Docherty

by William McIlvanney

  Once settled in, the old man came to seem not so much a new presence as the acknowledgement of one that had always been there, as the figure of a madonna merely locates an already existing influence. With him ensconced every day beside the fire, the mystique of venerability had difficulty surviving the manual clumsiness, the hoasting, the simply boring repetitiousness of his talk.

  Only Conn perhaps felt something like awe, for a short time. He was fascinated by the hands filling the pipe, moving separately like misshapen crabs, the small swirl of sound that began somewhere inside, enlarged slowly, broke in a storm of coughing, the complete stillness which the old man could achieve within the motion of his chair. Also, he was the one his Grandpa liked to talk to. Secretly, Old Conn was paying for his keep by being subversive. Indoors, he talked of Ireland to his youngest grandson, trying to convey to him the sense of Connemara, which had become the landscape of his own mind – those miles of unremitting barrenness through which the rocks rise up like headstones. But outside, on the frequent walks when he took Conn ‘up the country’, he was trying to save the boy from the Protestant limbo in which he lived. He catechised him in the nature of God, spoke familiarly enough of hell to have been there, kept putting the rosary into his hands. Always before they came back to the house, Conn would be reminded of the need for secrecy, as if God were the head of a cabal.

  It would all have affected Conn more deeply if it hadn’t been for the counter-influence of his Grandpa Wilson. He too, needing to tighten his grasp on something before it loosened forever, moved closer to Conn, like a rival planet. His love of town rather than country exerted more power.

  To walk through Graithnock with Mairtin was to be ambushed at every corner by the past. From the fluted pillar inset in the wall of the Old High Kirk ‘To the memory of Lord Soulis AD 1444’ (of whose murder Mairtin was able to give an eye-witness account) to the house of Alexander Smith in Douglas Street (‘a genius wi’ words’ of whom Mairtin hadn’t read a line) the town came alive with ghosts. The industrial school was still to him what it had been – ‘The Place’, Graithnock House, residence of the last Earl of Graithnock, executed for his part in the ‘45 Rebellion after having unsuccessfully demanded that the citizens of Graithnock supply him with their arms. Mairtin liked to repeat how the local people had informed the Earl that if they gave him their guns it would be ‘with the muzzle till him’. Graithnock, Mairtin said with pride, had always been loyal to the crown.

  From Maritin Conn learned of ‘The Soor Mulk Rebellion’ of almost a hundred years ago, when housewives drenched baillies and farmers in milk at the Cross, rather than pay the increased prices the farmers were demanding. He discovered who Tam Samson was. He found out that thirty people had once been crushed to death in the old Laigh Kirk during a panic when the congregation thought the roof was falling in. He memorised, like a mystic message of grandeur, the words: ‘Here lies John Nisbet who was taken by Major Balfour’s Party and suffered at Graithnock 14 April 1683 for adhering to the word of God and our Covenant – Revn. XII and II. Renewed by public subscription ad 1823.’ ‘Who was taken . . . and suffered’ – the words haunted him.

  The best story of all was the one Mairtin told about the Foregate. When he was a boy, he said, there had been a two-storeyed thatched house there. When they were knocking it down, one of the workmen had found a leather pouch concealed under the thatch. As he lifted it out, it burst, and in seconds people were scrambling in the street for the hoard of silver coins that had scattered. The coins belonged to the reigns of Charles I and Charles II. How had they come there? ‘Only the grave kens,’ Mairtin would say.

  With that ability to conjure exotic past out of mundane present Grandpa Docherty couldn’t compete. Conn found himself joining with Angus in a conspiracy of mild laughter at the old man. They liked him but got into the habit of not taking him seriously. Angus was inclined to bait him a little, encouraging him to talk about Ireland. He would have done so more often if Mick hadn’t been aware of Angus’s tendency and stifled it whenever he saw it asserting itself.

  Mick was almost certainly the one affected most by his grandfather’s arrival. It clarified his understanding of himself and his family. Mick was naturally an accepter of the way things were, not spinelessly, or mindlessly, but just because he believed that was the only way you could make anything of them. He had a capacity for refining the raw shape his life had inherited into a personal pattern, and enjoying it, so that the drab necessity for work, for example, heightened his leisure-time rather than stultified it. Consequently, the discontent of someone like his father occasionally irked him and frequently puzzled him. Through countless long arguments with Tam, which Mick had incidentally enjoyed, he had tried to formulate what he meant, to explain why he didn’t share his father’s fervour for change. He had never quite succeeded.

