The Red Door (70 page)

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The second ‘moment’ I heard about – if such a term is permissible – has to do with a young friend of mine. This friend had come home to his
mother’s funeral from America where he held an important post, Professor of Physics in fact at some university, I think in California. I imagine he will now be about forty-three years old
which means that he has risen very fast in his career (and if you don’t believe that a small village like ours can produce a Professor of Physics in America you’re very wrong since in
fact we have also other famous people in other parts of the world). I remember Robert as a young reserved boy who was respected by the other children and took part in most of the sports and pranks
they got up to. But there was always something very adult about him even when he was young and he would talk to the older people on equal terms which was rather unusual. I put that down to the fact
that he was the only son of a widow who had great will-power and ambition for him though she wasn’t particularly liked in the village. In fact the villagers thought she was rather snobbish
though I don’t think that was true. It simply didn’t occur to them to wonder what it must be like to be a poor widow in a village: it is not an enviable position. In any case she died
and Robert came home to the funeral. It occurred to some of us that he might have taken his mother to America with him but he didn’t, and she herself insisted that she would never go there .
. . I thought when I saw him that he was looking very thin and seemed to be overworking. But I suppose the pressures in America must be greater than here (though the pressures here are great
enough). He hadn’t kept up with the village while he was away and indeed his appearance was almost a surprise to us all though we were glad he came to take charge of things. I gathered that
he was married to an American girl who herself had been a student and that he also had two children. He seemed rather astonished that the village hadn’t changed much – the same people
in the same houses, the same broken fences, the same subjects of gossip – though I can’t understand why that should astonish him. Still a lot of these very clever people don’t
live in the real world as ordinary people do. It struck me afterwards that maybe he didn’t write to his mother at all.

I felt that he was lonely and the night he came to visit me he talked for a long time about physics. Not that I know much about physics but I am a good listener. I was surprised that he wanted
to talk about his work since most people don’t, and I thought that it must be that he was hanging on to what he knew in an environment that seemed to disturb him. Not that he would ever think
of coming back to the village and settling down after being in America at the heart of things and concerned with a subject like physics at such a high level. He didn’t say anything much about
his wife and children.

I gathered something like this from him, that modern physics is very different from the physics that I learned at school. He told me that the connections are much less clear at a certain level
and that electrons for instance cannot be plotted both as to velocity and position. He told me all this very earnestly as if it were a disguise for something else that he didn’t want to talk
about. He repeated the bit about the electron a few times as if he were trying to convey something to me, almost in a kind of code, but I didn’t understand what he could be trying to convey.
I just listened. He told me that he himself ran a large department and that though he knew his physics he wasn’t sure whether he could manage people very well. I could have told him the
reason for this was his rather protected childhood but of course I didn’t say so. I kept having to remember that he was no longer a boy but had adult responsibilities. The thing was he looked
like a boy. Maybe it was something to do with his haircut. There was sometimes a wistful note in his voice as if by going to America he had left behind something which was very precious to him
though I couldn’t think what it was. Nor, as I said, did I think he would come back. Still he gave me a lesson on physics though all the time I felt that deep down he wasn’t talking
about physics at all. I can’t honestly remember much else that he told me since I haven’t the head for abstractions. When he left me late at night he looked more relaxed. I remember him
turning round boyishly at the door and saying, ‘I hope I haven’t bored you with all this, sir.’ It was the sort of remark that no true villager would ever have made and I of
course said that he hadn’t bored me. The other thing was I couldn’t tell whether I felt sad or proud that he had called me ‘Sir’. He went out into the night.

