The Fall Read Online Free PDF

was, slack and idle across the base of her belly. She leaned forward and presented her cheek for me to kiss. Her skin was
     soft and smooth.
    “You’re looking very well,” I said.
    She shook her head. “Forget the compliments. The only thing about age is the surprise it brings. Death is no surprise, of
     course, but you never know
who
is going to die. I’ll bet he put his money on me first. And I bet you did too. You probably thought that I was already dead
     and buried, didn’t you?”
    “Don’t be ridiculous, Caroline.” The name seemed absurd on her aged body, a young woman’s name given in error.
    “Oh, yes you did.” Another of her traits, to brook no argument. She walked away into the drawing room, where there were other
     photos — Jamie’s father looking youthful, like a corpse preserved — other artifacts, other memories enshrined. An old, polished
     gramophone from the time when they still made them like pieces of furniture. And on the wall another of Ruth’s paintings,
     a nude, this one, a woman standing beside a bed, her flesh blurred by sunlight from a window: white limbs and a smudge of
     pubic hair.
    “What would you like? Tea?” She rang for the maid, and I remembered the box of little mechanical flags on the kitchen wall,
     one for each room in the house, to signal which room had rung. There was even a green baize door dividing off the servants’
     quarters. Caroline had laughed when she had shown me that. It was one of those things that accumulated, like parts of an argument,
     to convince her that this isolated house on an isolated hillside was a place where she might live.
    “The other thing about age,” she said, “is that it’s only once you are old that you realize that things are for keeps. What
     seemed an interesting experiment is actually the only existence that you have or are going to have. Why did you leave it so
     long to come back?”
    “It doesn’t seem long,” I replied evasively. “It seems like yesterday.”
    She laughed. “That’s another trouble with age,” she said. “Thirty years ago seems like yesterday.”
    Alice came into the drawing room with a tray. While Caroline poured the tea with her left hand, her right remained couched
     in her lap like a small, helpless pet. It was only then that I understood that something was wrong with it, wrong with the
     mechanism of nerve and muscle that was meant to move the thing. She saw my glance. “A stroke, my dear,” she said. “Just a
     little one. My doctor assures me that I could go on for years yet.” She crossed her legs. Her ankles were still narrow, but
     they had a wasted look to them, as though slenderness had given way to fragility.
    “So tell me,” she said. “How is your mother?”
    I shrugged. “She’s in a nursing home. Oh, she’s well enough physically, but…her mind wanders.”
    Was there sympathy in her expression? It wasn’t happening to her, that was clear enough. Her mind was there, all right. “And
     tell me about you,” she said. “Married? Of course. I remember Jamie telling me. Are you happy?”
    “I’m content.”
    “That’s a very equivocal response. Children?”
    “Two. Girls. Twenty-one and seventeen. University and A levels.”
    “And what does Daddy do?”
    “Don’t you know?”
    “Should I?”
    “I thought Ruth might have said. I’m in the art business. Contemporary art. A gallery in London, another in Birmingham of
     all places. An associate gallery in New York.”
    “Bisected cows in formaldehyde, that kind of thing?”
    “Not often.”
    She looked thoughtful. Somehow I could see the younger woman behind the mask of age. “But happy?” she asked again. “Is Rob
happy?”
    I shrugged. Don’t you grow out of happiness? Isn’t happiness what kids hope for? Wasn’t adulthood the understanding that there
     is no real happiness, not long, sustained, and unequivocal happiness? “I told you. I’m content.”
    Caroline smiled as I knew she would. Blurred