Free Fall

  I remember the matron, too, because I had a little more to do with her than most of the patients. She was tall and thin. She must have been handsome, in a severe sort of way. Her uniform was dark blue with wings on her head of blinding white. She had stiff, glossy cuffs, small at the wrist but expanding a little up the forearm. When she came into the ward the world stopped turning. We gave the nurses a terrible time; but not matron. She was surrounded by awe. Perhaps the deference of the nurses had something to do with that but as far as I was concerned awe came from her as naturally as comfort from a mother.

  She did a job for me.

  One of the nurses told me that Ma had been taken poorly which was why she did not come to see me. I accepted this without thought for I was entirely taken up in the endless world of the ward. Somehow my pedestal was as full as the others and the visitors did not seem to belong too particularly to other children. I shared the visitors and everything. Things were so different, so ample, so ordered. One day matron came and sat on my bed instead of standing by it or in front of it. She told me that Ma had died—gone to heaven and was very happy. And then she produced the thing I had been wanting without ever believing it could belong to me; a stamp album and some envelopes of assorted stamps. There were transparent windows in each envelope so that you could see the coloured squares inside. There was a packet of transparent hinges, one side dull, the other shiny with gum. She made me open one of the packets and showed me how to put the hinges on and search through the album for the right country. She must have stayed there a long time because I remember putting in a lot of stamps with great concentration. I am unable to report on sorrow. I cannot even see a colour. All I remember is one vast, vertical sniff because it spilt the bitter liquid in a little glass that matron was holding and she had to send a nurse for another one. So at last I dozed off over my album and when I woke up the ward was the same as it had always been only with another fact added to life—and it seems to me now—already accepted out of a limitless well of acceptance.

  I was not entirely without visitors either. The tall parson came to see me and stood, looking down at me helplessly. He brought me a cake from his housekeeper and wandered off, gazing at the ceiling and finding the way out of the door with his shambling feet. The verger came to see me too. He sat anxiously by the bed and tried to talk; but it was so long since he had done anything to children but chase them out of the church if they were noisy that he didn’t know how. He was a crumpled little man in daylight, wearing the black clothes of his profession and carrying a black bowler hat. This worried him in the ward and he would put it on the bed and then take it off and try the pedestal and then take the hat back again as if certain that sooner or later he would find the exact spot that was right and proper for a black bowler hat in a hospital. He was used to ritual, perhaps, to an exact science of symbols. He had a high, bald forehead, no eyebrows, and a moustache very like our lodger’s in everything but colour. You could see the last wisps of his hair smeared black across the top of his baldness. I was shy of him because he was shy of me and worried. He talked to me as if I were another grown-up so his complicated story eluded me. I could not make out what he meant and only picked up odd bits here and there; and most of these were misunderstandings. There had been trouble with a society, he said, and I inferred a secret society at once. They had had people standing up in the back of the church and shouting during the service. That was bad enough; but the society had gone even further. People—he wouldn’t like to name them either, seeing he had no proof and couldn’t swear to a single one in a court of law—people had sneaked in during the dark evenings and spoiled ornaments, torn down curtains all because they thought the church was too high. I remembered the sheaf of rectangles soaring dizzily above the altar and thought I understood. The verger said the rector had always been high but in the last few years he had seemed to be getting higher and higher. Then when Father Anselm came, the curate he was, of course, he was just as high as the rector was or even a bit higher—in fact, said the verger, he wouldn’t be a bit surprised if one of these days——

  But there he broke off, leaving me to wonder mildly how high you could get and what happened when you reached the top. If the curate was as high as the rector then he, too, had his head in shadows when he stood in the middle of the carpet. I ceased to listen when the verger went on. His talk of aumbries, chasubles, images, apparels and thurifers went right over my head. My mind’s eye was occupied with a dim church full of elongated clergymen.

  Then I realized that he was talking of the time he had heard Philip and me in the church. He never turned the lights on until the last possible minute; if Lady Crosby was waiting for confession, he never turned the lights on until she left. Father Anselm had told him not to. But most evenings he wouldn’t anyway. It was the only way he could hope to catch the people from the society. When he heard us he made sure. He got his torch and crept out from the vestry and along the choir stalls. He saw it was only a kid and it made him angry.

  I was interested. He was kind to tell me exactly how he had done it, creeping along the choir stalls and then tiptoeing out. He had done a nice bit of work and he had caught me nicely.

  He took his bowler hat off the bed and put it on the pedestal. He began to talk urgently. Of course the ear must have been giving trouble but he hadn’t known, you see, and they’d had such a time with the society . . .

  He paused. He was red. Sallow red. He held out his right hand.

  “If I’d known what was going to happen I’d sooner have cut that hand off. I’m sorry, lad, sorrier than I can say.”

