Docherty

by William McIlvanney

  Gibby was content. Thereafter he kept his antagonism for those outside High Street. He had achieved his identity among the men at the corner, hewn out his own small niche in the annals of High Street. Like the inventor of gunpowder, he had devised a devastating new mode of combat – the ability so to sate the enemy with victories that he surrenders. As Tadger admitted, nursing bruised hands, made wise by experience, ‘Ye canny beat Gibby. He’s too cute fur us. He’s goat a system, ye see. He keeps pittin’ the heid oan your hauns till yer knuckles brek.’

  Tadger himself was too involved with other thoughts that spring to be much concerned with Gibby. He had carried out his three demolition jobs with a casualness that was almost absent-minded. He had his own worries. With his family nearly large enough to be declared a separate state, he and his wife had decided there would be no more. When he let this be known, it became a temporary pastime to make jokes about it. There were hints of panic in the Vatican, commemorative medals being struck, suggestions that he had lost his faith, counter-suggestions that that wasn’t what he had lost. None of this bothered Tadger. What bothered him was the fact itself – they would have no more children. Though there were some families whose large numbers weren’t entirely unrelated to the promptings of local priests, this wasn’t the case with Tadger’s. Both he and his wife were besotted with children. They had produced fourteen not so much in definance of their circumstances as indifference to them. Eleven were still alive. Things had been made slightly less impossible by the fact that four of them were now working, while Tadger’s mother, with her small shop, was able to help. Two of the children lived with her. But a sense of economy had finally overtaken the manic creative urge of Tadger and his wife.

  The effect on Tadger was a gentle melancholy that lasted for a few weeks, rather like a one-man wake for the unborn. The familiar thought of children to come had become so central to his life that he missed it badly. For a time he made up for it by telling stories about the children he had. Every day brought a new chapter in the saga of his family. His tendency to be boring about them was accepted by the others as a natural phase.

  Not all forms of boredom were so benign. Josey Mackay, long absent from the corner, reappeared regularly to issue up-to-the-minute bulletins on the Boer War. Much older than most of the others, Josey was conscious of his irrelevance to what was going on around him. His answer was to make everything irrelevant to him. Catching a lull in the conversation, he would suddenly say, ‘Aye. D’ye ken whit they used tae dae?’ An account of the unbelievable machinations of the Boers would follow. Between such urgent messages, Josey filled up the void of other people’s conversations with whistling. Fortunately for the others, Andra Crawford, though a good deal younger than Josey, had fought in the same war. It was one of his functions to confound Josey’s impressive powers of boredom by contradiction of facts, disruption of sequence, and by generally defusing the point of what Josey was saying, although this wasn’t always easy to locate.

  While Josey marched eternally on Mafeking and Andra outmanoeuvred him with ambush, the spring, almost unnoticed by them, prolifereated into new forms around their barren and disputed tract of past. One of Wullie Manson’s ferrets, obeying some primal urge, chewed its way out of its cage and escaped. It was duly arrested at the Cross by the prodigiously fat policeman they called Fifty Waistcoats. The chairge is vagrancy,’ he told Wullie when he reclaimed it.

  Dougie McMillan talked of one day owning a fleet of motorcars that could descend on well-stocked rivers such as the Stinchar and cull salmon ‘like getherin’ buttercups’. He wouldn’t travel himself, just sit in a wall-mapped office, directing an army of poachers. Alec Simpson talked of emigrating. Sconey developed the habit of buying a bag of grapes at the Barras so that, standing at the corner, he could throw the rotten ones up at Auld Jimmy Sticket’s window. What he enjoyed was disputing with Auld Jimmy when he had shoved his bald head out of the window: ‘We’ve seen nothin’, Jimmy. Ah’m afraid yer evidence is very flimsy. Widny stand up in a court of law. In fact, yer argument widny haud wee tatties.’

  Johnnie Allison believed he was going to have a good year at the horses. Danny Mitchell cured his wife completely of her tendency to neglect her household chores. Home from the factory one day, he threw up the window and screamed, Tire! Fire! Fire!’ When a crowd was gathering below, he added at a bellow, ‘In everybody’s bloody hoose but mine.’

