Cliffs of Fall Page 7

  When he had parked the car, Isabel closed her window. Vittorio turned off the engine and, waiting for her to gather her things together, pulled his glasses out of his pocket and took up her book to examine its title. It was one of his own works.

  He could not have been more embarrassed had he found her praying. “Accidenti!” he said. “How dull for you. But do you—?”

  “Understand anything? Well, no, not much, naturally.”

  “Then why ever do you bother?”

  Isabel took the book back and started to get out of the car. She looked oppressed and, he thought at first, offended. He opened his own door and went round to hers, astonishment still in his face.

  And it was with astonishment, more than anything else, that he saw her eyes enlarge with tears before she turned from him toward the house—an unbearable astonishment that called upon all his capacities for comprehension. He followed her in silence. They entered the house together and began to climb the stairs. He was profoundly aware of her, moving slowly and sadly at his side, but it did not occur to him to speak. He felt that he must be alone to think about it, that there must be some rational, disappointing explanation. He could scarcely breathe, from the stairs and from astonishment. He had never been so astonished in his life.

  IN ONE’S OWN HOUSE

  “I HOPE we didn’t wake you, Miranda,” Constance said.

  Miranda had come downstairs in her dressing gown, forgetting that her mother-in-law always appeared at breakfast fully dressed. And there she was, Constance, in a linen dress and a green sweater, pouring out coffee. This early rising and dressing on Constance’s part was rather uncharacteristic. She herself readily explained it to her guests as the necessity of setting a good example. “In one’s own house,” she would then add—it was an expression she was particularly fond of.

  In other respects, Constance affected a charming disorder, which turned to downright vagueness in the face of other people’s difficulties. Of independent mind and means (“a widow with a little money” was another of her favored phrases), she repudiated, shrewdly or selfishly, untidy elements in the lives of others. Within her own controlled variety of moods, coy or unfeeling, she maintained a handsome serenity—like a country that, suffering no extremes of climate, remains always green. Her affection was largely reserved for her younger son, James, now seated beside her at the breakfast table, holding his coffee cup in both his hands and resting his elbows on the edge of the table. With her other son, Miranda’s husband Russell, she had never felt at ease. She saw him seldom—when he and Miranda visited her here in the country, or on her own rare trips to New York. She thought him sarcastic, intense, unknowable; his attitude toward her seemed to be one of continual reproach, and she could not help wondering what, in his mind, he accused her of. She was distressed, but not surprised, that he had managed to have a nervous breakdown.

  Miranda said: “Oh no, not at all,” and seated herself opposite James. At the other end of the table, a fourth place had been laid for Russell.

  “Of course, time is getting on,” Constance continued, “if you want to go to church.”

  “Church?” inquired James.

  “Miranda does go to church,” Constance rebuked him, the soul of open-mindedness.

  “I went once,” Miranda told him, “when we were here at Easter. I was the only woman without a hat. I felt like the Infidel.”

  “I’m sure, my dear, you get credit for good thoughts.” Constance took Miranda’s cup. “Like Abou ben Adhem,” she added kindly.

  “The sermon was very dull,” Miranda said, placatingly.

  “I don’t doubt it.” Having filled the cup, Constance passed it back. “I always think, don’t you, that Catholic churches must be much more interesting than ours. So much more going on. Protestants are so docile—turning up in pairs on Sunday, like animals entering the Ark.” After an insufficient pause, Constance went on: “Well, Miranda dear, you must go to church just as often as you like—if you really do mean to spend the summer here.”

  Miranda, unresisting, drank her coffee.

  “Isn’t Russell coming to breakfast?” James helped himself to the last piece of toast without waiting for the answer to this question.

  “He’s still sleeping,” Miranda said. “I’ll take a tray up to him when we’ve finished.”

  Constance felt—and not for the first time—that Miranda was indulging Russell. Which may well be the cause of his trouble, she added to herself. Aloud, she pointed out that there was still hot coffee in the pot. “If you want to call him now,” she suggested.

