A Field Full of Folk

by Iain Crichton Smith

  I love him, she thought, he is so unlike John. He lives on the chances of the day. Why, even his betting on horses shows that. Only yesterday he had rushed in and poured money into her lap. You go and buy yourself a coat, he had said, dresses, anything you want. He had looked so confident and young, though he was in fact older than her. She had been out dancing three times and already her village, slow and almost empty, had become only a memory. She had thrown it off with the symbolic casting away of the ring as she had made her way to the railway station in her tall red boots. Nothing would happen to her children, that was certain, John was a good father. Her action had been instinctive, she would never have been able to take it except on impulse, and she was glad that she had done what she did. Now she felt more vigorous, energetic, able to cope with the world around her. They had a flat high above the street and at night she could see the lights from the high rise buildings as if they were becalmed ships in a mysterious sea.

  She would get a job in the city soon. When she had settled down, she would perhaps work in an office or a supermarket. She would meet people. Day after day she had lived in the village, waiting for her husband to come home at night, and when he did he had very little to say to her. Terry was different, he was always talking, making plans, it wasn’t at all like living in the village, nothing here lasted for too long. In her tall red boots she stopped at a window which showed a silver machine spinning round and round. She went in and found that it was one of those Eastern shops where even the assistants were dressed in foreign clothes. What were they called? Kaftans? There was a strong smell which was probably incense. There were foods she had never seen before. She felt the centre of attraction. A man in a long coat which trailed behind him glanced at her sideways. There were candles of different colours, a prayer wheel, asses and donkeys in onyx, lighters heavy and solid. The shop was a riot of colours and strange perfumes.

  If Terry won more money on the horses she would certainly come in here and buy something. She left the shop and walked up the road, stopping now and then and looking in the windows. It was like Christmas in her mind when she would stay awake all night and finally in the early morning tiptoe in her white cold nightdress across the green linoleum floor, her father and mother still asleep. The city suited her, it was as if she wanted to dance. The light flashing from the windows was like the workings of chance itself. When she stood at corners and gazed at the street it was as if anything could happen to her, as if that boy who had passed in his careless red cape would turn and take her away with him like Batman.

  One day she had walked past a cemetery in the city and she had seen people at their midday break sitting among the tombs and eating their sandwiches and playing radios. What an odd experience it had been, and something in her had stirred and been offended by it. There they were lying on the grass or sitting with their backs to the tombstones, some even sitting on the flat ones, drinking their lemonade while their radios played “Sailing”. After all it was life and not death that she was interested in.

  And now she was going home to the flat high above the street. It was a big spacious flat, not as well furnished as she would have liked, up six flights of stairs past the names of Italians on name-plates outside doors, the circular shaft spinning dizzily below her. If she looked through a window she could see the street with trees growing along it and the cars ranged each behind the other. And at night Terry would come from work in the restaurant where he was a waiter and on Saturday mornings they would roar on his motor bike out of the city. John had met Terry years ago when they had been on a course together in Glasgow where John had been learning about electronics before giving it up and coming back home. Terry had come now and again to see him, having himself abandoned the study of electronics as well.

  The three of them used to go out together to the local hotel for drinks and then each time Terry left she had felt an ache in her body that neither John nor the children could assuage. Worst of all she had felt it when she was listening to the radio during the course of the morning and heard the latest songs. It was for instance as if that song “Sailing” had spoken to her, as if it were inviting her to leave her well-ordered life and set off somewhere, anywhere, where there was motion and animation. She had hardly ever been out of the village except when she had been working as a hairdresser in the neighbouring town before she got married. But that hadn’t really been like leaving the village. If John had succeeded in electronics they might have moved away but she knew that his heart wasn’t really in it and by that time there were the two children and they had been unable to leave. But now she had finally left and she could hear a voice singing, at the back of her mind, “No Regrets”, a voice with a French accent and no fear of living.

  Even tonight Terry might come home with a few friends and they would put on the radio or some records, and dance. This was what life ought to be like, the unexpected, the random. Or he might take her to the restaurant where he worked and they could have their food there in the half darkness while the juke box played and the wine bottles lay aslant in their baskets and the couples talked gently to each other in the light of candles as if in a TV advertisement. He had told her that it would have taken him too long to make money in the electronics industry. Some day he might become a manager or own a restaurant. After all it was only a question of making contacts, knowing the right people. Before that he had started a sweet-shop which had failed not because of him but because of inflation. Sometimes when he was lying in bed beside her and she watched the lights scissoring the ceiling he would say, “There’s so much you can do here. I’d like to have a restaurant which would serve only Scottish food, you know salmon and stuff like that. And I’d have Scottish music and girls in kilts. You could be the manageress.” Or he would say, “A bicycle shop might be the best thing to have. Soon there won’t be any oil and people will have to ride bikes.” Or he would say, “A launderama would be a good bet. Many people don’t have washing machines and they can’t air their clothes.” And she would lie beside him as he talked. The future was a live chancey thing like the smoke that snaked bluely from his cigarette. It was romantic that they should sleep naked in bed. When she had been married to John such a thing had never happened but now it seemed the most natural thing in the world. His mind seethed with ideas like the sun on a loch, he wasn’t frightened of the world. However, she had once told him that he smoked too much and he had turned on her. The incident had lasted only a short time, the quick almost insane rage had blown out of the blue and subsided quickly, and then he had been calm again. But that rage had been really vicious, he had been about to strike her. She knew she would have to placate him, there was such a sudden demented strength to his anger.

