Docherty

by William McIlvanney

  At first they had been partisan, Rab Morrison wanting Angus to prove something, Tadger needing to go on believing in Tam. But in the end watchers and protagonists were together in a conspiracy, an experiment to prove how formidable they were. For them what had happened was the equivalent of a poem or a play – like those, over-simplified, but still a celebration of themselves. For a moment they could innocently believe that those joined hands squeezed everything into irrelevance but their own joint strength, that that was all there was. They could almost convince themselves that they weren’t just dupes, that they didn’t spend their lives in self-defeating conflict with one another merely because they were stupid but because they were themselves the only ones worthy of their own antagonism, that they were set apart not by their ignorance and their folly but by their honesty and a knowledge from the bone, abjuring as they did every day any meaning but a life.

  Their satisfaction in this pointless contest had the same ancestry as their love of gambling, drinking, fighting. It wasn’t only, as the socially conscious were inclined to say, the pathetic desire to escape from their condition. They were, much more profoundly, the expression of that condition. They gambled to gamble, they drank to drink, they fought to fight.

  The mystique of habits they practised went beyond reflexes conditioned by capitalist oppression, came closer to primitive rites for exorcising the power of the bastard god, economy, originated in an impulse that antedated Factory Acts. Like the adherents of a persecuted faith, they had endured long enough to acquire the sense not just of the unmerited privileges of others but of their essential worthlessness as well. Many of them, like Tam, felt militant in the face of these injustices. But it was difficult to mobilise that just resentment because so many carried deep inside themselves, like a tribal precept, a wordless understanding of the powerlessness of any social structure to defeat them. Their bondage admitted them to the presence of a truth from which their masters hid, because to live with necessity is the only freedom.

  It wasn’t surprising that the champions of reform, calling them to their cause, found them intractably engaged in inconsequential arguments over a pint, stealing a hare when they could have had the acres that it ran on, pursuing private vendettas. For they believed that the hare was all they would be needing till the next time. It was a fundamentalism frustrating to the more sophisticated, whether he was the owner elevated by his interest in painting or the political theorist baffled by their reluctance to animate his theories. What the socially superior failed to see was that they were the least conditioned members of society.

  Like the inheritors of an ancient black art, they could conjure real presences out of very thin air. A place behind a pit-bing and two pennies made a sport. A corner and some men was everywhere, debating-chamber, funeral-parlour, coffee-house, confessional, where they gave thoughts, hopes, laughter, words directly to the wind. Any open space was where two men could finally come to terms. Since they had learned how to become themselves under any circumstances, the exact nature of those circumstances was something they found it hard to care continuously about.

  That they were going to have to learn to care, perhaps only Mick, of all the people in the room, fully realised. For the rest, nights like tonight were their own meaning. The abrasiveness there had been between Tam and Angus was already receding. What stayed was the moment they’d made out of it. They all drifted away into their own thoughts and conversations like a crowd dispersing.

  The rest of the night was improvising elegies. Somebody sang ‘John Anderson, my Jo’. Andra Crawford came (‘Ah saw yer licht in, Tam.’) and wanted to talk about Keir Hardie. Into a growing silence Big Wullie Manson gently interjected, ‘Ah uset tae be ten stane nine.’ Angus’s friends all left. Mick saw Mary Hawkins home. Kathleen and Jack went with them, one of the weans in the shawl and Jack carrying the other one wrapped up, with Tadger saying, ‘Hoo much wid ye take fur wan o’ yer weans then, Kathleen?’

  Standing in the doorway before going through to his bed, Conn looked into the room and the image halted him. He saw its texture. It was as rich and strange as a painting. He took delight in the room for its own sake, the dying fire, the glow of the mantle, Wullie Manson meditating slimness, Tadger sprawled in comfort threatening never to go home. The scatter of empty glasses formed a mysterious pattern, a Tightness that could never have been achieved deliberately.

