Eventually it stopped as if it could go on no longer. Tom looked at it for a moment, that being assembled from layer after layer of old flesh and old cloth and outdated newspapers, wondering what he should do. But he knew that there was nothing really that he could do. He put his hands despairingly in his pockets and pulled out the last silver he had and pushed it into the claws. Then he hurried on. The being, composed of greyish fog, lifted its hand in a feeble wave, and as it did so the money poured out of the hand and dropped on to the road.
Tom walked on, looking around him from time to time in case duplicates of the being would emerge out of the night, but none came. The night was in fact astonishingly quiet. He saw again as if ahead of him the two Jehovah’s Witnesses clad in their streaming plastic, as if fresh from space, and saying, “What do you think about life?”
When he reached his flat it seemed as if he had been away for centuries. He stared at the room where he worked as if he did not recognise it. There were books lying on the floor. There was a mass of typescript. The harsh light of the bulb beat down on the carpet.
He got hold of the typescript and systematically began to tear it into little pieces which he scattered like confetti into the bucket ready to be put out in the morning. He looked at the clock but it had stopped. He thought it must be about eleven o’clock at night, but he did not know for sure. He suddenly felt very tired and prepared for bed.
He gazed at the yellow bottle of Parozone. If only one could wash the whole world clean with that acid, he thought, if only one could pour it over all the stains so that everything would become clear and clean again. But the yellow bottle of Parozone remained where it was, inscrutable, immune, bearing nothing on its surface, not even a picture, brutally self-sufficient.
He went to bed and fell asleep almost immediately though the sheets were cold.
28
ANN KNEW THAT Tom would come and see her. The night he had abruptly left her she had cried a lot but had insisted that she get a taxi; she refused the offer of a lift from the boy she was dancing with. She hadn’t spoken to Mary about what had happened, but had been wholly miserable. She hadn’t gone to Tom’s flat out of pride though once or twice she had dressed herself to go. Yet all the time in spite of her wretchedness she had known that he would come. She knew more about him than she knew about herself.
When she thought of him she didn’t at all see a future writer of distinction. She saw only a boy who nearly always looked untidy, needed someone to look after him, was unhappy. She didn’t think at all about his writing, she wondered mostly whether he was eating enough, and whether he kept his flat tidy. She didn’t require anything exceptional from him—she didn’t think in those terms—though she feared sometimes that he might require something exceptional from her. At first when he had met her she hadn’t been taken with him. She hadn’t missed him when he had left her at first, or when he wasn’t with her. Later, however, this had changed and she had missed him. It was as if she was no longer wholly herself, wholly present in the immediate world, but rather as if she were two people in her skin, for both of whom she was responsible. If it was love that she felt then love was different from what she had expected it would be. As a schoolgirl she had thought that love was a vast radiance that surrounded the lovers, in which they moved as fish move through the seas, their natural element. Now she was beginning to think that love was not like that at all. Love was an ache that was constituted by an absence.
Quite realistically she knew that if she didn’t marry Tom she wouldn’t marry at all. She knew that no one else would demand so much of her. She had no one else and he had no one else. He could, she thought, even now apply for a training college or a university. She knew that he would be happier that way.
When he had left her stumbling into the night she had been very hurt and had cried. It was the first time that she had cried for such a reason, it was wholly involuntary and inexplicable. She felt that he had been unfair since he had asked her to stay for the dance and she had waited because he had wanted her to wait. The tears perhaps were tears of offended pride and dignity, but she felt that perhaps they were more than that. They were an acceptance of a union not yet achieved.
She knew that she might suffer from these jealousies later but she also knew that it was better to be with him than to be without him. That, she realised, was what love meant. It was funny that it hadn’t touched her before, that this emotion so apparently common had avoided her. She had read somewhere of office girls who, after a broken love affair, would weep uncontrollably and be unfit to work, but she had never thought that was anything but a strange romantic delusion.
She began to imagine a possible future but couldn’t really do so. The future would be what it became. She could continue to teach and he would find a job. They would have to buy a house. She thought of practical things like that and as she thought of them they became more specific. They might even have children. They would have friends perhaps on whom they might call and who might call on them. That was what living was about. They would learn to plan things together. They would be together because it was necessary for them to be together.
She felt that he would come soon, that even that morning he was on his way towards her, that he wouldn’t be able to stay away. She thought that he might come to the school and waited for him the whole morning though she carried on with her work, since one must always do that no matter what one’s private griefs are. But he didn’t come either in the morning or in the afternoon. She sat and watched TV when she came home, Mary being out with one of her innumerable boy friends. Now she couldn’t imagine how such promiscuity was possible. She couldn’t conceive of such a multiplicity, as if people were things. She couldn’t keep her attention on the TV programme and would restlessly get up from the chair and go to the window hoping that she would see him.
She made herself innumerable cups of tea. She tried to do some work but found she couldn’t concentrate. Once or twice she went to the mirror to see how she looked and saw that there were wrinkles above her brow. She thought: If he doesn’t come, this is what my life will be like. And she felt such despair that she nearly cried. But she gritted her teeth and didn’t allow herself to. What was important was to have another human being with whom one could share one’s thoughts, one’s griefs, one’s joys.
