Raymond and young Danny were quarrelling over the pack of cards. Her arrival encouraged them to push their respective attitudes towards caricature. Raymond became innocently preoccupied in laying out the cards, his monkish dedication astonished at her arrival. ‘Oh, hello, Mum.’ Danny’s arms went out in outrage at the cruelty of man’s ways. ‘Mum!’ She felt she couldn’t face their trivial intensity at this time of the day. But Danny jumped up and danced before her eyes like a midge with messianic delusions (Those who are not for me are against me’).
‘Mum! He’s playin’ patience!’
‘Shurrup. So what?’ Raymond said.
‘Two canny play patience. Ya bam!’
‘You said you didn’t want to play.’ Raymond was now using carefully formal English, showing his mother how calm he was, how full of rectitude.
‘Ah said Ah didn’t want to play whist. But there’s other games.’
‘That’s right. Patience.’
‘Ah said Ah would play rummy.’
‘I’m not playin’ rummy. You don’t play right. You don’t even know the rules. You make a run outa clubs and spades and everything. You’re daft.’
Danny kicked away Raymond’s line of cards and Raymond lunged to hit him and Betty screamed, ‘Raymond! The two of you! Shut up! For God’s sake, shut your mouths!’ They both looked at her in a shocked way, as if they had just discovered that their mother was mad. Her own next remark made Betty think they might be right.
‘What’ve you had to eat, the two of you?’ she asked and couldn’t herself see how that related to the problem.
‘We had flakes,’ Danny said in passing. ‘Ye know what he did, Mum? He stopped playin’ because Ah was winnin’. Ye did so!’
‘Did not.’
‘Did sot.’
‘Not.’
‘Sot.’
‘Not, not, not.’
‘Sot, sot, sot, sot, sot. Sot, sot. Sot, sot, sot –’
‘Danny! Stop! Stop, Danny!’
In the silence she gathered up the cards and put them on the mantelpiece.
‘Aw, Mum!’ from Raymond.
She resentfully made them a breakfast of sausage and egg and toast, salving her rebellious conscience by making them lay the table. She tried not to let her affections take sides. But Raymond was so unfairly arrogant, playing his age advantage against Danny. He was thirteen against ten and he used those three years as a brutal birthright. His darkness of hair seemed to her for the moment sinister. Danny, still fair like herself, seemed an aggressed-on innocent, a small boy who sometimes gave the heart-wrenching impression that life was for him like jaywalking at Le Mans. She had a weakness for his passionate desire for justice, even when it was totally misguided.
While she fed them, she remembered an incident last year. She and Dan had been sitting in the house when Danny had rushed in from playing football in the street outside. His cheeks were florid from exertion and his eyes flamed with intensity.
‘Dad! Dad!’ he had been calling from the outside door.
He arrived in the room like the bearer of the news the world had been waiting for.
‘Dad, Dad! Ah told the boys you would know the answer.’
Dan had glanced up from his paper.
‘Twenty-two,’ he said.
‘Naw, naw. Listen, Dad. Andrew got hit in the face wi’ the ball.’
Dan looked at her and rolled his eyes.
‘Hit in the face wi’ the ball!’ Danny said.
‘In the face,’ Dan said. ‘With the ball. Correct.’
‘All right. He was goin’ to tackle Michael. And Michael lashed it. He really thumped it. An’ it hit Andrew right in the face. Full force.’
‘Amazin’,’ Dan said.
‘Naw. But listen, Dad. Is it a foul?’
Dan started to laugh.
‘What d’ye mean?’
‘Is it a foul?’
‘How can it be a foul?’
‘But it hit him right in the face!’
‘Danny! It’s not a foul. Because the ball hits somebody in the face. It’s mebbe an accident. But it’s not a foul.’
Betty remembered Danny’s disappointment and then the hope that rekindled his eyes, the counsel for the defence who has found the incontrovertible point of law.
