Remedy is None

by William McIlvanney

  ‘Yes, Mother, yes,’ the young woman said through the small opening in the window. She had slid back the pane, and her mother stood on the platform outside, hopping with maternal solicitude in case the guard should flag short her advice. ‘Now don’t worry about me. You would think I was going to the North Pole. I’ll be perfectly all right. Oh, excuse me. I’ll shift that,’ she said, lifting her hat from the seat opposite hers and putting it on the rack above her head beside the new tan suitcase.

  Charlie sat down on the cleared seat like a somnambulist. He hadn’t noticed the hat. He hadn’t noticed much between the university and the railway-station, only spasmodic and incomprehensible fragments of what was going on around him, an Underground map, a mother nursing her child on her knee, a ticket-collector’s hands clustered with warts. These things occurred as shapes and shadows against his frosted perception, threatened dimly without admittance. His awareness had frozen on the fact of his father dying, and impressions only skimmed the surface of his consciousness like skaters seen from underneath the ice. He still couldn’t realize it. FATHER DYING. Two words that detonated in his mind, exploding his concentration to smithereens, and left him searching the debris for fragments of understanding. How could he be dying? He had seemed all right the last time Charlie was home. But that was more than a month ago. Did people pass from apparent health to imminent death in a month? It seemed somehow unjust, somehow too casual. Death was something august and terrible, a climactic presence heralded by long illness. How could it come suddenly, unannounced like this, ensconce itself in your house behind your back? It was a possibility Charlie had never really contemplated. It wasn’t easy to start contemplating it now. But he tried to adjust to the fact towards which he was moving relentlessly.

  The train exhaled steam and lunged forward, leaving the young woman’s mother to run a few paces along the platform, throwing snippets of advice that the wind scattered like confetti. The young woman closed the pane with a sigh of relief and sank into her seat. She looked at Charlie, shaking her head, trying to form an alliance of understanding with him on the difficulties of having mothers. Charlie stared past her through the window. The old woman in the corner opposite them looked across deliberately, appointing herself chaperone while the young woman unbuttoned her costume jacket to reveal a lace blouse. The compartment door slid open and three businessmen came in, laughing. The youngest of them chose the seat beside Charlie so that he was facing towards the young woman. They had an air of mildly alcoholic carnival about them, as if they were wearing paper hats. One of the older men was smoking a cigar and its lengthening ash stayed miraculously intact in defiance of his gestures. He was telling a joke, the climax of which was imparted in a whisper that punched their heads back, leaving them groggy with laughter. The youngest one directed his laughter at the young woman, taking a side glance at Charlie to check the competition.

  Charlie’s impassivity made it obvious that he wasn’t entering. As the train gathered momentum, he strove to analyse what the news meant to him. With the numbness of the initial blow wearing off, his mind prodded tenderly at the pain, trying to determine the extent of the damage. There were certain obvious consequences. He might have to leave university. They had been very tight for money as it was. There was the house to keep. With only himself and Elizabeth living in it, that wouldn’t be easy. At eighteen, Elizabeth wasn’t making much of a wage. The mess he had made with Mary was going to be impossibly complicated. It was some time to get pregnant.

  But these were merely abrasions. The sheer fact of his father’s dying must cut a lot deeper than that. He was almost afraid to examine it to the marrow. He thought tentatively what it would mean to lose his father. He tried to consider it not in the practical terms, but simply in human ones. At first, in the absence of any definite reaction to something so unassimilable, his mind struck a vague, eclectic attitude towards it, one derived from dim, subliminal sources. Death was a terrible and awesome thing. Without any experience of it, he knew that. It was the ultimate mystery, recurrent theme of poets and preachers. His thinking had been subtly conditioned to endorse a vague, idealized image of it by what he had read in books and seen in films and overheard in occasional muted references. As a boy, he had been aware of it as a furtive presence in adult conversations, accompanied by lowered voices or significant looks or suggestions that he go out and play, as if this was too fiercesome an ogre to be admitted to the understanding of a child. He had witnessed the heroism of countless cinematic deaths from decorously positioned arrows or invisible bullets, which caused the lifeblood to bloom as formally as a flower on the victim’s breast, while angelic voices choired man’s majesty and the glycerine grief of women registered irreparable loss. And he had seen most of them at an age when the moment of lonely communion in the dark was still too powerful to be dispelled by the need to evade ‘God save the Queen’ or by the glib cynicism of the foyer. He had learned of death’s stature at secondhand from the broodings of the Metaphysicals and the declamations of Shakespeare. Now he was to meet his magnificence in person.

