The Waterfall Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  The Waterfall

  About the Author

  First Houghton Mifflin Harcourt edition 2013

  Copyright © 1969 by Margaret Drabble

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  First U.S. edition in 1969 by William Morrow & Co.

  Published in Great Britain in 1969 by Weidenfeld & Nicholson Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

  eISBN 978-0-544-28647-4

  v1.1013

  Drowning is not so pitiful

  As the attempt to rise.

  Three times, ’tis said, a sinking man

  Comes up to face the skies,

  And then declines forever

  To that abhorred abode,

  Where hope and he part company—

  For he is grasped of God.

  The Maker’s cordial visage.

  However good to see,

  Is shunned, we must admit it,

  Like an adversity.

  Emily Dickinson

  The Waterfall

  IF I WERE drowning I couldn’t reach out a hand to save myself, so unwilling am I to set myself up against fate.

  This is what she said to him one night. He was not interested, and she had not expected him to be so. She had not even thought, as she said it, that it might be the truth. But the image, nevertheless, remained with her, as though she had by accident articulated something of significance, and as she lay in bed at night, swollen and sleepless, she wondered whether it might not have been, after all, as she had said. Because it was not so much the indignity that she feared, not the screams, not the calls for attention, the inconvenience caused, the ugly respiration, the spluttering, the bubbling lungs: it was not so much these, though who could like the thought of them? It was worse than that, some yet greater pride or subjection: for if alone, even if alone, quietly, going under, submerging, she would reject the opportune branch, and fail to make for the friendly bank. Unless cast up there by the water itself, she would drown. There was something sacred in her fate that she dared not countermand by effort. If the current chose to rescue her, it could: providence could deal with her without her own assistance. If she was chosen, she was chosen: if not, then she would quietly refrain from the folly of asserting her belief in her election, in the miraculous interventions of fate on her behalf.

  Some weeks later, he left her. She was not surprised. She had been expecting it. She was quite pleased to see him go. Everything seemed a little colder without him—the bed, the house itself, her meals, which she no longer troubled to heat; she ate baked beans and sardines and asparagus straight from the tin. The temperature of her life seemed to be cooling into some ice age of inactivity, lacking the friction of a dying marriage, lacking even the fragile sparrow-like warmth of her child: her child was not with her, he was staying with her parents while she waited to give birth to her second. So she had nothing to do, nothing at all, but to keep herself alive, and to wait for the pangs of birth to begin. She did not ring her parents to tell them that her husband had left her, because she preferred to be alone. She wandered round the cold and empty house, watching the rain fall outside, seeing the windows silt up with London grime, watching the dust thicken on the furniture. She did nothing. She had often, as a girl, imagined such a life: empty, solitary, neglected, cold. It seemed to have happened to her, perhaps as a result of those imaginings. Like a victim, she waited: meek, like a sacrifice. From time to time it occurred to her that she ought to feel desolate, abandoned, frightened perhaps, but she seemed to lack the strength to feel these things. She felt nothing. She walked about, and lay in bed, and made herself cups of coffee, and sometimes waves of familiar dead emotion would softly suggest themselves to her—emotions such as loneliness and physical alarm and social fear. And somewhere else, far away, she heard those mighty abstractions crashing on a distant shore: treachery, love, despair.

  Meanwhile, as she waited, the emptiness was almost comfortable. She saw nobody, taking care to shop in shops where she was not known, staring blankly as she handed over a ten-shilling note and leaving money in an envelope for the milkman so that she could avoid his irregular, bespectacled, too human face. She held in fact so much to her solitude that when the pains of labour started, she could hardly bring herself to summon the midwife, so reluctant was she to see and to be seen. She lay on her bed, thinking of a True Story she had read once, many years ago, in a woman’s magazine: a story of a pregnant woman, stranded by some unmemorable and unimaginable stroke of fate in a hut in the snowy wastes of Alaska. The woman had lived there alone, and had produced her baby, and had survived, and had indeed lived to sell the story of her ordeal. This tale had always haunted her, and as she lay there and felt the ebb and flow of pain she wondered if she had remembered it so well because she was called upon to emulate such brave isolation. Although, of course, she did not: common sense prevailed, as she had always known it would, and after a while she got up and rang the midwife and then her cousin Lucy. So much contact, after so much silence, was exhausting: she lifted the baby’s Home Confinement Kit down from the top of the wardrobe, and got out some newspapers and towels, and then lay down once more upon the bed, damp and breathless. By the time the midwife knocked she was too far gone to get up to answer the door, so she called, idly, from where she lay.

