He looked at her almost with hatred.
‘If you didn’t feel any guilt why are you here then? Why didn’t you stay with your Catholic? By the way, what does he do?’
‘He has an antique shop. Actually, he’s quite scholarly. He’s more scholarly than you. He knows a lot about the Etruscans. He’s very enthusiastic. Just like you. He’s got a degree.’ She laughed, bubbling.
‘In that case,’ he said, ‘why didn’t you stay with him?’
‘I came to ask you,’ she said, ‘what it all means.’
He said, ‘I remember one morning at a lecture we were told about Newton. It was a long time ago and it was a large lecture room, row upon row of pupils, students stretching to the very back and rising in tiers. There was sunlight and the smell of varnish. And this bald man told us about Newton. About the stars and how everything was fixed and unalterable and the apple falling to the ground in a garden during the Plague. Harmony. He talked about harmony. I thought the sky was full of apples. And that the whole world was a tree.’
There was a long silence. In it she felt the child turning in its own orbit.
‘What use are the books to you now?’ she said. The words sounded incredibly naive, almost impudent, and inhuman but she didn’t mean them like that. And yet . . .
‘You mean,’ he said, ‘that my life was useless. That I spent my days and nights on phantoms. Is that what you want? Did you come to gloat?’
‘No, I want to know, that’s all. I want to know if it was something wrong with me. Perhaps it was something wrong with me all the time.’
She imagined him walking in the middle of the night, listening to the silence of the wards, watching the moonlight on the floor. She imagined him looking into the eyes of nurses for reassurance, without speech. She imagined him imagining things, the whispers, the rumours, the laughter. Sometimes a man would die and his bed would be empty. But there would always be another patient. She imagined him thinking: At what hour or minute will I die? Will I die in pain? Will I choke to death?
She thought of London and of this small place. She thought of the anonymity of London, the death of the rainy days. The lostness. The strangeness. Had she chosen well? She thought of Sean, with his small tufted beard, vain, weak, lecherous. He was her only link with that brutal city. All else flowed, she could only follow him, the indeterminate atom.
‘You don’t know what duty is,’ he said at last. ‘You live on romance and pap. I’ve seen you reading Woman’s Own. You think that the world is romantic and beautiful.’ (Did she think that? Was that why she had run away? Did she think that now? What had she not seen? Into the heart of the uttermost darkness in that room where at night the lights circled the ceiling, and nothing belonged to her, not even the flat, not the Etruscan soldiers with their flat, hollow sockets.)
‘You don’t know about trust and loyalty. You knuckle under whenever any difficulty crops up. Your generation is pap and wind. You owe allegiance to nothing. I have owed allegiance to this place. They may forget me, but I served. What else is there to do?’
She said in a low voice, ‘To live.’ But he hadn’t heard her.
‘To serve,’ he said. ‘To love one’s work. Oh, I was no Einstein but I loved my work and I think I did good. You, what do you do?’
Nothing, she thought, except to live where the lightning is, at the centre where the lightning is. At the disconnected places. At the place where our truth is to be found on the rainwashed blue bridges. At the place without hypocrisy. In the traffic. Where she would have to fight for everything including her husband, not knowing that at least this she could keep, as her mother had known. In the jungle.
She stood up and said, ‘Goodbye, father.’
Defiantly he said, ‘You refused your responsibility.’
It was like standing on a platform waving to a stranger on a train. For a moment she couldn’t make up her mind whether he was leaving her or she leaving him.
He relapsed into petulance. ‘I shouted for the nurse last night but she was too busy. She heard me right enough but she didn’t come.’
She thought to herself: There is a time when one has to give up, when nothing more can be done. When the connection has to be out. It is necessary, for not all things are retrievable.
As she stood up she nearly fell, almost upsetting the carafe of water, herself full of water.
He had closed his eyes again when she turned away and walked through the ward head down, as if fighting a strong wind. She paused outside the door in the blinding March light where the tulips were.
The man she had seen before had finished polishing his car and was looking at it with adoration. She thought: The Adoration of the Mini, and smiled.
The child stirred. The world spun and took its place, the place that it must have as long as she was what she was. She had decided on it. And what she was included her father. And she thought again of her child, loving and pitying it.
Home
The black polished car drew up outside the brown tenement and he rested for a moment, his hands still on the wheel. He was a big man with a weatherbeaten red-veined face and a strong jaw. On one finger of his right hand was a square red ring. He looked both competent and hard.
After a while he got out, gazing round him and up at the sky with a hungry look as if he were scanning the veldt. His wife in furs got out more slowly. Her face had a haggard brownness like that of a desiccated gipsy and seemed to be held together, like a lacy bag, by the wrinkles.
He glanced up at the tenement with the cheerful animation of one who had left it, and yet with a certain curiosity.
‘Lock the car, dear,’ said his wife.
He stared at her for a moment in surprise and then said as if he had been listening to a witticism,
‘But they don’t steal things here.’
