The Red Door

by Iain Crichton Smith

  Fiona looked at me, I thought, with some respect.

  ‘That’s very interesting,’ she remarked, but immediately turned away again chewing her grass like a straw in lemonade. Her gaze is almost impersonal as if she were studying a brief.

  ‘It’s true just the same,’ said George leaning forward from his deckchair and looking animated for the first time. ‘Death has nothing to do with us. Fiona here – she’s always on about the hydrogen bomb and the rest of it’ (Fiona was regarding him very quietly) ‘but after all if it comes – pouf.’ Though he was fervent in his speech I saw the despair in his eyes. ‘We won’t know. It’ll just come. Like bashing a fish with a stone. That’s the point. You die anyway.’

  ‘You talk very queerly – for a prospective doctor,’ said Fiona, her eyes following the bird which was now perched bright-eyed on a branch. I had the impression that she had heard this often before.

  ‘But that’s why,’ George almost shouted, leaning further forward, his elbows on his knees. ‘Can’t you see? You people make such a lot out of death. It’s death, that’s all, it’s a fact! It’s a fact! It comes one way or another. I’d try to save them of course, of course I would. But what can I do about politics? What would we ever do? My father now – it’s like the sea – sometimes he gets a good catch sometimes not. If he doesn’t who is he to appeal to? We’ve had all this out before. I can’t help it. I’m going to be a doctor but I’m not a blazing enthusiast. I love children, yes, all right but what can I do? What can we do?’

  I had never heard him speak like this before and I didn’t understand it. What had become of the jazz enthusiast? What had become of the joker?

  ‘It’s when you see death you begin to accept it. Oh I know one fights it – one does. But when you see and hear some stories, well, that’s different. Of old people living on and that boy, who was drowned. I tell you, sometimes I hate that.’ He stood up and aimlessly kicked a stone into the trees. The little bird flew away.

  ‘Now see what you’ve done,’ Fiona protested, ‘you’ve scared him away.’

  He looked at her in astonishment as if about to say ‘The bird’ but instead shut his mouth again. At the same time a wasp swooped on her – striped rather like a deckchair – and she swept it away with her hand almost absent-mindedly.

  With one of his sudden changes of mood George slumped back into the deckchair saying: ‘I’m not going to speak another word. That’s me finished.’ However he was speaking very good-humouredly.

  Fiona stood up removing some of the grass from her slacks and began:

  ‘But I’m not. You think like Kenneth here,’ (he started) ‘you think you don’t but you do. You accept hell too. That’s what you do, you accept it. You say you can’t do anything about it. Why can’t you? You can’t because you don’t care. You think you’re on the side of life because you play your jazz tunes and go to dances, but you aren’t. You don’t care because you don’t see. What’s your father got to do with this? It’s not your father. It’s you. And what has the fishing to do with it?’

  George looked at me half-laughingly but didn’t speak. Instead he took out two cigarettes and tossed one to her. She caught it while still speaking.

  We don’t have girls like this at home, not with this passion. I was listening but not speaking. When eventually she turned to me I said:

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m not on your side. I think we need the bomb. I know you go to meetings and I honour you for it but I can’t see it. We need it to defend ourselves. That’s all. I doubt if it will ever be used anyway.’

  That was all I said. I was honest when I said I honoured her for attending these meetings but I – there was something too ruthless about her, too dominating. I didn’t want to be dominated. I was afraid of her in some queer way. It was like these riddles old Angus used to ask me. I dreaded them as if I would make a mistake and I don’t like making mistakes. And I’m sure I’m right too and she’s wrong. Where will this tenderness get us? These birds? Then she said a strange thing:

  ‘You’re different from George, though. You’ll see.’ And she added: ‘You’ll see.’

  But what am I to see? The afternoon sun was waning slightly and I felt a slight chill. I wanted to stay here and argue but at the same time I wanted to leave. She reminded me of someone but I could not think of whom.

