Docherty (12 page)

Kathleen noticed happily that her father was being particularly nice. She understood his effusiveness. Gratefully, she realised that he wasn’t the kind of father who was critical of his daughter’s choice because he believed she deserved somebody very special. He simply believed that whoever was her choice must be very special. His wild sense of her value infused her with a sudden, deep love for him, the more intense for being valedictory. Looking at him enthroned in his chair, offering Jack his attention, his eyes an amnesty from criticism, she was taking her leave of him. With innocent arrogance, she took it for granted that the supporting role in her life to which she was assigning him was a true measurement of him. He would go on being kind and angry and discontented and concerned, and nothing much would change with him.

12

When Kathleen and Jack went out, Tam winked at Jenny and said, That’s a’ richt then, intit?’

‘He seems a nice boay,’ Jenny said.

‘He wid hiv tae be.’

Tam stood at the window, craning after them until they went through the opening to the park. He turned to Conn.

‘Hoo’s the wound, captain?’

‘It’s no sair noo, feyther. Where’s oor Angus?’

‘Still doon there. Wullie’s still showin’ him the ferrets.’

‘Can Ah go?’

‘It’s nearly yer bedtime,’ said Jenny.

‘Let ‘im go, Jen. He’s goat tae get ower it. Ye canny hiv ‘im bein’ feart fae ferrets. Oan ye go.’

Conn was away before his mother should lodge any more objections.

‘Ten meenits then,’ she shouted to him in flight. ‘An’ bring Angus back wi’ ye.’

Having finished her ironing, Jenny started to put the clothes away. Tam sat down again and lit a dout. It was unusually still with only the two of them in the house, a momentary insight into the future. She knew the thought his silence held but would let him wait his own time to unwrap it. In the meantime:

‘Mick didny say where he wis goin’ the nicht.’

Her voice was faintly edged with annoyance.

‘Did ye ask him?’

‘Ah did. “Over the hills and far away,” he says.’

Tam laughed.

‘Jist preuchin’ aboot. Lukkin’ fur some place tae pit his energy.’

‘He should’ve said.’

‘Jen. He’s no’ a boay. Ye canny keep them in shoart troosers a’ their days.’

‘He’s no Methuselah either. Though times he seems tae think he kens as much.’

She sat down for a minute.

That Jack’s a sensible boay, Ah think.’

‘Aye.’

‘Ah hope they’re baith sensible enough tae wait a while yet.’

‘Aye. They’re auld enough tae ken ye canny leeve oan kisses.’

His mood hobbled discussion. There was much more to be said and she knew that soon, tonight in bed or tomorrow evening by the fire, they would exchange reactions at length, and establish their common response to the situation and its immediate implications. But not now. He threw the stub of his cigarette in the fire. She realised his question before he put it.

‘Hoo is she the day then?’

‘Much the same. Maybe a wee bit lower. It’s no’ long noo.’

‘Ah’d best go roon.’

‘Aye. She’ll luk fur ye.’

He sat on. She appreciated his reluctance. It wasn’t just the pain of looking at his mother die. It was that salted by his surroundings, aggravated by its happening in the complex of disappointment and rejection which his family had become to him. Lizzie, his eldest sister, would be there. It was her turn tonight. She was a strong Catholic, to whom lapsing was just a flabby self-indulgence. She had never forgiven Tam for hurting his parents. Jenny she managed to tolerate as someone who had been born benighted, though Lizzie did believe that she should never have married the man if she wasn’t prepared to worship with him. And there would be his father, accusing with silence.

His mother herself had never remonstrated with him about leaving the faith. Unlike her husband and two daughters, her religious conviction was for her just the way she had learned of getting the world to talk sense. There were bound to be other ways, just as there would be other languages. She was Catholic because she needed to be, as she needed clothes for winter. But Tam’s desertion hadn’t diminished him a centimetre in her eyes. When told about the shocking things he had said about the Church, she would say to Lizzie or Mary, the youngest of them, ‘A man is mair than his words.’ She was quite often inclined to follow this up by describing Jenny as ‘the best wee wife in the toon’ with the assurance of someone announcing the result of a poll.

