Free Fall

  But of course there were other occasions. I was not wise enough to know that a sexual sharing was no way of bringing us together. So instead of abandoning the game then and there—and of course my own opinion of my masculinity was at stake—I persevered. We began to accept that she should submit to caresses and as all old wives know these things come right in the end. I had my warm, inscrutable Beatrice, triumphed in a sort of sorrow and pity; and Beatrice cried and did not want to go away but, of course, she had to, that was the penalty of jumping the gun. She took her secret back to the training college and endured the faces that might guess, then came back, went to chapel, did there whatever she did, came to what arrangement—and went to bed with me again. I was full of love and gratitude and delight, but I never seemed to get near Beatrice, never shared anything with her. She remained the victim on the rack, even a rack of some enjoyment. But there was nothing in this that we could share; for poor Beatrice was impotent. She never really knew what we were doing, never knew what it was about.

  “Don’t you feel anything?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  Her silences were if anything longer. She wasn’t the boss any more. Instead of my searching her face for a clue, wondering what was inside, I found myself being watched. After our one-sided lovemaking, I would wander up and down the room, thinking to myself that if this was all, there was nothing that would give us a unity and substantial identity. She would lie still on the narrow bed and her eyes would follow me, back and forward as long as I liked to walk. She was not unhappy. If, in the time that followed, I think of and visualize Beatrice below me, it is not entirely a sexual image. She was adjusting herself to a conceived place in life. She was beginning to look up, to belong, to depend, to cling, to be an inferior in fact, however the marriage service may gloss it. Instinctively she was becoming what she believed to be a wedded wife. Her contribution, after the heroic sacrifice, was negative. Death of a maidenhead pays for all.

  I loved her and was grateful. When you are young, you cannot believe that a human relationship is as pointless as it seems. You always think that tomorrow there will come the revelation. But in fact we had had our revelation of each other. There was nothing else to know.

  Sometimes when I was alone I would think of the future. What sort of life would it be? I should paint, of course, and Beatrice would always be around, making tea. She would have children, probably, be a very good mother. I began to think desperately, not of abandoning her but of some way to force myself towards that wonderful person who must be hidden somewhere in her body. Such grace of body could surely not be its own temple, must enshrine something——

  “I’m going to paint you, paint your body. Naked. Like this, all slack and given up.”

  “No. You mustn’t.”

  “I shall. Lie there. Let me pull the curtain back——”

  “No! Sammy!”

  “They can’t see in across the road. Now lie still.”

  “Please!”

  “Look, Beatrice—didn’t you admit that the Rokeby Venus is beautiful?”

  She turned her face away. She was being injected for T.A.B. again.

  “I shan’t paint your face at all. I just want your body. No. Don’t rearrange it. Just lie still.”

  Beatrice lay still and I began to draw.

  When the drawing was finished I made love to her again. Or rather, I repeated what my pencil had done, finished what my pencil had begun. The lovemaking accepted that she was unable to take part. The lovemaking was becoming an exploitation. I see now that she could not enjoy or welcome our commerce because she was brought up not to. All the little books and the occasional talks, all the surface stuff were powerless against the dead weight of her half-baked sectarianism. All her upbringing ensured that she should be impotent.

  It is difficult for a man to know anything about a woman. But how, when he is passionate, can he reach her through her obedient stillness? Does she feel nothing but a kind of innocent lubricity? Can she share nothing?

  “What are you thinking of——?”

  Her body was a perpetual delight. Moving or still she was finished in colour and texture. And yet she was not there.

  “What are you thinking about——?”

  Nevertheless from the moment that she let me take her virginity the change began between us. Her clear absence of being leaned in towards me, lay against me, clung. As though from conception she had waited for this, now she bowed against me. She watched me with doggie eyes, she put the lead in my hand.

  “What shall we talk about?”

  I became angry. I tried to force some response. But we could not even row and fight face to face. Always there was to be a difference of levels. As soon as she detected the touch of hardness in my voice she would grab me and hold me tight, she would hide her face against me.

  I would try to explain.

  “I’m trying to find out about you. After all if we’re going to spend our lives together—where are you? What are you? What is it like to be you?”

  Her arms would shake—those arms that bent in at the elbows, were so delicate they seemed for receiving only—her breasts and her face would push against me, be hidden.

  Impatient and angry. Continue the catechism.

  “Aren’t you human, then? Aren’t you a person at all?”

  And with shudders of her wrists and shaking of the long, fair hair she would whisper against me:

  “Maybe.”

  It comes into my memory now that at this time we never met face to face. Either she is a white body, the head hidden in her hair; or she holds me round the waist and looks up at me with big, faithful eyes, her chin against my stomach. She liked to look up. She had found her tower and was clinging to it. She had become my ivy.

