The Last Summer

by Iain Crichton Smith

  And Sheila would say nothing at all but she would edge closer to him behind the chair, the clock would tick on the mantelpiece with its many small ornaments, the mother would go out to milk the cow, and all the time he could feel Sheila standing behind him while her father would study the board, half asleep as he did so, never improving. Sometimes he would actually fall asleep and begin to snore.

  “Ah. I left school at fourteen,” he would sometimes say. “We didn’t have the chance then.” Sheila would regard him with contempt.

  So Malcolm would go off home in the balmy summer night, passing the dozen houses which stood between him and his home, men standing at their gates in their shirt sleeves in the twilight, the road itself glimmering in front of him and he would think: Sheila’s parents must have married late. They are so much older than her. He knew that they didn’t belong to the village but had moved down from the town many years before.

  And he would compare Sheila with Janet. Janet was asociated in some way with a higher life, Sheila exclusively with the village. She had nothing to do with the world of books—indeed he had never seen a book in the house except once an old exercise book with the word “Geography” written on it and inside a pair of dim-looking maps showing what was called the Industrial Belt—she existed only for herself and within herself.

  But Janet belonged to a different world. Though not clever herself she represented wider horizons than Sheila did. Sheila could milk a cow, stack peats, drive a horse and cart and Janet, he was sure, couldn’t do any of these things. And after all they weren’t important.

  Sometimes at night he would watch the blue mountain which rose above the town and which he could see from the village. It was distant and ideal. Its serenity was not that of laziness but of a hard-won peace. It beckoned to the world of the spirit, tranquil and clear. But he was in those days worried also about Colin, who seemed very restless. Once Malcolm had said to him, “Isn’t it your turn to go for the water today?” They brought their water to the house in buckets from the well which was about three hundred yards away but in the summer the well dried up and they had to go about a mile to the spring, carrying the two buckets to get a better balance.

  “You can go yourself,” said Colin abruptly, lying back on the bed.

  His mother had not intervened, looking puzzled and tired. So he had gone for the water without complaint.

  “You can play against yourself tonight then,” he said to Colin. But Colin simply turned over and began to read his Western.

  That night Colin went to the dance as usual. About midnight, while Malcolm lay in bed staring up at the ceiling which was yellow with moonlight, he could hear Colin come in, grunting as he undressed, hanging his trousers behind a chair.

  “Are you awake?” said Colin quietly.

  “Yes, I’m awake.”

  “We’ll beat you on Saturday just the same,” said Colin in an affectionate tone, his voice slightly slurred as if he had been drinking. It was only much later that the significance of what Colin had said sank in

  Saturday was the day he was to go to the cinema with Janet. That night he had a troubled dream. He saw himself sitting at the desk of a small village school, Sheila beside him, the two of them playing draughts in an endlessly somnolent afternoon.

  23

  “SO THAT’S WHAT you did it for,” said Malcolm.

  “I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” said Ronny leaning casually against the wall with its net of shadows.

  “You knew that the match and the visit to the cinema were at the same time. You planned this whole thing. Anyone could see it. What I don’t understand is why you should do it.”

  “Frankly, I don’t see what you’re talking about. The bet still holds.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You can take her out if you want. That hasn’t changed, has it?”

  “No, but the match is the same time as the cinema, isn’t it? And anyway why was the information about the game put up so late?”

  “I thought everyone knew about it. The dates were posted at the beginning of the session.”

  “That’s nonsense. Who was supposed to remember all that? I’m sure it was you who held it back. Everyone knows that old Manning does what you tell him. What does he know about football?”

  “I suppose that’s true,” said Ronny contentedly. “He doesn’t really know much about football I must admit. Still, he tries his best. He feels it justifies him for being an old man and for not being in the war. But at least he’s giving up his time to organise games.”

  There was a pause. With one eye screwed up Ronny was staring at one of his brown shoes with a startling blue gaze. Malcolm had noticed this mannerism of his when he was concentrating.

