Listen to the Voice

by Iain Crichton Smith

  I am working as hard as ever. I hope to do well. I drive myself to work every night. There are more distractions here than at home but so far I’ve maintained my hard work.

  George often asks me about you. He seems very interested in my early childhood illnesses. Last week he sounded me but said I was as clear as a bell. He says that sometimes he envies me for my background but at other times … I don’t see what you have against George. I like him very much.

  I think you should be going out more. I really do. It’s not good to depend on one person so much.

  George’s girl friend is coming here tomorrow. I shall be interested to see what she is like.

  Anyone would think from your letter that I was leading a dissipated life. I can assure you I’m not. And after all, you were at Lowestoft yourself when you were only 16. I know it was cold and miserable and the fishing was dreadful but it was a way of life.

  Your loving son,

  Kenneth

  Well, Fiona was up visiting George this afternoon and I’m not sure that I like her very much. She is quite unlike anyone I’ve met before not I mean physically but mentally and in her style. I don’t know, but the girls at home seem vague somehow, they’re not keenly interested in anything. But this girl thinks like a man: she has a cutting edge to her. After we had dinner and all the others except George, Fiona and I had gone to their work we went out to the lawn in front of the house and sat down on deckchairs. No, that’s not true, George sat on a deckchair: Fiona and I sat on the ground. George, I thought, was looking rather unsure of her. He lay back in his striped deckchair with his hands clasped behind his red hair, listening. Another thing by the way is that Fiona wears slacks. She cross-examines one and I don’t like that. In fact I dislike it immensely.

  ‘Well,’ said George lazily, ‘why don’t you argue?’

  ‘Shut up,’ Fiona snapped.

  There was a long silence inside the green shadows. One could almost hear the grass grow.

  Without thinking I said: ‘This is much less bleak than home.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Fiona. ‘Of course you come from Raws.’ Then after a while she added thoughtfully: ‘I suppose it must really be pretty bleak there.’

  For some reason I became angry: ‘It’s not as bleak as all that.’

  She looked at me in surprise, ‘Well, it was you who said so.’ Her face is very intense and pale. I don’t think she wears lipstick. The pallor however is of the kind which is rich, almost creamy, and not a wasted whiteness.

  ‘Don’t believe him,’ said George mischievously, ‘they live like prisoners up there—and they believe in hell! They can’t even go for a walk on Sunday.’

  ‘Is that right?’ asked Fiona wonderingly.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you believe in hell then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But what kind? You mean fire, brimstone, the little devils, etc?’

  ‘No, but I believe in …’

  George was looking at me quizzically, half-swivelled round in his chair.

  ‘You’re abandoning your people,’ he said at least laughingly.

  ‘I’m abandoning nothing,’ I retorted. ‘I believe in hell but not that sort of hell. There are other hells.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘there are indeed,’ coolly picking a thin green blade of grass and chewing it.

  I don’t know exactly what’s going on but George told me that two years ago she left her parents’ home (which is apparently in the city here) and went to live in digs with another girl.

  I didn’t like the turn the conversation was taking. I had noticed this in George before—that sometimes without meaning to he’s inclined to take advantage of people. It’s as if he were testing them. It’s as if he’s looking for someone who will ring true.

  ‘And what of death?’ I said to George, ‘what of that?’

  ‘Death?’ he said blinking into the sunlight. ‘Death? What has death got to do with us?’ Infront of us a small bird, possibly a wren—I think wrens are brown and this bird was brown—was hopping across the grass, stopping sometimes and staring up at us almost questioningly.

  ‘Do you think he’s frightened?’ asked Fiona stretching her finger out. But the bird hopped away again, sideways.

  ‘I once did that,’ I heard myself saying, ‘it was a snail: it was on a road, a pathway, dusty, with little stones. I shifted a very small stone in front of the snail but for some strange reason before it reached the stone it turned away as if it sensed that the stone was there, without even touching it. I did it a few times and each time it seemed to know.’

