There was a part of his personality which was forever shut to her, his omnivorous love of books and ideas and language. She was not herself a bookish person for quite simply she did not have the time to read. Nor did she consider books all that important. She thought of them rather as shadows of the real world in which one had to wash, cook, make one’s way with people. It never occurred to her that he should not have become a minister, for she felt that his only handicap was his shyness. Before she married him she had been a nurse of a younger generation than Mrs Berry’s and she was not likely not to know that he was ill. She had been a nurse in a geriatric hospital as well and though the patients there had delusions of permanent love and power, she would not have thought like Mrs Berry that to live in a world of dreams was a good thing for them, for she had come from a long line of ancestors who had fought in the real world for religious principle, her father having been a minister as well. She knew however that the ministry had changed from those days, that no one threatened passive congregations with the fires and tortures of hell as had happened in the past.
Her own faith was of a different order. She simply rested quite easily in the meaningfulness and sense of the world. God was like a housekeeper for Whom everything was in its place in an eternal busy kitchen. He could put His hand on anything when He wanted to.
There was no one in the village whom she disliked, for they were what they were and that was what could be said about them. The sanity of the world was its most important characteristic. It was true that recently she had been under considerable strain since her husband, though he was unaware of it, had begun to talk in his sleep, something which he had never done in the past. Suddenly he would cry out as if he were being attacked or as if he were lost on a road whose end he could not foresee. One night he had got up and walked about the chilly manse in his sleep muttering to himself in a language that she couldn’t understand, as if it were Hebrew or Greek or some idiom that only the unconscious could speak.
It had never occurred to her to love anyone else but him: her faithfulness was absolute. There were times she regretted not seeing more of her children but she must place her husband before them, especially now when the wheels of his being were running low and he was living on the energy of the past. As she watched the three-legged race the sort of thing she thought about was, ‘That handkerchief is not tied tightly enough: how could one be so clumsy and inefficient?’ She did not expect great miracles in her life nor did she think that when the day was over she would gather in more food than she had put out. Her image of Christ was of an infinitely good but sane and practical person who dealt with the people with compassion and good sense and was aware of their limitations. She did not see him surrounded by a halo of transcendent beauty—the beauty that was never yet on sea or land—but rather walking about Galilee with an energetic purposefulness that she could easily understand. Nor at the same time did she find it difficult to understand that He had been crucified. People were malicious on one level but on another level they could show the most amazing generosity as had happened for instance when Alisdair’s father had been killed. It was true that later they might cavil about this or that but in their very depths they wanted to be good. It was an instinct.
One of the people she most admired was Elizabeth who without fuss or ego did as much as she could for the village. She gave most of her salary to Oxfam and visited the old, the sick, and frail. It never occurred to Mary that she herself was doing much the same as Elizabeth for she considered her work a duty. Loving came more easily to her than to her husband. Loving for him was a perpetual struggle, an inarticulate desire. It was as if he considered it a weakness which had to be expiated and paid for. He could hardly bring himself to say, “My dear”, or “Darling”, or even to touch her much in the course of the day and yet his faithfulness like hers was absolute. People recognised this remoteness in him but at the same time they respected him for they knew that he was always trying to do the right thing. There were in the world the divinely gifted ones on whom grace rested continually like a light from heaven and who moved like perfect athletes, and there were the other ones, whose every gift had to be fought for at the greatest expense of the spirit. Why must everything be so hard for him, why was there never an unexpected letter from the fields of harmony?
In comparison with her husband even David Collins and Murdo Macfarlane led easy lives, for they, like her, rested in the simplicities of the day. Even as she watched she saw Murdo, one-eyed and garrulous, talking earnestly to Mrs Campbell. His sense of duty had also been overwhelming but he was now proud of those demanding journeys. Her husband would never rest in pride. She would often pray on his behalf, “Let him be at peace even for a short time”, but no answer had come to her one way or another. As she was thinking all this Mrs Johnstone’s little daughter came over to her and pointed to her grazed knee. Mary bent down and touched it with her fingers very gently. “It will be all right. That bad knee. It will be all right.” To deceive children was necessary, for to them the sharp stone and the thorn were evil and treacherous. It was so easy to cure them of their pain unless that pain was serious. She remembered again the apoplectic surgeon under whom she had trained, who had breezed his short-tempered way through the wards and whom the patients had instinctively loved, because he saw them and knew who they were. Clouds of minions followed him, adoring and disciplined, for he knew them too by name. His little shrewd eyes converted his work into a dramatic act which embraced all of them, though often he would swear at them and curse them. As she stroked the child’s knee those days came back to her on a flood of fresh feeling.
The windows were wide open, the nurses in their blue uniforms walked among the beds, with their red coverlets. Thermometers were studied like tiny silver fish held up to the light, old becalmed men sat watching TV while flowers flourished triumphantly in bowls and vases. There were sounds of taxi doors slamming at night, laughter and song.