  “So you say that the bet’s still on.”

  “Of course it’s still on. You don’t think I’m dishonourable, do you?” Ronny laughed engagingly.

  Behind the wall Malcolm could see the leaves of a tree opening and shutting, letting the sun through and then cutting it off.

  “What gave you the idea for this?”

  “The idea? Oh the idea came to me during the discussion we had about Dido and Aeneas. You were saying that it was wrong for Aeneas to have left her. Remember?”

  Malcolm didn’t know what he was going to do yet instinctively he felt that this clever person had faced him with a problem which was more than a problem. It went to the roots of his being. At the moment he could not foresee all the implications, though he was sure Ronny had worked them all out.

  “Did Janet know about this?” he asked.

  “Why don’t you ask her?”

  “Will she turn up on Saturday afternoon?”

  “Of course she will. I’m telling you the bet is still on. You have the chance of taking her away from me.”

  “Yes, and the chance of losing my place in the football team. You know that. Manning doesn’t forgive easily. Was it you who suggested all this or was it her?”

  “If you asked her would you believe her answer?”

  Half of Ronny’s face was in the shadow of the wall, the other in sunlight, and it was while looking at this that Malcolm was struck by what he had said. It was as if a blade of ice had penetrated into his heart. She might very well lie to him. What guarantee did he have that she wouldn’t? On the other hand she might be telling the truth but he wouldn’t know.

  He made an effort: “Could you at least tell me why you did this? Have I harmed you in some way?”

  Ronny’s expression was still an engagingly open one.

  “Harmed me? How could you have harmed me?”

  “What did you do it for then?”

  “Do you expect me to tell you that?”

  “That’s the least you could do.”

  “I had no reason. It just came into my head. I just thought it would be interesting.”

  “Like phoning Collins?”

  “If you like.”

  “What if I went and told Collins?”

  “Oh you wouldn’t do that. You’re too honourable. And anyway you’ve no proof.”

  “You mean it’s a kind of game, is that it?”

  “It was an impulse. I don’t know what you’re nagging on about. I’m not going to say anything more about it. How do I know why I did it?”

  Malcolm looked down at him for a long time, and then said, “You bastard,” and turned away.

  “What’s wrong with you this afternoon, Malcolm?” said Collins. “You’re not your usual self. That’s the second time I’ve asked you a question. Another wedding, eh?”

  Malcolm jerked his head up again. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  He was thinking. “What are you doing this for anyway? Is it all a game for you too? Is this all a façade, skin over bones? As long as we’re all civilised and well-mannered then Collins will be civilised and well-mannered too. It’s all a game. But what if we said to him: All this you’re doing, your scansion, your irregular verbs, your wee jokes, your acting, what if we said t
o you: All this is a lot of damn nonsense, what would emerge then, what animal would emerge then?

  And he was suddenly sick of the Latin poems, the meaningless jargon, the immature play-acting of Collins, the ridiculous swish of the authoritarian cloak.

  “It won’t do, you know, Malcolm, it won’t do. You will simply have to get down to it. Miriam, pray continue.”

  Where had he got the “pray continue” from? Churchill perhaps? Wasn’t that what he was supposed to say: “Pray send me a memorandum on this as soon as possible.” Or so the newspapers said—if you could believe them.

  He crouched miserably in his seat, cursing monotonously under his breath. There he was, supposed to be clever, and he had been played with like a child. Should he not have seen through Ronny from the beginning? Should he not have seen that he had been up to something? “I fear the Greeks even when they are bringing gifts.” But all he knew about was Latin verbs: about human beings he knew nothing at all. Miriam was answering all right. She would stay within the system, dead father or no dead father.

  Suppose he himself went and told Collins, “Look, it was Ronny who rang you up. He hates you. We all hate you. You think that we like you because we laugh at your jokes but can’t you see that all that is false? We despise and laugh at you, and think you ridiculous.” Could he bring himself to tell Collins? Well, why not? Wasn’t it the truth? Wasn’t the truth far better for people? He was finding out the truth. Why shouldn’t others?

