Docherty

by William McIlvanney

  Jenny soothed him, gathered the glass, crumpled the picture, snapped the frame, wrapped the lot in a newspaper for disposal tomorrow, finding the deepest sadness in the fact that the ashes of the righteous anger of the best man she had ever met should make so small a parcel. Both in bed, Tam havered on, the certainties growing more empty, the promises wilder, till they expired in snores. Jenny lay very still, knowing how much he needed his sleep. She thought of Mick. She thought of Tam, of Kathleen, Angus, Conn. Her small plans patiently nudged their way towards the future, moled unstoppably into the empty dark.

  In the other room, Angus said, ‘Hey. Whit wis that?’

  ‘A pictur fell,’ Conn answered.

  ‘It musta been a big yin. Whit pictur? There’s only two.’

  ‘Ah don’t ken.’

  Conn had heard his father’s voice coming through tears. Through that one fissure of sound he knew the significance if not the form of what had happened. He had never before been able to contemplate such a thing and he now thought that the war must indeed be something of incredible terror if it could make his father cry. His grandfather must have heard the noise, since he slept so light he said he could waken with a feather falling, but he hadn’t stirred.

  The old man was awake and he had heard. But he lay inscrutably still in the mysterious shroud of himself. He was thinking himself through a part of Connemara. Angus fell asleep at once, wondering how many people could have lifted that rock. Conn imagined German soldiers in the street. The ways in which we acknowledge the disintegration of those we love are legion.

  17

  The next morning Tam was up early. Not alluding to the night before, he had made a cup of tea for Jenny before he would let her get out of bed. He was brisk, pleasant, talking about Mick getting home. His words threatened constructiveness rather than achieved it, like a scaffolding erected on a waste lot. He was making plans for making plans. Significantly, he didn’t make any attempt to come to terms with last night’s despair. He merely reacted away from it, so that a counter-reaction would be inevitable. A syndrome was being established. He had become the victim of his life instead of its exponent.

  Not that anyone could have noticed. Leaning over Jenny, a dawn the colour of unfired clay on his shoulders, he was laughing with the tea-cup in his hand, calling himself ‘Jessie Tinney’, which was his term for a hen-peck. You couldn’t have told that he was lifting one morning too many. Jenny, with so much reason for faith in him, would have been betraying what they had made together if she had appreciated the poignancy of that moment. She was right to believe that last night would be overcome and that he would survive intact. It was only in retrospect that she would see that night as an earthquake in the annals of her private life.

  The extent of the damage was to be learnt only slowly. Over the next few years she would find broken parts of him, disseminated widely in time, come upon in a casual conversation, nudged accidentally in an aimless rummaging of her thoughts beside the fire. In them she would understand the hurt that had been done him. Piecing them together, she would reconstruct the man that he had been before they broke him and would wonder at his stature. Augmenting her failed memory with love, she would make him preposterously bigger than anyone else had ever seen him, but no bigger than he had been.

  What Jenny was to gather in the years ahead, to hoard in herself like mementoes of some important person, would be small perceptions, observed perhaps by others but rendered worthless by their ignorance or thrown aside by their indifference or crushed like archaic pottery to powder by the clumsiness of their unearthing. For they would be very fragile things, the truths about a man, for long ignored, buried like refuse under what was refuse, secreted like ancient gold under layers of error and misunderstanding. She alone would have the faith to find them, the skill to keep them intact, the love to understand their meaning.

  In this way she was soon to notice how impossible Tam’s promises became, how his certainties went no deeper than his voice. Hearing his desperate convictions brag themselves alive and die of their own intensity, like fireworks leaving the darkness blacker than before, seeing the emptiness that welled out of his eyes in some moments of calm, she knew that they measured not just the defeat of what he was becoming, but the almost unbelievable victory of what he had for so long been. Observing how his natural generosity developed into something more wilful, an unpredictable squandering of his time and what little money he had on aimless acts of kindness, so that paradoxically he seemed to some people more of a man than he had been, she knew it for a weakness, but a weakness stronger than the strength of many others. Having lost the purpose of his own life, he distributed it frantically among those he cared for, as if they might have a use for it.

