The Red Door (51 page)

He found a tin opener and opened cans. So long as it was food he didn’t care what food it was. He ate potato salad, peaches, steak, mince, indiscriminately. He found beer cans and twisted
the tops free and drank. He found a bottle of wine and drank most of it. He poured the wine down his throat watching the rats who seemed to be watching him with keen interest. He made faces at
them, he shouted and cursed them, he beat on the plate glass windows with his bare hands. But they didn’t go away. Eventually he left the shop: there was somewhere he had to get to. He took
the window pole with him and bottles and cans. He started throwing the bottles and cans at the rats while at the same time he began to dance and sing songs. He wasn’t scared of them now. He
went after them. He thrust the hook of the window pole at them. He kicked them with his boots. And slowly they retreated.

Something told him he must get away from there. Before the night came. He didn’t want to be there when it was dark. For then he wouldn’t be able to see the rats, and their eyes might
shine, green and remorseless. He plodded on through the dust, the rats watching him warily, some with lips retracted. Soon, shouting and screaming and cursing, he had left them behind and he made
his way out into the country beyond the town. Still the dead cars and the dead people and the dead birds and the dead animals. As he approached the woods, he saw the dead stoats and the dead hares
and the dead foxes. The trees themselves were draped with dead birds. And as he walked through the damp green wood there was still the same silence. Not ominous, just empty. And the same dust
everywhere. But above him the sky was clear and blue and the air warm. And he could hear the murmur of hidden streams.

Drunkenly he muttered to himself, singing snatches of songs, as he at last saw the large white house and approached it. From that distance he could see the chairs and what appeared to be people
sitting in them on the lawn. He began to run drunkenly. And as he ran he waved. He expected them to be coming towards him, dark-uniformed, and this time he would welcome them. He reached the lawn
and saw that it was skeletons sitting in the chairs. Damp books lay beside them covered with dust. He began rushing about from window to window and through the windows he could see the wards and
the machinery and the dead bodies. He could see the straitjackets.

He went to the door and began to bang on it, the heavy wooden door. He tried to turn the handle but it was heavy. He began to bang again and again. In a few hours it would be dark and the stars
would come out. And he didn’t want to be left outside. He wished now that they had found him with their torches when he ran away. He banged and banged on the door monotonously. He began to
feel small phantom teeth in his feet but when he looked down there was nothing there at all. He sank down in front of the large wooden door, weeping. And as he wept and hammered alternately the
shadows began to fall, and a breeze stirred the pages of the books and the skeletons swayed slightly to and fro, rocking.

At first it was all right, everything was clear and fine and autumnal. As he drove westward he nearly stopped to admire the trees at the side of the loch. There they were, the
oaks, the sycamores, the ash and the copper beech, with their leaves bronze and gold and green and red, perfectly still in a motionless air, burning steadily with their latest flare of the year.
The loch itself was so still that they were reflected in it as a perfect solid double of their reality, massive as rocks, so that it was difficult to know what was reality and what was reflection.
In fact he couldn’t recall seeing a day so still and so clear as if he had found himself by some accident at a point in time between growth and death, between the permanent and the
transitory. So that he wanted to stay and watch the trees and the loch, but it was three o’clock and he had to drive on.

And all the way it was like that, twisting roads and boulders and autumn trees in their final flare and all reflected in the loch which never seemed to end. Here and there were houses but in
general these trees expended their glamour and colour on the air and stone, but not on the eyes of any human being, bending over the road, seeming to gaze into the water.

Steadily he drove westwards, feeling restless, but stopping at half past five at a hotel for some food and drink. It stood at the side of the road and was the only one open in the small town,
all the rest being closed after the end of the season. The tourists with their talk of boats and wearing their red shirts like sails were all away. The shutters would come down, the shops would all
be shut on Sundays and the locals would be unable to buy anything, the infinite interrogations about local towers and castles would end till the bright tinkle of the tills in the spring just about
the time of the swallows and Easter.

