“No thanks,” said Tom, “not just now. It’s too early.”
“Aye it’s that, it’s early. The day’s so long,” said Niven, “ever since.” His voice strengthened. “We met, your mother and me, at a social. We had a drink or two, nothing much, mind you, your mother was a respectable woman, being married to a bank manager an’ all. We were lonely people, ye see. We used to go to the park now and again and sit and watch the ducks. Sometimes we’d go to the flicks. She’d tell me about you and how well you were doing. We were company for each other, understand? Mind you, there was gossip, but we didna mind. We had no one else, see? Afore I met her I had my pigeons but I gave them up. Would you like a cup of tea then?”
“No thanks, I just had one,” said Tom.
“Your mother was a strange woman. She wanted me to get a business o’ my ain but I had nae money. She’d show me your father’s books, a’ thae books he’d read. She used to cook for me. I laid off the drink when I knew her. Not a drop touched my lips hardly. She was too good for me, I knew that. She was a kind woman, she used to wash my clothes. Sometimes I’d go to her house and she’d come to mine, but I never married her. It was companionship, see? Sometimes she’d sit there in that chair and say that she’d not done very well for you, but that she’d tried her best. She used to say that, ‘I tried my best but I didn’t understand them.’ That’s what she used to say. And I used to comfort her. Not that I could give her much o’ that. A few weeks back she complained of a bad cold but she wouldn’t go to bed and then she got the pneumonia. And they took her to hospital. I used to go along with grapes and she would lie there and not say anything. One night a man came to my door and told me she had died. And I took to the drink again, that’s what I did.” Tom suddenly realised that the man was crying and he had never seen a man crying before.
“It’s all right,” he found himself saying, “it’s all right. It wasn’t your fault. It was my fault. I shouldn’t have left her.”
After a while, after wiping his eyes with a large soiled handkerchief, Niven continued: “Mind you, she had a temper too. And she wanted to improve me, as she called it, but it was too late. Some nights we quarrelled but we always went back to each other, since there was no one else.”
“I understand,” said Tom. He felt sluices inside him opening as if at last he was in touch with some reality that he actually felt and did not simply know about. His book and his preoccupations seemed very far away, as if they belonged to a dream world, except that at the centre there was Ann. He had another vision which seemed to imprint itself on the grimy wall. There was a fire and a smiling fair-haired man and a limping girl. The man was saying to him, “You shouldn’t have done that, you know.” He, Tom, had smashed a bottle of wine in the limping girl’s hand. He ran away as the man raised his stick. He was running through a desert but as he looked behind him he saw the two of them releasing hawks which followed him. He knew that wherever he went the two of them would be waiting for him. And sure enough they were. He found himself back at the fire, the smiling man raising a stick, the limping girl holding a rose which turned into the head of a snake swaying to no music. He began to sweat as if he had found himself in the middle of a nightmare in the daytime.
Niven was staring dully down at the floor. He was saying, “At first I couldna do anything. I couldna move. I didna want to leave the house. I didna believe it. I didna believe I wouldna see her again. So I took up the drinking again. I gave up ma work.”
“You should go back,” said Tom.
“What do you know about it?” said Niven aggressively. “Eh? What do you know about it? You’re just a child. You left her when she needed you. She used to say that you had done well for yourself but she was lying, I can see that. You havena, have ye?” He seemed to take an unholy joy in knowing that Tom was almost as badly off as himself.
“That’s true,” said Tom, “she used to say things like that.”
“You’re right, she said,” said Niven. “She was a good woman. She was a strong woman. We all let her down, that’s what we did. We let her down. She was looking for someone strong but we werena strong, were we?”
“No,” said Tom, “you’re right, we weren’t.”
“What did you come here for?” said Niven again aggressively. “Were you looking for money? Did ye want to find out about the house? I didna want her money. I’d ’a done wi’oot her money.”
“I know that,” said Tom.
“Do you, eh? I don’t know what happened to her house. Some other people are in it now. I couldn’t care less about the house.” He took another bottle of beer and bit the top off with a savage gesture. “You didna help her much, did you?”
Tom got to his feet. There was nothing more for him to see there. The pattern was a usual one. He himself would have to escape the pattern to know. He would have to get back, but there was something he needed to know. Richardson. Richardson. Who was Richardson? Richard. Dick. Richard, Dick. Something there if he could only get hold of it. Richardson.
Dixon.
He stood swaying in the middle of the floor while the small man raged at him. Was that it then? Was that who Dixon had been all the while? Richardson? Yet when he looked at them both they seemed to be the same, suave, witty, knowledgeable. So why had he made Dixon the hero of the book? He had often wondered where the idea of the story had come from. Richardson too had been clever and witty and bright. Richardson had been his god when he was in school. Now Dixon was collapsing in his mind and he couldn’t continue with his book. Why was that? The White City? The City of Culture, the school perhaps. Was that what it was? He felt he had grasped an essential part of the puzzle but not the whole of it. There was some part he still had to find, to grasp. And all the while Niven was shouting at him like a crazy man.
