Free Fall (21 page)

In the year of manliness sex was demonstrated to us and because it involved those whom we admired in part, I at least thought that now I understood. Miss Manning taught us French. She was about twenty-five, a sleepy, creamy woman with gusty black hair and a splash of mouth. She taught; but all the time as if she were thinking of something else. Sometimes she would stretch, cat-like, and smile slowly as if she found us and the classroom and education amiable but ridiculous. She looked as if in some other place she could teach us something really worth knowing; and I have no doubt this was true. She excited us boys agreeably with the V of her bosom between blue lapels and with her round, silk knees, too; for this was the era of the knee if a woman sat down so that there was a little competition to get the strategic desks and our Miss Manning, I believe, was not unaware of it. She was never angry and never particularly helpful. She seemed to be thinking all the time: poor little green-stick girls and hopeful, pustular rowdies! Be patient—presently the gates will be unlocked and you will walk out of the nursery. Miss Manning, in fact, was altogether too attractive a
woman
to have her heart in her work.

Mr. Carew thought her attractive, too. We had believed him to exist for the twin purposes of rugby and Latin, but now we saw that he shared the common image with us. If he were coaching us on the field and Miss Manning appeared on the touchline not only we, but he, were driven to excesses of manly activity. How we hurled ourselves into a loose scrum! And taking up our positions for a kick-off, how loping, rangy and altogether unconscious of Miss Manning our strides became! But Mr. Carew would coach us twice as hard, would demonstrate that particular
action with which he threw the ball like a torpedo far past the forwards in a line-out to where the threes might get it. Now all this activity was strange because Mr. Carew was married and had a small baby. He was a large, fair, red, sweaty man—or perhaps that was the rugby, but in my memory he always sweats. He had been to a minor public school and his rugby was much better than his Latin. He would not have found a job easy to get surely—but we had just changed over to rugby from soccer so we must have been his life’s luck. But our Miss Manning took to appearing on the touchline very often, sensibly cautious of getting her feet muddy. With what laughter and care did Mr. Carew help her round a particularly dirty patch! Then the game would be delayed and he would hang round her, laughing very loud and sending up clouds of breath and steam into the November air. He displayed his club colours before her in male splendour and Miss Manning smiled her creamy smile.

Our school caretaker was a sodden old soldier who chased us off the grass when we were small and told us about life when our pimples were out. There was a pub handy to the school and when he returned after the dinner break, fumes went before him like a king’s messenger. Then he would smooth out his grey, military moustache and tell us about being in action at two thousand yards against cavalry and show us the scar he got when he was serving on the north-west frontier. The more beer he had drunk the more military he became. This increase in martial ardour was paralleled by a rise in his moral temper. Normally he was opposed to puttees and lipstick; but when he had well drunken, short-skirted women in Parliament were unnatural. Bobbing, bingling, Eton crops—
but not apparently shaving—were flying in the face of providence and one of the reasons for the decadence of the modern army. He advocated the bayonet, Mr. Baldwin, and generally no nonsense.

At that time, a Novemberish time of short days and cold and mud, he was worried. He had something on his mind. Slurred by beer, fuming in our eager faces from veined nose, moustached mouth and eyes of yellow, he could only indicate that were he to tell us all, our mothers would remove us to a purer place. There were some things that young chaps had no business to know about, that’s what. So don’t you ask me no more, young Mountjoy. See?

He got so near letting on that we were wrought to a fever of conjecture and suspicion. We would not let him be. Our wings touched this honey and stuck there. Mr. Carew and Miss Manning were our Adam and Eve, were sex itself. This excitement was male, was kept from the green-stick girls, was knowledge, was glamour, was life. During the dinner-hour there was a master on duty for the boys and a mistress on duty for the girls; but who looks after the guardians? What more natural than that they should meet and that Benjie, going the round of the boiler-rooms or whatever he did, should see them, himself unseen? What was more, he now had a moral issue on his hands. What should he do? Should he tell the headmaster? This was what kept him awake and was turning him to drink. Where was his duty? Should he not, or should he tell?

