The Red Door

by Iain Crichton Smith

  I worked in a university and quite frankly I got tired. If you wish to know what I got tired of I will tell you. I became enraged, literally enraged, by the contradictions which I saw in people’s personalities every day and which they seemed implacably to be unaware of. Let me give you one or two instances. One man I knew was always talking of ‘professional behaviour’ and yet at the same time he was the worst, most consistently destructive and rabid gossip I have ever seen. Another, a hard drinker, lectured on alcoholism as the manifestation of ultimate weakness. Another, a so-called devotee of pure research, was leaping on to the barbaric bandwagon of the quick Penguin for the masses.

  I became obsessed by this gap between the spoken word and the reality of the personality. I was losing my balance. I found that I was checking myself continually against my own standard of consistency and in doing so making myself more and more vulnerable. In other words I was coming to the conclusion that these contradictions are necessary to life and that he who sets out deliberately to erase them is in fact destroying himself. I found in other words that there is an enmity between consistency and life. This discovery was so shattering that for a long time I was incapable of working at all. For if this were true then an attempt to seek consistency and truth was in fact suicidal. Many nights I have sat staring at a book completely oblivious of my surroundings, and when I woke up from my daydream I found that I was still at the same page. The discovery I had made seemed to me utterly shattering. My mind roamed pitilessly in all directions. It seemed to me quite clear for instance that Christ was both violent and peaceful in his nature and that theologians in trying to eliminate the one in order to reinforce the other so as to create a perfectly consistent being without flaw were, in fact, being false to reality. Life is not reasonable, to live is to be inconsistent. To be consistent is to cease to live. That was the logical converse.

  Now, however it happened, I thought that I should try and find a place where there would be a greater simplicity than I had been used to and that there I would be able to test this new theory. In fact what of course had happened was very simple. My energy and fire had run out and I was merely escaping. That was the truth I was disguising in terms of my research and my love of truth. I understand perfectly why my love of truth is so great. I was brought up by possessive parents who married late and each day I was trying to justify myself to their unlimited love and pride. Never would it be possible for any human being to do that – to fill that gap with the continual victories of the virtuoso – but this did not mean that it was possible for me to stop trying. It was this hunger for justification that destroyed me. For it is clear to me now that an excessive consciousness is bound to be at the mercy of the mediocre and the satisfied. An immense hunger for truth and consistency is rare and cannot by its nature lead to happiness. Most men do not by a privileged mercy see their own contradictions. Gandhi was peaceful to the world but aggressive to his family. So was Tolstoy. Both these men among many others were impaled on the impossible attempt to make life consistent and truthful. This is impossible precisely because truth is abstract and static and life flows ceaselessly like a river.

  I arrived therefore in this village, in this country, the Highlands. I didn’t know very much of the Highlands when I came. Naturally I could appreciate its scenery, but scenery after all is only a reflection of the psyche. There were hills, lochs, rivers, broken fences and roads. It looked like a land to which much had been done, adversely. It looked a lonely land without sophistication or riches. It echoed with ghosts and waterfalls. It looked a broken land. And it suited me because that was what I was myself, a broken man. Quite literally, I was a signpost pointing nowhere. It wasn’t, I suppose, at all extraordinary that the Highlanders accepted me or at least didn’t show any hostility. I used to go out fishing and they would tell me the best bait. I was shown how to cut my own peats. I even used to tar and felt my own roof. All these things I learned from them. I imagine that what I was doing was using my psychological techniques so that they would like me. I took care not to offend them. The only thing was I never went to church but strangely enough they accepted that too on the grounds that a man must be loyal to his own church and since mine was presumably the Church of England I couldn’t be expected to betray it simply because I had put a number of miles between it and myself.

  I studied these people and their history. I knew what had made them and what they had become. I recognised their secretiveness and the reason for it. I sensed the balance of forces which is necessary to keep a village together. I recognised the need for rivalry between villagers. I was dimly aware of the vast spaces of their past and how they must be occupied. I noticed the economic differentiation between men and women. I was aware of the hidden rancours and joys. After all I had been a psychologist. These things were child’s play to me. I learned their language and read their books and poems. I had plenty of time to read and I read a lot. The local schoolmaster came to visit me.

  And this is what happened. Now I am ready to tell my story and I am sure that you must appreciate that it is a very odd one.

  This schoolmaster was a very odd psychological type. He was immersed in his children, I mean his pupils. He believed that his ideal work, what he was destined for, was to be among them. He was really rather a child himself with his rosy face and his impermeable surfaces. I could see what had happened to him, but after all that is the terror with which a psychologist must live, to see the gestures and know their real value and weight and meaning, to track a joke to its stinking lair. The schoolmaster was in fact one of the few people I could really talk to on a certain level since he had in fact read a little though in no sense deeply. Still he was useful to me since he knew a great deal of the lore and literature of the people, though of course not profoundly, being himself still inside that lore.

