Cliffs of Fall Read online

  “Thank you,” the girl said. She had filled the lowest shelf of the bookcase and now sat back on her heels to survey it.

  “Nettie, are you all right?”

  Nettie blew some dust off A Shropshire Lad and looked at May over the end of the book. “Yes, of course.”

  “You seem a bit pale.” May lowered her voice slightly. “Aren’t you well? Would you like an aspirin?”

  “I’m fine. Really.” Nettie turned back to the shelves with a load of books. She had rolled up the sleeves of her heavy blue sweater, and her thin forearms were grubby from the books. An imprecise black pigtail dangled between her hunched shoulders.

  May eyed her for a moment with determination rather than concern, but was distracted by steps on the stairs. “Here’s Clem, anyway. He can fill the top shelves.”

  “What is it I’m supposed to do?” her husband asked—apparently as a formality, since he went straight to the books and began stacking them on upper shelves. “Why on earth Meredith? … And Galsworthy—Oh, for God’s sake, darling.” He turned round to May with a book in his hand.

  “Dear, I’ll be here for almost six months, you know. Mostly with just the children.”

  “No reason to lose your head completely.” He placed the book alongside the others. “Who was that on the telephone?”

  “Oh, the Bairds are back—that was Sarah. They opened their house last week. Sent you their love. I asked them for dinner tomorrow night.”

  “I thought you had to collect Matt from your mother’s tomorrow.” Their elder boy was spending a few days at his grandmother’s, thirty miles away.

  “I’ll be back before dinner. And Marion can have everything ready—I’ve asked her to stay a little later tomorrow evening.”

  Clem grunted. Nettie had only completed the two low est shelves, and he was already stooping to fill the middle of the bookcase. He was tall and light on his feet and looked less than his age, which was forty-two. He had an air of health and confidence as he handled the books, lifting them from the box, glancing at their titles, and ramming them quickly along the shelves. He, too, had rolled up his sleeves, and his arms as they moved back and forth contrasted with Nettie’s fragile and ineffectual ones.

  “Here’s Byron,” he said, handing Nettie a book. He looked down at her for the first time, and pulled on her plait of hair. “What’s this floppy thing?”

  Self-consciously, she put up her left hand, the book in her right. “I haven’t had time to do it properly.” They resumed their work.

  I suppose, Nettie thought, as she made a space between two books and fitted Byron into it, that I am in love with Clem. Love is so much talked and written about, you might expect it to feel quite different; but no, it does correspond to the descriptions—it isn’t commonplace. More like a concentration of all one’s energies. There seems to be a lot of waiting in it, though. I am always waiting for Clem to come into a room, or for other people to go out: Clem, whom I’ve known all my life and who is married to my cousin May. (Her hands, patting the books into an even row, trembled. ) I’ve been close to him a thousand times, and this is the first time it has made me tremble. Would I have discovered that I loved him, if he hadn’t drawn my attention to it? And is that really only a week ago?

  Now Clem, too, had to kneel, and her cheek came level with his shoulder. He smiled at her, a brief, open smile. Nettie reached up, still pushing the books into line, and the sweater rose above her skirt, showing a white, ribbed strip of her skin.

  May rose, and took up a stack of plates. “There. I’ll leave these in the kitchen and Marion can wash them later, with the lunch dishes.” She moved across the room and out of the shaft of sunlight. Her back looked, once more, entirely businesslike. She had a slow, deliberate way of walking—as if she had once been startled into precipitate action and had regretted it. It was the walk of a woman who dealt with men in a straightforward way and must suffer the consequences. Her steps sounded down the uncarpeted corridor.

  Clem got to his feet and rummaged in the last box. “What are these?” He held up a book he did not recognize.

  “Those are mine. I thought I’d leave them for the summer. I’ll take them up to my room.” Nettie got up, wincing, and rubbed her knees.

  He pulled the books out one at a time, flicking open the front covers. “Annette Bowers … Annette Bowers … A. Bowers … Annette Bowers.” He brought them to her, stacked between his palms, and put them into her grasp without releasing them. “Annette Bowers. I love you.”

  “Not.”

  “Yes, I tell you,” he said, shaking his head and widening his eyes in imitation of her. “Did you know that—somewhere in India, I think—there are people who shake their heads as a sign of assent, instead of nodding them?” Without lowering his voice, he went on: “What have you thought about all week?”

  “You,” she said gravely, with her hands about the books.

  He leaned forward and kissed her brow. “Now, take your books upstairs, there’s a good girl,” he said.

  She walked past him and out of the room.

  “Oh, Clem, help her,” May said, coming from the kitchen and passing Nettie in the corridor.

  “I can manage,” said Nettie.

  May came back into the living room and sat down in an easy chair. She crossed her legs and lit a cigarette. “Do you think Nettie’s all right?” she asked Clem.

  He was piling the abandoned wads of newspaper into an empty carton. “Why not?” he asked.

  “Oh, sometimes she seems such a … waif. Perhaps we should do more for her, now she’s living away from home.”

  He had fitted the empty boxes, ingeniously, one inside the other. “We have our own lives to lead,” he said.

