Free Fall (23 page)

“Your Beatrice is a foundation member.”

“Seven years.”

“Ever since you saw her last. In a condition which we think is rather like experiencing continual and exaggerated worry.”

“Ever since.”

“I hope it makes you happy.”

“Do you think hurting me will help you with Taffy?”

“I’m glad we’ve got that straight at last. Yes. I’m in love with her.”

“I know. She told me. We’re both sorry.”

“To hell with your sorrow. And her sorrow.”

“Well there.”

“And to hell with this place and life generally.”

“I asked her, you see. She would have kept your secret.”

Kenneth gave a high-pitched laugh.

“Oh, yes, you’ve got a good wife, she’ll never let you down. She’ll stand at your back and prop you up so that you can come across a few more suckers.”

“It isn’t like that, you know. Not from inside.”

“Got what you came for.”

“I did it then. I had a dream. Not your line of country—or is it? You could put this one in the file with the rest of the evidence. Mr. X after deserting Miss Υ had a
dream. She was following him, stumbling, and the waters were rising round her. Exaggerated worry, you said. Cause and effect holds good. Nick was right and Miss Pringle was right——”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Just that I tipped her over. Nothing can be repaired or changed. The innocent cannot forgive.”

I smiled wrily at Kenneth; and as I smiled I felt a sudden gust of affection for him.

“All right, Kenneth. Yes. I got what I came for. And thank you.”

“For what?”

“For being so—Hippocratic.”

“I?”

Suddenly the image of thick Beatrice started up behind my eyes, green, tense and nittering. I covered them with one hand.

“For telling me the truth.”

Kenneth moved about uneasily between his desk and the cupboard and then settled into his chair.

“Look, Sammy. I shan’t be seeing much of you both from now on.”

“I’m sorry.”

“For God’s sake!”

“I mean it. People don’t seem to be able to move without killing each other.”

“So I’m telling you what the chances were as far as I can see them. Then you’ll know. You probably tipped her over. But perhaps she would have tipped over anyway. Perhaps she would have tipped over a year earlier if you hadn’t been there to give her something to think about. You may have given her an extra year of sanity and—
whatever you did give her. You may have taken a lifetime of happiness away from her. Now you know the chances as accurately as a specialist.”

“Thank you.”

“God. I could cut your throat.”

“I suppose so.”

“No, I couldn’t. Don’t go. Wait. I want to talk to you. Listen, Sam. I love Taffy. You know that.”

“I can’t take it in.”

“And I said I hated you. But I don’t. In a sort of twisted way—it’s that life you both lead together, that place you’ve got. I want to share that. In a sense I’m in love with both of you.”

“I can’t take it in.”

I pulled myself up and made a sort of smiling grimace, mouth dragged down, in his direction.

“Well——”

“Sammy.”

I turned at the door.

“Sammy. What am I going to do?”

I adjusted myself to his face. Useless to say that a man is a whole continent, pointless to say that each consciousness is a whole world because each consciousness is a dozen worlds.

“There’s too much interpenetration. Everything is mixed up. Look. You haven’t hurt us. It will pass. Nothing of what you go through now will peer over your shoulder or kick you in the face.”

He laughed savagely.

“Thank you for nothing!”

I went out of the door then, and as I went, I nodded him my agreement.

I had my two speeches ready, one for each of my parents not in the flesh. Now I would go to Nick Shales and do him good. I would explain gently.

“You did not choose your rationalism rationally. You chose because they showed you the wrong maker. Oh, yes, I know all about the lip-service they paid. She—Rowena Pringle—paid lip-service and I know how much lip-service is worth. The maker they mimed for you in your Victorian slum was the old male maker,
totem
of the conquering Hebrews, totem of our forefathers, the subjectors and quiet enslavers of half the world. I saw that totem in a German picture. He stands to attention beside the cannon. There is a Hindu tied across the muzzle and presently the male
totem
of the Hebrews will blow him to pieces, the mutinous dog, for his daring. The male totem is jack-booted and topee’d and ignorant and hypocritical and splendid and cruel. You rejected him as my generation rejects him. But you were innocent, you were good and innocent like Johnny Spragg, blown to pieces five miles above his own county of Kent. You and he could live in one world at a time. You were not caught in the terrible net where we guilty ones are forced to torture each other . . .”

But Nick was in hospital dying of a tired heart. Even then it seemed to me he had less than his share, a bed in a ward in a town he always wanted to avoid. I saw him that evening from far off down the ward. He was propped up on pillows and leaned his immense head on his hand. The
light from a bulb behind him lay smoothly over his curved cranium, snowed on him like the years, hung whitely in the eaves over his eyes. Beneath their pent his face was worn away. He seemed to me then to have become the image of labouring mind: and I was awed. Whatever was happening to him in death was on a scale and level before which I felt my own nothingness. I came away, my single verse unspoken.

To her my speech was to be simple.

