The Red Door

by Iain Crichton Smith

  He came up close and said quietly,

  ‘Get out of here, daddy, before we cut you up, and take your camera and your bus with you. And your bag too. Right?’

  The one with the curving moustache spat and said quietly,

  ‘Tourist.’

  He got into the car beside his still unsmiling wife who was still staring straight ahead of her. The car gathered speed and made its way down the main street. In the mirror he could see the brown tenement diminishing. The thin stringy woman was still at the window looking out, screaming at the children.

  The shops along both sides of the street were all changed. There used to be a road down to the river and the lavatories but he couldn’t see anything there now. Later on he passed a new yellow petrol-station, behind a miniature park with a blue bench on it.

  ‘Mind we used to take the bus out past here?’ he said, looking towards the woods on their right, where all the secret shades were, and the squirrels leaped.

  The sky was darkening and the light seemed concentrated ahead of them in steely rays.

  Suddenly he said,

  ‘I wish to God we were home.’

  She smiled for the first time. But he was still thinking of the scarred tenement and of what he should have said to these youths. Punks. He should have said, ‘This is my home too. More than yours. You’re just passing through.’

  Punks with Edwardian moustaches. By God, if they were in Africa they would be sorted out. A word in the ear of the Chief Inspector over a cigar and that would be it. By God, they knew how to deal with punks where he came from.

  He thought of razor-suited Jamieson setting out on a Friday night in his lone battle with the Catholics. Where was he now? Used to be a boiler-man or something. By God, he would have sorted them out. And his wife used to clean the cinema steps on those big draughty winter days.

  ‘So you admit you were wrong,’ said his wife.

  He drove on, accelerating past a smaller car and blaring his horn savagely. There was no space in this bloody country. Everybody crowded together like rats.

  ‘Here, look at that,’ he said, ‘that didn’t use to be there.’ It was a big building, probably a hospital.

  ‘Remember we used to come down here on the bus,’ he said. ‘That didn’t use to be there.’

  He drove into the small town and got out of the car to stretch. The yellow lights rayed the road and the cafés had red globes above them. He could hardly recognise the place.

  ‘We’d better find a hotel,’ he said.

  His wife’s face brightened.

  They stopped at the Admiral and were back home when the boy in the blue uniform with the yellow edgings took their rich brown leather cases. People could be seen drinking in the bar which faced directly on to the street. They were standing about with globes of whisky in their hands. He recognised who they were. They had red faces and red necks, and they stood there decisively as if they belonged there. Their wives wore cool gowns and looked haggard and dissipated.

  His own wife put her hand in his as they got out of the car. Now she was smiling and trailing her fur coat. She walked with a certain exaggerated delicacy. It looked as if it might be a good evening after all. He could tell the boys about his sentimental journey, it would make a good talking point, they would get some laughs from it. No, on second thoughts perhaps not. He’d say something about Scotland anyway, and not forget to make sure that they got to know how well he had done.

  The two of them walked in. ‘Waiter,’ he said loudly, ‘two whiskies with ice.’ Some of them looked at him, then turned away again. That waiter should have his hair cut. After a few whiskies they would gravitate into the neighbourhood of the others, those men who ran Scotland, the backbone of the nation. People like himself. By God, less than him. He had had the guts to travel.

  Outside it was quite dark. Difficult to get used to this climate. His wife was smiling as if she expected someone to photograph her.

  Now she was home. In a place much like Africa, the bar of a first class hotel.

  He took out a cigar to show who he was, and began to cut it. In the lights pouring out from the hotel he could see his car bulging like a black wave.

  He placed his hand over his wife’s and said,

  ‘Well, dear, it’s been a tiring day.’

  With a piercing stab of pain he recalled Africa, the drinkers on the verandah, the sky large and open and protective, the place where one knew where one was, among Europeans like oneself.

  To have found one’s true home was important after all. He sniffed his whisky, swirling it around in the goblet, golden and clear and thin and burningly pure.

