The Red Door

by Iain Crichton Smith

  Many people wrote postcards by the light of the summer sun, telling how they had seen an idiot and how queer he was.

  The sea bounded against the rocks.

  A boy and a girl stood against a tree whose green leaves made their faces green. The boy put his hand around the girl and caressed her buttocks. She caressed the back of his neck. Her eyes closed. A sheep stared at them. In the distance a motor cycle accelerated. High above the brae there was a rubbish dump full of rats and discarded canisters and the dead body of a ewe.

  His father took the recorder from the idiot and put it away in a drawer. The idiot made a sound deep in his throat and scratched his crotch.

  ‘If only there was some expression on your face,’ said the father. ‘Even one bit of damned expression. Just one iota.’

  from

  THE BLACK AND THE RED

  and other stories

  PART I

  The Dying

  When the breathing got worse he went into the adjacent room and got the copy of Dante. All that night and the night before he had been watching the dying though he didn’t know it was a dying. The grey hairs around the head seemed to panic like the needle of a compass and the eyes, sometimes open, sometimes shut, seemed to be looking at him all the time. He had never seen a dying before. The breathlessness seemed a bit like asthma or bad bronchitis, ascending sometimes into a kind of whistling like a train leaving a station. The voice when it spoke was irritable and petulant. It wanted water, lots of water, milk, lots of milk, anything to quench the thirst and even then he didn’t know it was a dying. The tongue seemed very cold as he fed it milk. It was cold and almost stiff. Once near midnight he saw the cheeks flare up and become swollen so that the eyes could hardly look over them. When a mirror was required to be brought she looked at it, moving her head restlessly this way and that. He knew that the swelling was a portent of some kind, a message from the outer darkness, an omen.

  Outside, it was snowing steadily, the complex flakes weaving an unintelligible pattern. If he were to put the light out then that other light, as alien as that from a dead planet, the light of the moon itself, would enter the room, a sick glare, an almost abstract light. It would light the pages of the Dante which he needed now more than ever, it would cast over the poetry its hollow glare.

  He opened the pages but they did not mean anything at all since all the time he was looking at the face. The dying person was slipping away from him. She was absorbed in her dying and he did not understand what was happening. Dying was such an extraordinary thing, such a private thing. Sometimes he stretched out his hand and she clutched it, and he felt as if he were in a boat and she were in the dark water around it. And all the time the breathing was faster and faster as if something wanted to be away. The brow was cold but the mouth still wanted water. The body was restlessly turning, now on one side now on the other. It was steadily weakening. Something was at it and it was weakening.

  In Thy Will is My Peace . . . The words from Dante swam into his mind. They seemed to swim out of the snow which was teeming beyond the window. He imagined the universe of Dante like a watch. The clock said five in the morning. He felt cold and the light was beginning to azure the window. The street outside was empty of people and traffic. There was no one alive in the world but himself. The lamps cast their glare over the street. They brooded over their own haloes all night.

  When he looked again the whistling was changing to a rattling. He held one cold hand in his, locking it. The head fell back on the pillow, the mouth gaping wide like the mouth of a landed fish, the eyes staring irretrievably beyond him. The one-barred electric fire hummed in a corner of the room, a deep and raw red wound. His copy of Dante fell from his hand and lay on top of the red woollen rug at the side of the bed stained with milk and soup. He seemed to be on a space ship upside down and seeing coming towards him another space ship shaped like a black mediaeval helmet in all that azure. On board the space ship there was at least one man encased in a black rubber suit but he could not see the face. The man was busy either with a rope which he would fling to him or with a gun which he would fire at him. The figure seemed squat and alien like an Eskimo.

  And all the while the window azured and the body was like a log, the mouth twisted where all the breath had left it. It lolled on one side of the pillow. Death was not dignified. A dead face showed the pain of its dying, what it had struggled through to become a log. He thought, weeping, this is the irretrievable centre where there is no foliage and no metaphor. At this time poetry is powerless. The body looked up at him blank as a stone with the twisted mouth. It belonged to no one that he had ever known.

