Goodbye, Mr Dixon

by Iain Crichton Smith

  He walked briskly forward and said, “Here I am.” She looked at him. He wasn’t wearing his khaki coat. He was wearing instead a grey suit and a collar and tie. His bright hair, though long, was brushed and he seemed very presentable. She was flattered that he had gone to the length of improving his appearance, though she didn’t comment on it.

  “Shall we go in?” she said. She waited for him while he went over to the booth and bought two tickets. She noticed with concern that he had bought two of the most expensive tickets, sensing that he didn’t have very much money. They walked together up the wide steps, past the beribboned commissionaire, into the opulent interior with its plush seats. They sat beside each other while the music played before the film began and the lights shone with a dark red lustre. The curtains were still drawn. The room was filling up rapidly as if it were a theatre. She saw that there was a clock set in the ceiling directly ahead and that it registered six o’clock.

  “Would you like some sweets?” he asked her.

  “Not really,” she said, arranging herself comfortably in the seat. It was a very luxurious place really but she didn’t much care for the seat. Tom was sitting on her left not saying much at first. Then he began to talk about the Western and she was surprised to find how intense and interesting he was. But she felt that he was still not aware of her in a real way and that he seemed to be thinking of her in relation to another world, another context. She found this rather queer and nearly said something to him but decided against it. After all, she might not see him again after that night. She hadn’t yet made up her mind about him though certainly he had gone up in her estimation by the clothes he wore. That had shown a certain care and sensitivity.

  He was saying that the best Western was Shane followed by High Noon. She had never seen either of them. She didn’t know anything about Westerns. Her favourite films were romantic ones. The best film she had seen in recent times was Rebecca with Laurence Olivier. She didn’t like very advanced films where the hero and the heroine were seen in bed with each other naked and sweating. The films she really liked were ones where the hero and heroine were reconciled to each other after a certain amount of complication.

  He was saying that the idea of the Western was basically that of the chase, and that was why it was suited to the cinema. The cowboy, he remarked, was always lonely, he was not an admirable person, he was not self-sufficient. People didn’t seem to realise that to wander about as he did was the action of a lonely man. The purest cowboy idea was that of the cowboy playing a guitar to himself under the stars. It was the essence of beauty and loneliness. She thought that perhaps he saw himself as a cowboy.

  In fact she considered that his conversation was a protective device designed to prevent him from talking to her at all seriously.

  The music stopped and the film began. She watched it with fascination, the settler, the wife, the boy, the cowboy riding up to the homestead and asking for water for his horse. Now and again she would glance sideways at Tom and see that he was totally absorbed in what was happening. He didn’t look at her at all and this in some curious way made her feel secure so that she was able to relax. The story unfolded itself slowly in the bright colours of the large screen. She saw that Shane was meant to be an emanation from the distant past but she was more interested in the relation of the wife to him than in anything else. She herself preferred the solid settler to Shane. There was something about Shane that made her feel uneasy, a sense of transience, an edginess, an orphan restlessness. He was in the society but not of it. She approved of his sentiments though. Violence was bad. One shouldn’t wear a gun if one could help it.

  She was interested too in the behaviour of the boy who seemed to be about the same age as the ones she herself taught. She wondered what would happen to him and whether he would be corrupted. She thought again how much her teaching had affected her in that she saw everything as either useful or not useful for educational purposes.

  Once Tom touched her arm in excitement and said, “Watch this.” It was the part of the film where the gun-slinger, clad in black, had been taken to the ranch by Fletcher who was telling the homesteader, Starrett, to leave. The gunslinger was sitting at ease on his horse as if he owned the world, the hard sunlight defining him; and leaning against the fence with the same apparent casualness was Shane without a gun. For a moment the glances of the two men met, in a startled recognition that they were both of the same kind. It was a meaningful moment and she realised it.

  And so the film proceeded towards its end. Starrett had been knocked out by Shane to prevent him being killed in the denouement, and Shane rode out alone to his rendezvous, the boy running after him. It was true that it was all taut and interesting, but at the same time she wasn’t basically interested in that. Shane seemed unreal. She couldn’t imagine being as good as that and yet as hard. She would have liked to have seen more about the relationship between him and the wife. Gunfighting didn’t interest her. It was too easy a way out. She preferred the slow, almost sluggish, plodding Starrett to Shane. He seemed a more real character.

  Then there was the fight in the saloon, Shane spinning round and firing upwards at the ambusher on the balcony after he had killed the gunslinger. The silence in the saloon. The music fading away in an elegiac manner. She looked at Tom who seemed perfectly rapt. She couldn’t think exactly what he looked like, and then it came into her mind. He had exactly the same expression she had once seen on the face of a painting of the Virgin Mary. She started to laugh and he looked at her in amazement. When she told him he burst out laughing too. For the first time she felt some real contact. There was something else on, a film about the prairies, but Tom suddenly got up and said, “Come on, anything else would be rubbish after that.” The film about the prairies would have been useful for a geography lesson but she decided not to say anything.

