After the Dance

by Alan Warner

  Sometimes, as I walk along, I think of people and sometimes of books. I doff my hat carefully to people I know and glance equally carefully at people I don’t know.

  Of course, things are noisier now than they used to be. Cars race past, youths craning their heads out of windows and shouting at the passers-by. And they are crammed full of girls, these sports cars. But I ignore them. I walk past the trees which line the road, and I glance now and again at the sea with its lights. I think of . . . Well, what does one think of?

  Anyway, this evening I was walking along slowly, feeling benign and calm, and eventually I came to the bay. The sun was setting in its splendour of gold and red, and I sat down on a seat near the water. What is more beautiful and peaceful than that, watching the purple clouds and the pale moon, and the sun setting in barbaric splendour? The world was calm except for the twittering of birds. All round me was desolate and I was staring out towards the horizon where the sunset was turning the sky into, as they say, technicolour.

  What beautiful thoughts we have at such moments! How good and guiltless we appear to ourselves, sitting there as if on thrones, hat on head, gloves on hands, and umbrella in case of a shower! We feel like gods, clean, urbane, without sorrow or guilt.

  And as I was sitting there that evening, surrounded by rocks and sand, in the strange music of the sea birds, and confronting a sky of scarlet and purple, who should materialise – and I use the word advisedly – but Diane herself.

  How beautiful she was, how young! I cannot describe it. Her face at first looked more peaceful and calm than I had ever seen it.

  She spoke.

  ‘You told my father to beat me,’ she said, ‘didn’t you?’

  Her voice was musical and low (where did I hear that before?).

  Her eyes were green and she wore this mini-skirt of pure gold.

  I tried to stand up in confusion, clutching my umbrella.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘stay where you are. You look like a king sitting there.’ I can swear those were her exact words. But it was like a dream. You must remember the atmosphere: you have to remember that, the colours, the dreams.

  Then she leaned down towards my right ear and she said, still in that dreamy voice,

  ‘Beat me then. You can if you want. My father never beats me, that’s why I despise him. Don’t you do the same? Don’t you despise these weaklings, these sellers of goods? Can’t you imagine a world beautiful and strong and young? I think that you’re young. I was afraid of you at first, but now I realise what you are, what you truly are. You are aloof as if you had a destiny of your own. You watch everyone. Not everyone can do what you do, live in freedom.’

  What was I to say? She had a whip in her hand. She handed it to me there in that confusion of red and gold.

  And stood there waiting like a little girl.

  ‘I followed you, you know,’ she said. ‘I know you always take your constitutional and think your great thoughts while you do so. My father told me what you said. I made a great mistake in you. You always looked so mealy-mouthed. But then, when you said that, I knew you were not like my father, that you would not bow and scrape to anyone.’

  And all this time, I must have been peeling off my gloves very slowly. I couldn’t help myself, I tell you. I was taking the whip into my hands. Was I not right? Had she herself not asked me to?

  ‘You have a shop too,’ she said, ‘but you don’t bother to serve in it. You get others to do that.’ (Actually, it is a jeweller’s and my sister serves in it. A long time ago I left it. I couldn’t bring myself to serve people.)

  She kept saying, ‘I know now you couldn’t do that. Your nature isn’t like that, is it? You can’t bear to serve, you want to dominate.’

  By this time darkness was coming down. She bent over and I raised the whip, and as I did so I knew that this was what I was meant to do, to dominate and not to serve, to impose my will on others, to cleanse the sins of the world. And I knew that volunteers would come to me because they recognised who I really was, the jewel hardness of my will.

  She was so beautiful, so submissive. I raised the whip, and as I did so lights flashed all round me, and there was her boyfriend, and she was laughing and giggling and almost rolling on the sand in ecstasy. Naturally, he used a flashlight. And naturally . . . But this I won’t go over. The devil, that’s what she was, the snake with the green eyes. And so beautiful, wriggling like a fish on the sand. If he hadn’t taken the whip from my hands, I would have lashed her and lashed her. I had to wipe the blood from my face with the gloves.

