An End to Autumn

by Iain Crichton Smith

  When they eventually got back into the car, she said with an effort, “I think we should go home now. There’s a breeze getting up anyway and it will turn cold.”

  They drove back the way they had come very slowly as if Tom for some reason of his own were showing the countryside for the last time. After the hectic flurry of flames the trees seemed calmer and stiller, the lochs clearer and bluer, and the silence of the autumn day more present and insistent. They saw birds flying about the sky as if they were preparing to migrate and some perched on fences and telephone wires, their feathers trembling slightly in the breeze, their small heads already turned towards the lands that they would soon inhabit. There were bodies of rabbits on the road, squashed red and raw and flat, by travelling cars, and here and there were also the carcasses of seagulls.

  Once they had to stop for a while in the middle of the road to wait for a crow that had alighted on the body of a rabbit and was pecking at it, raising its shining head now and again and looking around with a blank stare. Tom had an impulse to go out and throw a stone at it, as if he felt something obscene in its innocent feeding, and would have done so but that it reluctantly rose of its own accord from the ravaged rabbit whose guts he could see hanging out.

  “Oh, look,” said Angela, “there’s the train,” and sure enough it was the four o’clock train winding among the brown hills, heading away from the small town towards the city. Tom refrained from looking at his mother who was sitting beside him, her hands clasped in her lap.

  All things continue, he thought, all things continue, but now they will continue in a different way. And he felt sadness as well as joy as if a world to which he had once belonged had come to an end. When he drew up at the door of the house he helped his mother out and then Vera. His mother couldn’t leave now anyway, she would have to wait till she got her house back, but in the end she would go, especially now. He had had to make a choice and now a new one was being made for him. It was a choice between Vera and his mother and, anguished though it was, life demanded it. There was no going back to a world that had once been and he must learn to swim in the new world. Thus as he steered his mother into the house it was with a tenderer touch and as he looked at Vera it was as if he knew that whatever she was, in her fierce love, he had chosen her and must abide by her, for that very possessiveness must have been one of the reasons for his love. Astonished by this revelation he stood for a moment dazed in front of the door before entering so that Angela had to speak to him as he fitted the key into the lock and even Vera herself looked surprised by his absentmindedness.

  Finally, however, he opened the door and let them all in one after the other, and then followed them, and it seemed to him that the house itself had changed and become a sort of shelter against what was to come in its unpredictability and its strangeness.