It was six o’clock when the doorbell rang. She got up, waited for what seemed an eternity to test her will, and walked slowly to the door, giving an almost final look at the room, as if she wouldn’t see it again, or not again in the same way. It was almost as if she had changed totally in the moments between hearing the bell and reaching the door. He was there waiting. She opened the door and he came in. When he was in she shut the door and they put their arms around each other without speaking. They stood like that for a long time, as if they would weep but didn’t.
Later on they watched TV and the story seemed to be more interesting than she thought. Continually she saw in it reminders of her own life, past and present. She felt Tom looking at her as she moved about the room and made tea. She was conscious of being the person he would be looking at for a long time, for many years, and because of this she blossomed anew. Something about him told her that a crisis was past, that he had in some sense found himself, that he was ready to leave for another world, another place. That he was ready to be with her. There was about him the gaunt air of beginnings.
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM POLYGON
BY IAIN CRICHTON SMITH
Consider the Lilies
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXTJO
‘Retrained, finely wrought … Mr Crichton Smith shows us isolation, perplexity, loneliness, a combination of blindness and indifference’ – New Statesman
‘Mr Crichton Smith has an acute feeling for places and atmosphere. The wind-blown heaths, the grey skies, the black dwellings, the narrow lives, the poverty – are all vividly depicted … one can linger over the sheer beauty of his phrases’ – Observer
The eviction of th
e crofters from their homes between 1792 and the 1850s was one of the cruellest episodes in Scotland’s history. In this novel Iain Crichton Smith captures the impact of the Highland Clearances through the thoughts and memories of an old woman who has lived all her life within the narrow confines of her community.
Alone and bewildered by the demands of the factor, Mrs Scott approaches the minister for help, only to have her faith shattered by his hypocrisy. She finds comfort, however, from a surprising source: Donald Macleod, an imaginative and self-educated man who has been ostracised by his neighbours, not least by Mrs Scott herself, on account of his atheism. Through him and through the circumstances forced upon her, the old woman achieves new strength.
The Last Summer
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXSGI
A sensitively written and memorable novel of youth by one of Scotland’s most distinguished twentieth century writers.
Malcolm, studious, imaginative, footballing, shy, sexually aware but uncomfortably innocent, is in his last term at school on a Hebridean island during the Second World War. His awkward relationship with his teachers, his widowed mother and younger brother, his friends – and with Janet whom he loves from a distance and the less comely and warmer, but to him still enigmatic, Sheila, are marvellously realised. Above all, this is the story of a boy, on his own, trying to discover himself and through himself to find his way in life.
My Last Duchess
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXRKA
Iain Crichton Smith’s third novel is as different from his second, The Last Summer, as that was from his first, Consider the Lillies. Crichton Smith is at the height of his powers as poet and prose writer. This new work of fiction follows hard upon his Selected Poems and his volume of short stories, Survival Without Fear.
Mark Simmons, aged 42, is a teacher at a training college. His wife has just walked out on him because she has found him so much less interesting than she expected the man she married to be. This event, which he has by no means expected, has jolted him into a major reassessment of himself, of his place in the universe. He realises that he has become bitter, cynical and disillusioned: he is a failure intellectually – he wanted to be a writer, but for years he has striven at one book, which he privately knows to be not very good. He is a failure as a teacher – he wasn’t competent enough to obtain a post at a university. He is a failure as a husband, because his wife was daily moving away from him. He is a failure as a father, because he and his wife had had no children. Above all, he is a failure as a human being, because he despises everybody, not least himself. Mark Simmons hates himself for being more concerned with argument than happiness.
My Last Duchess is a novel of great resourcefulness and energy.
An Honourable Death
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXQQU
‘Iain Crichton Smith writes like a poet, with strong natural rhythm and precise observation’ – The Times
In the summer of 1870, a seventeen-year-old crofter’s son turned his back on his apprenticeship with the Royal Clan and Tartan Warehouse in Inverness and signed up as a private in Queen Victoria’s army. He joined the Gordons – the 92nd Highlanders – whose reputation was second to none as the fearsome cutting-edge of the British Army. Posted to India, Afghanistan, South Africa and the Sudan, he became a formidable soldier, rising up through the ranks to become the glorified and much-decorated Major-General Sir Hector Macdonald or, more commonly, ‘Fighting Mac’, the true hero of Omdurman.
Then, in 1903, at the peak of his remarkable career, he was accused of homosexuality. Ordered to face court martial and unable to bear the disgrace, he ended his life.
From this true story, with a poet’s insight and precision, Iain Crichton Smith has crafted an exquisite novel: a tale of honour and elitism, equivocation and hierocracy, victory and despair.
The Dream
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXQIS
‘A superb novel … it must be accorded tremendous acclaim’ – Scotland on Sunday
‘Iain Crichton Smith writes like a poet, with strong natural rhythm and precise observation’ – The Times
In the grey streets of Glasgow, Martin is dreaming of the mist-shrouded islands of his youth. Behind her desk in the travel agency his wife Jean dreams of faraway places in the sun that beckon from the brochures.
