A Field Full of Folk by Iain Crichton Smith Page A

radios. What an odd experience it had been, and something in her had stirred and been offended by it. There they were lying on the grass or sitting with their backs to the tombstones, some even sitting on the flat ones, drinking their lemonade while their radios played “Sailing”. After all it was life and not death that she was interested in.
    And now she was going home to the flat high above the street. It was a big spacious flat, not as well furnished as she would have liked, up six flights of stairs past the names of Italians on name-plates outside doors, the circular shaft spinning dizzily below her. If she looked through a window she could see the street with trees growing along it and the cars ranged each behind the other. And at night Terry would come from work in the restaurant where he was a waiter and on Saturday mornings they would roar on his motor bike out of the city. John had met Terry years ago when they had been on a course together in Glasgow where John had been learning about electronics before giving it up and coming back home. Terry had come now and again to see him, having himself abandoned the study of electronics as well.
    The three of them used to go out together to the local hotel for drinks and then each time Terry left she had felt an ache in her body that neither John nor the children could assuage. Worst of all she had felt it when she was listening to the radio during the course of the morning and heard the latest songs. It was for instance as if that song “Sailing” had spoken to her, as if it were inviting her to leave her well-ordered life and set off somewhere, anywhere, where there was motion and animation. She had hardly ever been out of the village except when she had been working as a hairdresser in the neighbouring town before she got married. But that hadn’t really been like leaving the village. If John had succeeded in electronics they might have moved away but she knew that his heart wasn’t really in it and by that time there were the two children and they had been unable to leave. But now she had finally left and she could hear a voice singing, at the back of her mind, “No Regrets”, a voice with a French accent and no fear of living.
    Even tonight Terry might come home with a few friends and they would put on the radio or some records, and dance. This was what life ought to be like, the unexpected, the random. Or he might take her to the restaurant where he worked and they could have their food there in the half darkness while the juke box played and the wine bottles lay aslant in their baskets and the couples talked gently to each other in the light of candles as if in a TV advertisement. He had told her that it would have taken him too long to make money in the electronics industry. Some day he mightbecome a manager or own a restaurant. After all it was only a question of making contacts, knowing the right people. Before that he had started a sweet-shop which had failed not because of him but because of inflation. Sometimes when he was lying in bed beside her and she watched the lights scissoring the ceiling he would say, “There’s so much you can do here. I’d like to have a restaurant which would serve only Scottish food, you know salmon and stuff like that. And I’d have Scottish music and girls in kilts. You could be the manageress.” Or he would say, “A bicycle shop might be the best thing to have. Soon there won’t be any oil and people will have to ride bikes.” Or he would say, “A launderama would be a good bet. Many people don’t have washing machines and they can’t air their clothes.” And she would lie beside him as he talked. The future was a live chancey thing like the smoke that snaked bluely from his cigarette. It was romantic that they should sleep naked in bed. When she had been married to John such a thing had never happened but now it seemed the most natural thing in the