My Last Duchess

by Iain Crichton Smith

  “Oh my God,” he said to himself, “what have you done? What have you done?” A quotation came into his mind, “richer than all its tribe.” He stared down at his shoes trying to think of what went before that. “A pearl.” Something about a pearl. Let me see her again in all the tea rooms in existence with the pearls around her throat, he thought. But he knew he wouldn’t see her again. Tears pricked his eyes, and he put his handkerchief to them, behind the glasses.

  “Have you ever been lonely, really lonely? I love this place.” He put his hand to his cheeks. They seemed unshaven, untidy. His shoes looked unpolished. But then he had never been really tidy. That was part of his persona. That was part of the mask.

  Absentmindedly the point of his shoe moved among the thin blood, writing “They are incapable of affection. They are incapable of affection.” He left the lavatory and went back to the waiting room where a woman was wiping the nose of a small girl and saying something to her fiercely. The girl kicked at the shopping basket and the woman said, “Wait till I get you home. You wait, my girl.” He looked at them with intolerable longing as if at angels in a heaven he would never enter. The world had been too strange for him, too miraculous. The ordinary had been too miraculous. It had given too much but he could not see it. The train stood at the platform with its lighted carriages, houses of the ordinary day.

  11

  As he expected, he found the house empty and its emptiness was of a kind such as he had never experienced before. The only image that pricked itself on his mind like a thorny tattoo was an abandoned space ship and himself floating through space holding on to such reality as there was by a life line so thin that it could hardly be seen against the sky. The post had been since Lorna had left and he stared dully down at some Christmas cards which were lying on the floor of the lobby.

  From the wardrobe her clothes were gone: in his own wardrobe the clothes remained. He wandered from room to room not thinking, just existing and throbbing, and in the kitchen came face to face with the picture of the hermit which she had been working on. Shivering uncontrollably he turned its face to the wall and sat down, automatically switching on the fire, the switch for which he could reach from the chair. Raising his eyes to the mantelpiece he saw the envelope with his name on it. He stared at it for a long time not daring to open it, it seemed so final. He remembered sometimes how she would write messages on the backs of cheques in her quick round scrawl. She had gone away in the gipsyish way she had come, carelessly, without regard for her possessions except her clothes, casting herself on the world again. Even the painting she had left behind: she didn’t depend on him.

  Eventually he opened the envelope. The familiar round scrawl met his eyes. There was no Dear Mark, the letter went straight into its subject matter.

  “When you come back I shall have left. It never has worked and it never will work. You are not a real person. I think that’s what it is. You aren’t real. You said you disliked Wilkinson but he at least is real. It’s not just that you are always talking about books and the thesis you’ll write, it’s just that you aren’t real. I could never even touch you and you could never touch me. I can’t think of any other way of describing you. Other people live like you and yet they are real. At one time, when I saw you first, you were witty and interesting. But I think that was an illusion (or should that be delusion?). I am unhappy going away but not for leaving you. I liked the place. I said the other night that I had relatives and I know you haven’t any. I am worried by that but I know you won’t do anything silly.

  [Anything heroic, she means, he thought, the bile rising in his mouth. Anything real.]

  I did try, you know. I am a clumsy person but I did try. I wasn’t afraid at least to try. I wasn’t afraid of being undignified. I don’t think I was afraid of failing. The thing was you never thought about me at all. I could have stood anything except the unreality. I thought I was a child: people were always saying that I was a child. But I think I’m a different child from you. I shall be all right. The last straw was your going away today just to see these people. It showed me once and for all that you would never grow up, that you want to go to the pictures all the time. There’s no point in looking for me. I shan’t come back.”

  On the mantelpiece beside the letter was the ring he had given her. He picked it up and absentmindedly tried to fit it on to his finger but it wouldn’t fit. Then he thought that if it rolled from the mantelpiece it would be lost so he put it inside an aspirin bottle from which he emptied out all the aspirins. From the cupboard he took the half bottle of whisky which had been bought for Christmas and began to drink it steadily, thinking as he did so of the night he had gone to her house. That was bravado, this was reality.

  He drank steadily and much later he could recall Mrs. Carmichael and Wilkinson being in the house and talking in hushed voices and Mrs. Carmichael saying (he could hear her for his hearing had grown preternaturally sharp): “You see, when Lorna came here she was terrified. She had been wandering about all her days. She had never been given any affection by anyone. She wanted to settle down here and she didn’t want to move. She wouldn’t even go to the city to look at the pictures in the Art Gallery. She was very insecure you know. I think that was why she wanted to help with the hermit, because she knew about loneliness.” Her voice came to him through a drunken haze, the vowels and consonants seemed to shift and change.

  “How is he?” he heard her saying some time later. That was her speaking to her doctor husband, he thought, and then he saw the doctor’s violet coloured burnt face floating around him, an improbable phantasm.

  “Physically he’s all right. Just the shock.”

  “What are you going to do about him?”

  “He should take some sleeping pills, and go to bed. You can come and make his breakfast in the morning.”

  “I can do that.”

