After a while he said, ‘I didn’t want to worry you.’
‘About what?’ said John coldly.
‘About our mother. She went a bit queer at the end. She hated Susan, you see. She would say that she was no good at the housework and that she couldn’t do any of the outside work. She accused her of smoking and drinking. She even said she was trying to poison her.’
‘And?’
‘She used to say to people that I was trying to put her out of the house. Which of course was nonsense. She said that I had plotted to get the croft, and you should have it. She liked you better, you see.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me any of this?’
‘I didn’t want to worry you. Anyway I’m not good at writing. I can dash off a few lines but I’m not used to the pen.’ For that moment again he looked slightly helpless and awkward as if he were talking about a gift that he half envied, half despised.
John remembered the letters he would get – ‘Just a scribble to let you know that we are well and here’s hoping you are the same . . . I hope you are in the pink as this leaves me.’ Clichés cut out of a half world of crumbling stone. Certainly this crisis would be beyond his ability to state in writing.
‘She was always very strong for the church. She would read bits of the Bible to annoy Susan, the bits about Ruth and so on. You know where it says, “Whither thou goest I will go . . . ” She would read a lot. Do you know it?’
‘I know it.’
John said, ‘I couldn’t come back at the time.’
‘I know that. I didn’t expect you to come back.’
As he stood there John had the same feeling he had had with Sarah, only stronger, that he didn’t know anything about people at all, that his brother, like Sarah, was wearing a mask, that by choosing to remain where he was his brother had been the stronger of the two, that the one who had gone to America and immersed himself in his time was really the weaker of the two, the less self-sufficient. He had never thought about this before, he had felt his return as a regression to a more primitive place, a more pastoral, less exciting position, lower on the scale of a huge complex ladder. Now he wasn’t so sure. Perhaps those who went away were the weaker ones, the ones who were unable to suffer the slowness of time, its inexorable yet ceremonious passing. He was shaken as by a vision: but perhaps the visions of artists and writers were merely ideas which people like his brother saw and dismissed as of no importance.
‘Are you coming in?’ said his brother, looking at him strangely.
‘Not yet. I won’t be long.’
His brother went into the house and John remained at the gate. He looked around him at the darkening evening. For a moment he expected to see his mother coming towards him out of the twilight holding a pail of warm milk in her hand. The hills in the distance were darkening. The place was quiet and heavy.
As he stood there he heard someone whistling and when he turned round saw that it was Malcolm.
‘Did you repair the bike?’ said John.
‘Yes, it wasn’t anything. It’ll be all right now. We finished that last night.’
‘And where were you today, then?’
‘Down at the shore.’
‘I see.’
They stood awkwardly in each other’s presence. Suddenly John said, ‘Why are you so interested in science and maths?’
‘It’s what I can do best,’ said Malcolm in surprise.
‘You don’t read Gaelic, do you?’
‘Oh, that’s finished,’ said Malcolm matter-of-factly.
John was wondering whether the reason Malcolm was so interested in maths and science was that he might have decided, perhaps unconsciously, that his own culture, old and deeply rotted and weakening, was inhibiting and that for that reason he preferred the apparent cleanness and economy of equations without ideology.
‘Do you want to go to America?’ he asked.
‘I should like to travel,’ said Malcolm carelessly. ‘Perhaps America. But it might be Europe somewhere.’
John was about to say something about violence till it suddenly occurred to him that this village which he had left also had its violence, its buried hatreds, its bruises which festered for years and decades.
‘I want to leave because it’s so boring here,’ said Malcolm. ‘It’s so boring I could scream sometimes.’
‘It can seem like that,’ said John. ‘I shall be leaving tomorrow but you don’t need to tell them that just now.’
He hadn’t realised that he was going to say what he did till he had actually said it.
Malcolm tried to be conventionally regretful but John sensed a relief just the same.
They hadn’t really said anything to each other.
After a while Malcolm went into the house, and he himself stood in the darkening light thinking. He knew that he would never see the place again after that night and the following morning. He summoned it up in all its images, observing, being exact. There was the house itself with its porch and the flowers in front of it. There was the road winding palely away from him past the other houses of the village. There was the thatched roofless house not far away from him. There were the fields and the fences and the barn. All these things he would take away with him, his childhood, his pain, into the shifting world of neon, the flashing broken signals of the city.
One cannot run away, he thought to himself as he walked towards the house. Or if