There seemed to be only one way of pushing this crisis uphill. Yes, we cried, with a virtue even stronger than his, yes, of course he should. Roll on the crisis! After all, it was a bit thick if—so we delighted in our virtue and excitement.
Miss Manning! Creamy, luscious Miss Manning! Mr. Carew, steaming and red!

Five of us sneaked after Benjie when he made up his mind. We hung about in a deserted corridor, watched as he tapped the study door and went in. After that we waited for nearly ten minutes with just too little courage to go and listen outside the door. Presently it opened and Benjie appeared backwards, cap in hand and talking. The headmaster came after trying to silence him. But Benjie was fuming and loud.

“I said it once, sir, and I’ll say it again. It couldn’t ’ave been worse if they was married!”

Then the headmaster saw us. I imagine it was perfectly obvious to him why we were there and why we were so interested. I, at least, expected a blast from him, but he said nothing to us. He only looked sad as if he had lost something. He was no fool, that headmaster. He knew when a story could be forgotten and when it had reached too many ears.

For the time of their stay Mr. Carew and Miss Manning were now most popular and admirable. They were not just teachers, they had reached the adult stature of those who sin. They were our film stars. We would have sat at Miss Manning’s feet and listened to her with devoted attention if she had cared enough about us to tell us all the secrets of life. Whatever she said we should have believed her; and this is another contradiction. At her last lesson we examined our Miss Manning with bated breath for some sign of the experience that had been hers. But the gusty black hair, the V, the slow, creamy smile and the wide red mouth were the same. Her silk knees were the same. Once she caressed her leg, starting at the knee, running
her hand down, stretching and drawing up the shin at the same time, running the silken snake through the palm of one hand, bending the instep back till you might have thought she could smooth the whole limb small and squeeze it through a ring. Then the end of the lesson came and as we stood in our desks she dismissed us with a strange phrase for someone who was about to disappear for ever.

“
Eh bien, mes amis. Au revoir!
”

Then they were gone, the two of them, and the staff was grey and dingy again. Miss Pringle had a series of days when the world was too much for her—head lolling back, desperate sighing; but once when I presumed on her inattention she gave me a raving blast like a blowlamp. Nick reacted differently. He let me down for the first and last time in his life. I screwed up my courage and asked him a hesitant question about sex and all that, asked out of the fantasy life and our Miss Manning and Beatrice and having wanted to be a girl and wondering whether I was killing myself.

Nick shut me up violently. Then he spoke, flushing, his eyes watching water boiling in a flask.

“I don’t believe in anything but what I can touch and see and weigh and measure. But if the Devil had invented man he couldn’t have played him a dirtier, wickeder, a more shameful trick than when he gave him sex!”

So that was that. “It couldn’t have been worse if they was married!” And though I scored a hit with my suggestion among the lads that what Benjie should have said was “It couldn’t have been better——” nevertheless, I recognized the fallen angel. In my too susceptible mind sex dressed itself in gorgeous colours, brilliant and evil. I was
in that glittering net, then, just as the silk moths were when they swerved and lashed their slim bodies and spurted the pink musk of their mating. Musk, shameful and heady, be thou my good. Musk on Beatrice who knows nothing of it, thinks nothing of it, is contained and cool, is years from mating if ever, and with another man. Musk if man is only an animal, must be my good because that is the standard of all animals. He is the great male who keeps the largest herd for himself. Do not tell us that we are highest animals and then expect from us only the fierce animal devotion to the young, the herd instinct and not the high, warring hooves of the stallion. As for that light round the brow, the radiance of the unending morning of paradise—that is an illusion, a side effect. Pay no attention to it. Forget it, if you can.

Therefore I moved forward to the world of the lads, where Mercutio was, where Valentine and Claudio and for this guilt found occasion to invent a crime that fitted the punishment. Guilty am I; therefore wicked I will be. If I cannot find the brilliant crimes to commit then at least I will claim to have committed them. Guilt comes before the crime and can cause it. My claims to evil were Byronic; and Beatrice looked the other way.

