My Last Duchess

by Iain Crichton Smith

  “I am afraid,” the uncle had said amiably after a while—he had, against Mark’s better judgment taken them out to the sort of classy hotel where the manager would turn out a diner unless he was wearing a tie and had ordered among other things a fine white wine which Mark didn’t like—”I am afraid I am all for apartheid,” and had gone on to tell a story about taking a camera off at the customs, only to be stopped by an obstreperous native official who had insisted on seeing how it was used, thus holding up a crowd of people.

  “They are really pretty childish, you know,” he had said comfortably, his white shirt glittering in the light. (Mark was wearing a yellow polo-necked jersey but so far no-one had come to put him out.) A lot of the time the uncle had kept up a running badinage with the initially aloof waitress who had unbent enough to tell them something about her life, an autobiography which Mark deplored. The gift of a pound to her at the end seemed to Mark rather excessive though perhaps it had been related to the free view the uncle got of her thighs when she was bending over an adjacent table arranging the cutlery. Everything about that night made him angry, the affluent carelessness of the uncle, the obvious enjoyment Lorna took in his company, the in-jokes between the two of them, the ease with which the uncle ordered the food and knew exactly what he wanted.

  “It’s all very well for people like you to talk,” Mark had said heatedly, “But, after all, that country doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to the Africans themselves. That’s what you seem to forget. What god-given right have you to go over there and milk these people of everything they have?”

  The uncle—a large smiling man who spooned trifle into his mouth with the greatest pleasure and delight—had continued to eat for some time without answering and then had said:

  “Tell me, do you yourself mix with the ‘lower classes’?”

  Lorna had laughed: “Of course he doesn’t. He doesn’t mix with anybody. Not anybody and this is true. He mixes only with himself.” It didn’t matter what she wore, she always looked as if she were dressed in a painter’s smock.

  “That has nothing to do with it,” said Mark heatedly. “I don’t take anything away from the lower classes. I don’t limit their freedom. They are allowed equal education which they aren’t in African countries.”

  The uncle remained infuriatingly silent for a while as if he were wondering how anyone could put forward such ridiculously naive arguments, saying in the interval that he hoped the conversation wasn’t boring Lorna. Then he said carelessly:

  “Of course you know they are quite ineducable. Please believe me, I have been among them. When I went out there I was just as liberal as you. You’re not the only one who reads the Statesman, you know. We all do, some of us for fun. However, experience taught me differently. They are quite unable to pick up anything. That’s why their planes are being blown out of the sky by the Israelites, for instance. Now there is a race I admire.”

  “Just like me,” said Lorna, “absolutely unmechanical. Do you know, Uncle Edward, that I had the most hellish time with the cooker and Mark here wasn’t much better.”

  “We all know,” said Mark furiously (he always preferred to trade more in ideas than in facts) “how the educational budget is distributed.”

  “You know it from biased sources,” said the uncle wiping his cleanshaven chin with a napkin. “You haven’t been there so you can’t know. Please don’t think I’m being heavy handed, only realistic. Their minds work differently from ours. Now don’t think that I deduce from this that we are superior to them: I’m not saying that at all. All I’m saying is that they’re different. Shall I tell you a story? Once they were issued with wheelbarrows. And do you know what they did? They went about carrying them on their heads. They used to say: things were easier here before the white man came. And that’s what our friend Wilson calls the white heat of the technological revolution.” He laughed loudly and pleasantly and infectiously so that two men sitting silently by themselves turned and looked at them, as if wishing that they could join in the conversation.

  “You shouldn’t laugh at them,” said Lorna. “I know that you taught me horse riding but you shouldn’t laugh at them. I hope you’re going to stay the night but you mustn’t laugh at them.”

  But the uncle hadn’t stayed the night though his intention had at first been precisely this. In fact, he had decided to sell his farm and go abroad again.

  “I’m going to make a gesture,” he said. “I’m going to Rhodesia.”

  “Oh,” said Mark, coldly abandoning him.

