Docherty
Authors: William McIlvanney
William McIlvanney’s first novel,
Remedy is None
, won the
Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and with
Docherty
he won the
Whitbread Award for Fiction.
Laidlaw
and
The Papers of Tony Veitch
both gained Silver Daggers from the Crime Writers’ Association.
Strange Loyalties
, the third in the Detective Laidlaw trilogy, won
the
Glasgow Herald
’s People’s Prize.
Also by William McIlvanney
Fiction
Remedy is None
Gift from Nessus
The Big Man
Walking Wounded
The Kiln
Weekend
The Detective Laidlaw trilogy
Laidlaw
The Papers of Tony Veitch
Strange Loyalties
Poetry
The Longships in Harbour
In Through the Head
These Words: Weddings and After
Non Fiction
Shades of Grey – Glasgow 1956–1987, with Oscar Marzaroli
Surviving the Shipwreck
DOCHERTY
William McIlvanney
Copyright © William McIIvanney 1975
First published in 1975 by George Allen & Unwin
This digital edition first published in 2013 by Canongate Books. 14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 9781782111795
To the memory of my father and for
Mother, Betty, Neil and Hugh - in the
hope that there’s enough to go round.
There was a real High Street. This isn’t it but this is meant in part to be an acknowledgement of the real one. For that reason I want to make it clear that at no point are any of the people in this book identifiable with the actual people who lived there. But I hope there survives in the book some of the spirit with which those people imbued the place.
Contents
PROLOGUE: 1903
The year came and receded like any other, leaving its flotsam of the grotesque, the memorable, the trivial. On the first day the Coronation Durbar at Delhi saw King Edward established by proxy as Emperor of India. In the same month 5,000 people died in a hurricane in the Society Islands and 51 inmates were burned to death in Colney Hatch lunatic asylum. In July Pope Leo XIII died at ninety-three. In November the King and Queen of Italy visited England. Rock Sand was the horse, running up to his fetlocks in prize-money: 2,000 Guineas, Derby, St Leger. In Serbia King Alexander and Queen Draga were murdered, Peter Karageorgevitch became King, and dark conspirators regrouped around the throne, like actors obsessed with their roles although the theatre is on fire. In London Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show made genocide a circus. In Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, two brothers put a heavier than air machine into flight for fifty-nine seconds. In High Street, Graithnock, Miss Gilfillan had insomnia.
She called it ‘my complaint’, not unaffectionately. It grew as the year waned, so that by December her eyes seemed lidless. Most nights she nursed her loneliness at her window, holding aside the lace curtain to stare at the tenements across from her, to judge the lives that lay in them, to think that she would die here. The thought was pain and comfort. She would die among strangers, hard faces and rough voices, hands that hadn’t much use for cutlery, drunken songs of Ireland’s suffering in Scottish accents, swear-words in the street, children grubbing out their childhoods in the gutters. But her death would be a lifelong affront to her family, an anger in her father’s grave. So each night she would perfect her disillusion, her regret was a whetstone for her family’s, and High Street was the hell they would inherit.
Late at night on 26th December one circumstance accidentally gave a special poignancy to her self-pity. Across the cobbled street two upstairs windows were still lit. Behind one window, Mrs Docherty was near her time. This would be her fourth. She would be lucky if it was her last. Here, where hunger and hopelessness should have sterilised most marriages, people seemed to breed with an almost vengeful recklessness. It appeared to her that the sins of the fathers
were
the sons.
Behind the other window, Mr Docherty would be sitting in the Thompson’s single-end, banished to that uselessness which was a man’s place at such times, sheepish with guilt, or perhaps just indifferent with usage. Some of the folklore of High Street concerned the martyrdom of women: wife-beatings, wages drunk on the journey between the pit-head and the house, a child born into a room where its father lay stupefied with beer.
With Mr Docherty, she felt, it would be different. She knew him only as someone to pass the time of day with, as it was with everybody here. She preferred to form no friendships. Pity, contempt, or sheer incomprehension, were the distances between her and everyone around her, so that she knew them by their more dramatic actions. Her vision of their lives was as stylised and unsubtle as an opera, and even then was distorted by those tears for herself that endlessly blurred her thinking, as though something had irreparably damaged a duct.
