The Red Door (47 page)

She went into a restaurant and had some tea. By this time she was almost getting tired of eating. After her tea, which she prolonged till half past five, she went down and sat in the station
waiting-room for a while, till the play would begin. She thought about being married and being single. When one was married there were all sorts of things one had to do: the world became untidy.
One had to adjust to a husband, then one had to cope with noisy children. She could do this all right in the school because the children she taught were not her own. She saw them to a certain
extent at their best, not when they were screaming for attention, or harassing one when one was tired. On the other hand, to be single was not a particularly good state to be in. One gradually lost
contact with people unless one was one of those women who served on committees or started art clubs or went to church with flowered hats or made endless jars of preserves.

She sat on a leather seat in the waiting room as if she were waiting for a train. She could imagine herself going to London or any other part of Britain. Better still would be an airport lounge:
there one could imagine oneself going to Europe or Africa or Asia. She had only been on a plane once and it had been just like being on a bus, not at all exciting, just looking out of a window and
seeing banks of white clouds below one.

It was funny how she fell asleep so often nowadays if she sat down for a long time. Perhaps that was a good thing: on the other hand it might mean that there was something wrong with her. It
might be psychological also. She ought really to try and keep awake.

She read some of her book and then went out and walked about the station. She noticed a number of telephone kiosks some of which had been smashed and had gang slogans written on them in chalk.
The dangling useless phones somehow looked symbolic. The unharmed booths were occupied by people talking excitedly into black mouthpieces.

Everywhere she went it was the same, people talking to each other, laughing, gesturing, sometimes shouting at each other, as once she had seen a gipsy and his wife quarrelling. It had ended with
the man hitting his wife across the face so that blood poured out of her lip. A bony dog barked at their heels and in the background smoke rose slowly out of their camp.

You never saw so many gipsies now. Her mother would never give them anything when they came whining to the door, nor would she listen to the Jehovah’s Witnesses who tried to hand out what
she called heathenish magazines. Her mother would get rid of such people briskly and effectively. She herself would listen to them in an embarrassed manner while they, that is the religious people,
would talk about Darwin and God, referring closely like automata to verses in the Bible. Invariably she bought one of their magazines which her mother would immediately throw in the bin.

As she sat in the waiting-room, watching through the window trains coming and going, pictures of all kinds passed before her eyes. She remembered a holiday she had once had in a desolate glen in
the Highlands. She could visualise clearly the mountains veined with stone, the deer that grazed by fences, the foaming rivers, the abandoned cottages, the blaze of yellow gorse, the horses
nuzzling each other on the sands. She had liked that place. It seemed suited to her personality. But one day she had seen, sitting in front of a caravan, a large fat lady dressed in red trousers
and painting the glen, and the illusion of contentment had been destroyed.

At five past seven she started to walk to the theatre. Now that she had an aim she was happy but at the same time she thought that she would have difficulty in filling the hours of the following
day. She had already exhausted quite a lot of the sights she had intended to see, unless perhaps she went on a bus tour. She would have to check on that in the morning, or perhaps they had a
brochure in the hotel.

Her feet were already getting sore as she had done a lot of walking but she didn’t want to spend money on a taxi. She didn’t like taxis. They reminded her of hearses and she was
always sure she was being cheated. They would always take one the long way round and she was sure the drivers recognised strangers to the town instinctively.

At twenty past seven she reached the theatre which was a very small one, seating perhaps sixty people or so, on cushions round the central area which formed the stage. There were strong lights
blazing down which made the place hot: she imagined interrogations taking place there in a concentrated hot dazzle. She had bought a programme which gave very little information about the actual
play: all that she gathered was that it seemed very avant garde. She didn’t know what exactly to expect, perhaps a dramatisation of the rise of Hitler, with reference to the SS and the Jews
and the concentration camps. She didn’t often go to the theatre, preferring the cinema, but there was nothing else on that evening. She also didn’t like avant-garde stuff.

She noticed that the audience was predominantly youthful, girls wearing slacks and Indian headbands, most of them probably students. The theatre was a small and intimate one and she could hear
some of them talking in a brittle knowledgeable way before the play started. She sat in the front row on her cushion wishing that it was a chair and feeling rather tired because there was no
support for her back.

