An End to Autumn

by Iain Crichton Smith

  Inside that world as in any other world people complained and were inconsistent. They wished to be elsewhere at times but there was nowhere else to go. They were frightened at times, happy at other times. A single achievement would make them feel like gods, a single failure would dishearten them. The seasons flowered and withered, and these were dominated by the tasks of the year. It was seldom that any major disaster happened, but minor accidents were magnified. One need not be lonely in the school for if one surrendered to it one could find fulfilment. One could shine with its poor glory, one could live inside one’s dream. One could demand that uniforms should be made compulsory, or one could not. Each could be himself within limits, and those limits were created by the continual rubbing against others, whose personalities were different and therefore sacred.

  The school could be considered as a theatre or a church, a continually changing scene or one dominated by rules. It could be dignified or flamboyant but never silent. It was a world which reflected the outer world and as such it had to be borne, for the alternative was worse, the alternative was another world of still greater silence or greater noise, of diminished humanity or loss. And yet if one had come in and looked and listened to it, it would have seemed noisy and cheerful, with people talking intently to others, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, holding brief conferences while standing up, cups in hands.

  Miss Donaldson sat among the others, though curiously separate from them at one of the tables, smoking heavily as she always did. It was one of the school jokes that someone who taught R.E. (Religious Education) should find it necessary to smoke more than the acknowledged agnostics and atheists. Perhaps, they surmised, she also drank, in secret. Not that anyone knew very much about her, except that she had not been very long at the school, that she had taken over the R.E. classes because no one else was willing to do so, and that she didn’t seem particularly happy. Certainly she wasn’t a great talker. But the others were content to have her since otherwise it would have meant that they would have to take some of the R.E. classes themselves. R.E. was not taken seriously: indeed all it really meant was that classes were sent to a particular room where it was assumed, sometimes wrongly, that they would be given some instruction on the bible. But in fact no one knew whether they were being taught about religion or not.

  Miss Donaldson was a very odd sort of person with a white slab of a face, a stout body, and very large feet: she walked in a limping manner often imitated by her pupils. She had taken a philosophy degree, had taught in other more difficult schools in the city, and had finally found herself at this particular one. She hated what she was doing, for most of the pupils came to her, determined not to work, and would prevent her from doing anything by asking her questions which would set her off, against her better inclinations, down strange tracks of Hinduism, drug addiction, alcoholism and sometimes even sexual mania.

  “What about Hell then, miss?” they would ask her. “Do you believe in Hell then, in the tortures and that?” Or, “Do you believe Jesus rose from the dead, miss?” Or, “What did Jesus look like miss? Was he yellow or what?” And then disorganised arguments would start, someone implying that he was a Paki, others imitating Pakistani accents, saying, “Thank you very much, miss. I am thanking you a great deal, miss.” Sometimes they would say, “Why do we have to do R.E., miss? Why do we have to do it if we don’t believe in it? Do you believe in it, miss?” “Tell us about the Catholics, miss. Is it true that the Pope is infallible?” And one or two of the older and more daring pupils would wave green and white scarves shouting, “Cel-tic, Cel-tic.” “Is it true that the Catholics worship idols, miss? It says in the Bible not to worship the Golden Calf, isn’t that right, miss?” “What’s the Golden Calf then,” someone would ask as if attracted by some divine rustic vision, glimpsed perhaps momently on the farm from which he came and where he would look after the cattle during weekends.

  Philosophy never taught me this, she would think cynically, philosophy taught me that there was a calmer world than this where bearded tranquil men would speculate about matter, forms, language, morality, with an ease and luxury divorced from the concerns of everyday.

  “Do you believe God has a beard, miss?” “Twit, do you think he’s got a stash then?” “What about the Pope, miss? Why doesn’t the Pope ever get married.” Then there would be a communal whisper from which she would hear as if floating on another air the single word “Balls” and she would feel a primitive desire sometimes so intolerably strong that it would nearly overwhelm her.

