Docherty

by William McIlvanney

Uncertain who would be eligible for enlistment, wavering among conflicting impulses of fear and patriotism and duty and common sense and a feeling of exhilaration in their lives becoming strange, they achieved a temporary equilibrium in angling their reactions towards fantasy. Mock tactics were discussed. Wullie Manson inspired some revolutionary military concepts. His enormous bulk (‘Ah just don’t ken ma wecht. The last scales Ah wis oan surrendered at twinty stane an’ gave up the joab’) had long accommodated barbs without complaint. Told about the unbelievable dimensions of his rump, he would pleasantly reply, ‘Ye need a big hammer fur a nine-inch nail.’ Andra Crawford had once remarked, ‘Big Wullie doesny go fur a walk. It’s a mairch-past. If ye’re waitin’ fur him tae pass, it can take ye quarter o’ an ‘oor tae croass the road.’ Now that remembered image was generously embellished. ‘They’ll probably make Big Wullie intae a regiment,’ Tam Docherty suggested. The Manson Light Infantry’ was someone’s ironic name for it. Tadger foresaw Sir John French deploying his forces skilfully and blocking the French frontier with Wullie Manson.

  Having exhausted Big Wullie’s potential, their fancy went further afield, considered Gibby Molloy as Britain’s secret weapon, created Field-Marshal and reducing the enemy to victorious collapse. They saw Josey Mackay as the dreaded talking-machine that would secure German surrender in return for two days’ silence. But, their laughter thinning to a frenetic flippancy, they yielded more and more to the stillness that was growing in each of them as the evening ended.

  Opinions were proffered like motions for the future to consider. ‘It’ll a’ be ower in three month.’ ‘Mair like a year, Ah wid say maself.’ ‘They’re too much in the wrang no’ tae loass this war.’ Tam remarked, ‘D’ye think Asquith’s got some kinna pull wi’ Goad?’ Tadger thought, ‘They should’ve sunk the bastards when they had the chance at Kiel in June.’ ‘Ach, we’ll maybe be laughin’ aboot this six months fae noo,’ Danny Hawkins said. ‘There’s no’ much we can dae aboot it wan wey or the ither, is there, then?’ That was Dan Melville. ‘Jine up, Ah suppose.’ ‘Aye.’ ‘Aye.’ ‘That’s aboot it, richt enough.’

  The talk gave out. It had all been irrelevant anyway. But, like the nervous words of those awaiting a birth, it had served its purpose of being merely a means of letting something happen. Now, in the darkness constellated with glowing cigarettes, the war had become a fact. Like a minuscule separate state, unmappable except in the perspectives of its people, High Street had declared itself at war with Germany.

  Goodnights were muttered. A fist flicked its farewell at a shoulder. Someone lobbed an empty cigarette packet over his arm and back-heeled it into the gutter. The group of men moved in slow, disintegrating vortex, surrendering its solidity in ones and twos. Like all conversations, theirs had been a measurement of the area of their respective silences, and it was silence, now more defined, that each took home with him.

  For the war, after all, external artefact though it seemed, accomplished and immutable enormity, would be a different war for every one of them. Having no more than the natures that they stood in, they weren’t fixed in the marble pages of history and it didn’t inhabit its invented logic. They were only themselves, inhaling a troubled and incalculable air. They must compute on their pulses as it came, each as he could. Such computation would involve unknown quantities of eccentricity and trivia, the stink of a trench made more tolerable by the memory of a particular woman or conscience anaesthetised by patriotic slogans or the sufferings of Europe obliterated by the loss of a son, until the war assumed uniqueness in the experience of everyone who lived it.

  For them that evening war wasn’t politics or geography or the mobilisation of forces. It was, as they entered their houses, a special diffidence in the eyes of some of their women. It was a sharper etching of objects around them, as if a film had been scraped from their eyeballs. It was how the kettle was a comfort, the battered chair luxurious, the collapsing of a coal-husk in the fire inexpressibly elegiac.

  2

  ‘Ah’m gonny jine up,’ Mick said.

  Around his words the casual evening congealed to an event. They passed from a number of people who happened to be in the same room into a family group, frozen inside his statement. The absence of Angus and Conn became immediately inappropriate.

  ‘Aw, naw,’ Jenny said.

