The Red Door (14 page)

She looked down at the top of her daughter’s head and thought vaguely of the past. She had certainly trained for running a boarding house for she had been a maid in a hotel before she got
married. It was watching all these rich people that had made her envious and want to make money for herself. For that reason she was now pleased that her daughter was learning French. She had no
feeling for the language itself but to her it represented a weapon for survival, for advancement. If you worked in a boarding house you began to think like that. You studied people to make sure
that they didn’t cheat you, you had to be a good judge of character. You couldn’t afford to let anyone sidle into your affections for they might take advantage of you.

In fact, she might have been better if she had known more about her husband before she married him. To be drunk in youth might be considered bravado: in middle years it was something else again,
especially when it included unpredictable violence. She had seen nights when he had hit her in the face and about the body. One night she had pleaded with him not to hit her on the face: it was the
explaining to others of the outward stigmata that was difficult and shaming. You couldn’t get away from the fact that he was brutal.

‘Did you get any homework?’ she asked.

‘We got some English homework. Sentences.’

‘Get out your jotter and do it then,’ she said, turning back to the cooker. ‘Sit over there on that chair and do it.’

Grace got her bag, took out her jotter and her pencil case, and began to work, chewing gravely at the pencil, dangling her legs and knitting her brows.

Her mother sighed for a moment and then turned back to the cooker.

When her husband came home he threw his bag on the floor into the corner, went to the cupboard, took out a can of beer, opened it and began to drink. He sat down at the table stretching his legs
out. He was a big man with a bullet head set on a rather low thick neck, and the shoulders of a boxer. His eyes were small and mocking.

‘One of these days I’ll get a lorry of my own,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand that bastard Adams. One day he’ll go too far and I’ll do him, the
dwarf.’

‘You get good pay,’ she said evenly, putting the sausages on his plate. He seemed about to spit on the floor, and then recollected himself.

‘One of these days I’ll smash his lorry for him. Stood there today checking the time I came in, to the minute. The wee man with his book. What I’d really like is a taxi. I
could run a taxi, couldn’t I? Hey, I could bring your visitors up from the station. I’d go there in my cap, and I’d bow and I’d see them into the taxi and I’d shut the
door for them and everything. “Yes, madam,” I’d say, “44 Grosvenor Road. Yes, I know it well. I know it like the back of my hand. The house with the green gate. You
couldn’t get better chips anywhere, madam,” I’d say. “And the salt herring are out of this world and into the next one. Yes, madam, they make the best porridge in town with
treacle in it.” ’

He laughed aloud in sheer jollity thinking of himself in his peaked cap bowing to the visitors like a wee Jap and saying to them, ‘That house over there. That belongs to the famous
comedian, the Scottish Secretary of State. That statue? That’s of the man who invented the Scottish propelling pencil which works on a new principle. You have lead in it for the first time.
Yes, madam, he made millions on that.’

He laughed aloud again; he had a great life force, much more than she had. She laughed, too, knowing his ideas of old. Nothing would come of them. There was the time when he wanted to start a
shop; nothing came of that. The time he wanted to invest money in a pub. She couldn’t let her money go into that; he’d be drunk all day and night. She knew what would happen if he got a
taxi. He’d get drunk and wreck it. And of course, he’d never be obsequious to anyone: she couldn’t imagine him carrying the cases of some old wizened hag who was only held
together by the wrinkles. Even now, he got angry if a visitor got to the bathroom in front of him in the morning. Suddenly he got tired of the play-acting and shouted,

‘Grace. What are you doing there? Come over here.’

He bounced her on his knee and rubbed his face against hers. She twisted away from the bristles of his beard.

‘Getting too snobbish for your daddy;’ he said, joyously, ‘now that you’re going to the secondary. Eh?’

She climbed down from his knee and began to run madly about the house shouting, ‘Je t’aime, je t’aime’.

His wife put down the plate of sausages.

‘What in God’s name is that?’ he shouted in the direction of his daughter, his face going red.

‘It’s nothing,’ she said.

‘It must be something,’ he said, speaking through a mouthful of sausage. ‘What in God’s . . . ’ Then he stopped. A queer expression came over his face, composed of
rage and anguish. It frightened her. It was as if he were staring into some other room.

