Docherty (2 page)

‘Ah’m sorry, sur. Ah’m awfu’ sorry. Whit it . . .’

Her father’s raised hand stopped him. They all waited while her father chewed his mouthful of food.

‘So you are late again.’

The boys were quiet now. The moment had acquired a terrible solemnity.

‘Ah’m awfu’ sorry, sur. It’s ma wee brither. He’s that no’ weel. An’ ma mither

‘Excuses aren’t reasons.’ Her father was sadly shaking his head. ‘This makes three times in less than a fortnight. I’ve warned you twice before. When you’re late, my deliveries are delayed. When my deliveries are delayed, my customers complain. Then they take their custom somewhere else. And my business suffers. You’ll have to learn responsibility to other people. Until you do, I can’t afford to employ you. You’re dismissed.’

Why had that small scene stayed with her? All it had meant to her at the time was the authority of her father -and the kindness of her mother, who had prevailed against her father’s better judgement to let the boy have a full week’s wages, which came to a shilling, she remembered. Yet compulsively that morning came back to her from time to time, tormentingly, as if that one skinny boy had been the cause of everything that had happened afterwards, as if his unhealthy presence had infected their lives like a microbe. Dimly she sensed herself being nearer to the solution of the enigmatic equation that morning had presented to her: the boy’s misdemeanour plus her father’s punishment was somehow equal to the disintegration that had taken place in their lives afterwards, was somehow a formula for the kind of chaos she had learned to live in, but not with. And that was as far as rationalisation took her - a vague feeling, not one that she tried to examine, but one that she preferred to smother.

Faced with it, as she was now, her method was always the same. She took a dose of nostalgia, like a drug. In the special atmosphere of this room, she could indulge in a sort of retrospective trance like a religious ecstasy. There were certain passages of her life that she went over again and again, her personal beatitudes. Tonight she thought of the long walled garden at the back of their house, re-creating it flower by flower. It was as something of hallucinatory inconsequence that she was aware of Mr Docherty returning along the dark street with the doctor. The gas-lamp identified them for a moment, and then the close-mouth swallowed them.

Mr Docherty led the doctor up the dark stairway, knocked gently at the door of his house and let the doctor in. Then he himself crossed to Buff Thompson’s and went in without knocking, in case he would waken his sons. Mick and Angus had been moved through to Buff’s to sleep in the set-in bed nearer the door. Buff, on the chair by the fire, stirred and opened his eyes. Aggie Thompson must have gone back through to help Mrs Ritchie.

‘It’s yerself, Tam,’ Buff said, sat up, coughed quietly, and put a spittle on the fire to fry. ‘He’s here, then?’

‘That’s him in noo.’ Tam Docherty hung his jacket over a chair and sat down on the stool. ‘Hoo’s Jenny been?’

‘The same, jist much the same. Aggie went through a wee while past.’

They sat watching the fire as if it were a lantern show. The wind was plaintive. One of the boys wrestled briefly with a dream. Water boiled in the kettle Aggie had put on the hotplate. Tam reached across and laid it on the hearth.

‘It’ll be fine, Tam,’ Buff said quietly. ‘Don’t fash yerself. If it’s like the world, that’s everything.’

‘Aye. As long as it’s no’ too like.’

Their silence was listening.

In the room across the lobby, the scene that met Dr Allan was like a tableau of all that High Street meant to him. Though the address might have been different, he had come into this room more often than he remembered, to find the same place, the same women, the same secret ceremony happening timelessly in an aura of urgency. It was as if everything else was just an interruption.

The gas-mantle putted like a sick man’s heart. Dimmed to a bead of light, it made the room mysterious as a chapel. The polished furniture, enriched by darkness, entombed fragments of the firelight that moved like tapers in a tunnel. The brasses glowed like ikons. Even in this half-light the cleanliness of the room proclaimed itself. Jenny Docherty had scrubbed her house against the birth as if the child might die of a speck of dust. Beside the fire, where the moleskins lay ready for the morning, Aggie Thompson was standing, watching the water boiling, saying to herself, ‘Goad bliss ye, dochter. Ye’ll be a’ richt, noo. Goad bliss you this nicht,’ with the monotony of a Gregorian chant. Mrs Ritchie was leaning over the set-in bed, which was as shadowed as a cave, and was translating Aggie’s sentiments into practical advice. Over the bedclothes an old sheet had been laid for Jenny to lie on, and under her thighs newspapers had been spread. Her gown was rumpled above her waist. Legs and belly, wearing a skin of sweat, were an anonymous heave of flesh, a primeval argument of pain against muscles.

Turn up the light,’ Dr Allan said.

‘Oh, dochter. Thank Goad ye’re here.’

‘I’ll want to wash my hands,’ he said pointedly, hoping to soothe Aggie Thomspson’s nerves with work. ‘How long since the waters broke?’

