The Man Who Wanted to Smell Books

by Elspeth Davie

  ‘Where have you been living all this time then?’ Martin indicated vaguely some distant place on the other side of the forest. He was loath to confess his ignorance of what went on in any other part.

  ‘Well give it a year or two or even less, and you’re going to see a few tidy rows of bungalows going up along here and a broad main road, of course. We’ll see a beauty once the concrete’s down, with lamps and all to come. Obviously it’s going to take longer than the plan. Pedestrian crossings. Stop and Go. Ladies and Gents. Bins. Shelters. Telephones. The lot. Nobody knows where the money comes from or even who wants the things. But they always come in the end, no matter if the talk goes on for months.’

  ‘But I never thought you’d gone so far already,’ said Martin. ‘There’s a crowd back amongst the trees who are still collecting names.’

  ‘There’s always funny folk among the trees,’ said the woodman. ‘What names?’

  ‘People who agree and disagree. It’s all been agreement as far as I can see.’

  ‘Makes not a bit of difference,’ said the other. ‘The whole thing’s settled and done with long ago. Years and years ago.’ He gave a crack of laughter. ‘Surely you didn’t think a huge job like this was going to wait for agreement!’ he exclaimed scornfully. The saws screamed behind him and two great dinosaur cranes lowered their necks, opened their jaws, gulped greedily at a hole in the earth and creaked on. The workman looked sympathetically at the young man’s face. ‘Real brutes, aren’t they?’ He stared at the wood-strewn ground. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘all the bits of good wood round here won’t be wasted. Most of the better stuff will be shifted to factories. They’ll be used for making wooden spoons, toys, chests, tables and what have you. Some of the better chunks go to the monastery up there, so I’ve heard. I believe the monks like making wooden bowls. A good relaxing thing to do between prayers and keeps them out of mischief, I suppose. Though where the mischief comes from on that cold, windswept hill beats me, it really does. It must come from inside, mustn’t it? Well, everyone’s got their own ideas. But there’s something about wood they go for, I believe. It’s natural, you see. Good, clean and natural. But the funny thing about being natural too long – it begins to get unnatural. Yes, all good people are supposed to like wood. The rest of us go for the flashy stuff – the brass, tin, steel and aluminium, and gold and silver, naturally, if you can get your hands on it. Well, I never meddle with things that aren’t my line. Everyone’s got their own ideas. Leave them to get on with it is what I say. I believe they get up in the middle of the night to pray. I couldn’t do that myself though sometimes when I’ve been out with the boys I get up once or even twice, though certainly not to pray. Talking about being unnatural, you look a bit out of this world yourself. Where do you come from?’

  ‘From the other side of the forest.’

  ‘So you’ve never been properly out?’

  ‘Oh yes. I had to, of course,’ said Martin. ‘I went off to school like everyone else. Then I came back.’

  ‘No good,’ said the other. ‘Once you’ve got out, never go back. And you’re still too young to be shocked at changes like the ones around here. Don’t think I don’t detest some things myself. But then I’m far too old to shout and kick about it.’

  ‘I’m going to shout and kick all my life about ugly things,’ said Martin. He added that his father had once taught woodwork in a small school on the far side of the city.

  ‘There, you see!’ exclaimed the woodman. ‘Your father’s a good man. He’s a lover of wood like our friends the monks up there.’

  ‘I don’t believe he ever made bowls,’ said Martin. ‘He made a wheelbarrow once. Mostly it was chests he made. Tables and chests. Years ago he used to make bookcases. But it’s all different now. You’ve got to make them for ornaments, not books – for crinolined ladies, fat cupids and what have you, standing on shallow shelves. Still, he always used good wood. He’s old-fashioned of course, but I think he is a good man.’ He stood for a moment looking into the half-sawed branches above them. Already the tallest tree was lying on the ground with the woodchips and sawdust on top of a tangled heap of shattered twigs and a frenzy of leaves.

