The Red Door

by Iain Crichton Smith

  ‘About what?’ said John coldly.

  ‘About our mother. She went a bit queer at the end. She hated Susan, you see. She would say that she was no good at the housework and that she couldn’t do any of the outside work. She accused her of smoking and drinking. She even said she was trying to poison her.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She used to say to people that I was trying to put her out of the house. Which of course was nonsense. She said that I had plotted to get the croft, and you should have it. She liked you better, you see.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me any of this?’

  ‘I didn’t want to worry you. Anyway I’m not good at writing. I can dash off a few lines but I’m not used to the pen.’ For that moment again he looked slightly helpless and awkward as if he were talking about a gift that he half envied, half despised.

  John remembered the letters he would get – ‘Just a scribble to let you know that we are well and here’s hoping you are the same . . . I hope you are in the pink as this leaves me.’ Clichés cut out of a half world of crumbling stone. Certainly this crisis would be beyond his ability to state in writing.

  ‘She was always very strong for the church. She would read bits of the Bible to annoy Susan, the bits about Ruth and so on. You know where it says, “Whither thou goest I will go . . . ” She would read a lot. Do you know it?’

  ‘I know it.’

  John said, ‘I couldn’t come back at the time.’

  ‘I know that. I didn’t expect you to come back.’

  As he stood there John had the same feeling he had had with Sarah, only stronger, that he didn’t know anything about people at all, that his brother, like Sarah, was wearing a mask, that by choosing to remain where he was his brother had been the stronger of the two, that the one who had gone to America and immersed himself in his time was really the weaker of the two, the less self-sufficient. He had never thought about this before, he had felt his return as a regression to a more primitive place, a more pastoral, less exciting position, lower on the scale of a huge complex ladder. Now he wasn’t so sure. Perhaps those who went away were the weaker ones, the ones who were unable to suffer the slowness of time, its inexorable yet ceremonious passing. He was shaken as by a vision: but perhaps the visions of artists and writers were merely ideas which people like his brother saw and dismissed as of no importance.

  ‘Are you coming in?’ said his brother, looking at him strangely.

  ‘Not yet. I won’t be long.’

  His brother went into the house and John remained at the gate. He looked around him at the darkening evening. For a moment he expected to see his mother coming towards him out of the twilight holding a pail of warm milk in her hand. The hills in the distance were darkening. The place was quiet and heavy.

  As he stood there he heard someone whistling and when he turned round saw that it was Malcolm.

  ‘Did you repair the bike?’ said John.

  ‘Yes, it wasn’t anything. It’ll be all right now. We finished that last night.’

  ‘And where were you today, then?’

  ‘Down at the shore.’

  ‘I see.’

  They stood awkwardly in each other’s presence. Suddenly John said, ‘Why are you so interested in science and maths?’

  ‘It’s what I can do best,’ said Malcolm in surprise.

  ‘You don’t read Gaelic, do you?’

  ‘Oh, that’s finished,’ said Malcolm matter-of-factly.

  John was wondering whether the reason Malcolm was so interested in maths and science was that he might have decided, perhaps unconsciously, that his own culture, old and deeply rotted and weakening, was inhibiting and that for that reason he preferred the apparent cleanness and economy of equations without ideology.

  ‘Do you want to go to America?’ he asked.

  ‘I should like to travel,’ said Malcolm carelessly. ‘Perhaps America. But it might be Europe somewhere.’

  John was about to say something about violence till it suddenly occurred to him that this village which he had left also had its violence, its buried hatreds, its bruises which festered for years and decades.

  ‘I want to leave because it’s so boring here,’ said Malcolm. ‘It’s so boring I could scream sometimes.’

  ‘It can seem like that,’ said John. ‘I shall be leaving tomorrow but you don’t need to tell them that just now.’

  He hadn’t realised that he was going to say what he did till he had actually said it.

  Malcolm tried to be conventionally regretful but John sensed a relief just the same.

  They hadn’t really said anything to each other.

  After a while Malcolm went into the house, and he himself stood in the darkening light thinking. He knew that he would never see the place again after that night and the following morning. He summoned it up in all its images, observing, being exact. There was the house itself with its porch and the flowers in front of it. There was the road winding palely away from him past the other houses of the village. There was the thatched roofless house not far away from him. There were the fields and the fences and the barn. All these things he would take away with him, his childhood, his pain, into the shifting world of neon, the flashing broken signals of the city.

  One cannot run away, he thought to himself as he walked towards the house. Or if one runs away one cannot be happy anywhere any more. If one left in the first place one could never go back. Or if one came back one also brought a virus, an infection of time and place. One always brings back a judgment to one’s home.

  He stood there for a long time before going into the house. He leaned over the fence looking out towards the fields. He could imagine his father coming towards him, in long beard and wearing wellingtons, solid, purposeful, fixed. And hadn’t his father been an observer too, an observer of the seasons and the sea?

  As he stood thinking he saw the cloud of midges again. They were rising and falling in the slight breeze. They formed a cloud but inside the cloud each insect was going on its own way or drifting with the breeze. Each alive and perhaps with its own weight, its own inheritance. Apparently free yet fixed, apparently spontaneous yet destined.

