The Big Man

by William McIlvanney

  He moved slightly down the bar, away from the possibility of being seen by them, and with the one small, lateral movement seemed to shuck the code he had thought was his, became not the master of that rough ethic’s baying principles but their prey. He felt unmanned. He became for himself an impostor among these men of raucous certainties and instant responses. Their laughter excluded him.

  ‘It’s true,’ one of them was saying. He was in his fifties, his face lit from within by the beer like a Hallowe’en lantern. Sitting down, he held the attention of several men at the bar who were turned towards him. He had the sonorous delivery of a man who was used to being listened to. ‘Apart from churches, the auldest thing in this toon’s Tammy Bruce. An’ even he’s condemned. Ye seen him lately? What? He’s no’ gonny last. A waste o’ time for him to wind up his watch. Naw. Nearly every buildin’ in this toon is since the Thirties. Think about it. That’s a fact. They’ve ta’en our past away from us. A sign o’ the times.’

  They all went on to argue and compare buildings and evoke past people. Dan’s thoughts were a personal descant on their public theme, elegiac with self-pity. What they were discussing as an abstraction he felt he was experiencing. He saw himself briefly as the victim not of personal circumstances but of something larger. These were the changes that were all around. He was just a part of them. This wouldn’t have happened before. He thought vaguely of his parents’ house and evoked in himself a misty ambience of warmth and brightness and stability. He managed to believe in the image for a moment, like one of those coloured pictures he had stared at as a child, wishing he could go there, where flowers of different seasons bloomed together and wormless apples grew and no hen-shit clogged the tails of fluffy chickens. But now, as then, reality blocked his way, this time in the shape of a memory he never welcomed.

  After his father died, he had gone round as often as he could, or as often as he told himself he could, to see his mother. Her life was contracting then to a narrowing circle of daily trivia and that in itself was painful to look on at, for her generosity of nature began to atrophy with disuse. Small, uncharacteristic bitterness tarred her speech and her mouth seemed often tasting aloes. Then one day she changed in the passing his sense of his own boyhood.

  They had been talking about someone who lived locally and who was a little older than Dan. His habit of not giving his wife enough money was mentioned. Dan was laughing at the man’s reputation for meanness.

  ‘About as bad as yer feyther,’ his mother suddenly said.

  ‘What?’ Dan thought she was joking.

  ‘About as bad as yer feyther. A penny rolled a long, long way wi’ him.’

  ‘Come on, Mither. That was oor joke.’

  ‘Was it? He woulda skinned a louse for the tallow. Ah think he was feart Ah would save up the bus fare tae Graithnock an’ no’ come back.’

  The coldness of her voice chilled the air in the room. He stared at her in the twilight she would let turn almost to darkness before she pressed the switch, for the habits of a lifetime saw only financial waste in light that you weren’t using to look at anything in particular. The fire was embers to which a few fresh nuggets tried to give the kiss of life. Perhaps it was what she had become herself she was accusing his father of. Perhaps the accusation was that he had made her so. Years of assumptive laughter went hollow for Dan.

  Sitting with a stranger, he began to question her and she animated under his questions, almost shone eerily in the dusk with a truth she had found the occasion to tell and in the telling defined it for herself. She told him of slights so small you would have thought no memory could retain them. But hers had. There were embarrassments in shopping, masculine insensitivities, small things impossibly longed for – the terrible lifelong minutiae of unshared pain. There was the wish that she had the chance to do it again and the avowal that so many things would be different.

  It wasn’t the contradiction of his sense of their relationship that was shocking. It was the awareness of the host of denied selves that were dead in her and she mourned for still. As she talked, he caught glimpses of girls she almost was and women she had wanted to be. They came faintly from her dwindling body like an exorcism in the darkening room. In that moment the brutish inadequacy of his past appreciation of her shamed him.

  He had always known her life a selfless giving, a bequest from the living of everything she had. That moment was the codicil, not one that changed what was given but clarified the terms on which it was received. The proviso was the selfishness of others. The beneficiaries could only become beneficiaries through their own greedy indifference. Otherwise, how could they have accepted a gift so destructive of the donor?