The time came for me to leave. Beatrice was going to a training college in South London where they would make a teacher of her. I was going to the Art School. I had no clear desire for success. I repeated the catch-phrases of the party because in that society one had the illusion of perpetual freedom, the monk’s freedom in reverse. We had our blessings and farewells. Nick told me, in strangely religious phraseology, “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might.”

The headmaster took longer but said much the same.

“Going, Sam?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Come to me for words of wisdom?”

“I’ve seen the others, sir.”

“Trouble with advice is you might remember it.”

“Sir?”

“Sit down, boy, for a minute and don’t fidget. There. Cigarette?”

“I——”

“Look at your fingers and come off it. Throw the ash in that basket.”

Sudden, inexplicable emotion.

“Want to thank you for all you’ve done, sir.”

He waved his cigarette.

“What am I going to say to you? You’ll go a long way from Rotten Row.”

“That was Father Watts-Watt, sir.”

“Partly.”

Suddenly he swung round in the seat and faced me.

“Sam. I want your help. I want—to understand what you’re after. Oh, yes, I know all about the party, it’ll last you a year or two. But for yourself—you’re an artist, a born artist, the Lord knows why or how. I’ve never seen anyone so clearly gifted. Yet these portraits—aren’t they important to you?”

“I suppose so, sir.”

“But surely—isn’t anything important to you? No, wait! Never mind the party. I’ll take that as read, Sammy, I’m a moderate man. But for yourself. Isn’t anything important?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ve got this gift and you haven’t thought if it’s important? Look, Sammy. We don’t have to pretend any more, do we? You have an exceptional talent that makes you as distinct as if you had a sixth finger on each hand. You know that and I know it. I’m not flattering you. You’re dishonest and selfish as well as being a—whatever you are. Right?”

“Sir.”

“Your talent isn’t important to you?”

“No, sir.”

“You aren’t happy.”

“No, sir.”

“Haven’t been for some years now, have you?”

“No, sir.”

“Happiness isn’t your business. I tell you that. Leave happiness to the others, Sammy. It’s a five-finger exercise.”

He held up his right hand and twisted the fingers about.

“So your portraits aren’t important in themselves. Are they a means to an end? No. Forget the dictatorship of the proletariat. What end?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Aren’t you looking forward to being famous and rich?”

Now it was my turn to think.

“Yes, sir. That would be very nice.”

He gave a sudden jerk of laughter.

“Which is as much as to say you don’t care a damn. And I’m supposed to advise you. Well, I won’t. Good-bye.”

He took my stub from me and shook me by the hand. But before I could close the door, the incorrigible schoolmaster in him had called me back.

“I’ll tell you something which may be of value. I believe it to be true and powerful—therefore dangerous. If you want something enough, you can always get it provided you are willing to make the appropriate sacrifice. Something, anything. But what you get is never quite what you thought; and sooner or later the sacrifice is always regretted.”

I went out of there and out of the school into high summer. It seemed to me, though in fact I was only exchanging one tutelage for another, that the world had opened to me. I would not go back to the rectory but walked out of the town instead and along beside the downs. There was the forest here, clinging to the downs between the escarpment and the river. I took my sudden excitement into them, I began to wade into the tall bracken as though somewhere in here was the secret.

Even the wood-pigeons co-operated for they sang the refrain of a dance tune over and over. “If you knew Susie” they sang from their green penthouses and all the forest, the bracken, the flies and uncatalogued small moths, the thumping rabbits, the butterflies, brown, blue and white, they murmured sexily for musk was the greatest good of the greatest number. As for the heavy sky, the blue to purple, it filled every shape between the trees with inch-thick fragments of stained glass, only at arm’s length out of reach. The high fronds touched my throat or caught me round the thighs. There was a powder spilled out of all living things, a spice which now made the air where I waded thick. In basements of the forest among drifts of dried leaves and crackling boughs, by boles cathedral thick, I said in the hot air what was important to me; namely the white, unseen body of Beatrice Ifor, her obedience,
and for all time my protection of her; and for the pain she had caused me, her utter abjection this side death.