‘But, Dad,’ he said. ‘Andrew’s cryin’. He’s really roarin’.’
While Dan explained that tears didn’t make a foul, Betty thought she had glimpsed the core of Danny and remembered why she loved him so much. He believed that circumstances had to yield to feeling. He was such a lover that he couldn’t understand why the deepest feeling didn’t make the rules. As Danny trailed disconsolately back out the house to announce the bad news from the adult world, Betty felt a compassion for him that was out of all proportion to a football match.
It was perhaps that memory that determined how she would decide when Raymond picked up the cards from the mantelpiece as soon as he had finished eating. He was about to play patience again.
‘Raymond,’ she said. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Ah’m goin’ to play at cards.’
‘With Danny?’
‘No way. Danny’s a diddy.’
The venom of it annoyed her.
‘No he’s not,’ she said. ‘You want to play, Danny?’
‘Uh-huh.’ Danny put his last piece of toast in his mouth and crossed towards Raymond. Raymond threw the cards on to the floor. Danny painstakingly picked them up.
‘Right, Raymond,’ Betty said. ‘You don’t want to play with Danny, you don’t want to play. But just make sure you leave him alone.’
She heard Dan coming downstairs as Raymond brushed past her. When she went into the kitchen, Dan was standing, wearing only a pair of old trousers and looking drowsily into a packet of cornflakes as if there was a message there he must decipher. His rumpled presence somehow provoked her and one of those familiar quarrels over nothing already hung in the air around them. The rules for such quarrels were that the cause of them should be irrelevant and that the venom they evoked should be out of all proportion. Raymond had exiled himself to the back green and she could hear him kicking a ball steadily against the wall of the house as if he was trying to tell her something. Danny was pretending to play with the cards that had caused the trouble but he had put the television on. Dan shook the cornflake packet and its contents rustled faintly. The sound made her grit her teeth.
‘Oh-ho,’ Dan said. ‘No cornflakes.’
He said it gently enough but it was audible.
There’s some in it. I can hear them,’ Betty said.
Dan pulled open the packet and held it towards her.
‘If ye’ve got a microscope, Ah’ll show ye them.’
‘You normally take cornflakes for your supper?’
‘It’s ten past ten.’
‘The money I’m getting, we’re lucky we’ve got bread.’
He crushed the packet with unnecessary force and put it in the bin.
‘Your period due?’ he said.
It was the remark that rendered any mediating sanity powerless to intervene, the unfair reprisal that escalated the conflict. Until then she would have been herself inclined to admit that he was the offended party to begin with, but his spite had wakened to the possibilities quickly enough and she was content that the war was on, both sides wheeling out their weaponry.
They traversed some familiar ground, littered with the dead of old campaigns. Her contempt was loud for his need to relate any recriminations of hers to the menstrual cycle, as if having a womb precluded having a mind. He touched again on how she made a crisis out of every casual conversation, saw deliberate attacks in accidental gestures. The structure of the day was set, an expression of the complex of devious failures and abandoned possibilities and secret chambers of hurt where their lost hopes lived alone.
The fact that they weren’t going anywhere that day seemed simple enough. But behind it lay a reminder that they had recently had to sell the second-ha
nd car. Just staying in the house compounded her frustration at the way they had to live, his sense of how he was failing them. Lunch was communication through the boys.
When he took Raymond and Danny out the back to play with the ball in the afternoon, she sat indoors with her coffee, reading her own alternative text in the glossy magazine she leafed through. It was how she might have been living, somewhere among those advertisements. She wouldn’t have minded that but the text between adverts depressed her, suggested that perhaps the price was too high. The bright preoccupied tone, so full of blind assurance, was like a more intellectual version of her mother set in type.
She thought about her mother. Were daughters condemned to fulfil their mothers’ worst fears for them as punishment for disobedience? But then her mother’s fears for her had been so chameleon that they would have been able to fit in with whatever habitat Betty had chosen, found a niche there and been ready to feed on any stray passing thoughts of hers, as now. Protectively, Betty reminded herself of her mother’s desperately self-limiting philosophy, like a cage to keep her in. It was the cage she had kept herself in.