  In fact I’ve been thinking that these letters are sometimes difficult for me to write. You want to know about everything but writing in English I can’t communicate somehow. It’s so formal. I begin to feel that we have never really communicated. However . . .

  So we left it there and the three of us relaxed in the chilling air for a while, George with his eyes closed, I feeling rather out of things as if I had caused a quarrel between George and Fiona and wondering what he had told her about me before she came, and Fiona in her red slacks curled up on the ground tightly like a spring. How had they ever come into contact? Well, George told me. They met at a dance and I suppose hearing that he was a prospective doctor she thought he would be a natural for her ideas and she might discover interesting information as well. Not that she was as calculating as this: no one as passionate as she is could be as calculating as that, but it must have crossed her mind.

  Anyway they’re not suited to each other. George is too pedestrian for her. I can see that. I think medicine is getting him down.

  As for me I have a greater capacity for suffering than either of them. These long summer days in bed – the blackness – the eternal fire – these things have hardened me. I’ll not be broken, I know that, not by her arguments. And after all it may be we shall never meet again.

  For some reason the thought came into my mind just now. Do you remember Mrs Armstrong? You remember that the day her husband died she stopped the clock and never wound it again. Why did I think of that just now? And when we went into her house – the silence there was, the silence you could hear.

  When I saw the two of them going out together, George clowning again and she walking briskly to keep up with him, I thought they looked so young. And yet both of them are older than me! By one year. It’s the heart of man. Will that ever change? Will it ever change?

  I’m still working hard – in fact harder than ever – and doing reasonably well.

  Why did you send me that money? Don’t martyr yourself. It makes me feel guilty.

  Your loving son,

  KENNETH

  PS The thing that fascinates me most about university is the way one argues as if the mind matters. At home it wasn’t like that. Nothing we could do seemed to matter. Like that bird hopping about, that’s how it is now. Of course it wasn’t free. But in a way it was. Perhaps that was why Fiona was watching it all the time, the diminutive wren hopping about. I’m sure that phrase diminutive wren is from some book or other, probably Shakespeare but I can’t remember where.

  Last night sitting in the dining room after supper I listened to a monologue from George. We were in our armchairs in a sort of restful near-midnight silence with the radio playing nostalgic music. Perhaps that’s what started him off.

  ‘After we left you today,’ he began, ‘we didn’t talk much. And yet what I said this afternoon was true. They say it all goes back to your childhood. I don’t know. My father is a fisherman. You have to know about fishing. It’s not like a profession. It’s more – precarious. All fishermen drink, you know, well, most of them. You see, they’re living under strain. My father doesn’t drink all that much but he drinks, a little. Living in a small place does that too. He’s a big man, very friendly, very slaphappy. My mother’s different – good worker, you know the sort, very industrious. No, I didn’t have an unhappy childhood, not at all. I spent a lot of time at the motor boats tinkering about and watching them at the harbour, most of them painted yellow with their names and the yellow buoys on the deck and the green nets . . . But sometimes we were hungry, very hungry. I could have savaged a piece of meat in my childhood. You can’t eat fish all of the time.

  ‘Once
my father told me a story. He used to tell me a lot of stories. It was when he was younger – when he was sailing – he ended up in New Zealand. A few of them jumped ship and stayed behind. One holiday they went out in a small boat – two of them, the day was warm. Very lazy they were, very lazy, drifting along. Then they began to take off their clothes – it was so hot – first the jackets, then the shirts. The sea was – you know – glassy with that tremendous eye-shattering heat. They decided they’d have a plunge – smell of tar from the boat too. So they lowered themselves over the side. No, his friend went first while he kept the boat steady. It was very warm, very calm. Then the shark came. It sheared right through his friend. The boat toppled slightly then he steadied it, sort of. There was some threshing through which he rowed, then nothing. Later they found his friend’s stocking – one stocking.

  ‘He often used to tell me stories. You know he didn’t drink at all then. Later of course he didn’t drink much, but some. There was some – precariousness, but I was happy. I don’t write to them, not because I don’t like them but because I’m lazy – I’m quite lazy really. I suppose I became a doctor to enter a profession. I didn’t want to be poor, you see, again.

