Docherty

by William McIlvanney

  ‘Yes I think so. Not long now.’ Washing his hands in the basin, he kept talking, more for Aggie Thompson’s sake than for Jenny’s, who was beyond the use of words as a palliative.

  ‘You must have a terrible comfortable womb in there, Jenny. Your wee ones are never anxious to come out. They need some coaxing. Towel. Thanks.’

  In the street outside somebody had started singing. Aggie tutted in shock: ‘Is that no’ terrible.’

  ‘I have heard better,’ Dr Allan said, taking out the pad of chloroform. ‘Well, that’s enough pain you’ve been through for triplets, Jenny.’

  His hand was a sudden coolness on her forehead. The bottom half of her face came against something soft that seemed to erase her jawline. She fought against a darkness that swooped and then billowed above her and left her falling. Out of emptiness looped one long sound like a rope at which her mind clutched till it snapped: a phrase of song.

  ‘Josey Mackay,’ Buff pronounced after a few attentive seconds, as if identifying the call of one of the rarer birds. ‘He’s late oan the road the nicht.’

  The song diminished into garbled mutterings that suggested Josey was in loud and incoherent conference with himself. It wasn’t long before he had perfected a public statement, delivered through a megaphone of drunkenness: ‘Yese don’t know whit it wis like. Yese haven’t lived. The lot o’ yese. Ah saved yer bacon. Me an’ the likes o’ me. Mafeking. Ah wis there. For King an’ Country. At Mafeking. Queen an’ Country.’

  ‘Christ, no’ again,’ Buff sighed. ‘It’s weel named the Bore War, eh?’

  The Boer War!’ Josey said defiantly. And then more obscurely, ‘Honour the sojer. Wounded in the service of his country.’

  ‘Josey’s only wound’s a self-inflicted wan. He’s dyin’ o’ drouth. An’ it’s like tae injure a few innocent bystanders. Such as his wife an’ weans. There canny be mony gills o’ his gratuity left.’

  ‘Sleep soundly in yer beds this nicht,’ Josey urged with unintentional irony. Thanks tae the sojer laddies. Asleep in foreign soil.’

  The Last Post came through Josey’s clenched hand. When it was over, they waited for further bulletins. But the silence was restored as abruptly as it had been broken.

  ‘Ah doobt they’ve goat ‘im,’ Buff said at last. ‘We’ll bury ‘im in the mornin’.’

  Outside, Josey had ceremonially unbuttoned himself and was urinating against the wall below Buff’s window. With a soldier’s instinct his eyes scouted the winter street. He was conscious of a face somewhere. Cautiously, he didn’t look back round but reconnoitred the street again in his mind, trying to locate whose face he had seen. Having decided who it was, he made his plan. Wheeling abruptly, he bellowed, ‘Present - arms!’ and presented something else. Then he shambled on up the street, buttoning his trousers.

  Miss Gilfillan’s hand jumped away from the window. The lace curtain fell between her and the street, an armour as ineffectual as her gentility. Her heart protested delicately. She almost wept with shame and anger. She withdrew still further, feeling her privacy under siege, when she saw a dark shape at the Thompson’s window.

  ‘Ah canny see ‘im,’ Buff said. ‘He must be away.’

  He crossed and sat back down at the fire.

  ‘Away tae yer bed, Buff,’ Tam said. ‘Ye’ll be needin’ yer rest.’

  ‘Naw, naw,’ Buff said. ‘Ah’d like tae see the wean.’

  Twenty-past eleven. The minute-hand seemed struggling through treacle. The fire, having forged itself to a block of embers, made the area around it molten with heat, and they sat steeping in warmth. They spoke little. Yet their silence was a traffic, more real than words. They had known each other for a long time and both were miners. Their friendship was fed from numberless tubers, small, invisible, forgotten, favours like help with shifting furniture, talk in the gloaming at the corner, laughters shared. Intensifying these was that sense of communal identity miners had, as if they were a separate species. When Buff coughed, it wasn’t just an accidental sound disturbing the quiet of the room. It was part of a way of life, a harshness bred in the pits and growing like a tumour in his breathing. He was at sixty much of what Tam, in his early thirties, would become. And as Buff was Tam’s future, so Tam was his past. The mere presence of one enlarged the other, so that now just by sitting here they were a dialogue, a way of ordering the uncertainty of this night into sense.