  ‘Now you’ll be asking about birds,’ said the woodman, following his eyes. ‘They’ll just have to find other places, won’t they? Just like everything else, like the moths, the bats and butterflies, the hedgehogs, the hares and the foxes. I hope you’re not the sort who thinks it helps to take one bird or bat home out of its misery, while driving your mother round the bend.’

  ‘I’m not an idiot,’ Martin replied.

  ‘I never said so. I believe I’d join you if I could,’ said the man, picking up a great barrow of red earth. ‘Anyway, I’ll see you around.’

  Martin walked slowly back through the forest to his home. He said nothing to his parents of what he’d seen that day or whom he’d talked to. He didn’t often cross the forest after that, and the days passed slowly as usual. Occasionally he wrote a few mediocre verses. His father and mother were delighted. They said that nothing would please them better than that he should become a poet – a good or even a great one. Lots of other parents, they added, would hate this idea. But they would love it. From that moment he wrote no more verse.

  Martin’s father was now in his late sixties and he was glad enough to retire from teaching. It had taken a long time to reach the school by the roundabout bus that circled the forest. The new houses going up on the other side had meant that his classes had become larger and larger. As for his mother, she saw few people. She was becoming frail and rather querulous. She said that trees were her only friends, but it seemed that wood itself was not included. She complained of her husband’s job. He brought in sawdust on his shoes and scattered woodchips around the place. There were, of course, no shops near, but a few large vans were now moving about the place. Because of the growing housing schemes on the far side they carried everything that anyone could possibly wish for in a forest including romantic paperbacks, insect repellent, shoe polish, high-class writing paper and denture cream. Martin dropped all poetry and began to paint a little – studies of trees gesticulating against luminous puffball clouds. Again his parents were overjoyed. There had been painters as well as poets in the family. They took pains to buy him a box of the most expensive paints and a fistful of genuine horsehair brushes. His mother was just about to buy him a voluminous linen smock with pleats down the back and front when he said he had changed his mind. What did he want to do then? He wanted, at this moment, to do nothing. His mother, on the whole, was a patient person. It was her one great virtue, but she made the mistake of showing it day and night. Such patience made her son angry. Two winters later Martin’s mother died of a dangerous flu, and bad conscience was added to his other feelings. The father now confessed to his son that he’d had a quiet but rather a disappointing life. He didn’t enlarge on this, but Martin decided that, though his own life was quiet – quieter than that of any other young man he’d ever known – yet it must never end in patience and disappointment. His father was now over eighty and did not have long to live.

  ‘If it will cheer you, father,’ said Martin one day, ‘I’d like you to know that I’m going to take up painting after all.’ His father was overjoyed. ‘Oh, if only your poor mother were alive to hear it. Your uncle Joe was a painter, and your second cousin – the one in America – called himself a painter, though, in my poor judgement, not a good one. Plates. Teapots and fruit. He tried to be a Cubist, but far too late. That was his mistake, of course. Square apples and grapes like those strange oblong green beads your mother wore. I suppose he was clever. He even managed to get indecency into his painting of pillows. Hard to believe, but there it was, art or no art. I’m afraid it was no art with him. But you – I know you’ve got the right stuff in you to make a painter!’ There was silence for some moments.

  ‘But I won’t be painting pictures, father, so don’t worry,’ said Martin. ‘I mean to be a housepainter. That’s what I�
��ve wanted to be for years.’

  Martin saw that this was another disappointment, but his father was used to these as he’d said, and his life was now short. He said nothing against his son’s ambition – simply gave the whole idea his blessing and only asked that the young man should use only the very best brushes, pails and paints for his trade, that his planks and ladders should be safe and strong and that he should get the highest pay for the job. There had been quite a bit of money in the family, he said, and now it was all his. The father did not live long after this. Martin was surprised and pleased that, so soon after death, his face seemed to change. The expression of quiet patience and disappointment gradually sharpened into a look of strange, peering alertness and expectancy. His son wondered if this might indeed be the sight of heaven in the far distance between close-set trees.

