A Field Full of Folk (19 page)

“That man thinks he runs the school,” she would say. “He has more power than the headmistress herself.” And indeed one would think that too from talking to Duncan who would say, “My school has the worst ceilings in the county. When I 'phoned him up the Director of Education said that he couldn't do anything about them. I told him that I considered my school to be as important as any in the county. I told him that over the 'phone.”

“I should just like to know,” said Mrs Campbell. “If we are going to have competitions let us have fair competitions. It's the principle of the thing.”

The minister briefly made the announcement about the three-legged race and standing with his back to the table stood and watched. He felt very tired as if his whole body had turned to water, and yet there was an hour or so yet to go. He looked forward to a night at the fire reading a book. The last time he had been to the library he had a strange feeling as if he were walking over skulls and the bones of millions of people, as if as a minister he should not be studying books but listening to endless stories of tragedy and sickness.

He looked over towards Elizabeth. Now there was a girl of plain shining goodness. What money she made at her job she spent the greater part of on Oxfam, and yet he himself had recently read that hardly any of that money was getting through to the victims. They said that parcels meant for the poor and dispossessed were being stolen by those who were organising the supplies. Bespectacled, cheerful, pale, Elizabeth was always helping people in the village, but was considered by Mary Macarthur to be in the pay of the Catholics because she had brought her fish on a Friday.

He was suddenly filled with anger. Was there no end to the petty strategies of the mind, was there no end to its vanity and egotism and its thorny sensitivity? Was there no end to the eternal voice that cried, “I am, I am, look at me. I will not be put upon.”

He felt as if he wished to leave the assembled crowd and go away somewhere, and then it came to him, “This must have been how Christ Himself felt when He went into the desert to pray. Underneath the stars. He must have grown exhausted by unteachable human nature with its coil on coil of self deceit, He must have tried to put the voices away from Him and lain on the ground at night staring up at the lucid cities of the stars, so aloof and so apparently harmonious.” But then he was a minister, he wasn't Christ, he was only a poor follower, he needed help.

How could God have made such people the apex of his creation, how could He have generated out of the immense ocean of His illimitable spirit people whose worry was that a wheelbarrow race had been fixed? And he suddenly smiled to himself as he thought that perhaps he was being too serious. Perhaps he should look more towards a solution of comic glory, as if the whole universe were a healthy joke the answer to whose complexities would finally emerge like the punch line in a funny story.

27

M
ARY
M
URCHISON WAS
not an imaginative person. It did not occur to her when she watched the three-legged race that there was anything at all symbolic in it, two people limping along chained to each other heading for the same goal. As she watched her husband talking now to one person now to another she was concerned first of all by his appearance (had he for instance polished his shoes or had he forgotten to put his shirt inside his trousers?), but these days she was also worried about more than that. For of course she knew what the doctor had told him, she was not foolish enough not to know that there was something wrong. Nor did she speculate, as she might have done if she had been more intellectual, that there might be a profound connection between his loss of faith and his cancer, one causing the other, though the enigma was like that of the chicken and the egg. For reasons of his own he did not wish to tell her, he was protecting her in his own fashion and she respected him for what he was doing.

There was a part of his personality which was forever shut to her, his omnivorous love of books and ideas and language. She was not herself a bookish person for quite simply she did not have the time to read. Nor did she consider books all that important. She thought of them rather as shadows of the real world in which one had to wash, cook, make one's way with people. It never occurred to her that he should not have become a minister, for she felt that his only handicap was his shyness. Before she married him she had been a nurse of a younger generation than Mrs Berry's and she was not likely not to know that he was ill. She had been a nurse in a geriatric hospital as well and though the patients there had delusions of permanent love and power, she would not have thought like Mrs Berry that to live in a world of dreams was a good thing for them, for she had come from a long line of ancestors who had fought in the real world for religious principle, her father having been a minister as well. She knew however that the ministry had changed from those days, that no one threatened passive congregations with the fires and tortures of hell as had happened in the past.

