Free Fall (20 page)

“Better take this down in your books because we are going to try and disprove it. Ready? Here you are then. ‘Matter can neither be destroyed nor created’.”

Obediently we wrote. Nick began to talk. He was imploring us to find a case where matter was either destroyed or created.

“In a shell.”

“A candle burning——”

“Eating.”

“When a chicken comes out——”

Eagerly we gave him examples. Sagely he nodded and disposed of each.

Yet not one of us thought of Miss Pringle next door and her lessons. We might have shouted together that a burning bush that burned and was not consumed away surely violated the scheme of Nick’s rational universe as he unfolded it to us. But no one said a word about her. We crossed from one universe into another when we came out of her door and went into his. We held both universes in our heads effortlessly because by the nature of the human being, neither of them was real. Both systems were coherent—was it some deep instinct that told us the universe does not come so readily to heel and
kept us from inhabiting either? For all Miss Pringle’s vivid descriptions that world existed over there, not here.

Neither was this world of Nick’s a real thing. It was not enveloping; each small experimental result was not multiplied out to fill the universe. If he did the multiplication we watched and marvelled. Nick would paint a picture of the stars in their courses as a consequence of his demonstrations of captive gravity. Then not science but poetry filled him and us. His deductions stood on tiptoe reaching out to the great arithmetical and stellar dance; but neither he nor we looked at the sky. A generation was to pass before I myself saw the difference between the imaginary concept and the spread picture overhead. Nick thought he spoke of real things.

A candle burnt under a bell-jar. Water rose and filled the space once occupied by oxygen. The candle went out but not before it had lighted up a universe of such orderliness and sanity that one must perforce cry; the solution to all problems is here! If there were problems, nevertheless they must contain their own solution. It would not be a rational universe in which problems were insoluble.

What men believe is a function of what they are; and what they are is in part what has happened to them. And yet here and there in all that riot of compulsion comes the clear taste of potatoes, element so rare the isotope of uranium is abundant by comparison. Surely Nick was familiar with that taste for he was a selfless man. He was born of poor parents and had nearly killed himself working his way up. Knowledge, therefore, was most precious to him. He had no money for apparatus and made things work from tin and bent glass and vulcanite. His
mirror
galvanometer was a wonder of delicacy; and once he produced
the aurora borealis for us, captive like a rare butterfly, in a length of glass tubing. He did not care to make technicians of us, he wanted us to understand the world around us. There was no place for spirit in his cosmos and consequently the cosmos played a huge practical joke on him. It gave Nick a love of people, a selflessness, a kindness and justice that made him a homeland for all people; and at the same time it allowed him to preach the gospel of a most drearily rationalistic universe that the children hardly noticed at all. At the beginning of break he could not get away to the staffroom for the crowd of children round his dirty gown who were questioning, watching, or just illogically and irrationally wanting to be near. He would answer patiently, would say when he did not know the answer, would receive the creature before him openly as of equal stature and importance. Nick had come out of a slum as I had, but by his own brains and will. He was not lifted; he lifted himself and his short body was the legacy of semi-starvation and years of overwork. He was a socialist and had been one in the heat of the day; but his socialism was like his natural philosophy; logical and kind and of astonishing beauty. He saw a new earth, not one in which he himself would have more money and do less work for it, but one in which we country children would have schools as good as Eton. He wanted the whole bounty of the earth for us and for all people. Sometimes now that the British Empire has been dissolved and I meet natives of one hot land or another who are triumphant in their claims to have freed themselves, I think of Nick; Nick who would have freed them sixty years ago to his own cost. Yet he had no possessions himself; he neither drank nor smoked nor had a car. He had nothing that I
saw except an old blue serge suit and a black gown gnawed into a net by acid. He denied the spirit behind creation; for what is nearest the eye is hardest to see.