  But in his grandfather, when he came to live with them, he saw his argument incarnate. Mick admired the old man very much. In everything from his arthritis to his love of Ireland, Mick found the same quality – the ability to accept necessity and make it a part of himself. It didn’t matter if you didn’t believe that Catholicism was true. Mick himself had stopped going to church because it had come to mean nothing to him. But the point was that it was true for Old Conn, as everything about him was. There was nothing that for Mick could imaginably have been different. He felt his grandfather had become what he inevitably had to be. Accordingly, he lived amicably with himself, the pain in his hands, his poverty, his exile. By accepting his troubles, he was able to extract daily from their bitterness, as by an age-old, secret process, the dram of comfort that made his living worthwhile.

  His insight into Old Conn gave Mick a perspective on the rest of his family, he felt. He saw his grandfather as having inherited from his early rural life the talent for enduring as simply as a tree, twisted by the winds, perhaps, stunted even, but still there. What his father lacked, having been born in an industrial town, was that simple acceptance. To Mick, Old Conn had a patriarchal authority, offered a way of life to them, not through his words, which were often almost nonsensical, but by being as he was.

  But it was an authority to which Mick’s young brothers seemed impervious. There was a brief spell not long after Old Conn came to live with them when their disrespect threatened to become open. It took one of Tam’s cauterising expressions of anger to cure them.

  Old Conn had been talking about Skibbereen. He did that a lot. It held some obscure but fundamental significance for him that made him invoke it every so often. When someone mentioned present hardships, Old Conn had a habit of saying, ‘Aye. How are things in Skib then?’ as if that somehow put everything else in perspective. He referred much to the mass grave there and sometimes would allow you to persuade him to sing ‘Revenge for Skibbereen’, lack of breath erasing half-lines, garbling words. The effect was of listening to someone far away in a shifting wind.

  On this night he talked himself towards a peroration: ‘The blight, ye see. But the blight wisny jist in the grund. It wis in the folk as weel. The nabarry. Their leavin’s wid’ve saved lives. But naw. Fur want of a tattie they died.’

  Angus and Conn could hardly stop laughing. Apart from the natural tendency of solemnity to induce hysteria in them, there was the fact that Angus had been doing a secret imitation of the old man’s expressions and gestures. Conn, trying to swallow his amusement, noticed Angus coming nearer and nearer to the state that his mother called ‘Gettin’ above yerself. As if to demonstrate the accuracy of Conn’s observation, Angus spoke.

  ‘It wid hiv tae’ve been an awfu’ big tattie. Wid it no’, Grandpa?’

  Angus brayed once with laughter and Conn irresistibly echoed him.

  ‘Hey!’ Their father crumpled the paper he was trying to read. ‘D’ye ken who ye’re talkin’ tae?’

  He stared at them steadily. The rain falling beyond the window behind him slicked the room in grey light. Conn felt the charge of shock that meant incontrovertibly they had crossed a bor
der, tresspassed where they shouldn’t be.

  ‘Dae ye?’ He paused, his eyes angry. ‘This is a man that kens whit he’s talkin’ aboot. He’s had times when there wis nothin’ tae eat but air. An’ he came through them. An’ if he hadny, you two widny be here. Show them yer hauns, feyther. Show them! Ye see that? Ye ken hoo they goat like that?’

  ‘Workin’ wi’ the bricks,’ Conn suggested.

  ‘Wi’ pittin’ the bite in ma mooth. An’ that means yours as weel. An’ don’t you forget it. That’s a man ye’re talkin’ tae. No’ a bloody bit o’ furniture. Ya pair o’ yelps!’

  ‘Och, feyther,’ Kathleen said. His anger was becoming ridiculously disproportionate. ‘Ye’ve said yerself ma Grandpa goes oan aboot Ireland at an awfu’ rate.’

  ‘Whit if Ah have? An’ you’re another yin. Lady Muck. Ah’ve heard ye complainin’ aboot the mess o’ the fire-end wi’ him. This is a hoose. No’ a hotel. An’ if Ah fa’ oot wi’ him aboot Ireland, well, that’s a private argument.’ He looked round them all. ‘An’ jist all of ye remember. He’s where ye come fae. An’ whaurever ye go, ye’ll have tae take ‘im wi’ ye.’