  Andy Dunlop’s greyhound bitch had three pups from a good strain, and Andy saw a fortune up ahead. Tam Docherty felt inexplicably that things were going to be all right, as if hope came to him in the air, like pollen. Four of the men formed themselves into a barber-shop quartet, giving corner recitals. Night after night as they stood there, songs, ambitions, small, private hopes, careful plans, were revealed, and released like pigeons into the evening air.

  It was March 1914.

  18

  ‘Trees talk’ his Grandpa had once said. And around Conn lay a countryside brimming with dangers, peopled by all races, mountained wildly, amok with monsters.

  Other people called it The Bringan’. Conn knew the name but had frequently managed to forget it. It was applied to the stretch of countryside lying north east of the town, between the Dean Estate on the one hand and the Grassyards Road on the other. Built above the Barren Red Coal Measures, Graithnock was an industrial town under siege from farmland, so that Bringan was only one of many areas of rich greenery, but to Conn it was what ‘the country’ meant.

  Introduced to him by his Grandpa Docherty, it became more than a place and assumed the importance of a relationship, establishing in him a growing and shifting complex of responses which partly measured and partly influenced his development. Seeing it first through the druidical eyes of his Grandpa, he was frightened, deliriously stirred. Trees were brooding presences, soughing incantations. Every bush hid an invisible force, frequently malevolent. Just to walk was to invade all sorts of jealously held terrains and you had to avoid taboos and observe placative rites.

  But it wasn’t long before deliberate misdemeanours without retribution undid the old man’s enchantments, and Conn was able to imbue the place with his own more enlightened and manageable mythology. There was the Crawfurdland Estate, wooded with a luxuriance unlike any other part of Bringan, in summer dark and dense with undergrowth. Anyone with any knowledge of these things could see that it was Africa.

  The familiar part of the river where the land shelved down dramatically towards it for fifty feet or so, balancing trees, was Indian country. You had to move warily there, for – Indians will be Indians – they had that habit of whooping suddenly over the crest of the hill to sweep down on you among the trees. The trick was to keep your nerve until they were on you, crouch swiftly, and, straightening unexpectedly, catapult them on down the slope where they drowned in a huddle of broken bones.

  Just beyond the main bridge on the other of the two rivers, which ran through the Bringan before converging in the Dean, the forest became fir. There, among the pine-cones, trappers moved, swaddled warmly in fur-lined jerseys, their bare feet defying the snow as they fought off the ravening wolves. Perhaps best known of all was the hill he had discovered by himself, coming on it suddenly round a bend in the river. It was uniquely ribbed, a huge semi-circle of grass like an eroded stairway. For whoever dared to climb, the rewards were great. Standing victorious on its summit, you could see the world spread out like a map twenty feet below.

  Little by little, though, the forces of practicality reclaim their own. The man absorbed in trapping the passing seasons in his field is a persistent presence. It’s all right if you can remain invisible to him so that he becomes unknowingly a part of whatever landscape you put him in. But seeing you some days, he tames the tumult, atomises all reivers with a look. The war-paint fades, the whoops of pursuit wane into sunlight, and you’re left standing small beside a hedge, looking at a man ploughing, legginged in mud, who waves and laughs with a jauntiness that is no way to treat a warrior. At least th
e horse is beautiful.

  It was a slow and patient process, by those who worked the land, lived on it, used it, this reclamation for ordinary purposes of country usurped by fantastic intruders. For Conn, some salutary moments, which measured his acceptance of reality rather than provoked it: being chased from the Crawfurdland Estate by the gamey, who, while Conn dodged among the trees, remained an invisible pursuer, enraged Zulu, but, seen from the safety of the road beyond the gate, emerged from the trees middle-aged and jacketed, and disappointingly out of breath. Falling into the river while defending a fort, so that he had to sit naked on the grass while his clothes ‘dried’ and Angus and some other boys engaged in wild battles. When he arrived home shivering in damp jersey and trousers, he was given a mustard bath by his mother, who kept muttering ‘pneumonia’. Meeting poachers, whose preoccupied movements and bulbous jackets hinted at real adventures taking place around him which made his own imaginary ones seem silly.