  Miranda almost sighed. “No,” she said. “I think he should sleep. He has a long journey ahead of him tomorrow.”

  “My dear, he gets on a plane in New York and gets off it in Athens. That isn’t so strenuous, after all.”

  Miranda thought it sounded utterly exhausting, but said nothing.

  James said to Miranda: “Are you going to New York with him?”

  “No. I’ll drive him to New Haven and see him off on the train.”

  “Why don’t you go to New York?”

  Miranda said bravely: “Because he doesn’t want me to,” and began to collect the empty dishes within her reach.

  Damn Russell, thought James; everything connected with him led to trouble and hurt someone’s feelings. Rather, hurt Miranda’s feelings—and that’s all I care about, he said to himself—looking at her briefly, so that his mother wouldn’t notice, but seeing everything: her meekly attentive face, still faintly smeared with night cream and dominated by her wide, now colorless mouth, the straight black hair she had already brushed into a careful line along her shoulders, and the rose-colored dressing gown that opened on the white curve of her breast Damn Russell, thought James.

  Oh Russell, my darling, why must you do this, Miranda wondered, grieving above the plates and cups. Is it really going to help you to be away, to be without me? Will you really come back? She pushed her chair out from the table and wrapped her dressing gown about her, resting her hand for a moment against her body. It’s strange, she thought, that these trite expressions should have such meaning—“My heart bleeds”; “It cut me to the heart” … One does feel it here. Something to do, perhaps, with circulation or breathing.

  “A very good color for you, Miranda, that pink,” Constance declared. She had a proprietary way of admiring other people’s possessions, as if all good taste were in some measure a tribute to herself. “Yes, an excellent color,” she repeated, in this flat, confiscating manner of hers, as Miranda trailed out of the dining room toward the kitchen. Then she looked adoringly at James, who was still eating his breakfast.

  Constance’s husband had died in the war, shortly after James’s birth. The fact that she had, unaided, raised this remarkable young man was a daily source of gratification to her. James’s strong and subtle personality, his intelligence, his good looks would have more than met her own requirements. That he should, into the bargain, have turned out to be charming and kind was an unlooked-for bonus that, as far as Constance was concerned, simply vindicated his gifts in the eyes of a jealous society. He was so attractive, she sometimes thought, that he was really entitled to be a bit nasty; instead—magnanimously, she felt—he was very nice. He would go a long way—always in the right direction; they all said so, his professors, his college friends, even Russell. Russell himself had done well enough, until now, but James would do more. James was more singular, his talents less diffuse. If only, she prayed, if only he would get over these grotesque notions about Miranda. (Thank God Miranda herself hadn’t noticed yet.) It really couldn’t be worse, if the two of them were to be in the house all summer. “Poor little Miranda’s looking rather drawn, I thought,” she said.

  “Seemed all right to me,” James replied. “Perhaps she’ll cheer up after Russell goes.”

  Someone will cheer up anyway, Constance thought grimly, watching him. “She’d be better advised to cheer up beforehand. It only makes Russell worse to see her subdued lik
e this.”

  “Russell’s not exactly clamorous himself,” James pointed out. He wiped his hands on a paper napkin and left it in a ball on his plate. “And never has been.”

  “All the more reason for Miranda to provide a little contrast … Proust, if you recall, says that Swann was instinctively repelled by the very women whose depth of character and melancholy expression exactly reflected his own.”

  “I don’t, no.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Recall.” But James was pleased to note that his mother had inadvertently credited Miranda with a depth of character she usually managed to deny her.

  Constance got up from the table, picked up James’s empty dishes, and followed Miranda to the kitchen. She found her daughter-in-law leaning one elbow on top of the refrigerator, waiting for the toast to be done. A set tray stood on the kitchen table.

  “May I take the paper for Russell?” Miranda asked.

  “Oh of course. I’ll see it later.”

  “Oh, not if you’re not finished with it.”

  “My dear, I’m sure there’s nothing of interest in it. I can very well wait.” Constance watched Miranda buttering the toast. “Though I must say, Miranda, I don’t think you ought to pander to Russell quite so much.”

