After the Dance

by Alan Warner

  As she was going out the old librarian was standing at the door. He said, ‘We have millions of books here. Millions. Down below,’ he said, pointing.

  ‘Do any of them ever get stolen?’ she asked.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he said. ‘We have a lot of manuscripts here. Some valuable ones get stolen.’

  ‘I suppose a lot of them go to America,’ she said.

  ‘They go where the money is. But I don’t know much about that.’ They talked for a little longer and then she went out into the sunshine.

  She continued down the long street. After a while she came to a museum and went inside after she had paid ten pence. She stayed for some time at a case which showed old spectacles worn by people in the past. One pair reminded her of the ones her grandmother used to wear when she visited her as a child. She remembered her grandmother as a twinkling old woman who seemed always to be sitting knitting at a window looking out on to a field full of flowers and inhabited by one wandering cow with soft resentful eyes. As she looked at the spectacles she seemed to see her grandmother again holding a needle up to her eyes and peering through her steel-rimmed glasses.

  She left the case with the glasses and had a look at one with old coins, and later one with old stones which were labelled with the name of the finders. There were also ancient stone axes and stone jewellery.

  There was a case which showed a wild cat with its claws sunk in the dead body of a rabbit, and another one of a large eagle with flashing yellow eyes. In a corner there were some old guns. There were powder horns richly decorated and domestic implements of various kinds.

  One section had a complete reconstruction in shaded orange light of a cottage of the nineteenth century. There was an old woman wearing a shawl sitting on a chair looking into a peat fire. In one corner there was a herring barrel and in another a creel. There was an old clock on a mantelpiece and an iron grille for holding oat cakes. There were old candles and by the fire an old teapot and kettle. Beside the old woman there was a cradle with a doll lying in it imitating a sleeping child. There was a churn and a dressing table. There was a flail and a table. The old woman, long-nosed and shawled, seemed to be dreaming as she looked into the imitation fire. Again she was reminded of her grandmother as this woman too had a pair of spectacles on her nose.

  How long ago it all was. How apparently calm it had all been. How pastoral and tranquil that existence behind glass. Had it really been like that? Day after day of peaceful existence without challenge, surrounded by the furniture and routine of a life without significant history. If she broke the glass and entered that world how would she find it? Would she find it peaceful or boring, a world without radio or TV or ballet or art or music, but a world with children and animals and work? How much one could lack and how much one could have. Faintly in the distance she heard the roar of the traffic. What about her own mother? Had she been happy in her routine? She didn’t think so, though her father had apparently been. Did she love her father more than she loved her mother? She couldn’t say: perhaps they were both part of her, the restless and the tranquil. The fire flamed in front of the old woman showing a red landscape. What was she thinking of as she looked into it? What a strange motionless world really. What a distant motionless world.

  She turned away and went outside again. She sat down on a bench and rested in the coolness of the morning.

  Men and women were going in and coming out of a bar opposite but she herself never went into a bar alone. At one time she used to go to pubs with Phil and she would sit there sipping a tomato juice. She never said much but Phil was always the centre of attention, open and generous. Not that he was particularly witty, he was just energetic and lively. She sometimes wondered whether this was what was important in life, energy, but at other times she thought that it was courage that was important. Phil wasn’t particularly courageous. In fact in many ways he was weak. She had heard that he had left the shop and gone off to London and wasn’t doing very well there. He was the kind of person who would become very dull and complaining when he felt that his youth was over, she was sure of that.

  She decided that she would go to the Castle after all, since there was nothing else to do. She got up and walked slowly up the brae and when she got to the entrance bought her ticket and joined the queue which was waiting for the guide to take them round. Standing at the gate were two soldiers dressed in tartan trews who, with rifles beside them, stared unwinkingly ahead of them as if they were mechanical dolls. The guide who was carrying a stick and who looked like an ex-sergeant major – strong and red-cheeked – led them off. She half listened to his practised commentary, watching the people ahead of her, most of them foreign. There was a Japanese girl and a boy, some crew-cut Americans, a group who spoke German and a Frenchman with a moustache. The guide told them about the defences of the castle and she thought that every day he would be making the same speech and stopping at the same places for laughter. He made a few jokes about the English and she saw some people laughing: she thought that they were probably English.

  After a while she left the party and entered a small chapel which was dedicated to St Margaret. There was a portrait of her in colour with folded hands set in the window, and a Bible on the table. She had a certain tranquillity about her such as she had already seen in the illuminated manuscripts. What was a saint? she wondered. How did one become a saint? Was it when all anger left one, when all passion was drained away, when one was utterly transparent and all life moved in front of one as in pictures? And were saints saints all the time, or only at particular moments?

