Docherty

by William McIlvanney

  ‘Huh.’ Kathleen went through to the boys’ room, which was accepted as being hers in the early evening.

  ‘Ye’ll excuse me if Ah go oan wi’ this ironin’, Jack.’

  ‘Aye, surely. Ah’ve jist left ma ain mither daein’ that. Ah thocht fur a meenit Ah hidny left the hoose.’

  It was a good beginning, implied simultaneously that his mother was a good housewife and that he felt at home with them. Jenny was encouraged.

  ‘Ye’re never done, richt enough. Yer mither’ll no be lost for somethin’ tae dae. How mony in your faimly?’

  ‘Six. Fower boays, two lassies.’

  ‘An’ you the auldest?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘An’ you’ll be whit?’

  ‘Twinty come ma birthday.’

  ‘Aye? Ah thocht ye were aulder.’ (Jack understood, ‘Ye’ll no’ be in ony hurry tae get mairrit.’) ‘Kathleen tells me that ye’re in the Skinwork. D’ye like it?’

  ‘It’s a’ richt. As long as ye can avoid the ticks.’

  ‘Ah thocht the ticks wid dee when the animals were slaughtered.’

  ‘They’re dour, the ticks. They hing oan. They’re jist like arrows wi’ bodies oan them. They stick themselves intae yer skin an’ ye canny mudge them. Ye canny scrape them aff.’

  Conn, tempted to go outside when they had been staring at him, was glad he had waited. He watched Jack, ‘een an’ mooth’, as his mother called it.

  ‘Whit happens then?’ he asked.

  ‘Ye light a fag,’ Jack said.

  He halted, enjoying the bafflement on the boy’s face. Conn was trying to focus on the connection. All he could make out was a blurred picture of stoical manhood. When the ticks got a man, embedded themselves in him in their thousands, he knew it was hopeless to pluck feebly at them. They were there to stay. What could a man do but light a cigarette, and smile?

  ‘Look. Ah’ll show ye.’ Jack took the excuse to light a Woodbine. The tick’s in ma haun’, richt?’ He held out his hand, palm down, tapping the back of it. Conn nodded sympathetically. ‘Ah haud the tip o’ the fag against its bum. An’ it wriggles oot... Ye knock it aff an’ tramp oan it. The heat draws them oot, ye see.’

  Conn filed away the information to pass on to his friends, having become an authority on ticks.

  The wages are guid enough?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘Guid enough. Ah can see ma mither richt. An’ then save some. Ye get no’ a bad wage. An’ as mony ticks as ye can cairry hame wi’ ye.’

  It was a work joke. Not having heard it, Jenny laughed. Conn’s expression was extravagant praise. Jack thawed out completely. He had arrived in the room.

  ‘Whit’s yer mither tae her ain name, Jack? Wid she be . . .’

  In the next room Kathleen flinched. She knew her mother was moving on to one of her favourite subjects. Jenny carried in her head incredibly complicated interconnections of local families. She was relentlessly accurate about who was so-and-so’s auldest boy, younger brother, hauf-cousin, and who he was married on to. Jack was about to be interviewed by the Keeper of the Records.

  Kathleen started to get ready. Up till now, she had been sitting on one of the beds, willing the conversation to come right. She had followed its course like a game of chance, smiling to herself when Jack indicated the similarity between their mothers, grimacing when he used the word ‘bum’. When she turned her attention to the freshly cleaned and ironed skirt and blouse on the bed, it meant she was satisfied that Jack had won her mother’s approval. The rest was for side-stakes, though she still listened.

  Checking the collar of her blouse in the mirror that sat on top of the small dressing-table, she admitted to herself the often remarked resemblance to her Granny Docherty – the same bone-structure, the same eyes that were habitually set in an attitude of startled listening. Granny still contrived to look mildly surprised about life, as if she hadn’t quite got used to the whole thing, though not for much longer. Kathleen felt guilty about all the times she had resented being compared to her grandmother, now that her grandmother was dying. She dwelt on their likeness now as a penance. For the first time, some understanding of that resentment was granted to her, like absolution.