  They sat welded into a group by his words, the rain corroding their silence. Having turned a casual evening into a family manifesto, Tam smoothed out his paper and resumed staring at it. Angus watched him opaquely. Kathleen huffed. The old man rose slowly.

  ‘Well. Ah’m doon the entry-mooth fur a breath o’ air.’

  When he was gone, Conn remained hypnotised by the rocking of his empty chair. Its motion without presence gave it a quality of mysterious power. By the time it was still, it had impressed the image of itself on Conn with a force greater than words, a part of his personal heraldry.

  15

  ‘Docherty!’ Less a voice than an effulgence of sound falling across their suddenly stricken silence. Outwith its paralysing glare, others freeze. Conn stands up slowly, carefully doesn’t look at anybody else, as if a glance might prove infectious. They all wait. ‘Simpson! Would you two creatures come out here.’

  They are allowed to stand on the floor for a moment, to become the relief of the others, a moral.

  ‘You’ll excuse us, Miss Carmichael. I wouldn’t want to get blood on your floor.’

  Some titters are gratefully offered, withdrawn. Silence is safest.

  ‘Certainly, Mr Pirrie.’

  They pass into the next room. Their small procession isn’t a unique sight but they gain a brief attention here too. Beyond this room, a small cloakroom area, where they stop.

  Conn almost swoons with the staleness of the place. It is a small passageway, foetid with forgotten children, a knackery for futures. He sees the drifting motes as clear as constellations. Two coats hang damp. Their quality of sadness haunts his inarticulacy. Mr Pirrie inflates, enormous in the silence, hovers like a Zeppelin.

  ‘Well, well, well. Who started it?’

  On one of the floorboards an accentuation in the grain makes a road. It runs winding, vanishes under Mr Pirrie’s boot.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. You’ll both be getting the same. What’s wrong with your face, Docherty?’

  ‘Skint ma nose, sur.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Ah fell an’ bumped ma heid in the sheuch, sur.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Ah fell an’ bumped ma heid in the sheuch, sur.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  In the pause Conn understands the nature of the choice, tremblingly, compulsively, makes it.

  ‘Ah fell an’ bumped ma heid in the sheuch, sur.’

  The blow is instant. His ear seems to enlarge, is muffed in numbness. But it’s only the dread of tears that hurts. Mr Pirrie distends on a lozenge of light which mustn’t be allowed to break. It doesn’t. Conn hasn’t cried.

  ‘That, Docherty, is impertinence. You will translate, please, into the mother-tongue.’

  The blow is a mistake, Conn knows. If he tells his father, he will come up to the school. ‘Ye’ll take whit ye get wi’ the strap an’ like it. But if onybody takes their hauns tae ye, ye’ll let me ken.’ He thinks about it. But the problem is his own. It frightens him more to imagine his father coming up.

  ‘I’m waiting, Docherty. What happened?’

  ‘I bumped my head, sir.’

  ‘Where? Where did you bump it, Docherty?’

  ‘In the gutter, sir.’

  ‘Not an inappropriate setting for you, if I may say so.’

  The words mean nothing. Only what happens counts.

  ‘I’m disappointed in you, Docherty. You’ll soon be coming up to the big school. And I’ll be ready for you. I used to hear nice things about you. But not any more. You might’ve had the chance to go to the Academy. You still could. Do you know what that means? But what’s the point? I wouldn’t waste the time of highly qualified men. But while you’re here you’ll behave like civilised people. Brawling in the playground!’

  His voice shudders the wood around them. The words have worked, mystically invoke his anger. It possesses him. The veins in his nose suffuse. The strap snakes out from its nest under the shoulder of his jacket.

  ‘Simpson first!’ It is a ritual. He holds the strap in his right hand, drops it over his shoulder, reaches back with his left hand, flexes the leather, begins. ‘I will not. Have. Violence. In my school.’

  Four. Conn can prepare.

  ‘Docherty!’ One. Conn recites to himself: Ah bumped ma heid in the sheuch. Two. Sheuch. ‘You’re getting as bad as your brother was.’ Three. Fat man. ‘I was glad to get rid of him.’ Four. Conn’s hands drop, stiff as plaster-casts. ‘Up, Docherty, up! Two more for insolence.’ Five. Bastard. He is watching for signs of tears. Six. Big, fat bastard.

