The Red Door

by Iain Crichton Smith

  She knew I was there all right but she wouldn’t speak to me. I went back to my corner from which the Finnish girl had disappeared perhaps to the lavatory. I hadn’t known how to speak to her: instead of talking to her I had in fact been cross-examining her. On the fringe of the crowd who were by now licking the bottoms of their mugs, since the whisky had all gone, a young girl was watching me. I went across to her. I said Hello and we sat down on the floor. She told me that she had been studying literature but was now studying physics. She wasn’t pretty but she was young and she had managed somehow or other to get hold of some coffee. I told her a joke about a Pakistani who had been taught to play darts. I was ready to like her since my Finnish girl had disappeared. I asked her about university and she said that she preferred physics to literature though she wasn’t very practical. She said that she wrote some poetry but didn’t have any with her and I silently thanked God. The last poetry book I had read I couldn’t make head nor tail of: it seemed to be designed to be read either from the bottom upwards or diagonally or both simultaneously. I thought that if the poet who had climbed the lamp-post had fallen down we might have had our first concrete poet. I was astonished at the extraordinary number of charlatans in art whom I now seemed to see as if in a clear light infesting the room and other rooms all over the world.

  The Gaelic singers surrounded us singing in a last fervent burst as if they sensed that the party was nearly over. The young girl looked at them tolerantly and remotely. But after all, I thought angrily, they were my people, weren’t they? They had come from my world, a broken world, but a world which still provided the cohesion of song, a tradition. The other people watched, almost with envy. We were the only cohesive group there. She asked me to translate a verse and I did so:

  It is a pity that you and I were not where I would

  wish to be, in locked room with iron gates, for

  the six days of the week for seven, eight years,

  the keys lost and a blind man looking for them.

  It was, according to the flowery clock on the mantelpiece, one o’clock in the morning, and I saw the poet and Miriam leaving. He put on her black cloak for her and for a brief moment she looked back at me, Napoleonic, self-possessed, frightened. The two of them had probably talked their alienation out, and now perhaps going out into the night she might feel sufficiently like Mother Courage (or the German equivalent). ‘You bloody bad poet,’ I thought, ‘why do people never see through you?’ I watched them go. I nearly went after her but I couldn’t get out of the singing group. I imagined her and him in their taxi returning perhaps to her flat. I imagined the taxi going past the desolate lamp-posts. The Concept of Alienation. Well, books and plays might help, I supposed. I thought of the taxi as a hearse ticking over. Why were taxis always black, or was that just in Scotland? I imagined her leafing through her pictures of the dead and the doomed, the tubercular and the moustached, all brown with age.

  The singing was growing louder. I was with my own people. The song they were singing was about an exile in the city who wished to be home. He remembered the hills, the lochs, the neighbours, the songs. I thought of the last time I had been home. It had rained all the time and I had spent a whole week reading Reader’s Digest and books by Agatha Christie. Sometimes I had played cards with a spotty cousin. I had seen between showers the mangled body of a rabbit at the side of a road: it had been run over by a car and its guts hung out. One day I had tried to find some fool’s gold on the beach but I didn’t find any. I remembered the blue and white waves, the astounding Atlantic.

  I left the circle. Who was I looking for? I tried to find the Finnish girl but she seemed to have gone, for the ladies’ lavatory (quaintly captioned Girls in a primary tangle of colours) was open and vacant. The guitar player had also gone. I went into the darkness. As I was standing there trying to find my bearings a voice came from inside the room. ‘When shall we see you again?’ Blinded, I turned into the light, not recognising the voice. I went back into the room. It was the student who had changed from literature to physics and I was disappointed: I was hoping it would have been the Finnish girl. I looked at her for a long time and then said that I wasn’t in the city very often. I went back into the darkness again. From the next garden a dog, probably a large one, began to bark excitedly. It sounded as if he was tearing at the wall to try and get at me. I went out into the street feeling my way as I had once done across a midnight field on the island. The singing seemed to have stopped and everyone, I supposed, was preparing to leave. I started to walk down the street towards the centre of the city where my hotel was. I supposed the stony-faced porter would come to the door again this time. I would have preferred someone more happy-looking, especially at three in the morning.