  No, truly this was not what philosophy had taught her. In those university days when she was studying Philosophy she had lived in an exalted fever of study, in an atmosphere of libraries, imagining that the “real world” was that of Kant, whose mind worked like a watch, or that of Wittgenstein whose personality attracted her so much that she thought she was in love with him. It seemed to her that his idea of a one-to-one relationship of objects with the parts of the speech of the language was a beautiful concept which made reality meaningful and radiant. But now here she was teaching R.E. to pupils who did not want to listen.

  How had it all happened? Well first of all she found that there was little she could do with her philosophy degree except teach. When she was in university she had never thought of what she would do with her life afterwards: that would have been too vulgar, too empirical: that would have been the sort of instrumentalism that derived from Dewey. Thus when naked she had arrived at last in the winds of reality she was like a bird whose feathers shake in the bad weather. And she had found herself in a school in Glasgow whose doors had never been darkened or lightened by any knowledge of Hegel, and whose roughness almost destroyed her.

  She would not have stayed long in that school if her mother had not been alive in those days. It was she who had kept her there, nailed her to the classroom so that she felt as if she was being slowly crucified. Many a time she would have walked out of the doors forever, anywhere at all, without destination, if it hadn’t been for her mother who would say to her.

  “But what will I do? I have no money. What am I going to live on?” And she would add,

  “I brought you up. I sent you to university. You owe me something or don’t you think you do?”

  And her conscience, sterile and bitter, had allowed that this was the case. Sometimes she would walk for hours on the streets at night, among the flaring yellow lights, as if looking for some deliverer among these lamps that bowed down like aged scholars casting their small pale halos on the stone. But she had found none, or at least not a permanent one. Once she had got gloriously drunk and had shouted at her mother as if the latter were a warder keeping her in prison with the iron key of filial gratitude.

  In that school she had found one person with whom she had gone out once or twice. He was a middle-aged man who taught music and who gave her, once, a box of chocolates addressed to “Ma cherie”. His primness and affectedness would often make her laugh when she was away from him, and she certainly didn’t love him, but she would have been willing to marry him in order to get out of her nightmare. But she realised eventually that he would never marry, his selfishness was too firmly embedded. Unlike her he was reasonably happy where he was—his dramatic flourish of the baton at annual school concerts satisfied him. Even his taste for music—his hero was Tchaikovsky—seemed to her to be suited to him, a vulgar dream of heroic narrative. One night he promised to meet her at a concert but she hadn’t gone, partly because her mother had felt pains about her heart, and when she had met him on the following day he had turned away. He was, she concluded, incapable of loving her, of loving anyone. Men were childish careless creatures of the moment, their boxes of chocolates meaningless gifts. Nevertheless she often felt unsatisfied physical desires which tormented her: and these she found affected the clarity of her mind, and became an instrument of torture like a very fine needle.

  One day her mother had died—she had had after all a bad heart, it wasn’t just a phantom of her imagination—an
d when she had tidied up all the family affairs, being the only offspring and her father no longer alive, she had left the school she was in and had made a leap towards this one, for by that time she was thirty-eight years old, and there was nothing else that she could do. They had been happy to have her, for the classes had been without an R.E. teacher for a year: they would have been happy to have anyone, she later realised.

  She stayed by herself in a small flat in the centre of the town and to this flat she returned night after night and spent the weekends there as well for she had nowhere else to go. Sometimes at nights as she read or watched TV, for she did no preparation for her school work after the first six months, she felt herself being shaken as if by physical waves of aggression, and at nights she was convulsed by sexual dreams in which she was the main protagonist. Limbs and eyes and breasts surged around her as in a Picasso painting, she found herself in tunnels where trains crowded with naked bodies rushed straight at her, seeking her, and aboard the trains were schoolboys shouting “Why did you never marry, miss? Was Jesus a poof, miss?”

