In the Middle of the Wood (25 page)

“How do you know?”

“How do I know what?”

“Like how do you know that you weren't well before and you're ill now. How do you know?”

Her sharp belligerent intelligence pierced him but he knew that he must hang on: he must cling to his joy. His joy told him that all was well, his misery had vanished like a cloud. The people in the lounge had all swum back into focus again. The room was real, its occupants were not actors, there was no longer a threat.

“I know,” he said, “because I feel happy.”

“Happy.”

Her eyes on his were hard and hostile, and bitter as if he were her enemy.

“Why should I listen to you? Jim told me that he'd marry me but he didn't. He changed his mind. Over and over he said that he would marry me. Give me it, he'd say, give me it, I'll marry you, I swear I will. And he pawed me all over and he breathed like a pig. But he never married me. He never came to see me.”

“I see,” said Ralph. Her pallor was poignant and childlike. Tears were brimming from her eyes. How many of these girls he had seen, on streets late at night, with their cracked handbags in the yellow fallen light, walking in pairs, giggling their high virginal giggles.

“Listen,” he said, from the very centre of his care, of his joy.

“Get away from me, old man,” said the girl. “Or I'll tell Snooty face. Get the f… … hell away from me.” And her voice rose hysterically. Ralph got to his feet quickly and moved over to where Tom was sitting cradling his coffee cup in his hands as if he was warming them. The following day he was going to Glasgow to have the operation to his head.

“Come on out for a walk,” he said. They made their way along a road beside which were fields and houses: a house that had once been a nunnery and was now a Nurses' Home. Tom knew the area well as he had been brought up close to it, after being born in Aberdeenshire. They opened and shut gates and strolled between tall red foxgloves like burning spires in the cold raw wind. It was strange to smell the scent of flowers again, to have the freedom of the air: it was as if already in reality he were leaving the hospital behind him.

There was an immense silence and purity everywhere, like Easter, like the resurrection. Cows gazed at them with absent eyes, chewing green blades of grass.

“I think you'll be oot quicker than me,” said Tom.

“What makes you think that?”

“They told me I might be fower or five weeks after my electric treatment. They say it'll mak me dizzy for a few days.”

Now that he could see properly the delineaments of the world he could understand that after all Tom was not a psychologist but a rural man, and an authentic non-chess player. His accent was explained by the fact that he had not been born in the area.

For the first time Ralph felt that he might be allowed home. The mountains, flowers, animals, fields, were not alien to him but natural. They were not inconceivable gifts but ordinary and fixed in their places, to be accepted. They did not represent an infinite yearning of the spirit towards the unattainable.

A large brown butterfly swam past and settled on the leaf of a tree, swaying and drifting. My mind didn't make that, he said to himself, it is out there, drunken, dizzy. He saw some rabbits playing in a cold field.

When they were returning after their short walk he could see the institution for the first time in full focus from a distance. It looked like an academy, like a school built of grey elegant stone. It had towers and columns and a lovely porch. It seemed at peace, classical, exact. Odd that it should seem so, he thought. But perhaps the palaces of Greece were the same, not apparently resounding with the cries of tragedy, with the griefs of heroes and heroines as through tragedy they made the painful evolutionary climb away from their gods.

“Well, here we are then,” said Tom.

“So you're all right now,” said the psychologist flanked by her nurses.

“Yes.”

“Not feeling you're being spied on, or were ever spied on?”

“No. I feel fine.”

“None of this nonsense of your telephone book being torn by your wife?”

“No, I realize now it must have been myself.”

“And no nonsense of anyone having interfered with your papers?”

“None. I must have done that myself too.”

“And this boy Ronny, is that his name, wasn't put there deliberately?”

“No.”

“I see. And how do you feel? Appetite good?”

“Yes.”

“Sleeping well?”

“Yes.”

“And your wife? How do you feel about your wife?”

“I love her. And I'm sorry. She was put under a great strain.”

“Good. If all goes well I think you should be out of here in two or three days.”

“Thank you. And I'm very sorry for all the trouble I've caused.”

“You couldn't help yourself.”

“I suppose not.”

“But it is quite clear what happened. You were overworking. And you felt symptoms of overwork before your breakdown, didn't you.”

