Listen to the Voice

by Iain Crichton Smith

  He is not mad really. He’s just living in a dream. Maybe he could have been Napoleon if he hadn’t been born at 26 Sheffield Terrace. It’s not easy being Napoleon if you’re born in a council house. The funny thing is that he never notices the aerial. How could there be an aerial or even a TV-set in Napoleon’s time, but he doesn’t notice that. Little things like that escape him, though in other ways he’s very shrewd. In small ways. Like for instance he will remember and he’ll say to the milkman, ‘You didn’t bring me these five divisions yesterday. Where the hell did you get to? Spain will kill me.’ And there will be a clank of bottles and the milkman will walk away. That makes him really angry. Negligence of any kind. Inefficiency. He’ll get up and shout after him, ‘How the hell am I going to keep an empire together with idiots like you about? EH? Tell me that, my fine friend.’ Mr Merriman thinks he is Joan of Arc. That causes a lot of difficulty with dresses though not as much as you would imagine since she wore men’s armour anyway. I dread the day Wellington will move in. I fear for my china.

  Anyway that’s why we don’t speak. Sometimes he doesn’t even recognize me and he calls me Antoinette and he throws things at me. I don’t know what to do, really I don’t. I’m at my wits’ end. It would be cruel to send for a doctor. I don’t hate him that much. I think maybe I should tell him I’m leaving but where can you go when you’re eighty years old, though he is four years younger than me; I would have to get a home help: he doesn’t think of things like that. One day he said to me, ‘I don’t need you. I don’t need anyone. My star is here.’ And he pointed at his old woollen jacket which had a large hole in it. Sometimes I can hardly keep myself from laughing when I’m doing my shells. Who could? Unless one was an angel?

  And then sometimes I think. Maybe he’s trying it on. And I watch out to see if I can trap him in anything, but I haven’t yet. His despatches are very orderly. He sends me orders like, ‘I want the steak underdone today. And the wine at a moderate temperature.’ And I make the beefburgers and coffee as usual.

  Yesterday he suddenly said, ‘I remember you. I used to know you, when we were young. There were woods. I associate you with woods. With autumn woods.’ And then his face became slightly blue. I thought he was going to fall, coming out of his dream. But no. He said, ‘It was outside Paris and I met you in a room with mirrors. I loved you once before my destiny became my sorrow.’ These were exactly his words, I think. He never used to talk like that. He would mostly grunt and say, ‘What happened to the salt?’ But now he doesn’t say anything as simple as that. No indeed. Not at all.

  Sometimes he draws up a chair and dictates notes to me. He says things like, ‘We attack the distillery at dawn. Junot will create a diversion on the left and then Soult will strike at the right while I punch through the centre.’

  He was never in a war in his life. He was kept out because of his asthma and his ulcer. And he never had a horse in his life. All he had was his sandwich box. And now he wants a coronet on it. Imagine, a coronet on a sandwich box. Will this never end? Ever? Will it? I suffer. It is I who put up with this for he never leaves the house, he is too busy organizing the French educational service and the Church. ‘We will have pink robes for the nuns,’ he says. ‘That will teach them the power of the flesh which they abominate,’ and he shouts across the fence at Joan of Arc and says, ‘You’re an impostor, sir. Joan of Arc didn’t have a moustache.’ I don’t know what I shall do. He is sitting there so calm now, so calm with his stick in his hand like a sceptre. I think he has fallen asleep. Let me put your crown right, child. It’s fallen all to one side. I could never stand untidiness. Let me pick up your stick, its fallen from your hand. We are doomed to be together. We are doomed to say to the milkman, ‘Bring up your five divisions’, for morning after morning. We are doomed to comment on Joan of Arc’s moustache. We are together for ever. Poor Napoleon. Poor lover of mine met long ago in the autumn woods before they became your empire. Poor dreamer.

  And yet … what a game … maybe I should try on your crown just for one moment, just for a short moment. And take your stick just for a moment, just for a short short moment. Before you wake up. And maybe I’ll tell the milkman, We want ten divisions today. Ten not five. Maybe that would be the best idea, to get it finished with, once and for all. Ten instead of five.

  And don’t forget the cannon.

  What to Do About Ralph?

  ‘WHAT ON EARTH has happened to you?’ said his mother. ‘These marks are getting worse and worse. I thought with your father teaching you English you might have done better.’

  ‘He is not my father,’ Ralph shouted, ‘he is not my father.’

  ‘Of course, having you in class is rather awkward but you should be more helpful than you are. After all, you are seventeen. I shall have to speak to him about these marks.’

  ‘It won’t do any good.’

  How sullen and stormy he always was these days, she thought, it’s such a constant strain. Maybe if he went away to university there might be some peace.

  ‘He has been good to you, you know; he has tried,’ she continued. But Ralph wasn’t giving an inch. ‘He bought you all that football stuff and the hi-fi and the portable TV.’

  ‘So I could keep out of his road, that’s why.’

  ‘You know perfectly well that’s not true.’

  ‘It is true. And anyway, I didn’t want him here. We could have been all right on our own.’