  Martin now tidied up the house ready to sell it. Most people who came into the forest passed it without interest. One day, however, a romantic, middle-aged widow came round to view it. She didn’t care for the cramped, untidy house, but she took an immediate fancy to the young man. This alarmed him. He saw that it was the extraordinary convenience and economy of the arrangement that had struck her. A pleasant middle-aged bachelor living alone could be thrown in with some useful items of furniture – all going dirt cheap. She asked him if he was lonely. He replied that he was not. She asked him if he had always been a lover of trees and forests. He replied that he was now beginning to hope for other things in his life. He was careful not to specify what these things might be in case she would offer them on the spot. She asked what he was going to do now that he was quite alone. He said he was going to paint. The woman said it was one of the most romantic things she had ever heard – a man alone on the edge of a great forest who was setting out to be a great painter. He replied that his painting was probably not the sort she had in mind. When he had learnt the trade he was going to paint the interiors and exteriors of the houses on the other side of the forest. In fact, he intended to buy one himself and start from there.

  Eventually Martin sold his house to a botanist and his wife. He took an immediate liking to them both. He noticed how, after a cursory examination of the place, they kept moving towards the windows and stayed there looking out for a long time. The wife made no mention of measuring the rooms at once for curtains or carpets, and her husband, though he mentioned the creakings and crackings of the place, took no steps to see if all the floorboards were sound. They seemed, in fact, more interested in the scene outside. There was still a great strip of trees beyond the house, but Martin warned them that the scene would soon look very different. Many more houses would certainly go up on the other side. The strips of sunlight between the trees they were looking at now would eventually be cut by paths and even busy roads. They might be staring at an illusion, he added. One day the forest would not exist.

  ‘Well, isn’t everything an illusion?’ said the botanist. ‘We’re looking down, up and sideways into a universe that doesn’t exist in any way we can possibly conceive. But at least we can remember and enjoy the illusion. I’d remember these trees, for instance, even if they disappeared tomorrow – even if they turned overnight into masts and telegraph poles.’ He added that long ago he’d given up the idea of anything in heaven or earth being lasting. The whole thing was totally mysterious, a mind-blowing process of metamorphosis.

  This was a great relief and comfort to Martin. It was as if he could hand over to these benevolent strangers everything that the forest meant to him – the blessing and burden of ancient trees, their strength and fragility in the modern world, the tragedy of their disappearance, and even the unexpected friendliness of those who had put axe and saw to them. Now all these emotions could be left to the incomers. As a duty he mentioned all the things that could be made with the spare wood – cooking spoons, bread-boards, stools, toys, bookends, trays and boxes. ‘I daresay there will soon be a shop over on the other side that would take and sell all of them,’ he added.

  ‘We’re not really interested in what can be made from bits of wood,’ said the woman. ‘My husband simply likes to study trees and everything that grows under them. I’m writing a book myself. This place is ideal for that.’ She mentioned fairy tales.

  ‘I never cared for those,’ said Martin cautiously. ‘I heard them all as a child. Rather cruel and sad they seemed. Nobody ever met the kind and beautiful people passing by in the distance.’

  In a few weeks he had moved out. But the clearing of the house had taken him a long time. He discovered that his parents had been more interesting and even more secretive people than he’d imagined. His mother had kept old letters in a shoe box – letters from some young man written to her when she was a girl. They were unusually personal letters, expressing thoughts and feelings, but never mentioning love. Obviously for her, however, their long sojourn inside a box and hidden, like bulbs, in a dark cupboard, had turned them into love letters – precious things ready for a future flowering that had not materialized. His father had collected only things connected with his work – the tools of his woodwork days along with the designs for things that had never been made. There were also a few bowls that had not come up to the mark and had been scrapped. Either they had not been perfectly round or there was some almost invisible flaw on their surface. Along with these there was one photo of his father. This photo – very spry, very bright-eyed and hopeful – made Martin feel sad. He had only seen a different side. So was there no way the young were ever going to know their hidden parents except as tired and rather desperate people, long past their best, if there had ever been a best?

