In the Middle of the Wood

by Iain Crichton Smith

  He saw a police car swing up the drive and draw up at the door of the bad wards.

  A nurse swirling a red and navy-blue cloak passed like a foreign exotic bird along the pathway.

  “Maybe you can’t help what you’re doing,” he said. “Maybe none of us can.”

  “I shan’t be able to come tomorrow,” Linda said tiredly. “I’ll come the day after that. It’s a long drive and mother isn’t well.”

  “I’m sure she isn’t.”

  “She isn’t. She doesn’t know what is happening. She doesn’t understand.”

  “But I do,” said Ralph proudly. “I understand.”

  “My mother likes you.”

  “No, she doesn’t. She doesn’t understand what I do. She wishes you had married someone else. She has the old-fashioned idea that writing isn’t work, not like nursing. It’s not respectable.”

  “Well, you’ve got to make allowances for that.”

  “Why should I be making allowances all the time?”

  “I don’t know. I make allowances too,” said Linda. “We all have to make allowances. That among other things is what marriage is.”

  Like Dante I must enter the final circle, he thought. I must burn there and find out about the fire and the mad shadows. That is what the Inferno is, the seethe of lost egos burning in their pain.

  “Do you remember Mrs Hunter?” said Linda briskly. “She phoned Annie Macleod and asked her who had hired Judas to betray Christ. Would you believe that?”

  “And who did?”

  “What?”

  “Who did hire him? She has a point there. She’s no fool.”

  Linda ignored this comment and proceeded. “And Mary Mason has a black baby. Her husband is a black doctor in Liverpool, I think it is.”

  Ralph thought of the house surrounded by its gravel. It seemed to him that the ferns and grasses were rising up to swallow him. Once he had been hacking at ferns when his glasses, which he kept in his top jacket pocket, fell into the greenery. Blindly he had searched for them but couldn’t find them. Such a failed scholar among famished nature he was. There was some deep meaning in the incident. Nature which he had seen by means of his glasses now became a blur as he thrust his arms into the luxuriant greenery, which had closed over them. Sometimes he had felt the vegetation was devouring even his manuscripts, turning them first green and then brown. And on rainy days he watched the water pour into the brimming barrel which stood under the rone. Another day he had seen two rabbits playing in the garden. No, he said to them, this is not an Irish missal, the real weasel is waiting for you. Even now he is feeling his way towards you, he is preparing his dance of luminous rings.

  “Is there anything you want me to bring you?” said Linda.

  “No, nothing. There is a man in here who’s writing a history of the world. An amateur. A fool. He walks about all the time, he can’t sit still. And he wears bedroom slippers. He’s expecting his wife to bring him books and notes but of course she won’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why do you think he’s here? She didn’t care about his book. God knows what will happen to his notes while he’s away from home.”

  “Ralph,” said Linda tenderly.

  “What?”

  “Come back to me.”

  He turned his face away from her towards the two lunatics with their wheelbarrow.

  There was a silence and then Linda said, “I’ll have to go.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to come to the car?”

  “I don’t know if I’m allowed out.”

  “Give me a wave then.”

  He didn’t speak. She kissed him lightly on the lips and then left. She waved to him but he gazed back at her stonily. She seemed to be smaller than usual as she entered the car. So the strain was getting through to her. This huge plot took a lot of thinking out, no wonder she was tired. There must even be a place for the feeding rabbits and the tenuous redbreast on the branch. The car turned away in a shower of pebbles and then she was gone. The car was red as an expiring ember. Oh God, when would there be an end to this? To cut cleanly away from the world, that was what he should do. Only he didn’t have the courage.

  The compulsory discussions were unstructured. Sometimes someone might make a complaint, at other times there might be a general statement which would generate a debate. The scientist of whom Hugh had spoken was a tall man with a goatee beard who gave the appearance of being at home where he was, intelligent, egotistic. Hugh was there of course as was the handicapped girl, Heydrich, Lady Macbeth, and the disguised psychologist: and others. The scientist got on to the topic of the soul. Suddenly Ralph burst out impatiently, “Are we talking of the soul or of consciousness? Consciousness is what differentiates us from the animals. We carry mirrors about with us. Some time or another the leap was made, and man could see doubly, he could act and watch what he was doing at the same time.”

  “But surely the soul is different from that,” said the scientist.

  An old man with a trembling head and a trembling hand said, “Plato thinks so at any rate. He talks of the soul. Not that I can remember the exact words but I can recall doing some Greek at school.”

  Lady Macbeth stared dully ahead of her and so did the man whom Ralph had seen on his first day pacing up and down like a metronome.

  The lady psychologist glanced rapidly at each person in turn, while another lady doctor, younger, took notes in her book.

  “I’m not sure that we can equate the soul with consciousness,” said the scientist, putting his pipe down on the seat beside him and stretching out his legs. “The soul is a theological thing surely …”

  “It is a question of mirrors,” said Ralph, speaking smoothly and with certainty. “One particular day man had consciousness. He called this the soul, or whatever the word was at the time. He knew that he inhabited his body like an animal but he also sensed that he had this other thing as well, by means of which he could study himself from the outside, as if he were an object. I’m not saying that he thought all this out, he sensed it. The episode in the Garden of Eden is a method of mythologizing consciousness. At first man was totally in harmony with his surroundings, later he felt himself separated from them. He wore a fig leaf but when he took the fig leaf away he discovered shame and self-consciousness.”

