The Last Summer

by Iain Crichton Smith

  “Ah, all those people in the war,” said Mr Collins abruptly. “When I think of them, my pupils scattered all over the world, over all the oceans of the world, taking the routes which the Romans took, it reminds me of the Punic wars. Yes indeed. Mathematics, eh? Are you good at mathematics? Could you say that you have a talent for mathematics? It is a curious thing that talents for mathematics and Latin go together.”

  “I like geometry,” said Malcolm. This was an understatement. He idolised, adored geometry with the pure love that Plato might have bestowed on his Forms. Geometry to him was the music of the spheres and a solution to a geometrical problem more beautiful than poetry.

  “Ah, yes, geometry,” said Mr Collins. “Yes, I can quite see that. But geometry is not the whole of mathematics, is it? There will be more than geometry. Eh?”

  “I don’t know,” said Malcolm, “I haven’t seen a specimen paper.”

  “What! Not seen a paper, eh? Not seen a paper. That is inexcusable. That must be looked to at once. But in Latin make sure of your subjunctives. Your Latin into English is passable but your English into Latin must be looked into. Make sure of that. The subjunctive is very important in Latin. For such a practical race the Romans were a very subjunctive people.” He laughed again. “You keep at it,” and added, leaning forward confidentially: “remember that they may print the ‘u’s as ‘v’s. Remember that.” He spoke as if somewhere at the centre of things there was an enormous conspiracy, a plot against the alphabet itself. “And don’t forget, the war won’t go on for ever. Just work. Work hard as you can. That is the true gospel. Otherwise there is darkness.”

  Malcolm thought of this as he watched the ships cruising past through a haze which was not the fictitious haze of Vergilian days. Wearily, he opened his Aeneid and glanced at the section about Dido and Aeneas. He thought of the Mediterranean and then thought of something else.

  It had happened the previous winter. There was a boy in the village called Nobby who was serving in the Navy, as indeed were practically all the servicemen in the village. Malcolm had been studying Latin till late and had gone to bed about ten o’clock. He heard, as if in a dream, steps on the gravel outside and then the door being opened. His bed was in the kitchen and through a haze of sleep he heard Nobby’s voice. Nobby had come to say goodbye at the end of his leave. All the servicemen did this. When their leave was over they would make a tour of all the houses in the village to say goodbye. Nobby would be leaving on the midnight boat from the town pier. Malcolm heard Nobby’s voice and his mother’s murmuring in the glare of the Tilley light, so harsh that he couldn’t open his eyes against it. The lashes seemed to be stuck together though he could see vaguely the yellow light. After about ten minutes he heard Nobby standing up, and felt him standing at the bed and saying that he didn’t want to wake him up. Malcolm made another determined effort to lever the lids of his eyes upward, but he couldn’t. It was as if he was drowning in yellow water with the thickness of tar. And all this because of the Latin he had been studying that night. Then he heard Nobby going away, the door opening and shutting amidst a murmur of conversation, then the footsteps on final gravel.

  Two weeks later news came that Nobby had been drowned, his cruiser sunk by a submarine in a sea which Nobby probably wouldn’t have been able to indicate on a map in the days of his education, such as they had been.

  Thinking of Nobby standing by the bed and looking down at him, and imagining the white naval cap, like the top of a wave, with the yellow script on it, Malcolm felt as if he had betrayed Nobby in some way or other. It was as if by indifference he had sent him to his death, as if he had drowned him in that yellow light.

  Thoughts such as these flitted into his mind as he watched the convoy sliding past in the endless calm of the day. A butterfly swam lazily past him. He thrust out his hand but the butterfly avoided it. In the distance he could see blue smoke rising from the houses into the clear air. It seemed that the houses of the village were like ships perpetually becalmed in water. There was no movement anywhere, apart from the white butterfly drifting and slanting in the blue air. Sunday had clamped down on the world. The day of God had imprisoned it. He began to think of what Dell had told him of the bodies locked together and wished that he were locked in Janet’s arms, leaning over her brown freckled mocking face.

