Free Fall Read Online Free PDF Page B

to go to the infant school and she was to convoy me. In the morning I would be out first by the gutter waiting for her to come out of her door. She would appear and the world would fill with sunlight. She would call and I would rush into her collection. She cleaned me up at the tap, took me by the hand, talking all the time and led me out past the “Sun”, past the window of the lady with theleathery-green plant and into the street. The school was three hundred yards away or a little more, along, across round a corner, across the main road and along a pavement. We stopped to examine everything and Evie was much more interesting than school in her explanations. Most of all I remember the antique shop. What must have been the firm’s name was displayed in huge gold letters on a sloping sill just below the window and my nose. I can only remember one golden W. Perhaps I had reached that letter in the alphabet.
    There were some ornate candlesticks in that shop. They stood on a gold-gilded table and each one held up a dunce’s cap as our alarm clock held up the umbrella. Evie explained that you had only to turn the dunce’s cap over, pour in the melted wax and it would burn for ever. Evie had seen them doing so in her cousin’s house in America—not a house exactly, a palace, rather. She elaborated the house all the way down the road and when I was set before a piece of paper with crayons at my side, I drew her house—her cousin’s house, a huge downstairs and a huge upstairs; and the dunce’s caps burning with flames of gold.
    There was a little spoon among some litter, a spoon which was much longer than a spoon should be. Evie explained that they’d given a man poison with this by mistake, thinking it was medicine. He had bitten the spoon with his teeth and started to jerk about on the bed. Then they realized of course that they had given him poison instead of friar’s balsam but it was too late. They had pulled and pulled but the spoon wouldn’t come out. Three of them had held him down and three had pulled as hard as they could but the spoon only stretched and stretched—then Evie was running away down the pavement,knees hitting each other, heels kicking out; she was twitching and giggling and horrified, and I was running after her, crying Evie! Evie!
    There was a suit of armour in the dim back of the shop. Evie said her uncle was inside the suit. Now this was demonstrably ridiculous. You could see through the suit where the pieces did not quite join. Yet I never questioned that he was there for my faith was perfect. I simply felt that he was an unusual creature with all those holes in him; and this may have been because he was a duke. Evie explained that he was waiting there until he could rescue her. She had been stolen by the people she lived with—she was really a princess and one day he would come out and take her away in his car. She described the car, with frosted and chased glass, and I recognized it. The people would cheer, said Evie; but I knew I should stand on the pavement and the hair-ribbon would vanish as the white cap of swan’s feathers had vanished.
    Evie must have watched my lifted and trusting eyes for a flicker of doubt; because soon her stories took wings to themselves. I know now that I was privileged to see a soul spread out before me; was introduced to one of our open secrets. But my innocent credulity was a condition of the sights so that I learned nothing. She was, she confided to me, she was sometimes a boy. She told me that, but first she swore me to a secrecy which I violate now for the first time. The change, she said, was sudden, painful, and complete. She never knew when, but then pop! out it came and she had to stand up in the bog— had to, she explained, she couldn’t do anything else. She had to pee the way I did. What was more, when she changed she could pee higher up the wall than any of the boys in ourRow, see? I saw and was appalled. To think of Evie, putting off the