  It hadn’t been anything personal to her grandmother at all. Old as she was, there was still enough left in her face to take colour from and make credible the descriptions of her past appearance that Tam and others liked to indulge in. Any comparison with their reminiscences was not unflattering. What had irked her, Kathleen saw, was that such comparisons were merely symptoms of a more serious complaint, one that affected her intermittently, so that there had been times when she came down with alienation from her family like an illness.

  Sometimes the closeness of her family had almost stifled her. Even her face wasn’t to be her own. They were so much involved in one another that, like grotesque Siamese sextuplets, the pain of one reverberated through all the others. She had for a time enjoyed the packed atmosphere of that small room through the wall, where so much had always seemed to be happening, where so many people carved their convictions into the air, where there was so much laughter, anger, argument and just plain talk that she had believed on occasions that her eyes must be deceiving her, and it had to be as big as a hall to be containing all this. But later, as she grew towards herself and her sexuality taught her separateness, she had felt more and more the need to deny the stridency of their demands for identification with them, the certainty of their assumption that she was just one of the family. Her desire to obey her individuality had put her at odds with them. In her family, you weren’t just a member. You had to enlist.

  Her father stood at the heart of her discontent. Whereas Jenny at the final level was the family, she still allowed within its amplitude great freedom and flexibility. There was about her something enduring, enfolding, and ultimately unshockable. You felt that whatever you did, no matter how terrible, she was the one you could tell it to. She might not understand, but she would accept it as a part of you. Her love was a gift, a necessity, yet still a form of freedom for you, and indefinitely extensive, it seemed, like air.

  But Tam’s proximity was somewhat more overwhelming. There was a fierceness about his affection, a relentlessness about his commitment to you. In his eyes you acquired an importance that you couldn’t always live with. His love wasn’t like Jenny’s, uncompromised, a gently suffused warmth in which it was comfortable to move about. His was fuelled by odd, apparently disconnected fragments from other parts of his life, his rage at the man-made predestination that loomed over them, his contempt for the acceptance of it in others, his dread that they would none of them have the chance to be what they might have been. All the refuse of his experience was gathered into and consumed by the irrational belief in the worth of people which was as intense as a flame in him. In the middle of that belief, as both benefactors and victims, were his family. More than once Kathleen had been obliged to withdraw from the blast-furnace glare of his concern for all of them.

  She had come to find it a burden. She had sometimes thought that if he had only stayed in the Church he would have been happier. He didn’t merely live his life. He had to live it and justify the living of it simultaneously, instead of leaving that to the Church, as she was content to do. Things were neither so bad nor important as he felt them to be. Occasionally, she used amusedly to imagine him descended from an ancient line of dethroned royalty, say Irish kings. It was ridiculous, but staying in that cramped house, labouring every week in the pits, living a pot of soup away from hunger, he was still the proudest man she had ever seen. She had noticed the difference between him and Jack’s father, between him and the men she worked with at the mill.

  ‘Ye’re no’ ony better than onybody else, and naebody else is better than you,’ he used to say. She had heard other people say that too. But he meant it differently. With them it tended to be a passive article of faith, recourse of the resigned. With him it was a battle-cry, a plea for the clearing of a space, for getting rid
of false barriers and obstacles, and then they would see what happened. He seemed to believe that if you broke down the encrusted assumptions of society, each would achieve his own incalculable value.

  Between her and such outrageous intensity had come Jack, and Kathleen understood with joy, her dilemma was resolved. What she was doing now, smoothing down her skirt, fixing her hair for the third time, was a vindication of a faith which she had long nurtured and which was now being openly acknowledged by the presence of her boy-friend in the house. Sexual awareness had come on her like a secret formula for transforming the quality of her life. Before she met Jack, it had already removed her from the immediate sphere of influence of her father, had convinced her that his passionate harangues about the state of things were just a masculine attribute which didn’t have any significance beyond itself, like hair on the chest. Her relationship with Jack had completed her liberation.

  Her attitude now had the benignly patronising quality of the young in love. Tam, emotional revolutionary, would go on beating his life against walls that would never break. Kathleen, with the simplicity of someone in a fairy tale, had fallen in love, and the walls collapsed. The love of Jack and herself was the force which had transmuted her life into something marvellous.