  But it was a reflex, the way people shut their eyes on an imminent blow, which doesn’t mean they expect to avoid it. Jenny had known he was trying to decide. She had hoped without conviction that this wouldn’t be his decision. She had been glad he had survived the first fever for enlisting at the start of the war. Otherwise, he might have been dead by now. Some from High Street were. Ypres had already been naturalised to Wipers by the weight of its British dead. But he hadn’t escaped the fever. It had merely been incubating in him.

  ‘Ah’ve made up ma mind, mither.’

  ‘But why, Mick?’

  ‘Ah just think it’s whit Ah should dae.’

  ‘Ah don’t see why it is. Ah don’t see that at a’.’

  ‘Ither folk jine up, mither.’

  ‘You’re no’ ither folk. It’s different when it comes tae yer ain door.’

  But it had come and they all knew it, even Jenny. Her voice had been from the first brittle with hopelessness. You couldn’t talk to the war. As Mick put on his jacket and picked fluff from his cap, they seemed already to be spectators in his life, their own lives having become derivative. For the first time, the war was visiting their house. The past few months had been a pretence that had collapsed. They had gone on with their lives in desperate conclave, as if the more determinedly they remained themselves, the less chance the war would have of reaching them. They half-believed it would be over before it became personal to them.

  Now they were left staring stupidly at their small preoccupations, the means by which they had tried to effect the magical exorcism of big events turned into trivia in their hands. Jenny, sewing a patch on Angus’s moleskin trousers felt her fingers sore with trying to force the needle through, and wondered why she was bothering at all. She had spent her life amassing tiny, patient skills against the weather, accident, disease. She knew what to do when faced with most troubles from a burnt hand to suspected pneumonia. And there didn’t seem to be much point to any of it.

  Tam, cutting wire and looping it into snares for Wullie Manson, decided the last bit he had cut was too short, and threw it into the fire. Old Conn stilled his rocking-chair, erasing himself into silence. Kathleen was the only other person there. Since she had become pregnant with her first, she had tended to look in on her mother several times a week. (‘Jist in case it’s eicht month early,’ Tam had kidded her at first.) Now even she became fully aware of a world beyond her belly.

  Mick was ready to go out but knew he had to wait. Their silence was still talking to him.

  ‘When did ye decide this, son?’ Tam asked.

  ‘Ah’ve been thinkin’ aboot it for a while. Me an’ Danny Hawkins.’

  ‘Does Danny mean tae jine up tae?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘My Goad,’ Jenny said. ‘He’s everythin’ that Mary Hawkins has.’

  ‘It’s the HLI we fancy,’ Mick told his father.

  ‘The Highland Light Infantry,’ Old Conn confided to the air in front of him. He had developed a disconcerting habit of acting as a kind of neutral commentator on conversations, as if interpreting events for invisible friends.

  ‘They’re jist sully boays.’ Jenny offered the remark to Tam like advice.

  ‘Ye say ye’ve thocht aboot this?’ Tam asked.

  ‘Aye. A lot.’

  ‘Ye ken whit Keir Hardie says?’

  ‘Whit’s that?’ Mick fretted with his cap, feeling pestered with irrelevancies. He had expected his mother not to understand but not that his father would invoke Keir Hardie even for this, although he had long been used to that name which his father used with the familiarity of a friend.

  ‘He says it’s a dishonourable war. A
capitalist war.’ He put the stress on the second syllable. ‘An’ he disny think there’s ony place in it fur a workin’ man.’

  ‘Did he tell that tae the Germans?’

  ‘By Christ, son. Don’t try tae take yer waiter aff that man. You’ll dae whit ye think ye hiv tae dae. But don’t make jokes aboot it. Whitever it is, it isny funny.’

  ‘Ah don’t mean it that wey, feyther. But if it’s no’ a guid war, the best thing tae dae is get it feenished. Is it no’?’

  Jenny looked up at him, shaking her head.

  ‘An’ you an’ Danny Hawkins’ll see tae that, wull yese? My Goad, son. Ye don’t ken whit ye’re daein’.’

  ‘Och, mither. Credit us wi’ some brains. We’re no’ kiddin’ oorselves. But we’ll help a sicht mair by enlistin’ than by hidin’ in the mull. Wid ye like us tae let ither folk dae oor fightin’ fur us? Is that whit ye want?’

  ‘Ah’ll tell ye whit. Ah want. Ah want ye the wey Goad made ye. Wi’ a’ yer faculties. That’s all Ah want.’