  And this led him to think of something else that had happened that week.

  He had promised to get Janet a turnip. This was not in fact so comical as one might think, for the school under a patriotic headmaster with a small fierce moustache, who was himself too old for military service, had its own plot of ground where turnips and carrots were grown. If you jumped over a high wall, there on the other side lay the field. The pupils dug the earth in spring, planted their potatoes, turnips and carrots, and harvested them in the autumn. That particular day Malcolm had dug out a beautiful bluish tinged turnip and had hidden it under his jacket. He remembered clearly the quick deft way in which he had snatched it before old Storrie, the Technical teacher, could see him and how he had then climbed the high wall as if escaping from prison. It wasn’t really stealing: it was a product of his own work.

  At the interval he had gone to Janet and offered her this turnip which he had sliced with a knife. And she had eaten some of it too. He had never had such a sensation in his life. It was as if for the first time he had thought of himself as a husband providing for his wife. It was as if he had entered a new responsible world, which at the same time was of an incredible sweetness. As he saw her eating the turnip, her teeth white against the whiteness of the turnip in the blue sky, he was filled with the most inexpressible joy, rather like that joy he had felt once before when a cousin of theirs on leave from the war had slept in their house. He, Malcolm, had gone to see him sleeping peacefully in their bed, a stranger safe for the moment, unafraid, submitting himself to the shelter of a house not his own, his drawn face, used to war and alarms, at rest. Malcolm had slipped away, trying to control his joy, which was like a pail of water in his hands, balanced precariously, almost spilling over in his heart, breaking, dancing.

  So it was with him as he watched her teeth cut into the turnip. He didn’t say anything at all. Nor did she. Shortly afterwards the bell went, and it was only later that she had sent him a note, by devious passage across the classroom, thanking him for the turnip. He had the message in his breast pocket at that moment. It simply said: “The turnip was delicious.” And that was all. It wasn’t even signed. It was like a message a spy might send across a foreign land, the word “turnip” standing for some weapon of war of inconceivable destructive power which he had been sent to explode. Sometimes Malcolm would take out the note and read it, studying it for hidden meanings, a code of the heart promising love, not realising that there was something rather comic in the words objectively considered. To him, the words were as marvellous as a poem by Keats.

  Yet he was beginning to realise that she wasn’t as innocent as he had thought. He had once overheard her telling another girl of a book which they were both reading called No Orchids for Miss Blandish. He knew by their sniggers that it was indecent, but at the same time she had looked so desirable when she was speaking that he was almost overcome by a wave of love and shame. Nowadays, he had dreams of feeding and protecting her, and imagined himself as some kind of caveman bringing back meat to his mate as she waited for him in the morning of the world, full of leaves and sunlight. But there had been no other sign apart from that message. She still went with Ronny who, to crown everything, was the captain of the school football team, a prefect, tall and elegant, a cosmopolitan being of a kind of French radiance. Indeed, he had been to France with his father. 17 But there was the note and that was something. He began to think of how she had surged into his life. He had hardly noticed her at the beginning. How strange that was, that she had been on his class as a kind of absence for three months before he noticed her at all. And the incident that had brought her to his notice had happened about a year previously. />
  It had happened in the class of Mr Moore, a big brutal man of whom everybody was terrified. He taught history and sometimes, if he was in a good mood, he would joke with a ponderous pedantry, but at other times he would fly into the most unpredictable rages, flagellating the desk with a huge ruler that leaned in calmer weather against the wall, distempered in a vague blue. He taught his own registered class religious knowledge, and one sure way of antagonising him was to arrive without a bible: at nine o’clock in the morning he was usually in a vile temper anyway. Looking back now, Malcolm could afford to find this absurd, the uninhibited rages during a period supposedly designed to teach love and humility. But in those days he was simply terrified.

  One morning, Ronny had come without his bible and Moore had begun on him, pacing up and down beside him, his hands clasped behind his back, twisting and untwisting, the large blue veins prominent.