  They emerged into the lights and stood for a moment outside the cinema. “Is there a restaurant?” he asked. As they walked along, it began to drizzle a little. They passed boys and girls walking arm in arm, and a group of skinheads who looked bleak and monkish in the harsh light. They passed a dance hall which was painted a bright and awful green. They passed skinny lovers embracing in closes scarred with gang names, till they eventually found a restaurant. It was a Chinese restaurant and they sat as before in a corner.

  This time he wouldn’t let her pay for anything and he told her this before they started. It looked quite an expensive restaurant, dimly lit, music leaking from the walls.

  “What did you think of the film?” he asked. She had taken off her coat and he saw that she was wearing an attractive blue dress which matched her eyes and a large emerald brooch at her breast.

  “I thought it was very good,” she said. “What did you think of the wife?”

  “What wife?” he said.

  “Mrs Starrett, was that her name? She seemed to be in love with Shane.”

  “Oh, I see. Yes, I suppose she was, now that you mention it.”

  “I noticed it. I thought there would have been more about that.”

  “What did you think of Shane himself?”

  “He was all right. He seemed rather strange.”

  “How do you mean strange?”

  He seemed not really to be listening to her. She noticed that he had cut himself shaving. She still felt that they were strangers, that he was examining her, that he was watching her, studying her.

  “Well, he didn’t seem to belong anywhere. I wondered where he was going at the end.”

  “He was supposed to be a man dedicated to something,” he said.

  After a while she said, “It’s very expensive here. Are you sure that we wouldn’t be better …”

  “No, we’ll eat here. I have some money.”

  At that moment the waiter came up and they ordered curries. He ate quickly and she more slowly. She wondered what she was doing there at all, but if she hadn’t been she would have been at home working on projects and she was tired of them.

&
nbsp; “Tell me about your book,” she said. “You said you were trying to write a book. What’s it about? It’s not a Western, is it?”

  “Good Lord, no,” he said in surprise, “it’s not a Western. I’m not good enough to write a real Western. It’s not a very good novel. It’s silly and pointless. I may never finish it.”

  “But surely you can if you want to,” she said.

  “It’s not like that,” he said in a sudden burst of energy. “It’s not like that at all. It’s not a matter of the will, like trying to learn a bicycle. It’s got to be waited for. Sometimes I can’t write anything. Anyway it’s no good. But I want to finish it. After that I’ll see.”

  “Why isn’t it a matter of the will?” she probed, eating slowly.

  “You have to wait,” he said, looking at her for the first time directly as if he were really seeing her. “You have to wait. You can’t go on day after day. You could decide to spend hours on it but it might not be any good. It’s not a routine thing. Do you understand?”

  “I think so,” she said, though she didn’t really. In her experience if you worked hard enough, if you decided on something, you could do anything you liked. It was all a question of determination.

  “Where did you get the brooch from?” he asked suddenly.

  “It was my mother’s,” she said.

  “It’s very pretty,” he said as if embarrassed. “It suits you. It really does. Are you liking the food?”

  “Yes,” she said, “it’s very nice.”

  The trouble was that they didn’t seem to have any small talk. She felt that he was trying to talk but couldn’t find anything to talk about, as if his obsessions were elsewhere.

  “I …” They both began to speak at the same time and then stopped embarrassed.

  “Tell me about your projects,” he said.

  “Oh, they’re not terribly interesting. One is called Dress Down the Ages. We did a lot of work on that.”

  “I see.”

  Somehow she felt that he would find the project trivial and didn’t wish to talk about it. And she supposed that on one level it was, all that cutting of pictures out of newspapers and magazines, and pasting them into notebooks. To him that would appear superficial.

  It wasn’t really being a very successful evening.

  “Can you give me your address or your phone number?” he suddenly asked.

  “If you’d like it,” she said. It was difficult to say no, though at the same time she wasn’t all that sure she wanted to see him again. So she wrote it down for him though she said he wasn’t to phone her at the school. The headmaster didn’t like personal phone calls coming through on the school switchboard.

  Near them two young people were sitting opposite each other gazing into each other’s eyes, their hands clasped above the table. The light was gentle and unglaring and she felt at ease in the room. It reminded her of early days spent lying under leaves in green woods when she wanted to be alone. She had a sudden impulse to straighten his tie but his face looked moody and distant and she didn’t think he would want her to touch him. She thought of him as unfinished and needing to be put together. But she didn’t have the knowledge or expertise to set about doing it, and she sensed that if she tried to do anything like that he would withdraw again. She couldn’t understand why he was interested in her. She sensed a fierce inarticulate rage deep within him as if some force in him was trying to get out.

  “Are you ready?” she said at last.

  They got up, he paid, and they walked out together into the light of the city which seemed to make them smaller as they emerged. Instinctively they drew closer to each other. The buildings around them were tall, there was a jigsaw of shining lights on the road. To each of them simultaneously there came a chilling haunting wind of separateness. Without thinking she put her hand on his arm and he let it rest there. She didn’t know what he was thinking. The rain had stopped and they left the slummy area and came out into an area of more space. They crossed a bridge and he stopped and stared down into the water.

