The Red Door (60 page)

The red door stood out against the whiteness of the frost and the glimmerings of snow. It seemed to be saying something to him, to be asking him a question. Perhaps it was pleading with him not
to destroy it. Perhaps it was saying, ‘I don’t want to be green. There must be a place somewhere for me as myself. I wish to be red. What is wrong with red anyway?’ The door
seemed to him to have its own courage.

Wine of course was red and so was blood. He drank none of the former and only saw the latter when he cut himself while repairing a fence or working with wood when a nail would prick his
finger.

But really was he happy? That was the question. When he considered it carefully he knew that he wasn’t. He didn’t like eating alone, he didn’t like sitting in the house alone,
he didn’t like having none who belonged to him, to whom he could tell his secret thoughts, for example that such and such was a mean devil and that that other one was an ungrateful rat.

He had to keep a perpetually smiling face to the world, that was his trouble. But the red door didn’t do that. It was foreign and confident. It seemed to be saying what it was, not what it
thought others expected it to say. On the other hand, he didn’t like wellingtons and a fisherman’s jersey. He hated them in fact: they had no elegance.

Now Mary had elegance. Though she was a bit odd, she had elegance. It was true that the villagers didn’t understand her but that was because she read many books, her father having been a
teacher. And on the other hand she made no concessions to anybody. She seemed to be saying, ‘You can take me or leave me.’ She never gossiped. She was proud and distant. She had a world
of her own. She paid for everything on the nail. She was quite well off. But her world was her own, depending on none.

She was very fond of children and used to make up masks for them at Hallowe’en. As well as this she would walk by herself at night, which argued that she was romantic. And it was said that
she had sudden bursts of rage which too might be the sign of a spirit without servility. One couldn’t marry a clod.

Murdo stared at the door and as he looked at it he seemed to be drawn inside it into its deep caves with all sorts of veins and passages. It was like a magic door out of the village but at the
same time it pulsed with a deep red light which made it appear alive. It was all very odd and very puzzling, to think that a red door could make such a difference to house and moors and
streams.

Solid and heavy he stood in front of it in his wellingtons, scratching his head. But the red door was not a mirror and he couldn’t see himself in it. Rather he was sucked into it as if it
were a place of heat and colour and reality. But it was different and it was his.

It was true that the villagers when they woke would see it and perhaps make fun of it, and would advise him to repaint it. They might not even want him in the village if he insisted on having a
red door. Still they could all have red doors if they wanted to. Or they could hunt him out of the village.

Hunt him out of the village? He paused for a moment, stunned by the thought. It had never occured to him that he could leave the village, especially at his age, forty-six. But then other people
had left the village and some had prospered though it was true that many had failed. As for himself, he could work hard, he had always done so. And perhaps he had never really belonged to the
village. Perhaps his belonging had been like the Hallowe’en mask. If he were a true villager would he like the door so much? Other villagers would have been angry if their door had been
painted red in the night, their anger reflected in the red door, but he didn’t feel at all angry, in fact he felt admiration that someone should actually have thought of this, should actually
have seen the possibility of a red door, in a green and black landscape.

He felt a certain childlikeness stirring within him as if he were on Christmas day stealing barefooted over the cold red linoleum to the stocking hanging at the chimney, to see if Santa Claus
had come in the night while he slept.

Having studied the door for a while and having had a long look round the village which was rousing itself to a new day, repetitive as all the previous ones, he turned into the house. He ate his
breakfast and thinking carefully and joyously and having washed the dishes he set off to see Mary though in fact it was still early.

His wellingtons creaked among the sparkling frost. Its virginal new diamonds glittered around him, millions of them. Before he knocked on her door he looked at his own door from a distance. It
shone bravely against the frost and the drab patches without frost or snow. There was pride and spirit about it. It had emerged out of the old and the habitual, brightly and vulnerably. It said,
‘Please let me live my own life.’ He knocked on the door.

Miss Maclean said, ‘And pray tell me how did you get the blot on your book?’

