The Red Door (44 page)

‘It is untrue because I was there. The witness was doing no harm. I was watching him. He was pushed into the middle of the road.’

I now knew what had happened. I had spoken these words not because of the bomb but because of Fiona. I knew now what she meant by being on the side of life. She had asked nothing of me. She had
stood there in her pallor and her weakness and had made no demands. Therefore I had offered her myself. It was like the amethyst at her breast exploding into a new bomb, which in turn exploded
within me, the bomb of truth. It is not preaching I want, but vision!

Therefore, there was the old judge leaning between us with his hearing aid and the policeman with his neat diced evil cap laid beside him. There was the smell of varnish and the court which was
like a church. The sun exploded through the window, drunkenly. It flashed on the judge’s head, leaped through the glass of water, and shone on Fiona’s face which was smiling and dizzy.
It swayed the wall diagonally towards the policeman, scything him in two, it made the varnish into a stifling musk, and punched me between the eyes exploding light in my head. The prison fell in
like a pack of cards. I looked up. The floor swayed like a deck beneath me. The sun was rising over the sea. There was the noise of a train and coloured flowers. Above me was George’s face.
And Fiona was standing beside him. The floor steadied. I was calm, so calm. I had never been so calm. Now I write out of this calmness, Fiona and I. George has gone and we are alone. We send you
this letter, Fiona and I.

Your loving son,

K
ENNETH
.

PART II

She paid off the taxi she had taken from the railway station and went into the hotel. She felt sweaty and the palm of her right hand slid along the handle of the red case. She
put the case down and waited for the girl at the reception desk to stop phoning. She had been in the hotel three or four times before in the past two years but she didn’t expect that anyone
would recognise her, and this girl seemed new as if she were a schoolgirl working there during holiday time. As she waited she looked around her. There were some chairs with olive green covers at
one side of the lobby and on one an old man lying asleep, his mouth open, his feet stretched out, and what looked like a guidebook fallen open on the floor beside him. Her eyes traversed him,
following the wall upward to the high ceiling with its white edgings like wedding cake. She turned back to the girl who was looking at her enquiringly. She was a very pretty girl with dark pigtails
and bare tanned arms.

‘A single room,’ she said. ‘Have you a single room?’

‘I think we can manage that,’ said the girl brightly, turning to a plan of the hotel hung up on a sheet on the wall. ‘Room 5,’ she said, ‘or would you like one with
a bath? There’s 31.’

‘I’ll take 5.’

‘Righto. If you would please sign?’

She signed ‘Miriam Hetherington’, hesitating as she always did whether to put ‘Scottish’ or ‘British’ and finally deciding as she always did to put
‘British’. She took the key attached to the large blue block and went to the room which was on the ground floor. She opened the door and entered.

It was like all the other hotel rooms in which she had stayed. There was a dressing table, a wardrobe, a wash basin with towels, a phone, a card with a list of hotel charges, a large notice
about what to do in the event of fire, a Gideon Bible, a bed with electric blanket, a large glass ashtray and a small gold-coloured box of matches stamped with the name of the hotel. She lay down
on the bed and fell asleep.

When she woke she found by a glance at her small silver wrist watch that she had slept two hours and that it was five o’clock in the afternoon. She got off the bed, looking down vaguely at
her red shoes which matched the case. Then she opened the latter and took out her clothes – two dresses, a hat, four pairs of stockings, a pair of shoes, three sets of undergarments, two
pairs of pyjamas, shoe brushes and shoe polish and various other odds and ends including a sewing kit and a number of paperbacks. She packed them neatly into her wardrobe and dressing chest. When
she had done this she took off her blouse and began to wash her face and neck, rubbing the cold water briskly into her eyes.

The face that looked back at her from the mirror was the face of a woman of about thirty-five whose skin at the corner of the eyes was beginning to wrinkle. The eyes themselves had a questioning
look as if, confronted with the world, they had found it rather puzzling, not to say unintelligible. The nose was rather long, the upper lip narrow and severe, the lower lip full and red. Her teeth
were still her own and fairly white. The forehead was narrow and high and lightly veined and the hair cut into a boyish crop. In short she had the appearance of someone who might have been
passionate but whose passion had been mastered by a relentless severity. Her colourful red blouse and red shoes seemed like a late desperate blossoming of her buried personality. But she
wasn’t ugly and, given rouge and lipstick and relaxation of mind, she would in certain circumstances appear pretty.

