After the Dance Read online

  After the Dance

  IAIN CRICHTON SMITH was born in Glasgow in 1928 and raised by his widowed mother on the Isle of Lewis before going to Aberdeen to attend university. As a sensitive and complex poet in both English and Gaelic, he published more than twenty-five books of verse, from The Long River in 1955 to A Country for Old Men, posthumously published in 2000. In his 1986 collection, A Life, the poet looked back over his time in Lewis and Aberdeen, recalling a spell of National Service in the fifties, and then his years as an English teacher, working first in Clydebank and Dumbarton and then at Oban High School, where he taught until his retirement in 1977. Shortly afterwards he married, and lived contentedly with his wife, Donalda, in Taynuilt until his death in 1998.

  As well as a number of plays and stories in Gaelic, Iain Crichton Smith published several novels, including Consider the Lilies (1968), In the Middle of the Wood (1987) and An Honourable Death (1992). In total, he produced ten collections of stories, including The Hermit and Other Stories (1977) and Thoughts of Murdo (1993).

  Alan Warner grew up in Connel, near Oban. He is the author of seven novels including Morvern Callar (1995), winner of a Somerset Maugham Award, which was later adapted as a feature film; These Demented Lands (1997), winner of the Encore Award; The Sopranos (1998), winner of the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award; and more recently The Stars in the Bright Sky (2010) which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and The Deadman’s Pedal (2013).

  He lives in Scotland, mostly.

  After the Dance

  Selected Stories of

  Iain Crichton Smith

  Edited with an introduction by

  ALAN WARNER

  This edition first published

  in paperback in Great Britain in 2017 by

  Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

  West Newington House

  10 Newington Road

  Edinburgh EH9 1QS

  www.polygonbooks.co.uk

  ISBN: 978 0 85790 323 5

  Copyright © the estate of Iain Crichton Smith. Selection and introduction copyright © Alan Warner, 2013, 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  Typeset by Antony Gray

  Printed and bound by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  Murdo Leaves the Bank

  Mr Heine

  The Play

  The Telegram

  Murdo’s Xmas Letter

  Home

  The Red Door

  The Button

  Murdo’s Application for a Bursary

  The Mess of Pottage

  The Old Woman and the Rat

  The Crater

  The House

  A September Day

  The Painter

  In Church

  The Prophecy

  Do You Believe in Ghosts?

  A Day in the Life of . . .

  Murdo and Calvin

  After the Dance

  Mother and Son

  An American Sky

  Murdo & the Mod

  Sweets to the Sweet

  The Bridge

  The Long Happy Life of Murdina the Maid

  The Wedding

  The Hermit

  The Exiles

  The Maze

  In the Silence

  Introduction

  In the nineteen-eighties, Iain Crichton Smith and I both lived near Oban. One day I saw him approaching me up the town’s main street. It was a small town where everyone more or less knew everyone else and since we had met before, I hailed him. If memory serves, over his shoulder, Iain was carrying a black binliner of his washing for the laundrette – not the image we would always associate with the figure of ‘famous poet’ yet, familiar from his great alter-ego, Murdo, who you will read about in these stories. Iain and I chatted away about what books we were then reading, but we were soon interrupted by an elegantly arranged lady of senior years who looked askance at his binliner but nevertheless said, ‘Oh, Mr Crichton Smith. Just who I was so hoping I would run into! We were wondering if you are going to say yes to speaking a few words and maybe reading some of your wee poems at the opening of our tea afternoon and sale of work?’

  I found my lurking, teenage presence immediately unwelcome to this good lady, so I made my excuses and despite the slight look of desperation on Iain’s face, I abandoned him to the price of fame in Oban.

  Some days later I ran into Iain again, ‘down the town’ or, ‘up the street’ – depending where you had started out from. I soon asked, ‘Well. Are you going to say a few words at yon one’s tea evening?’

