A Field Full of Folk (4 page)

“What was there about him that was so special?” said the joiner. Did the man used to have a moustache? The minister couldn't remember, perhaps his wife would.

“I don't know,” he answered. There was nothing he could do here. He didn't have that instinctive rightness of response that his wife had, his mind was too reflective. But what could anyone say?

“I don't know,” he admitted. “I really don't know.” Surely from the distance of imminent death he could speak freely, but the habits and constraints of a lifetime were difficult to change.

“She was always watching the TV,” said the joiner helplessly, “and listening to the radio. I used to say to her that she would get square eyes but it didn't matter what I said. That was her life. Perhaps if she had a job, but she didn't want one. I failed her. Where did I fail her?”

“You didn't fail her,” said the minister angrily. “You did what you could.”

“But she did love me when she married,” said the joiner. “I am sure of that. In those days we used to go to the dances but after that we had the children and we couldn't go. She never gave me a sign that she was going to leave. And I never knew that he was visiting her.” His huge red raw hands lay helplessly on his knees, and the minister thought, “Here is a man who can make a chair or a table or a wardrobe and he does not know what is happening to him. Is the world run by the devil then? Is he joking with us?” And the devil appeared in his mind, inscrutable and suave as a travelling salesman.

He rose from his chair and said, “I just wanted to see how you were. That was why I came. If you need any help …” And his voice trailed away but Murray had ceased to listen to him.

“I'm very sorry,” said the minister again. In the old days he would have prayed aloud for the two of them but he didn't feel like praying today.

The two little girls were playing outside the door when he left, taking the path along the stream. Here he stood and watched two small boys fishing patiently for trout and bending down in the slant rays of the sun. That must be the … No, one of them was Flora's son, Alisdair, and the other was Hugh, the butcher's son. In the blaze of sun they were netted as if they themselves were the trout. Their voices echoed towards him like chimes from his own youth, We twa hae paiddlt i' the burn, he thought radiantly and regretfully, frae morning sun til dine. Now and again as he watched them they would plunge their hands into the stream and raise them again empty. How can I not feel, he asked himself, how can I not feel anything? The rowan trees are behind them with their red berries and yet I cannot feel anything. I see the two of them only as the repetitions of their parents as if the world were being typed out on carbon paper by a God who wielded the machine with effortless ease. Their voices echoed back to him for they were completely lost in their own concerns. He did not wish to disturb them, they appeared so innocent. And then, as he watched them, they began suddenly to fight about some obscure business of their own. They threw water in each other's faces which were suddenly swollen with rage and then as quickly as they had flared up they calmed down again and were fishing quietly in the stream once more. He raised his eyes to the hill above them whose sides were indented with the dry beds of streams. He was like a lost psalmist whose body was feeling the thorns. Then he saw one of the boys, Alisdair, holding up a small fish which glittered in the sun and the two of them were rushing away from the stream, their little legs flashing past the rowan trees which glowed in the autumn day. It was as if part of himself followed them but not with feeling, rather with conscious regret.

“I cannot go on like this,” he thought, “I cannot. How can I live this lie? What should I have said to Murray the joiner? Should I not have wept with him rather than spoken. What Murray required was companionship, his grief to be shared by others.”

The minister looked down at his feet where a small plump snail with tiny black aerials had come to a halt in the sun. What is your purpose, he asked it. What are you doing here? Would the world be any different if you did not exist? What for that matter difference would it make if either little Hugh or Alisdair did not exist? The stream was an intricacy of sun and it blazed and flashed at him like a loom, and the hill above it cast a perfect replica of itself into the water like a transparency which had once been imprinted on his wrist.

He walked on. Mrs Berry was as usual working in her garden, bent over her flowers.

“It's a fine day,” he said, raising his hat.

“It is that,” she replied. Now there was a woman he admired. She had lost her husband, she lived alone, and yet she showed absolute firmness in the face of eternity.

“Coal is expensive now,” he remarked, looking at the pile of fuel she had outside the house.

“That's right,” she said. There were mounds of sticks lying beside the coal as if she expected to live forever, and yet she must be seventy-six at least. What was the secret of her purposes?

“Won't the minister come in for a cup of tea?” she asked, and without realising what he was doing he had accepted. Her kitchen was neat and clean, the cups and saucers and plates were in their positions, the walls had been freshly painted a lime green.

All the time she was boiling the water she was speaking. “I see the minister was visiting John Murray.”

“Yes,” he said, carefully removing his hat and laying it on the table.

“It's a shame, that's what it is. That girl has no right to leave her children like that. What is the world coming to? In my young days that would never have happened. She should have her bottom skelped and that's a fact. Going away like that in full view of everybody. It's a scandal.”

Her strength invigorated him and he said, “Do you think there is anything to be said on her side?”

“On her side? Of course there is nothing to be said on her side. She's a spoilt brat and that's all there is to it. When she was growing up she was exactly the same. She was a friend of my own daughter and she was getting far too much pocket money when she was a girl. The two of them were at Guides' Camp together and she had a pound a week pocket money. I used to make my daughter cut the bracken and she gave me all the money she earned. It's a disgrace. When I was growing up do you think I had any pocket money? Stuff and nonsense.”

Of course she was right. But then how did she know all this, how could she remember it all? We have our certificates, he thought, but someone like Mrs Berry would make a better minister than me. He realised that Mrs Berry lived in the details of the day, that he himself had made an abstraction of the world, that he was not deeply interested in its routine. That had been his mistake. He had been looking for a continual radiance that wasn't there. One should feed on the world as it was. Mrs Berry continued, while pouring the hot water into the tea pot.