These two people, Nick Shales and Rowena Pringle, loom larger behind me as I get older. Mine is the responsibility but they are part reasons for my shape, they had and have a finger in my pie. I cannot understand myself without understanding them. Because I have pondered them both so deeply I know now things about them which I did not know then. I always knew that Miss Pringle hated Nick Shales; and now, because I am so much like her, I know why. She hated him because he found it easy to be good. The so-respectable school marm with her clean fingers was eaten up with secret desires and passions. No matter how she built up the dam on this and that, the unruly and bilious flood of her nature burst forth. May she not have tortured herself in despair and self-loathing, every time she tortured me? And how she must have writhed, to see Nick, the rationalist, followed by children as if he were a saint! No one liked her, except a succession of dim and sycophantic girls, a line of acolytes not worth having. Perhaps she half understood how flimsy a virtue her accidental virginity was, perhaps sometimes in a grey light before the first bird she saw herself as in a mirror and knew she was powerless to alter. But to Nick the rationalist, the atheist, all things were possible.

I needed Nick that lesson, not to teach but be there. I think he noticed my stained face and this led him into his usual error of exercising charity for the wrong reason. He fancied, I believe, that the contrast between my position at the rectory and my known, my almost brandished bastardy had been flung at my head. So he took pains to keep
me back after the class had gone, to help him put the apparatus away.

But I said nothing. I was incapable of explaining what had happened. So Nick talked instead. He cleaned the board again with his filthy gown and put his notes away in the desk.

“Have you got any more drawings to show me, young Mountjoy?”

“Sir.”

“What I like about your drawings is that they look like the things they’re meant to be.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Faces. Now how do you manage to draw faces? I can see that a landscape might need rearranging; but faces have to look like somebody. Wouldn’t a photograph be better?”

“I s’pose it would, sir.”

“Well then!”

“Haven’t got a camera, sir.”

“No. Of course not.”

We had finished putting away the apparatus. Nick turned and sat perched on his high stool and I stood near him, one hand on the demonstration bench. He said nothing at all; but there was in his silence a placid acceptance of me and all my ways. He took off his spectacles, polished them, put them on and looked up out of the window. There were rich bulges of cloud unfolding above the horizon and he began to tell me about them. They were thunderheads, anvil-shaped spaces in which power was building up. This time he went from the particular to the general for my benefit. The weather from the Arctic down became a gorgeous dance in slow, tremendous time. When
he finished, we were side by side, contemplating this together and as equals.

“You wouldn’t think people could be cruel. You wouldn’t think they would have the time, not in a world like this. Wars, persecutions, exploitations—I mean, Sammy, there’s so much to look at, for me to examine and for you to paint—put it this way. If you took all this away from a, a millionaire, he’d give all his money for no more than a glimpse of the sky or the sea——”

I was laughing and nodding back at him; because it
was
so obvious to us both and so astonishingly not obvious to all the others.

“—I remember when I first learnt that a planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times—it seemed to me that armies would stop fighting—I mean—I must have been about your age—that they would see how ridiculous a waste of time——”

“Did they, sir? Did they really?”

“Did who?”

“The armies.”

Slowly the difference between the adult and the child re-established itself.

“No. They didn’t. I’m afraid not. If you do that sort of thing you become that sort of animal. The universe is wonderfully exact, Sammy. You can’t have your penny and your bun. Conservation of energy holds good mentally as well as physically.”

“But, sir——”

“What?”

Understanding came to me. His law spread. I saw it holding good at all times and in all places. That cool allaying rippled outward. The burning bush resisted and I understood
instantly how we lived a contradiction. This was a moment of such importance to me that I must examine it completely. For an instant out of time, the two worlds existed side by side. The one I inhabited by nature, the world of miracle drew me strongly. To give up the burning bush, the water from the rock, the spittle on the eyes was to give up a portion of myself, a dark and inward and fruitful portion. Yet looking at me from the bush was the fat and freckled face of Miss Pringle. The other world, the cool and reasonable was home to the friendly face of Nick Shales. I do not believe that rational choice stood any chance of exercise. I believe that my child’s mind was made up for me as a choice between good and wicked fairies. Miss Pringle vitiated her teaching. She failed to convince, not by what she said but by what she was. Nick persuaded me to his natural scientific universe by what he was, not by what he said. I hung for an instant between two pictures of the universe; then the ripple passed over the burning bush and I ran towards my friend. In that moment a door closed behind me. I slammed it shut on Moses and Jehovah. I was not to knock on that door again, until in a Nazi prison camp I lay huddled against it half crazed with terror and despair.

