you tonight as I don’t remember talking to anybody. It was so easy. We seem to be on the same wavelength somehow.”
“You mean…?”
“I mean, for the moment, that you could help me run the place. I don’t know much about the domestic side of things. Of course your mother would live there, too. Later perhaps… Well, we could see how we got on with each other.”
Louise said, “To smell the fresh air every day, and not the perfume, the setting lotion, the high-class sin. You’d better wait until the morning, Howard. You may think better of it.”
Howard said: “Louise, I think it’s time you stopped underestimating yourself. I know it’s your mother’s fault, but you’re a woman, Louise, and given a chance…”
“Yes?”
“You’ll take a chance with me?”
Louise ran her fingers through the hair that felt soft and light and free. She bent back her head and laughed, her teeth shining, her eyes steadily on Howard’s.
“I’ll take a chance.”
Twenty-seven
In November, the more exposed, less populated English seasides die quiet deaths. In the High Streets the shops are back to a barely pulsating normal; to Cheddar cheese, to endless chats over small purchases with the local inhabitants. The telephone does not ring with imperious orders, the shop is empty, only Grandma Spillikins sits on the solitary chair; the remaining tins of paté, asparagus and other delicacies are put into store until the next hopeful August. The business at the twopenny library improves with each fall of the barometer and at the ‘Tea Shoppe’, steamy with heat, replete villagers are reluctant to leave the table and totter down a High Street which has quite forgotten its tempting tables outside the shops of rubber sand-shoes, biff-bats and plastic boats. In echoing boarding-houses recuperating landladies are setting profits against losses, imaging new paint in Number Four, new curtains certainly in Six…or will they do another year? Those three from Bridlington were nice…but never again that dreadful child from, where was it?…near Edinburgh? No, that was that nice inoffensive couple with the baby; she hadn’t regretted letting her into the kitchen with her tins, such a tidy little person…and the rent in the bedspread in Number Two was a shame – that careless London couple…and lying in bed till ten.
In Whitecliffs, only the wind moaned down the empty streets. On the promenade, ‘Le Casse-Croûte’ and the Corporation Café shuttered, empty, sat amicably silent, battles fought and won, waiting stoically for the sea that would lash icily at them before the winter was out, the snow that would lie impartially on their roofs. Summer, brief as it was, had picked up its colours and gone. The red, yellow and orange of the pedalo boats, the blue of the sky, the green of the sea, the brown bodies of the children, their bathing suits in many colours, their beach-balls, their kites, their buckets and spades; the colours and the voices. The sand stretched greyly silent down to the sea that met the grey sky. The gulls circled looking for food.
Across the empty beach, across the hard, flat winter sands which knew neither flagged castles built by pudgy fingers nor carefreely paced cricket pitches, a man, head bent, walked slowly with a stick. Huddled into his thick tweed coat, his collar up, his hat down, his face nearly as grey as the sea and the sand, he walked a few paces, battling against the wind, then glanced up with, was it fondness? at the closed face of ‘Le Casse-Croûte’. His progress across the bay was slow; painfully slow. Outside there was the wind, cutting round his face, his ankles, threatening at times to blow him over, and within the pain. The pain. That was something he had been thinking about. It was two months now since they had operated on him for his ulcer, but the pain had not only not got better, it had become worse, much worse. He would have to speak to Doctor Gurney about it when they went back to town. The local chap who was looking after him at ‘Castellamare’ was all right, of course, nice young chap in a way, but he couldn’t talk to him as he could to Doctor Gurney. The young man, pompous rather, not very long qualified, talked to him as if he were a child, an idiot almost, he hadn’t the humanity…funny, Doctor Gurney had once said he might as well have been a plumber; had changed his mind though after Whitecliffs; realised he was made for medicine, medicine for him; he understood people in all their horridness. This young chap now hardly remembered your name. He would walk to the far rocks, black, slime-covered, where the beach huts, white and chilly-looking, ended, he had promised Vera… Vera now! She was a different person if anyone was. If he wasn’t back before twelve as he’d promised, she’d be down to the beach in her crepe-soled brogues and her warm stockings, a scarf round the grey hair that was no longer blue but soft, silvery, and her cheeks pink from the wind, and woolly gloves, and she wouldn’t turn up her nose at the sand as though it were something dirty but would stride across it towards him and take his arm, and her voice would be gentle, tender almost, as it had never been, and she would tell him off for being too long, getting cold, as if he were precious to her, as he knew he never had been, for all those years until Willie Boothroyd… Willie Boothroyd. Perhaps he was the only one who had really cared. Polly Boothroyd was talking already of marrying again and going to South America. He wondered if Vera…? No, he was sure she wouldn’t, not so soon at any rate. Once he might have thought so, but not now. Not now. She listened for his every move in the night, was ready with a drink, his pills, a water-bottle. Not that he had any intention of dying for years and years anyway; not now that he was taking things easily, had ‘Castellamare’ for weekends, the healing air of Whitecliffs. As soon as he was feeling properly fit from th
is operation he would be back in the City, but gently, much more gently; oh, he had learned a lot! And they talked even, he and Vera – had got back again into the old way of talking about ‘nothing’. When the pain in his stomach was bad and he had to do something to take his mind off it, before the pills worked, they switched on the fire in the bedroom from which they could hear the wind sweeping the shore and the sea battering against it, and they’d talk. They’d talk of Victor, now with eye-shade and stick, and scars on his face, cutting a dash at Cambridge, his shame forgotten, a kind of hero, not denying the stories that circulated through the colleges about how he received his injuries, only when the girls fell at his feet, stepping warily… Vanessa, now officially engaged to Cliff, waiting patiently, contentedly, as, having passed his Anatomy, he waded painstakingly through rivers of Pathology, Medicine and Surgery. They talked of Basil, now the blue-eyed boy of his publishers; Elisabeth waiting for their baby; of Howard philosophising happily, nightly, from the other side of the bar at the ‘Landscape’; of Louise, his ring on her finger, watching him with love. Often, when the pain was bad, the efficient, sterile, young doctor had been with his efficient, sterile syringe, and they were waiting for the drug to work, they talked of themselves. They rolled back the carpet of their married life and discussed the times before the twins were born, their early months together, or they rolled it down and talked of the happy summer at Whitecliffs. They never trod on the years in between. When the pain grew less and the effect of the drug greater, Arthur would talk of ‘Castellamare’ and how lucky they were to have thought of it and found it, and of their happiness and of the vine in the greenhouse and of the grapes they would have, and how Vanessa and Cliff could bring their children for holidays by the sea, and, whenever he did, Vera’s face would be turned towards the fire or she would busy herself with something or other in the bedroom.
