In the Middle of the Wood by Iain Crichton Smith Page B

out towards a ghostly yacht in the bay, freeing himself from his estranged quarrelling parents. It seemed to him that he must create fables, tales, fantasies, to make the world real, otherwise there would only be the gift shops, the baked clayey roads, the shops in which patient Yugoslavs sat, immured in their foreign language, watching the rich strutting tourists.
    Eventually they returned to the hotel as the heat had become fierce and oppressive. They lay down on their bed side by side and after a while fell asleep.
    For a day or two this pattern continued, though sometimes the two of them would sit in their mother’s room in the afternoon, sheltering from the heat. While the other two talked, Ralph would find himself reading the Woman’s Realm , as there was no other reading matter available. He read a story about a blind woman who had been involved in a plot against her life in Greece, a plot labyrinthine and almost impenetrable: and another one set in a hospital. He read the letters’ page in which girls confided that they had fallen in love with married men, and asked what they should do about it. Others complained of boy friends and husbands having affairs. What was to happen about houses after separation? Some houses were in the husband’s name, some in the wife’s. There were so many people to whom so many horrible things happened. Some were given no housekeeping money, some wondered about their children who were on drugs or sniffing glue, some wrote in to say that their husbands were now retired and following them about the kitchen. It was a catalogue of minor tragedies. Young girls wrote in to say that they were too shy to talk to anyone; how could they improve their conversational techniques? Others worried about the spots on their faces, the shape of their noses, the size of their breasts. They cried out for the definitive remedy for fatness, thinness, ugliness, they looked for the ultimate oracle. Ralph turned over the pages casually: everywhere there was a cry for help.
    He disliked more than anything his lack of reading material. He had never been so long without books. He wanted to know what was happening in the Falklands, he wanted to know about Yugoslavia itself. Who were the people who governed it? What did they think of Britain? What sort of education system did they have? Did they have a HealthService? What did the people do with themselves, for he never saw any of them in the vicinity of the hotel which was totally devoted to tourists. Could he hear any of their stories, listen to any of their native songs or ballads? He was reduced to the meagre minimal sights of the day, watching the Germans draw out from the kerb in their large gleaming limousines.
    Once, on a day which was heavy and cloudy with lightning and thunder and rain, he saw three men dressed in long white gowns dancing about in the teeming puddles, one with a rose in his hand. Were they tourists? Yugoslavs? There was no way of knowing. They seemed to be drunk and hugely enjoying themselves. Then they got into an old car and drove away, regally waving.
    And as they sat in their mother’s room she would tell them stories of her past while resting her legs, which were wreathed with varicose veins, and swollen.
    â€œWhen I was a nurse in Edinburgh we had this strict matron. She wouldn’t allow us to meet our boy friends. But we went out just the same through the windows. One night when we were coming back to the hospital we heard her talking to this man in the garden. She had a boy friend of her own and never told us. She was dressed in her best, too.
    â€œThere was a boy who was dying of TB and he wrote a poem for me. I still have it. One minute he was joking with me and the next he was dying in my arms.”
    And then, “Did you see that waiter? Linda talked to him one night but he was taken away. He never comes to our table now. They don’t want us to talk to them, that’s what it is.”
    Ralph