  Conn found himself wishing that the completeness of that room with those people in it could be kept, that it could somehow be a self-sufficiency. He found himself wondering why it wasn’t enough.

  BOOK III

  1

  The men coming out of the dyeworks were walking briskly, their preoccupied faces stamped with a private destination. Each of them carried his wages in his pocket, like a map of the week ahead. It was bleak terrain.

  Some of them noticed him as they passed, standing against the wall as still as a statue in a niche, a stance they could have captioned: ‘This is a claim.’ The realisation held them momentarily before, checking the features and finding them impersonal, they moved on. Quite a few felt the vague sense of relief that comes when an accident happens to somebody else.

  He knew what would reach his recognition first. He waited patiently until he was aware of that limping walk from yards away, before it came into the lamplight. The swagger was enforced, he knew, but he let it feed his purpose, pride before the fall. Without moving, he called pleasantly, ‘Jack.’

  Jack swivelled. The man who had been walking with him went on a few paces before turning round. There was a pause. Then the man said, ‘Ah’ll see ye, Jack.’

  ‘Gus.’ Jack used the shortened form of the name unintentionally. He had never called him that and he knew himself it was placative. In his confusion, his mouth had led the way, taught him what he was feeling. He admitted to himself that he felt guilty and that he understood exactly why Angus was here.

  ‘Ah want tae talk tae ye,’ Angus said and started walking. Jack walked with him. They turned the corner to where the river ran on one side of the narrow lane and the factory buildings overhung the other. Angus stopped on a patch of waste-ground between two buildings. Gas-lamps made a lunar landscape of it.

  Jack understood. They were standing on the terms Angus was offering. They could talk and something might be settled that way. If it wasn’t they would have to go on to something else. Like someone finding himself in a blind alley, Jack thought back through the recent turnings he had taken. He couldn’t pretend to be surprised that this was where they led.

  ‘It’s aboot Kathleen.’

  ‘Whit aboot her?’

  ‘She’s no’ happy.’

  ‘Whit’s happy?’

  ‘No’ whit she is, onywey.’

  They waited in the pale light for something to happen, a meeting to take place. The words they had said were like the noises people make in a mist, trying to locate each other. For Jack what was happening was still confused with the conversation he had been having coming out of the works. Angus listened to somebody’s footsteps, wanting them to disappear, as if he needed silence to unravel whatever was knotted in him. Across the river a dog barked distantly. They were as far from it as from each other.

  ‘She disny hiv much o’ a life.’

  ‘Who telt ye that?’

  ‘Ah’m tellin’ you that.’

  ‘Ah think she’s a’ richt. Ah’m maybe no’ makin’ as much money as you. But we manage.’

  ‘It’s no’ jist the money. Ah’ve seen bruises oan ‘er.’

  What affected Jack was the innocence of Angus’s knowingness. He had seen bruises on his sister and it was something terrible. Through Angus’s reaction to some grains of sand, Jack had a fresh perspective on the desert he was living in. He saw how unimaginable it must be to Angus, who was still young enough to be shocked at the infringement of a principle – you never hit women. Jack had been taught that too. Even now he couldn’t have argued against it. It was just that he had been beyond argument, to places w
here such principles seemed about as relevant as brushing a corpse’s teeth. There was no way for him to convey how he and Kathleen lived, how circumstances had taught them to be. Nor could he understand how they had got from where they started to where they were. But wordlessly a part of him were long evenings when they sat through their marriage like a wake while their past illusions reflected their present as in grotesque, distorting mirrors. So he drank and Kathleen hid behind religion, like a married nun. Often they quarrelled. He blamed himself. Certainly Kathleen had tried. She was miraculous with money. In her hands its value doubled, though it still wasn’t enough. He sometimes wondered if it was because he had missed the war. But nothing answered the void in him. It would have been like trying to explain why someone had a weak heart. He had no hopes beyond today. Even anger seemed futile. He had nothing to say to Angus, who stood luxuriating in his own feelings like a boy who stands in a cemetery mourning the carcase of a mouse.