  Gradually, then, the Bringan became itself for him, no longer strange. Over several years, visiting it frequently, first with his Grandpa, then with others or alone, he made of it the opposite pole to his life from High Street. The Bringan was where he could escape from the arbitrary and frequently harsh identity which High Street impressed on him. It was more gentle, flexible, yielding easily to mood, and, in its timeless folds of field and aged conclaves of trees, it held places that could absorb any grief, soothe any hurt.

  Two places in particular were special for him, drew his injuries to them like foxes hunted to their earths. One was the lake in Crawfurdland, the better for being forbidden – a big stagnancy of water, mocked frequently into small waves by the wind, haunted fitfully by wild ducks. Sedge made inroads into it, lilies drowned. Trees grew thickly, making colonnades of gloom along its edge.

  The other was Moses’ Well. He didn’t know why it mattered so much to him, but its hold on him was potent as a shrine’s. How many times he slid precariously down among the trees that overhung the river to reach the niche hollowed from the rock by the water – polished and slippery like green glass, damp and vapoury, largely screened by ferns and fronds of weed. The water didn’t fall but hung, bright and still as an icicle which is melting from within, so that it seemed to shiver inwardly in a tremor of light. It was only at the base of the niche that you were aware of movement, as the water broke itself across a sycamore leaf (who kept renewing it?). The frozen length of water melted onto the leaf, delicately filming its intricately grained texture with the finest veneer until it channelled to the centre-tip, spouting into the air. That was where you drank.

  But these places themselves, like the fantasies in which he had once clothed them, became residual. The lake and the well turned into the past, as if they contained sloughed selves. As he grew, the Bringan, which he thought he had used, had really been using him, had taken over a part of him. Always inclined to be withdrawn, he had allowed himself to become so addicted to the silences of Bringan, the shelter of its trees, the languor of its fields, that set against the demands which High Street made on his growing, it caused a conflict in him.

  Holding him in a vice between them, Bringan and High Street squeezed him into puberty. In his emergence, what was left behind was what Bringan had meant to him. What stayed with him was High Street. Later, when he thought of his boyhood, it was Bringan he would remember. But, ageing towards work and responsibility within his family, his times in Bringan came more and more to seem like truancy from himself, the person he had to learn to be.

  So, as time passed, returning in many dusks from Bringan, he was burying his boyhood, not once but again and again, as if it was a corpse which had to be disposed of gradually, limb by limb. And each time High Street took him to itself more firmly, claimed him as part of itself. Scattered throughout Bringan, buried several autumns deep like the traces of distant picnics, lay hopes of an impossibility such as only a boy’s heart can encompass, preposterous ambitions, fragile dreams.

  Instinctively, he had come to know that this was who he was. The geography of his future would be discovered among these things that greeted his return: the massive women folded like sphinxes on their window-sills; the pub that burst with laughter as he passed it; the dark archway where coopers hammered – the three men returning from the day; welcomed by a dog, a bundle of barking chained to their iron heels. One day he would be one of them. And he was glad.

  BOOK II

  1

  London and Berlin were two places but one scene. On balconies appeared figures, too distant from the crowd below to be recognisable to them. In the streets surged people, too distant from the figures above to be recognisable to them. The people cheered. The gestures enlarged the cheers, the cheers enlarged the gestures. The languages were different but, since no words were audible, the sounds became identical. Straw boaters, waved aloft, pitched above the abandoned faces like the heads of lopped off flowers.