“I used to burst out in sudden sweats. For no reason at all. And I felt mentally exhausted even when I was on holiday.”

“And you realize that I'm a psychologist and that these are real nurses.”

“Of course. I've been so stupid.”

It occurred to him while the psychologist was talking that reality was far more fragile than he had thought, that whatever picture of reality one chose could be corroborated by information pouring in and being filtered, that a madman was the most rigorously logical of all beings, not at all scatterbrained but rather remorselessly reasonable. He wanted to discuss this with the psychologist, but when he looked at her as if for the first time, he saw a grossly overworked woman whose eyes were filled with pain, who herself tapped on the desk obsessively with a pencil. This was no infallible goddess, this was a human being just like himself.

“Thank you,” he said again, “thank you for curing me.”

He knew suddenly why Hamlet needed Horatio as a witness, why Horatio had to be left behind to tell the truth as he saw it, to explain the extraordinary pattern of events, the murders, the accidents. The most terrible thing of all would be to be in a world without witnesses, a Robinson Crusoe on an island. That in a sense was what he had been.

And another thought occurred to him; he, the novelist, rundown, struggling with his book, face to face with the bareness and meagreness of his material, had deliberately created a plot, a novel, in the real world, had interfered with reality in order to invent new events, strange and perilous, had put his immortal soul on the line, had thrown a gauntlet at sanity in the interests of art. The observer had gambled with his own soul.

“Well, then,” said the psychologist brightly, “that's it. I shall probably see you again before you leave. Keep up the good work.”

“Thank you,” he said. He walked out with the same joy as he had felt before. In a short while he would be free, he would be at home again, he would see his office and his wife. He wanted to see her again as soon as possible to tell her how much he loved her. Love was what saved us from the demonic nature of reality. Together the lovers are common witnesses of the world.

But there was something else that bothered him too. He had not reached the uttermost limits, he had not visited the really mad, he had not seen them in their meagre cages, he had not sought out their discords to make sense of them.

Was he therefore a failure as a novelist? Could he face that final place without harmony? He looked out of the window and saw that the man he had seen the first day in his room had entered the hospital from outside and was pacing up and down. Then he noticed that he was waiting for a car. Was he being taken on a day trip somewhere? He saw the man's wife speaking to him and the man himself, perhaps her husband, her brother, staring straight ahead of him through the windscreen silently, his lips not moving.

The autumn leaves were blowing about the strange tree with the pink petals. No one had yet told him what kind of tree it was.

Linda, my love, he thought, how much I made you suffer. I must atone for this. I must tell you of my love. I must change, must enter the ordinary world. I must ascend into it.

It was the day of his departure. All morning he had been pacing up and down his room and then up and down the corridor. The scientist had already left the hospital, waving at him with his pipe like Einstein. Heydrich and the handicapped girl strolled to the canteen for sweets, cigarettes. Hugh had gone home but the boy who wouldn't eat was still in the ward and so was Tom who would be in for a few weeks yet. Ronny had not yet come back from the extreme place.

Any moment now he would see Linda's car. And then, as he watched for it, for its brisk red flame, he saw the two lunatics spearing the leaves and placing them in the barrow. They looked up once or twice and it seemed to him that they were staring at him with their unwrinkled brows.

He had again the feeling that he had failed them, failed himself, that he had not suffered enough. Must I enter the final rooms of unreason, is that asked of me, he questioned himself. And it seemed to him that happiness was what he had avoided because he hadn't thought he deserved it. Not finding grace he had sought its equivalent through work: every book had been a justification of himself, a gift he had brought pleadingly to his stepfather. “If you want books I can write them for you: you couldn't do that, so I am better than you. I am a creator: you are only a parasite. You are a worm, a book worm.” That icy face didn't even break into a smile when he brought him book after book. More, more, more, it demanded.

Even while he was thinking this he was imagining Linda speeding towards him across winding intricate roads, past lochs and woods, arrowing towards him in the fine silvery day. Her faithfulness now astonished him, made him proud. Her love had been great indeed. In spite of everything, tiredness, perplexity, grief, she had stayed with him to the very end. As he stood there in his phantom cloak of stone and sorrow and joy he swayed and rocked.