  ‘It’ll no’ dae.’

  That’s fur Kathleen tae decide.’

  ‘Whit dae you say?’

  ‘Ah say it’s nane o’ yer business.’

  ‘She’s ma sister.’

  ‘She’s ma wife.’

  ‘Ye hide it weel.’

  In the realisation that their words were going nowhere, Jack saw what was going to happen. It seemed pointless. While Angus wound himself up, Jack was aware of a rusted bicycle wheel lying near them. Some spokes had sprung. He felt vaguely that it was as much involved in this as he was, that it and the river coughing quietly near them were a part of his predicament.

  ‘She deserves better.’

  ‘It’s no’ jist ma fault.’

  ‘It’s nae way tae treat a wumman. Ye’ve nae decency. It’s no’ richt.’

  Jack said nothing. In this place Angus’s words seemed empty, even to himself. The concept of some kind of morality that he had been stumbling towards, to which he had been trying to bring Jack, had seemed important, even impressive. Now that he had got there, it was like a ruin that houses only shit and clumsy slogans. People used to live here, that was all. For the first time the place impinged on Angus and he felt as if the rubble among which they stood was shifting under his feet. He lost his hold on what was happening. He felt that, in some way he couldn’t understand, it was Jack who was aggressing on him. Just by being there and waiting passively, Jack was exerting a pressure.

  Angus’s assurance divided, and what had started in him that evening as a proclamation of intent became an argument. He began to wonder why he was here. It occurred to him wilfully and shockingly that it wasn’t so much Jack he was confronting as his father, because he knew that Tam should have been the one to do this, and by Angus’s doing it he was demonstrating something about his father, putting a date on the headstone. Angus hesitated. He felt himself involved in a contest the rules of which were secret. So how could you ever know if you were winning?

  ‘Jack. You’re gonny hiv tae treat her better.’

  His voice was as near to a plea as it could go.

  ‘Ah’ll treat her the wey Ah treat her.’

  ‘Christ. It’s goat tae be different. Ye’d better promise tae try.’

  ‘Why?’

  Angus was faced with a moment he thought he would have relished. It had come down to bodies, and there he knew quite simply that he couldn’t lose. But with the two of them alone on that amphitheatrical patch of ground, he waited for the familiar sensation that made the blood surge like a crowd, and nothing happened. He was aware only of a deafening silence, a baffling sense of pointlessness as if those who had arranged the contest were unable to attend. Dimly, he felt used, hired to carry out something he didn’t understand. What did it matter what he did? Fifty yards away beyond the wasteground, he saw a woman’s shape move behind a tenement window, and he was afflicted by a nightmare sensation of people mysteriously doing things in rooms, as if the front walls of every building in the town were made of glass. He realised that he didn’t know what was happening.

  When he hit Jack, it was less an event than the expression of a need for one. Jack rocked and stood. It was as if both of them felt nothing. Angus looked into the set hardness of Jack’s face and struck it again. Jack’s head came down and his hands waved slightly. Something bounced out of his breast-pocket and fell on the ground. A trickle of blood came out of the corner of his mouth. It was finished. Angus’s arm atrophied.

  ‘Okay?’ he said, not knowing what he meant himself.

  Jack nodded. Angus bent down and picked up what had fallen. It was Jack’s pay-packet. It felt about as heavy as bird-seed and the amount scrawled in pen on the front of it was an insult. Giving it back, Angus was embarrassed, and he couldn’t get rid of the feeling that he had lost a fight. Jack took the packet, wiped his mouth, and walked away.

  Going in the other direction, Angus was hesitant, walked slowly, as if he had inherited Jack’s limp. But the further away he went, the more positive his stride became. He had acted he had done something. He had dispelled his own misgivings by going right through them, and as far as he was concerned they were finished. He had no need of the erratic gas-lamps to find his way through the maze of grubby streets. He carried his own certainty with him like a lantern and, knowing where he was going, the darkness all around didn’t bother him, and the feeling that what he had almost met on the waste lot, the thing that had almost pinioned his arms, padded patiently behind him, was no more than a slight unease.

