The Red Door (48 page)

He and Sergeant Smith looked at each other. They were both thinking the same: there is no point, he’s had it. They could see each other’s eyes glaring whitely through the black, but
could not tell the expression on the faces. The shells were still falling, drumming and shaking the earth. All these craters out there, these dead moons.

‘Do you know which one?’ said Robert.

‘I think so, sir, I . . . Are you going to get him?’

‘Sergeant Smith, we’ll need our rifles. He can hang on to that if he’s there. Harris, come with us.’ They were all looking at him with sombre black faces, Wright divided
between joy and pain.

‘Sir.’

Then they were at the parapet again, shells exploding all around them.

‘Which one is it?’ And the stars were now clearer. Slowly they edged towards the rim. How had he managed to break away from the white lime?

They listened like doctors to a heartbeat.

‘Are you there, Fred?’ Harris whispered fiercely, as if he were in church. ‘Are you there?’ Lights illuminated their faces. There was no sound.

‘Are you sure this is the right one?’ Robert asked fiercely.

‘I thought it was. I don’t know.’

‘Oh, Christ,’ said Sergeant Smith.

‘We’d better get back then,’ said Robert.

‘Are you going to leave him, sir?’ said Harris.

‘We can’t do anything till morning. He may be in one of the shallower ones.’ His cry of ‘Morrison, are you there?’ was drowned by the shriek of a shell.

‘Back to the trench again,’ he said, and again they squirmed along. But at that moment as they approached the parapet he seemed to hear it, a cry coming from deep in the earth around
him, or within him, a cry of such despair as he had never heard in his life before. And it seemed to come from everywhere at once, from all the craters, their slimy green rings, from one direction,
then from another. The other two had stopped as well to listen.

Once more he heard it. It sounded like someone crying ‘Help’.

He stopped. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’re going for him. Come on.’

And he stood up. There was no reason for crawling any more. The night was clear. And they would have to hurry. And the other two stood up as well when they saw him doing so. He couldn’t
leave a man to die in the pit of green slime. ‘We’ll run,’ he said. And they ran to the first one and listened. They cried fiercely, ‘Are you there?’ But there was no
answer. Then they seemed to hear it from the next one and they were at that one soon too, peering down into the green slime, illuminated by moonlight. But there was no answer. There was one left
and they made for that one. They screamed again, in the sound of the shells, and they seemed to hear an answer. They heard what seemed to be a bubbling. ‘Are you there?’ said Robert,
bending down and listening. ‘Can you get over here?’ They could hear splashing and deep below them breathing, frantic breathing as if someone was frightened to death. ‘It’s
all right,’ he said, ‘if you come over here, I’ll send my rifle down. You two hang on to me,’ he said to the others. He was terrified. That depth, that green depth. Was it
Morrison down there, after all? He hadn’t spoken. The splashings came closer. The voice was like an animal’s repeating endlessly a mixture of curses and prayers. Robert hung over the
edge of the crater. ‘For Christ’s sake don’t let me go,’ he said to the other two. It wasn’t right that a man should die in green slime. He hung over the rim holding
his rifle down. He felt it being caught, as if there was a great fish at the end of a line. He felt it moving. And the others hung at his heels, like a chain. The moon shone suddenly out between
two clouds and in that moment he saw it, a body covered with greenish slime, an obscene mermaid, hanging on to his rifle while the two eyes, white in the green face, shone upward and the mouth,
gritted, tried not to let the blood through. It was a monster of the deep, it was a sight so terrible that he nearly fell. He was about to say, ‘It’s no good, he’s dying,’
but something prevented him from saying it, if he said it then he would never forget it. He knew that. The hands clung to the rifle below in the slime. The others pulled behind him. ‘For
Christ’s sake hang on to the rifle,’ he said to the monster below. ‘Don’t let go.’ And it seemed to be emerging from the deep, setting its feet against the side of the
crater, all green, all mottled, like a disease. It climbed as if up a mountainside in the stench. It hung there against the wall. ‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘Hold on.’ His whole
body was concentrated. This man must not fall down again into that lake. The death would be too terrible. The face was coming over the side of the crater, the teeth gritted, blood at the mouth. It
hung there for a long moment and then the three of them had got him over the side. He felt like cheering, standing up in the light of No Man’s Land and cheering. Sergeant Smith was kneeling
down beside the body, his ear to the heart. It was like a body which might have come from space, green and illuminated and slimy. And over it poured the merciless moonlight.

