The Red Door

by Iain Crichton Smith

  However, just as he was leaving, Jimmy said quietly, ‘I wonder if you have still got the five pound note you keep in your wallet.’ The policeman looked at him, saw some dancing glitter of comedy in his eyes, took out his wallet and sure enough there was a five pound note missing.

  There was a long silence in the room interrupted only by the frantic buzzing of a bluebottle against dim panes. The two men gazed at each other. The balloon swung gently between them and the guitar leaned back in its corner.

  ‘So,’ said the policeman at last, ‘this is a challenge.’ He brooded for a moment, thought that beating Jimmy up was not on, that pure deduction must be the answer, that if he didn’t come up with the answer he was finished in the village, and then proceeded to think. Jimmy glanced at him mockingly. For the first time the policeman realised that there was an elfin quality about Jimmy, in the thin ironic face, and the playful smile, that too he had what could only be called an implacable cheek. He said, ‘First of all I have to search you. Come here.’

  Jimmy submitted to the search in a good-humoured manner, but there was no five pound note on him. There was no money on him at all.

  The policeman took a walk over to the sink. There was nothing there either. It was neat and tidy and white. The policeman examined himself. There were no five pound notes in his pockets and nothing in his turn-ups. He opened the wallet again to make sure that the money hadn’t been returned there in some mysterious manner, but it hadn’t. He looked in the fireplace but that was bare. He tried the top of the stool but it remained fixed. He made Jimmy stand naked while he examined all his clothes. For one terrifying moment he thought that perhaps Jimmy had gambled on this, that he would have arranged for someone to be watching, and that he, the policeman, would be accused of sodomy. He made Jimmy put on his clothes again. Jimmy sat back in the chair puffing at his pipe contentedly. The policeman gazed at him. He said at last, ‘I am really a very good policeman, you know. It would be a tragedy for you if I were to leave. Who else would you get in my place but some idiot who would be unable to solve any of your crimes? I believe in what I am doing. I was born to be a policeman. You think your idyllic existence will go on forever, that there will never be any serious crime or murder. But how do you know that? All you have to do is read the papers.’

  The silent guitar leaned back in the corner. The balloon drifted a little, like someone breathing. Jimmy said nothing but smiled. The policeman knew that if Jimmy told the story of the Locked Room he would never recover from it. In a sudden rage he pulled down the balloon and burst it as if he thought the money might be inside it, but it wasn’t, and the deflated balloon lay on the floor. He searched in the teapot and the kettle, but there was nothing there. He looked in the tin where the tea had been.

  ‘I’ve got it!’ he said at last. ‘I know what you’ve done. I know exactly what you’ve done. You’ve rolled the money up and put it in your pipe bowl.’ Jimmy looked at him in wonderment and slightly fearfully. He mimicked alarm and despondency. He seemed to protest as he handed the pipe over. The policeman looked into the bowl. There was nothing there.

  He sat and looked at Jimmy in despair. He had tried everything and he hadn’t found the solution. The room was small and bare. There were no other hiding-places.

  For the first time however he realised that there was a clock and that it was ticking rather loudly. He felt that it was ticking away his career. He remembered the stories about Jimmy, how once at Hallowe’en he had made a cart disappear, how he could do weird things with telephones . . . As he sat there in amazement and bafflement, Jimmy said, ‘You’re a good policeman. You’re really very good. But what you haven’t realised is that if you go on the way you are going you will increase and not decrease the amount of crime in the village. You will have to learn to leave people alone unless there is something really serious. Look at me. I leave people alone. I’m cleverer than you. I’ve just proved it. My mind works faster. If I wanted to commit a serious crime I could get away with it. You have forced me to take a five pound note from you. That is a crime you are directly responsible for. Do you understand? Now I am a law-abiding person and if the law were just I should be able to sue you for serious temptation but I am not going to sue you. I’m letting you off. Do you realise that I have put you in prison? This room is a prison for you. You can’t leave it because I have wound round you a net of the mind. For years, for the rest of your life, if you leave now with the mystery unsolved, you will be wondering about it. It will cause self-doubt. You will never be the policeman you were. I hope you understand that clearly.’

  The policeman looked at him for a long time and then said, ‘You are saying that you are offering me a bargain.’

  ‘Yes. The fact that you thought of my pipe suggests that you are clever. You will have to learn to be tolerant. Will you do that if I tell you the solution?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the policeman at long last. ‘I’ll do that. I have understood everything you have said.’

  ‘Good,’ said Jimmy springing up. ‘The five pound note is pinned to the back of your tunic. If you had gone out of this house swearing vengeance on me with the five pound note pinned to your tunic, what do you think would have happened?’

  The policeman shivered as if in a cold wind.

  ‘Now,’ said Jimmy, ‘I think we’ll have a proper cup of tea. Or rather whisky. I make it myself, you know. After all we have something to celebrate. The return of a policeman to ordinary humanity.’

