Docherty

by William McIlvanney

  Now it seemed right that she should die outside the walls of understanding and explanation. She had never wanted to come to terms with the factors that governed her life, to understand what lay behind her hardships. She had simply been herself from day to day. Her death was similarly going to be her own event, uncompromised by official explanations. The only intermediary she needed was a priest. The tumour secreted inside her was uniquely her own, like a birth-mark. Like everything else in her life, her family, her poverty, getting married, having children, it was just something that had happened to her, not significantly related to causes, and certainly not to effects.

  Standing at the window, Tam endured a garbled pain that became confused with the shape of the infirmary, the cruciform frame of wood in the window, the oppressive shabbiness of the room behind him, his father’s posture, Lizzie’s fussiness, the very placing of the furniture, it seemed, as if they were all somehow the cause of it, all of them together, and as if the altering of one of them would make things different. In the illumination not of thought but of experience, one word came to him with visionary suddenness: unnecessary. All of it. Not in the fact that it happened. But in the way that it happened. Like an army, the members of which never reach the battle. But die not for a common cause. Separately, and to no purpose. Choking on a fishbone. Contracting gangrene from a skelf.

  He turned and tried to talk to his father. But the priest would be coming tonight and Conn was more or less postponing himself till he should arrive. Lizzie had always seemed to be talking round the edge of some preoccupation, ever since he had ceased to call himself a Catholic. Tam crossed again to the bed and looked at his mother. She didn’t open her eyes. For the last few nights it had felt strange coming round here. She had now become more a process than a person. You simply came and looked on, at an event.

  ‘Ah’ll luk roon again the morra,’ he said.

  As he left, he heard Lizzie complaining to her father that Mary wasn’t doing her share, had missed a turn.

  At the corner he stood silently. It started to rain and they all stepped back against the building. He hoped that Kathleen and Jack had found some shelter.

  13

  ‘Auld Swig? They used tae say it wis only Communion wine he drank. The drunker he goat, the holier he goat. Ye mind that, Jessie?’

  ‘Hiv Ah no’ jist. His sister Peggy could tell ye aboot that. She gi’ed him a plate o’ soup ance. When he had the drinker’s hunger on ‘im. Twa plates he took. Smacks his foag, says, “That was guid!” “So it should be,” says she, “wi’ a pun o’ guid beef stock in it.” He went white. “God forgi’e ye, wumman. It’s Friday.” He went ootside like a whittrick an’ put his fingers doon his throat. Twa plate o’ soup doon the pen.’

  ‘He wis an awfu’ drinker.’

  ‘Young Sconey’s no’ sa bad, is he?’

  ‘Naw. He can take a dram wi’ the next man. But no’ like his feyther. He went at it like a day’s darg.’

  ‘He’s an awfu’ case, the Sconey.’

  ‘It wis him that stole the candyman’s cairt at the Taury Raws. Did a cavalry charge up the street wi’ it.’

  ‘Aye. Shoutin’, “Weans, weans, gether banes, an’ Ah’ll gi’e ye candy.”‘

  ‘Here, Andra. Whit wis it he did in the street yon nicht wi’ you?’

  They all waited, some watching Andra expectantly, because this was part of the Sconey legend that they hadn’t heard of so far.

  ‘Och, it wis jist a wee thing,’ Andra said. ‘We were walkin’ doon the main street. A summer’s evenin’, like. Ah wis quite prood o’ maself. Done up like a dish o’ fish. An’ Sconey says, “A meenit, Andra. Ah’ll catch up wi’ ye.” He nipped intae an entry. Tae tie his lace, as Ah thocht. So. He catches up richt enough. An’ we walk oan. Quite jocko. But Ah stertit to notice folk sniggerin’. As they went past. An’ lookin’ back et us. Ah looked doon tae check maself aff, ye ken? An’ here’s Sconey wi’ wan trooser-leg rolled up tae ‘is thigh. Stridin’ along, his face sober as a judge. Whit a leg, tae! As if he’d done a clean swap wi’ a spider.’