It was certainly not a conventional play. It began with a sinister music on drums which went on and on, exerting a hypnotic dark rhythm. In a mirror high above she could see the drummers with
their long hair reflected. Then a young man came into the central space and stood there motionless for a long time while the music played.

Suddenly he became a dying German soldier with glazed eyes, greatcoat, rifle and dull boots. Children came in and danced around him, among them a girl who appeared to be a spastic. The beating
drums seemed to draw one into the dying festering mind of the German soldier by their rhythmic compulsion, as he was slowly resurrected, pulling himself to his feet against the wind of death and
the beat of the drums. He made an appointment with the spastic girl who at night went into a wood to meet him, the dead German soldier. The lights all dimmed, there was only the wood created by the
words, and the girl trying to find the German soldier on her macabre tryst, while the music played, the music of dark Nazism, the music of the terrible haunted wood, where everything was eerie and
festering, and the animals crawled and killed. The scene was electrifying. It made her feel excited and disgusted at the same time, that wood where all desires were waiting, buried, but rising as
if reflected in the manic glasses of the murdering German soldier. The girl crawled into the wood. The music quickened and then there was the interval, a sane blaze of lights.

She stood up, shaken. She hardly knew where she was. She left the theatre knowing that she couldn’t bear to watch. She walked out into the hurting daylight. She walked down the brae
steadily till she came to the park again. There she sat down on a bench among all the people. Behind her she could hear the tolling of a church bell. Ahead of her she could see the glasshouse where
all the flowers were – the wide red flowers – and the plants, the Mexican cacti which she had once seen and which could exist on so little water.

She sat on the bench and as she did so she thought to herself: I can’t bear this total freedom any more. I can’t, I can’t. I don’t know what to do. I cannot live like
this. She got up restlessly and walked into the wood. She looked down at a stretch of water where the polluted river flowed past. There were some boys wearing towels round their waists who seemed
to have just emerged from the dirty stream, which was not at all like the clean streams to which she herself had been accustomed and where you could see right down to the bottom where the white
stones were.

As she stood there she saw a little girl in checked skirt and checked blouse walking into the wood by herself to pick flowers. Dazed she watched her. To her right she could hear the shouting of
the boys. Without knowing precisely what she was doing she began to follow the little girl. As she did so she was amazed to discover that a transformation had taken place in her as if she had found
a role which she could perform, as if the total freedom had narrowed and come to a focus. She didn’t know what she was going to do but it was as if she felt it right whatever it would turn
out to be. She followed the little girl into the wood.

In the intervals of inaction it had been decided by the invisible powers that minor raids were feasible and therefore to be recommended. In the words of the directive:
‘For reasons known to you we are for the moment acting on the defensive so far as serious operations are concerned but this should not preclude the planning of local attacks on a
comparatively small scale . . . ’

Like the rest of his men on that particular night, Lieutenant Robert Mackinnon blackened his face so that in the dugout eyes showed white, as in a Black Minstrel show. He kept thinking how
similar it all was to a play in which he had once taken part, and how the jokes before the performance had the same nervous high-pitched quality, as they prepared to go out into the darkness. There
was Sergeant Smith who had been directed to write home to the next of kin to relate the heroism of a piece of earth which had been accidentally shattered by shrapnel. His teeth grinned whitely
beneath his moustache as he adjusted the equipment of one of the privates and joked, ‘Tomorrow you might get home, lad.’ They all knew what that meant and they all longed for a minor
wound – nothing serious – which would allow them to be sent home honourably. And yet Smith himself had been invalided home and come back. ‘I missed your stink, lads,’ he had
said when he appeared among them again, large and buoyant and happy. And everyone knew that this was his place where he would stay till he was killed or till the war ended.