  How could she tell him that to be on your own was not easy? She had jumped at the chance of getting out of teaching and, in any case, they were cutting down on Latin teachers nowadays. Furthermore, the pupils, even the academic ones, were becoming more difficult. She had been very lucky to have had the chance of marrying again, after the hard years with Tommy. But you couldn’t tell Ralph the truth about Tommy, he wouldn’t listen. Most people, including Ralph, had seen Tommy as cheerful, humorous, generous, only she knew what he had been really like. Only she knew, as well, the incredible jealousy that had existed between Jim and Tommy from their youth. Almost pathological, especially on Tommy’s side. It was as if they had never had any love from their professor father who had been cold and remote, hating the noise of children in the house. They had competed for what few scraps of love he had been able to throw to them now and again.

  She couldn’t very well tell Ralph that the night his father had crashed his car he had been coming from another woman, on Christmas Eve. She had been told that in the wrecked car the radio was playing ‘Silent Night’.

  Of course, in his own field Tommy had been quite good, at least at the beginning. He had been given a fair number of parts in the Theatre and later some minor ones on TV. But then he had started drinking as the depression gripped and the parts became smaller and less frequent. His downfall had been his golden days at school when he had been editor of the magazine, captain of the rugby team, actor. What a hero he had been in those days, how invisible Jim had been. And even now invisible in Ralph’s eyes. And he had been invisible to her as well, though she often recalled the night when Tommy had gate crashed Jim’s birthday party and had got drunk and shouted that he would stab him. But he had been very drunk that night. ‘I’ll kill you,’ he had shouted. Why had he hated Jim so much even though on the surface he himself had been the more successful of the two? At least at the beginning?

  She should have married Jim in the first place; she could see that he was much kinder than Tommy, less glamorous, less loved by his father, insofar as there had been much of that. But she had been blinded by Tommy’s apparent brilliance and humour, and, to tell the truth, by his more blatant sexiness.

  Of course he had never had any deep talent, his handsomeness had been a sort of compensatory glow, but when that faded everything else faded too. She herself had been too complaisant, declining to take the hard decision of leaving him, still teaching in those days, and tired always.

  To Ralph, however, his father had appeared different. He had been the one who carried him about on his shoulders,
taught him how to ride a motor bike, how to play snooker (had even bought a snooker table for him), taken him to the theatre to see him perform. Even now his photograph was prominent in his son’s room. She had been foolish to hide from him the true facts about his father’s death, his drunken crash when returning home from one of his one-night stands. She should have told him the truth, but she hadn’t. She had always taken the easy way out, though in fact it wasn’t in the end the easy way at all.

  And then Jim had started to visit her, he now a promoted teacher, although in the days when Tommy had been alive not often seen except casually at teachers’ conferences, but very correct, stiffly lonely, and certainly not trying to come between her and his brother, though she knew that he had always liked her. She had learned in the interval that kindness was more important than glamour, for glamour meant that others demanded some of your light, that you belonged as much to the public as to your wife. Or so Tommy had used to say.

  She remembered with distaste the night of the school play when she had played the virginal Ophelia to his dominating Hamlet, off-hand, negligent, hurtful, almost as if he really believed what he was saying to her. But the dazzled audience had clapped and clapped, and even the professor father had turned up to see the theatrical life and death of his son.

  But how to tell Ralph all this?

  That night she said to Jim in bed,

  ‘What are we going to do about Ralph?’

  ‘What now?’

  ‘You’ve seen his report card? He used to be a bright boy. I’m not just saying that. His marks are quite ridiculous. Can’t you give him some help in the evenings? English used to be his best subject. In primary school he was always top.’

  ‘I can help him if he’ll take it. But he won’t take it. His English is ludicrous.’

  ‘Ludicrous? What do you mean?’

  ‘What I said. Ludicrous.’ And then, of course, she had defended Ralph. No one was going to say to her that her son’s intellect was ludicrous which she knew it wasn’t. And so it all began again, the argument that never ended, that wasn’t the fault of anyone in particular, but only of the situation that seemed to be insoluble, for Ralph was the thorn at their side, sullen, implacable, unreachable.

  ‘I’m afraid he hates me and that’s it,’ said Jim. ‘To tell you the truth, I think he has been very ungrateful.’

  She could see that herself, but at the same time she could see Ralph’s side of it too.

  ‘Ungrateful?’ she said.

  ‘Yes. Ungrateful. You remember the time I got so angry that I told him I had after all brought him a television set and he shouted, “You’re a bloody fool then.”’

  ‘You have to try and understand him,’ she said.

  ‘It’s always the same. He won’t make the effort to understand. His father’s the demi-god, the hero. If he only knew what a bastard he really was.’ Always making fun of him with his quick tongue, always taking girls away from him, always lying to his distant father about him, always making him appear the slow resentful one.

  That night she slept fitfully. She had the feeling that something terrible was happening, that something even more terrible was about to happen. And always Ralph sat in his room playing his barbarous music very loudly. His stepfather would mark his eternal essays in his meticulous red writing, she would sew, and together they sat in the living room hearing the music till eventually he would tell her to go and ask Ralph to turn it down. She it was who was always the messenger between them, the ambassador trying hopelessly to reconcile but never succeeding. For Ralph resented her now as much as he resented Jim.

