The Big Man

by William McIlvanney

  ‘Ah’m sorry if Ah helped to put ye in a bad place, Dan. But Ah’m doin’ the best Ah can to put it right. Ah’m for London. Are ye comin’?’

  ‘Cheerio, Frankie,’ Dan said and, as Frankie’s face went hurt and he turned away, ‘Hey!’

  Frankie turned back, tensed with the memory of that other time he had heard Dan say that. Dan smiled. For he meant the same thing now as he had meant then – give each of us the room to be ourselves – only now he knew what he meant.

  ‘Ah’ll miss you,’ Dan said.

  It was true, not just because he had come back from the dead in Dan Scoular’s mind to offer him at least the chance to share in Frankie’s demented life, such as it was, but because, as everybody did even in spite of themselves, he had helped Dan to a stronger sense of himself, and because he had never acted out of malice, only fear.

  ‘Good luck wi’ London.’

  Frankie nodded and went out. Dan felt more vulnerable for his going. He missed him in that way, too. Frankie’s changeability, once you had accustomed yourself to it, had its own value, in the way that the exact nature of a lie can give you an imaginative fix on the truth. Dan waited, checking the door by which Frankie had left, and then he checked the bar. A couple of people nodded into his wandering look. Everything was normal, even the way that Vince Mabon was shaking his head, as if the world would never get it right. Dan imagined Frankie telling Vince what had happened. He tried not to imagine Vince bringing his cosmic intelligence to bear upon the problem, solving it in seconds. But Vince didn’t make it easy.

  ‘You’re a mug, Dan,’ Vince said.

  ‘So tell me what’s new.’

  ‘You’ve done it all wrong.’

  ‘What is it wi’ you two?’ Dan said. ‘Sentry duty? When one clocks off, the other clocks on?’

  ‘You’ve done it all wrong.’

  ‘How do ye do it right in this place? Ye do whit ye can. The best ye can.’

  ‘You don’t have the wider view, Dan.’

  ‘Vince, who does?’

  ‘Some do.’

  ‘Very good then.’

  ‘It’s true. And the rest of us have to reach that higher consciousness.’

  ‘Vince. There are people around have trouble readin’ the Daily Record. Where do they figure in your Utopia? An’ who told you you had “higher consciousness”? Whatever the fuck that is.’

  ‘I didn’t say I had it.’

  ‘Then how do you know it’s there?’

  ‘Of course I know. You recognise it when you see it.’

  ‘Any chance ye could attach yer mouth to yer brain? Ye judge everybody by what they do with what they’ve got an’ how they cope with the circumstances they have. That’s all. Ye’re not goin’ to ask an illiterate tae read a book. Ah think it’s called context.’

  ‘No, no. You’re just compounding the problem. You did it wrong, Dan. You don’t attack the individual. You attack the system.’

  ‘The system. Where does it live? You got an address for it?’

  ‘The individuals are irrelevant. Change the system, you’ll change the individuals. It’s the only way.’

  Dan thought he wouldn’t like to be discussing theory with Vince when the time came to confront Matt Mason.

  ‘The future,’ Vince said. ‘See you and me, Dan, we don’t matter much. Only what we can contribute to what’s comin’.’

  ‘Ye’re a slander on life,’ Dan said. He thought of himself and was generous enough not to exempt others from his condition. ‘We’re only even money tae have a future. You don’t like people, Vince. You want to turn them intae ideas. Any future that has to sacrifice the present to get there isny worth goin’ to. Don’t save me a ticket.’

  ‘Well, one thing I’m sure –’

  ‘Anybody who’s sure doesn’t know, Vince.’

  ‘That’s pathetic, Dan.’

  ‘So fair enough, Vince. Ah’ve got a lot on ma mind. Any chance ye could start yer revolution in the next street? An’ if ye’re gonny start it, could ye hurry up? Otherwise, Ah’m liable to miss it.’

  Vince shrugged and took his pint across to check on one of the domino-tables. Dan watched Vince studying the dominoes as they were laid out, nodding to himself, as if he saw something in their partly accidental sequence that nobody else could see. That was Vince. He was nice enough but he lived inside his mind like an oxygen-tent. Everything had to submit to his conception of it, even the dominoes. It was as though ideas were his element, not air.

