The Red Door

by Iain Crichton Smith

  Eventually the telegrams had all been read and the father got up to speak about the bride. I didn’t know what I expected but he certainly began with an air of business-like trepidation. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I am here today to make a speech which as you will know is not my speciality.’ He twisted his neck about inside the imprisoning collar and continued. ‘I can tell you that the crossing was good and the skipper told me that the Corona is a good boat though a bit topheavy.’ He beamed nervously and then said, ‘But to my daughter. I can tell you that she has been a good daughter to me. I am not going to say that she is good at the peats for she is never at home for the peats and she never went to the fishing as girls of her age used to do in the past.’ By this time people were beginning to look at each other or down at their plates and even the waitresses were smiling. ‘I’ll tell you something about the old days. We turned out good men and women in those days, good sailors who fought for their country. Nowadays I don’t know about that. I was never in the city myself and I never wore a collar except to the church. Anyway I was too busy. There were the calves to be looked after and the land as you all know. But I can tell you that my daughter here has never been a burden to us. She has always been working on the mainland. Ever since she was a child she has been a good girl with no nonsense and a help to her mother, and many’s the time I’ve seen her working at the hay and in the byre. But things is changed now. Nowadays, it’s the tractors and not the horses. In the old days too we had the gig but now it’s the train and the plane.’ The bride was turning a deadly white and staring down at the table. The girls on my left were transfixed. Someone dropped a fork or a spoon or a knife and the sound it made could be heard quite clearly. But the father continued remorselessly: ‘In my own place I would have spoken in the Gaelic but even the Gaelic is dying out now as anyone can read in the papers every week. In the old days too we would have a wedding which would last for three days. When Johnny Murdo married, I can remember it very well, the wedding went on for four days. And he married when he was quite old. But as for my daughter here I am very happy that she is getting married though the city is not the place for me and I can tell you I’ll be very glad to get back to the dear old home again. And that is all I have to say. Good luck to them both.’

  When he sat down there was a murmur of conversation which rose in volume as if to drown the memory of the speech. The girls beside me talked in a more hectic way than ever about their hotels and made disparaging remarks about the islands and how they would never go back. Everyone avoided the bride who sat fixed and miserable at the table as if her wedding dress had been turned into a shroud.

  I don’t know exactly what I felt. It might have been shame that the waitresses had been laughing. Or it might have been gladness that someone had spoken naturally and authentically about his own life. I remember I picked up my whisky and laid it down again without drinking it and felt that this was in some way a meaningful action.

  Shortly afterwards the dancing began in an adjoining room. During the course of it (at the beginning they played the latest pop tunes) I went over and stood beside the father who was standing by himself in a corner looking miserable as the couples expressed themselves (rather than danced) in tune to the music, twisting their bodies, thrusting out their bellies and swaying hypnotically with their eyes half shut.

  ‘It’s not like the eightsome reel,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know what it is like,’ he said. ‘I have never seen anything like it.’

  ‘It is rather noisy,’ I agreed. ‘And how are the crops this year?’ I said to him in Gaelic.

  He took his dazed eyes off a couple who were snapping their fingers at each other just in front of him, and said: ‘Well, it’s been very dry so far and we don’t know what we’re going to do.’ He had to shout the words against the music and the general noise. ‘I have a good few acres you know though a good many years ago I didn’t have any and I worked for another man. I have four cows and I sell the milk. To tell you the honest truth I didn’t want to come here at all but I felt I couldn’t let her down. It wasn’t an easy thing for me. I haven’t left the island before. Do you think this is a posh hotel?’

  I said that I thought it was. He said, ‘I tell you I’ve never been in a hotel before now. They’ve got a lot of carpets, haven’t they? And mirrors, I’ve never seen so many mirrors.’

  ‘Come on,’ I shouted, ‘let’s go into the bar.’ We did so and I ordered two beers.

  ‘The people in there aren’t like human beings at all,’ he said. ‘They’re like Africans.’

  After a while he said, ‘It was the truth I said about her, she’s never at home. She’s always been working in hotels. I’ll tell you something, she’s never carried a creel on her back though that’s not a good thing either. She was always eating buns and she would never eat any porridge. What do you think of her husband, eh? He was talking away about cars. And he’s got a good suit, I’ll give him that. He gave the waiter a pound, I saw it with my own eyes. Oh, he knows his way around hotels, I’ll be bound. But where does he come from? I don’t know. He’s never ploughed any ground, I think.’

  I thought at that moment that he wouldn’t see his daughter very often in the future. Perhaps he really was without knowing it giving her away to a stranger in a hired cutprice suit.

  After a while we thought it politic to go back. By this time there was a lull in the dancing and the boy in the lightish suit had started a Gaelic song but he didn’t know all the words of it, only the chorus. People looked round for assistance while red-faced and embarrassed he kept asking if anyone knew the words because he himself had lost them. Suddenly the father pushed forward with authority and standing with his glass in his hand began to sing – verse after verse in the traditional manner. They all gathered round him and even the waitresses listened, there was so much depth and intensity in his singing. After he had finished there was much applause and requests for other songs for he seemed to know the words of all of them. The young girls and the boys gathered round him and sat on the floor in a circle looking up at him. He blossomed in the company and I thought that I could now leave, for he seemed to be wholly at home and more so than his audience were.