  But, sitting in this compartment – death’s mobile anteroom – with the insistence of the wheels imposing their practical rhythm on his thoughts, what gradually impressed itself on his mind was simply the depressing ordinariness of it all. There was no sense of grandeur about it. Nothing was any different. The random chords of the day did not combine into any impressive overture to death, but remained casually dissonant. In a station they passed through, a porter lounged in the doorway of a waiting-room, picking his teeth. Two horses stood immobile in a field, distinguishable from statues only by tail and mane. Everything that could be seen, through the patch Charlie’s hand had automatically cleared in the misted glass, was the same as ever. Was this how death happened, in the middle of a bright day that was too busy to notice? It was somehow shocking. What made it worse was that Charlie’s shock included himself. He was like a child who has closed his eyes against the imminent pain of a doctor’s touch, and opens them again in disbelief, surprised to find that it can hurt so little.

  He was ashamed of himself, ashamed not because he had dreaded pain, but because his feelings didn’t justify that dread. How could he be so callous? How could he have been so callous in the past? For this callousness must have developed gradually in his relationship with his father, and was like a hard skin formed on his affection. How had it happened? He seemed hardly to have thought about his father as himself for as long as he could remember. The selfishness of it was shattering. He had known the last time he was home that his father had been X-rayed, but he had somehow assumed that it had been all right. His father had been very off-hand about what he called ‘just a check-up’, probably because he didn’t want to disturb Charlie’s studies. To Charlie’s father, ‘the studying’ was sacrosanct, a mysterious activity involving some miraculous act of concentration. And Charlie had let himself be convinced that there was nothing to worry about. The truth was that in the last few days his own problems had left no room for his father’s in his mind. But that was no excuse. For a long time now, he had been concerned almost exclusively with himself, living his separate life in Glasgow. It was so easy to become isolated. He had an established routine and it was a pleasant one. His only real worries had been examinations. And they were the kind you could defer until they gathered in one week and were over the next. The rest of the time he enjoyed just being a student. Certainly, he could have gone home more often. He thought again of how long it was since he had been home. Over a month, and it was only a short train journey away. But he had discussed it with his father and Elizabeth, and they had all decided that with important class examinations coming up it would be a good idea for him to stay in Glasgow and work at the week-ends. Mary had agreed reluctantly. She had come up to Glasgow for the day once or twice since then. It might have been better if she hadn’t, he reflected ruefully.

  He should have gone down more often, he told himself. He should have gone down much more often. How was it
possible to have been so thoughtless and indifferent about his own father? Their relationship had been so tacit and casual, confined to meetings at the tea-table or the occasional brief exchange when Charlie came in late at night. The whole relationship had become a cliche for Charlie, as incidental as the talk between these people with whom he happened to be sharing a compartment.

  ‘They’re making some drastic changes here,’ the one with the cigar said to the man beside him, indicating a street in the town they were going through.

  ‘Yes. It’s high time, too.’

  ‘Those buildings must have stood for seventy years, anyway.’

  ‘More like eighty.’

  ‘Yes. They’re very old.’

  They nodded knowledgeably, the motion of the train prolonging the action until it looked like the perpetual acquiescence of dotage. Their jollity had lapsed before the seductive torpor of a long journey, and they sat recharging their batteries. The one with the cigar held it burnt out between his fingers, his trousers stained haphazardly with ash. The youngest one was making a show of looking out the window, conducting an optical conversation with the young woman. The old woman sat blinking in her corner like a cat, having a dignified disagreement with her eyelids, which kept insisting on sleep, although she jerked herself awake repeatedly.

