My Last Duchess

by Iain Crichton Smith

  “Let me to my own self be hereafter kind.”

  Another dealt with the opposite situation; that is, a wife who had been involved in a tempestuous life and had imported into the husband writer’s quiet retreat disorderly gales from the world outside.

  Sections of the former book were masterly in every way and looked as if they were autobiographical. The prose became luminous with pain as the novelist described the writer’s wanderings through midnight streets in a plague of neon.

  Mark found that he had really to concentrate on his book for he had fallen into bad habits of superficial reading in the past few years and he had to learn to read again. When he came home from college—which he began to feel as an interruption to his real work—he would start work in his room while Lorna watched TV or occupied herself in some other way that he didn’t investigate. In Mark there was a streak of the dissatisfied creative writer. He knew that he could never write a poem or a novel or a play but he felt that he ought to be able to write this particular book, though he was frustrated by not getting in the local public library—run by a dim old man on the point of retirement—the literature that he wanted.

  It never entered his head to wonder what Lorna did when he was in college. He simply thought that she would be reading the Woman’s Own or cooking or watching TV. It was as if she had taken the place of his landlady. But she blossomed too in those early days so that he felt jealous of her. She learned to mow the lawn at the back of the house and she would tell him stories of people she had met when she was out shopping. She had bought herself a bicycle which she would ride on the good summer days instead of taking the car. She would drink coffee in the mornings by herself in a restaurant. But he himself was growing more and more discontented. He felt that something was expected of him that he couldn’t provide, that some compensation ought to be made for what she had given up, for instance more companionship. But at the same time he was occupied with his book and felt that what he was doing was useful and likely to have results, though he wasn’t very clear what these would be. Now and again she would get letters from her relatives but he would never ask to see them though it turned out that some were from her parents. At one time they were in South Africa rooting for apartheid, at another they were in South America.

  “She likes nothing better than night clubs,” said Lorna to him once. “Perfectly useless you know” (this she would say with her mouth full of rollers from changing the curtains) “but fabulously beautiful.” Unlike this apparently perfect physical being, Lorna had mastered the domestic machinery all right but she was still liable to break things. After getting the hang of a dishwasher or a washing machine she would seem to look to him for approval or praise but he was nearly always preoccupied and never noticed this.

  She got on marvellously well with strangers. On summer nights they seemed to come closer together when they would walk along the shore and watch the nostrils of dogs twitching alertly as their owners held the rainbow coloured ball back a second before releasing it. She too wanted a dog but he didn’t like dogs and so they didn’t get one. On such summer nights she would sit on one of the green benches and immerse herself in conversation with a middle aged women who always haunted the shore and who was telling stories about her son who was a priest “across the water” and her daughter “who was going in for a teacher”. Lorna would delight in the quaint talk and imitate the accent, “It’s a rer day init?” Sometimes she would take her easel with her and place it on the strip of grass where people usually sat on their wasp striped deckchairs. There she would sit for hours, tongue protruding, her skin turning blacker and blacker in the hot sun, drawing them all, dogs, children, adults running among the blue waves. At times she would be completely dissatisfied and would throw the painting away, watching it drift out to sea. At others she would be quite happy with it. A recurring motif was a black bird that appeared in one corner of the picture. When he asked her about it she told him about the white bird that appears in the later work of Braque. Not that she understood what the bird was there for: her attitude to painting was purely instinctive. Mark’s own knowledge of painting was confined to Picasso and Goya and Van Gogh. Once or twice he suggested that they visit the Art Gallery in the city but she wouldn’t go. In fact she wouldn’t go to the city at all.

  But on the whole he was much happier than when he was in digs. He began to grow more and more immersed in his thesis. The prospect of leaving the town took on a sharper reality and he began to withdraw mentally from the college. He saw now quite clearly that the girls were lumpish and uninspired: their work seemed naive, their ambitions petty. Similarly, he found Wilkinson and the rest of the staff mediocre. He began to notice more and more clearly some of the former’s habits. Wilkinson would never engage in a conversation about literature with him, and if an argument appeared to be developing he would become aloof in a silly manner. Miss Diamond would talk about Wilkinson behind his back (which Mark would never do) but when he came into the room she was affable again.

  Miss Diamond was tall and thin and wore rimless glasses. Her favourite poet was Tennyson. One day Mark was astonished to hear that she still had her university notes and she referred to university professors as if they were gods from Olympus. He once had a discussion with her about “The Lady of Shalott” and found that she hadn’t even asked herself the question: What does the poem mean? Why was it written at all? She talked about its “beauty” and shortly afterwards launched into a tirade against the Geography man who was trying to import into the library a massive American book which would cost ten guineas.

  “How he expects me to know about these books I don’t understand. I think he’s mad actually. Have you noticed his moustache? I should expect him to marry at any moment. Have you noticed how he’s been trimming his moustache recently? And his teeth. Whiter than white. You should hear him boasting to the girls about his career. And he’s only got a second class too. Did you know that he shifted his university half way through but it didn’t do him any good?”

