The Red Door (46 page)

Two large blue policemen burst into a red room and there were gun shots. She rose and went to her room. She took off her clothes, laying them down on the chair, and then got into bed. She took
out a paperback and began to read it. One of the things she had always dreaded was that she would become an insomniac but in fact she slept quite well. One of the teachers in her school was an
insomniac. His name was Ross and he had told her that he only slept an average of an hour a night. He would stay up most of the night making tea and reading. He had got through the whole of
Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in one spell of six months. Now he was getting to work on Dickens. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be an insomniac. She was sure she would go off her head
but thanked God that at least she could sleep at nights. She looked at her watch which told her that it was ten o’clock. She closed the book and then her eyes, even though outside she could
hear quite clearly the roar of the traffic and somewhere in the hotel the sound of conversation and crockery and trays. She fell asleep almost immediately.

She dreamed that she was in a park full of Greek statues of boys with short cropped hair like American athletes. In the middle of the night the statues began to move and to dance as if during
the day they had been waiting patiently so that they could do precisely that. Their hollow eyes assumed expression and intelligence, they moved as if to a music which she herself could not hear.
All round them bits of paper and other litter as well as fallen leaves swirled in a wind which had blown up. In the storm of leaves the statues remained solid and the expressions on the faces were
both smiling and cruel as if they belonged to a royal supercilious race which despised the human. Then she saw in her dream the park-keeper unlocking the gate and the statues became immobile and
blank again.

The following morning she woke new and refreshed and in the blaze of white sunlight that illuminated the room felt inexplicably the same kind of large hope that she used to feel when she was a
girl, when suddenly she would throw off the bed-clothes and walk about the silent house as if waiting for something dramatic to happen.

She washed quickly and went down to her breakfast. The waitress was an old woman with a limp who had a pleasant smile, and asked her whether she would like one egg or two as if she really wanted
to give her the two. When she had finished her breakfast she went outside, her handbag over her shoulder. The morning was still cool and she felt confident and happy as she walked along. She knew
exactly what she was going to do. She would tour the High Street and look at the museums and other sights and she might even have a look at the Castle later.

All around her she could see the crenellated outlines of old houses, solid and heavy, houses that had been in existence for centuries and between which were lanes and steps that had known many
secrecies which at the time appeared trembling and immediate. She could see the spires of large churches that had seen many congregations which had flowed into them and flowed out again in their
changing dresses. She found herself on ancient winding stairs at which people had once stood and talked in their short red flaring cloaks. The whole area was a place of romance and mystery. She
walked up the steps till she arrived at a library which was advertising an exhibition of old manuscripts. She entered and went into a room which was off to the right and in which a man in blue
uniform was sitting at a desk looking rather bored. He said good morning and turned back to whatever he was doing. She walked around looking at the old manuscripts, most of them beautiful
illuminated Bibles such as she had never seen before. The pages were embellished with colourful Virgin Marys, green fields, and omnipresent angels. She couldn’t read the writing, most of
which appeared to be in Latin. In one section she saw Mary, Queen of Scots’ last letter written in ancient French in which she seemed not to show so much fear as an imperious hauteur. But it
was the lovely illuminated Bibles with their populace of angels that captivated her. What patience and faith and sense of vocation these monks must have had to create these works! She imagined them
in gardens, surrounded by trees inhabited by birds, painstakingly drawing and painting. She compared their colours to those of the TV screen and smiled to herself. The world which they revealed
seemed so natural and so real though in fact the angels were descending on to the earth that we know. One showed Sarah, Abraham’s wife, being greeted by the two young men who were really
angels and the whole picture was so ordinary and almost banal and everyday that it comforted her. Imagine a time when angels came to talk to human beings in such an unremarkable manner, descending
and ascending ladders that led from heaven to earth like painters on the street. She thought what her mother would have said. ‘Nothing but candles and masses,’ she would have said.
‘Heathenism.’

As she was going out the old librarian was standing at the door. He said, ‘We have millions of books here. Millions. Down below,’ he said, pointing.

‘Do any of them ever get stolen?’ she asked.

‘Sometimes,’ he said. ‘We have a lot of manuscripts here. Some valuable ones get stolen.’

‘I suppose a lot of them go to America,’ she said.

‘They go where the money is. But I don’t know much about that.’ They talked for a little longer and then she went out into the sunshine.

She continued down the long street. After a while she came to a museum and went inside after she had paid ten pence. She stayed for some time at a case which showed old spectacles worn by people
in the past. One pair reminded her of the ones her grandmother used to wear when she visited her as a child. She remembered her grandmother as a twinkling old woman who seemed always to be sitting
knitting at a window looking out on to a field full of flowers and inhabited by one wandering cow with soft resentful eyes. As she looked at the spectacles she seemed to see her grandmother again
holding a needle up to her eyes and peering through her steel-rimmed glasses.

She left the case with the glasses and had a look at one with old coins, and later one with old stones which were labelled with the name of the finders. There were also ancient stone axes and
stone jewellery.

There was a case which showed a wild cat with its claws sunk in the dead body of a rabbit, and another one of a large eagle with flashing yellow eyes. In a corner there were some old guns. There
were powder horns richly decorated and domestic implements of various kinds.

One section had a complete reconstruction in shaded orange light of a cottage of the nineteenth century. There was an old woman wearing a shawl sitting on a chair looking into a peat fire. In
one corner there was a herring barrel and in another a creel. There was an old clock on a mantelpiece and an iron grille for holding oat cakes. There were old candles and by the fire an old teapot
and kettle. Beside the old woman there was a cradle with a doll lying in it imitating a sleeping child. There was a churn and a dressing table. There was a flail and a table. The old woman,
long-nosed and shawled, seemed to be dreaming as she looked into the imitation fire. Again she was reminded of her grandmother as this woman too had a pair of spectacles on her nose.

