Free Fall Read online

  The bathroom door rattled and shook. Father Watts-Watt spoke softly outside.

  “Sam. Sam.”

  I said nothing at all, before the idol, in that defenceless place.

  “Sam! Why have you bolted the door?”

  Before I could answer I heard him walking away along the corridor.

  “Mrs. Pascoe!”

  She said something and for a moment or two they muttered.

  “But the child might have a fit!”

  I could not hear her answer but Father Watts-Watt cried out jerkily.

  “He must never bolt the bathroom door—never!”

  I squatted there in the hot water and shivered with cold while the argument, if such it was, faded away downstairs. A door shut somewhere. After that bath when I had dressed and crept downstairs, it was an astonishment to find Mrs. Pascoe sitting so quietly in the kitchen and mending his socks. I had my supper with her and she shooed me off to bed. I had two lights for myself. One hung from a bulb in the middle of the ceiling and one was hidden in a little pink shade on a table by the bed. But Mrs. Pascoe saw me into bed and then, just when she was leaving, she took the bulb out of the bedside lamp.

  “You won’t want that one, Sam. Little boys should go to bed to sleep.”

  She hovered for a moment and paused by the door.

  “Good night, Sam.”

  She turned out the other light and shut the door.

  This was my first meeting with the generalized and irrational fear which attacks some children. They cannot localize it at first; and when at last they succeed, it becomes more unbearable still. I went down in that bed, hunched up and shivering, taking up a foetal shape first that only unfolded a little because I had to breathe. In Rotten Row I had never seemed to be so alone—there was always the brass knob of the pub’s back door; and, of course, in the ward we were legion we little devils—but here, in this wholly not-understood milieu, among these strange, powerful people—and at that the church clock struck with a sound that seemed to make the rectory shake—here I was utterly and helplessly alone for the first time in darkness and a whirl of ignorance. Fear was spasms, any of which might have made me faint clean away if I had known of that refuge; and when, gasping for air, the disarranged clothes allowed me a glimpse of the glimmering window, the church tower looked in like an awful head. But there must have been in me still some of the prince whom Philip used, for I determined then and there that I would have a light at any cost. So I got out of bed into a white flame of danger that burnt and gave no light. I put a chair under the single bulb in the middle of the room because I planned to transfer the bulb to the lamp by my bed and put it back in the morning. But if you are undefended in bed, you are helpless out of it and utterly the sport of whatever dark thing waits for you when you stand on a chair in the middle of the room. I stood on that chair in the middle of the room with my back twitching. I was reaching up, I was holding the bulb when both my hands burst into cherry red and the lightning flashed at me from between them. I dropped from the chair and bounded into bed with a dactylic rush dumtydy umtydy and huddled there sitting knees up and bedclothes drawn to my ears.

  Father Watts-Watt stood in the open door, his hand on the switch. The light shone at me from his knees and his eyes and the swinging bulb moved all the shadows of the room in little circles. For a time we looked at each other through this movement. Then he seemed to pull his eyes away from me and look for something in the air over my bed.

  “Did you call out, Sam?”

  I shook my head without saying anything. He moved away from the door, watching me now, trailing his right hand behind him on the switch and then letting it go consciously, like a swimmer who takes his feet off the sand and knows now he is out of depth. He struck out into the room where I was. He went first to the chair and examined my clothes, rubbing them between his fingers; and then he looked down past me.

  “You must not play with the light, Sam. If you touch the bulb I shall have to take it away.”

  Still I said nothing. He came to the bed and very slowly sat himself down sideways near the foot. He could sit anywhere there without touching me. I did not stretch down so far. He began to tap with his fingers on the counterpane. He watched his fingers carefully as though what they did was very difficult and very important. He tapped slowly. He stopped tapping. His fingers had so occupied me that I was startled when I looked up to see that he was watching me sideways and that his mouth was open. When I looked up, he looked down and began to tap again, quickly.

  He coughed and spoke.

  “Did you say your prayers tonight?”

  Before I could answer him he had hastened on. He talked fast about how necessary prayer was before sleeping as a protection from wicked thoughts which all people had no matter how good they were, no matter how hard they tried and so one must pray—pray in the morning and at midday and at night so that one could put away the thoughts and sleep quietly.

  Did I know how to pray? No? Then he would teach me—but not tonight. Tonight he would pray for us both. There was no need for me to get out of bed. He prayed there, writhing his bony hands together, moving them and his head up and down so that the black patches of his eye-hollows changed shape. He prayed long, it seemed to me, sometimes in broken sentences of English and sometimes in another language. Then he stopped and put his hands down on either side of him so that they rested on the ribbed pattern of the counterpane. His two black patches, still moving a little as the hanging bulb settled deeper into the spiral, regarded me opaquely. Each was topped with a tangle of white and black hairs, as though youth and extreme age contended in that body without hope of compromise; and the lowish forehead shone and the bridge of the sharp nose. Then as I watched, the bedclothes still drawn up to my mouth, I saw the whole lower part of his face shorten and broaden, move upward. Lighted skin appeared under each patch. Father Watts-Watt was smiling at me, moving the set flesh of his face, rearranging the muscles of the cheek, showing folds and creases and bumps and teeth. I could hear him breathing, fast and shallow—and once he reared up with a curious jerk of the neck just as on that first evening, a shudder from feet to head, a goose walking over his grave. At last he moved six inches nearer on the counterpane. I could see his eyes now in the patches. They were peering at me closely.