  Why must you say it, Miranda wondered. “Constance,” she said, carefully putting butter at the corners of the slice, “Russell is very sick.”

  Sick, Constance repeated to herself, now thoroughly exasperated. Sick. People seem quite incapable of using straightforward words these days. My son questions, as well he might, the very nature of our existence, and they discuss him as though he had German measles. Sick—that’s the word they use now when people become exercised over the human condition. Sick, indeed. “Do you have any idea, Miranda darling, how all this started?”

  Miranda put the toast on the tray and took the coffee off the stove. “It’s a long story,” she said.

  When one says that it’s always something fundamental that could be explained in a single sentence, Constance remarked to herself. She pushed the door open for Miranda to pass through.

  Turning back into the room, she saw that Miranda had left the newspaper on the table.

  When Russell had finished his breakfast he lay in bed with his hands folded under his head and watched Miranda making up her face. He could see that this unnerved her, from the attention with which she handled the succession of little jars.

  “Why do you need all of those?”

  “Oh, they’re all different, you see.”

  “They can’t all be different. It’s ridiculous. An obsession.”

  She thought with mild resentment of the equipment he carried on his own person. He was always looking for his lighter, running out of cigarettes, forgetting his glasses. She, who did not smoke or wear glasses, would not have dreamed of complaining of these things. But his irritation, she knew, was not concerned with the jars on her dressing table: directed at herself, it was the antithesis of love.

  “Oh—perhaps you’re right. It’s probably silly.”

  “I hate the way you keep saying ‘Oh.’” He saw, in the mirror, her eyes deflect. “And the way you keep agreeing.”

  “Agreeing?”

  “Humoring me. Backed like a weasel. Very like a whale. How true, my lord.”

  She lowered her head, defeated, and began to put the contents of the dressing-table drawer in order. These onslaughts of his were like outcroppings of rock in the surface of her day. Sometimes, as now, her heart twisted and broke under his determination to wound her. At others, she was almost convinced that she felt nothing more for him, that he had overdrawn on her endurance: then she would stay silent for a while, almost at peace, beyond his reach, not knowing whether she had been utterly vanquished or become completely invincible. However, it required merely some slight attention on his part to restore all her apprehensions—for these extremes of feeling only existed within the compass of her love.

  Russell, still watching her, experienced the sensation of being abandoned that always accompanied such victories, as if he had lost the one person who connected him to reality, whose very pain was a guiding thread in the endless labyrinth of his anguish. He thought with despair of her selfishness, all her anxiety for him originating in her own need for his love. She imagines, he thought bitterly, that I could simply be nicer to her; that I could easily be kind if I wanted to, treat her better if I would only try. She had completely failed to realize how far he had descended into this dark place from which no consoling speech could deliver him, no outstretched hand—even hers—bring him back. While she, at one word from him, could be fully restored to life and power and thought. What could she complain of, then, he demanded of her inclined head. Her misery was vicarious, almost parasitical; she knew its cause precisely. It might, in fact, be said of her that she stood continually at the brink of utter happiness. Why, she should count herself among the most fortunate of mortals—blessed art thou among women, Miranda Richmond.

  But occasionally he did feel her suffering—as it were, through the screen of his own. The night before, they had lain down in silence, immensely remote from each other in this comfortable bed in his mother’s best guest room. He had behaved so cruelly to Miranda all day that he knew he could not decently approach her (here he made a mental note to be more careful this evening), and they slept without touching. But that morning he had wakened very early and watched her sleeping—her grief showing even then, for her closed fist was pressed against her mouth as if she had fallen asleep stifling her sobs. For a moment he had wanted intensely to awaken and reassure her, to take her out of sleep back into his embrace before she could recollect what stood between them. For that moment he had lain wanting her to know that help was at hand. But the moment passed, and with it the impulse to rescue her. He could not face her surprise, her pleasure, her tears. He could not face his own inability to sustain this moment of sanity, and the absolute certainly of her disappointment.