The race had ended and there was only one more left, till the finale she had chosen. But the lemonade bottles must be collected—they might get money on the empties. The janitor would have to take away the remains of the sandwiches. She was glad to see there were no fragments on the ground.
Kenny Foolish was standing beside her with his shining eyes.
“How are you, Kenny,” she said. He smiled back at her. He put out his hand and she gave him a sandwich, and his eyes lighted up.
“You like the sandwiches?” she asked. He nodded gratefully while at the same time he chewed the bread so loosely that she could see it soggy and half masticated in his loose mouth.
“Good,” she said briskly as if she were a nurse in a hospital. “Good.” And now here was Mrs Campbell. She would have some other complaint probably about the three-legged race. Mary lifted her eyes and saw, past the approaching Mrs Campbell, the mountain which rose into the sky at the back of the village.
I raise my eyes to the hills, she thought. From them comes my strength. Part of the sky was reddening now. In David Collins’ field she saw the sheep grazing. To him at that moment Annie was talking intently and now and again raising her stick as if to indicate a sight that was of interest to them both.
Her husband was handing out ten pence each to the winners of the three-legged race whom she recognised as Tommy Matheson and Ewen Harrison. Past them and past the approaching Mrs Campbell she could see that clever bespectacled English boy, Henry, who was taking it all in, that scene which lay before him, and speculating on it. She wondered if in the future when she and her husband and most of the participants were dead, he would describe it to someone perhaps at the other end of the world.
In a corner of a field she heard a radio being played and decided that it must stop. For one thing it wasn’t good for Chrissie, she might construe it as a subtle insult. In the future she would be known as Chrissie the Radio: these words would be her epitaph as fixed as if they had been written on marble: as if they had been carved on her tombstone.
28
/> SITTING BESIDE HUGH on the ground Alisdair said, “My mother says David Collins’ cat is going to heaven. Do you think you’ll go to heaven?”
“I’m going to heaven,” said Hugh confidently. “But my father is going to the devil. My mum said so.”
“Is that where you have to work?” said Alisdair seriously.
“I think so,” said Hugh equally gravely. “You have to have a shovel … I’d rather go to heaven.”
Alisdair put his hands together and prayed, “Please God, don’t let me go to hell for I don’t like working with a shovel. Do you think that’s all right?”
“I think so,” said Hugh swiping at a big white butterfly that swam past. “I think that’s all right.” He thought his own grandfather would be going to heaven soon for he had a wrinkled face and would find the cat in heaven and look after it.
29
AT FOUR O’CLOCK when the last event of the sports had taken place Mary Murchison stepped forward and said, “And now we have a little surprise for you. Elizabeth here will play on her guitar. She will of course play and sing religious songs. And now without any more ado, Elizabeth.” The spectacled girl bent down and retrieved her guitar which was in its case on the table and strung it round her neck.
“She doesn’t at all look like a guitarist,” thought the minister. “She looks pale and rather nervous.”
The boys and girls sitting on the grass or standing at the edge of the field clapped and she began to play. At first she played Amazing Grace and When the Saints Go Marching In, and the minister was surprised at the fire and enthusiasm with which she sang. Her pallor looked passionate and dedicated as if she had emerged in a dazzled manner into the power of her own talent. Behind her he could see the sun which was now lower in the sky and casting shadows across the field while in the far distance he could see the train winding its way like an undulating snake among the hills. It was with unexpected force that the vision came to him. In the background while she was playing he was aware of a child persistently crying. On the margin of his mind he was even wondering what Annie would think of the guitar-playing and more especially what Murdo’s reaction would be. And then quite suddenly the vision came. Elizabeth was playing Go Tell it On the Mountain, the young people on the grass were swaying from side to side, the mountain ahead of him was tipped with flame and its veined dry watercourses were startlingly visible in the light as if they had leapt forward and become three-dimensional
Go tell it on the mountain,
over the hills and everywhere,
Go tell it on the mountain
that Jesus Christ is born …
At that exact moment it was as if he heard very distinctly a bell ringing in his mind like a telephone in an empty house. The sound of the bell became faint, and he began to fill slowly as if with water, very gravely, very seriously. The baby’s cry had something to do with it. It was the guarantee of humanity itself. It wasn’t that he saw angels in the sky, not David Collins’ angel at Mons, not Annie’s blazing twenty-four elders, not any winged clear-eyed angels at all. No, it was something very different from that. As his eyes, free and hawklike, scanned the people in the field it was as if he was overwhelmed by the pathos of their existence. He saw them each as separately and clearly as the shadows that were cast like solid black metal on the ground and he was aware that each of them was alone, and yet at that moment they were joined to each other by the power and joy of the music.