  Tam was quiet. He felt his position compromised by the fact that he and Tadger Daly had both secretly taken steps to find out if they were fit for the army. Suspecting, in any case, that their age was against them, they had paid a local doctor to examine them. The idea was that they would have their decision made easier for them without causing any worry to their families. Both had been declared unfit. Tam’s eyesight had been described as ‘atrocious’. Tadger was asked what he was using for lungs. These melancholy reassurances should have helped more than they had done. Financially, it was unthinkable that they should leave their families, and the doctor’s findings should merely have added a moral sanction to the economic necessity of staying at home. Also, constituting as they did a revolutionary caucus of two, they should have taken solace from being absolved from helping to fight a war they felt had nothing to do with them. They both believed profoundly in Keir Hardie and though they couldn’t have access to his comprehension of the situation, they had faith in the pronouncements that emerged from it. But still they shared an irrational sense of guilt. Younger friends of both were in the war and no number of ideas would ever alter that. Both Tam and Tadger wished they hadn’t disqualified themselves from trying to enlist, since any attempt now would have been a safe and empty gesture.

  Jenny said, ‘An’ hoo are we supposed tae manage wi’ you awa’?’

  It was a remark so desperately untypical of Jenny that the rest of them were embarrassed. It showed her prepared to hobble Mick’s freedom of choice by any means.

  Mick said, ‘Aw, mither,’ and she looked away at the fire.

  ‘Ah’ll no’ be a burden tae onybody,’ Old Conn said suddenly, busking for sympathy along the edge of their attention. ‘Ah’m no’ afraid o’ the pair hoose,’ he confided to his secret brotherhood.

  ‘Behave yerself, feyther,’ Tam said. ‘Ye wid bring a tear tae an iron bed.’

  Mick put on his cap.

  ‘Ah’m gled Jack has a limp onywey. Ah’m gled.’ The childish simplicity of Kathleen’s interjection put the whole scene in perspective instantly, for they knew their own responses were no more sophisticated than hers. Jenny’s protectiveness, Tam’s confusion, Mick’s determination to be a soldier, all were revealed as naïve and arbitrary reactions in the face of an ungraspable complexity.

  ‘We’ll talk mair aboot this when ye get back, son,’ Tam said.

  ‘Right, feyther.’ Mick went out.

  Jenny could hardly believe that this was all. She knew that something very serious, perhaps terrible, had been decided. Yet it had taken no longer than it would to discuss buying a new suit and there seemed even less to be said about it. Aware of the masculine assumptions around her – Mick’s that he must fight, Tam’s that Mick must be allowed to make an untrammelled choice, she despaired of the stupidity of things. She remembered Wullie and Annie Manson’s only boy. Ill in infancy, desperately wanted, willed into health by Annie who hoarded his every breath and fought for each hour of his life until he became a big, sonsy boy that everybody liked – and then, after Annie had put fourteen years of his life together, illness and health, like a hand-stitched quilt, he was drowned in the Black Rocks because his foot slipped on a wet stone and there was no man near enough to get to him in time. God had to be a man. No woman could ever be as wasteful.

  Tam found it hard to concentrate on what he was doing. The sequence of more than this one evening was broken. The sense of continuity he had always clung to in their lives was lost, had been for some time now, but Mick’s decision had demonstrated it with a clarity he couldn’t hide from. The slow evolution towards improvement which he had kept his faith in was interrupted. The intrusion of the war showed the naïveté of his beliefs, the triviality of any contribution he could make to his own life. He had noticed the feeling of self-importance there was in Mick, as if history had just called out his name, and while Tam couldn’t share his son’s conviction, it did make the converse real for him – that the rest of them were living in parenthesis.

  The room was becalmed in aimlessness. Old Conn rocked, nursing his martyrdom, Kathleen knitted, Tam looped a snare and tested the speed of its contraction. Jenny ran her thumbnail along the moleskin, softening a path of easier access for the needle. Against the ravening insanity of nations, a cunning skill for keeping out the damp.

