The Big Man

by William McIlvanney

  She made it clear to him that she would have nothing to do with the fight. If it happened, she wouldn’t be there. In the meantime, she would provide him with meals and a laundry service. The money she took as the children’s commission on the sale of their father. And she felt within herself that a limit had perhaps at last been put on their marriage, a point of ultimatum reached.

  Yet a strange thing happened. Suspecting the imminence of her separation from Dan, she began to see her relationship with Gordon Struthers with a colder clarity. Now that her relationship with Gordon was threatening to become real, she wondered how real it could be.

  Sitting in the lounge bar where they had taken to meeting, she thought, the first time after Dan had told her about the fight, that the place itself seemed hardly real. Its carefully contrived, wall-lighted cosiness shut out the rainy night so effectively that it might have been the only place there was. The piped music was like double glazing. Conversations murmured privately.

  Feeling the fragile hold these moments with Gordon had on the structure of her life, she wondered how deep their roots went. She had met him at a party. It had been a dire occasion, as she found so many parties were. She and Dan had been invited by Elspeth Murchie, a friend whom she had known at school and with whom she had never lost touch, just meaningful contact. At that time things were already so fraught between Dan and her that the house sometimes felt no more than a terminus where their separate days merely happened to end. They had prepared for the party in the way that was usual for that time, with a quarrel.

  Dan didn’t want to go. What was the point of it? They could have a fight in their own house. They didn’t have to sell tickets for it. They hardly knew anybody who was going to be there. Hardly knew anybody? Elspeth Murchie had been at school with her. Barney Finnegan, the wino, had been at school with Dan but that didn’t mean they had to go out and have a bevvy with him in his favourite bus-shelter. Elspeth Murchie was her friend. Betty hadn’t bothered to add that the thing she remembered most vividly about Elspeth was her habit of cutting off model labels from old garments and sewing them on to clothes she had bought in a chain store. Betty wanted to go out, anywhere, even to Elspeth’s.

  Almost as soon as they arrived at the semi-detached sandstone house, which Elspeth’s accountant husband had wittily named Hades and which was lit like a bonfire, Betty wasn’t so sure. Their quarrel had made them late and Elspeth and John, her husband, seemed almost heartbroken that they had missed so much riotous fun already. Large drinks, like passports to pleasure, were put in their hands and they were ushered into a room where a laughing competition appeared to be in progress. The restless ebb and flow of people in pursuit of joy separated them at once.

  ‘You must meet Bill,’ Elspeth Murchie said. ‘He’s a lady-killer. But nice with it. Just watch he doesn’t charm you out of your pants. This is Betty.’

  ‘Hi,’ Bill said, and it was the highlight of her conversation with him. Within five minutes Betty had decided that if Bill was a lady-killer he must be carrying a knife. While he kept his smile trained on her remorselessly like a laser beam – what was she supposed to do, crumble? – he started to tell her about the last time he had been on the ski-slopes at Gstaad. She was still wondering how they got there when she managed to escape, but not to safety.

  She found herself with Ralph and Mary Brierley. They seemed to be a joint sales team. What they were selling was the story of their amazingly successful marriage. They had worked out a routine. What they did was they asked you about yourself, creating the cunning impression that they were interested. But really they were playing a private game, a sort of materialistic conkers. They were eliciting facts from you that they could top. If you said you had come in the car, they would ask what make, and then run over it with their BMW, closely followed by their Saab. Betty found herself nonplussed. They were obviously used to and expected certain reactions but she didn’t know what they were supposed to be. Trade names – BMW, Everest, Moulinex – occurred in their talk with the frequency of conjunctions. It was like listening to a quick-fire vaudeville act in a foreign language.

