Free Fall Page 9

  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.

  “One more half, Dai, and then you must go home. I have some things to discuss with Mr. Mountjoy.”

  When we were alone, he bought me a drink but would have no more himself.

  “Well, Sammy. So you know where you’re going.”

  Helter-skelter, rush down to the dark arch.

  “Does anyone?”

  “That chap—Wimbury. Does he? How old is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Teacher?”

  “Of course.”

  “What’s he up to?”

  I drank up and ordered another.

  “He’s working for the revolution.”

  Philip was following the movements of my drinking with careful eyes.

  “Where does he go from here?”

  I must have thought for a long time because Philip went on speaking.

  “I mean—he’s an ordinary teacher? An assistant?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Being a communist won’t make him a head teacher.”

  “You are the most bloody awful ungenerous——”

  “Listen, Sammy. What does he get out of it? What can he become?”

  “Well!”

  But what could Comrade Wimbury become?

  “Don’t you understand, Philip? We aren’t in this for ourselves. We’ve——”

  “Seen the light.”

  “If you like.”

  “So have the blackshirts. Now look—don’t start a fight.”

  “Fascist bastards!”

  “I’m trying to find things out. I’ve been to their meeting too. Now don’t make a fuss, Sammy. I’m—as you would say—uncommitted.”

  “You’re too damned middle-class, that’s your trouble.”

  Drink warmed me, gave me virtue and self-righteousness. I began a rambling and laboured exposition. Philip watched me, always watched me. Finally he straightened his tie and smoothed down his hair.

  “Sammy. When the war comes——”

  “What war?”

  “Next week’s war.”

  “There won’t be a war.”

  “Why not?”

  “You heard Wimbury.”

  Philip began to laugh. I had never seen him so genuinely merry. At last he wiped his eyes and looked at me solemnly again.

  “Do something for me, Sammy.”

  “Paint your portrait?”

  “Keep me informed. No. Not just about politics. I can read the Worker as well as you. Just let me know what it’s like in the branch. The feeling. That other chap with the bald head——”

  “Alsopp?”

  “What does he get out of it?”

  I knew what Alsopp got out of it, but I was not going to say. After all, love was free and private life irrelevant—all except your own.

  “How should I know? He’s an older man than I am.”

  “You don’t know much, do you, Sammy?”

  “Have ’nother drink.”

  “And you respect your elders.”

  “Hell with my elders.”

  Beer in those days was cold and flabby for two half-pints and then took off, had golden wings with the third. I peered for Philip.

  “What you up to, Philip? You come here—blackshirts and communists——”

  Philip was looking back through my haze with an air of clinical detachment. He was tapping his long
teeth with one white finger.

  “Know Diogenes?”

  “Never heard of ’im.”

  “Went round with a lamp. Wanted to find an honest man.”

  “You being bloody rude? I’m honest. So’s comrades. Bloody blackshirts.”

  Philip was forward and peering into my face.

  “Dai wants booze more than anything. What do you want more than anything, Sammy?”

  I mumbled.

  Philip was very near and very loud.

  “Beetroots? You want beetroots?”

  “What do you want then?”

  The reeling eye is sometimes as percipient as the drugged one. Essentials only. Philip was isolated in bright light. Feeling my own uncertainties, my lopsided and illogical life, now lugged into a semblance of upright by bass, I could see why he was not drinking. For Philip, pale, freckled Philip who was skimped in every line of his body by a cosmic meanness was keeping himself intact. What I have I hold. Therefore the bony hands and the cut-price face, the brow pushed in on either side as though supplies had run out, were defended against giving, were incapable by nature of natural generosity, were tight and aware.

  Let me describe him as I saw him at that instant. His clothes were better than mine, cleaner and neater. His shirt was white, his tie subdued and central. He sat, not hunched, but precisely, on a vertical spine. His hands were in his lap, his knees together. His hair was of a curious indefinable texture—growing all ways, but so weak that it still lay close to his skull like a used doormat. It was so indeterminate that the large, light freckles blurred the hair line on his sloping forehead. His eyes were pale blue and seemed curiously raw in that electric light for he had neither eyebrows nor eyelashes. No, madam, I’m sorry, we don’t supply them at that price. This is a utility model. His nose was generous enough but melted, and the sphincter muscles round his mouth, only just sufficient to get it shut. And the man inside, the boy inside? I had schemed with him for fagcards, wrestled with him in the dark church—I had been cheated by him and beaten by him—I had accepted his friendship at a time when friendship was very dear to me.

  The man inside?

  It could smile. Was doing so now, with a localized convulsion of the sphincter.

  “What do you want, Philip?”

  “I told you.”

  He got up and began to put on his raincoat. I was about to suggest he should escort me home for I began to feel uncertain of getting there; but while the suggestion was rising to my lips he cut it off.

  “Don’t bother to come with me to the station. I shall have to hurry. Here’s an envelope with my address on it. Remember. Just every now and then—let me know how things go on in the branch. What people are feeling.”

  “What the hell are you trying to do?”

  Philip pulled the door open.

  “Do? I’m—I’m inspecting the political racket.”

  “An honest man. And you haven’t found one.”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “What if you find one?”

  Philip paused with the door open. There was darkness and a glint of rain. He looked back at me out of his raw eyes from a long, long way away.

  “I shall be disappointed.”

