The Last Summer Read online

  THE LAST SUMMER

  IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

  This eBook edition published in 2015 by

  Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

  West Newington House

  10 Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.polygonbooks.co.uk

  Copyright © Iain Crichton Smith, 1969

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  eBook ISBN: 9780857907363

  Version 1.0

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  Epilogue

  Also Available from Polygon

  1

  HE WAS SITTING on the peat bank looking south. It was a fine day and the moor, spongy under his feet, was covered with heather bells: a breeze gently stirred his trousers. The sky above him was a blue inverted vase, unflawed, unscarred; and in the depths of it a skylark was singing deliriously. He had a book in his hand which he wasn’t reading. He was sixteen years old and it was wartime. Somewhere else guns were being fired, sailors were being drowned. Here there was no sound; no sound whatsoever except for the humming of a bee or the skylark, or the buzz of a fly. Below him, the peats were set in their black pyramids, wet, dripping and new. The peat bank itself was a shiny scar among other shiny scars on the moor. He swung his legs down over the edge of the peat bank and looked down, conscious of his body. The pages of his book fluttered in the slight breeze. He looked south.

  It was there she lived. He had never seen the house for it was in a different village from his own, about three miles away across the moor. He could walk there in the direction of the sea and look at it, the house where she stayed, the house where she woke at morning and slept at night. His thoughts about her were pure. She was a goddess, someone out of a Greek or Roman book of legends. She walked on air. She was clothed with fire, as the poets wrote. She was so far above him that he could not aspire to her. She was sixteen years old and lived in that village three miles away and he had never seen her house. But sometimes he would come out to the moor by himself and look south, to where she lived, dreaming of her. It was impossible to do other than dream about her.

  What else could he do? What chance would he ever have of doing anything else? He was a worm. He was a good scholar. He played football rather well. But he couldn’t swim and he wasn’t a fighter. He ticked off all the things he couldn’t do. He knew nothing about mechanical things: he couldn’t do algebra well, though he was good at geometry. In some things he was slow: in other things he was very quick. But the trouble was that what he was quick at, other than football, were scholarly things, like Latin or English or geometry. He hated having to climb the roof to put the felt on it. He didn’t like tarring the roof or mending fences. He was clumsy. There was no way round it. He was not suited to her. Furthermore, he was poor and he had no style. He was liable to blush, he couldn’t talk to a girl. In fact, he was useless.

  For instance, there was Ronny: he knew everything about girls. He was as much at ease with them as he was with boys, perhaps more so. He hated Ronny, envying him his grace, his sophisticated manners, his air of rich negligence. He envied him his deceptively lazy mind, his almost adult self-possession, his cleverness among people, and that subtle, dangerous quality in him which could turn almost to sadism. Why, he had even taken her to the cinema a few times. He had told everyone about it. Oh, God, imagine him with her in the cinema in the darkness. Malcolm’s mind spawned images of light and dark, chocolates and oranges, white limbs and red plush seats, coquettish glances in the night of the folk.

  Oh, God, he couldn’t bear it. In this summer, this last summer which ought to be perfect and unflawed like the sky but wasn’t and never would be again. He banged his hand down savagely on the book. These wasted years of learning, had they not left him clumsy and terrified? Staring south he thought of her, black-haired, the blood coursing vigorously under the skin of her face which had the sheen of a rare fruit, a redness which was not raw but like a fruit, delicate. Of course there were so many rednesses. The redness of blood, the redness of carrots, the redness of beetroot, the redness of plush seats. None of these was her redness. He thought of a Gaelic proverb about the highest apple on the bough, and was uncomforted again because it told of her infinite distance. She, in her schoolgirl’s uniform, with her smile, her white teeth. The swell of her, under the navy blue. The yellow belt at her waist. Her voice. The slanted look in her eyes as if she were eternally laughing, bubbling over. And looking south she was there by the sea. At this moment she was there. What was she doing now? Only to be with her would be enough. To be her dog. To look at her, to breathe in her vicinity. Not even to speak if that did not suit her.

  And if she had even asked him for a Latin book. If she had asked him to translate Cicero or Vergil for her. But she didn’t care. She wasn’t interested in scholarship. Or perhaps others were teaching, construing for her. Perhaps even in that village hundreds of miles away there was a pet tutor sweating over her Euclid and her Vergil, content to do this if nothing else for her, a slave to her Roman grace. Nor did she ever ask him to explain the theorems, and yet the class was not a large one, taught by that idiotic football-managing bald-headed Warhorse. Perhaps she hadn’t even noticed him; not really noticed him, the him below the one she saw. And yet he was in love with her and would be till he died. No matter how old he was he would remember her. She would be his desperate love. In the south. Where the breeze played over the heather bells. Where the moor was blood red.