  At ten to twelve a sound came. It was a tear in the stillness of the night, high, cold and forlorn, seeming to pass on through the house as if it would unravel the silence of the town itself. Through the hole it made there bled a steady crying. Looking at each other across the sound, their eyes enlarged into laughter.

  ‘Somebody’s arrived,’ Buff said.

  Tam was on his way to the door when Buff stopped him.

  ‘Hing oan noo, Tam.’ Buff was on his feet himself. ‘There’s things tae be done yet. They’ll send fur ye when ye’re wanted.’

  The next few minutes had no purpose in themselves but only as an anteroom. Tam walked up and down in them, rounding the stool crossing to the window, and coming back again, making the room a landscape of his impatience. Every time he passed Buff he would nod and smile at him inanely, or wink, or say ‘Eh!’ as if Buff were several acquaintances and each had to be acknowledged, however absently. A couple of times he punched his right hand into the palm of his left and said, ‘Come oan, then,’ in a tone of brisk challenge. Once he stopped dead, muttering, ‘It must be a’ richt,’ confidentially to the floorboards, and then went on with measured steps, as if pacing out the exact dimensions of his happiness.

  ‘It’s no’ short o’ lungs, onywey,’ Buff said. ‘Is it no’ hellish, though. Ye go through a’ that bother tae get born. An’ the first thing they gi’e ye is a skelp on the erse.’

  The remark opened a valve on the tension of the whole evening, and they started to laugh. Tam’s worry ran out in a kind of controlled hysteria. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Aye.’ They nodded and smiled. The moment was a conspiracy, a compact sealed - two men agreeing that the fear of each hadn’t been noticed by the other.

  The door opened and Aggie came through.

  ‘A’ richt, then?’ Tam had already started to go past her.

  ‘Wait, wait. Fur Goad’s sake, man.’ She was flushed with the excitement of the sanctum. For a few seconds her experience worked an alchemy on her, made her incongruously almost girlish, a sixty-year-old coquette. ‘Whit dae ye think she’s been daein’? Passin’ wind? Give ‘er time. She’s no’ ready for ye yet.’

  ‘Are things a’ richt?’ He knew from her face they were, but he felt a superstitious need for the humility of such a question, as if presumption would be punished.

  ‘Everything fine, Tam. Jist fine.’ Her reassurance became licence for more teasing. ‘Nae thanks tae you. If ye saw whit your pleasure costs that lassie. We had an awfu’ time bringin’ that wee yin intae the world.’

  He couldn’t feel chastised. Everything that touched him was transmuted into pleasure, even his impatience.

  ‘Whit is it?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s a lassie. Naw. Ah mean it’s a boay’. Her excitement had left her honestly confused.

  ‘Hell, wumman!’ Buff said. ‘You’re a handy messenger. If it’s no black, it’ll be white. Clear as mud.’

  ‘Shut up, you.’ The child was everybody’s excuse for having a holiday from habit. ‘Whit would you ken aboot it? When you rolled ower an’ went tae sleep that wis your joab done, as far as you were concerned.’ It was a bitterness fermented over years and only served up now when occasion made it palatable. ‘Naw, Tam, that’s richt, son. It’s a boay.’

  ‘It’ll be an auld man before Ah get tae see it.’

  A tap at the door refuted him. It was Mrs Ritchie. Going through they formed a little jostling cavalcade behind her, Buff being the tail of it. As soon as he entered the room, Tam took it over. His pride was the master of ceremonies. He flicked his right hand at his wife in a private tic-tac of
affection and smiled at her. Freshly washed, her face was a gentle bloat of weariness on which her smile floated, fragile as a flower. Her eyes were already palling with sleep. Tam lifted the child in its sheet and, checking by the way that Aggie’s second thought was right, held him up in his hands to inventory his perfection. He had hair, black, a rebellion of separate strands, going in all directions. One temple was badged with dried blood. His face made a fist at the world. The twined remnant of umbilicus projected vulnerably. Hands, feet and prick. He had come equipped for the job.

  The room was discreetly tidy. The debris of birth had all been spirited away. Dr Allan stood with his back to the fire, genteelly jacketed again, insulating himself against the walk back home.

  Thanks, dochter,’ Tam said. ‘Aggie, there’s a drap whusky in the press there. Fur the dochter.’

  ‘No, thank you. I’ll be getting back round. And we’d best all get away and let the lassie sleep. She’s a far distance to come back from.’