  He has become his hands. His will huddles round them, containing the radiations of their pain, refusing them the salve of tears. The two of them are led back to the room.

  Mr Pirrie says, ‘I’ve just been tickling these two’s hands. As a little warning. The next boys I catch behaving like savages won’t be able to use their hands for a week.’

  The room is dislocated by his departure, becomes for a moment no more than his absence. Patiently, Miss Carmichael shepherds their attention. Her talk moves delicately across the film of her own thoughts, a fly walking water. Her sympathy, limed by circumstances, flutters halfheartedly and subsides. No doubt Mr Pirrie knows best. He comes from a working-class home himself, he says. He isn’t afraid to admit what his father was – a pig walking upright. Troughing it at the table. Swearing. They’re all the same. Afraid to better themselves. They need the comfort of the herd. They have the place they want. They have to be taught to keep it. He blesses his mother, who married beneath herself and found that you couldn’t convert them. No wonder Livingstone left Blantyre. Africa was an easier proposition. But she at least managed to save her son. He will be forever grateful for what she has helped him to become.

  A dull sense of irony exists in Miss Carmichael’s mind without the hardness of conviction to sharpen it against. Her thoughts shift to High Street. There is a family there that she visits. From them she has heard about Conn’s father. Once he was pointed out to her in the street. The stories about him have fused in her head with the white gash of a face, the hard-heeled walk. The image has occasionally troubled the demureness of her thoughts, like an uncouth and uninvited guest at a teaparty, and has become the extension of a vague unease in her own life. A brief confrontation of pictures occurs in her mind. Mr Pirrie seated in his own house, a book in his hand, people listening, his words incontrovertible in the atmosphere of the room, the whole scene held in a self-generated luminosity, bright and delicate as a soap-bubble. Tam Docherty walking down a street. The bubble bursts.

  Briefly there comes to Miss Carmichael a swamping and frightening sense of chaos, thousands of uncontradictable and contradictory opinions, unimaginable ideas, invisible angers, millions of directions, pains, all hopelessly entangled. What is there that can possibly be done? She teaches spelling.
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  In the room there is a snuffling sound, contained, private. Alan Simpson is crying. Conn, on the brink of tears himself, is sorry but grateful. Poor Alan. He lost the fight too. Conn knows now that he won’t be crying. Alan Simpson is doing it for him.

  It was an unimportant incident and yet significant beyond itself, the hundredth sparrow alighting that snaps the twig. Within minutes, Conn was taking an almost aesthetic interest in the look of his wrists, pebbled lightly with blisters. Inside the puffiness of their pain his fingers hardened again. He flexed them. The rawness of the experience had already refined itself into separate constituents, not without their uses. The blisters weren’t unimpressive. There would be the admiration of the boys, the sympathy of the girls. He would have to enlist his mother’s help, though, in making sure that his father didn’t take it any further.

  Conn’s conscious adjustment to what had happened didn’t go much deeper than that. But more important, registering beyond the reach of his awareness, the small incident in the cloakroom was like a crucial digit affecting an immensely complicated calculation. Relating to it, realignments were already taking place in him. He was coming to understand through his own experience the attitudes Mick and Angus had expressed towards school. More and more he was beginning to envy Angus his escape and involvement in what was to Conn the real life of his family, work and the bringing in of a wage. He knew his father’s contempt for the way they had to live and his reverence for education. But against that went Conn’s sense of the irrelevance of school its denial of the worth of his father and his family, the falsity of its judgements, the rarified atmosphere of its terminology. It was quite a wordless feeling, but all the stronger for that, establishing itself in him with the force of an allergy.

  While Miss Carmichael gave him sympathetic exemption from her questions, he took a stub of pencil in his fingers. Slowly across a scuffed piece of paper a word moved clumsily. Opposite it another word was manoeuvred and settled, the way he had seen in a dictionary Miss Carmichael showed him. His hand shook as he did it. It was a painful and tremulous matter, like an ant trying to manipulate stones. He sat buried inside himself while the words spread themselves across the paper. Minutes later, he was stunned into stillness, looking at the big awkward shapes they made before him.