  One day he had shown her the place where he had grown up. It was a slum area which even as she watched was being blown down, men with bluish lights flowering at their gloves, and others high on roofs whistling down at her. In the distance she could see a bridge and then the glitter of the Clyde with the idle cranes dominating the skyline.

  She climbed the stairs. Soon she would be in the flat and preparing Terry’s food on the gas cooker. She would have much preferred the electric kind to which she was used but it sufficed. And then at night Terry would come home and they would talk and make plans and she herself would decide about a job.

  It was an old grey-haired retired schoolmistress who lived opposite them but she herself hadn’t spoken to her except that night when she and Terry had asked if they could use her ’phone to call a taxi because the rain was pouring down outside. That was another thing she missed, the ’phone. And the schoolmistress had a chain on her door and then had finally opened it because she recognised Terry and they had paid her the money for the ’phone call. But the schoolmistress had looked at them suspiciously all the time as if she thought they were going to attack her. How lonely she seemed and how lucky she herself was to have Terry! As the taxi made its way among the lights and over the bridge she had clutched Terry’s hand while all the time he wa
s saying, “The bugger’s taking the long way round, that’s for sure.” And when he had protested the taxi driver had said, “You can get off here, Jimmy, if you want. It’s no skin off my nose, but you pay where you get off,” and Terry had snorted angrily but had left it at that. That was the night they had visited his friend Eddie and had stayed there playing records till one o’clock in the morning. Eddie was hunchbacked and collected Space Fiction. “He’s a clever lad that,” Terry had told her but all she could remember about Eddie was that he smelt, and his rooms were a desolate clutter of books and old boxes as if he were already half packed for somewhere else (perhaps Mars) but couldn’t bring himself to go. A budgie jumped restlessly from bar to bar of its cage and preened itself in front of a tiny pink-framed mirror while the hunchbacked Eddie leaned like Humphrey Bogart against a wall.

  10

  “AND I SAY,” said Murdo Macfarlane, “that they shouldn’t be given the church hall for their dance.”

  “And why not?” said the minister patiently.

  “Well,” said Donald Drummond, pushing back a lock of his silver hair, and not committing himself till he saw what way the minister decided. Murdo’s face filled with blood as he tried to put his feelings into words. They were all against him, it was only he that could see the Apocalypse that was coming by giving in to everybody, especially to the younger generation. Drummond always followed the minister, but neither Scott nor Macrae had spoken yet. Scott was the incomer from England who wrote the pantomime every year. As for Macrae he was a slow heavy farmer who had two children of his own.

  “It’s like this,” said Murdo, “the church wasn’t meant for dancing in. Where does it say that in the Bible, eh? You tell me that.”

  The minister stared down at the doodle that he had been pencilling on his note-pad. It seemed to show two angels fighting each other and they had narrow heads like vipers. On the other hand it might just be a pair of birds. The Bible of course could be used to justify anything. In the past he had thought that that was not possible, that he knew the final meaning of all the passages. But what could be made of a saying like, “To them that hath shall be given”, or “In my father’s house are many mansions”? In what heaven would they sit together round a table such as this holding a committee meeting?

  “It certainly doesn’t say that in the Bible,” said Scott gazing mildly at the minister as if he expected him to make a comment. The minister ignored the look and continued the doodle.

  “That’s what I am saying,” said Murdo triumphantly. “We have to make a stand somewhere.”

  In the old days if a complaint was made about a postman a form was filled in and if there were no more complaints that year the complaint was scrubbed. But now a postman could put his letters through the wrong letterbox and nothing was done about it. The younger generation didn’t care what they did with letters or anything. He for one wasn’t giving in to them.

  “It doesn’t say in the Bible that churches should have church halls,” said Macrae slowly. Drummond smiled affably but didn’t say anything.

  “It’s high time we put our foot down,” said Murdo angrily. “They think they can get everything they want. Who put them up to this? What did we have when we were growing up? Did we have church halls for dancing? But now they want everything. And who is going to clean it up when they finish, that’s another thing I’d like to know.”

  “I think the janitor might do that,” said Scott smoothly. “He’s not against it. He’s got children of his own.”

  “And why wouldn’t they clean it up themselves?” said Murdo.

  “But I thought you were against giving them the hall.” Those bloody English, thought Murdo, smooth as oil they are. What’s his business here anyway? What right has he to speak?