  Charlie sat staring out the window at himself. He wasn’t exactly enamoured of what he saw. A selfish taker, whose habitual gesture towards his father was an extended hand, palm up. It wasn’t as if things had been so easy for his father. Apart altogether from the money, it must have been hard going. Especially over the past six years. Was it six? Perhaps it was more. Charlie had trained himself not to think about it. That part of his memory was fenced off from everyday contact. It had left its effect on all of them when it happened, and each had had to make his own peace with it. They seldom talked about it. But he found himself wondering how big a toll it had taken of his father, while Charlie had been too busy to pay it any attention.

  The telegraph poles outside went past more slowly now, measuring the progress of his private journey as well as that of the train. The coaches ricocheted to a standstill, waiting for the signal that would bring Charlie home not only to his father, but to himself. In the stillness, a wagon clanked somewhere in a siding and a man shouted some words that the wind pared to a shapeless sound. Then they could hear the signal swing down on its metal joint, and the train pulled in to the platform.

  As they drew in, Charlie stood up, thinking for a second of his brief-case before he remembered that Andy had put it in his locker. He slid open the compartment door and went into the corridor. He left at a run, his tie flapping like an oriflamme, as if he could outpace the last six years or so.

  ‘Where’s the fire?’ said one of the businessmen, shutting the door.

  The old woman, briefly disturbed, settled back into herself.

  The youngest businessman looked at the young woman and winked at the other two. He slid casually into the seat opposite her that had been vacated by Charlie, wiping the pane unnecessarily with a prefatory hand.

  ‘That’s better,’ he said, smiling at the young woman.

  She smiled back, not taking her eyes from his. She shifted slightly under his gaze. Her skirt moved a tantalizing inch and she let it lie. The other two nudged each other and got up.

  ‘We’re going out for a breath of air in the corridor, Ted,’ one of them said.

  ‘Right, John. Don’t walk off the end of the train.’

  They left. The old woman had succumbed at last to sleep. As the train drew out, Ted leaned forward to look out of the window, accidentally brushing the young woman’s knee. She didn’t move.

  ‘Hm. Kilmarnock. How far do you go?’ he said. While Charlie ran.

  Chapter 3

  ‘HE’S AWAKE UPSTAIRS,’ JOHN SAID. ‘THE DOCTOR WIS in this mornin’ tae give ’im morphine, but he wouldny have it till he’d seen you. He hasny long, Charlie. Maybe a matter of hours.’

  John was wearing his good clothes. He couldn’t have been to work at all that day. He had an air of harassed competence in his official capacity as elder son. Elizabeth was sitting in statuesque misery by the fire. Her cheeks looked as if there had been acid on them. She had started to cry all over again when Charlie came in, as if his presence brought the fact of her father’s death nearer.

  ‘Why the hell wis Ah not told aboot this, John?’ Charlie said, filibustering with the facts. Now that he was here, Charlie felt himself inadequate to the moment of facing his father, and instinctively postponed it a little longer. ‘Ah knew nothin’ aboot it. Then Ah get this telegram. Ye coulda told me sooner than this, John. Ma feyther musta been ill for a long time. How long has he been lyin’? Whit is it, anyway?’

  ‘Look, Charlie. You musta had some idea. Ye kent ma feyther had T.N.T. poisoning durin’ the war. An’ every night fur mair than fifteen year he coughed for hours in that bed up there. Ye don’t go on like that an’ nothin’ happens. Somethin’s got tae happen.’

  ‘So what? Am Ah a clairvoyant? How does it happen now? Whit is it, anyway?’

  ‘It’s cancer, Charlie,’ John said. ‘That’s whit it is.’