  In the Station

  One day I was sitting in the buffet at Waverley Station in Edinburgh reading the Sunday Times and drinking coffee out of a paper cup when a voice from in front of the paper said: ‘Have you heard of these two then?’ At first I didn’t realise that the odd question was directed at me and continued to read about a particularly atrocious brutality in Ireland. But the voice came again: ‘Have you heard of these two then?’ I lowered the Sunday Times and saw sitting opposite me at the table (it was strange I hadn’t noticed him before) an unshaven man with a thin ravaged face and wearing an open-necked dirty shirt. In front of him on the table was a paper plate with the remains of a pie which he had been dabbling at.

  As I shifted to lower the paper my soaking umbrella which had been leaning against the rather frail table fell down and as I bent to pick it up I could see that on one foot the man was wearing a boot but that on the other foot there was nothing but an old soiled bandage. I straightened slowly and glanced at the pale clock which said quarter to eleven. My train was at ten past, and outside it was raining . . .

  ‘Burke and Hare,’ he said. ‘They used to kill people and sell their bodies to the hospitals. Sometimes they would dig bodies from the cemeteries and sell them. It was a long time ago, you understand, the nineteenth century.’ (As a matter of fact it had been the eighteenth.) ‘Not many people know about it.’ In this he was wrong: I certainly knew about it. It was one of those things that everybody knew about Edinburgh as well as the fact that Sir Walter Scott had connections with it, that there was a large castle, that there was a cuckoo clock in the Gardens, that the Edinburgh Festival took place once a year. In fact I had just the previous night attended a version of King Lear done against a backcloth of what appeared to be oatmeal-coloured sacking. Most of the characters also wore sacking.

  ‘One of the doctors recognised one of the bodies and that was how they were caught. Do you understand?’

  I said I did. He had clearly taken me for a tourist which I wasn’t and I prepared to raise the Sunday Times again – in my mind it had taken on the character of a drawbridge which one could raise or lower according to one’s inclination – when he started again.

  ‘I go to the cinema a lot,’ he said. ‘Last night I saw a film about the last war. The Second World War. It was about the Commandos. My uncle was in the Second World War. He was in the Commandos. This film was about the Commandos. They had flamethrowers and one of the officers said that they would get those German buggers. They were using tanks. What do you call those American tanks they had in the Second World War?’

  ‘Shermans,’ I offered automatically.

  ‘No,’ he said seriously, ‘they were American tanks.’

  I nearly burst out laughing. This man seemed a very simple person really. He was also a bore. I volunteered no more words in case he would be encouraged to start on another of his stories. But he continued.

  ‘I go to see the Swedish films too. There was one about this girl who was killed by a fellow with a camera. He would kill them you see and then he would take photographs of them. One night she went up to her bed, before she was killed you understand, and this woman opened the window. She looked green and she walked across to the bed and she put her hand on the pillow and
she left blood there. It was a sign, you see. When this girl was killed she was chased across this wood and he killed her. He put her in this pond and he took a photograph of her. And then the detectives got him. Swedish detectives, you understand.’

  I was trying to think of what this encounter reminded me of and suddenly I knew. It was exactly like a Pinter play in its utter inconsequentiality. I felt suddenly frightened and odd.

  ‘I suppose you’ll be here on holiday,’ he said. ‘We have the Edinburgh Festival here once a year. They come from all over. They have plays and they have . . . ’ He stopped suddenly and gazed down at his plate.

  Behind my Sunday Times I was thinking of another episode that had happened two days before.

  I was staying at a hotel in the city and one wet afternoon I was sitting in the lounge. There were large windows and through the rainswept panes I could see the Castle towering theatrically out of the mist. There was also a huge statue of Sir Walter Scott that I could see and a stone horse. About the lounge were scattered copies of the Scottish Field and the Countryside as one might find them in the waiting rooms of dentists or doctors or lawyers. In one corner of the lounge there sat an oldish woman with a mouth like a trap reading Nemesis by Agatha Christie. Beside her was a plate of biscuits at which she would absentmindedly nibble in the intervals of turning pages of the book. She was wearing a blue dress and had a string of pearls round her reddish throat.

