Goodbye, Mr Dixon

by Iain Crichton Smith

  He couldn’t quite analyse his own feelings. To be involved again or not? She seemed very restful, but perhaps he needed more than that. Perhaps he needed a storm of some kind to keep him working. Already as he was talking to her he was thinking about her place in the Cultured City.

  His mind suddenly became cold and clear and he could see where this was going quite easily and he didn’t seem to need her. As if sensing this she got up. He said that he would see her again. Where did she want to go? The zoo might be a good place; he liked looking at animals, did she? She said that she was very fond of animals; she didn’t mention that she had already been at the zoo a few times with her class. He was grateful to her for coming. It was with a certain sadness however that he watched her go downstairs to enter her own world again. There was one thing sure, he wouldn’t get in touch with his wife again: if she wanted to see him she would have to take the initiative. He had his own world now, with his books and pictures and this girl. He had been pleased that she had liked his Vermeer, the one with the girl pouring milk into a milk jug. It was a solid happy picture, which he loved. She would learn from him and he would learn from her. Perhaps such a life would be enough. Unless, of course, he thought with a sudden panic, she had someone else whom she was interested in. Perhaps someone else had already found her or would find her. He imagined such a person as a dark missile speeding towards her at that very moment. That would be dreadful. That would be unimaginably dreadful.

  16

  AFTER TOM HAD gone Ann ran after him, but he had walked away so quickly and angrily that she couldn’t find him. She had returned to the house dispiritedly. Why had she acted like that, practically ignoring him? Was it that she had wanted to make him jealous? She was ashamed of herself and yet angry too. He hadn’t needed to be so sensitive. She told Mary about it, but Mary had simply said, “Oh, that fellow glowering all night in a corner. Who is he anyway? You should tell him to go to hell.”

  Sometimes Ann wondered who Mary would marry. She was a bit alabaster-like and cold and variable. At the moment she was going with an arty bloke who talked with an affected drawl and wore a lot of hair on his face and head. Ann knew that she herself wanted to marry. She wasn’t the type to live forever on her own. But on the other hand Tom was a bit odd to say the least. He flared into anger very easily and as far as she could see he didn’t have a proper job. The conservative part of her nature was a bit wary of him, and yet there was another part which was attracted to the mysterious smouldering quality in him.

  “Do you really think I should see him again?” she asked Mary who was combing her hair.

  “Up to you. He looked a bit of a drip to me. And there was a patch on his jacket,” said Mary casually peering into the mirror and screwing up her face. She said this quite without emphasis as if her judgment were reasonable and acceptable. Ann stood in the middle of the room and watched her. Mary was very proud of her hair. She spent a lot of time on it. And it was very crisp and boyish and glistening, resting on her head like a Greek helmet. It made her look like an antique Greek such as Ann had once seen in a Life magazine when she was doing a project.

  It was one of those moments which seem to hold the highest significance, like a vase full of sparkling water which one bears about carefully. Ann almost shook as she made the discovery. And the discovery was that the patch in the jacket had made Tom seem real for the first time. She stared at Mary astonished that she hadn’t realised what she had said but Mary continued to comb her hair.

  Imagine, thought Ann, making a statement like that so casually. For that matter she herself hadn’t noticed the patch on the jacket. A well surged up within her full of spring water and she felt renewed and at the same time she felt pity for Mary.

  To have a patch on one’s jacket was a distinguishing mark. It was what separated Tom from herself, from Mary. It was what made him real.

  “Yes,” she said in astonishment, “he had, hadn’t he?”

  “We should never have asked him,” said Mary, “if he can’t speak to people. He pretends he’s high and mighty. I know the type.”

  “With a patch on his jacket,” said Ann for the first time speaking to Mary without awe of her superior beauty and sophistication. Mary seemed to sense this and she looked at her in surprise and said, “What’s wrong with you anyway?”

  “Nothing,” said Ann. She wanted to burst out laughing. Her hero with a patch on his jacket.