‘Come on,’ he said to the other two. And at that moment Sergeant Smith said, ‘He’s dead.’

‘Dead?’ There was a long pause. ‘Well, take him in anyway. We’re not leaving him here. We’ll take him in. At least he didn’t die in that bloody lake.’
They lifted him up between them and they walked to the trench. ‘I’m bloody well not crawling,’ said Robert. ‘We’ll walk. And to hell with the lot of them.’ He
couldn’t prevent himself swearing and at the same time despising himself for swearing. What would Sergeant Smith think of him? It was like bringing a huge green fish back to the lines.
‘To hell with them,’ he shouted. ‘This time we’ll bloody well walk. I don’t care how light it is.’ And they did so and managed to get him back into the dugout.
They laid him down on the floor and glared around them at the silent men.

‘Just like Piccadilly it was,’ said Harris, who couldn’t stop talking. ‘As bright as day.’

‘Shut up, you lot,’ said Sergeant Smith, ‘and get some sleep.’

Robert was thinking of the man he had seen reading a book in a flash of light before they had gone in with their bayonets. He couldn’t see properly whether it had been a novel or a comic.
Perhaps it was a German comic. Did Germans have comics? Like that green body emerging out of the slime, that fish. He began to shiver and said, ‘Give the men whisky if there is any.’
But he fell asleep before he could get any himself, seeing page after page of comics set before him, like red windows, and in one there was a greenish monster and in another a woman dancing with a
fat officer. Overhead the shells still exploded, and the water bounced now and again from the craters.

‘The bloody idiot,’ said Sergeant Smith looking down at him. ‘He could have got us all killed.’ Still, it had been like Piccadilly right enough. Full of light. It
hadn’t been so bad. Nothing was as bad as you feared.

He didn’t dare to confront it, wriggling with piercing embarrassment into the tent poled by his thin legs and bony knees. The blankets hung warm and woollen from his
arched bones to whom today had happened a disgrace so tremendous that his thought could not even edge sideways up to it without the terror of annihilation. Yet how could he prevent images from
sidling into his shut eyes enveloped even in their second darkness. First there came the gloves against his petrified scream. But it didn’t matter, the gloves still came – the brown
glossy white furred gloves: he would never wear them again, that was certain. And yet they had been so neat and fine, fitting with a loud click on his pale hands. It had all started with the gloves
which he had worn to school that day for the first time having tested their leather in the early morning when in his shivering joy he had crossed unshod and conspiratorially the cold green linoleum
to build the fire and surprise them all. They had matched his brown shoes too: that was an unexpected gift. Though you couldn’t throw stones with them you could walk gloved and delicate along
the grassy verge of the road like an officer, a lieutenant certainly, a colonel possibly, except that you didn’t have the thin whistling cane which swished and cut aristocratically through
the icy air. Then inside them your hands felt so disciplined as if the fingers had gathered together out of some chaos, some sadness of shapelessness, into a fixed flesh that you could control and
command.

And he had walked up the sideroad to the school where at the gate were assembled some of his classmates. And the whole thing had started because he was so happy and possessed, being by the time
he reached school Joe Louis the murderous hooker with the brown polished fists and the crowd rising in a frenzy roaring and punching ‘Come on, finish him off ’ so that in the brisk blue
air he had begun to shadow box, his small tight nutty fists left-leading and right-crossing ceaselessly while his head swerved sideways from a slow but murderous opponent.

Then of course in his careless delight he had found himself face to face with the Section scowling in front of him with his screwed red face above his ragged blue jersey and his harsh rocky
knees. He had led with a crisp checked left to the jutting chin and brought up his right till it halted exactly in the dirty circle in the centre of the blue jersey. And all the time the Section
had stared at him without moving watching the new brown flickering gloves darting about his upright body like moths. The stocky body was rooted: the eyes were rooted: the heavy chin was rooted.