“We were two of a kind, that is all. You were forced to torture me. You lost your freedom somewhere and after that you had to do to me what you did. You see? The consequence was perhaps Beatrice in the looney bin, our joint work, my work, the world’s work. Do you not see how our imperfections force us to torture each other? Of course you do! The innocent and the wicked live in one world—Philip Arnold is a minister of the crown and handles life as easy as breathing. But we are neither the innocent nor the wicked. We are the guilty. We fall down. We crawl on hands and knees. We weep and tear each other.

“Therefore I have come back—since we are both adults and live in two worlds at once—to offer forgiveness with both hands. Somewhere the awful line of descent must be broken. You did that and I forgive it wholly, take the spears into me. As far as I can I will make your part in our story as if it had never been.”

But forgiveness must not only be given but received also.

She lived in a village some miles from the school now, a bitsy village with reed thatch and wrought-iron work. She cried out delightedly when she saw me at the end of the garden path.

“Mountjoy!”

And then she took off her gardener’s glove and offered me her white hand while the speech and everything I knew flew out of my head. For there are some people who paralyse us as if we were chicken, our beaks at the chalk line. I knew at once I should say nothing; but even so I was not prepared for the position and opinion of Miss Pringle; nor did our pictures of the past agree. My fame and Philip’s fame, were the consolations of teaching. She liked to think that her care of me—Sammy; may I say Sammy? And I muttered of course, of course, because my beak was on the chalk line—she liked to think that her care of me had been a little bit, a teeny bit (there was a plaster rabbit sitting by the plaster bird-bath) a teeny-weeny bit responsible for the things of beauty I was able to give the world.

And so, in ten seconds, I wanted nothing but to get away. My flesh crept. She was still this being of awful power and now her approval of me was as terrible as her hatred and I knew we had nothing to say to each other. For that woman had achieved an unexpected kind of victory; she had deceived herself completely and now she was living in only one world.

All day long the trains run on rails. Eclipses are predictable. Penicillin cures pneumonia and the atom splits to order. All day long, year in, year out, the daylight explanation drives back the mystery and reveals a reality usable, understandable and detached. The scalpel and the microscope fail, the oscilloscope moves closer to behaviour. The gorgeous dance is self-contained, then; does not need the music which in my mad moments I have heard. Nick’s universe is real.

All day long action is weighed in the balance and found
not opportune nor fortunate or ill-advised, but good or evil. For this mode which we must call the spirit breathes through the universe and does not touch it; touches only the dark things, held prisoner, incommunicado, touches, judges, sentences and passes on.

Her world was real, both worlds are real. There is no bridge.

The bright line became a triangle sweeping in over a suddenly visible concrete floor.

“Heraus!”

Rising from my knees, holding my trousers huddled I walked uncertainly out towards the judge. But the judge had gone.

The commandant was back.

“Captain Mountjoy. This should not be happening. I am sorry.”

The noise turned me round. I could see down the passage now over the stain shaped like a brain, could see into the cell where I had received what I had received. They were putting the buckets back, piles of them, were throwing back the damp floorcloths. I could see that they had forgotten one, or perhaps left it deliberately, when they emptied the cupboard for me. It still lay damply in the centre of the floor. Then a soldier shut the buckets and the floorcloths away with an ordinary cupboard door.

“Captain Mountjoy. You have heard?”

“I heard.”

The commandant indicated the door back to the camp dismissively. He spoke the inscrutable words that I should puzzle over as though they were the Sphinx’s riddle.

“The Herr Doctor does not know about peoples.”

When William Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel Foundation said of his novels that they ‘illuminate the human condition in the world of today’. Born in Cornwall in 1911, Golding was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and Brasenose Oxford. Before becoming a writer, he was an actor, a lecturer, a small-boat sailor, a musician and a schoolteacher. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and saw action against battleships, submarines and aircraft, and also took part in the pursuit of the
Bismarck
.

Lord of the Flies
, his first novel, was rejected by several publishers and one literary agent. It was rescued from the ‘slush pile’ by a young editor at Faber and Faber and published in 1954. The book would go on to sell several million copies; it was translated into 35 languages and made into a film by Peter Brook in 1963. He wrote eleven other novels,
The Inheritors
and
The Spire
among them, a play and two essay collections. He won the Booker Prize for his novel
Rites of Passage
in 1980, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988. He died at his home in the summer of 1993.

www.william-golding.co.uk

Books by

Sir William Golding

1911–1993 

Nobel Prize for Literature

Fiction

L
ORD OF THE FLIES

T
HE I
NHERITORS

PINCHER MARTIN

FREE FALL

THE SPIRE

THE SCORPION GOD

DARKNESS VISIBLE

THE PAPER MEN

RITES OF PASSAGE

CLOSE QUARTERS

FIRE DOWN BELOW

THE DOUBLE TONGUE

TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH

(a revised text of
Rites
of
Passage,
Close
Quarters
and
Fire
Down
Below
in one volume)

Essays

THE HOT GATES

A MOVING TARGET

Travel

AN EGYPTIAN JOURNAL

Play

THE BRASS BUTTERFLY

LORD OF THE FLIES

adapted for the stage by

Nigel Williams

WILLIAM GOLDING:
A CRITICAL STUDY OF THE NOVELS

LORD OF THE FLIES

by Mark Kinkead-Weekes and Ian Gregor