I went to see him on his death bed. His head rested on a very white pillow showing the hair still black. His face brightened when he saw me, and I tried to suppress my shock at what the disease was doing to him.
I said, ‘How are you, John?’
And he said, ‘You’re a doctor, Colin, you should know.’
I knew of course.
‘And how are you keeping yourself?’
‘Oh, fine,’ said I.
A nurse walked past, airy and light, with the dry starchy competent clothes all blue.
What was he thinking of?
‘How’s Mary?’ I said.
He didn’t blink.
‘Fine,’ he said.
Someone had once said of him, ‘He’s the kind of man who wants to be in on everything. He would read a paper on Urdu if you asked him. He knows nothing about science, especially the recent stuff, but he would lecture you on it. He gives the illusion of knowledge, but he doesn’t care about anything really. Except himself.’
‘Do you remember,’ I said to him, ‘the night Miller played the bagpipes on the bus coming home from the “picnic”?’
I could see him trying to remember Miller. Finally he said, ‘ “The Barren Rocks of Aden”, wasn’t it?’
And he was right too. Absolutely.
‘And the woman who lectured us on zoology,’ I pursued. ‘Her mother died and she died a year later.’
He thought again and then he said, ‘Yes, I remember her. Her name was Green, wasn’t it?’
Of course.
He had been a good headmaster or so they said. He had been as you would have expected: competent and, to a certain extent, an innovator. He had kept up with things, no one could say he hadn’t. He was willing to do all that was required of him. He would speak well about a departing colleague. He would give a kind reference. He would tell a good joke at the club. He would speak at a Conservative conference.
And I wondered: Did he really like doing thus? Was this really what he wanted to do?
For I remember him one midnight talking about Spain and saying that he wished he could go. And he was horrified by Guernica (or said he was).
He married well, a girl about two years younger than himself who introduced him to the gentry. Sometimes she looked puzzled, but she always supported him and could be humorous about him too.
What I want to know is: What is he? Have I ever known him? I mean was all that stuff about Spain put on because he knew that I was going (as indeed I did, serving in an ambulance unit)? Was he even then saying what he wanted me to believe? Was he building up his image with me as early as this? Was he much cleverer than I ever realised? Did he think even then that a reference to Spain would look bad in his education reports? All those Commies.
What I want to know is: When he was drinking his glass of wine in the light of the flashbulb, when he was delivering his little speech to the local ladies on the atom, was he bored to distraction behind the smiling confident face?
Or was that really his world? Was it sufficient to him? And if so, what can one say about Man?
And was even his Christianity a pose?
The obituaries were all very favourable. His friends were all respectful. All that was in order. I watched the coffin as if I expected him momently to emerge from it like a Houdini. But he did not emerge. Naturally not.
Everyone had something good to say about him. He had helped so many causes, being chairman and vice-chairman of this and of that. Never had he been called upon in vain. He had given so much of his time to the community.
One day I went to the office to see him. He spoke to me very pleasantly, smiled, and then tactfully got rid of me. He was expecting a phone call. Lord Coulter, I believe. Some committee on which he served anyway. Very poised he was, very competent, very cool as always.
But I knew, as he gaily turned away, that he was dying.
So I suppose he was everything they say. Except . . .
When we were in university we were both in love with the one girl. Her name was Lorna. She was a lovably stupid girl, the kind of girl who is always breaking valuable vases, and who rides motor bikes. Full of life, gaiety, and so on. In any case, she contracted TB (there was a lot of that in the forties). The point, however, is this: one night he came to see me and told me that after much conflict he was letting me have the first choice with her. He looked pale and worn as if after a sleepless night. I can’t remember exactly how he put it: one can’t really remember the words he used. Perhaps that’s why it’s so difficult to make up one’s mind about him.
I married her, of course. But that’s not the point: the point is, did he know the night he came to see me that she had TB? I can’t for the life of me work out how he could have known.
I keep trying to remember what he said, but all I can remember is him standing by the mantelpiece looking very pale but distinguished.
I mean, perhaps he did think of me as a friend. Perhaps he did really make a sacrifice; but why is it that his sacrifices turned out so well for him and mine so badly for me?
That is why I wonder whether I should say something about him. That he was in fact a bastard of the first order. That he would sell his own mother for an ounce of power. That he conned everybody into believing that he was ‘good’.
Or is this what in our society goodness means?
Now if he is a real Christian he may meet Lorna. I wonder what plausible story he will have concocted by then. For I’m sure he’ll think of something. And even there one would never be entirely sure of him.
Or is this what Christianity is all about, that there the conning is over and the double-dealing is at peace?
Goodbye, John Summers. The fact is, I don’t know what I would put on your tomb and I’m sure you would say the same about me.
The Black and the White
‘But you should have seen him,’ said Bella out of her fat, white, constipated face. ‘I mean,’ she said, collapsing into a series of small giggles.
‘What was it?’ said Chrissie sternly, sitting bitterly by the fire, unable to go to church any more because of her legs which couldn’t even take her out of the house.
Speaking through her giggles, Bella continued,
‘I mean he was just like the minister, like Mr Gunn. The sermon and everything. How are you feeling?’