The following day was the day of the funeral. A large number of people turned up in the church and we sat there quietly waiting for the service to begin. I always feel cool and composed in
church. I think it has something to do with the atmosphere and the silence. In front of us was the pulpit and below the pulpit was the coffin. After a while the minister came in in his robes and we
sang a hymn and he said a prayer and read a passage from the Bible. I remember thinking at the time how divorced the language of the Bible is from the language of everyday life, how majestic and
weighty it is, with its similes of desert and water, angels and devils, the spirit and the body. I looked at Robert now and again but he seemed to be taking things calmly enough. There was however
in front of me a small woman in black who was dabbing at her eyes with a small white lacy handkerchief. When the service was over four men came forward and lifted the coffin to their shoulders. I
saw Robert staring intently and then we were out in the bright sunshine of the day, among the green fresh leaves which had turned the window a deep green. There were cars waiting and I got into one
and he got into another which was driven by an uncle of his – a brownish man with a large brown moustache – and we set off to the cemetery. When we arrived there we walked between
glittering rows of tombstones to the place where his mother would be buried. The minister was standing bare-headed by the grave, his hair blowing slightly in the wind and his eyes screwed up
against the breeze and the sun. He spoke loudly in the open air while we all stood around the grave in silence, all of us in dark suits. Robert went forward when his name was called and took hold
of one of the tassels and the coffin was lowered on ropes into the earth. When it was all over we went to our cars and made our way home.

That night Robert came to see me though I didn’t expect him. Normally a visitor would only come to see one once because he was expected to visit every house in the village. After he had
sat down he suddenly said, ‘Do you remember last night when I was telling you about physics?’ I said that I remembered some of it, though I couldn’t understand all of it. He was
silent for a moment and then he said, ‘I had an astonishing vision today, if I can call it that. You remember we were sitting in church waiting for the service to start. Well, I felt very
calm and composed at the time. There was a smell of varnish or something from the pews and everyone was quiet. In America I don’t go to church much though America is a very religious country
whatever people may tell you. I just didn’t seem to have the time, there was always so much to do. So I was surprised when I felt so peaceful and serene. To tell you the truth I don’t
much believe in God and heaven and things like that. My feelings about my mother were not intense. I have been away for years and I hadn’t seen her for a long time. She was as you know a very
strong-willed woman – ’ he hesitated as if about to say more and then decided against it. ‘In any case that wasn’t what I meant to tell you. You remember last night I was
talking about the fact that physics nowadays is not so simple as it used to be and I mentioned to you that an electron cannot be plotted both as to position and velocity. I have always found this
difficult to accept. I have always wanted physics to have intelligible connections, at the lower level as well as at the higher. Maybe there is buried in me the teaching of the church which sees
connections everywhere. Anyway there I was sitting in the front pew feeling serene and the minister was speaking that beautiful language about eternity and the hymn was being sung. It didn’t
happen then, that vision. It was later.’

‘At the graveside, you mean?’ I said.

‘No,’ he said, ‘not at the graveside.’ He looked at me triumphantly as if he were setting me a puzzle which he was daring me to work out. But then he continued.

‘No, it wasn’t then. It was shortly beforehand. You remember when the service was over, four men came forward and lifted the coffin on their shoulders?’

I said I did.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘the coffin was heavy and they were staggering a bit till they got a proper grip and then I noticed something extraordinary. Perhaps I would have noticed it
before but that was the first funeral I had ever been at.’

I looked at him almost in amazement. It was so strange to think that was his first funeral, that that was the first dead person he had seen. Perhaps that was why he looked so boyish.

‘To you perhaps it won’t mean anything. Perhaps you didn’t even notice it. But to me it came as a vision. You see, it was perhaps my conversation with you that ignited it. But
as they staggered under the weight of the coffin – such red-faced ordinary stalwart men – for a moment I saw that one of the men in front had his arm round the other man.’ He
paused and sat in silence as if he were seeing it all again. ‘It was one of those moments such that if one is lucky one gets in a lifetime, in one’s researches I mean, such as perhaps
Einstein had. The two things came together in my mind you see, the electron lacking both position and velocity and the arm of the man round the other man as they staggered under the weight of the
coffin. The significance was stupendous and shattering. I suppose you’ll think I’m daft?’

