The Red Door (27 page)

The Gaelic singers surrounded us singing in a last fervent burst as if they sensed that the party was nearly over. The young girl looked at them tolerantly and remotely. But after all, I thought
angrily, they were my people, weren’t they? They had come from my world, a broken world, but a world which still provided the cohesion of song, a tradition. The other people watched, almost
with envy. We were the only cohesive group there. She asked me to translate a verse and I did so:

It was, according to the flowery clock on the mantelpiece, one o’clock in the morning, and I saw the poet and Miriam leaving. He put on her black cloak for her and for a brief moment she
looked back at me, Napoleonic, self-possessed, frightened. The two of them had probably talked their alienation out, and now perhaps going out into the night she might feel sufficiently like Mother
Courage (or the German equivalent). ‘You bloody bad poet,’ I thought, ‘why do people never see through you?’ I watched them go. I nearly went after her but I couldn’t
get out of the singing group. I imagined her and him in their taxi returning perhaps to her flat. I imagined the taxi going past the desolate lamp-posts. The Concept of Alienation. Well, books and
plays might help, I supposed. I thought of the taxi as a hearse ticking over. Why were taxis always black, or was that just in Scotland? I imagined her leafing through her pictures of the dead and
the doomed, the tubercular and the moustached, all brown with age.

The singing was growing louder. I was with my own people. The song they were singing was about an exile in the city who wished to be home. He remembered the hills, the lochs, the neighbours, the
songs. I thought of the last time I had been home. It had rained all the time and I had spent a whole week reading
Reader’s Digest
and books by Agatha Christie. Sometimes I had
played cards with a spotty cousin. I had seen between showers the mangled body of a rabbit at the side of a road: it had been run over by a car and its guts hung out. One day I had tried to find
some fool’s gold on the beach but I didn’t find any. I remembered the blue and white waves, the astounding Atlantic.

I left the circle. Who was I looking for? I tried to find the Finnish girl but she seemed to have gone, for the ladies’ lavatory (quaintly captioned Girls in a primary tangle of colours)
was open and vacant. The guitar player had also gone. I went into the darkness. As I was standing there trying to find my bearings a voice came from inside the room. ‘When shall we see you
again?’ Blinded, I turned into the light, not recognising the voice. I went back into the room. It was the student who had changed from literature to physics and I was disappointed: I was
hoping it would have been the Finnish girl. I looked at her for a long time and then said that I wasn’t in the city very often. I went back into the darkness again. From the next garden a
dog, probably a large one, began to bark excitedly. It sounded as if he was tearing at the wall to try and get at me. I went out into the street feeling my way as I had once done across a midnight
field on the island. The singing seemed to have stopped and everyone, I supposed, was preparing to leave. I started to walk down the street towards the centre of the city where my hotel was. I
supposed the stony-faced porter would come to the door again this time. I would have preferred someone more happy-looking, especially at three in the morning.

One day I was sitting in the buffet at Waverley Station in Edinburgh reading the
Sunday Times
and drinking coffee out of a paper cup when a voice from in front of the
paper said: ‘Have you heard of these two then?’ At first I didn’t realise that the odd question was directed at me and continued to read about a particularly atrocious brutality
in Ireland. But the voice came again: ‘Have you heard of these two then?’ I lowered the
Sunday Times
and saw sitting opposite me at the table (it was strange I hadn’t
noticed him before) an unshaven man with a thin ravaged face and wearing an open-necked dirty shirt. In front of him on the table was a paper plate with the remains of a pie which he had been
dabbling at.

As I shifted to lower the paper my soaking umbrella which had been leaning against the rather frail table fell down and as I bent to pick it up I could see that on one foot the man was wearing a
boot but that on the other foot there was nothing but an old soiled bandage. I straightened slowly and glanced at the pale clock which said quarter to eleven. My train was at ten past, and outside
it was raining . . .

‘Burke and Hare,’ he said. ‘They used to kill people and sell their bodies to the hospitals. Sometimes they would dig bodies from the cemeteries and sell them. It was a long
time ago, you understand, the nineteenth century.’ (As a matter of fact it had been the eighteenth.) ‘Not many people know about it.’ In this he was wrong: I certainly knew about
it. It was one of those things that everybody knew about Edinburgh as well as the fact that Sir Walter Scott had connections with it, that there was a large castle, that there was a cuckoo clock in
the Gardens, that the Edinburgh Festival took place once a year. In fact I had just the previous night attended a version of
King Lear
done against a backcloth of what appeared to be
oatmeal-coloured sacking. Most of the characters also wore sacking.