Her own faith was of a different order. She simply rested quite easily in the meaningfulness and sense of the world. God was like a housekeeper for Whom everything was in its place in an eternal busy kitchen. He could put His hand on anything when He wanted to.

There was no one in the village whom she disliked, for they were what they were and that was what could be said about them. The sanity of the world was its most important characteristic. It was true that recently she had been under considerable strain since her husband, though he was unaware of it, had begun to talk in his sleep, something which he had never done in the past. Suddenly he would cry out as if he were being attacked or as if he were lost on a road whose end he could not foresee. One night he had got up and walked about the chilly manse in his sleep muttering to himself in a language that she couldn't understand, as if it were Hebrew or Greek or some idiom that only the unconscious could speak.

It had never occurred to her to love anyone else but him: her faithfulness was absolute. There were times she regretted not seeing more of her children but she must place her husband before them, especially now when the wheels of his being were running low and he was living on the energy of the past. As she watched the three-legged race the sort of thing she thought about was, ‘That handkerchief is not tied tightly enough: how could one be so clumsy and inefficient?' She did not expect great miracles in her life nor did she think that when the day was over she would gather in more food than she had put out. Her image of Christ was of an infinitely good but sane and practical person who dealt with the people with compassion and good sense and was aware of their limitations. She did not see him surrounded by a halo of transcendent beauty—the beauty that was never yet on sea or land—but rather walking about Galilee with an energetic purposefulness that she could easily understand. Nor at the same time did she find it difficult to understand that He had been crucified. People were malicious on one level but on another level they could show the most amazing generosity as had happened for instance when Alisdair's father had been killed. It was true that later they might cavil about this or that but in their very depths they wanted to be good. It was an instinct.

One of the people she most admired was Elizabeth who without fuss or ego did as much as she could for the village. She gave most of her salary to Oxfam and visited the old, the sick, and frail. It never occurred to Mary that she herself was doing much the same as Elizabeth for she considered her work a duty. Loving came more easily to her than to her husband. Loving for him was a perpetual struggle, an inarticulate desire. It was as if he considered it a weakness which had to be expiated and paid for. He could hardly bring himself to say, “My dear”, or “Darling”, or even to touch her much in the course of the day and yet his faithfulness like hers was absolute. People recognised this remoteness in him but at the same time they respected him for they knew that he was always trying to do the right thing. There were in the world the divinely gifted ones on whom grace rested continually like a light from heaven and who moved like perfect athletes, and there were the other ones, whose every gift had to be fought for at the greatest expense of the spirit. Why must everything be so hard for him, why was there never an unexpected letter from the fields of harmony?

In comparison with her husband even David Collins and Murdo Macfarlane led easy lives, for they, like her, rested in the simplicities of the day. Even as she watched she saw Murdo, one-eyed and garrulous, talking earnestly to Mrs Campbell. His sense of duty had also been overwhelming but he was now proud of those demanding journeys. Her husband would never rest in pride. She would often pray on his behalf, “Let him be at peace even for a short time”, but
no answer had come to her one way or another. As she was thinking all this Mrs Johnstone's little daughter came over to her and pointed to her grazed knee. Mary bent down and touched it with her fingers very gently. “It will be all right. That bad knee. It will be all right.” To deceive children was necessary, for to them the sharp stone and the thorn were evil and treacherous. It was so easy to cure them of their pain unless that pain was serious. She remembered again the apoplectic surgeon under whom she had trained, who had breezed his short-tempered way through the wards and whom the patients had instinctively loved, because he saw them and knew who they were. Clouds of minions followed him, adoring and disciplined, for he knew them too by name. His little shrewd eyes converted his work into a dramatic act which embraced all of them, though often he would swear at them and curse them. As she stroked the child's knee those days came back to her on a flood of fresh feeling.

The windows were wide open, the nurses in their blue uniforms walked among the beds, with their red coverlets. Thermometers were studied like tiny silver fish held up to the light, old becalmed men sat watching TV while flowers flourished triumphantly in bowls and vases. There were sounds of taxi doors slamming at night, laughter and song.