  Dan had seen a glimpsed truth not only of his mother’s life that day but of whole generations of working-class women. From then on the praises he would hear given to those self-sacrificing many were to have a doubtful ring for him. It was right, justice, that the true heroism of working-class life should be accorded to those women. But like all heroism it was a dubious commodity. That lost army of fraught, unglamorous women, with the coats they had to make last for years and the shoes inside which strips of cardboard, absorbing dampness, recorded the passage of hard times like the rings of a dead tree, had done unbelievable things. But they shouldn’t have been asked to do them.

  With a few pounds and some sticks of furniture, they had every day practised a very commonplace white magic. They had sewn comfort out of rags, brewed surprising satisfaction from unimpressive ingredients, calmed storms and taught decency in the face of the injustice their own lives suffered. But the cost of it had often been themselves. They were the ingredients of their own magic, last ounce of spirit, last shred of ambition, smallest fragment of dream. The wastage – the good minds starved, the talents denied, the potential distorted – was beyond computation. So when Dan was to hear afterwards a woman who had married well make a small shrine of her mother, or a man who had been successful praise his mother’s sacrifice, he appreciated their feeling but thought it would have been better not to need to feel it. Those attitudes seemed to him like wreaths laid at the graves of the prematurely dead, ones on which the cards should read ‘With fond misgivings’ and ‘Guiltily remembered’.

  The guilt he had felt towards his mother extended now to include Betty. The looks through to the lounge he had continued to take had forced him to see the potential to be someone else that there was in her. He saw not only her attractiveness through the eyes of a stranger but her interestingness, realising afresh how much he didn’t know about her. It was as if, having found the bay of a continent habitable, he hadn’t explored the rest of it. He suspected it was mainly that honest admission which held him there. He didn’t doubt his ability to go through and deal with the man. But, acknowledging how far Betty – by the very action of being here – had reminded him that she was incomprehensibly herself, he had doubts about the results of his going through the lounge.

  He remembered, too, in seeing her, his own misgivings about their life together, his own longings for something other, his own times of unfaithfulness. He couldn’t pretend that she had no right to be the same. The thought was a shared nakedness of doubt with her, a dismantling of his own machismo. Stripped of who he had thought he was, of Wullie Mairshall’s moth-eaten robes of manhood, he felt the chilliness of honesty. He held balanced in himself two forces: a rage that could have demolished the furnishings of this pub and anybody who got in his way, especially Betty, and a certainty of how useless doing that would be. He knew simultaneously his strength and its pointlessness.

  He understood how fragile he was and in the understanding, twinned in the same placenta, was his compassion for Betty’s fragility, no matter what she did. One couldn’t be born without the other. And in the realisation of his own rawness and that of others, he saw the flimsiness of the coverings sometimes made for it, the tatterdemalion beliefs, the certitudes any trivial accident could pierce. When he looked back into the lounge and saw that they were gone, it was l
ike looking in a mirror and seeing no reflection.

  Before he could stop himself, he had panicked, and gone through to check. Three girls on a night out assessed him calmly. He went out into the street. Two men were taking a prolonged farewell on the pavement. A car was refusing to start. There was only one person in it. Normalcy mocked him. Not knowing what else to do, he went back into the public bar and ordered another pint.

  ‘John Logie Baird,’ someone was saying. The inventor of television.’

  The steam engine. James Watt.’

  The phone.’

  ‘Who was that?’ somebody asked.

  The phone, does that no’ ring a bell? An Alexander Graham Bell?’

  ‘Alexander Fleming fae Darvel. Penicillin.’

  ‘Sir Alexander Fleming.’

  ‘Simpson. Chloroform.’

  ‘Tar MacAdam.’

  ‘Naw, but listen. Yese’ve all missed out the greatest Scotsman of them all.’

  ‘Rabbie Burns!’

  ‘The autodidact.’

