Goodbye, Mr Dixon

by Iain Crichton Smith

  He stumbled away, pulling the door after him, not waiting to see what would happen, what Richardson would do, how he would extricate himself. He ran downwards lest Richardson should come after him, to explain, to talk. How could Richardson look at him now in class? It was lucky that he was leaving. How could he speak at all of the things of the mind now, how could he make his jokes? But Richardson would not pursue him, he knew. What after all could he say? “You know how it is, old chap”? No, Richardson didn’t have the language of the squire to draw on.

  His own head ached as if he wished to bury that sight, as if he wanted to walk again about the cool world, uncaring, free of responsibility. Without knowing what he was doing he got his jacket—which he had left in Richardson’s room—and made his way steadily home as if he were walking against a high wind. At one stage he went into a café and bought himself an iced drink. When he got home he told his mother that he wasn’t well—the heat, he said—and had fallen into a deep sleep still lying on the bed in his clothes.

  He had in fact gone to school the following day, still suffering from the same headache, and the most amazing thing had happened. The two of them—he and Richardson—had decided as if by mutual empathy to ignore the whole thing. Richardson hadn’t looked at him during the course of the lesson but had been rather more subdued than usual. He had looked slightly apprehensive, but knew perfectly well that Tom wouldn’t say anything. It was a bit of a comedy really. But all the time Tom had a terrible headache and was shaking with terrible tremors like a land subject to earthquakes. He knew that something important and awful had happened, that he must survive it as best he might, that a precious thing like a vase had been irretrievably smashed, that time after time he would be visited by unutterable pain. Nor could he clearly focus why this should be. It was something to do with betrayal, with vulgarity, with hypocrisy expressed in its most animal form, with finding a rottenness at the centre of things in the most immediate manner, with seeing the world of his mother, frenzied and inferior, set here as well, a penetration of his final preserve.

  So it was that night—after Richardson had told him just as he was going out of the room that his poems would be in the school magazine after all—that he lay down on his bed again, staring up at the ceiling, still suffering from the same intense blazing headache. His father was in the shed reading as usual, his mother was stamping heavily about the kitchen, he himself lay staring at the ceiling. He knew it would be impossible to carry on in the class as if nothing had happened even for the few remaining weeks, the situation was too intolerable and artificial, quite apart from the fact that he would have to see Jean every day and pretend that she had been totally invisible to him. He felt a bitter sense of betrayal. Behind the wit and the humour, behind the cool detachment, had been the same carnality and vulgarity which was at the centre of all things. There had been no superiority at all, only a false façade. All the other teachers—duller, more tedious—had been after all superior to Richardson. They had gone on their steady solid way doing their best, humourless, serious. He had misjudged them all. But more than all these speculations, not logically pursued, had been his vision of the animal body and the distortion of the detached mind.

  And so the following morning he had taken his clothes and slipped quietly out of the house not knowing where he was going but determined to go somewhere. He had hitch-hiked his way north.

  And now he was standing in the light of day in the cemetery looking around him. Dixon had been Richardson all the while and perhaps Ann had been Jean. How strange the ways of the mind were. And his so-called novel had been simply a method of psychological cure. Perhaps that was why he had such great difficulty with it. But why had Dixon become so objectionable, why had he come to hate him? Was that simply a psychological manifestation as well or did it mean something truer, more eternal? He knew now why he had run away from the hotel. It was because of that boy bending over Ann at the dance, suave, fair-haired, and a reminder of Dixon. He stood in the cemetery meditating. The stones sparkled in the chill light, names and dates standing out clearly in row after row. His mother was dead under one of those stones. Dixon for that matter was dead under all of them. Dixon was finished with forever. He would never write about him again, he would never feel anything for him but hate. All these ridiculous values, they had all been false.