  “Is there no bible in your home?” he boomed. “Are you a race of heathens? Did you not think of borrowing one from the library?” Foam brimmed at his mouth.

  Ronny sat there, smiling insolently but saying nothing. Malcolm tried to bring the image into focus. It was an image of negligence, insouciance, a slim boy eventually standing up in a navy blue blazer, tall and cool and looking a little bit bored. His attitude was so strange in view of the terror that Moore normally inspired that the class sat looking on in petrifaction, and even into Moore’s reddening eyes had crept a rather worried, wary, judging look.

  He had, of course, belted Ronny but the latter had not turned a hair. It seemed that the incident was over, till the following morning when Ronny arrived again without his bible. Moore had stared at him as if he had seen a ghost, a nemesis, one of the cold uncontrollable parcae of mythology, his ruler held tightly in his hand, his knuckle whitening as the fist closed and unclosed. It was while Moore was gathering his forces for the storm—inside which Ronny remained calm and cool—that Malcolm had seen Ronny turning and smiling briefly at Janet, she smiling back and then lowering her gaze as Moore watched her.

  It was then that both Malcolm and Moore realised that Ronny was doing this for her. That day, Ronny was belted again and finally sent out of the room altogether at the bible period. He had achieved a victory over Moore who became more manic than ever and whose hatred of Janet grew to terrifying proportions, so much so that he had once thrown a big green history book at her for some trivial offence. It was as if Moore sensed himself inside a maelstrom of forces that he couldn’t control, precisely because they were the forces of life itself. One would sometimes see him looking at the class with a certain puzzlement, his hand clenching and unclenching on the ruler, his moustache twitching. He would stare at Janet for long periods as if she were a cinder which he wished to squeeze in his fist and put out for ever, always trying to catch her out with some date or footnote to mediaeval history, but she was very quiet—stunningly pretty in the morning of her beauty—and her very existence a triumph over force and disorder. But of course he did manage to get her into difficulties, for she wasn’t very clever, and finally Ronny had given in, not to save himself but to save her and then Moore was happy again to find the rebel brought to heel, the bible on his desk punctually every morning. Christianity having triumphed once more. Sometimes he would take a walk down the passageway and stand behind Ronny’s desk, glancing down at the bible not saying a word but confirming that it was there, that the victory was his, that the Jehovah with the ferrule had established his rule over the swarming devils of darkness.

  That was when Malcolm had noticed Janet for the first time, and ever since then he had brooded about her. But there was no way of getting her away from Ronny and his admiration was a hopeless one. Sometimes he thought of fighting Ronny but he knew that he would lose. He would beat him however at schoolwork, because Ronny didn’t care. In his negligent way he made his way through school without exertion but without brilliance, quizzical, speaking little, relaxed.

  He thought of this too as he sat on the headland watching the ships, and wishing that he were a pilot in a Spitfire, high up in the air, veering and turning and blitzing Moore in vicious acrobatics over the mediaeval history books and the coloured bibles.

  9

  THE TOWN HAD a population of about 5,000, though of course the war had diminished it. There was a Town Hall, a library, numerous churches whose congregations streamed to them on Sundays in their rigid black, one cinema, three cafés, two newspaper shops and a variety of other buildings. The town stood by the sea and on certain days one could see the women in blood-coloured gloves gutting the herring and laying them tier on tier in their boxes of ice.

  He spent a lot of time in the library. Once he had stayed a whole afternoon and was found there by an emissary sent by Miss Miles. He had completely lost himself in the world of upper-class magazines, leather-covered chairs and newspapers. He would go from paper to paper reading the Scotsman, then the Glasgow Herald, then the Express sadly thinned by the scarcities of war. On Mondays, he mostly read the football reports. This life progressed step in step with the war. One year he would be reading about the African campaign with its thrust and counter-thrust of tanks racing across infinite deserts. How capable Rommel looked, standing in the glare, wearing his goggles, and staring across to the British lines. Another year, it would be Timoshenko standing up in a frozen tank. He liked the library with its smell of varnish and comfortable leather and at times he would stand at the window looking down on the town, a hawk, he liked to imagine, looking down on the world of lesser birds. The novels he borrowed from the library were mostly by P. C. Wren.

