After the Dance

by Alan Warner

  He drank it obediently as if he were a child.

  ‘Jock died, you know. A stroke it was. It lasted for three years. But he never complained. You remember Jock.’

  He didn’t remember him very well. Was he the one who used to play football or the one who played tricks on the villagers? He couldn’t summon up a picture of him at all. What had she meant by his mother and his brother? He had a strange feeling as if he were walking inside an illusion, as if things had happened here that he hadn’t known of, though he should have. But who would tell him? They would all keep their secrets. He even had the feeling that this large apparently frank woman was in fact treacherous and secretive and that behind her huge façade there was lurking a venomous thin woman whose head nodded up and down like a snake’s.

  She laughed again. ‘That brother of yours is a businessman. He is the one who should have gone to America. He would have got round them all. There are no flies on him. Did you not think of coming home when your mother died?’

  ‘I was . . . I couldn’t at the time,’ he shouted.

  George, entrapped in his corner, the net around his feet, plied his bone needle.

  ‘It’ll be good to come home again,’ she shouted. ‘Many of them come back. Donny Macdonald came back seven years ago and they hadn’t heard from him for twenty years. He used to drink but he goes to church regularly now. He’s a man of God. He’s much quieter than he used to be. He used to sing a lot when he was young and they made him the precentor. He’s got a beautiful voice but not as good as it was. Nobody knew he was coming home till he walked into the house one night off the bus. Can you imagine that? At first he couldn’t find it because they had built a new house. But someone showed it to him.’

  He got up and laid the cup on the table.

  ‘Is Mr Gordon still alive?’ he shouted. Mr Gordon was his old English teacher.

  ‘Speak up, I can’t hear you,’ she said, her large bulging face thrust towards him like a crab.

  ‘Mr Gordon?’ he shouted. ‘Is he still alive?’

  ‘Mr Gordon,’ she said. ‘Yes, he’s alive. He’s about ninety now. He lives over there.’ She took him over to the window and pointed out a house to him. ‘Oh, there’s the Lady,’ she said. ‘He’s always sitting on the wall. He’s there every day. His sister died, you know. She was a bit wrong in the head.’

  He said goodbye and she followed him to the door. He walked out the gate and made his way to where she had pointed. The day seemed heavy and sleepy and he felt slightly drugged as if he were moving through water. In the distance a man was hammering a post into the ground. The cornfields swayed slightly in the breeze and he could see flashes of red among them. He remembered the days when he would go with a bucket to the well, and smelt again the familiar smell of flowers and grass. He expected at any moment to see the ghosts of the dead stopping him by the roadway, interrogating him and asking him, ‘When did you come home? When are you going away?’ The whole visit, he realised now, was an implicit interrogation. What it was really about was: What had he done with his life? That was the question that people, without realising it, were putting to him, simply because he had chosen to return. It was also the question that he himself wanted answered.

  Ahead of him stretched the moors and in the far distance he could see the Standing Stones which could look so eerie in the rain and which had perhaps been used in the sacrifice of children in Druid times. Someone had to be knifed to make the sun appear, he thought wryly. Before there could be light there must be blood.

  He made his way to see Mr Gordon.

  5

  Gordon recognised him immediately: it was almost as if he had been waiting for him. He came forward from behind a table on which were piled some books and a chessboard on which some pieces were standing, as if he had been playing a game.

  ‘John,’ he said, ‘John Macleod.’

  John noticed that standing beside the chair was a small glass in which there were the remains of whisky.

  ‘Sit down, sit down,’ said Gordon as if he hadn’t had company for a long time. He was still spry, grey-haired of course, but thin in the body. He was wearing an old sports jacket and a shirt open at the neck. There was a slightly unshaven look about him.

  ‘I play chess against myself,’ he said. ‘I don’t know which of us wins.’ His laugh was a short bark. John remembered himself running to school while Gordon stood outside the gate with a whistle in his hand looking at his watch impatiently.

