‘How are you feeling . . .’ Roddy Stewart turned questioning towards Matt Mason.
‘Dan,’ Matt Mason said. ‘Dan Scoular.’
‘How are you feeling, Dan?’
‘Ah feel all right.’
Dan Scoular peeled the gloves like an extra layer of skin from his sweating hands and walked about the room, cowled in his own exhaustion. He picked up a towel that stank with his sweat and tried to dry himself off. But his pores were still working, and beaded him again at once. He kept on walking.
‘You think I should bet on you?’ Roddy Stewart said.
‘It’s your money.’
‘Well.’ Roddy Stewart was talking to Matt Mason. The horse looks good. But the jockey seems to have doubts. I wonder what Cutty’s saying.’
‘Who cares?’ Matt Mason said. ‘I didn’t buy the big man for his mouth. I don’t expect him to talk Cutty out the game. The only thing his head needs to be able to do is take a punch. Not even a kick. This is going to be a fair fight.’
The others laughed, except for Tommy Brogan.
‘Well, we’ll see,’ Roddy Stewart said. ‘Tommy. There’s something I have to talk to you about. I think it’s a bit important.’
Roddy Stewart was looking at the wall. His expression was a customer looking for a waiter.
‘Dan,’ Matt Mason said. He said it gently, like the name of someone he cared about. He nodded approximately towards the wall where there were two doors, one into the dressing-room and one into what Dan had assumed was an office. ‘You think you could give us a minute?’
Dan was nearer the door to the office. As he went in, he heard Roddy Stewart saying, ‘I’ll tell you what, Matt. I think that dinner tonight is an interesting idea.’
Dan pushed the door shut. He sat on the one chair in the place, a wooden one, and dabbed himself again. He spread the towel and draped it over his shoulders. As he sat excluded from the importance of their conversation, his body shivered as if in confirmation of the indignity his mind had registered. He recalled a moment from the past, one of those incidents which seem casual at the time but which the mind keeps like a found instrument by which to measure subsequent experience.
It was early evening in his parents’ house. His father wasn’t long home from his work and they were at their tea when the club-man came. The club-man’s presence was never a comfortable one in their house. They paid him money weekly and in return they could buy clothes from the ‘club’ – the name had always seemed an odd one to Dan, suggesting a nice chumminess that belied the hard financial basis of the arrangement. His father resented that he worked as hard as he did and yet the only way they could afford the clothes they needed was to buy them ‘a fuckin’ button at a time’. His mother’s pride was that everything they had was paid for. Forced by their circumstances to use the club, they had worked out, as they always did, the precise terms of their transaction with the demands of their own experience. They would never take anything from the club until they had almost fully paid the money it required to buy it. No matter how often Mr Burnley, the club-man, tried to talk them into taking the clothes first and paying them up afterwards, they never would. It was how they made their circumstances submit to their pride.
That evening Mr Burnley had been talking in his usual, free-associating way, as if reluctant to leave. He no longer ever mentioned other houses he had been to, because, once when he had done that, trying to elicit a laugh out of something he had seen, Dan’s mother had said, ‘Other folk’s business is other folk’s business. It’s not ours.’ Mr Burnley was talking about the weather and how well his oldest son was doing at school and how quickly children outgrew their clothes. Dan and his father were still at the table. Dan’s mother was standing beside Mr Burnley, waiting for him to give her back the book in which he had recorded her latest payment. As he gave her back the book, Mr Burnley reached across to the mantelpiece.
‘I’ll take a couple of your cigarettes,’ he said. ‘I’ve run out.’
He took three cigarettes. Putting two in his breast pocket, he lit one and threw the match in the fire. As he exhaled the smoke, Dan’s father said the first thing he had said for a few minutes.
‘See next week,’ he said. ‘You wait at the door. We’ll bring the book out tae ye.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
Dan’s father was spreading a piece of bread.
‘What do you mean, Mr Scoular?’
Dan’s father looked at him.
‘Just chap the door. We’ll bring the book out.’