  One night we had a long discussion about predestination. It was disordered and random and without penetration. My mind had lost its edge and wandered vaguely round the edges of the real problem like someone who roams round a field at night. I knew that my mind had lost its edge and its conviction and it disturbed me. I knew that my mind was not powerful enough to make a proper analysis of such a concept though in relation to his it was in fact the mind of a giant. We drank much sherry since the schoolmaster would not drink whisky. I was sick of myself and only half listening when suddenly he said, ‘What do you think of this? Many years ago, in fact it must be over a hundred years ago, we had a prophet here who made some odd prophecies.’

  ‘And how many of them have come true?’ I said indifferently, purely automatically.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it is rather difficult to say. They are set in such mysterious terms. For instance, he said that when the river ate the land stones would be raised. Some people think this refers to the storm of last year when that big wall was built.’

  Mechanically, I said, ‘That could be expected, surely, in a place which gets so much rain as this. I wouldn’t place much reliance on that.’ And I poured myself another sherry.

  Anyway he told me some more of his mysterious sayings but only one stayed in my mind. There is a reason for this which I did not see at the time but which will appear later.

  This saying went something like this: ‘When the wood is raised at the corner then wills will crash.’

  In my befuddled state I coundn’t make any sense of this, especially the last part. The first part could refer to a wooden building and the corner was a clear enough sign since there is a place at the end of the village called the Corner but as for the second part I was bemused. I said to him and I remember this clearly, ‘Surely that must really be “Wills will clash”, not “crash”.’

  ‘That’s how it has come down to us,’ he said looking at me. And that was that. I was sure that there had been an error in the manuscript or whatever and later found out that the manuscript if it had existed no longer did so. For that matter, perhaps the man had never existed at all. The schoolmaster however was very sure of the prophet’s ex
istence and talked of him as a strange being who lived by himself, wore a beard and walked about in a dream most of the time.

  Anyway, the night passed and the schoolmaster went home and I went to bed half thinking about the phrase ‘Wills will crash’ and pretty certain that the word should have been ‘clash’. Otherwise the whole thing didn’t make any sense and naturally I wanted it to make sense. After all that was what I was, a man who wanted to make sense of things. I slept a dreamless sleep but when I woke up in the morning I was still thinking of this saying. I am sure it would have passed smoothly into my mind leaving no trace if it hadn’t contained what I considered to be a semantic inexactitude. I worried at it but could make no further sense of it. I tried to find out more about the prophet’s sayings but could discover little about him, no more in fact than the schoolmaster had told me. As it was winter time I had time on my hands and pursued my investigations and came up with a blank. It was at this point that the idea came to me, as Relativity must have come to Einstein.

  2

  It was really a blindingly simple idea and I wondered why no one had thought of such a thing before. Maybe (I half considered) I had been sent to this place in order to arrive at the stunning conception I had now arrived at. Maybe I was predestined to meet the schoolmaster . . . At that time you see I had no idea of the intricacies that would enmesh me. Anyway my idea was this. Why didn’t I raise the wood at the corner (that is, raise a shed there) and see what would happen? There was no reason why I couldn’t do it if I wanted to. I had plenty of money. There were one or two unemployed people who would build the shed for me. I had no fears that permission would be refused me as I was quite popular and not thought of as an outsider. I reviewed my idea from all angles and there seemed nothing against it. It would give me an interest during the winter months and it would return me to a psychological or at least philosophical theme. I may say that as I have mentioned already I had no feeling for ghosts, spirits, stars, etc., at that time, and thought them easily explicable manifestations of the fallible human psyche.

  Anyway, not to be too tedious about the business, I decided to build a wooden shed at the Corner. I had no doubt that this was the location mentioned since I gathered that the place had been so-called from time immemorial. I got hold of a middle-aged fellow called Buckie who was a builder but unemployed at the time. As he had a large family which consisted mostly of teenage girls who shrieked and screamed and presumably ate a lot, like seagulls, he was very glad to help me. The hut was to be fairly spacious. Buckie reported every morning in his blue overalls with his rule in his pocket and began to work on the fine new yellow wood. I often used to watch him but as he didn’t say much at any time I ended by leaving him alone. He didn’t even ask me why I wanted the shed built. Perhaps he thought I wanted a place where I could be absolutely quiet or perhaps he thought I intended to get some stuff which I would store there eventually.

  In any case one fine day I went to the Corner and found that the shed had been built. As green is my favourite colour I decided to paint it green and this I did myself. For the rest it was a fairly spacious shed with two windows and one door. It was fairly warm inside but not too warm and there was plenty of room. The windows were quite large and looked out on to the road which travelled past the hut towards the town eight miles away. After the hut was finished I would go and sit there. I took a chair and table and I would read and so some writing. Otherwise I didn’t use it much.