  “Yes, that’s what I’m going to do. I believe in my principles. In any case the climate over there is better and I can afford it.” He had also insisted on paying the bill which had been rather a large one. All in all, it hadn’t been a successful evening, Mark not liking the uncle at all, mainly because of his large easy confidence and especially because of the cards which he carried in his wallet with his name, address, and telephone number.

  “You like it here?” he had said to Lorna. She had looked at him for a long time and then said, “Yes, uncle, I do. It’s beautiful.” There was a haunting quality in the admission which had caused the uncle to sigh briefly and then say:

  “I remember a long time ago you said the same about London. You were always on about these homosexual artists who bought flowers for each other. Fabulous was the word you used, I believe.”

  “Yes,” Lorna said quietly, “That was the word I used.”

  “I see. In that case, perhaps I could buy you another drink before we part for a while.”

  But Mark wanted to go home, and Lorna had followed with her eyes the large easy uncle making his way to the lift as if she would never see him again.

  “He tried to teach me horse riding,” she said to Mark as he thought rather irrelevantly, “he was very patient. I never did learn but he did try to teach me.”

  That night Lorna had been very distant and quiet as if blaming him for getting rid of the uncle of whom she appeared so very fond.

  “He doesn’t think much of a simple lecturer,” said Mark.

  “Oh, he’s got a great respect for learning,” said Lorna, pulling off her stockings, “And he reads a lot. His wife’s dead, you know. He thought a lot of her.” She looked pale in the half darkness of the room, like a fish in the shadowed part of a stream.

  “Anyway, your book will be good and they’ll make you a senior lecturer or something fabulous like that. Then you can teach Eliot all the time.”

  “Here? I don’t want to stay here.”

  “So you say. But you’ve been here a long time.”

  “I should have thought that you would have been the last to want to stay here,” said Mark petulantly, opening the window slightly and feeling the fat scent of the flowers on the night air. “I haven’t been anywhere.”

  “Yes, but that was necessity,” she said slipping her dress over her head.

  Suddenly she came over and put her arms around him without saying anything, clutching him tightly, almost like a child, her lips cold and dry.

  But he was still angry about the uncle: “Damn fool,” he muttered. And then gaily, “He’ll end up with a white moustache and a red face, like all of them.”

  “Of course you know that he’s got an M.C.” she said, her voice muffled. “He won it in Libya, I believe. I can’t remember it very well but it was to do with getting someone out of a burning tank. Mind you, he used to drink a lot after he came home from the war.”

  “He missed the killing, I suppose.”

  “No. It wasn’t that. He always used to tell my father that he should make more of himself instead of living off his money. Daddy inherited a lot of money, you know. But he’s never done a stroke in his life. He goes about like the Duke of Windsor, very bored, but always telling everyone he’s happy.”

  “And does your mother look like the Duchess of Windsor?”

  “My mother is very beautiful. She once asked me if I had been deflowered yet. That was when I was sixteen and she seem
ed disappointed when I said I hadn’t. She thought it was unhealthy or something. Very hygienic, my mother.” She laughed loudly and gaily.

  “He’s a very efficient man, my uncle,” she continued. “He runs his farm like clockwork. Everything he tries he does well. I envy that in people, don’t you?”

  “No,” said Mark unnecessarily loudly, “It depends what they’re doing, I’d say.”

  They went to bed. She came closer to him, putting her arms around him and he was suddenly flooded by an extraordinary happiness and desire which left him almost weak.

  “You were supposed to die for us,” said Mark to himself looking out at the Christmas tree. “You were supposed to save us. But it’s no good, she took the ring from her finger.” The hot water wheezed in the pipes.

  After the snow and the shivering he thought of the brown land where Christ had walked in his long white robe and long hair, blessing, gathering disciples, the blue sea never far away. He imagined Frith’s son saying, “Educate. Everything is possible,” and Christ carrying a wheelbarrow on his head. The meek head—with the weight of the inexpressible—bowed before the Pilate to whom all things are expressible and that which was inexpressible did not exist.

  On and off flashed the light of the Christmas tree as on and off flashed the images in his mind. High up in the night he eventually slept, stretching his arm out now and again in his sleep and finding nothing, and the embrace of nothing teaching him the new habit of not stretching out. Ahead of him the light flickered on and off, throughout the night.