  Naturally, my sister left the shop and left the town and naturally . . . Well, naturally, my bowing friend put in for the shop and got it fairly cheap. Who else would buy? Not that he put a direct bid in himself, he did it through intermediaries. It was next door to his sweet shop.

  He never came to see me. I never saw him again.

  They tell me she’s going to university after all, to study psychology. A soft option, if ever there was one.

  It was funny though. That moment was the most intense of my life. I’ll never forget it. I keep going over and over it in my mind, that duel in scarlet and red. Who would have believed evil would be so beautiful and young? And him so servile too. No wonder we get fascists in the world, fascists with blue eyes like mine.

  They deceive you and then turn nasty.

  But these green eyes, these . . . sweets.

  The Bridge

  My wife and I met them in Israel. They were considerably younger than us and newly married. They came from Devon and they had a farm which they often talked about. For some reason they took a fancy to us, and were with us a fair amount of the time, sometimes on coach trips, sometimes at dinner in the evenings. They were called Mark and Elaine.

  I didn’t like Israel as much as I had expected I would. I read the Jerusalem Post regularly, and was disturbed by some of the stories I found there, though the paper itself was liberal enough. There were accounts of the beatings of Palestinians, and pictures of Israeli soldiers who looked like Nazis.

  Certainly it was interesting to see Bethlehem, Nazareth, the Garden of Gethsemane, and they reminded me of the security of my childhood: but at the same time seemed physically tatty, and without romance. Also we were often followed, especially in Jerusalem, by Arab schoolchildren who tried to sell us postcards: the schools were in fact shut by official order.

  Though this was the first time Mark and Elaine were abroad they were brighter than us with regard to money. Mark had a gift for finding out the best time for exchanging sterling and was, I thought, rather mean. Sometimes we had coffee in a foursome during the day or at night, and he would pull his purse out very carefully and count out the money: he never gave a tip. He was also very careful about buying for us exactly what we had bought for him on a previous occasion. On the other hand he bought his wife fairly expensive rings which she flourished expansively. They walked hand in hand. They were both tall and looked very handsome.

  One day the coach took us to the Golan Heights. There were red flowers growing there, and some abandoned tanks were lying in a glade. The guide, who was a Jew originally from Iraq, told us that a few tanks had held off the attacks till the reservists had been called up. ‘They can be called up very quickly,’ he said. It was very peaceful, looking across the valley to the other side but there were notices about unexploded mines.

  Often we met young boys and girls on the buses. They hitched rides from place to place in their olive-green uniforms. They were of the age of schoolboys and schoolgirls. One morning on a bus I heard a girl listening to a pop song on a radio that she carried with her. It seemed very poignant and sad.

  I used to talk quite a lot about articles I had read in the Jerusalem Post, which was my Bible because it was the only paper written in English. But neither Mark nor Elaine read much, not even the fat blockbusters that passengers on the coach sometimes carried with them. They told us a great deal about their farm, and what hard work it was. Then there was also a lot
of paper work, including VAT. They were very fond of each other, and, as I have said, often walked hand in hand. He was very handsome: she was pretty enough in a healthy sort of way.

  We were told by the guide a great deal about the history of Israel, about the Assyrians, about the Crusaders, about the Philistines. I especially remember a beautiful little simple Catholic church above Jerusalem. Then in Jerusalem we were shown the Via Dolorosa. At intervals along the route, young Jewish soldiers with guns were posted. ‘Here is where Christ’s hand rested,’ said the guide, pointing to the wall. He himself had emigrated to Israel from Iraq. ‘They took everything from us, even our clothes,’ he said; ‘for years we lived in a tent.’ He had served in the paratroopers and was still liable for call-up.

  We saw Masada, which was very impressive. Here the Jews had committed suicide en masse rather than surrender to the Romans. At one time the Israeli soldiers had been initiated into the army at a ceremony held at Masada, but that had been discontinued because of its passive associations. Thoughts of suicide were not useful against the Arabs.

