The Red Door (35 page)

I said that I thought it was. He said, ‘I tell you I’ve never been in a hotel before now. They’ve got a lot of carpets, haven’t they? And mirrors, I’ve never seen
so many mirrors.’

‘Come on,’ I shouted, ‘let’s go into the bar.’ We did so and I ordered two beers.

‘The people in there aren’t like human beings at all,’ he said. ‘They’re like Africans.’

After a while he said, ‘It was the truth I said about her, she’s never at home. She’s always been working in hotels. I’ll tell you something, she’s never carried a
creel on her back though that’s not a good thing either. She was always eating buns and she would never eat any porridge. What do you think of her husband, eh? He was talking away about cars.
And he’s got a good suit, I’ll give him that. He gave the waiter a pound, I saw it with my own eyes. Oh, he knows his way around hotels, I’ll be bound. But where does he come
from? I don’t know. He’s never ploughed any ground, I think.’

I thought at that moment that he wouldn’t see his daughter very often in the future. Perhaps he really was without knowing it giving her away to a stranger in a hired cutprice suit.

After a while we thought it politic to go back. By this time there was a lull in the dancing and the boy in the lightish suit had started a Gaelic song but he didn’t know all the words of
it, only the chorus. People looked round for assistance while red-faced and embarrassed he kept asking if anyone knew the words because he himself had lost them. Suddenly the father pushed forward
with authority and standing with his glass in his hand began to sing – verse after verse in the traditional manner. They all gathered round him and even the waitresses listened, there was so
much depth and intensity in his singing. After he had finished there was much applause and requests for other songs for he seemed to know the words of all of them. The young girls and the boys
gathered round him and sat on the floor in a circle looking up at him. He blossomed in the company and I thought that I could now leave, for he seemed to be wholly at home and more so than his
audience were.

It had all happened like a dream. There he was seated on a bench watching the men playing at the open-air yellow-and-black draughtsboard on a beautiful summer’s evening,
his guitar by his side, not even able to make up his mind whether his holiday was being a success. At the draughtsboard just in front of him a squat one-armed man was sitting on an upended box and
staring across at his opponent who was dangling his hooked pole precisely in front of him. Up above at street level the sun flashed from the black statue of Burns who clutched a black marble daisy
in his left hand and looked gaily across to a block of what seemed to be insurance offices. He himself was almost falling asleep: he had done a lot of travelling in the last few days. He stretched
out legs encased in their tight trousers and regarded his unpolished shoes. He was wondering whether he could get into the YMCA or somewhere.

A gardener hosed a strip of green grass to his right and in the distance on a wooden stage he could see Highland dancers, dressed in innocent white, tiptoeing delicately as if in an amateurish
ballet. They looked virginal and clean and oddly archaic. At the same time they reminded him that he himself felt sweaty and unwashed. The one-armed man, chewing gum relentlessly, hooked another
piece from the board as if he were taking part in some battle whose outcome would decide the destiny of the world. Somewhere behind him among the trees he heard a clock hammering out six solid
strokes.

He closed his eyes and as he did so he heard a voice saying, ‘Do you like Shelley?’ He turned round in surprise and saw that sitting beside him on the bench was a young girl with a
miniature face, long blonde hair and wearing dark green slacks. He hadn’t even heard her coming. He jerked himself awake, his long hair shaking.

Her enquiry had been very low and tentative and he didn’t quite know what to make of it. She was holding a book out towards him and he looked at it stupidly half wondering if he were
really asleep and she were part of his dream.

‘I thought you might like Shelley,’ she said, ‘because of your guitar.’

He gazed at her, tired and sleepy, noticing that there were shadows under her eyes and that her slacks looked slightly worn and soiled. She might have been seventeen.