  It was a cold night, and just after the baby was born snow started to fall. The midwife, distressed by the general inadequacy of the arrangements, and afraid lest the baby should catch cold, had concentrated all available sources of heat in the bedroom: a gas fire was burning, and there were two small electric fires. The air was heavy and warm and damp. Jane, sitting there in the bed with the small new child tucked in beside her, could feel the sweat of effort flowing unchecked into the sweat of a more natural warmth. They were waiting, she and the midwife, for the doctor, and for cousin Lucy: the doctor, too late to assist the delivery, was coming to put in the stitches, and Lucy was to sit with her for the night. The midwife was sitting in an arm chair by the gas fire: her job ended, and the night growing late, she was dozing. Jane lay there, propped up against the pillows, and watched the snow fall beyond the dark shining pane of the window: there was no noise except the woman’s heavy breathing, and the small feeble movements of her new daughter, who was trying to suck her emaciated thumb. Everything was soft and still: the whole night, and Jane’s nature with it, seemed to be subdued in a vast warm lull, an expectancy, a hesitation, a suspension and remission of trial. The snow fell outside the uncurtained window, and she could feel the blood flowing from her into the white moist sheets. There was newspaper under the sheets, but it too was warm now from the heat of her body: warm and sodden, having lost the dry hard edges and crackling noises that it had made at first, as she moved and stirred in labour. The bedroom had dark blue walls, like the night sky itself, and the bars of the fire were red and glowing. Heaps of white towels and baby clothes lay upon the chest of drawers, and on a table in front of the fire stood a large pale yellow pudding bowl, an ordinary mixing bowl, in which the midwife had bathed the baby. The colours of the scene affected Jane profoundly: they were the violent colours of birth, but they were resolved into silence, into a kind of harmony.

  She thought that she was happy. It was as though all the waiting and the solitude had resolved themselves into some more hopeful expectation, though of what she did not know. Deliverance seemed at hand. It woul
d be safe to wait, now: it could no longer be missed or avoided. This close heat would surely generate its own salvation.

  After a while the doctor came, and stitched her up—drawing the curtains nervously to do so, shutting out the witnessing snow. The shoulders of his coat were covered in flakes and he brushed them off and they fell and melted on the floor and on the sheets. One of them fell on her bare leg as she lay there. His hands were cold. When he had finished he inquired after her domestic arrangements, seeming ready to be satisfied, producing no refuting evidence when she claimed, deceitfully, to avoid trouble, that her husband would be home the next day. The midwife made them a cup of tea and he drank some, and she drank some too, though it was a drink she did not care for: but in this state, at this time of night, she liked its thin warm wetness. It was liquid and warm, like weeping. It replaced the need for tears. When the baby cried—though she was not crying now, she was silent, asleep, tired by her own birth—when she cried, her eyes were dry and angry, her face red and indignant, protesting against the possibilities of desertion and neglect, unwilling to let such things threaten her: but Jane let her whole body weep and flow, graciously, silently submitting herself to these cruel events, to this pain, to this deliverance.

  When the doctor had finished his cup of tea, he looked at his watch and said that he must go: the midwife said that she would stay until Lucy arrived to relieve her vigil; but even as the doctor went down the stairs Jane heard the car draw up outside and knew that Lucy was there. The doctor let her in: she could hear them exchanging remarks in the hall, and could hear the dry murmur and cough that indicated the presence of James, Lucy’s husband.

  That must be my cousin,’ said Jane to the midwife; it seemed the most personal remark that she had made in weeks.

  ‘I’ll be off, then,’ said the midwife, who had already risen to her feet and was donning the layers of cardigan which the heat of the room had obliged her to cast off. ‘I’ll be back in the morning, nine o’clock.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jane.

  And the woman left: she met James and Lucy on the stairs, and Jane could hear another low-pitched indistinct murmur of greeting and parting, and then the dividing of their footsteps, the opening and closing of the front door downstairs, and then the tap and push upon her own—and then there, suddenly, was Lucy, like a visitor from another life, her arms full of parcels, a blank, diffuse and nervous smile upon her face.

  ‘Hello,’ said Jane, propped up there upon her high pillows.

  ‘Hello,’ said Lucy, dropping the heap of parcels upon the midwife’s chair. ‘We’re late, I’m sorry. I couldn’t get hold of James, and it would have taken even longer to try to get here without him . . . ’

  ‘I hope you didn’t mind coming all this way,’ said Jane.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Lucy, politely. ‘Of course not. We’d been waiting to hear.’

  And the two women smiled at one another, carefully. They were afraid of one another in daily life: tentative, respectful, unsure when they met: but the extremity of the present situation absolved them from their mutual apprehension. They were both so diffident and frail that they were tempted to drift out of contact, out of sight, even when in conversation with each other, both too easily persuaded to abandon hold of any thread or link; but this warm room, and the necessity of their being there, held them together.

  ‘Where’s James?’ said Jane, as Lucy admired the small sleeping baby.

  ‘He went down again,’ said Lucy, ‘to get the cradle from the car.’

  ‘Did he mind bringing you?’ asked Jane, and Lucy smiled, and shook her head, and said, ‘No, he never minds doing things’, as though the fact still after all these years surprised her; and Jane too smiled, because one of the attitudes that they recognized in each other was this shared surprise about James’s docility. For he did not look docile, he looked dangerous, he seemed to carry with him the yellow sulphureous clouds of some threatening imminent disaster, but it never happened, it never took place, and James continued to play with his children and to take them to school, and to drive Lucy around in the car, to be polite to her friends, to meet people at stations, to mend electric fuses, to carry heavy furniture, to answer his post. His actions in fact so much contradicted his appearance that Jane, covertly watching him, would sometimes wonder whether she did not see in his place some totally unreal person, some imaginary face and head and voice, and it was only Lucy’s air of shared surprise that acquitted her of a conviction of hallucination.