  Later he heard her moving about the house, fixing the bed, and then later still he heard the voice of Wilkinson.

  “How is he? Terrible thing. I came over as soon as you phoned.”

  “He’s a bit shocked. In fact badly shocked.”

  Mark stretched his hand out for the whisky bottle and it crashed to the hearth. He heard it breaking without distress or joy: it was simply another event in a universe of pain.

  “He could come and stay with us tonight,” said Wilkinson. “We would be happy to have him. If we could get something together. Shaving gear and things like that.”

  He found himself, without knowing much about it, in Wilkinson’s car, Wilkinson not speaking at all, as they drove along, and Mark’s head lolling against the leather coverings of the back seat. He was thinking, There’s always a Horatio around, isn’t there, someone who will pick up the pieces after a sordid little affair which doesn’t even deserve being called a tragedy. And then he thought: Lorna wouldn’t like these quotations. Lorna wouldn’t like this being converted into literature. Will I never stop, he agonised, will I never stop setting this grid over reality?

  But that wasn’t what was wrong after all. It was something else. It was mediocrity, that was what it was.

  “Up we get,” said Wilkinson heaving him out of the door and taking him into the house. There were flashes of lights and then he was lying in a clean white bed in pyjamas that were too large for him (something about that in Macbeth, ticked the lights from his mind which never rested). He shut his eyes.

  “I did not know that she was afraid too,” he thought. “I thought it was she who was the aristocrat and I who was the frightened one.”

  He remembered vaguely how Wilkinson had undressed him, some whispered words to his wife (she seemed to be saying in answer, “He never liked you, you know”) and then he was being carried into the bedroom like a child.

  They would be talking about him, they would be arranging his future for him, they would already be reading the documents. They knew about things like that, they were more solid than he was, his irony was comic. All that time Wilkinson had been capable of all th
is, the ease of action, of putting pyjamas on him, of carrying him to that bed. That was part of the moving world for him, he didn’t need to think about it.

  He wondered what colour the pyjamas were.

  “Court jester,” he thought. “Comedian.”

  And I did it all for her, he thought. For Lorna. I wanted to find out. I wanted to become real, because I knew I was less than real. And all the time we were at cross purposes.

  He felt her presence suddenly in the room, definably, like a perfume, and sat up in bed, but of course there was no-one there.

  Horror stricken he stared into the darkness. It was as if ahead of him he could see himself disintegrating and in his place the picture of the hermit or the face of Wilkinson, one frowning, the other genially smiling, holding out a welcoming hand.

  And also he saw Lorna setting her face into the shifting world again, the cheques with their messages drifting around her like snowflakes, and being met by two youths who were whispering into her ear, tenderly close to the black hair;

  “What a lovely coon you are, what a lovely coon.” So distinct was the picture that he must have shouted out from the world of bed and wardrobe and bookshelf and table and chair for Wilkinson came to the door, switched on the light and said in his easy voice:

  “It’s all right. You’re with us. You’re quite safe. Shall I leave the light on?”

  “No,” he said without thinking, then quickly, “Yes, please leave it on.”

  PART THREE

  He stood at the window of the hotel watching the whirling snow, its drifting intricate leisurely dance. He had given up thinking. Images floated about in his mind but he wasn’t thinking. Strangely enough, one of them was from long ago, the discussion about Hamlet in the cafe and the little waitress in the white uniform with the red at the breast. He felt that there was something there that he ought to understand because it was somehow important. All around him the pipes of the hotel wheezed, like someone with lung trouble.

  The trouble was of course that he had nowhere to go. He had come by a blind route to an end. In mathematics if one came to a problem that one couldn’t work out one abandoned it: in life one simply endured it. In mathematics you leave it, in life you live it, he rhymed mercilessly to himself.

  He thought of Frith who had come home to a fireplace after the abyss. But he himself could never do that. Once in the abyss one was coloured by its light forever and forever. Perhaps even Frith was, and his rubicund appearance was merely a mask such as one might wear at a Christmas party or at Hallowe’en. Perhaps below the smart doll-like clothes there was a city raped and torn by mental wars, by an alien occupation.

  If this were a book, he thought, there would be a rational ending. At least there would have been in Victorian times. The author would tell what had happened to all the characters, how Jill had married Tom, how everyone had got what he or she deserved, how the world after all was inhabited by an artistic justice. But in the twentieth century this was no longer possible. In this world there were jagged flashes of unfinished anecdotes, theses and antitheses, edgings of lightning.

  “But at least,” he said to himself, “you know about yourself now. And that is something. You have been stripped to the bare bone. You know your assets.” And he began, as a business man might, to add up these assets. “You are five foot ten, you wear glasses, you weigh 110 pounds, you have a sufficiency of clothes. You have a mind that is irretrievably romantic in a world that is no longer so, but believes no longer in the hero. The hero is no longer the man on the frontier of things, he goes into space but describes the earth seen from the moon in the language of a bank manager.”