  But he knew that he couldn’t bring himself to do it, not so much to save Collins but because he just couldn’t, it wasn’t in his nature. He thought of his mother telling him to work harder so that he could get himself a good professional job. And he knew that Latin and English and history (the little she knew of them) were for her a means to an end. If a regulation came out that in order to get an M.A. or become a minister one would have to dissect a quota of frogs’ legs or slice worms into little bits, then this wouldn’t stop her urging. She would say: What’s wrong with you? You haven’t cut up your quota of frogs’ legs tonight! Get on with it! Five hundred to be done before midnight. How can you become a minister unless you dissect your quota of frogs’ legs?

  James, of course, was like that. His only concern was to get to university. That was why his little envy-twisted face was bent over page after page of print. That was why he spent his hours in the large spacious library copying down long extracts about the genealogies of the Angles and the Jutes. What relationship did these abstruse and utterly uninteresting facts have to him? He wasn’t even an historian. He wanted to become a doctor, be called Dr, and that was why he read all the footnotes and the bits in small print. These things didn’t matter to him at all.

  Sitting in his seat, Malcolm thought. Was his mistake that he had liked things for their own sake? Was that it? For instance, he liked that poem of Auden’s and the section about Dido and Aeneas. They were important to him. But to people like James and the ineffably bored Ronny they weren’t important at all. They were there to be used, they led to somewhere else, another destination which had nothing to do with the poem. Was that why he himself had left the village school? Was that why Mr Collins was where he was now? Did he like reading Vergil and Horace? What did they mean to him? Had he read any Latin authors since he left university? How much did he really know about the classics? Was he in the slightest bit interested, or were these authors a method of gaining his M.A.?

  And even if he went and told Collins about these questions, and asked him for a possible answer, he wouldn’t understand what they meant. He wouldn’t even see Malcolm as a human being, he would simply begin by saying, “Ah Malcolm,” but he wouldn’t really be speaking to Malcolm at all, he would be speaking to an abstract student to whom he reacted as an actor might to an audience. He would address him in his usual jocular self-protective tone. No, there was no hope there.

  The bell rang and he went heavily to his next class.

  24

  MR THIN WAS an unorthodox teacher who had a bald head and a lot of ideas in his own subject, which was science. It was Mr Thin who said that he hated teaching, though he was the best teacher in the school. During the first two terms he was forced to teach but in the summer term he made up for this as he said by “fertilising”. No longer did he talk about magnetism and light. No longer was he involved with experiments. What Mr Thin did in the summer term was lecture, exactly as if his class were a university one. There was a difference, however. No one took any notes and anyone could ask questions. Mr Thin had unorthodox ideas about teaching: he wanted a common room exclusively for the use of the sixth year and their teachers. He believed that ideas were more important than anything else in this world including Mrs Thin. But in the first two terms he couldn’t teach ideas, so he took advantage in the summer term. The rector would have liked to put an end to these ideas sessions but he didn’t want to lose Mr Thin, who surprisingly enough got “good results”, so he bore with them as best he could. Mr Thin had a good conceit of himself but he had reason to, for he was the best teacher in the school though he despised teaching. When Malcolm entered the room rather late, Mr Thin didn’t say anything: this wouldn’t have been right for after all he wanted to treat his pupils as adults. He was saying:

  “Now the thing about science is that it is impersonal. The truths of science are true whether any human being exists or not. Even if no human being existed at all the truths of science would remain true. That was what Newton, among many others, knew.” He went over to the board and drew a circle. It wasn’t a very good circle. “That,” he said, drawing back from the board, “is an apple.” He waited for the laugh, for it didn’t look like an apple. “Let us assume in any case that it is an apple. Newton saw an apple fall, or so they say. All of us have seen apples falling. Eve perhaps was one of the first to see one falling.” This was the kind of outrageous thing that the rector objected to, bringing religion into science and doing it moreover in a mocking, discrediting way.