  Fiona looked at me, I thought, with some respect.

  ‘That’s very interesting,’ she remarked, but immediately turned away again chewing her grass like a straw in lemonade. Her gaze is almost impersonal as if she were studying a brief.

  ‘It’s true just the same,’ said George leaning forward from his deckchair and looking animated for the first time. ‘Death has nothing to do with us. Fiona here—she’s always on about the hydrogen bomb and the rest of it’ (Fiona was regarding him very quietly) ‘but after all if it comes—pouf.’ Though he was fervent in his speech I saw the despair in his eyes. ‘We won’t know. It’ll just come. Like bashing a fish with a stone. That’s the point. You die anyway.’

  ‘You talk very queerly—for a prospective doctor,’ said Fiona, her eyes following the bird which was now perched bright-eyed on a branch. I had the impression that she had heard this often before.

  ‘But that’s why,’ George almost shouted, leaning further forward, his elbows on his knees. ‘Can’t you see? You people make such a lot out of death. It’s death, that’s all, it’s a fact! It’s a fact! It comes one way or another. I’d try to save them of course, of course I would. But what can I do about politics? What would we ever do? My father now—it’s like the sea—sometimes he gets a good catch sometimes not. If he doesn’t who is he to appeal to? We’ve had all this out before. I can’t help it. I’m going to be a doctor but I’m not a blazing enthusiast. I love children, yes, all right but what can I do? What can we do?’

  I had never heard him speak like this before and I didn’t understand it. What had become of the jazz enthusiast? What had become of the joker?

  ‘It’s when you see death you begin to accept it. Oh I know one fights it—one does. But when you see and hear some stories, well, that’s different. Of old people living on and that boy, who was drowned. I tell you, sometimes I hate that.’ He stood up and aimlessly kicked a stone into the trees. The little bird flew away.

  ‘Now see what you’ve done,’ Fiona protested, ‘you’ve scared him away.’

  He looked at her in astonishment as if about to say ‘The bird’ but instead shut his mouth again. At the same time a wasp swooped on her—striped rather like a deckchair—and she swept it away with her hand almost absent-mindedly.

  With one of his sudden changes of mood George slumped back into the deckchair saying: ‘I’m not going to speak another word. That’s me finished.’ However he was speaking very good-humouredly.

  Fiona stood up removing some of the grass from her slacks and began:

  ‘But I’m not. You think like Kenneth here,’ (he started) ‘you think you don’t but you do. You accept hell too. That’s what you do, you accept it. You say you can’t do anything about it. Why can’t you? You can’t because you don’t care. You think you’re on the side of life because you play your jazz tunes and go to dances, but you aren’t. You don’t care because you don’t see. What’s your father got to do with this? It’s not your father. It’s you. And what has the fishing to do with it?’

  George looked at me half-laughingly but didn’t speak. Instead he took out two cigarettes and tossed one to her. She caught it while still speaking.

  We don’t have girls like this at home, not with this passion. I was listening but not speaking. When eventually she turned to me I said:

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m not on your side. I think we need the bomb.
I know you go to meetings and I honour you for it but I can’t see it. We need it to defend ourselves. That’s all. I doubt if it will ever be used anyway.’

  That was all I said. I was honest when I said I honoured her for attending these meetings but I—there was something too ruthless about her, too dominating. I didn’t want to be dominated. I was afraid of her in some queer way. It was like these riddles old Angus used to ask me. I dreaded them as if I would make a mistake and I don’t like making mistakes. And I’m sure I’m right too and she’s wrong. Where will this tenderness get us? These birds? Then she said a strange thing:

  ‘You’re different from George, though. You’ll see.’ And she added: ‘You’ll see.’

  But what am I to see? The afternoon sun was waning slightly and I felt a slight chill. I wanted to stay here and argue but at the same time I wanted to leave. She reminded me of someone but I could not think of whom.