The race had ended and there was only one more left, till the finale she had chosen. But the lemonade bottles must be collected—they might get money on the empties. The janitor would have to take away the remains of the sandwiches. She was glad to see there were no fragments on the ground.

Kenny Foolish was standing beside her with his shining eyes.

“How are you, Kenny,” she said. He smiled back at her. He put out his hand and she gave him a sandwich, and his eyes lighted up.

“You like the sandwiches?” she asked. He nodded gratefully while at the same time he chewed the bread so loosely that she could see it soggy and half masticated in his loose mouth.

“Good,” she said briskly as if she were a nurse in a hospital. “Good.” And now here was Mrs Campbell. She would have some other complaint probably about the three-legged race. Mary lifted her eyes and saw, past the approaching Mrs Campbell, the mountain which rose into the sky at the back of the village.

I raise my eyes to the hills, she thought. From them comes my strength. Part of the sky was reddening now. In David Collins' field she saw the sheep grazing. To him at that moment Annie was talking intently and now and again raising her stick as if to indicate a sight that was of interest to them both.

Her husband was handing out ten pence each to the winners of the three-legged race whom she recognised as Tommy Matheson and Ewen Harrison. Past them and past the approaching Mrs Campbell she could see that clever bespectacled English boy, Henry, who was taking it all in, that scene which lay before him, and speculating on it. She wondered if in the future when she and her husband and most of the participants were dead, he would describe it to someone perhaps at the other end of the world.

In a corner of a field she heard a radio being played and decided that it must stop. For one thing it wasn't good for Chrissie, she might construe it as a subtle insult. In the future she would be known as Chrissie the Radio: these words would be her epitaph as fixed as if they had been written on marble: as if they had been carved on her tombstone.

28

S
ITTING BESIDE
H
UGH
on the ground Alisdair said, “My mother says David Collins' cat is going to heaven. Do you think you'll go to heaven?”

“I'm going to heaven,” said Hugh confidently. “But my father is going to the devil. My mum said so.”

“Is that where you have to work?” said Alisdair seriously.

“I think so,” said Hugh equally gravely. “You have to have a shovel … I'd rather go to heaven.”

Alisdair put his hands together and prayed, “Please God, don't let me go to hell for I don't like working with a shovel. Do you think that's all right?”

“I think so,” said Hugh swiping at a big white butterfly that swam past. “I think that's all right.” He thought his own grandfather would be going to heaven soon for he had a wrinkled face and would find the cat in heaven and look after it.

29

A
T FOUR O
'
CLOCK
when the last event of the sports had taken place Mary Murchison stepped forward and said, “And now we have a little surprise for you. Elizabeth here will play on her guitar. She will of course play and sing religious songs. And now without any more ado, Elizabeth.” The spectacled girl bent down and retrieved her guitar which was in its case on the table and strung it round her neck.

“She doesn't at all look like a guitarist,” thought the minister. “She looks pale and rather nervous.”

The boys and girls sitting on the grass or standing at the edge of the field clapped and she began to play. At first she played
Amazing Grace
and
When the Saints Go Marching In
, and the minister was surprised at the fire and enthusiasm with which she sang. Her pallor looked passionate and dedicated as if she had emerged in a dazzled manner into the power of her own talent. Behind her he could see the sun which was now lower in the sky and casting shadows across the field while in the far distance he could see the train winding its way like an undulating snake among the hills. It was with unexpected force that the vision came to him. In the background while she was playing he was aware of a child persistently crying. On the margin of his mind he was even wondering what Annie would think of the guitar-playing and more especially what Murdo's reaction would be. And then quite suddenly the vision came. Elizabeth was playing
Go Tell it On the Mountain
, the young people on the grass were swaying from side to side, the mountain ahead of him was tipped with flame and its veined dry watercourses were startlingly visible in the light as if they had leapt forward and become three-dimensional