  May left early in the morning. Having meticulously calculated time and distance on a piece of paper, she could tell the hour at which she would reach her mother’s house, how long she must, in order not to seem hurried, linger over lunch there, and when she and Matt might reasonably be expected home. Seated neatly dressed at the wheel of the car, she gave an impression of carrying away with her all the order and assurance of the house.

  Nettie, untidy in a dressing gown, received last instructions with a series of nods whose very frequency betrayed inattention. May has our day all planned, she thought, as well as her own. She has allowed for everything except what will happen. The engine started, and Nettie waved. When the car disappeared, she turned back to the house abruptly, dissociating herself from Clem.

  “Can we play dominoes?” asked Kenny, the younger boy, who had been left in her charge.

  “When I’m dressed,” she said.

  “Doesn’t it seem a pity,” Clem said, “to waste a day like this inside?”

  “We could go for a walk along the beach,” said Nettie, still addressing herself to Kenny.

  “I’d rather play dominoes.”

  “All right, let’s play dominoes first. We could go for a walk after lunch.”

  While they played dominoes, the day deteriorated. They sat down to lunch with a Sunday halfheartedness, Clem short-tempered from not having had his way and Kenny petulant from having had his. Marion, the maid, came and went between the kitchen and the dining room, as though they were, all three, fractious children who needed supervision. The cold meat that had seemed a good idea in the morning now simply contributed to the day’s feeling of being left over.

  After lunch, Nettie proposed again the walk that now nobody wanted, and out of sheer perverseness they walked on the deserted beach. Nettie wore a raincoat and Kenny a waterproof jacket with a broken zipper. A wind had come up, releasing little swirls from sand that had been tightly packed all winter. The sky hung over the low-lying land, huge as a sky in a Dutch painting. Clem could not light his cigarette, although he persisted in trying. Nettie struggled to fold the flapping triangle of her scarf over her hair. After she had accomplished this, Kenny put his hand in hers, but when Clem took her hand on the other side the child pulled away and ran ahead of them d
own the beach.

  “Children know everything,” Nettie said.

  “Well, they have a kind of insight into fundamentals. I don’t think one can call that knowledge.” He would not let her withdraw her hand from his. “You look such an orphan in that raincoat.”

  “I always look a bit like that, apparently.”

  “That’s what May said.”

  “What did she say?”

  “That you looked a waif. That we should do more for you.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I looked preoccupied and said we had our own lives to lead.”

  Freeing her fingers at last, she put both her hands in her pockets and they walked a little way in silence.

  He looked at her, faintly amused. “What should I have said?”

  “I don’t know. Did you mean that when you said it? I mean, what did you feel?”

  “You’d be happier if I had felt a liar and a hypocrite?”

  “That, at least, would be a redeeming feature.”

  He shrugged. “I rather thought I’d redeemed myself by telling you about it.” He was a little bored. “I see no object in hurting people unnecessarily.”

  “It would be all right if it were necessary?”

  “You say all the wrong things,” he observed. “You have no experience—you’re thrown back on your intuitions, like Kenny. That’s why you make these judgments on yourself and others.”

  She spread her hands, distending the pockets of her raincoat. “I’m afraid of this. Of not knowing what will happen next.”

  “Ah, well,” he said, offhandedly, “you would have come to some things pretty soon in any case, if only out of curiosity. As for the other things, you simply attract them by worrying about them. What you fear most will happen to you—that is the law.”

  No one had spoken to her in this way before, and for a moment she actually imagined the words sternly inscribed in a statute book. Now Clem thrust his hands into his pockets, which had the effect of making Nettie, repudiated, distractedly bring out her own.

  “Watch for shells!” Kenny roared from the horizon.

  Neither of them replied. Presently Clem laughed and looked at her, and touched her shoulder with his. “You’re a fool,” he said, more kindly.

  “But what have I done wrong?”

  “You got born twenty years too late.”

  So immense and so complex did the gulf between them appear to her that it was a shock to have it simply stated as a matter of bad timing on her part. She had once been told that the earth, had it been slightly deflected on its axis, would have had no winter; and the possibility of a life shared with Clem appeared to her on the same scale of enormity and remote conjecture. Inexperienced, as he had pointed out, she had no means of knowing if his remarks were excessively unfeeling. She knew him in his daily life to be a reasonable man; from ignorance, she assumed that his conduct now would represent the same proportions of logic and compassion.

  “Let’s go back,” he said. He cupped his hands and shouted to Kenny. Of Kenny’s response, only the word “shells” could be distinguished. They retraced the pattern of their steps on the sand, the wind now at their backs.

  “The Bairds are coming for dinner,” Clem remarked.

  “I met them once, last year.”

  “Vernon is rather a bore, but I like Sarah. She has the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen.” He glanced round to be sure that Kenny was following.

  Nettie, annoyed, said nothing. Her dim recollection of Mrs. Baird became tinged with antagonism—a plump, middle-aged woman bullied by her husband.

  “I have never heard her say an unkind thing,” Clem continued, “about anybody.”

  Nettie reflected that this, when said of a woman, made her sound totally uninteresting.