  ‘And sometimes, you know, you see certain things, like that drowned boy. They don’t get you down all that much, but Fiona, she’s romantic, she thinks that life is so tremendously important, and death too. I . . . Well, she’s pretty you know. Sometimes you don’t think so, but there’s bone there. Intensity. So few people have it. Like . . . It’s precious. Oh, I’ll be a doctor all right and a good one. Remember I told you once you were on the side of life? You are. I laugh more than you, and I joke, but perhaps it’s defensive. Since I came here I saw an old woman. She’s hanging on to life like a leech in the hospital. Why? And her daughter comes in, weary, weary. It would be better if the old woman died. But she doesn’t. She hates life too. She’s always complaining. She’s eighty – and I once heard her call on her mother. What do you think of that?

  ‘Oh well. Up. Bed, boy. End of Reminiscences of George Morton.

  ‘But I’ll tell you this. I’ve never met anyone like Fiona. I’ve been out with a lot of girls but . . . she’s alive you know. At the dance I met her, you couldn’t help being attracted, it was as if she was gulping up life. If you take her to the pictures she’s leaning forward, she takes part in the film. You can feel her throwing the pies – and cracking nuts between her teeth. There’s a quality of carelessness about her – a divine carelessness.

  ‘Hey! That’s great. I ought to be a poet. “Divine carelessness.” That’s good, that’s good. Come on, let’s go upstairs and pull the chain and wake Mrs Bryden from her dreams of filthy lucre.’

  So that’s George since you wanted to know about him.

  As he was talking, for some reason this came into my head. Do you remember Mrs Murray who died about five years ago, you know at 10a. You remember Donald her son – he died of tuberculosis – he was sixteen. I used to visit him. It was in the black house. I remember listening to her once. She was telling me the minister had been in – in fact he used to come in often. ‘Donald,’ she said, ‘he talks about these practical jokes of yours, you know when you let Norman’s horse loose and when you took that dead rat into school. He laughs at all these things remembering them and yourself. These are the things he’s always talking about and the jam jar you ran away with. And he doesn’t know what’s waiting for him. The doctor says he’ll die but Donald doesn’t know it. He’s gay – but he coughs a lot. And all he talks about is these nonsensical things! The minister tells him to read the Bible but he hardly ever does. And he doesn’t pray. He says he doesn’t know how to. He sometimes can’t stop himself laughing when the minister is praying. What am I going to do with him?’

  I don’t know why I thought of that but it came back to me very clearly, and especially the last thing she told me. They told him he was going to die and the minister was always there. Strangely enough he wanted the minister to be with him and he was already reading the Bible. She said however that he was always following her about with his eyes as if he were asking her something and she couldn’t think what it was. The moment he died she was sitting in a chair knitting. The Bible fell out of his hand and she went to give it back to him but he was dead. She told me that when she bent down she remembered that the Bible itself was cold but the sun on the floor below was warm. For some reason she remembered this.

  I hate the deaths of our island. There are too many. There are far too many deaths.

  Your loving son,

  KENNETH

  I do not understand your letter. Why this attack on Fiona? No, I haven’t seen her since that day but that is no reason for your letter. I don’t understand it. I begin to think you are not trying to understand me, though I am trying to understand you. You are not even trying. I know what you have done for me, believe me. I appreciate it. But at the same time it is clear that you are not trying to understand me. That is terrifying. I hadn’t realised it before. Fiona is not like that at all. You say she has no right to meddle with these things, that it’s not woman’s work. What do you expect her to do? Go to the well for pails of water? You say that the government know best. I don’t agree. What have they done for us? I’m beginning to see a lot of things. Hell paralyses the will. I don’t agree with her, but I don’t see why she shouldn’t go to meetings if she wishes to. I am not under bad influence. I work hard. I drive myself far into the night. But sometimes I wonder why I do it. At home one doesn’t question these things, but I can’t prevent my mind from developing.

