‘Loo! Loo! Loo!’
He was flat on his face, he was looking at legs and the light from a doorway on the filth of the gutter.
Then there was a spreading silence. The legs moved away from him, little by little. He heard a voice in the silence, a woman’s voice.
‘Holy Mother of God. Look at his back!’
The feet moved more quickly. They went out of his eyes, and he heard them going, running, rushing, stumbling over the cobbles. The lighted door slammed shut.
He lay there for a while, shivering. At last he began to move, crawling towards the wall. I am naked, he thought, that was to be expected. He pulled himself up and began to edge towards the faint lights from the cressets in the High Street. At times he fell away from the wall, staggered into the gutter and out again; though once he fell in it. Here I show what I am, he thought, and climbed out again. At the place where the alley met the High Street, he fell and did not move. He was hardly conscious of the cloth placed over his back, and of the hem of Rachel’s skirt and the sandalled feet of Father Adam. Hands began to care for him gently. A voice began to babble like the gutter in winter. Then he was swamped by clouds of darkness.
Chapter Twelve
He was facing the stone rib of the vaulting again. It had changed in no way but he himself had entered some new kind of life. This was a sense of suspension above the body, which every now and then would be engulfed by an irresistible wave of faintness which brought a mindless fear with it. After the faintness, there would be a gap. Then he would find himself suspended in consciousness again, and wondering vaguely what had happened. He would speak wordlessly to himself above the body.
Where was I then?
And always, the answer would come, wordlessly.
Nowhere.
There was a bitter stuff to drink, poppy perhaps, which he thought sometimes, was what allowed him to drift and swim so above the prone body. There were faces that interposed themselves too, one which gave him the drink, and another, Father Adam, now fully in focus. He could not tell how wide the gaps were, nor how long the periods of suspension and drifting. Only he would note, without surprise between one glance and the next, how the sunlight or shadow had measured off hours on the ribs of the vaulting. Sometimes he would be more immediately aware of the thing, the mechanism that lay beneath him. It was concerned above all with the business of stretching and collapsing the ribs, a task which it did ceaselessly but feebly and the heart at the centre fluttered like a bird caught in a window. But he was fetched down into his body only when the ministers laid hands on him for some necessary office. Once he heard a conversation clearly and understood only the last few words.
‘It is a wasting, a consumption of the back and spine —’
Then after a pause: ‘No. None whatever. His heart, you see.’
But most of the curious, fluctuating time, he was suspended above his body or in the gap. He had thoughts that lasted a century or a second. He saw images to which now he was wholly indifferent. He said almost nothing, because speech was so complex, even when you only had access to one mouth. His access was limited by a desire to avoid the trap of the body down there — limited also by the gap that so often ambushed him. Nevertheless, every few centuries among the mists and the matter-of-fact examinations of the vaulting, he would make the long effort. He would pull himself down into the stone mouth, would break up the stone, and eject a puff of shaped air.
‘Fallen?’
The focused face of Father Adam would come close, leaning down, smiling.
‘Not yet.’
He would examine the blue eyes, the mouth stretched ever so slightly by the smile into the pucker of the cheeks. Then when the face had slid sideways out of sight, he would find himself examining whatever had come to take its place — a stone rib, with perhaps a fly landing upside down and occupying itself with some small business.
At one point he began to think about his tomb and managed to send for the dumb man. Through an interminable succession of time and gap he got him to understand what was wanted; himself without ornament, lying stripped in death of clothing and flesh, a prone skeleton lapped in skin, head fallen back, mouth open. He plucked at the bedclothes, and at last hands understood. They stripped him for the young man, who drew with a face of fascinated disgust while Jocelin drifted away again. After a century or two the young man had gone, and a fly cleaned its legs on the vaulting.
Once there were candles, voices murmuring, and the touch of oil. He floated above the unction which had relevance to nothing but the leaden body; and a gap came. But when he woke and floated again there was a new thing. He could hear wind and rain, and the window drumming. Then he remembered the cellarage and the rats in it and the panic of that flung him right back into the gasping body.
