The Tenement (21 page)

“You watch what you're doing. Be careful,” Mrs Cameron was shouting as they lifted him up, bumping into the wall with its green scarred paint, as they climbed the stair.

“The door's open,” Mrs Cameron was saying. They made their way through the flat as if they were carrying a corpse and laid Cameron on a bed. His wife immediately dashed to the kitchen to put the kettle on. Then she came in.

“Out of my house,” she shouted to John, “hitting an old man like that and not fighting fair. Out.” She pursued them till they were on the stair again. They walked down the stone steps in silence.

“We're witnesses,” said Cooper eagerly. “It was him or you. We saw it.” He glanced worshipfully at John.

“What if she sends for the police?” said John.

“She won't send for the police,” said Trevor definitely.

“Why not?”

“I just know. She won't have anything to do with the police.”

“Bastard,” said John, “waking the baby. He's an animal. Want to come in for a cup of coffee?”

“No thanks,” said both Trevor and Cooper. “It's after eleven.”

“Okay then.” John suddenly felt the responsibility of a family. Out there he had been defending it. He and Cameron were quite like each other, thought Trevor, one defending, the other attacking. He looked around him. For the first time he saw the tenement clearly as old and crumbling. There were white patches on the ceiling upstairs. As they descended they met Mrs Miller toiling upstairs, clutching the bannister. She was obviously drunk. A rancid smell came from her fur coat.

“Good evening,” said Trevor, forgetting that it was later than that. She didn't answer. For a moment he felt an immense pity for her returning to her empty unlighted flat. They heard her trying to fit her key into the lock and then she suddenly shouted, “F . . k off the lot of you.”

Defiantly she stood there at the door, staring down at them, her face palely powdered. She was indomitable, masterful. In a strange way Trevor couldn't but admire her. “Silly old trout,” said Cooper. They continued their descent.

Trevor stopped at his own door. “Good night,” he said to John. “You had to do what you did. He won't tamper with you again. He won't live it down. He looked just like an exploded balloon. Maybe you've done some good.”

“I don't know,” said John, “You never know with people like that.”

“She should leave him,” Cooper insisted eagerly. “She should move in with Mrs Floss. I wasn't joking.”

“Good night, then,” said Trevor. He opened and shut the door behind him. He switched on the light in the lobby.

The house was large and quiet. All he could hear was the thin crying of a baby from below. He made himself some coffee and as he did so, he thought of Julia. Funny how when he had seen Cameron lying there – all that he longed for – the outstretched body seemed an anti-climax, and the battering not sufficient for the pain that he had inflicted on himself and his wife. Not at all an equal exchange for these long nights of fear, frustration and anguish. How suddenly old and fat and out of condition Cameron had looked. And what viciousness he had seen in John's revelation of aggression. He shouldn't have hit the man's head with his boot. But at the same time he had been defending his family, as Trevor had not done. When Cameron had burst in like that he himself had stood up, sublime in his drunkenness, and would have fought him, but John had forestalled him. Or he believed that he would have fought him.

He stood by the cooker in the quiet of the night. Upstairs, Mrs Cameron would be wiping her husband's head and face free of the blood. He was all she had, her child. Tomorrow perhaps, she would make friends with John and Linda again, or she wouldn't speak to them. One never knew the ways of women. How deep love, if love it was, went. She too had seen her conquering hero lying outstretched on the stone.

Trevor sipped his coffee slowly. The tenement was so old. It had seen so much: this was only one incident in its tangled history. The door was scarred and losing its paint. The bins overflowed with rubbish. The walls were flaking and so was the ceiling. It was a place for derelicts, though once it had been fresh and fine.

He prowled restlessly about the flat, from room to room. They suddenly seemed alien. It was as if Julia had been placated by that violence which had created a peace in his own mind. How curiously peaceful he felt. “Rest in peace,” he said under his breath. “You can leave this place now, both of us can leave. This will be our last shift, I promise you.”

He gazed across at the church, the graveyard, shining in the moonlight. The street was quiet as if exhausted after a death or a birth. The graves had a yellow shine. This tenement was finished. He knew that the Masons would shortly leave, if they could. They couldn't afford to have Cameron near them. There would only be left Mrs Floss, and himself, and Cooper, and Mrs Miller, and the Camerons, and he didn't want to stay.

He said goodbye to the tenement in that yellow light which irradiated the walls. The silence was now so deep that he thought he could hear as far as the end of the world. He was like a flower in a vase, peaceful.

He went into the bedroom and removed his clothes. Some of Julia's things were still lying on the sideboard. He listened carefully. There was a new noise. It was the noise of water flowing; another pipe must have burst. The roof, and now a burst pipe. He could hear the noise brimming below the kitchen window. There would be a squabble as to who would pay for its repair. The water was loud in the night.

He lay in his bed staring up at the ceiling. Lights from passing cars made transient crosses on it, scissoring each other. He heard above him the restless steps of Mrs Cameron as she tended her husband. The baby had ceased to cry. There was a time when one had to leave, when nothing more could be done. A line for a poem sprang into his mind.

In the time of the useless pity he turned away …

He must move out of the middle of the dark wood, out of the waste of rusty wheezing pipes, unfinished roofs. He deserved better than this, didn't he?

“Didn't he?” he asked Julia.

She didn't answer, but in the middle of the peace, he was not unreassured. The moon lay gently on her bottles of powder and scent, on her finally discarded things.

I will leave here, he said aloud. I will begin again. And the words did not sound strange or impossible. I will sell this old flat and buy a new one, a smaller one. Perhaps not even in this town. He was tired of sick pipes, flaking paint, a whole body disintegrating. The use of the tenement was over. It was time to leave it.

The noise of the burst pipe was a torrent in the night.

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM POLYGON
BY IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

Consider the Lilies

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXTJO

‘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

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXSGI

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

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXRKA

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

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXQQU

‘Iain Crichton Smith writes like a poet, with strong natural rhythm and precise observation' –
The Times

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

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXQIS

‘A superb novel … it must be accorded tremendous acclaim' –
Scotland on Sunday

‘Iain Crichton Smith writes like a poet, with strong natural rhythm and precise observation' –
The Times

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

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXQCE

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

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXQDI

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

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXQBU

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

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXQBK

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

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXRKU

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

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00VIGXTN0

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.