G. (6 page)

In the summer of 1893 there was a drought for three months. When at last it rains in a great storm, he runs out and the earth smells of meat.

On his hands is the smell of horse and harness. Its components derive from leather, saddle soap, sweat, hooves, horsehair, horse breath, grass, oats, mud, blankets, saliva, dung and the smell of various metals when moisture has condensed upon them.

He brings one of his hands to his face to savour the smell. He has noticed that sometimes a trace of it lingers until the evening—even when he hasn’t ridden since early morning.

The horse and harness smell is the antithesis of the cowshed smell. Each can only be properly defined by reference to the other. The
shed smell means milk, cloth, figures of women squatting hunched up and small against the cow flank, liquid shit, mulch, warmth, pink hands and udders almost the same colour, the absolute absence of secrecy and the names of the cows: Fancy, Pretty, Lofty, Cloud, Pie, Little-eyes.

The horse and harness smell is associated for him with the eminent nature of his own body (like suddenly being aware of his own warmth), with pride—for he rides well and his uncle praises him, with the hair of his pony’s mane and with his anticipation of a man’s world.

He knows some of the terms of this world but he believes that all of them refer to something which nobody ever mentions. He assumes that the men around him have, for their own reasons, a need for secrecy comparable to his own. When he enters their world—and follows Captain Elwes’ hounds—he will learn their secrets.

Between the ages of two and five the boy has three governesses. The last one is called Miss Helen.

In the schoolroom in the wing of the farm furthest from the kitchen and the yard, there are no men; there is only the boy. He is sitting at the high desk, his feet dangling in the air, reading out loud. She is in an armchair which she has turned round so that she can gaze out of the window.

When it seems that her attention is entirely taken up by what she can see through the window, he deliberately makes a mistake so as to re-attract her attention. Sometimes his mistakes are unintentional.

… all thrush summer the birds were singing.

Thrush?

Yes, the speckly bird.

Thrush summer?

She gets up from the chair, smooths the front of her dress where it
is pleated round her tiny waist and comes behind him to look at the book.

All through summer. Thrush indeed!
OUGH
not
RUSH
.

She laughs. He laughs and in laughing throws his head back against her dress.

It was a good mistake, a thrush is a sort of bird.

But not a sort of preposition.

Falling in love at five or six, although rare, is the same as falling in love at fifty. One may interpret one’s feelings differently, the outcome may be different, but the state of feeling and of being is the same.

A pre-condition is necessary for a five-year-old boy to fall in love. He must have lost his parents or, at least, lost any close contact with them, and no foster-parents should have taken their place. Similarly, he must have no close friends or brothers or sisters. Then he is eligible.

Being in love is an elaborate state of anticipation for the continual exchanging of certain kinds of gifts. The gifts can range from a glance to the offering of the entire self. But the gifts must be gifts: they cannot be claimed. One has no rights as a lover—except the right to anticipate what the other wishes to give. Most children are surrounded by their rights (their right to indulgence, to consolation, etc.): and so they do not and cannot fall in love. But if a child—as a result of circumstances—comes to realize that such rights as he does enjoy are not fundamental, if he has recognized, however inarticulately, that happiness is not something that can be assured and promised but is something that each has to try to find for himself, if he is aware of being essentially alone, then he may find himself anticipating pure, gratuitous and continual gifts offered by another and the state of that anticipation is the state of being in love. You may ask: but what does he have to offer in exchange? The boy, like a man, offers himself—not altogether impossibly. What is impossible, or at least very improbable, is that his beloved will ever recognize either his offer or his anticipation for what they are.

What—he asks—is a preposition?

A preposition is part of grammar. It’s always in front of a noun and it tells you what the noun is doing.

But—you protest (as she too would protest, with vaguer words)—a boy of five is not sexually developed and the basis of falling in love is sexual.

Every morning he hears her washing in her bedroom. Every morning he considers entering her room and surprising her. He could enter on the excuse of being frightened or of some fabricated need, but to do so would be to appeal, to claim as a child: and because he is in love with her, his lover’s pride prevents this.

At night in bed, alone, he examines his body part by part to discover the source of the mystery which inflames him. (Her presence, as now when she is standing behind him and he still has his head against her dress, makes his heart beat faster and his limbs feel weak, as after a bath that is too hot.) He examines his nose, his ears, his armpits, his nipples, his navel, his anus, his toes. Finally he arrives at his erect penis, which, he already knows, will afford him a half-answer. He caresses it to bring on the waves of familiar sweet pleasure. The frequency of the waves increases until suddenly they turn to pain. He categorizes the pleasure as a good pain because the only other sensations he knows which approach the intensity of this one are indeed pains.

Can we do some singing, he asks.

Unlike his previous governess, Miss Helen, who is unusually lazy, appears to have no strict programme for the lessons she gives to the boy. They do whatever suggests itself. Instead of having three distinct and formal lessons, they pass the morning together. For the boy this establishes a kind of equality between them. It allows her to moon.

She goes to the piano and sits down on the round stool that can twirl round like a roundabout.

Let me turn you, he says, let me turn you.

From behind her he puts a hand on either hip and pushes. She lifts her feet off the ground so that her shoes disappear beneath her skirts. Slowly she revolves.