  “I would even fight for her,” he thought. Imagine it. Suppose the Germans landed there, he would defend her with stones, with forks, with knives. If he were only given a gun he would hold the house against thousands of them in their silvery uniforms. In fact he would even fight the Japs for her. He thought of himself climbing into a plane, pulling back the joystick, waving down at her from his serious goggled face, turning south, zigzagging, determined to return to her but to die if that was necessary. He would stand on beaches—the last to leave—throwing grenades; he would stand on the last deck on the last ship, pumping shells into a hot gun; he would be tied to the stake for her while the Germans or the Japs in their fierce gutturals complimented him on his courage, dragging his guts out. But, try as he might, when he looked up into the sky he saw only Ronny in the pilot’s seat, with his negligent, devilmay-care expression. And there she was in the south, with her navy blue pinafore belted with yellow, unconcerned about Cicero.

  He picked up the book with a sigh and turned home, kicking the turf as he went along, slamming stones away from him with a vicious swearing curve, climbing the moorland, startling a lark from its nest and glancing for a moment with tender care at the warm, sunny, speckled eggs. He had never seen a plover’s egg nor an eagle’s. What would an eagle’s egg be like? Lark’s eggs were common. You found the nests near cart tracks, the eggs tanned and speckled. He remembered when he was younger running about in his shorts, taking the peats home in a wheelbarrow. How long ago that seemed! Running barefoot to school
while the headmaster waited with the whistle in his mouth and you ran like the wind and the iron bell clanged and the strawberries were growing in the garden and the teachers—all women—were waiting to welcome you into their huge arms and bosoms and the walls were bright with all the maps of the world.

  More serious now, and older, he headed home.

  2

  THERE WERE ABOUT sixty houses in the village, ringed on one side by the moor and on the other by the sea, with a river not too far distant. In winter the wind swept across the bare level, lashing at houses and fences, lifting the hens and driving them helter skelter to their deaths where the crows hovered. In winter too there was rain blurring the sea where the boats bobbed on the slate-grey water.

  Sometimes he would sit dreamily by the window watching the rain pouring down the panes and the sea’s restless leaping white horses, like hounds in at a final hunt, baying an invisible prey. In winter, the wind howled in the wide chimney, the grass swayed all yellow, uncombing itself, the ditches ran with wild water, and the blackbirds were cuffed down the sky by a terrible slapping hand. The clouds raced overhead and lightning flashed and thunder ran, one-footed in the ditch. The sheep cowered by walls in their used wool, horses shook in the cold, their fine skins streaming with rain. The roads were rutted and slippery. The bewildering snow made a manic pattern on the earth and in the air.

  In summer it was different. To wake on a summer morning was bliss. To walk among the flowers; sometimes he used to try and walk so carefully that he wouldn’t crush the daisies and the daffodils and the bluebells hiccuping up the slope. The air was full of perfume. Sometimes, taking the water home in buckets, he would lie on the earth listening to the humming of the bees, watching the red flowers growing among the potatoes. Springs of water gushed and bubbled and sparkled in clear air. There was the smell of tar from the road which was being mended. There was football to be played till late at night while the moon shone overhead, clear and bright as a ghostly football between invisible goalposts. In the hot summer days cows lashed their tails at the flies, and often he had watched them struck dumb in the heat, their eyes full of tears and flies, exhausted by the venom of summer.

  Norman would be singing his songs early in the morning like the lark, but he was away now in the Navy. Perhaps he was singing there. Sometimes Malcolm and his brother Colin would be up in the attic swinging on the beams, leafing through old books which had been there for years, or boxing and hitting each other in that obscure struggle for supremacy that went on under the semblance of play. Sometimes he hated Colin. He seemed so unaware, so careless, so brutal, living purely by the senses while he himself was a dreamer. His brother was thirteen years old, three years younger than himself. He was afraid of nothing. He would climb the highest cliffs in search of seagull’s nests. He was often out on a local boat in search of fish and arrived home with saithe for his mother, who would be waiting up for him till midnight. Nothing she said to him made the slightest difference. He obeyed none but himself. Strange how though he himself observed the rules his brother was preferred and admired more. At least he thought that this was true.

  Saturday afternoon. Where was his brother now? Perhaps fishing for trout in a brook, perhaps building a tent with Dell, perhaps hunting rats. Once a rat had leaped straight at his throat and he had killed it with a stone as it catapulated straight through the air. Malcolm made his way down to the house. From the brow of the hill he could see it clearly with the thin blue smoke rising from the chimney, blown a little by the wind. He could see the washing on the line. No one could be seen except for Tinker mending a fence, raising a hammer with slow weighty dignity. The village was being emptied of its youth as the war continued. That evening he would spend translating Vergil. His mother would want him to be working. “To get on in the world”, whatever that meant. She had worked hard bringing up the two boys ever since his father had died, so long ago that he couldn’t remember him except that there was a picture of him on the sideboard, a small dapper alert man with a very live looking moustache and thin lips.

  He kicked another stone ahead of him. He wished he could be out with the other boys, wherever they were. He never seemed to know where they were since he had left the local school and gone to the town one. Sometimes on Sundays they would be doing a little gambling, throwing pennies at sticks, but he had few pennies. His brother was still in school but would be leaving this year. He might become a fisherman. He certainly didn’t like school and Malcolm thought that he himself was despised for staying.

