In the Middle of the Wood

by Iain Crichton Smith

  When they arrived in the village, what he would have to do was, ask the taxi driver to take him in to see his own doctor and according to how he reacted to that suggestion he would know whether he was genuine or not. He wanted to see his own doctor anyway and get tablets from him.

  The road unwound like a lost white ribbon, the taxi driver and Linda talked on. They had now left Glasgow and were heading north. If he was going to be put in an asylum it wouldn’t be in Glasgow, that was for sure. The Sunday morning was quiet and cool and there were few cars on the road. He lay back in his corner seat and closed his eyes, trying to keep away from Linda, withdrawing when the lurch of the taxi threw them occasionally together.

  As a matter of fact he didn’t want to talk anyway. It was as if the power of speech had left him, as if he had sunk into the most profound lassitude and darkness. He focussed his eyes on the broad back of the taxi driver and thought, If only I were like him then Linda would not have considered leaving me. How competent he was, how effortlessly and expertly he drove. This taxi driver had probably learned to drive quite easily, had never had any trouble with practical matters. Why was it that there were some men who had this innate competence while others had to work so hard at everything they did. On the other hand writing was a gift which he himself had, his talent in that was assured and clear without the shadow of a doubt lying on it.

  “I would like to go on to the town of … to see my doctor,” he said aloud in a firm voice.

  It seemed to him that the taxi driver glanced at Linda in his mirror and winked at her.

  “I would like to go on and see my doctor,” he repeated.

  “But the surgery won’t be open on a Sunday,” said Linda.

  “It doesn’t matter. We can go to his house. After all, I’m paying for this taxi.”

  The taxi driver remained silent, waiting for Linda to speak.

  She said again, “I don’t think the doctor would be very pleased. He can call tomorrow. What you need is a good rest.”

  “I want to see the doctor,” he repeated. “The fact is I don’t think this is a real taxi. It would make me happier if I saw my doctor.”

  “You don’t really want to see your doctor,” said the taxi driver, as if he were talking to a child. “As your wife says, the doctor’s surgery will be shut today.”

  “It’s none of your business,” said Ralph angrily.

  “I’m not afraid of you,” thought Ralph to himself angrily. “You may be big and strong and my wife’s lover but I’m not frightened of you.”

  They were now out in the country: land stretched away on both sides of them with sheep feeding on the grass. There was the sudden glitter of a loch: and a house with a slanted roof like the house of a witch. For a moment Ralph imagined that there was a woman leaning out of the attic window, like Mrs Rochester plotting her fire. He often invented fantasies like this when he was travelling. But then hadn’t he come to a dead stop with his novel? For days he had sat and stared at the white empty page unable to continue.

  “I will not go mad,” he kept saying to himself. “I will not go mad. I am not mad. This is a plot aimed at me. I am perfectly sane. There was never any madness in my family. There was coldness, remoteness, but there was never any madness.” The sheep grazed contentedly and the fields were intersected with rays of yellow light.

  “Sweet day so clear so calm so bright, the bridal of the earth and sky,” he repeated silently to himself. Usually he hated Sundays which seemed to last forever. But now he was frightened.

  “Look,” he said coldly and aloud to Linda, “I know you for what you are.” She woke up in a startled manner and stared at him.

  “Sir,” said the taxi driver, politely and protectively.

  “You keep out of it,” said Ralph fiercely.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Linda. “Let him carry on.”

  “I know you for what you are,” said Ralph savagely. “I remember the time you danced with that small bald man at the party and you created when I danced with the blonde girl.”

  “That was a long time ago,” said Linda. “And anyway I can’t remember.”

  The large hands of the taxi driver rested on the wheel but he didn’t speak, though Ralph could tell that he was listening intently. That bloody pseudo-Catholic from some nameless Glasgow housing scheme.