‘Mason. Roger Mason.’
Faces came close to his, enquiring with raised eyebrows, and speaking long, incomprehensible sentences.
‘Roger Mason!’
All at once the gasping caught up with the words and the thoughts in his head. His chest declined its work so that he drove it in fear. He felt hands lift him up so that he was sitting.
Then he was lying on his back again, looking up at a stone rib where the glossy sunlight was shifting line by line.
Where was I then?
But a face came between him and the sunlight, leaning down, shaken, redrimmed as to the eyes, the black hair fallen in snakes that brushed over him, the mouth flashing open and shut. There was a wildness about her attack that made him indifferent to it, since he could not follow it successively.
‘In the outhouse between the onions and a sack of wheat —’
How will she ever be rid of so much life? She is a devouring mouth, a good woman.
‘— on his hands and knees. The rope was still round his neck and a broken rafter on the other end of it. He always said the most difficult thing in his business was to estimate a breaking strain, though God knows —’
God, thought Jocelin, as his mind saw things small, God? If I could go back, I would take God as lying between people and to be found there. But now witchcraft hides Him.
‘Sits by the fire, his head on one side, blind and dumb — I have to do everything for him, everything! Do you understand? Like a baby!’
He noted without interest how the hands of Father Adam pulled her sideways from him, heard her high sobbing in the room, then diminishing down the stairs. He saw in some mode, the face of Roger Mason beyond communication, the children on the grass, the body of Pangall crouched in its vigil. He saw the clumsy platforms of the tower, the ungainly and splintered octagons. He felt the weight.
No more, he thought, no more. I can’t even feel for them. Or for myself.
Someone was muttering in the room and there was the clink of metal. The face of Father Adam came close again. He watched the lips and they let out a sound, but he was too weary to pay attention to it.
The blue eyes blinked once. Wrinkles appeared in the skin outside them. The lips opened and shut again. This time his poppied ears caught the word before it vanished into the vaulting.
‘Jocelin.’
Then he knew that the great revolution of his clock was accomplished; and dying seemed easy as eating or drinking or easing, one thing to be taken after another.
Only the present knowledge was a kind of freedom so that his thoughts went trotting away like a horse unharnessed from the cart. He looked up experimentally to see if at this late hour the witchcraft had left him; and there was a tangle of hair, blazing among the stars; and the great club of his spire lifted towards it. That’s all, he thought, that’s the explanation if I had time: and he made a word for Father Adam.
‘Berenice.’
The smile became puzzled and anxious. Then it cleared.
‘Saint?’
Out of all the complex of weaknesses and defences, the labouring body contracted the chest, trying to laugh; and he stilled it in sudden fear, balancing himself in life like a juggler; and he had a su
dden liking for Father Adam and desired to give him something; so when he was properly balanced, he made another word for him.
‘Saint.’
And dying is more natural than living, because what could be more unnatural than that panicstricken thing leaping and falling like a last flame beneath the ribs?
‘Jocelin.’
That is my name, he thought, and he looked at Father Adam with mild interest; since Father Adam was dying too; and tomorrow or some such time a voice would say ‘Adam’ in the same tone as to a child. No matter how high he rises, robe after robe, tomorrow or the day after they will tap three times on the smooth parchment of that forehead with the silver hammer. Then his mind trotted away again and he saw what an extraordinary creature Father Adam was, covered in parchment from head to foot, parchment stretched or tucked in, with curious hairs on top and a mad structure of bones to keep it apart. Immediately, as in a dream that came between him and the face, he saw all people naked, creatures of light brown parchment, which bound in their pipes or struts. He saw them pace or prance in sheets of woven stuff, with the skins of dead animals under their feet and he began to struggle and gasp to leave this vision behind him in words that never reached the air.
How proud their hope of hell is. There is no innocent work. God knows where God may be.
Arms wrestled him down, and there was a gap. But he came back in a panic, to see it through.