Then Merry had shouted: ‘Look at the Fairy making rings round the Section,’ and Plummy had said: ‘Come on, Fairy, let’s see you,’ and his light beautiful footwork
dazzled even himself as he merged into the music of his body, his gloves darting in and out, artistically, not ferociously, showing off, imperiously calling attention to Joe Louis created by ten
thousand eyes, blown into being on ten thousand voices. ‘Come on, Fairy, give it to him.’ But the Section remained there unmoved as if watching a child dancing, his black hair waving
faintly in the morning breeze, his eyes steady.

And then at the climax of the dance when all his feathers were turning red, fanning out all about him in music of colour he had actually hit the Section on the nose and the Section had looked at
him at last. Some being had come shambling out of the cave in his eyes and was staring at him as if awakened across a bleak landscape. Even then it might have been all right if he had apologised
but how could he when everybody was shouting: ‘You should see the Fairy,’ ‘Why he’s a boxer. He’s a real boxer’ – even though his knees were really melting
to water as he looked into the unfolding eyes of the Section.

Then someone shouted: ‘There’s going to be a fight,’ and because it was spoken it was certain.

‘At four o’clock.’

‘Out on the moor.’

‘Behind the school.’

He could have apologised but he turned away saying nothing. And the Section stood there while the strange being stood taller and taller in front of the cave in his red eyes.

‘At four o’clock.’

‘You should have seen the Fairy.’

‘He’s a beautiful boxer.’

When he looked at them he could have sworn they were mocking him. He had never been so scared in his life.

All morning he became more and more scared. At the eleven o’clock interval he was speechlessly followed by four or five small boys who stared at him as if they expected him to begin boxing
as they watched. Trailed by his fans, he walked round by the grey stone privy at the back of the school. He saw two girls clucking ahead of him, arm in arm, giggling, telling each other secrets.
Perhaps they were joking about him. Everyone must know: he was opened out like a walking wound. If only they had fought right away instead of waiting like this. He imagined the Section lounging
against a wall or bending his black composed head under the pouring water of the copper tap, an inverted animal. If only he could speak to him. He went into the privy. He read the names scratched
on the walls, the initials, the rhymes. He read them over and over again. He passed the Section in the quadrangle as the huge iron bell tolled and tolled. They looked at each other but did not
speak. How large he had become, with his raw red fists, his blue jersey like the sea covering a rock, his deadly savage eyes, the rending rage in his heart. But nothing could be done now, he
thought, almost vomiting, ceremony had taken over. He was trapped.

At dinner time he felt sick. He could eat nothing. He wanted to be really sick so that he could stay off school. He looked at the safe book he was in the middle of reading with its beautiful
crisp cover
– Oliver Twist
. He imagined himself running through the queer air of London, pursued.

It was so strange. Why should he not just stay away from school and listen to the noise the book made in his ear as he read and read throughout the night? He could have cursed himself. He looked
through the window and saw a cornstack standing still and motionless on the ground. A fly crawled across the table. Some days he would put a knife in front of it vertically to see what it would do.
Today he didn’t, he let it crawl. He thought of the Section, ragged-trousered, reddening-eyed, stupid: for he was stupid, everybody said so. The teacher had once asked him: ‘How much
does a 2½d. stamp cost?’ and he hadn’t known. The class roared when they told the story. The Fairy however hadn’t roared: he had simply hated the teacher. He pushed the
plate away from him, to the end of the world. His mother said: ‘Are you ill?’ No, he wasn’t ill. Anyway if he was he couldn’t tell her this kind of sickness. She
wouldn’t understand.

The bell, ponderous and huge, iron and near, swung him into his corner on the windy moor. Grass stirred greyly in the wind. The ground was wet. Pushed by his unwanted supporters he found himself
unreally standing in front of the Section. He couldn’t understand what he was doing there: all he wanted was to get it over and done with and be home with his book. Someone was advising him
to take his jacket off. He didn’t: he wanted to be warm. He heard one boy beside him panting with excitement but didn’t turn round to see who it was. There in front of him stood the
Section, solidly, his jersey billowing in the cold wind. He was afraid to look into his face as if he would meet there some image which would finally destroy him. The ceremony had begun.