And then out of the indifferent day the red car came, and he saw her quite small crouched figure behind the wheel, gripping it tightly, her face pale and tiny as a shell. He ran along the corridor to the front door carrying his case in his hand. He was running past the office and they were shouting “Good luck” to him, and then he was walking towards the car. For a moment he stood under the tree in the shelter of its flaming petals, watching the two men lifting the leaves on sharp prongs. Then with a final gesture as if of repudiation he turned away towards the car, the door of which Linda had opened. She ran towards him and they swayed and rocked in each other's arms. Joy was flooding his mind and body. His witness was with him. Love was what moved the stars and the other planets and kept us steady in the stormy astronomy of reality.

He looked back. Ronny was waving towards him from the window. He must just have been returned, promoted to a higher circle. He pointed out Ronny to Linda and they both waved to him. Then Ronny's face disappeared as if it had been an illusion. He clutched Linda briefly. Reality was what one had to cling to: one should not take chances with it. The stone cloak of duty fell away from his shoulders. At that moment it did not bother him if he never wrote again.

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM POLYGON
BY IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

Consider the Lilies
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‘Retrained, finely wrought … Mr Crichton Smith shows us isolation, perplexity, loneliness, a combination of blindness and indifference' –
New Statesman

‘Mr Crichton Smith has an acute feeling for places and atmosphere. The wind-blown heaths, the grey skies, the black dwellings, the narrow lives, the poverty – are all vividly depicted … one can linger over the sheer beauty of his phrases' –
Observer

The eviction of the crofters from their homes between 1792 and the 1850s was one of the cruellest episodes in Scotland's history. In this novel Iain Crichton Smith captures the impact of the Highland Clearances through the thoughts and memories of an old woman who has lived all her life within the narrow confines of her community.

Alone and bewildered by the demands of the factor, Mrs Scott approaches the minister for help, only to have her faith shattered by his hypocrisy. She finds comfort, however, from a surprising source: Donald Macleod, an imaginative and self-educated man who has been ostracised by his neighbours, not least by Mrs Scott herself, on account of his atheism. Through him and through the circumstances forced upon her, the old woman achieves new strength.

The Last Summer
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A sensitively written and memorable novel of youth by one of Scotland's most distinguished twentieth century writers.

Malcolm, studious, imaginative, footballing, shy, sexually aware but uncomfortably innocent, is in his last term at school on a Hebridean island during the Second World War. His awkward relationship with his teachers, his widowed mother and younger brother, his friends – and with Janet whom he loves from a distance and the less comely and warmer, but to him still enigmatic, Sheila, are marvellously realised. Above all, this is the story of a boy, on his own, trying to discover himself and through himself to find his way in life.

My Last Duchess
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Iain Crichton Smith's third novel is as different from his second,
The Last Summer
, as that was from his first,
Consider the Lillies
. Crichton Smith is at the height of his powers as poet and prose writer. This new work of fiction follows hard upon his Selected Poems and his volume of short stories, Survival Without Fear.

Mark Simmons, aged 42, is a teacher at a training college. His wife has just walked out on him because she has found him so much less interesting than she expected the man she married to be. This event, which he has by no means expected, has jolted him into a major reassessment of himself, of his place in the universe. He realises that he has become bitter, cynical and disillusioned: he is a failure intellectually – he wanted to be a writer, but for years he has striven at
one book, which he privately knows to be not very good. He is a failure as a teacher – he wasn't competent enough to obtain a post at a university. He is a failure as a husband, because his wife was daily moving away from him. He is a failure as a father, because he and his wife had had no children. Above all, he is a failure as a human being, because he despises everybody, not least himself. Mark Simmons hates himself for being more concerned with argument than happiness.

My Last Duchess
is a novel of great resourcefulness and energy.

An Honourable Death
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‘Iain Crichton Smith writes like a poet, with strong natural rhythm and precise observation' –
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In the summer of 1870, a seventeen-year-old crofter's son turned his back on his apprenticeship with the Royal Clan and Tartan Warehouse in Inverness and signed up as a private in Queen Victoria's army. He joined the Gordons – the 92nd Highlanders – whose reputation was second to none as the fearsome cutting-edge of the British Army. Posted to India, Afghanistan, South Africa and the Sudan, he became a formidable soldier, rising up through the ranks to become the glorified and much-decorated Major-General Sir Hector Macdonald or, more commonly, ‘Fighting Mac', the true hero of Omdurman.

