The Red Door (69 page)

He saw in his mind’s eye the professional killer walking down his own village street. For that matter he himself for a moment was the professional killer. He always looked after his gun,
polished it. After all, he was dependent on it. It was his livelihood. His reflexes were honed to the sharpest possible pitch. His mind operated continually at the highest levels. Life was a
continual gamble with death, a continual proof of itself on that fabulous street he was walking now and which was quite still. It looked like a bone in the moonlight and as he thought this he heard
a dog bark. The bark was duplicated by that of another dog. Then there was silence. He walked or rather rolled on his high heels down the street, feeling the gun in his hand, the leather on his
body, cool and tight. All problems were solved by the gun, by speedy reflexes.

He was in Dodge City or Abilene. There were enemies all around him. But he was walking easily. He wasn’t a simple village boy who moved slowly about in acres of time. He was impregnable
among all these untidy shapes beside the untidy sea, which bothered him a bit because it shouldn’t be in the script. The moonlight lay across it in sparkling drops, right out to the furthest
edge. As he watched, the tightness and stiffness drained out of him. The professional was walking towards the sea but who would shoot into the sea? He didn’t understand why this should bother
him so much. His phantom hat cast its shadow over the unseen flowers which grew at the side of the road. His body was black and menacing. He had ridden far and in his hand the six-gun spun. He was
walking down the road towards the sea, towards its shining acres, towards its jagged rocks. He passed the houses all asleep. He saw a cat scurry across the road in front of him, its eyes green and
watchful. He walked on. The sea was growing louder. It reminded him suddenly of Mary, who would be lying asleep in her bed at that moment, her hair untouched by scent. Tomorrow at school he would
see her again. As he thought this he also realised that his mind had been clouded, that the professional care had left him. ‘I could have been killed there,’ he thought to himself.
‘Just as I passed that house I could have been killed. I allowed myself to think of something else.’ He made his mind steady and cold again, drawing his power from the dazzling stony
moon. As before, the untidy shadows fed his superiority, he himself was a being of hard edges. But nevertheless the sea glittered ahead of him and he could hear the sound it made, languorous and
resonant with ancient stories. The light shining on it made him recall a wedding he had been to recently. The cat leaped out ahead of him again and he went for his gun. But he was too late. The cat
had got away. If that had been the sheriff he would have been killed. The professional never got a second chance from another professional. The sea filled his head with its noise. The houses
entered his consciousness, untidy and shadowy. Mary was walking across the sea, long blonde hair streaming. His gun and holster had dropped away. He walked on naked and vulnerable into the roar of
the night and its randomness. He felt a breeze stir his hair briefly and die away. The road had become mysterious and he could feel the scent of the flowers rank in his nostrils. His black leather
clothes faded into the night, and his jersey shone white in the moonlight. He was making his way to the sea. He wished to listen to the ageless stories, the rumours of the past. He felt like a rock
melting. He entered the random shapeless shadows, happy to be there looking around him. To be a professional . . . How to shoot into the sea with the blonde light falling across it? How to keep
continually awake in that ancient sleepy sound? He had dropped his holsters, he was moving forward, unprotected, towards that ageless monotonous sound which the villagers had heard for centuries,
towards the sea the gunfighter had never seen.

1

There exist in life what I call moments and I mean, by that, moments of vision. I should like to tell you of two of them which have a connection with the village. One I
experienced myself; the other was experienced by a friend of mine. There is nothing supernatural about these moments. They do not belong to another world or anything silly like that. They appear in
the present but when they do appear they seem to shine with an enormous significance, as if they meant to tell us something that we do not quite understand or cannot put into words. There are of
course coincidences but that is not what I mean. Once I myself for instance phoned a girl friend of mine and three times got another girl whom I had once known. There was something wrong with the
phone. And I could list hundreds of other coincidences. Moments aren’t like that, they aren’t surprising. On the contrary, they seem to reveal something we ought to have seen for a long
time. They dazzle with their rightness. But let me go on and tell my story.

In the first instance I must tell you that in my village years ago, and indeed in most villages years ago, there was a man who wrote business letters and filled in forms for people. The
villagers cannot write business letters and they are terrified of forms. The reason I think is that these letters and forms are official and in their minds connected with the Government or its
agencies and, because of past experience engraved on their consciousnesses, they consider the Government and its agencies hostile and frightening. The reason why they have to write business letters
and fill in forms is that some of them get subsidies for cattle and so on, and also there is some correspondence in connection with their crofts. They are always afraid that their crofts will be
taken away from them if they do not write these letters and fill in these forms correctly.