Their marriage frays in the silence as Martin clings to the Gaelic he teaches at the university, the dwindling bedrock of the culture of the isles, while Jean refuses to speak a language that brings back memories of the bitter years of her childhood. While Jean chatters with her friends of relationships and resentments, Martin turns to Gloria who seems to share his dream of the islands of the Gael…
Iain Crichton Smith’s The Dream explores the precarious survival of a modern marriage with a poet’s lean, evocative precision and all the spellbinding authority of a master storyteller in the time-honoured Celtic tradition.
In the Middle of the Wood
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXQCE
Ralph Simmons, a writer, struggles to survive a nervous breakdown that leaves him anxious, suspicious, and frightened.
In the Middle of the Wood is considered by many to be Iain Crichton Smith’s most remarkable achievement in prose. Like Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, it derives directly from a phase of paranoia, which in Crichton Smith’s case actually led to a spell in a mental hospital.
The Tenement
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXQDI
The tenement has its being, its almost independent being, in a small Scottish town. Built of grey granite, more than a century ago, it stands four-square in space and time, the one fixed point in the febrile lives of the transient human beings whom it shelters. At the time of which Iain Crichton Smith writes, there are married couples in three of the flat; two widows and a widower occupy the others. All of them are living anxious lives of quiet desperation, which Mr Smith anatomises with cool and delicate understanding.
The Masons, Linda and John, are the youngest and perhaps the happiest house-hold, who can still look to the future with hope: he has quite a well-paid job in a freezer shop, she is expecting a child. Mr Cooper’s role in life is humbler: he is a lavatory attendant, but can take an off pride in his work. The Camerons provide drama: the husbands, once a long distance lorry driver who was sacked for heavy drinking and now a casual labourer, is consumed with unreasoning hate of Catholics, and when drunk becomes a raging brute who batters and terrifies his wife.
Trevor Porter, an ex-teacher who like to think of himself as a poet (unpublished), is destroying his marriage by his self-absorption, though after his wife has surprised him by dying of cancer he feel guilt-ridden. Mrs Floss is the tenement’s most colourful inhabitant: the widow of a local hotel owner, she still has money and can indulge in holiday cruises and foreign lovers. Mrs Miller, up on the top floor, is odd-woman-out even in this company of loners: since her husband was killed by lightening, crucified on the telephone wires he was repairing, she has become a slatternly recluse, who finds occasional drinking companions among the town’s down-and-outs.
The course of several of these lives reaches a startling crisis during the little party to celebrate the birth of the Masons’ child. But Iain Crichton Smith declines any easy resolution of events. His fascinatingly ill-assorted group of characters, brought together only by grey granite, are left to struggle on, with their own strengths and weaknesses.
The Search
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXQBU
Trevor Griersor, a Scottish university lecturer, is spending a term in Canberra, lecturing on Scottish authors. One day a stranger phones, with garbled news of Trevor’s brother Norman who vanished in Australia many years before, and has since, according to the caller, become an alcoholic and been in trouble with the police.
Trevor feels overwhelmed with guilt, for having neglected his brother for so long. He imagines him penniless now, a down-and-out, drunk in the gutter; or perhaps even lyi
ng in a pauper’s grave. He resolves that he must trace him, and travels to Sydney to begin his search. The search takes him to government offices, police stations, the Salvation Army, a squalid doss-house; and his experiences drive him into a state of panic.
But why does he feel so compelled to search? As Douglas, that ambiguous Iago-like figure who first phoned him, now says, Norman won’t be at all the younger brother of eighteen years ago; he’ll be a stranger. If he’s an alcoholic, he may be violent. He’s unlikely to thank Trevor for seeking to patronise him by ‘rescuing’ him. Trevor has asked himself – and it’s the basic question that faces the reader too – ‘Am I my brothers’ keeper?’ Does he really care about his brother, or is he acting from a sense of duty?
This is the novel’s crux, and Trevor’s cross, which he bears with him to a highly ironical conclusion. It’s an absorbing study of conscience and responsibility, written with all of Crichton Smith’s quiet authority.
A Field Full of Folk
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXQBK
The world, in Iain Crichton Smith’s vision is a field full of folk; and one Scottish village is its microcosm. Here, the Minister wrestles with his loss of faith, and his cancer, concealing them even from his wife, but she had divined them. Mrs Berry cultivates her garden assiduously, and when Jehovah’s Witnesses come quoting their texts, she tells them that the hill at the end of the village can be climbed by many paths. Old Annie has no doubts about her path: she has no use for Christianity (‘Protestants and Catholics, nothing but guns and fighting’) and finds her answer in the East. On more mundane levels, Morag Bheag worries about her son serving in Northern Ireland, and Chrissie Murray shocks the village by leaving her husband and making for Glasgow – taking only a radio with her, that’s what shocks most. Murdo Macfarlane vehemently urges his puritanical views – about, for instance, the use of the church hall for a young people’s dance – and David Collins nurses his hatred of Germans, but cannot insult them when they come as tourists.
Goodbye, Mr Dixon Page 18