  The story gained by context: Andra Crawford sat looking, as people always said of him, as if he’d just stepped out of a bandbox. An ex-regular soldier, he still dressed with a military neatness and precision. For him, a walk was a one-man parade. Set against his punctiliousness, Sconey’s behaviour took on a satirical edge with Andra as involuntary straight man in a double-act.

  Their laughter was measured, formal as a response, hardly more than a chorus of amplified smiles. It washed gently round the coffin that sat on trestles in the centre of the room. The talk was all of local people, things they had said, what they had done, caught living in a luminous phrase or a definitive action. Sarah Docherty herself featured in some of them. But there was no attempt to talk particularly of her. When she appeared, it was because she naturally belonged in what they happened to be saying. She was, in any case, inseparably a part of all they said. Oral scriptures, the stories absorbed her into them, saving something from the corpse in the box.

  The people sat against the walls of the room. Since Sarah came originally from Cronberry, none of her brothers or sisters or their children had managed to be present. They lived too far away, but would come in for the funeral. Even without them the place was filled, with neighbours, relatives, friends of the family. All the borrowed chairs, which had been set round the room against the walls, were in use. Some of the men sat on the floor. All evening people had been coming and going, some waiting only an hour or so, others staying. Clay pipes and saucers containing Woodbines and teased tobacco had been put at various places, and people helped themselves. The conversation too was communal like a hookah.

  ‘Miss Gilfillan’s keepin’ herself by herself these days.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘She’s always done that, mind ye.’

  ‘Aye, but mair so lately.’

  ‘Pair sowl.’

  ‘Is she no’!’

  ‘Aye. But she’s got mair in her heid than the kaim’ll take oot. The same lady.’

  ‘Goad aye. D’ye hear whit she did wi’ the fellas at her windy?’

  ‘Ah heard aboot that.’

  ‘Whit wis that?’

  ‘Two or three o’ the fellas late at night.’

  ‘Ah wis wan. It was jist afore we a’ went up hame. We stoapped tae hiv a word ootside her windy. An’ we plants oor bums on the ledge, ye see. Well, we wis talkin’ quiet but it must’ve annoyed her. Afore we kent whit wis happenin’ wur bums is soakin’. She’d eased up the windy awfu’ quiet an’ poored watter richt along the windy-sill. No’ a word spoken, mark ye. But we goat the message.’

  ‘Whit did ye say?’

  ‘Whit could we say? Good nicht.’

  ‘No’ bad, richt enough.’

  ‘Oh, she’s a winker.’

  Andra Crawford rose and crossed towards the door of the house. It was open and he stepped out into the upstairs lobby of the tenement. He wanted to stretch his legs. As he walked up and down slowly, smoking, he could still hear their voices, though the words had no meaning, muffled by the wall. It was pleasant that way, like listening to a muted, improvised music. A Protestant himself, Andra preferred the atmosphere at a Catholic wake. Perhaps it was because he had been a soldier that he responded to the sense of orderliness, the way in which the Catholics present carried in their hands the means to reduce the whole thing to a prearranged pattern. At midnight, someone would kneel down and say the rosary and their words would range themselves in drilled ranks against the fear that surrounded them.

  He had come because it was Tam Docherty’s mother. He hadn’t known the old woman very well but he talked to Tam at the corner quite a lot. Old Conn he saw quite often on the streets and he had been watching him tonight, sitting like a monument among them, older than his age, quietly tholing the amputation of a large part of himself.

  Andra went down the few stairs to the middle-landing and stubbed his cigarette out on the ledge of the open wind
ow. Throwing the stub, he watched it roll down the roof of the wash-house and settle in the guttering. The aimless action, felt suddenly against the size of what was happening in the room above, was plucked from continuity, fell from him slowly, it seemed, suspended upon void, like the descent of a feather measuring a chasm. That fragment of an evening which had come to rest minutely and invisibly among the complex of roofs and buildings below him like a dust-speck on a prairie was himself. He looked above the buildings to the tress in the darkness of the park, fortuitously remembered Africa. Strange rivers. Land that never held a print. A quarrel that was nobody’s. Thoughts drifted in his head like the dust that settles after motion. None of them seemed to belong particularly to him. Except Anderson. A Galloway man lying on a kopje. His chest caved in on one side. The paybook and the photos blown to bits. He thought of Old Conn, weathered and alone, washed up on a single-end in Ayrshire, not having come here, but having been brought. Sarah dead. His own children going to work in the mill. His youngest son with a heart as weak as paper. Six medals in the house. Anderson’s face, the eyeballs hardening. His own father, remembered sitting by the fire, waiting somehow, as if his life was an anteroom to a place he never reached. Andra stood, his mind submerging slowly, drowning among currents he couldn’t overcome.