  Almost ready now to go through to him, she felt gratitude as well as love, because it was through him that within herself she had made peace again with her family. By finding her own identity, she was able to give them back theirs, and saw them in a clearer perspective. Having now a choice, she could afford them the full run of their qualities, because they didn’t encroach on her as they had done.

  Hearing her father coming into the house, laughing about Wullie Manson’s horse being ‘nearly human – like a pit manager’ and then saying hullo to Jack, she went through herself, hugging the thought that Jack and she had already decided to get married fairly soon. It wouldn’t be long before they told their parents.

  She had to wait while Jack and her father talked. It was an easy free-wheeling conversation, but behind its casualness something quite formal was discreetly happening, a mutual assessment. Through anecdote and opinion, Kathleen remained obliquely the subject of what they said: Jack coming to terms with the background she would bring with her like a dowry, Tam judging the kind of future she might have with Jack. They seemed to like each other.

  Kathleen noticed happily that her father was being particularly nice. She understood his effusiveness. Gratefully, she realised that he wasn’t the kind of father who was critical of his daughter’s choice because he believed she deserved somebody very special. He simply believed that whoever was her choice must be very special. His wild sense of her value infused her with a sudden, deep love for him, the more intense for being valedictory. Looking at him enthroned in his chair, offering Jack his attention, his eyes an amnesty from criticism, she was taking her leave of him. With innocent arrogance, she took it for granted that the supporting role in her life to which she was assigning him was a true measurement of him. He would go on being kind and angry and discontented and concerned, and nothing much would change with him.

  12

  When Kathleen and Jack went out, Tam winked at Jenny and said, That’s a’ richt then, intit?’

  ‘He seems a nice boay,’ Jenny said.

  ‘He wid hiv tae be.’

  Tam stood at the window, craning after them until they went through the opening to the park. He turned to Conn.

  ‘Hoo’s the wound, captain?’

  ‘It’s no sair noo, feyther. Where’s oor Angus?’

  ‘Still doon there. Wullie’s still showin’ him the ferrets.’

  ‘Can Ah go?’

  ‘It’s nearly yer bedtime,’ said Jenny.

  ‘Let ‘im go, Jen. He’s goat tae get ower it. Ye canny hiv ‘im bein’ feart fae ferrets. Oan ye go.’

  Conn was away before his mother should lodge any more objections.

  ‘Ten meenits then,’ she shouted to him in flight. ‘An’ bring Angus back wi’ ye.’

  Having finished her ironing, Jenny started to put the clothes away. Tam sat down again and lit a dout. It was unusually still with only the two of them in the house, a momentary insight into the future. She knew the thought his silence held but would let him wait his own time to unwrap it. In the meantime:

  ‘Mick didny say where he wis goin’ the nicht.’

  Her voice was faintly edged with annoyance.

  ‘Did ye ask him?’

  ‘Ah did. “Over the hills and far away,” he says.’

  Tam laughed.

  ‘Jist preuchin’ aboot. Lukkin’ fur some place tae pit his energy.’

  ‘He should’ve said.’

  ‘Jen. He’s no’ a boay. Ye canny keep them in shoart troosers a’ their days.’

  ‘He’s no Methuselah either. Though times he seems tae think he kens as much.’

  She sat down for a minute.

  That Jack’s a sensible boay, Ah think.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Ah hope they’re baith sensible enough tae wait a while yet.’

  ‘Aye. They’re auld enough tae ken ye canny leeve oan kisses.’

  His mood hobbled discussion. There was much more to be said and she knew that soon, tonight in bed or tomorrow evening by the fire, they would exchange reactions at length, and establish their common response to the situation and its immediate implications. But not now. He threw the stub of his cigarette in the fire. She realised his question before he put it.

  ‘Hoo is she the day then?’

  ‘Much the same. Maybe a wee bit lower. It’s no’ long noo.’

  ‘Ah’d best go roon.’

  ‘Aye. She’ll luk fur ye.’

  He sat on. She appreciated his reluctance. It wasn’t just the pain of looking at his mother die. It was that salted by his surroundings, aggravated by its happening in the complex of disappointment and rejection which his family had become to him. Lizzie, his eldest sister, would be there. It was her turn tonight. She was a strong Catholic, to whom lapsing was just a flabby self-indulgence. She had never forgiven Tam for hurting his parents. Jenny she managed to tolerate as someone who had been born benighted, though Lizzie did believe that she should never have married the man if she wasn’t prepared to worship with him. And there would be his father, accusing with silence.

