It was amazing how “ordinary” people did these right things, how they learned to do them. They did not live in a world of fiction, they allowed things to be what they were, they did not probe and dissect them, they did not create phantoms and gargoyles and monsters. They rested in the real. They learned how to see about the minister and pay him, how the right people must be seated at the right tables, how the telegrams must be read. He felt it extraordinary that all this should happen in such a fluent way. And yet they all appeared ordinary and drab. And all the people around him knew this too, they too had undergone it all. They had succeeded in being married and marrying. They had taken on responsibility.
Taxis began to appear and the people left the church and entered them, talking animatedly. They would go to a cheap hotel somewhere and have their fairly cheap food and everything would be done correctly.
The spectators too began to drift away and he was left alone. Without knowing what he was doing he went into the church. He stared straight down the aisle and saw that at the organ a white-haired man was playing by himself as if unaware that everyone had gone. The music he was playing didn’t sound like a hymn tune, it seemed classical. Perhaps it was Bach or someone like that. He stayed for some time listening to the music and watching the player who hadn’t noticed him, then he went out again. Perhaps the organist was a purist, he played for himself alone. Perhaps he liked playing without an audience. Perhaps that was what his purity consisted of.
He entered a pub and ordered a beer.
He drank steadily. For some reason the white-haired man playing alone haunted him. He seemed to be symbolic of something though he couldn’t tell what. The white helpless hair had seemed to drift down the back of his head as in a picture of Beethoven he had once seen.
“As a matter of fact,” said a woman who was sitting at the next table, “he had no reason to be jealous …”
Tom went to the bar and leaned on it ordering a whisky. He felt reckless as if he wanted to spend all his money. The man beside him was reading a sports paper.
“To tell you the truth,” said the man to the barman, “I didn’t think Johnstone played so well last Saturday. I think he’s past it.”
“I’ll tell you something,” said the barman leaning forward confidentially, “I’ll tell you something. European football is far better than ours.”
“I agree,” said the man.
“I’ll tell you,” the barman continued, “if I was managing the Scottish team I’ll tell you what I’d do. I’d teach them to control the ball, and how to pass. That’s where the Europeans have it over us all the time, all the time.”
“Couldn’t agree more,” said Sports Paper. “Couldn’t agree more. Our players can’t pass. Not inch-perfect passes.”
“And what’s more—” said the barman. “Another whisky, sir?” he said to Tom.
“And what’s more,” he continued after pouring it out, “they can pass moving forward, that’s what they can do. I’d have them out hail and shine, passing and controlling the ball. That’s what I’d do.”
“No doubt about it,” said Sports Paper, “I agree a hundred per cent. A hundred per cent. Jim Baxter could do that, I think you’ll agree.”
“Jim Baxter …” said the barman, sighing. “We’ll never see his likes again, I can tell you that right now. We’ll never see another Jim Baxter, that’s for sure. And I’ll tell you something else. My father used to tell me that Alan Morton could do it. But nowadays what do you get? What do you get? You get people who kick the ball up the park and hope for the best. That’s what you get. They kick it up the park.”
“I agree absolutely,” said Sports Paper. “No question of it. That’s what they do. That’s why people won’t go and watch them. That’s why the League is folding up.”
“You can say that again,” said the barman wiping the bar busily with a cloth. “At his best Johnstone is good I grant you but he’s never been any good in an international. He’s too moody, that’s what’s wrong with him. Gordon Smith was the same, he was never any good in an international. I grant you he was good for his club but not in an international. In an international, never.”
“You never said a truer word,” said Sports Paper, “never a truer word.”
“And I’ll tell you something else—” said the barman. “Another whisky, sir? And I’ll tell you something else, till they get the players to control the ball they’ll never get anywhere against the Continental sides. Nowhere. We’ve got the talent but what do we do with it? We waste it. They’ll have to start from basics, that’s what I say. We should be out all the time looking for youngsters, that’s what the scouts should be doing. Right?”
“Right,” said Sports Paper.
Much later Tom walked home in the cold air. He felt light-headed. The city around him was vibrating and blazing with lights. It was dangerous and precarious. In the distance he could see the multi-storey flats remote and cold like banks of computers. He tried to imagine what it would be like to live in one of them, problems of milk and mail, all sorts of daily problems, or standing at the window on a summer’s morning high as the birds and looking out across the river. But at night they looked like the latest in technology, all green lights, shining above the huddled slums, with their rustlings of rats.
What was Dixon doing now? Writing away somewhere in his airy flat. Fitting his masterpiece together. Far from the madding crowd. Wearing his bow tie, playing his music, putting his ironies on the record player.
Tom felt as if he wanted to talk to someone. He would have to go back to his flat and continue with his own book, such as it was. There was nothing else he could do. Even though he hated his hero now. Even though he couldn’t stand him. And ahead of him another mile of walking in the cold night in the pulsing city.