  PART FOUR

  IT WAS A day in April when Tom and Vera took Mrs Mallow down to the railway station to see her off to Edinburgh. Unstated though understood, the departure had been in their minds for a long time, but when Tom woke that morning to see the glare of light about the bedroom the imminent parting had returned to him as a shocking surprise: and yet it was not as if he wouldn’t see her again. Breakfast had passed in a silence that was almost meditative: and now they were at the railway station staring at the train that was waiting at the platform. To Tom it was as if the train were bearing both his father and his mother away from him: Vera on the other hand reposed in the sluggish triumph of her future. The two women regarded each other from inside a world that Tom did not understand, as if they had learnt a wary respect each for the other. They briefly kissed and then Tom took his mother’s case and walked with her to the door of a carriage that was already open. He swung the case on to a rack and then helped his mother aboard. She said, “Look after yourself,” and he muttered some reply. It was as if he wished it to be all over, and indeed it seemed that his mother too wanted to leave and be back in her own home, in its independent silence. “You don’t need to wait,” she said, but he waited just the same, not speaking, just being there: there was little that he could profitably say. Then he saw the dingily-uniformed guard with his flag, in his moment of importance. There was a piercing whistle and he stepped slightly away from the train, seeing his mother in black standing at the window, diminished and distant. The train began to move, to shudder backward and forward as if reflecting the motion of his own mind. Then it gathered power and decisiveness and started on its way. It was as if he could see the rails narrowing and widening, narrowing and widening, a complex metallic loom. His mother wasn’t waving, she must have gone to her seat. He walked back past the barrier to where Vera was waiting, her large belly outthrust, slightly sleepy and satisfied. He did not look her straight in the eye but began to walk with her to the exit from the station. As they did so and as they passed the bookstall they saw, as if it were in a strange vision, as if it were fated, Ruth Donaldson standing there turning over some magazines and it seemed to Tom that they were the magazines of sexual fantasy that the schoolboys were always studying in their furtive groups. As they passed she looked up and it occurred to Tom at that moment to go over and speak to her, to say that he held nothing against her, that life was what it was and that no one could be held responsible for it. But Ruth Donaldson was gazing at his wife’s triumphant body, swollen as if under sail, and he could not fathom the expression in her eyes. It might have been the utmost fever of despair, it might have been a perverted reflected triumph of its own. It was as if she were on the edge of a feast that she envied or despised, he couldn’t make out which. At any rate as he made a slight move towards her she deliberately and unsmilingly looked down at the magazines again, as if she were withdrawing into the reality and limits of her own life. And yet he felt her burning, scorching, ugly and present. For a moment he thought that she was what Vera might have become, and he suddenly took his wife’s hand as if she had had a narrow escape in front of his eyes. His mother in black speeding through the countryside to her home and Ruth Donaldson standing at the railway bookstall were part of the one vision: they were on the rim of his world. His hand tightened on Vera’s, warm and frail: and then the two of them left the railway station and made their way to the car. Ruth Donaldson had not lifted her head but appeared absorbed in the magazines, and it occurred to him that perhaps they had only been a refuge for her from Vera’s tremendous glow. The seagulls on the pier were still pecking at the herring bones and one of them yawned vastly, its yellowish gullet visible. The sea glittered extensively, light flashing from it in all directions. On the hill directly ahead and above him he could see the trees, with the leaves beginning to tremble on them. Already the spring could be felt in the air, naked and vulnerable. He opened the door of the car for his wife, eased himself into the driving seat and they set off home.

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM POLYGON

  BY IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

  Consider the Lilies

  http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXTJO

  ‘Retrained, finely wrought … Mr Crichton Smith shows us isolation, perplexity, loneliness, a combination of blindness and indifference’ – New Statesman

  ‘Mr Crichton Smith has an acute feeling for places and atmosphere. The wind-blown heaths, the grey skies, the black dwellings, the narrow lives, the poverty – are all vividly depicted … one can linger over the sheer beauty of his phrases’ – Observer

  The eviction of the crofters from their homes between 1792 and the 1850s was one of the cruellest episodes in Scotland’s history. In this novel Iain Crichton Smith captures the impact of the Highland Clearances through the thoughts and memories of an old woman who has lived all her life within the narrow confines of her community.

  Alone and bewildered by the demands of the factor, Mrs Scott approaches the minister for help, only to have her faith shattered by his hypocrisy. She finds comfort, however, from a surprising source: Donald Macleod, an imaginative and self-educated man who has been ostracised by his neighbours, not least by Mrs Scot
t herself, on account of his atheism. Through him and through the circumstances forced upon her, the old woman achieves new strength.

  The Last Summer

  http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXSGI

  A sensitively written and memorable novel of youth by one of Scotland’s most distinguished twentieth century writers.

  Malcolm, studious, imaginative, footballing, shy, sexually aware but uncomfortably innocent, is in his last term at school on a Hebridean island during the Second World War. His awkward relationship with his teachers, his widowed mother and younger brother, his friends – and with Janet whom he loves from a distance and the less comely and warmer, but to him still enigmatic, Sheila, are marvellously realised. Above all, this is the story of a boy, on his own, trying to discover himself and through himself to find his way in life.

  My Last Duchess

  http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXRKA

  Iain Crichton Smith’s third novel is as different from his second, The Last Summer, as that was from his first, Consider the Lillies. Crichton Smith is at the height of his powers as poet and prose writer. This new work of fiction follows hard upon his Selected Poems and his volume of short stories, Survival Without Fear.