  He walked out of the cemetery quite briskly. He wanted to go home. He wanted to see Ann, to see what it was possible to salvage. Perhaps there was nothing to salvage, but at least he would try. Now he knew that he wasn’t a writer, that that illusion was over, that he must save himself. He was willing to try to enter the world, it was necessary for him to do so, all the rest had been a dream.

  26

  IT WAS AFTERNOON when he approached his flat again and by a strange coincidence it was the time when Mrs Harrow in her patchy furs was setting out again on her usual trip. This time he did follow her, he didn’t care whether he was seen or not. He wanted to find out once and for all whether her house existed. He waited till she had got on to the bus and got on behind her. She sat at the front and he at the back. He turned his face to the window and spent his time watching the people passing along the streets. He was thinking that it would be interesting if her dream turned out to be a reality. He wanted it to be reality. He wanted her to have succeeded with her project. For if she succeeded then he might succeed too in whatever he decided to do next. He couldn’t continue with the life he was leading. That was quite settled in his mind. It would be pitiable, however, if she too turned out to be a figure of comedy, if she too had been living in a lie constructed out of her own psychological debris, especially when, as he looked out of the window, he could see so much of the city being rebuilt, the old slums being demolished, the tall new buildings taking their place.

  When she eventually got out he followed her, past the university up a long street of largish houses. She turned in at one of them. Somehow she seemed to have become more brisk and effective and real as she approached the house, as if she was wearing a new authority. It was quite noticeable, something to do with her sense of purpose which communicated itself to her walk. If one has a purpose then one has everything, he thought. It doesn’t matter what the purpose is, as long as one believes in it, then that of itself creates life. Even the rat has a purpose, the dog, the ant, the fly. Without purpose there is nothing at all, there is only fog, the sandy grit of tedium and emptiness that rubs at the eyes.

  She entered and he followed her. He waited for a bit and then stood outside an open door. He heard her moving about in the room. Then he went into the room. She was standing looking up at a pair of purple curtains, admiring them. She swung round when he spoke. “Good afternoon, Mrs Harrow,” he said. “I thought I’d come along and give you a hand. I saw you going in. I happened to be in the neighbourhood quite by chance. It really is amazing, isn’t it?” She was astonished to see him as if he had broken into her private dream, but she gained control of herself rapidly.

  “It’s very beautiful,” he said looking around him. And truly enough it was. The walls had been wallpapered in white, but the rest was purple throughout, curtains, chairs, carpets.

  He said, “I’ll give you a hand if you like.”

  “Do you think the students will like it?” she asked eagerly.

  “I’m sure they will,” he said. “I should like to stay here. It’s very quiet.” And it was too. He couldn’t hear the sound of any traffic.

  “This isn’t all,” she said suddenly. “There are other rooms. I have a bathroom and four bedrooms and a living room.”

  Her face had come alight, her clumsy body seemed to glow with achievement and pride of ownership. “I had to do something,” she said, “when my husband … It won’t be long now till I get everything arranged. If you’d care to see the other rooms. I was going to do some painting this afternoon. I have some paint pots in my bag here.”

  They walked into the other rooms, one of which still remained to do. The others were tast
efully decorated each in a different colour, one in red, one in green. He felt as if he were in an art gallery walking from room to room admiring. How much she must have denied herself to do this!

  “I thought,” she said, “that I would call them the Purple Room, the Red Room and the Green Room. I got the idea from a magazine.”

  Tom suddenly felt that he wanted badly to do physical work again. He was tired of reading and writing. There was a part of him that felt starved after all those months. In the old days he had felt the same satisfaction when he had started work with a pick on a fine summer’s morning and the stones of the road sparkled ahead of him, though the feeling had worn away in the course of the day with the pain and the tiredness. But at the beginning it was fine, that release of new areas of himself long unused.

  “I should like to do some painting,” he said. “I should like to help. I haven’t got anything else to do anyway. Would you like me to do that?”

  “It would be a great help,” she said. “I’ll go out and get some buns and rolls and I’ll make tea later.”

