I will now tell you about the moment. As time passed he grew, as I have said, more and more pale and would lie on his bed staring at nothing. He would only rouse himself when some villager would tiptoe in, taking off his bonnet, and tell him in wearisome roundabout terms of a letter that he had wanted written. I sometimes think he thought of these villagers as petitioners whose requests he was tired of granting. He would even talk about ‘emoluments’ which he received from them. But in the end I am sure he would have written the letters for nothing much as a writer may practise his art for his own satisfaction even though no one will ever see it. He would rouse himself as if from some deep reverie, listen keenly, and stretch out his hand twisted by arthritis for his pen and paper. He had a tray beside his bed on which he would rest the paper and then he would start to write as if he had forgotten the villager and the reason for writing in the first place. At moments like these he seemed happy and the vacancy would fade from his eyes and he would again return to the world of things.
One day when he was working in the fields – my field adjoined his – his wife came rushing down and panting heavily told me that he was in a bad way, that he had been taken with some sort of fit. She wondered if I would go for the doctor but before that she would be grateful if I would look in on him. I immediately rushed up to the house, she trailing in my wake, her breath whistling from her narrow box of a chest. I opened the door. The house had a strange cool silence about it. I went into the bedroom where he was lying. He was sitting up in bed with the tray in front of him and on the tray there was resting a sheet of notepaper. His head, however, had fallen on one side like a bird’s head frozen on a branch. I knew that he was dead. As I waited for his wife to come panting in I looked down at the letter and it was then that the moment occurred. The letter was addressed to a tax office in Glasgow and the first words – for the letter was incomplete – read as follows: –
My Dear Sir,
I would like to draw your attention to the fact that during the past years I have been excessively burdened with tax for which I can find no reason when I consult my records. It seems to me that there is something radically wrong with the keeping of your accounts and that you have made an inexcusable error particularly as there are others in the same position as myself who have not been excessively taxed in this manner. I would esteem it a great favour if you would make an enquiry into this at your earliest . . .’
There the letter broke off and a scrawl trailed right down the page. As I said, I was struck and illuminated by something extraordinarily significant in the letter though I could not at the time see what the significance was. Nor do I now see it. For one can sense significance without understanding it. All I can say is that as I waited for his wife to arrive I stood there at the bedside staring down at that head all on one side – the face unshaven – and the pen escaped from his hand, swollen and glassy, while the letter lay on the tray, fairly neatly written except for the scrawl which ran down the page beginning at the end of the letter. The other thing I remember, out of that storm of pathos and illumination, was that I noticed a chamber pot underneath the bed as if he had been using it not long before.
2
The second ‘moment’ I heard about – if such a term is permissible – has to do with a young friend of mine. This friend had come home to his mother’s funeral from America where he held an important post, Professor of Physics in fact at some university, I think in California. I imagine he will now be about forty-three years old which means that he has risen very fast in his career (and if you don’t believe that a small village like ours can produce a Professor of Physics in America you’re very wrong since in fact we have also other famous people in other parts of the world). I remember Robert as a young reserved boy who was respected by the other children and took part in most of the sports and pranks they got up to. But there was always something very adult about him even when he was young and he would talk to the older people on equal terms which was rather unusual. I put that down to the fact that he was the only son of a widow who had great will-power and ambition for him though she wasn’t particularly liked in the village. In fact the villagers thought she was rather snobbish though I don’t think that was true. It simply didn’t occur to them to wonder what it must be like to be a poor widow in a village: it is not an enviable position. In any case she died and Robert came home to the funeral. It occurred to some of us that he might have taken his mother to America with him but he didn’t, and she herself insisted that she would never go there . . . I thought when I saw him that he was looking very thin and seemed to be overworking. But I suppose the pressures in America must be greater than here (though the pressures here are great enough). He hadn’t kept up with the village while he was away and indeed his appearance was almost a surprise to us all though we were glad he came to take charge of things. I gathered that he was married to an American girl who herself had been a student and that he also had two children. He seemed rather astonished that the village hadn’t changed much – the same people in the same houses, the same broken fences, the same subjects of gossip – though I can’t understand why that should astonish him. Still a lot of these very clever people don’t live in the real world as ordinary people do. It struck me afterwards that maybe he didn’t write to his mother at all.
I felt that he was lonely and the night he came to visit me he talked for a long time about physics. Not that I know much about physics but I am a good listener. I was surprised that he wanted to talk about his work since most people don’t, and I thought that it must be that he was hanging on to what he knew in an environment that seemed to disturb him. Not that he would ever think of coming back to the village and settling down after being in America at the heart of things and concerned with a subject like physics at such a high level. He didn’t say anything much about his wife and children.
