Docherty (18 page)

Now they were left staring stupidly at their small preoccupations, the means by which they had tried to effect the magical exorcism of big events turned into trivia in their hands. Jenny, sewing a patch on Angus’s moleskin trousers felt her fingers sore with trying to force the needle through, and wondered why she was bothering at all. She had spent her life amassing tiny, patient skills against the weather, accident, disease. She knew what to do when faced with most troubles from a burnt hand to suspected pneumonia. And there didn’t seem to be much point to any of it.

Tam, cutting wire and looping it into snares for Wullie Manson, decided the last bit he had cut was too short, and threw it into the fire. Old Conn stilled his rocking-chair, erasing himself into silence. Kathleen was the only other person there. Since she had become pregnant with her first, she had tended to look in on her mother several times a week. (‘Jist in case it’s eicht month early,’ Tam had kidded her at first.) Now even she became fully aware of a world beyond her belly.

Mick was ready to go out but knew he had to wait. Their silence was still talking to him.

‘When did ye decide this, son?’ Tam asked.

‘Ah’ve been thinkin’ aboot it for a while. Me an’ Danny Hawkins.’

‘Does Danny mean tae jine up tae?’

‘Aye.’

‘My Goad,’ Jenny said. ‘He’s everythin’ that Mary Hawkins has.’

‘It’s the HLI we fancy,’ Mick told his father.

‘The Highland Light Infantry,’ Old Conn confided to the air in front of him. He had developed a disconcerting habit of acting as a kind of neutral commentator on conversations, as if interpreting events for invisible friends.

‘They’re jist sully boays.’ Jenny offered the remark to Tam like advice.

‘Ye say ye’ve thocht aboot this?’ Tam asked.

‘Aye. A lot.’

‘Ye ken whit Keir Hardie says?’

‘Whit’s that?’ Mick fretted with his cap, feeling pestered with irrelevancies. He had expected his mother not to understand but not that his father would invoke Keir Hardie even for this, although he had long been used to that name which his father used with the familiarity of a friend.

‘He says it’s a dishonourable war. A capitalist war.’ He put the stress on the second syllable. ‘An’ he disny think there’s ony place in it fur a workin’ man.’

‘Did he tell that tae the Germans?’

‘By Christ, son. Don’t try tae take yer waiter aff that man. You’ll dae whit ye think ye hiv tae dae. But don’t make jokes aboot it. Whitever it is, it isny funny.’

‘Ah don’t mean it that wey, feyther. But if it’s no’ a guid war, the best thing tae dae is get it feenished. Is it no’?’

Jenny looked up at him, shaking her head.

‘An’ you an’ Danny Hawkins’ll see tae that, wull yese? My Goad, son. Ye don’t ken whit ye’re daein’.’

‘Och, mither. Credit us wi’ some brains. We’re no’ kiddin’ oorselves. But we’ll help a sicht mair by enlistin’ than by hidin’ in the mull. Wid ye like us tae let ither folk dae oor fightin’ fur us? Is that whit ye want?’

‘Ah’ll tell ye whit. Ah want. Ah want ye the wey Goad made ye. Wi’ a’ yer faculties. That’s all Ah want.’

Tam was quiet. He felt his position compromised by the fact that he and Tadger Daly had both secretly taken steps to find out if they were fit for the army. Suspecting, in any case, that their age was against them, they had paid a local doctor to examine them. The idea was that they would have their decision made easier for them without causing any worry to their families. Both had been declared unfit. Tam’s eyesight had been described as ‘atrocious’. Tadger was asked what he was using for lungs. These melancholy reassurances should have helped more than they had done. Financially, it was unthinkable that they should leave their families, and the doctor’s findings should merely have added a moral sanction to the economic necessity of staying at home. Also, constituting as they did a revolutionary caucus of two, they should have taken solace from being absolved from helping to fight a war they felt had nothing to do with them. They both believed profoundly in Keir Hardie and though they couldn’t have access to his comprehension of the situation, they had faith in the pronouncements that emerged from it. But still they shared an irrational sense of guilt. Younger friends of both were in the war and no number of ideas would ever alter that. Both Tam and Tadger wished they hadn’t disqualified themselves from trying to enlist, since any attempt now would have been a safe and empty gesture.

Jenny said, ‘An’ hoo are we supposed tae manage wi’ you awa’?’