When she had washed herself and used rouge and lipstick she thought for a moment and then going out of the room and leaving the key at the desk she went out into the dazzling sunlight.

The streets were crowded with people – men in shirt sleeves, women bare-armed in blouses – all strolling along in an easy, relaxed manner. The road was dense with traffic and it took
her some time to cross, but she waited till the sign ‘Cross’ appeared and then half ran across the street. On the opposite side was a restaurant which she entered. She sat down at a
table in the shade and when the waitress came she ordered fruit juice and a gammon steak. At a table beside her there was a boy and a girl holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes. At
another table there was a large man with a moustache eating fish and squeezing juice from a lemon on to his plate. He had a newspaper propped against the tea-pot.

She drank her juice and waited for her gammon steak. She didn’t feel at all hungry but decided that she ought to eat something since that was what people did at that time of day. Since her
parents had died and she had started living on her own she sometimes skipped meals but on holiday one ought to eat, she told herself. She remembered that her mother used always to be very keen on
her eating a lot, and would pile her plate high with meat and vegetables which weren’t really very well cooked. Her father of course ate steadily and gravely, not seeming to mind what was set
in front of him, but as if he were filling himself with necessary fuel. He reminded her of a large squat car which was being pumped full of petrol. Of course he had been a large man and he needed
the food. Her mother on the other hand was thin and stringy.

She ate the gammon, carefully putting aside the chips. The man with the newspaper was chewing rapidly and reading at the same time. The young couple were preparing to leave. They had eaten, she
noted, some of the cheapest stuff, sausage and egg, but had wiped their plates clean. It took her a long time to eat the gammon but she succeeded and got up. She didn’t want any sweet as it
might fatten her too much. The waitress hoped that the gammon had suited her and she said yes. The waitress said that if she cared to come back tomorrow they would have something special on the
menu. She didn’t reply. Again she went out into the sunshine.

For a while she walked along the streets looking in the shop windows. It was a good area of the town with a large number of jewellers’ shops, good food shops, and furniture shops. She
looked at the rings in the windows and noted that they were very expensive. There were also some quite splendid Russian watches. She remembered giving away her father’s watch to her uncle but
she had kept her mother’s watch and was still wearing it. Her father’s watch had been a large golden one, of the kind that men used to carry in their waistcoat pockets. She still had
his Masonic ring in a box in the house.

She went into a supermarket and walked around for a bit. There was nothing there that she wanted to buy except possibly two large red footballs which she might take to the neighbours’ boys
who were mad keen on football. It was always a good idea to take something home to them: one never knew when one might need help from a neighbour, for example if one was ill with ’flu and
couldn’t get out, especially in the winter time. There were various perfumes which she was tempted to buy but didn’t. Later on she went into a large bookshop and studied the books. She
read a lot but not as much as she used to. Her mother had always told her that she read too much. ‘Too much reading is a weariness to the flesh,’ she would say, quoting from the Bible,
or what she thought was the Bible. Her mother had hardly read a book in her life except the Bible and the
People’s Friend
, and couldn’t understand why people should want to
read books at all: it seemed such a waste of time when they could be doing something useful. She herself thought she might buy a book called
Emerging Africa
to help her with her geography
but decided against it. Holiday time wasn’t the right time to read serious books. One read detective stories or thrillers. Half ashamedly she looked at a book on horoscopes and found that she
ought to keep a tight grip on financial matters that week and not mix very much with strangers. She put the book down and went out again into the sun.