  3

  A branch was creaking, close, intimate, like the sound of a shoulder-strap. A peeweep haunted the area, its plaintive pretence of defencelessness combing back and forth persistently. Beside them the grass was slowly straightening again, absorbing their love-making. Where they sat was a hollow beside two trees and among long grass, so that they had no sense of location, all fixity diffused among the lazy whorlings of the sky, adrift on an ocean of land. Drugged with country fumes, Mick smoked heavily, watching the grass scars heal on the back of his hand and remembering the same marks on her thighs and arms when they were finished, as if they had both just newly been amputated from the earth. Tuned into small sounds all around them, their voices found a low key, naturalised themselves to an insect softness.

  May was saying, ‘Ah don’t want ye tae go. Whit if ye get killed?’

  Mick said, ‘Ah’ll no’ get killed.’

  ‘Whit if ye did?’

  ‘Weel, it’ll no’ be ma worry then. Will it?’

  ‘Naw. It’ll be mine.’

  Her voice was sad but the sadness was overlaid with something else, a deliciousness almost. Mick put his hand over hers and the gesture allowed them to think of themselves as lovers sadly parting. They needed a convention within which to enact what was happening in them. May fumbled for words.

  ‘Ah’ll wait fur ye,’ she said.

  ‘Wull ye, May?’

  ‘Of coorse.’

  ‘Ah want ye tae dae that. But we don’t ken whit can happen.’

  ‘An’ Ah don’t care.’

  ‘Ye’ll maybe chinge, May.’

  ‘Maybe you wull.’

  ‘No’ the way Ah feel fur you. That canny change.’ His kiss wasn’t something willed but a formality that both of them expected, like punctuation. ‘Ah’ll still want you.’

  ‘An’ Ah’ll want you. Ah’ll wait. Ah don’t care hoo long it is.’

  ‘But whit if Ah get killed?’

  ‘Ye’ll no get killed.’

  ‘But whit if Ah did?’

  ‘Then Ah’ll never mairry.’

  ‘May.’ His voice was solemn. Both of them managed to ignore the fact that a passing bird had dropped a shit on the grass beside them. Perhaps they hadn’t seen it. ‘Ah want ye tae promise me something.’

  ‘Naw, Mick, naw.’

  ‘Ah want ye tae promise me that if Ah don’t come back ye’ll mairry somebody else.’

  ‘Naw, Mick. Ah’ll no’.’

  ‘But, May. Ye hiv tae.’

  ‘Ah’ll never want tae mairry onybody else.’

  ‘Maybe ye wull.’

  ‘Hoo can ye say that? Wull you?’

  ‘Naw,
Ah’ll no’.’

  ‘Then why are ye sayin’ that aboot me then? Oh, Mick, whit dae ye take me fur?’

  Before she had a chance to cry, he had embraced her, being careful with his cigarette. It was easier without words. What made talk doubly difficult was that both of them were acting, trying to evoke with words a reality that was inconceivably alien to this place and time that they were sharing. What was war to them? Meaningless statistics, awesome principles that had never before occurred to them, the rantings of the press. They only knew that it was there and Mick was going to it. They had to try to match the simplicity of their relationship to the complexity that had compromised it. In the effort they stopped being themselves and became the roles they thought circumstances had cast them in.

  The truth was that they found it impossible to believe seriously in any of the possibilities they entertained in words. The likelihood of Mick dying was to them a stage-prop, merely a means of establishing more firmly the fact that he was alive. Their commitment to each other was as yet too immediate and direct to realise the feasible disintegration of itself.

  From the beginning their relationship had been a natural and remarkably uncomplicated phenomenon. Meeting May at a dance, Mick had walked her home to the farm where she was in service. The ease with which they were able to talk left them with an unfinished conversation, and they met again. What they learned about each other gave them a private area that nobody else had access to, like a furnished room only they knew about. May was an orphan who didn’t like the farm where she worked, and her loneliness made her especially confessional with Mick. He in turn put the intensity of his family into perspective through her eyes. Neither had told anyone else about themselves. Tam and Jenny were left to surmise that Mick was walking out with somebody and the family at the farm were left not bothering to surmise what May was doing.

  In this way, free from any social pressures, their times together taking place mainly along empty roads and among the anonymous sounds of the countryside, there was an animal naturalness about what happened with them. When they eventually began to make love, it was as a simple progression in themselves, a further discovery. Marriage seemed inevitable at some time and if May were to become pregnant, it would only change later to sooner, nothing more. But the easy spontaneity that had attracted them to each other was also what was causing them to part, for it was that quality which made Mick decide without too much thought to join the army and which made May accept his decision without more than a token resistance.