  Opposite me near the fire was a really old woman with a stick. Her back was humped and she wore a meal-coloured matching blouse and skirt. Beside her was a formidable lady in tweeds who had the look of a retired schoolteacher. The old lady signalled for the waitress who almost ran to her, leaning towards her as if she were royalty. The old lady said in a very distinct loud voice, as if she were sitting in her own home, ‘I should like a cup, not a pot, of tea and some digestives and thin slices of bread – two – with very thin slices of cheese.’ The waitress, enthusiastic and young and beautiful and possibly Irish from her pale fine face, said ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and rushed off. The old lady rested her veined, entwined hands on top of her stick like a queen and stared ahead of her. The woman beside her was talking but she didn’t seem to hear. Now and again her lips moved as if from a phantom memory of eating. Or perhaps she might have been talking to someone. In a supernaturally short time the girl ran back with a silvery glittery tray containing the stuff the old lady had ordered and began to lay it out on the small table with the claw legs. The hotel was certainly clean, one could say that. That morning I had seen a fat singing woman emerging from a lift with a huge mound of billowy sheets, like soap suds all about her.

  The old woman picked up the sandwiches and examined them. ‘The cheese is too thick,’ she said in a squeaky penetrating voice. ‘Far too thick. I wanted thin slices.’ The girl bent in front of her (I could imagine her furious flush). She was very beautiful with a narrow waist and she was dressed in black with a froth of white at the throat. Yellow curls appeared from below her small black cap and from where I was I could see her graceful youthful thighs. ‘I wanted thin slices, didn’t I say that?’ She turned to her companion. The woman who was reading Nemesis turned another page. She had eaten all her biscuits.

  ‘I heard you say that quite distinctly,’ said the old lady’s companion. The waitress looked from one to the other, all quivering with the desire to serve. ‘I’m sorry, Ma’am, I’m sorry, Ma’am,’ she repeated over and over.

  ‘Sorry is not enough,’ said the old lady. ‘Not enough. Take it back.’ The waitress retrieved the plate with the sandwiches as if it were a mine and took it back, half running as before. As she raced across the carpeted floor I heard the old lady say:

  ‘Ever since Watson left, the sandwiches have not been the same.’ The companion commiserated with her, and began to pour out the tea.

  ‘Not so much milk,’ said the old lady suddenly, ‘not so much milk.’

  I stared moodily out at the Castle. I had phoned three times already for a taxi but they were all busy with tourists.

  Beside me there had appeared a man and his wife and their teenage son who was dressed in a red school uniform and looked all knees and hands. He sat very stiffly between his mother and father. The woman closed Nemesis with a snap and walked towards the door. Before she reached it she stopped and said to the mother:

  ‘I see that your son is at Heriot’s. Has he been playing Rugby?’

  ‘Yes, that’s just what he has been doing,’ said the mother. The boy looked pleased in an embarrassed way as if he were Achilles being talked about by the Greeks after a particularly good fight.

  ‘My son still plays Rugby,’ said the woman. ‘He is a lawyer. He comes to see me on Thursday afternoons.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ the mother murmured.

  ‘I remember,’ said the woman in a loud voice, ‘when I was at school – it was at Gillespies – we used to have hockey every Friday afternoon. I don’t see so much hockey being played now.’

  The mother murmured something incomprehensible. Her husband had taken out a pipe but wasn’t sure whether he should light it or not.

  ‘In those days the Principal was a Miss Geddes,’ the woman went on relentlessly. ‘And there was another lady called Miss Brown who taught us Tennyson. I never hear of her now but I remember quite clearly that she used to teach us much Tennyson. Is your son good at Rugby?’

  ‘Are you, darling?’ said the mother brightly to the appanage all red and knobbly-kneed and standing out from the frail furniture.

  ‘Not really, Mother,’ said the boy. ‘Some of the other chaps are better.’

