A Field Full of Folk (5 page)

“But,” said the minister helplessly, “you don't often come to church.”

“That has nothing to do with it, nothing at all to do with it. Does your wife feed you properly? You look ill. Are you sure you are all right? In the Eastern churches they are not interested in food. Starve yourself and you will see visions. Some of the saints did that. I would say that the saints are very close to the Eastern church. John the Baptist lived on milk and honey. And locusts. And there was a saint who lived on top of a pole for many years. I hear that Morag Bheag's son is in Ireland. That is an example of your Christian church for you. Nothing but guns and mines. And tell me why is the Pope coming there in an aeroplane? They say he's a Communist.”

“He's not exactly a Communist,” said the minister patiently.

“Well, he comes from a Communist country. He is probably a spy. Have you noticed that he has to be guarded by 'planes in order to take peace to Ireland? That shows you what's wrong.” She raised her stick to salute Mrs Berry who had reappeared in the garden wearing leather gloves. “And another thing that puzzles me is why Judas wasn't stopped from betraying Christ. Did Christ know about it and if He did why did He allow him to betray Him? I know that he was hanged just as Christ was and our own St Andrew was hanged on a different kind of cross. But that was an example of modesty on his part. I don't understand why Judas wasn't struck down.” She gazed at him sternly and he thought, “How can I give her the long explanation which wouldn't satisfy her anyway.”

He thought of Judas sitting by himself in a ditch watching thirty moons shrinking across the Eastern horizon, each of them a silver coin. Then in the dark night of the soul he had climbed the tree and hanged himself. How beautiful this day was, he mused, and yet he felt nothing. How is it that the days pass and they are to me pictures which I myself create, except that now and again some of the pictures snap back at me like a dog at a postman: and one of those recalcitrant pictures is this very Annie who is standing foursquare in front of me at this very moment.

Annie, taking his silence for ignorance, triumphed by saying, “It is from the East that our salvation will come. And, another thing, it says in the Bible that the last battle will be fought there. Is that why the Russians have invaded Afghanistan? That is what I would like to know. The Bible talks a great deal about fire. Is that the atomic bomb? Even the weather has turned against us these days.”

Is this another of our disguises and protections, thought the minister, these futile speculations? Do people still believe in horoscopes, in the unchanging influence of the stars, in the fatal luminosity of the sky? And yet certainly Annie showed energy of a kind, which was more than he did.

“I will see you later about this,” she said, royally waving her stick and leaving him standing there. Was she occupying herself with religion as a game? Something that would pass the time for her? In her day she had been a clever woman, well able to take a leading part in the little organisations that the village had. Now she had retreated into her superficial speculations about the more extravagant aspects of religion. We set up cages all around us, he thought. If only he could be open again to the world, and bleed. Perhaps he should go and see Morag Bheag: she would be worried about her son who was now in Ireland, and who at one time attended, loutish and ignorant, his own Sunday class.

A seagull alighted beside him on a fence and stared around it with stony eye. Where do you come from, asked the minister silently. All you are concerned with is what food you will get, nothing else. Why were you created, what is your place in the blindingly intricate system? Its breast was snowy white and it had a little red spot on its beak. In the winter months he and his wife would put out bread for the small birds but it was always the seagulls who arrived first, recoiling from the throwing hand, advancing later with large beatings of wings. And how did they always know the bread was there as if they smelt it from vast distances? At the very moment that he and his wife threw the bread they seemed to be there, big yellow-clawed angels of the day, with blank eyes, machines dedicated to greed.

He turned away and made his way home. Curious how that ache for other places had faded now, that desire for voyaging had gone. He was not like those Christians who took staffs in hand and set off into the blue among the bristly autumn, towards the burning city. No, he was here, and here he would remain. But nevertheless he felt unfinished and fragmentary in this marvellous weather whose blueness and calm seemed to last forever. Day after day with no rain,
day after day so cloudless and so blue, day after day with the fruit ripening, the roses bowed on their stems, each day a repetition of the previous one, like an image in a mirror.

If only I could feel, he thought, if only I could feel the fruit burst with its sweetness, leaving the husk and the skin behind. But let there be that rich gushing first.

7

D
AVID
C
OLLINS BROODED
angrily about the two Germans whom he had met in the Post Office. Oh, they couldn't fool him. He knew German when he heard it. He knew that it wasn't French or Dutch that was being spoken. They had the blond hair of Germans too, you could tell them miles away. These damned tourists coming to the village every year, he ought to send them back to where they came from. They looked so innocent too, so young, but he knew what they were really like. Buying stamps in his country, in his village! He had a good mind to make a scene, but in fact he didn't. Perhaps he was getting too old. Maybe if there was a meeting of the village committee he would bring it up. It was far more important than sewage or lavatories. Why, if they didn't watch out they would have Germans swarming all over the villages like midges in July.

He stood in front of the mirror, with his helmet on. Those had been the days when one knew one's enemy and could fight him face to face, not like nowadays when you didn't know your friend or your foe, like for instance the bureaucrats who had tried to adjust his pension after his wife died. As he stood there in front of the mirror it seemed to him that the helmet made him appear young again, that it gave a sterner cast to his face, till it became like those faces that one saw on coins. As the austere helmeted face gazed back at him from the depths of the glass he thought about those children who ran about outside the house at night and tapped on the windows. It wasn't just mischief, there was evil loose in the world.

The sun was rising and they were all making straight at it. He could hear the big hollow blows of the guns, he could see the earth, continually ploughed beneath him. The sun sparkled from his bayonet and from the bayonets of those to the left and right of him, but he had no time to look who was there, who was still advancing and who was down on the earth. At that very moment his dog would be running across a field, its tongue lolling. On mornings like these he would send him after the sheep, he would be walking about his little empire with his shepherd's crook. But now he was rushing headlong into the blinding sun with a gun and a bayonet in his hand. And they were among the German trenches and there were faces in front of him, some with moustaches, some without. They were all rising like grey rats out of the trenches, the ground was spawning them.

