The Red Door (61 page)

Tonight I shan’t be able to sleep and I don’t know what to do about it. I could not understand what was being said to me on the phone. The first twice I phoned I
couldn’t get through at all. There was an intolerable buzzing in my ears, a noise like that of the sea, and I had to put the phone down. I hate phones anyway, especially public phones, half
of which are now vandalised. Last week for instance after hearing the pay signal I put money in the slot, a querulous voice spoke from somewhere and then faded away. I couldn’t even recognise
it. Another time when phoning my village home from the heart of this terrible city I heard instead of my brother’s voice that of an old bewildered man. Why can’t the world be more
predictable? And as well as this there are women of a certain kind who phone forever. They place their handbags and cigarette packets in front of them on the ledge (as if they were ensconcing
themselves for the night) and project interminably their inane verbiage. I can hear them clearly through the glass saying that they will have to stop now as there is someone waiting but they
continue just the same, shifting away from me as I parade up and down, whistling loudly or coughing heavily if it is a cold night and in any case seething with murderous thoughts.

I do not know as a result of the conversation what is happening. I know that my mother is ill but I don’t know how serious her illness is. I was speaking to Donny but I could not hear what
he was saying. He doesn’t like the phone either and he also speaks from a public phone box. I heard what sounded like a high wind raging in the background. He said something about
‘dea’ but I couldn’t make out whether he was saying ‘dead’ or ‘deaf’. And there was a word which might have been ‘ever’ or ‘fever’.
He might have been saying that she was deaf as ever or that she was dead of fever. I know that she is deaf and has been growing more so, though she used to have exceptionally acute hearing. She
could hear everything I did. Even when I was reading and turning a page in the book she could hear me. I used to read a lot when I was young. Now I live in the city and I do not read so much. I do
not have that tranquillity any more.

I too have always had good hearing. I could hear the rustling of her gown on those beautiful spring days. I could hear her muttering to herself as she read a newspaper, or a letter from her
sister in Canada. She always read the letter in low tones to herself. She and her sister were always very close and they were both religious. I remember when her sister was once on holiday from
Canada she gave me a terrible telling off for coming in late one night after I had been drinking a little. She was wearing black clothes and a necklace of fake gold at the throat. She terrified me.
I thought Canada would have chastened her a bit (after all she had been there for thirty years) but not at all, she was more religious than my mother. She is a tough old bird and I have seen from
her letters (which have always the same clichés) that she isn’t afraid of death even though she has had one heart attack. Her letters of course are totalling uninteresting, most of
them misspelt and consisting of phrases such as ‘We are in the hands of God.’ That night she shouted and was very angry. My mother said nothing but looked down at her hands which were
resting loosely in her lap. That was one of the reasons I left home. I should have done it years ago.

But I would not wish her dead just the same. How could I wish her dead when I recall her fierce solicitude for me, her overwhelming demonic love, which though frightening was also genuine?
Sometimes I walk the streets at night – this yellow maze – thinking what a mess she made of me. I shudder now when I think of how my heart leaped when that voice seemed to say across
immense distances, ‘Dead of fever’. Was it fear or joy? I shall never go back there. But that does not mean that I do not feel tenderness, or that the tenderness grows any less the
further away I am from home and its fields in the middle of this incomprehensible city.

Poor Donny, shouting to me across distances. Nevertheless I shall not sleep tonight, and all because of these kiosks which contain the storms of our civilisation, the scrawls of illiterates, nor
can one do anything but hate the latter when they cut one off from communication, so that one does not know whether one’s own mother is dead or alive, and all that one hears is a high
wavering hum as if the voices of the dead, venomous and confused, were speaking to one. She always loved her brother who was drowned at sea many many years ago. He was her favourite brother,
handsome and daring, and he died young. That was why she would never allow me near the sea and why the other boys called me a coward. Her brother was drowned when there was a high wind.