He looked at the book which showed on the cover the picture of a dreamy poet with long hair.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t read Shelley.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I got it from the library.’ She didn’t seem the type who would read Shelley; he thought her voice sounded slightly uneducated. She seemed in fact
like the kind of girl who might work in a shop except that she had about her a curious vulnerability and he was reminded of a woman he had met on the bus coming up who had been crying by herself
for a long time and had then confided in him that she was going home to her mother because her husband was beating her up. She kept trying to speak to everyone and offering them cigarettes. Her
open appeal for help was embarrassing. Eventually she had gone up to the driver to offer him a cigarette in spite of the fact that there was a notice saying that passengers must not engage the
driver in conversation without good reason as they might distract him. At one stage she had shown him a burn on her hand which she said her husband had made with a cigarette.

He himself had heard of Shelley but that was all: he didn’t read books like that.

‘I am going for a walk,’ she said. ‘Would you like to come for a walk?’ and again he was reminded of the open vulnerability of that other woman, her pouting childish
face. Though she had said she was fifty years old, she had looked infantile. Imagine a grown woman on a bus crying like that, the tears seeping out of her as out of a well. At first he had taken
her for a spastic, she looked so shapeless and childish, and her legs were drawn up on the seat like a child’s.

He got up without thinking partly because he was so surprised and partly because he had nothing else to do and partly because he was beginning to feel lonely. It didn’t really do to jump
into a holiday as he had done without preparation, to leave the familiar urban streets with their noisy cafés and set off to the north to find lochs and trees and seas and fresh air. He was
so tired that he felt as if he was walking in a dream. She put her hand in his and they climbed the steps together. He noticed vaguely that someone had scrawled YA BAS on the statue of Burns. He
knew it was a statue of Burns because it said so and he had heard of Burns though he hadn’t heard much about Shelley.

‘Where are we going?’ he said.

‘We’ll go for a walk,’ she said, ‘you just follow me.’ They walked down the street, crossed another one and turned right, down to the harbour.

‘I like watching the ships,’ she said. They sat on the edge of the quay swinging their legs over the side watching the oily scummy water choked with floating boxes and scum. The
harbour was crammed with fishing boats with names like
Mary Rose
and
Victor
and
Grace
. Above them towered a huge merchant ship with scarred rusty sides.

‘I would like to go to India,’ she said.

‘Why India?’

‘I don’t know. Sometimes I want to go to India. Other times I want to go to Africa. Tonight I want to go to India. My father is a scientist, you know. My mother was at
university.’

She clutched his hand tightly as if otherwise they might fall into the water. He didn’t know exactly what he felt, a strangeness and yet a warmth. And as she spoke he himself thought, Yes,
it would be good to leave this place and go off to India or Greece or someplace like that. But then you had to have money. Perhaps she had money. He’d never had any money. It would be
marvellous to have as much money as you wanted, buy as many cigarettes as you wanted, wear good clothes, go into the cabin with your new cases and have people wait on you.

‘What songs do you know?’ she said. ‘You look like a poet. I thought you looked like Shelley. That’s why I spoke to you. Are you a poet? I got Shelley out of the library.
I don’t understand him sometimes.’

‘I know a ballad about Benny Lynch,’ he said. ‘The boxer. He was destroyed by hangers-on. He was a great champion but the money destroyed him. That happens a lot with
boxers.’

‘Sometimes I like to pretend that this is Venice,’ she said. ‘I once saw a picture book about Venice. It’s full of canals. They don’t have buses in Venice. I would
like to go to Venice too.’

She swung her legs together like a child.

‘I’m on holiday,’ he said. ‘I took my guitar with me. I don’t have much money. I don’t have any money.’

‘Are you a good guitarist?’ she asked.

‘Yes, I think so. Do you know that song
Waly Waly
?’

‘No. Can you play it? Play it then.’

He started to sing and play:

Ever since he had first heard that song he couldn’t get it out of his head. It was at the Gringo pub one afternoon. A few of the boys had been there, that was where they met. It was a
pretty crummy pub but the prices were all right.