  It seemed that in this atmosphere literature itself was going sour on Mark. It was as if for the first time he realised how few people were interested in it: how the world was run by grey men who emerged like crocodiles from a swamp. He felt that in some way he had been conned, that the serious had turned into the frivolous, that what was deadly earnest had turned into play, that poetry itself was going the way of theology, either into meaningless linguistics or into the glare of pop. Now and again he felt a deadly constriction as if all that he believed in was in deadly danger, as if he had mistaken the froth on the surface for the lethal churnings below.

  One day Wilkinson summoned them in and said gravely like Eisenhower at D Day: “They are going to build an extension to the college. At the present moment it looks as if the Science and Music Departments will benefit most but I feel strongly that we should have a room suitable for theatrical purposes and the showing of films. I have drawn up a document which I should like you to read.”

  He passed an impeccably typed document round the table (all his “plans” were impeccably typed and the language florid and impersonal). They all looked at it, Mark and Miss Diamond and Mr. Gray who was a large friendly stertorous man who spilt ash on his waistcoat most of the time and was an ex-Cambridge graduate. The document was impressively phrased with sentences beginning with “It is felt …” and “It is considered” and so on which detached it from the sordid greed of the personal and placed it in the Platonic realms of the ideal. Somewhere up there there was an umpire who “it was believed” wished that Wilkinson should get his room.

  Mark could see no relationship between the contents of the document and the reality of the department. He knew for a fact that Wilkinson was entirely uninterested in both the theatre and the cinema and never visited either. His favourite film was Rebecca which he had seen many years before. It was with a remoteness that bordered on indifference that Mark read the paper, arranged and numbered point after point like a military document of the kind t
hat Wilkinson might have seen when he was serving in Africa during the war. How could Wilkinson actually and in cold blood write this? How could he not see the gap between reality and appearance? It was purely a ploy in power politics. It was a document which he could admire and keep, the only outlet for his minimal creativity, an aesthetic object like the examination papers he set and spent such time over. Like a child he wanted to have a part of what was going. It was quite likely (indeed more than likely) that even if he got the room he wouldn’t use it as a theatre. It would however be part of the Department. It would be another area that Wilkinson would be able to call his own.

  For a moment Mark studied him, the craggy face, the tall rangy body. The eyes were wrinkled as if he were one of those Americans who look across immense distances towards a dim frontier. He radiated benevolent energy and believed implicitly in the value of what he was doing. In fact, thought Mark, he should have been a farmer. He was in the habit of giving long notes to his classes and would tell them little anecdotes such as one may hear in a theatre from a poor comedian trying to warm up his audience. For instance, if he was discussing Sophocles he would tell them how he had been to Greece in the war and what the Greeks were like and what they ate and what they drank and seemed to be convinced that this would cast a perfect illumination over a tragedy that had occurred even before men were born.

  Mark felt cowardly in not stating his thoughts about the room. Miss Diamond of course was all for extending the domain. Mr. Gray made no objection but, as his asthma concealed effectively whether his vague heavings constituted yes or no, no-one ever really listened to him and he didn’t expect that anyone would. Mark said nothing and merely watched Wilkinson who ticked off point after point with a gold pencil. Mark had a vague vision of each of them running to their planes after the briefing was over, and taking off into the blue skies of the Battle of Britain. He found Wilkinson incomprehensible. Yet Wilkinson would be considered by most people as a competent man. Mark remembered a Company Sergeant Major he had once encountered in the army. This man was extremely idle but at all parades and sports meetings he would be met striding across square and field carrying an impressive file of notes and documents tied with an elastic band and he would look extremely hard pressed and busy, encased in a local air of urgency. For this reason even if one knew that he was bone lazy one might wonder whether this time perhaps he was doing something of value.

  This was exactly how he felt about Wilkinson. Now Miss Diamond was talking about shifting the library to the new block which would be rather distant from the Geography Department. The new building had become a focus for their various futures. Mark amused himself by sketching in a new Lady of Shalott where Wilkinson would, all a-glitter, cross the field of corn and Miss Diamond, ravished away from her mirror, would lie down in a boat and float down to the college which was her Camelot, and Wilkinson would stand on the bank looking down at her distraught face saying, “Yes, she did try.” So they talked on about the new building till eventually everyone forgot what it was intended for. It was a speculative place, a new beginning, it was itself and not its use, it was the façade that rose in their imagination concealing reality.

  3

  Lorna started going to church mainly because of Mrs. Carmichael who stayed next door with her husband who was a doctor with a large body and a burnt face. He played rugby for a local team. Of course there might have been other reasons for her wishing to go to church, but if so she didn’t tell Mark. Mark himself had no intention of ever going to church, and felt that Lorna had in some way betrayed both him and herself. He felt rather bewildered when he saw her putting on her green coat and her green hat and beginning to appear less untidy than she had been.