Mr Burnley looked at Dan’s mother, who was embarrassed for him.
‘Is it the cigarettes?’ Mr Burnley was shaking his head tolerantly. His hand moved towards his breast pocket. ‘If that’s all it is –’
‘Leave them where they are.’ The quiet commandingness of the voice held the hand still in mid-air. ‘Ye miss the point. Ye could have the packet if ye want. Why no’? Ah’ve given more to a blin’ fiddler. But in people’s houses, ye don’t take. Ye ask. Ah wouldny smoke in a tramp’s bothy unless Ah was sure it was all right with him.’
‘Mr Scoular –’
‘Cheerio.’
‘Ah’ll see ye tae the door, Mr Burnley,’ Dan’s mother said.
Shivering under his towel, Dan smiled wryly to himself. He had to admit he agreed with his parents about some things. He was glad they had passed on to him a sense of pride so finely calibrated that it could have registered a fly landing where it shouldn’t. He had missed none of the insults the last few minutes had offhandedly given him: the arranged inspection about which everybody seemed to know except him, although he was the focus of it; the discussion of him as if he weren’t there; Roddy Stewart’s vagueness about who he was, as though he only mattered as a function; his withdrawal to the servants’ quarters while they conducted serious business.
As he carefully quantified their insultingness, he could imagine his father’s reaction to the fact that he had done nothing but accept the insults. He envisaged a facial expression of his father’s, a grimace so familiar to Dan’s memory that it was how he almost always remembered his father, his personal death-mask of him. It was how Dan’s father had endured the preparedness of others to submit to treatment no one should submit to. He turned his face towards his own right shoulder and his eyes stared conspiratorially at nothing and his right cheek developed a moving lump as if he were chewing on a wad of disbelief that tasted bitter. Perhaps he had been communing with all the proud Scoulars he was convinced he came from. Dan confronted that expression in his memory and acknowledged its rightness for his father but also felt its irrelevance to where he was.
He had the same sense of pride as his father but it had had to develop even finer calibrations because it had to lead him through a more complicated, a more various experience. In a way, precisely because the terms he had to face were more harsh and more obvious, the pride of Dan’s father had been a luxury, his only luxury and one Dan knew he himself couldn’t quite afford.
His parents’ poverty had been not spectacular but sheer. They ate and they managed to feed and clothe themselves and him. But beyond that, from the time that they were children, there had been just a cliff-edge. Nothing more for so long had been possible. Given the clarity of the terms by which they lived, their responses to those terms were equally clear. They knew precisely how little they had and since the area they had was so small, they could defend it totally without exhausting their moral resources. For someone to move into the narrow enclave of their lives was like moving into themselves. They knew the mental placement of everything that mattered to them. The minutest aggression was observed as soon as it occurred and action taken. They knew what they were fighting for and what they were fighting against and had drawn up their lines accordingly.
But Dan was aware of how much the conflict had changed for him. His parents had been engaged in a kind of trench-warfare with their circumstances. Do certain things, you were a traitor. Cross certain lines and die to them. They knew e
nemy action when they saw it. They were enlisted young and their experience formed them and they were never subsequently able to demobilise themselves. While the weaponry ranged against them became modernised, while the tactics of social exploitation developed unforeseen subtleties that outmanoeuvred their past principles completely, they stayed stubbornly at their posts, though the battle had moved past them, and they died there, still clutching beliefs that their confused leadership had forgotten to countermand. And even their son, trained by his own experience in different methods, couldn’t endorse their actions.
But too late, in retrospect and with them dead, he could appreciate. Sitting alone there, preparing for a strange fight of his own and one the implications of which he couldn’t fully grasp, he thought perhaps he was nearer to understanding his father’s dark rage against him in the back green. Maybe his father hadn’t just been fighting him. Maybe he had been trying to fight all the changes he felt coming, the loss of crucial principles. Maybe he had tried to bar at least from his own house the fifth column of careless self-interest he felt infiltrating all around him.