  She left the chapel and went into the museum which contained all sorts of stuff, uniforms, helmets, guns. She stayed for a long time staring at a black Prussian cap which was shaped like a skull. Once she saw the uniform of a British soldier which had a charred hole in the breast where the bullet had entered. There were pictures on the wall of battle scenes. One showed a British soldier in the act of driving his sword through a French standard bearer at Waterloo. She shuddered. What was it like to kill a man with a sword? It would be easier to do it with a gun. She couldn’t imagine herself killing anyone with bare steel, it would be an impossibility.

  She wandered about studying waterbottles, guns, powder-horns, armour. She read the names of those who had been killed in wars and read the memorial to the unknown dead. She had a look at the Scottish jewellery, the Honours of Scotland. It looked tawdrier than she expected.

  When she came out she sat down on a bench near the black cannon wondering what she would do next. From where she was sitting she could look down into the mouths of the cannon and above them the roofs of the city, on which gangs had written with chalk words like groovy and so on. Eventually she got up and left the Castle and walked down the brae and into a restaurant where she had her lunch.

  It was two o’clock when she came out and she was at a loss what to do next. She thought that perhaps she might go and sit in the Gardens. So that was what she did. She sat on a bench and half read a book and half snoozed. There were a number of people on the putting green and others lying in the sun, their arms about each other, while in the Pavilion a religious singer sang with great fervour a song about Jesus’s saving blood.

  All around her was movement and laughter. She tried to concentrate on her book, which was a paperback copy of Rebecca, but she couldn’t, and finally she laid it down. It was as if she was feeling a change coming over her, a mutation, but she couldn’t imagine what it was and she felt dizzy and slightly frightened. She got up again and walked over to the Information Bureau which was quite near. She discovered that there was a play on that night and decided that she would go. It was about Hitler but she didn’t know what to expect. Time passed very slowly. She bought an evening paper but most of it seemed to be about cricket and tennis. There was, however, a story about a man and his wife who had picked up a hitch-hiker in their car. After they had been travelling for some time the hitch-hiker had dragged the wife into a wood threatening the husband that if he said
anything he would kill him. She nodded over the paper and fell asleep. When she woke up it seemed to be cooler and the place slightly more empty. She got up and went along for her tea. It was now five o’clock.

  It occurred to her as she walked along that she ought to have more friends, people she could go and stay with. The previous summer she had actually gone to stay with a friend of hers, a college friend called Joan, who had recently married. But she had found the stay constricting and tedious as Joan had become very dull and respectable and responsible since her marriage, and she had left earlier than she had intended. It was odd how people changed. Before her marriage Joan had been very gay and exciting; now she looked as if she were carrying the weight of the whole world on her shoulders. She also worried a lot about money though her husband had a good job and was making at least three thousand a year.

  She went into a restaurant and had some tea. By this time she was almost getting tired of eating. After her tea, which she prolonged till half past five, she went down and sat in the station waiting-room for a while, till the play would begin. She thought about being married and being single. When one was married there were all sorts of things one had to do: the world became untidy. One had to adjust to a husband, then one had to cope with noisy children. She could do this all right in the school because the children she taught were not her own. She saw them to a certain extent at their best, not when they were screaming for attention, or harassing one when one was tired. On the other hand, to be single was not a particularly good state to be in. One gradually lost contact with people unless one was one of those women who served on committees or started art clubs or went to church with flowered hats or made endless jars of preserves.

  She sat on a leather seat in the waiting room as if she were waiting for a train. She could imagine herself going to London or any other part of Britain. Better still would be an airport lounge: there one could imagine oneself going to Europe or Africa or Asia. She had only been on a plane once and it had been just like being on a bus, not at all exciting, just looking out of a window and seeing banks of white clouds below one.

  It was funny how she fell asleep so often nowadays if she sat down for a long time. Perhaps that was a good thing: on the other hand it might mean that there was something wrong with her. It might be psychological also. She ought really to try and keep awake.

  She read some of her book and then went out and walked about the station. She noticed a number of telephone kiosks some of which had been smashed and had gang slogans written on them in chalk. The dangling useless phones somehow looked symbolic. The unharmed booths were occupied by people talking excitedly into black mouthpieces.

  Everywhere she went it was the same, people talking to each other, laughing, gesturing, sometimes shouting at each other, as once she had seen a gipsy and his wife quarrelling. It had ended with the man hitting his wife across the face so that blood poured out of her lip. A bony dog barked at their heels and in the background smoke rose slowly out of their camp.

  You never saw so many gipsies now. Her mother would never give them anything when they came whining to the door, nor would she listen to the Jehovah’s Witnesses who tried to hand out what she called heathenish magazines. Her mother would get rid of such people briskly and effectively. She herself would listen to them in an embarrassed manner while they, that is the religious people, would talk about Darwin and God, referring closely like automata to verses in the Bible. Invariably she bought one of their magazines which her mother would immediately throw in the bin.

