In the Middle of the Wood by Iain Crichton Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

spooned the last of the fish on to the plate, and then turned away. One thing, he thought, there had been no Service Charge or Vat on the Last Supper. He smiled to himself: there was no point in telling Linda his joke for she would consider it blasphemy. Odd how religious she was in her own way, far more religious than him.
    â€œLook,” he said, “let’s have peace between us. If you leave me alone I’ll not write anything about you. I swear I won’t.”
    â€œWhat do you mean, leave you alone?”
    â€œWhat I said.”
    Linda sighed heavily and put her fish on one side. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
    So she wasn’t taking his offer of peace. Well then, let the sequel be on her own head. The room was swaying in front of him, the floor was rising and falling as if it was a high sea. The waiter was still standing at the far end of the cave staring at him. White coat, white coat …
    And what had happened to the door? He couldn’t see it. He searched around for it but it seemed to him that he was locked in and that Linda was laughing at him. Her face enlarged itself as in a fairground mirror.
    â€œI think we should go upstairs,” she said.
    She placed her shawl across her shoulders and he followed her. There was a door after all; it seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. The lounge to his right was vaster than the dining-room and there was a TV set playing. The faces elongated and shortened and for a terrible moment he saw his own face on the screen and his own hand gesturing, pale and ghostly against a background of Renaissance reds.
    â€œListen,” he said to Linda, but she had already gone ahead of him and was climbing the stairs.
    He staggered after her. She seemed to be floating ahead of him and then she was fumbling at the door with her key. He decided not to go into the room, but turned away abruptly. He walked back along the corridor and came to the stair and descended. He passed door after door which he did not recognize and he knew that he was in hell. He spiralled downwards but he wasn’t finding an entrance into the foyer at all. At the third turning of the second stair. … There were no windows anywhere and he couldn’t see out and the stairs descended forever, perhaps to a boiler room. He knelt down on the stair and wept and then began to climb slowly again. There was no way out of the hotel. He was locked in and perhaps at this moment she was phoning to her two friends. Somehow or another she had manoeuvred him to this vain journey by reading his mind.
    He ascended the stair unsteadily and found the corridor again. He walked past a number of doors, though the numbers on them seemed to have changed, and knocked on the door of his own bedroom.
    â€œLet me in,” he shouted urgently.
    She opened the door and asked, “Where have you been?”
    â€œNowhere,” he said. “I went down the stairs.”
    â€œWhat for?”
    â€œNo reason. I wanted to get out.”
    She hadn’t been phoning after all: or perhaps she had been doing so while he was descending the stair into hell. She always looked so innocent. He locked the door, thinking despairingly that these two men might have skeleton keys.
    â€œI think you should go to sleep,” she said. “You look tired.”
    â€œNo,” he replied. “I must stay awake. But I will lie down.”
    â€œAnd take your clothes off,” she said.
    â€œAll right,” he said. “What did you do with the receipt for my case?”
    â€œYou’ve got it. You put it in your wallet.”
    He took out his wallet and searched for it. Sure enough there it was. He put his wallet under the pillow for safe keeping. He didn’t want her to rise in the middle of the night and take out the case with his manuscripts and perhaps throw it into the Clyde.
    The receipt was the most important thing in the universe for him at that moment.