  The snow swirled and swirled. Perhaps he should go in search of Lorna, that would be his pilgrimage. He would find her after many years and he would say, “I was wrong. I will do anything you wish. I will be whatever you wish me to be. I will no longer be the mental aristocrat, the aloof ridiculous backward man.” Homo textual.

  But as he looked into the varying patterns of the snow he knew that he had come to the end of a certain road, that he had forced himself by some inner compulsion to the limits, that after all this was where he must have wanted to be, in the coldness of truth. Everyone got what they deserved in a way the Victorian novelists did not dream of.

  Ahead of him he saw an advertisement for something or other that he could not make out because of the snow flashing on and off in red. It entered him, and he let it enter him. Everything could enter him. He was a mirror open to the doings of the universe. He was as open as a door. Anything, anybody could walk through and take up its place in him. Even the future. Whatever that meant.

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM POLYGON

  BY IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

  Consider the Lilies

  http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXTJO

  ‘Retrained, finely wrought … Mr Crichton Smith shows us isolation, perplexity, loneliness, a combination of blindness and indifference’ – New Statesman

  ‘Mr Crichton Smith has an acute feeling for places and atmosphere. The wind-blown heaths, the grey skies, the black dwellings, the narrow lives, the poverty – are all vividly depicted … one can linger over the sheer beauty of his phrases’ – Observer

  The eviction of the crofters from their homes between 1792 and the 1850s was one of the cruellest episodes in Scotland’s history. In this novel Iain Crichton Smith captures the impact of the Highland Clearances through the thoughts and memories of an old woman who has lived all her life within the narrow confines of her community.

  Alone and bewildered by the demands of the factor, Mrs Scott approaches the minister for help, only to have her faith shattered by his hypocrisy. She finds comfort, however, from a surprising source: Donald Macleod, an imaginative and self-educated man who has been ostracised by his neighbours, not least by Mrs Scott herself, on account of his atheism. Through him and through the circumstances forced upon her, the old woman achieves new strength.

  The Last Summer

  http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXSGI

  A sensitively written and memorable novel of youth by one of Scotland’s most distinguished twentieth century writers.

  Malcolm, studious, imaginative, footballing, shy, sexually aware but uncomfortably innocent, is in his last term at school on a Hebridean island during the Second World War. His awkward relationship with his teachers, his widowed mother and younger brother, his friends – and with Janet whom he loves from a distance and the less comely and warmer, but to him still enigmatic, Sheila, are marvellously realised. Above all, this is the story of a boy, on his own, trying to discover himself and through himself to find his way in life.

  My Last Duchess

  http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXRKA

  Iain Crichton Smith’s third novel is as different from his second, The Last Summer, as that was from his first, Consider the Lillies. Crichton Smith is at the height of his powers as poet and prose writer. This new work of fiction follows hard upon his Selected Poems and his volume of short stories, Survival Without Fear.

  Mark Simmons, aged 42, is a teacher at a training college. His wife has just walked out on him because she has found him so much less interesting than she expected the man she married to be. This event, which he has by no means expected, has jolted him into a major reassessment of himself, of his place in the universe. He realises that he has become bitter, cynical and disillusioned: he is a failure intellectually – he wanted to be a writer, but for years he has striven at one book, which he privately knows to be not very good. He is a failure as a teacher – he wasn’t competent enough to obtain a post at a university. He is a failure as a husband, because his wife was daily moving away from him. He is a failure as a father, because he and his wife had had no children. Above all, he is a failure as a human being, because he despises everybody, not least himself. Mark Simmons hates himself for being more concerned with argument than happiness.

  My Last Duchess is a novel of great resourcefulness and energy.

  An Honoura
ble Death

  http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXQQU

  ‘Iain Crichton Smith writes like a poet, with strong natural rhythm and precise observation’ – The Times

  In the summer of 1870, a seventeen-year-old crofter’s son turned his back on his apprenticeship with the Royal Clan and Tartan Warehouse in Inverness and signed up as a private in Queen Victoria’s army. He joined the Gordons – the 92nd Highlanders – whose reputation was second to none as the fearsome cutting-edge of the British Army. Posted to India, Afghanistan, South Africa and the Sudan, he became a formidable soldier, rising up through the ranks to become the glorified and much-decorated Major-General Sir Hector Macdonald or, more commonly, ‘Fighting Mac’, the true hero of Omdurman.

  Then, in 1903, at the peak of his remarkable career, he was accused of homosexuality. Ordered to face court martial and unable to bear the disgrace, he ended his life.

  From this true story, with a poet’s insight and precision, Iain Crichton Smith has crafted an exquisite novel: a tale of honour and elitism, equivocation and hierocracy, victory and despair.

  The Dream

  http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXQIS

  ‘A superb novel … it must be accorded tremendous acclaim’ – Scotland on Sunday

  ‘Iain Crichton Smith writes like a poet, with strong natural rhythm and precise observation’ – The Times

  In the grey streets of Glasgow, Martin is dreaming of the mist-shrouded islands of his youth. Behind her desk in the travel agency his wife Jean dreams of faraway places in the sun that beckon from the brochures.