‘I’m just the same,’ said Chrissie, regarding with secret rancour the jar of home-made marmalade which Bella had brought.
‘It’s not good to be in the house all the time,’ said Bella, her face crinkling. ‘If you could only get out even for a breath of fresh air.’
Chrissie looked enviously at Bella’s legs, large and red. Perhaps she would get varicose veins soon, what with all the walking she did in aid of her Bed and Breakfast.
There was a silence through which she could only hear the ticking of the clock. Nowadays her hearing was so acute that she could hear it when it was about to stop. Life, what was it? Long ago she was young and able and could go to church. There was a calm then and peace and a sense of green. The church was a hollow well, cool as summer water. The silence before the sermon began was the kind of silence that you could get nowhere else, not when you were alone, not even in the midst of mountains. It slowly unwrinkled your mind.
Bella burst out sniggering. ‘And he had a collar just like the minister. And he showed us films.’
‘They shouldn’t be showing films in a church,’ said Chrissie decisively. Why should she have been struck down? She had done nothing wrong. She had been a good attender, but God had abandoned her.
‘And he gave the blessing at the end just like the minister,’ said Bella. ‘He raised his arms at the end and he gave the blessing. It was like . . . ’ She paused, her brow wrinkling. She’s such a stupid woman, Chrissie thought. Why am I talking to her at all? She’s got all these silly girls, delinquents the whole lot of them.
‘Like what?’ she said aloud.
‘It was like . . . he was imitating him. That’s what it was li
ke. It would have made you laugh, though you shouldn’t laugh in church. I know that. And he told us all about India and how the people were dying. And they had leprosy and how their arms weren’t fleshy enough to put the injection in.’
What do I care about that? thought Chrissie. A long time ago I might have cared. But then God left me here alone and I became bitter. I get headaches all the time.
‘He said there was millions of them. Millions. And that they looked on their women folk like dirt. He said a man would have four wives. Imagine that,’ she continued, sniggering helplessly, ‘four wives.’
‘What’s that to do with Christianity?’ said Chrissie fiercely, feeling the pain in her legs again. ‘Films and Sunday picnics. What’s that got to do with God?’
‘I didn’t know he was going to be there, you see,’ said Bella. ‘And instead of the minister you saw this wee man – he was so wee, you understand, you could have lifted him up and put him in the pulpit – and he walked along in his gown very dignified. And, I tell you, Mr Mason went up to the pulpit with the Bible same as he does before Mr Gunn comes in, and you know that he can’t abide blacks, and this wee man stood up there and looked at us. Honestly, I nearly burst out laughing. He was so black, you see. He was as black as boot polish.’
‘I wouldn’t have believed it,’ said Chrissie. ‘When you think of the old days the ministers would stand up there and tell you that you were a sinner and that you would go to hell. They had spunk.’
Bella broke in eagerly.
‘And do you remember Maclachlan saying to them one day, “You come here and you read the Bible as if it was a catalogue. You send away for your wardrobes and your dressing tables and your mirrors, but I am telling you that there will come a day when you will go to a place that will have no wardrobes and no dressing tables and no hairbrushes and no mirrors.” Oh, he was a terrible man.’
‘He told them the truth,’ said Chrissie sharply, ‘and they deserved it too. Every word of it. I heard him once. He was a great preacher. Black men!’
Bella said in her giggling voice, ‘The funny thing was that he was so black, you know, and it was as if he was imitating what the minister does. You wanted to burst out laughing. You can’t tell with their faces, you know, what they’re thinking. You can’t see anything on their faces, they’re so black.’
And Chrissie thought: It was the devil, of course. God has sent the devil into the churches to deceive the people: that’s what’s happening. The devil is imitating the preachers and laughing at them with his black face and white collar. She imagined the black neck ringed with the white collar.
Oh, she could see him there all right. Wasn’t it him who was tempting her to blaspheme, to say that God had left the world for ever, and nothing was left but the television sets and the radios and the dance halls and people swearing as they came up the road at night at twelve and one o’clock?
Wasn’t it him who spoke to her in the silence of the night, who spoke to her when the light was blue and the lights spun round the ceiling, in the night when she had to get up to take aspirins to dull the pain, and she could see herself in the long mirror in the long lobby?
Wasn’t it the devil who was black as night, who spoke to her out of the black night and said to her, ‘Come with me. Abandon yourself. Curse God. Speak the terrible words.’
‘He was so funny,’ said Bella, ‘honestly you couldn’t help smiling. What did the doctor say about your legs?’
‘He said I wouldn’t be able to walk down the stairs. That’s what he said. I don’t know what I’m going to do.’ Her whole body seemed suddenly to be full of tears and she repeated, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do.’
As she said this she hoped that Bella would respond in some way, that she would realise that she had opened herself out, that she was asking for help; that Bella would sense in that dim mind the true voice of feeling, that she would know that God had spoken.
‘It is hard. Everything is hard these days,’ said Bella.
And the moment passed.
Devil, devil, devil, thought Chrissie. You too are a devil. And you laugh at the devil in the pulpit, when he has come to tell us of the end of the world when no one will be able to walk about the streets as it tells us in the Bible, when the world will be abandoned to the night.