There was hardly anyone in the hotel but himself and a humpbacked maid who told him to wait in the lounge. He sat down on a grey collapsing armchair and looked about him. The furniture seemed to
have been thrown together without order. There was an old black wooden chest, two chairs with green and grey cloth over them, and one coloured a faded red. A few
Reader’s Digest
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were lying about on a sideboard, and reflected in an old mottled mirror. Surprisingly in the middle of it, like a new house among slums, was a modernistic TV set.

Eventually the maid called him in to dinner. He ate the pork without much interest and then had peach melba. When he had finished he bought only one whisky because he thought he’d better
drive safely, though his nerves screamed for more. When he left the hotel it was after six. As the church bells hammered at him he put his foot on the accelerator and headed west passing a group of
girls on their way to church, all of them appearing to be wearing pink caps and carrying pink hymn books. The small town, like the trees and the loch, looked calm. The Triumph hummed steadily on
but he passed little traffic. As time passed he began to drive between moors on which white sheep grazed and on which rested huge white boulders. The streams seemed to have dried up after the dry
summer. Once he passed a caravan and sitting on the green verge beside it on a chair a woman in red slacks painting. She did not stir as he roared past. And all the time the landscape grew rockier
and rockier.

Gradually, as he drove on, the darkness began to come down, at first only a slight haze and then more thickly. To his left a moon, autumnal red, began to climb the sky. A rabbit ran across the
road and he avoided it by a hairsbreadth. Once a hare lolloped ahead of him for about two hundred yards before leaving the road as if it had been dazed by his lights. Eventually it dashed off to
the side of the road and disappeared. Once he saw a weasel and once an owl wafted slowly in front of his windscreen. He had still a long way to go and already he found himself in this world of
nocturnal animals. But at least they were company for now the darkness was steadily coming down and he was following the white lines of the road which seemed to continue indefinitely. To make
things worse a white fog was swirling about, probably caused by a mixture of frost and warm air. It was moving vaguely at the sides of the road and worse in some places than in others. At times he
could see the road quite clearly, at others it was foggy and grey.

He didn’t realise when he first became nervous. The nervousness probably grew from the silence around him which was unbroken by anything but the noise of the engine: from the lack of
traffic: from the grey fog. At one time he stopped and unfastened his safety belt as if he might wish to escape from some disaster that threatened him. To the left and right of him there were
trees, and a straight road ahead of him down which he hurtled. He knew this length of straight road: it lasted for miles.

Behind him in the back seat bounced some toys which had been lying there since she had left and taken the children with her. He had gone to her mother’s but she hadn’t been there and
there was no message. That was a week ago. And he couldn’t find her anywhere. Then he had simply stopped looking, just like that. And he had begun to drink, steadily, relentlessly. In pub
after pub, arguing with people, being bitter and unpleasant, finding himself alone, going home to an empty house whose mirrors revealed nothing. One night he had wakened up feeling hot (he
wasn’t sleeping very well) and gone to the window to open it, only to be astonished by the terrible blaze of light which shone on the street and the houses and the grooved dustbins. Shaken to
the core he couldn’t bear the brilliant light. For a moment it was as if he had glimpsed the world before man, before intelligence, its negligent power, its careless scattering of energy, its
clear brilliance. He felt like an interruption of the light.

For a moment as he drove on he thought he saw two hikers with foggy packs waiting at the side of the road and drew up for he needed the company but there was no one there. He had seen no rabbits
or weasels or owls for a long time. Once he thought he saw his brother standing at the side of the road – his brother to whom he hadn’t written for twenty years – but again there
was no one there. He began to shiver uncontrollably. He was frightened lest round the next corner he would find his wife and children waiting in the grey fog, holding out their hands to him. It was
like a film of Jack the Ripper, phantoms moving around him, grey. He began to sweat and the palms of his hands felt sticky on the wheel. He began to think of the night he had walked out on Helen
the year before.