‘Now Jocelin, we are going to help you into heaven.’
Heaven, thought Jocelin busily in the panic, you who bind me, you who won’t die until tomorrow, what do you know about heaven? Heaven and hell and purgatory are small and bright as a jewel in someone’s pocket only to be taken out and worn on feast days. This is a grey, successive day for dying on. And what is heaven to me unless I go in holding him by one hand and her by the other?
Assent?
I traded a stone hammer for four people.
Suddenly he found he had to bite the air, bite and hold on. Hands were heaving him upright so that his chest got air for a moment without his trying. The panic went out of his chest but beat about him.
There were two eyes looking at him through the panic. They were the only steady things, and before them, he was like a building about to fall. They looked in, an eye for an eye, one eye for each eye. He bit more air and clung to the eyes with his own as the only steady things in living.
The two eyes slid together.
It was the window, bright and open. Something divided it. Round the division was the blue of the sky. The division was still and silent, but rushing upward to some point at the sky’s end, and with a silent cry. It was slim as a girl, translucent. It had grown from some seed of rosecoloured substance that glittered like a waterfall, an upward waterfall. The substance was one thing, that broke all the way to infinity in cascades of exultation that nothing could trammel.
The panic beat and swept in, struck the window into patches that danced before either eye; but not the panic nor the blindness could diminish the terror of it and the astonishment.
‘Now — I know nothing at all.’
But arms were laying down a whirl of terror and astonishment, down, down. Wild flashes of thought split the darkness. Our very stones cry out.
‘I believe, Jocelin, I believe!’
What is terror and joy, how should they be mixed, why are they the same, the flashing, the flying through the panicshot darkness like a bluebird over water?
‘A gesture of assent —’
In the tide, flying like a bluebird, struggling, shouting, screaming to leave behind the words of magic and incomprehension —
It’s like the appletree!
*
Father Adam, leaning down, could hear nothing. But he saw a tremor of the lips that might be interpreted as a cry of: God! God! God! So of the charity to which he had access, he laid the Host on the dead man’s tongue.
About the Author
William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911 and was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and at Brasenose College, Oxford. Before he became a schoolmaster he was an actor, a lecturer, a small-boat sailor and a musician. A now rare volume, Poems, appeared in 1934. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and saw action against battleships, submarines and aircraft. He was present at the sinking of the Bismarck. He finished the war as a Lieutenant in command of a rocket ship, which was off the French coast for the D-Day invasion, and later at the island of Walcheren. After the war he returned to Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury and was there when his first novel, Lord of the Flies, was published in 1954. He gave up teaching in 1961. Lord of the Flies was filmed by Peter Brook in 1963. Golding listed his hobbies as music, chess, sailing, archaeology and classical Greek (which he taught himself). Many of these subjects appear in his essay collections The Hot Gates and A Moving Target. He won the Booker Prize for his novel Rites of Passage in 1980, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988. He died at his home in the summer of 1993. The Double Tongue, a novel left in draft at his death, was published in June 1995.
Books by
Sir William Golding
1911–1993
Nobel Prize for Literature
Fiction
LORD OF THE FLIES
THE INHERITORS
PINCHER MARTIN
FREE FALL
THE SPIRE
THE SCORPION GOD
DARKNESS VISIBLE
THE PAPER MEN
RITES OF PASSAGE
CLOSE QUARTERS
FIRE DOWN BELOW
THE DOUBLE TONGUE
TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH
(a revised text of Rites of Passage, Close Quarters and Fire Down Below in one volume)
Essays
THE HOT GATES
A MOVING TARGET
Travel
AN EGYPTIAN JOURNAL
Play
THE BRASS BUTTERFLY
LORD OF THE FLIES
adapted for the stage by
Nigel Williams
Copyright
First published in 1964
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition published in 2012
All rights reserved
© William Golding, 1964
The right of William Golding to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–26747–7
William Golding, The Spire
(Series: # )
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