Falling Read Free

and was casting about in the library for a new subject. I ended up by taking one novel each
by Iris Murdoch, Virginia Woolf, Ouida and Elinor Glyn – an odd bag you might say, but I like to cast my net as widely as possible, and I’m no intellectual snob. I mention this
particular trip to the library only because it was on that evening that, walking back from the village, I noticed the cottage. It was not that I had never seen it before; it had always been an
unremarkable part of the landscape of the familiar walk from boat to village and gave every sign of being uninhabited. Now I observed the cottage because there were lights on; I could see
that one of the rooms had red walls, which made a rosy glow in the grey autumn dusk, and the contrast between this picture-postcard cosiness and my damp and generally cheerless abode impressed me.
If my life had not been so studded with misfortune,
I
could have owned such a place – more modest than my original ambitions had dictated, but better by far than my present lot.
    That evening, while I consumed what was left of a tinned steak and kidney pudding, I did find myself sinking into a depression, which began with a resume of my present condition: in my sixties,
living on the state, homeless, or shortly to become so (the owners had written to say that they were returning sooner than expected), and without a lover, let alone a companion of any kind. How had
I come to this? When I thought back to my youth and remembered how easy it had been to get any girl who interested me interested in me, it seemed extraordinary that I should end up alone. Women of
all ages had succumbed to my attentions. If I had married Daphne, might things have been different? Or perhaps if I had
not
married Hazel success might have shone. But it had never done that
for more than a few weeks, or perhaps months. I could not understand why, when I possessed a talent that from my observation of them was given to few men, I should not have landed myself with all
the emotional and other security so necessary to someone of my nature. It was true that, years ago, in the Daphne days, I had had hopes and dreams far beyond any that I might entertain now. I was,
though I say it myself, extremely good-looking. I was bright. My English teacher at school told me that I should try for university; she thought, if I worked, I had a good chance of a scholarship.
But Daphne had intervened, followed – mercifully as it turned out – by the war. It was really my father who persuaded, or rather bullied, me into learning his trade but to me there has
always been something menial about being a gardener, which no quantity of upper-class, middle-aged ladies in green wellingtons can dispel. However much they yap on about old-fashioned shrub roses
and white gardens, I know that someone else does the double digging, the muck-spreading, the hedge-cutting, the seed-thinning, the potting-up and other countless tasks that are made wearisome by
their repetition. My father ‘put me through it’, to use his phrase, and this meant that I did all those things. It used to take me ages to get my hands clean enough to meet Daphne.
    I remember coming back that evening into the saloon from the galley where I had gone to make a cup of instant coffee and wondering idly what Daphne – or, indeed, any of the others –
would think if they saw how I lived now, and at once it was as though I was viewing the scene before me through other, actually critical eyes. It’s true that I have never been much of a one
for domestic life (the man who cannot find some woman to clear up and generally administer to him has hardly the right to call himself a man) but really, in this particular case of the boat,
I had let things go rather too far. I had fallen into the habit of waiting to do the washing-up until there was not a clean crock left. Anyone who has had to water a boat then boil any they want
hot will understand this point. But that autumn I