‘So, Crane, you’ve been dreaming.’
***
It took him a good half hour to get back to the bungalow. He arrived there worn out, his flesh goose-pimpled from the warm wind that blew towards him from the west. He stood his motorcycle near the wall, sat for a moment on the seat, and found himself so worn out that he doubted if he could manage to cover the few yards that separated him from his destination: the bed, clean and white, flanked by a few packing cases that served him in place of furniture. He could not bring himself to raise his eye towards the sky, the clarity of which, he sensed with bitterness, had been restored. He slept in his clothes in the tiny porch of the bungalow, not taking off even his shoes.
The following morning he watched the news on the three channels he received. During the night the aeroplane, whose fall he had seen over and over again, had acquired such a material existence that in the end Crane decided that the silence of the news-readers was concealing an embarrassing truth. During the day a more pleasant idea occurred to him. ‘It is a failure of chronology, a weakness in the fabric of the universe. At sea off Orebost times are confused.’
Before going to open the bar he descended again to the beach, took off his trainers and turned up the ends of his trousers. Feet in the water, he looked out to sea. It seemed to him that in the course of the night it had become paler and less dense.
‘If I went swimming there, if I drowned, what if I found myself in the war years?’
A childish thought, but it returned several times during the day to give him a delectable vision between the pulling of two pints of beer.
And the secret happening he had witnessed, the accident buried by the authorities? Crane talked of it in veiled words to one of the habitués of the pub, a retired teacher who kept a Bed and Breakfast on the road out of Orebost. The teacher—it was useless, Crane thought, to speak to him of contortions in time—gave him a lecture on the nuclear installations out at sea off the archipelago.
‘That’s a dozen miles or so away as the crow flies. Sooner or later, Crane, they’ll prove their worth.’
‘For what, Mr Gunderson? To launch against what enemy?’
They were joined by a crazy preacher from the Church of the Last Days, a Canadian with big blue eyes who had taken a room at the Orebost hotel for a month with the aim of evangelising the farmers of the Peninsula. Elder Doyle was of the opinion that the forces of Jesus Christ would eventually carry the day: meanwhile it was very possible that the armies of the Devil had by one means or another obtained an interval to sow destruction.
Crane, having regained his ramshackle hovel of corrugated iron and plastic, recalled the conversation as he went down to the lighthouse. The house attached to it was occupied. In the evening, light shone from the windows and there was linen on clothes-lines to dry, underclothes pertaining to both sexes and a red shirt the colour of a sail or of old wine: they flapped ceaselessly in the wind. It never entered Crane’s head to envy these fortunate tenants. He took the little path that ran down to the Kilt, a tongue of rock folded by a freak of geology, the word for which Crane was too idle to recall. On the Kilt he and others over the years had erected cairns of many shapes, built out of fragments of rock that could be detached without too much effort from the more exposed blocks.
Crane went to sleep at the foot of a grassy slope after constructing two little stone towers at the far end of the Kilt. They wouldn’t last. He woke at dusk. The wind had fallen, the air of the May evening had become suddenly soft. There was no more trace of his dreams than of the wreck of the aeroplane. Two skuas perched on a square rock flew off when he opened his eyes. The windows of the house by the lighthouse were lit up. Crane pulled himself together. He had a pain in the back. In his mouth was a taste of raw meat, which he explained in an instant. He had had a nose-bleed in his sleep. The blood had flowed out over his lips, his chin and his throat, and on the flat stone he had used as a pillow it had formed a pool, the surface of which was beginning to dry. He touched it with the tip of his forefinger. The skin of blood detached itself, tracing on the stone a spidery pattern that in shame he covered up with soil.