As he walked along, for the first time in his life he felt afraid. He had to cross the windy bridge and he was panicking. He stopped for a moment. He couldn’t understand the sudden panic, why he was suddenly shaking, why his whole body seemed to be vibrating like the bridge in a high wind. He stopped as if to gather himself together before proceeding. It wasn’t altogether that he was drunk. He wasn’t drunk, only light-headed. It was almost as if he felt that he didn’t exist, as if he was a shade, a ghost, a coloured ripple on the water. He was a frightened shade. The book was slipping away from him, he realised, and the book had been his reason for existence. Dixon was fading away from him, with his twisted ironical superior smile, he could see him drifting into the complex of lights, into the winds. He could feel him leaking away from him, whole paragraphs, chapters.
His feet echoed on the bridge and as he walked along he saw for the first time a figure coming towards him. The figure was black and carrying something in its hand. He thought it might be a knife but surely it couldn’t be that. I shall run, he thought, I shall run away. I shall turn back. There was the bridge shaking in the wind and the water below. Never before had he felt so frightened. He knew that the figure was hostile. He knew that he was going to be attacked. And yet he was advancing towards the figure. Slowly, but still advancing. And after all he had very little money. His feet rang on the stone as he walked into the wind towards the black figure. What was frightening him? He couldn’t understand it. He had never been so conscious of his body before, of his bones, of his blood, of his flesh, of his vulnerability. But now he was conscious of them. He felt them as distinct and heavy, his own and not his own. He felt the blood tingling in his body. He felt himself as mortal, his bared breast, his bared face.
The black figure was coming towards him. And he knew that he must go forward or die. The wind shook them both but the figure hadn’t stopped, it was coming on, a ballet dancer. In the terrible opera of lights. The wind was pure and piercing and screaming. His legs dragged him forward against his will since every other part of him wanted to run back. And at a certain point across the bridge he surrendered. His body seemed to say, let what will happen happen. And then at that very moment a warmth coursed throu
gh him, a fire, his body became fiercely pure and exhilarated. His feet moved freely forward, he didn’t care. He was willing to let it all happen, all the events that would happen. He felt them as necessary. He would remember that night for the rest of his life. Ahead of him was the killer—he knew there were many of these attackers—but his body had decided it didn’t care. His body had decided, let what will happen happen. And as it did so he felt free. He felt as if he could dance. Some energy was released in him. The city blazed around him with marvellous beauty, heartbreaking in the pure desert wind.
And as he came up to the figure he saw that after all it was a man in a black suit carrying a rolled up umbrella which he could not unfurl in the wind. The man looked at him terrified and he looked back. He said, “Good evening”, and walked on. For a moment Tom had a sense of a transformation, a magical renewal, as if really there had been a killer there and by simply going forward he had changed the killer into a peaceable man with an umbrella. It had been like something out of a fairy tale. Suddenly he danced gaily and shouted into the teeth of the wind as if he had discovered himself. Suddenly he was filled with an overwhelming joy, suddenly he heard in the voices of the wind extraordinary hopes, and smelt real perfumes. Suddenly he felt that he could write good things, that he could create a chapter which would burn with pure fire and which would have the desert wind howling in it. And he realised that the bridge was long passed and he was near home.
18
THE SCHOOL WAS large and airy and full of glass and it was built on a slight rise on a hill out of the city. Tom asked the janitor where Ann’s room was and was directed across the hall into an alcove where he found it. He knocked on the door. She didn’t seem at all surprised to see him and she asked him to come in. Some children dressed up in bright clothes were standing about on the floor as if they had been taking part in a play. She introduced him to them as a gentleman who would like to see them acting and they considered this to be quite natural and continued with what they were doing. After a while he realised that the play was Cinderella.
In the first scene there was Cinderella herself, dressed in a drab gown, scrubbing the floor with the back of a duster while she carried the wastepaper basket about with her to do duty for a bucket. Lolling on chairs with pieces of chalk in their mouths were the two ugly sisters who weren’t in fact at all ugly. They gossiped to each other while now and again throwing instructions at Cinderella who dashed about making imaginary beds, cleaning the floor, bringing in coal and so on.
Then a little boy came in with an envelope, which was supposed to contain the invitation to the ball. The two sisters squabbled over it and started to dress up, making Cinderella comb their hair and attend to their clothes. The glass in the door served as a mirror. The two ugly sisters were enchanting blonde girls with long hair who however spoke peevishly and harshly as if echoing the language of their parents. They stamped their feet and shouted and screamed with adult authority and shortly afterwards gossiped to each other about the ball. He found their ability to make such transitions quite extraordinary.
The two sisters left and Cinderella was left alone. She sat down miserably at a desk which had been drawn out to the middle of the floor and talked tearfully to herself. She heard a sound, looked up, and was confronted by her Fairy Godmother in a ballooning white dress, waving a ruler for a wand and repeating the age-old magical words in an endearing childish voice.
“Who are you?” she said in a faltering voice.
“I am your Fairy Godmother.”
There was the business with the coach and horses and the pumpkins. Tom marvelled at the assurance and inventiveness of the children. For instance, instead of pumpkins they had oranges.
Cinderella was transformed and set off for the ball.