“You left her didn’t you? You left her alone. You didna care. Get out. GET OUT.” Tom thought he might soon come at him with a bottle. There were flecks of spittle on his mouth and he looked like a crazy man. He backed away from him, opened and shut the door and walked down the stairs. He wasn’t going to run, that was for sure, but he didn’t want any trouble. The stair spiralled downwards and on his side was always that deep dark well. To think that his mother had once visited that place because of her loneliness. He hadn’t thought about that. He should have thought about it. She couldn’t write to pass some of the time so what must her life have been? Perhaps she had started to think, perhaps she had changed, but by then it was too late. No one would care whether she had changed or not, whether she had learned. And yet perhaps she had learned to see, but there was no way of making amends. For there was no one to make amends to. Perhaps that little man had seen the best of her, perhaps she had become kindly and warm at the end. And then she had learned to accept her death. She had lain down under it for there was nowhere else to go. Perhaps he himself shouldn’t have run away on that summer’s morning which he couldn’t clearly recollect since something in him, some obstacle, was preventing him from doing so. What was that obstacle? Why couldn’t he remember? Had it occurred after some particular experience? Was that it?
He found his feet taking him steadily towards the cemetery. Without thinking he entered a flower shop. “I should like,” he heard himself saying, “some flowers to put on a grave. In a vase or something.” He had a vague memory of seeing some flowers in vases at cemeteries, inside marble bowls. He got the flowers and the vase and continued on his way.
As he walked along he knew that he was now finished permanently with Dixon. He knew that Dixon was a part of him which he must get rid of or die. All these books had been dreams, all these libraries had been an escape from the world. His father had used them to escape and now Richardson had done the same. For look what he had turned into, a “wee man” cracking “wee jokes”. It was all a con, that spiritual aesthetic thing. There was no answer to be found in that direction. The answers were to be found in the world around when one surrendered to that world. One could only live, the questions were irrelevant
since a reason for living could never be found. In all the philosophical books that had ever been written where could one find a single new fact, apart from interpretations of facts that had always been known, that lay around one like the rubble of the city? He had been frightened of being with other people, of touching them, of being interested in their concerns. He had been frightened even of Ann, and his jealousy was not a romantic glamour but the fear of dispossession, of solitude.
Was that not what life was about, to find at least one person one could trust, whom one could touch lightly on the shoulder as being near and true, as the companion in the terrible flux? What else was there? What else?
24
IT WAS A large cemetery, larger than any he had ever been to. The last one he had visited was while he was working on the roads. It had been very quiet, down by a loch, and he had gone and sat in it one day while eating his sandwiches. It was a very old cemetery with graves dating back to the seventeenth century. As he sat there in the sunny air, with butterflies darting about, a large rabbit had run past him, wobbling fatly. There were strong scents in the air, the noise of the water lapping on the shore mingled with the humming of bees, and once a lark rose straight up, singing. There was also, he remembered, a freshly made grave with a spade inside it, and a jacket.
But this one was different, this one was more impersonal. He supposed that like everything else even cemeteries had their different characters. It was kept neat enough and the avenues between the headstones were like streets, but it was impersonal. He had a fantasy of knocking on the large stone doors and receiving no answer in this city cemetery. He walked down each street looking for his mother’s name but he couldn’t see it. He would simply have to walk for a long time till he found it, that was all, for there was no one to tell him where it was. As he walked he carried the vase with its flowers, and studied the wreaths by the tombstones. Some of the flowers were lying loose, some were in vases, and now and again he would see a stone shaped like a Bible, open at a page on which the name and dates of the dead were carved. After a while he began to grow used to being in the graveyard, as if it were quite an ordinary place to be walking in. He imagined it in different seasons of the year; in the winter the wind howling about the headstones, in the spring the flowers coming up, in the late autumn the rain falling steadily and dripping from the stone.
Once to his astonishment he saw a man sitting against one of the headstones reading a comic. It was almost like a hallucination, but the man looked up and said good morning to him, and then went back to reading again. He was wearing blue dungarees and smoking a cigarette. Tom walked on, studying the gravestones. Some were as polished as mirrors so that he could almost see his own reflection in their glittering surfaces, some were old and cheap. The dead too had their orders and ranks, their poverties and riches, funny how he hadn’t thought of that before. He had had some idea that when people were dead they entered an equal kingdom, but that was not the case. Even the act of burial was an economic act and those who could afford bigger and better tombstones set them up, to show that even in death they were richer than the others.
The society of the dead—and his mother inhabited it now. What was happening to her? Her bones were rotting away under there, no matter what flowers he placed above them. But bringing the flowers was a gesture of reconciliation, he sensed that. He was not exactly asking for forgiveness, he was simply entering that world which the dead were part of, and that too was a real world, the real world of death, like the world of birth and marriage. He was involved in an act of commitment. He wanted to be in that world, which was the world of everyone, which was also the world of the dead.