  I found it difficult to talk to the young couple about farming since I didn’t know much about it. My wife, however, who had been brought up on a farm, chattered away about sheep, cattle, and hay. For myself I was more interested in the information I was getting from the Jerusalem Post. For instance, an American rabbi had said that the reason for the stone-throwing which had started was that the cinemas at Tel Aviv had been opened on a Saturday night.

  We often saw Orthodox Jews wearing black hats, and beards. They sometimes read books while they were walking along the street. Also we saw many of them chanting at the Wailing Wall, where the men were separated from the women. My wife wrote a message and left it in the Wall as if it were a secret assignation. There was one comic touch: some of the Orthodox Jews covered their hats with polythene if it was raining, as the hats were very expensive.

  I read diligently in the Jerusalem Post. Apparently in the past there has been stone-throwing against Jews. This was in mediaeval times and when they were living in Arab countries. But though Jews complained nothing was done about it. It was considered a reasonable sport.

  My wife often used to wonder why Mark and Elaine had picked us for friends since they were so much younger. Did we look cosmopolitan, seasoned travellers, or did they simply like us? Sometimes Elaine talked to my wife as if she were talking to her mother. I found it hard to talk to Mark when the women were in the shops. He often spoke about money, I noticed, and was very exact with it. I sometimes thought that it was he who looked like the seasoned traveller, since he was always totally at ease and was excellent with maps.

  The two of them didn’t take so many coach trips as we did. Often they went away on their own, and we only met them in the evening.

  They didn’t go to the Holocaust Museum with us the day we went there. The place was very quiet apart from some French schoolchildren who scampered about. My wife hissed at them to be quiet, but they only grinned insolently. There were piles of children’s shoes on the floor: these had been worn by victims of the Holocaust. There were many photographs, and a film that ran all the time.

  There was also a room which was in complete darkness apart from thousands of candles reflected from a range of mirrors, so that it seemed that we were under a sky of stars. A voice repeated over and over again the names of the children who had been killed. The Jews had suffered terribly, but were now in turn inflicting terror themselves.

  We met a woman who had come to Israel from South Africa. She opposed the Jewish attitude to the Palestinians, though she was a Jew herself. She said that mothers everywhere were against the continued war. She herself had driven her son in her own car to the front, not during the Seven Days War but the one after it.

  We were in Israel on Independence Day. Jewish planes, streaming blue and white lines of smoke behind them, formed the Jewish flag. It was very impressive and colourful but also rather aggressive.

  The coach took us to a kibbutz where we were to stay for two nights. Immediately we arrived, Mark and Elaine found that there were cattle there, and they left us in order to find out about the price of milk, etc.

  The kibbutz itself had been raised out of a malarial swamp. Everyone had to work, and the place looked prosperous. It even had a beautiful theatre which the kibbutzers had built themselves. I ordered coffee from an oldish waiter, and when I offered him a tip he wouldn’t accept it. I found out that he had been a lieutenant-colonel on Eisenhower’s staff.

  The kibbutzers, we were told by the guide, had their own problems. Sometimes when the young ones who had been reared in a kibbutz were called up on national service they entered an enviable world which they had not known of, and they left the kibbutz forever. Also some Jews had accepted compensation money from the Germans while others hadn’t, and so there was financial inequality. Thus some could afford to take holidays while others couldn’t. This introduced envy into the kibbutz.

  Mark and Elaine were pleased with the cattle they had seen and full of praise. Mark had brought a notebook with him and had jotted down numbers of cattle, type of feeding stuff, etc. They had been given a tour of the farm with which they had been very happy.

  One night they had told us that they recently had been in a place in England, it might have been Dorset, and they had come to a little bridge. There was a notice on the bridge that according to legend a couple who walked across the bridge hand in hand would be together forever. They smiled tenderly as they told us the story. In fact they had been on a coach trip at the time, and the passengers on the coach had clapped as the two of them volunteered to walk across the bridge. I thought it was a touching little story and I could imagine the scene; on the other hand I am not superstitious. ‘How lovely,’ said my wife.