  I will tell you something. I have a picture of an island. It is bleak but the people are gentle. Oh they are gentle enough and polite and well mannered . . . But it may be the gentility of the dead. I see them sitting by their TV sets as here and not walking casually into each other’s houses as before without knocking. There is nothing we can do against that, but prepare ourselves. Gentility is not enough in the world we’re born into. It is a weakness. To break the will of the children is wrong.

  What have I seen in the city since I came? I have seen beggars and lonely men, I have seen the yellow lights of the mind, and the crooked shadows. Yet we must learn to live with it. I know we must. You should not have written that letter. Children should be able to respect their parents. You must try to learn to understand. I know it is difficult but you must learn to try. There is nothing else for you to do, nothing else.

  Sometimes I get terrified. In this house there are seven or eight people. The landlady – what does she live for, but the making of money? And what will she do with it? She will leave it to her children. And her husband who smokes his pipe and watches films twice or thrice a week? Were the two of them always like that? Or were they once like Jake and Joan? How have they been cheated? And this lady lecturer, who spends her evenings sewing or visiting her friend, the other lady lecturer, what has she to look forward to? These things have to be answered. I sometimes wonder: Might they not as well be dead? Perhaps that’s what happened to man: he was unfortunate enough to be able to prolong his life. For most people might as well be dead at thirty. And yet . . . I feel that’s wrong. There is some meaning if one can find it – a precarious balance somewhere. One looks out and sees, like the Lady of Shalott. But one day the mirror breaks. One should not think like this. Or is it that others don’t see it, the abyss?

  Jake and Joan are happy. They will be married. They follow each other with their eyes and to others appear silly: but they are precious to each other. And perhaps that is enough: even for a short while. I don’t know. Today I got a wedding invitation from Norman, Norman Morrison. He knows I can’t go to the wedding but he sent me the invitation and a flattering letter calling me his dearest friend. And it’s true I suppose. We went to school together. We used to be sent out gardening together by the head-master. We ate the stolen strawberries with their almost unbearable tartness together. We studied for our bursaries and read the crates of books from the library, surreptitiously chec
king over our answers to arithmetic problems. And I am glad he is to be married, but I know that we will never speak to each other again in the same way.

  I am sick of our melancholy, sick of it. I want to see things as they are. It is necessary. I am sick and tired of people saying No. It is necessary to stop saying No.

  I am sorry about your letter. I am very sorry and shocked. I do not think you should have written it. I think it’s time you went out amongst people more. I think it is time you depended less on me, although I shall never abandon you. It is time you looked at the facts. I do not want this burden of guilt. It is time we laughed more – high time.

  Your loving son,

  KENNETH

  2

  Yesterday quite by chance I ran into Fiona. I went into the café in front of the reading room – where I sometimes study – and there she was. After my ten days at home I had completely forgotten about her. She was sitting by herself in a corner seat drinking coffee. At first she didn’t see me, and I watched her. She was idly stirring the coffee with a spoon – her brown and white leather bag was slung over a chair: and she was staring into the cup as if it was – well, perhaps something nuclear! Then she saw me, her face brightened and we began to talk.

  I have this bad Highland manner of wanting to know about people – all about them. I pointed to her CND badge and asked her about it. She also showed me the card they are given with its peculiar biblical message. I think she intends going to Aldermarston for the march.

  ‘I’m tired of studying,’ she said, ‘I feel suffocated. Honestly I do. Suffocated. As if I can’t get enough air. Sometimes I walk down to the quay and watch the ships. That helps a little but not much.’

  I found it strange listening to her because that was how I felt when I was home – as if I were being strangled to death by invisible hands. However I don’t feel so bad now.

  She talked fairly freely about her parents after a while: ‘My mother’s dead,’ she said, ‘my father’s alive. He’s a lawyer. He’s a fairly successful lawyer – here. Once he had a chance to try for a bigger job in England: but my mother was ill at the time, with her nerves, and he couldn’t go.’