  But at the same time she knew that it wasn’t going to be easy.

  “I think I shall go and see him,” she said.

  “You must be off your nut,” said Mary.

  “How can I tell what he’s like till I go and see him?” said Ann. But she did know what he was like. He was different from Mary’s arty friends. He wasn’t affected.

  “It’s your life,” said Mary, dismissing her and turning away into her dream. There was one thing about Mary’s friends, none of them had a patch on his jacket. None of them needed to have their jackets mended. And she felt that there was some odd significance in that.

  “What have you done with the needle and thread?” she asked Mary.

  “I’ve no idea,” said Mary.

  Ann searched and found them inside a green box. She put both in her handbag and said, “Be seeing you.” She ran down into the street which seemed suddenly alive and full of interesting people. She patted the head of a boy who was kicking a rainbow-coloured football against a railing. After she had passed him she looked back but in fact there was no patch on his sleeve or his knees. She hoped very much that Tom would be at home when she arrived.

  17

  WHEN MRS HARROW left the house Tom determined to follow her. He didn’t really know why he wanted to do this but he knew that it was in some way important to him to find out whether after all she had this house she was talking about or whether it was all really a fantasy. Perhaps on the other hand it was a ruse for him to get away from his book especially as he wasn’t quite clear what to do with Dixon, whom he was getting more and more to dislike if not actually to despise. It might have been that Dixon was becoming more and more unclear to him but he felt that it went deeper than that. Perhaps he felt that Dixon was a conman and he wanted to know if Mrs Harrow was a conwoman too.

  He remembered the first time he had encountered her. It had been on the stair when he was going down with some rubbish to the bin, loaves of bread that he had forgotten about and had left lying about till they had become green, tins emptied of tasteless fruit, newspapers which he had now given up reading. She had been hanging up washing on the back green. Before he knew where he was she had begun to tell him about this new house that she was in the process of buying and decorating so that she could rent it to students and make money from it. She had told him that in the past she had been working in hotels. It seemed very important to her that he should know about her project, as if she felt that she wouldn’t appear real to him or serious unless she had established herself as someone with a future and business to handle. He had been very bored, the bucket in his hand, she standing there small and squat with a cold fresh wind blowing about her. “The silly cow,” he kept muttering to himself. She reminded him of a man called Derry he had met while he was working on the roads. This man was always writing away for jobs but when he was asked to go for an interview he never went. He wrote the letters very beautifully on fine notepaper and seemed quite educated. He kept the letters which he got back and showed them to anyone who would look at the evidence that in fact there was a possibility of his getting a job away from the roads. The very possibility was enough. The man was in fact Irish, always neatly turned out, and he wore a groomed moustache. He referred often to a small croft which he owned in Ireland and which he said he could go back to if he wished.

  When therefore Mrs Harrow left the house dressed in her fragmentary furs, Tom followed her. He felt like a detective hired by some obscure agency to find out the truth about an evasive client. Some years before he would never have set on such a trial and he har
dly even knew why he was doing it now. Mrs Harrow walked ahead of him quite briskly and he pursued her at a safe distance. She never looked back and he thought that this argued a definite purpose. Perhaps she really did have this house; perhaps she was really decorating it. They walked one behind the other across the windy bridge, her fur like the feathers of a bird stirred in the breeze.

  All around him he could see signs of the city being rebuilt, old houses being pulled down, new ones going up. Yellow cranes like dinosaurs clawing at the earth. Men with acetylene lamps burning iron bars away, the blue flame flickering.

  Eventually they reached the main part of the city and it was more difficult to keep track of her. She went into a supermarket and he followed her, just keeping out of sight, as she pottered about with her wire basket, considering purchases and deciding against them, weighing their cost against her resources. He didn’t know where her money came from, what she lived on. He thought that perhaps Ann would have known the answer to that sort of question without difficulty. Dixon, of course, wouldn’t. She was too dumpy, too silly, too ordinary, for Dixon.

