I was running again. Upon the roof the sun was white like dead stone faces. Peter sat on the parapet with his legs over the edge. He had put his tennis racquet on the wall beside him and on top of it a tennis ball. He saw me. I felt very tired. I thought he is like a child, this has got to be something extraordinary.
Across the enormous spaces of grey concrete a life such as everyone’s on the edge of the sky. A life to be saved or to go to damnation. Twenty yards of dust and eternity to span it. If I approach him, I thought, he will have no alternative.
Words, Marius’s words, I remembered. “Everybody wants to love their neighbours, of course they do, but they can’t. They don’t know how to set about it.”
He is a child, I thought. I cannot approach him and I cannot leave him. He would then have to jump, to create his eternity. His car is running downhill. And he is facing the wrong way, that is what I have got to tell him, that he is facing the wrong way. I have got to give him eternity. When you jump you do not jump to damnation, that is worse than wreckage, more deathly than the iron in the rusty sun. It is ironical, I thought, that he should have used the word jump. All his life he has been ready for this and now he thinks that he has come to it. He has not, and it is I who have always known this, that if you make your own moments you are facing the wrong way and when you jump facing rightly it has nothing to do with you. It is to do with those who are concerned about you. “It must be something new,” I remembered.
I walked keeping my distance from him and I sat on the parapet at the far corner of the roof. Twenty yards of stonework and the precipice at our feet. I will sit here, I thought, until I have destroyed those spaces. In eternity all spaces are destroyed.
London lay at our feet like the world. A pale grey evening upon the heights of the wilderness. There was an old temptation;—to cast yourself down, to be picked up, to prove that you were a God. And now;—to cast yourself down, never to be picked up, to prove that you are a devil. This is a new temptation.
The people of London like ants on a mound of dust. O world, world, flat round shapeless shape, be loved or not loved but do not ask for everything. Suffer us to have the illusion that we are beyond you. Perhaps after all we can fly.
Peter did not do anything. He was looking at his toes in the evening sun.
O God, God, to destroy those spaces you must destroy time. Let us go back and begin again and then this will not have happened. This is what you have promised, what you have told us is possible. It is only that I must remember, and there is something I must do.
I thought — Perhaps we must all become again as children. Was it not this that we were told?
A sky of violet and an earth of grey and ourselves in between them. Once we were part of them, we spread veins to enclose us, around us and the universe there was a body that was whole. There is nothing new, it is just what is old that has been forgotten. You can always go back, that is what I have known is true, when the car is running downhill there are always trees on the roadside. The trees are all the same, it is only one tree that is needed. We have looked for something permanent, but a moment will do. A tree is eternity. There would be moments if I could remember them. I remembered an evening with the square huge and moonlit when a statue stood folded like the wings of a bird.
Looking downwards, to the ground, I saw Marius step out of the entrance to the building and walk sedately into the middle of the road. He gazed on either side of him and circled slowly like a weathercock. I dared make no sound. He was a tiny figure distorted by the distance. Then he stood still, facing the building, and looked up, and saw us.
We were the three corners of a triangle. I had an extraordinary desire to jump myself. Marius stood with the traffic running past him. I wanted to jump so that there would be communication between the sky and the world. The white light waited. Then Marius raised his arms and shouted, “Peter, Peter, there are always shooting stars!”
His voice came to us clearly as an echo from stone. There were so many memories. Salvation, I thought, and the catching of grapefruits. “Throw him your tennis ball,” I said.
For a while Peter made no move. The spaces were between us. Then he picked up the ball in one hand and the racquet in the other and he threw the ball up into the air and lashed at it with the racquet and the ball shot away into the sky like a star. “He will never catch it,” he said.
“He will,” I said.
Marius began to run. I had never seen him run before. He ran fast and steadily through the raging traffic with a car hooting and skidding at him his long legs wandering a bicyclist lurching and a crowd turned to watch. By the side of the road he stopped, beneath a tree. There he stood while the ball fell for millions and millions of years and then he leaned backwards with his hands clasped in front of him and the ball bounced against a branch of the tree and he caught it as if he were making love.
“There!” I said.
Marius held the ball up so that it was whiter than the evening. There were no more spaces. Then he put the ball in his pocket, turned, and walked away from us. We watched him grow smaller and smaller until he disappeared behind the trees. It was the last time that I saw him in England.
“Romps!” Peter said. “They are still a credible concept.” He had stuck his feet out straight in front of him and was smiling at his knees. “But I am facing the wrong way,” he said. He swung his legs over the parapet and waited there, still smiling. Then he stood up and walked across the roof. He did not look at me. I saw him go through the door and down the steps into the building. He never saw Marius again. I looked down from my height upon the old iron of the world and felt tired. I remembered Annabelle.
On the landing I met Alice. “You?” I said. “Marius telephoned me,” she said. Father Jack opened the door to us and she went through with the furious assurance of a professional. Father Jack was making enquiring faces so I told him, “She is a nurse.”
Peter was not there. Alice had gone through to the bedroom. We could hear her talking to Annabelle. When she came back Father Jack said, “Can I be of any assistance, nurse?”
“I’m not a nurse,” Alice said.
She rang up for a doctor. She took everything into her hands. She appeared to be in a rage that made all other efforts seem trivial. I knew that at the moment there was nothing more to be done about Annabelle.
“Can I help, Alice?”
“By keeping out of the way,” she said.
I could not bear to stay with Father Jack. In his presence I felt an irritation that drowned even my anxiety about Annabelle. I went out into the street to recover my anxiety.
Once before I had stood on the steps of a doorway and there had been nowhere I had wanted to go. Then I had gone nowhere. Now, in the same situation, I chose to go to the right, and went.
The rage that was in Alice seemed to have entered into me. I found, with surprise, that I did not recover my anxiety. I continued to be irritated by the image of Father Jack, by thoughts of the scene in which I had just taken part, by memories of absurdity that seemed to stretch through the whole of my life. I felt as if I dragged behind me a string of tin cans that clattered against my ankles;—cans of falseness and sentimentality and the dregs of everything trivial. There were also, on another string, a trail of responsibilities — the pain of Annabelle, the insanity of Peter, the waste which was myself. It was this that was uppermost, the knowledge of waste. And yet I felt no emotion about it except a determination that it should stop. I jerked savagely at my memory so that the tin cans rattled.
Passing on the corner an old man selling evening papers I saw upon his placard the latest reminder of disaster. I bought a paper and read it as I walked. There was the inevitable news of misery and madness and the fiddling of politicians in the face of death. I found with less surprise that this did not worry me either. I stopped, so that the cans should not divert me, and tried to think what was happening.