‘Come here,’ he said to Grace who was abandoned to her wheeling, her blonde pigtails bouncing up and down.

‘What was that you were saying just now?’

‘I was just saying, “je t’aime”,’ said Grace, standing looking at him, thumb in mouth.

He turned to his wife. ‘That’s French,’ he said accusingly. ‘She’s learning French.’

‘And what if it is? What’s wrong with that?’ she answered, still at the cooker. ‘They all learn French nowadays in the secondary school.’

‘That’s a lie,’ he said. ‘I was talking to the headmaster, and he said you could take French or Gaelic.’ She knew that he had never talked to the headmaster in his
life (firstly because he did not take the slightest interest in education, and secondly because deep down he was convinced that he was as good as the headmaster any day and therefore wouldn’t
talk to him), but she also knew that, however he had heard it, what he said was true; there
was
a choice between French and Gaelic.

‘What do you think I am, an idiot like your daughter,’ he went on, his face darkening. ‘And you didn’t put on enough sausages. You were supposed to train as a hotel maid
and you don’t know anything.’

She ignored this and said,

‘French is more useful to her. She can go to . . . ’ She was going to say ‘University’, but she stopped, saying instead, ‘Domestic College. She can help me
here.’

‘Her? Domestic College? Don’t make me laugh. I’m brighter than her myself and I wouldn’t go to a college.’

She leaned against the cooker praying, ‘Please God, not another quarrel. I’m tired, tired, tired . . .’

But he continued relentlessly.

‘She should be doing Gaelic. That’s the language of her forefathers. My mother spoke Gaelic. So did your mother. What does she want with French. She should stand up for Scotland. I
was in a Highland regiment and I’m proud of it. What business has she got with French? She can’t even speak English. I’m going to see the headmaster and tell him she’s going
to change.’

He cut himself a slice of bread, buttering it lavishly.

She held on.

‘She’s going to do French not Gaelic. No one speaks Gaelic now. It’s finished. I want her to learn French: it’s more useful to her. She could be a help to me. She
can’t do anything with Gaelic.’

As he munched the bread he seemed to be muttering, ‘Je t’aime, je t’aime’, over and over to himself.

‘He can say it right, mammy,’ shouted Grace suddenly. ‘He can say it better than you.’

‘Be quiet. Go and do your lesson.’

‘She’ll never learn French in a month of Sundays. She’s too stupid. It takes a long time to learn French. I’m telling you, I know.’

She summoned all her strength.

‘And I’m telling you she’s going to learn French. You can clear out if you want. We’ve got enough to live on without you. We can do without you. All her friends are
learning French. She would feel out of it if she wasn’t with her friends.’

‘Yah, the Andersons. You want to keep up with the Andersons. You’ll soon be teaching her horse-riding. She’ll be a debutante, that’s what.’

‘And what’s wrong with horse-riding?’

‘Horse-riding?’ He laughed, then his face darkened again. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I might just clear out. I might just do that.’ He put on his jacket, leaving
his food unfinished, and went towards the door looking down grimly at Grace and saying in a mocking voice, ‘Je t’aime’.

‘You don’t know what it means,’ said his wife suddenly. ‘You talk big, but you don’t know what it means.’

He stared into her almost dead, slate-grey eyes for a long time and then said, controlling himself with an effort,

‘It’s you who don’t know what it means.’ Then he walked out.

When he slammed the door she began to think: perhaps this time he will really leave, and in a way she didn’t want him to leave. He wasn’t a good provider but he had been her only
lover, brutal though he was. Not always brutal too, for he could be tender when he remembered. And once he had been dashing and young. She ran to the window and saw him walking down the road, the
bullet head and the powerful torso thrust forward as if he were fighting a high wind.

‘Get on with your book,’ she shouted at Grace, screaming in a voice that she hardly recognised.

He sat in the pub in a corner by himself drinking a big pint of draught. He never drank anything but draught and whisky: he had no time for highfaluting effeminate French wines
and that sort of drink. In front of him and behind the counter there was a twisted bottle and above it were written the words: ‘W
HEN YOU SEE THIS STRAIGHT YOU KNOW
YOU’RE DRUNK
.’