  Iain raised his eyebrows towards his pleasingly bald head, ‘Och, I had to say yes to her. She was ever so insistent a personality. A very insistent personality indeed. The kind of person you end up saying goodbye to through your own letter box.’

  I remember laughing out aloud at this comment and I still laugh today – over thirty long years later. It’s the kind of warmly wry human observation you would expect both from the man himself and from the author of these short stories which show such a wise understanding of people, but also an outsider’s amazement, fascination and sometimes horror with us all.

  In many ways, I believe Iain was always an outsider – perhaps writers must be? Many of these stories like, ‘A Day in the Life of . . . ‘ and ‘The Exiles’, feature lonely, isolated individuals at odds with the society and the values around them.

  Iain was born in 1928 and he grew up in the shieling of a very small village on the Isle of Lewis. Fatherless, he was raised by his mother in some poverty, along with his two brothers. Gaelic, not English was Iain’s first language. Very many of the stories here, like ‘The Telegram’, ‘Mother and Son’, ‘In the Silence’, and ‘The Painter’, evoke this rural background and his fascination with the taut dynamics of close-knit communities. Many stories, like ‘Home’, and ‘An American Sky’, also show an ambiguous attitude towards concepts of hearth and home – or to the illusion of community. ‘The Wedding’ is an interesting weighing up of cultural difference and change. Yet ‘The Long Happy Life of Murdina the Maid’ is a gloriously scandalous satire of Gaelic culture and rural small–mindedness which would still outrage devotees of the strict religious creeds on Lewis. Many of the iconoclastic Murdo stories also tease at the shibboleths of the larger Scottish Gaelic world.

  In the nineteen-sixties, Iain had become known as a very fine poet, mostly through poems written in his second language, though he also wrote many important ones in Gaelic. In 1968 his first and most famous novel in English, Consider the Lilies, had been published. It enjoys – at least in the Highlands – the status of a classic, exploring the cruel historical realities of the Clearances from the point of view of a vulnerable, stubborn but admirable old woman. As a Gael, educated at Aberdeen University during the years of the second world war, Iain was formed between these two changing cultures, neither of which he was ever able to fully embrace; that is of a Gaelic, rural world in a small, religious, traditional community and that of an English-speaking, modern intellectual in a technologising society. While he cared passionately about Gaelic culture and language, he did not sentimentalise that culture. He was never prepared to pretend the islands were some sort of Eden which could be contrasted to the turmoil and horrors of the twentieth century. As a high school English teacher who taught war poetry, we can see in these stories his fascination with the two world war
s, which took so many young men from the islands.

  I have included several of his hilarious Murdo stories as I believe they are among the finest things he ever wrote. With the creation of Murdo, Iain was able to reconcile in fiction, the serious intellectual side of his character – which loved ideas and modern literature – with his natural and huge sense of humour. This results in a disarming salvo of send-up, scorning any lofty attitudes. Murdo emerges as one of the most unpredictable and certainly one of the most welcome characters in recent Scottish writing. Murdo should have his own Facebook page!

  Like all interesting writers, Iain made joy, and wonder and fascination for us out of his own inner turmoil. I hope you enjoy all these stories as much as I did re-reading them.

  ALAN WARNER

  Edinburgh. July 2013

  Murdo Leaves the Bank

  ‘I want to see you in my office,’ said Mr Maxwell the bank manager, to Murdo. When Murdo entered, Mr Maxwell, with his hands clasped behind his back, was gazing out at the yachts in the bay. He turned round and said, ‘Imphm.’

  Then he continued, ‘Murdo, you are not happy here. I can see that.

  ‘The fact is, your behaviour has been odd. Leaving aside the question of the mask, and the toy gun, there have been other peculiarities. First of all, as I have often told you, your clothes are not suitable. Your kilt is not the attire most suitable for a bank. There have been complaints from other sources as well. Mrs Carruthers objected to your long tirade on the evils of capitalism and the idle rich. Major Shaw said you delivered to him a lecture on Marxism and what you were pleased to call the dialectic.