  “I suppose your mother used to kiss you good night, Sam?”

  Dumbly I shook my head. Then for a long time there was silence again and no motion but the tiny dying circles of the shadows on the floor, no sound but breathing.

  Suddenly he jerked off the bed. He strode to the window and then to the door. He turned with his hand on the switch and he seemed to me to be twice the height of a man.

  “Don’t let me catch you signalling again, Sam, or I shall take away this light, too.”

  He switched off the light and banged the door behind him. I dived into the bedclothes again, shielding myself from the church tower that looked in through the window with its black, concealing patches. Now there was not only the threat of the darkness but a complete mystery added to it.

  Yet here, if I look for the moment of change I cannot find it; I was still the child from Rotten Row and if I had no freedom it was taken away physically not mentally. For Father Watts-Watt never repeated his advances, if that is what they were. Instead, he wrapped me in an occasional mystery of signals to the unnamed foes who surrounded him. He had a developing persecution mania; and presently the world saw him less and less. He watched me from far off to see if I would communicate with these enemies; or perhaps he wrapped me into his fantasies because that was a way of concealing his true motives from himself. On some involved level he pretended to be mad in order to evade the responsibility for his own frightening desires and compulsions and therefore in a sense he was not mad at all—yet is a man who pretends to be mad completely sane? This, for Father Watts-Watt and Samuel Mountjoy is another of those infinite regressions, an insoluble relativity. Thus when Father Watts-Watt stopped me on the gravel path outside
the rectory side door, neither he nor I could have analysed his motives now or then.

  “If anyone appears at your window, Sam, in the middle of the night and tries to make you believe things about me, you are to come to my room at once.”

  “Sir.”

  And then it was such a long, writhing look across the garden, round and up the wall of the church, back above my head, his hands together—Father Watts-Watt moving with vast improbability like the caterpillar in Alice, then hands clasped up by his left cheek and looking past my own:

  “I could tell you such things! They will go to any expense, Sam, any length——”

  This was an example, I thought, of the elongating clergymen mentioned by the verger, here was one in fact before me on the daylight gravel now writhing sideways, winding up, flinging his arms wide with a gasp and smile:

  “Back to work, eh, Sam? Back to my study——”

  He moved away and then stopped, looking back in the door.

  “You won’t forget, Sam? Anything unusual—anything in the middle of the night——”

  He went away and left me unfrightened. The curious intuition of childhood sensed his lies and did not mind them. He added nothing to the terror of the dark, the terror generalized and mindless that had to be endured nightlong and night after night. Once or twice more, I remember, he covered up that first passionate movement towards me by hinting at mysteries so that now I can piece them together.

  His delusion or pretence, whichever it was, was basically that people were trying to take away his reputation. They were, I suppose, accusing him, trying to pin on him publicly all the acts of his fantasies. There was a complex system of lights employed as signals so that each of them should know where he was and what he was doing. The Russians—still in those days, Punch Bolshies—were at the back of it. Father Watts-Watt brought into his mania all the features of existence as it appeared to him, just as Evie had brought in hers. The only difference was that Evie told me everything whereas Father Watts-Watt only gave me hints. I did not believe Father Watts-Watt because I had known Evie. There had come a time and I cannot remember when or where, when I had realized that Evie’s uncle did not live in the suit of armour because a duke would not do such a thing. I knew that Evie was telling stories—that childish, far more accurate description of half our talking—and now I knew that Father Watts-Watt was telling stories, too.

  I knew that no lights would flash, no messages be passed; that no one would sidle up to me with a whispered condemnation of my guardian. There were laws which I knew as applying to this play. At the bottom of it all, of course, stood Ma’s fantasy of my birth and her fictitious steady. As I progressed from person to person the fantasy changed in character but remained substantially the same in its relation to the teller. They were all trying to adjust the brute blow of the fist that daily existence dealt them till it became a caress. He and I at various crises in our lives, pretended to others that we were mad or going mad. He at least, ended by convincing himself.