Above him towards the house people were speaking. Crane saw two red points glow in the twilight, and over the smells of the sea and his blood there floated the reassuring odour of cigarettes. He re-seated himself on the edge of the stone and waited for silence to resume. Before coming to the peninsula he had lived a year and a half in the Orkneys as a general labourer on a farm on Hoy. One Sunday, under the persistent gaze of a long-eared owl that had followed him part of the way, he had found on the mountainside the wreckage of a small aeroplane: grey wings lying in the heather, fuselage gutted. Crane had passed on his way without venturing to lean up against the windscreen. The aeroplane would doubtless rust away under the stars, the owl nesting in the fleshless skull of a hypothetical pilot.
‘I should have gone back,’ Crane thought.
***
Towards one in the morning a large cumulus cloud, whitish in the night, reared itself above the sea. It held in it several gleams of day—something at that time of the year never far distant. Crane stopped thinking and absently scratched at the dried drops of blood on the sleeve of his coat. A little later, under the band of still clear sky that separated the sea from the colossal cumulus cloud, there rose a storm-cloud, thick and translucent, resembling the moving skirt of a gigantic jelly-fish. It trembled for an instant between sea and sky to give birth almost instantly to a dark red column veined with bright flames. Paralysed, Crane saw it pierce into the cumulus, merge itself temporarily with it and then slowly explode in an absolute silence proportionate to the distance. The cloud embraced it, swelled in its turn, expanded and was on the point, surely, of swallowing up the world. The stars, faint stars of the solstice, had been sucked into it. By the light of the monster Crane saw his hands trembling.
Slowly darkness returned; with it the murmuring of the surf. Crane was seated with his hands folded on his stomach, his head hanging heavy. At last he turned his head towards the house by the lighthouse: there, all was sleep. He returned to the bungalow not by the path under the lighthouse, which was too steep, but by the open moor, waking several sheep as he passed. Before going to bed he looked at the sea through binoculars. Of the gigantic jelly-fish there was no vestige. Crane went to bed not wishing to abandon himself any further to these dangerous observations. He slept for two hours, awoke at the first sound of bird-song. Or rather—was there some other noise? His limbs were still heavy. He went as far as the window of his kitchen-bedroom-sitting room, which overlooked the lake: it lay green and serene, reflecting the delicate morning sky. He opened the window, climbed on a box containing tins of food, and craned his neck to see flying high in the sky towards the east fighters in formations of three, so many of them that the spectacle lasted for more than five minutes.
The forces of Christ, was that it?
Still perched on his box he turned, an imbecile smile on his lips, towards the interior of the bungalow: towards the blanket of duck-egg blue on his bed, the racks of transparent plastic on which he arranged his small wardrobe and his crockery, the piles of magazines, covering music, fishing and body-building, the television, which he had been unable to stop himself from switching on at this hour of the morning—though it was now showing only programmes about animals, anacondas strangling unsuspecting jaguars, elephant cows giving birth, venomous Amazonian frogs.
‘The forces of Christ,’ he repeated, turning back to the sky where the last aeroplanes were passing with a whistling sound that was now audible.
***
That day he was on morning duty. What was he to do, however, in the sleepless hours that still separated him from returning to work? He turned off the television, treated himself to a lengthy hot shower, and a prolonged study of all the imperfections, the pustules, scars, blood-blisters and beauty spots with which his body was marked. Besides his nose-bleeds he had acquired on the inner side of his right thigh an abrasion he c
ould not easily explain. It was the length of a hand, blackish red in colour, and it seemed already to have formed a scab. When he touched it with a hesitant finger it opened and blood poured out mixed, apparently, with pus. He had a brief qualm of nausea.
‘What am I to do about a mess like this?’
In his medicine box he found something with which to disinfect the wound and cover its ugly mouth. After a moment the pain disappeared. He dressed and went off to work.
The bar was full continuously. At Fort James, seven miles from Orebost, there was a sports festival, a distraction much valued by tourists who doubtless liked to see men in kilts throwing tree trunks and emitting Pictish cries. Crane had hidden away the events of the night in a corner of his mind; he had not even looked for any confirmation. From time to time he felt his face give birth to a smile of triumph. Going to the lavatories he established almost with joy that his wound was sweating beneath its dressing, and that in his groin he had a haematoma, bluish and painful. He waited, however, till he had returned to the bungalow, his mind clearer than it had been for years, before he tore off the plaster and gauze to measure the progress of his malady.
