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

stolen it away from him. They were more evil than he had ever imagined. He had looked down on them from above as if they were a tribe of busy ants engaged in a bizarre unfathomable business of their own. But all the time they had been glancing at him sideways out of their small ant’s eyes and saying to themselves with remorseless bitterness, We will get you yet: Oh we will and no mistake.
    Their spiteful little eyes were now all around him like evil stars, mocking and besieging him.
    In a short while they would be reaching the house again. He thought of it as a trap, set in a beautiful garden, with the lovely cherry tree in the centre. Linda’s eyes were closed and the taxi driver was whistling under his breath ‘Bridge Over Troubled Waters’. The road stretched before him, a tape on a tape recorder, the track he must take unless he exerted his will power. They had now passed the hotel and he would soon be at the house and God knew what bizarre scenario was waiting for him there.
    The taxi drew up at the house and they all got out of it. But then before Linda or the taxi driver knew what was happening he had run away from them and was walking purposefully towards the town. They couldn’t do anything now for there were plenty of cars passing on the road, tourists probably: and in the fields he could see people strolling. He gritted his teeth and ran on. The other two stared after him, panic-stricken, not knowing what to do. They had thought that he would enter the house quite tamely and submit to them but he knew better than that. They would now have a consultation and decide what they could do next. In this complicated chess game he had made an unorthodox move: he had taken himself off the board completely. He headed steadily for the town which was twelve miles away. But though he felt tired that didn’t bother him. He wanted to get to his own doctor who would convince him of his sanity. On the right-hand side of the road huge rhododendrons grew freely, in clouds of gaping red. There was also a shimmer of bluebells, hyacinths. This road was very familiar to him. Once he and Linda had seen a fawn, long legged and fastidious and delicate, stepping across it. And one night she had stopped to take care of an owl which had slammed into the windscreen of the car. Oh, she was kind to animals all right. She couldn’t bear to leave a dead cat or dead rabbit lying on the road for cars to squash it flat endlessly. No, she had to get out of the car to remove the carcass to the side. There were such paradoxes in her nature: how could one understand human beings at all?
    He heard the taxi drawing up behind him but continued walking. The taxi stopped and the driver leaned out of the window.
    â€œCome back home, sir. Don’t be a fool.”
    â€œCome on,” said Linda. “You’re making an exhibition of yourself.”
    â€œNo,” Ralph snapped and kept on walking.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?” said the driver. “You have a beautiful wife, a beautiful house. What more do you want?”
    â€œYou keep them then,” Ralph shouted angrily.
    The taxi driver looked angry as if at any moment he would jump out of his taxi and hit him but he wasn’t frightened. Not at all. The taxi came to a stop while the two of them consulted with each other as to what they should do next and then it raced onwards and in a short while returned. This time he kept his head down so that he wouldn’tsee the two of them. He kept on walking, one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other. Eleven miles past the bridge, the still waters, in which trees were reflected perfectly, were without motion. If only the world of human beings were like that, serenely painted, but, no, in that world there were all sorts of distortions. There were no true reflections.
    A steady stream of cars passed but no one seemed surprised to see him walking. He kept to the grass verge and felt the wind of the