“Go tell it on the mountain,” sang Elizabeth, bespectacled and pale. She too was a part of the proud humble company, which needed so much the happiness that the music created. “They are all like me, each one of them is like me,” he thought with a sudden rapture, “I am not in any way apart from them, different from them. Whatever they suffer I suffer. We are together on this supremely imperfect and perfect earth. We are not looking for miracles, for the miracles do not happen. We are enduring but more than enduring. At moments we are touched by the crown of grace. Envious, jealous, embittered as some of us are the message is for us. The kingdom of heaven is at hand, it is here, it is all around us.” And he had a vision of the people of the world, the fireman, the doctor, the lifeboatman, the minister. He saw tenement doors being broken down by axes, and the half dead receiving tea from extended hands. He saw at night the lifeboat heading out to sea in response to the call of those who were in danger of drowning. He saw the fire engine racing towards a fire, itself red as it, he saw stewardesses on ’planes walking confidently among the passengers. He saw the network which joined all those people, one to another, and he saw the village itself as a subtle structure like a spider’s web on a summer’s day, the spider existing on the justice of heaven.
All this he saw in a grave radiance illuminated by the sun, by the cry of the child. “We are united indissolubly,” he thought, “as if we are part of a divine marriage, as if in a church we had taken each other by the hand and placed the ring on the finger, the ancient scarred ring.” He was astonished by the water and light that poured through him as if he were pregnant with faith. Christ walked among the hedges, among the flowers of Galilee, beside a sea that was an illimitable expanse, meagre and haggard and yet joyful. That wood on which he had died was formed by some carpenter as ordinary as John Murray, proud of his handiwork. There was an ironical perfection about the world, it was overwhelmingly composed of complexity and simplicity.
“Go tell it on the mountain,” Elizabeth sang and he watched all. the people around.
“My love, my love,” he thought as he gazed at his wife in that vision of opening doors, “how much you have done for me. This love between us is part of the love that created the sun and the other stars.”
And he did not feel frightened at all when he saw Morag Bheag approaching with a piece of yellow paper in her hand, though he knew with amazing clarity what it was. It was curious how transparent his mind was; without being told he knew what the telegram signified and the telegram itself became part of the whole network that he was so sublimely aware of. It must be about her son, from Ireland, what else could explain that stumbling somnambulant walk? She was howling above the music for Elizabeth had not yet seen her. She was screaming and howling: she was shrieking. And then Elizabeth turned round and the music stopped and he saw with inevitable finality the women moving towards her across the space which separated them from her and on which the shadows fell.
And then he himself was walking towards her. She was weeping and cursing, she was almost falling among the hollows of the field. The women were converging on her, they made a circle around her as if to protect her from the consequences of her own cries. And then he himself was there, he was in the sacred ring of pity and help, he was holding out his hands for the telegram, he was reading it, he was putting his hands on hers, he was saying, “We must take you home.” He was walking towards the car and his wife was by his side and Morag Bheag was between them. He knew that every movement he was making, every word that was said, would be analysed by the spectators for later conversation, but that did not prevent him from knowing that out of that gossip and watchfulness there was also emerging compassion and tears and indeed he noticed that Elizabeth was openly crying.
He and his wife had reached the car. He opened the door and Morag Bheag entered it. She was sitting beside his wife in the back seat, her face working but her voice silent. In her hand she clutched the crumpled telegram. He found that even as he eased the clutch he could pray. It was as if his whole body were gushing forth grief and happiness like a fruit whose taste was both sharp and sweet on his tongue.
He heard his wife talking to Morag Bheag, “You’ll stay with us tonight. It will be all right. We’ll look after you.” The car moved forward from the field on to the road. The village would be forgotten for a while. We are free, he thought, God made us free. It is natural that if there is freedom there should be pain. Endless joy would be impossible for man, could not be sustained. He saw ahead of him as he drove the two lovers returning from the wood, the girl clutch
ing a radio in her hand.
In the back Morag Bheag was whimpering like a beaten dog. Invisible blows rained on her continually from the sky. The picture of her son sprang up in front of her eyes, absolutely mercilessly. His face was round and red cheeked, his hair was long, and he didn’t wear a tie. He was sitting at the back of the Sunday class looking loutish and impudent. He was talking to another boy who was sitting beside him. Now and again his eyes would meet the minister’s with a defiant stare and then would slowly drop.
“Sh, sh,” said his wife over and over again as if she were calming a child. The car drove through the deserted village and turned up towards the manse. To the right of him he could see the bramble berries like drops of blood on their tree.
He opened the car door and both of them helped Morag Bheag into the house. “I will make some tea,” his wife said in a whisper. He and Morag Bheag were together. He said in a strong voice, “There is no sadness such as you are suffering. But faith will make us whole. Faith will really make us whole. God Himself lost His only son.”
We are free, he thought, we are really free to live and to die. If it were not so we would have been told. Don’t look for the kingdom of God elsewhere. The kingdom of God is all round you. Even in the eyes of this grieving woman, even in her helpless curses, the chain stretches to infinity.
“Let us pray,” he said and even as he knelt and prayed he saw the Spanish doll veiled in a black net, skirted in a scalloped pink, toe pointed and alert, a waterfall of hair streaming down her back.
“We are free,” he said, “we are each in the care of the other.”
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A Field Full of Folk Page 15