The barman was tall and had a stringy neck. A lot of the time he would talk about the farm his family owned on the Borders quite near to the Douglas-Homes, but tonight there was no conversation,
the lorry driver staring moodily at the bottle and drinking his beer from time to time, thinking. His eye was caught by a bottle which said Burgundy on it. He stared at it as into a mirror, and
through the glass he saw her standing at the door of the café, very petite, very thin, very pale, with curly hair. A thin face: the word ‘gamin’ returned to him over the years.
Sitting at the table in the café in 1945, he put down the roll he was eating and looked brazenly at her, letting his eyes run down from the blonde hair to her feet. He seemed to straighten
up in his uniform feeling his thighs, covered in their khaki, heavy and solid.

She caught his eye and he deliberately put the roll back to his mouth again, savouring it; she watching hungrily as he chewed, her eyes damned and burning in the white face. He raised the glass
of milk to his lips, his eyes still locked with hers. She walked over towards him as if in a dream, her eyes, her whole body, fascinated by the roll and the milk, by their whiteness and their
sustenance. He twisted his neck against the rub of the uniform.

As if in a dream she sat down on the chair in front of him, sitting half frightened on the edge, at the same time unable to help herself.

He put down the glass of milk. He looked into her eyes, and she nodded very slightly with despair.

He got up, rolling slightly at the hips like a cowboy, went over to the counter and got another roll and a glass of milk. He brought them over and put them in front of her looking down at her
legs as he did so. These thin French tarts, he thought. Not much flesh, but a man couldn’t be choosy: it wasn’t easy.

Her head bowed like the stalk of a flower, she bit into the roll almost with agony, absorbed in it as a child might be in something it had never seen before, or seen only rarely. He himself
stopped eating and watched her. She stopped eating at once, and he looked away. He could see in the mirror that his cap was on at the right rakish angle. When she had finished he got her another
roll and some milk: after all, she would be no use otherwise. She looked to see if he had got one for himself, but he hadn’t and her eyes darkened again.

During the time she was eating she made once or twice as if to speak, but then looking at him checked herself. Once he looked at his watch which had a leather strap about the hairy flesh. When
she was finished she got up slowly and he followed her, putting on his belt, then taking it off again and putting it across the shoulder under the strap. These Redcaps could go to hell as far as he
was concerned. He’d beaten up one or two of them already on his way across Europe: they’d remember him, no doubt of that.

They walked silently down the street, meeting other soldiers and French girls on their way. It was a balmy evening and there was a faint moon low in the sky showing the slummy buildings towards
which they were heading. She was like a wraith drifting beside him, the only sound being that made by his tackety boots on the roadway. Eventually, they reached a tenement and began to climb some
steps, she going ahead. When she was high enough up, he could see that she was wearing a white slip.

There were little sounds in the tenement as if it were inhabited by animals and by people who never ventured out. The walls were scribbled on and there was urine on the stairs. Once a cat with
startled green eyes ran down the stairs past them, pausing at the bottom to look up at him before running off. They came to a door which was painted a cracked green. She opened it with a key which
she found under the mat, and they went inside. The curtains were all drawn and there was a smell of used air. Under the bed he saw the edge of a chamber pot. Again she made as if to speak but
didn’t. She sat down on the bed while he studied a photograph on the sideboard marked with cigarette ends. The photograph showed a man in a hat like a drum. When he turned round she was in
bed staring up at the ceiling.

He took off his jacket and his tie and then his boots and trousers, leaving his socks on. He climbed into bed. The sheets were more grey than white. Her helplessness released him. Afterwards he
fell into a deep sleep in which he saw some deer which reminded him of home.

He woke at seven in the morning and took a while to discover where he was, the room was so dark. Outside he heard the traffic. Inside there was silence apart from the creakings of the old house.
The girl was still sleeping on her side, away from him. As he got up he noticed that there were delicate blue veins on her forehead. He tried to orientate himself. Where am I? he thought, where in
hell in Europe am I? What country is this? What have I been doing for the past four years? There had been border after border, faces cheering and faces sullen, wet weather and fine, strange faces;
strange languages. He sat on the edge of the bed, took off his socks, scratched the soles of his feet, and then put the socks on again. He felt dirty and was about to waken her to ask for some soap
and water when something stopped him. His foot accidentally hit the chamber pot: he had forgotten it was there.