  The landscape outside the window shimmered. He remembered an incident that had happened not so long before he had run away. Linda had been working in the kitchen and he himself had been typing in his room. Suddenly he had seen a girl in a leather coat, carrying a carton of milk, walk across the gravel in the direction of the kitchen door. She hadn’t looked in through the window where he himself was typing and after a while he had seen her returning and going out by the gate. Later, when he and Linda were having coffee, he had asked her who the girl was.

  “What girl?” Linda had said.

  “A girl in a leather coat. She was carrying a carton of milk.”

  “That’s odd,” Linda had said. “I never saw such a girl.” And then she had tried to pass the incident off lightly by saying, “You must have been thinking of one of your girl friends.” And indeed she had looked like Irma. He had dismissed the incident from his mind but now and again it would return to him and he would shake his head in a puzzled manner. Was it true that he had imagined the girl or had Linda simply denied her existence for some deep reason of her own? Had she asked the girl to call and then deliberately insisted that she didn’t exist? How much, he thought, we rely for our sanity on witnesses without prejudice. Without them we would be gnashing our teeth in the outer darkness.

  Another twenty miles or so and then he would be home. The house would appear out of its familiar space with its garden and its cherry tree. The taxi would stop and he and Linda would get out and then the taxi driver would drive away, still pretending that he was a real taxi driver. And then he might phone Linda and they would both have a good laugh about an affair which had been so elegantly executed.

  He should never have allowed himself to become so solitary, he should not have withdrawn into the world of words, so that now he had to rely on corrupt witnesses for his sanity. That was the mistake he had made. What reason would his enemies have to tell the truth? None at all. He had despised the ordinary and it had turned round and bitten him. It had turned its aloof mocking face on him, it had played esoteric games with him: he who had thought he was the élitist of the study. Like the far side of the moon with its mysterious hollows and shadows it was blindly turning its cruel face towards him.

  The ordinary witnesses whom he had despised were taking their revenge on him, and what a subtle revenge it was, far more subtle than any of his plots. Who would have foreseen it, that ordinary people would be so clever, that after all they recognized that he depended on them for the true colour of an orange, an apple. On them depended his reality. From their dull ponderous hands hung the real world as on a golden chain. An exile, he returned, blinded now and again to that ordinary world from his own world, and it had seemed to be waiting for him harmlessly. But like the corrupt evil fairies they had stolen it away from him. They were more evil than he had ever imagined. He had looked down on them from above as if they were a tribe of busy ants engaged in a bizarre unfathomable business of their own. But all the time they had been glancing at him sideways out of their small ant’s eyes and saying to themselves with remorseless bitterness, We will get you yet: Oh we will and no mistake.

  Their spiteful little eyes were now all around him like evil stars, mocking and besieging him.

  In a short while they would be reaching the house again. He thought of it as a trap, set in a beautiful garden, with the lovely cherry tree in the centre. Linda’s eyes were closed and the taxi driver was whistling under his breath ‘Bridge Over Troubled Waters’. The road stretched before him, a tape on a tape recorder, the track he must take unless he exerted his will power. They had now passed the hotel and he would soon be at the house and God knew what bizarre sc
enario was waiting for him there.

  The taxi drew up at the house and they all got out of it. But then before Linda or the taxi driver knew what was happening he had run away from them and was walking purposefully towards the town. They couldn’t do anything now for there were plenty of cars passing on the road, tourists probably: and in the fields he could see people strolling. He gritted his teeth and ran on. The other two stared after him, panic-stricken, not knowing what to do. They had thought that he would enter the house quite tamely and submit to them but he knew better than that. They would now have a consultation and decide what they could do next. In this complicated chess game he had made an unorthodox move: he had taken himself off the board completely. He headed steadily for the town which was twelve miles away. But though he felt tired that didn’t bother him. He wanted to get to his own doctor who would convince him of his sanity. On the right-hand side of the road huge rhododendrons grew freely, in clouds of gaping red. There was also a shimmer of bluebells, hyacinths. This road was very familiar to him. Once he and Linda had seen a fawn, long legged and fastidious and delicate, stepping across it. And one night she had stopped to take care of an owl which had slammed into the windscreen of the car. Oh, she was kind to animals all right. She couldn’t bear to leave a dead cat or dead rabbit lying on the road for cars to squash it flat endlessly. No, she had to get out of the car to remove the carcass to the side. There were such paradoxes in her nature: how could one understand human beings at all?

