Free Fall Read online

  They were coming out of the training college already, I could see them, fair heads and mousy ones, giggling and laughing in flocks, tinkling their good-byes and waving, so girlish and free, the thin ones, tall ones, dumpy ones, humpy ones, inky ones, slinky ones, gamesy ones and stern ones with glasses on. I was in the gutter, sitting my bike, willing them to die, be raped, bombed or otherwise obliterated because this demanded split-second timing. And, of course, she might not come out at all—might be—what the hell did you do in a girls’ training college at half-past four on an autumn afternoon? The crowd was thinning out. If she saw me first so obviously sitting my saddle in the gutter and waiting, the game would be up. Had to be accident, I had to be riding when she saw me; so I pushed off and balanced along with circus slowness, half-hoping now that the crisis was at hand that she would not come out and my misbehaving heart would be able to settle again, wobble wobble heart and bike and she appeared with two others, turned and walked away without seeing me. But I had rehearsed this too often in my bed for my heart and swelling hands to let me down. The whole thing was mechanical, fruit of terrible concentrated thought and repetition. I rode casually, one hand in my pocket and the other on my hip, look no hands, swaying this way and that. She was past and behind me. Startled I looked back, grabbed the handle-bars, braked and skidded to a stop by the pavement, looked back brazenly as she approached, grinned brazenly in immense surprise——

  “Why, if it isn’t Beatrice Ifor!”

  So they stopped all three while my rehearsed prattle left her no chance of moving off without being rude; and those other two, those blessed damozels, they were in the freemasonry of this sort of meeting and moved on almost immediately, waving back and giggling.

  “—was just cycling past—never dreamed—so this is the training college, is it? I come along this road a lot or shall do in the future. Yes, a course. I prefer cycling between the other place and the other place—no buses for me. Can’t stand ’em. Course in lithography. Were you going back to your digs? No. I’ll walk. Can I carry? Are you enjoying it here? Is the work hard? You seem to be thriving on—yes. Look. I was going to have a cup of tea before I ride the rest—how—oh, but you must! One doesn’t meet—and after all these months, too! Lyons. Yes. I can leave the bike——”

  There was a small round table of imitation marble on three iron legs. She was sitting on the other side. I had her now for whole minutes, islanded out of all the complexities of living. By sheer hard work and calculation I had brought this about. There was much to be achieved in those minutes, things noted down and decided, steps to be taken; she was to be brought—oh, irony! a little nearer to a complete loss of freedom. I heard my voice babbling on, saying its lines, making the suggestions that were too general to be refused, the delicately adjusted assumptions that were to build up into an obligation; I heard my voice consolidating this renewed acquaintance and edging diplomatically a trifle further; but I watched her unpaintable, indescribable face and I wanted to say—you are the most mysterious and beautiful thing in the universe, I want you and your altar and your friends and your thoughts and your world. I am so jealousy-maddened I could kill the air for touching you. Help me. I have gone mad. Have mercy. I want to be you.

  The clever, unscrupulous, ridiculous voice murmured on.

  When she got up to go, I went with her, talking all the time, talking an attentive, amusing—oh, the calculated stories! pleasant young man into the picture; erasing the other Sammy, so incalculable, insolent and namelessly vicious. When she stopped dismissively on the pavement I accepted this as if the sky was not reeling round me. I allowed her to go, attached to me by a line no thicker than a hair, but at least, if one could not say that she had swallowed the fly, it was still there, dancing over the water; and she, she was still there—she had not flicked her tail and vanished under weed or rock. I watched her go and turned to my bike with something accomplished—a meeting with Beatrice in the privacy of a crowd, a contact re-established. I rode home, my heart molten with delight, goodness and gratitude. For it was good. She was nineteen and I was nineteen; we were male and female, we would marry though she did not know that yet—must not know that yet, lest she vanish under weed or rock. Moreover there was peace. For she would be working at her books tonight. Nothing could touch her. Until the next afternoon—for who knew what she would do that evening? Dance? Cinema? With whom? Nevertheless the jealousy was to-morrow’s jealousy and for twenty-four hours she was safe. I surrounded her with gratitude and love that came out strongly as a sense of blessing, un-sexual and generous. Those who have nothing are made wild with delight by very little. Once again as at school I yearned not to exploit but protect.