As she walked down the street she came to a cinema which was showing a film called
The Cowboys
starring John Wayne. She decided to go in and bought a ticket for the balcony. When she
sat down it disturbed her to find that she was the only person in the whole cinema. Not only was there no one in the balcony seats, there was no one – not even children – in the stalls.
She felt rather frightened and wished that she had not come in till later but after all she had paid her money and couldn’t go out again. The red curtains were still drawn and for a long time
there was nothing but music to which she listened impatiently, now and again looking behind her as if expecting that someone would come in and attack her. Eventually the music stopped and there
were some advertisements, one of which showed a young girl riding a horse through a mountain stream and which after all turned out to be an advertisement for cigarettes. ‘Cool as a mountain
stream,’ breathed the sexy voice of the sponsor. She herself didn’t smoke. Her mother hadn’t believed in girls smoking: her father however smoked a pipe. When he was finished
working for the day in the distillery he would read the paper for a while and smoke his pipe and then fall asleep. She herself was the only child and had perhaps loved her father more than her
mother who had often told him that he ought to have a better job with his abilities though as a matter of fact his abilities weren’t all that extraordinary except that he was good with his
hands. He could make or repair anything. He had made a chair for her when she was a child and later he would make toys for her, wooden animals of all kinds. Her favourite was a squirrel which would
climb the chair on its clockwork machinery.

The credits came on the screen for the big picture and she realised that she had read a review of the film in the
Observer
which she bought every Sunday. She also bought the
Sunday
Times
. Her father and mother used to get the
Sunday Post
and they would spend the whole week reading it, not missing a single story. In her own job as a teacher she would use the
Sunday Supplements for projects. One of her projects was on the Motor Car, though she couldn’t drive.

The film turned out to be rather a good one, at least at the beginning. The title
The Cowboys
had to be taken literally for it was about boys, not about men. John Wayne, a rancher whose
cowhands abandoned him in order to join a gold rush, was a stern man who had lost two sons partly because he had been too strict with them. The film showed him becoming attached to the boys and
learning how to handle them in a human manner with the help of a coloured cook. On the drive too the boys learned to become men. They were attacked by some ex-jailbirds who killed the unarmed Wayne
after he had refused to kow-tow to them and had then driven off his cattle. The last part of the film she wasn’t sure of. It showed the boys setting off grim-faced after the killers and one
by one detaching them and murdering them and finally manœuvring the survivors into a trap where they shot them all. The leader of the killers had got his legs entangled in his horse’s
stirrups and pleaded to be freed but one of the boys fired a shot into the air which so frightened the horse that it dragged its rider along through a river till he was drowned. She wasn’t
sure about this last part. Nothing surely could condone violence and if there had been someone with her she would have argued about it. But there was no one there.

Many years before while her parents were still alive she had fallen in love with a man who owned a shop at the time. He was very handsome and very glib but what she took for cleverness her
parents took for falsity. He used to take her out a lot especially to the cinema but most of the time she had to pay for their outings. She didn’t mind this as she thought that he was making
his way in the business. The first time he had tried to seduce her she had been very cold, so cold that she had managed to put him off. It had been in a wood where he had taken her in his new car:
she could remember the brown autumnal leaves, and the river flowing through the glen with a desolate sound. He had been very persuasive using all the common arguments such as that it was good for
one to have sex. He had been very handsome with his fair hair and fine blue eyes but she had not succumbed. She thought that innocence was important and felt that if she had given in she would have
carried for a long time a load of guilt. In fact the sequence which showed the girl riding through the mountain stream had reminded her of the episode. He had been very passionate and also
persuasive. He used to take her to parties and she had been so much in love or so infatuated that she had defied her parents and come into the house in the early hours of the morning, still
remembering the dancing round the record player in the grey streamers of cigarette smoke. Once she had come in at four o’clock in the morning, only to find her mother, toothless, still awake
and waiting for her. ‘After all we have done for you,’ hissed her mother through a mouth without dentures, ‘and you are just a common prostitute.’ As a matter of fact it
hadn’t been like that at all. The party had been exciting and they had all danced to the music of the latest pop songs. She could still remember them with a certain bitterness. Not that she
was the kind of person who was very interested in pop songs; she was more interested in classical music and conversation. But coming back in the whiteness of the morning under the million stars had
been an experience, for during most of her life she had gone to bed at eleven at the latest, drawing the curtains carefully before removing her clothes.