  But no one else would notice much, except Jenny. The only thing that struck some people was that Tam Docherty was more heavy on the drink. There were those perceptive enough to say, ‘Aye. Since his auldest boay wis in the war. A funny thing that. Tam wis aye that sober.’ Jenny herself was to date roughly from that time the pattern Tam evolved of Saturday night drunkenness and Sunday morning plans for an unrealisable future. She understood it was an arbitrary choice of time to some extent. He had been drunk before that. He had often enough before had depressions so black as to make his presence all but uninhabitable for other people. And after that night he was to remain as formidable as ever in the eyes of outsiders. In some ways he was to seem more so to them, because his anger and his concern and the frequently riveting instantaneousness of his responses could operate more dramatically, their deployment no longer inhibited by the need to conform to a central and continuous control. Only Jenny was gradually to grow aware that these had become more gesture than action and that the almost primal sense of unchallengeable selfhood that had animated them had now abandoned them. Nobody else could have realised that Tam, still forceful and outwardly intimidatingly hard, had forsaken any future. There was, after all, no visible wreckage but a broken photograph, which Tam himself threw out that morning, as if he didn’t want Jenny to have to touch it.

  But Jenny, ignorant at the time of that Sunday’s implications, was to come back to it so often later in her life, enlarging it with her understanding. It was to be the uttermost fulfilment of her love that she would know all of him in the part of him that remained. She would record in herself, incommunicable to any other living person, the importance of a courageous living and a secret, terrible, consuming grief of failure that would otherwise have had the permanence of smoke, been as conspicuous as the death of a wild crocus in a forest. This she would achieve not with words or by reasons, which other reasons could have refuted, but with a mute tenacity of belief that only death could relax. Her love would show her this, the magnitude of his experience, not as a matter of exclusive arrogance, but as a law for all here, where even the agony of the dying ant is seismic.

  Yet that morning was at that time just itself. Surrounding himself with imprecise plans, Tam seemed genuinely hopeful, nothing like a man immuring himself alive in his own past. The cups of tea he gave to Jenny and his father and to Conn and Angus were incidental thoughtfulness, hadn’t become a part of his pathetic future generosities, those errant kindnesses purposely done, like seeds planted in stone, as if he were Johnny Appleseed lost in a city. Washed and dressed and mending the fire, Jenny smiled over at him, blessedly without understanding, which never arrives except in time for the headstone. The day was going to be fine.

  ‘We’ll hiv a walk in the afternin, Jenny, eh?’

  ‘As long as its no’ too faur,’ she laughed.

  18

  Mick didn’t come home to the place so much as the place came home to him, in suddenly found fragments, like broken pieces of a mirror he would have to try to fit together. In them he found distortions of himself.

  Wullie Manson said, ‘It wid be hellish, wis it, son?’

  ‘Well. It wis bad.’

  ‘At least they say it’ll no’ be long noo tae it’s ower. Ha’e some mair beer.’r />
  Wullie didn’t seem to know that it wouldn’t be over. Not for Mick and not for any of the people who lived through it. Mick wanted to convince Wullie of the men who would die twenty years later of gas. But it wasn’t possible.

  And Tadger thought, ‘There’s wan thing, Mick son. You’ve did yer bit. Everybody in this room’s owin’ you. They’ll no’ forget in a hurry.’

  Not in a hurry. It might take a year or two. Already Mick had overheard himself referred to in Mitchell’s as ‘him wi’ the wan wing’. In a couple of years, he’d just be a curio. Anyway, he didn’t think they owed him anything. He hadn’t done it for them. He didn’t know why he had done it. That was what made it so hard to live with.

  ‘Ye a’ richt, son?’ His mother’s hand touched his shoulder.

  ‘Ah’m a’ richt, mither.’

  ‘They’re a’ that gled tae see ye. It’s great jist tae hiv ye sittin’ there. Thank Goad ye’re back.’