How long ago it all was. How apparently calm it had all been. How pastoral and tranquil that existence behind glass. Had it really been like that? Day after day of peaceful existence without
challenge, surrounded by the furniture and routine of a life without significant history. If she broke the glass and entered that world how would she find it? Would she find it peaceful or boring,
a world without radio or TV or ballet or art or music, but a world with children and animals and work? How much one could lack and how much one could have. Faintly in the distance she heard the
roar of the traffic. What about her own mother? Had she been happy in her routine? She didn’t think so, though her father had apparently been. Did she love her father more than she loved her
mother? She couldn’t say: perhaps they were both part of her, the restless and the tranquil. The fire flamed in front of the old woman showing a red landscape. What was she thinking of as she
looked into it? What a strange motionless world really. What a distant motionless world.

She turned away and went outside again. She sat down on a bench and rested in the coolness of the morning.

Men and women were going in and coming out of a bar opposite but she herself never went into a bar alone. At one time she used to go to pubs with Phil and she would sit there sipping a tomato
juice. She never said much but Phil was always the centre of attention, open and generous. Not that he was particularly witty, he was just energetic and lively. She sometimes wondered whether this
was what was important in life, energy, but at other times she thought that it was courage that was important. Phil wasn’t particularly courageous. In fact in many ways he was weak. She had
heard that he had left the shop and gone off to London and wasn’t doing very well there. He was the kind of person who would become very dull and complaining when he felt that his youth was
over, she was sure of that.

She decided that she would go to the Castle after all, since there was nothing else to do. She got up and walked slowly up the brae and when she got to the entrance bought her ticket and joined
the queue which was waiting for the guide to take them round. Standing at the gate were two soldiers dressed in tartan trews who, with rifles beside them, stared unwinkingly ahead of them as if
they were mechanical dolls. The guide who was carrying a stick and who looked like an ex-sergeant major – strong and red-cheeked – led them off. She half listened to his practised
commentary, watching the people ahead of her, most of them foreign. There was a Japanese girl and a boy, some crew-cut Americans, a group who spoke German and a Frenchman with a moustache. The
guide told them about the defences of the castle and she thought that every day he would be making the same speech and stopping at the same places for laughter. He made a few jokes about the
English and she saw some people laughing: she thought that they were probably English.

After a while she left the party and entered a small chapel which was dedicated to St Margaret. There was a portrait of her in colour with folded hands set in the window, and a Bible on the
table. She had a certain tranquillity about her such as she had already seen in the illuminated manuscripts. What was a saint? she wondered. How did one become a saint? Was it when all anger left
one, when all passion was drained away, when one was utterly transparent and all life moved in front of one as in pictures? And were saints saints all the time, or only at particular moments?

She left the chapel and went into the museum which contained all sorts of stuff, uniforms, helmets, guns. She stayed for a long time staring at a black Prussian cap which was shaped like a
skull. Once she saw the uniform of a British soldier which had a charred hole in the breast where the bullet had entered. There were pictures on the wall of battle scenes. One showed a British
soldier in the act of driving his sword through a French standard bearer at Waterloo. She shuddered. What was it like to kill a man with a sword? It would be easier to do it with a gun. She
couldn’t imagine herself killing anyone with bare steel, it would be an impossibility.

She wandered about studying waterbottles, guns, powder-horns, armour. She read the names of those who had been killed in wars and read the memorial to the unknown dead. She had a look at the
Scottish jewellery, the Honours of Scotland. It looked tawdrier than she expected.

When she came out she sat down on a bench near the black cannon wondering what she would do next. From where she was sitting she could look down into the mouths of the cannon and above them the
roofs of the city, on which gangs had written with chalk words like groovy and so on. Eventually she got up and left the Castle and walked down the brae and into a restaurant where she had her
lunch.

It was two o’clock when she came out and she was at a loss what to do next. She thought that perhaps she might go and sit in the Gardens. So that was what she did. She sat on a bench and
half read a book and half snoozed. There were a number of people on the putting green and others lying in the sun, their arms about each other, while in the Pavilion a religious singer sang with
great fervour a song about Jesus’s saving blood.

All around her was movement and laughter. She tried to concentrate on her book, which was a paperback copy of
Rebecca
, but she couldn’t, and finally she laid it down. It was as if
she was feeling a change coming over her, a mutation, but she couldn’t imagine what it was and she felt dizzy and slightly frightened. She got up again and walked over to the Information
Bureau which was quite near. She discovered that there was a play on that night and decided that she would go. It was about Hitler but she didn’t know what to expect. Time passed very slowly.
She bought an evening paper but most of it seemed to be about cricket and tennis. There was, however, a story about a man and his wife who had picked up a hitch-hiker in their car. After they had
been travelling for some time the hitch-hiker had dragged the wife into a wood threatening the husband that if he said anything he would kill him. She nodded over the paper and fell asleep. When
she woke up it seemed to be cooler and the place slightly more empty. She got up and went along for her tea. It was now five o’clock.

It occurred to her as she walked along that she ought to have more friends, people she could go and stay with. The previous summer she had actually gone to stay with a friend of hers, a college
friend called Joan, who had recently married. But she had found the stay constricting and tedious as Joan had become very dull and respectable and responsible since her marriage, and she had left
earlier than she had intended. It was odd how people changed. Before her marriage Joan had been very gay and exciting; now she looked as if she were carrying the weight of the whole world on her
shoulders. She also worried a lot about money though her husband had a good job and was making at least three thousand a year.