  Into his foundering thoughts came voices. His reactions were unfocused for a moment until he realised that people were speaking quietly, urgently in the lobby above him and that they couldn’t see him because of his position on the landing.

  ‘It his tae be decided noo.’

  That was Lizzie, Sarah’s daughter. Among the consenting murmurs he picked out the other daughter Mary’s voice and what he took to be both their husbands.

  ‘The auld sowl canny afford tae stey himself,’ Mary said.

  ‘But we’ve nae room.’ One of the men.

  ‘Nae mair hiv we.’ The other husband.

  There was a silence. It came to Andra as the sound of shame. He wanted to leave, felt as if he was spying on people in the lavatory. But he was unwilling to betray his presence with noise and held in spite of himself by the hypnotism of other people’s dilemmas.

  ‘Then it’ll maybe hiv tae be the Home.’

  Lizzie had been the one with the guts to say it. Andra’s mind automatically translated her euphemism – The Pair-hoose – then instantly substituted another more common euphemism of his own – The Hoose wi’ the Wan Lum.

  ‘We jist couldny possibly manage wi’ him.’ Mary’s voice was canvassing support.

  ‘Nane o’ us could.’ Lizzie’s husband it sounded like.

  ‘Whit does Tam say?’ the other man asked.

  ‘Where is oor Tam onywey?’ Mary said.

  ‘I telt him tae step oot a meenit. He’s comin’,’ Lizzie replied.

  They took refuge again in silence. Lizzie broke it.

  ‘It’ll a’ hiv tae be seen aboot richt awa.’

  The others muttered.

  ‘Whit’s this?’

  Andra recognised Tam Docherty’s voice. Lizzie was the obvious spokesman.

  ‘It’s aboot ma feyther, Tam. Whit’s tae be done wi’ him? We’ve nane o’ us got room. An’ . . .’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’

  ‘Noo listen, oor Tam

  ‘Listen? Ma mither’s no’ richt cauld an’ ye’re pittin’ the auld man up fur auction.’

  ‘Ye’ve nae richt tae be talkin’ that wey, Tam,’ Lizzie’s husband said.

  ‘Ah’ve every richt. It’s ma feyther ye’re tryin’ tae parcel up among ye.’

  ‘He’s mine tae, ye ken,’ Lizzie broke in.

  ‘By Christ, ye hide it weel.’

  ‘Tam!’ Mary was angry. ‘It’ll hiv tae be the Home.’

  ‘Naw, naw.’

  ‘But there’s nae room.’

  ‘Then we’ll make room.’

  ‘Hoo? Jist tell me hoo!’

  ‘Listen! Whit’s gaun oan here? Ye should be fighting’ tae take ‘im. No tae get rid o’ ‘im.’

  ‘Och. Talk sense, Tam,’ Lizzie said. ‘We hivny room!’

  ‘It’s a bit late fur sense. Hoo mony weans hiv you goat, Lizzie? Five. An’ Mary’s three. An’ Ah hiv fower. If sense came intae it, that wid be twelve weans less tae feed fur a stert. If ye want tae be sensible, take yer weans up tae the market oan Friday an’ sell them. Because that’s what we are. Fuckin’ cattle. Unless we can prove different. Well Ah’m different. An’ Ah’m damned if Ah’ll leeve ma life according tae their sense. Whit’s mine belongs tae me. An’ Ah’m no’ askin’ thame tae come an’ collect him like a bit o’ rubbish. He’s fur nae “Home”. D’ye ken whit it’s like in there?’

