The next Macrae – Donald – was different again from Norman. He was a gloomy man who always wore dark clothes and spent most of his time reading his grandfather’s plans in a small room of his house. He also hired workers but kept them at it. The trouble was that he could never find the exact kind of stone that he wanted for the house, and all the stone that he did find locally was, according to him, soft and inferior. He spent much money on importing stone and because it was so expensive he became poorer and poorer but succeeded at last in adding another wall in which a long narrow lugubrious window was set. Sometimes he would sit with his elongated head and body at this window gazing across the village or brooding or reading a theological book. He would tell the villagers that they must prepare for their deaths and that they were merely like the lilies of the field. It did not escape their notice however that he got as much money from them as he could. He said that the house he was building was like a temple which would last forever and that it would glorify them all, poor as they were. Did they not wish to see some solid building erected among their poor thatched houses? They would gaze down at the ground, their caps in their hands, but say nothing since they couldn’t understand a word he was saying. What with his theological books and his stones he spent practically all his money and the family’s money and he died at fifty years old, a religious recluse who would suddenly emerge from his house and shout at the workmen that they weren’t worthy of their hire. Then he would mutter to himself and go back into his gloomy room where he would read till the early hours of the morning. No one had a good word to say for him for he would say things like, ‘You have no sense of excellence’ to their faces. At one time he even started a school in competition with the one already there, but after a while no one would attend it for he would never allow any of the pupils out during school hours in contrast to the teacher in the other school who used to take the children out to pick flowers and berries.
The Macrae I knew – the son of this one – was a large jovial fat man who dressed in a brown canvas blouse. Day after day he would set off with his wheelbarrow and bring back a huge boulder which he would lever on to the ground in order to add another part of the wall to the house, which by now had three walls and a stone floor and three windows. The trouble with Iain Macrae was that he liked children and when they danced round making fun of his house which would never in their opinion be finished, he would look at them with a merry smile and tell them stories. When he was doing this, his expression would become wonderfully tender and he would gaze into the distance over their heads as if he were seeing a most beautiful serene sight. He would completely abandon any work on his house and begin, ‘Last night I was walking across the moor looking for a boulder when I saw an owl sitting on a stone reading a book.’ The children would gather round him open-mouthed and cease to play pranks. He was really a very lazy fat man who seemed to move heavily like a large solid cloud. When he was asked why he didn’t abandon the house altogether he would say, ‘One must have something to do. Even if it’s no good.’ And he would smile a sad clownish smile. He was liked in the village as he would do anything for anyone at any time and would wholly neglect his own affairs in order to help. When he was on his death-bed he was making jokes about his coffin and saying that they must get him a large one. At one time he would say that it should be made of stone, but at other times he preferred wood since it changed so much, whereas stone never changed, and this was its weakness. In fact he didn’t care about the quality of the stone he trundled along in his wheelbarrow and sometimes he would forget which stone he ought to have been using at a particular time. ‘We all have something to do,’ he would say, ‘and this was what was left to me. I couldn’t live in this house,’ he would add, ‘if it was finished. I would admire it from a distance.’ And so another wall and another window would be slowly added in the interval of telling stories to the children. But the people grew used to seeing this unfinished structure and praised God that their own houses were wind and rain proof and tightly made. He also died as a result of wheeling a stone along. He fell on his face while torrents of blood poured out of his mouth, and stained the ground. He wasn’t long on his death-bed where he grew very thin and meagre so that no one would ever have thought that he had weighed fifteen stone and could tell interesting stories to children, who as a mark of respect gathered a bunch of flowers and laid them on his grave.
His son was a brisker thinner man who decided that the house must be finished once and for all. He had grown up in the knowledge that his father had been, to a certain extent, a figure of fun and was determined that he himself would not be humorous or play the clown for anybody. For this reason he would rise early in the morning and start on the house. The village would resound to his hammering day after day. He never ceased working. He was also resolute that he would do all the work himself. It is true that he couldn’t handle a hammer as well as his forebears but what he lost in skill he made up for in determination. ‘One should never leave a job incomplete,’ he would say, staring you straight in the eye. ‘Never. It is immoral. Laziness is immoral.’ And as most of the villagers were themselves lazy, standing at the corners of their houses with their hands in their pockets most of the day, he wasn’t liked much. ‘I have other things I must do after this is completed,’ he would say. And so he would work like a slave. People said that he would kill himself but in fact he didn’t. He seemed to be very tough physically and never once had an illness while he was building the house, though he worked in the rain and sometimes in the snow.
