The Red Door

by Iain Crichton Smith

  4

  The following day which was again fine he left the house and went down to a headland which overlooked the sea. He sat there for a long time on the grass, feeling calm and relaxed. The waves came in and went out, and he was reminded of the Gaelic song The Eternal Sound of the Sea which he used to sing when he was young. The water seemed to stretch westward into eternity and he could see nothing on it except the light of the sun. Clamped against the rocks below were the miniature helmets of the mussels and the whelks. He remembered how he used to boil the whelks in a pot and fish the meat out of them with a pin. He realised as he sat there that one of the things he had been missing for years was the sound of the sea. It was part of his consciousness. He should always live near the sea.

  On the way back he saw the skull of a sheep, and he looked at it for a long time before he began his visits. Whenever anyone came home he had to visit every house, or people would be offended. And he would have to remember everybody, though many people in those houses were now dead.

  He walked slowly along the street, feeling as if he were being watched from behind curtained windows. He saw a woman standing at a gate. She was a stout large woman and she was looking at him curiously. She said, ‘It’s a fine day.’ He said, ‘Yes.’

  She came towards him and he saw her red beefy face. ‘Aren’t you John Macleod?’ she asked. ‘Don’t you remember me?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ he replied. ‘You’re Sarah.’

  She shouted jovially as if into a high wind, ‘You’ll have to speak more loudly. I’m a little deaf.’ He shouted back, ‘Yes, I’m John Macleod,’ and it seemed to him as if at that moment he were trying to prove his identity. He shouted louder still, ‘And you’re Sarah.’ His face broke into a large smile.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ she shouted. ‘Come in and have a cup of milk.’

  He followed her into the house and they entered the living room after passing through the scullery which had rows of cups and saucers and plates on top of a huge dresser. In a corner of the room sat a man who was probably her son trapped like a fly inside a net which he was repairing with a bone needle. He was wearing a fisherman’s jersey and his hands worked with great speed.

  ‘This is George,’ she shouted. ‘My son. This is John Macleod,’ she said to George. George looked up briefly from his work but said nothing. He was quite old, perhaps fifty or so, and there was an unmarried look about him.

  ‘He’s always fishing,’ she said, ‘always fishing. That’s all he does. And he’s very quiet. Just like his father. We’re going to give John a cup of milk,’ she said to her son. She went into the scullery for the milk and though he was alone with George the latter didn’t speak. He simply went on repairing his net. This room too was cool and there was no fire. The chairs looked old and cracked and there was an old brown radio in a corner. After a while she came back and gave him the milk. ‘Drink it up,’ she instructed him as if she were talking to a boy. It was very cold. He couldn’t remember when he had last drunk such fine milk.

  ‘You were twenty-four when you went away,’ she said, ‘and I had just married. Jock is dead. George is very like him.’ She shouted all this at the top of her voice and he himself didn’t reply as he didn’t want to shout.

  ‘And how’s that brother of yours?’ she shouted remorselessly. ‘He’s a cheat, that one. Two years ago I sold him a cow. He said that there was something wrong with her and he got her cheap. But there was nothing wrong with her. He’s a devil,’ she said approvingly. ‘But he was the same when he was young. After the penny. Always asking if he could run messages. You weren’t like that. You were more like a scholar. You’d be reading books sitting on the peat banks. I remember you very well. You had fair hair, very fair hair. Your father said that you looked like an angel. But your brother was the cunning one. He knew a thing or two. And how are you?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ he shouted back.

  ‘I hope you’ve come to stay,’ she shouted again. He didn’t answer.

  ‘You would be sorry to hear about your mother,’ she shouted again. ‘We were all fond of her. She was a good woman.’ By ‘good’ she meant that she attended church regularly. ‘That brother of yours is a devil. I wonder if your mother liked him.’ George looked at her quickly and then away again.

  He himself shouted, ‘Why do you ask that?’ She pretended not to hear him and he had to shout the words again.

  ‘It was nothing,’ she said. ‘I suppose you have a big job in America.’