  ‘I suppose coming from America,’ he said, ‘you’ll know about Fischer. He’s about to do the impossible, beat the Russian World Champion at chess. It’s like the Russians beating the Americans at baseball – or us at shinty,’ he added with the same self-delighting barking laugh. ‘He is of course a genius and geniuses make their own rules. How are you?’

  ‘Very well. And how are you?’ He nearly said ‘Sir’ but stopped himself in time.

  ‘Oh, not too bad. Time passes slowly. Have you ever thought about time?’ Beside his chair was a pile of books scattered indiscriminately. ‘I belong to dozens of book clubs. This is a book on Time. Very interesting. From the point of view of physics, psychiatry and so on.’ He pointed to a huge tome which looked both formidable and new. ‘Did you know, for instance, that time passes slowly for some people and rapidly for others? It’s a matter of personality, and the time of year you’re born. Or that temperature can affect your idea of time? Very interesting.’ He gave the impression of a man who devoured knowledge in a sterile way.

  John looked out of the window. Certainly time seemed to pass slowly here. Everything seemed to be done in slow motion as if people were walking through water, divers with lead weights attached to them.

  ‘Are you thinking of staying?’ said Gordon, pouring out a glass of whisky for his guest.

  ‘I don’t know that yet.’

  ‘I suppose you could buy a house somewhere. And settle down. Perhaps do some fishing. I don’t do any myself. I read and play chess. But I suppose you could fish and do some crofting. Though I don’t remember that you were particularly interested in either of these.’

  ‘I was just thinking,’ said John, ‘of what you used to tell us when we were in your English class. You always told us to observe. Observation, you used to say, is the secret of good writing. Do you remember the time you took us out to the tree and told us to smell and touch it and study it and write a poem about it? It was a cherry tree, I recall. We wrote the poem in the open air.’

  ‘I was in advance of my time,’ said Gordon. ‘That’s what they all do now. They call it Creative Writing. But of course they can’t spell nowadays.’

  ‘And you always told us that exactitude was important. Be observant and exact, you said, above all be true to yourselves.’

  ‘Drink your whisky,’ said Gordon. ‘Yes, I remember it all. I’ve kept some of your essays. You were gifted. In all the years I taught I only met two pupils who were really gifted. How does one know talent when one sees it? I don’t know. Anyway, I recognised your talent. It was natural, like being a tiger.’

  ‘Yes, you kept telling us about exactitude and observation. You used to send us out of the room and change objects in the room while we were out. You made Sherlock Holmeses out of us.’

  ‘Why do you speak about that now? It was all so long ago.’

  ‘I have a reason.’

  ‘What is your reason?’ said Gordon sharply.

  ‘Oh, something that happened to me. Some years ago.’

  ‘And what was that? Or don’t you want to talk about it?’

  ‘I don’t see why not. Not that it’s very complimentary to me.’

  ‘I have reached the age now,’ said Gordon, ‘when I am not concerned with honour, only with people.’

  ‘I see,’ said John, ‘but suppose you can’t separate them. Well, I’ll tell you anyway.’ He walked over to the window, standing with his back to the room and looking out at the empty road. It was as if he didn’t want to be facing Gordon.

&
nbsp; ‘I was an editor for some time as you know,’ he said. ‘Your training stood me in good stead. It was not a big paper but it was a reasonable paper. It had influence in the largish town in which I stayed. It wasn’t Washington, it wasn’t New York, but it was a largish town. I made friends in this town. One was a lecturer in a university. At least that is what we would call it here. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t a lecturer in English. He was a lecturer in History. It was at the time of the McCarthy trials when nobody was safe, nobody. Another of my friends went off his head at that time. He believed that everyone was persecuting him and opening his mail. He believed that planes were pursuing him. In any case this friend of mine, his name was Mason, told me that files had been dug up on him referring to the time when he was a student and had belonged to a left wing university club. Now there were complaints that he was indoctrinating his students with communism and, of course, being a History lecturer, he was in a precarious position. I told him that I would defend him in my paper, that I would write a hard-hitting editorial. I told him that I would stand up for principles, humane principles.’ He stretched out his hand for the whisky and decided against drinking it. ‘I left him on the doorstep at eleven o’clock on a Monday night. He was very disturbed because of course he was innocent, he wasn’t a communist and anyway he had great integrity as a teacher and lectured on communism only theoretically as one ideology among others. But the McCarthy people of course were animals. You have no conception. Not here. Of the fog of lies. Of the quagmire. No conception.’ He paused. A cow outside had bent its head to the grass and was eating.