Jenny, going to the house every day lately and quite a few evenings, felt bad enough about being an intruder on everyone except old Sarah Docherty herself. It was almost unbearable for Tam. He saw families as little fortresses of loyalty and sanity and mutual concern, set defiantly in a landscape of legalised looting and social injustice. Yet here was his father untouchably distant from him, his sisters strangers, his brothers-in-law having little to say to him, and among the ruins of their relationships his mother dying, her eyes enlarging on their half-shut faces, her death demeaned by the politics of their pointless disagreements.

He stared into the fire and said, ‘Aye, then. Ah’ll go roon.’

Old Conn and Sarah lived in Boyd Street. Waving to the fellows at the corner, Tam walked along Union Street. The evening was mild but clouds hung sluggishly in the air. Turning right at the end of Union Street, Tam climbed the cobbled hill to the house.

What was happening there drew him immediately into the inevitability of itself, its gathering stillness. His mother was neither better nor worse than she had been. Only perhaps the eyes had frozen a little more, her thoughts and fears dim blurs beyond them. Lizzie’s busyness hopelessly sought purpose, a candle against a glacier. Old Conn’s fingers led him along his rosary’s braille. Tam stood at the bed, his mouth a mockery.

‘Hoo are ye the day then, mither?’

She smiled and nodded. Her answer was incomprehensible, a knead of soft sounds. She smiled again, stared at him, and closed her eyes. She seemed to understand that he had come.

He crossed to the window and looked out. Through the gaps between the houses opposite, and rising above them, he could see the infirmary. She had refused to go there. The ominous bulk of the building on its hill, overwhelming their houses, was partly an explanation of her doggedness. It looked like offices, a network of long corridors and big, strange-smelling rooms, where the initiated watched over the dispensing of fierce laws which their subjects would never understand. Appeals were made obliquely, long and complicated hassles entered into, reprieves won, a limb conceded, a sentence deferred, and some came out acquitted. Others stayed, bewildered into submission. It was as if Sarah knew that to go in there was to surrender herself, condone her dying.

Her unwillingness to do that was typical. Arbitrariness was her element. The only shape that could be imposed on her life was a time-span. She hadn’t matured in any definable sense. She had simply grown older. Her past was a rubble of contradictions from which no coherent pattern could be salvaged. She was a Catholic who was secretly rather impressed that her son had stopped being one. She had accepted Old Conn’s passivity in the face of whatever happened without ever agreeing with it. She had been a woman who could be a careful solicitous mother for months and then be genteelly drunk for a week at a time with her friend, old Bella Duncan.

Tam remembered some of those times, when his mother and Bella would sit at opposite sides of the fire, rocking slightly and cackling in a private, preoccupied way, like witches who had found a charm for annihilating every concern but themselves. There wouldn’t be a bite to eat in the house, and his father, coming home, would banish Bella and put Sarah to bed. They would have to try to confine her to the house till the impulse passed from her, like a temperature dropping. With false recoveries and relapses, a bout could last for days. Once, not long after he had started in the pits, Tam came in to the two of them smirking together. He changed, stood among the men at the corner for a while, and then went down to Ayr to enlist in the army. But he was kept waiting so long that his mother and Bella had arrived before he could do it. One of the men at the corner, who had been talking to him, had gone to the house and informed his mother what he was doing. Since he was cheating his age to get in, he had to come away. His mother had been very contrite. It was the last time she went seriously on the drink.

Now it seemed right that she should die outside the walls of understanding and explanation. She had never wanted to come to terms with the factors that governed her life, to understand what lay behind her hardships. She had simply been herself from day to day. Her death was similarly going to be her own event, uncompromised by official explanations. The only intermediary she needed was a priest. The tumour secreted inside her was uniquely her own, like a birth-mark. Like everything else in her life, her family, her poverty, getting married, having children, it was just something that had happened to her, not significantly related to causes, and certainly not to effects.

Standing at the window, Tam endured a garbled pain that became confused with the shape of the infirmary, the cruciform frame of wood in the window, the oppressive shabbiness of the room behind him, his father’s posture, Lizzie’s fussiness, the very placing of the furniture, it seemed, as if they were all somehow the cause of it, all of them together, and as if the altering of one of them would make things different. In the illumination not of thought but of experience, one word came to him with visionary suddenness: unnecessary. All of it. Not in the fact that it happened. But in the way that it happened. Like an army, the members of which never reach the battle. But die not for a common cause. Separately, and to no purpose. Choking on a fishbone. Contracting gangrene from a skelf.