  He heard the taxi drawing up behind him but continued walking. The taxi stopped and the driver leaned out of the window.

  “Come back home, sir. Don’t be a fool.”

  “Come on,” said Linda. “You’re making an exhibition of yourself.”

  “No,” Ralph snapped and kept on walking.

  “What’s wrong?” said the driver. “You have a beautiful wife, a beautiful house. What more do you want?”

  “You keep them then,” Ralph shouted angrily.

  The taxi driver looked angry as if at any moment he would jump out of his taxi and hit him but he wasn’t frightened. Not at all. The taxi came to a stop while the two of them consulted with each other as to what they should do next and then it raced onwards and in a short while returned. This time he kept his head down so that he wouldn’t see the two of them. He kept on walking, one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other. Eleven miles past the bridge, the still waters, in which trees were reflected perfectly, were without motion. If only the world of human beings were like that, serenely painted, but, no, in that world there were all sorts of distortions. There were no true reflections.

  A steady stream of cars passed but no one seemed surprised to see him walking. He kept to the grass verge and felt the wind of the cars’ headlong humming course. More than ever he was convinced that Linda and the taxi driver were stalking him. Why else should the taxi driver have remained at all? What business was it of his? Why hadn’t he gone back to Glasgow? Or was he simply adding mileage so that he could present him with a large bill at the end of his journey? Why indeed had he himself consented to come home at all? He should have stayed where he was, he had allowed himself like a baby to be passive to their will, which was much stronger than his own. Linda had a simplicity and directness of energy which he could never emulate no matter how hard he tried. It was that trait of hers which he admired most but he didn’t admire it now, he feared it.

  He plodded steadily on. He had settled down into a rhythm now, allowing his feet to take him to his destination, not thinking. That would be best. From the time they had been to Yugoslavia she had thought this plot out carefully: perhaps that was why she had selected Yugoslavia in the first place, had immersed herself in its brochure, nesting with it in her chair. His mind opened frightening vistas. HOW LONG HAD THIS BEEN GOING ON? It hadn’t started recently.

  Mines began to explode in his thoughts, one after the other. When she had come in with cups of coffee for him had she really been deliberately interrupting him, trying to stop the flow of his ideas?

  And these endless interrogations about Christianity, had they been intended to unnerve him? Linda, too, was far more superstitious than he was, she believed in planetary influences, ghosts, auras, phantoms. She believed that the Egyptians had encountered space-men in ancient times. She believed that Christ had been a space-man. She believed that planes had disappeared in the Bermuda triangle. She believed that when she died she would go to another planet. Was she not at all frightened of the punishments of hell, then? Did she not feel the flames stroking her hair tenderly? He himself was a rational man, he didn’t believe that watches could be bent by minds, he didn’t believe that the laws of physics could be set aside by the spiteful winds of magic. He believed that we were all on a perishable road where the grave waited for us, the tombstone with our name inscribed on it like a simple address.

  He headed onwards as if into a high wind. And then he heard the car coming up behind him and slowing. It was Linda, but this time Linda on her own without the taxi driver, and in her own car. She drove alongside him as if he were the runner in a race and she was following him with the sustenance of food and water. She leaned out of the window.

  “Listen,” she said, “I’ll take you to the doctor if you must go.”

  “I don’t believe you,” he said.

  “I swear,” she said. “If that is what you want.” Cars passed them steadily, in a magnified and diminishing roar, and people looked at the two of them as if wondering what was happening. In one car a tall black dog stood upright as a Buddha, with smooth shining black skin.