He has a face like a monkey, darling, but with deep dark eyes. He’s a funny little fellow, he really is. He keeps on looking at you and in the end you have to turn away. I’ve no idea what goes on in his head. In two days’ time she is going to London for a week.

He has noticed (and considers it unique to her) that her clothes always feel warm.

She puts her feet down.

What would your uncle say if he could see us now?

He never comes to this end of the house. And if he did, he would come on his horse and look through the window.

Involuntarily she glances towards the window.

Let me turn you again.

No.

The no is almost petulant.

Then sing your song, he says, the one I always like.

Which one do you mean?

The one about Helen, your song.

She laughs and touches the side of his head.

Anybody might think that was the only one I could sing.

Her voice is thin, not dissimilar from a child’s. When she is singing, it seems to him that they are the same size and a well-matched couple. He no longer listens to the words of the song (‘I would I were where Helen lies …’) partly because he knows them too well and partly because he does not believe in them. The words thus discounted, he hears her singing her song, in the same sense as a bird sings its song. Whilst she sings, he might be asking her: Helen, will you marry me? And whilst she sings, she might be answering: Yes. But he would not believe it, because he is fully aware that in consideration of everything in the world, except themselves, it is impossible.

Her eyes are slightly lowered, as though she were reading music instead of playing by heart. Her rather heavy eyelids, half covering her eyes, are smooth, rounded and without a fold. Once he came upon her asleep in the hammock at the top of the lawn, and there was a fly on her face.

She imagines herself singing lightly and sweetly ‘her’ song to the boy she has been employed to look after, being overseen by Mr John Lennox, prospective Liberal candidate for Ross-on-Wye, and
then his coming up to her and saying: I had not dreamt that amongst all your other gifts and accomplishments you had such a sweet voice.

The mystery which inflames him and at night in bed stiffens his penis leads the boy to ask a number of questions. But the questions are asked in a mixed language of half-words, images, movements of the hands and gestural diagrams which he makes with his own body.

Thus, the following are the crudest translations.

Why do I stop at my skin?

How do I get nearer to the pleasure I am feeling?

What is in me that I know so well and nobody else yet knows?

How do I let somebody else know it?

In what am I—what is this thing in the middle of which I have found myself and which I can’t get out of?

He is convinced that by means of the same mixed language in which he asks these questions, she can answer them. All the formal questions he asks her in the schoolroom and which she answers (What makes rain? What does a wolf really eat? etc.) are a mere preparation for this.

Her hands on the keyboard. Pale hands with thin fingers, and very short nails. On Sundays she wears white gloves: when they walk back from church he takes her hand. He is fascinated by an old fascination: her fingers touch the keys in two very different ways. Either they touch them so lightly that no sooner have they touched them than they desist and fly on; or else they descend heavily upon them, pressing the keys down and keeping them down, so that he can see the unpolished sides of the adjacent keys. It is then as though she forces her fingers through the piano. The last note dies away.

Now you play and I will sing for you.

What do you want to sing?

I’ll sing your song back to you.

Beyond the age of six or seven it is very unlikely for a boy to fall in love—at least until adolescence. He knows too many people. The world-that-is-not-himself begins to become multiple, to separate out into many different people, any one of whom may confront him as somebody different from himself. When he is five this may not yet have happened.

Lacking parents, he is still searching for one single person to represent all that he is not, to confront him as his other half and his opposite. If the person he finds is entirely distinct from him—in experience, in role, in background, in personal interests, in age, in sex, if the person is, in the most extensive sense of the word, a stranger to him and yet is continually and intimately with him, and if, in addition to all this, she is pretty and nubile, then he is liable to fall in love.

You may still insist that effective sexual passion is missing. You may present his naked five-year-old body to prove your argument. (Twice a week in his bath he offers the proof himself to his beloved.) But what little he lacks physically, he makes up for metaphysically. He senses or feels that she—by being all that is opposite and therefore complementary to him—can make the world complete for him. In adults sexual passion reconstitutes this sense. In a five-year-old it does not have to be reconstituted: it is still part of his inheritance.

He begins to sing, regardless of the words, intently watching her fingers on the keys. He takes the opportunity of stepping closer and resting his cheek on her shoulder.

Miss Helen is soon replaced by a tutor.

The boy seeks no explanation and is offered none. He is used to accepting decisions as indisputable facts. He has no sense of any ultimate authority residing in any one person: and consequently the idea of appealing against decisions does not arise.

With his ear to the bark, he listens to the tree. He has never yet dared to listen to a dead tree. There are quite distinct categories in his own mind into which he fits trees. Ones he likes and ones he does not like (without reason). Ones that are too easy to climb. Ones that frighten him a little to climb. Ones with a view at the top and ones without. There are also more complicated categories. Trees are alive but not alive as animals are. What is the difference? First, the tree is more accessible. Second, the tree is more mysterious. Third, the tree is immovable. Fourth, the tree can hide him. If he carves on the bark of a tree, he does not believe that the tree feels pain. If a large branch is lopped off there is neither the sound nor the smell of pain. Nevertheless when he is pressed against the bark of a tree, it feels alive to his own skin to a degree that is more comprehensive than his categorical reasoning. When he touches an animal, the animal’s will intervenes. There is a tree which, when he is as high as he dare climb, he kisses. Always in the same place.