‘One of the doctors recognised one of the bodies and that was how they were caught. Do you understand?’

I said I did. He had clearly taken me for a tourist which I wasn’t and I prepared to raise the
Sunday Times
again – in my mind it had taken on the character of a drawbridge
which one could raise or lower according to one’s inclination – when he started again.

‘I go to the cinema a lot,’ he said. ‘Last night I saw a film about the last war. The Second World War. It was about the Commandos. My uncle was in the Second World War. He was
in the Commandos. This film was about the Commandos. They had flamethrowers and one of the officers said that they would get those German buggers. They were using tanks. What do you call those
American tanks they had in the Second World War?’

‘Shermans,’ I offered automatically.

‘No,’ he said seriously, ‘they were American tanks.’

I nearly burst out laughing. This man seemed a very simple person really. He was also a bore. I volunteered no more words in case he would be encouraged to start on another of his stories. But
he continued.

‘I go to see the Swedish films too. There was one about this girl who was killed by a fellow with a camera. He would kill them you see and then he would take photographs of them. One night
she went up to her bed, before she was killed you understand, and this woman opened the window. She looked green and she walked across to the bed and she put her hand on the pillow and she left
blood there. It was a sign, you see. When this girl was killed she was chased across this wood and he killed her. He put her in this pond and he took a photograph of her. And then the detectives
got him. Swedish detectives, you understand.’

I was trying to think of what this encounter reminded me of and suddenly I knew. It was exactly like a Pinter play in its utter inconsequentiality. I felt suddenly frightened and odd.

‘I suppose you’ll be here on holiday,’ he said. ‘We have the Edinburgh Festival here once a year. They come from all over. They have plays and they have . . . ’ He
stopped suddenly and gazed down at his plate.

Behind my
Sunday Times
I was thinking of another episode that had happened two days before.

I was staying at a hotel in the city and one wet afternoon I was sitting in the lounge. There were large windows and through the rainswept panes I could see the Castle towering theatrically out
of the mist. There was also a huge statue of Sir Walter Scott that I could see and a stone horse. About the lounge were scattered copies of the
Scottish Field
and the
Countryside
as one might find them in the waiting rooms of dentists or doctors or lawyers. In one corner of the lounge there sat an oldish woman with a mouth like a trap reading
Nemesis
by Agatha
Christie. Beside her was a plate of biscuits at which she would absentmindedly nibble in the intervals of turning pages of the book. She was wearing a blue dress and had a string of pearls round
her reddish throat.

Opposite me near the fire was a really old woman with a stick. Her back was humped and she wore a meal-coloured matching blouse and skirt. Beside her was a formidable lady in tweeds who had the
look of a retired schoolteacher. The old lady signalled for the waitress who almost ran to her, leaning towards her as if she were royalty. The old lady said in a very distinct loud voice, as if
she were sitting in her own home, ‘I should like a cup, not a pot, of tea and some digestives and thin slices of bread – two – with very thin slices of cheese.’ The
waitress, enthusiastic and young and beautiful and possibly Irish from her pale fine face, said ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and rushed off. The old lady rested her veined, entwined hands on top
of her stick like a queen and stared ahead of her. The woman beside her was talking but she didn’t seem to hear. Now and again her lips moved as if from a phantom memory of eating. Or perhaps
she might have been talking to someone. In a supernaturally short time the girl ran back with a silvery glittery tray containing the stuff the old lady had ordered and began to lay it out on the
small table with the claw legs. The hotel was certainly clean, one could say that. That morning I had seen a fat singing woman emerging from a lift with a huge mound of billowy sheets, like soap
suds all about her.

The old woman picked up the sandwiches and examined them. ‘The cheese is too thick,’ she said in a squeaky penetrating voice. ‘Far too thick. I wanted thin slices.’ The
girl bent in front of her (I could imagine her furious flush). She was very beautiful with a narrow waist and she was dressed in black with a froth of white at the throat. Yellow curls appeared
from below her small black cap and from where I was I could see her graceful youthful thighs. ‘I wanted thin slices, didn’t I say that?’ She turned to her companion. The woman who
was reading
Nemesis
turned another page. She had eaten all her biscuits.