  ‘Anyway this was what happened. I walked home because I needed the exercise. The street was deserted. There were lampposts shining and it was raining. A thin drizzle. I could hear the echo of my feet on the road. This was the kind of thing you taught us, to remember and listen and observe, to be aware of our surroundings sensuously. By then it had become a habit with me.

  ‘As I was walking along two youths came towards me out of the shadow, from under the trees. I thought they were coming home from the cinema or from a dance. They wore leather jackets and were walking towards me along the sidewalk. They stayed on the sidewalk and I made as if to go round them since they were coming straight for me without deviating. One of them said, “Daddy.” I stopped. I thought he was going to ask me for a light. He said, “Your wallet, daddy.” I looked at him in amazement. I looked at the two of them. I couldn’t understand what was going on. And something happened to me. I could feel everything very intensely, you see. At that moment I could have written a poem, everything was so clear. They were laughing, you see, and they were very casual. They walked like those cowboys you see on the films, physically at ease in their world. And their eyes sparkled. Their eyes sparkled with pure evil. I knew that if I protested they would beat me up. I knew that there was no appeal. None at all. One of them had a belt, and a buckle on it sparkled in the light. My eyes were at the level of the buckle. I took out my wallet and gave them the money. I had fifty dollars. I observed everything as you had trained us to do. Their boots which were shining except for the drizzle: their neckties: their leather jackets. Their legs which were narrow in the narrow trousers. And their faces which were looking slightly upwards and shining. Clear and fine almost, but almost innocent though evil. A rare sort of energy. Pure and bright. They took the wallet, counted the money and gave me back the wallet. They then walked on. The whole incident took perhaps three minutes.

  ‘I went into the house and locked the door. The walls seemed very fragile all of a sudden. My wife had gone to bed and I stood downstairs thinking, now and again removing a book from the shelves and replacing it. I felt the house as thin as the shell of an egg: I could hear, I thought, as far away as San Francisco. There was a tap dripping and I turned it off. And I didn’t write the editorial, I didn’t write anything. Two weeks after that my friend killed himself, with pills and whisky.’

  The whisky which Gordon had given him was still untouched.

  ‘Observation and exactitude,’ he said, ‘and elegance of language.’ There was a long silence. Gordon picked up a chess piece and weighed it in his hand.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and that’s why you came home.’

  ‘Perhaps. I don’t know why I came home. One day I was walking along a street and I smelt the smell of fish coming from a fish shop. And it reminded me of home. So I came home. My wife, of course, is dead.’

  ‘Many years ago,’ said Gordon, still holding the chess piece in his hand, ‘I was asked to give a talk to an educational society in the town. In those days I used to write poetry though of course I never told anyone. I was working on a particular poem at the time: it was very difficult and I couldn’t get it to come out right. Well, I gave this talk. It was, if I may say so myself, a brilliant talk for in those days I was full of ideas. It was also very witty. People came and congratulated me afterwards as people do. I arrived home at one o’clock in the morning. When I got home I took out the poem and tried to do some work on it. But I was restless and excited and I couldn’t get into the right mood. I sat and stared at the clock and I knew quite clearly that I would never write again. Odd, isn’t it?’

  ‘What are you trying to say?’