  In fact I’ve been thinking that these letters are sometimes difficult for me to write. You want to know about everything but writing in English I can’t communicate somehow. It’s so formal. I begin to feel that we have never really communicated. However …

  So we left it there and the three of us relaxed in the chilling air for a while, George with his eyes closed, I feeling rather out of things as if I had caused a quarrel between George and Fiona and wondering what he had told her about me before she came, and Fiona in her red slacks curled up on the ground tightly like a spring. How had they ever come into contact? Well, George told me. They met at a dance and I suppose hearing that he was a prospective doctor she thought he would be a natural for her ideas and she might discover interesting information as well. Not that she was as calculating as this: no one as passionate as she is could be as calculating as that, but it must have crossed her mind.

  Anyway they’re not suited to each other. George is too pedestrian for her. I can see that. I think medicine is getting him down.

  As for me I have a greater capacity for suffering than either of them. These long summer days in bed—the blackness—the eternal fire—these things have hardened me. I’ll not be broken, I know that, not by her arguments. And after all it may be we shall never meet again.

  For some reason the thought came into my mind just now. Do you remember Mrs Armstrong? You remember that the day her husband died she stopped the clock and never wound it again. Why did I think of that just now? And when we went into her house—the silence there was, the silence you could hear.

  When I saw the two of them going out together, George clowning again and she walking briskly to keep up with him, I thought they looked so young. And yet both of them are older than me! By one year. It’s the heart of man. Will that ever change? Will it ever change?

  I’m still working hard—in fact harder than ever—and doing reasonably well.

  Why did you send me that money? Don’t martyr yourself. It makes me feel guilty.

  Your loving son,

  Kenneth

  P.S. The thing that fascinates me most about university is the way one argues as if the mind matters. At home it wasn’t like that. Nothing we could do seemed to matter. Like that bird hopping about, that’s how it is now. Of course it wasn’t free. But in a way it was. Perhaps that was why Fiona was watching it all the time, the diminutive wren hopping about. I’m sure that phrase diminutive wren is from some book or other, probably Shakespeare but I can’t remember where.

  Last night sitting in the dining room after supper I listened to a monologue from George. We were in our armchairs in a sort of restful near-midnight silence with the radio playing nostalgic music. Perhaps that’s what started him off.

  ‘After we left you today,’ he began, ‘we didn’t talk much. And yet what I said this afternoon was true. They say it all goes back to your childhood. I don’t know. My father is a fisherman. You have to know about fishing. It’s not like a profession. It’s more—precarious. All fishermen drink, you know, well, most of them. You see, they’re living under strain. My father doesn’t drink all that much but he drinks, a little. Living in a small place does that too. He’s a big man, very friendly, very slaphappy. My mother’s different—good worker, you know the sort, very industrious. No, I didn’t have an unhappy childhood, not at all. I spent a lot of time at the motor boats tinkering about and watching them at the harbour, most of them painted yellow with their names and the yellow buoys on the deck and the green nets … But sometimes we were hungry, very hungry. I could have savaged a piece of meat in my childhood. You can’t eat fish all of the time.

  ‘Once my father told me a story. He used to tell me a lot of stories. It was when he was younger—when he was sailing—he ended up in New Zealand. A few of them jumped ship and stayed behind. One holiday they went out in a small boat—two of them, the day was warm. Very lazy they were, very lazy, drifting along. Then they began to take off their clothes—it was so hot—first the jackets, then the shirts. The sea was—you know—glassy with that tremendous eye-shattering heat. They decided they’d have a plunge—smell of tar from the boat too. So they lowered themselves over the side. No, his friend went first while he kept the boat steady. It was very warm, very calm. Then the shark came. It sheared right through his friend. The boat toppled slightly then he steadied it, sort of. There was some threshing through which he rowed, then nothing. Later they found his friend’s stocking—one stocking.

  ‘He often used to tell me stories. You know he didn’t drink at all then. Later of course he didn’t drink much, but some. There was some—precariousness, but I was happy. I don’t write to them, not because I don’t like them but because I’m lazy—I’m quite lazy really. I suppose I became a doctor to enter a profession. I didn’t want to be poor, you see, again.