  “Newton was an extraordinary man. He lived in the seventeenth century. It was a time of bad hygiene and plagues. We don’t know how Newton reacted to the bad hygiene but we know how he reacted to the plague. If one were to ask who is the greatest genius the world has produced one might answer, without fear of being laughed at, ‘Newton.’

  “In those days mathematicians and scientists used to propound problems to each other. There was a lot of jealousy and rivalry amongst them for, though science is impersonal, scientists are human. A famous continental mathematician propounded a problem and challenged anyone to solve it. One day someone mentioned this to Newton, and he said: ‘I think I’ve got the answer to that problem somewhere among my drawers.’ ” There was a roar of laughter: Miriam flushed. Mr Thin looked up innocently and proceeded:

  “And it was true. He really did have the answer to this problem in his drawers. He had completely forgotten about it. A remarkable man. A truly remarkable man. And the most extraordinary thing of all was that this most innocent of men outside science ended up as Master of the Mint, and, even more extraordinary than that, that he spent the best part of his life trying to work out the dates at which the prophets of the Old Testament must have lived. A complex man. A curious mixture of rationalism and superstition. But to get back to the apple. Most of us have seen an apple fall to the ground. And of course we all know about gravity. But so did Newton. But what did Newton do? What was he famous for? He didn’t discover gravity, whatever that means. That is a ridiculous statement. Anyone can see apples falling to the ground, and not only apples.” (Someone at the back suggested “drawers” in a whisper, but Mr Thin pretended not to hear.) “No, what Newton did was to take a leap into space and see that the same force that pulled the apple to the ground was exactly the same force as kept the Moon circling the Earth and the planets circling the Sun, except of course that the planets would fall into the Sun and the Moon into the Earth if there were no force provided by the impetus of these bodies. The greatness of Newton was to see that the laws
of Earth are also the laws of Heaven. It is very simple when you see it. But you had to see it. And of course this law exists whether Newton exists or no. Newton personally has nothing to do with it: he doesn’t provide this law. He only elucidates it. That is what science is about. The scientist discovers laws which are independent of himself. A scientist can be rancorous, envious, atheistic, difficult, loving, or emotional in any other way you like, but that has nothing to do with the correctness or incorrectness of the laws he discovers. These laws are not personal ones. So as a result of Newton the seventeenth century became harmonious. The Moon went round the Earth, the Earth went round the Sun. The stars were in their places. Everything was in its place. Everything was beautiful because everything was harmonious. And religion combined with science.”

  Mr Thin paused to put a sweet in his mouth. “I read recently an article in which a scientist said that he didn’t believe that his equations were right unless they were beautiful and harmonious. Well, Newton’s equations are like that. Some people argue that we put ourselves into science, that we discover what we put there ourselves, that the universe isn’t rational, that we make purely human constructs. That of course is nonsense. Do they mean to say that the laws of the universe would disappear on the day that the human element was wiped out? Do they mean that there were no rational laws before man existed, in the age of the dinosaur and the pterodactyl? Do they mean that on the day man was born, he brought into the universe all its laws? This man whose knuckles as yet were touching the ground? The laws of science do not depend on us. They are there apart from us. Anything else is madness.

  “We may compare science with the arts. As I have said, the laws of science are independent of us. A true scientific discovery can be repeated again and again. Can we repeat a play over and over again? Suppose you put a play on night after night with the same actors and the same audience, would the result be the same? No. It wouldn’t. Why not? Because a play cannot by the nature of things be experimentally controlled. The script may remain constant but the result will always be different. And why is this? The reason is that you are dealing with human beings. Now in science the law will always turn out to be constant, no matter what scientist is making the experiment. It does not depend on him. It could be a Jew, a Nazi, a Negro, who’s making the experiment. He will always get the same results if the law is a valid one. As for poetry, what law has a poet discovered? Laws, perhaps, about human beings? But there are no laws about human beings! If there were, who would have believed that the Nazis would have arisen in our century?