I stood up in my seat automatically and said, ‘It was . . . I put too much ink in the pen, please, miss.’ I added again forlornly, ‘Please, miss.’

She considered or seemed to consider this for a long time, but perhaps she wasn’t really thinking about it at all, perhaps she was thinking about something else. Then she said, ‘And
did you not perhaps think of putting less ink in your pen? I imagine one has a choice in those matters.’ The rest of the class laughed as they always did, promptly and decorously, whenever
Miss Maclean made a joke. She said, ‘Be quiet,’ and they stopped laughing as if one of the taps mentioned in our sums had been switched off. Miss Maclean always wore a grey thin blouse
and a thin black jacket. Sometimes she seemed to me to look like a pencil.

‘Do you not perhaps believe in having a tidy book as the rest of us do?’ she said. I didn’t know what to say. Naturally I believed in having a tidy book. I liked the whiteness
of a book more than anything else in the world. To write on a white page was like . . . how can I say it? . . . it was like a bird leaving footprints in snow. But then to say that to her was to
sound daft. And anyway why couldn’t she clean the globe which lay in front of her on the desk? It was always dusty so that you could leave your fingerprints all over Europe or South America
or Antigua. Antigua was a really beautiful name; I had come across it recently in an atlas. The highest mark she ever gave for an essay was five out of ten, and she was always spoiling jotters by
filling them with comments and scoring through words and adding punctuation marks. But I must admit that when she wrote on the board she wrote very neatly.

‘And what’s this,’ she said, ‘about an old woman? I thought you were supposed to write about a postman. Have you never seen a postman?’ She was always asking stupid
questions like that. Of course I had seen a postman. ‘And what’s this word “solatary”? I presume you mean “solitary”. You shouldn’t use big words unless
you can spell them. And whoever saw an old woman peering out through the letterbox when the postman came up the stairs? You really have the oddest notions.’ The class laughed again. No, I had
not actually seen an old woman peering through a letterbox but there was no reason why one shouldn’t, why my old woman shouldn’t. In fact she
had
been peering through the
letterbox. I was angry at having misspelt ‘solitary’. I didn’t know how I had come to do that since I knew the correct spelling. ‘Old women don’t look through
letterboxes waiting for letters,’ she almost screamed, her face reddening with rage.

Why did she hate me so much? I wondered. It was the same when I wrote the essay about the tiger who ate fish and chips. Was it really because my work wasn’t neat and because I was always
putting ink blots on the paper? My hands were clumsy, there was no getting away from that. They never did what I wanted them to do. Her hands however were very thin and neat, ringless. Not like my
mother’s hands. My mother’s hands were wrinkled and one of the fingers had a plain gold ring which she could never get off.

‘Old women don’t spend their time waiting for letters,’ she shouted. ‘They have other things to do with their time. I have never seen an old woman who waited every day
for a letter. H
AVE
you? Have you?’

I thought for some time and then said, ‘No, miss.’

‘Well then,’ she said, breathing less heavily. ‘But you always want to be clever, don’t you? I asked you to write about a postman and you write about an old woman. That
is impertinence. I
SN
’
T
IT
?’

I knew what I was expected to answer so I said, ‘Yes, miss.’

She looked down at the page from an enormous height with her thin hawklike gaze and read out a sentence in a scornful voice. ‘ “She began to write a letter to herself but as she did
so a blot of ink fell on the page and she stopped.” Why did you write that? That again is deliberate insolence.’

‘It came into my mind at that . . . after I had put the ink on my jotter. It just came into my head.’

‘It was insolence, wasn’t it? W
ASN
’
T IT
?’

Actually it hadn’t been. It had been a kind of inspiration. The idea came into my head very quickly and I had written the sentence before I thought how it would appear to her. I
hadn’t been thinking of her when I was writing the composition. But from now on I would have to think of her, I realised. Whatever I wrote I would have to think of her reading it and the
thought filled me with despair. I couldn’t understand why her face quivered with rage when she spoke to me, why she showed such hatred. I didn’t want to be hated. Who wanted to be hated
like this?

