A Field Full of Folk by Iain Crichton Smith Page B

and ran away.
    â€œIs is okay?” said Alisdair breathlessly. They picked the rabbit up. And stroked it. Its little body heaved.
    â€œWe’ll let it go,” said Alisdair.
    â€œDon’t be stupid,” said Hugh, “it wouldn’t live.”
    He had once seen his mother stopping the car and picking up a wounded bird and placing it in cotton wool which she had taken from an aspirin bottle. Its beak had pecked at her feebly.
    â€œThat’s right,” said Alisdair, “it wouldn’t. I’ll take it home.”
    â€œNo, I’ll take it home,” said Hugh. “My father knows about rabbits. He’s a butcher.”
    Alisdair whose father was dead didn’t say anything, but he too felt injustice. After all it was he who had saved the rabbit. But they didn’t have a hutch at home and probably Hugh had. They had everything because they were well off.
    The tiny rabbit panted in Hugh’s hand.
    â€œIf you like,” said Alisdair carelessly as if he didn’t wish Hugh to know that he too had been wounded and hurt.
    Hugh went on ahead with the rabbit in his hands, a hero coming home from the wars. Alisdair knew that Hugh would gain the credit for saving the rabbit and the tears pricked his eyes. In his mind’s eye he saw the calm fathomless eyes of the cat. When Miss Lamond had strapped Hugh, his father had been at the school the following day but when he himself had been strapped his mother refused to go. “You probably deserved it,” she had said. And later, “You have to learn to take your punishment.” David Collins shouted “Hello” to them as they passed. He was an old man and he had a big red nose, with hair in his nostrils and his ears.

14
    W HILE HALF LISTENING to his wife the Reverend Peter Murchison was thinking of a time when he had been travelling on the train home from Glasgow. It had been a winter’s night and he had been reading in his compartment when he suddenly looked up from his book and there, across the water, across the Clyde, he had seen the lights of the houses and the shops and the cinemas and the restaurants. Immediately there they were, columns of green and red and white towering almost solidly upside down into the water, so that the town, composed of tenements, suddenly became opulent and colourful, almost Eastern in its dazzle of pillars. Then as he still stared in astonishment he saw a curving snakelike yellow apparition of lights and then—darkness.
    â€œAnd Mrs Scott objected,” said his wife, “on the grounds that it might be a wet day. I told her that if it was we could always make use of the sandwiches and lemonade. In any case we always used to have a Sunday School picnic every year, I said, and we had to take that risk. But I don’t think it’s much of a risk this year.”
    â€œOf course not, dear,” said the minister.
    â€œShe then asked who was going to pay for it and I said that some of the women had agreed to make the sandwiches and as for the lemonade we could maybe hold a small Sale of Work to raise the money. It wouldn’t need much organising.”
    â€œI see,” said the minister.
    â€œOf course if she had thought of the idea herself … I mean having the old people as well,” said his wife, “she would have been all for it. But she’s a good worker and I’ll have to convince her that she did think of it herself.”
    â€œThat’s a good idea.”
    Opposite him on top of the bookcase he saw the Spanish doll which his wife had bought some months before. It stood on thin legs, dressed in a pink frock and flaring pink skirt with a pink flower in its long dark hair which streamed over the shoulders. He imagined it on top of a grave in a cemetery.
    There had been Mrs Sinclair the old widow who had lived by herself and refused to let anyone into her house. Eventually she had no lighting and no heating, her corridor was full of