Robert was thinking of the man he had seen reading a book in a flash of light before they had gone in with their bayonets. He couldn’t see properly whether it had been a novel or a comic. Perhaps it was a German comic. Did Germans have comics? Like that green body emerging out of the slime, that fish. He began to shiver and said, ‘Give the men whisky if there is any.’ But he fell asleep before he could get any himself, seeing page after page of comics set before him, like red windows, and in one there was a greenish monster and in another a woman dancing with a fat officer. Overhead the shells still exploded, and the water bounced now and again from the craters.
‘The bloody idiot,’ said Sergeant Smith looking down at him. ‘He could have got us all killed.’ Still, it had been like Piccadilly right enough. Full of light. It hadn’t been so bad. Nothing was as bad as you feared.
The House
In Oban in Scotland there is an unfinished circular many-windowed tower which dominates the town. It was built by a local banking family in order to give employment to the townspeople at a time when there was not much work to be had. Modelled on the Colosseum, statues of the bankers were to be placed in the windows and possibly, for all one knows, illuminated at night. But in fact for some reason – it may be that there was not enough money or it may be that death intervened – the tower was never completed and remains to this day, an object of curiosity to the many tourists who come from all over the world. It is very high up and the walk there is long but pleasant. When one arrives inside the empty structure one can walk across the circular grassy floor and hear, if it is a day in spring or summer, the birds trilling close at hand, or one can perch on the sill of one of the windows and look down at the sea which glitters in the distance. It is said that a certain lady was once looking for the Colosseum in Italy and tried to find out where it was by describing it as that building which is modelled on McCaig’s Tower in Oban.
But in fact in our own village when I was growing up there was a house which had been unfinished for a long time though of course it was not so large as this tower. It was being built by the family of the Macraes over many years and no one remembers when it was begun though there are legends about it. The first Macrae, it is said, spent his entire life gathering huge boulders from wherever he could find them and hammering away at them like a sculptor to prepare them for the house. He was, it is also said, a very large strong fellow who killed a man who made mock of his dream house, not a stone of which had actually been laid. The two men, the Macrae and the other, fought, so it is said, for a whole day till eventually Macrae got his opponent on the ground and banged away at his head with a large stone which he was actually going to use in the building of the house. After that, no one made fun of his project. He died of a stroke with the hammer in his hand.
The next Macrae was a dreamier type of person. He himself didn’t attempt any of the actual building but employed some workers to do it. The trouble was that he had so many ideas and plans, some appearing in his head simultaneously, that they had to pull down what they had built almost as soon as they had built it.
Also they drank and smoked when they should have been working and continually asked for higher wages which he refused to give them. At one time he would want the house to merge into the landscape, at another he would want it to stand out from it since he was subject to varying moods of submission and domination. They say that he would walk around dressed in very bright colours shouting at his workmen in fragments of Italian which he had picked up from a guidebook. The workers naturally thought that he was mad.
One of the inhabitants of the village – actually the schoolmaster – called him Penelope partly because of his dainty effeminate air, but also because he was pulling down each morning what had been erected the night before. But this Macrae, whose name was Norman, didn’t care. He went his way, carried a whip, and liked nothing better than to order his workers about though they paid little attention to him. There seemed, otherwise, little purpose in his life. He didn’t believe in God or the Bible and said once that things existed to be changed every day in order to prevent boredom. In fact he would have nothing to do with the detailed plans which his massive father had drafted out and wouldn’t even look at them. He would sometimes say that he wasn’t necessarily his father’s son, a comment which caused some gossip in the village as in fact his father had been a man who liked women and was a bit of a Lothario.
When Norman died all that had been accomplished was that half the gable had been built. Norman had wanted to have an engraving set in the stone which would show a horse with an eagle’s head but had died before this could be started. The only reason he could give for creating such an engraving was that he liked eagles and horses, though in fact he had only seen an eagle once in his whole lifetime, and that was in a painting. The villagers didn’t like him as much as they had liked his father, though he had harmed them
