A Field Full of Folk (3 page)

“And what,” she asked him, “is the meaning of the lion and the ox? Is the ox connected with the Nativity and the stable?”

Mr Wilson said, “We know that the Jews divided the world into this Present Age which is bad and the Age to Come which is good.” His stomach rumbled and he felt embarrassed: his wife had told him that his breath was rotten.

“The Beast in Revelation,” he continued, “stands for the worship of Caesar.” She looked at him with blazing contemptuous eyes. What a strange woman she was! How had she managed to retain her questioning nature for so long and why did she always wear a khaki coat? What submerged army did she belong to? Perhaps she was some kind of a witch?

“I think that will be enough,” said Annie. “It's clear that you don't know any of the answers to my questions. You won't need to come any more.” She talked to him as if she were a teacher dismissing a dim-witted pupil. “I shall have to turn to the East after all,” she said. Mr Wilson had an uncharacteristic thought. Why, he asked himself, doesn't this woman drop dead? It was such a terrifying thought that his face paled, and anguished sweat beaded his brow. What is happening to me, he thought, that was an awful thing to think of. On the other hand she showed such ingratitude, and her contempt was so obvious. I am trying to do my best, he defended himself, I really am. But how can anyone answer the questions she asks? No one had ever asked him before about jasper and cornelian, such questions were not in his opinion theological ones, they were concerned with matters of fact which could be learned at a jeweller's.

He rose, brief-case in hand, which he was sure was shaking. There was a photograph of a man on the mantelpiece and it showed a face which was cowed and intimidated, capable only of a fixed smile which was like a grimace of pain. It was as if the man had been staring at Annie while the photograph was being taken, like a rabbit at a dancing stoat.

“Only from the East will I learn anything,” said Annie expansively. How did she have the knowledge that she had an endless time to live? Mr Wilson often felt that he himself didn't have very long to live, what with three children and his wife and the mortgage on the house. And, another thing, he never sang in the bathroom as he had used to. When was the last time that he had shouted out Halleluiah? He had failed again. How did he know that he had failed and this woman didn't know that she had failed? It was a frightening enigma. Whenever he looked at her he had to drop his eyes immediately: he walked about the world with his eyes turned earthward. He belonged to the meek, and that was true. But this woman had an almost dictatorial self-confidence.

“I'm sorry,” he said in a low voice, feeling like a dismissed servant who has worked out his notice.

“From the East,” said Annie triumphantly. What a strange little worm this man was with his winding snaky blue tie and his blue collar and his look of an insurance man! How could such a man, such a dwarf, bring her news of the triumphs of Revelations, tell her about jasper and cornelian, the lion and the ox? She had always known that this village was not her true place, that it was not in her fixed stars to be trudging about with a message bag, that the measure of her worth was the heavenly arcade of jewellery and tawny lions. How had she put up with Norman for so many years? And as for the minister he was clearly a fake as well. Where had he come from anyway? Was it Edinburgh? No, she was sure it wasn't Edinburgh, it was probably Lanark. No, there was something small about him, too. She needed worlds to stretch herself in, to yawn like a lioness.

“You may go,” she told Mr Wilson. She watched him walk down the pathway and enter his old car which banged and spluttered and then turned a corner so that she could no longer see it.

“Silly little man,” she thought, as if she were engraving the words on a gravestone. Last time she had been at Norman's grave she had seen a worm winding its way along like a tiny little train. She had ground her heel into it and turned and turned it. “Little bastard,” she thought. “The East is the answer. That is where the sun rises.”

5

“I
THINK
,”
SAID
Murdo to himself, “that I shall go over and see David Collins, though all he does is talk, about the Great War. It is true that I didn't go to the war because of my glass eye, but I served my country just the same.” Nevertheless, had being a postman been as glamorous as fighting at Mons or Loos? True, he had been a very good postman, making sure that his badges and boots were highly polished just as if he had in fact been in the army. Only the other day he had seen a postman in sandals and football jersey, and if he hadn't been carrying a mailbag he would never have known he was a postman at all. Things had changed in the service right enough. When he had been a postman he would only give the letter or parcel to the addressee and under no circumstances to anyone else. He would go down to the field where the addressee might be scything rather than give the letter to his wife or mother or brother or sister. He blinked with his one eye in the autumn sun. Maybe he should have got married but he never had, and that was that. Latterly on his rounds he had seen many strange things. Why, in the village of Westdale he had seen in the early mornings strange cars parked outside certain houses, though he would never tell anyone. And then there had been the time when Mrs Glass, who was no better than she should be, had taken a parcel from him, wearing practically next to nothing. How he had blushed and stammered while she had looked at him in an amazed manner as if he were a species from another planet!

Quite apart from his work as a postman he was an elder in the church because he had more time to do the work than many of the married men, and as well as that, again because of his wifeless state, he was always winning prizes for his garden. His only rival in that was Mrs Berry, who, like himself, spent a lot of time trimming the roses and planting new seeds. But this year he had won the cup again and perhaps he would keep on winning it till he was planted under the flowers. There was nothing in the world like seeing a flower growing to its full colouring and shape in the height of summer. It was like nursing a child through all the tribulations of life. Now, David Collins couldn't do that, all he could talk about was death and battles, and perhaps he hadn't done as well in the Army as he said he had done. Anyone would think that he had won the First World War by himself. He was always going on about that wound in his leg. Why, he hadn't walked or marched as much as he himself had done on those enchanted mornings when the summer returned and the world was wreathed in a heat haze, and you could watch the ducks in the water, and the trees were putting on their berries and there was a stillness everywhere so that you could see the green leaves perfectly reflected in the lochs. There had been nothing like bringing letters from all the corners of the earth to old ladies staying in scattered cottages all over the village. And then there were all the catalogues they would send for, the divorce papers, the bank statements. He recognised them all though of course he would never open a letter.