Her mother had known things with a certainty beyond the power of reason to refute. She had known that housework put off is housework doubled. She had known that you would see things differently when you were older. She had known that a girl shouldn’t cheapen herself, steam irons never get the job done properly, once a Catholic always a Catholic, educate a girl you educate a family, some men only want the one thing, if she had her life to live again she would do it differently, you’re only a virgin once, nobody needs to be out at two in the morning, they should hang them, the truth never hurt anyone, marry in haste, repent at leisure and Dan Scoular wasn’t good enough for her daughter.
She had also been a very good cook and baker and the house had always been tidy, very tidy, but Betty honestly couldn’t remember when her mother had touched her spontaneously. She could recall her mother kissing her goodnight but that was a ritual, something she had decided you were supposed to do, not an unrehearsed act of affection. When she thought of her mother, and she had often tried so hard to do it justly, she thought of that voice like a barking dog forbidding the world to come near her. She thought of One Thousand and One Nights of clichés, of a Scheherazade whose frenetic variety of repetitions was not a postponement of death but of life, a charm against the dread of coming alive.
And her father had fallen in love with that ability. She thought of the way he used to raise his eyebrows and shrug, as if in conspiracy with Betty’s outrage, but really – she had realised how many times since – in conspiracy with her mother. In return for those utterances neither of them could possibly believe, he was given his status, his small, imagined kingship of the house. Betty was, she had slowly and painfully come to realise, irrelevant here. A two-way charade was in progress. Nobody else knew the rules.
Dan Scoular had been an innocent intruder. She remembered them talking to her after his first time in the house, when he was gone. Quietness had been the first thing, her mother moving about and doing things only she could have imagined needed done, her father in soulful conclave with the gas-fire. They were talking to each other with silence and she was excluded, except insofar as she was meant to understand that she had somehow failed them. Their silence was hurt, deep shock which she was supposed to realise she was responsible for.
That night a lot of scattered misgivings about the way she and her parents lived had come together for her, and from them she had begun to make a kind of credo for herself. Her relationship with Dan had already given her an alternative sense of herself, an awareness of her own worth that contradicted her mother’s dismissive criticisms, which ranged from the way she dressed to her inability to cook. But the most painful forms those criticisms took were their trivial, momentary manifestations. It might be the way she had thrown down a magazine or the way she was sitting or a look she was supposed to have given. Her mother seemed capable of arranging endless ambushes in which Betty was taken by surprise and robbed of her self-esteem. Dan restored to her a more balanced sense of herself. His appreciation of her was like a constantly repeated present.
That night, after he had gone, that sense of herself remained with her. His absence had stayed stronger than their presence, had enabled her not to become a part of her parents’ strange ritual but to maintain her own perspective on it and, with a quiet dismay, understand what was really happening. Her mother had eventually stopped fussing around and sat down across the fire from her father.
The atmosphere was one with which she was familiar. Sometimes, coming in from a night out, she had been invited into the lounge to sit with her parents and their friends. The invitation was usually extended with an elaborately insistent generosity, a privilege self-consciously granted.
They all sat around with their drinks, playing a game Betty had decided to call pass-the-bromide. The reek of complacency in the room was as strong as formaldehyde. She used to wonder if they changed their smiles daily with the flowers. If anything strange were mentioned as having happened, the shock of it was quickly neutered to surprise by common consent.
The only displays of strong emotion she had seen among them took a careful stylised form and seemed triggered by a pre-determined set of values. What was happening outside the immediate range of their own lives was disarmed, could provide no trigger for deep feeling. Things like the rates, the iniquity of conveyancing or the shabbiness of modern workmanship were rich in potential for long, heartfelt diatribes.