  Something to forgive is a purer joy than geometry. I’ve found that out since, as a bit of the natural history of living. It is a positive act of healing, a burst of light. It is real and precise as aesthetic enjoyment, not weak or soft but crystalline and strong. It is the sign and seal of adult stature, like that man who reached out both arms and gathered the spears into his own body. But innocence does not recognize an injury and that is why the terrible sayings are true. An injury to the innocent cannot be forgiven because the innocent cannot forgive what they do not understand as an injury. This, too, I understand as a bit of natural history. I guess the nature of our universe is such that the strong and crystalline adult action heals a wound and takes away a scar not out of today but out of the future. The wound that might have gone on bleeding and suppurating becomes healthy flesh; the act is as if it had never been. But how can the innocent understand that?

  What was the verger talking to me about then? Was he sorry about the whole story, starting when I and Philip had concocted our plan? But he did not know that story or so I hoped. Was he sorry that little boys are devils, that their brash and violent world would knock down the high walls of authority if it could? As I saw the truth the adult world had hit me good and proper for a deed that I knew consciously was daring and wrong. Hazily and in pictures more than in thought I saw my punishment to have been nicely graded. I had spat though rather drily and inadequately on the high altar. But I had meant to pee on it. My mind flinched away from the possibilities of what might have happened if I had not been three times before we reached the church. Men were hanged but boys got nothing worse than the birch. I saw with a sane and appreciative eye the exact parallel between the deed and the result. Why should I think of forgiveness? There was nothing to forgive.

  The verger’s hand was still held out. I examined it and him and waited.

  At last he sighed, took his bowler off the pedestal and stood up. He cleared his throat.

  “Well——”

  He turned his hat round and round in his hands, sucked his moustache, blinked. Then he was away, walking quickly and silently on his professional creepers down the centre of the ward and through the double door.

  Wubb. Wuff.

  When did I discover that the tall parson was now my guardian? I cannot dissect his motives because I never understood him. Was it perhaps the opening of the Bible that decided my fate? Was he touched by me
more than I can think? Had the verger any hand in it? Was I an expiation, not of the one blow, but of numberless fossilized uneases and inadequacies, old sins and omissions that had hardened into impenetrable black stone? Or was I only a forbidden fruit, made accessible but still not eaten? Whatever it was, the result did not seem to do him much good, bring him much peace. Other people understood him no more than I did. They always laughed at him behind his back—might have laughed in his face if he had had less care to be solitary and hidden. Even his name was ridiculous. He was Father Watts-Watt. His choirboys used to think it very funny to ask each other: “Do you know what’s what?” I wish now I could look back down his story as I can look down my own. He could never have been tough as I was tough. Things must have gone right through him.

  So he came fairly often and hung about, trying to talk, trying to find out about me. He would stand, knit his jutting grey eyebrows and swoop a look up under them at the ceiling. All his movements were like that, writhings as though the only source of movement was a sudden pain. There was so much of him, such lengths that you could see the motion travel outwards, bend his body sideways, stretch an arm out and end in the involuntary gesture of a clenched fist. Did I like school? Yes, I liked school. Good—bend, stretch, clench. It was like a nonsense story; talking with him was like a nightmare ride on a giraffe. Yes, bashfully, I liked drawing. Yes, I could swim a bit. Yes, I should like to go to the grammar school, ultimately, whenever that was. Yes, yes, yes, agreement but still no communication. Did I go to church? No, I didn’t—at least—Wouldn’t I like to go? Yes, I would like to go.

  Well—balancing movement, bend stretch clench​—​good-bye, my dear child, for the time being.

  And so the world of the ward must have come to an end.

  I have searched like all men for a coherent picture of life and the world, but I cannot write the last word on that ward without giving it my adult testimony. The walls were held up by sheer, careful human compassion. I was on the receiving end and I know. When I make my black pictures, when I inspect chaos, I must remember that such places are as real as Belsen. They, too, exist, they are part of this enigma, this living. They are brick walls like any others, people like any others. But remembered, they shine.

  That, then, is all the infant Samuel I can remember. He trailed no clouds of glory. He was spirit and beauty-proof. He was hard as nails and gave better than he got. Yet I should deceive myself if I refused to recognize something special about the period up to mastoid, up to the end of the ward-world. Let me think in pictures again. If I imagine heaven metaphorically dazzled into colours, the pure white light spread out in a cascade richer than a peacock’s tail then I see that one of the colours lay over me. I was innocent of guilt, unconscious of innocence; happy, therefore, and unconscious of happiness. Perhaps the full sheaf of colours is never to be experienced by the human being since if he experiences these colours they must lie in the past or on someone else. Perhaps consciousness and the guilt which is unhappiness go together; and heaven is truly the Buddhist Nirvana.