  He was wondering what she had meant and felt uneasy, but he knew that he wouldn’t get anything more out of her.

  ‘They’ve all changed here,’ she shouted. ‘Everything’s changed. The girls go about showing their bottoms, not like in my day. The boys are off to the dances every night. George here should get married but I wouldn’t let him marry one of these trollops. And you can’t visit your neighbours any more. You have to wait for an invitation. Imagine that. In the old days the door would be always open. But not any more. Drink up your milk.’

  He drank it obediently as if he were a child.

  ‘Jock died, you know. A stroke it was. It lasted for three years. But he never complained. You remember Jock.’

  He didn’t remember him very well. Was he the one who used to play football or the one who played tricks on the villagers? He couldn’t summon up a picture of him at all. What had she meant by his mother and his brother? He had a strange feeling as if he were walking inside an illusion, as if things had happened here that he hadn’t known of, though he should have. But who would tell him? They would all keep their secrets. He even had the feeling that this large apparently frank woman was in fact treacherous and secretive and that behind her huge façade there was lurking a venomous thin woman whose head nodded up and down like a snake’s.

  She laughed again. ‘That brother of yours is a businessman. He is the one who should have gone to America. He would have got round them all. There are no flies on him. Did you not think of coming home when your mother died?’

  ‘I was . . . I couldn’t at the time,’ he shouted.

  George, entrapped in his corner, the net around his feet, plied his bone needle.

  ‘It’ll be good to come home again,’ she shouted. ‘Many of them come back. Donny Macdonald came back seven years ago and they hadn’t heard from him for twenty years. He used to drink but he goes to church regularly now. He’s a man of God. He’s much quieter than he used to be. He used to sing a lot when he was young and they made him the precentor. He’s got a beautiful voice but not as good as it was. Nobody knew he was coming home till he walked into the house one night off the bus. Can you imagine that? At first he couldn’t find it because they had built a new house. But someone showed it to him.’

  He got up and laid the cup on the table.

  ‘Is Mr Gordon still alive?’ he shouted. Mr Gordon was his old English teacher.

  ‘Speak up, I can’t hear you,’ she said, her large bulging face thrust towards him like a crab.

  ‘Mr Gordon?’ he shouted. ‘Is he still alive?’

  ‘Mr Gordon,’ she said. ‘Yes, he’s alive. He’s about ninety now. He lives over there.’ She took him over to the window and pointed out a house to him. ‘Oh, there’s the Lady,’ she said. ‘He’s always sitting on the wall. He’s there every day. His sister died, you know. She was a bit wrong in the head.’

  He said goodbye and she followed him to the door. He walked out the gate and made his way to where she had pointed. The day seemed heavy and sleepy and he felt slightly drugged as if he were moving through water. In the distance a man was hammering a post into the ground. The cornfields swayed slightly in the breeze and he could see flashes of red among them. He remembered the days when he would go with a bucket to the well, and smelt again the familiar smell of flowers and grass. He expected at any moment to see the ghosts of the dead stopping him by the roadway, interrogating him and asking him, ‘When did you come home? When are you going away?’ The whole visit, he realised
now, was an implicit interrogation. What it was really about was: What had he done with his life? That was the question that people, without realising it, were putting to him, simply because he had chosen to return. It was also the question that he himself wanted answered.

  Ahead of him stretched the moors and in the far distance he could see the Standing Stones which could look so eerie in the rain and which had perhaps been used in the sacrifice of children in Druid times. Someone had to be knifed to make the sun appear, he thought wryly. Before there could be light there must be blood.

  He made his way to see Mr Gordon.

  5

  Gordon recognised him immediately: it was almost as if he had been waiting for him. He came forward from behind a table on which were piled some books and a chessboard on which some pieces were standing, as if he had been playing a game.

  ‘John,’ he said, ‘John Macleod.’

  John noticed that standing beside the chair was a small glass in which there were the remains of whisky.

  ‘Sit down, sit down,’ said Gordon as if he hadn’t had company for a long time. He was still spry, grey-haired of course, but thin in the body. He was wearing an old sports jacket and a shirt open at the neck. There was a slightly unshaven look about him.