I felt this even while she was belting me. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps it had been insolence. Perhaps neatness was the most important thing in the world. After she had belted me she might be
kind to me again and she might stop watching me all the time as if I was an enemy. The thing was, I must learn to hide from her, be neat and clean. Maybe that would work, and her shouting would go
away. But even as I thought that and was writhing with pain from the belt, I was also thinking, Miss Maclean, very clean, Miss Maclean, very clean. The words shone without my bidding in front of my
head. I was always doing that. Sums, numbs, bums, mums. I also thought, Have you Macleaned your belt today? I thought of a story where a dirty old man, a tramp sitting by the side of the road,
would shout, ‘Why aren’t you as clean as me?’ The tramp was very like old Mackay who worked on the roads and was always singing hymns, while breaking the rock. And there was
another story where the belt would stand up like a snake and sway to music. In front of her thin grey blouse the belt would rise, with a snake’s head and a green skin. I could even hear the
accompanying music, staccato and vibrant. It was South American music and came from the dusty globe in front of her.

We walk together along the shore. You are searching for stones which have interesting shapes, gnarled pieces of wood, shells. Walking ahead of you I find a pink doll’s
leg with brine inside it and as I turn it upside down small orange organisms like fragments of crab pour out. There is an empty squashed bottle of Parozone. There is a dead crow with dried black
claws and a gutted body. You bring me a beautiful scalloped shell veined with blue, and place a gnarled piece of wood, which seems to have a bird’s head, on top of a stone. It peers blankly
out at the yachts anchored colourfully in the bay. I am reminded of the bird’s cage with the yellow budgerigars which whistle all day when they are not billing and cooing and looking in their
small round pink-edged mirrors.

There are stones everywhere worn away by the sea over the ages. Your bright blue coat looks slightly out of place but your tanned face belongs to the world of sailors. There is a large bare bone
which might be that of a sheep. Soupy pools of brine contain green organisms. The breeze slightly ruffles your hair as you bend over a shell, totally absorbed. You are carrying pieces of wood in
your arms almost as if you were visiting a large supermarket. I say, ‘Why didn’t you collect a basket before you came on to the shore?’ You laugh. So much of the detritus of the
world comes here at night and during the day. Men in ships throw plastic bottles over the side and they land here. But there is nothing that this detritus tells us. It is purely random, a
doll’s leg and arm, smooth and hollow; bones; a veined shell.

Our car, small and red and round as a bubble, stands by itself not far from the pier with its rotting planks. It doesn’t look as if it has been cast up. Nothing has yet gnawed at it, as
something gnawed at the crow in the middle of the night. The sun flashes from the water and the waves move in to the shore very quietly. There is a strong acrid smell of brine, a thick soupy smell;
it is all a disordered kitchen. I find a large rusty wheel and a broken telescope.

You are squatting by the shore studying a shell. You are entirely absorbed in the study of it. I can see your blue coat from the back and your bent head with the ordered coiffure. For a moment I
am frightened by a terrifying vision. It is as if you are in another time, seeing that shell for the first time, and as if a glass wall had come down between us. I am studying you studying the
shell, as you are studying the shell. I am frightened lest you should change before my eyes, lest your blue coat change to one made of skin, lest your hair become straggly and greasy, lest your
knees and legs peer out from the frayed pelt. I suddenly shout to you because I am frightened. You do not answer. You change. Slowly you change. I look down at my suddenly bared legs. I see the
boat coming to the shore with cloth bellying from its masts. I feel the contrary wind. It is cold here. It is very cold. My hairy hand has mislaid its wristwatch. The crow rises into the sky on
flapping leathery wings. The bottle floats back to the ship. The bone grows into an animal which I do not know, which I know, which is ambling towards me as the sky darkens, as your bony brow
stares and stares at the blue veined infinitely coiled shell.