  After the Film

  Murdo came out of the village hall in a daze after seeing the Western. The shapeless night was all about him and the moon a cold stone in the sky. He stopped and looked up at it. Its gaze reminded him of the professional killer in the film, cold, inhuman. The killer clad in black had ridden out of the mountains, guns slung low, hat casting a black shadow over the rough rocky ground. There had been a saloon full of people dancing, whirling about, shouting, drinking: of girls with frilly dresses which ballooned over their heads: of comic finished men with large drooping moustaches. And into this place the killer had come, professional, remote, always standing on the edge of things, watching. Murdo lowered his eyes from the moon. There was the village with its huddle of houses, its unfinished fences, its holed walls. There were the peatstacks, black in the moonlight. For a moment he had a vision of the village as unprotected, untidy, dull. He peopled it with the villagers standing in their braces outside the houses, harvesting, stacking corn. There was one thing about Westerns, however, you never saw the sea in them. Plains, rocks, canyons, but never the sea.

  He saw in his mind’s eye the professional killer walking down his own village street. For that matter he himself for a moment was the professional killer. He always looked after his gun, polished it. After all, he was dependent on it. It was his livelihood. His reflexes were honed to the sharpest possible pitch. His mind operated continually at the highest levels. Life was a continual gamble with death, a continual proof of itself on that fabulous street he was walking now and which was quite still. It looked like a bone in the moonlight and as he thought this he heard a dog bark. The bark was duplicated by that of another dog. Then there was silence. He walked or rather rolled on his high heels down the street, feeling the gun in his hand, the leather on his body, cool and tight. All problems were solved by the gun, by speedy reflexes.

  He was in Dodge City or Abilene. There were enemies all around him. But he was walking easily. He wasn’t a simple village boy who moved slowly about in acres of time. He was impregnable among all these untidy shapes beside the untidy sea, which bothered him a bit because it shouldn’t be in the script. The moonlight lay across it in sparkling drops, right out to the furthest edge. As he watched, the tightness and stiffness drained out of him. The professional was walking towards the sea but who would shoot into the sea? He didn’t understand why this should bother him so much. His phantom hat cast its shadow over the unseen flowers which grew at the side of the road. His body was black and menacing. He had ridden far an
d in his hand the six-gun spun. He was walking down the road towards the sea, towards its shining acres, towards its jagged rocks. He passed the houses all asleep. He saw a cat scurry across the road in front of him, its eyes green and watchful. He walked on. The sea was growing louder. It reminded him suddenly of Mary, who would be lying asleep in her bed at that moment, her hair untouched by scent. Tomorrow at school he would see her again. As he thought this he also realised that his mind had been clouded, that the professional care had left him. ‘I could have been killed there,’ he thought to himself. ‘Just as I passed that house I could have been killed. I allowed myself to think of something else.’ He made his mind steady and cold again, drawing his power from the dazzling stony moon. As before, the untidy shadows fed his superiority, he himself was a being of hard edges. But nevertheless the sea glittered ahead of him and he could hear the sound it made, languorous and resonant with ancient stories. The light shining on it made him recall a wedding he had been to recently. The cat leaped out ahead of him again and he went for his gun. But he was too late. The cat had got away. If that had been the sheriff he would have been killed. The professional never got a second chance from another professional. The sea filled his head with its noise. The houses entered his consciousness, untidy and shadowy. Mary was walking across the sea, long blonde hair streaming. His gun and holster had dropped away. He walked on naked and vulnerable into the roar of the night and its randomness. He felt a breeze stir his hair briefly and die away. The road had become mysterious and he could feel the scent of the flowers rank in his nostrils. His black leather clothes faded into the night, and his jersey shone white in the moonlight. He was making his way to the sea. He wished to listen to the ageless stories, the rumours of the past. He felt like a rock melting. He entered the random shapeless shadows, happy to be there looking around him. To be a professional . . . How to shoot into the sea with the blonde light falling across it? How to keep continually awake in that ancient sleepy sound? He had dropped his holsters, he was moving forward, unprotected, towards that ageless monotonous sound which the villagers had heard for centuries, towards the sea the gunfighter had never seen.

  Moments

  1

  There exist in life what I call moments and I mean, by that, moments of vision. I should like to tell you of two of them which have a connection with the village. One I experienced myself; the other was experienced by a friend of mine. There is nothing supernatural about these moments. They do not belong to another world or anything silly like that. They appear in the present but when they do appear they seem to shine with an enormous significance, as if they meant to tell us something that we do not quite understand or cannot put into words. There are of course coincidences but that is not what I mean. Once I myself for instance phoned a girl friend of mine and three times got another girl whom I had once known. There was something wrong with the phone. And I could list hundreds of other coincidences. Moments aren’t like that, they aren’t surprising. On the contrary, they seem to reveal something we ought to have seen for a long time. They dazzle with their rightness. But let me go on and tell my story.