  The feeling of foreignness continued. Every time Elspeth reclaimed her from one conversation to subject her to another, she used words like ‘charming’ and ‘fascinating’, ‘so funny’ and ‘interesting’, until Betty, meeting the people the words were applied to, wondered if she had ever known what they meant. She began to cringe from the laughter that rang around her like cracked tubular bells. She felt trapped in a nightmare mannequin parade of egos. The offhand way Elspeth referred to Dan in introducing her to people made Betty wonder if she was being encouraged to see what she was missing in not having a husband like one of these men. She had never regretted not moving among these people and that night confirmed her earlier decision. She felt closer to Dan for having been separated from him by this hubbub. A few times she had tried to catch his attention, thinking they should leave soon. But he was pursuing his own mood with the whisky as a guide. Once when she had seen him coming back in with a refilled glass, he had mouthed at her, not pleasantly, ‘Anaesthetic.’ And then it was already too late.

  She sensed before she was fully aware of the raised voice that it was coming from Dan.

  ‘Crap!’ he was saying. ‘How can you say that? The people you’d be sorry for would be the white settlers? What they’ve put into South Africa? They’ve exploited it for generations.’

  The incident flared briefly. Two of the three men Dan was arguing with turned round and smiled knowingly at some of the other guests while Dan ranted on.

  ‘You call that compassion? Writing off ninety-odd per cent of the population. Fuck off!’

  Betty saw what he was doing. In his antipathy to the whole event he had moled into himself with the whisky until he found the bedrock where he could make his stand. If it hadn’t been South Africa, something else would have served. He was addressing this place, telling it what he thought of it, as wild and out of context as Savonarola at a cocktail party. She felt a familiar feeling in relation to him, emotional agreement locked with rational despair. She had never doubted his intelligence and she had never stopped doubting how he applied it. All he was doing for these people was providing the cabaret, being the party’s dancing bear.

  It was at that moment that the party died for her as a public event and became a private conversation. For she met Gordon. She had since wondered how far their almost immediate and effortless intimacy had been conditioned by her abdication of concern for Dan, her decision that she was alone in an unbearable place. It had been odd. She was spoken to by a stranger she had noticed a couple of times as she had been towed round by Elspeth and within minutes the gentle grin and the thoughtful eyes felt familiar to her. All she had observed about him before was that, sitting down, he looked like a big man and when he stood up he was barely medium height. (‘Long torso, short legs,’ he had later explained. ‘I just missed being Toulouse-Lautrec.’)

  Their initial rapport came from a mutual rejection of the party. They had been cast up on the same desert island of mood, appeared to be its only inhabitants. As they talked, she felt that Gordon was providing an articulate gloss on the attitude Dan had tried to express with such uncontrolled vehemence that he had only succeeded in hurting himself, giving the others an excuse not to take him seriously. Gordon dismembered the pretensions of the party delicately and while he was doing it, the irony of his responses to others who spoke to them became a conspiracy between Betty and himself. They were a subversive group of two within the event.

  That conversation between them had never stopped. Their discontent with the party became their shared discontent with their lives, as if this party were an intensification of what was wrong more generally and in experiencing it together they had clarified things for themselves. Their failing marriages provided them with matching despairs and the sharing of the despair was the beginning of trying to find a way out of it.

  They had been meeting surreptitiously ever since, m
ainly in this lounge bar in Graithnock. Gordon wanted that they should both quit their marriages and live together. Since Dan had told her about the fight, Betty had been trying to move nearer to the acceptance of Gordon’s suggestion. But she had misgivings. Listening to Gordon talk in the atmosphere of the bar, she found him convincing. But she wasn’t sure how convincing he would have sounded elsewhere. The very secrecy which gave their talk its intensity made her wonder how far that intensity would transfer into the open. Perhaps their strength came from opposition. Take that away and how much would survive? Something else occurred to her.

  That was the worst phase,’ Gordon was saying quietly. That had to be the worst. I couldn’t believe what was happening. Everything I did was wrong. I was breathing in and out at the wrong time. Know what I did? What I used to do. I used to write whole conversations down. Just to prove to myself that was what had been said. To convince myself that I wasn’t going mad.’

