The Red Door

by Iain Crichton Smith

  ‘What are you trying to say?’

  ‘Say? Nothing. Nothing at all. I don’t think you’d better stay here. I don’t think this place is a refuge. People may say so but it’s not true. After a while the green wears away and you are left with the black. In any case I don’t think you’d better settle here: that would be my advice. However, it’s not my business. I have no business now.’

  ‘Why did you stay here?’ said John slowly.

  ‘I don’t know. Laziness, I suppose. I remember when I was in Glasgow University many years ago we used to take the train home at six in the morning after the holiday started. At first we were all very quiet, naturally, since we were half-asleep, most of us. But then as the carriages warmed and the sun came up and we came in sight of the hills and the lochs we began to sing Gaelic songs. Odd, and Glasgow isn’t that far away. What does it all mean, John? What are you looking at?’

  ‘The broken fences.’

  ‘Yes, of course. There’s a man here and he’s been building his own house for ten years. He carries stone after stone to the house and then he forgets and sits down and talks to people. Time is different here, no doubt about it.’

  ‘I had noticed.’

  ‘If you’re looking for help from me, John, I can’t give you any. In the winter time I sit and look out the window. You can see the sea from here and it can look very stormy. The rain pours down the window and you can make out the waves hitting the islands out there. What advice could I give you? I have tried to do my best as far as my work was concerned. But you say it isn’t enough.’

  ‘Perhaps it wasn’t your fault.’

  John made his way to the door.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I shall have to call on other people as well. They all expect one to do that, don’t they?’

  ‘Yes, they still feel like that. That hasn’t changed.’

  ‘I’ll be seeing you then,’ said John as he left.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course.’

  He walked towards the sea cliffs to a house which he had visited many times when he was a boy, where he had been given many tumblers of milk, where later in the evening he would sit with others talking into the night.

  The sea was large and sparkling in front of him like a shield. No, he said automatically to himself, it isn’t like a shield, otherwise how could the cormorants dive in and out of it? What was it like then? It was like the sea, nothing else. It was like the sea in one of its moods, in one of its sunny gentle moods. As he walked pictures flashed in front of his eyes. He saw a small boy running, then a policeman’s arm raised, the baton falling in a vicious arc, the neon light flashing from his shield. The boy stopped in midflight, the picture frozen.

  6

  He knocked at the door of the house and a woman of about forty, thin and with straggly greying hair, came to the door.

  She looked at him enquiringly.

  ‘John, John Macleod,’ he said. ‘I came to see your mother.’ Her face lighted up with recognition and she said, ‘Come in, come in.’ And then inexplicably, ‘I thought you were from the BBC.’

  ‘The BBC?’

  ‘Yes, they’re always sending people to take recordings of my mother singing and telling stories, though she’s very old now.’

  He followed her into a bedroom where an old white-faced white-haired woman was lying, her head against white pillows. She stretched out her prominently veined hand across the blankets and said, ‘John, I heard Anne talking to you. There’s nothing wrong with my hearing.’

  They were left alone and he sat down beside the bed. There was a small table with medicine bottles and pills on it.

  ‘It’s true,’ she said, ‘the BBC are always sending people to hear me sing songs before I die.’

  ‘And how are you?’

  ‘Fine, fine.’

  ‘Good, that’s good.’ Her keen wise eyes studied his face carefully. The room had bright white wallpaper and the windows faced the sea.

  ‘I don’t sleep so well now,’ said the old woman. ‘I waken at five every morning and I can hear the birds twittering just outside the window.’

  ‘You look quite well,’ he said.

  ‘Of course I’m not well. Everybody says that to me. But after all I’m ninety years old. I can’t expect to live forever. And you’re over sixty but I can still see you as a boy.’ She prattled on but he felt that all the time she was studying him without being obvious.

  ‘Have you seen the BBC people? They all have long hair and they wear red ties. But they’re nice and considerate. Of course everybody wears long hair now, even my daughter’s son. Would you like to hear my recording? My grandson took it down on a tape.’

  ‘I would,’ he said.

  She tapped on the head of the bed as loudly as she could and her daughter came in.

  ‘Where’s Hugh?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s outside.’

  ‘Tell him to bring in the machine. John wants to hear my recording.’ She turned to John and said, ‘Hugh is very good with his hands, you know. All the young people nowadays know all about electricity and cars.’

  After a while a tall, quiet, long-haired boy came in with a tape recorder. He plugged it into a socket beside the bed, his motions cool and competent and unflurried. He had the same neutral quizzical look that John had noticed in his brother’s two grandchildren. They don’t want to be deceived again, he thought. This generation is not interested in words, only in actions. Observation, exactitude, elegance. The universe of the poem or the story is not theirs, their universe is electronic. And when he thought of the phrase ‘the music of the spheres’ he seemed to see a shining bicycle moving through the heavens, or the wheels of some inexplicable machine.