I don’t like kiosks. I don’t like boxes of any kind. I feel when I shut the door as if I shall never be able to get out again. Once I panicked and pushed at the wall instead of the
door and it was perhaps five minutes before I got out. My hands were raw with punching at the walls. I am the same with certain dirty lavatories at railway stations, the locks are sometimes
difficult. Some day I shall have a telephone of my own when I earn enough money for I can’t say that I have prospered since I came to the city. I find it confusing and brutal and some
mornings I wake up with a taste of death in my mouth and stare at the morning star, wincing and pointed. I miss the apron which once I touched as a child. Let me admit that.

But to think that perhaps at this very moment she may be dying and I not to know it. Perhaps she is lying dead on a bed, though the word could of course have been ‘deaf’, not
‘dead’, for she certainly became that. She would shout at me, ‘What are you saying about me?’ though I was in fact saying nothing. My trouble has always been my pity and my
tenderness, they have been my enemies. Even at my work I can’t be brutal enough. For one has to be brutal, there is no getting away from it. For instance, if someone comes after me into the
office and wishes to phone I let him do so though he knows perfectly well that he was second and I was first. And never yet have I met anyone who refuses to take advantage of my pity and
tenderness. For I have this ability to put myself in the position of other people. On the other hand few other people seem to have this gift. To tell you the truth my tenderness is gradually
festering into contempt. I hate quarrels. That is why even if a woman of the type I have mentioned has been phoning from a public call box for an hour and I have been shivering out in the cold she
will always get away with it because of her strength of will, and I always feel that it is I who have been in the wrong. I have sometimes noticed that when I speak to someone in the office they
don’t answer as if they don’t hear me, or if they do answer it is only after a very long pause. I often feel that I am some sort of ghost. I am always impressed by the firmness of other
people, and how they stand up for their rights. I know that I owe my weakness to her. Nevertheless she loved me, I admit that. I have enough imagination and pity to make allowances for that, for if
we don’t have imagination what are we but animals? What are we but animals anyway? Though I am more sensitive than most, a fact which has caused me much pain . . . I am more sensitive though
not so intelligent.

Tonight I shan’t sleep, wondering if in fact she has died and because of that vandalised phone and that high wind I can do nothing about it. I can see Donny in my mind’s eye crammed
into the kiosk and furrowing his brow, at that corner not far from the house. Perhaps he had finished with the farm work for the day. He must have done; after all it was after six when I phoned. He
was always a slow solid worker, not like me, bored by her many illnesses. If anything went wrong she always took to her bed and told us that she was going to die. And she did that as far back as I
can remember; it was her way of punishing us. Perhaps this time she really is ill, perhaps she is going to die. I used to make tea for her and she would cough (or pretend to cough) and take the cup
with a trembling hand while I stared unwinkingly at the brown landscape through the window with the flowery curtains. She always insisted that the house be clean, that the furniture be polished.
Every day I could see my useless superfluous face duplicated in it endlessly. I hate my face and my weak pointed chin. Her face is dominated by the curving beak of the nose, ruthless and Roman. And
that, even when she was sick or pretending to be so.

Now night is falling. And I remember the incident after I had left the kiosk angry and frustrated. There was a man waiting outside in order to phone and I asked him what the time was (I never
carry a watch). He was apparently stone deaf for he said, ‘It is a very beautiful evening isn’t it?’ and continued to say this. He was dressed impeccably though he was undoubtedly
a lost man: I could tell that by his neat voice and his veined eyes. He was dressed like someone out of a film, a kind of superannuated British major who is trying to put a good face on things and
pretends to belong to a good club. He had in fact the appearance of a broken-down gentleman with his brown suit and veined gentle eyes. He went on and on about the weather, in his extremely polite
voice, and I seethed with rage at the inefficiency of the world. I hadn’t got through on the phone and now I couldn’t get through to this man though all I wanted to know was the time. I
could have picked him up like one of the china ornaments in my mother’s house and smashed him to pieces on the road. He was so eager to please, so impeccable in his dress and wandering
irrelevant speech.

