Free Fall (9 page)

“Maybe.”

And so she took herself away wonderfully into the house.

How big is a feeling? Where is the dial that registers in degrees? I found my way back across South London, trying to come up out of my mind. I said that there was no need to exaggerate; you are not an adult, I said—there will be far worse things than this. There will be times when you will say—did I ever think I was in love? All that long ago? He was in love. Romeo was. Lear died of a broken heart. But where is the means of comparison? Where in the long scale did Sammy come? For now there were rough ropes on my wrists and ankles and round my neck. They led through the streets, they lay at her feet and she could pick them up or not as she chose. It was torture to me as I rode away with the miles of rope trailing, that she did not choose. She was perhaps tied herself in another direction? But I did not believe it. At my fever heat, processes went on more than apace. I was a local and specialized psychologist. I had seen her eyes, knew them and her untroubled. What fool was it insisted that he should know where she had been when at the same time he knew how thin that thread was in the beginning? There had been no risk. Her quality was untouched and the only risk was that somewhere and somehow she might meet the inscrutable chance and be set on fire. I walked in my room, beating my hands together.

The party was a relief. Robert Alsopp was in the chair and the air was thick with smoke and importance. The others were standing or sitting or lying, full of excitement and contempt. Everything was bloody, comrades. But
passion, we know where we are going if no one else does. Sammy, you’re next. Now keep quiet, comrades, for Comrade Mountjoy.

Comrade Mountjoy made a very small report. In fact he had not worked out any report from the Y.C.L. at all. He vamped. But the smoke and the technicalities the urgency and passion were a place hollowed out. So when I came to my lame conclusion I was disciplined and directed to undertake some self-examination. I began it there and it is still going on; but I remember my first decision; namely, to write to Beatrice that very night and be honest. I remember my second decision, too, and that was that I would never bring Beatrice into this home from home because she would have first to go to bed with Comrade Alsopp. He had a wife who didn’t understand him just as though he were a bourgeois school teacher instead of a progressive one; but what with the war only a week or two off, the decay and break-up, the excitement, nobody noticed that this was not Marxism but the oldest routine in the world. Nevertheless, it provided our more personable females with a kind of graduation and, as it were, softened them up.

Comrade Wimbury was speaking. He was very tall and vague, and he was another teacher. I remember how we were ruled by Alsopp and Wimbury because they were, if I could only have seen it at the time, an act of low comedy. Alsopp had an immense bald head, a ruined face with a wet lecherous mouth scrawled across it. He was broad and most impressive at the table; but then you found he was not sitting down but standing up. He had the stumpiest legs of any man I have ever seen. He did not sit on a chair. He leaned his seat against it. Wimbury, on the other
hand, had a tiny body so that when he sat by Alsopp his narrow chin and rabbit face only just appeared over the table. But if he stood up, this doll’s body was elevated on two stilt-like legs that pushed him right up towards the ceiling. That evening, he was giving us our political lecture and he was proving with a wealth of reference and initials that there would be no war. It was all a capitalist plot to do something, I forget what. We listened and nodded wisely. We were on the inside. We knew that in a few years the world would be communist: and of course we were right. I tried to sink myself in listening; but the ropes were still there.

That night I wrote Beatrice a letter. The Christmas card had taught me that words are our only communication, so it was a long letter. I wish I could read it now. I begged her to read the letter carefully—not knowing how common this opening was in such a letter—not knowing that there were thousands of young men in London that night writing just such letters to just such altars. I explained about school, about the rumoured aphrodisiac. I went back to the first day when I had sat by Philip and tried to draw her. I explained what I had seen or thought I had seen. I told her that I was a helpless victim, that pride had prevented me from making this clear to her, but she was the sun and moon for me, that without her I should die, that I did not expect much—only that she should agree to some special relationship between us that would give me more standing than these acquaintances so casually blessed. For she might come to care for me, I said, in my bourgeois pamphlet, she might even—for I have loved you from the first day and I always shall.