  Hugh switched on the tape recorder and John listened.

  ‘Tonight,’ the announcer began, ‘we are going to hear the voice of a lady of ninety years old. She will be telling us about her life on this far Hebridean island untouched by pollution and comparatively unchanged when it is compared with our own hectic cities. This lady has never in all her life left the island on which she grew up. She has never seen a train. She has never seen a city. She has been brought up in a completely pastoral society. But we may well ask, what will happen to this society? Will it be squeezed out of existence? How can it survive the pollution of our time, and here I am speaking not simply of physical but of moral pollution? What was it like to live on this island for so many years? I shall try to elicit some answers to that question in the course of this programme. But first I should like you to hear this lady singing a Gaelic traditional song. I may interpolate at this point that many Gaelic songs have apparently been anglicised musically, thus losing their traditional flavour. But Mrs Macdonald will sing this song in the way in which she was taught to, the way in which she picked it up from previous singers.’

  There followed a rendering of Thig Tri Nithean Gun Iarraidh (‘Three things will come without seeking . . . ’). John listened to the frail voice: it seemed strange to hear it, ghostly and yet powerful in its own belief, real and yet unreal at the same time.

  When the singing was over the interviewer questioned her:

  INTER.

  And now, Mrs Macdonald, could you please tell me how old you are?

  MRS M.

  I am ninety years old.

  INTER.

  You will have seen a lot of changes on this island, in this village even.

  MRS M.

  Oh yes, lots of changes. I don’t know much about the island. I know more about the village.

  INTER.

  You mean that you hardly ever left the village itself?

  MRS M.

  I don’t know much about the rest of the island.

  INTER.

  What are your memories then of your youth in the village?

  MRS M.

  Oh, people were closer together. People used to help each other at the peat gathering. They would go out with a cart and they would put the peats on the cart. And they would make
tea and sing. It was very happy times especially if it was a good day.

  INTER.

  Do they not do that any more? I mean, coal and electricity . . .

  MRS M.

  No, they don’t do that so much, no. Nowadays. And there was more fishing then too. People would come to the door and give you a fish if they had caught one.

  INTER.

  You mean herring?

  MRS M.

  No, things like cod. Not herring. They would catch them in boats or off the rocks. Not herring. The herring were caught by the drifters. And the mackerel. We used to eat herring and potatoes every day. Except Sunday of course.

  INTER.

  And what did you eat on Sunday?

  MRS M.

  We would always have meat on Sunday. That was always the fashion. Meat on Sundays. And soup.

  INTER.

  I see. And tell me, when did you leave school, Mrs Macdonald?

  MRS M.

  I left school when I was fourteen years old. I was in Secondary Two.

  INTER.

  It was a small village school, I take it.

  MRS M.

  Oh, yes, it was small. Perhaps about fifty pupils.

  Perhaps about fifty. We used to write on slates in those days and the children would bring in a peat for a fire in the winter.

  Every child would bring in a peat. And we had people called pupil-teachers.

  INTER.

  Pupil-teachers? What were pupil-teachers?

  MRS M.

  They were young people who helped the teacher. Pupils. They were pupils themselves.

  INTER.

  Then what happened?

  MRS M.

  I looked after my father and mother. We had a croft too. And then I got married.

  INTER.

  What did your husband do?

  MRS M.

  He was a crofter. In those days we used to go to a dance at the end of the road. But the young people go to the town now. In those days we had a dance at the end of the road.

  INTER.

  Did you not know him before, your husband I mean?

  MRS M.

  Yes but that was where I met him, at the dance.

  INTER.

  What did they use for the dance?

  MRS M.

  What do you mean?

  INTER.

  What music did they use?

  MRS M.

  Oh, you mean the instrument. It was a melodeon.

  INTER.

  Can you remember the tunes, any of the tunes, any of the songs?

  MRS M.

  Oh yes, I can remember A Ribbinn Oig bbeil cuimbn’ agad?

  INTER.

  Could you tell our listeners what that means, Mrs Macdonald?

  MRS M.

  It’s a love song. That’s what it is, a sailors’ song. A love song.

  INTER.

  I see. And do you think you could sing it?

  And she proceeded to sing it in that frail voice. John listened to the evocation of nights on ships, moonlight, masts, exile, and he was strangely moved as if he were hearing a voice speaking to him from the past.

  ‘I think that will be enough,’ she said to the boy. He switched off the tape recorder without saying anything, put it in its case and took it away, closing the door behind him.

  John said, ‘You make it all sound very romantic.’

  ‘Well, it was true about the peats.’

  ‘But don’t you remember the fights people used to have about land and things like that?’