They were … He put the helmet back on the sideboard as he heard a knock at the door and there was Elizabeth with his meal. Meals on wheels, they called that. In the old days he wouldn't have accepted charity but now with inflation biting into his pension like a rat there was no reason to be ashamed.

Elizabeth was casting a strange look at the helmet while she poured out some soup for him.

“I've just been feeding Mary Macarthur,” she said. “She didn't like the fish. Only Catholics take fish, she told me. You can take your fish away and bring me meat.” And she laughed so that her slightly yellow teeth showed.

“Mary Macarthur?” said David as if returning with difficulty to the reality of the village.

“That's right. Up the glen. Of course you know Mary.”

“Of course I know Mary Macarthur,” said David violently. “Of course I know her. Wasn't I in school with her? She was in the same class as me.” He didn't want to tell Elizabeth that his memory sometimes failed him, that often he had to cast about for a name as if he were fishing in a swirling river.

“Of course I know Mary Macarthur. How is she keeping?”

“Oh, she's not too bad. It's mostly arthritis she's got, though she calls it neuritis. I've got the neuritis, she keeps saying.”

“Is that right now?” said David complacently, thinking that this young girl did not know about the old. Also she was pale and thin and spectacled and he liked someone with a big hefty body.

“I told her the fish would help her arthritis but she wouldn't take it. It's for the Catholics, my dear, she kept saying. But she gets up and looks after the house. She has a lot of hens, too.”

Mary Macarthur: he tried to visualise her. But of course it was Kate's mother, who had been married to Andrew Lang. What was he thinking about? He must have been thinking of the other Macarthur.

Elizabeth was still looking at the helmet and he said, “I took it out to give it an airing.”

He finished his soup and began on the fish. How good and rich it was, though his teeth weren't as good as they had once been. He should take a lot of fish to keep him healthy, he would show them yet, he would outlast them all.

“Annie is of course a vegetarian,” said Elizabeth. “She won't eat anything but carrots and honey and stuff like that.”

How young she was, probably as young as his own grandchild in Australia whom he had never seen, though they were always sending him photographs of her and her parents at Christmas. In his day Christmas Cards were Christmas Cards and had holy verses on them and pictures of angels and fires and coaches and frost, but now people sent you photographs of themselves. Anyway, their Christmas was in midsummer which was ridiculous.

“In the old days,” he said, “my wife would take me out my food to the moor.”

“Just like Joseph bringing food to the brethren,” said Elizabeth brightly. What was she talking about? What had that to do with anything?

“And I would sit and eat it and the sheep would be grazing and my dog would be at my side.”

“Is that right?” said Elizabeth. “They don't have many shepherds now.”

“No, they don't have much of anything now.”

Those sweets that melted like rainbows in one's mouth, they were gone too.

He smacked his lips and said, “That was very good.”

Eat, chew, survive, get all the vitamins you can. Outlast them all. Survive, survive. “Did you see the Germans in the Post Office today?” he said.

“No, I wasn't in the Post Office.” She gazed at him oddly.

“Well, I can tell you there were Germans there all right. There were two of them and they had cameras.”

“Is that right now?” said Elizabeth.

“Yes,” he said, “they had fair hair. You can tell them by their fair hair. I'm sure it's that Maisie Campbell that takes them in.”

“I never heard,” said Elizabeth. “But Greta had Germans for their Bed and Breakfast last year and do you know what they did? They took all the stuff off the table—the jam, the sugar, everything—and put it all in a bag. Did you hear of anything like that?”

But he was only half listening. They shouldn't be giving rooms to those Germans. Elizabeth was the best of the villagers. Though she was young she was compassionate and they said that she gave most of her wages to Dr Barnardos. She had a good kind heart. In the winter she knitted jerseys for them. What would happen when she got herself a man? And the threat was like a shadow over the room. She and the minister's wife were his best friends in the village, and of course Murdo.

The sun was pouring in through the window and illuminating the bones of the fish left on the plate. But there were no angels to be seen anywhere. Not even Elizabeth was an angel.

She was now tidying everything away. “I'll make you a nice cup of tea,” she said, and went into the kitchen. While she ran the water, it was as if for a moment he heard his wife there, the busy ghost that had returned once or twice but only in his mind and in his bed at midnight. Why, in his youth he had beaten her up once or twice and wherever she was she might remember that and not forgive him for it. She had always been asking for jewellery. She could never pass a window without drawing his attention to a ring or bracelet. And yet she had been a good wife too and their last days had been the best and quietest.

“I can't find the sugar,” she shouted at him.

He had forgotten to buy any, he really must remember.

“It's all right, I can do without it,” he shouted. He was never going to a hospital or home, that was for sure. He had seen the ones who had gone to hospitals, they looked like prisoners of war, and just as helpless.

She came in with the tea and said, “That's the train past. Did you see it?”

“No, I didn't see it.”

Maybe she was after his house: maybe that was why she was so kind to him. He could leave her the house if he wanted to. What had his own son and daughter-in-law ever done for him? Except send him photographs of themselves.

No, that couldn't be right, she had a kind heart.

“Do you know what I'm going to do?” she said and before he could stop her she was wearing his helmet. She was parading up and down in front of the mirror trying to make him laugh. His heart almost turned over with the pity of it, the terror of it, her face looked so young and yet so stern with its steel-framed glasses. Her appalling youth frightened him: for a moment there she had looked like an angel, an angel with glasses.

“Do you like me in my helmet with my National Health glasses?” she said laughing.

And he didn't know how to answer her.