The Red Door

by Iain Crichton Smith

  He didn’t realise when he first became nervous. The nervousness probably grew from the silence around him which was unbroken by anything but the noise of the engine: from the lack of traffic: from the grey fog. At one time he stopped and unfastened his safety belt as if he might wish to escape from some disaster that threatened him. To the left and right of him there were trees, and a straight road ahead of him down which he hurtled. He knew this length of straight road: it lasted for miles.

  Behind him in the back seat bounced some toys which had been lying there since she had left and taken the children with her. He had gone to her mother’s but she hadn’t been there and there was no message. That was a week ago. And he couldn’t find her anywhere. Then he had simply stopped looking, just like that. And he had begun to drink, steadily, relentlessly. In pub after pub, arguing with people, being bitter and unpleasant, finding himself alone, going home to an empty house whose mirrors revealed nothing. One night he had wakened up feeling hot (he wasn’t sleeping very well) and gone to the window to open it, only to be astonished by the terrible blaze of light which shone on the street and the houses and the grooved dustbins. Shaken to the core he couldn’t bear the brilliant light. For a moment it was as if he had glimpsed the world before man, before intelligence, its negligent power, its careless scattering of energy, its clear brilliance. He felt like an interruption of the light.

  For a moment as he drove on he thought he saw two hikers with foggy packs waiting at the side of the road and drew up for he needed the company but there was no one there. He had seen no rabbits or weasels or owls for a long time. Once he thought he saw his brother standing at the side of the road – his brother to whom he hadn’t written for twenty years – but again there was no one there. He began to shiver uncontrollably. He was frightened lest round the next corner he would find his wife and children waiting in the grey fog, holding out their hands to him. It was like a film of Jack the Ripper, phantoms moving around him, grey. He began to sweat and the palms of his hands felt sticky on the wheel. He began to think of the night he had walked out on Helen the year before.

  Phantoms seemed to waver at his side. His father, left alone in the house after his own marriage and now dead, seemed to extend grey hands to him. ‘It was not my fault,’ he screamed silently. ‘I couldn’t do anything else.’ The foggy hands were replaced by others. There were Irma’s hands too. The last time he had seen her was ten years ago. She had driven away from him, her gloved hands resting on the wheel in front of the green dashboard. That was just after he had told her about Helen.

  The road now was seething with phantoms and sometimes amongst them he saw himself shouting at Helen, ‘Leave me alone. Leave me alone. Can’t you see I’m busy?’ And his mother with her tranquil cunning eyes. I must get back, he thought, I must get back to where I was happy. But the faces now began to scream at him. The phantoms had come out into the middle of the road and he was boring through them, afraid to stop. He was afraid to stop lest if he did stop they would enter the car. It was like the time he had taken Helen and the boys to the Safari Park and the monkeys had insisted on climbing on the bonnet of his car making faces at him through the windscreen. ‘Don’t stop,’ he had been advised. And he had driven on with his cargo of mocking primitive diminutive faces.

  And all the time the terror of the niceness, the warmth of Helen and the boys, their niceness.

  Now ahead of him he saw a strange white form waving out of the mist. It flared and changed but at the centre of it was darkness, at the centre of it was a maze of darkness, a wheel. It seemed to be a reflection of the wheel of the car. Instinctively as the car entered it he braked, inside the fog and the darkness and the wheel. And from it issued such a stench as nearly destroyed him. It was a stench such as might arise from the concentrated marshes of the world. He heard someone scream, relentlessly, mindlessly. A wind shook the door of the car. Flashes of light shook the form. It was like thunder, stinking thunder, with a play of lightning and wheels inside it. It was a huge stinking brain, concentrated on itself, wheel within wheel. It turned on itself blindly, blankly, inside the fog which surrounded it. There were ladders of light in it and small animals, weasels leaping at rabbits’ throats, owls swooping on mice. And all the time there was the stench. Like the monkeys on the bonnet of the car, it screeched and gibbered and knocked. He couldn’t speak, his clammy hands clutched and slid from the wheel. In one corner of the fog, Helen sat knitting, in another his children sat reading red comics. He began to howl like a wolf, as if a hot stone were being wrenched out of him.