  So she gave him the paint and the brushes and the turpentine and he spread on the floor some newspapers that she had brought. He had done some painting before though he wasn’t a very good painter. Painting looked much easier than it really was. Still it was rather easier than wallpapering. All that stretch of wall waiting to be covered with yellow paint. For she had decided to call this the Yellow Room. He painted slowly and smoothly, feeling a kind of sleepy rhythm permeate what he was doing. It was as if suddenly he had decided that afternoon that he would let things happen and not impose himself on them any more, as if he had committed himself to the inevitable. He brushed with a sleepy sensuous motion, aware only of the painting and nothing else. He didn’t wonder whether it was going to be good or bad, he let it be what it was going to be. What he did think of was that he was doing something useful, that he was transforming a dull room without character into a pretty room, that the room was being transformed under his eyes, that moment by moment he was creating more and more colour, that he liked what he was doing. He wanted to do as much as possible, to tire himself out so that he would sleep, he wanted to go on till he had finished, so that in fact the lights were put on and he was still working in a dream of satisfaction as more and more of the walls became yellow, as less and less of them retained their drab dull white. He ate his rolls and buns and drank his tea but he wouldn’t stop for long. He wanted to see the entire transformation taking place, though now and again Mrs Harrow would say, “Isn’t it time for you to go home?” But even she began to feel this as an adventure as, for the first time, she stayed on late enough to put on the lights and see her house for the first time in their glow. She fussed about with tea and biscuits as he steadily worked on making the room sunnier and sunnier. Some part of him was flowering in the paint, some part of him had long needed this efflorescence into reality, some part of him demanded this relentless, effortless blossoming. He imagined at one stage that he was creating a vast yellow flower, that he was himself this huge yellow flower, that he was bringing into birth a new species. His arm passed from aching to tranquillity. He no longer felt tiredness when he stretched. He was like a remorseless god, intent and domestic. At one stage he found himself whistling a tune he thought he had forgotten, while Mrs Harrow watched him from the door, a smile on her lips.

  When he was finally ready he said, “I think that’s enough for now.” And he stretched sensuously like a cat. He said, “Will you be all right now getting home?” She said yes, and he left her and went into a pub for a drink.

  For the first time for many months he felt that he had deserved the drink. He drank his first pint slowly savouring it richly in his mouth. Then he bought another one. At one stage in the evening he got into a game of draughts with an old man who was smoking a pipe. The old man beat him easily.

  “What you have to do,” said the old man, “is gain control of the centre. That’s what you have to do. You’re always out on the flanks. Gain control of the centre.” The old man puffed smoke contentedly.

  “I think I’ll get married,” said Tom for no reason at all, after he had lost the game.

  The old man looked at him through clouds of smoke. “Merrit, eh? Are ye no merrit yet?”

  “No,” said Tom. “But I think I shall get married.” He felt warm and happy and slightly drunk.

  The old man was quiet for a while, then he said, “It’s a big step in a man’s life. I’ve been merrit thirty-six year.” He added, “I’m here every night of the week.”

  “What?” said Tom. “You mean you leave the house every night and come and sit here? What does your wife do?”

  “My wife has to put up with it,” he said. “Son, when I was your age, if my wife looked at any other man I’d clobber him. We used to fight each other all the time, all the time. I clobbered a bloke once for smiling at her, a stranger he was. Mind you, I didna like him. We was in this bar and he was sitting at the other end of the bar by hisself, and he smiled at my wife and I went over and clobbered him. But that’s all gone now. Now I know she’ll be waiting for me and I’ll be waiting for her.”

  “In here?” said Tom.

  “She knows where A am,” said the old man comfortably. “She knows where A am. She’s the best wife any man could have.”

  The bar began to fill up and there was no room any longer to play draughts. Tom found himself sitting at a table with the old man and a lot of other people who seemed to be in a group. Two of them started a long discussion on Marx and the UCS.

  One of them was saying, “What Marx means by the dictatorship of the proletariat is that the working classes—that’s me and you—will take over in the end.”