  It was not that she wasn’t interested in religion, in fact she no longer believed in it. She had found herself in a situation that she couldn’t get out of, so that her solution was simply to teach the Bible as if it were any other historical book. But the children perhaps sensing this—”the buggers know everything” she would say to anyone who cared to listen—kept at her, forcing her to explore the trivialities of the human, and not the divine, probing her weaknesses.

  “I sometimes think I am evil,” she would say to herself. “I really think I am evil.” And at times evil would attract her not simply as a concept but as a living thing. She felt that she could have been a witch, that she could have celebrated a Black Mass, that she could have hung the cross upside down, read from a book consecrated to the devil, sung hymns and psalms backwards in a blasphemous gibberish.

  Other times however she would rise on a sunny morning as if there was some destination still left to her, as if she could set off on a train somewhere to another place far from where she was, as if she could carelessly thumb a lift into a distant future. But as the day passed and the sun declined she knew that she was where she was, fixed and hopeless, and that she would probably be there forever.

  How had it all happened? How had the trains of Plato and the rest sped off into another universe leaving her standing among rusting rails where small discontented shabby men held up their dirty green trivial flags? How had the roughness of reality come upon her so suddenly?

  But it was the sexual nightmares that made life almost unbearable. It was these that had dulled her mind, that left her restless and unsatisfied, as, thick and heavy and limping as a frog, a demon frog on fire, she made her way through the world. She was like a frog on fire, turning back, quivering in the flame, its limbs spread out, a blackened evil star.

  “Miss, did Jesus pee like anyone else?”

  “If he was a god how could he pee, twit?”

  “I was only asking.”

  “Shove off.”

  “Miss, what was the cross like? How big were the nails? Did they have nails like we have? Did they hammer them in, miss?”

  Oh the terrifying multiplicity of the world, its trivial inanity. Theologians never told you about the length of the nails, the feelings of the alien people, the kinds of fishing boats they used, the taste of the wine they drank, the sorts of fish they ate. And yet these were the questions that her pupils were always asking, the irrelevant questions that had nothing to do with the tranquilities of theology. Nothing at all to do with the mind, only with the body, its sordid functions, its idiotic appearances. She raised her head from the table where the rings left by the coffee cups intersected with each other and stared straight at Vera Mallow.

  10

  MRS MALLOW AND Mrs Murphy had got into the habit of going for tea together in the morning and then taking a walk around the town. Sometimes they would sit on a bench by the sea and look out across the water, at the bare green island opposite. Mrs Mallow found the place more beautiful, more relaxing, than she had expected and in a strange way she was happy, though certain things worried her. Vera worried her, as she found it very difficult to speak to her, and there was a certain glacial air about her daughter-in-law which bothered her. In spite of that she felt more secure in the town than she had felt in Edinburgh, though there was one incident which when she looked back on it made her wonder if she really felt as happy as she should have. One afternoon she had gone to the railway station and had sat there staring at the trains, as if she wished to be setting out on one. It was an odd sensation, watching these trains, the flag men, the porters, as if at any time she expected to see her husband again walking towards her through a cloud of steam and inviting her to go with him to wherever he was going, so that for a moment she felt light-hearted, and was almost ready to step forward from her bench to be with him. But that had only happened one afternoon. Still it had been slightly disturbing.

  But otherwise she felt more cheerful than she had expected, especially as she had found a friend she could talk to.

  “There’s one thing anyway,” Mrs Murphy would say, “when you’re like me you can do anything you like. You can go anywhere you like. I can get up tomorrow morning and go to Ireland if I feel like it. Not that I want to go. But I can. How are you getting on up there yourself?”

  She talked of “up there” as if she had assigned Mrs Mallow’s son and daughter-in-law to the “hill” where lived all those people who belonged to Rotary Clubs, Inner Wheels and posh houses.