  ‘They are of course modest,’ said the woman. ‘That is what public schools teach if they teach nothing else. And a good thing too in the world we live in.’ With that she went through the doorway clutching her Nemesis, and for a dazed visionary moment I saw with a sense of bewilderment all the old women in the room running on to hockey fields with white sticks and ribboned hair and shouting in the blue windy day. It was all so real that I felt tears coming to my eyes, seeing those locker rooms, those beautiful young girls in green, slim and vivid and pigtailed and uniformed.

  I got up from the table folding my Sunday Times carefully. I said I had to catch a train. My companion was sitting staring into space, unshaven, pale. He seemed to be wearing layers and layers of clothes as if he were cold. I shivered for a moment as if he were a threat to me. But that of course was ridiculous. With my umbrella, my Sunday Times and my case I went to the ticket office and bought my ticket. My train had changed platforms. It usually left from twelve but today it was leaving from fourteen. I didn’t like that and was glad that I had checked the notice. It was some time before the man at the gate would allow us on to the train but eventually I settled myself into a corner seat. In front of me there was a man in a bowler hat who was also carrying a Sunday Times. I put my umbrella and case on the rack and sat down: after a while the train shuttled backwards and then forwards and began to move away from the platform. The scenery sped past, everything wet and miserable and grey. To the left of me a boy wearing a large Western-style hat was bending down to kiss his girl friend. For a panicky moment I nearly said to the bowler-hatted man, ‘You’ve heard of those two, haven’t you?’ But I clamped my teeth together lest any language should bleed out. Most of the time my companion made a snorting noise behind the newspaper which I had already read. I wished now that I had bought a paper-back but most of the books on the bookstalls were spy stories which I had read before and I didn’t fancy the involved and trivial stories of the second-raters.

  An American Sky

  He stood on the deck of the ship looking towards the approaching island. He was a tall man who wore brownish clothes: and beside him were two matching brown cases. As he stood on the deck he could hear Gaelic singing coming from the saloon which wasn’t all that crowded but had a few people in it, mostly coming home for a holiday from Glasgow. The large ship moved steadily through the water and when he looked over the side he co
uld see thin spitlike foam travelling alongside. The island presented itself as long and green and bare with villages scattered along the coast. Ahead of him was the westering sun which cast long red rays across the water.

  He felt both excited and nervous as if he were returning to a wife or sweetheart whom he had not seen for a long time and was wondering whether she had changed much in the interval, whether she had left him for someone else or whether she had remained obstinately true. It was strange, he thought, that though he was sixty years old he should feel like this. The journey from America had been a nostalgic one, first the plane, then the train, then the ship. It was almost a perfect circle, a return to the womb. A womb with a view, he thought and smiled.

  He hadn’t spoken to many people on the ship. Most of the time he had been on deck watching the large areas of sea streaming past, now and again passing large islands with mountain peaks, at other times out in the middle of an empty sea where the restless gulls scavenged, turning their yellow gaunt beaks towards the ship.

  The harbour was now approaching and people were beginning to come up on deck with their cases. A woman beside him was buttoning up her small son’s coat. Already he could see red buses and a knot of people waiting at the pier. It had always been like that, people meeting the ship when it arrived at about eight, some not even welcoming anyone in particular but just standing there watching. He noticed a squat man in fisherman’s clothes doing something to a rope. Behind him there was a boat under green canvas.

  The ship swung in towards the harbour. Now he could see the people more clearly and behind them the harbour buildings. When he looked over the side he noticed that the water was dirty with bits of wooden boxes floating about in an oily rainbowed scum.

  After some manœuvring the gangway was eventually laid. He picked up his cases and walked down it behind a girl in yellow slacks whose transistor was playing in her left hand. Ahead of her was a man in glasses who had a BEA case with, stamped on it, the names of various foreign cities. There were some oldish women in dark clothes among the crowd and also some girls and boys in brightly coloured clothes. A large fat slow man stood to the side of the gangway where it touched the quay, legs spread apart, as if he had something to do with the ship, though he wasn’t actually doing anything. Now and again he scratched a red nose.