  The corn was growing well, the sea was calm today, the air clear and the sky blue. Why therefore was he so restless? More and more now he felt restless. Sometimes he would go away by himself for long periods into the solitude of the moor and sit there reading a book. Dreaming of ships with white sails, of countries full of tropical plants, of islands and of cities, of girls with brilliant stockings and brilliant smiles. The river sparkled along among the stones. Sometimes you could find very small trout there. His mother would be waiting in the house, cooking perhaps, making flat floury scones, preparing herring for their food, salt herring to go with the potatoes. They were poor but there was always enough food. There were always eggs from the hens, potatoes from the ground, herring from the sea, and sometimes they might get a present of fish.

  At night, the Tilley lamp, brighter than electric, stood in the middle of the oilclothed table, casting its round circle of dazzling light. His mother would be sitting on the low green painted stool, knitting, darning, sewing. Always busy. Always hoping that he would do well. And this year was his last one in school. If he was lucky he might get to university. If he got a bursary things would be even better. At night the stars sparkled above the village, immensely vivid and animated with their intense voltage, a sieve in the sky. He could stretch out his hands to them. On the moor he could hear an owl hooting or see it sitting there in moonlight like a grandmother with spectacles. How clear and cool the night was. He liked the night best of all.

  His brother and his sister were in the house. They were going to kill a cock.

  3

  THE COCK WAS inside the cage of the creel, upturned on the linoleumed floor, its beady eyes winking. Now and then it would turn its head and look down at the floor, then it would raise it and look up stonily. Its body was partly yellow, its comb red and serrated. It was quite old. When it looked down at the floor, it seemed to think that there ought to be something there which it might peck and eat.

  “Where have you been?” said his mother. “I was going to send you to the shop.”

  “What did you want?” he said, looking at the cock which had begun to withdraw into itself, staring down at the floor without moving, its head on one side as if it were thinking, as if it knew that it was going to die.

  “We need a mantle for the Tilley,” said his mother.

  His brother Colin was bending down, polishing the toes of a pair of bright black boots. He looked up and smiled suddenly, showing small white perfect teeth. His smile was always disarming.

  “I suppose,” he said, glancing at the cock, “we’d better get it over with if I’m going to the dance.”

  Malcolm looked at the cock with hatred. “If only I could kill you,” he thought. And he wanted suddenly to pull the creel away, to hold its thin neck in his hands, the throat through which it crowed in the morning to announce the dawn, and squeeze the life out of it, to watch it die in its red and yellow splendour, in its colour and flame. But then he thought of Janet and was weakened again.

  “Malcolm won’t be going to any dance,” said his mother to Colin. “He has his bursary to sit.”

  It amazed him how she knew about these things. All his life he would never speak to her about the school or exams or teachers, or bring home any gossip.

  Sometimes she would say to him: “I heard that one of your teachers collapsed today, but you never thought of telling me. I had to hear it from Mrs Mackenzie and she has no son in that school. I felt so ashamed.”

&nb
sp; He didn’t say anything this time either. Still, he knew that come evening he would be sitting there doing his Latin and his geometry.

  “Are you going to the dance then?” he said to Colin.

  “Yes, all the boys are going.” He didn’t ask Malcolm to come. He often boasted to the boys about how clever Malcolm was, though he would never say anything flattering to his face. Putting a blue handkerchief carefully in the breast pocket of his jacket that was lying on the back of a chair, he said suddenly to Malcolm, with a wicked grin:

  “Would you like to kill the cock yourself?” Malcolm didn’t answer. The cock was now crumpled into itself, huddled up like an old woman.

  “Ah, well,” said Colin, straightening slowly and walking across the green linoleum floor, his arms bare. He walked over to the creel, looking down at it for a moment. Then he knelt, squatting on his heels, looking in through the bars of the creel and poking his finger between them. The cock turned its head away.

  Malcolm said: “What do we need to kill him for anyway? Can’t we have herring?”

  His mother, who was pouring hot water into a white basin with a blue line running across the top, said:

  “You know very well that we always have meat on a Sunday.” Sunddenly Colin upended the creel. There was frantic fluttering of feathers, a swirling and flapping of wings all yellow and red, the snakelike neck thrusting this way and that in a storm of motion. Malcolm forced himself to look. Colin had seized the neck and was twisting it slowly in his hands, the veins standing out on his arms, his body rocking with the effort, his face as red as the cock’s comb. Slowly the effort eased, the eyes of the cock glazed, the neck seemed to relax, colour seemed to go out of the body and Colin was standing up.

  “There you are, mother.” There was blood on his hands, dark red blood. His mother took the cock and began to pluck the feathers, first laying it on a piece of newspaper on the floor. From where he was standing Malcolm tried to read the headline. It said: “RAF hits Germany again.”