  To rise in the morning involved the most terrible effort: this must be, he thought, what it must be like to wake in a capsule, far from earth, all communications gone. Connected to reality by his watch which said eight o’clock, he struggled into his clothes as if against a high wind. Deep inside him a negative star was pulsing destructive signals: he was tuned into anti-matter. It kept saying—that jagged star—”Lie down. There is no point. You have nowhere to go. You are yourself alone and that is nothing.” His eyes seemed to be, without knowing it, searching the room for a powder puff, a compact, anything that might speak of her but there was only alien impersonality. The pulsing star seemed to be whispering death in his ear. To stand upright was to be like the first man, descended from the companionable trees, balancing himself in a morning without promise.

  “I must eat,” he thought, “that is what I must do.” He shaved and dressed quickly and went into the dining room for breakfast which was served by a boy with long hair in off-white stained uniform. He passed the night porter’s place where there were newspapers on sale and he realised that he hadn’t read a newspaper for a week. He could do without all that. What he had to do was survive. With a frozen face he ate his porridge—which Lorna could not abide—and his ham and egg, cramming it down against all inclination. Then he paid his bill and left the hotel with his orange case. It was still very cold. Where now? he wondered. He felt he had to polish his shoes and descended the steps to the station again where there was no brown shoe polish, only black. He passed the bookstall—where they were advertising Updike’s Couples—without buying anything, and at the ticket office bought a ticket for the northern city at which he had attended university. An irate ticket collector shunted him to the right platform and he sat down in a corner seat in one of the leading carriages. A soldier in khaki passed the window and a phantom memory of barracks and cold water and targets jagged his mind for a moment. Once he had been travelling on a train—a sergeant in the Intelligence Corps—when he had got into conversation with a young ATS girl whom he had on the spur of the moment asked to go out with him. “Phone me,” she had said, “I work on the switchboard.” As if she hadn’t believed that he would go out with her. But he hadn’t phoned her after all.

  A woman as small as a toy sat down on the seat opposite him. The train jolted backwards and forwards but did not start. He looked dully out of the window at the landscape of grey stone, hugging himself in the corner because of the cold. The train moved and objects which before had been here were now there. He closed his eyes.

  “Would you like a Victory V?” said the little woman, offering him a glazed red packet. “To keep off the cold.”

  He took it, snuggling more deeply into his corner. “Have you escaped the flu?” she said perhaps noticing some signs of ravage and recent wreckage in his pale face. He heard himself saying that he had indeed escaped the flu and asking her if she had.

  “Oh I’m just after an operation,” she said. “For my veins, you see. The doctor said I’d be dead else. The blood wasn’t getting through, you see. We live in Glasgow—my man and me—near Castlemilk. Perhaps you’ve heard of Castlemilk? When I say ‘Castlemilk’ people stare. But we don’t stay in Castlemilk itself. My son now, he hates Glasgow—he’s a carpenter by trade—he gets out of it any chance he can. Loves the country, you understand. My neighbour—that’s Mrs. Mason—she thought I was going to die, honest.” The little woman laughed delightedly. “It was a big operation, I can tell you. The doctor said I could have passed away. They had to open up my veins. But I feel great now. I told the kids—that’s the grandchildren—I would be jigging at their Christmas Party and I will too, I feel so great. Before, I couldn’t drag myself about. I was in a chair all the time. What sort of life was that? So when I got the chance I took it.”

  Mark stared at her as if at a being from another world, not speaking but quite glad to hear her talk.

  “I go up there every Christmas. There’s nothing like Christmas with your own folk, that’s what I always say. My daughter, she’s married to a baker up there and they’ve got two lovely children, you wouldn’t see the beat of them anywhere. I’ve got presents for them in the case up there. My son now, he doesn’t like the city—he likes the country. But my husband, you wouldn’t get him out of Glasgow. Born and bred there, as you might say. He wouldn’t come with me, says he’s got the sciatica. But he was worried about me for a while there. It was touch and go, that operation. But I’m all right now. See, if someone was suffering like that and said to me: ‘Should I take that operation?’ I’d say ‘yes’ any time. What’s the use of living in a chair?”