He awaited nightfall with such impatience that, once the dressing had been replaced—he fancied, proud and resigned, that he had seen the bone glinting at the bottom of the wound—he swallowed two sleeping pills and slept for at least four hours. The night was not altogether dark. He got up, remade his bed, thought for a moment of going down to the telephone kiosk at Tullamus, from which he could have telephoned his friend in Glasgow and told him, perhaps, what he had seen and what he was going to see. In Glasgow, perhaps people knew—more than he? He changed his mind before he had even finished lacing his shoes.
He switched on the television and helped himself to a whisky with ice-cubes, to which he imparted tints from the screen as he watched, without really seeing them, two young women giving a lesson in Indian cookery. Just above the door a square fanlight showed the height of the mountain which overhung the lake. The blue-black of the mountain was traversed by a slow beam of light. A car? There was no road suitable for cars that high. A kid on a mountain-bike? Crane set forth just after midnight. In a small knapsack he carried a bottle of whisky, a pair of binoculars, an electric torch and his blue blanket. He went up to the path to the lighthouse. Some lambs with yellow rumps bleated.
The lighthouse or the cliff? The cliff had the preference. From the top you had a better view of the enemy forces. At the lighthouse, despite the late hour, he feared meeting Katie or her tenants, come out to look at the stars and smoke. He would have to speak to them, and he, Crane, had no more to say. Better still, he should go down to the lake with his painful thighs and unseen, take account of how he had lost that inner voice which, though prone to digressions, had nevertheless kept him company since childhood.
On the other side of the lake the slope was rugged. He slipped into a hole full of water and struggled out wet to the knees. If it had been full daylight and bright sun he would have undressed and coated his face and torso in mud; the night was cool, and he had no more room in his soul for these childish games.
Having reached the top of the cliff he squatted down facing the sea, the blanket over his shoulders. His heart beat in short pulses. On the path taken by the blood countless minute needles picked away at the partitions of his blood vessels. He waited. The sea was black, sluggish beneath a sky of a colour he could not define. Which was it? Blue? green? greyish? Concepts, these, that had now left him. Empty, yes, empty sky, non-sky from where were now falling in downpours those same needles that were shredding his veins. He shed tears of impatience; he told himself—who knows?—that those tears which were running down to his lips, and which in his exhaustion he was swallowing, were tears of blood.
At last they came, yes, in their hundreds, just before the rising of the sun. The sky was once more overcast and he heard them before he saw them. Their bellies stuck out below the clouds. Crane saw them open their fertile trapdoors. He had just time to cast off his blanket, and to lie down, arms crossed, eyes, mouth, thighs streaming blood, in order to welcome with joy his own private end of the world.
II
Crucifixions
PAN’S CHILDREN
for Stepan Ueding
ON the right bank of the Thay a path that was formerly used more by pilgrims than by shepherds crosses fields which in spring are covered with bluebells and wild garlic, and then enters undergrowth that harbours wild beasts I have no desire to see again.
I took this path one morning. It was late, because the fields of lucerne were burning, and the fires had escaped out of the farmers’ control. The sky was stained with black, and for an hour or two I had worked in a chain of buckets that were filled from a branch of the Thay while we waited for the fire brigade.
The banks of the Thay, whatever the time of year, are more deeply peaceful than anywhere I know. A quarter of an hour’s walk from the village there rises a church we call ‘the old church’ to distinguish it from the one at Murton. In its graveyard are buried my parents and grandparents, and I too shall lie there one day, which I hope—or I hoped until recently—is still far off. The church is small. A storm destroyed its original tower, but the new one has now been standing for more than two hundred years. I stopped there, as I always do, and I saw through the gap under the trees that the blaze still continued. But at the old church one is already a long way from the world. Mass there has become rare; in the village and round about people prefer the church in the Main Street where we have an organ and a children’s choir. I weeded round the family graves and pulled up the nettles, leaving only flowers.