Once he stood resting his arm on a tombstone quite casually and found that he was completely at ease. There was a slight breeze and a blue chilly sky but it was not different from the usual sky. Those dead people hadn’t changed, they weren’t monsters, they had merely succumbed to what he himself would succumb to. He almost felt happy, or if not happy at least contented. And eventually he found her grave.
There was a headstone and on the headstone was written:
Elizabeth Spence dearly beloved wife
of
James Spence
1910–1970
Dead but not forgotten
He stared at the stone for a long time. It was quite a nice stone, prosperous and shining, of a reddish colour. He didn’t know what he was thinking. He wished that he had been there when she had died but otherwise he felt that she had gone forever and that there was nothing anyone could do about it. He couldn’t summon up any hypocritical tears but he arranged the flowers and the vase and felt that the act of doing so was important. It meant that he hadn’t utterly left her alone, though he didn’t think of himself and her as belonging to a chain of generations. He didn’t have that kind of feeling, though he knew that many people had it. Some people were very conscious of their ancestry and thought of themselves as coming at a certain point on a chain, as being significant links. He had never had that feeling.
As he rose from the gravestone he knew that he would come back now and again. All this symbolism was important. It might not be important to Dixon but it was to him. Anything that had lasted for a long time, that had been continued by thousands and millions of people, was not to be despised. That was where Dixon was wrong. The ironical laughter of someone like Dixon was not in the long run important; what was important was the ceremonies and sufferings and beliefs of the ordinary people. It was they, who never read a word that Dixon wrote, who passed final judgment on everything. It was they who spat out what was not healthy.
He got up and made his way to the gate, and as he did so his mind began to wander. He thought of Macdonald who had been working with him on the roads, a large ginger-haired fellow with high cheekbones like a gipsy’s who had told him that he had sexual intercourse with a girl in a cemetery at night on a flat gravestone. “The best I ever had, boy,” he had said. He had met the girl at a dance and had taken her into the cemetery at one in the morning. “There was this moon,” he had said, “shining all over the names.” And he had had her there. Though at first she had been frightened and superstitious but later had become passionate.
And it was then that Tom remembered it all clearly. It all flooded back to him so that he stood astonished in the middle of the cemetery. No, he hadn’t known Jean very well, he hadn’t been going out with her. She hadn’t been a romantic date, she had just been a girl he had liked. She had been with him on the magazine committee in that last summer term. There had been five of them, he couldn’t recall them very clearly, but he could remember her. They used to go outside and sit in the sun and read over articles and poems that had been submitted to them. He had an impression of a wall dappled with shadows. Funny how even that school had become more beautiful and nostalgic that summer, though in actual fact it was crude and dull. But that had been an enchanted summer.
And Richardson had been in charge of them. Not that he took much to do with them but now and again he would come and discuss a poem or two, mostly in order to criticise it fairly ruthlessly.
But Tom could remember it very clearly now. There had been a question of whether his own poems should be put in the magazine and he wanted them in, no question about that. He wanted to see his own name in print, though he knew that perhaps the magazine was not the most glorious aperture for viewing them by. But he had a desire which was almost hurtful in its intensity that the poems should be published. Though he thought that the others and especially Jean hadn’t wanted them. Richardson too had looked at them briefly but had said nothing which was a sure sign that he didn’t think much of them. He hadn’t even bothered to criticise them. Tom could still see him reading them quickly and himself waiting for a verdict because it was so important to him. The poems were the most important things in the world to him at that time. He had only started writing, and he thought it was something he could do since he couldn’t do very much else. All one needed was privacy and a pen and paper. But
Richardson hadn’t said anything at all. If Richardson had liked them then he would have known they were good and that would have been precious to him.
25
HE REMEMBERED THE day very well. It had been a very hot summer’s day and at dinner time he had come into the school, into the coolness away from the dead glare. He had wandered round the hall, jacketless, meeting no one. The place seemed to lie in a dream of emptiness. He had had a look at the defaced notices and had then climbed the stairs to the balcony with a vague idea that he might find the library open. But it wasn’t, and he wandered aimlessly along the balcony, now and again looking down into the hall and for his own amusement turning his thumb down as if he were gazing at phantom gladiators and he himself were the Emperor. He came in his wanderings to the science room and had gone in thinking that it would be cool there with all the taps and glass and tubes. In fact he was bending over the was basin washing his face and hands which felt sticky when he heard from a smallish room off the science room sounds which were like strenuous sighings. Thinking for a moment that they might be made by some of the juniors who had gone in there and were engaged in horseplay, or perhaps harming some equipment, he had gone over and opened the door.
And there he saw them, that is, he saw Richardson lying on top of her, that is, Jean, her legs clasped tightly round his back, he with his face fastened to hers like a bird’s famished beak. Richardson was in his shirt (white), fastened, probing, intent. Tom felt as if his face had been smashed in like a window pane. He stood there astonished, confused, in the grasp of a whirlwind of emotions, but above all what seemed to surge into his mind was not the immorality of the episode, it was the animality of it. It was the sight of the cool detached Richardson in that intense carnality, attached.
Goodbye, Mr Dixon Page 16