Free Fall (11 page)

I seized her wrist and swung her round on the path.

“I meant it.”

They were still clear eyes, still untroubled. But they were brighter, brighter with mutiny or triumph.

“You said you cared for me.”

“Oh, my God!”

I looked at her slight body, sensed the thin bone of the skull, the round and defenceless neck.

“We couldn’t get married for ages.”

“Beatrice!”

She moved a little closer and looked at me squarely with bright, pleased eyes. She put herself in the position for a permitted kiss.

“You will? Say you will!”

She smiled and uttered the nearest she ever knew to saying yes.

“Maybe.”

For maybe was sign of all our times. We were certain of nothing. I should have said “Maybe” not Beatrice. The louder I cried out in the wake of the party the more an inner voice told me not to be silly, that no one could be certain of anything. Life waded knee-deep in shadows, floundered, was relative. So I could take “maybe” from Beatrice for “yes”.

A young man certain of nothing but salt sex; certain that if there was a positive value in living it was this undeniable pleasure. Be frightened of the pleasure, condemn it, exalt it—but no one could deny that the pleasure was there. As for Art—did they not say—and youth with the resources of all human knowledge at its disposal lacks nothing but time to know everything—did they not say in the thick and unread textbooks that the root of art was sex? And was this not certain to be so since so many clever people said so and what was more to the point, behaved so? Therefore the tickling pleasure, the little death shared or self-inflicted was neither irrelevant nor sinful but the altar of whatever shoddy temple was left to us. But there remained deep as an assessment of experience itself the knowledge that if this was everything it was a poor return for birth, for the shames and frustrations of growing up. Nevertheless I had now brought Beatrice into the sexual orbit. Even she must know that marriage and the sexual act are not unconnected. My thighs weakened, my lungs tripped over a hot breath at the thought of it.

“Sammy! No!”

For, of course, there was only one answer to that “maybe” and I tried for a clinch—she unco-operating. Then I was trembling, I remember distinctly, as if love and sex and passion were a disease. I was trembling regularly from head to foot as if my button had been pressed. There in the winter sunlight, among the raindrops and rusted foliage I stood and trembled regularly as if I should never stop and a sadness reached out of me that did not know what it wanted; for it is a part of my nature that I should need to worship, and this was not in the textbooks, not in the behaviour of those I had chosen and so without knowing I had thrown it away. This sadness had no point therefore, and came out at the eyes of that ridiculous, unmanly, trembling creature so that Beatrice was frightened by it. What accepted suitor in a book ever started to tremble and weep? Her better nature or her commonsense would have taken back that binding maybe there and then if I had not turned away and made a dramatic effort to master my emotion. That was a cliché of behaviour and therefore not frightening. The trembling passed and suddenly I was overwhelmed by realization that here was the beginning of the end of that long path. One day, yes, one real day and not in fantasy I should achieve her sweet body. She would be safely mine beyond doubt or jealousy.

I turned again and began to chatter out of my unbearable excitement. So I led her away down the path, chattering and laughing, she silent and astonished. I see now how extraordinary these reactions must have seemed to her; but at the time I felt them as natural to me. It was an instability that I feel now should have ended in madness and
perhaps at the time she felt that too. But for me, old scars were vanishing. The pursuer’s hate was swallowed up in gratitude. The burns seared into me by overheated emotion were swealed away, I was unfolding, luxuriating in peace of deep heart over which delight danced, wildly invisible.

I don’t think for a moment that she loved me then. If it comes to that I have asked myself how many people know at all the complete preoccupation and dependence? She was much more taken up with custom and precedent. She was now engaged and perhaps I was necessary as a shadowy adjunct in the life of the training college; an adjunct which she could accept more easily as she felt how she did me good. If marriage entered her head at all it was far off after college, was so to speak at the end of the film, was a golden glow near enough the end. But I had definite thoughts and purpose.

I am amazed now at my shyness and ignorance. After all the imagined passion of bed, at first I hardly dared kiss her and made the most tentative advances. Of course she warded them off and they served to bring up the central affair and impossibility of years of waiting.

“Girls don’t feel like that.”

“I’m not a girl!”