He turned and tried to talk to his father. But the priest would be coming tonight and Conn was more or less postponing himself till he should arrive. Lizzie had always seemed to be talking round the edge of some preoccupation, ever since he had ceased to call himself a Catholic. Tam crossed again to the bed and looked at his mother. She didn’t open her eyes. For the last few nights it had felt strange coming round here. She had now become more a process than a person. You simply came and looked on, at an event.

‘Ah’ll luk roon again the morra,’ he said.

As he left, he heard Lizzie complaining to her father that Mary wasn’t doing her share, had missed a turn.

At the corner he stood silently. It started to rain and they all stepped back against the building. He hoped that Kathleen and Jack had found some shelter.

13

‘Auld Swig? They used tae say it wis only Communion wine he drank. The drunker he goat, the holier he goat. Ye mind that, Jessie?’

‘Hiv Ah no’ jist. His sister Peggy could tell ye aboot that. She gi’ed him a plate o’ soup ance. When he had the drinker’s hunger on ‘im. Twa plates he took. Smacks his foag, says, “That was guid!” “So it should be,” says she, “wi’ a pun o’ guid beef stock in it.” He went white. “God forgi’e ye, wumman. It’s Friday.” He went ootside like a whittrick an’ put his fingers doon his throat. Twa plate o’ soup doon the pen.’

‘He wis an awfu’ drinker.’

‘Young Sconey’s no’ sa bad, is he?’

‘Naw. He can take a dram wi’ the next man. But no’ like his feyther. He went at it like a day’s darg.’

‘He’s an awfu’ case, the Sconey.’

‘It wis him that stole the candyman’s cairt at the Taury Raws. Did a cavalry charge up the street wi’ it.’

‘Aye. Shoutin’, “Weans, weans, gether banes, an’ Ah’ll gi’e ye candy.”‘

‘Here, Andra. Whit wis it he did in the street yon nicht wi’ you?’

They all waited, some watching Andra expectantly, because this was part of the Sconey legend that they hadn’t heard of so far.

‘Och, it wis jist a wee thing,’ Andra said. ‘We were walkin’ doon the main street. A summer’s evenin’, like. Ah wis quite prood o’ maself. Done up like a dish o’ fish. An’ Sconey says, “A meenit, Andra. Ah’ll catch up wi’ ye.” He nipped intae an entry. Tae tie his lace, as Ah thocht. So. He catches up richt enough. An’ we walk oan. Quite jocko. But Ah stertit to notice folk sniggerin’. As they went past. An’ lookin’ back et us. Ah looked doon tae check maself aff, ye ken? An’ here’s Sconey wi’ wan trooser-leg rolled up tae ‘is thigh. Stridin’ along, his face sober as a judge. Whit a leg, tae! As if he’d done a clean swap wi’ a spider.’

The story gained by context: Andra Crawford sat looking, as people always said of him, as if he’d just stepped out of a bandbox. An ex-regular soldier, he still dressed with a military neatness and precision. For him, a walk was a one-man parade. Set against his punctiliousness, Sconey’s behaviour took on a satirical edge with Andra as involuntary straight man in a double-act.

Their laughter was measured, formal as a response, hardly more than a chorus of amplified smiles. It washed gently round the coffin that sat on trestles in the centre of the room. The talk was all of local people, things they had said, what they had done, caught living in a luminous phrase or a definitive action. Sarah Docherty herself featured in some of them. But there was no attempt to talk particularly of her. When she appeared, it was because she naturally belonged in what they happened to be saying. She was, in any case, inseparably a part of all they said. Oral scriptures, the stories absorbed her into them, saving something from the corpse in the box.

The people sat against the walls of the room. Since Sarah came originally from Cronberry, none of her brothers or sisters or their children had managed to be present. They lived too far away, but would come in for the funeral. Even without them the place was filled, with neighbours, relatives, friends of the family. All the borrowed chairs, which had been set round the room against the walls, were in use. Some of the men sat on the floor. All evening people had been coming and going, some waiting only an hour or so, others staying. Clay pipes and saucers containing Woodbines and teased tobacco had been put at various places, and people helped themselves. The conversation too was communal like a hookah.