  The copy of Dante seemed to have fallen into an abyss. It was lying on the red rug as if in a fire. Yet he himself was so cold and numb. Suddenly he began to be shaken by tremors though his face remained cold and without movement. The alien azure light was growing steadily, mixed with the white glare of the snow. The landscape outside the window was not a human landscape. The body on the bed was not human.

  The tears started to seep slowly from his eyes. In his right hand he found he was holding a small golden watch which he had picked up. He couldn’t remember picking it up. He couldn’t even hear its ticking. It was a delicate mechanism, small and golden. He held it up to his ear and the tears came, in the white and bluish glare. Through the tears he saw the watch and the copy of Dante lying on the red rug and beyond that again the log which seemed unchanging though it would change since everything changed.

  And he knew that he himself would change though he could not think of it at the moment. He knew that he would change and the log would change and it was this which more than anything made him cry, to think of what the log had been once, a suffering body, a girl growing up and marrying and bearing children. It was so strange that the log could have been like that. It was so strange that the log had once been chequered like a draughtsboard, that it had called him into dinner, that it had been sleepless at night thinking of the future.

  So strange was it, so irretrievable, that he was shaken as if by an earthquake of pathos and pity. He could not bring himself to look at the Dante; he could only stare at the log as if expecting that it would move or speak. But it did not. It was concerned only with itself. The twisted mouth as if still gasping for air made no promises and no concessions.

  Slowly as he sat there he was aware of a hammering coming from outside the window and aware also of blue lightning flickering across the room. He had forgotten about the workshop. He walked over to the window and saw men with helmets bending over pure white flame. The blue flashes were cold and queer as if they came from another world. At the same time he heard unintelligible shoutings from the people involved in the work and saw a visored head turning to look behind it. Beyond it steadied the sharp azure of the morning. And in front of it he saw the drifting flakes of snow. He looked down at the Dante with his bruised face and felt the hammer blows slamming the lines together, making the universe, holding a world together where people shouted out of a blue light. And the hammer seemed to be beating the log into a vase, into marble, into flowers made of blue rock, into the hardest of metaphors.

  At the Party

  A group of us was gathered in a corner of the room singing Gaelic songs. It was midnight and we were in somebody’s house though we weren’t sure exactly whose, except that now and again a young couple who seemed to own the place – or at least to rent it – appeared in the doorway of what seemed to be an annexe off the main room and looked around with what might have been satisfaction or apathy or even tiredness. The man was tall, bearded and wore a Red Indian hair band, the girl fair and wearing a chain of white beads at the waist.

  The room was crowded with people who had arrived in cars or taxis when the rumour of a party had gone round after the poetry reading was over. Many of them were young and most were students. Two or three messengers had been sent off to buy drink but none had returned, either because they had absconded with the money or because they couldn’t
find any drink, a reasonable enough assumption at that time of night. Coffee, dispensed in tumblers or mugs, was circulating.

  None of the real lions of the poetry reading had stayed. One was so drunk that he had to be carefully disengaged from a lamp-post around which he had entwined himself like a monkey, emitting fragmentary lines of his own verse. Another had gone off with a serious-faced girl in glasses who had spent most of her time taking down notes in a small red notebook during the proceedings. Yet another had disappeared with a dull man who worked in advertising and who had come along to find out how poetry could be used in the selling of fruit. ‘My boss,’ he said, ‘says that before you can sell tomatoes you must think of them as women.’ He repeated this statement a lot and did not realise that the laughter it evoked was not a tribute to its perception.