I turned away knowing that I would not be able to sleep, though in fact in the barbarous city I do not sleep anyway. Perhaps she is dead or perhaps she is only deaf. And it might have been
‘fever’ or ‘forever’, the words are very like. I hate kiosks; they remind me of upright coffins. And the vandalism doesn’t help, these obscenities and the black
dangling useless phones. I could strangle those vandals, those useless animals. They can’t do anything, they can’t even read books. They get like that because they love no one. But I
have no pity for them: it is their own fault. Others have come from bad backgrounds and turned into good citizens with good jobs. Others have survived the sea and the high winds as uselessly and
lived lives without aggression. Why can’t they do the same?

In Oban in Scotland there is an unfinished circular many-windowed tower which dominates the town. It was built by a local banking family in order to give employment to the
townspeople at a time when there was not much work to be had. Modelled on the Colosseum, statues of the bankers were to be placed in the windows and possibly, for all one knows, illuminated at
night. But in fact for some reason – it may be that there was not enough money or it may be that death intervened – the tower was never completed and remains to this day, an object of
curiosity to the many tourists who come from all over the world. It is very high up and the walk there is long but pleasant. When one arrives inside the empty structure one can walk across the
circular grassy floor and hear, if it is a day in spring or summer, the birds trilling close at hand, or one can perch on the sill of one of the windows and look down at the sea which glitters in
the distance. It is said that a certain lady was once looking for the Colosseum in Italy and tried to find out where it was by describing it as that building which is modelled on MacCaig’s
Tower in Oban.

But in fact in our own village when I was growing up there was a house which had been unfinished for a long time though of course it was not so large as this tower. It was being built by the
family of the Macraes over many years and no one remembers when it was begun though there are legends about it. The first Macrae, it is said, spent his entire life gathering huge boulders from
wherever he could find them and hammering away at them like a sculptor to prepare them for the house. He was, it is also said, a very large strong fellow who killed a man who made mock of his dream
house, not a stone of which had actually been laid. The two men, the Macrae and the other, fought, so it is said, for a whole day till eventually Macrae got his opponent on the ground and banged
away at his head with a large stone which he was actually going to use in the building of the house. After that, no one made fun of his project. He died of a stroke with the hammer in his hand.

The next Macrae was a dreamier type of person. He himself didn’t attempt any of the actual building but employed some workers to do it. The trouble was that he had so many ideas and plans,
some appearing in his head simultaneously, that they had to pull down what they had built almost as soon as they had built it.

Also they drank and smoked when they should have been working and continually asked for higher wages which he refused to give them. At one time he would want the house to merge into the
landscape, at another he would want it to stand out from it since he was subject to varying moods of submission and domination. They say that he would walk around dressed in very bright colours
shouting at his workmen in fragments of Italian which he had picked up from a guidebook. The workers naturally thought that he was mad.

One of the inhabitants of the village – actually the schoolmaster – called him Penelope partly because of his dainty effeminate air, but also because he was pulling down each morning
what had been erected the night before. But this Macrae, whose name was Norman, didn’t care. He went his way, carried a whip, and liked nothing better than to order his workers about though
they paid little attention to him. There seemed, otherwise, little purpose in his life. He didn’t believe in God or the Bible and said once that things existed to be changed every day in
order to prevent boredom. In fact he would have nothing to do with the detailed plans which his massive father had drafted out and wouldn’t even look at them. He would sometimes say that he
wasn’t necessarily his father’s son, a comment which caused some gossip in the village as in fact his father had been a man who liked women and was a bit of a Lothario.

When Norman died all that had been accomplished was that half the gable had been built. Norman had wanted to have an engraving set in the stone which would show a horse with an eagle’s
head but had died before this could be started. The only reason he could give for creating such an engraving was that he liked eagles and horses, though in fact he had only seen an eagle once in
his whole lifetime, and that was in a painting. The villagers didn’t like him as much as they had liked his father, though he had harmed them less, and had not, like his father, fornicated
with many of their pliant daughters. They didn’t understand his statements for he could say that truth can be revealed as much in a green door as a red one, and that men’s shoes are
being worn out each day. However when there was a sickness in the village he had helped them out with corn and fish though he openly despised all of them and called most of them superfluous.