Then, in 1903, at the peak of his remarkable career, he was accused of homosexuality. Ordered to face court martial and unable to bear the disgrace, he ended his life.

From this true story, with a poet's insight and precision, Iain Crichton Smith has crafted an exquisite novel: a tale of honour and elitism, equivocation and hierocracy, victory and despair.

The Dream
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‘A superb novel … it must be accorded tremendous acclaim' –
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‘Iain Crichton Smith writes like a poet, with strong natural rhythm and precise observation' –
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In the grey streets of Glasgow, Martin is dreaming of the mist-shrouded islands of his youth. Behind her desk in the travel agency his wife Jean dreams of faraway places in the sun that beckon from the brochures.

Their marriage frays in the silence as Martin clings to the Gaelic he teaches at the university, the dwindling bedrock of the culture of the isles, while Jean refuses to speak a language that brings back memories of the bitter years of her childhood. While Jean chatters with her friends of relationships and resentments, Martin turns to Gloria who seems to share his dream of the islands of the Gael…

Iain Crichton Smith's The Dream explores the precarious survival of a modern marriage with a poet's lean, evocative precision and all the spellbinding authority of a master storyteller in the time-honoured Celtic tradition.

In the Middle of the Wood
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Ralph Simmons, a writer, struggles to survive a nervous breakdown that leaves him anxious, suspicious, and frightened.

In the Middle of the Wood is considered by many to be Iain Crichton Smith's most remarkable achievement in prose. Like Waugh's The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, it derives directly from a phase of paranoia, which in Crichton Smith's case actually led to a spell in a mental hospital.

The Tenement
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The tenement has its being, its almost independent being, in a small Scottish town. Built of grey granite, more than a century ago, it stands four-square in space and time, the one fixed point in the febrile lives of the transient human beings whom it shelters. At the time of which Iain Crichton Smith writes, there are married couples in three of the flat; two widows and a widower occupy the others. All of them are living anxious lives of quiet desperation, which Mr Smith anatomises with cool and delicate understanding.

The Masons, Linda and John, are the youngest and perhaps the happiest house-hold, who can still look to the future with hope: he has quite a well-paid job in a freezer shop, she is expecting a child. Mr Cooper's role in life is humbler: he is a lavatory attendant, but can take an off pride in his work. The Camerons provide drama: the husbands, once a long distance lorry driver who was sacked for heavy drinking and now a casual labourer, is consumed with unreasoning hate of Catholics, and when drunk becomes a raging brute who batters and terrifies his wife.

Trevor Porter, an ex-teacher who like to think of himself as a poet (unpublished), is destroying his marriage by his self-absorption, though after his wife has surprised him by dying of cancer he feel guilt-ridden. Mrs Floss is the tenement's most colourful inhabitant: the widow of a local hotel owner, she still has money and can indulge in holiday cruises and foreign lovers. Mrs Miller, up on the top floor, is odd-woman-out even in this company of loners: since her husband was killed by lightening, crucified on the telephone wires he was repairing, she has become a slatternly recluse, who finds occasional drinking companions among the town's down-and-outs.

The course of several of these lives reaches a startling crisis during the little party to celebrate the birth of the Masons' child. But Iain Crichton Smith declines any easy resolution of events. His fascinatingly ill-assorted group of characters, brought together only by grey granite, are left to struggle on, with their own strengths and weaknesses.

The Search
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Trevor Griersor, a Scottish university lecturer, is spending a term in Canberra, lecturing on Scottish authors. One day a stranger phones, with garbled news of Trevor's brother Norman who vanished in Australia many years before, and has since, according to the caller, become an alcoholic and been in trouble with the police.

Trevor feels overwhelmed with guilt, for having neglected his brother for so long. He imagines him penniless now, a down-and-out, drunk in the gutter; or perhaps even lying in a pauper's grave. He resolves that he must trace him, and travels to Sydney to begin his search. The search takes him to
government offices, police stations, the Salvation Army, a squalid doss-house; and his experiences drive him into a state of panic.