  I sat among the Gaelic singers in a corner, a Finnish girl beside me. She had very fair fine hair, very fair fine eyelashes and blue clever eyes. I asked her about Finland and though she was unwilling to sing Finnish songs she told me about the sparse literature of the country in attractive broken English. She said there were quite a lot of Finnish girls and housewives in the city and that they met now and again in clubs. I stroked her hair and she regarded me with a cool amused gaze. Her husband apparently was a lecturer in the Scandinavian languages and she had met him at a skiing resort. He had gazed down at her solicitously while she lay spreadeagled in the snow. ‘Very Victorian,’ she said, ‘just like God.’ ‘What do you think of our Gaelic songs?’ I asked. She smiled but didn’t answer. It occurred to me that at midnight all women are loveable.

  The group around me were singing every Gaelic song they had ever heard. They sang songs about exile, about love, about war, about shepherds on distant islands. They sang with the obsessive fidelity and love of the exile. They sang with eyes closed, swaying with longing, as if they were snakes entranced by the scent and blossom of Eden. They were all young except for one man who wore a waistcoat and watch and chain and was bald. No one knew where he had come from – he didn’t look like a poetry lover – and his stiff hat was clamped straight over his forehead. His hands rested gently on his stomach and he sang each song carefully and comfortably as if he were sitting at dinner. No one knew what to make of him since he didn’t say anything. Now and again he would close his small eyes and then open them and look shyly and quickly around him. Most of the time he looked bovine and had an air of enigmatic satisfaction. Sometimes a song was started by someone who didn’t know the words and it had to be completed by the others in their obsessed ring.

  I leaned back in my corner, my head on the shoulder of the Finnish girl who was looking across towards a young bearded fellow who was strumming a guitar by himself in the opposite corner. Her face was cool and untroubled. I imagined that I was in love with her; I felt the air of sunny mornings and lemons. I said to her: ‘You are so relaxed. Are you always as relaxed as this?’ She told me that her child wrote poetry with large coloured crayons and that it was very good poetry too. ‘In English, of course,’ she said, smiling. I believed her. I believed that her child was a cool Finnish genius with fair hair and classic features. I didn’t know why she was there. She reminded me of someone from the Sunday supplements. ‘Do they have Sunday supplements in Finland?’ I asked. She smiled. I thought of Grimm, Hans Andersen, girls in red coats meeting bowing wolves in birch woods. ‘Do you write yourself?’ I asked. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I play the piano – badly.’

  At that moment there was a ragged cheer such as a dispirited army seeing a glint of reinforcements might give. The drink had arrived though there wasn’t much of it. We were doled out a little whisky each, holding out our mugs like refugees in some eastern country. The singing stopped for a moment and then began again. They were singing a song called The White Swan which is about the First World War. I drank some of the whisky and joined in. A young girl waved her empty glass like a conductor’s baton and smiled at me.

  And over her head I saw Miriam whom I had forgotten was there. She was standing talking to a tall bearded flat-faced poet who wore a slightly stained violet tie and a lumber jacket. He was a very bad poet though large and handsome and talkative. Miriam was wearing black which contrasted very strongly with her white miniature face and blonde hair. I tried to make out what she was saying by lip-reading but I couldn’t, so I got to my feet and stumbled over to listen. They were talking about the Concept of Alienation. I listened owlishly and amusedly. Brecht and the Concept of Alienation: It’s a Braw Brecht Munelicht Nicht the Nicht. He spoke freely and as if he knew a great deal about the Concept of Alienation which presumably he had made some study of. He was a very serious person and much less preferable to X, another poet who lived by quick-wittedness rather than by scholarship. Sometimes Miriam laughed delightedly, sometimes she looked grave and questioning like a child. I wondered how long she would stay at the party.

  I had met her first in a library quite by accident when she was looking for a book on the American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson and I had been able to help her as he is one of my own favourite poets. I was very lonely at that time and we began to go about together, having dinner in hotels, going to pubs though she didn’t drink much. In fact she always sipped a tomato juice laced (if that is the right word) with Worcester sauce, or it may have been the other way round. Once we were invited late at night to the house of an actor who had tried to make love to her while his wife was making coffee. She had been very angry with him and had hit him over the head with a large book by George Steiner. Another time we went to visit an alcoholic woman painter who had managed to sell me a painting called Exhalations which I had barely succeeded in dragging down four flights of stairs to a taxi.