The next scene was the ball. Dancers danced together to pop music. The children had picked up impeccably the mannerisms of the dancers on Top of the Pops and swayed with a cool sensuousness to the record. They were inexpressibly poignant, their childlike bodies merging into an adult poise. At one side of the room was the prince and his attendant—a fat boy with a running nose—talking to each other in a superior manner. Standing on the other side were the two ugly sisters, making malicious comments about the dancers, and waving petulant fans. They rolled their eyes and sighed in an exaggerated manner. At one stage they each in turn asked the prince for a dance but he turned away disdainfully, and gazed at a map of Scotland which hung on the wall.
Then Cinderella entered, dressed in white. He went over to her and they danced. One by one the dancers all dropped away leaving the two dancers in the middle of the floor. Suddenly a little girl rushed out and moved the hands of the clock to midnight. Cinderella gathered her dress about her and rushed off, leaving her shoe behind her. The prince ran out the door, looked this way and that, apparently couldn’t see her and came back disconsolately.
In the third scene the two sisters were discussing the ball when there was a knock at the door. It was the prince and his servant. They asked if the sisters could try on a shoe which the servant was carrying. They did so eagerly, squabbling with each other when they heard what it was for, but the shoe fitted neither. In another part of the room, though really off stage, Cinderella was sitting on the floor, listening to sad music from a record player. The prince asked the sisters if there was anyone else in the house but they assured him there was no one. He asked where the music was coming from. They made all sorts of excuses but eventually he demanded to see where the music was coming from and Cinderella was brought on to the stage. He tried the shoe on her foot and it fitted. It was really the girl he had seen at the ball though she was in fact dressed in dull grey.
The wedding took place to pop music, comic and yet somehow moving. Tom noticed how the girl who had been acting the part of Cinderella seemed to have projected herself into the world of a princess: there was a grace about her movements, a conscious pride. He was astonished at the ideas and turmoil that seethed in his own head. He had never realised that education could be like this, that it could draw from children this spontaneous commitment. The atmosphere of the class was warm, free and relaxed. There was a feeling of emotional growth in the air, a controlled unpredictability. The fact that there was no script seemed to help. And all the time Ann was standing in the background, except that now and then she would interject an idea if the play was settling into a repetitive groove. He gazed at her in astonishment realising that she was a craftsman, a real teacher. And yet to look at her one would not have believed this. She looked usually so pale and quiet but here she was changed, had become strangely beautiful.
When the play was over and the bell had rung and the children had left for their lunch he said to her:
“That was amazing.”
“You liked it then?” She seemed pleased.
“It was superb,” he said. “Absolutely. I didn’t think that sort of thing was possible.”
“Oh, anything is possible. What you have to do is release their energies. That’s all. They are natural actors.”
There was an awkward silence and then she said, “Would you like to see around for a bit?”
They walked around and they looked at drawings and paintings. They saw magazines and newspapers lying about on desks. They saw piles of bright books, crayons, tape-recorders, record players. The paintings on the walls, she told him, were by the children themselves. Everywhere were bright colours, a higgledy piggledy storm of creativity, as if ideas were being picked out of the air in accordance with the laws of life itself. There was no sense of a forced order, no sense of anyone looking for a theology that would unite the data, that would arrange the world. Everything incomplete, disorderly, spawning …
“It’s quite astonishing,” he said. “Astonishing.” He felt as if he had encountered something important, as if he had been hit on the head with a hammer which made bright colours fly around him.
“I found your note,” he said at last. “It was inside the door when I got home.”
/> “Yes, I went to your flat but you weren’t there,” she said. She didn’t tell him about her feeling of desolation when he hadn’t answered the door.
“There was a man with a dog,” she said. “The dog was leaping up at him all the time. It was very odd.”
“Yes,” he said, “one of these days it’ll bite him.” He was suddenly awkward again and couldn’t think what to say. She looked so at home where she was, and so suddenly desirable, because she knew what she was doing with her life. She seemed to have a purpose and to be inside that purpose, surrounded by her own kind of creativity, and the idea of it staggered him for a moment. Perhaps, he thought, she is more creative than me. And he was puzzled by the thought, as if suddenly he had been pushed off an imaginary rock.
“Is there anywhere you want to go,” he said.
“Why don’t we go out of the city on Monday?” she said. “We have a holiday.”
“I’d like that,” he said.
He was enthusiastic about his idea. “We could go into the country. We could take a bus and walk about and come back at night. It might be a good day.”
“I would really like that,” she said.
She looked at her watch. “I must go for my lunch,” she said. “I have to go to the canteen. I’ll see you on Monday then.”
“Come to the flat then,” he said. “We’ll leave from the flat. At about two o’clock.”
“All right,” she said. As she turned away he gazed after her for a while. Her trim figure disappeared round a corner and he turned away from the room with all its projects and bright paintings. He went out of the school threading his way between bunches of shouting children who were running about as if demented in their world. There was a fresh breeze blowing and he felt as if he were moving with it, as if sails inside him were filling with it, and there was a blue glittering sea ahead of him.
Goodbye, Mr Dixon Page 11