But why does he feel so compelled to search? As Douglas, that ambiguous Iago-like figure who first phoned him, now says, Norman won't be at all the younger brother of eighteen years ago; he'll be a stranger. If he's an alcoholic, he may be violent. He's unlikely to thank Trevor for seeking to patronise him by ‘rescuing' him. Trevor has asked himself – and it's the basic question that faces the reader too – ‘Am I my brothers' keeper?' Does he really care about his brother, or is he acting from a sense of duty?

This is the novel's crux, and Trevor's cross, which he bears with him to a highly ironical conclusion. It's an absorbing study of conscience and responsibility, written with all of Crichton Smith's quiet authority.

A Field Full of Folk
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The world, in Iain Crichton Smith's vision is a field full of folk; and one Scottish village is its microcosm. Here, the Minister wrestles with his loss of faith, and his cancer, concealing them even from his wife, but she had divined them. Mrs Berry cultivates her garden assiduously, and when Jehovah's Witnesses come quoting their texts, she tells them that the hill at the end of the village can be climbed by many paths. Old Annie has no doubts about her path: she has no use for Christianity (‘Protestants and Catholics, nothing but guns and fighting') and finds her answer in the East. On more mundane levels, Morag Bheag worries about her son serving in Northern Ireland, and Chrissie Murray shocks the village by leaving her husband and making for Glasgow – taking only a radio with her, that's what shocks most. Murdo Macfarlane vehemently urges his puritanical views – about, for instance, the use of the church hall for a young people's dance – and David Collins nurses his hatred of Germans, but cannot insult them when they come as tourists.

In short, it's a village much like any other, with its prejudices and certainties and kindliness and heartbreak: the whole and the small part. As the Minister sees in his visionary moment at the annual sports, when the petty disputes over the wheel-barrow race and the tragic news of young Bheag's death come together in his realisation that it's all a part of ‘this supremely imperfect and perfect earth.'

Mr Crichton Smith's novels never carry any superfluous weight: they're as spare as sprinters. He writes with a poet's concentration, and never more precisely, or more movingly, than here, in what amounts to a gentle, compassionate meditation on life and death, with a warm, affirmative conclusion.

An End to Autumn
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Tom and Vera Mallow, who are in only their early thirties, might indeed be said to be in the autumn of their lives already, they are school teachers, both of them, but without any strong feeling for children, and without nay children of their own. Their outlook is wary; they hold themselves apart. When they invite Tom's mother to share their home, they do so from a sense of duty rather than love.

But after autumn, we find, comes summer; and it is the mothers – Tom's and, later Vera's – who in surprising ways reverse the march of the seasons: Mrs Mallow as irritant, with her incongruous
friendship with Mrs Murphy, a Catholic and of a lower social class; and then Angela, the vivacious ex-actress, from the a different world, to provide catharsis.

Here is a sympathetic and unusual study of a marriage that, surprisingly and against the odds, takes the right turning; though lest anyone should feel that Crichton Smith is succumbing to sentiment, the novel's last page echoes the veiled foreboding of it first. Once again he reminds us, with oblique irony, of the poet lurking behind the novelist.

On the Island
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For an eleven-year-old boy, living with his widowed mother and younger brother in a remote seaside village on one of the Western Isles of Scotland, growing up has its difficulties, as well as its idyllic pleasures.

Iain Crichton Smith's vivid evocation is loosely based on memories of his own childhood on Lewis. There are so many discoveries to be made, along the shore and on the moor. Crossing a field under snow has its perils; exploring an empty cottage has its imaginative terrors; you might be humiliated by a village woman when your mother has sent you to a neighbour to borrow half-a-crown until her pension comes through: or playing along the shore with Pauline, a visitor from London with her wider knowledge of the world, you might find your own certainties called into question. There is poverty and richness; and eventually the war casts its shadows across your world.

Iain Crichton Smith has brought to life a gallery of distinctly memorable figures: the sure-footed Blinder with his amazing sense of the island terrain; Stork with his wooden leg; Speedy, the reluctant footballer; Jim returned after twenty years in America with such stories … The author's own sense of the terrain, and of the characters who inhabit it, is equally sure and beautifully precise; his book will evoke for all ages the inner-emotions of growing up, as well as the outward sights and scents of an island experience.