  So my tiny thread was attached to her and I did not see that with every additional thread I myself was bound with another cable. Of course I went back next day, against my better judgment but with a desperate impulse to move on, to hurry things up; and she was not there, did not come. Then I spent an evening of misery and hung about the next day all the afternoon.

  “Hullo, Beatrice! It looks as if we are going to meet quite often!”

  But she had to hurry, she said, was going out that evening. I left her on the pavement with Lyons like an unvisited heaven and agonized as she vanished into the infinite possibilities of going out. Now I had ample time to consider the problems of attachment. I began to appreciate dimly that a thread must be tied at both ends before it can restrain anything.

  Facetious.

  “Hullo, Beatrice! Here we are again!”

  When we were sitting at the marble-topped table my plans began to come apart.

  “Did you enjoy yourself last night?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  Then, out of the unendurable compulsion to know; with heart beat and damp hand with plea and anger——

  “What were you doing?”

  She was wearing, I remember, a suit, grey, some sort of smoothed flannel with a vertical stripe, alternately green and white. She had a blouse on beneath it with some throat and chest showing. Two fine gold chains fell down the glossy skin and vanished into the treasury. What was there at the end, between the Hesperides? A cross? A locket with a curl of hair? An aquamarine to shake and glimmer there, a perfection secret and unattainable?

  “What were you doing?”

  The contrast between the formal suit, the masculinity of the lapels, the neatness of the waist—and the soft body that sat in it—don’t you know what you do to me? But there were changes, too, a faint hint of pink now over each cheekbone and under the long lashes a level look. Suddenly the air between us was filled with comprehension—understanding on the small-change level. This was not worded, did not need to be. She knew and I knew; but still I could not keep the fatal word back. It vibrated in my head, was unstoppable as a sneeze, came out with fury and contempt and pain.

  “Dancing?”

  The hints of pink were definite now. The round chin lifted. The thread stretched and broke.

  “Well, really——”

  She lifted off the chair, took her books.

  “I’m late. I must go.”

  “Beatrice!”

  I had to run after her as she walked along the pavement. I hung by her, walking sideways.

  “I’m sorry. Only I—hate dancing—hate it! And the thought of you——”

  We were stopped and half turned to each other.

  “Were you dancing?”

  There were three steps up to the front door, curved iron railings descending them on either side. Neither of us had the right vocabulary. She wanted to tell me, that assuming what she sensed was correct then I still had no right to insist on knowing. I wanted to cry—look how I burn! There are flames shooting out of my head and my loins and my heart! She wanted to say: however I may have half unconsciously appraised you as a mate—and of course you seemed impossible, only slightly amended by your recent behaviour—however much I have exercised my normal function of female living and allowed you to approach thus far; neverthel
ess, the rules of the game should have been observed; whereas you have broken them and affronted my dignity.

  So we stood, she on the lower step, I, hand on the rails, red tie blown by my own violence over my right shoulder.

  “Beatrice! Were you——?”

  She had such clear eyes, such untroubled eyes, grey, honest because the price of dishonesty had never been offered to her. I looked into them, sensed their merciless and remote purity. She was contained in herself. Nothing had ever come to trouble her pool. If I held out my hand, desperate and pleading, inarticulate and hot out of raw youth and all the tides that bundled me along, what could she do but examine it and me and wait and wonder what I wanted?

  “Were you?”

  Indignation and hauteur; but both scaled down because the thread had been after all so hair-thin and to make much of the offence would imply that I had threatened her freedom.

  “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 the
n, 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?