  Charlie’s ears suddenly had hands of silence to them and sound was a closed circuit inside his head. He was aware of the pneumatic thrust of blood against his brain and the metallic click of his tongue sticking and unsticking on the roof of his mouth and his throat constricting on a lump of panic it could not swallow. The word ‘cancer’ kept blaring in his head like a klaxon, startling into his mind confused images of emaciation and the memory of a poster showing a man caught in the coils of a green snake.

  ‘Cancer?’

  John said nothing. Charlie stood enclosed in that moment of bright silence like a thrown net. That word conveyed his father’s death to him, was as final as if it had been carved in stone. Cancer? he asked the wooden figure of a woman with a child on the mantelpiece, who had always been like a cipher of security for him. Now she stood there like a sinister totem, carved out of indifference. The enormity of the situation grew around him like a glacier.

  ‘Ah shoulda been told,’ Charlie said suddenly, chipping at it with the first thought that came to hand. The sheer fact of his father dying was too much to be withstood, swept all reactions and attitudes before it, and he had to canalize it into something more manageable, anger that he had not been told sooner. ‘This musta been goin’ on for some time. Ah shoulda been told sooner.’

  ‘That’s the way ma feyther wanted it, Charlie. He knew ye had examinations comin’ off an’ he didny want tae worry ye.’

  ‘Didny want tae worry me? For God’s sake, John. Didny want tae worry me.’

  ‘Ye know whit he’s like about university an’ that. Ah mean a’ he wants is for you tae make the grade. That’s what’s been really preyin’ on ’him. He wisny wantin’ tae let anythin’ put ye off. Ah think he felt he could hold out all right tae after yer exams were finished. Ah don’t think he realized how near it was. Ah don’t think anybody did. Ah mean, maybe Ah shoulda told ye sooner, Charlie. But this was the way ma feyther wanted it. An’ it meant an awfu’ lot tae him. So Ah went along with it. Whit else could Ah dae?’

  Nothing else. Charlie’s brief recriminations turned shamefaced from John’s question. Behind it, making it unanswerable, lay the attitude of his father, and Elizabeth and, to a lesser extent, John himself to all that the university meant. To them it was something of immense importance and impregnability, a fortress of fabled knowledge that they could never gain access to, and they never quite became blase about the fact that one of their family had managed to penetrate it. They maintained a certain deference, not to him (for he was still to an extent the familiar fixture he had always been about the house, reading and self-absorbed, to be met with suddenly, vegetating quietly in a chair, and everywhere he went books and magazines and ties and pullovers grew like a fungus, so that Elizabeth had to keep following him up and pruning his untidiness before the furniture got submerg
ed), but a deference to that part of his life that took place in Glasgow, that consisted of lectures and notes and books with portentous titles. Because of this, he was accorded certain concessions. Into their thinking had been introduced a special clause of consideration that affected their reactions to many of the things he did. If he were short-tempered or inconsiderate or uncommunicative, allowance had to be made. He was ‘studying’, he was ‘at university’. And had Charlie done anything to discredit this attitude? Had he not enjoyed to a degree this special consideration for what he was doing? Had he not on occasion fostered it by deliberate reference to some abstruse work or to ‘Anglo-Saxon’, which he knew would create a measure of awe among them? He couldn’t now blame John for something which emerged from a situation he had himself helped to create. John’s question was unanswerable. It stood like a wall before his recriminations, the stronger because he had helped to mortar it himself, and his anger struck ineffectually against it and washed back on himself. For his anger was really directed against himself, he realized. It was not so much that he blamed John as that he had sought to divert any blame from himself, and now he admitted to himself that he was in part to blame. He was the one who had been content to stay in Glasgow and concern himself almost exclusively with his own problems and his own life. John and Elizabeth had been here, knowing and worrying about his father, and trying to look after him. What right had he to blame anyone?

  ‘An’ anyway,’ John went on superfluously, ‘it’s all happened so quick. Ah mean, ma feyther got the X-ray, and then they had him in for observation fur a wee while, and then they just sent him hame tae dee. There wis nuthin’ else fur it. They said it wis too late. Ah think ma feyther musta been nursin’ this fur a long time, Charlie, without tellin’ anybody.’