  ‘We’ll no’ be long. But ye’ll hiv some. It’s Hogmanay the nicht, as faur as Ah’m concerned.’ Knowing that Tam Docherty didn’t keep drink in the house, Dr Allan decided not to offend against the special provision he had made. ‘An’ wan fur Buff as weel.’

  ‘Whit’s he done tae deserve a whusky?’ Aggie had found the whisky and two glasses Tam had laid ready.

  ‘Ah’ve suffered you fur foarty year,’ Buff said.

  ‘Well.’ The doctor raised his glass of whisky. ‘Here’s to . . . whoever he is. Have you got a name?’

  Tam hoisted the baby round to face them: ‘Cornelius Docherty to the company.’

  The name seemed to drown him, like regal robes on a midget. The doctor sipped.

  ‘That’s a terrible size of a name for such a wee fellow.’

  ‘He’ll grow tae fit it. Don’t you worry.’

  ‘Whit aboot yerself, Tam?’ Aggie asked. ‘Ye could likely dae wi’ a drap.’

  ‘Naw. Thanks, Aggie. But Ah’m drunk enough already, withoot drink.’

  ‘Ah’d oaffer ye mine, Tam,’ Buff said, looking disconsolately at what wasn’t so much a finger as a fingernail of liquor, ‘if Ah could fin’ it.’

  The doctor took another sip, and spoke meditatively, as if whisky were philosophy: ‘What are you going to make this one, then? A Hindu? You’ve got two religions in the house already.’

  ‘He’s a’ Ah’ wid want tae make ‘im as he is. A perfect wee human bein’. Whit mair could ye want? Except fur him tae get bigger. Be mair o’ the same.’

  ‘He’ll certainly have to get bigger. Before he’s ready for the pits.’

  ‘He’ll never be ready fur the pits. No’ this wan. He’ll howk wi’ his heid. Fur ideas.’ He winked at the baby. ‘Eh, Conn? Ah’m pittin his name doon fur Prime Minister. First thing in the moarnin’.’

  Their laughter ebbed to a still contentment. Mrs Ritchie sat smiling in self-satisfaction by the fire. Buff took his whisky a meniscus at a time. Aggie had put temptation back into the press. Jenny was adrift in drowsiness, her body flotsam abandoned to her weariness. One white hand was being held in Tam Docherty’s, while in his other arm he still cradled his son. Dr Allan leaned into the cushion of heat behind him. His professionalism being disarmed by tiredness, he saw the scene as a fortress of people built protectively and perhaps hopelessly round a child. He remembered how at the birth he had put the child to the bottom of the bed, a parcel of useless flesh, while he concerned himself with the mother. It was Mrs Ritchie who had skelped him into life. She would talk about that and it would swell in the telling, would become a story of a life stolen from the jaws of death. The child came trailing legends, became in the act of being born more than himself. For Tam Docherty he had existed before himself, had been a name, an idea, just waiting for flesh. He saw a tacit but deeply held sense of triumph in which all these people shared. No matter what their lives did to them, this was what they salvaged, this unsmirched new beginning. Conn lay, hubbed in their middle, raw as a fresh wound, and seemed suddenly to Dr Allan impossibly burdened with the weight of all their lives. As the doctor lifted the glass again to his mouth, it was a private toast. With it there went a solemn wish for the kind of fulfilment to this beginning that they dreamt of. It was wished for all the more intensely because he could not for a second begin to believe in it.

  Across the street Miss Gilfillan’s figure glimmered tall and pale as a candle in her window. Around her, High Street, its tenement windows gutted by shadows, closes gaping like abandoned burrows, seemed as dead as Pompeii, a desolation where people were frozen into the sordid postures of their grovelling lives. In her mind there echoed still among them the sound of the child’s cry from the lighted window. It came to her not as a birth but as a wail against dying. The ooze of hopelessness had already claimed it. None of them here had any chance. Watching a cliff of cloud slowly erode in the wind, she felt herself dwindle to a small helplessness, her heart contracting to a pebble. The comfort of the past dispersed like a vapour, leaving her shivering in a void inhabited by what people called ‘progress’. She sensed it only as a malign presence, like a legendary monster, fabulous with the future, devouring the past, a self-begetting sequence of deformities. As this year died, what successor, more hideous than itself, would it be spawning?

  BOOK I

  1

  This’ll be a guid clear nicht fur the poachin’,’ Tam said. ‘Are ye up the road the nicht, Dougie?’