  Other times he would go and look at the boats which were tied up alongside the quay. He liked to watch the men in their white woollen jerseys and their wellingtons. He liked to see one of them sitting like a cobbler on the deck, mending his nets in a humdrum domestic atmosphere. He liked to watch the seagulls standing precariously on the wooden ledge rimming the stone quay, winking at him with idiotic moronic gaze. He liked the colours, the yellow of the oilskins, the green of the nets, the blue of the water. He liked to see the lanterns on the masts, the orange buoys, the names of the ships picked out in yellow, “Resolute”, “Island Queen”, and many others. Once or twice he’d been down in the galley of a motor boat with a local boy who was the cook, but he had been put off by the smell. He liked the feeling the boats gave him of another world, a world connected with the vast spaces of the sea, storms, illimitable horizons.

  Sometimes he met one of the fishermen from home and talked to him, though he sensed that the fisherman didn’t think much of his pale face and scholarly appearance. At the same time he himself compensated for this by imagining that the fisherman looked very clumsy and unsophisticated away from his boat and the sea.

  His mother would come up town now and again to do some shopping and he would meet her for lunch; they would go to one of the cafés where he would sit with her in an agony of embarrassment among the pupils, giggling over their ice drinks, she in her black coat and black hat, stiffly seated at the round-topped table with its veined inferior green marble.

  “Won’t you introduce me to your friends?” she would say, but he would mumble that his friends actually weren’t in the café at the time. Who in fact were his friends, the villagers or the town boys?

  “Where is the son of the minister you were telling me about?” she would ask, but he was careful to make sure that he never came. How pitiful she looked in this new environment, like a rabbit looking about it, nose nervously twitching.

  Once one of his teachers had passed and he had pointed him out. She had said: “Why don’t you introduce me?” and then looking at the teacher carefully: “Mrs Mackenzie said he was forty. He can’t be more than thirty-five. And he’s bald, too. She didn’t tell me that.”

  She was glad of this additional fact: it was worth putting in her bank. Usually after he had had his dinner he would wander round the town and perhaps look at the trailers on the cinema. There was one film that he always remembered.
It was called “Wake Island” and was about the war in the Pacific between the Americans and the Japs. It showed a Japanese pilot in black helmet and goggles scowling ferociously behind the controls of a plane and a great area of flame behind him branching out into the Rising Sun. He could imagine his own hands tightening on the controls in the summer light, and the roar of the crowd cheering him on as he swooped out of the sun, guns flaring. Other times there were films of Laurel and Hardy. These he didn’t particularly care for. Sometimes he would walk down to the local newspaper offices and say to himself: “If I get a place in the Bursary Competition, I’ll have my name in the paper.”

  When he was younger and before he went to the town school he only went to town once a year. He could still remember the rank foreign scent of the apples, the coolness of ice cream on his teeth, the sound of cinema gunfire in his ears, himself crossing mesas among cactus more alien, more needly than gorse. He even remembered his very first day in the town school, wearing his new brown suit, and being dandled on the knees of a girl on the bus and she saying, “My big man,” while her bangles clattered and her cheap perfume was a corrupt aura. He liked the freedom of walking about the town because he didn’t feel that anyone was watching him as they would be at home in the village, the worst ones being the religious people. In town he could walk along without having to look over his shoulder. What could he not do if he wished? There were no familiar faces at the windows and no twitchings of curtains.

  On wet days he would spend a lot of time wandering through Woolworths, looking for cheap books (such as the Phantom and the Spider), studying which note books to buy, which pencils to use. All was colourful, but he couldn’t afford much. Sometimes he would meet one of the boys from the village during the lunch hour and they would go into a café or down to the boats. Once Dusky had said to him: