A Field Full of Folk (9 page)

The air was very still, apart from the hammering, and she could see the smoke rising from the houses, drifting away in the direction of the railway line. She should have asked someone to paint her door which was a dull green. She looked up as the hammering continued and saw him sitting astride the roof, a clutch of nails in his mouth.

13

“L
OOK
,”
SAID
A
LISDAIR
to Hugh and he pointed to the grey cat—it belonged to David Collins—which was carrying a baby rabbit in its mouth across the railway line. It padded along, looking neither to right nor to left, its fat body heavy and smoky, as if it was filled with grey water.

They followed it across the rusty rails, among the wet grass which left green threads on their sandals. It stopped and looked when it heard them approaching. They stared into its fathomless eyes which seemed so calm and deep and mysterious, like emeralds. The sun sparkled on the stones, there were berries on the trees. It was a morning of intent serenity, and through it as if through a picture the cat padded.

Suddenly Alisdair began to run and Hugh ran after him. The cat scampered up the brae but the boys were close behind it. Alisdair began to pick up stones and throw them. The cat looked behind it again and sped onward. A stone hit it in the back and it winced. Alisdair ran ahead to cut off its progress, before it could reach David Collins' house. It dodged hither and thither but, caught between the two boys, it didn't know what to do. Its eyes flashed but it still clamped the rabbit in its jaws. On such a fine morning it seemed to be wondering about the injustice of the world, when all it was doing was hunting for its daily food. Alisdair had got hold of a branch and was pushing the cat back, thwacking the ground with it. As if defeated the cat laid the rabbit down, then sped between the boy's legs and ran away.

“Is is okay?” said Alisdair breathlessly. They picked the rabbit up. And stroked it. Its little body heaved.

“We'll let it go,” said Alisdair.

“Don't be stupid,” said Hugh, “it wouldn't live.”

He had once seen his mother stopping the car and picking up a wounded bird and placing it in cotton wool which she had taken from an aspirin bottle. Its beak had pecked at her feebly.

“That's right,” said Alisdair, “it wouldn't. I'll take it home.”

“No, I'll take it home,” said Hugh. “My father knows about rabbits. He's a butcher.”

Alisdair whose father was dead didn't say anything, but he too felt injustice. After all it was he who had saved the rabbit. But they didn't have a hutch at home and probably Hugh had. They had everything because they were well off.

The tiny rabbit panted in Hugh's hand.

“If you like,” said Alisdair carelessly as if he didn't wish Hugh to know that he too had been wounded and hurt.

Hugh went on ahead with the rabbit in his hands, a hero coming home from the wars. Alisdair knew that Hugh would gain the credit for saving the rabbit and the tears pricked his eyes. In his mind's eye he saw the calm fathomless eyes of the cat. When Miss Lamond had strapped Hugh, his father had been at the school the following day but when he himself had been strapped his mother refused to go. “You probably deserved it,” she had said. And later, “You have to learn to take your punishment.” David Collins shouted “Hello” to them as they passed. He was an old man and he had a big red nose, with hair in his nostrils and his ears.

14

W
HILE HALF LISTENING
to his wife the Reverend Peter Murchison was thinking of a time when he had been travelling on the train home from Glasgow. It had been a winter's night and he had been reading in his compartment when he suddenly looked up from his book and there, across the water, across the Clyde, he had seen the lights of the houses and the shops and the cinemas and the restaurants. Immediately there they were, columns of green and red and white towering almost solidly upside down into the water, so that the town, composed of tenements, suddenly became opulent and colourful, almost Eastern in its dazzle of pillars. Then as he still stared in astonishment he saw a curving snakelike yellow apparition of lights and then—darkness.

“And Mrs Scott objected,” said his wife, “on the grounds that it might be a wet day. I told her that if it was we could always make use of the sandwiches and lemonade. In any case we always used to have a Sunday School picnic every year, I said, and we had to take that risk. But I don't think it's much of a risk this year.”

“Of course not, dear,” said the minister.

“She then asked who was going to pay for it and I said that some of the women had agreed to make the sandwiches and as for the lemonade we could maybe hold a small Sale of Work to raise the money. It wouldn't need much organising.”

“I see,” said the minister.

“Of course if she had thought of the idea herself … I mean having the old people as well,” said his wife, “she would have been all for it. But she's a good worker and I'll have to convince her that she did think of it herself.”

“That's a good idea.”

Opposite him on top of the bookcase he saw the Spanish doll which his wife had bought some months before. It stood on thin legs, dressed in a pink frock and flaring pink skirt with a pink flower in its long dark hair which streamed over the shoulders. He imagined it on top of a grave in a cemetery.

There had been Mrs Sinclair the old widow who had lived by herself and refused to let anyone into her house. Eventually she had no lighting and no heating, her corridor was full of empty bottles, the ceiling had collapsed and fallen on the bed and Mrs Sinclair had lived in that squalor for day after day till she had died. The beached detritus of bottles and dirt and papers had taken four days to shift. He imagined the doll standing on her grave and crowing like a cockerel.

“That's right, dear,” he told his wife, “you handle that. You're more diplomatic than me.” And indeed she was. He himself couldn't come to terms with the ordinary contradictions of life, and life, he was beginning to believe, was all contradictions, immune to reason.

“When were you thinking of holding the Sale of Work?” he said, taking out his diary.

“I think perhaps in a fortnight's time,” she said, “say August the ninth and then have the picnic the following Saturday.”

His wife of course could see the contradictions better than he could but she could live among them without being greatly affected. On the other hand if there was no predestination why should he object to the contradictions? How could he object to both? How could he object to rails and the absence of rails at the same time? But then religion was not a reasonable thing and neither was life. He felt the pain stab at him again and winced.

“Is there anything wrong, dear?” said his wife.

“A touch of indigestion.” Bearing this pain was like feeling a child growing within one. It was an obscure pregnancy unlooked for, evil, irreversible, a punishment perhaps for an unwillingness to accept the contradictions. She was looking at him with concern.

“Would you like a cup of coffee or anything?”

“No, dear, I'll be all right. So it's August the ninth then,” and he put his diary away.

“The thing about Mrs Scott,” said his wife, “is that being an outsider no one has accepted her. She has lots of ability but her accent puts people off. And then Mrs Campbell is rather busy now with her Bed and Breakfast.”

“Yes, of course.”

And then he added, “You can take the paperbacks to the Sale of Work.”

“All of them?”

“Yes you can take all of them. We need the space anyway.”

“If you're really sure …”

His wife of course didn't read as much as he did. He had always been a reader. In that ideal kingdom he had spent most of his days. It came to him with a pang that few people read books at all, that he was an exception, that most people's lives were circumscribed by their daily work. The love of beauty and reading came from that excess energy that was left over from existing.

One of the terrible revelations that had come to him as a minister was hearing a woman—who had it been? Mrs Scott herself perhaps or Mrs Campbell?—saying to Kate in a shop,

“Of course, dear, she wore the same hat as she wore last week. Has she nothing else to wear?”

At that moment he had a comic yet tragic vision of God as a dress designer staring down from heaven with a considering eye on the blouses, hats and coats of the congregation, assigning them to heaven or hell according to the quality and newness and brilliance of their clothes. How far one could go from the centre of the truth to trivial trumpery mirrors!

“I think,” said his wife, “that I'll talk to Mrs Berry's daughter, Patricia. She can help me with the cakes and things.”

“I'm sure she will,” said the minister.

He watched her affectionately as she got up from the chair, kissed him lightly on the cheek, waved to him and then busily entered her car and sped cheerily down the drive. What would happen to her when he died? It was better, he supposed selfishly, for her to survive than for him to do so. How dependent he had been on her all his life! It was as if without her he didn't exist at all. Perhaps that was what love was, the dread of the other's absence, the dread of her extinction, a match being put out in the dark.