  I kept my drinking from Beatrice because she thought of pubs as only one degree less damned than the Church of England. In her little village, three miles beyond Rotten Row, all the boozers were Church of England and all the boys in broad cloth, chapel. Church of England was top and bottom; chapel was middle, was the class grimly keeping its feet out of the mud. I kept an awful lot of things from Beatrice. I see myself haunted and hurrying, dishevelled, my shoes uncleaned, grey shirt unbuttoned, blue jacket bulging on either side with oddments till the pockets looked like panniers. I had a lot of hair and I shaved when I was going to see Beatrice. I was thankful for the party’s red tie; it settled one item of wardrobe for me. As for my hands, the cigarette stain was creeping towards my wrists. I had neither Johnny’s sunny simplicity, nor Philip’s sense of direction; and yet I was for something. I was intended. When I did as I was told; when I drew and painted in obedience I was praised judiciously. I would make a good teacher, perhaps, a man who knew all the ropes and understood why each thing must be done. Set a problem, and I could produce the straight, the safe academic answer. Yet sometimes I would feel myself connected to the well inside me and then I broke loose. There would come into my whole body a feeling of passionate certainty. Not that—but this! Then I would stand the world of appearances on its head, would reach in and down, would destroy savagely and re-create—not for painting or precisely for Art with a capital A, but for this very concrete creation itself. If, like Philip and Diogenes I had been looking for an honest man in my own particular racket I should have found him then and he would have been myself. Art is partly communication but only partly. The rest is discovery. I have always been the creature of discovery.

  I do not say this to excuse myself—or do I? You cannot have two moral standards one for artists and one for the rest. That is a mistaken view on both sides. Whoever judges me must judge me as if I had been a grocer addicted to chapel. If I have painted some good pictures—brought people slap up against another view of the world—on the other hand I have sold them no sugar nor left the early milk on their doorsteps. I say it rather, perhaps to explain what sort of young man I was—explain it to myself. I can think of no other audience. I am here as well as on canvas, a creature of discovery rather than communication. And all the time, oscillating between resentment and gratitude I was straining towards Beatrice as I have seen a moored boat tugged by the tide. You cannot blame the boat if it breaks loose at last and goes where the water carries it. This young man, sucking first pleasure then drug then nothing out of fags until they became as he smoked them no more than a gesture—drinking first for the phosphorescence and reality it brought to a wall or a lintel, then drinking to escape from a world of nonsense into one of apocalyptic meaning—throwing himself into the party because there people knew where the world was going—this young man, wild and ignorant, asking for help and refusing it, proud, loving, passionate and obsessed: how can I blame him for his actions since clearly at that time he was beyond the taste or the hope of freedom?

  But Beatrice hoped to do me good. We walked again. We wrote each other little letters. I became familiar with her vocabulary, found out less and less about her. She stood by a tree and I put my arm round her and vibrated, but she never noticed. I was determined to be good, to move on the highest level, to settle once and for all the hauntings. I bent and put my cheek against hers. I was looking where she looked.

  “Beatrice.”

  “Mm?”

  “What is it like to be you?”

  A sensible question; and asked out of my admiration for Evie and Ma, out of my adolescent fantasies, out of my painful obsession with discovery and identification. An impossible question.

  “Just ordinary.”

  What is it like to hold the centre of someone’s universe, to be soft and fair and sweet, to be neat and clean by nature, to be desired to distraction, to live under this hair, behind these huge, unutterable eyes, to feel the lift of these guarded twins, the valley, the plunge down to the tiny waist, to be vulnerable and invulnerable? What is it like in the bath and the lavatory and walking the pavement with shorter steps and high heels; what is it like to know your body breathes this faint perfume which makes my heart burst and my senses swim?

  “No. Tell me.”

  And can you feel them all the way out to the rounded points? Do you know and feel how hollow your belly is? What is it like to be frightened of mice? What is it like to be wary and serene, protected and peaceful? How does a man seem to you? Is he clothed, always, jacketed and trousered, is he castrated like the plaster casts in the art room?

  Beatrice made a slight movement as though she would move away from the tree. We were both leaning against it, she against me, too; and my arm was round her waist. I would not let her go.

  Above
all else, even beyond the musky treasures of your white body, this body so close to me and unattainable, above all else: what is your mystery? This is not a question I can ask you because I can hardly frame it to myself. But as freedom of the will is to be experienced like the taste of potatoes, as I once saw in and round your face what I cannot draw and hardly remember—as I am unable to make a picture of you that remotely resembles the breathing Beatrice; for mercy’s sake admit me to the secret. I have capitulated to you. I go with the tide. Even if you do not know what you are at least admit me.

  “Where do you live, Beatrice?”

  She stirred again suddenly.

  “Don’t move. No, silly girl, not your address. Inside. The side of my head is against the side of yours. Do you live in there? We can’t be an inch apart. I live near the back of my head, right inside—nearer the back than the front. Are you like that? Do you live—just in here? If I put my fingers there on the nape of your neck and move them up am I close? Closer?”

  She pulled away.

  “You’re—don’t, Sammy!”

  How far do you extend? Are you the black, central patch which cannot examine itself? Or do you live in another mode, not thought, stretching out in serenity and certainty?

  But the musk won.

  “Sammy!”

  “I said I loved you. Oh God, don’t you know what that means? I want you, I want all of you, not just cold kisses and walks—I want to be with you and in you and on you and round you—I want fusion and identity—I want to understand and be understood—oh God, Beatrice, Beatrice, I love you—I want to be you!”

  It was the moment when she might have got away, got far enough away to write me a letter and avoid me. It was, in fact, her last chance; but she did not know that. And perhaps even to her contained skin there was some warmth and excitement of the body in my stronger arms.