  “I must say these things, you know,” he told her, in a fairly pleasant voice. “I don’t care for them either, but they do come out, ugly as they are.”

  She turned round on the stool and looked at him. “Russell, tell me why.”

  He lowered his eyes from the ceiling and looked at her again, still with his hands behind his head. “I suppose they represent me at the moment—I mean, that I am ugly. Wouldn’t you think? Something like that?”

  “No.”

  “I tell you yes, Miranda. That’s the way it is. Envy-and-calumny-and-hate-and-pain , darling—the bloody lot.” He smiled at her. “Where’s the paper?”

  “I didn’t bring it up. I think Constance wanted to see it.”

  “Oh, she’s turned nasty again, has she? God, darling, I can’t see you sticking out the summer here. Even the city in a heat wave is better than Constance.”

  “She’s not so bad. You have to know how to handle her.”

  “Which, as it happens, neither of us does.”

  Miranda laughed. She took off her rose-colored gown and started to dress.

  “Could you hand me those folders.” He sat up and took a bundle of travel leaflets from her. She sat on the bed at a little distance from him, buttoning her dress. Between them, over the blanket, he spread a topographical map of the Greek peninsula and the islands. “You understand that I have to do this?” he asked her, for the twentieth time. “That I have to be away—be alone?”

  For the twentieth time she responded: “Oh yes.” She subdued the folds of the map with her fingers. She bent her head over the fantastic pattern of blue sea and green islands with an assiduous show of interest, like a child examining an invitation for a party to which she has not been asked.

  “I may go to France later,” Russell remarked unsparingly. The studied absorption of her attitude and his awareness of her unshed tears could not touch him. He felt again that she was obtruding her trivial, untimely demands on to a scene of disaster, and he felt justified in setting her down. B
eing away from all this, and from her, was now the only prospect that gave him pleasure; tomorrow could not come quickly enough. And yet—the idea of anyone else receiving this tender, faultless love of hers, or being subjected to its relentless self-denial, was unthinkable. Even if he never came back to her—though he supposed he would—he must be able to think that she wanted him, always. “Was James around this morning?” he asked, discarding one pamphlet after another.

  “He was having breakfast,” she said.

  “Is he going to hang about here all summer? Really, Constance indulges him. I always had to work at least part of the vacation.”

  “She does spoil him, of course. It’s the gap in your ages, don’t you think?” Russell was fourteen years older than James. “Still, James is turning out rather well.” Miranda cast about uneasily for a means of turning the conversation. She felt it would be the last straw if James’s interest in her, ridiculous as it was, were to come to Russell’s attention now.

  Russell could only hope that James would get over it soon. It was better, he had decided, not to mention anything to Miranda. But she really was impossible—any other woman would have noticed such a thing immediately. She lives in a world of her own, he thought, as he looked at her innocently sorting the papers on the bed. “I suppose it’s time I got up,” he said.

  “Where’s Miranda?” James asked, when Russell appeared alone in the bright garden.

  “She had letters to write.” Russell walked on down the path, nodding to his mother, who sat, sewing buttons on a shirt, in a cane chair beside James. James’s effrontery, the ineptitude of Miranda now ceased to interest him. He walked along the flagged path, onto which the flood tide of his mother’s flowers had overflowed, fully engaged in maintaining his own equilibrium. This required an effort so intense that it became, at times, almost, physical and he walked like a person under a strong sedative, slightly stupefied, his body braced against the return of pain. In so far as he noticed at all, he saw only a threat in the brilliant delicacy of the flowers, the smooth sweep of grass, and the light shredded through trees and shrubs at the end of the path. These were things—unlike his relations with Miranda, or his inability to work, which were matters inextricably entangled with his life—offered gratuitously by fate to impede his struggle for sanity. He felt that if he did not soon reach a place of shelter and darkness he would have to turn and go back inside. He crossed the foot of the lawn and pushed his way into a small wood with the instinctive haste of someone who, at the point of suffocation, seeks fresh air.