Wine of course was red and so was blood. He drank none of the former and only saw the latter when he cut himself while repairing a fence or working with wood when a nail would prick his finger.
But really was he happy? That was the question. When he considered it carefully he knew that he wasn’t. He didn’t like eating alone, he didn’t like sitting in the house alone, he didn’t like having none who belonged to him, to whom he could tell his secret thoughts, for example that such and such was a mean devil and that that other one was an ungrateful rat.
He had to keep a perpetually smiling face to the world, that was his trouble. But the red door didn’t do that. It was foreign and confident. It seemed to be saying what it was, not what it thought others expected it to say. On the other hand, he didn’t like wellingtons and a fisherman’s jersey. He hated them in fact: they had no elegance.
Now Mary had elegance. Though she was a bit odd, she had elegance. It was true that the villagers didn’t understand her but that was because she read many books, her father having been a teacher. And on the other hand she made no concessions to anybody. She seemed to be saying, ‘You can take me or leave me.’ She never gossiped. She was proud and distant. She had a world of her own. She paid for everything on the nail. She was quite well off. But her world was her own, depending on none.
She was very fond of children and used to make up masks for them at Hallowe’en. As well as this she would walk by herself at night, which argued that she was romantic. And it was said that she had sudden bursts of rage which too might be the sign of a spirit without servility. One couldn’t marry a clod.
Murdo stared at the door and as he looked at it he seemed to be drawn inside it into its deep caves with all sorts of veins and passages. It was like a magic door out of the village but at the same time it pulsed with a deep red light which made it appear alive. It was all very odd and very puzzling, to think that a red door could make such a difference to house and moors and streams.
Solid and heavy he stood in front of it in his wellingtons, scratching his head. But the red door was not a mirror and he couldn’t see himself in it. Rather he was sucked into it as if it were a place of heat and colour and reality. But it was different and it was his.
It was true that the villagers when they woke would see it and perhaps make fun of it, and would advise him to repaint it. They might not even want him in the village if he insisted on having a red door. Still they could all have red doors if they wanted to. Or they could hunt him out of the village.
Hunt him out of the village? He paused for a moment, stunned by the thought. It had never occurred to him that he could leave the village, especially at his age, forty-six. But then other people had left the village and some had prospered though it was true that many had failed. As for himself, he could work hard, he had always done so. And perhaps he had never really belonged to the village. Perhaps his belonging had been like the Hallowe’en mask. If he were a true villager would he like the door so much? Other villagers would have been angry if their door had been painted red in the night, their anger reflected in the red door, but he didn’t feel at all angry, in fact he felt admiration that someone should actually have thought of this, should actually have seen the possibility of a red door, in a green and black landscape.
He felt a certain childlikeness stirring within him as if he were on Christmas day stealing barefooted over the cold red linoleum to the stocking hanging at the chimney, to see if Santa Claus had come in the night while he slept.
Having studied the door for a while and having had a long look round the village which was rousing itself to a new day, repetitive as all the previous ones, he turned into the house. He ate his breakfast and thinking carefully and joyously and having washed the dishes he set off to see Mary though in fact it was still early.
His wellingtons creaked among the sparkling frost. Its virginal new diamonds glittered around him, millions of them. Before he knocked on her door he looked at his own door from a distance. It shone bravely against the frost and the drab patches without frost or snow. There was pride and spirit about it. It had emerged out of the old and the habitual, brightly and vulnerably. It said, ‘Please let me live my own life.’ He knocked on the door.
The Button
One day the old man and the old woman stopped talking to each other. They sat for a lot of the time in the same room but they didn’t speak. She would make the breakfast and the dinner and the tea and lay them at regular times on the table and they would both sit and eat but they remained silent. Neither would pass anything to the other, but each would stretch across to get the salt or the pepper or whatever was required. At night they would go to bed and turn their backs on each other and go to sleep.
And yet in their early days they had been lovers. They had married young and gone through life together as other couples had done. They had a house of their own and in those days they would discuss what furniture they should
