After a few minutes, Jennifer looked anxiously up the stairs.
“We should go and see if he needs help,” she said irritably.
“It’ll be an awful nuisance if he’s lost another one.”
They took a few steps up the short set of stairs and looked down towards the place where they could make out David’s back, hunched behind a seat, the light of the torch glinting between the seating. And it was at that moment, as they stood there, that the young man fell from the layer above—silently, wordlessly, arms flailing as if he were trying to fly, or fend off the ground—
and then disappeared from view.
F O R A B R I E F M O M E N T they stared at each other in mutual disbelief. And then, from below, there came a scream, a woman’s voice, high-pitched; and then a man shouted and a door slammed somewhere.
T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
7
Isabel reached forward and seized Jennifer’s arm. “My God!”
she said. “My God!”
From where he had been crouching, Jennifer’s husband straightened up. “What was that?” he called to them. “What happened?”
“Somebody fell,” said Jennifer. She pointed at the upper circle, at the point where the top layer joined the wall. “From up there. He fell.”
They looked at one another again. Now Isabel moved forward to the edge of the circle. There was a brass rail running along the parapet, and she held on to this as she peered over.
Below her, slumped over the edge of a seat, his legs twisted over the arms of the neighbouring seats, one foot, she noticed, without a shoe, but stockinged, was the young man. She could not see his head, which was down below the level of the seat; but she saw an arm sticking up, as if reaching for something, but quite still. Beside him stood two men in evening dress, one of whom had reached forward and was touching him, while the other looked back towards the door.
“Quickly!” one of the men shouted. “Hurry!”
A woman called out something and a third man ran up the aisle to where the young man lay. He bent down and then began to lift the young man off the seat. Now the head came into view, and lolled, as if loosened from the body. Isabel withdrew and looked at Jennifer.
“We’ll have to go down there,” she said. “We saw what happened. We had better go and tell somebody what we saw.”
Jennifer nodded. “We didn’t see much,” she said. “It was over so quickly. Oh dear.”
Isabel saw that her friend was shaking, and she put an arm about her shoulder. “That was ghastly!” she said. “Such a shock.”
8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Jennifer closed her eyes. “He just came down . . . so quickly.
Do you think he’s still alive? Did you see?”
“I’m afraid he looked rather badly hurt,” said Isabel, thinking, It’s worse than that.
T H E Y W E N T D OW N S TA I R S . A small crowd of people had gathered round the door into the stalls, and there was a buzz of conversation. As Isabel and Jennifer drew near, a woman turned to them and said: “Somebody fell from the gods. He’s in there.”
Isabel nodded. “We saw it happen,” she said. “We were up there.”
“You saw it?” said the woman. “You actually saw it?”
“We saw him coming down,” said Jennifer. “We were in the grand circle. He came down past us.”
“How dreadful,” said the woman. “To see it . . .”
“Yes.”
The woman looked at Isabel with that sudden human intimacy that the witnessing of tragedy permitted.
“I don’t know if we should be standing here,” Isabel muttered, half to Jennifer, half to the other woman. “We’ll just get in the way.”
The other woman drew back. “One wants to do something,”
she said lamely.
“I do hope that he’s all right,” said Jennifer. “Falling all that way. He hit the edge of the circle, you know. It might have broken the fall a bit.”
No, thought Isabel, it would have made it worse, perhaps; there would be two sets of injuries, the blow from the edge of the circle and injuries on the ground. She looked behind her; there T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
9
was activity at the front door and then, against the wall, the flashing blue light of the ambulance outside.
“We must let them get through,” said Jennifer, moving away from the knot of people at the door. “The ambulance men will need to get in.”
They stood back as two men in loose green fatigues hurried past, carrying a folded stretcher. They were not long in coming out—less than a minute, it seemed—and then they went past, the young man laid out on the stretcher, his arms folded over his chest. Isabel turned away, anxious not to intrude, but she saw his face before she averted her gaze. She saw the halo of tousled dark hair and the fine features, undamaged. To be so beautiful, she thought, and now the end. She closed her eyes. She felt raw inside, empty. This poor young man, loved by somebody somewhere, whose world would end this evening, she thought, when the cruel news was broached. All that love invested in a future that would not materialise, ended in a second, in a fall from the gods.
She turned to Jennifer. “I’m going upstairs quickly,” she said, her voice lowered. “Tell them that we saw it. Tell them I’ll be back in a moment.”
Jennifer nodded, looking about her to see who was in charge.
There was confusion now. A woman was sobbing, one of the women who must have been standing in the stalls when he came down, and she was being comforted by a tall man in an evening jacket.
Isabel detached herself and made her way to one of the staircases that led up to the gods. She felt uneasy, and glanced behind her, but there was nobody around. She climbed up the last few stairs, through one of the archways that led to the steeply racked 1 0
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h seating. It was quiet, and the lights suspended from the ceiling above were dimmed in their ornate glass bowls. She looked down, to the edge over which the boy had fallen. They had been standing almost immediately below the point at which he had dropped, which enabled her to calculate where he must have been standing before he slipped.
She made her way down to the parapet and edged along the front row of seats. Here was the brass rail over which he must have been leaning before, and there, down on the ground, a programme. She bent down and picked it up; its cover, she noticed, had a slight tear, but that was all. She replaced it where she had found it. Then she bent over and looked down over the edge. He must have been sitting here, at the very end of the row, where the upper circle met the wall. Had he been further in towards the middle, he would have landed in the grand circle; only at the end of the row was there a clear drop down to the stalls.
For a moment she felt a swaying vertigo, and she closed her eyes. But then she opened them again and looked down into the stalls, a good fifty feet below. Beneath her, standing near to where the young man had landed, a man in a blue windcheater looked upwards and into her eyes. They were both surprised, and Isabel leant backwards, as if warned off by his stare.
Isabel left the edge and made her way back up the aisle between the seats. She had no idea what she had expected to find—if anything—and she felt embarrassed to have been seen by that man below. What must he have thought of her? A vulgar onlooker trying to imagine what that poor boy must have seen during his last seconds on this earth, no doubt. But that was not what she had been doing; not at all.