Free The Fall by Simon Mawer Page A

James.”
    “Oh?” She hadn’t recognized me. She smiled vaguely as though trying to assemble an appearance of hospitality and wondering
     whether the effort was worthwhile.
    “I’m Robert.”
    “Robert?” And the expression changed, shifted, lightened into a true smile, a slow and remarkable metamorphosis. “Robert,
     of course. Diana’s son. How” — a breath’s pause as she looked at me with something like recognition — “remarkable. My goodness,
     how you’ve grown!”
    “I thought —”
    “You thought you might find Jamie? What a shame. He was here last Easter. I told him to try and contact you, but you know
     what he’s like. Come in anyway. Let me get you something. Why didn’t you telephone?”
    I noticed things as I followed her inside: paintings, objects, particular pieces of furniture, the kinds of things that you
     collect to make a place yours. The jawbone of something, perhaps a shark, hanging there on the wall: it had the shape of an
     hourglass, rimmed with ivory daggers. Since I had looked around it on that previous visit, Gilead House had become something
     that our house never really was: a home.
    “Mary, can you get us some coffee or tea, which would you prefer?” Mrs. Matthewson’s question slid easily from the maid to
     me as I stood there looking up at the curious object. “Oh, that? Yes, that’s my trophy. I fished it off Nantucket. Yes, I
     caught it myself while the men jeered and told me I could never do it and all that sort of crap.” The word
crap.
My mother would have been appalled. “But I did, and there it is.” She laughed, and I had a brief and fugitive glimpse of
     gold. I followed her up the stairs past the stained-glass window of a medieval knight and his lady and into what she called
     the morning room, which was actually a sitting room looking out over the top garden and the woods at the back of the house.
     There was an oil painting on the wall, a portrait of a girl with a blank face and eyes like black pebbles.
    “Is that you?” I asked.
    She laughed delightedly. No, it was something she had picked up at a flea market. The
phase flea market
struck me. It may have been the first time I’d heard it. I imagined a kind of rummage sale, like they had in the local church:
     stalls selling old clothes that hummed with insect life. “I think it may be an original. Do you know Laurencin?”
    I didn’t. Together we examined the painting, the heavy layers of paint, the signature scrawled along the bottom:
Marie Laurencin.
And as we looked, Mrs. Matthewson’s scent came to me, an insidious blend of things I couldn’t put names to: musk and orange
     and sandalwood and jasmine, perhaps those, something far more subtle and convincing than any painting by Marie Laurencin,
     whether original or copy. “The trouble is,” she said (and the scent was on her breath as well), “I don’t dare have an expert
     look at it. In case it isn’t.”
    She left the painting and settled into an armchair, and watched me with interest, curiosity almost, as if she was trying to
     work something out and would come up with the answer in a moment. Her feet were bare, the toes pinched from wearing pointed
     shoes. Her feet were the only thing that betrayed her age. “So, Robert, what a pleasant surprise this is. And how you’ve grown!
     I would say quite a man, but that would be patronizing, wouldn’t it? So I won’t.” She smiled. Even white teeth.
Capped,
I could hear my mother saying. “And how’s Diana? I really should get over and see her, but it’s finding the time. And I’m
     not here very often, with the house in London.”
    It wasn’t finding the time, I knew that. This woman was a different being altogether from my mother, almost a different gender.
     I couldn’t imagine them doing anything together, couldn’t imagine them having exchanged clothes or confidences or boyfriends,
     or any of the usual currency of girlhood. But whatever might have happened in the