It was a remark so desperately untypical of Jenny that the rest of them were embarrassed. It showed her prepared to hobble Mick’s freedom of choice by any means.

Mick said, ‘Aw, mither,’ and she looked away at the fire.

‘Ah’ll no’ be a burden tae onybody,’ Old Conn said suddenly, busking for sympathy along the edge of their attention. ‘Ah’m no’ afraid o’ the pair hoose,’ he confided to his secret brotherhood.

‘Behave yerself, feyther,’ Tam said. ‘Ye wid bring a tear tae an iron bed.’

Mick put on his cap.

‘Ah’m gled Jack has a limp onywey. Ah’m gled.’ The childish simplicity of Kathleen’s interjection put the whole scene in perspective instantly, for they knew their own responses were no more sophisticated than hers. Jenny’s protectiveness, Tam’s confusion, Mick’s determination to be a soldier, all were revealed as naïve and arbitrary reactions in the face of an ungraspable complexity.

‘We’ll talk mair aboot this when ye get back, son,’ Tam said.

‘Right, feyther.’ Mick went out.

Jenny could hardly believe that this was all. She knew that something very serious, perhaps terrible, had been decided. Yet it had taken no longer than it would to discuss buying a new suit and there seemed even less to be said about it. Aware of the masculine assumptions around her – Mick’s that he must fight, Tam’s that Mick must be allowed to make an untrammelled choice, she despaired of the stupidity of things. She remembered Wullie and Annie Manson’s only boy. Ill in infancy, desperately wanted, willed into health by Annie who hoarded his every breath and fought for each hour of his life until he became a big, sonsy boy that everybody liked – and then, after Annie had put fourteen years of his life together, illness and health, like a hand-stitched quilt, he was drowned in the Black Rocks because his foot slipped on a wet stone and there was no man near enough to get to him in time. God had to be a man. No woman could ever be as wasteful.

Tam found it hard to concentrate on what he was doing. The sequence of more than this one evening was broken. The sense of continuity he had always clung to in their lives was lost, had been for some time now, but Mick’s decision had demonstrated it with a clarity he couldn’t hide from. The slow evolution towards improvement which he had kept his faith in was interrupted. The intrusion of the war showed the naïveté of his beliefs, the triviality of any contribution he could make to his own life. He had noticed the feeling of self-importance there was in Mick, as if history had just called out his name, and while Tam couldn’t share his son’s conviction, it did make the converse real for him – that the rest of them were living in parenthesis.

The room was becalmed in aimlessness. Old Conn rocked, nursing his martyrdom, Kathleen knitted, Tam looped a snare and tested the speed of its contraction. Jenny ran her thumbnail along the moleskin, softening a path of easier access for the needle. Against the ravening insanity of nations, a cunning skill for keeping out the damp.

3

A branch was creaking, close, intimate, like the sound of a shoulder-strap. A peeweep haunted the area, its plaintive pretence of defencelessness combing back and forth persistently. Beside them the grass was slowly straightening again, absorbing their love-making. Where they sat was a hollow beside two trees and among long grass, so that they had no sense of location, all fixity diffused among the lazy whorlings of the sky, adrift on an ocean of land. Drugged with country fumes, Mick smoked heavily, watching the grass scars heal on the back of his hand and remembering the same marks on her thighs and arms when they were finished, as if they had both just newly been amputated from the earth. Tuned into small sounds all around them, their voices found a low key, naturalised themselves to an insect softness.

May was saying, ‘Ah don’t want ye tae go. Whit if ye get killed?’

Mick said, ‘Ah’ll no’ get killed.’

‘Whit if ye did?’

‘Weel, it’ll no’ be ma worry then. Will it?’

‘Naw. It’ll be mine.’

Her voice was sad but the sadness was overlaid with something else, a deliciousness almost. Mick put his hand over hers and the gesture allowed them to think of themselves as lovers sadly parting. They needed a convention within which to enact what was happening in them. May fumbled for words.

‘Ah’ll wait fur ye,’ she said.

‘Wull ye, May?’

‘Of coorse.’

‘Ah want ye tae dae that. But we don’t ken whit can happen.’

‘An’ Ah don’t care.’

‘Ye’ll maybe chinge, May.’

‘Maybe you wull.’

‘No’ the way Ah feel fur you. That canny change.’ His kiss wasn’t something willed but a formality that both of them expected, like punctuation. ‘Ah’ll still want you.’