“And I know for a fact that he bought her a pair of red boots before she left. Imagine that! And he doesn't make all that money as a joiner. The bin men were telling me all about it. You should see the bottles that were in their bins, they
told me. All her drinking. And what do you think Murdo Macfarlane said to me, you know, Murdo. He said, ‘She'll regret it, you mark my words, Mrs Berry, she'll regret it. Nothing good will come of it. She'll get no luck from it.' “

“And how is Murdo?”

“Murdo is fine. There's nothing wrong with Murdo. We never had a postman like him. They go about on their bicycles now and in their vans but Murdo walked every mile. Murdo was conscientious. I was looking at him and he keeps himself tidy. He shaves every day, I can see that, and his shoes are polished. There's nothing wrong with Murdo. If it hadn't been for that old mother of his he would have been married years ago. Back of my hand to the likes of her.”

She poured the tea into his cup. “Now, tell me if this is too strong.”

“It's fine,” he said. He felt empty as if he didn't wish to speak and yet when he was young he had never felt like that. Why, when he had been in the theology class, the world had been a sparkle of language. Now it was as if he had lost the ability to communicate.

“And another thing,” said Mrs Berry, her eyes alight with intelligence, “she'll find, that same girl, that he'll leave her. I've seen it happen before and it will happen again. As the saying goes, what she put in her head she put in her feet and she'll be sorry for it.”

To have such a firmness, such a compass for right and wrong! He gazed at her in amazement.

“But that's the way it is nowadays,” she said. “From the cradle they turn on you. They are so impudent that they must be being prepared for a different world. They're all the same, impudent and fearless. All those hippies or whatever you call them. Rubbish and nonsense.”

And as he drank his tea he felt an inner peace for the first time for many days. If life were as simple as this!

He made an effort and said, “I heard that Murray used to work late and that she was lonely …”

“Lonely,” she shouted. “Wasn't he working for her? I've seen the day when the fishermen were nights away from home, and my own Angus wasn't home every night. When I used to live in the islands they told me of a boat that never came home for five nights and when the women opened the door to their husbands on the sixth night they came out of the darkness like ghosts. They were standing one behind the other and they looked like ghosts. I'm alone as she was. So is Murdo Macfarlane and David Collins, and even Annie. We're all lonely. But there's right and there's wrong and she was lucky to have a good husband. She had no call to leave, and imagine these poor little girls have no one but a father to look after them. No, the back of my hand to the likes of that. She was spoilt and that's it. Going off on a train like that to another man.”

“And how is Annie?” the minister asked.

“Oh, Annie's all right. There's nothing wrong with Annie. Annie's lonely but she doesn't make a fuss about it.”

Suddenly she said, “I remember when I was working in a geriatric ward in Edinburgh we had this old woman and she believed that her husband was going to come and fetch her. Every morning I had to do her hair and prettify her face and then she would wait for her husband. But her husband was dead and she didn't know it. She lived in a world of her own, you understand. The things you see in this world, but I don't have to tell the minister that.” She paused and then went on, “Sometimes I used to think that it was the ones who lived in a world of their own who were the happiest. But that's not right. We shouldn't live in a world of our own. When my patients died they used to look at something beyond them, I'm convinced of that. There was a light there that they saw. They were seeing things that we can't see. And there was this old schoolteacher. She would talk about the school register all the time. She thought I was one of her scholars. Of course I was only eighteen years old then. Would the minister like more tea?”

“No, thanks. I'd better be going.” What did she really think of him? Her shrewd eyes were examining him and he felt that she saw that there was something wrong with him. Perhaps she did know of the crab that was eating into him and was too polite to say anything. Why for that matter did he not tell his wife? Was it because illness of any kind was a mark of failure, a stigma of dishonour? Was that why he had lost his faith, because he had become ill? Or had he become ill because he had lost his faith? He thought of the time that the two drunken brothers had come to him at midnight to ask him to bury their mother.

“We don't go to church,” they had said. “But we want you to bury her. We're strangers here.”

And they had even been drunk at the funeral!

“Get out of here,” he had shouted at them. “You are desecrating the place.” And they had become meek as lambs, his rage was so awesome. And then years afterwards one of them had come back with flowers in his hands and asked him if he could tell him where his mother was buried: he had spent all morning trying to find her gravestone though once he had been there, though drunk. The world was full of strange people and things. Only the other day he had been reading in a newspaper of a blank record that you could buy in order to put it in a juke box in a cafe so that you could have some moments of silence. Buying silence! Surely the earth we inhabited was trembling with madness and derangement. What about for instance that man who kept a lion in his garden?

She watched him as he left and later he was accosted by Annie who had come out of the house in her long trailing khaki coat, stick in hand, as if she were setting off to shepherd the sheep.

“Good morning, minister,” said Annie briskly and then, as if she were continuing a conversation which had only briefly been interrupted, “I meant to ask you, what is the meaning of the twenty-four elders in Revelations?”

“The twenty-four elders in Revelations?” said the minister blankly.

“Yes, it mentions twenty-four elders,” said Annie. “I've read that book through and through. And what's that child doing bicycling along the middle of the road? Hey, you,” she shouted, “get off that road and on to the pavement. Yes, twenty-four elders,” she continued imperturbably, “why is it that we don't have twenty-four elders? I should like to know that.”

“We have the number we have,” said the minister, “because that is all we need.”

“I am growing disappointed with your church,” said Annie. “I think I will turn towards the East. The Eastern religions are more interested in the spirit. Have you heard about Nirvana?”

“I have heard about it,” said the minister carefully.

“Well, if you have heard of it you will know that it is a condition of peace. Utter peace, that's what we want. In the Eastern church you do spiritual exercises. In fact it cannot be called a church at all. You have too many women interfering in your church. Why is it Mrs Macrae who does the flowers most weeks? I have enough flowers in my garden.”