  She couldn’t believe that this could go on.

  Ralph sat at the back of his stepfather’s class, contemptuous, remote, miserable. Quite apart from the fact that he thought him boring, he was always being teased by the other pupils about him. His nickname was Sniffy, for he had a curious habit of sniffing now and again as if there was a bad smell in the room. But, to be fair to him, he was a good, conscientious teacher: he set homework and marked it and it really seemed as if he wanted them all to pass. But there was a curious remoteness to him, as if he loved his subject more than he loved them. Nevertheless, he was diligent and he loved literature.

  ‘This, of course, was the worst of crimes,’ he was saying, sitting at his desk in his chalky gown. ‘We have to remember that this was a brother who killed another one, like Cain killing Abel. Then again there is the murder in the Garden, as if it were the garden of Eden. There is so much religion in the play. Hamlet himself was religious; that, after all, was the reason he didn’t commit suicide. Now, there is a very curious question posed by the play, and it is this’ (he sniffed again),

  ‘What was going on between Gertrude and Claudius even while the latter’s brother Hamlet was alive? This king about whom we know so little. Here’s the relevant speech:

  ‘Aye that incestuous, that adulterate beast,

  with witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts,

  won to his shameful lust

  the will of a most seeming virtuous queen …’

  The point was, had any of this happened in Hamlet’s lifetime? He meant, of course, King Hamlet’s. Had there been a liaison between Gertrude and Claudius even then? One got the impression of Claudius being a ladies’ man, while Hamlet perhaps was the soldier who blossomed in action, and who was not much concerned with the boudoir. After all, he was a public figure, he perhaps took Gertrude for granted. On their answer to that question would depend their attitude to Gertrude.

  The voice droned on, but it was as if a small red window had opened in Ralph’s mind. He had never thought before that his mother had known his stepfather before the marriage which had taken place so suddenly. What if in fact there had been something going on between them while his father was still alive? He shivered as if he had been infected by a fever. He couldn’t bring himself to think of his mother and stepfather in bed together, which was why he had asked for his own bedroom to be changed, so that he would be as far away from them as possible.

  But suppose there had been a liaison between them. After all, they had both been teachers and they must have met. True, they had been at different schools but it was inconceivable that they hadn’t met.

  Ο God, how dull his stepfather was, in his cloud of chalk. How different from his father who inhabited the large air of the theatre. What a poor ghostly fellow he was in his white dust.

  But the idea that his mother had known his stepfather would not leave his mind. How had he never thought of it before?

  That night, his stepfather being at a meeting at the school, he said to his mother,

  ‘Did you know … your husband … before you married him?’

  ‘I wish you could call him your stepfather, or even refer to him by his first name. Of course I knew him. I knew the family.’

  ‘But you married my father?’

  ‘Yes. And listen, Ralph, I have never said this to you before. I made a great mistake in marrying your father.’

  He was about to rise and leave the room when she said vehemently, ‘No, it’s time you listened. You sit down there and listen for a change. Did you know that your father was a drunk? Do you know that he twice gave me a black eye? The time I told everybody I had cut myself on the edge of the wardrobe during the power cut, and the time I said I had fallen on the ice? Did you know where he was coming from when his car crashed?’

  ‘I don’t want to hear any more,’ Ralph shouted. ‘If you say any more I’ll kill you. It’s not true. You’re lying.’

  For a moment there he might have attacked her, he looked so white and vicious. It was the first time he had thought of hitting her; he came very close.

  Her face was as pale as his and she was almost swaying on her feet but she was shouting at him,

  ‘He was coming from one of his innumerable lady friends. I didn’t tell you that, did I? I got a message from the police and I went along there. He had told me he was going to be working late at the theatre b
ut he was coming from the opposite direction. He was a stupid man. At least Jim is not stupid.’

  He raised his fist as if to hit her, but she didn’t shrink away.

  ‘Go on, hit me,’ she shouted. ‘Hit me because you can’t stand the truth any more than your father could. He was vulgar, not worth your stepfather’s little finger.’

  He turned and ran out of the house.

  Of course it wasn’t true. That story was not the one his mother had told him before. And for all he knew the two of them might have killed his father, they might have tampered with the brakes or the engine. After all, a car crash was always suspicious, and his father had been a good if fast driver. His stepfather couldn’t even drive.

  He went to the Nightspot where some boys from the school were playing snooker, and older ones drinking at the bar. He stood for a while watching Harry and Jimmy playing. Harry had been to college but had given it up and was now on the dole. Jimmy had never left town at all. He watched as Harry hit the assembled balls and sent them flying across the table. After a while he went and sat down by himself. He felt as if he had run away from home, as if he wanted to kill himself. He was tired of always being in the same room by himself playing records. And yet he couldn’t bring himself to talk to his stepfather. The two of them were together, had shut him out, he was like a refugee in the house. He hated to watch his stepfather eating, and above all he hated to see him kissing his mother before he set off for school with his briefcase under his arm. But then if he himself left home where could he go? He had no money. He loathed being dependent on them for pocket money, which he used buying records.