  Getting Married

  It had all happened like a dream. There he was seated on a bench watching the men playing at the open-air yellow-and-black draughtsboard on a beautiful summer’s evening, his guitar by his side, not even able to make up his mind whether his holiday was being a success. At the draughtsboard just in front of him a squat one-armed man was sitting on an upended box and staring across at his opponent who was dangling his hooked pole precisely in front of him. Up above at street level the sun flashed from the black statue of Burns who clutched a black marble daisy in his left hand and looked gaily across to a block of what seemed to be insurance offices. He himself was almost falling asleep: he had done a lot of travelling in the last few days. He stretched out legs encased in their tight trousers and regarded his unpolished shoes. He was wondering whether he could get into the YMCA or somewhere.

  A gardener hosed a strip of green grass to his right and in the distance on a wooden stage he could see Highland dancers, dressed in innocent white, tiptoeing delicately as if in an amateurish ballet. They looked virginal and clean and oddly archaic. At the same time they reminded him that he himself felt sweaty and unwashed. The one-armed man, chewing gum relentlessly, hooked another piece from the board as if he were taking part in some battle whose outcome would decide the destiny of the world. Somewhere behind him among the trees he heard a clock hammering out six solid strokes.

  He closed his eyes and as he did so he heard a voice saying, ‘Do you like Shelley?’ He turned round in surprise and saw that sitting beside him on the bench was a young girl with a miniature face, long blonde hair and wearing dark green slacks. He hadn’t even heard her coming. He jerked himself awake, his long hair shaking.

  Her enquiry had been very low and tentative and he didn’t quite know what to
make of it. She was holding a book out towards him and he looked at it stupidly half wondering if he were really asleep and she were part of his dream.

  ‘I thought you might like Shelley,’ she said, ‘because of your guitar.’

  He gazed at her, tired and sleepy, noticing that there were shadows under her eyes and that her slacks looked slightly worn and soiled. She might have been seventeen.

  He looked at the book which showed on the cover the picture of a dreamy poet with long hair.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t read Shelley.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I got it from the library.’ She didn’t seem the type who would read Shelley; he thought her voice sounded slightly uneducated. She seemed in fact like the kind of girl who might work in a shop except that she had about her a curious vulnerability and he was reminded of a woman he had met on the bus coming up who had been crying by herself for a long time and had then confided in him that she was going home to her mother because her husband was beating her up. She kept trying to speak to everyone and offering them cigarettes. Her open appeal for help was embarrassing. Eventually she had gone up to the driver to offer him a cigarette in spite of the fact that there was a notice saying that passengers must not engage the driver in conversation without good reason as they might distract him. At one stage she had shown him a burn on her hand which she said her husband had made with a cigarette.

  He himself had heard of Shelley but that was all: he didn’t read books like that.

  ‘I am going for a walk,’ she said. ‘Would you like to come for a walk?’ and again he was reminded of the open vulnerability of that other woman, her pouting childish face. Though she had said she was fifty years old, she had looked infantile. Imagine a grown woman on a bus crying like that, the tears seeping out of her as out of a well. At first he had taken her for a spastic, she looked so shapeless and childish, and her legs were drawn up on the seat like a child’s.

  He got up without thinking partly because he was so surprised and partly because he had nothing else to do and partly because he was beginning to feel lonely. It didn’t really do to jump into a holiday as he had done without preparation, to leave the familiar urban streets with their noisy cafés and set off to the north to find lochs and trees and seas and fresh air. He was so tired that he felt as if he was walking in a dream. She put her hand in his and they climbed the steps together. He noticed vaguely that someone had scrawled YA BAS on the statue of Burns. He knew it was a statue of Burns because it said so and he had heard of Burns though he hadn’t heard much about Shelley.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he said.

  ‘We’ll go for a walk,’ she said, ‘you just follow me.’ They walked down the street, crossed another one and turned right, down to the harbour.

  ‘I like watching the ships,’ she said. They sat on the edge of the quay swinging their legs over the side watching the oily scummy water choked with floating boxes and scum. The harbour was crammed with fishing boats with names like Mary Rose and Victor and Grace. Above them towered a huge merchant ship with scarred rusty sides.

  ‘I would like to go to India,’ she said.

  ‘Why India?’

  ‘I don’t know. Sometimes I want to go to India. Other times I want to go to Africa. Tonight I want to go to India. My father is a scientist, you know. My mother was at university.’

  She clutched his hand tightly as if otherwise they might fall into the water. He didn’t know exactly what he felt, a strangeness and yet a warmth. And as she spoke he himself thought, Yes, it would be good to leave this place and go off to India or Greece or someplace like that. But then you had to have money. Perhaps she had money. He’d never had any money. It would be marvellous to have as much money as you wanted, buy as many cigarettes as you wanted, wear good clothes, go into the cabin with your new cases and have people wait on you.