  ‘Say? Nothing. Nothing at all. I don’t think you’d better stay here. I don’t think this place is a refuge. People may say so but it’s not true. After a while the green wears away and you are left with the black. In any case I don’t think you’d better settle here: that would be my advice. However, it’s not my business. I have no business now.’

  ‘Why did you stay here?’ said John slowly.

  ‘I don’t know. Laziness, I suppose. I remember when I was in Glasgow University many years ago we used to take the train home at six in the morning after the holiday started. At first we were all very quiet, naturally, since we were half-asleep, most of us. But then as the carriages warmed and the sun came up and we came in sight of the hills and the lochs we began to sing Gaelic songs. Odd, and Glasgow isn’t that far away. What does it all mean, John? What are you looking at?’

  ‘The broken fences.’

  ‘Yes, of course. There’s a man here and he’s been building his own house for ten years. He carries stone after stone to the house and then he forgets and sits down and talks to people. Time is different here, no doubt about it.’

  ‘I had noticed.’

  ‘If you’re looking for help from me, John, I can’t give you any. In the winter time I sit and look out the window. You can see the sea from here and it can look very stormy. The rain pours down the window and you can make out the waves hitting the islands out there. What advice could I give you? I have tried to do my best as far as my work was concerned. But you say it isn’t enough.’

  ‘Perhaps it wasn’t your fault.’

  John made his way to the door.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I shall have to call on other people as well. They all expect one to do that, don’t they?’

  ‘Yes, they still feel like that. That hasn’t changed.’

  ‘I’ll be seeing you then,’ said John as he left.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course.’

  He walked towards the sea cliffs to a house which he had visited many times when he was a boy, where he had been given many tumblers of milk, where later in the evening he would sit with others talking into the night.

  The sea was large and sparkling in front of him like a shield. No, he said automatically to himself, it isn’t like a shield, otherwise how could the cormorants dive in and out of it? What was it like then? It was like the sea, nothing else. It was like the sea in one of its moods, in one of its sunny gentle moods. As he walked pictures flashed in front of his eyes. He saw a small boy running, then a policeman’s arm raised, the baton falling in a vicious arc, the neon light flashing from his shield. The boy stopped in midflight, the picture frozen.

  6

  He knocked at the door of the house and a woman of about forty, thin and with stragg
ly greying hair, came to the door.

  She looked at him enquiringly.

  ‘John, John Macleod,’ he said. ‘I came to see your mother.’ Her face lighted up with recognition and she said, ‘Come in, come in.’ And then inexplicably, ‘I thought you were from the BBC.’

  ‘The BBC?’

  ‘Yes, they’re always sending people to take recordings of my mother singing and telling stories, though she’s very old now.’

  He followed her into a bedroom where an old white-faced white-haired woman was lying, her head against white pillows. She stretched out her prominently veined hand across the blankets and said, ‘John, I heard Anne talking to you. There’s nothing wrong with my hearing.’

  They were left alone and he sat down beside the bed. There was a small table with medicine bottles and pills on it.

  ‘It’s true,’ she said, ‘the BBC are always sending people to hear me sing songs before I die.’

  ‘And how are you?’

  ‘Fine, fine.’

  ‘Good, that’s good.’ Her keen wise eyes studied his face carefully. The room had bright white wallpaper and the windows faced the sea.

  ‘I don’t sleep so well now,’ said the old woman. ‘I waken at five every morning and I can hear the birds twittering just outside the window.’

  ‘You look quite well,’ he said.

  ‘Of course I’m not well. Everybody says that to me. But after all I’m ninety years old. I can’t expect to live forever. And you’re over sixty but I can still see you as a boy.’ She prattled on but he felt that all the time she was studying him without being obvious.

  ‘Have you seen the BBC people? They all have long hair and they wear red ties. But they’re nice and considerate. Of course everybody wears long hair now, even my daughter’s son. Would you like to hear my recording? My grandson took it down on a tape.’