  Mark Simmons, aged 42, is a teacher at a training college. His wife has just walked out on him because she has found him so much less interesting than she expected the man she married to be. This event, which he has by no means expected, has jolted him into a major reassessment of himself, of his place in the universe. He realises that he has become bitter, cynical and disillusioned: he is a failure intellectually – he wanted to be a writer, but for years he has striven at one book, which he privately knows to be not very good. He is a failure as a teacher – he wasn’t competent enough to obtain a post at a university. He is a failure as a husband, because his wife was daily moving away from him. He is a failure as a father, because he and his wife had had no children. Above all, he is a failure as a human being, because he despises everybody, not least himself. Mark Simmons hates himself for being more concerned with argument than happiness.

  My Last Duchess is a novel of great resourcefulness and energy.

  An Honourable Death

  http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXQQU

  ‘Iain Crichton Smith writes like a poet, with strong natural rhythm and precise observation’ – The Times

  In the summer of 1870, a seventeen-year-old crofter’s son turned his back on his apprenticeship with the Royal Clan and Tartan Warehouse in Inverness and signed up as a private in Queen Victoria’s army. He joined the Gordons – the 92nd Highlanders – whose reputation was second to none as the fearsome cutting-edge of the British Army. Posted to India, Afghanistan, South Africa and the Sudan, he became a formidable soldier, rising up through the ranks to become the glorified and much-decorated Major-General Sir Hector Macdonald or, more commonly, ‘Fighting Mac’, the true hero of Omdurman.

  Then, in 1903, at the peak of his remarkable career, he was accused of homosexuality. Ordered to face court martial and unable to bear the disgrace, he ended his life.

  From this true story, with a poet’s insight and precision, Iain Crichton Smith has crafted an exquisite novel: a tale of honour and elitism, equivocation and hierocracy, victory and despair.

  The Dream

  http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXQIS

  ‘A superb novel … it must be accorded tremendous acclaim’ – Scotland on Sunday

  ‘Iain Crichton Smith writes like a poet, with strong natural rhythm and precise observation’ – The Times

  In the grey streets of Glasgow, Martin is dreaming of the mist-shrouded islands of his youth. Behind her desk in the travel agency his wife Jean dreams of faraway places in the sun that beckon from the brochures.

  Their marriage frays in the silence as Martin clings to the Gaelic he teaches at the university, the dwindling bedrock of the culture of the isles, while Jean refuses to speak a language that brings back memories of the bitter years of her childhood. While Jean chatters with her friends of relationships and resentments, Martin turns to Gloria who seems to share his dream of the islands of the Gael…

  Iain Crichton Smith’s The Dream explores the precarious survival of a modern marriage with a poet’s lean, evocative precision and all the spellbinding authority of a master storyteller in the time-honoured Celtic tradition.

  In the Middle of the Wood

  http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXQCE

  Ralph Simmons, a writer, struggles to survive a nervous breakdown that leaves him anxious, suspicious, and frightened.

  In the Middle of the Wood is considered by many to be Iain Crichton Smith’s most remarkable achievement in prose. Like Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, it derives directly from a phase of paranoia, which in Crichton Smith’s case actually led to a spell in a mental hospital.

  The Tenement

  http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXQDI

  The tenement has its being, its almost independent being, in a small Scottish town. Built of grey granite, more than a century ago, it stands four-square in space and time, the one fixed point in the febrile lives of the transient human beings whom it shelters. At the time of which Iain Crichton Smith writes, there are married couples in three of the flat; two widows and a widower occupy the others. All of them are living anxious lives of quiet desperation, which Mr Smith anatomises with cool and delicate understanding.