Dan felt a liberating affection for his father. Poor, old, hard, honest bastard. Having lashed himself to his principles to survive, he couldn’t be blamed for not being able to move, though the times did. Dan’s love of his mother, never compromised, came back to him. He wished he could speak to them now to reassure them that he wasn’t lost entirely to the past they had believed in, that he hadn’t quite forsaken what they stood for, that he, too, had his pride. It wouldn’t have been an elaborate speech – they never were in his parents’ house. It would have been something gruffly cryptic, in a code they would have understood, something like: ‘Don’t panic, Feyther. Mither, Ah’m still me.’
But he had to admit to himself that his pride, if it was still there, was in a funny place. His parents’ pride had been like a medal they could wear, one they had earned. His own was something he felt was still with him but he couldn’t have pointed to it. The explicitness of their experience had bestowed on them a kind of brute heroism. His experience had been different, still was. If their lives had been as clear-cut as trench-warfare, his was as confusing as espionage, a labyrinth of double-agents.
What did you trust these days? You couldn’t vaguely trust the historical future in which his parents had believed. Part of it was already here and it was unrecognisable as what had been foretold. Better material conditions hadn’t created solidarity but fragmentation. Working-class parvenus were at least as selfish as any other kind. You couldn’t simply vote Labour and trust that Socialism would triumph. The innocence of his parents’ early belief in the purity of Socialism couldn’t be transplanted to the time that followed Socialism’s exercising of power, however spasmodic. In power, Socialism had found it hard to recognise itself, had become neurotic with expediency, had forgotten that it had never merely been a policy but a policy growing from a faith founded in experience. Lose the faith that had been justly earned from the lives of generations of people and Socialism was merely words and words were infinitely flexible. You couldn’t trust the modern generation of those who had formerly been the source at which Socialism had reaffirmed its faith. All around they were reaching private settlements with their society’s materialism in terms that contained no clauses to safeguard others of their own who might be less fortunate.
If you were honest, you couldn’t even trust yourself. He had often enough expressed his contempt for people he had known who, coming from his own background, had succeeded academically or in business and had turned their backs on where they came from. He had heard them at parties and in pubs preaching the worthlessness of their own heritage and he had despised them. But he also knew that you couldn’t trust yourself not to be like them until you had been to a place where the temptations were real, where you too had the opportunity to make a purely private enterprise of your life and the rewards were sufficient to put such principles as you had to the test. He had never been to such a place.
He sometimes wondered if part of his motivation for giving up his academic course at school had been to avoid making the kind of choice for which he had blamed others. If so, perhaps that choice had found him out in any case. For what was he doing here, if not moving towards it? When his own situation had been bad enough, he hadn’t taken long to conform to an arrangement that fitted no principles he had previously held.
He knew he was wise not to trust himself too much. That distrust helped to explain why he hadn’t reacted to the insults of Matt Mason and the others. He was far out in himself, out of touch with his own instincts, and waiting to find out what he really thought and felt. He had set out on his own small voyage of self-discovery and he wouldn’t predetermine his destination. He would suspect the glibness of his own habitual responses. He would put his pride in abeyance for the time being. He would wait and see where all this was leading, where he was going.
He listened for a moment to the muffled voices beyond the door but couldn’t make out what they were saying. In his preoccupation he had lifted from the desk in front of him a pile of what looked like old advertising leaflets, of a dim blue cardboard that was stained and unevenly discoloured with age, stiff single sheets. He had been riffling them in his hands for minutes before he looked and became very still and slowly understood what they were. They had been lying among other papers and a couple of pencils and a few manila folders, as if someone had been clearing out the drawers of the desk.
Eddie McAvoy v. John Malloy (9 st 9 lbs). Mickey Macrae v. Andy Parvin (8 st 6 lbs). Bert Morrison v. Martin Shinoeth (8 st). Alec Corrigan v. Tony Bertelotti (12 st 7 lbs). John Wajda v. Iain McTavish (9 st 9 lbs). John McLintock v. Allan Devoy (11 st 6 lbs).