  Frantically he looked for a place to turn, gritting his teeth. He found it and turned. As he pointed the engine eastwards the fog began slowly to fade away. He drove on slowly and after a while got out of the car. The stars were shining with a concentrated brilliance, millions and millions of them, just as he had used to see them when he was young. He held his hands and his face up to the light as if to wash away the stench. The light was so clear that he could see for miles and miles around him as if he were in a large arena. He got into the car and drove away. He wanted to go home, he wanted very much to touch human hands again.

  The Professor and the Comics

  1

  His moon glasses shining on his round red-cheeked face Professor MacDuff cycled happily along through the March day which made the streets as white as bone. On days like these the city looked freshly coloured and new, the butchers in their striped smocks standing at shop doors, knives clutched absent-mindedly in their hands, young boys racing each other on bicycles, older boys hanging about with yellow crash helmets, women pushing prams and groceries along, window panes flashing, church spires climbing into a blue sky, cinemas advertising (he noticed sadly) Bingo instead of Wild Westerns.

  Professor MacDuff waited placidly at the red traffic lights, in his tweed suit, his white shirt and large green tie. He felt fine as if newly resurrected from the grave of winter. What a fine month March was, bringing with it scents as from a rich soil, memories of boyish escapades, ladders, paint, whooping dogs, hosepipes. He cycled on past the Art Gallery (where they were holding an exhibition of Magritte’s paintings), past streets lined with flaring green trees, past small shops which said things like ‘M NS CL T ES’ (the brood which flourished and so quickly died) till he arrived at last at the open steel gates of the university from which rose green sweeping lawns towards the mellow-bricked building itself.

  Students (boys hardly distinguishable from girls wearing long hair like Charles I’s doomed followers or the Marlborough he hugely admired) strolled about, books under their arms, talking. They waved to him. He waved back, by now wheeling his bicycle. The clock in the tower boomed. Ah, the forest of Arden where all was green, where Rosalind and Celia and Orlando and Oliver (indistinguishable from each other in their virginal green) wandered happily forever. He waved to the Professor of Logic who on dusty days sometimes wore a gas mask. Logic could of course be carried too far.

  He parked his bicycle and walked along the corridor where the notices proliferated, so many of them that one didn’t have the time or the inclination to read them: a Violin Concerto cheek by jowl with a performance of Uncle Vanya, a teach-in on Communism next to a notice about Nationalism, a Wine and Cheese Social next to a poster which showed a lynx-eyed Chinaman with a machine gun.

  He said ‘Hello’ to young Hilton who looked, as usual, aloof and saturnine. He wondered if he was wearing his red socks again and looking back saw that he was. The Moral Philosophy Professor of course never wore socks at all.

  He stood outside the door of his lecture room looking at the wooden seats which arose in tiers towards the back, smelling as he so often did the smell of varnish, a reminiscence of his first day in university as a student. ‘Ah,’ said the History Professor, ‘narcissising again?’ The History Professor was called Black, wore a black gown and was a very precise Civil Service type of man who read out his lectures with great deliberation in a very even unexcited voice. His students liked him becau
se he arranged and tabulated everything so neatly that it really seemed as if the precise year 1485 was a new departure in English History and the Renaissance did begin in a particular year and perhaps even on a particular day.

  ‘The lecture rooms look different in spring,’ said Professor MacDuff.

  ‘Everything is different in spring,’ said Professor Black, ‘except History.’

  ‘It is as if the people in there were plants,’ said Professor MacDuff, turning moon glasses benevolently towards Black who had however moved on. Having not a single jot of imagination himself he was uneasy in the presence of anyone who had.