  We talked a lot about literature in which I was rapidly losing interest, much preferring solidly constructed detective stories of the classical type, such as those by S. S. Van Dine. She still retained the pristine hunger for books which I had long lost. She would sit, composed and small, in the corner of a lounge bar while I made a vicious random attack on the supposedly good writing of Faulkner. She was very sensitive and sent a lot of money to Irish people. Once she had a refugee from Ireland in her flat, a ginger-haired slatternly woman who brought in her wake a husband who played the Irish bagpipes from the hip and who was eventually put out of the house by the landlady for practising on them at three in the morning after what he called a ‘wet’. When that pair had left she had got hold of an Indian and his wife. Together they wore lots of beads and talked in the most beautiful Oxford accents. She was always helping ‘lame ducks’ and reminded me of Joan of Arc except that she was much more literate. There was some trace of Americanism in her descent which I thought accounted for her combination of innocence and experience.

  I admired her a lot. I admired her sensitivity, her feeling for other people. I admired the simple, almost elegant way in which she lived. She had a very fine delicate wristwatch which recalled her best qualities – unhurried competence and fine outer appearance. I knew that she had had an unhappy upbringing. Her father had died of TB when she was very young – he had been a lecturer somewhere – and her mother of some other incurable disease. She had lots of nieces and nephews for whom she was always buying toys and though she didn’t like mess of any kind she was always dressing and undressing them and taking them to the bathroom and feeding them. They would sit on her lap and pull at her necklace of brown beads. Once I was invited to her brother-in-law’s house. He was a professor who was deeply involved in linguistics and whose silences were prolonged as if his researches had convinced him that language is very dangerous and should be tampered with as little as possible. She and her sister (one of three she had) kept up a bitter private running battle all the time we were there, needling each other about incidents that went back to their childhood days. I wondered whether the professor was making notes. A lot of the time, however, he retired to a large sunny room which overlooked a garden full of red and blue flowers. Perhaps he was studying their language or the langua
ge of the birds.

  However my admiration for her had evaporated when one night after we had been drinking and I had taken her home in a taxi she had savagely turned on me and said as I was making some attempt to kiss her: ‘You are the most selfish bugger I have ever met. You really are. Why are you taking me out? You think I’ll go to bed with you. You don’t care about anyone in the world except yourself. You laughed at that painter though she is on the verge of suicide. What’s wrong with her painting anyway? I think it’s quite good. You think I’ll go to bed with you. You laughed at my brother-in-law because you think he’s a pedagogue. It never occurs to you that there are people who genuinely know so much that they find it difficult to say anything at all. You think you can buy me with your money. I don’t give a bugger about you. I think you’re a bad artist anyway. You laughed at the photographs I showed you. You’re always laughing at things, aren’t you? You can’t even use a tape recorder properly.’ That gibe came from an incident when I was recording a Gaelic song for her, I myself doing the singing. ‘Your bloody Highlands,’ she said. ‘All your bloody mist and your bloody principles. No wonder you’ve never painted anything worth a damn.’ The taxi stopped. I tried to help her out but she pushed my hand away. Just as she stood on the road she added, ‘And that coat you’re wearing, it’s bloody mediaeval.’ I watched her trying to fit the key in the lock as the taxi sizzled along the blue rainy street. There were lamp-posts every few yards all down the long street brooding over the stone below them. Haloes . . . separate haloes. We entered the circles and bracelets of light. An Indian restaurant flashed by, then a huge warehouse. There was a newspaper headquarters, a shop with naked tailors’ dummies and a Chinese restaurant. A drunk pawed at the air with his hands.