Her impression of Mr Docherty was not of one man but of several. It was as if among all the stock roles to which she assigned the people of the street, wife-beater, drunkard, cadger, or just one of the anonymous chorus of the will-less poor, he had so far settled for none, played more than one part. She knew him coming home from the pit, small even among his mates, one of a secret brotherhood of black savages, somebody hawking a gob of coaldust onto the cobbles. Cleaned up, dressed in a bulky jacket and white silk scarf, a bonnet on his black hair, he looked almost frail, his face frighteningly colourless, as if pale from a permanent anger. Yet shirtsleeved in summer, his torso belied the rest of him. The shoulders were heroic, every movement made a swell of muscle on the forearms. Below the waist he fell away again to frailty, the wide trousers not concealing a suggestion that the legs were slightly bowed.
She had watched him in the good days of summer, when chairs were brought outside the entry doors on to the street, playing with his children. At such times his involvement with them was total. But what impressed her most was the reflection of him that other people gave. The men who stood with him at the corner obviously liked him. Yet she had often sensed in passing them a slight distance between him and anybody else. It was a strange, uncertain feeling, as if wherever he stood he established a territory. She half suspected it might mean nothing more than that he was physically formidable. In High Street the most respected measurement of a man tended to be round the chest. But her own observations kept crystallising into a word, one she admitted grudgingly: it was ‘independence’.
She felt it was a ridiculous word in this place. For what claim could anyone who lived here have to independence? They were all slaves to something, the pit, the factory, the families that grew up immuring the parents’ lives, the drink that, seeming to promise escape, was the most ruthlessly confining of all. Whatever hireling they served, owed its authority to a common master: money, the power of which came from the lack of it. Poverty was what had brought herself to this room. It defined the area of their lives like a fence. Still, in that area Mr Docherty moved as if he were there by choice, like someone unaware of the shackles he wore and who hadn’t noticed that he was bleeding.
Like an illustration of her thoughts, he came out of the entry at a run, still pulling on his jacket, and became the diminishing sound of his boots along the street. It was a bad sign. Earlier, she had seen Mrs Ritchie go in. A midwife should have been enough. Doctors were trouble. Poor Mrs Docherty. She was a nice woman. They called her a ‘dacent wumman’, which was High Street’s VC. Given the crushing terms of their lives, decency was an act of heroism. Now she lay in that room, trying to coax a reluctant child out of her body. The reluctance was understandable.
Out of the thought of what that child was being urged to come out and meet poured her own frustrations, and she felt all the injustice of her life afresh. She remembered her father, the benign stability of his presence, the crisp, hygienic order of their lives. The solemn family outings. Miss Mannering’s School for Young Ladies. Every memory of that time, no matter how fragmentary or trivial, from her father’s moustaches to the flowers she had sewn on a sampler, was held in a halo of warmth and security. Everything else, dating from and including the death of her mother, was in partial darkness, merely another imperfectly glimpsed particle of a chaos from which she was still in flight. Even the cause of her mother’s death was to this day obscure to her - she only knew it was a disease which had spread its contagion through all their lives. Much later she had understood that the coffin in the darkened parlour contained the corpse of a world as well as a woman. Her father became someone else, the house developed the atmosphere of a seedy hotel where strangers met for meals. When the bakery business folded, her father’s heart ran down as if it had been a holding company. He left her what money he had. Her two brothers (which was how her thoughts referred to them, disowning intimacy) wanted nothing to do with an unmarried sister. She had moved from Glasgow to Graithnock and then, as her capacity for pretence diminished with her capital, circumstances had brought her to High Street.
One solitary memory, the persistence of which suggested that it might not be as fortuitous as it seemed, stayed with her as a clue to the chaos that had overrun the serenity and order of her early life. It had happened in childhood: a family breakfast, herself, her mother, father and two brothers. The room, above her father’s bakery, was brightly warm, although a November drizzle retarded the daylight outside. The table was heavy with food. They were talking and the boys were laughing a lot when she noticed her father glance at his watch. He sent a question downstairs to the bakehouse. The answer that came back pursed his lips.
Ten minutes later there was a knock at the door and a boy of fourteen or so was pushed into the room. He pressed against the door, as if he was trying to stand behind himself. The old jacket he wore was a man’s, the cuffs turned up to show the lining, the pockets bumping the knees of his frayed trousers. His boots were a mockery, ridiculously big and curling up at the toes and misshapen by other people’s feet. His scalp showed in white streaks through the hair where the rain had battered it. Hurry seemed to have sharpened every bone of his face to a cutting edge, and had left him hiccoughing for breath. In the warmth of the room he steamed slightly, the smell of him mixing unpleasantly with the fresh cooking odours of the food. The boys giggled.