‘And he told us about the Indian babies. That was nice. That part. He’s a clever man though he’s black, give him that.’
‘Indian babies,’ said Chrissie vehemently. ‘What are you talking about Indian babies for? He should have been talking about God and his hand upon us. He should have been talking about our sins and our lusts. He should have stood up and denounced you all, that’s what he should have done. And you watch his films about Indian babies and you think: It’s like the TV. He should have told you the truth about yourselves.’
‘Well, Chrissie, there are Indian babies and if you had seen them . . . ’
‘And I’m telling you that we need God more with our black hearts. That’s what I’m saying. And he stands there as black as boot polish when he should be white. Oh, Bella, Bella, how much we need him to be white.’
‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Bella hesitantly, ‘I thought he . . . ’
‘He should be white. It’s we who are black. But he should be white. That’s what it is, Bella. That’s what it should be like. And I’ll never see it again. The church will be standing there and I’ll never enter it again, I’ll never sit in my pew again and listen to the psalms. I’m so tired of the blackness, Bella, and you come along and tell me that it’s got into the church.’
Bella looked at her in amazement. She must be going out of her mind. This was the last time she’d come here, that was sure. You paid her a nice visit and she was at your throat.
‘It should all be white. Everything should be white. Tell the minister to get rid of him at nights when the light is blue. Or he’ll be wandering round the rooms laughing, looking at himself in the mirror and admiring himself and trying on the minister’s collar for size. Tell him that. Tell him that our hearts are black enough already. Time is so long and there should be more whiteness and not blackness. Time is so long . . . ’
Sweets to the Sweet
When I went into the shop next door that day, I heard them quarrelling, I mean Diane and her father, Mason, or the Lady, as we called him. Perhaps they hadn’t heard the tinkle of the bell or he had forgotten that I often came in at that time.
‘And I’m telling you that university is crap. I’m not going and that’s the end of it.’
That was beautiful baby-faced Diane with the peroxide, white hair and the heart-shaped ruthless face.
I heard him murmuring and she began again:
‘I’m telling you, you can shove these books. And all that stuff about sacrificing yourself for me is a lot of . . . ’
At that point I went back to the door, opened it and let it slam as if I had just come in. The voices ceased and the Lady came into the shop.
He looked tired and pale, but his sweet angelic smile was in evidence as usual. I heard a far door slam and judged that it must be his daughter leaving.
‘Marzipan?’ he said. I agreed. I like sweets and I eat a lot of them.
Mason is the kind of man who was born to serve, and not simply because it is his trade but because his whole nature is servile. I mean, one has seen shopkeepers who are brisk and obliging, but this is something else again, this is obsequiousness, an eagerness to please that is almost unpleasantly oriental. It makes one feel uncomfortable, but it must please a certain type since his shop does a good trade and, in fact, the rumour is that he is thinking of expanding.
I return to his servility. It isn’t that he is insincere or anything like that. It is as if deep in his soul he has decided that he really is the servant, that you are a different order of being, an aristocrat, and he lower than a peasant. He gives the impression of finding himself in you. If it weren’t for you he wouldn’t exist. Frankly, if you haven’t met that kind of
person, it is difficult to explain it. I hope I won’t be accused of anti-semitism if I say that he reminds me of a Jew, and yet he isn’t a Jew, he belongs to this small town and was born and bred here. I suppose there is something about that kind of person which brings out the fascist in one, a desire to kick him as if he were a dog, he looks so eager to please, hanging on your every word, on your every order, as if a few ounces of sweets is more important to him than anything else you can conceive of. (Some day, if I have the time, I shall write a paper about the psychology of service. I think it’s important, I imagine a shopkeeper who screams at you because you don’t buy anything from his shop as if ‘you had something against him’.) The Lady will even cross his hands and stare at you like a lover till you decide what you want, and then he will sigh as if an accomplishment had taken place.
I come here fairly often, and I know his daughter reasonably well. He has only the one daughter and no sons, his wife is dead. They say that he treated her badly. I don’t know about that, but I’m sure that he loved his jars of sweets more than her. Imagine living among sweets all day: one would have to be sour when one had left them surely. Is that not right? He wants Diane to go to university since somewhere buried beneath that servility is ambition. I know her, and she is a bitch. Anyone with half an eye could see that, but she’s sweet in public, dewy-eyed and cool above the mini-skirt. One of these peroxide blondes and the kind of nutty mind that may get her yet into a students’ riot in our modern educational system.
He has brought her up himself, of course. I have played chess with him in the local chess club; I always win, naturally. After all, would he want to lose a customer? But sometimes, I have seen him looking at me . . . He thinks the world of his daughter. You know the kind of thing; if she’s first in Domestic Science, he’ll give her a bicycle. As a matter of fact, I know that she goes with this fellow Marsh, who’s at least ten years older than her, and he takes her out to the beach at night on his motor-cycle. His father owns a hotel in the town, and he’s got quite a reputation with the ladies. You’re not going to tell me that they are innocently watching the sea and the stars.
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