Two o’clock in the morning and autumn mist, London
fog about. I sneaked out of the house for the family I lived with were supposed to report my movements to the authorities. I rode off, through the night, not daring to lose a post. First one policeman stopped me and took my name and address and then two stopped me. The third time I was tired enough to be honest and I told the statue in the blue coat that I was in love so he waved me on and wished me luck. At last I came to her door, pushed the package through and heard it fall. I was saying to myself as I nodded on the bike: at least I have been honest, been honest, I don’t know what to do.

How do they react in themselves, these soft, cloven creatures? Where is the dial that marks their degrees of feeling? I had had my sex already. The party had seen to that, Sheila, dark and dirty. We had given each other a little furtive pleasure like handing round a bag of toffees. It was also our absurd declaration of independence, a declaration made by behaving as much like Alsopp as possible. It was freedom. But these other contained, untouched girls—how do they feel and think? Or are they like Sammy in Rotten Row, a clear bubble blown about, vulnerable but unwounded? Surely she must have known! But how did the situation present itself? Granted the whole physical process appears horrible and unmentionable—for so it did, I know that—what then does love appear to be? Is it an abstract thing with as little humanity as the dancing advertisements of Piccadilly? Or does love immediately imply a white wedding, a house? She had dressed and undressed herself, tended her delicate body year in year out. Did she never think with faster pulse and breath—he is in love, he wants to do—that—to me? Perhaps now with the spread of enlightenment virginity
has lost sacred caste and girls go eager to swim. It was, after all, a social habit. She was lower middle class where the instinct or habit was to keep what you had intact. It was a class in those days of great power and stability, ignoble and ungenerous. I cannot tell what flutter if any I made in her dovecote, could not, cannot, knew and know nothing about her. But she read the letter.

This time I did not pretend to be riding by. I sat my saddle, one hand on the handle-bars one foot on the pavement. I watched them tumble out of the double doors and she came with them. The blessed damozels had been tipped off because they marched away without a giggle. I looked her in the eye and burned with the shame of my confession.

“You read my letter?”

They were not terms on which she blushed. Without a word we went to Lyons and sat in silence.

“Well?”

She did pinken a bit then, she spoke softly and gently as to an invalid.

“I don’t know what to say, Sammy.”

“I meant every word of it. You’ve”—spread hands—​“got me. I’m defeated.”

“How?”

“It’s a kind of competition.”

But I saw that her eyes were still empty of understanding.

“Forget it, Beatrice. If you can’t understand—look. Have goodwill. You see? Give me a chance to—
am
I so awful? I know I’m nothing to look at, but I do”—deep breath—“I do—you know how I feel.”

Silence.

“Well?”

“Your course. It won’t last for ever. Then you won’t come this way.”

“My course? What? Oh—that! I mean I thought if you and I—we could go walking in the country and then you could—I’m quite harmless really.”

“Your course!”

“So you guessed, did you? I’m cutting the Art School at this moment. There are some things that are more important.”

“Sammy!”

Now the untroubled pools began to fill. There was wonder and awe and a trace of speculation. Did she think to herself; it is true, he is in love, he has done a real thing for me? I am that, after all, which can be loved. I am not entirely empty. I have a stature like the others. I am human?

“You’ll come? Say you’ll come, Beatrice!”

She was commendably virtuous on every level. She would come; but I must promise—not in exchange, for that would be bargaining—must promise I would not cut the art school any more. I think she began to see herself as a centre of power, as an influence for good; but her interest in my future gave me such delight that I did not analyse it.

Not on Sunday. On Saturday. She couldn’t come on Sunday, she said, with a kind of mild surprise that anyone should expect her to. And so I met my first, indeed, my only rival. That surprised me then and surprises me now; first, that I should rage so at this invisible rival, second, that I had none physical. She was so sweet, so unique, so beautiful—or did I invent her beauty? Had all young men
been as I, the ways where she went would have been crowded. Did no other man have as I this unquenchable desire to know, to be someone else, to understand; was mine the only mixture near her of worship and jealousy and musky tumescence? Were there others, is it the common experience to be granted a favour, and at once to be a tumult of delight and gratitude for the granting and wild rage because the favour had to be asked for?