  She paused for a long time at various counters. Once he saw her at the cheese counter, picking up cheeses and weighing them in her hand, as if deciding whether she was going to get value for money. Some were red and some white and some fat and fine and yellow in their cellophane covers. After a long time however she put them all down and turned away, not buying any of them after all. Ah, thought Tom laughingly, the tragedy of choice. The existentialist confrontations with cheese.

  From the cheese counter she moved to the fruit counter and bought two oranges and some apples. Now and again she would look in her purse with an exact regard. It was funny to be watching another human being like this when she did not realise that she was being watched. There was something unclean about it. It reduced the person to a kind of machine, a caricature. It made him feel sordid. For a moment he nearly left the store.

  When she eventually took the basket to the girl at the adding machine there was very little in it. Just the fruit, one or two tins, and a loaf. The girl didn’t even look at her, she merely removed the articles from the basket and priced them on her machine. Music drifted over the supermarket, some pop song or other designed to soothe and prevent thought. Mrs Harrow walked out and he followed her. He was hoping she wouldn’t get on a bus, but she made no move to do that. In any case it was dry and she probably didn’t have much money.

  She stopped for a long time at a jeweller’s window and stared into it. There were rings, brooches, watches, stones of all kinds, emeralds, opals, etcetera. He couldn’t imagine what she was thinking of as she stared dully at the window. Perhaps she was thinking of her marriage. Once she craned forward to look at a particularly large necklace of pearls which dangled and writhed on a red velvet background. She shifted the bag from one hand to another and moved on.

  She went into the next shop which advertised ladies’ clothes. He waited outside as he didn’t dare to go in and hoped that there wasn’t a back exit. Was this then how she spent her afternoons, going from shop to shop, studying the unattainable? He was stabbed by an almost unbearable pain. Why had he not known about this before? He saw coming towards him a dandyish looking man with grey hair and a grey moustache who was carrying a cane. The man reminded him of Dixon and he instantly disliked him. He thought, I shall get my revenge on Dixon for what he has done to me, for the fact that I believed in him. He thought of what he had heard one of the girls in the supermarket saying to a friend, “Do you know who I was dreaming of last night?”

  “Go on, keep me in suspense,” said the other girl.

  “And it wasn’t anyone I think much of,” said the first girl. What did these girls have to do with Dixon or he with them? Tom thought, I don’t like either of them.

  A piece of paper swirled past him in a small whirlwind. He saw that it was a page out of a comic. Its cheap red vulgar paper delighted him so that for a moment he forgot that he was waiting and he nearly bent down and picked it up to read it.

  She came out but she didn’t see him. She continued on her way and he followed her. She went into a teashop and sat in a corner drinking tea and eating cake. She spent a long time there while he waited. Her back was to him and he could see her picking at the cake and drinking the tea delicately with her forefinger curled round the handle of the cup.

  A policeman walked past him slowly turning his head this way and that. And Tom felt guilty as if he had been caught in some terrible act. But the policeman’s glance bounced off him impersonally, calm and self-possessed. Still he himself had felt for a moment panicky as if he had been caught in another man’s mind, and it shook him. Ahead of him on a corner he saw a small man with a wooden leg selling what must be artificial flowers. Now and again he would clasp his arms around his body. His face was thin and pale and indomitable. A thin slice of fat from the world’s supermarket.

  Mrs Harrow came out of the restaurant. He couldn’t imagine where she was going next. She stopped for a moment at a huge cinema made of blue and white marble which was showing the Decameron and then passed on. As she walked ahead of him he tried to think what she must have been like in the past but he couldn’t. She might have been young and pretty but perhaps she hadn’t been. She certainly must have been young. She walked on, clutching her bag, once patting her hair. Did she in fact do this pilgrimage every day? Was that how she passed the time?