  ‘I play chess against myself,’ he said. ‘I don’t know which of us wins.’ His laugh was a short bark. John remembered himself running to school while Gordon stood outside the gate with a whistle in his hand looking at his watch impatiently.

  ‘I suppose coming from America,’ he said, ‘you’ll know about Fischer. He’s about to do the impossible, beat the Russian World Champion at chess. It’s like the Russians beating the Americans at baseball – or us at shinty,’ he added with the same self-delighting barking laugh. ‘He is of course a genius and geniuses make their own rules. How are you?’

  ‘Very well. And how are you?’ He nearly said ‘Sir’ but stopped himself in time.

  ‘Oh, not too bad. Time passes slowly. Have you ever thought about time?’ Beside his chair was a pile of books scattered indiscriminately. ‘I belong to dozens of book clubs. This is a book on Time. Very interesting. From the point of view of physics, psychiatry and so on.’ He pointed to a huge tome which looked both formidable and new. ‘Did you know, for instance, that time passes slowly for some people and rapidly for others? It’s a matter of personality, and the time of year you’re born. Or that temperature can affect your idea of time? Very interesting.’ He gave the impression of a man who devoured knowledge in a sterile way.

  John looked out of the window. Certainly time seemed to pass slowly here. Everything seemed to be done in slow motion as if people were walking through water, divers with lead weights attached to them.

  ‘Are you thinking of staying?’ said Gordon, pouring out a glass of whisky for his guest.

  ‘I don’t know that yet.’

  ‘I suppose you could buy a house somewhere. And settle down. Perhaps do some fishing. I don’t do any myself. I read and play chess. But I suppose you could fish and do some crofting. Though I don’t remember that you were particularly interested in either of these.’

  ‘I was just thinking,’ said John, ‘of what you used to tell us when we were in your English class. You always told us to observe. Observation, you used to say, is the secret of good writing. Do you remember the time you took us out to the tree and told us to smell and touch it and study it and write a poem about it? It was a cherry tree, I recall. We wrote the poem in the open air.’

  ‘I was in advance of my time,’ said Gordon. ‘That’s what they all do now. They call it Creative Writing. But of course they can’t spell nowadays.’

  ‘And you always told us that exactitude was important. Be observant and exact, you said, above all be true to yourselves.’

  ‘Drink your whisky,’ said Gordon. ‘Yes, I remember it all. I’ve kept some of your essays. You were gifted. In all the years I taught I only met two pupils who were really gifted. How does one know talent when one sees it? I don’t know. Anyway, I recognised your talent. It was natural, like being a tiger.’

  ‘Yes, you kept telling us about exactitude and observation. You used to send us out of the room and change objects in the room while we were out. You made Sherlock Holmeses out of us.’

  ‘Why do you speak about that now? It was all so long ago.’

  ‘I have a reason.’

  ‘What is your reason?’ said Gordon sharply.

  ‘Oh, something that happened to me. Some years ago.’

  ‘And what was that? Or don’t you want to talk about it?’

  ‘I don’t see why not. Not that it’s very complimentary to me.’

  ‘I have reached the age now,’ said Gordon, ‘when I am not concerned with honour, only with people.’

  ‘I see,’ said John, ‘but suppose you can’t separate them. Well, I’ll tell you anyway.’ He walked over to the window, standing with his back to the room and looking out at the empty road. It was as if he didn’t want to be facing Gordon.