Beyond the graveyard the path enters the forest. In time gone by, I reflected, pilgrims used to follow it all the way to the sea, some of them out of contrition or thirst for knowledge, and others, I am told, from a taste for roving. The journey to the sea took about ten days. In those days people travelled from church to church, and I used to enjoy imagining the evenings the pilgrims spent beside the Thay; in late spring to the smell of garlic, then that of honeysuckle, in summer hay, and lastly dead leaves and the earth under the bare trees.
That day I walked the length of the footpath which under the woods passes between the two hills of the Thay that the villagers of Murton call ‘the Greater’ and ‘the Lesser’. The Greater has twin tops like paps; the Lesser has more height, but is pointed. The summits are bare, but the saddle which separates them is wooded with beech. As I crossed it I could hear lambs and, in the distance, dogs, but nothing from the village.
It was in coming down from the saddle, and still in solitude, that I heard other cries: a fox, I thought, but with more menace than its bark ordinarily holds. The path drops steeply to the Thay; below the hills, the valley is almost a gorge. There are very few anglers to be met with there; today I believe that the animals and other things which live in that part of the valley make the fishing bad. They eat the fish, or possibly the water is unhealthy, the water and the plants on the banks; or again the cries of the animals unnerve the fish and possibly the fishermen.
You descend right down to the bank of the Thay by a path that is abrupt and narrow, its edge reinforced by boulders and planks. In the steepest parts of the descent the walker can avail himself of ropes knotted to the trunks of trees. The beeches, the birches, the bluebells and the flowers of wild garlic make the forest more blue than green.
On this day, the day when three fields at Murton were on fire, I saw quite a large beast cross in front of me. Its coat was dark, it was less thickset than a wild boar and its snout was very sharply pointed. Sometimes the birds sang and made the branches rustle; at other moments I could no longer hear them, nor the river, nor the wind: only my steps, the beat of my heart, and certain other dull sounds that seemed to come from the twin hills, the Greater and the Lesser. Then, two or three hundred paces beyond where the animal had crossed, I saw the pale earth on the path in motion. Bending forward—the brown still river was glittering through the
trees—I saw lying beside the path a living thing, about as long as my hand, twisting in the dust and puling like a child. The thing was formed like a child in other respects. It had two tiny legs and two arms, and two weak fists with delicate fingers, and a little round head with a crinkled face from which came a horrible mewing. Covering all its body was a kind of quilt coloured beige by the dust.
Going down on my knees and touching it with a branch I must have hurt it, for it wailed louder, and its body was seized by a violent trembling. I felt a temptation to touch it again to hear its cry, and also to crush its head with my walking boot.
I was on my knees. Several times I touched the terrible child with my little stick, and each time it twisted and opened its mouth and whimpered, but each time more weakly. And so, and because the idea of obliterating it would not leave me but was forcing black blood towards my heart, I cut through the woods to go down to the river itself without looking back at the infant, the infant-like creature.
But what sort of infant is no bigger than a hand and yet alive, fully formed and breathing? What sort of infant is cast like this beside a path? On the far side of the Thay the bank is flat and forms a meadow, which at that season is full of flowers. At the water’s edge were growing irises and those big kingcups that lure our sons and daughters to drowning because they imagine them to be gold buttons. But I ought to have taken the creature in my hands and given it succour. I should have done that, I tell myself, if it had been a bird or a little dog. Or at least covered it up, hidden it, hidden its poor little death. When I was a child it was common to bring such little animals into the kitchen. Then you made a box which you lined with cotton; you fed them with a tiny spoon or a syringe. They died, most often, and you buried them at the bottom of the garden.
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