  “I still think,” said the scientist, “that the soul is different from consciousness. The soul is supposed to be eternal, consciousness isn’t. That’s the difference surely.”

  “I agree,” said the man with the trembling head. “Consciousness doesn’t last forever. The soul is the image of God in us. Isn’t that what it is supposed to be?”

  The handicapped girl turned away impatiently as if she were tired of this long boring discussion. Lady Macbeth didn’t change the expression on her face which was entirely dull. The metronomic man lit a cigarette and studied it speculatively. The disguised psychologist had a fixed smile on his face: he was hiding behind two other people.

  “The soul is said to be eternal,” said Ralph. “Of course it’s meant to be eternal but that’s like saying to the poor that there is a heaven. They have to have their beads of eternal glass. They are like Indians, natives. But surely we don’t need to pay any attention to that.”

  “Why not?” said the lady psychologist, pointing at him with a long pencil which she held in her right hand. Her white hair was arranged in ridges and waves, her bright intelligent eyes were fixed on him.

  “Why not? There is no proof of its existence.”

  “Neither is there of many other things that we accept.”

  “Look,” said Ralph, “look at your bookshelves. They are full of books about metaphysics but what single fact have they uncovered equivalent to the fact that the walls of this room are painted green.”

  “That is another question,” said the lady psychologist. “Whether the walls of this room are green or not.”

  “It’s a fact different from the fact of the soul.”


  “But what about love, its eternity?” said the psychologist. “When it is said that two souls meet.”

  “Love? That is an affair of mirrors as well. The lover sees himself in the loved one. Love is an illusion like the soul.” It was Ralph now who felt masterful. He felt that his mind moved more quickly than that of the psychologist’s, or the scientist’s. He felt that he was becoming master even in this place and laughed inwardly. To be avid for power even here. What a joke. The man with the trembling head who knew some Greek, who was he? He had the curious antique manners of an outdated gentleman, tentative and frail.

  The handicapped girl scratched her head, another girl beside her, thin as a rake, yawned. These discussions were revolving boxes: there was no secret inside them.

  “I don’t agree with you about love,” said the psychologist. “That it is an affair of mirrors as you put it. Do you think man is a machine?”

  “Yes.”

  “That he has no free will?”

  Oh, God, here we go again thought Ralph. “Listen,” he said, “if you put a plateful of cakes all of different colours and texture in front of people at a party one will take one and one another. Why do you think that is? We are programmed by previous experience to do so.”

  “Programmed how far back?” said the scientist.

  “As far back as the womb perhaps,” said Ralph. “Free will is an illusion. You should know that as a scientist.”

  “I wouldn’t admit that at all. Science has nothing to do with questions of free will and predestination.”

  “You make the same experiments and expect them to come out the same way each time. If they don’t you’re angry. What about Yuri Geller? Every scientist set out to prove that he was wrong, that he was breaking the laws of physics. And now we know that he was a magician. Next you’ll be talking about the Bermuda Triangle, the Turin Shroud, horoscopes, that there were spacemen in early Egypt.”

  “Not necessarily,” said the psychologist. The lady doctor in the white coat was writing furiously in her notebook. All this crap, thought Ralph, as if it had any meaning: just talk and talk and talk. … It’s all been said over and over, there is nothing new here, just staleness.

  It was like being in one of the circles of the Inferno; if only he could leave the room but he couldn’t. He despised himself. He had broken his vow of silence. He looked at the clock. He should have remained like a stone in the midst of the currents and swirls of conspiracy that ebbed and flowed around him. But he hadn’t reckoned with his vanity. He wanted to go to the toilet and be violently sick and spew up all his words, his ideas, his stale theories. His glib orations disgusted him.

  To be loved and to love. He thought there had been a time when that had happened, when he had waited for Linda when, in her yellow dress, she would come and see him before they were married: when, if she was late or if she didn’t come, the world seemed to come to a stop. He could tell the sound of her footsteps from others. But that had been long ago.

  Funny that Heydrich had nothing to say. He sat there upright in his chair. What had happened to his Webley, to his negligent massacres? Was he keeping the silence of the stone man?

  The silence lasted and then because men cannot bear much silence, he heard Hugh saying,

  “One thing I thought to bring up, there is something wrong with the plumbing in the toilet. It was like that when I was here four years ago and it hasn’t been sorted since.”

  There was a muted laugh. The psychologist said, “You know what workmen are. And you know the financial restraints we have.”

  “I know what workers are,” said Hugh. “I was one myself.”

  There was another muted laugh. The subject of the soul had been safely negotiated. Now one could turn to comedy. And yet Ralph wanted to discuss it more deeply, the subject of love. Was it like the cakes, were we conditioned to choose one person, or was love itself a glorious manifestation of free will, opening like a scented bouquet and conferring meaning on the whole world. It had seemed like that to him once. But now he was in chains, the world was grey and distant like Lady Macbeth’s hair. She reminded him of a schoolteacher he had once had who in order to protect herself from the children had to offer them sweets. But that did not protect her.