Eventually one morning he finished it. People thought that he would have a celebration party but he didn’t. He wasn’t the kind of man who cared for sentiment. But when the house was completed it was noticed that he would stand looking at it and then move onward and look at it from another angle. A depression hung over the village. The villagers had thought that they would be glad when the house was finished but they weren’t. It was partly because it wasn’t as good as they had expected (after all builders had been working at it for a hundred years at least and perhaps even longer than that) and in comparison with their dreams it looked more ordinary than they had expected. They didn’t quite know what they had expected, but they had certainly expected a structure more elaborate and elegant than they got. It seemed to be saying that after all man’s imagination is much the same everywhere.
But the real trouble was that they didn’t have so much to talk about. In the past if there was a pause in the conversation they would start to tell some story about That House or if they didn’t have actual stories about it they would invent some. In any case the village seemed to grow gloomier and gloomier. Some of them wanted to smash the house down so that it could be started all over again. But of course they wouldn’t do that for they were all basically law-abiding people. But they grew to hate the last of the Macraes, who was called William. And as he sensed this he began to avoid them. He too grew tired of looking at the house in which he had begun to live. He had bought very ordinary furniture for it, and all the usual conveniences of a house, and in fact made it look very common and not to be distinguished from the other houses of the village except that it was a stone house. People would say how different he was from his forefathers and what fine ideas they had had, and what plans and ideals they had nursed. William tried to mix with them but not very successfully since, though he enquired about their families, they knew that fundamentally he wasn’t interested. Obscurely they felt that they had been betrayed. Was all their legend-making to end up like this after all, with this very ordinary house which seemed to answer very trivial problems? Why, because it was lived in, the house didn’t even have any ghosts! The villagers had even been cheated of that! They looked forward to William’s death and for this reason hoped that he would not marry, since they would then have the freedom to do with the house what their imaginations wished. They actively discouraged any girl in the village from marrying him, though at the same time they were worried lest he should import a wife from somewhere el
se. But in fact he showed no sign of doing that. On the contrary, he would sit in the house brooding for hours and it was even rumoured that he wished to pull the house down and start again. But all the zest had left him – perhaps he had overworked too long – and he remained where he was in his ordinary house with the ordinary curtains and the ordinary carpets and furniture.
He died of some form of melancholia. After his death, all the furniture and carpets etc. were sold by a dull-looking niece of his from outside the island who had no intention of coming back. The house remained empty since there was no one who wanted to buy it and a satisfactory series of legends began to blossom around it, most of them having to do with mysterious lights at windows, men reading Bibles in a greenish light or telling stories to phantom children. Stories were freely invented and the best of them survived and the worst perished. The most mysterious statement they found was in one of the books which the second Macrae had kept. It read, ‘When all the lies have been answered, other lies will have to be invented.’ The villagers thought that in inventing legends they were being true to the early founders of the house and looked at it as women will stand at a church door watching the bride coming out and dreaming that she at least will begin a race of uncorrupted children, not realising that for this to happen she must be a virgin of the purest blood.
The Painter
We only once had a painter in our village in all the time that I can remember. His name was William Murray and he had always been a sickly, delicate, rather beautiful boy who was the only son of a widow. Ever since he was a child he had been painting or drawing because of some secret compulsion and the villagers had always encouraged him. He used to paint scenes of the village at harvest time when we were all scything the corn, or cutting it with sickles, and there is no doubt that the canvas had a fine golden sheen with a light such as we had never seen before. At other times he would make pictures of the village in the winter when there was a lot of snow on the moor and the hills and it was climbing up the sides of the houses so that there was in the painting a calm fairytale atmosphere. He would paint our dogs – who were nearly all collies – with great fidelity to nature, and once he did a particularly faithful picture of a sheep which had been found out on the moor with its eyes eaten by a crow. He also did paintings of the children dressed in their gay flowery clothes, and once he did a strange picture of an empty sack of flour which hung in the air like a spook.
We all liked him in those days and bought some of his pictures for small sums of money since his mother was poor. We felt a certain responsibility towards him also since he was sickly, and many maintained that he wouldn’t live very long, as he was so clever. So our houses were decorated with his colourful paintings and if any stranger came to the village we always pointed to the paintings with great pride and mentioned the painter as one of our greatest assets. No other village that we knew of had a painter at all, not even an adult painter, and we had a wonderful artist who was also very young. It is true that once or twice he made us uncomfortable for he insisted on painting things as they were, and he made our village less glamorous on the whole than we would have liked it to appear. Our houses weren’t as narrow and crooked as he made them seem in his paintings, nor did our villagers look so spindly and thin. Nor was our cemetery, for instance, so confused and weird. And certainly it wasn’t in the centre of the village as he had placed it.
He was a strange boy, seeming much older than his years. He hardly ever spoke and not because there was anything wrong with him but because it seemed as if there was nothing much that he wished to say. He dressed in a very slapdash manner and often had holes in the knees of his trousers, and paint all over his blouse. He would spend days trying to paint a particular house or old wall or the head of an old woman or old man. But as we had a lot of old people in the village, some who could play musical instruments – especially the melodeon – extremely well, he didn’t stand out as a queer person. There is, however, one incident that I shall always remember.
