Free The Red Door by Iain Crichton Smith

himself. We came up the hard way, Harry,
but he doesn’t care. We’re on our own, Harry, that’s what we are. We’re on our own.’
    He looked down at her and shouted in an unreasoning frenzy as if part of him were being squeezed to death.
    ‘What are you talking about? We’ll see him again. He won’t stay in Africa forever.’
    ‘Why not, Harry?’
    There was a silence. ‘What happened today?’ she asked him. ‘I know something happened. I can tell. We’ve been too long together for me not to know.’
    So he told her about the lieutenant he’d met.
    ‘Are you sure he was a lieutenant, Harry?’
    ‘Of course he was a lieutenant. I saw the pips, didn’t I? And he invited me to the ship but I couldn’t manage. I had to come back, all because of you.’
    ‘Is that true, Harry?’
    ‘It’s as true as anything you’ve been saying about Robin,’ he shouted.
    ‘No, Harry, it’s not. What I’ve said about Robin is true. If you’d been going out to the ship, you’d have gone, only you’d have left a note, because you want
to do what’s right. Do you think I don’t know you after forty years?’
    She looked in the wastepaper basket and there, sure enough, was the note, crumpled up.
    ‘Why didn’t you go, Harry? Was it really a lieutenant? It was a rating, wasn’t it? If he had been a lieutenant, you’d have made him a commodore. It was really a rating.
Tell me, Harry.’
    So he told her, half rending himself in the process. He hadn’t realised how hard it was to tell the truth. She had to prompt him over silences and direct him away from lies.
    When he had finished, she said,
    ‘I see. It was very bad of him, wasn’t it? Just to get a beer and a whisky. It was very mean. That’s why we’ve got to realise we’re on our own, Harry. No
one’s going to fly in from Africa or from Canada. Do you see that, Harry? We were young once, and now we’re old and we’re on our own. We’ve got to muddle through somehow and
be as humble and as proud as our circumstances permit. Have you had any tea?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Drink it now, then, while it’s still warm. We’re still thinking of ourselves as boys and girls. I’m an old woman and you’re an old man, Harry. And there I am just
as bad as you, going to a Conservative fête.’
    He drank his tea. She went next door and he followed her. She took down the photographs of her son and daughter from the top of the piano and put them in a drawer. She put all the music away
into a drawer. The last one he saw was ‘Silver Threads among the Gold’.
    Then she drew him over to the window. It was getting dark, and she didn’t put the light out. Out in the bay they could see the lights of the ships, very bright, twinkling like a bracelet,
the lights of the British Navy. Not really all that many, he thought, when you came to think of it. And after all they couldn’t beat the Americans and the Russians, and these were the
countries that mattered. In the half light he could imagine Sarah as young again. His voice became tender when he spoke to her. Sensing this she went over and switched on the lights. The room was
now so bright he could see her, loved and pitiless, but he couldn’t see the lights of the ships so well. So he thought he might as well draw the curtains. So that the two of them could learn
to be alone, for that was the way it was going to be.

Survival without Error
    I don’t often think about that period in my life. After all, when one comes down to it, it was pretty wasteful.
    And, in fact, it wasn’t thought that brought it back to me: it was a smell. To be exact, the smell of after-shave lotion. I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror – as I do
every morning at about half past eight, for I am a creature of habit – and I don’t know how it was, but that small bottle of Imperial after-shave lotion – yellowish golden stuff
it is – brought it all back. Or, to be more exact, it was the scent of the lotion on my cheeks after