  “No,” Ralph shouted.

  “Come on,” said Linda. “I won’t say anything. I won’t even speak to you if you don’t want me to.”

  He thought for a while and then he said, “All right then,” and got into the car. He refused to put his safety belt on and Linda didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to be bound and helpless if she suddenly turned back. But, no, she was indeed driving in the direction of the town. Perhaps she was really telling the truth.

  “Where did you meet him,” he asked at last.

  “Meet who?”

  “That so-called taxi driver.”

  “I’ve never seen him before in my life.”

  “That’s a laugh. What’s he doing helping you then? Why hasn’t he gone back to Glasgow?”

  “Because he has some human feeling, that’s why. He has a wife and six children. He says he’s seen this kind of thing before. He’s sorry for me, that’s why he stayed. And I’m very lucky, that he should have done.”

  “And where is he now?”

  “What do you mean, where is he now? He’s probably gone back to Glasgow.”

  “Probably?”

  “I’m sure he’s had enough of this. I would if I were him.”

  “Would what?”

  “Have gone back to Glasgow.”

  “Huh.”

  He relapsed into his seat beside her. She was like an eel, she had an answer for everything. The terrible thing was that he could prove nothing against her. And she probably had a tape recorder hidden in the car taking down everything he said so that she could use it as proof against him.

  “Can’t you go faster than this?” he asked.

  “If you want,” she said, sensing the challenge in his voice. He glanced at her fixed profile as if it were stamped on a false coin.

  And then the voice said to him, You must kill yourself and her. Put the car off the road. That is what you must do.

  He listened. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? That would solve all his problems at once. He didn’t care about his own life anyway and as for her, he wanted his revenge. The car was going quite fast now, Linda staring ahead of her, and suddenly in a savage motion he grasped the wheel and began to tug. At first Linda didn’t realize what was happening and panicked, not knowing what to do. The car swerved from side to side of the road and then she applied the brakes and he tried to kick her leg away. Another
car passed, a man’s mouth opening in surprise. Ralph fought like a madman and Linda fought against him for her life. And then the car came to a stop. She ran out of it to another car which had come to a stop as well. He ran after her and then when he saw the other car he slowed down and began to walk away as if he didn’t have a care in the world. If those people hadn’t been there! But, no, they were looking at him and Linda was standing between them, panting, her face dead white.

  He began to run blindly along a path into the wood which lay on the far side of the road. He passed a farmhouse and heard some hens clucking in the yard. A cockerel crew: that was bad luck, for a cockerel to crow in the middle of the day. There were a lot of leaves, roots, trunks of trees dappled with sun. He must get clear of all pursuit. He didn’t want to see anyone again. He crossed a park where sheep were grazing and plunged into the wood again. The ground was mossy and soft and his shoes sank into it. Finally he came to a clearing and sat down in it. After a while he lay on his back and stared up at the sky where the clouds passed slowly as if made of marble.

  In the middle of the wood. … He heard the whisperings of little animals but saw nothing. He sat up, took the bottle of pills from his pocket and began to count them. He poured them into his palm and gazed at them, the little red globes. Before he swallowed them there was something else he felt he ought to do, but he couldn’t think what it was. What did people do before they killed themselves? Of course. They left a suicide note. He took out a letter which he had received from South Africa asking if they could use for an anthology a short story of his. Then he scribbled in large letters on the back, the words, MEET YOU IN HELL, and he addressed it to Linda. That would really frighten her. Even if he didn’t believe in hell she did and she would wake up in the middle of the night wondering if he was haunting the house. It might take years for them to have that infernal rendezvous but for the rest of her life she would remember his last words.

  He arranged some twigs below him. He might as well be comfortable. He might as well look calm and resolute in death. After all, this death might be reported. He might as well die like a classical hero as if he didn’t have a care in the world.