  One day he abruptly stopped his search into the past. He swept up the place one last time, then sat down and waited for the van that was to take him and his possessions to his new bungalow on the other side. He never turned his head as it drove off and his cottage disappeared like a small ship going down in a green sea.

  It was some time before he got to work on his next place, but meanwhile he put up a prominent sign inviting orders for painting and decorating the neighbouring houses. Their owners were not slow to answer. There had been many changeovers even in the last ten years or so. Martin soon found himself inside rooms where, before painting, he would have to strip and scrape down into the recent past like an archaeologist of wallpaper. He found himself uncovering bizarre ambitions and longings. Carefully and tenderly he peeled away old fears and desires. Sometimes someone’s longing to get away was suddenly revealed by a paper covered with ships, aeroplanes and sleek motorcars. Certain kitchens and dining rooms boasted old wallpapers covered with wine bottles and glasses, tropical fruits hanging in branches, and criss-crossing designs of knives, forks and spoons. Nurseries had wallpapers of bears and dolls, drums and pink bows overlaid by other designs as the children grew older. In some bedrooms he stripped off naked dancing girls with pumpkin breasts. Occasionally he came on a tree paper vainly trying to echo the vanishing forest. He uncovered clouds, stars, moons and flowers. Soon he began to repaper every room. Before long he was ready to paint the outside of certain houses – their doors, windows, railings and garages. He offered a restricted choice of colours to his clients. He told them he used only soft shades of green and blue. He also used purple, brown and black. ‘These are the forest colours,’ he would say to all objections and queries.

  ‘But the forest will soon not exist,’ the bungalow people insisted. ‘And these are houses, not trees. We can’t go back to the monkey stage, can we?’ They had lived a long time beside a dark forest, they said, and now they wanted to take bright yellow to the doors, to outline the railings in brilliant scarlet.

  ‘Do you want your great-grandchildren to remember you when they dig up ugly planks of shiny yellow, when they trip over lethal splinters of scarlet railing?’ said Martin.

  ‘Anyway, nothing matters now,’ said the old pessimist of the district, ‘whether our houses are red, yellow or black. Soon concrete will cover everything. Concrete’s the strongest stuff in the world,�
� he added as he watched a huge machine rolling out the stuff in the distance.

  ‘Don’t you believe it!’ exclaimed Martin. ‘Living trees are stronger than dead concrete, stronger even than all the lifeless metal in the world. Tree roots can pass through cracks as thin as threads. They can burst through steel vaults. No. You’ll never get rid of the trees. Never.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ said the neighbour. ‘Meanwhile we’d better stop theorizing and get on with the painting. I’m not too keen on nature talk. It begins sensibly enough, but ends with cranks knocking their heads together.’

  ‘By the way,’ Martin remarked after a while, ‘are the monks still around? It was said they were keen on wood. Wooden bowls, to be exact.’

  ‘Begging bowls, you mean?’ the other asked suspiciously.

  ‘No, just plain, round wooden bowls. You can get them from the craft shop down there. Natural circles, you understand. Something to do with perfection. It all appeals to the religious outlook, I daresay.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ said the householder. ‘My wife’s got a thing about bowls too. Bowls on every shelf and table, in every corner. Wooden, china, metal, glass – you name it. She collects them wherever she goes. And I can tell you straight off it’s nothing to do with perfection. She’s very far from perfect as she’d be the first to admit. I wouldn’t know about the monks, of course, but I do happen to know my own wife.’

  The road was becoming more used to Martin’s forest colours by the time he came to paint the outside of the bungalows. Even from an aeroplane the houses, on the edge of ground where trees had once grown, looked more at home. They now appeared to grow out of the landscape instead of being stuck on like separate, bright bricks. The saws still screamed amongst the few trees left. The concrete was gradually going down and in some months the road might be ready for heavy traffic. But Martin was thought of as some sort of mediator between city and forest. His large brushes stroked the walls, gates, railings of houses steadily, confidently. Yet people would still stand round to watch and question: ‘Why do you use that dark blue?’