  That must be the end of a section. There is no root of infection to be discovered in those pictures. The smell of today, the grey faces that look over my shoulder have nothing to do with the infant Samuel. I acquit him. He is some other person in some other country to whom I have this objective and ghostly access. Why does his violence and wickedness stop there, islanded in pictures? Why should his lies and sensualities, his cruelty and selfishness have been forgiven him? For forgiven him they are. The scar is gone. The smell either inevitable or chosen came later. I am not he. I am a man who goes at will to that show of shadows, sits in judgment as over a strange being. I look for the point where this monstrous world of my present consciousness began and I acquit him in the ward.

  Here?

  Not here.

  4

  And even by the time I was on the bike by the traffic light, I was no longer free. There was a bridge over a skein of railway lines among the smoky huddles of South London and the traffic lights were a new thing there. They sorted the traffic which went north and south beside the lines from the dribble that tried to pick a way round London, east and west. They were so new a thing in those days that an art student like myself could not see them without thinking of ink and wash—ink line for the sudden punchball shape, wash for the smokes and glows and the spilt suds of autumn in the sky.

  No. I was not entirely free. Almost but not quite. For this part of London was touched by Beatrice. She saw this grime-smothered and embossed bridge, the way buses heaved over its arch must be familiar. One of these streets must be hers, a room in one of these drab houses. I knew the name of the street, Squadron Street; knew, too, that sight of the name, on a metal plaque, or sign-posted might squeeze my heart small again, take away the strength of my knees, shorten my breath. I sat my bike on the downward slope of the bridge, waiting for a green light and the roll down round to the left; and already I had left my freedom behind me. I had allowed myself the unquiet pleasure of picturing her, taken the decisive step of moving toward. I sat, waiting, watching the red light.

  There was a large chapel that rose among the houses perhaps a quarter of a mile off in the smoke and the feelings I had thought seared out of me, stirred as if seeds had burst their cases. Make an end and these feelings die at last. But I had not made an end. Sitting there, I could feel all the beginnings of my wide and wild jealousy; jealousy that she was a girl, the most obscure jealousy of all—that she could take lovers and bear children, was smooth, gentle and sweet, that the hair flowered on her head, that she wore silk and scent and powder; jealousy that her French was so good because she had that fortnight in Paris with the others and I was forbidden to go—jealousy of the chapel-deep inexplicable fury with her respectable devotion and that guessed-at sense of communion: jealousy, final and complete of the people who might penetrate her goodwill, her mind, the secret treasures of her body, getting where I if I turned back could never hope to be—I began to scan the men on the pavement, these anonymities who were privileged to live in this land touched by the feet of Beatrice. Any one of them might be he, could be he, might be her landlady’s husband or son; landlady’s son!

  Still the traffic lights said stop. I became aware that the roads were filled with a jam of traffic—so the lights could break down then. We were held up. There was still time to turn round and go away again. A few days and the feelings would sear themselves out. But even as that possibility presented itself I knew that I should not go back; felt myself get off the bike, lift it on the pavement and wheel it under the red light.

  Courage. Your clothes are clean if cheap; your hair is cut and combed; your mug if ugly is carefully shaved and slightly scented with a manly scent as in the advertisements. You have even cleaned your shoes.

  “I didn’t ask to fall in love!”

  I found I was fifty yards on, still pushing my bike along the pavement though here the road was free. I was under a huge hoarding which was flourishing beans and red cheeks ten feet in the air. My heart was beating quickly and loud, not because I had seen her or even thought of her, but because in the walk along the pavement I had understood at last the truth of my position. I was lost. I was caught. I could not push my bike back again over the bridge; there was nothing physical to stop me and only the off-chance of seeing Beatrice to push me on. I had cried out aloud, cried out of all the feelings that were bursting their seed-cases. I was trapped again. I had trapped myself.

  For to go back is—what? Not only all that has gone before, but also this added: that I had seen her pavements and people, invented an addition in the landlady’s son, was far worse off than when I started. Going back would end somewhere—in Australia perhaps, or South Africa—but somewhere it would end in one way only. Somewhere a man would accost me casually.

  “Did you ever know a girl called Beatrice Ifor?”

  Myself, with reeling heart and straight, painful face:

  “A bit. At school——”

  “S
he’s——”

  She’s what? Become a Member of Parliament. Been canonized by the Catholic Church. Is on the hanging committee.

  “She’s married a chap——”

  A chap. She could marry the Prince of Wales. Be queen. Oh God, myself on the pavement. Queen Beatrice, her secret plumbed and known, but not by me——

  I was addressing the beans.

  “Does everyone fall in love like this? Is so much of their love a desperation? Then love is nothing but madness.”

  And I do not want to hate her. Part of me could kneel down, could say as of Ma and Evie, that if she would only be and meward, if she would be by me and for me and for nothing else, I wanted to do nothing but adore her.

  Pull yourself together. You know what you want. You decided. Now move towards that consummation step by step.