I gathered something like this from him, that modern physics is very different from the physics that I learned at school. He told me that the connections are much less clear at a certain level and that electrons for instance cannot be plotted both as to velocity and position. He told me all this very earnestly as if it were a disguise for something else that he didn’t want to talk about. He repeated the bit about the electron a few times as if he were trying to convey something to me, almost in a kind of code, but I didn’t understand what he could be trying to convey. I just listened. He told me that he himself ran a large department and that though he knew his physics he wasn’t sure whether he could manage people very well. I could have told him the reason for this was his rather protected childhood but of course I didn’t say so. I kept having to remember that he was no longer a boy but had adult responsibilities. The thing was he looked like a boy. Maybe it was something to do with his haircut. There was sometimes a wistful note in his voice as if by going to America he had left behind something which was very precious to him though I couldn’t think what it was. Nor, as I said, did I think he would come back. Still he gave me a lesson on physics though all the time I felt that deep down he wasn’t talking about physics at all. I can’t honestly remember much else that he told me since I haven’t the head for abstractions. When he left me late at night he looked more relaxed. I remember him turning round boyishly at the door and saying, ‘I hope I haven’t bored you with all this, sir.’ It was the sort of remark that no true villager would ever have made and I of course said that he hadn’t bored me. The other thing was I couldn’t tell whether I felt sad or proud that he had called me ‘Sir’. He went out into the night.
The following day was the day of the funeral. A large number of people turned up in the church and we sat there quietly waiting for the service to begin. I always feel cool and composed in church. I think it has something to do with the atmosphere and the silence. In front of us was the pulpit and below the pulpit was the coffin. After a while the minister came in in his robes and we sang a hymn and he said a prayer and read a passage from the Bible. I remember thinking at the time how divorced the la
nguage of the Bible is from the language of everyday life, how majestic and weighty it is, with its similes of desert and water, angels and devils, the spirit and the body. I looked at Robert now and again but he seemed to be taking things calmly enough. There was however in front of me a small woman in black who was dabbing at her eyes with a small white lacy handkerchief. When the service was over four men came forward and lifted the coffin to their shoulders. I saw Robert staring intently and then we were out in the bright sunshine of the day, among the green fresh leaves which had turned the window a deep green. There were cars waiting and I got into one and he got into another which was driven by an uncle of his – a brownish man with a large brown moustache – and we set off to the cemetery. When we arrived there we walked between glittering rows of tombstones to the place where his mother would be buried. The minister was standing bare-headed by the grave, his hair blowing slightly in the wind and his eyes screwed up against the breeze and the sun. He spoke loudly in the open air while we all stood around the grave in silence, all of us in dark suits. Robert went forward when his name was called and took hold of one of the tassels and the coffin was lowered on ropes into the earth. When it was all over we went to our cars and made our way home.
That night Robert came to see me though I didn’t expect him. Normally a visitor would only come to see one once because he was expected to visit every house in the village. After he had sat down he suddenly said, ‘Do you remember last night when I was telling you about physics?’ I said that I remembered some of it, though I couldn’t understand all of it. He was silent for a moment and then he said, ‘I had an astonishing vision today, if I can call it that. You remember we were sitting in church waiting for the service to start. Well, I felt very calm and composed at the time. There was a smell of varnish or something from the pews and everyone was quiet. In America I don’t go to church much though America is a very religious country whatever people may tell you. I just didn’t seem to have the time, there was always so much to do. So I was surprised when I felt so peaceful and serene. To tell you the truth I don’t much believe in God and heaven and things like that. My feelings about my mother were not intense. I have been away for years and I hadn’t seen her for a long time. She was as you know a very strong-willed woman – ’ he hesitated as if about to say more and then decided against it. ‘In any case that wasn’t what I meant to tell you. You remember last night I was talking about the fact that physics nowadays is not so simple as it used to be and I mentioned to you that an electron cannot be plotted both as to position and velocity. I have always found this difficult to accept. I have always wanted physics to have intelligible connections, at the lower level as well as at the higher. Maybe there is buried in me the teaching of the church which sees connections everywhere. Anyway there I was sitting in the front pew feeling serene and the minister was speaking that beautiful language about eternity and the hymn was being sung. It didn’t happen then, that vision. It was later.’
‘At the graveside, you mean?’ I said.
‘No,’ he said, ‘not at the graveside.’ He looked at me triumphantly as if he were setting me a puzzle which he was daring me to work out. But then he continued.
‘No, it wasn’t then. It was shortly beforehand. You remember when the service was over, four men came forward and lifted the coffin on their shoulders?’
I said I did.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘the coffin was heavy and they were staggering a bit till they got a proper grip and then I noticed something extraordinary. Perhaps I would have noticed it before but that was the first funeral I had ever been at.’
I looked at him almost in amazement. It was so strange to think that was his first funeral, that that was the first dead person he had seen. Perhaps that was why he looked so boyish.