  Nobody else seemed to have heard of him.

  ‘The self-taught man. That’s Scotland’s greatest tradition. There’s men walkin’ about these streets in boiler-suits wi’ mair knowledge o’ mair things than a lot o’ professors have. Little wonder we’ve inventit an’ discovered so mony things. We’re intae everythin’. A very restless an’ curious intelligence, the Scottish intelligence. Ask me any question.’

  And he burst out laughing. With the obsessive desperation of the lost, Dan imagined a landmark in every casual observation. He had been listening to their talk as if he could deduce from it a fix on where he was. He had been thinking about how the Scots seemed to be curious about everything except themselves. The roster of names had come to him, like a surrogate identity, a list of aliases behind which it was possible to hide from the unexamined reality of your own experience. He understood the comfort of those familiar names. These talking men seemed to him like where he had been. He sensed them falling behind him like comfortable voices murmuring round a camp-fire while he moved on into a darkness disturbingly and unfamiliarly alive.

  Like a brand aimlessly lifted from their fire, he took that one word: autodidact. His mind played with it. He was an autodidact who would be taking his official test on Sunday. But he was an autodidact of experience, and that was different from knowledge. Experience was an unlearning of certain kinds of knowledge, not a garnering but a stripping off.

  He saw, perhaps because he had to in this moment of fearful vulnerability, a rough shape to his life. He had been preparing unselfconsciously for something like this. That instinctive boyhood decision to reject an academic course at school, that apparently casual turning away, had been a determined turning towards. He had chosen his own experience, undiluted, not filtered through the preconceptions of those who had gone before him. His parents had been wrong to see in his choice a rejection of his own intelligence. He had been choosing to develop his own intelligence, not as a career but as a way of life, something not compromised by its professional usefulness. What he had rejected was intellectuality, the force-feeding of intelligence in disjunction from personal experience.

  From this distance that boy’s determination seemed not a wilful silliness or a fear of taking on a hard challenge but an act of surprising self-confidence. For he had even then believed in the reality of his own intelligence, had no doubts that it was there. He hadn’t felt the need to prove its existence to anyone else. Not much he had ever read had intimidated his mind, and he had read a lot. But he had always read in relation to his own life, using his intelligence to inform his experience, never to subvert it with unproven theory. Betty had often despaired of him. She said that he didn’t use his intelligence or his reading to any purpose that affected his life significantly. But the purpose had been there, if opaque. Perhaps, he reflected ruefully, this moment was a fulfilment of it.

  He stood at the bar and considered where all that ferreting among books, that patient coexistence with his own experience, that rejection of what he thought were false certainties, had brought him. If you had to come at experience without too many illusions about yourself, he seemed to be succeeding. He didn’t know what his marriage was any more, he didn’t know what he believed in, he wasn’t sure who he was supposed to be. He felt he would be turning up on Sunday in a condition that would justify what Eddie said was the farmer’s name for that patch of grass: ‘no-man’s-land’. He would be arriving as a body and not much else, so insubstantial he wondered if he would leave footprints.

  But some reflexes of identity stayed with him, like the twitchings of a dying insect. He knew he had been waiting for time to pass. He looked at the clock above the bar and decided he had waited long enough. Betty and the man had left early. That had given Dan hope because it might mean she was concerned about the boys and didn’t want to stay out too late. It might mean she was still as much their mother as she was whatever she was to the man. He wanted to check and hoped that she was home because he couldn’t bear to face the images that would be running in his head all night like a blue movie if she wasn’t. He crossed to the pay-phone and dialled. He had been phoning her from Glasgow every night. She would suspect nothing.

  When Betty said ‘Hullo’, the meaning of the call was over. There was nothing they could seriously say to each other. They briefly told each other everything was all right, sentries guarding separate but adjoining states of loneliness, exchanging passwords. Putting down the phone, he submitted to the rest of the evening because there was nothing else he could think of to do.