I said that of course I didn’t believe he was daft and shortly afterwards he left. It was as if he had been trying to tell me something – or tell himself something – but I
couldn’t understand quite what it was. And that is the thing with ‘moments’. They illuminate but at the same time they don’t necessarily lead to what you would call
understanding. And in any case one man’s ‘moment’ is different from another man’s. He left home the following day and naturally he never came back. Now and again I hear that
he is doing great things over there and sometimes I see his name in the local paper as having been awarded another degree. But I shall always remember him as I saw him that night, his brown hair
tossed back, telling me about the arm that was round the other man as they staggered under the weight of the coffin.

So old Betsy is dead, who belongs to my days of childhood in this village. I see her very clearly, many years ago, walking down the road, after being in the shop, and shouting
to the villagers, ‘The bread is good today but don’t touch the meat. The oranges are good but don’t touch the bananas.’ And she would walk past in her black cloak, her
curdled face alight with life, lonely and indomitable, her husband, a road mender from Ireland, long since dead. ‘He was a fine man, a chreutair,’ she would say, ‘and always fond
of his bit of bacon, and his egg.’ I have a vague memory of a small bent man in blue braces hammering dispiritedly among a pile of stones. But it may not be a memory of him at all.

Once when I was a little girl, going to school, some workmen were repairing our roof, boys from the neighbouring town, and she walked past shouting at me, ‘Do you wear a semmit, a
chreutair?’ I blushed among the laughing boys and she shouted, ‘1/11 from J. D. Williams, a chreutair. I saw them in the catalogue.’ And, red and pale by turns, I nearly sank into
the ground while the boys on the roof crowed like cockerels.

And so she’s dead in the house she inhabited alone for twenty years among plates green with verdigris, hard by a rapacious nephew who was waiting for her to die, and I see us shouting
after her from the school bus, as she carries her messages home, swaying from side to side like a sailor. It is Easter, time of new hats and daffodils. And when did she ever have a new hat?

‘A chreutair,’ she told me. ‘Don’t marry that man. His father was a drunkard and his father before him.’ But I did marry him. ‘I told you, a chreutair,’
she said a year later. ‘A man who doesn’t shave every morning is no good. It shows he has no respect.’ I would wash the plates, mossy with green stuff, and give her soup which I
had brought over in a pan. (He and I had divided our possessions neatly when he left: he had insisted on taking the refrigerator because it was his mother’s, but I had kept the set of pans
decorated with red roses.) ‘Now, Seumas Macleod, he would suit you, he’s a good-living man and he was born in April. That’s a good sign.’

Today I shall go to the funeral after I have made some coffee. There is snow on the hills and it is Easter.

The fact is the two of us never got on and he is now in Glasgow probably drinking heavily. I have little feeling for him and I no longer even have his photograph in the house which is much
cleaner. Yesterday I was in church in my new green costume and I watched the young girls in the choir tossing their hair back as they sang a hymn about God’s love.

‘Thank you for the soup, a chreutair,’ Betsy would say, ‘but there isn’t enough turnip in it. I can’t stand that woman who plays the organ in church. Her mother
came from one of the islands. She couldn’t use a cooker, you know, till I taught her and now she plays the organ.’

I waited for the Resurrection to take place as I do every spring, but it didn’t. The minister flung his arms wide like a bat and blessed us but he doesn’t visit the sick. He
doesn’t visit Betsy. ‘He is a wooden minister, a chreutair. He was born in September. That’s always a bad sign.’ The Resurrection of course never happens, not even a frail
yellow Christ rising from the green mossy plates. What are we here for?

What are we here for? said the minister at the graveside shivering.

Let them take out their flowers and their mirrors, I thought. The skies are blue and there are clouds like semmits in J. D. Williams. She used to sweat a lot when she was alive and sometimes
pinch sweets and fruit from the village shop. They said she had rich relatives who never came to see her and that she had once been engaged to a prosperous farmer.