Free Fall by William Golding

result. Why should I think of forgiveness? There was nothing to forgive.
    The verger’s hand was still held out. I examined it and him and waited.
    At last he sighed, took his bowler off the pedestal and stood up. He cleared his throat.
    “Well——”
    He turned his hat round and round in his hands, sucked his moustache, blinked. Then he was away, walking quickly and silently on his professional creepers down the centre of the ward and through the double door.
    Wubb. Wuff.
    When did I discover that the tall parson was now my guardian? I cannot dissect his motives because I never understood him. Was it perhaps the opening of the Bible that decided my fate? Was he touched by me more than I can think? Had the verger any hand in it? Was I an expiation, not of the one blow, but of numberless fossilized uneases and inadequacies, old sins and omissions that had hardened into impenetrable black stone? Or was I only a forbidden fruit, made accessible but still not eaten? Whatever it was, the result did not seem to do him much good, bring him much peace. Other people understood him no more than I did. They always laughed at him behind his back—might have laughed in his face if he had had less care to be solitary and hidden. Even his name was ridiculous. He was Father Watts-Watt. His choirboys used to think it very funny to ask each other: “Do you know what’s what?” I wish now I could look back down his story as I can look down my own. He could never have been tough as I was tough. Things must have gone right through him.
    So he came fairly often and hung about, trying to talk, trying to find out about me. He would stand, knit his jutting grey eyebrows and swoop a look up under them at the ceiling. All his movements were like that, writhings as though the only source of movement was a sudden pain. There was so much of him, such lengths that you couldsee the motion travel outwards, bend his body sideways, stretch an arm out and end in the involuntary gesture of a clenched fist. Did I like school? Yes, I liked school. Good—bend, stretch, clench. It was like a nonsense story; talking with him was like a nightmare ride on a giraffe. Yes, bashfully, I liked drawing. Yes, I could swim a bit. Yes, I should like to go to the grammar school, ultimately, whenever that was. Yes, yes, yes, agreement but still no communication. Did I go to church? No, I didn’t—at least—Wouldn’t I like to go? Yes, I would like to go.
    Well—balancing movement, bend stretch clench​—​good-bye, my dear child, for the time being.
    And so the world of the ward must have come to an end.
    I have searched like all men for a coherent picture of life and the world, but I cannot write the last word on that ward without giving it my adult testimony. The walls were held up by sheer, careful human compassion. I was on the receiving end and I know. When I make my black pictures, when I inspect chaos, I must remember that such places are as real as Belsen. They, too, exist, they are part of this enigma, this living. They are brick walls like any others, people like any others. But remembered, they shine.
    That, then, is all the infant Samuel I can remember. He trailed no clouds of glory. He was spirit and beauty-proof. He was hard as nails and gave better than he got. Yet I should deceive myself if I refused to recognize something special about the period up to mastoid, up to the end of the ward-world. Let me think in pictures again. If I imagine heaven metaphorically dazzled into colours, the pure white light spread out in a cascade richer than a peacock’stail then I see that one of the colours lay over me. I was innocent of guilt, unconscious of innocence; happy, therefore, and unconscious of happiness. Perhaps the full sheaf of colours is never to be experienced by the human being since if he experiences these colours they must lie in the past or on someone else. Perhaps consciousness and the guilt which is unhappiness go together; and heaven is