  He drank the rest of his pint and caught a bus to Glasgow and returned to the Burleigh Hotel and sat in his room and responded to Frankie White’s remarks and lay in the darkness on his bed, through the wall from Frankie and far away from everyone, and wondered where he was to find enough will to clench a fist.

  FIVE

  He wakened into a block of structured sunlight, no casual place but one imprisoning him in an experience he must confront. The unfamiliar room told him his loneliness. Time on his travelling alarm pointed at him like a gun: empty yourself and let’s see what is there. The dull sounds in the hotel were too preoccupied to help him. He stirred his shoulders and arms and legs, probing for problems. There was none of the underwater sluggishness that sometimes held him on waking. His muscles responded instantly, gave him no excuse.

  Necessity was waiting for him. But now, at this moment when he realised he must accept it, it seemed an invented necessity, not something he had discovered for himself. The happenings of the past three weeks, the money Matt Mason had given him, the companionship of Frankie White, the sessions with Tommy Brogan, all seemed an illusion of common purposes, a mirage of togetherness that dissipated leaving him only with himself, and in himself there was no discoverable reason for fighting Cutty Dawson. Who was Cutty Dawson?

  The only way he could get himself out of bed towards what he would have to do was to imagine the reactions of the others if he didn’t. He thought of the outrage, the contempt, the accusations of fear from Matt Mason and his friends, from the people who would be coming to watch, from Thornbank. Out of those thoughts he patiently constructed a ladder of shame by which to climb out of his disbelief in what was ahead.

  Upright, he tried to conjure normalcy out of small actions. He took a long time washing himself at the basin. He brushed his teeth three times, as if Cutty Dawson and he were to meet for a smiling contest. Examining his rough chin in the deceiving mirror, he wondered about leaving it as it was. But he shaved because shaving was what he usually did. He did all of this very slowly and thoroughly because he was trying through the ceremony of habit to make the day real for him. It didn’t work.

  Instead of familiar objects giving him back himself, his strangeness imparted itself to them. Soap was a weird thing. How had they arrived at manufacturing that? The structure of a razor was outlandish. Everything oppressed him with its arbitrariness. What did all this have to do with him? He felt imprisone
d in inventions of which he was one. He felt separate from his own life, as if seeing it for the unreal thing it was. The feeling persisted when Frankie White came in.

  ‘Morning, morning, morning,’ Frankie began briskly. ‘We’ve got a good day for it.’

  Dan nodded.

  ‘You ready for the big breakfast?’

  Frankie was reminding him of the arrangements Matt Mason had made. They were to meet in a hotel in the city centre. The fight was to begin at two o’clock and it had been decided that Dan should eat a big, late breakfast so that he would have digested the food properly by the time he met Cutty. Frankie kept talking as Dan finished dressing. He seemed to sense Dan’s distance and was providing a running commentary of trivia as if to normalise things for him. But Dan was aware of how carefully Frankie was watching him. Frankie’s caution isolated Dan further.

  His isolation extended to the hotel where Eddie Foley took them. The big dining-room was empty except for themselves. They sat at a long table and were served by a waitress who stood well away from them unless she was signalled over to be asked for more toast or another pot of tea. It required some effort for Dan to eat the two well-done steaks that were put before him but he chewed his way through them determinedly, as if they were a substance with magical powers that would see him through what was ahead. Only Tommy Brogan, looking uncomfortable in this setting and perhaps in need of a purpose to hide behind, was checking on what Dan was eating.

  Roddy Stewart was dividing his time between his meal and the Observer. Matt Mason, Eddie and Frankie were exchanging the sports pages of other papers. All strangers, Dan thought. He was a temporary adjunct to their lives, fuel for their own purposes. For Tommy Brogan, he was a test of his training skills, an experiment in how effectively Tommy could create a clone of himself within a week. For Matt Mason and Eddie Foley, he was an investment the point of which he didn’t understand himself. For Frankie White, he was a wage. He couldn’t be sure what he was for Roddy Stewart, perhaps a collector’s item, like a primitive painting the worth of which would be decided today.