Now in our village the man who did this was called John Campbell. He had spent most of his early life in Canada and America. He would tell us how he had been working for many years on what he
called the Elevators though as far as I can gather this was something to do with grain and not lifts. He came home when he was forty-five years old. He was a small, clever man who however suffered
badly from arthritis, so intensely that he was often in great physical pain. For this reason he didn’t work as most of the crofters did. In fact I would say that apart from one other man
– an idler of the first order – he was the only man in the village who didn’t work at anything day after day. He used to stay in bed late because of his arthritis and when he got
up he would propel himself to his chair with sticks. He was an entertaining man and his house used for a while to be the centre of the village ceilidhs. He would still get magazines from someone in
America and he would talk at great length about the Depression and events like that. He would tell us about the political changes in the world and how they ought to be interpreted. ‘You mark
my words,’ he would say. ‘One of these days the Communists will take over in America, and in Britain too.’ He hated Socialists and complained about the smallness of his pension.
Sometimes as he talked he would wince from the pain of his arthritis, which he once told me he thought he had got from swimming in too cold water. He had a very strong torso but that may have been
because of the sticks he was always pushing himself along with, and the way in which he would use the muscles of his chest. He was also a great smoker though he didn’t have very much money.
One morning he appeared at my window at five o’clock – it was summer time – asking if I had a cigarette. This was before his arthritis became so bad that he was confined to the
house. The villagers thought that because he had been in America he must be a very clever man and as I said he used to write their letters for them. They gave him some money for doing this and as
he also had an ailing wife this helped him a lot. His wife was a pale, pretty, dark-haired woman who suffered much from bronchitis especially in summer and autumn when there was a lot of pollen in
the air. She spoke little and did not complain. I used to visit John a lot because he was an intelligent man and sometimes we would play draughts together. He often used to beat me and when he did
his whole appearance seemed to change and he would grow fresh and cheery and happy. There was no harm in him at all and what I liked about him was that he never used to gossip. His mind was on
higher things. The villagers of course never talked politics. They would talk about such and such a girl who had suddenly to go away to England to hide, as they thought, her pregnancy. And stories
like that were their daily food. But John on the other hand would talk about politics and economics and loved a good argument. There was another reason why the villagers liked him, and that was
that he never revealed their secrets to anyone. For them, to receive a letter was a great event and to receive a form a threatening one. They hardly ever wrote even personal letters.

I knew that John suffered a lot from his arthritis and that was the main reason why I visited him. He would never complain however and showed a keen interest, as I have said, in intellectual
affairs. I wondered sometimes if he was very bored by his narrow existence but he never said anything about that either. Sometimes he would tell me stories about his years in Canada and America. He
told me once that he had been in a bar in some American city and he had seen a boy from the village who was down and out and who had pleaded with him with tears in his eyes not to tell anyone he
had seen him. Another time he had told how he had fought a man for a piece of bread during the Depression years. Clearly he had suffered a lot but in general he maintained the reticence of the true
gentleman. Sometimes he would show me letters of a less private nature he had written to Government Departments on behalf of crofters. These letters were usually very neatly written till the
arthritis spread to his hands. He would write to these remote people in an almost commanding style in which he often used long words though shorter ones would have done equally well. For instance
he would use ‘comprehend’ instead of ‘understand’ and ‘differentiate’ instead of ‘distinguish’. He told me with a certain pathos that when he was in
school he was very good at English and the teacher had prophesied a future for him as a writer. I myself thought that his writing though commanding was rather florid but as he himself used to say,
‘We must make sure that these people know that we aren’t barbarians, that we are educated people. Otherwise they’ll trample all over us.’ Perhaps he believed that all
Governments are infested with Communists. He also, I remember, used words like ‘inst.’ and ‘ult.’, words which I would never use myself.

As time passed he had to retire to his bed and he became paler and paler. His wife too wasn’t very well and all of us in the village used to bring them fish because we knew they were
dependent on us since they didn’t have a breadwinner. Latterly he would prop himself against the pillows and write his letters, whose style became more and more elaborate. Once indeed I think
he got a letter back from a bureaucratic minion who wrote that he couldn’t understand what he was writing about. It was almost as if he were creating an elaborate manner of writing such as a
writer may do in his ‘middle’ or ‘late’ period. Or it may even be that he was trying to establish a more personal contact with these remote people than is warranted by
subjects like taxation or crofting. He used to write, ‘Dear Sir,’ but in his later years he would write ‘My dear Sir.’ He would sign all his letters with a large, almost
royal, flourish.

I will now tell you about the moment. As time passed he grew, as I have said, more and more pale and would lie on his bed staring at nothing. He would only rouse himself when some villager would
tiptoe in, taking off his bonnet, and tell him in wearisome roundabout terms of a letter that he had wanted written. I sometimes think he thought of these villagers as petitioners whose requests he
was tired of granting. He would even talk about ‘emoluments’ which he received from them. But in the end I am sure he would have written the letters for nothing much as a writer may
practise his art for his own satisfaction even though no one will ever see it. He would rouse himself as if from some deep reverie, listen keenly, and stretch out his hand twisted by arthritis for
his pen and paper. He had a tray beside his bed on which he would rest the paper and then he would start to write as if he had forgotten the villager and the reason for writing in the first place.
At moments like these he seemed happy and the vacancy would fade from his eyes and he would again return to the world of things.

One day when he was working in the fields – my field adjoined his – his wife came rushing down and panting heavily told me that he was in a bad way, that he had been taken with some
sort of fit. She wondered if I would go for the doctor but before that she would be grateful if I would look in on him. I immediately rushed up to the house, she trailing in my wake, her breath
whistling from her narrow box of a chest. I opened the door. The house had a strange cool silence about it. I went into the bedroom where he was lying. He was sitting up in bed with the tray in
front of him and on the tray there was resting a sheet of notepaper. His head, however, had fallen on one side like a bird’s head frozen on a branch. I knew that he was dead. As I waited for
his wife to come panting in I looked down at the letter and it was then that the moment occurred. The letter was addressed to a tax office in Glasgow and the first words – for the letter was
incomplete – read as follows: –

There the letter broke off and a scrawl trailed right down the page. As I said, I was struck and illuminated by something extraordinarily significant in the letter though I could not at the time
see what the significance was. Nor do I now see it. For one can sense significance without understanding it. All I can say is that as I waited for his wife to arrive I stood there at the bedside
staring down at that head all on one side – the face unshaven – and the pen escaped from his hand, swollen and glassy, while the letter lay on the tray, fairly neatly written except for
the scrawl which ran down the page beginning at the end of the letter. The other thing I remember, out of that storm of pathos and illumination, was that I noticed a chamber pot underneath the bed
as if he had been using it not long before.