  ‘Some of your other activities have been odd as well. Why for instance did you put up a notice saying, THIS IS A BANK WHEREON THE WILD THYME BLOWS? And why, when I entrusted you with buying a watch for Mr Gray’s retirement did you buy an alarm clock?

  ‘Why did you say to Mrs Harper that it was time the two of you escaped to South America with, I quote, “the takings”: and show her what purported to be two air tickets in the name of Olivera? You told her, and I quote, “I’ll be the driver while you bring the money out to me. I have arranged everything, even to the matter of disguises.”

  ‘You also said, and I quote, “The mild breezes of the Pacific will smoothe away our sin.”

  ‘No wonder Mrs Harper left the bank and joined the staff of Woolworths. Other oddnesses of yours can be catalogued, as for instance the advertisement you designed saying, THIS IS THE BANK THAT LIKES TO SAY ‘PERHAPS’.

  ‘I have therefore decided, Murdo, that banking is not your forte, and that we have come to the parting of the ways: and this I may say has been confirmed by Head Office. I understand, however, that you are writing a book, and that you have always intended to be an author. We cannot, however, have such odd behaviour in an institution such as this. Imphm.

  ‘Also, you phoned Mrs Carruthers to tell her that her investments were in imminent danger because of a war in Ecuador but that you were quite willing to fly out for a fortnight to act as her agent. When she asked you who you were, you said, “Mr Maxwell, and his ilk.”

  ‘You also suggested that an eye should be kept on Mr Gray as, in your opinion, he was going blind, but he was too proud to tell the bank owing to his sense of loyalty and to his fear that he might lose his job, as he was supporting three grandchildren. Such a man deserved more than money, you said, he required respect, even veneration.

  ‘You have in fact been a disruptive influence on this office, with your various-coloured suits, your balloons, and your random bursting into song.

  ‘Have you anything to say for yourself?’

  ‘It is true,’ said Murdo, after a long pause, ‘that I have been writing a book, which I shall continue after I have suffered your brutal action of dismissal. It will be about the work of a clerk in a bank, and how he fought for Blake’s grain of sand against watches and umbrellas. Banks, in my opinion, should be havens of joy and pulsing realities. That is why I have introduced fictions, balloons, masks, toy guns, and songs.

  ‘You yourself, if I may say so, have become to my sorrow little better than an automaton. I do not advert to your sex life, and to your obsession with yachts, but I do advert to the gravestone of your countenance, to your strangled “Imphm”, and to your waistcoat. Was this, I ask myself, what you always wanted to be, when you were playing as a young child at sand castles? Is this the denouement of your open, childish, innocent face? Why is there no tragedy in your life, no comedy, no, even melodrama? You have hidden behind a mound of silver, behind a black dog and a Nissan Micra. Regard yourself, are you the result of your own dreams? What would Dostoevsky think of you, or Nietzsche? Are the stars meaningless to you, the common joys and sorrows? You may pretend otherwise, Mr Maxwell, but you have lost the simple clownish heart of the child. Nor indeed does Mrs Maxwell have it as far as my observations go. I leave you with this prophecy. There will come a day when the vault will fail and the banknote subside. The horses of hilarity will leap over the counter and the leopards of dishevelment will change their spots. The waves will pour over the cravat and the bank that I have labelled ‘Perhaps’ will be swallowed by the indubitable sands of fatuity. What price your dog then, your debits, and your accounts? What price your percentages in the new avalanche of persiflage? In the day when the giant will overturn the House of the Seven Birches what will you do except crumble to the dust? Nor shall there be special offers in those days, and the brochures will be silent. Additions and subtraction will fail, and divisions will not be feeling so good. Computers will collapse, and customers will cast off their chains. Cravats will cease and crevasses will no longer be concealed.’