Through the window in front of him he could see old Smelly who lived in a cave by himself (he was at that very moment bending over to peer into a big yellow bin) and who came out of it each morning in his long unutterably dirty coat that trailed the ground, to poke among the scraps of food that others had thrown out. On an impulse he walked down to where Smelly was and as he did so he imagined with loathing the rats simmering in the bin among the damp biscuits, fragments of bread, empty milk cartons, shoes with no laces, mounds of tins.

Smelly raised his gaunt unshaven face towards him when he saw him coming.

“How are you, sir?” he said through his black broken teeth.

“Fine, fine, Mr Morrison,” said the minister. “And how are you yourself?”

“No complaints,” said Smelly who was holding a big canvas bag in his hands and putting bits of bread and biscuit into it as he spoke. His unwashed coat trailed the ground. The hem of my garment has been touched, some virtue has gone out of me, thought the minister. Not far from them a buzzard waited, and a small group of seagulls. The long thin veined hand stretched into the bin. The horror, the horror, thought the minister, what if a rat should suddenly clamp it fast. His eyes closed at the thought of it and he swayed momentarily, feeling dizzy. How is it you live and what is it you do? The old leech gatherer on the moor, the wanderer, half stone, half man, the murmur of the Presbyterian voice.

“Fine weather,” said Smelly, briskly filling his bag as calmly as if he were out shopping.

“It is that, Mr Morrison,” said the minister, “no sign of rain at all.”

Smelly, strangely enough, had a beautiful voice and when he was drunk on VP as he so often was, when he could get it, he would sing opera and sentimental Scottish songs, marching up and down like a retired soldier, his mouth frothing. Once the minister had seen him following David Collins like an obscene shadow from the First World War marching behind him, imitating him. It was fatal to give him money for then he would follow one, thanking one, especially if he was drunk. He probably slept in a cave, or a barn for sometimes his clothes were prickled and veined with straw: his boots of course were windowed with holes. Today however he was sober, unashamed, at ease. No one knew where he had originally come from. It was said that he had trained as a musician and then a love affair had left him stranded on the shore from which he could see the ships of other more successful crews.

He packed his bag with what he could find in the bin. In one of the open tins the minister could see a few clotted beans. Once he had passed the bin in his car and had seen a goose—a white angel—stretching its long pure neck into it.

On an impulse and well aware of the danger he took a fifty pence piece from his pocket and gave it to Smelly.

“And don't spend it on drink,” he said.

“On drink,” said Smelly, his face breaking into a smile as if an old rock with its green wet moss had suddenly shone wetly. “Me, sir, spend it on drink? I wouldn't spend it on drink, sir.” Was there a hint of an Irish accent there?

“It's for food,” said the minister, “remember that.” Perhaps he ought to have someone like Smelly in the church, to let him walk the aisle among the women in their green and red and blue hats, interwoven with flowers. And what if Smelly did come in, smelling of drink, singing his drunken operatic arias, his mouth dripping with foam, and they all would walk out? Did they have the right to?

He stood there feeling ashamed of himself. Oh, God, he prayed silently, who gave us Your beautiful day with the larks trilling in the heavens, the buzzard sitting on his fence post, the seagull alert and ravenous, the trees with their blood-red berries, how can I not feel Your grace?

Sometimes he and his wife would go and collect bramble berries, stretching their hands out among the thorns. Why was it that the best berries were always protected by thorns? The two of them wore wellingtons and gloves and placed their plunder in bags, just as Smelly was doing now.

He saw a soggy slice of bread disappearing down the open tunnel of Smelly's sack and almost vomited on the spot but Smelly was by then seriously examining an old boot.

“Too small,” he muttered to himself as the minister had seen his own wife doing at a bargain sale. What is it that you do and how is it you live?

Some people claimed that Smelly stole eggs from the barns, but Smelly maintained that it was the foxes who did that, the cunning-faced innocent thieves. Was it Smelly who had killed Mrs Robertson's hens whose heads and necks
had been found one morning, white with frost, outside the henhouse, though there was nothing left of the bodies but a few brown feathers?