  ‘Naw. It’s temptin’, mind ye.’

  ‘Up by Silverwood wid be the thing. Whaur Barney saw the ghost. Ye mind?’

  ‘That wis a nicht.’

  It was a Saturday evening in summer. Tam and Jenny Docherty were out at the entry-door and had been joined by Dougie McMillan and his wife, Mag. The women sat in the two chairs Tam had brought out. Conn, still too young to have the wider tether of Mick and Angus and Kathleen, who were over in the park, was playing quietly at their feet, already wise enough to forestall bedtime by being unobtrusive.

  ‘We’re aboot due fur the “Store Races” again,’ Jenny was saying.

  ‘Aye.’ Mag shook her head.

  It was a term coined by the corner-wags for the beginning of the Co-operative Stores quarter. Jenny lamented the chance it would give certain people to exploit what she called ‘their fella bein’s’. The method was simple enough, though not without its risks.

  Since the dividend was good, usually above two bob in the pound, some members made a habit of allowing non-members to buy goods in their name, with the proviso that the dividend from the purchase came back to them. Since such an order was on tick and didn’t have to be paid till the end of the quarter, the non-members could enjoy a brief Utopian sense of luxury without cost.

  ‘The day of reckoning,’ Mag pronounced.

  ‘Aye, an’ the cost isny jist in money,’ Jenny said.

  Living next door to the grocery, Jenny had seen the effects often enough: families ‘racing’ to the shop at the start of the quarter, descending like locusts on the counters, to take away provisions in clothes-baskets, hand-carts, bogeys. The crunch came at the end of the quarter. Furtive visits were paid to people like Suzie Temple in New Street. She was fabled to have wealth (though she lived in a house where strips of margarine box were nailed across the frames of old chairs). The eyes of certain women took on a desperate, preoccupied look. ‘Store Fever’ it was called.

  They say Suzie Temple’s no’ keepin’ too grand,’ Mag said.

  ‘Christ, yon wis some nicht.’ Dougie had been re-creating it in his memory. ‘Ye mind Ah wis sittin’ oan the bankin’ at the side o’ the road. Stringin’ the rabbits. Ah had them roon ma neck.’

  ‘Barney had been et the dancin’, had ‘e no’?’

  ‘Aye. Nae moon tae speak o’. Ah gets up an’ says, “Barney. Whit time wid it be?”‘

  Tam was starting to smile.

  ‘He stoapped died. A’ he could see wis the white o’ the scuts. Swingin’ in the daurkness. An’ he’s away.’

/>   ‘Oot o’ trap wan. Through hedges an’ fields. They tell me you coulda stertit a ferm wi’ the muck that came aff his troosers.’

  ‘Wi’ his ain brand o’ manure thrown in, nae doot.’

  They had coaxed themselves to laughter, Tam leaning on the wall for support.

  ‘Your time has come,’ Tam said. That’s whit he said the ghost said tae ‘im.’

  Along High Street other families had brought out chairs and were chatting in the mellow sunshine. A well-to-do family – husband, wife and two daughters – were strolling towards where Tam and the others stood. That was a common enough occurrence. Quite a few families from better districts made such a walk a Saturday evening event in summer. It could be very interesting.

  On this occasion the man was pointing things out to his wife as they went past. A phrase of his talk drifted towards them – ‘people actually living there’. The girls looked mostly at the ground, blinkered with apprehension. The man’s hand patted Conn’s head lightly as he passed. Looking up, Conn felt his father’s hand fit tightly, like a helmet, over his head.

  And his father’s voice cleft the calmness of his play like a lightning-flash.

  ‘Why don’t ye bring fuckin’ cookies wi’ ye? An’ then ye could throw them tae us!’

  Conn’s mother hissed, ‘Tam!’

  Immediately Conn had a feeling he would forget but would experience again. It was a completely familiar and secure happening transformed instantly into something foreign and frightening. He saw and heard but couldn’t understand.

  The man stopped without looking round.

  ‘Aye, sur,’ Tam Docherty was saying very quietly. ‘Come oan back, then.’

  ‘Please, Tam. Please,’ Jenny was whispering.

  The woman’s linked arm took her husband on. Jenny’s face was flushed.

  ‘Is somethin’ wrang, Tam?’ Dougie asked and felt himself contract in the look Tam Docherty gave him.