  Now she was standing at a bus stop. She was looking in her purse as if searching for her fare. In front of her was a man reading a newspaper. He thought: Perhaps she really has this house. Perhaps I should let her have it without investigation. But he wanted to know. One had heard of women leaving thousands of pounds after existing on bread and sausage in small dingy rooms. Perhaps she was one of them. Perhaps she was a genuine mystery and not to be ignored. As she stood at the bus stop the thought suddenly came to him that she looked rather like his mother if she had been a bit fatter. It was something about the stance, the stolid acceptance of what was to come. He shied away from the image.

  The bus came and she climbed on it. It was almost for a moment as if she saw him but he couldn’t be sure. Perhaps she had been aware of him the whole time, but he didn’t think that. In any case it didn’t matter, he wasn’t yet ready to follow her to the ultimate conclusion. He was willing to let her have her house. The time for investigation hadn’t yet come. Some time soon but not yet. It would be a terrible blow if the story weren’t true. Somehow she had become important to him, with her moth-eaten fragmentary furs and her bag with the sparse foodstuffs. He felt he ought to give her a chance, but was that too a form of cowardice?

  The bus drove away splashing him a bit as he stood there not caring whether she saw him or not. It occurred to him that when she came to him with jam and scones she was perhaps depriving herself of them and this made him feel uncomfortable, for it changed everything, didn’t it?

  He turned away from the bus stop and found himself face to face with a church. As he stood there, he saw people coming out of it. There had apparently been a wedding and they hung about in small groups talking self-consciously. In a short time Tom found himself in the middle of a group of spectators, mostly drab women with shopping bags, all standing by the railings, staring. He couldn’t understand the expression on their faces. Perhaps it was a strange longing, perhaps a looking into a more romantic past which they had idealised, or into a possibility which had escaped them.

  The bride, her white dress blossoming in the slight breeze, stood smiling nervously just outside the door. The tentative smile became more definite as a little boy wearing a kilt ran forward and offered her a bouquet of red flowers before retreating hastily into the shelter of his mother’s arms. The bride held the bouquet uneasily as if it were a shopping bag. Her husband with oiled hair and a cut-price morning suit which seemed too large for him stood stiffly beside her. A photographer bent on one knee and fired his camera at them. The bride started as if she had been hit by a bullet and
then resumed her shy, awkward, patient attitude.

  The women gathered in groups around her, putting their hands on their hats as if they were in danger of blowing away. A small squat man with large red hands which he didn’t seem to know what to do with stood beside the bride, probably her father. For the first time in his life Tom began to think about the ceremony as if from inside the mind of the bride. She was stepping out into a new world. She had taken a decision. She had decided to spend the rest of her days with that man with the oiled hair and the cut-price over-large suit. She had decided that she would have children by him and populate the world with miniature versions of the two of them. This was in fact the greatest day of her life, the only day in her whole life that people would stop and stare at her as if she were some bird clad in common yet extraordinary plumage. The only day on which she would emerge from the crowd, the only day she would be famous.

  She would keep the photographs, she would remember those people who had been at her wedding, she would remember that day with its slight breeze, she might even remember Tom as a face she had once seen. She would think of herself as fresh and blossoming. Tom thought with amazement that once upon a time, on perhaps such a day, his own father and mother had been like this, they too had made a decision about each other, they too had worn their new strange clothes, they too had thought that the world was beginning anew. His mother had smiled exactly like this, shyly and nervously, his father had stood there awkwardly perhaps in such an over-large suit. The two of them had made a decision in the real world.

  For this was a real thing, it was not fictional. It was not a dream. This was a stepping out into the flux, which would be renewed forever by an album of coloured photographs. The two of them would become “one flesh”. This was a ceremony to which all must conform except the saints and the hermits and the neurotic. She must take on the responsibility of the real world. The mother, who looked clumsy and ill-dressed, must look after the guests, she must send out invitations, she must do everything in the way it was done by everybody else. The bride too must do things in the right way, she must cut the cake, she must buy the right sort of dress. It was amazing how all those things got done. They got done because they were necessary.