‘I remember,’ he used to tell them, ‘we came to this house once. It was among a lot of trees, you understand. I don’t know their names so don’t ask me. Well, the
house was rotten with Boche and we’d fired at it all day. And the buggers fired back. Towards evening – it might have been 1800 hours – they stopped firing and it got so quiet you
could hear yourself breathing. One of our blokes – a small madman from Wales, I think it was – dashed across and threw a grenade or two in the door and the window. And there
wasn’t a sound from inside the house, ’part from the explosion of course, so he kept shouting, “The Boche are off, lads,” in that sing-song Welsh of his. So we all rushed
the place and true enough they’d mostly gone. Run out of ammunition, I suppose. We went over it for mines but there wasn’t none. So we stood in the hall, I suppose you’d call it,
all of us with our dirty great boots and our rifles and bayonets and there was these stairs going up, very wide. The windows were shot to hell and there was glass all over the place. And suddenly
– this is God’s truth – an old woman come down the stairs. Dressed in white she was, a lovely dress like you’d see in a picture. And her lips all painted red. You’d
think she was dressed for a ball. Her eyes were queer, they seemed to go right through you as if you wasn’t there. She came down the last steps and our officer stepped forward to help her.
And do you know what she did? She put her arms around him and she started to waltz. He was so surprised he didn’t know what to do – the fat bugger. And all the time there was this
music. Well, in the end he got away from her and some people took her away. Well, we could still hear this music, see? So we goes upstairs – there was a dead Boche on the landing, he’d
been shot in the mouth – and we goes into this room. There was a bed there with a pink what-do-you-call-it over it. And beside the bed there was this big dead Boche. And do you know what
– there was a dagger with jewels in it stuck in his breastbone. And beside him on the floor there was this phonograph playing a French tune, one of the officers said. He said it was a dance
tune. Someone said it was bloody lucky the little fat fellow wasn’t wearing a grey uniform.’

‘All present and correct, sir,’ said Sergeant Smith.

‘All right, let’s go then,’ said Lieutenant Mackinnon.

Down the trench they went, teeth and eyes grinning, clattering over the duckboards with their Mills bombs and their bayonets and their guns. ‘What am I doing here?’
thought Robert, and ‘Who the hell is making that noise?’ and ‘Is the damned wire cut or not?’ and ‘We are like a bunch of actors,’ and ‘I’m leading
these men, I’m an officer.’

And he thought again, ‘I hope the guns have cut that barbed wire.’

Then he and they inched across No Man’s Land following the line of lime which had been laid to guide them. Up above were the stars and the air was cool on their faces. But there were only
a few stars, the night was mostly dark, and clouds covered the moon. Momentarily he had an idea of a huge mind breeding thought after thought, star after star, a mind which hid in daylight in
modesty or hauteur but which at night worked out staggering problems, pouring its undifferentiated power over the earth.

On hands and knees he squirmed forward, the others behind him. This was his first raid and he thought, ‘I am frightened.’ But it was different from being out in the open on a
battlefield. It was an older fear, the fear of being buried in the earth, the fear of wandering through eternal passageways and meeting grey figures like weasels and fighting with them in the
darkness. He tested the wire. Thank God it had been cut. And then he thought, ‘Will we need the ladders?’ The sides of the trenches were so deep sometimes that ladders were necessary to
get out again. And as he crawled towards the German trenches he had a vision of Germans crawling beneath British trenches undermining them. A transparent imagined web hung below him in the darkness
quivering with grey spiders.

He looked at his illuminated watch. The time was right. Then they were in the German trenches. The rest was a series of thrustings and flashes. Once he thought he saw or imagined he saw from
outside a dugout a man sitting inside reading a book. It was like looking through a train window into a house before the house disappears. There were Mills bombs, hackings of bayonets, scurryings
and breathings as of rats. A white face towered above him, his pistol exploded and the face disappeared. There was a terrible stink all around him, and the flowing of blood. Then there was a long
silence. Back. They must get back. He passed the order along. And then they wriggled back again avoiding the craters which lay around them, created by shells, and which were full of slimy water. If
they fell into one of these they would be drowned. As he looked, shells began to fall into them sending up huge spouts of water. Over the parapet. They were over the parapet. Crouched they had run
and scrambled and were over. Two of them were carrying a third. They stumbled down the trench. There were more wounded than he had thought. Wright . . . one arm seemed to have been shot off.
Sergeant Smith was bending over him. ‘You’ll get sent home all right,’ he was saying. Some of the men were tugging at their equipment and talking feverishly. Young Ellis was lying
down, blood pouring from his mouth. Harris said, ‘Morrison’s in the crater.’