  ‘But d’ye . . .’

  ‘It’s feenished. He steys wi’ me. Whit are we talkin’ aboot this fur? Can ye no’ see? By the time somethin’ like this gets tae talk there’s nothin’ tae say.’

  They all said nothing. Andra heard somebody else come out into the lobby.

  ‘Lizzie!’ It was a woman’s voice. They’re jist goin’ tae say the rosary noo.’

  ‘Right, Agnes,’ Lizzie said.

  Andra listened, but nobody had moved.

  ‘Whit’s Jenny goin’ tae say?’ Mary asked.

  ‘Jenny’ll have him. Ah ken her.’

  Andra heard them move along the lobby back into the room. He wouldn’t be going in after them, not just because they might know he had heard them. It was mainly from a desire to keep intact the feeling that was in him. He thought he understood why it was he had always liked Tam Docherty so much. He was more than anything in his life showed him to be, and he knew it. The effect on Andra was as if he had come across some powerful animal in a cage, kept fit on its own frustration, endlessly restless, knowing instinctively that the bars are an invention, nothing final, and feeling contempt for its keepers. Andra sensed quite simply that Tam was not defeated. And if Tam wasn’t, neither was he.

  ‘Our father who art in heaven . . .’ A single voice began, continued, was joined by others: ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us . . .’

  Andra slipped quietly down the stairs and went home to his private faith.

  14

  The rocking-chair interested Conn – worn, discoloured, chipped at parts, it somehow conveyed to him a sense of other places as well as other times. Whenever he had the chance, he liked to sit in it, gathering speed, as if it were a means of transport. But he didn’t very often get the chance. It was the only piece of furniture his Grandpa Docherty had brought with him and the old man almost lived in it, like a private room. When Tam started to call it ‘the jaunting car’, Conn was puzzled, until he noticed how often his Grandpa talked about Ireland from it, as if he was still seeing it.

  The chair was the last prop for the old man’s pride. Hurt by the knowledge that it had taken the family renegade and his Protestant wife to save him from the poorhouse, he continued to convince himself, with commendable inventiveness, that as long as he had the chair he was less a non-paying lodger than a sub-tenant. Swaying gently in it, he would disappear for an hour at a time into martyred silence on which the inscription read: ‘Far be it from me to be a nuisance to anyone.’ It was precisely at such times that his presence tended to irritate. A question met with a response the tired gentleness of which was a remonstrance. Carefully judged attempts to bring him into the conversation were foiled by the deafness which afflicted him in unpredictable phases, sometimes coming and going by the minute. Tam diagnosed him as suffering from ‘politician’s lugs’.

  Jenny was best at dealing with him. Her success lay in the way she combined a readiness to accord him privileges with a refusal to grant him concessions. Miraculously, she managed to keep him supplied from the housekeeping with money for tobacco and the clay pipes he smoked it in. She didn’t buy them for him. Every other day, the money appeared on the mantelpiece, and was enough to get him the occasional glass of beer he took as well. It was never mentioned after the first evening when she told him what it was for, and
she never handed it directly to him. It might as well have come from an anonymous benefactor. At the same time, she wasn’t inclined to spend a lot of attention on his huffs. Her ability to ignore them made them happen in a void, so that he was glad to come out of them.

  When others wanted to complain about him, Jenny would remind them of his hands, as if they were justification enough for any mood. Before, Conn had always been conscious of the hugeness of his Grandpa’s hands. Now they were crippled with arthritis, making him unfit for work. Grotesquely gnarled and knobbed, they seemed only distantly related to his arms, projecting from them like pieces of monumental sculpture. ‘It’s in the breed,’ Old Conn would explain. But Tam, who in his wilder moments would have blamed the weather on the wealthy, claimed they were the result of his work with Kerr the builder. There was a certain amount of proxy justice in Tam’s statement. Kerr had worked Old Conn for a pittance all his life and, when he couldn’t work any more, had dismissed him with a handshake in which all that changed hands was sweat, not Kerr’s. When his father was dead, Tam used to say, they should have the hands mounted and presented to Kerr. Tor above his bloody mantelpiece.’