  On the Island

  They tied up the boat and landed on the island, on a fine blowy blue and white day. They walked along among sheep and cows, who raised their heads curiously as they passed, then incuriously lowered them again.

  They came to a monument dedicated to a sea captain who had sailed the first steam ship past the island.

  ‘A good man,’ said Allan, peering through his glasses.

  ‘A fine man,’ said Donny. ‘A fine, generous man.’

  ‘Indeed so,’ said William.

  They looked across towards the grey granite buildings of the town and from them turned their eyes to the waving seaweed, whose green seemed to be reflected in Donny’s jersey.

  ‘It’s good to be away from the rat race,’ said Donny, standing with his hands on his lapels. ‘It is indeed good to be inhaling the salt breezes, the odoriferous ozone, to be blest by every stray zephyr that blows. Have you a fag?’ he asked Allan, who gave him one from a battered packet.

  ‘I sent away for a catalogue recently,’ said William. ‘For ten thousand coupons I could have had a paint sprayer. I calculate I would have to smoke for fifty years to get that paint sprayer.’

  ‘A laudable life time’s work,’ said Donny.

  Allan laughed, a high falsetto laugh and added,

  ‘Or you might have the whole family smoking, including your granny and grandfather, if any. Children, naturally, should start young.’

  The grass leaned at an angle in the drive of the wind.

  ‘We could have played jazz,’ said William, ‘if I had brought my record player. Portable, naturally. Not to be plugged in to any rock. We could have listened to Ella Fitzgerald accompanied by her friend Louis Armstrong who sings atrociously, incidentally.’

  ‘Or, on the other hand, we could have played Scottish Dance Music each day. “The Hen’s March to the Midden” would not be unsuitable. I remember,’ he continued reflectively, keeping his arms hooked in his lapels, ‘I remember hearing that famous work or opus. It was many years ago. Ah, those happy days. When hens were hens and middens were middens. Not easy now to get a midden of quality. A genuine first class midden as midden.’

  ‘The midden in itself,’ said Williams. He continued, ‘The thing in itself is an interesting question. I visualise Hegel in a German plane dropping silver paper to confuse the radar of the British philosophical school, and flying past, unharmed, unshot, uncorrupted.’

  ‘I once read some Hegel,’ said Allan proudly, ‘and also Karl Marx.’

  Donny made a face at a cow.

  They made their way across the island and came to a pillbox used in the Second World War.

  ‘Sieg Heil,’ said William.

  ‘Ve vill destroy zese English svine,’ said Donny.

  ‘Up periscope,’ said Allan.

  The island was very bare, no sign of habitation to be seen, just rocks and grass.

  ‘Boom, boom, boom,’ said Donny, imitating radio music. ‘The Hunting of the Bismarck. Boom, boom, boom. It was a cold blustery day, and the telegraphist was sitting at his telegraph thinking of his wife and four children back in Yorkshire. Tap, tap, tap. Sir, Bismarck has blown the Hood out of the water. Unfair, really, sir. Bismarck carries too strong plating. Boom, boom, boom. Calm voice: “I think it’ll have to be Force L, wouldn’t you say, commander?” And now the hunt is on, boom, boom,
boom, grey mist, Atlantic approaches, Bismarck captain speaks: “I vill not return, herr lieutenant. And I vill not tolerate insubordination.” Boom, boom, boom.’

  William looked at the pillbox, resting his right elbow on it.

  ‘I wonder what they were defending,’ he mused.

  ‘The undying right to insert Celtic footnotes,’ said Donny.

  Allan said,

  ‘I was reading a book about Stalingrad. You’ve got to hand it to these slab-faced Russians.’

  The wind patrolled the silence. The green grass leaned all one way. There were speedboats out in the water plunging and rising, prows high.

  ‘Oh well, let us proceed, let us explore,’ said William. As they were walking along they came to a seagull’s ravaged body, the skull delicate and fragile, lying among some yellow flowers. The carcass had been gnawed, probably by rats. Its white purity in the cold wind was startling. Its death was one kind of death, thought William with a shudder. Suddenly he placed the seagull’s fragile skull on top of a hillock, and they began to throw stones at it. Donny stood upright, one hand clutching a stone, the other still in his lapel.