Our village of course was not a wholly harmonious place. It had its share of barbarism and violence. Sometimes people quarrelled about land and much less often about women. Once there was a prolonged controversy about a right of way. But the incident I was talking about happened like this. There was in the village a man called Red Roderick who had got his name because of his red hair. As is often the case with men with red hair he was also a man of fiery temper, as they say. He drank a lot and would often go uptown on Saturday nights and come home roaring drunk, and march about the village singing.
He was in fact a very good strong singer but less so when he was drunk. He spent most of his time either working on his croft or weaving in his shed and had a poor thin wife given to bouts of asthma whom he regularly beat up when it suited him and when he was in a bad temper. His wife was the daughter of Big Angus who had been a famous fisherman in his youth but who had settled down to become a crofter and who was famed for his great strength though at this time he was getting old. In fact I suppose he must have been about seventy years old. His daughter’s name was Anna and during the course of most days she seemed to be baking a lot without much result. You would also find her quite often with a dripping plate and a soggy dishcloth in her hand. She had seven children all at various stages of random development and with running noses throughout both summer and winter.
It must be said that, when sober, Red Roderick was a very kind man, fond of his children and picking them up on his shoulders and showing them off to people and saying how much they weighed and how clever and strong they were, though in fact none of them was any of these things, for they were in fact skinny and underweight and tending to have blotches and spots on their faces and necks. In those moments he would say that he was content with his life and that no one had better children or better land than he had. When he was sunny-tempered he was the life and soul of the village and up to all sorts of mischief, singing songs happily in a very loud and melodious voice which revealed great depth of feeling. That was why it seemed so strange when he got drunk. His whole character would change and he would grow violent and morose and snarl at anyone near him, especially the weakest and most inoffensive people.
One thing that we noticed was that he seemed very jealous of his father-in-law who had, as I have said, a reputation in the village for feats of strength. It was said that he had once pulled a cart loaded with peat out of a deep muddy rut many years before when he was in his prime, but now that he was ageing and wifeless he lived on more failingly from day to day, since after all what else is there to do but that?
Red Roderick in his drunken bouts would say that it was time the ‘old devil’ died so that he might inherit something through his wife, since there were no other relations alive. Red Roderick would brood about his inheritance and sometimes when he was drunk he would go past his father-in-law’s house and shout insults at him. He brooded and grew angry, the more so since his father-in-law’s land was richer than his own and better looked after, and also there were a number of sheep and cows which he coveted. I sometimes think that this must have been how things were in the days of the Old Testament, though it doesn’t mention that people in those days drank heavily unless perhaps in Sodom and Gomorrah.
His whole mind was set on his inheritance mainly because he regretted marrying the old man’s daughter who, in his opinion, had brought him nothing but a brood of children whom in his drunken moments he despised and punished for offences that they had never even committed. Yet, as I said, in his sunny moments there was no one as gay and popular as he was, full of fine interesting stories and inventions.
However, I am coming to my story. One day he went to town in the morning (which was unusual for him) and came home in the afternoon on the bus, very drunk indeed. This was in fact the first time he had been drunk during the day, as it were, in the village, and we all thought that this was rather ominous, especially as he began by prowling around his own house like a tiger, sending one of his children spinning with a blow
to the face in full sight of the village. The trouble was that all the villagers were frightened of him since none of them was as strong as he was in those moments of madness.
After he had paced about outside his house for a while shouting and throwing things, he seemed to make up his mind and went down to the byre from which he emerged with a scythe. At first I thought – since I was his neighbour – that he was going to scythe the corn but this was not at all what was in his mind. No, he set off with the scythe in his hand towards his father-in-law’s house. I remember as he walked along that the scythe glittered in his hand as if it was made of glass. When he got to the house he shouted out to the old man that it was time he came out and fought like a man, if he was as great as people said he had been in the past. There was, apart from his voice, a great silence all over the village which drowsed in the sun as he made his challenge. The day in fact was so calm that there was an atmosphere as if one was in church, and it seemed that he was disturbing it in exactly the same way as a shouting lunatic might do who entered a church during a service.
One or two people said that someone should go for a policeman but no one in fact did. In any case looking back on it now I think that in a strange shameful way we were looking forward to the result of the challenge as if it would be a break in an endless routine. Nevertheless there was something really frightening and irresponsible about Red Roderick that day as if all the poison that seethed about his system had emerged to the surface as cloudy dregs will float upwards to the surface of bad liquor. Strangely enough – in response to the shouting, as in a Western – the old man did come out and he too had a scythe. He advanced towards Roderick, his eyes glittering with venom and hatred as if he too shared in the madness which was shattering the silence of the day. Then they began to fight.
The Red Door Page 48