Phantoms seemed to waver at his side. His father, left alone in the house after his own marriage and now dead, seemed to extend grey hands to him. ‘It was not my fault,’ he screamed
silently. ‘I couldn’t do anything else.’ The foggy hands were replaced by others. There were Irma’s hands too. The last time he had seen her was ten years ago. She had
driven away from him, her gloved hands resting on the wheel in front of the green dashboard. That was just after he had told her about Helen.

The road now was seething with phantoms and sometimes amongst them he saw himself shouting at Helen, ‘Leave me alone. Leave me alone. Can’t you see I’m busy?’ And his
mother with her tranquil cunning eyes. I must get back, he thought, I must get back to where I was happy. But the faces now began to scream at him. The phantoms had come out into the middle of the
road and he was boring through them, afraid to stop. He was afraid to stop lest if he did stop they would enter the car. It was like the time he had taken Helen and the boys to the Safari Park and
the monkeys had insisted on climbing on the bonnet of his car making faces at him through the windscreen. ‘Don’t stop,’ he had been advised. And he had driven on with his cargo of
mocking primitive diminutive faces.

And all the time the terror of the niceness, the warmth of Helen and the boys, their niceness.

Now ahead of him he saw a strange white form waving out of the mist. It flared and changed but at the centre of it was darkness, at the centre of it was a maze of darkness, a wheel. It seemed to
be a reflection of the wheel of the car. Instinctively as the car entered it he braked, inside the fog and the darkness and the wheel. And from it issued such a stench as nearly destroyed him. It
was a stench such as might arise from the concentrated marshes of the world. He heard someone scream, relentlessly, mindlessly. A wind shook the door of the car. Flashes of light shook the form. It
was like thunder, stinking thunder, with a play of lightning and wheels inside it. It was a huge stinking brain, concentrated on itself, wheel within wheel. It turned on itself blindly, blankly,
inside the fog which surrounded it. There were ladders of light in it and small animals, weasels leaping at rabbits’ throats, owls swooping on mice. And all the time there was the stench.
Like the monkeys on the bonnet of the car, it screeched and gibbered and knocked. He couldn’t speak, his clammy hands clutched and slid from the wheel. In one corner of the fog, Helen sat
knitting, in another his children sat reading red comics. He began to howl like a wolf, as if a hot stone were being wrenched out of him.

Frantically he looked for a place to turn, gritting his teeth. He found it and turned. As he pointed the engine eastwards the fog began slowly to fade away. He drove on slowly and after a while
got out of the car. The stars were shining with a concentrated brilliance, millions and millions of them, just as he had used to see them when he was young. He held his hands and his face up to the
light as if to wash away the stench. The light was so clear that he could see for miles and miles around him as if he were in a large arena. He got into the car and drove away. He wanted to go
home, he wanted very much to touch human hands again.

1

His moon glasses shining on his round red-cheeked face Professor MacDuff cycled happily along through the March day which made the streets as white as bone. On days like these
the city looked freshly coloured and new, the butchers in their striped smocks standing at shop doors, knives clutched absent-mindedly in their hands, young boys racing each other on bicycles,
older boys hanging about with yellow crash helmets, women pushing prams and groceries along, window panes flashing, church spires climbing into a blue sky, cinemas advertising (he noticed sadly)
Bingo instead of Wild Westerns.

Professor MacDuff waited placidly at the red traffic lights, in his tweed suit, his white shirt and large green tie. He felt fine as if newly resurrected from the grave of winter. What a fine
month March was, bringing with it scents as from a rich soil, memories of boyish escapades, ladders, paint, whooping dogs, hosepipes. He cycled on past the Art Gallery (where they were holding an
exhibition of Magritte’s paintings), past streets lined with flaring green trees, past small shops which said things like ‘M NS CL T ES’ (the brood which flourished and so quickly
died) till he arrived at last at the open steel gates of the university from which rose green sweeping lawns towards the mellow-bricked building itself.