  Betty was aware how much they talked to each other like that. She didn’t feel dismissive of what Gordon was saying. She knew the feeling. She had talked like that often enough herself. She could see how open to mockery what Gordon was saying might be (‘My wife doesn’t understand me’) but she understood the original pain there could be in living in a cliché, the horror you could have of being trapped for life inside another person’s apparently total incomprehension.

  What worried her was the uncertainty whether what they were experiencing had more to do with group therapy than love. She didn’t know what love was supposed to be but she couldn’t doubt that it was there and that it mattered. She believed that part of it must have to do with a desire for mutual revelation, a wanting to know each other to the bone. Yet she felt that she and Gordon, for all their endless conversations, didn’t come near to doing that. Gordon, she realised with surprise, remained a rather shadowy person to her, as she must be to him. They were an exchange of pasts, tentative promises for a future. Their present was a ghost in both their lives. And those pasts were carefully edited editions.

  Even their love-making had been almost formal, like a convention they had followed. She wasn’t sure whose choice that had been. Certainly she was wary of making it merely physical. She was aware of the way some men kept their genitals and their private lives at separate addresses and she wanted no part of that. Since she had always been determined to hold making love as an integral part of her life, she had perhaps not given herself to it fully.

  But she sometimes wished that Gordon had simply come at her with passion so that happening, sheer physical occurrence, had stranded both of them beyond the viable range of their own doubts. This way, she felt that Gordon was offering her a contract. He analysed convincingly the unsatisfactoriness of the way they lived. He presented a logical solution to that dilemma. But it was as if their lives existed in the abstract. He had worked out financially how they could manage to realise a new situation for themselves but he gave no hint of the passion, the living reality by which it would be habitable. She often felt less like a lover than a co-opted member of a committee.

  Sitting holding hands with Gordon in their lounge bar, she knew she was waiting for something to happen, for time to infiltrate the sureness of Gordon’s theory with event – discovery of their secret, Dan’s withdrawal from the fight, something. She was waiting for time, but not much time, to make her clearer to herself.

  The Sunday he was due to go to Glasgow, Dan had decided to leave from the Red Lion. He and Frankie White were to be picked up by Eddie Foley – Dan didn’t want Eddie Foley to come to the house. One reason was a protective instinct he didn’t examine too carefully, a decision of the heart that the people he was dealing with shouldn’t know where his family lived. Another reason was to deflect as far as possible Betty’s disapproval of what he was doing.

  When Frankie White came round for him after lunch, he found an atmosphere so alien he thought maybe he should have brought his passport. Dan let him in, greeting him quietly. Betty was in the kitchen. Frankie could hear her moving dishes around mysteriously but she didn’t appear. Raymond and Danny hovered around their father and sometimes one of them would go across and fuss with the leather grip that was packed and zipped and waiting on the floor.

  ‘Ye think ye’ll win him, Dad?’ Danny asked.

  ‘We’ll see, son, we’ll see.’

  Frankie, standing uncertainly in the middle of the floor, looked a question at Dan.

  ‘They found out at the school,’ Dan murmured. ‘Somebody was nice enough to tell them.’

  Frankie knew Dan had agreed with Betty that the boys shouldn’t know what he was involved in. Dan had understood her desire not to have them think of their father in that way, had shared the desire. Frankie thought that was perhaps why she was in the kitchen, disowning the event. Her absence was an awkwardness in the room. The boys were obviously excited but their high spirits were baffled by the adult mood that surrounded them, like children at a funeral. They looked at their father a lot. They exchanged glances with each other, making grimaces of mute hysteria. They took turns at lifting the grip, testing its weight. When they asked him questions, where would he be fighting, was the other man a big man, would there be a crowd, the questions were quietly furtive. Dan’s responses were muted too. He seemed to feel the need to touch them a lot, aimlessly ruffling their hair or giving one of them a slowmotion punch on the arm. At last he went across and put on his jerkin.

  ‘Well,’ he said and looked at Frankie.

  ‘Ah’ll get you outside, Dan,’ Frankie said. ‘Ah’ll be porter. Ma stuff’s up there already.’

