Free Falling by Elizabeth Jane Howard Page A

Tell him I don’t want any more letters or other people telling me what he wants.’ And she
rang off.
    All very fine, but she soon discovered that she had simply manufactured an unbearable suspense for herself.
Would
he turn up? She realized from the rest of his behaviour that he would
find it very difficult to face her. On the other hand, she suspected that his, or possibly, oh, yes,
Marietta’s
desire to get married would force him to come. Her feelings for him were
by then so grievous that she was entirely divided about what she wanted. She knew that there was no future for her with him; she felt a miserable contempt for his moral cowardice (among other
things); and she loved him more than she had ever loved anyone in her life.
    The days – once she had willed herself to get up – were not so bad: she could cram them with action. She decided to move just to get away from the place where she had lived with him,
so she had to start flat-hunting again and force herself to care where she lived. She packed up his clothes and a few other possessions to send round to his agent. There were surprisingly few of
the latter: half a dozen paperbacks, some scripts, his squash racquet, an expensive camera and an album half-full of pictures of them. Their married life in half a small book. If she packed this
last in the case, he would surely throw it away. It was not, she told herself, that she wanted the album; she simply didn’t want it to be destroyed. Why not? Given the situation, why on earth
not?
    She had been kneeling on the floor because she had pushed all these things into the bottom drawer of the chest. Now she sat, with her back against the end of the bed, to go through the album for
the last time. Then she would either pack it up with everything else for him, or destroy it herself.
    The pictures were pretty evenly divided between ones of them separately, with a few taken of both of them by a friend or passer-by. There were four to a page, and he had written below each one:
‘Avignon’, ‘The ferry to Le Havre’, ‘Kensington Gardens’, ‘Siena’ and so on. She stared at each picture of him, trying to see past his holiday
happiness, his astonishing good looks – so much more endearing because he seemed hardly aware of them, his apparent glowing affection for her . . . but he was an actor, she reminded herself:
he may never have been more than sexually enthralled – if even that. He may just have been fascinated by
her
infatuation. She may have been no more than an adoring audience of one. The
trouble about betrayal was partly the terrible difficulty of knowing when it had begun. It was like liars who destroyed the currency of any words: once you knew that they had lied about anything,
you had no way of knowing that there had ever been any truth, or if there had, where it had ended. She realized drearily that she was crying again, crying and hating him. What was the point of
keeping the pathetic little book, and why should she give him the privilege of destroying it? No doubt, as soon as he got back his camera, he would start a new album with Marietta. She thought for
a moment of destroying the camera (it had been her first birthday present to him) but the idea quickly disappeared: she had no heart for spite or destruction. She wrapped the camera in bubble-wrap
and put it in the case. The album went into the drawer where she kept her underclothes, buried under a pile of nightdresses – just for the present, she had told herself, until I move, until
I’ve made up my mind . . .
    He
did
turn up in the end. With almost no warning – rang rather late the night before and asked if he could come at six o’clock the following evening.
    Nights had been pretty bad ever since Anna had told her about him – even with sleeping pills she would wake suddenly at three or four in the morning, become instantly and entirely awake,
craving him, body and mind. She would lie, staring into the dark above where