  Lorna must have missed those luxuries, those careless days of lying in the sun on a deck chair, or perhaps, if she had been willing to surrender the disorientation of new frontiers, new parties, new hotels, the shifting orphanage of her travels since clearly her parents were always elsewhere, then she might have expected him to give more than he had done as compensation for that surrender. Whole areas of her conversation were curiously empty as if she knew nothing of ordinary things, as if her knowledge were of other countries, different schools—she had been to so many—horses, nannies and so on.

  “What did I do to you, Lorna?’ he thought with agony, listening again to the little woman in order to muffle that terrible inner voice.

  The woman’s words turned interminably in time with the train’s wheels. “Of course what can you expect in Castlemilk? But I don’t like the way respectable people look at you. There are good people in Castlemilk too. But, as I was saying, they’ve organised this party especially for me. I’m sure it will go well. Say what you like though, the Glasgow people are warm-hearted. My neighbour (Mrs. Mason I was telling you about) made the dinner for Jack every day, Jack’s my husband, my son goes to the canteen. Now, wasn’t that nice of her? It’s not everybody would do that. But, as I always say, a good neighbour is worth her weight in gold. And Mrs. Mason has never said an unkind word about me, I know that for a fact. But I’ll never forget her face, the day I went for my operation. She thought I was going to die. And the day I came home I danced a waltz with her. What a sight we were, her with flour all over her, she does a lot of baking, you see. Nothing from the shops for Mrs. Mason.”

  The little woman laughed merrily and her laughter was like a bell that one might hear tinkling on a Christmas tree. And Mark remembered:

  “The door bell rang twice the week before Lorna … and I went to the door and ther
e was no-one there. If I had been superstitious …”

  Sometimes, before, he had heard the bell in the night but this was in the early evening around eight o’clock and Guy Fawkes Night and Hallowe’en were past. Lorna had thought it might be some pranksters but he had rushed out quickly the second time and he had heard no sound of retreating feet.

  He leaned his cheek against the cold glass of the window pane and saw slag heaps, foundries, tall chimneys, wheeling past under a red industrial sky. On a pitch not far from the railway he saw some boys—in striped green and white jerseys and white shorts—playing football. The air seemed absolutely motionless, the cold zero reducing reality to a painting. He felt no hunger: he felt nothing, exactly as one is when anaesthetised by the dentist and it is only much later that one feels the pain and the red gash where the tooth was. His eyes noted objects but asked for no reasons. The little woman had raised her feet to the seat opposite and had gone to sleep as the train rolled on. The lines in her face suggested suffering, a piece of paper that had been creased. As he looked at the face it suddenly smoothed itself out and he saw it as one might see the face on a Roman coin, aloof and cold and serene.

  So the train rolled on northwards passing a landscape ever more and more bleak. Sometimes they passed by the sea, looking down sheer cliffs and across at limitless cold waters where seagulls circled in enormous spaces. Here and there a lighthouse could be seen and here and there small villages.

  When they were preparing to leave the carriage—after reaching their destination—the little woman said:

  “Come and see us if you’ve got time. The address is 36 Claremont Street. You’ll remember it won’t you? Excuse me for mentioning it.”

  Then she was off briskly looking for her son and daughter in law. “36 Claremont Street, 36 Claremont” he repeated to himself as he passed the bookstall and emerged into the air. This was the echoing station at which he had arrived twenty-five years before, at the age of seventeen, having travelled by slow train from bare land to rich, from ragged croft to geometrical farm, seeing from the window in the autumn light here and there a red tractor moving across rich black loam. It was a rich wide land with carefully constructed mathematical farms very different from the stony land from which he had come. There was a feeling of space and fertility, a lack of constriction and yet at the same time a knowledge of boundaries. Man had really conquered this land, man was making use of it for himself. There was no sign of the sea, only the rich inner spaces of a country, controlled and directed, very different from the scattered stony landscape which had been his and which had entered his heart.