  ‘And sometimes, you know, you see certain things, like that drowned boy. They don’t get you down all that much, but Fiona, she’s romantic, she thinks that life is so tremendously important, and death too. I … Well, she’s pretty you know. Sometimes you don’t think so, but there’s bone there. Intensity. So few people have it. Like … It’s precious. Oh, I’ll be a doctor all right and a good one. Remember I told you once you were on the side of life? You are. I laugh more than you, and I joke, but perhaps it’s defensive. Since I came here I saw an old woman. She’s hanging on to life like a leech in the hospital. Why? And her daughter comes in, weary, weary. It would be better if the old woman died. But she doesn’t. She hates life too. She’s always complaining. She’s 80—and I once heard her call on her mother. What do you think of that?

  ‘Oh well. Up. Bed, boy. End of Reminiscences of George Morton.

  ‘But I’ll tell you this. I’ve never met anyone like Fiona. I’ve been out with a lot of girls but … she’s alive you know. At the dance I met her, you couldn’t help being attracted, it was as if she was gulping up life. If you take her to the pictures she’s leaning forward, she takes part in the film. You can feel her throwing the pies—and cracking nuts between her teeth. There’s a quality of carelessness about her—a divine carelessness.

  ‘Hey! That’s great. I ought to be a poet. “Divine carelessness.” That’s good, that’s good. Come on, let’s go upstairs and pull the chain and wake Mrs Bryden from her dreams of filthy lucre.’

  So that’s George since you wanted to know about him.

  As he was talking, for some reason this came into my head. Do you remember Mrs Murray who died about five years ago, you know at 10a. You remember Donald her son—he died of tuberculosis—he was 16. I used to visit him. It was in the black house. I remember listening to her once. She was telling me the minister had been in—in fact he used to come in often. ‘Donald,’ she said, ‘he talks about these practical jokes of yours, you know when you let Norman’s horse loose and when you took that dead rat into school. He laughs at all these things remembering them and yourself. These are the things he’s always talking about and the jam jar you ran away with. And he doesn’t know what’s waiting for him. The doctor says he’ll die but Donald doesn’t know
it. He’s gay—but he coughs a lot. And all he talks about is these nonsensical things! The minister tells him to read the Bible but he hardly ever does. And he doesn’t pray. He says he doesn’t know how to. He sometimes can’t stop himself laughing when the minister is praying. What am I going to do with him?’

  I don’t know why I thought of that but it came back to me very clearly, and especially the last thing she told me. They told him he was going to die and the minister was always there. Strangely enough he wanted the minister to be with him and he was already reading the Bible. She said however that he was always following her about with his eyes as if he were asking her something and she couldn’t think what it was. The moment he died she was sitting in a chair knitting. The Bible fell out of his hand and she went to give it back to him but he was dead. She told me that when she bent down she remembered that the Bible itself was cold but the sun on the floor below was warm. For some reason she remembered this.

  I hate the deaths of our island. There are too many. There are far too many deaths.

  Your loving son,

  Kenneth

  I do not understand your letter. Why this attack on Fiona? No, I haven’t seen her since that day but that is no reason for your letter. I don’t understand it. I begin to think you are not trying to understand me, though I am trying to understand you. You are not even trying. I know what you have done for me, believe me. I appreciate it. But at the same time it is clear that you are not trying to understand me. That is terrifying. I hadn’t realised it before. Fiona is not like that at all. You say she has no right to meddle with these things, that it’s not woman’s work. What do you expect her to do? Go to the well for pails of water? You say that the government know best. I don’t agree. What have they done for us? I’m beginning to see a lot of things. Hell paralyses the will. I don’t agree with her, but I don’t see why she shouldn’t go to meetings if she wishes to. I am not under bad influence. I work hard. I drive myself far into the night. But sometimes I wonder why I do it. At home one doesn’t question these things, but I can’t prevent my mind from developing.