  Lucy took off her coat, commenting, inevitably, on the heat of the room, and started to unpack the parcels she had brought—baby parcels, cast-off jackets and socks from her own small son. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘look at this one, I always liked it, how nice to have another baby to put in it—’ and she held it up, a small hand-knitted coat of cream wool with small blue buttons and an embroidered ribbon in the neck: and Jane took it, smiling, and laid it on the pillow by her. As she did so, Lucy, profiting from the diversion to speak without the appearance of speech, said, averting her eyes, delicately, staring towards the window, ‘And what about Malcolm? Ought somebody to ring him?’

  ‘No, no, there’s no need to ring,’ said Jane, stroking the small garment anxiously.

  And that disposed of Malcolm, for Lucy would never have asserted herself, would never for a moment have struggled with Jane’s faintest expression of wish: and Malcolm, the missing husband, dropped from between them into nothing and nowhere, forgotten, abandoned, disclaimed, cast off.

  When James arrived, he was carrying the baby’s cradle tucked under one arm, and a bottle of champagne. He stood in the doorway and put the cradle down, and looked at Jane lying there, and said, embarrassed, incapable of the moment and the gesture he had selected, and yet looking at her nevertheless, making the effort to look at her, and not, as usual, averting his eyes as he spoke—

  ‘I brought you a present. To drink your health, if you like.’

  He did not hand it to her, but stood there holding it, and smiling at her.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘Shall I open it?’ he said, and she nodded, so he opened it while Lucy went downstairs to look for some glasses. The cork came out with a subdued pop, and the baby stirred and moaned in its sleep, and Jane felt herself start to cry, so she bent over the child to hide her tears, which were probably tears of joy, of nothing else: and when she looked up again Lucy had come back with the glasses, and James was sitting on the end of her bed, pouring out.

  When she drank, the cold dry taste of the wine frightened her, and she would not accept a second glass. She shook her head limply, and said, ‘No, you have it, you have it, I’ve had enough.’

  So James and Lucy sat there and finished the bottle. They did not talk much—they never talked much to each other, and Jane was too tired to speak, and felt herself freed by recent events from the necessity of effort—so the room was silent, except for the sound of breathing, and the sound of the gas fire, and the faint, small effervescence of the liquid in the glasses. The curtain was half open, and Jane could see that the snow was still falling beyond the glass, whitely, persistently, dimly. She shut her eyes, and rested her head, and listened to the sounds of the room, the quiet sounds, and she thought that perhaps it might have been like that to be with somebody that one loved—to be wanting nothing, to be desiring and suffering nothing, to be without apprehension, loss or need. The room softly surrounded her; she could tell that there was no dissension in it, for all dissension came always from herself, and having removed it, having removed herself, everything else could not but fall gently into its own place, as the snow fell.

  Before she fell asleep she tried to open her eyes once more, to see them, but she was too tired.

  When she woke in the morning, the baby was crying, hungry, cross, sucking its fist, having abandoned the search for its small elusive thumb: she scooped it out of bed and started to feed it, before she noticed that Lucy was stil] in the room, curled up asleep in the chair that t
he midwife had abandoned. The empty champagne bottle was on the floor at her feet, her mouth was slightly open, and she was breathing very heavily. Jane looked away, not liking to look at her in so vulnerable a state, and not quite liking the fact that she looked, unusually, more than her age—twenty-eight, she was, as she herself was twenty-eight, and she had a sudden panic sensation of having observed herself asleep there. There was only two weeks in age between them: their mothers, who were sisters, had had a conspiratorial pregnancy, having coolly resolved to share the troubles and the discussions and the inactivity and the doctor’s waiting room. Jane, thinking of this, reflected, and not for the first time, on the amazing apparent control with which her mother’s generation had planned their lives and their families—family planning had been a meaningful phrase to them, whereas to her and most of her generation it seemed a fallacious concept quite out of date, a bad joke, like those turban hats that women had worn in war time to conceal their uncherished hair. She herself had never understood contraception, and had disliked what she had understood of it: she had acquired, after her son’s birth, a Dutch cap, but she disliked it so much that when he found it lying in a drawer one day she let him take it out and sail it in the bath for a few nights, until he was bored with it, and it perished. She looked down now at the small child in her arms, evidence of that perishing, and amazement filled her—amazement that she was a woman, that knowing so little she was a woman—that babies were so easy to bear and so cruel to contemplate—and the small child sucked and sucked, pulling at her nipple, and seeming to pull at her guts. She remembered the phrase ‘after-pains’, and realized that she was suffering from them. They weren’t bad; like most things, they weren’t as bad as they might have been. The child sucked with such facility, just as she herself had given it birth with such facility: it seemed strange to her that so much natural instinctive force could flow through such a medium as herself, a woman so frail and flawed. She wondered why her own frailty did not interrupt the process, did not keep the milk from the child, or the child from the light.