  In the first instance I must tell you that in my village years ago, and indeed in most villages years ago, there was a man who wrote business letters and filled in forms for people. The villagers cannot write business letters and they are terrified of forms. The reason I think is that these letters and forms are official and in their minds connected with the Government or its agencies and, because of past experience engraved on their consciousnesses, they consider the Government and its agencies hostile and frightening. The reason why they have to write business letters and fill in forms is that some of them get subsidies for cattle and so on, and also there is some correspondence in connection with their crofts. They are always afraid that their crofts will be taken away from them if they do not write these letters and fill in these forms correctly.

  Now in our village the man who did this was called John Campbell. He had spent most of his early life in Canada and America. He would tell us how he had been working for many years on what he called the Elevators though as far as I can gather this was something to do with grain and not lifts. He came home when he was forty-five years old. He was a small, clever man who however suffered badly from arthritis, so intensely that he was often in great physical pain. For this reason he didn’t work as most of the crofters did. In fact I would say that apart from one other man – an idler of the first order – he was the only man in the village who didn’t work at anything day after day. He used to stay in bed late because of his arthritis and when he got up he would propel himself to his chair with sticks. He was an entertaining man and his house used for a while to be the centre of the village ceilidhs. He would still get magazines from someone in America and he would talk at great length about the Depression and events like that. He would tell us about the political changes in the world and how they ought to be interpreted. ‘You mark my words,’ he would say. ‘One of these days the Communists will take over in America, and in Britain too.’ He hated Socialists and complained about the smallness of his pension. Sometimes as he talked he would wince from the pain of his arthritis, which he once told me he thought he had got from swimming in too cold water. He had a very strong torso but that may have been because of the sticks he was always pushing himself along with, and the way in which he would use the muscles of his chest. He was also a great smoker though he didn’t have very much money. One morning he appeared at my window at five o’clock – it was summer time – asking if I had a cigarette. This was before his arthritis became so bad that he was confined to the house. The villagers thought that because he had been in America he must be a very clever man and as I said he used to write their letters for them. They gave him some money for doing this and as he also had an ailing wife this helped him a lot. His wife was a pale, pretty, dark-haired woman who suffered much from bronchitis especially in summer and autumn when there was a lot of pollen in the air. She spoke little and did not complain. I used to visit John a lot because he was an intelligent man and sometimes we would play draughts together. He often used to beat me and when he did his whole appearance seemed to change and he would grow fresh and cheery and happy. There was no harm in him at all and what I liked about him was that he never used to gossip. His mind was on higher things. The villagers of course never talked politics. They would talk about such and such a girl who had suddenly to go away to England to hide, as they thought, her pregnancy. And stories like that were their daily food. But John on the other hand would talk about politics and economics and loved a good argument. There was another reason why the villagers liked him, and that was that he never revealed their secrets to anyone. For them, to receive a letter was a great event and to receive a form a threatening one. They hardly ever wrote even personal letters.

  I knew that John suffered a lot from his arthritis and that was the main reason why I visited him. He would never complain however and showed a keen interest, as I have said, in intellectual affairs. I wondered sometimes if he was very bored by his narrow existence but he never said anything about that either. Sometimes he would tell me stories about his years in Canada and America. He told me once that he had been in a bar in some American city and he had seen a boy from the village who was down and out and who had pleaded with him with tears in his eyes not to tell anyone he had seen him. Another time he had told how he had fought a man for a piece of bread during the Depression years. Clearly he had suffered a lot but in general he maintained the reticence of the true gentleman. Sometimes he would show me letters of a less private nature he had written to Government Departments on behalf of crofters. These letters were usually very neatly written till the arthritis spread to his hands. He would write to these remote people in an almost commanding style in which he often used long words though shorter ones would have done equally well. For instance he would use ‘comprehend’ instead of ‘understand’ and ‘differentiate’ instead of ‘distinguish’. He told me with a certai
n pathos that when he was in school he was very good at English and the teacher had prophesied a future for him as a writer. I myself thought that his writing though commanding was rather florid but as he himself used to say, ‘We must make sure that these people know that we aren’t barbarians, that we are educated people. Otherwise they’ll trample all over us.’ Perhaps he believed that all Governments are infested with Communists. He also, I remember, used words like ‘inst.’ and ‘ult.’, words which I would never use myself.

  As time passed he had to retire to his bed and he became paler and paler. His wife too wasn’t very well and all of us in the village used to bring them fish because we knew they were dependent on us since they didn’t have a breadwinner. Latterly he would prop himself against the pillows and write his letters, whose style became more and more elaborate. Once indeed I think he got a letter back from a bureaucratic minion who wrote that he couldn’t understand what he was writing about. It was almost as if he were creating an elaborate manner of writing such as a writer may do in his ‘middle’ or ‘late’ period. Or it may even be that he was trying to establish a more personal contact with these remote people than is warranted by subjects like taxation or crofting. He used to write, ‘Dear Sir,’ but in his later years he would write ‘My dear Sir.’ He would sign all his letters with a large, almost royal, flourish.