‘What’s crammasy?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

There was a smell of brine and oil all around them, mixed with the aroma of rotten apples as if a box of them had been left lying about.

‘Have you any money at all?’ she said. ‘We could go to the pictures.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I haven’t any money.’

She turned towards him, her hand still in his, her face white and beautiful and intense.

‘Come on,’ she said. They got up and hand in hand walked back to the main street and then along it westwards for what appeared to be miles. Eventually they came out on to the beach
which faced a large panorama of sea. There was a fairground and they walked through it looking at the people pulling levers, on the roundabouts, spinning on top of the huge wheel which turned over
and over against the sky.

They passed a fortune teller’s tent and she thought about going in but didn’t. ‘When my mother was in university,’ she said, ‘she went to a fortune teller’s
and he told her she would marry a clever man.’ She watched some women playing bingo and said, ‘It’s disgusting how they spend their time.’

Eventually she turned away and said, ‘I don’t like fairs. Everything is so cheap.’ They left the fair and walked down to the beach. They sat on a seat and watched the white
rollers rising terrifyingly high and then dissipating themselves along the sand. They could sense an inhuman violent force of water which would engulf and destroy anything that came near it.
Clutching his hand she looked out with parted lips.

‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ she said. He wished that he could take his guitar out there and play. He wanted to stand up and shout ‘As we cam in by Glesca toun’. He wanted
to dive in there and play his guitar, into that whiteness, that ghostly whiteness, that wheel of power.

She was restless. ‘Let’s go over there and sit on the grass,’ she said. He obeyed her and they sat by themselves away from the little boys playing football in their green and
white Celtic stripes.

He lay beside her and stroked her hair tenderly, wanting to comb it. He kissed the side of her head. Then he kissed her gently opened mouth. They breathed in and out tenderly without
passion.

‘Would you like to marry me?’ she said seriously, staring up at the white sliver of moon which had appeared in the dark blue sky.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s what I would like to do.’ He kissed her fingers one by one.

‘We’ll go and see my father later then,’ she said. The moon was white and tender like her face. On the finger of one hand she was wearing a Woolworth ring.

‘I only met you an hour ago,’ he said, tenderly and amazedly kissing her hair and feeling as if the bones in his body were melting. He picked up her hand and kissed each finger again
individually. He wanted to protect her. He wanted to have money so that he could give her food. He parted her hair tenderly.

‘So this is what love is like,’ he thought. He had never felt such tenderness before. She laid her head on his shoulder and fell asleep. He lay on his side and looked at her while
the moon rose and the light darkened and the blue of the sky began to become black.

After what seemed a long time she woke up, took his hand and said, ‘Let’s go.’ They walked across the grass and out to the street again. Again they walked for what seemed to be
miles, turning right till they came to a rough group of scarred tenements which seemed to have been there for so long that they were like rotten teeth growing out of the ground. He had an
impression of scummy pools, worn grass and bricks and at one time saw the moon beyond the corner of the house but then lost it again.

‘Play something,’ she said. So in front of these ancient horrible old buildings he played
The Bonnie Earl o’Moray
.

‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, her eyes half closed.

Then he played
Macpherson’s Rant
.

He was tired. It was growing dark and he didn’t know where he was. She eventually stopped at one of the closes which had stairs ascending steeply into the darkness above. There was a smell
of urine and of cats. She clutched his hand as they climbed as if worried that he would run away. Once they stopped on a landing and looked out of the broken window there. He saw nothing but a
waste of clay and overflowing bins. They climbed till they reached the top landing. He looked down into the well below and felt dizzy. There was no bell and she knocked on the door. There was no
answer and she knocked harder. A man’s voice was heard from within.

‘Eff off,’ it said.

‘It’s Eileen.’

‘Eff off.’

‘There’s someone with me.’

Eventually the door was opened and they went in. Her father was standing in his shirt sleeves just inside the door, unshaven, his shirt open, showing thick black hair at the chest.