be. Often, when it rained, Rebecca and I had sat on our doorstep in the evenings with the stone roof overhead, but increasingly I stood under it alone, shutting myself out of the house in order to consider the possibility that my life with Rebecca was unsustainable, a thought that was like a small, panicked pet I wasn’t allowed to keep indoors, and hence was forced to exercise outside, where it ran crazily up and down the front steps in the dark, occasionally venturing a few feet out into the street.
One morning, when I left to go to work, I closed the front door and was on the second or third step down to the pavement when the balcony dropped off the front of the building just behind me. The impact was so great that it was virtually soundless. It made a sort of void or vacancy in time. A tremor rose from the earth beneath my feet and passed through me like a momentary torrent of electricity, exiting with a burning sensation from the top of my head. I didn’t turn around, or run: it was too late to move. Presently I noticed that the street was utterly deserted. For some reason I found this disconcerting, that there were no witnesses to this strange event. I looked behind me and saw the giant slab lying broken on the steps. It had broken into no more than three or four pieces. It broke like a heart, I thought. After a while I climbed over the pieces and with a shaking hand rang the doorbell. I could hear Hamish crying inside. Rebecca took a long time to answer.
It was only because I happened to be at home when the surveyor came that I was the one to whom the explanation for the falling balcony was given. The surveyor was a slim, clean-smelling man of about my own age. His name was Ed Reynolds. When I saw him standing on the doorstep amidst the rubble and the broken railings I understood how dangerous my life had become. Crystal fruit bowls did not come flying through the air at Ed Reynolds. Balconies did not fall on him from above. Standing there he explained to me how a small crack in the limestone had gone for several yearsunfilled, allowing a plant to grow up through the slab. I knew that plant: it used to put out purple flowers that waved outside our bedroom window in summer. In fact I had noticed before how it seemed to be growing out of the wall. It had a thick, twisted brown stem. At the time I found it quaintly characteristic of the Alexanders that flowers should be allowed to grow out of their walls: it seemed to add to the impression I had formed of them, that they acknowledged few rules and yet went joyously unpunished. In conditions of frost, the surveyor continued, the plant had expanded and contracted. This caused the crack to become unstable. A simple programme of repairs and maintenance over time would have prevented the accident. For these reasons it was excluded from the terms of most insurance policies. When I relayed this information to Rick and Ali they acted as though some personal stupidity in my dealings with Ed Reynolds had resulted in his presenting us with this verdict. For the first time I felt a coldness, an insubstantiality in their attitude to me. They didn’t seem to understand how many times fate had loomed over Rebecca and Hamish and me in the form of the limestone slab, how nearly it had caught us. I had showed Ed Reynolds a photograph I had found of Hamish, aged two, sitting on the doorstep, under the balcony, in the sun. I had thrust it before his eyes repeatedly, as though I were possessed. I couldn’t stop looking at this photograph. I couldn’t separate myself from it. For a time it seemed almost to replace Hamish himself.
Adam Hanbury had become a surveyor. He had a practice in Doniford. Seeing Ed Reynolds had put me in mind of him, and so without much thinking of what I was doing I found his number and sat one day at the window dialling it, while I looked through the glass at the catastrophe which still lay strewn, untouched, over the front steps. A little bird alighted for an
One morning, when I left to go to work, I closed the front door and was on the second or third step down to the pavement when the balcony dropped off the front of the building just behind me. The impact was so great that it was virtually soundless. It made a sort of void or vacancy in time. A tremor rose from the earth beneath my feet and passed through me like a momentary torrent of electricity, exiting with a burning sensation from the top of my head. I didn’t turn around, or run: it was too late to move. Presently I noticed that the street was utterly deserted. For some reason I found this disconcerting, that there were no witnesses to this strange event. I looked behind me and saw the giant slab lying broken on the steps. It had broken into no more than three or four pieces. It broke like a heart, I thought. After a while I climbed over the pieces and with a shaking hand rang the doorbell. I could hear Hamish crying inside. Rebecca took a long time to answer.
It was only because I happened to be at home when the surveyor came that I was the one to whom the explanation for the falling balcony was given. The surveyor was a slim, clean-smelling man of about my own age. His name was Ed Reynolds. When I saw him standing on the doorstep amidst the rubble and the broken railings I understood how dangerous my life had become. Crystal fruit bowls did not come flying through the air at Ed Reynolds. Balconies did not fall on him from above. Standing there he explained to me how a small crack in the limestone had gone for several yearsunfilled, allowing a plant to grow up through the slab. I knew that plant: it used to put out purple flowers that waved outside our bedroom window in summer. In fact I had noticed before how it seemed to be growing out of the wall. It had a thick, twisted brown stem. At the time I found it quaintly characteristic of the Alexanders that flowers should be allowed to grow out of their walls: it seemed to add to the impression I had formed of them, that they acknowledged few rules and yet went joyously unpunished. In conditions of frost, the surveyor continued, the plant had expanded and contracted. This caused the crack to become unstable. A simple programme of repairs and maintenance over time would have prevented the accident. For these reasons it was excluded from the terms of most insurance policies. When I relayed this information to Rick and Ali they acted as though some personal stupidity in my dealings with Ed Reynolds had resulted in his presenting us with this verdict. For the first time I felt a coldness, an insubstantiality in their attitude to me. They didn’t seem to understand how many times fate had loomed over Rebecca and Hamish and me in the form of the limestone slab, how nearly it had caught us. I had showed Ed Reynolds a photograph I had found of Hamish, aged two, sitting on the doorstep, under the balcony, in the sun. I had thrust it before his eyes repeatedly, as though I were possessed. I couldn’t stop looking at this photograph. I couldn’t separate myself from it. For a time it seemed almost to replace Hamish himself.
Adam Hanbury had become a surveyor. He had a practice in Doniford. Seeing Ed Reynolds had put me in mind of him, and so without much thinking of what I was doing I found his number and sat one day at the window dialling it, while I looked through the glass at the catastrophe which still lay strewn, untouched, over the front steps. A little bird alighted for an
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