  But he wasn’t back. He was among strangers. When they thought they were touching him, he could feel no contact. He looked round the room. There were his family and friends. They had gathered without forewarning to welcome him. He knew they were kind and generous, and he felt a bitter black anger towards them. No matter what happened, all they could offer against it was their warmth. Their goodness seemed to him impossible. The only connection he could make was sometimes in the eyes of Conn, as if he was honestly trying to work out who Mick was. That gave Mick and him something in common.

  Mick endured that occasion and it gave way to others like it. Most of the time he felt at best uncomfortable and clumsy, as if his life didn’t fit him. Only rarely could he find any resemblance between what happened outside and what was going on in him, like the first time he visited Mary Hawkins.

  It was a strange event. He had gone because he felt he had to. He had no idea of what to say or do. He just went. When she opened the door, she looked at him, put her hand out and touched his face, and said, ‘Och.’ She walked back to her chair, sat down and started to cry. He came in and closed the door.

  The two of them sat like that for a long time, Mary crying and Mick just being there. He thought at first he should say something, had a moment of guilt because he let this happen without trying to console her. But he remembered Danny and consolation seemed ridiculous. Her tears were right. Danny’s death was making something happen. Someone was admitting what it meant. It would have been false to deny that admission.

  Outside, Mick could hear people passing in the street. He remembered Auld Jake’s voice in Bethune – Danny had been living then – telling a human truth in counterpoint to the military pretence going on outside. It seemed to him that Mary Hawkins was answering the glibness outside in the same way. He had brought his utter bleakness to her and she acknowledged it with crying. Together, they made up a kind of truth.

  Later, she got up and made him tea. It seemed to him a ceremony of immense dignity, an old woman ordering her grief into politeness. They took the tea and talked a little, and he tried to tell her nice things about Danny. But his respect for her sorrow made him tell her only true things, very small, momentary things, which were in any case all that was left of her son which she would have recognised.

  Leaving, he was thanked by her for coming. He said he would come back. He did, partly because he felt closer to her than almost anybody else. It wasn’t that Danny had meant so much to him. It wasn’t that Mary Hawkins’s grief affected him so deeply. It wasn’t what she felt or for whom she felt it – it was the pure fact that she did feel it. She wasn’t able to hide from the reality Mick was experiencing, as even his own family appeared to him to do. She shared it with him.

  His home wasn’t a place where he liked to be. The others felt it. But the more they tried to help him the more they irked him. Every acknowledgement of what he was going through was for him a diminution of it, every action just a gesture. He went out a lot.

  His walks were aimless. Mostly he noticed the changes even in places. Though they had taken place before he had joined up, he saw them now as if they had a new personal significance. The Meal Market had become. The Scotia’. Sometimes he went in there to hide and let the piano music and the pictures blot out his thoughts.

  Once in the street he met May. She was pregnant. She stopped and said defiantly, ‘Hullo!’ He noticed that she didn’t wear a ring. She told him she was pregnant to the farmer she worked for. He was a recent widower and he couldn’t marry her just now because his family would have been too offended. But he was good man and kind to her. She kept Mick standing for a long time while she justified herself and he listened absently. What puzzled him was that she thought it mattered.

  How long he would have gone on living in limbo he didn’t know – perhaps for good. But his father arranged it differently. He usually did. There were a lot of things you could feel about Tam Docherty, but indifference wasn’t one of them. His presence was an invasion. You had to react to survive. And Mick reacted.

  There were the three of them in the house, Mick and his mother and father. Angus was at the dancing, obeying his blood in a way Mick could just about remember and almost envy. Conn was wherever Conn was. You couldn’t tell with him. He often set out for a place and never got there. He was always being ambushed. So many things seemed to interest him. Old Conn was out for a walk.

  Jenny was watching him. Mick had felt her watching. His father was reading the paper.