  As she sat in the waiting-room, watching through the window trains coming and going, pictures of all kinds passed before her eyes. She remembered a holiday she had once had in a desolate glen in the Highlands. She could visualise clearly the mountains veined with stone, the deer that grazed by fences, the foaming rivers, the abandoned cottages, the blaze of yellow gorse, the horses nuzzling each other on the sands. She had liked that place. It seemed suited to her personality. But one day she had seen, sitting in front of a caravan, a large fat lady dressed in red trousers and painting the glen, and the illusion of contentment had been destroyed.

  At five past seven she started to walk to the theatre. Now that she had an aim she was happy but at the same time she thought that she would have difficulty in filling the hours of the following day. She had already exhausted quite a lot of the sights she had intended to see, unless perhaps she went on a bus tour. She would have to check on that in the morning, or perhaps they had a brochure in the hotel.

  Her feet were already getting sore as she had done a lot of walking but she didn’t want to spend money on a taxi. She didn’t like taxis. They reminded her of hearses and she was always sure she was being cheated. They would always take one the long way round and she was sure the drivers recognised strangers to the town instinctively.

  At twenty past seven she reached the theatre which was a very small one, seating perhaps sixty people or so, on cushions round the central area which formed the stage. There were strong lights blazing down which made the place hot: she imagined interrogations taking place there in a concentrated hot dazzle. She had bought a programme which gave very little information about the actual play: all that she gathered was that it seemed very avant garde. She didn’t know what exactly to expect, perhaps a dramatisation of the rise of Hitler, with reference to the SS and the Jews and the concentration camps. She didn’t often go to the theatre, preferring the cinema, but there was nothing else on that evening. She also didn’t like avant-garde stuff.

  She noticed that the audience was predominantly youthful, girls wearing slacks and Indian headbands, most of them probably students. The theatre was a small and intimate one and she could hear some of them talking in a brittle knowledgeable way before the play started. She sat in the front row on her cushion wishing that it was a chair and feeling rather tired because there was no support for her back.

  It was certainly not a conventional play. It began with a sinister music on drums which went on and on, exerting a hypnotic dark rhythm. In a mirror high above she could see the drummers with their long hair reflected. Then a young man came into the central space and stood there motionless for a long time while the music played.

  Suddenly he became a dying German soldier with glazed eyes, greatcoat, rifle and dull boots. Children came in and danced around him, among them a girl who appeared to be a spastic. The beating drums seemed to draw one into the dying festering mind of the German soldier by their rhythmic compulsion, as he was slowly resurrected, pulling himself to his feet against the wind of death and the beat of the drums. He made an appointment with the spastic girl who at night went into a wood to meet him, the dead German soldier. The lights all dimmed, there was only the wood created by the words, and the girl trying to find the German soldier on her macabre tryst, while the music played, the music of dark Nazism, the music of the terrible haunted wood, where everything was eerie and festering, and the animals crawled and killed. The scene was electrifying. It made her feel excited and disgusted at the same time, that wood where all desires were waiting, buried, but rising as if reflected in the manic glasses of the murdering German soldier. The girl crawled into the wood. The music quickened and then there was the interval, a sane blaze of lights.

  She stood up, shaken. She hardly knew where she was. She left the theatre knowing that she couldn’t bear to watch. She walked out into the hurting daylight. She walked down the brae steadily till she came to the park again. There she sat down on a bench among all the people. Behind her she could hear the tolling of a church bell. Ahead of her she could see the glasshouse where all the flowers were – the wide red flowers – and the plants, the Mexican cacti which she had once seen and which could exist on so little water.

  She sat on the bench and as she did so she thought to herself: I can’t bear this total freedom any more. I can’t, I can’t. I don’t know what to do. I cannot live like this. She got up restlessly and walked into the wood. She looked down at a stretch of water where the
polluted river flowed past. There were some boys wearing towels round their waists who seemed to have just emerged from the dirty stream, which was not at all like the clean streams to which she herself had been accustomed and where you could see right down to the bottom where the white stones were.

  As she stood there she saw a little girl in checked skirt and checked blouse walking into the wood by herself to pick flowers. Dazed she watched her. To her right she could hear the shouting of the boys. Without knowing precisely what she was doing she began to follow the little girl. As she did so she was amazed to discover that a transformation had taken place in her as if she had found a role which she could perform, as if the total freedom had narrowed and come to a focus. She didn’t know what she was going to do but it was as if she felt it right whatever it would turn out to be. She followed the little girl into the wood.