  ‘I was an editor for some time as you know,’ he said. ‘Your training stood me in good stead. It was not a big paper but it was a reasonable paper. It had influence in the largish town in which I stayed. It wasn’t Washington, it wasn’t New York, but it was a largish town. I made friends in this town. One was a lecturer in a university. At least that is what we would call it here. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t a lecturer in English. He was a lecturer in History. It was at the time of the McCarthy trials when nobody was safe, nobody. Another of my friends went off his head at that time. He believed that everyone was persecuting him and opening his mail. He believed that planes were pursuing him. In any case this friend of mine, his name was Mason, told me that files had been dug up on him referring to the time when he was a student and had belonged to a Left Wing university club. Now there were complaints that he was indoctrinating his students with Communism and, of course, being a History lecturer, he was in a precarious position. I told him that I would defend him in my paper, that I would write a hardhitting editorial. I told him that I would stand up for principles, humane principles.’ He stretched out his hand for the whisky and decided against drinking it. ‘I left him on the doorstep at eleven o’clock on a Monday night. He was very disturbed because of course he was innocent, he wasn’t a Communist and anyway he had great integrity as a teacher and lectured on Communism only theoretically as one ideology among others. But the McCarthy people of course were animals. You have no conception. Not here. Of the fog of lies. Of the quagmire. No conception.’ He paused. A cow outside had bent its head to the grass and was eating.

  ‘Anyway this was what happened. I walked home because I needed the exercise. The street was deserted. There were lampposts shining and it was raining. A thin drizzle. I could hear the echo of my feet on the road. This was the kind of thing you taught us, to remember and listen and observe, to be aware of our surroundings sensuously. By then it had become a habit with me.

  ‘As I was walking along two youths came towards me out of the shadow, from under the trees. I thought they were coming home from the cinema or from a dance. They wore leather jackets and were walking towards me along the sidewalk. They stayed on the sidewalk and I made as if to go round them since they were coming straight for me without deviating. One of them said, “Daddy.” I stopped. I thought he was going to ask me for a light. He said, “Your wallet, daddy.” I looked at him in amazement. I looked at the two of them. I couldn’t understand what was going on. And something happened to me. I could feel everything very intensely, you see. At that moment I could have written a poem, everything was so clear. They were laughing, you see, and they were very casual. They walked like those cowboys you see on the films, physically at ease in their world. And their eyes sparkled. Their eyes sparkled with pure evil. I knew that if I protested they would beat me up. I knew that there was no appeal. None at all. One of them had a belt, and a buckle on it sparkled in the light. My eyes were at the level of the buckle. I took out my wa
llet and gave them the money. I had fifty dollars. I observed everything as you had trained us to do. Their boots which were shining except for the drizzle: their neckties: their leather jackets. Their legs which were narrow in the narrow trousers. And their faces which were looking slightly upwards and shining. Clear and fine almost, but almost innocent though evil. A rare sort of energy. Pure and bright. They took the wallet, counted the money and gave me back the wallet. They then walked on. The whole incident took perhaps three minutes.

  ‘I went into the house and locked the door. The walls seemed very fragile all of a sudden. My wife had gone to bed and I stood downstairs thinking, now and again removing a book from the shelves and replacing it. I felt the house as thin as the shell of an egg: I could hear, I thought, as far away as San Francisco. There was a tap dripping and I turned it off. And I didn’t write the editorial, I didn’t write anything. Two weeks after that my friend killed himself, with pills and whisky.’

  The whisky which Gordon had given him was still untouched.

  ‘Observation and exactitude,’ he said, ‘and elegance of language.’ There was a long silence. Gordon picked up a chess piece and weighed it in his hand.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and that’s why you came home.’

  ‘Perhaps. I don’t know why I came home. One day I was walking along a street and I smelt the smell of fish coming from a fish shop. And it reminded me of home. So I came home. My wife, of course, is dead.’

  ‘Many years ago,’ said Gordon, still holding the chess piece in his hand, ‘I was asked to give a talk to an educational society in the town. In those days I used to write poetry though of course I never told anyone. I was working on a particular poem at the time: it was very difficult and I couldn’t get it to come out right. Well, I gave this talk. It was, if I may say so myself, a brilliant talk for in those days I was full of ideas. It was also very witty. People came and congratulated me afterwards as people do. I arrived home at one o’clock in the morning. When I got home I took out the poem and tried to do some work on it. But I was restless and excited and I couldn’t get into the right mood. I sat and stared at the clock and I knew quite clearly that I would never write again. Odd, isn’t it?’