Still there was no doubt about it, David Collins was growing quite odd. One day, he, Murdo, had said to him, “How are you today, David?” And David had turned a bristling face on him and had said, “It's none of your business how I am. You keep your questions to yourself.”

It was almost as if David thought he was spying on him. But that had passed and David was quite normal again, apart from taking out old khaki shirts and washing them and hanging them on the line, and as for that woman Annie she was even queerer with her religions and her farmer's wellingtons. Mrs Berry was all right but then she had her grandchildren to keep her company.

Now there was another thing that had happened recently. That girl Chrissie had run away from her husband and had only taken her radio with her. It was a poser right enough. Imagine that, leaving her children behind her and taking her radio. And her husband was earning good money, too, as a joiner. She had just jumped on the train when he was at his work and that was the last anyone had heard of her. It was said that she had gone to Glasgow with that fellow who had sometimes visited her husband during the tourist season. It was funny, that whole business. He wondered what his mother would have thought of it, she with whom he had stayed till she had died at the age of eighty-seven, almost blind but still powerful in her will. If it had not been for his mother he would have married. He remembered how he had used to leave her in her bed while he would go down and scythe the corn in the field next to Mrs Berry's and he would feel stirring within himself the sap of life—O the shameful sap of life—while he wished that his mother would … No, he had better not think of that. And then there had been the day of the gale when he had seen his cornstacks shake in the wind and he had thought, “Go on, lift yourselves from the ground, clear off to Alaska, take your big strawy bums from here.” But they had after all not moved and the clouds had raced across the sky and in the morning uprooted trees had blocked the road but his cornstacks were still there. That had been the year one of the church windows had blown in, the one with the picture of Christ on it as a yellow shepherd, among a flock of sheep. The minister had really looked shocked that day.

“It's odd, isn't it?” he had said. “Isn't it odd that the window of the house of God should have been shattered?” A pale, thinking man, the minister, not like the one before him who had been hail-fellow-well-met with everybody and with his red healthy face might have been a farmer. Still, the thing was to keep the house tidy and not drink. Drink was one's downfall, no question of that. He had a good idea that David Collins drank though he couldn't prove it. One morning he would have to look in his dustbin to see if there were any empty bottles.

He prepared to go over and see David. Together they would watch the TV, though it was only a black and white one, and then he would come home and make himself a cup of tea and go to bed. And then there was the meeting about the church hall on Friday. Now, if it was up to him the young people wouldn't get it for a dance.

6

N
OW MORE AND
more the Reverend Peter Murchison felt disturbances within himself as if there was some volcanic evil that was trying to get out, a demon that possessed him like the demons mentioned in the Bible. When his wife was out visiting the sick and the bed-ridden he thought that perhaps she was betraying him with another man: and yet how could that be? He felt as if he wished to punish her, to cut her out of his meagre will, to leave to someone else, as a final unforgiving insult, whatever money he had. “I am sure she is betraying me,” he told himself. “What about that David Collins and that Murdo Macfarlane she is always visiting? There is more to this than meets the eye.” But he never spoke to her about his suspicions and listened patiently to the stories she brought back from her daily rounds.

One morning he set off for a walk. The hills all around were covered with gorse, the sky was blue, the cows cropped the grass, and now and again he would see a rabbit race across the dew, stop and gaze around it with trembling body, and then resume its running. He didn't know where he was going but found himself outside the house of John Murray the joiner whose wife had left him. When he entered, Murray was sitting at the table with his two little daughters and he immediately got to his feet when he saw the minister.

“Don't bother,” said the Reverend Murchison, “don't bother. I'll wait till you're finished.” The two girls gazed at him with large round eyes while he sat there and thought, “I have nothing to say to them, I bring no help.” He thought that Murray looked much paler than he remembered him and while he was sitting there he was reminded of a cobbler whom he had met in his youth. He too had lost his wife and he used to sit outside his house, repairing shoes, nails in his mouth like thorns, and saying from red distended cheeks,

“Milton, now, did you know that his coffin was five feet eight inches long?” And later.

“Rameses the Second, now, he was an Egyptian, you know. That was what he was, an Egyptian. These are the pyramids I am talking of, you understand.” He always seemed to be talking about items he had read in the Reader's Digest. Perhaps that was why his wife had left him, or perhaps it was after she had left him that he began to read the Reader's Digest.

After the two little girls had had their breakfast their father sent them out to play and then turned to the minister with a face of stone.

“I'm sorry,” said Peter awkwardly, because he could not think of anything else to say, “I'm very sorry.”

“She just took the radio,” said Murray stonily, “and she left her two little daughters. And yet the man was a friend of mine. I met him in Glasgow and he used to come here for a few days' holiday now and again. And all the time while I was at my work he was driving up from Glasgow and visiting her. His car was parked outside the door and no one told me.”

The minister remembered Murray repairing the roof of the manse not so many months before and how he had heard him whistling above him, as carefree as the birds themselves.

“There's a bit of wood rot, there,” he had told the minister, who was feeling sudden twinges of pain which he suppressed, his face twisting. Didn't the Bible warn us that women were not to be trusted, that when you had thought you had them they were far away from you?

“She went away in the red boots I gave her,” said the joiner. “Isn't that funny? And yet I was always kind to her. I suppose I'm slow by nature but I was always kind to her. But she was always saying how bored she was, just the same.” The minister's eyes wandered across to the sink which was full of dishes, to the frosty shirt hanging over the back of a chair, to the stained cooker which was losing its icy whiteness.

What would he himself do if Mary left him? Would he be able to cope?