Indeed I was not. I have never felt more severely heterosexual. But she was a girl, her emotions and physical reactions enclosed as a nun. She herself was hidden. All the time I knocked and then hammered at the door she remained shut up within. We continued to see each other, to kiss, to plan marriage in several years’ time. I got her a ring and she felt achieved and adult. I could place one hand gently on her left breast provided my hand remained
outside her clothes. Beyond that point she became very positive. I have never been able to follow the precise train of thought that guided her reactions. Perhaps there was no thought at all and merely reactions. It is better to marry than burn. How I agreed with Saint Paul! But we could not marry. So I kissed the cold edge of her lips, laid one hand on her hidden pap and blazed like a haystack.

I got myself a bed-sitting-room, moving out of the care which a landlady was supposed to give me. If it had not been for Beatrice that room would have been very bleak; but I designed it as a place to seduce her in.

I had no precedents outside the cinema and these I was not in a position to imitate. I could not surround Beatrice with luxury, had no gipsy violinist to shudder his way into her ear. That room with its couch bed, narrow for two unless they were glued together or superimposed, with its brown dado and pink lamp shade gave me no help. The Van Gogh sunflowers of course were prominent—was there a single bed-sitter in London without them? But there was nothing to draw Beatrice there except our poverty. It was cheaper to sit on the couch than drink coffee in a little shop; it was cheaper, even, than walking in the country, because you had to break out of the smoke by train or bus. So when I finally got her there, though I knew why, she herself may very well have believed it was from laudable motives of economy.

She came; and there were huge, desert areas of silence. For this was so unlike my fevered fantasies that she had no immediate attraction for me. She maddened me by
being
there; yet I could not cross the gulf of her silence. She would sit on the couch, her elbows on her knees and her chin between her two palms and look placidly at nothing.
Sometimes I would squat in front of her and intercept her gaze.

“What are you thinking of?”

She would smile slightly and shake her head. If I stayed there, she would sit up and look past me again. It seemed like boredom; but it was a strange and untouched content with the process of living. She was at peace. The chapel with its assurances was behind her and for the rest she enjoyed sitting in her pretty body. Nobody told her this was a sin, this calm and selfish enjoyment of her own delicate warmth and smoothness; they told her it was virtue rather and respectability. I see now that her nun-like innocence was an obedient avoidance of the deep and muddy pool where others lived. Where I lived. I gesticulated to her from the pool and she was sorry for me. But all that was taken care of, was it not? For she was to marry me; and that was what nice boys wanted, the dual vanish into a golden haze, all folly smoothed away.

“What are you thinking of?”

“This and that.”

“About us?”

“Maybe.”

Outside the window the long winter road would darken. A sky-sign would become visible, a square of red words with a yellow line chasing round them; a whole mile of street lights would start and quiver into dull yellow as though they suddenly awoke. There would not be many minutes left.

“What are you thinking about?”

The time would come, she would stand up, allow me my careful embrace and then balance away, feminine and untouched.

I wonder what she was thinking of? She baffles me still, she is opaque. Even though she enjoyed being herself innocently as a young cat before the fire, yet surely there must have been some way to her for someone—for some girl, perhaps, if not for me? Would she have seemed accessible to her own children? Would a lifetime with her bring up a transparency first and then reveal in it the complex outlines of the soul in itself?

Yet she was accustomed to my room—to our room as I began to call it. I worked hard at lines of approach, subtle or logical. I did violence to our physical shyness, hid my face in her hair and begged her—unconscious perhaps of the humour of the narrow couch—begged her to sleep with me. She would not, of course; and I played another card. She must marry me immediately. Let it be secret——

Beatrice would not. What was she up to? What did she want? Was she doing nothing but giving me stability? Did she ever intend to marry me?

“Marry me. Now!”

“But we can’t!”

“Why not?”

We had no money. She was not supposed to marry, had signed some sort of agreement. It wouldn’t be honest——

The poor girl had delivered herself into my hand.

“Then come to bed with me——”

“No.”

“Yes. Why not?”

“It wouldn’t be——”

“It wouldn’t be what? I’m supposed to suffer because you—I’ve got to wait—you know what a man is—all because you signed some damned agreement to turn you into a sour school marm——”

“Please, Sammy——”

“I love you.”

“Let me go.”