  ‘Uptight, that’s what you are,’ said Professor MacDuff grinning.

  He went into his room, and put on his gown. Soon his students would be appearing for the lecture. He smiled with satisfaction, and for a moment he appeared different, as if he were about to embark on a difficult adventure.

  It seemed at first to be as it had always been before, the lecture room filling slowly then more rapidly with chattering students who quoted at each other the possibly more obscene bits of Anglo-Saxon or opened notebooks on which were drawn in bold imaginative detail anatomical sections of the human (feminine) form with words like Sex and Crap prominently displayed. Some lounged, some sat up attentively, some shifted about, some half closed their eyes (after late night hangovers), some dreamed. And here and there of course were the pale, intense, bespectacled ones who had really come to drink at the fount of Helicon, to whom for instance Donne’s poetry was not merely an academic abstraction but a possible experience. The students wore all sorts and styles of clothing: the only constant was difference. Some of the girls wore long sweeping red Lady Macbethish coats which swung open to frame like Renaissance pictures voluptuous legs below brief skirts. Boys wore dungaree trousers, leather jackets, silken scarves, polo-necked jerseys, a proliferation of costumes.

  When he arrived at the dais the noise as usual died down. Professor MacDuff had been at the university for some time, was an institution and was expected to provide not only information but some urbane and even vaguely comic jokes or at least some entertainment. Bred on the unrelated stories of TV the students did not so much want a lecture as a performance, not however insincere but at least with the sincerity of the actor who has his own truth. They expected the medium and the message to coincide and were quickly bored if the medium (in this case the lecturer) should provide a message which had no relation to his own life style. As a Professor at the university had recently remarked with some bewilderment, ‘They not only want us to lecture on Che Guevara but in some measure to be Che Guevara.’ They did not like dissection of the dead and were therefore impatient with literary criticism.

  It need not be said that what the Professor was about to do was remarkable and in some ways revolutionary. He had his own reasons for doing it and they were perhaps not mean reasons. What the students were looking for was excitement. They were young, volatile, energetic (fed on the milk of the Welfare State), already, many of them, veterans of demonstrations, obscurely irritated by restlessnesses whose source they could not focus. It was, Professor MacDuff often thought, a hunger for drama. There was something theatrical about their clothes even. They were pseudo-Elizabethans without any world (except dead planets) to conquer. They seemed to be continually dressing up for a stage which had been shifted while they were preparing or which, though still there, had no audience waiting. For no one wanted to be a member of an audience, everyone wanted to be an actor. Everyone wanted colour, the brighter the better, and drama, the more exciting the better. Perhaps many of them thought they could do the Professor’s job better than he could himself.

  Nevertheless it was a big thing he was about to do . . . ‘Today,’ said Professor MacDuff drawing himself up to his full height, ‘and for the next few weeks of this term I shall talk about comics.’

  The reaction of the students to this was at first complete stunned silence and then after a moment a spontaneous roar of applause in the middle of which he stood benevolent and fresh-faced as if he were a kind of happy personification of a vernal rural god.

  Some however refrained from cheering as if they sensed that they were being got at in some way, as if they felt a daring breathtaking irony, a parody so piercing that it was a kind of hatred.

  One or two among the pale and the bespectacled looked at him as if he had gone mad.

  But he continued unperturbed referring duly to his lecture notes, a rotund slightly untidy figure with moon glasses.

  ‘Today,’ he said, ‘I shall begin since it is spring with a short lecture on the World of the Comics with special reference to Desperate Dan. Later I shall mention other such heroes of the comics as Korky the Cat. My sources are the Dandy and the Beano and to a lesser extent the Rover, the Wizard, the Hotspur, etc. I shall sometimes refer to comics that are now extinct though at one time they flourished in the imaginations of many who for instance set out to found the British Empire. It is partly with this buried imaginative world, so like Atlantis, that I shall be concerned.