Here?

Not here.

Yet the future was not wholly in her hands or his, for now there was wine spilt in our blood to emerge in pimples and fantasies of the wakeful bed and in sniggers, in sexual sniggers, the lore of the small town and the village. There were catchwords only mentioned to call forth the dirty laugh. There was a sense of inferiority because Self did not know why the guffaw, would like to be on the ball, know the inside story, the dirt, would like the social security of belonging to the tribe, to those who know. And, of course, here Nick’s universe of cause and effect, his soulless universe fitted like a glove. I was more intelligent than Nick. I saw that if man is the highest, is his own creator, then good and evil is decided by majority vote. Conduct is not good or bad, but discovered or got away with. Self, then, emerging from his preoccupation with Moses and trying to find out why for two days cherries are so ludicrous and somehow to do with the silent country girl Selina. Self listening to Johnny and getting in on a bit of current dirt for the first time. Self hearing Mr. Carew use the crash word in history and laughing before anyone else and getting fifty lines but well, well worth it. Self right in, knowing all the dirt, inventing dirt, a leading muck raker in the warm sniggery world, home.

Self looking in the mirror.

I saw myself as a very ugly creature. The face that looked at mine was always solemn and shadowed. The black hair, the wiry black eyebrows were not luxuriant but
coarse. The features set themselves sternly as I strove to draw them and find out what I really was. The ears stood out, the forehead and the jaw receded. I felt myself to be anthropoid and tough, in appearance, no lady’s man but masculine.

But I would have liked to be a girl. This was in the fantasy world where their skirts and hair, their soft faces and the neatness of their bellies had always been. But now when the wine spilt, with added intensity came the scent of talcum, the difference of a breast, glitter of brooches in Woolworth’s, round, silk knees, the black treacle of their celluloid mouths, their mouths like wounds. I wanted to be one of them and thought this unique as self-abuse and very shameful. But I was mistaken all round. Masturbation is universal. Our sex is always uncertain. I wanted not so much to become as to enjoy. Then when the mechanism of sex became clear to me I knew only too well what I wanted. In the pages of my rough book the girls’ faces began to outnumber the others. The currents were running. Ambivalent and green we had sat for three years in the same room, neutral as anemones on the wet rock. The tide was stirring us. There was scent in the air and on the lips of the celluloid beauties. We looked across the room, searching among the live creatures for a trace of those lineaments that had launched a thousand films.

How if Miss Pringle had been as good and as attractive as Nick? Would prayer and meditation have cooled the fever? Would the beauty of holiness have triumphed over the cheap scent and the flickering, invented faces? Should I have drawn the nine orders of the angels?

Philip could not draw at all. He sat by me in Art and it was an understood thing that I would do his work
quickly before I did my own. Miss Curtis, the spinster who taught us, was a sensible woman. She let sleeping dogs lie though she knew well enough what was going on. The morning I think of was no more outwardly noteworthy than she—yet she first encouraged me and I liked her well enough. We sat round in a hollow square; and sometimes the platform in the middle would have a cone or ball on it, sometimes a chair and a violin: sometimes a live model.

The girl who sat there that morning was known to me slightly. She sat usually across the room and to the back. She was a mouse. I proposed in my mind not to draw her, but to concentrate on little stick men besieging a castle instead. But Philip nudged me. I glanced at the girl and scrawled her in with about two lines and a couple of patches of offhand shading. Then I returned to my scaling ladders.

Miss Curtis moved round behind the desks. I began to make tokens of working at this model. Perhaps there was something unusual in my decision not to draw her. I may have—who knows? Seen with other eyes, or remembered the future. I may have been trying to avoid the life laid down for me.

“Philip Arnold! Why, Philip!”

Miss Curtis was behind and between us. We turned our shoulders together.

“That’s very good indeed!”

She leaned forward, she seized the paper and walked quickly to the board with it. All the boys and girls leaned back and looked up. The model coughed and moved, Miss Curtis went over the drawing in detail. Philip sunned himself and I chewed up a pencil in my rage. She came back to the desk.

“Don’t do any more work on it, Arnold. Just sign it.”