We walked on the downs in grey weather and I shook out my talent before her. I impressed myself. When I described the inner compulsion that drove me to paint I felt full of my own genius. But to Beatrice‚ of course, I was describing a disease which stood between me and a respectable, prosperous life. Or so I think; for all these are guesses. Part of the reality of my life is that I do not understand it. Moreover she did not make things easy for she hardly spoke at all. All I know is that I must have succeeded in giving her a picture of a stormy interior, an object of some awe and pity. Yet the truth was on a smaller scale altogether, the wound less
tragic
and paradoxically less easily healed.

“Well? What do you think?”

Silence; averted profile. We were coming down from the ridge, about to plunge into wet woods. We stopped where they began and I took her hand. The rags of my self-respect fell from me. Nothing venture, nothing win.

“Aren’t you sorry for me?”

She let her hand lie in mine. It was the first time in my life I had touched her. I heard the little word float away, carried by the wind.

“Maybe.”

Her head turned, her face was only a few inches from
mine. I leaned forward and gently and chastely kissed her on the lips.

We must have gone on and I must have talked yet the words are gone. All I remember is my astonishment.

Not quite all. For I remember the substance of my discovery. I was, by that mutely invited salute, admitted to the status of boy friend. The perquisites of this position were two. First, I had a claim on her time and she would not go out with any other male. Second, I was entitled to a similar strictly chaste salute on rare occasions and also on saying good night. I am nearly sure that at that moment Beatrice meant her gesture as prophylactic. Boy friends were nice boys and therefore—so her reasoning may have gone—if Sammy is a boy friend it will make him nice. It will make him normal. Dear Beatrice!

I kept my communism to myself. It would not have suited my rival. He was apparently as jealous as I, holding that they that touch pitch shall be defiled. But to tell the truth, if it had not been for Nick and his socialism I should never have bothered with politics at all. I shouted and nodded with the rest; but went along with them because at least they were going somewhere. If it had not been for Miss Pringle’s nephew who now was high up in the blackshirts I might as well have been a blackshirt myself. But there was something special about that time. Though Wimbury convinced himself and us that there would be no war, our bones knew better. The world around us was sliding on and down through an arch into a stormy welter where morals and families and private obligations had no place. There was a Norse sense of no future in the air. Perhaps that was why we could sleep around with such a deep irresponsibility; only the sleeping had to be
among the people who felt the same headlong rush. Beatrice was outside it. Workers of the world—unite!

We had a worker. The rest of our branch were teachers and a parson or two, some librarians, a chemist, assorted students like myself and our jewel—Dai Reece. Dai worked in the gas works, trimming coal or something. I believe that Dai had social aspirations and looked on our branch as gentry. He never came within a mile of showing any of the textbook reactions. Our army, in fact, was all generals. Dai did what he was told for a time obediently and did not even guess what it was all about. Then he rebelled and got disciplined. Wimbury and Alsopp and the rest were all closed communists. The only people who could do anything publicly for the party were students like myself and of course our worker, Dai. He got so much that he broke out into a tirade at a branch meeting. “You sit on your fat ass in your ’ouse all the week, Comrade and I ’ave to go out in the cold to sell the bloody
Worker
every night, man!”

So he got disciplined and I got disciplined because it was the night I had let Philip into the branch meeting without authority. I wanted to keep him with me because we could have talked about Beatrice and Johnny. Otherwise he would have gone back and vanished into central London. What astonished me most was the anxiety in Philip’s pale face. Almost, one could have fancied him in love; and it was symptomatic of my state that I should begin to wonder whether he, too, had been throwing away his career to move closer to Beatrice. But Philip watched faces and went close to Dai. When the meeting broke up he insisted that we should all three go off for a drink. He cross-examined Dai who treated him with great respect. I
began to answer for Dai who was being appallingly bourgeois and not acting like the white hope of the future at all. I became warm and moved on Philip with conviction and heart-throb. But he was elusive and worried. He treated Dai, too, with an authority I could not yet recognize. At last he dismissed him.