  ‘Christ!’ Tam said. ‘Whit wid ye make o’ that? This is a learnt man talkin’. Yer JP nane the less. “The theft of this pail of coal ...” This wee lassie o’ eleeven. Her feyther’s died. She stole the coal fae a railway yaird. Tae keep the faimly warm. “The theft of this pail of coal is a serious offence. The more so that it takes place in time of war. Responsibility –”, Tam stumbled over the word, “for the nation’s plight belongs to all of us. This offence cannot be overlooked. We are all in need in this war.” Aye. An’ Ah hope yer choke on yer roast beef. Ye can write tae that fella care o’ Mars, by Christ.’

  Mick was willing his mother not to watch him. He dreaded that she was going to be concerned for him. He didn’t want her to speak. She spoke.

  ‘Mick, son. Dae ye no’ fancy the picturs? It’s Charlie Chaplin in the Scotia.’

  ‘Yer Chairlie Chaipleton,’ Tam said.

  His father’s attempt at levity made him grue.

  ‘Naw, mither. Ah’m no’ fussy.’

  ‘Ye’re sittin’ in too much these nichts, Mick. It’s no’ healthy fur a young man sittin’ in wi’ us.’

  He couldn’t explain that he felt older than them. She didn’t understand. He just wished she would keep quiet.

  ‘It’s a nice nicht, son. Wid ye no’ like a walk?’

  ‘Mither. If ye want the hoose tae yersel’s, then Ah’ll go oot. Is that whit ye want then? Is it?’

  ‘Aw, Mick. It’s no’ that, son. It’s jist

  ‘Mither! Fur Christ’s sake, gi’e it a by. Stoap worryin’ yersel’. Fur ye ken damn a’ aboot it. Jist gi’e us peace, wumman.’

  He heard his father’s paper lowering.

  ‘Hey, boay.’ Against Mick’s will, the intensity of his father impinged on him. ‘It’s time Ah teilt you somethin’. Ah don’t care you’ve been tae hell an’ came back. Ah don’t care you loast three fuckin’ airms. Ye talk tae yer mither like that an’ Ah’ll take yer wan airm an’ wrap it roon yer fuckin’ neck. Ah’ll fell you deid. Noo unnerstaun’ that, son.’

  ‘Tam,’ Jenny said.

  Her head was lowered. Mick looked at her and for the first time for a long time he touched the quick of himself. He was feeling shame. He shook his head. He saw his father’s eyes bruise.

  ‘Aw, Mick,’ Tam said. ‘Forget it, son.’

  That wasn’t possible. Tam’s anger had precipitated a mutual awareness in which they were caught. Jenny saw in the two of them the bafflement of her love. Her great gift had always been for loving people. She had sublimated everything else into that and now it
was all that she had, she saw that it wasn’t enough. Incarnated in Tam and Mick that love merely intensified the terrible contradictions in their lives and made them fiercer. She saw the life she irrevocably had to inhabit. She was nailed to her love for them and though that love might offer temporary happinesses, the end of it was pain.

  Tam saw the strangeness of his son. Mick sat shaped and partly broken by an experience Tam could never imagine, and Tam felt ashamed of his own anger. His need to connect with Mick had made him say what he had no right to say.

  But it had worked. For Mick’s protective shell of bleakness had been breached. Somewhere in him an icicle thawed. He was beginning to feel again. He admitted to himself who his mother was – not some petty nuisance but a woman with an awesome ability for love. There was no way you could stop her loving you. In reacting against his father, he was obliged to try to see him honestly. It seemed to Mick that his father quite simply didn’t hold with privacy. Experience was for sharing and people only happened in one another. That was what gave him that force which made his very presence seem a happening. He forced people out of themselves and into events. As had happened now.

  Mick felt almost substantial again. He had a hazy sense of perspective on himself. He saw his mother and father as very simple people, dangerously simple, but at the same time he knew himself unmistakably a part of them, in part defined by them. They gave him no choice. In that, he thought, he saw a way to go on living. There had to be a way to connect the truth he felt he had glimpsed to their own lives, a way that would protect them from their own simplicity, a way that would give purpose to the desecration of folk like Danny.