  Mrs. Carmichael was older than Lorna – about thirty-five – but she was neat and trim and interested in doing good works. She would often make tablet for sales of work and grew flowers in her garden for the church. But she wasn’t at all a stupid woman and not at all the kind who runs after the minister. Indeed she was neither servile nor stuffy. When they came first she would leave things at the door for them in a basket, mainly fruit and jam which she had made herself. She was more educated than the usual good woman for once or twice after she started visiting them Mark had an argument with her and she was quite capable of holding her own, though she did tend to stammer a little when she got excited

  Mark himself knew a little about theology for he read indiscriminately. He sensed that the theologians were beginning to surrender and wanted to be liked, for, after all, there they were, complete from university or college, and there was nothing for them to do, for no-one wanted to hear what they had to say. Therefore, like artists, they must be lonely people. Their abandonment of God he thought of as ridiculous, but perhaps it was no more so than the abandonment of strict form by the poets. They retreated into a language which bristled with abstract words, so that one picked one’s way through it with the greatest difficulty.

  But, as for Mrs. Carmichael, Lorna seemed to look on her as an older sister. They would go for early morning coffee together and little by little Lorna grew more dependent on her for companionship. Mark didn’t like her much: to him she represented the bourgeois, the more so as she was more modern than was consistent with the ethics of the bourgeoisie. And yet there was no reason why he should dislike her. After all what was wrong with doing “good works”? There must be people in the world who needed help. But in the same way as he was suspicious of people who went on long walks to help save Vietnam from napalm, he was suspicious of her because she was doing something that he would never think of doing himself.

  Mrs. Carmichael wasn’t exactly a blue stocking. She was a highly personable, indeed attractive, woman who had decided that service for others was of the greatest importance. It amazed Mark that Lorna had taken up with her, for her environment and breeding were all against such an association. Lorna was arty and scatterbrained while Mrs. Carmichael was a very organised woman. Lorna had actually never been to church in her life before and surprisingly became attached to going. She talked about the silence of the church, about the coolness, about the kindness of the people, how they shook her hand when the service was over, how there was no pressure on her to go. She even liked the church artistically with its blue cloth draped over the pulpit and the great red cross at the front.

  Lorna and Mrs. Carmichael had got hold of a hermit whom they were helping. This had happened after they had started going to a small discussion group with the minister, a pleasant man who had preached in Africa before coming home. When they went to the hermit’s house first he was living in incredible filth, according to Lorna, but they had cleaned the place out (the doctor giving them a great deal of advice) and he was now more comfortable, though liable to snarl at them when he was in a bad temper. Once he had threatened to throw them out of the house, but Mrs. Carmichael’s invincible good temper had prevailed. Lorna didn’t care for his ingratitude and was for giving up but Mrs. Carmichael had explained the psychology of the hermit to her. He hated them because they were doing good and that was a great weight on his mind. One night Mark and Mrs. Carmichael had a great argument about the hermit. Mark said: “One day I was on a bus tour and the driver stopped at a small tin hut at the side of the road. It had a rather clumsy chimney, I remember. The driver blew his horn and after a while this hermit came out. His braces were tied round his trousers like a belt and he looked as if he had just got out of bed though it was twelve o’clock. He was carrying a chanter in his hand and he came and stood on the steps of the bus. He had a rather professional line in patter and he told the passengers how every Tuesday he went down the road for his pension. He said he used to poach in the past but he had stopped that now as he was getting too old. He also told us how the TV people had been trying to interview him. He played some tunes on his chanter, very badly, I may say. The women were all agog about him, inventing all sorts of romantic backgrounds for him. One big fat Yorkshire woman kept insisting that it was “luv” that had driven him
into a hermit’s life.

  “When the driver sent round the hermit’s tin at the end for money I couldn’t see any reason why I should give him any. After all he did play the chanter very badly and really he was also a colossal bore. In any case, if he was a hermit why was he making money from innocent passengers? He seems to me to have been merely an inadequate man.”

  “And so you think,” said Mrs. Carmichael, “that I’m wasting my time with the hermit?”

  “If he’s a real hermit he shouldn’t want you and in any case how do you know you’re making him any happier?”

  “Well, at least he’s cleaner than he was, as far as I can gather,” said her husband calmly smoking his pipe. “And that’s always something. Cleanliness, you know, does make a difference to people.”

  “He was dying,” said Lorna. “He would have died if we hadn’t helped him. All you do is go around with your New Statesman mentality which means that you end up doing nothing at all except criticise.”

  But Mark continued, “Who gave you the right to go and help him? That’s what I don’t understand. The question is asked in all seriousness.”

  “And all humility don’t forget,” said Lorna bitterly. “All you want is an argument. You’re just listening to yourself talking.”

  “Oh I can quite see what your husband is getting at,” said Mrs. Carmichael. Lorna got up furiously and went into the kitchen to make some tea.

  “Well I don’t,” she said on her way out, “I can’t see it at all. He’s just making mischief. The fact is he doesn’t want to soil his lily white hands.”

  “Do you mean,” said the doctor, “that we have no right to help each other?” Surely that is putting it a bit strong. After all what would my job be like if that was the case? I wouldn’t have a job at all,” he said looking round him with a comic air.