  He suddenly began to sweat and panic. He wanted more than anything to leave the room and be by himself for a while. He hung on to the legs of the chair feeling the room spinning about him. And then slowly the room steadied and he was all right again. He took out a handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his forehead. Neither the psychologist nor the note-taker was watching him at the time. They were listening to Hugh who was making some more good-humoured complaints.

  The soul … love … Where was Linda at that moment? He didn’t know. And yet if he telephoned her again he would be giving in. She had cried last time and on other occasions. These tears, what were they? What did they mean? Laughter, what did that mean? Pure, mechanical exhalations. Was that right? He saw again the river and heard its quiet tranquil noise, he gazed at the deer on the hills above. The two of them had sauntered there hand in hand. Their meetings had been like a radiance of the spirit, strong as the sun that shone yellow on the hills turning them to the colour of honey. Tears rose to his eyes and he wiped them away with his hands. No, no, he must not cry, he mustn’t, he had never cried in his life. That was one thing he had learned from his stepfather.

  There was a burst of laughter around him. Hugh had made another pawky statement. The clock showed half-past twelve. Now they could go for their lunch. Love could be left behind among the chairs which even now were being returned to another room. Some impulse moved the puppet Lady Macbeth towards the dining-room. Ralph joined the queue behind the man with the trembling head, and then sat at the same table with him.

  “Hawkins,” said the man with the trembling head, putting his hand out across the table.

  “Simmons.”

  “I must say that I didn’t agree with you but you talked well,” said Hawkins.

  “You seem to know Greek,” said Ralph.

  “My father was a doctor. He was a great man. Great personality. He stayed in the same district all his life but he was a tremendous personality. He taught me Greek.” Hawkins thought for a while and then said, “He committed suicide.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Ralph. And then. “What did you used to do yourself?”

  “Me? I was in charge of a scientific laboratory. Investigating various chemicals. I was to be shifted to England but I retired instead. I didn’t want to go to England. I was to be merged with a lot of other laboratories.”

  He leaned forward confidentially. “I fell ill and I attended this Pakistani doctor. And he told the psychologist that I was going to commit suicide. I had never said that to him at all.” And his eyes flared with a brief anger.

  “I have depressions, of course, since my wife died, but I never at any time said that I was going to commit suicide.”

  His hands shook as he took a piece of bread from the plate in front of him. “I must say, that your talk today reminded me of my father. He was an atheist you see. He didn’t believe in the soul.”

  “Do you?”

  “In the soul? I don’t know. I often think that someone with as powerful a personality as my father had will never die. Then again in practical terms nothing ever dies. There’s an exchange of energies.”

  All the time he was speaking his head was shaking uncontrollably.

  “Tell me,” said Ralph, “do you think we can ever tell what is truth.”

  “Tell what is truth? What do you mean?”

  “I mean here we are talking to each other and we can’t tell what either of us is really thinking. There’s no way of knowing. Words don’t mean anything, do they? They are disguises for the truth. They are what we say when we are thinking of something else.”

  “I suppose so,” said Hawkins slowly. A piece of bread stuck to the left side of his mouth. “My father always told the truth. To tell the truth and be damned, he�
�d always say. People respected him. He was a big bluff man. I’m not sure whether telling the truth always works but people admired him for it. My mother said he should have been more tactful. I remember him saying to a patient, “Aren’t you dead yet, man?” The odd thing was that they loved him for it.”

  “That’s not exactly what I mean,” said Ralph. “Look, is there no way of finding out what goes on behind the face.”

  “None,” said Hawkins with finality.

  “Then,” said Ralph, “we may live in a world of perpetual betrayal.”

  “Yes. You find the same in the natural world. Animals disguise themselves so that they won’t be eaten. Take the chameleon, for example. But there are thousands of examples. That of course might cause depression.”

  “What might?”

  “The strain of keeping up a disguise. Some of course are more natural liars than others. My father said that a lot of his patients were liars. If they told the truth they might be better off. There’s a woman I used to know who kept up the pretence of having been a landowner in Kenya. She had never been to Kenya in her life. She would talk of her doctor in Harley Street. She lived in a room and kitchen.”

  “Why did your father commit suicide?”

  “I don’t know. He hanged himself. He used to say that one had no reason for living if one had no future. He was referring to his patients. They had no future and they still lived.”

  “Did he believe that he himself had no future?”

  “I don’t know. His suicide came as a great surprise to everyone. That very day he had been issuing pills. His diary was full. Everyone loved him. Sometimes when he came into a patient’s house he would start dancing.”

  “I don’t think I’ll ever write again,” said Ralph suddenly.

  “Are you a writer then?”

  “Yes. I’m a novelist but you won’t have read any of my books. The fact is I can’t concentrate. And another thing. I don’t believe in words any more. They’re no different from spit. No, they’re worse than spit, they’re dangerous. I’m sick of them. They betrayed me. If you live long enough everything betrays you, even the earth itself. Even the things that are dearest to you. Where is there evidence in the universe for love?”