  That would have been a nice place, inside an idea, but it wasn’t a place to live. It was necessary to live where the idea and the fact collided. He was enjoying a pint and he was threatened with death. And he accepted Vince’s term. He wasn’t heroic, he was pathetic. Having chosen his place, he would struggle to live there as long as he could, by any means. He didn’t want to die. Mortality was incurable. But given the space he had chosen, he would live with the disease as long as he could. If he had the chance, he wanted to die of old age. He was pathetic, but he believed in pathos. He believed in rheumy eyes and incontinence and hallucinations that the brisk middle-aged found quite distressing. He believed in the necessity of embarrassing those who think they know how life should be.

  He was going to die. That was all. From the honesty of that admission the rest followed. If you didn’t have control over your own life, you couldn’t presume to have control over anyone else. If you did, you were cheating them of the reality that contained both of you. In the absolute fact of death was his morality.

  Immorality lay in the refusal to share in the weakness of everyone, in the preparedness to pretend, for a day or a year or a lifetime, that you were different. It was self-deceit to pretend otherwise. You had to choose not to be victorious and to refuse to be defeated by anything smaller than death. That absolute humility implied a comparative arrogance. Matt Mason fell within the range of that arrogance. Dan Scoular was pathetic but he knew it. Matt Mason was pathetic but he didn’t know it. Dan revelled in his pathos. It was his strength.

  When Alistair Corstorphine came up to him and invited him to next year’s Burns Supper in Liverpool, Dan accepted. Barney Farquharson, a local man, ran a hotel in Liverpool, and every year a busload of Thornbank men went down there for a Burns supper. Dan intended to be around to keep his promise.

  But the thought that the future might not be his caused panic in him. Something Frankie White had said about Matt Mason came back and he knew he would live with it like a shadow: ‘He would hide a week in yer coalhouse just to get ye.’ Dan felt the proximity of Matt Mason. He was coming.

  As the door of the pub swung, Dan clenched his hands and looked up quickly, knowing who it must be. It was Davie the Deaver. Dan lifted his glass to his mouth carefully, making sure his hand didn’t shake, and took the last of his pint and glanced towards the domino players. Three of them winked like a chorus in slight disharmony.

  ‘We’ll get ye doon the road when ye’re goin’, Dan?’ Harry Naismith said.

  Dan smiled and nodded. In that moment he understood why the pub was so busy. The word was out from somewhere else, Frankie or Vince or Betty, as well as from Matt Mason. This wasn’t a casual group of drinkers. It was an expression of solidarity. Looking around at their separate faces and postures, he sensed a disguised unity among them, an army in mufti. He thought that if somebody were to come to the door of the pub just now and summon him by name, a lot of these men would stand up in answer.

  He thought of the moment outside the Black Chip disco. They knew more than their smiles and their clowning and their self-deprecation would readily admit. They were ready to share his pathos. He was glad to share theirs. The more who knew the truth, the more hope he had. Like them, he believed in the simple things he would try to do. If he could, he would watch his children grow up. He would be with Betty.

  ‘Hey, Dan!’ someone shouted. ‘Ye goin’ to stop laughin’ so loud? Ah canny hear myself thinkin’.’

  Some laughed and he was laughing too. H
e felt the joy of being here, whatever the terms. Tonight or tomorrow it might come. He wasn’t unique in that. It was what his father had faced, and countless others. And when he spoke, his voice was an echo of the generations of people who had stood where he was standing.

  ‘Ah’ll have another pint when ye’ve time, Alan,’ he said.

  ROSE TREMAIN

  THE SWIMMING POOL SEASON

  Best of Young British Novelists 1983

  Winner of the Angel Literary Award 1985

  The lines of love and longing, if you drew them, they’d criss-cross Pomerac like a tangle of wool’

  After the collapse of ‘Aquazure’, his swimming pool construction business, Larry and Miriam Kendal have exiled themselves to a sleepy French village. When Miriam is summoned to her mother’s deathbed in Oxford, Larry begins to formulate a dazzling new idea: the creation of the most beautiful, most

  artistic swimming pool of all.

  Around them, Rose Tremain weaves the intricate fabric of the lives of two communities: Miriam’s mother, Leni, clever, beautiful and arrogant. Polish Nadia, tortured by the passions of her sad and guilty past. Gervaise the peasant woman – content with her boisterous German lover and confused husband. And the young tearaway Xavier, in love with the virginal

  Agnès.

  ‘Sharp, eloquent, pure’

  David Hughes, Mail on Sunday

  ‘Rose Tremain has the rare gift of an inclusive sympathy towards her characters and the ever-rarer talent among English writers of being able to write with absolute conviction

  about love . . . we watch enthralled’

  Observer

  ‘Rose Tremain seems impressively mature as a writer . . . It has a particular kind of excellence and is an entertaining book’

  Sunday Times