  ‘Now you will all be familiar I take it with the red and yellow pages of the Dandy which I place I may say at this point much higher than the rather belligerent papers such as the Victor, the Wizard and the Hotspur in accordance with the one law which I shall enunciate, that distinguishing the truly creative from the uncreative. This law states that no truly creative work of any kind can omit the vulgar.

  ‘For it is clear,’ the Professor continued, ‘that whereas the Wizard for instance is a merely inferior version of such overrated books as Treasure Island, the Dandy on the other hand represents pure creativity and belongs to the same world as the silent films and the inimitable Charlie Chaplin, the Dandy oscillating as it does between the human world of Desperate Dan and the animal world of Korky the Cat.

  ‘It would however be invidious for me to draw comparisons between these two characters since in fact in such a world comparisons are not possible and would in fact be odious, nor would it be meaningful for me to point out that an animal and a man are not essentially different in this world before good and evil (notice that I do not say beyond good and evil), theological terms which cannot be applied to material of this kind. It is a world rather of errors and inexactitudes. There is a difference one might interpose between an error and a sin. A sin is not an aesthetic term, whereas an error may be so classified.

  ‘Now should comparisons be made on the grounds of vocabulary. I myself would not wish to use neo-Bradleyan techniques in this matter since to do so would be to exile these characters from their own separate world. In the short time that I shall spend today on an introduction to this theme I should merely like to draw attention to some of the characteristics of a typical comic hero, that is, Desperate Dan.

  ‘Naturally one begins with his name. I could spend a long time discoursing on this, especially on the inspired choice of the name Dan which I consider to be much superior to the word Donald or Daniel which are possible alternatives. Why it is superior is not so easy to determine. (It is not for instance as clear as the inspired choice of name by Dickens for his sullen sexton, Gabriel Grub, a name which reconciles both heaven and earth, the angelic and the mouldy.)

  ‘Also one would have to discuss the adjective “desperate”, again an inspired choice because of the connotations of menace and despair, both transfused with comedy.

  ‘And I suppose that when one studies Desperate Dan with his unshaven appearance one could at first sight consider him menacing, especially as he is rather large. He might at first be thought of almost as domesticated Stone Age man ambling about in a world of CLONKS and AARGHS.

  ‘He is one might say perpetually on the verge of a revelation, a being dazzled and swindled continually, sometimes by his family, sometimes by outsiders. But he always wins.

  ‘I should like at this point to outline the plot of a typical Desperate Dan episode. In this episode . . . ’

  At which precise moment there was an unexpected (or perhaps exp
ected) interruption. A slim pale bespectacled boy of the kind whose aloofness conceals a fanatical fire, whose shyness is a mask for a burning egotism, stood up and said: ‘I think we have listened long enough to this ridiculous lecture. Surely, sir, you are aware that we have to try to pass an examination in a few weeks’ time. As this examination will affect the livelihood of most of us . . . ’ Before he could proceed any further there was a brutal roar of derision and anger from the assembled multitude and expletives such as ‘SHIT’, ‘CRAP’, etc. were freely hurled.

  But the serious boy though paler than before continued: ‘It’s possible, sir, that you may be interested in comics but that is no good reason for interrupting the syllabus. You are paid to teach us English Literature and by no stretch of the imagination can the Dandy and the Beano be said to form part of . . . ’

  A huge bearded student wearing a flowered shirt and tie and a brown leather jacket pushed the earnest protester back into his seat. But at that same moment as the huge hand descended on his shoulder propelling him downwards there emerged from another part of the whirlpool a fresh-faced curly-haired girl who shouted vigorously: ‘He’s quite right. There are some of us who believe that Shakespeare and Donne are great poets and that it is our right to be told about them. That stuff about Desperate Dan is what we left behind in the nursery. What do you think we are? Do you think we are still in the primary school? Are you playing a joke on us or something? Are you trying to take the mickey? What sort of professor are you? Are you showing some kind of intellectual contempt for us or what?