  “The way I see it is like this,” said Murdo. “What do they do for the old folk? They’re very good at asking but not giving. They expect money just to run a message.”

  “Oh, I don’t think you could say that they don’t do anything,” said the minister. “The Girl Guides have a party for the Old Age Pensioners. They’re not bad children.”

  “Not bad children? Why are they tapping the windows of the old people’s houses at night then? And why are they hanging about the street corners?”

  “That’s the whole point,” said Scott. “It’s because they have nowhere to go that they do that.”

  “It’s the devil’s work,” said Murdo, “that’s what I say. They smoke and they drink, some of them. And I’ll tell you, I’ve seen one of them …” He stopped suddenly, for the person he was thinking of was Scott’s own eldest daughter who had been sent home from a private school because of some scandal.

  “What about the school then?” said Macrae slowly. “Why can’t we use the school?”

  “The school’s being used for other things,” said Drummond abruptly.

  “I can see it all,” said Murdo. “You give them this and then they’ll ask for something else. They’ll want the church itself next. And how many of them go to the Sunday School?”

  “I have a class of forty,” said the minister without looking up from his note-pad.

  “And there’s another thing.” He stopped. He didn’t like putting his wife’s proposition next. He felt tired and drained. Well, was it right or wrong to give them the church hall? The fact was that he wasn’t sure. Everyone was turning to him for advice as if all the details of dances and church were imprinted in the Bible engraved in letters of stone. The Jews didn’t have dances and church halls: that race, at the time the Bible was made, belonged after all to a small section of humanity at a certain stage of development but how could he explain that to the villagers? They would think he was a Communist, all of them except Scott. He was no rabbi equipped with principles from which all deductions easily flowed. For him to speak to them on equal terms they would have to read all the theology that he had himself read, to have suffered what he had suffered.

  Of course Murdo was a fundamentalist, as his mother had been. She had even objected when he had given out those little envelopes to put the collection in. They didn’t know what demands were made on him all the time from Edinburgh. Did they think about the boat people, the children with large hollow eyes and shrunken bellies in Cambodia, the ships with their cargoes of death? He blinked and his hand trembled. What had this little squabble to do with anything real? He felt himself falling and rising on a nameless grey sea, landing on a strange shore without a name or documents, the brine on his face and body, the yellow-faced guards waiting with their guns poised to blast himself and his companions out to sea again. Anger rose in him like bile. He felt as if he was going to be sick. He steadied himself and took a deep breath and waited it out.

  “The thing is,” said Scott suavely, “what we have to decide as I see it is, ‘was the Sabbath made for man or man for the Sabbath?’ “ The minister knew what he was getting at but he doubted if the others did.

  Poor Murdo was trying to speak again, his face reddening. The minister could understand his point of view: Murdo didn’t like the lack of conscientiousness to be found among the young, the fact that they wouldn’t take the letters down to the fields rather than hand them over to relatives. But that sort of conscientiousness was surely excessive. He tried to remember what church Murdo’s father had gone to but couldn’t.

  “What we have to decide,” said Drummond, “is whether they will look after the hall. That in my opinion is a good part of the question.”

  Of course that isn’t the question, thought the minister, regarding Drummond’s burnished face, and silver hair so beautifully waved. That wasn’t a theological question, that was only a question of tidiness. The boy and girl who had come to ask him about the hall had been sensible and polite. One in fact was Macrae’s daughter and the other Charles Gowan, a widow’s son. Their case was quite clear, they felt that they were being deprived of entertainment while the village hall was being repaired.

  “I think,” he said, putting down his pencil, “
that we should put the issue to a vote.” The vote was always the easy way out. It only confirmed whether a majority was present for a particular point of view, it didn’t guarantee whether that point of view was right.

  “Who,” he asked, “wants them to have the hall?”

  As he expected, both Scott and Macrae put their hands up.

  “That leaves it to me,” he said. At that moment he thought it might have been much better if he had twenty-four elders as it stated in Revelations, according to Annie. What would she have decided with the wisdom of the East behind her? He smiled wryly and then said, “My casting vote is against giving it to them.” Drummond gazed at him with approval while the other two said nothing. It amazed him that he should have done what he had done. When he had said that his was the decisive vote he had no idea what he was going to do. The decision had been made for him at a deeper level than he had himself understood, the Covenanters were still hiding in the brakes of his mind, their voices still spoke through him. It was as if without his knowing it there were voices speaking inside him, voices which without the benefit of a committee had come to a predestined conclusion as if he himself did not exist, as if he were simply a vessel. His face flushed and he would have almost wanted his decision all over again, for like twin railway lines it pointed to a future converging at the horizon in one fixed choice. He looked at the four men, astounded. Had the world begun from tiny drifting molecules so that this committee should be held in this particular room in this particular village? Had Judas been programmed to do as he had done, as Annie had suggested? And why should he, when imminent death should have given him largeness of vision, have denied the hall to the children? But no, in spite of approaching death, there was a heritage to maintain, a gift that flowed through him.