  I should be disingenuous if I pretended to be uncertain about what these frightening desires of my guardian’s were. And yet I must be very careful in the impression I convey because although he teetered on the edge he never went further towards me than I have said, never went near anyone as far as I know. There was, to account for his shining knees and his complex lies of persecution, there was an awful battle that raged year in year out in his study where I could sometimes hear him groaning. There was nothing ludicrous in this, either then, or in memory. He was incapable of approaching a child straight because of the ingrown and festering desires that poisoned him. He must have had pictures of lucid and blameless academes where youth and experience could walk and make love. But the thing itself in this vineless and unolived landscape was nothing but furtive dirt. He might have kissed me and welcome if it would have done him any good. For what was the harm? Why should he not want to stroke and caress and kiss the enchanting, the more than vellum warmth and roundness of childhood? Why should he in his dry, wrinkled skin, his hair falling and his body becoming every day less comely and masterful, why should he not want to drink at that fountain renewed so miraculously generation after generation? And if he had more savage wishes why they have been common enough in the world and done less harm than a dogma or a political absolute. Then I could have comforted myself in these later days, saying: I was of some use and comfort to such a one.

  The more I have thought over his action in adopting me, the more I have seen that there is what I might call one and a half explanations. First, of course, he would tell himself and perhaps believe that I must be suffered to come, that the shame of my reception at the altar must be atoned for, that it were better for a millstone and except ye do it to one of these little ones and so on. That is what I call the half explanation. The whole one is nastier if you have the conventional view of things, but if not, heroic. I was like the full bottle of gin that the repentant cobbler stood on his bench so as to have the devil always in full view. He must have thought that to know a child properly, to have as it were, a son, might exorcise the demon; but he had not the art of getting to know. We remained strangers. He became, if anything, more eccentric. He would be walking in the street shaking his head, striding along, knees bent, arms gesticulating—and then he would cry out from the heart of his awful battle.

  “Why? Why on me?”

  Sometimes half-way through his cry he would recognize a face and turn his voice down into the social gesture: “Why—how do you do?”

  Then he would writhe away, muttering. As he got older he got higher and higher in this attempt to get away from himself; and finally I think he came right out at the top to find himself a man who has missed all the sweetness of life and got nothing in exchange, a derelict, old, exhausted, indifferent. I cannot see then that we did each other much harm but little good either. He fed me, clothed me, sent me to a dame school and then the local grammar school. He was well able to afford this and I do not make the mistake of confusing his signatures on cheques with human charity. He effectually lifted me from the roaring squalor and happiness of Rotten Row to the luxury of more than one room to a person.

  But where does the fear of darkness come in? The rectory itself was more daunting than he, full of unexpected levels and cupboards with one storey of vast rooms and two others of shadows and holes and corners. There were religious pictures everywhere and I liked the bad ones much better than the few that had any aesthetic merit. My favourite Madonna was terribly saccharine, coming right out of the picture at me with power and love, buckets of it. Her colours were lovely, like the piled merchandise in Woolworth’s, so that she eclipsed that other lady floating impossibly with her child in Raphael’s air. The house itself was cold with more than lovelessness. It was supposed to have central heating from some arrangement of gas tubes in a cellar like the engine-room of a ship. Mrs. Pascoe told me that if the arrangement was turned on it ate money; a vivid phrase which combined with the dark house and the rector’s eccentricity to give me much thought. But whether the machinery ate money or not, what could a few puffs of lukewarm air do against those twisting stairs and corridors, those doors that never met the floor, those dormer windows, those attics where the warmth poured up and away through the warped boards? I have sat in the great drawing-room at the rectory, warming my hands at my Madonna before going up to bed and I have heard the slow tapping as a picture beat against the brown panelling though all the doors and windows were closed. I got little warmth in that house to take up to bed with me. And bed meant darkness and darkness the generalized and irrational terror. Now I have been back in these pages to find out why I am frightened of the dark and I cannot tell. Once upon a time I was not frightened of the dark and later on I was.

  9

  After the sound of the feet died away I did not know how to react or what to feel. My pictures of torment were unformed and generalized. Somewhere there was a bench in my mind, a wooden bench with clamps and a furrowed surface; but Nick Shales sto
od behind that bench and demonstrated the relativity of sense impressions. So I began to wonder on which side of my confusion the bench was and where my tormentors were. All that I felt or surmised was conditioned by the immediacy of extreme peril. I could not know how much warning I should have before they hurt me. I could not know whether they would speak or not or whether theirs was only the more bitter business of dealing with excruciated flesh. So I knelt in the thick darkness, holding my trousers up with both hands and flinched and listened for breathing. But an outside breathing to be heard must have been gusty indeed to penetrate that riotous duet of my lungs and heart. Also the composition of experience was disconcerting and unpredictable. Who could have told me, for example, that the darkness before my blindfolded eyes would take on the likeness of a wall so that I would keep lifting my chin in order to look over it? And I held up my trousers not for decency but protection. My flesh, though it crawled, cared nothing for the recent brain nor the important, social face. It cared only to protect my privates, our privates, the whole race. So at last in the riot of air and pulse, one hand still down at my trousers, I put up the other and tore the soft bandage away.