  His eyes followed their frail yet beautiful movements. He smiled wryly as he felt them nipping him. He’d have to get into the house. He would have to find out when the bus left in the morning. That would be the first stage of the journey: after that he could find out about boats and trains and planes.

  After the Dance

  I had met her at a dance and we went to her house at about eleven o’clock at night. It was in a tenement and the steps up to her door were wide and large and clean as if they had been newly washed. The road, I remember, was very slippery as it was winter and, walking along in her red leather coat and red gloves, she looked like an ageing heroine out of a fairy story.

  When we opened the door and went in she said in a whisper, ‘You’ll have to be quiet. My father is asleep.’ The room blossomed into largeness in the light and one’s first impression was of whiteness, white wallpaper and white paint. Above the mantelpiece there was a rectangular mirror with a flowery border. There were rooms leading off the one we were in and the whole flat seemed much more spacious than one might have expected.

  She took off her coat and gloves and laid them on the table and sat down. The fire had gone out but there were still a few bits of charred wood remaining in it. A large dog got up and greeted her and then lay down in a corner munching a bone. A white-faced clock ticked on the mantelpiece.

  ‘Would you like some tea?’ she asked.

  I said ‘Yes,’ and she went to the blue cooker and put the kettle on. She got out a tin of biscuits.

  ‘My father will be trying to listen,’ she said. ‘But he’s in the far end room. He doesn’t sleep very well. There’s no one to look after him but me. No one else. I have four sisters and they’re all married and they won’t look at him. Does one abandon him?’ She looked at me wearily and now that she had removed her red coat
her face appeared more haggard and her throat more lined. ‘Or does one sacrifice oneself ? He says to me, “Why did you never marry like your sisters and your brothers?” He taunts me with not marrying and yet he knows that if I married he would be left alone. Isn’t that queer? You’d think he wouldn’t say things like that, I mean in his own defence. You’d think he’d have more sense. But he doesn’t have any sense. He spends a lot of his time doing jigsaws. They never come out right of course. A bit of a castle or a boat, something like that, but most of the time he can’t be bothered finishing them. And another thing he does; he puts ships in bottles. He spends hours trying to get the sails inside with bits of string. He used to be a sailor you see. He’s been all over the world. But most of the time he cuts wood. He goes down to the shore and gathers wood and chops it up in the woodshed. He makes all sorts of useless ornaments. He’s got an axe. And lots of tools. In the summer he spends all his time in the shed chopping up wood. There’s a woodshed down below on the back lawn and in the summer there are leaves all round it. He sits there. But he’s always hacking away with that axe. Day after day. But what can one do with the old?’

  She poured the hot water into the tea-pot and took it over to the table. She poured the tea into two large blue mugs and milked it.

  ‘It’s a problem, isn’t it, what to do with the old? If one wasn’t so good-hearted – some people aren’t like that at all. Do you take sugar? One? Some people can go away and forget. My sisters always make excuses for not having him. They say they haven’t got enough space with the children. Or they say they haven’t got enough money. Or they say he wouldn’t be good for the children. It’s funny how they can be so forgetful and yet he wasn’t any better to me than he was to them. In fact he treated me worse.’

  She looked at me as if she expected me to say something. I murmured something unintelligible through the biscuit I was chewing, thinking that it all did sound really like a fairy tale. I wondered why she wore red. I had been reading something in one of the Sunday colour supplements about colour being a betrayal of one’s personality but then everything was a betrayal of one’s personality. Even conversation. I myself preferred blue but she wore red gloves, a red coat and she even had a red ribbon in her hair.

  She was an odd mixture. At the dance she had danced very freely as they do in Top of the Pops, swaying like an unconscious flower, in a hypnotic trance of complete surrender to the body.

  The dog crunched his bone in the corner and the clock ticked on.

  ‘I don’t understand why I’m so soft-hearted,’ she said, crushing a biscuit in her hand.

  I looked at the TV set. ‘Is there anything on TV?’ I said, ‘or would that disturb your father?’

  ‘There’s a Radio Times there,’ she said carelessly. ‘If we shut the door he won’t hear it. I don’t watch it much.’ The set was of white wood and I had a vision of her father hacking it up for firewood with his trusty axe.

  I found the Radio Times among a pile of romantic magazines, some of which lay open with rings of black ink round horoscopes.

  ‘There’s a series about Henry VIII,’ I said. ‘It’s been going on for a week or two. Have you seen any of it?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘but if you want it. So long as it isn’t too loud.’

  I switched on the TV and waited for the picture to declare itself. How did people exist before TV? What did they talk about? She rested her elbow on the table and drank her tea.

  The picture clarified itself. It showed Anne Boleyn going to the scaffold. She was being prepared by her maids in attendance in the prison while the sunlight shone in straight shafts through the barred window. She told them that she wasn’t frightened though some of them were crying and their hands shaking as they tied the ribbon in her hair.