  “All right,” said Mrs Mallow, “I’m getting on fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “Oh well if you’re sure you’re sure, I didn’t get on with my daughter-in-law at all. There were little things you see.” And she would suddenly look out into the distance and say “The steamer’s late today. Usually it’s ten o’clock. What time do you make it? It’s half an hour late. Anyway as I was saying, I didn’t get on with her at all. She would get on my nerves. She would sit in front of me when I was watching the TV in her house. Her chair was next to the TV, you see, and she would sit there and I would say, ‘I can’t see the TV for you,’ and she would shift over a bit, but after that she would be back again in the same place. She was doing it, trying it on, the same miss. After a while I never watched the TV at all. She was trying it on the wrong lady.” And she squared her shoulders and looked at Mrs Mallow with suddenly fierce eyes, “I wasn’t going to take her snash. Anyway I was paying for my own groceries. Don’t you take any snash from anybody. Are you paying?”

  “I offered to pay,” said Mrs Mallow, “but they didn’t want anything.”

  “You should have paid them,” Mrs Murphy pronounced, nodding her head vigorously. “You should have paid them. If you pay they can’t say anything to you. If I was you I’d pay.”

  “Would you?” Mrs Mallow asked meekly.

  “I would,” Mrs Murphy repeated emphatically. “I would. They wouldn’t have anything to cast up at me. My mother taught me that. ‘Always pay your way’ she would say to me. My mother was a big woman and she brought up seven of us. ‘You pay,’ she would always say, ‘hold your head up high.’ My husband, though, he was different. He drank a bit. He worked on the roads and he drank. One night I threw him out but he was back the next day: you know, he had slept in the railway station that night. He used to joke and laugh all the time, you couldn’t be angry with him for long, he had all the charm of the Irish as they say. He died ten years ago: he was very brave, a very brave man. Sometimes in the mornings I can still see him at the basin splashing water all over himself for he was very clean, I give him that. He came from Connemara. We used to fight all the time and then he would come home from his work and tell me to put on good clothes and we would go out to a hotel and he would splash out. He was a very kind man. But he used to drink a hell of a lot,” and she laughed, remembering him tenderly.

  “You
know,” she said, “you’ve nothing to be ashamed of. After all you brought him up. Why shouldn’t he look after you in your old age? That’s what I’d like to know. Though, mind you, I didn’t look after my own mother. I left her to marry Sean. Even then he used to drink but I never thought anything of it. ‘You’ll rue the day,’ my mother used to say to me, but I didn’t care. When we’re young we don’t listen to anybody. And I left her. She died when I was over here. I didn’t stay to look after her, but people have their own lives to live, have they not, that’s what I always say. You can’t be looking after people all the time. Don’t let them bother you.”

  A beautiful haze lay over the water, and through it Mrs Mallow could see two elegant grey ships side by side as if they had landed there like birds. In front of them, in a clearer space, a number of seagulls were squabbling in a ring for pieces of bread which were floating in the sea. Now and again one of them would rise from the quarrelling circle only to be pursued by another one, trying to make it drop the bread which it held in its beak.

  The thought suddenly came into her head. “Maybe it would be better for me to live with Mrs Murphy. Wouldn’t that be a good idea?” But she knew that that wouldn’t happen, for in spite of her friendship with Mrs Murphy, she knew that she couldn’t live with her. Mrs Murphy didn’t have a good flat and as one got older one liked one’s comforts. Tenements were all right in one’s youth, but not in age.

  “I’ll tell you what,” said Mrs Murphy, “why don’t we go and have a look at the castle? How would you like to take a walk there? It’s not far. Can you manage that?”

  “Yes, I would like that,” said Mrs Mallow though she would have preferred to stay where she was, gazing into the blue haze ahead of her.

  “Come on then,” said Mrs Murphy decisively, rising to her feet and setting off in her brisk duck-like walk, nodding now and again to people whom she knew and at one point saying, “That’s an old bitch that one. You wouldn’t think it to look at her, but she’s going with another man. And she’s an ugly old bitch right enough.”