  His mother herself had never remonstrated with him about leaving the faith. Unlike her husband and two daughters, her religious conviction was for her just the way she had learned of getting the world to talk sense. There were bound to be other ways, just as there would be other languages. She was Catholic because she needed to be, as she needed clothes for winter. But Tam’s desertion hadn’t diminished him a centimetre in her eyes. When told about the shocking things he had said about the Church, she would say to Lizzie or Mary, the youngest of them, ‘A man is mair than his words.’ She was quite often inclined to follow this up by describing Jenny as ‘the best wee wife in the toon’ with the assurance of someone announcing the result of a poll.

  Jenny, going to the house every day lately and quite a few evenings, felt bad enough about being an intruder on everyone except old Sarah Docherty herself. It was almost unbearable for Tam. He saw families as little fortresses of loyalty and sanity and mutual concern, set defiantly in a landscape of legalised looting and social injustice. Yet here was his father untouchably distant from him, his sisters strangers, his brothers-in-law having little to say to him, and among the ruins of their relationships his mother dying, her eyes enlarging on their half-shut faces, her death demeaned by the politics of their pointless disagreements.

  He stared into the fire and said, ‘Aye, then. Ah’ll go roon.’

  Old Conn and Sarah lived in Boyd Street. Waving to the fellows at the corner, Tam walked along Union Street. The evening was mild but clouds hung sluggishly in the air. Turning right at the end of Union Street, Tam climbed the cobbled hill to the house.

  What was happening there drew him immediately into the inevitabilit
y of itself, its gathering stillness. His mother was neither better nor worse than she had been. Only perhaps the eyes had frozen a little more, her thoughts and fears dim blurs beyond them. Lizzie’s busyness hopelessly sought purpose, a candle against a glacier. Old Conn’s fingers led him along his rosary’s braille. Tam stood at the bed, his mouth a mockery.

  ‘Hoo are ye the day then, mither?’

  She smiled and nodded. Her answer was incomprehensible, a knead of soft sounds. She smiled again, stared at him, and closed her eyes. She seemed to understand that he had come.

  He crossed to the window and looked out. Through the gaps between the houses opposite, and rising above them, he could see the infirmary. She had refused to go there. The ominous bulk of the building on its hill, overwhelming their houses, was partly an explanation of her doggedness. It looked like offices, a network of long corridors and big, strange-smelling rooms, where the initiated watched over the dispensing of fierce laws which their subjects would never understand. Appeals were made obliquely, long and complicated hassles entered into, reprieves won, a limb conceded, a sentence deferred, and some came out acquitted. Others stayed, bewildered into submission. It was as if Sarah knew that to go in there was to surrender herself, condone her dying.

  Her unwillingness to do that was typical. Arbitrariness was her element. The only shape that could be imposed on her life was a time-span. She hadn’t matured in any definable sense. She had simply grown older. Her past was a rubble of contradictions from which no coherent pattern could be salvaged. She was a Catholic who was secretly rather impressed that her son had stopped being one. She had accepted Old Conn’s passivity in the face of whatever happened without ever agreeing with it. She had been a woman who could be a careful solicitous mother for months and then be genteelly drunk for a week at a time with her friend, old Bella Duncan.

  Tam remembered some of those times, when his mother and Bella would sit at opposite sides of the fire, rocking slightly and cackling in a private, preoccupied way, like witches who had found a charm for annihilating every concern but themselves. There wouldn’t be a bite to eat in the house, and his father, coming home, would banish Bella and put Sarah to bed. They would have to try to confine her to the house till the impulse passed from her, like a temperature dropping. With false recoveries and relapses, a bout could last for days. Once, not long after he had started in the pits, Tam came in to the two of them smirking together. He changed, stood among the men at the corner for a while, and then went down to Ayr to enlist in the army. But he was kept waiting so long that his mother and Bella had arrived before he could do it. One of the men at the corner, who had been talking to him, had gone to the house and informed his mother what he was doing. Since he was cheating his age to get in, he had to come away. His mother had been very contrite. It was the last time she went seriously on the drink.