She smiled disdainfully.
They walked into the close whose walls were brown above and a dirty blue below, pitted with scars. Somebody had written in chalk the words Ya Bass. It looked for a moment African, and he stared at it as if it had recalled some memory.
On the other side of the road the flat-faced shops looked back at them blankly.
He pointed upwards to a window.
‘Mind the Jamiesons?’ he said.
She remembered them but took no pleasure in the memory.
The Jamiesons had lived above them and were, of course, Protestant. Not that at that level you could distinguish Catholic from Protestant except that the former went to chapel and the latter didn’t. The O’Rahilly’s house – for instance – had been full of wee ornaments, and once she had seen a complete ornamental house showing, outside it, like Europeans outside a verandah, Christ and the twelve disciples, the whole thing painted a distasteful green.
She remembered Jamieson all right. Every Friday night he would dress up in his best blue suit, neat as a ray or razor, and would wave to his wife who was following his progress to the road from an open window, her scarf tight round her head. He would go off to the pub and pick a fight with a Catholic, or more likely three Catholics. At midnight he would come home covered with blood, his face bruised a fine Protestant blue, his clothes dirty and brown. He would walk like a victorious gladiator up the stair and then start a fight with his wife, uprooting chairs and wardrobes till the silence of exhaustion settled over the flats at about one in the morning. The next day his wife would descend the stair, her eyes black and blue, and say that she had stumbled at the sink. Her repertoire of invention was endless.
‘I remember,’ she said.
The town had changed a lot since they had left it, that much was clear. Now the old tenements were being knocked down and the people shuttled out to huge featureless estates where the windows revealed the blue sky of TV. There were hardly any picture houses left: they had been converted into bingo halls. Instead of small shops supermarkets were springing up, flexing their huge muscles. The lover’s lane had disappeared. The park seemed to have lost its atmosphere of pastoral careles
sness and was being decorated for the visitors with literate slogans in flowers.
‘It’s thirty-five years since we left,’ said her husband.
And the wallet bulged from his breast pocket, a wife, two children, and a good job in administration.
He moved about restlessly. He wanted to tell someone how well he had done but how could he do that? All the people he had known were gone elsewhere, many of them presumably dead and completely forgotten.
‘Do you mind old Hannah?’ he said.
She had been a fat old woman who sat day after day at the window leaning out of it talking to the passers-by. A fat woman with arthritis. He wondered vaguely what had happened to her.
‘I wonder if the coal-house is still here. Come on.’
He took his wife by the hand and they walked down the close to the back. The coal-houses were incredibly still there, all padlocked and all beside each other, all with discoloured doors.
She kept her fur coat as far away from them as she could.
‘Do you mind the day I went to the factor?’ he said. The factor had been a small, buttoned-up, black-suited lawyer. In those days of poverty he himself had been frightened to visit him in his wee office with the dim glass door. He imagined what he would do to that factor now.
He had gone there after coming home from the office, and the wee lawyer in the undertaker’s suit had said to him over his shoulder,
‘What do you want?’
‘I want to report the rain coming through the roof.’
‘How much do you pay Jackson?’
‘Fifteen shillings a week.’
‘And what do you expect for fifteen shillings a week?’ said the factor, as if even giving words away were an agony of the spirit. In a corner of the office an umbrella dripped what seemed to be black rain.
‘I was hoping that the house would be dry anyway.’
‘I’ll send someone round tomorrow,’ and the factor had bent down to study a ledger with a rusty red cover.
‘You said that a week ago.’
‘And I’m saying it again. I’m a busy man. I’ve got a lot to do.’ At that moment he had been filled with a terrible reckless anger and was about to raise his fist when the factor looked up. His mouth opened slightly showing one gold tooth in the middle of the bottom row of teeth, and he said carefully,
‘Next week.’
So he had walked out past the dispirited receptionist in the glass cage – the one with the limp and the ageing mother – and then home.
Thinking back on it now, he thought: I was treated like a black. That’s what it amounted to. By God, like a black.
He wished that that factor was alive now so that he could show him his bank balance. The wee nyaff. The Scottish words rose unbidden to his mouth like bile.
For a moment he did in fact see himself as a black, cringing in that rotting office, suffering the contempt, hearing the black rain dripping behind him from the furled umbrella.
But then a black would buy a bicycle and forget all about his humiliation. Blacks weren’t like us.
As he turned away from the coal-house door he saw the washing hanging from the ropes on the green.
‘Ye widna like to be daeing that noo,’ he told his wife jocularly.
‘What would the Bruces say if they saw you running about in this dirty place like a schoolboy?’ she said coldly.
‘Whit dae ye mean?’
‘Simply what I said. There was no need to come here at all. Or do you want to take a photograph and show it to them? “The Place Where I Was Born”.’
‘I wasna born here. I just lived here for five years.’
‘What would they think of you, I wonder.’