Philip smirked and signed. Miss Curtis looked at me with creased cheeks and a glittering eye.

“If you could draw like that, Mountjoy, I would say that one day you might be an artist.”

She went away, smiling a little and I examined my orphaned portrait. I was astonished. In carelessness and luck I had put the girl on paper in a way that my laborious portraitures could never come at. The line leapt, it was joyous, free, authoritative. It achieved little miracles of implication so that the viewer’s eye created her small hands though my pencil had not touched them. That free line had raced past and created her face, had thinned and broken where no pencil could go, but only the imagination. Astonished and proud I looked back at the model.

There was a certain flamboyance in the pictures on the wall behind her, dancers by Degas, some rococo Italian
architecture
and a palladian bridge; and she took her place by appearance and cooled them. The egg and the sperm had decreed a girl and that difference was there in the bone. I could see that one of these fingers held against the light would be transparent; and possibly the palm also. I could assess the fragility of the skeleton, the hollows either side of the brow—like the reverse of a petal. I saw—let me be exact where exactitude is impossible—I saw in her face what I can neither describe or draw. Say she was beautiful to me. Say that her face summed up and expressed innocence without fatuity, bland femininity without the ache of sex. Say that as she sat there, hands in her lap, face lit from a high window she was contained and harmless, docile and sweet. Then know that nothing has been said to touch or describe the model set before us.
Only I now declare across a generation to the ghost of Nick Shales and to the senile shape of Rowena Pringle, I saw there in her face and around the openness of her brow, a metaphorical light that none the less seemed to me to be an objective phenomenon, a real thing. Instant by instant she became an astonishment, a question, a mountain standing in my path. I could tell myself before that first lesson ended that she was nothing but a girl with fair hair and a rather sweet expression; but even then I knew better.

How big is a feeling? Where does an ache start and end? We live from hand to mouth, presented with a situation before which and in which we execute our dance. I have said that our decisions are not logical but emotional. We have reason and are irrational. It is easy now to be wise about her. If I saw that light of heaven, why then it should have been a counterpoise to Nick’s rationalism. But my model was flesh and blood. She was Beatrice Ifor; and besides that unearthly expression, that holy light, she had knees sometimes silk and young buds that lifted her blouse when she breathed. She was one of those rare girls who never have an awkward age, who are always neat, always a little smoother than their sisters. They become a blinding contradiction. Their untouched, bland faces are angels of the annunciation; and yet there is a tight-rope poise in their walk which is an invitation to what Father Watts-Watt would have called Bad Thoughts. She was demure but unconsciously so. She was like other girls in that she was a girl, but she was unique for me in being what I can only describe as a lot more so. She was untouched and unapproachable. She came from a home of respectable tradespeople and now that the barrier down the middle of the class was breaking, now that the currents 
were sorting us into types and groups and temporary pairs she remained remote and untroubled. No one could expect giggles or badinage from her. Her great eyes, light grey and lucent under the long lashes, looked at nothing, at a nothing hanging in the air. Now with passion I repeated her profile on the page but she eluded me. I never recaptured the inspired ease which came from luck and not caring. Yet my masterpiece lay there and Philip Arnold had written his name across the bottom right-hand corner. Miss Curtis extracted some amusement from the situation. When that stolen portrait, or if you like, when that freely given portrait was put up in pride of place at the prize-day exhibition she went out of her way to praise it. After I had resented Miss Curtis long enough she merely remarked to me that there was plenty more where that came from. But to my terror and continuing frustration I could not catch the being of Beatrice on paper no matter how I studied her. She was flattered by the portrait and gave Philip the beginnings of a smile that stabbed me to the heart. For now I was lost. She could not be avoided or walked round. The compulsion was on me. Somehow I must draw her again successfully; and this required careful study. But the careful study only blinded me. She was of fearful importance and yet when the door closed behind her I could not remember her face. I could not catch this particular signature of being which made her unique; I could not remember it. I could only suffer. Then when she appeared again my reeling heart recognized a beauty that is young as the beginning of the world. In my fantasy world the dreams were generous enough. I wanted to rescue her from something violent. She was lost in a forest and I found her. We slept in a hollow tree, she in my arms, close, her face on
my shoulder. And there was the light round her brow of paradise.