  The Masons, Linda and John, are the youngest and perhaps the happiest house-hold, who can still look to the future with hope: he has quite a well-paid job in a freezer shop, she is expecting a child. Mr Cooper’s role in life is humbler: he is a lavatory attendant, but can take an off pride in his work. The Camerons provide drama: the husbands, once a long distance lorry driver who was sacked for heavy drinking and now a casual labourer, is consumed with unreasoning hate of Catholics, and when drunk becomes a raging brute who batters and terrifies his wife.

  Trevor Porter, an ex-teacher who like to think of himself as a poet (unpublished), is destroying his marriage by his self-absorption, though after his wife has surprised him by dying of cancer he feel guilt-ridden. Mrs Floss is the tenement’s most colourful inhabitant: the widow of a local hotel owner, she still has money and can indulge in holiday cruises and foreign lovers. Mrs Miller, up on the top floor, is odd-woman-out even in this company of loners: since her husband was killed by lightening, crucified on the telephone wires he was repairing, she has become a slatternly recluse, who finds occasional drinking companions among the town’s down-and-outs.

  The course of several of these lives reaches a startling crisis during the little party to celebrate the birth of the Masons’ child. But Iain Crichton Smith declines any easy resolution of events. His fascinatingly ill-assorted group of characters, brought together only by grey granite, are left to struggle on, with their own strengths and weaknesses.

  The Search

  http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXQBU

  Trevor Griersor, a Scottish university lecturer, is spending a term in Canberra, lecturing on Scottish authors. One day a stranger phones, with garbled news of Trevor’s brother Norman who vanished in Australia many years before, and has since, according to the caller, become an alcoholic and been in trouble with the police.

  Trevor feels overwhelmed with guilt, for having neglected his brother for so long. He imagines him penniless now, a down-and-out, drunk in the gutter; or perhaps even lying in a pauper’s grave. He resolves that he must trace him, and travels to Sydney to begin his search. The search takes him to government offices, police stations, the Salvation Army, a squalid doss-house; and his experiences drive him into a state of panic.

  But why does he feel so compelled to search? As Douglas, that ambiguous Iago-like figure who first phoned him, now says, Norman won’t be at all the younger brother of eighteen years ago; he’ll be a stranger. If he’s an alcoholic, he may be violent. He’s unlikely to thank Trevor for seeking to patronise him by ‘rescuing’ him. Trevor has asked himself – and i
t’s the basic question that faces the reader too – ‘Am I my brothers’ keeper?’ Does he really care about his brother, or is he acting from a sense of duty?

  This is the novel’s crux, and Trevor’s cross, which he bears with him to a highly ironical conclusion. It’s an absorbing study of conscience and responsibility, written with all of Crichton Smith’s quiet authority.

  A Field Full of Folk

  http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXQBK

  The world, in Iain Crichton Smith’s vision is a field full of folk; and one Scottish village is its microcosm. Here, the Minister wrestles with his loss of faith, and his cancer, concealing them even from his wife, but she had divined them. Mrs Berry cultivates her garden assiduously, and when Jehovah’s Witnesses come quoting their texts, she tells them that the hill at the end of the village can be climbed by many paths. Old Annie has no doubts about her path: she has no use for Christianity (‘Protestants and Catholics, nothing but guns and fighting’) and finds her answer in the East. On more mundane levels, Morag Bheag worries about her son serving in Northern Ireland, and Chrissie Murray shocks the village by leaving her husband and making for Glasgow – taking only a radio with her, that’s what shocks most. Murdo Macfarlane vehemently urges his puritanical views – about, for instance, the use of the church hall for a young people’s dance – and David Collins nurses his hatred of Germans, but cannot insult them when they come as tourists.

  In short, it’s a village much like any other, with its prejudices and certainties and kindliness and heartbreak: the whole and the small part. As the Minister sees in his visionary moment at the annual sports, when the petty disputes over the wheel-barrow race and the tragic news of young Bheag’s death come together in his realisation that it’s all a part of ‘this supremely imperfect and perfect earth.’