  In a stunned silence, he rose and said, ‘That is my last word to you, Mr Maxwell, and may God protect you in his infinite mercy.’

  He pulled the door behind him and walked in a dignified manner to the street, in his impeccable red kilt and hat with the red feather in it.

  Mr Heine

  It was ten o’clock at night and Mr Bingham was talking to the mirror. He said ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ and then stopped, clearing his throat, before beginning again, ‘Headmaster and colleagues, it is now forty years since I first entered the teaching profession. – Will that do as a start, dear?’

  ‘It will do well as a start, dear,’ said his wife Lorna.

  ‘Do you think I should perhaps put in a few jokes,’ said her husband anxiously. ‘When Mr Currie retired, his speech was well received because he had a number of jokes in it. My speech will be delivered in one of the rooms of the Domestic Science Department where they will have tea and scones prepared. It will be after class hours.’

  ‘A few jokes would be acceptable,’ said his wife, ‘but I think that the general tone should be serious.’

  Mr Bingham squared his shoulders, preparing to address the mirror again, but at that moment the doorbell rang.

  ‘Who can that be at this time of night?’ he said irritably.

  ‘I don’t know, dear. Shall I answer it?’

  ‘If you would, dear.’

  His wife carefully laid down her knitting and went to the door. Mr Bingham heard a murmur of voices and after a while his wife came back into the living-room with a man of perhaps forty-five or so who had a pale rather haunted face, but who seemed eager and enthusiastic and slightly jaunty.

  ‘You won’t know me,’ he said to Mr Bingham. ‘My name is Heine. I am in advertising. I compose little jingles such as the following:

  When your dog is feeling depressed

  Give him Dalton’s. It’s the best.

  I used to be in your class in 1944–5. I heard you were retiring so I came along to offer you my felicitations.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Mr Bingham turning away from the mirror regretfully.

  ‘Isn’t that nice of Mr Heine?’ said his wife.

  ‘Won’t you sit down?’ she said and Mr Heine sat down, carefully pulling up his trouser legs so that he wouldn’t crease them.

  ‘My landlady of course has s
een you about the town,’ he said to Mr Bingham. ‘For a long time she thought you were a farmer. It shows one how frail fame is. I think it is because of your red healthy face. I told her you had been my English teacher for a year. Now I am in advertising. One of my best rhymes is:

  Dalton’s Dogfood makes your collie

  Obedient and rather jolly.

  You taught me Tennyson and Pope. I remember both rather well.’

  ‘The fact,’ said Mr Bingham, ‘that I don’t remember you says nothing against you personally. Thousands of pupils have passed through my hands. Some of them come to speak to me now and again. Isn’t that right, dear?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Bingham, ‘that happens quite regularly.’

  ‘Perhaps you could make a cup of coffee, dear,’ said Mr Bingham and when his wife rose and went into the kitchen, Mr Heine leaned forward eagerly.

  ‘I remember that you had a son,’ he said. ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘He is in educational administration,’ said Mr Bingham proudly. ‘He has done well.’

  ‘When I was in your class,’ said Mr Heine, ‘I was eleven or twelve years old. There was a group of boys who used to make fun of me. I don’t know whether I have told you but I am a Jew. One of the boys was called Colin. He was taller than me, and fair-haired.’

  ‘You are not trying to insinuate that it was my son,’ said Mr Bingham angrily. ‘His name was Colin but he would never do such a thing. He would never use physical violence against anyone.’

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Heine affably. ‘It was a long time ago, and in any case

  The past is past and for the present

  It may be equally unpleasant.

  Colin was the ringleader, and he had blue eyes. In those days I had a lisp which sometimes returns in moments of nervousness. Ah, there is Mrs Bingham with the coffee. Thank you, madam.’

  ‘Mr Heine says that when he was in school he used to be terrorised by a boy called Colin who was fair-haired,’ said Mr Bingham to his wife.