“Don’t you understand? I love you. You love me. You ought to be coming gladly to me, we to each other, all your beauty given, shared—why do you keep me out? Don’t you love me? I thought you loved me!”

“So I do.”

“Say it then.”

“I love you.”

But still she would not. We would be sitting and wrestling ridiculously on the edge of the narrow bed; there was nothing but foolishness. After a time even desire would tire of this and we would sit, side by side, I suddenly conversational about an exhibition or the picture I happened to be painting. Sometimes I would take up the conversation if such a monologue was conversation—where I had dropped it a quarter of an hour before.

Beatrice belonged to my only rival. Her body, therefore, was not hers to give. This she thought, this she acted upon. And we could not get married yet. So she came, time after time to my room and sat with me on the edge of the bed. Why did she do it? Was there the taste of salt curiosity in her mouth, was she going as near the edge of excitement as she dared? Or what?

“I shall go mad.”

She had a most wonderfully mobile body that seemed to yield wherever you touched it; but when I threw off that obscene remark her body stiffened between my arms.

“You mustn’t ever say such a thing, Sammy.”

“I shall go mad, I tell you!”

“Don’t say it!”

Madness was not quite so fashionable in those days. People did not so cheerfully claim to be unbalanced or schizo. I may claim to have been before my time in this as in many other things. So where today a girl would be sympathetic, in those days Beatrice was frightened. She gave me the lever I wanted.

“I think I
am
mad, a bit——”

Once a human being has lost freedom there is no end to the coils of cruelty. I must I must I must. They said the damned in hell were forced to torture the innocent live people with disease. But I know now that life is perhaps more terrible than that innocent medieval misconception. We are forced here and now to torture each other. We can watch ourselves becoming automata; feel only terror as our alienated arms lift the instruments of their passion towards those we love. Those who lose freedom can watch themselves forced helplessly to do this in daylight until who is torturing who? The obsession drove me at her.

But, of course, once she had got over her fear and we were bound so closely together by lovemaking, there would be no end to the brightness of the sunlight future.

My madness was Wagnerian. It drove me forth on dark nights forsooth striding round the downs. I should have worn a cloak.

I sent a message in by the porter. Mr. Mountjoy wishes to speak to Miss Ifor.

“Sammy!”

It was a quarter to eight in the morning.

“I had to come and look at you. To make sure you were real.”

“But how did you get here at this time?”

“I wanted to see you.”

“But how——”

“I wanted—oh that? I’ve been walking all night, keeping ahead of it.”

“But——”

“You are my sanity, Beatrice. I had to come and see you. Now everything is all right.”

“You’ll be late, Sammy, you must go. Are you all right?”

Compunction in compulsion, almost weeping. What is madness after all? Can a man who pretends to be mad claim to be sane?

Compulsion, weeping.

“I have to do it. I don’t know why. I have to.”

“Oh look, Sammy—here I’m not supposed to—I’ll see you to the bus stop. Come on. You know the number? You’re to go straight to bed.”

“You won’t leave me?”

“Look—dear!”

“As soon as you can then—the very first moment——”

“I promise.”

The bus top was among branches part of the way. I was shaking and shuddering by myself with no need to act. I was muttering like a drunk man.

“I don’t understand. I don’t know anything. I’m on rails. I have to. Have to. There is too much life. I could kick myself or kill myself. Is my living to be nothing but moving like an insect? Scuttering, crawling? I could go away. Could I? Could I go away? Across the sea where the painted walls wait for me, I might. I am tied by this must.”

The muscles of the chest get tautened, the sinews stand out in the wrists, the heart beats faster till the air is eaten
up with red shapes expanding; and then you understand that you ought to breathe again; for even if compulsion is a pitiless thing a man does not have to let it take charge of his physical reflexes, no, he can suffer emotionally without starving himself of air—there, I thought, I have breathed the load off my back.

She came to me malleable, and at the same time authoritative, for she was very firm about eating regularly and so on. She was very sweet. She only put up a token fight. She was my sanity. I would take any consequences that ensued would I not, who was so breathlessly assuring her that there would be no consequences. And then Beatrice of four years’ fever lay back obediently, closed her eyes and placed one clenched fist bravely on her forehead as though she were about to be injected for T.A.B.