Behind him on the sand was the firm imprint of his footsteps, and beside them the line of holes left by his stick. Ahead the beach lay smooth and the rocks seemed very far away, and was it that the wind was colder today? Perhaps he would walk only until he was level with ‘Le Casse-Croûte’ and then turn back. That had been a joke, that had. But a good one. Arthur Dexter running a beach café. He had surprised them all. He had surprised himself. But he had had the courage to get off his treadmill, hadn’t he? He had been off it too long. A month, two perhaps, Doctor Gurney said, and he would be back at the office, but this time it would be different. He would run his life, he would not allow life to run him. He looked up towards the promenade. He was level now with ‘Le Casse-Croûte’. By the shutters that hid the ice-cream counter stood a girl; a girl in a duffle-coat and trousers. For a moment she was motionless, her hands in her pockets, looking out to sea. Then she saw him and she was all arms and legs and black hair flying, running across the sands towards him.
“Mr Dexter! Mr Dexter!” She was excited, breathless from the wind.
“Honey!” Arthur said as she stopped in front of him. “What are you doing here?”
Honey didn’t answer. She was staring at him. Staring at the greyish-yellow skin, the accentuated cheek-bones, the sunken eyes. The wind whistled round them. Suddenly Arthur understood. Looking at Honey’s face as she gazed into his own, he understood why he was not getting better as quickly as he had hoped; why the pains in his stomach were becoming worse; why his son and daughter could not look into his eyes; why, when he talked about the vine in the greenhouse of ‘Castellamare’, Vera stared into the fire. How stupid he had been!
“You’re ill,” Honey said.
“I had an operation,” Arthur said. “I’m getting better now. What’s been happening to you?”
“I’ll tell you,” Honey said. “I just came back to say goodbye to ‘Le Casse-Croûte’. To Whitecliffs. I didn’t expect to see you.”
“Shall we walk along?” Arthur said. “It’s too cold to stand.”
Honey took his arm, and he was glad of her support as they walked back across the sand.
“Of course I’ve been a fool,” Honey said. “I always am where men are concerned. Terence looked after me very nicely, but this broadcasting thing just never came off. It was always next week, and when next week came, the week after that. Honestly, Mr Dexter, I don’t think he had anything to do with the BBC after all.”
Battling with the wind, Arthur smiled at her naïveté.
“So I’m going back to Jimmy,” Honey said, “and back to the show. It was lovely of you to get me away and I must say I enjoyed it. The café was fun, but I suppose you’ve got to go back to work some time. You can’t stay away for ever. That’s life.”
Arthur, frail, finding the walking difficult, looked out to the unquiet and inexorable sea. “Life is a gift, Honey,” he said slowly. “And we should not look gift horses in the mouth.”
About the Author
Rosemary Friedman has published 21 novels – which have been widely translated and serialised by the BBC – three works of non-fiction and two children’s books. Her short stories have been syndicated worldwide and she has judged many literary prizes. She has written and commissioned screenplays and television scripts in the UK and the US. Her stage plays Home Truths, Change of Heart and An Eligible Man toured major UK venues following their London premières. She lives in London with her husband, psychiatrist and author Dennis Friedman.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
ALSO ON EBOOK BY ARCADIA BOOKS
THE COMMONPLACE DAY
AN ELIGIBLE MAN
THE FRATERNITY
THE GENERAL PRACTICE
GOLDEN BOY
INTENSIVE CARE
THE LIFE SITUATION
THE LONG HOT SUMMER
LOVE ON MY LIST
A LOVING MISTRESS
NO WHITE COAT
PATIENTS OF A SAINT
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT
PROOFS OF AFFECTION
ROSE OF JERICHO
A SECOND WIFE
TO LIVE IN PEACE
VINTAGE
Copyright
Arcadia Books Ltd
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First published in 2001 by House of Stratus
This Ebook edition published by Arcadia Books 2013
Copyright © Rosemary Friedman 1960, 2001, 2013
Rosemary Friedman has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publishers.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978–1–910050–13–2
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We All Fall Down Page 26