  “I agree wi’ ye,” said the other man who had a small black thin moustache and looked like a film star whose name Tom couldn’t remember. “I agree wi’ ye, but you haveta remember that the Chinks did it wi’oot a proper proletariat.”

  “You could do it yourself wi’oot a proper proletariat,” said the first man who burst out laughing. He turned round to the others and said, “Imagine old Ken here doing it wi’ a’ the proletariat standing roon. Aw, bugger off.”

  The old man had told them that Tom was thinking of getting married, and he found himself surrounded by people offering him drinks, advice and jokes.

  At a little after ten o’clock he was standing outside the pub saying goodbye to a lot of new hazy friends, swaying on his feet, and laughing a great deal.

  He floated off eventually, waving his arms and saying, “Goo’ night, sweet ladies, goo’ night. Goo’ night sweet Lil,” he shouted after a large man with a broken nose who worked in a shipyard. “Goo’ night Desperate Dan,” he shouted, swaying, “goo’ night my red comics.”

  Staggering from side to side he set off home.

  27

  AS HE WALKED along he suddenly found an unshaven bristly dirty man, who seemed to be wearing long dirty skirts belted by a rope, slanting along beside him. This vague tall being kept pace with him all the time, greyish, foggy, like the survivor of a war.

  “Who are you?” said Tom. “What do you want?”

  He thought of him as one of the innumerable outcasts of the city scrabbling among ruined buildings and pleading for VP or spirits.

  But the man said nothing, still keeping pace with him all the time, while a strong rank smell compounded of wet cloth and sickness and cheap spirits emanated from him, so that Tom began to feel panicky. Would the man attack him? Would he hit him over the head and try to take what little money he had from him and then retreat to whatever cave or slum he inhabited? The night was now quite dark and he could hardly see him, only he had an impression of greyness and bristle and long flapping clothes. Now and again the man would try to put his hand on his shoulder as if pleading with him for something. Perhaps—greatest of horrors—he had recognised a being like himself. Perhaps he was dumb and was trying to communicate without speech. Tom began to run and the man ran with him alongside him,
panting, or at least he lengthened his stride in such a manner that Tom couldn’t draw away from him. He felt dirty and stained as if he were being infected by this being which moved alongside him as if it were a huge bird of prey whose breath smelt of corruption and carrion.

  Tom was sober again, his gaiety had left him, his sense of irresponsible joy was dissipated and he felt again in touch with a kind of reality, a grey shrouded smelly bristly reality. Were the man’s hands really hands or were they claws? What should he do? Should he try to speak to it?

  Words began to spout out of him almost against his will. “Who are you? What do you want? How do you spend your time?” All these questions he asked as if he were begging pardon, as if he were acknowledging responsibility.

  Tom used to see people like this shambling along the roads with bags over their shoulders or sitting half asleep in reading rooms. Who were these people? Where had they come from? Once in broad daylight he had seen a chimney sweep on a bicycle cycling decorously along wearing black shiny clothes, the face black, a comic Death.

  He felt despair emanating from the figure like slime. Oh God, he thought, if only it were daylight. If only the dawn would come up, if only he were in the Yellow Room again painting.

  He felt the panting of the figure again as if it were out of condition. What did it want of him? It did not seem to wish to attack him, otherwise it would have done so before. It merely wanted to be with him, walking beside him. Sometimes under street lights he could see the thin bluish face, the whiskers, the thin bony hands.

  After a while a kind of peace came over him. Perhaps the being just wanted companionship, perhaps that was all it wanted. Perhaps it just wanted the smell and the touch of man. Perhaps it just wanted to be near the sound of his footsteps. Was that so monstrous a crime?

  The city was full of people like this, escaped from the bright bubble of the Welfare State, from its air suit. It slanted along beside him, as the dog trotted beside the other old man, but silent, not barking, not making a sound except that now and again it panted as if Tom were walking too fast.