The names went on endlessly, it seemed to him, and no one today would have recognised one of them. The cards were boxing programmes from the Thirties. He read them avidly like some lost roll of honour, combatants in a war that had never officially been declared. Some had in brackets after the names odd, tantalising references: The Dancing Pole’, The Man Your Sister Couldn’t Take Home To Your Mother’, The Mad Miner’.
Each fight had both the fighters’ purses marked in pencil under their names. A common figure was five shillings. These must have been mainly scratch fights between men whose training had been the dole queue. There were several programmes in which a full bill of five fights was covered by fifty shillings in old money. Today’s £2.50 would have bought a night’s entertainment in which five men would box or batter another five into submission, or maybe the wiser ones would box a draw.
Dan found himself pondering impossible questions. What had those men been like? What had they felt towards one another in their circumstantially conditioned aggression? Out of what demolished tenements or lost miners’ rows had they come? No answer was the loud reply, he thought, remembering a saying of his father’s.
‘He’s still got a bit to go,’ he suddenly heard Tommy Brogan saying.
Dan didn’t know if the remark referred to him but he took it as doing so. What interested him as much as the distance he had to go was his recharging sense of the distance he was coming from. He studied the faded sheets painstakingly, aware of a kinship. He no longer minded the closed door. It occurred to him that doors exclude from both sides.
Frankie White had been demoted to chaperon. He and Dan had adjoining rooms in the Burleigh Hotel, a place where the floors were so uneven with age that Frankie said it gave a new meaning to the term listed building’. All the time Dan wasn’t in the gym, he was supposed to be with Frankie. Apart from the early-morning training runs along Kelvin Walkway, their time together was amorphous. There was nowhere they had to go, nothing they must do. The first day in Dan’s hotel room, Frankie had started to worry.
Boredom always worried Frankie. It was time unshaped by imagination. All Frankie had to know himself by was the ability of his small but persistent fantasy to triumph over the banal facts of his life. In such moments as these the facts reasserted themselves, oblit
erating like drifting sand the shaky structure he had been maintaining. This time the feeling gained strength from the depressing image of Dan Scoular stretched out on his bed staring at the wall and from the room itself.
Sitting in that room, Frankie decided that the word people so often used of hotel rooms, ‘impersonal’, didn’t fit there. That was maybe true of new places where the rooms could seem just small architectures of assorted functions that reduced people to a series of processes. But in that old hotel room it was the proliferation of identities that was overwhelming. You could neither ignore those past presences nor imagine who they were and their meaninglessness seemed to talk to you of your own.
Dan Scoular’s room whispered endlessly of people who were no one. The stains around the place were a muted hubbub of the past that couldn’t be effectively silenced by the vaguely Arabian-looking woman Dan sometimes saw in the morning. He had tried to pass the time of day with her and she replied in what was presumably English, incantatory monosyllables that seemed to lack hard endings. He had wondered where she came from, what she was doing there. He wasn’t even sure what she did in the room. Coming back into it after she had been there, he had noticed ritual gestures, the dried streak of a cloth-mark across the small, cobbled bedside table. One of the small squares of soap that looked made to fit the hand of a foetus might have been moved from one side of the washhand basin to the other. Perhaps she mainly just talked to the room in her strange language, telling the ghosts to keep their voices down.
Above the wooden bedhead there was a mark on the wall that looked like blood, a brown smear shaped not unlike Italy, with Sicily vanished. A drunken stumble, a quarrel, or maybe just a drink spilled? Along the edges of the bedside table were the black grooves of cigarette burns. They were numerous enough to suggest a casual attempt at furniture design or notches made to measure an endless boredom. Dan had soon learned to read those stains and scrapes and scratches like a secret map of where he was, a chart that led him unerringly to the same sense of his own smallness, with time passing and nothing achieved. Sometimes the feeling induced him to cross to the glass above the washhand basin, which didn’t help much, for it was so dim and striated and freckled with age, it was like a mirror that has lost its memory and gives you back an uncertain image of yourself, as if it is confusing you with some of the other mysterious faces stored in its dull recesses.
The Big Man Page 13