  ‘What songs do you know?’ she said. ‘You look like a poet. I thought you looked like Shelley. That’s why I spoke to you. Are you a poet? I got Shelley out of the library. I don’t understand him sometimes.’

  ‘I know a ballad about Benny Lynch,’ he said. ‘The boxer. He was destroyed by hangers-on. He was a great champion but the money destroyed him. That happens a lot with boxers.’

  ‘Sometimes I like to pretend that this is Venice,’ she said. ‘I once saw a picture book about Venice. It’s full of canals. They don’t have buses in Venice. I would like to go to Venice too.’

  She swung her legs together like a child.

  ‘I’m on holiday,’ he said. ‘I took my guitar with me. I don’t have much money. I don’t have any money.’

  ‘Are you a good guitarist?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, I think so. Do you know that song Waly Waly?’

  ‘No. Can you play it? Play it then.’

  He started to sing and play:

  ‘As we cam in by Glesca toun

  A comely sicht we were to see

  my love was clad in the black velvet

  And I mysel in crammasy.’

  Ever since he had first heard that song he couldn’t get it out of his head. It was at the Gringo pub one afternoon. A few of the boys had been there, that was where they met. It was a pretty crummy pub but the prices were all right.

  ‘What’s crammasy?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  There was a smell of brine and oil all around them, mixed with the aroma of rotten apples as if a box of them had been left lying about.

  ‘Have you any money at all?’ she said. ‘We could go to the pictures.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I haven’t any money.’

  She turned towards him, her hand still in his, her face white and beautiful and intense.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. They got up and hand in hand walked back to the main street and then along it westwards for what appeared to be miles. Eventually they came out on to the beach which faced a large panorama of sea. There was a fairground and they walked through it looking at the people pulling levers, on the roundabouts, spinning on top of the huge wheel which turned over and over against the sky.

  They passed a fortune teller’s tent and she thought about going in but didn’t. ‘When my mother was in university,’ she said, ‘she went to a fortune teller’s and he told her she would marry a clever man.’ She watched some women playing bingo and said, ‘It’s disgusting how they spend their time.’

  Eventually she turned away and said, ‘I don’t like fairs. Everything is so cheap.’ They left the fair and walked down to the beach. They sat on a seat and watched the white rollers rising terrifyingly high and then dissipating themselves along the sand. They could sense an inhuman violent force of water which would engulf and destroy anything that came near it. Clutching his hand she looked out with parted lips.

  ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ she said. He wished that he could take his guitar out there and play. He wanted to stand up and shout ‘As we cam in by Glesca toun’. He wanted to dive in there and play his guitar, into that whiteness, that ghostly whiteness, that wheel of power.

  She was restless. ‘Let’s go over there and sit on the grass,’ she said. He obeyed her and they sat by themselves away from the little boys playing football in their green and white Celtic stripes.

  He lay beside her and stroked her hair tenderly, wanting to comb it. He kissed the side of her head. Then he kissed her gently opened mouth. They breathed in and out tenderly without passion.

  ‘Would you like to marry me?’ she said seriously, staring up at the white sliver of moon which had appeared in the dark blue sky.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s what I would like to do.’ He kissed her fingers one by one.

  ‘We’ll go and see my father later then,’ she said. The moon was white and tender like her face. On the finger of one hand she was wearing a Woolworth ring.

  ‘I only met you an hour ago,’ he said, tenderly and amazedly kissing her hair and feeling as if the bones in his body were melting. He picked up her hand and kiss
ed each finger again individually. He wanted to protect her. He wanted to have money so that he could give her food. He parted her hair tenderly.

  ‘So this is what love is like,’ he thought. He had never felt such tenderness before. She laid her head on his shoulder and fell asleep. He lay on his side and looked at her while the moon rose and the light darkened and the blue of the sky began to become black.

  After what seemed a long time she woke up, took his hand and said, ‘Let’s go.’ They walked across the grass and out to the street again. Again they walked for what seemed to be miles, turning right till they came to a rough group of scarred tenements which seemed to have been there for so long that they were like rotten teeth growing out of the ground. He had an impression of scummy pools, worn grass and bricks and at one time saw the moon beyond the corner of the house but then lost it again.

  ‘Play something,’ she said. So in front of these ancient horrible old buildings he played The Bonnie Earl o’Moray.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, her eyes half closed.

  Then he played Macpherson’s Rant.

  He was tired. It was growing dark and he didn’t know where he was. She eventually stopped at one of the closes which had stairs ascending steeply into the darkness above. There was a smell of urine and of cats. She clutched his hand as they climbed as if worried that he would run away. Once they stopped on a landing and looked out of the broken window there. He saw nothing but a waste of clay and overflowing bins. They climbed till they reached the top landing. He looked down into the well below and felt dizzy. There was no bell and she knocked on the door. There was no answer and she knocked harder. A man’s voice was heard from within.

  ‘Eff off,’ it said.