  At nights I would lie awake and wonder why I had been so stupid as to build it. There it pointlessly stood for no reason that I or anyone else could offer. I had no clue as to what I was going to do with it. I couldn’t offer it to anyone else, not even as a place for staying in, for no one would have made their home there as there was a tradition that there were ghosts at the Corner and the villagers were very superstitious. Thus the days passed and I waited. I had built the hut and the next move was up to the prophet, if there was to be any next move. Sometimes I felt like a girl waiting to be visited by a lover and impatient that he wasn’t coming. If he had any sincerity or love why didn’t he prove by his presence that his words were true?

  Naturally some of the villagers asked me why I had built the hut and I told them some vague story about wanting a quiet place to study in. They seemed quite satisfied with this explanation as though I mixed with them, they didn’t make any pretence of understanding me.

  Then on a lovely spring evening the first move was made. There was a knock at the door and standing there was a young boy from the village whose name was John Macleod. He was a tall rather clumsy-looking fellow with a reddish face and large hands and he worked as a painter in the town coming home at nights on the bus. I was in a good mood at the time for some reason and I stood there at the window looking out towards the glittering sea across the walls and ditches and houses and fields.

  The boy took a long time to come to the point (indeed if he had had a cap he would have been twisting it in his hands) but the gist of his request was that perhaps out of the goodness of my heart I might lend the young people of the village the hut for their weekend dances. Normally they conducted their dances in the open air at the Corner but of course this meant that there could be no dances on a rainy night. There was really no problem since my hut was large enough to accommodate all the young people who were likely to turn up (about sixteen at the most). I thought about it very briefly and then agreed, especially as the boy assured me that the hut would be left spick and span after they had finished with it hat there would be no damage at all as the village youth were well-behaved, that he would return the key to me after they had cleaned out the hut if it was necessary to do so. I myself knew that the villagers were law-abiding and would not harm the hut, so I agreed readily. And he went away quite excessively happy. I dismissed the whole thing from my mind, glad that at last a use had been found for my hut. Funnily enough, though, I had a vague feeling at the back of my mind that I had made some connection however tenuous with the prophet hovering somewhere in the offing. It was an odd unaccountable feeling and I soon got rid of it.

  Nothing happened for four or five weeks. During the successive Saturdays the dances in the hut went on, the key was handed back to me and the place was left tidy as promised. Unfortunately, though I didn’t know it, the air around me was rapidly darkening with omens. As everyone knows islanders are not notable for speaking out, and no rumour at first reached me till quite suddenly out of the blue the Rev. Norman Black made his explosive attack in the pulpit on a particular Sunday. As I wasn’t in church I didn’t hear his exact words but I was given accounts of it. The Rev. Norman Black is a small fiery man with a ginger moustache who holds the local people in an iron grip. They go out and gather his peats for him, they give him presents of meat and milk, and in return he exercises dominion over them. They are in fact very frightened of him indeed. I cannot help admiring him in a way since his consciousness of his own rightness is so complete and utter. He bows the knee to no one and he flashes about in his small red car like a demon from the pit spitting sulphur and flame, and when he feels it is necessary he has no deference to the high and no mercy on the low. As far as I could gather the drift of his sermon, shorn of theological and ecclesiastical language, was as follows. The shed or hut was infested by young people intent on fornication: this was in fact the reason why the hut had been built in the first place. As long as the dancing took place in the open then one could see what was going on but when walls had been erected then privacy suitable for dalliance and immorality had been created. Also why was the hut painted green? This was very ominous indeed. Furthermore why had this hut been built by an Englishman who never attended church? Was it because he was bent on undermining the morality of the village? What other explanation could there be? Considered from that angle my enterprise did indeed look suspicious and cunning especially as I had no real explanation for the hut, and even if I were to offer one no one would believe me now. As for my true reason, who would believe that?

&nb
sp; At first I was inclined to laugh at the whole thing but in fact there apparently had been some drinking. Some ‘dalliance’ had, in fact, taken place though it was, I am sure, quite innocent. Nevertheless people began to sidle past me. They began to wonder. Was I some thin end of the wedge? Had my previous civil behaviour been a mask? Cold shoulders were turned to me. My visitors dwindled. Anger grew. After all I had been extended hospitality and I was repaying it with lasciviousness cunningly disguised as philanthropy. I felt around me a rather chill wind. Neighbours began to slant off when I approached.

  Steadily as the Rev. Norman Black blew on the flames and lashed his theological whip the village divided itself into two camps, that of the adults and that of the young. One night there was an attempt to set the place on fire. After that a guard was mounted over the hut for some time each night. Parents warned their children not to go to the dances and the young rebelled. I found myself at the centre of the cross fire. Messages were scrawled on my door in the middle of the night. The young expected me to stand up for them and I still gave them the key. Even the schoolmaster was divided in his mind and ceased to visit me. I was alone. My visits to the local shop became adventures into enemy country. The shop was often out of articles that I needed. My letters arrived late.