  My wife and I had been to Devon once. One day quite by accident we arrived at a house which was said to be haunted, and which had been turned into a restaurant. The owner of the restaurant, who made full use of the legend for commercial purposes, told us that many years before, there used to be criminals who used lanterns to direct ships onto the rocks. One man had done this only to find that one of the passengers on the wrecked ship had been his own daughter coming home from America. He had locked the body up in a room in his house. Many years afterwards the farmer who now owned the house noticed a mark on the wall which suggested the existence of an extra room. He knocked the wall down and found a skeleton there. An American tourist had said that she had seen the ghost of the young girl in broad daylight, and so had been born the legend of the Haunted House. So romance and death fed money and tourism.

  We told Mark and Elaine the story, which they hadn’t heard before. Suddenly there was a chill in the day as I imagined the father bending down to tear the jewellery from a woman’s neck and finding that it was his own daughter.

  ‘Should you like a coffee?’ I said. I saw Mark fumbling with his purse. I thought of the Samaritan Inn which had been built at the presumed point where the Good Samaritan had helped his enemy. And indeed in Israel much of the biblical story had been converted into money.

  Nevertheless I couldn’t love Israel. There was too much evidence of Arab poverty. The dead bodies of Palestinian children were mixed up in my mind with the dead bodies of Jewish children. The mound of worn shoes climbed higher and higher.

  On the last night of the tour we exchanged addresses. Mark and Elaine said they would write and my wife and I said we would do the same. And in fact we did do that for a while.

  Today, this morning in fact, my wife received a letter from Elaine saying that she and Mark had split up. She said little, but reading between the lines we gathered that he had met a richer woman who was able to invest money in his farm.

  We looked at each other for a long time, thinking of the young radiant couple who had walked hand in hand across the bridge.

  Finally my wife said, ‘At least they didn’t have children. It would have been much worse if they had children.’

  The Long
Happy Life of Murdina the Maid

  And now we arrive at the island of Raws, well known in legend and in song. To this island, rich in peat and some deposits of iron, there came St Murriman, clad in monk’s habit and hair-shirt. A great man, he is said to have baptised in his old age a number of seals which he thought to be children as they rolled by the shore in their innocent gambols. (And indeed seals do have a peculiar childlike appearance if you scrutinise them carefully enough.) This island too is famous for the story of the Two Bodachs, one of these stories in which our history is perennially rich. But perhaps the most famous story of all is that of Murdina the Maid. (I speak under correction but I believe that a monograph has been written on this story and that a paper was once delivered on it at a Celtic Congress.)

  Murdina the Maid was born of good-living parents, the father a blacksmith and the mother a herdsgirl. They lived together in harmony for many years till the mother, whose name was Marian (a relation it is said on the distaff side to the MacLennans of Cule), delivered a fine girl. She grew up, as Wordsworth says, in ‘sun and in shower’ till she attained the age of seventeen years. We may think of her as apple-cheeked, dewy-eyed, with sloe-black eyes and a skin as white as the bogcotton. However, matters were not allowed to remain like that.

  This poor innocent girl one night was attending what we call in the vernacular a dance (though different indeed were the dances of those days from the dances of our degenerate time) and there she met a man, let us call him a man for want of a better name, though he was more like a beast in human form. He was a Southron man, and he was addicted to the music of the melodeon, an instrument which in those days provided our people with much innocent amusement.

  We have no record of their dalliance and of his wicked wiles but sufficient to say that he persuaded her to run away with him to Glassgreen, the great metropolis, albeit she went home for her wardrobe (poor as it was) first. One may imagine what such a wardrobe would consist of, two long skirts, a coiffed headdress, two pairs of stockings woven at home, one pair of shoes and one pair of tackety boots, with, of course, some underclothes of the colour pink.