‘To you perhaps it won’t mean anything. Perhaps you didn’t even notice it. But to me it came as a vision. You see, it was perhaps my conversation with you that ignited it. But as they staggered under the weight of the coffin – such red-faced ordinary stalwart men – for a moment I saw that one of the men in front had his arm round the other man.’ He paused and sat in silence as if he were seeing it all again. ‘It was one of those moments such that if one is lucky one gets in a lifetime, in one’s researches I mean, such as perhaps Einstein had. The two things came together in my mind you see, the electron lacking both position and velocity and the arm of the man round the other man as they staggered under the weight of the coffin. The significance was stupendous and shattering. I suppose you’ll think I’m daft?’
I said that of course I didn’t believe he was daft and shortly afterwards he left. It was as if he had been trying to tell me something – or tell himself something – but I couldn’t understand quite what it was. And that is the thing with ‘moments’. They illuminate but at the same time they don’t necessarily lead to what you would call understanding. And in any case one man’s ‘moment’ is different from another man’s. He left home the following day and naturally he never came back. Now and again I hear that he is doing great things over there and sometimes I see his name in the local paper as having been awarded another degree. But I shall always remember him as I saw him that night, his brown hair tossed back, telling me about the arm that was round the other man as they staggered under the weight of the coffin.
Old Betsy
So old Betsy is dead, who belongs to my days of childhood in this village. I see her very clearly, many years ago, walking down the road, after being in the shop, and shouting to the villagers, ‘The bread is good today but don’t touch the meat. The oranges are good but don’t touch the bananas.’ And she would walk past in her black cloak, her curdled face alight with life, lonely and indomitable, her husband, a road mender from Ireland, long since dead. ‘He was a fine man, a chreutair,’ she would say, ‘and always fond of his bit of bacon, and his egg.’ I have a vague memory of a small bent man in blue braces hammering dispiritedly among a pile of stones. But it may not be a memory of him at all.
Once when I was a little girl, going to school, some workmen were repairing our roof, boys from the neighbouring town, and she walked past shouting at me, ‘Do you wear a semmit, a chreutair?’ I blushed among the laughing boys and she shouted, ‘1/11 from J. D. Williams, a chreutair. I saw them in the catalogue.’ And, red and pale by turns, I nearly sank into the ground while the boys on the roof crowed like cockerels.
And so she’s dead in the house she inhabited alone for twenty years among plates green with verdigris, hard by a rapacious nephew who was waiting for her to die, and I see us shouting after her from the school bus, as she carries her messages home, swaying from side to side like a sailor. It is Easter, time of new hats and daffodils. And when did she ever have a new hat?
‘A chreutair,’ she told me. ‘Don’t marry that man. His father was a drunkard and his father before him.’ But I did marry him. ‘I told you, a chreutair,’ she said a year later. ‘A man who doesn’t shave every morning is no good. It shows he has no respect.’ I would wash the plates, mossy with green stuff, and give her soup which I had brought over in a pan. (He and I had divided our possessions neatly when he left: he had insisted on taking the refrigerator because it was his mother’s, but I had kept the set of pans decorated with red roses.) ‘Now, Seumas Macleod, he would suit you, he’s a good-living man and he was born in April. That’s a good sign.’
Today I shall go to the funeral after I have made some coffee. There is snow on the hills and it is Easter.
The fact is the two of us never got on and he is now in Glasgow probably drinking heavily. I have little feeling for him and I no longer even have his photograph in the house which is much cleaner. Yesterday I was in church in my new green costume and I watched the young girls in the choir tossing their hair back as they sang a hymn about God’s love.
‘Thank you for the soup, a chreutair,’ Betsy would say, ‘but there isn’t enough turnip in it. I can’t stand that woman who plays the organ in church. Her mother came
from one of the islands. She couldn’t use a cooker, you know, till I taught her and now she plays the organ.’
I waited for the Resurrection to take place as I do every spring, but it didn’t. The minister flung his arms wide like a bat and blessed us but he doesn’t visit the sick. He doesn’t visit Betsy. ‘He is a wooden minister, a chreutair. He was born in September. That’s always a bad sign.’ The Resurrection of course never happens, not even a frail yellow Christ rising from the green mossy plates. What are we here for?
What are we here for? said the minister at the graveside shivering.
Let them take out their flowers and their mirrors, I thought. The skies are blue and there are clouds like semmits in J. D. Williams. She used to sweat a lot when she was alive and sometimes pinch sweets and fruit from the village shop. They said she had rich relatives who never came to see her and that she had once been engaged to a prosperous farmer.
‘I broke it off, a chreutair, when one day we were out for a walk and he walked ahead of me at a great rate. Never trust a man like that. He has no consideration.’ My husband used to take my housekeeping money and he never walked anywhere much. He sometimes became violent and once gave me a black eye. ‘I fell off a ladder,’ I told her, ladling out some potato soup.
‘Ay, a chreutair, there’s a lot of ladders in life and a lot of snakes too.’ That surprised me, for I had never thought of her playing games. And yet she too must have been young once, I supposed. ‘There was no harm in him,’ she said, ‘all he wanted was his bit of bacon. And his clothes washed. He was born with a hammer in his hand.’
The Red Door Page 54