  ‘Have I been successful?’ he asked, after he had thrown the stone.

  Allan went over. ‘No,’ he said shortly and took up position. In a frenzy, William threw stone after stone, but missed. It was Allan who finally knocked the seagull’s skull from the knoll.

  ‘All these years, like David, watching the sheep,’ he admitted modestly.

  They walked on and came to the edge of the water on the far side of the island. They were confronted by a seething waste, tumbled rocks, a long gloomy beach, a desert of blue and white ridged waves, a manic wilderness. As they stared into the hostile sea they saw a boat being rowed past by a man with a long white beard who sat in it very upright as if carved from stone. It was very strange and eerie because the man didn’t turn his head at all and didn’t seem to have noticed them. Donny broke the silence with,

  ‘Ossian, I presume.’

  ‘Or Columba,’ said Allan.

  ‘Once,’ said Allan, ‘I was entertaining two friends.’

  ‘Ladies,’ they both shouted.

  ‘Let that be as it may,’ said Allan, ‘and may it be as it may. I, after the fourth whisky, looked out the window and there, to my astonishment, was a blanket, white with a border of black stripes, waving about in the air. I need not say that I was alarmed; nor did I draw the attention of the two people I was entertaining to it; nor did they notice it. At first, naturally, I thought it was the DTs. But better counsels prevailed, and I thereupon came to the conclusion that it must be the woman above engaged in some domestic activity which entailed the hanging of a blanket out of her window.’

  ‘It was,’ said Donny, ‘the flag of the Scottish Republic, a blanket with . . . ’ He stopped as the bearded man rowed back the way he had come. They watched the white hair stirred in the cold wind and the man with his upright stance.

  ‘The horrible man,’ said William suddenly.

  ‘The thing in itself,’ said Donny.

  ‘Scotland the Brave,’ said Allan, cleaning his glasses carefully. ‘I remember now,’ said Donny. ‘I saw these two green branches on a tree and, full of leaves, they were dancing about in a breeze just outside my window. I didn’t pay any attention to them at first and then I saw that they were like two duellists butting at each other and then withdrawing, like, say scorpions or snakes, upright, as if boxing. Such venom,’ he concluded, ‘in the green day.’

  He added, ‘Another time I was coming home from a dance in a condition of advanced merriment and I was crossing the square, all yellow, as you will know. Thus I came upon a policeman whom I had often seen in sunny daylight. He asked me what I was doing, looking at the shop window, and I returned a short if suitable answer, whereupon he, and his buddy who materialised out of the yellow light like a fairy with a diced cap, rushed me expeditiously up a close and beat me furiously with what is known in the trade as a rubber truncheon. It was,’ he concluded, ‘an eye opener.’

  ‘Once,’ said William, ‘I saw a horse and it could think. It was looking at me in a calculating way. I got out of there. It was in a field on a cold day.’

  They stared in silence at the spray, shivering.

  ‘There is a man who is supposed to live in a cave,’ said William at last. ‘It must be an odd existence.’

  ‘Mussels,’ said Donny.

  ‘Whelks,’ said Allan.

  ‘All locked up for the night,’ said William.

  After a pause he said,

  ‘Nevertheless, it’s got to be faced.’

  ‘What?’ said the others.

  ‘This wilderness. Seas, rocks, animosity, ferocity. These waves all hating us, gnashing their white teeth.’

  ‘I think,’ said Allan, ‘we should do a Socrates.’

  ‘Meaning?’ said Donny.

  ‘Meaning nothing. Irony is not enough any more.’

  ‘It’s the inhumanness,’ said William, almost in a whisper, feeling what he could not say, that for the waves they themselves didn’t matter at all, any more than the whelks or the mussels.