  But before he could reach the grip the boys were there, taking a strap each to carry it between them, and he followed them out. Dan went through to the kitchen.

  Betty was standing in the middle of the kitchen floor, staring out of the window. She spoke as soon as he came in, still looking out.

  ‘Do you have to do this?’

  ‘I took the man’s money, Bette.’ The form of the name was a plea.

  ‘What if we could give him it back?’

  ‘We can’t.’

  ‘What if we could?’

  ‘Bette. What’s the point of talkin’ like that?’

  She turned and faced him.

  ‘What’s the point of talking at all?’

  They looked at each other. It was a long way between them, too far to cross with words. There seemed no way to tell him what she thought she was planning to do. There seemed no way to tell her that he suspected what she was planning to do. Knowing nothing else but to admit the truth of his moment, he spoke, holding up his forefinger towards her.

  ‘A cuddle?’ he said. The jocularity of his expression struggled to overlay the pain of his face. ‘Puts you under no obligation whatsoever. Oh, love, Ah need a cuddle.’

  As they held each other, he spoke into her hair.

  ‘Remember last night, love. Keep it in your head. Ah meant what Ah said. Just let me do this. Then we’ll see.’

  She held him very tightly. Her eyes were closed. It was easier to talk like that, without the possibility of seeing the confusions of a muddied past cloud the other’s eyes.

  ‘You,’ she said. ‘You, you. Well. Maybe. When you come back. Maybe.’

  They kissed and he went out, leaving her looking out of the window. Frankie White was sparring with Raymond and Danny together on the front green. Dan hugged the boys and sent them back into the house. Somehow he didn’t want them following him even part of the way. Dan picked up the grip, refusing Frankie’s offer to carry it. Looking back several times, Dan saw the boys still waving frantically at the window. He thought he could see Betty standing behind them but he wasn’t sure. He waved back until they were out of sight.

  The walk to the Red Lion was a quiet one. Frankie felt Dan’s thoughts were not for interrupting. Once a man working in his garden waved and shouted, ‘Good luck, Dan!’ Dan waved back.

  The man’s shout had been the herald of what was waiting for them in the Re
d Lion. The pub was full. A Sunday lunch-time was probably Alan Morrison’s best few hours of trade in any week and today the Sunday regulars were augmented with well-wishers. The jogging figure of Dan Scoular had found its way into the awareness of a lot of people in the town during the past two weeks. Questions had been asked about him and the answers, though vague and often compensating for that vagueness with misinformation, hadn’t lacked imagination. He was variously rumoured to be coming late to a career as a professional boxer, to be settling a grudge fight with a man from Sullom Voe, to be taking on allcomers at a boxing-booth they were opening up in Glasgow.

  Whatever he was doing, it was dramatic and he came from Thornbank. In the economic greyness of the times, his tracksuited figure had moved romantically among them like the carried flame of one man’s small rebellion. No one enquired too deeply into what he was rebelling against or for. He was doing something rather than rot in unemployment. So many of them knew and feared the internal, wasting effects of redundancy, of the slow, cumulative realisation that you didn’t matter. It wasn’t just the shortage of money. It was the constant daily rejection that surrounded you like an inimical air that was nevertheless all you had to breathe. It lodged its malignancies in you against your will. It gnawed at you in almost every thought, attacking your smallest ambition with the conviction that it wouldn’t happen or, if it did, wouldn’t make any difference. No wonder it overwhelmed some men so effectively that they lived thereafter until they died with an almost unmitigable deadness of mood, a total petrification of the will.

  This man is different, Dan’s doggedly running bulk had seemed to say. They admired the difference. They loved the spirit they believed had produced it. Few of them had watched him in his painful self-absorption without an igniting of the spirit in themselves, a smile of recognition for what they felt was a part of them, a piece of where they came from. He had, however briefly and however dubiously, rekindled in the town a small sense of itself. The presence of so many people here today looked like the evidence of that. The cheers and the stamping feet and the shouts as he came in felt like the proof.