Falling Read Free Page A

had taken to eating off bits of the
Sunday Times
when I had run out of plates, or rinsing one mug whose pottery was heavily stained with
tannin, and otherwise drinking straight from cans. The place was a litter of paper, crumbs and minor congealed spillages of anything from Guinness to strawberry jam. The small carpet was filthy;
the windows clouded with paraffin fumes and condensation. The oil lamps were dull with the greasy black that results from untrimmed wicks. The galley was in a revolting state. In fact, the only
bits of the boat that I had kept clean were the toilet and basin (I have never been able to endure squalor in those areas). My books were covered in a scum of untouched dust. I knew, because every
time I returned to the boat and unlocked the saloon doors it assailed me, that the place smelt of paraffin, damp, unwashed clothes and tobacco. If I
did
find anybody, I thought, it would
have to be on her ground rather than mine. That I can rise above almost any material circumstances does not mean that I should expect others to do the same. It is not even a question of priorities:
for me love has always been the single most important influence in my life.
    And now I have lost it – again! It is strange how one’s mind shies away from unbearable reality into past, quite trivial detail; into small pointless pieces of reminiscence or
speculation of what might have been if some minor aspect of a situation had been different – anything, I suppose, to protect oneself from more than a second’s endurance of pain as fresh
as it is relentless. I know that in the end the freshness will fade. If pictures of her slip across my inner vision with that soundless poignancy that makes one want to cry out, their recurrence
(it is curious how repetition is the chief habit of memory) will degenerate into a familiar ache. At the moment, however, the loss of her is too new for me even to contemplate the idea that it may
diminish. Worse – and how I recognize this! – I do not
want
it to: I clutch at my pain as the last straw of feeling I may ever possess before the Ice Age of a vegetable senility
sets in, such as I have seen so often in a vacant gaze, a trickle of mucus generated from mumbling jaws, the pointless fidgeting of veined and liver-spotted hands that smooth non-existent hair or
shabby clothes. Old age has become something that I dread – far more than death.
    I can remember that when I was young, a boy, old age was something that I regarded with a kind of incredulous boredom. It could have nothing to do with me because I was never going to be like
that. My horizon then extended merely to my becoming dashingly adult, past the age when people could call me boy and boss me about. It is strange how, when we are very young, we equate growing up
with freedom; we think that having escaped parental bondage we shall live thereafter exactly as we please. The business of having to earn one’s living has not impinged. But when we have to
start doing
that,
old age shifts from its distance and settles nearer: at least it was so for me. And since then it has loomed, edged ever nearer, usually – as in that game that the
girls at school were so fond of called Grandmother’s Steps – when I was not looking. Shortly before I left Hazel I remember waking early – I had tried to turn over in bed and the
pain had woken me – looking at my watch and realising that I couldn’t see what time it was without my specs. Then I understood that at last old age had succeeded in creeping up on me,
had woken me with a tap on the shoulder.
I
was old; in good nick, but indisputably old.
    All that day to counteract panic I added up my assets: nothing wrong with my heart or blood pressure; memory not quite what it had been, but still pretty good. My hair was now a steel grey but
there was plenty of it. My teeth, apart from a small bridge, were my own, and the use of spectacles for reading was no indictment. And in spite of failing