Free Fall Read Free

dad, Ma?”
    Out of our common indifference to mere physical fact, came answers that varied as her current daydream varied. These were influenced by the “Sun” and the flickering stories at the Regal. I knew they were daydreams and accepted them as such because I daydreamed too. Only the coldest attitude to the truth would have condemned them as lies, though once or twice, Ma’s rudimentary moral sense made her disclaim them almost immediately. The result was that my father was sometimes a soldier, he was a lovely man, an officer; though I suspect Ma was past the officer and gentleman stage by the time I was conceived. One night when she came back from the Regal and pictures of battleships being bombed off the shores of America, he was in the Royal Air Force. Later still in our joint life—and what was the celebration this time? What prancing horses, plumed helmets and roaring crowds? Later still, he was none other than the Prince of Wales.
    This was such tremendous news to me, though of course I did not believe it, that the red glow behind the bars of the grate has remained on my retina like an after-image. We neither believed it but the glittering myth lay in the middle of the dirty floor, accepted with gratitude as beyond my own timid efforts at invention. Yet almost before she threw the thing there, she was prepared to snatch it back. The story was too enormous, or perhaps the daydreamtoo private to be shared. I saw her eyes shift in the glow, the faint, parchment colour of her lighted face move and alter. She sniffed, scratched her nose, wept an easy gin-tear or two and spoke to the grate where there could well have been more fire.
    “You know I’m a sodding liar, dear, don’t you?”
    Yes. I knew, without condemnation, but I was disappointed all the same. I felt that Christmas had disappeared and there was no more tinsel. I recognized that we should return to Ma’s fictitious steady. The Prince of Wales, a soldier, an airman—but whores claim to be the daughters of clergymen; and despite all the glitter of court life, the church won.
    “What was my dad, Ma?”
    “A parson. I keep telling you.”
    On the whole, that has been my steady, too. There would be nothing in common between us but our division yet we should at least recognize it: and I should know behind the other face, the drag, the devil, the despair, the wry and desperate perceptions, conforming hourly to a creed until they are warped as Chinese feet. In my bitter moments I have thought of myself as connected thereby to good works. I like to think then that my father was not doing something for which he had either an excuse or moral indifference. My self-esteem would prefer him to have wrestled desperately with the flesh. Soldiers traditionally love them and leave them; but the clergy, either abstemious or celibate, the pastors, ministers, elders and priests—I should be an old anguish once thought forgiven now seen to be scarlet. I should blow up in some manse or parsonage or presbytery or close, I should blow up like a forgotten abscess. They are men as I am,acquainted with sin. There would be some point to me.
    Which branch, I wonder? Only a day or two ago I walked down a side street, past the various chapels, the oratory, round the corner by the old church and the vast rectory. Of what denomination shall I declare my fictitious steady to be? The church of England, the curator’s church? Would not my father have been a gentleman first and a priest afterwards, an amateur like me? Even the friars walk round with trousers showing under their well-cut habits. They remind me of the druids on Brown Willie, or somewhere, coming in cars and spectacles. Shall I choose a Roman Catholic to be my father? There is a professional church even when you hate her guts. Would a bastard tug one of them by the heart as well as the sleeve? As for the ranks of nonconformity so drearily conforming, the half-baked, the splinter parties, the tables, and tabernacles and