  ‘Yes but I remember the money they collected when Shodan was drowned.’

  ‘But what about the tricks they used to play on old Maggie?’

  ‘That was just young boys. And they had nothing else to do. That was the reason for it.’

  There was a silence. A large blue fly buzzed in the window. John followed it with his eyes. It was restless, never settling, humming loudly with an angry sound. For a moment he nearly got up in order to kill it, he was so irritated by the booming sound and its restlessness.

  ‘Would you like to tell me about my mother?’ said John.

  ‘What about your mother?’

  ‘Sarah said something when I was speaking to her.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘I felt there was something wrong, the way she talked. It was about my brother.’

  ‘Well you know your brother was fond of the land. What did you want to know?’

  ‘What happened. That was all.’

  ‘Your mother went a bit odd at the end. It’s quite common with old people. Perhaps that’s what she was talking about. My own brother wouldn’t let the doctor into the house. He thought he was poisoning him.’

  ‘You say odd. How odd?’

  ‘She accused your brother of wanting to put her out of the house. But I wouldn’t pay any attention to that. Old people get like that.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You know your brother.’

  ‘Yes. He is fond of land. He always was. He’s fond of property.’

  ‘Most people are,’ she said. ‘And what did you think of my singing?’

  ‘You sang well. It’s funny how one can tell a real Gaelic singer. It’s not even the way they pronounce their words. It’s something else.’

  ‘You haven’t forgotten your Gaelic.’

  ‘No. We had societies. We had a Gaelic society. People who had been on holiday used to come and talk to us and show us slides.’ The successful and the failed. From the lone shelling of the misty island. Smoking their cigars but unable to go back and live there. Since after all they had made their homes in America. Leading their half lives, like mine. Watching cowboys on TV, the cheapness and the vulgarity of it, the largeness, the spaciousness, the crowdedness. They never really belonged to the city, these Highlanders. Not really. The skyscrapers were too tall, they were surrounded by the works of man, not the works of God. In the beginning was the neon lighting . . . And the fake religions, the cheap multitudinous sprouting so-called faiths. And they cried, some of them, at these meetings, in their large jackets of fine light cloth, behind their rimless glasses.

  He got up to go.

  ‘It’s the blood, I suppose,’ she said.

  ‘Pardon.’

  ‘That makes you able to tell. The blood. You could have seen it on my pillow three months ago.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be sorry. One grows used to lying here. The blood is always there. It won’t allow people to change.’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  He said goodbye awkwardly and went outside. As he stood at the door for a moment, he heard music coming from the side of the house. It sounded American. He went over and looked. The boy was sitting against the side of the house patiently strumming his guitar, his head bent over it. He sang the words in a consciously American way, drawling them affectedly. John moved quietly away. The sun was still on the water where some ducks flew low. He thought of the headland where he was standing as if it were Marathon. There they had combed each other’s long hair, the effeminate courageous ones about to die.

  As he walked back he couldn’t get out of his mind an article about Billy Graham he had read in an American magazine not long before. It was all about the crewcut saint, the electric blue eyed boy perched in his mountain eyrie. The Victorian respect shown by the interviewers had been, even for him with a long knowledge of American papers, nauseating. Would you like these remarks off the record, and so on. And then that bit about his personal appearances at such shows as Laugh-in where the conversation somehow got round to Jesus Christ every time! In Africa a corps of black policemen, appointed to control the crowd, had abandoned their posts and come forward to make a stand for Jesus!

  Mad crude America, Victorian and twentieth century at the one time. Manic country of the random and the destined. What would his father or his mother have thought of Billy Graham? The fundamentalist with the stereophonic backing. For the first time since he came home h
e laughed out loud.

  7

  It was evening when he got back to his brother’s house and the light was beginning to thicken. As he turned in at the gate his brother, who must have seen him coming, walked towards it and then stopped: he was carrying a hammer in his right hand as if he had been working with posts. They stood looking at each other in the half-light.

  ‘Have you seen everybody then,’ said his brother. ‘Have you visited them all?’ In the dusk and carrying the hammer he looked somehow more authoritative, more solid than his brother.

  ‘Most of them. Sarah was telling me about the cow.’

  ‘Oh, that. There was something wrong with the cow. But it’s all right now. She talks too much,’ he added contemptuously.

  ‘And also,’ said John carefully, ‘I heard something about our mother.’

  ‘What about her? By God, if that bitch Sarah has been spreading scandal I’ll . . . ’ His hands tightened on the hammer and his whole body seemed to bulge out and bristle like a fighting cock. For a moment John had a vision of a policeman with a baton in his hand. John glimpsed the power and energy that had made his brother the dominant person in the village.

  After a while he said, ‘I didn’t want to worry you.’