Let us see if the outcome could have been different. To whom could I have gone and spoken of this? Nick would have dismissed that light. Miss Pringle would have had me expelled as a danger to her dim girls. As for Father Watts-Watt, by now everything about him was lack-lustre, including his knees. Because the whole situation had to remain inexplicable, suffering was at once inevitable and pointless. For Beatrice saw no light in my face. The tides of my passion and reverence beat on her averted cheek and she never looked round. I could not say I love you, or do you know there is a light in your face? In a desperate effort to make some contact I took to facetiousness. I heard myself being silly and rude and all the time I could have kissed her feet.

So she noticed me at last only to ignore me with point and I fell into the pit of hell. Calf-love is no worse or stronger than adult love; but no weaker. It is always hopeless since we come to it under the lee of economics. How old was Juliet?

Beatrice lived some miles out in the country and came to school by bus. That part of the landscape took on significance and any fact about it was relevant to me. With flayed off skin and a new knowledge of life I walked many miles spiralling in towards her village and flinching off again. What mysteries there were behind the white fence of her garden I could not tell but felt them. There was, in and around me, an emotional life strange as dinosaurs. I was jealous of her not only because someone else might take her. I was jealous of her because she was a girl. I was jealous of her very existence. Most terribly and exactly I
felt that to kill her would only increase her power. She would go through a gate before me and know what I did not know. The tides of life became dark and stormy. The grey, failing man in the rectory thought of nothing but his book on Pelagianism. When I went near him now, no goose walked over his grave because he stood on the edge of it. What had we to do with each other? And those other adults that surrounded me, remote and august as images from Easter Island—how could I speak of my hell and let them in? Even today I can hardly speak of it to myself.

In this forcing bed I tried to come to decisions about the world. There was this terror that walked by day and night, referred to so casually by a four-letter Saxon word. There was the well in me from which occasionally came the need to express and the certainty of doing so. I could draw a face now in one swift line—any face but the one I could not remember—and the likeness leapt from the
paper
. I even tried indirect communication with Beatrice. I made a Christmas card for her. I painted it with desperate care, elaborating, tearing up and simplifying with such passionate intentness that I flashed through a whole history of art without knowing it. Those purples and reds became flying shapes in which the blue and white thing, once a star but now battered, could scarcely survive. The black and jagged slash down the centre of my picture had been her profile, once drawn with literal, dead accuracy, but now acknowledged to be a symbol only. Behind that savage crack in daily life the torrential colours fought, an indescribable confusion. What did I think to achieve? Did I think that two continents could communicate on such a level? Did I not understand that none of my tide had come to trouble her quiet pool? Better if I had written
two words on paper—help me! Then after all that I sent the card to her anonymously—strange, involved, proud contradiction! and of course nothing happened.

Sex, you say; and now we have said sex where are we? The beauty of Miss Pringle’s cosmos was vitiated because she was a bitch. Nick’s stunted universe was irradiated by his love of people. Sex thrust me strongly to choose and know. Yet I did not choose a materialistic belief, I chose Nick. For this reason truth seems unattainable. I know myself to be irrational because a rationalist belief dawned in me and I had no basis for it in logic or calm thought. People are the walls of our room, not philosophies.

My deductions from Nick’s illogically adopted system were logical. There is no spirit, no absolute. Therefore right and wrong are a parliamentary decision like no betting slips or drinks after half-past ten. But why should Samuel Mountjoy, sitting by his well, go with a majority decision? Why should not Sammy’s good be what Sammy decides? Nick had a saintly cobbler as his father and never knew that his own moral life was conditioned by it. There are no morals that can be deduced from natural science, there are only immorals. The supply of nineteenth-century optimism and goodness had run out before it reached me. I transformed Nick’s innocent,
paper
world. Mine was an amoral, a savage place in which man was trapped without hope, to enjoy what he could while it was going. But since I record all this not so much to excuse myself as to understand myself I must add the complications which makes nonsense again. At the moment I was deciding that right and wrong were nominal and relative, I felt, I saw the beauty of holiness and tasted evil in my mouth like the taste of vomit.