  High Street was less hysterical. As a mere distant province of the truth, it received the news already modified by its having happened, as if the distance it had travelled from the capital had left its regal livery stained a little, as if the things that lay between, the sheep rooted in their hillsides, the factory-towns preoccupied with their smoke, the rivers thin with summer and the farms, had all given it accretions of their disbelief, indifference, dismay. Like a messenger who has come so far that he forgets exactly what his message is, word of the war limped stammering into High Street, barely audible above the shouts of children, needing to repeat itself to housewives sleeved in suds, having to wait for a man to turn from his loom and listen.

  That evening men gathered at the corner in large numbers. Their muttered conversations were a council, for, faced with the alien presence of a war, they had to relate it communally to what they understood, and what they understood best was one another, the accidental interweaving of their pasts tightening under pressure to the necessity of dependence on one another. Their ignorance and bafflement made their proximity mutually unenlightening but all the more compulsive for that. At least to have your incomprehension shared was some kind of comfort. In any case, they had nowhere else to be.

  Josey Mackay was out early. He brought with him a paragraph cut out of the Daily Mail, quoting the Foreign Office announcement, and pasted – in accordance with some dark, unfathomable purpose – on to a piece of plain cardboard with his name in pencil on the back. He kept passing this out to people as they arrived. Although everyone knew the content by now, they would each read it, as if the words might contain an escape clause they had missed. But the message remained as inflexible as an epitaph: ‘Owing to the summary rejection by the German Government of the request made by His Majesty’s Government for assurances that the neutrality of Belgium would be respected, His Majesty’s Ambassador in Berlin has received his passports, and His Majesty’s Government has declared to the German Government that a state of war exists between Great Britain and Germany as from 11 p.m. on August 4.’

  ‘Of coorse, 11 p.m. London time is midnight Berlin time,’ Josey said every time he got his card back, glad that he had had the foresight not to include that piece of information in his cutting. He offered the remark always with the air of a man putting the entire complex of international affairs in a new and illuminating perspective. Then he would move along to somebody else, being somehow proprietary about the whole thing, as if the war was a newly discovered and underdeveloped area and he was establishing a stake in it. That weird fragment of officialdom bearing his name meant something to him. It was as though history had visited him personally and left its calling-card. He was to keep it and subsequently, in his seemingly endless old age, take a strange pride in showing it to people, scuffed with the thumbs of men who died in the war. He would nod with the senile complacency of a man who has managed to fingerprint fate.

  They found themselves searching the recent past for significant events, like the torn pieces of a picture they had carelessly thrown out. When they had been so busy with what
had seemed important, what really had been happening? With the masochism of nostalgia, they tried to confront the ravaged face of that summer they had veiled in a selfish innocence which, it seemed, would never again be possible. It was obvious that Britain was in the war because of Belgium. Somebody pointed out that Belgium was really just a road into France. Another voice was sure that the French were allied in some way to the Russians. But Russia would never have been in the war if it could have helped it. Hadn’t the Russians tried to keep the peace? But Germany had declared war on the Russians on 1 August. That was because of Serbia. Serbia had an alliance with Russia. The moves and counter-moves multiplied themselves into the incompatibility of a game for which they didn’t know the rules. Their attempts to understand what was going on broke down into expletive frustration. That daft bastard wi’ the gun in Serbia,’ Wullie Manson said. ‘He must be aboot as wise as Gibby Molloy.’ ‘An’ where the bloody hell is Serbia?’ somebody wanted to know. Turn left at Knockentiber,’ Tadger said.

  The sky, grazing its peaceful clouds above them, was a camouflage that fooled nobody. The mother who shooed her two children home to safety was ironic. A bird sang its idiot song in the eaves of a tenement. Tomorrow was the war. Each wondered what it was going to be like. Only Josey Mackay knew. ‘Oor cavalry’11 rin them intae the grund. The Jerry canny handle a horse the way that oor boys can. An’ then again, we’re in better trim. We’ve focht mair recently. Against the Boers. Ah’ve seen oor men dae things . . .’ Even Andra Crawfurd let him rave. It was not an unpleasant sound, like a song that reminds of an almost unimaginable past. All Andra himself would say was, ‘It’ll be like nothin’ that’s been afore.’ They understood. Their pasts lay like obsolete maps.