  Their heads close to each other, he said, “Sometimes I want desperately to be alone. Do you ever need to be alone?”

  With a spirit of gaiety she said, “Like Greta Garbo,” and had an image of Greta Garbo in a long coat walking up an avenue with autumn leaves all round her and a dying music following her.

  “Yes,” he shouted gaily, “like Greta Garbo. I vant to be alone.” He faced the city and shouted in a German voice, “I vant to be alone. I do not vant ze Common Market.” She was amazed at this sudden transformation, this ebullience. “Bring me my bow of burning gold,” he shouted, “and also, if you have ze time, my arrows of desire. Also pick up my chariot.” He looked suddenly gay and clownish in the harlequin lights.

  Suddenly he started whirling round and round in a gay invented dance and then came back to her and took her by the arm. “You Tarzan, me Shane,” he said and burst out laughing. Then she burst out laughing as well. They walked briskly together down the long road till they came to her bus stop. She waved at him out of the bus wondering if she would see him again but sensing deep down that she would. He waved back furiously and then turned away. She watched him from the window of the stationary bus. He looked suddenly part of what her life had become. He was a recognisable person among the streets and the stones, in a city being torn down and rebuilt.

  12

  Dixon and Sheila stood in the foyer of the concert hall, Dixon dressed in white shirt and cravat and carrying a cane, Sheila dressed in a long trailing blue gown which, Dixon thought, didn’t suit her. Perhaps she hadn’t been going to concerts in the past, perhaps she didn’t like music. And yet music was very important to Dixon, especially the music of Mozart. He whistled a Mozart tune while he waited to go in, hoping that he wouldn’t meet anyone he knew, which in fact was extremely unlikely since he didn’t often go to this particular place. He noticed that Sheila was gazing at the dresses the other women were wearing with a certain envy. She seemed ill at ease; was it because she was with him? He couldn’t tell. She was carrying a large blue handbag which seemed unsuitable. He would have to get her new clothes, he would have to dress her.

  With a practised mind he absorbed the scene around him. Always there was that small crystal which was ticking over in his mind and which made him see everything in terms of the novel. He glanced at the three women sitting at the low table and tabulated them as unmarried lecturers talking in their usual brittle, intellectual manner. He studied the men in tails and dinner shirts standing at the bar, looking over each other’s shoulders. He watched the commissionaire who stood at the door proprietorially in his military ribbons.

  “Would you like a drink?” he asked her.

  “No,” she said, “not really.”

  “Well, in that case hadn’t we better go in?”

  They went in and found their seats. It wasn’t a very large place but it looked luxurious with its clock set in the ceiling and its plushy seats.

  “Have you listened to much music before?” he asked her, unfolding the programme he had bought.

  “No, I haven’t.” He glanced sideways at her. She still seemed uneasy, in a strange place. He smiled inwardly. Certainly his former wife would never have come at all; she thought music was ridiculous and was bored easily. He didn’t think this girl would show boredom. Perhaps she was used to boredom in her orphan world. He thought of the book he was working on, in which he had torn to pieces the woman he had left, transforming her into the brittle spirit of a world dominated by barbarians. There he took his revenge on her, calmly and slowly and with immense leisured satisfaction. In order to do it, he had to leave her. He had to hate her sufficiently and that wasn’t difficult, she had hurt him enough. The first pages were going all right but he did find the day long without her. There was a certain hectic combative excitement that he missed.

  There was some applause as the orchestra took their seats. The first item on the programme was the 1812 Overture. It wasn’t one of his favo
urite pieces of music. Still, it might appeal to Sheila. He listened without much interest, though there was no doubt that Tchaikovsky had a certain naive tunefulness. But he wasn’t a great composer. These long languorous stretches alternating with bouts of violent action. Descriptive music of this nature was a denial of true music, its essential quality.

  He handed Sheila the programme and she studied it. He liked looking at her sideways, noticing her clear pure profile, her quiet competent appearance. She didn’t speak much because this wasn’t a situation that she felt at home in. He liked that. He liked the fact that she wouldn’t speak when she had nothing to say. Her bowed neck and head looked vulnerable and helpless.

  The Overture accelerated to a frenzied clash of arms, cavalry, horses, swish of sabres. No, this wasn’t really his music. It was too active, not intellectual enough, lacking in true feeling, superficial. Sheila unearthed some sweets and gave him one. He gazed at them bemusedly and then tasted the mint on his tongue. He watched a musician staring at his score in a bored manner, not at that point playing. Napoleon. Ah, there was a hero, the man with the broken star wandering dazedly through the snow which destroyed him. What thoughts he must have had, how he must have suffered. Josephine, palaces, men eating each other at fires on that terrible march, the star fading behind the snow, the ghostly riders hemming them in, the squat little emperor with his contempt for the proles. Ah, there was a man. There was a mind. If only one could put him down on paper, if only one could make him credible.