‘An’ Ah’ll want you. Ah’ll wait. Ah don’t care hoo long it is.’

‘But whit if Ah get killed?’

‘Ye’ll no get killed.’

‘But whit if Ah did?’

‘Then Ah’ll never mairry.’

‘May.’ His voice was solemn. Both of them managed to ignore the fact that a passing bird had dropped a shit on the grass beside them. Perhaps they hadn’t seen it. ‘Ah want ye tae promise me something.’

‘Naw, Mick, naw.’

‘Ah want ye tae promise me that if Ah don’t come back ye’ll mairry somebody else.’

‘Naw, Mick. Ah’ll no’.’

‘But, May. Ye hiv tae.’

‘Ah’ll never want tae mairry onybody else.’

‘Maybe ye wull.’

‘Hoo can ye say that? Wull you?’

‘Naw, Ah’ll no’.’

‘Then why are ye sayin’ that aboot me then? Oh, Mick, whit dae ye take me fur?’

Before she had a chance to cry, he had embraced her, being careful with his cigarette. It was easier without words. What made talk doubly difficult was that both of them were acting, trying to evoke with words a reality that was inconceivably alien to this place and time that they were sharing. What was war to them? Meaningless statistics, awesome principles that had never before occurred to them, the rantings of the press. They only knew that it was there and Mick was going to it. They had to try to match the simplicity of their relationship to the complexity that had compromised it. In the effort they stopped being themselves and became the roles they thought circumstances had cast them in.

The truth was that they found it impossible to believe seriously in any of the possibilities they entertained in words. The likelihood of Mick dying was to them a stage-prop, merely a means of establishing more firmly the fact that he was alive. Their commitment to each other was as yet too immediate and direct to realise the feasible disintegration of itself.

From the beginning their relationship had been a natural and remarkably uncomplicated phenomenon. Meeting May at a dance, Mick had walked her home to the farm where she was in service. The ease with which they were able to talk left them with an unfinished conversation, and they met again. What they learned about each other gave them a private area that nobody else had access to, like a furnished room only they knew about. May was an orphan who didn’t like the farm where she worked, and her loneliness made her especially confessional with Mick. He in turn put the intensity of his family into perspective through her eyes. Neither had told anyone else about themselves. Tam and Jenny were left to surmise that Mick was walking out with somebody and the family at the farm were left not bothering to surmise what May was doing.

In this way, free from any social pressures, their times together taking place mainly along empty roads and among the anonymous sounds of the countryside, there was an animal naturalness about what happened with them. When they eventually began to make love, it was as a simple progression in themselves, a further discovery. Marriage seemed inevitable at some time and if May were to become pregnant, it would only change later to sooner, nothing more. But the easy spontaneity that had attracted them to each other was also what was causing them to part, for it was that quality which made Mick decide without too much thought to join the army and which made May accept his decision without more than a token resistance.

Mick disengaged his arm in order to drop his cigarette butt on the grass and grind it with his foot. He stood up, put on his cap, and helped May to her feet. As they brushed the grass from each other, it was as if they weren’t alone. The war was like an onlooker and, self-conscious of the pleasant ordinariness of what they were doing, they felt they should be doing more. They suddenly embraced fiercely, hurting themselves with the impact, and clung.

‘Let’s get mairrit noo, Mick,’ May gasped.

‘Before Ah go away?’

‘Aye.’

‘Where wid ye leeve?’

‘Ah don’t know.’

‘If only we could.’

‘Why can we no’?’

‘It isny poassible.’

Mick had given the right response. If he had said anything else, neither of them would have known how to go on from there. But at the moment of saying these things, they believed in their own sincerity, identified with the spurious intensity events were imparting to them. Infected by that delusive sense of stature history sometimes causes, as if private lives could be enlarged by public events, they seemed more than just themselves. They strove to assume virtues of constancy and self-awareness, which until now their relationship had been too innocent, too pure to need. Unconscious of their own pathos, they half-believed, standing there in a clumsy embrace, that they had somehow become more important. The grass soughed romantically, the trees mourned, and three or four birds foundered around them in the wind like personal omens.

Then, turning to walk, Mick tripped on a tree-root, was hit on the bridge of the nose by a low branch, fell on his knees, lost his cap among the long grass. He crouched there, looking up at her as his eyes watered. There was a moment of disbelief before they both started to laugh. Mick collapsed on to his back. May finished leaning against the tree, moaning for mercy.