  Donny stood facing the water, his hands at his lapels. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he began, ‘Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, guests, hangers-on, attendants, servants, serfs, and tribesmen, I have a few words to say about a revered member of our banking profession: well-known bowler, bridge-player, account-keeper, not to mention the husband of a blushing bride who looks as good as new after clearing her fiftieth hurdle.’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Allan. ‘He’s right you know, Willie.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘He faces it. He faces the chaos. Without dreams, without chaos. Only without chaos is it possible to survive. The plant does not fight itself, neither the tiger nor the platypus.’

  ‘You mean that that speech orders the waves,’ said William. ‘Let me think.’

  After a while he said,

  If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,

  absent thee from felicity awhile

  and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain

  to tell my story.

  ‘They have their purpose and their eyes are bright with it. Keats.’

  ‘Meaning?’ said Allan.

  ‘Meaning vanity. If there were no vanity there would be nothing. The flowers and the women all drawing attention to themselves. The signals. Have you not known, have you not seen, all the people around you, each with his own purpose staring out of his eyes and proclaiming “I am.” “I am the most important. Look at me.” “I must not be trifled with.”? Have you not known it, have you not seen it, have you not been terrified by it? That each feels himself as important as you, that intelligence weakens, that the unkillable survive, the ones who don’t think?’

  A seagull swooped out of the stormy black and landed on a rock with yellow splayed claws, turning its head rapidly this way and that as if deliberating.

  ‘Then,’ said Donny, ‘vanity prevails.’

  ‘Without vanity we are nothing,’ said William, ‘without the sense of triumph.’

  ‘And we have to pay for it with pomp,’ said Allan. ‘Out of the savage sea the perfected ennui.’

  ‘From the amoeba to the cravat,’ said Donny. The wind blew about them: it was like being at the end of the world, the crazy jigsaw of rocks, the sea solid in its strata, the massive power of its onrush, the spray rising high in the sky.

  ‘Where action ends thought begins,’ said William, almost in a whisper. ‘Out of the water to the dais. And yet it is unbearable.’

  ‘We rely on the toilers of the night,’ said Donny.

  ‘Is there anything one can say to the sea,’ said Allan, ‘apart from watch it?’

  They looked at it but their hatred was not so great as its, not so indifferent. It was without mercy because it did not know of them. It was the world before man.

  ‘Imagine it,’ said William, ‘out of this, all that we have.’

  ‘A
nd us,’ said Donny, no longer clowning.

  ‘To watch it,’ said Allan. After a while he said,

  ‘It would be fair if we threw stones at it too.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed the other two, beginning to throw stones at the white teeth, but they sank without trace and could hardly be seen against the spray which ascended like a crazy ladder.

  There was no ship to be seen at all, only the weird rowing boat that had passed twice with the white bearded man in it.

  They turned away from it, frightened.

  As they were leaving, Allan said,

  ‘There is nothing more beautiful than a woman when her long legs are seen, tanned and lovely, as she drinks her whisky or vodka as the case may be.’

  They bowed their heads. ‘You have found the answer, O spectacled sage of the west. Except that the battle there too is continuous.’

  ‘Except that everywhere the battle is continuous,’ said William. ‘Even in the least suspected places. But you are right nevertheless.’

  They took one last look at the sea. In the smoky spray they seemed to see a fish woman, cold and yet incredibly ardent, arising with merciless scales.

  ‘I knew a girl once,’ said Allan. ‘We slept on the sofa in her sitting room.’

  ‘Both of you?’ said the others.

  There was a reverent silence.

  ‘I knew a girl once,’ said William. ‘I remember her gloved hands on the steering wheel, and the dashboard light was green.’

  Their clothes stirred in the breeze. Their flapping collars stung their cheeks. They passed the place where the dead seagull was.

  ‘We will bury it,’ said Allan. ‘It’s only fair.’

  ‘No,’ said William, ‘it would be artificial.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Donny. ‘Motion carried, seconded, transformed and retransformed in some order.’

  They saw a rat. It looked at them with small beady eyes and scurried out of sight.

  ‘Look,’ said William. A cormorant dived from a rock into the seething water. They watched for it to emerge and then it did so like a wheel turning. Also, they saw three seals racing alongside each other at full speed, sleek heads and parts of the body above the surface.