  The scene shifted to the execution block and showed a large man in black who was wearing a black mask: he was carrying a huge axe in his hand. The wooden block lay below. She came forward and lay down as if she were a swimmer, her hair neatly tied. Her motion had an eerie aesthetic quality as if she were taking part in a ballet dance, swanning forward, the axe falling. As the axe cut the head from the neck there was a roar of applause from the people.

  I turned towards her. She was looking very pale. ‘I don’t like these TV programmes,’ she said, and I switched it off. ‘They’re all so violent.’

  ‘I’d better be going,’ I said looking at the clock. ‘It’s getting late.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose you’d better,’ she said. ‘I enjoyed the dance.’

  I went out into the darkness, at first unable to see, and closing the main door of the tenement behind me. Then as my eyes focused and the sky came into view and defined itself, I saw the white stars. They were like the bones the dog had been crunching.

  I walked very carefully along the glassy road almost slithering at times.

  Funny about the tall man with the mask and the axe. It had reminded me of something in its extraordinary blatant brutality. The axe and the wood. But the picture I remembered most clearly was that of Anne Boleyn in the sunlight looking out of the narrow barred window on to the lawn. I really hoped that she had meant it when she said that she wasn’t afraid. But she had certainly acted as if she meant it. And I was sure she did. For that particular moment in time she had meant it and that was something. One could not be expected to mean it for all moments, even on TV.

  The Telegram

  The two women – one fat and one thin – sat at the window of the thin woman’s house drinking tea and looking down the road which ran through the village. They were like two birds, one a fat domestic bird perhaps, the other more aquiline, more gaunt, or, to be precise, more like a buzzard.

  It was wartime and though the village appeared quiet, much had gone on in it. Reverberations from a war fought far away had reached it: many of its young men had been killed, or rather drowned, since nearly all of them had joined the navy, and their ships had sunk in seas which they had never seen except on maps which hung on the walls of the local school which they all had at one time or another unwillingly attended. One had been drowned on a destroyer after a leave during which he had told his family that he would never come back again. (Or at least that was the rumour in the village which was still, as it had always been, a superstitious place.) Another had been drowned during the pursuit of the Bismarck.

  What the war had to do with them the people of the village did not know. It came on them as a strange plague, taking their sons away and then killing them, meaninglessly, randomly. They watched the road often for the telegrams.

  The telegrams were brought to the houses by the local elder who, clad in black, would walk along the road and then stop at the house to which the telegram was directed. People began to think of the telegram as a strange missile pointed at them from abroad. They did not know what to associate it with, certainly not with God, but it was a weapon of some kind, it picked a door and entered it, and left desolation just like any other weapon.

  The two women who watched the street were different, not only physically but socially. For the thin woman’s son was a sub-lieutenant in the Navy while the fat woman’s son was only an ordinary seaman. The fat woman’s son had to salute the thin woman’s son. One got more pay than the other, and wore better uniform. One had been at university and had therefore become an officer, the other had left school at the age of fourteen.

  When they looked out the window they could see cows wandering lazily about, but little other movement. The fat woman’s cow used to eat the thin woman’s washing and she was looking out for it but she couldn’t see it. The thin woman was not popular in the village. She was an incomer from another village and had only been in this one for thirty years or so. The fat woman had lived in the village all her days; she was a native. Also the thin woman was ambitious: she had sent her son to university though she only had a widow’s pension of ten shillings a week.

  As they watched they could see at the far end of the street the tall man in black clothes carrying
in his hand a piece of yellow paper. This was a bare village with little colour and therefore the yellow was both strange and unnatural.

  The fat woman said: ‘It’s Macleod again.’

  ‘I wonder where he’s going today.’

  They were both frightened for he could be coming to their house. And so they watched him and as they watched him they spoke feverishly as if by speaking continually and watching his every move they would be able to keep from themselves whatever plague he was bringing. The thin woman said:

  ‘Don’t worry, Sarah, it won’t be for you. Donald only left home last week.’

  ‘You don’t know,’ said the fat woman, ‘you don’t know.’

  And then she added without thinking, ‘It’s different for the officers.’

  ‘Why is it different for the officers?’ said the thin woman in an even voice without taking her eyes from the black figure.

  ‘Well, I just thought they’re better off,’ said the fat woman in a confused tone, ‘they get better food and they get better conditions.’

  ‘They’re still on the ship,’ said the thin woman who was thinking that the fat woman was very stupid. But then most of them were: they were large, fat and lazy. Most of them could have better afforded to send their sons and daughters to university but they didn’t want to be thought of as snobbish.

  ‘They are that,’ said the fat woman. ‘But your son is educated,’ she added irrelevantly. Of course her son didn’t salute the thin woman’s son if they were both home on leave at the same time. It had happened once they had been. But naturally there was the uneasiness.

  ‘I made sacrifices to have my son educated,’ said the thin woman. ‘I lived on a pension of ten shillings a week. I was in nobody’s debt. More tea?’

  ‘No thank you,’ said the fat woman. ‘He’s passed Bessie’s house. That means it can’t be Roddy. He’s safe.’

  For a terrible moment she realised that she had hoped that the elder would have turned in at Bessie’s house. Not that she had anything against either Bessie or Roddy. But still one thought of one’s own family first.