‘I heard you say that quite distinctly,’ said the old lady’s companion. The waitress looked from one to the other, all quivering with the desire to serve. ‘I’m
sorry, Ma’am, I’m sorry, Ma’am,’ she repeated over and over.

‘Sorry is not enough,’ said the old lady. ‘Not enough. Take it back.’ The waitress retrieved the plate with the sandwiches as if it were a mine and took it back, half
running as before. As she raced across the carpeted floor I heard the old lady say:

‘Ever since Watson left, the sandwiches have not been the same.’ The companion commiserated with her, and began to pour out the tea.

‘Not so much milk,’ said the old lady suddenly, ‘not so much milk.’

I stared moodily out at the Castle. I had phoned three times already for a taxi but they were all busy with tourists.

Beside me there had appeared a man and his wife and their teenage son who was dressed in a red school uniform and looked all knees and hands. He sat very stiffly between his mother and father.
The woman closed
Nemesis
with a snap and walked towards the door. Before she reached it she stopped and said to the mother:

‘I see that your son is at Heriot’s. Has he been playing Rugby?’

‘Yes, that’s just what he has been doing,’ said the mother. The boy looked pleased in an embarrassed way as if he were Achilles being talked about by the Greeks after a
particularly good fight.

‘My son still plays Rugby,’ said the woman. ‘He is a lawyer. He comes to see me on Thursday afternoons.’

‘That’s nice,’ the mother murmured.

‘I remember,’ said the woman in a loud voice, ‘when I was at school – it was at Gillespies – we used to have hockey every Friday afternoon. I don’t see so
much hockey being played now.’

The mother murmured something incomprehensible. Her husband had taken out a pipe but wasn’t sure whether he should light it or not.

‘In those days the Principal was a Miss Geddes,’ the woman went on relentlessly. ‘And there was another lady called Miss Brown who taught us Tennyson. I never hear of her now
but I remember quite clearly that she used to teach us much Tennyson. Is your son good at Rugby?’

‘Are you, darling?’ said the mother brightly to the appanage all red and knobbly-kneed and standing out from the frail furniture.

‘Not really, Mother,’ said the boy. ‘Some of the other chaps are better.’

‘They are of course modest,’ said the woman. ‘That is what public schools teach if they teach nothing else. And a good thing too in the world we live in.’ With that she
went through the doorway clutching her
Nemesis
, and for a dazed visionary moment I saw with a sense of bewilderment all the old women in the room running on to hockey fields with white
sticks and ribboned hair and shouting in the blue windy day. It was all so real that I felt tears coming to my eyes, seeing those locker rooms, those beautiful young girls in green, slim and vivid
and pigtailed and uniformed.

I got up from the table folding my
Sunday Times
carefully. I said I had to catch a train. My companion was sitting staring into space, unshaven, pale. He seemed to be wearing layers and
layers of clothes as if he were cold. I shivered for a moment as if he were a threat to me. But that of course was ridiculous. With my umbrella, my
Sunday Times
and my case I went to the
ticket office and bought my ticket. My train had changed platforms. It usually left from twelve but today it was leaving from fourteen. I didn’t like that and was glad that I had checked the
notice. It was some time before the man at the gate would allow us on to the train but eventually I settled myself into a corner seat. In front of me there was a man in a bowler hat who was also
carrying a
Sunday Times
. I put my umbrella and case on the rack and sat down: after a while the train shuttled backwards and then forwards and began to move away from the platform. The
scenery sped past, everything wet and miserable and grey. To the left of me a boy wearing a large Western-style hat was bending down to kiss his girl friend. For a panicky moment I nearly said to
the bowler-hatted man, ‘You’ve heard of those two, haven’t you?’ But I clamped my teeth together lest any language should bleed out. Most of the time my companion made a
snorting noise behind the newspaper which I had already read. I wished now that I had bought a paper-back but most of the books on the bookstalls were spy stories which I had read before and I
didn’t fancy the involved and trivial stories of the second-raters.