Once she had watched a neighbour come apart slowly and with dignity in her parents’ lounge. She cried for several minutes, her mascara spiking the rims of her eyes. Betty’s mother had gone across to comfort the woman. The others looked on in sympathy. It would have made a moving scene in a silent film. But Betty had heard the sound-track. The woman was crying because her teenage son had taken to wearing his hair long and his clothes were casually shabby. Everybody in the room except Betty seemed to understand instantly the grief he had caused his mother, to share in her sorrow at the wantonness with which life inflicts its sufferings. There were murmured condolences, remarks about ‘no matter what you do for them’ and ‘he’ll grow out of it’. Unfortunately, he had. Betty knew the boy, a fragile, earnest teenager, rebellious as a convention of kirk elders. She had been amazed by the scene: all those people huddled together for support against four inches of hair on a harmless boy. It was as if, unable to feel for things that mattered, they all colluded in exaggerated reactions to trivia, indulged without risk in a ceremony of feeling.
Dan Scoular was her parents’ equivalent of long hair in their neighbour’s life, the proof that trouble does eventually come to every door. In that family summit meeting it became clear that it wasn’t who he was they had noticed but who he wasn’t. He didn’t have a very cultured accent. He wasn’t at university. He had no prospects of becoming a professional man. Everything they said to her when he was gone was another door closed on the possibility of their seeing him as he was. Their talk was the noise of preconceptions sliding home like bolts: ‘you’re young yet’, ‘more fish in the sea than ever came out of it’, ‘marriage is more than physical’, ‘not what we thought you would finish with’, ‘manners maketh the man’. This last came from her mother because Dan had not cut his piece of cake into segments with his knife but had lifted it whole and bitten into it.
‘Oh,’ her mother had said as if a small, domestic crisis had arisen. She put on one of her favourite expressions of rehearsed surprise. ‘I’m sorry. Didn’t I give you a knife?’
‘Aye, thanks,’ Dan had said. ‘But I never eat them.’
Betty had understood what had often troubled her about her parents’ politeness: it was a form of rudeness. Her mother in that moment had used what she liked to regard as manners to make somebody feel uncomfortable. For her mother and father the manners had become the most important things, because that way they never needed to go beyond them, could make their lives a continu
ous ritual round of attitudes in which any real feeling occurred like a short-circuit. The natural grace with which Dan had deflected an awkward moment into a joke was something they didn’t appreciate.
Her parents, she had decided, deserved their friends. From that night on, her sense of them had hardened. She realised how her mother’s pride in Betty’s achievements at school had never seriously related to what they meant about Betty herself. It was something her mother could brag about, something to wear like a fancy feather in her hat. She recalled something her mother had said several times when her parents were having what passed for an argument, a monotonous reshuffling of stock responses. ‘I did my duty by you, anyway.’ She meant she had given him a child. Her daughter was an expression of duty. Her father was always appropriately humble before the resurrected spectre of that often referred to and agonising experience, a nightmare of sickness and contractions and bravely borne self-sacrifice beyond his capacity to imagine. Betty herself had been accused of her mother’s pregnancy but had proved less susceptible to being intimidated by her birth than her father was.
Such memories were a farewell look at where she had been. From her reading she made up her own name for the place she was determined to leave: the lumpen-middle-class. If the dynamic of aristocratic life, she had thought, was the past (you inherited your status), that of middle-class life was the present, what you now materially possessed. For lineage, read money, the mechanical womb in which her parents had conceived her and from which they saw her own children coming. They seemed dead to the possibilities that lay beyond it.
That was one reason why, besides being in love with Dan Scoular, she had felt an intellectual identification with what she understood to be working-class life. The knowledge she had acquired of it through him made her want to be a part of it. From the first image she had had of him at a wedding to which she was taken by somebody else, she had wanted to know more about how he came to be the way he was, with a relaxed assurance and a smile that would have thawed a glacier. The company of his relatives she had found herself among welcomed her as if she belonged to a branch of their family they were delighted to make contact with again.
The Big Man Page 3