  There were days of content—there must have been. I must remember that “last time” was never love but only “infatuation”. Therefore we went on for nearly two years until the ripples and then waves of war washed round us. We corresponded when we could not meet. I was full of wit and protestations; she full of simplicity and small change. She would buy a dress. Did I think green suited her? The lecturer in hygiene was very nice. She hoped we should be able to afford a little house some time. When we were married she would have to think of making her own clothes. On some of her letters, in the top left-hand corner, was a little cross-sign that for another few weeks we were safe from having children, though by then the risk was small enough. Her work was going badly and she was getting into hot water over it, but she didn’t seem to care any more, except about hygiene! The lecturer in hygiene was very nice. Insensibly I drifted rather than went deliberately into the last cruel effort to reach her.

  I must be careful. How much was conscious cruelty on my part? How much was her fault? She had never in her life made one movement towards me until I roared over her like a torrent. She was utterly passive in life. Then was that long history of my agony over her, my hell—real as anything in life could be real—was that self-created? Was it my doing? Did I put the remembered light in her face? Did I? I saw her on the platform in the art room with the bridge behind her, and she did not see me. Yet the descent we were now to embark upon and at my hands was one I was powerless to control or stop. What had been love on my part, passionate and reverent, what was to be a triumphant sharing, a fusion, the penetration of a secret, raising of my life to the enigmatic and holy level of hers became a desperately shoddy and cruel attempt to force a response from her somehow. Step by step we descended the path of sexual exploitation until the projected sharing had become an infliction.

  Yet even here, in the sewers of my memory, nothing is sure. How did that good girl that uninscribed tablet receive these violations? What did she think of them if she thought of them at all? They made her as far as I could see, more devoted, more dog-like, more secure. They are memories of my own failure, my own degradation, not hers. Those fantasies of adolescence now brought to half realization on my side were sad, dreary and angry. They reinforced
the reality of physical life and they destroyed the possibility of anything else; and they made physical life not only three times real but contemptible. And under everything else, deep, was an anguish of helplessness and loss.

  These advances in lubricity then, bound her arms more closely round my waist. I could not paint her face; but her body I painted. I painted her as a body and they are good and terrible paintings, dreadful in their story of fury and submission. They made me my first real money—except for the mayor’s portrait, of course—and one of them is hung publicly so that I can go back and see that time, my room—our room—and try to understand, without apology or pity. There hangs the finished perfection of her sweet, cleft flesh. The light from the window strikes gold from her hair and scatters it over her breasts, her belly and her thighs. It was after the last and particularly degrading step of her exploitation; and in my self-contempt I added the electric light-shades of Guernica to catch the terror, but there was no terror to catch. There ought to have been but there was not. The electric light that ought to sear like a public prostitution seems an irrelevance. There is gold, rather, scattered from the window. There was dog faith and big eyes and submission. I look at the picture and I remember what the hidden face looked like; how after my act and my self-contempt she lay, looking out of the window as though she had been blessed.

  6

  Those were the great days of the Communist Party in England. There was a certain generosity in being a communist; a sense of martyrdom and a sense of purpose. I began to hide from Beatrice in the uproar of streets and halls. There was a meeting at the Town Hall in which a local councillor was going to give his reasons for joining the party. The decision had come down from above. He was a business man, so by remaining “closed” he could never hope to be in a better position, that is, one of governmental trust. There was no reason why his faith should not be capitalized there and then. That was in autumn, a chill autumn of blackout and phoney war. “Why I am joining the Communist Party” said the bills and hoardings, and the hall was crowded. He never got a chance to speak really; there were storms of cheering and counter-cheering, chairs overturned, local swirls in the thick blue cigarette smoke, cheers, shouts, boos. Someone went down at the back of the hall and there was a scuffle while paper arched up and glass smashed. I was looking at the councillor and his silent film mouthing so I saw when a bottle hit him over the right eye and he went down behind the green baize table. So I made to help him as someone turned out the lights and a police whistle blew. We huddled his limp body off the platform, through a side door and into his car, I and his daughter, while the police stood guard because after all he was a councillor. There was still much noise and darkness, and out of that uproar I can remember the first words her unseen mouth said to me.

  “Did you see the bastard who threw that bloody bottle?”

  I had never met Taffy before, but as my eyes got used to the blackout I could hardly believe what I saw. She was dark and vivid. She had the kind of face that always looks made-up, even in the bath—such black eyebrows, such a big, red mouth. She was the prettiest girl I ever saw, neat in profile, with soft cheeks and two dimples that were in stunning contrast with her tenor voice and scarifying language. She was dabbing her father’s head with a scrap of a handkerchief and muttering over and over again:

  “I could kill that bloody sod!”

  We took him to hospital and waited. Then there came a moment when we both looked at each other, were face to face; and a dozen things were obvious at once to both of us. We took him home and I waited again, below in the hall while he was put to bed—waited though not a word had been said. She came down the stairs and stood and there was nothing to do but look, nothing needing to be said. She took a scarf—her father’s, I think—and we went out together. We went to a blacked-out pub and sat hand in hand, both stunned by this overwhelming sense of recognition. We kissed then and there in public without shame or bravado because although people stood within a yard of us, we were alone. We were both deeply committed elsewhere and we both recognized without a moment’s doubt that we should never let each other go. I cannot remember how much we said of this or how much we felt. That very night she came to my spartan room and we made love, wildly and mutually. After all, we were communists and our private life was our own concern. The world was exploding. None of us would live long. Then she went home and left me to think of her next coming; and to think of Beatrice. What was I to do about her? What could I do? Give Taffy up? Presumably that would be the standard reply of the moralist. But was I now to live the rest of my life with Beatrice, knowing all the time that I was in love with Taffy?