  2

  The house had gradually changed for them. Tam had felt it settle round him like a shroud. It wasn’t just that it was old in itself but that it was worn with them, used. As well as the simple overcrowding of so many adults in such a confined space, it was replete with a past that oppressed the present. It had contracted from a refuge to a cage.

  Jenny still scrubbed and dusted and polished it as thoroughly as before but what had been an action became a tic. Her work enshrined its own futility, preserved the ugly furniture scars in polish, wore down the linoleum it cleaned. And following her as she went, like dust she could never be rid of, was the growing sense that the family, which was what gave everything purpose for her, didn’t really live here any more.

  Angus and Conn used the house like an inn, stopping in it en route from place to place, exchanging travellers’ tales. Mick was often a stranger. Old Conn was always there but he had changed too, as if all his past acquiescence had been a means of forming an alliance with the house. Physically, the house was more his than anybody else’s. His rocking-chair had become the basic rhythm of each day, like a clock the monotony of which sometimes threatened to drive Jenny mad. He remained pleasant but utterly intractable, wanting tea at certain times, the paper read to him at others. Like a monument set in the middle of a busy thoroughfare, his presence brought the persistent annoyance of having to re-route all traffic round it.

  At times Jenny had tried to talk to Tam about what was happening to them but it was difficult. For one thing, it was something that surrounded them, like an element, too much a part of them to be isolated and examined. For another, Tam didn’t want to talk about it. He tended more and more to let incidents glance off him instead of facing them frontally as he had used to. It was seldom that his anger exploded as it formerly had so that in the middle of an otherwise ordinary evening he was haranguing their lives into militancy against the forces he dimly felt crushing them. Now he was more likely to take a sudden frenzy for some intense but apparently unmotivated activity. For a week he would be painting the doors in the house, defiantly. But the drabness of the place seemed to absorb his and Jenny’s efforts more quickly now. Or he would take to going round the dog-tracks, or poaching, or try the pitch-and-toss, as if the key to what was wrong was somewhere around and he’d better find it quickly. But all these substitute actions left the centre of his life more empty. Like Jenny, he knew his house was dividing and, like her, he couldn’t understand it.

  Both of them shared with other members of the older generation in
High Street the wide conviction that things were ‘no’ the same’. This wasn’t merely an expression of that hardening falsification of the past to which people over a certain age are subject, like cataracts or hair in the ears. They were aware of something new in their lives, tangible if incomprehensible. It was as if the Spanish “flu’ had developed a social counterpart and just as, although that virus had been invisible to them, the corpses it left had been proof of its existence, so now the obsolescence of attitudes they had held for so long conveyed to them the strangeness of their circumstances. Women at the close-mouth relayed the latest account of how a son had insulted his father, a daughter was smoking. Older men at the corner heard yet another story of a young man attacking somebody with a weapon, and of the time when a man might pulp his opponent’s face but only with a clenched fist they talked sadly, as if mourning the death of chivalry. The strange virus was everywhere and parents waited for their family to catch it and bring it into the house.

  So Jenny knew the symptoms when Angus said, ‘Ah’ll work a few weeks mair, feyther, an’ then Ah’m leavin’ the pit. Tae go tae Number Eicht.’

  The remark interrupted what Old Conn had been saying. But that wasn’t significant. There were certain nights when if you wanted to speak, chances were you would have to interrupt Old Conn. He took periodic talking fits, lengthy flushings of the mind. They were always about the past and the same stories occurred irregularly. Tonight he had been talking about the priests blessing the fishing boats on the west coast of Ireland. He had been stuck for the name of one of the priests. Names eluded him and he would never go on without them, believing that if he surrendered one he might lose them all. ‘Always let yer memory ken who’s boss,’ he said. He had been busy trying to establish the mastery when Angus spoke.