The Fall Read Online Free PDF Page A

say?”
    “Robert. Just Robert.”
    She shuffled off. I waited in the hall, the dark-brown hall with the longcase clock that paced out the silence. Stairs led
     upward into shadow. There was a stained-glass window at the turn of the stairs: an Arthurian knight looking toward his lady,
     a piece of vapid Burne-Jonesery. I remembered that. I remembered laughing at it because she had laughed. There were pictures
     on the walls: watercolors of Welsh hillsides and an oil painting of an urban street — one of the slate towns, the slate cliffs
     laid on with a palette knife that brought to them the very texture of the rock itself: lucid slabs, slick with rain. I knew
     that style well enough, even without seeing the signature at the bottom:
    Ruth Phoenix, 1979
    Then there was the jawbone of a shark, fished — I recalled the story — off Nantucket. That was what Caroline had told me, laughing
     at the memory of it. “I caught it myself, while the men jeered and told me I could never do it and all that sort of crap.
     But I did it. And there it is.”
    How much had changed? I couldn’t be sure. The illusion of memory gave me everything, all the artifacts, all the
objets d’art
(I could hear her enunciate the French phrase): a tortured glass bottle — Lalique? — that was like some intimate female organ;
     a porcelain shepherdess — Meissen? — that laughed at the onlooker as though flaunting her recently lost virginity; another oil
     painting that may have been (but she had never dared subject it to the expert’s curious gaze) by Marie Laurencin. I peered
     at the thing with new eyes now and knew just the man to examine it and value it. On the opposite wall there was even a photograph
     showing Jamie: a crouched figure in silhouette, his bandaged face looking out from under a helmet, with plunging cliffs behind
     him and bright alpine meadows far below. Jamie at Death Bivouac. I knew that photo well: I had taken it myself.
    From upstairs there was the noise of talking, but I couldn’t make out any words. Then a light footfall at the top of the stairs.
     “Yes?”
    I turned from the photo. Someone was coming down. She turned at the landing and paused in front of the stained glass, looking
     down at me. “Yes?”
    There was a shock at seeing her, of course. Something physical like a fist, a child’s fist perhaps, swung playfully into the
     stomach when you weren’t expecting it. A convulsion of heart and diaphragm. The blow had been intended as a joke, so you had
     to smile.
    “It’s Robert,” I said.
    “Robert, yes.” She smiled vaguely. For a moment I wondered whether she even remembered.
    “I came to see how you were. I’ve been over at Jamie’s place. With Ruth. I’ve come to say how sorry I am.” Paltry words. Maybe
     that was what made her smile. Paltriness had always amused her. She was wearing trousers (she’d have called them
slacks)
and a white shirt (she’d have called it a
blouse),
and her hands were clasped in front of her as though she had to do that to stop a tremor. As she came down the final flight
     of stairs, she moved cautiously, with one hand on the banister and the other still clasped in front of her. “Have you been
     to see him?” she asked.
    For an awful moment I thought that she hadn’t understood. I imagined — it was a fleeting moment of horror, like the sudden perception
     of a death — that her mind had gone. “Caroline, Jamie’s
dead,”
I told her gently.
    She came up close to me, as though it was necessary to bring my face into focus. It was like looking at someone through a
     screen, a Japanese screen of some kind, rice paper or whatever: the woman I had known peering out through the layers of time.
     “I know what Jamie is,” she said softly. “I know exactly what Jamie is. I have had practice in this, don’t forget.” Her left
     hand, which had gripped the banister, which had gripped many things in its time, gripped my arm. The other hand remained where
     it