  “You can entertain Vernon at dinner,” Clem said.

  “How?”

  “Simply by listening to him, I should think. He likes shy young things. Although you’re not exactly shy, are you? It’s rather as though you were afraid we might all find out what you think of us.” They climbed up a bank onto the road. “I wish we were alone,” he said, as though their entire conversation had been irrelevant. He opened a gate and held it for her.

  “There’s Marion,” Nettie said.

  Marion had come out of the house and was standing in the drive. She put her hands to her mouth and shouted to them.

  “She can’t be collecting shells, too, can she?” Clem made a gesture of not hearing, and Marion shouted again. This time, as in the case of Kenny, one word only was distinct.

  “The damned telephone,” he said. “You bring Kenny. I’ll go ahead.”

  Nettie waited by the gate for Kenny, who was walking —inexplicably—backward. Clem had disappeared into the house. Marion stood by the door, holding it almost closed against the wind. When Nettie came up the steps, Marion still grasped the doorknob—as if, Nettie thought, one could not enter the house without first being brought up to date on its contents.

  “Matt has a temperature.”

  “Is that May on the phone?”

  “Yes. They can’t drive back today—Kenny, turn round at once or you’ll fall over something—Matt has a temperature of a hundred and two.”

  Nettie dressed for dinner with great care. Instead of bending hurriedly before the speckled mirror above her chest of drawers, she propped the mirror by the bed, in the strongest light, and sat in front of it. She combed her hair and wound it into a circle at the back of her head and fastened it there. She brushed the shoulders of her black dress, and clasped a string of pearls around her neck, and put on high-heeled shoes. When she was quite ready, she sat once more on the bed and took her hair down, and put it up again in the same way.

  As she came downstairs, the hallway was cold from the passage of night air. The Bairds had arrived. Sarah Baird had let Clem take her coat and was standing at the foot of the stairs in a dark-blue dress; her eyes, shining from the brief drive, were very fine indeed. Vernon looked up as Nettie joined them. From the slight surprise in his face, Nettie thought that she had been right, after all, to do her hair a second time.

  “Ah, here she is,” Clem said.

  Sarah turned and, although they scarcely knew each other, kissed Nettie. So did Vernon. “Are you warm enough in that dress?” Sarah asked her.

  “It’s wool,” said Nettie, speaking for the first time.

  Clem put away Vernon’s hat and shut the closet door. “There’s a fire in the living room,” he said. He laid his hand lightly on Nettie’s shoulder as they moved away.

  Clem poured out drinks, and they sat down by the fire. Clem rattled the ice in his drink and talked about Matt’s temperature. He had been trying to telephone May all evening; the telephone, on a party line, was being used.

  “You must tell them it’s an emergency,” Sarah began indignantly.

  Nettie, leaning back in a deep chair as the others bent forward to the fire, reflected that Matt’s temperature was, socially, a godsend to them all. Sarah, it seemed, moved with complete ease among children’s temperatures, virus infections, the possibility—not to be ruled out—of measles. Briefly, she took charge of the conversation. “Try not to worry,” she said, implying that one must by all means worry, though possibly not to distraction. The Bairds had four children, all of whose temperatures had, at one time or another, considerably outclassed Matt’s.

  She really is quite stupid, Nettie decided, believing—erroneously—that fine eyes could not atone for stupidity.

  Looking away from Sarah, she was disconcerted to find Vernon watching her. If he were capable of interpreting her scrutiny of Sarah, she wondered, would he mind? Or was it just that he took an interest in other women? But his interest gave the impression of being so general that it almost amounted to fidelity. And immediately she asked herself, “Is Clem like that? Has he done this before? Will he do it again?” The last of these questions pained her so much that she left all of them unanswered. Of course with Clem it was no
t the same at all, utterly different, the comparison was meaningless … But in what way different?

  “I know what’s different,” Vernon said suddenly. “You’ve changed your hair since I last saw you.”

  “And since I last saw you,” said Clem, turning a little to smile at her. She thought that his tenderness, after the day’s indifference, was like a warning.

  “Clem could try the telephone again,” Vernon said, “before we sit down to dinner.”

  When Vernon pushed Nettie’s chair in to the table, he rested his hand, as Clem had, briefly on her shoulder. It troubled her to sit in May’s place, and for that reason she took no responsibility for the meal, allowing the dishes to pass without offering to serve them, behaving as less than a guest. She was grateful to Vernon for requiring—as Clem had predicted—nothing more than a hearer. He seemed content that she should stare down onto the polished table beside her plate so long as her head was slightly inclined toward him. Once, she looked up, and Clem, who was talking to Sarah, lifted his eyes. Studying the table again and tracing the grain of the wood with her finger, she thought there had been no intimacy in his look, only a reflection of her own preoccupation, and a sort of recalcitrance. She felt that she could not breathe properly, and she disappointed Vernon by uttering a sharp sigh. The tabletop bore the damp mark of her lifted finger.

  “Of course, I’m an incurable romantic,” Vernon was saying. He made it sound like a disease.

  “Of course,” she said.