‘I don’t give a damn about the Bruces,’ he burst out, the veins on his forehead swelling. ‘What’s he but a doctor anyway? I’m not ashamed of it. And, by God, why should you be ashamed of it? You weren’t brought up in a fine house either. You worked in a factory till I picked you up at that dance.’
She turned away.
‘Do you mind that night?’ he asked contritely. ‘You were standing by the wall and I went up to you and I said, “Could I have the honour?” And when we were coming home we walked down lovers’ lane, where they had all the seats and the statues.’
‘And you made a clown of yourself,’ she said unforgivingly.
‘Yes, didn’t I just?’ remembering how he had climbed the statue in the moonlight to show off. From the top of it he could see the Clyde, the ships and the cranes.
‘And remember the flicks?’ he said. ‘We used tae get in wi jam jars. And do you mind the man who used to come down the passage at the interval spraying us with disinfectant?’
The interior of the cinema came back to him in a warm flood: the children in the front rows keeping up a continual barrage of noise, the ushers hushing them, the smoke, the warmth, the pies slapping against faces, the carved cherubs in the flaking roof blowing their trumpets.
‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ she said. ‘Remember it was me who drove you to the top.’
‘Whit dae ye mean?’ – like a bull wounded in the arena.
‘You were lazy, that was what was wrong with you. You’d go out ferreting when you were here. You liked being with the boys.’
‘Nothing wrong with that. What’s wrong wi that?’
‘What do you want? That they should all wave flags? That all the dirty boys and girls should line the street with banners five miles high? They don’t give a damn about you, you know that. They’re all dead and rotting and we should be back in Africa where we belong.’
He heard the voices round him. It was New Year’s Eve and they were all dancing in a restaurant which had a fountain in the middle, and in the basin hundreds of pennies.
‘Knees up, Mother Brown,’ Jamieson was shouting to Hannah.
‘You used to dance, too,’ he said, ‘on New Year’s Night.’
‘I saw old Manson dying in that room,’ he said, pointing at a window. The floor and the ceiling and the walls seemed to have drops of perspiration and Manson had a brown flannel cloth wrapped round his neck. He couldn’t breathe. And he heard the mice scuttering behind the walls.
She turned on him. ‘What are you bringing that up for? Why don’t you forget it? Do you enjoy thinking about these things?’
‘Shut up,’ he shouted, ‘you didn’t even have proper table manners when I met you.’
She stalked out to the car and he stayed where he was. To hell with her. She couldn’t drive anyway.
He just wondered if anyone they had known still remained. He climbed the stair quietly till he came to the door of their old flat. No gaslight there now. On the door was written the name ‘Rafferty’, and as he leaned down against the letter box he heard the blast of a radio playing a pop song.
He went down again quietly.
He thought of their own two rooms there once, the living room with the table, the huge Victorian wardrobe (which was too big for the bedroom) and the huge Victorian dresser.
As he looked out of the close he saw that his car was surrounded by a pack of children, his wife, sheltered behind glass, staring ahead of her, an empress surrounded by prairie dogs.
He rushed out. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘don’t scratch my car.’
‘Whit is it?’ a hard voice shouted from above.
He looked up. ‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘I was just telling them not to scratch my car.’
‘Why have you goat it there onyway?’
The woman was thin and stringy and wore a cheap bracelet round her throat. A bit like Mrs Jamieson but less self-effacing.
‘I was just paying a visit,’ he said. ‘I used to live here.’
‘They’re no daeing onything to your caur,’ said the voice which was like a saw that would cut through steel forever.
‘It’s an expensive car,’ he said, watching his wife who was sitting in it like a graven image, lips firmly pressed together.
Another window opened. ‘Hey, you there! I�
�m on night shift. Let’s get a bit of sleep. Right?’
A pair of hairy hands slammed the window down again.
Two tall youngsters chewing gum approached.
‘Hey, mister, whit are you on about?’ They stared at him, legs crossed, delicate narrow toes.
‘Nice bus,’ said the one with the long curving moustache.
‘Nice bus, eh Charley?’
They moved forward in concert, a ballet.
‘Look,’ he began, ‘I was just visiting.’ Then he stopped. Should he tell them that he was a rich man who had made good? It might not be advisable. One of them absently kicked one of the front tyres and then suddenly said to his wife, ‘Peek a boo’. She showed no sign that she had seen him. They reminded him of some Africans he had seen, insolent young toughs, town-bred.
‘All right, boys,’ he said in an ingratiating voice. ‘We’re going anyway. We’ve seen all we want.’
‘Did you hear that, Micky? He’s seen all he wants to see. Would you say that was an insult?’ Micky gazed benevolently at him through a lot of hair.
‘Depends. What have you seen, daddy?’
‘I used to live here,’ he said jovially. ‘In the old days. The best years of my life.’ The words rang hollow between them.
‘Hear that?’ said Micky. ‘Hear him. He’s left us. Daddy’s left us.’
The Red Door Page 16