  In the end I did nothing. I merely ensured that they should not meet. But poor Beatrice bored me. The old magic, the familiar nerve was deadened or burned out. I no longer desired to understand her, no longer believed that she had some secret. I was sorry for her and exasperated by her. I tried to hide this; hoping that time would produce some solution but I was just not callous enough to get away with it. Beatrice noticed. She knew that I was colder and more distant. Her grip on me tightened, her face, her breasts bored in at my stomach. Perhaps if I had had the courage then to look her down in the eye I should have seen all the terror and fear that did not get into my pictures of her; but I never met her eye for I was ashamed to. Beatrice clung to me in tears and fear saying nothing.

  She was the image of a betrayed woman, of outraged and helpless innocence. At this distance in time I find myself cynical enough or detached enough to question the tilt of her chin. Was she being operatic again? I cannot think that she had the emotional resources. She was sincere. She was helpless and terrified. The grip of her arms had a pitiful strength as though she could hold physically what was escaping her emotionally. Now I became acquainted with tears, now if I had been brutal enough I might have cried quits for the distraught bed of my school days; now I saw the very water of sorrow hanging honey-thick in eyelashes or dashed down a cheek like an exclamation mark at the beginning of a Spanish sentence. In between her visits to my room and when the requirements of her course made it impossible for her to see me, she took a leaf out of my old book. She began to write me letters. They were elaborate in their queries. What was the matter? What had she done? What could she do? Didn’t I love her any more?

  One day I was walking in a country lane and came out on the high road. I could see then what was making the noise. A car had caught a cat and taken away about five of its nine lives, and the poor, horrible thing was dragging away and screaming and demanding to be killed; and I ran away, my fingers in my ears until I had put the writhing thing out of mind and could play supposing again, or when the ship comes home. For, after all, in this bounded universe, I said, where nothing is certain but my own existence, what has to be cared for is the quiet and the pleasure of this sultan. Therefore the exposed nerve of the monocular, homunculus, the rack is all; is the point of my hunting Beatrice. In the curious and half-forgotten image of Beatrice on the platform before the Palladian bridge I saw nothing now but the power of the mind’s self-deception. Certainly there was no light in her face. There were blemishes under the skin if one looked for them, and beneath the corner of each eye a little triangle of darkness that told of long nights. Her only power now was that of the accuser, the skeleton in the cupboard; and in this bounded universe we can easily put paid to that.

  So Taffy and I went our way regardless. She was a lady by my low standards. She was fastidious except when she remembered that we were the spearhead of the proletariat. She also had a little money—not enough to support a husband or a lover but enough to help. So I left my room and address—gave no notice and paid no rent; and where in the bomb-broken basement, the square of blasted concrete, the crazy leaning brickwork that flowers are bursting should I post the money—but sneaked back to take the letter out of the box after a day or two; the letter that Beatrice wrote to me when she could not find out where I was. It was full of upbraiding, weak, gentle, frightened upbraiding. I saw Taffy a
nd we were estranged for a while. She knew something and she sulked. We had one of those interminable, reasonable conversations about the relationship between men and women. One would not be jealous, one would understand enjoyment taken with a third person. Nothing was permanent, nothing was more than relative. Sex was a private business. Sex was a clinical matter and contraception had removed the need for orthodox family life. And then suddenly we were clinging to each other as though we were the only stable thing in an earthquake. I was muttering into the back of her neck.

  “Marry me, Taffy, for Pete’s sake marry me.”

  And Taffy was sniffing under my chin, cursing hoarsely, grabbing and rubbing her face against my jersey.

  “You cock an eye at another woman and I’ll have your guts for a girdle.”

  I left my temporary bed at the Y.M.C.A. and we shifted into a studio on Taffy’s money. We got married at a registry office as an afterthought and the ceremony meant nothing to us except that we were free now to go back to the studio. I got a letter from Beatrice by way of Nick Shales who was still teaching at school then; and I did not know whether to open it or not. Nick wrote too, a wounded letter. Beatrice had been to every common acquaintance, looking for me. I saw her in my mind’s eye standing on doorsteps, crimsoning with the shame of it all yet forced to go on.

  “Do you know where Sammy Mountjoy is? I seem to have mislaid his address——”

  I opened the letter and the first lines were a plea for forgiveness; but I read no further because the sight of the first page stabbed me with a knife. In the top left-hand corner she had drawn a little cross. We were out of danger.

  I have one more memory of her, memory of a dream so vivid that it has taken a place in my history. I am receding along a suburban road that is infinitely long and the houses on either side are mean, unpainted, but drearily respectable. Beatrice is running after me, crying out with a shrill bird cry. It is evening in that horrible country and the shadows are closing round her. And the water is rising from the basements and gutters so that her feet trip and splash: but I have avoided the water somehow. It rises round her, always rises.