‘A good ‘oor past, dochter,’ Mrs Ritchie said, ‘An she’s had a show o’ bluid. Ah hope ye don’t mind comin’ oot. But ye couldny put a wink between ‘er pains. An it’s still no’ showin’. An’ knowin’ the times she’s had afore.’

‘I wouldn’t miss it.’ His jacket was off. He was rolling up his sleeves. ‘Would I, Jenny? Have these sterilised, Mrs Ritchie.’ She took the forceps. ‘We didn’t do so badly with the other three now, did we?’ Her mouth was forming ‘No, doctor’ when a pain rubbed out the words. He felt her gently, watching. Surprisingly, in the moments of quiescence, she didn’t look much more than her thirty, but when the pains came they were centuries passing across her face. Each would leave its residue. In High Street primes were not enjoyed for long.

‘Yes I think so. Not long now.’ Washing his hands in the basin, he kept talking, more for Aggie Thompson’s sake than for Jenny’s, who was beyond the use of words as a palliative.

‘You must have a terrible comfortable womb in there, Jenny. Your wee ones are never anxious to come out. They need some coaxing. Towel. Thanks.’

In the street outside somebody had started singing. Aggie tutted in shock: ‘Is that no’ terrible.’

‘I have heard better,’ Dr Allan said, taking out the pad of chloroform. ‘Well, that’s enough pain you’ve been through for triplets, Jenny.’

His hand was a sudden coolness on her forehead. The bottom half of her face came against something soft that seemed to erase her jawline. She fought against a darkness that swooped and then billowed above her and left her falling. Out of emptiness looped one long sound like a rope at which her mind clutched till it snapped: a phrase of song.

‘Josey Mackay,’ Buff pronounced after a few attentive seconds, as if identifying the call of one of the rarer birds. ‘He’s late oan the road the nicht.’

The song diminished into garbled mutterings that suggested Josey was in loud and incoherent conference with himself. It wasn’t long before he had perfected a public statement, delivered through a megaphone of drunkenness: ‘Yese don’t know whit it wis like. Yese haven’t lived. The lot o’ yese. Ah saved yer bacon. Me an’ the likes o’ me. Mafeking. Ah wis there. For King an’ Country. At Mafeking. Queen an’ Country.’

‘Christ, no’ again,’ Buff sighed. ‘It’s weel named the Bore War, eh?’

The Boer War!’ Josey said defiantly. And then more obscurely, ‘Honour the sojer. Wounded in the service of his country.’

‘Josey’s only wound’s a self-inflicted wan. He’s dyin’ o’ drouth. An’ it’s like tae injure a few innocent bystanders. Such as his wife an’ weans. There canny be mony gills o’ his gratuity left.’

‘Sleep soundly in yer beds this nicht,’ Josey urged with unintentional irony. Thanks tae the sojer laddies. Asleep in foreign soil.’

The Last Post came through Josey’s clenched hand. When it was over, they waited for further bulletins. But the silence was restored as abruptly as it had been broken.

‘Ah doobt they’ve goat ‘im,’ Buff said at last. ‘We’ll bury ‘im in the mornin’.’

Outside, Josey had ceremonially unbuttoned himself and was urinating against the wall below Buff’s window. With a soldier’s instinct his eyes scouted the winter street. He was conscious of a face somewhere. Cautiously, he didn’t look back round but reconnoitred the street again in his mind, trying to locate whose face he had seen. Having decided who it was, he made his plan. Wheeling abruptly, he bellowed, ‘Present - arms!’ and presented something else. Then he shambled on up the street, buttoning his trousers.

Miss Gilfillan’s hand jumped away from the window. The lace curtain fell between her and the street, an armour as ineffectual as her gentility. Her heart protested delicately. She almost wept with shame and anger. She withdrew still further, feeling her privacy under siege, when she saw a dark shape at the Thompson’s window.

‘Ah canny see ‘im,’ Buff said. ‘He must be away.’

He crossed and sat back down at the fire.

‘Away tae yer bed, Buff,’ Tam said. ‘Ye’ll be needin’ yer rest.’

‘Naw, naw,’ Buff said. ‘Ah’d like tae see the wean.’

Twenty-past eleven. The minute-hand seemed struggling through treacle. The fire, having forged itself to a block of embers, made the area around it molten with heat, and they sat steeping in warmth. They spoke little. Yet their silence was a traffic, more real than words. They had known each other for a long time and both were miners. Their friendship was fed from numberless tubers, small, invisible, forgotten, favours like help with shifting furniture, talk in the gloaming at the corner, laughters shared. Intensifying these was that sense of communal identity miners had, as if they were a separate species. When Buff coughed, it wasn’t just an accidental sound disturbing the quiet of the room. It was part of a way of life, a harshness bred in the pits and growing like a tumour in his breathing. He was at sixty much of what Tam, in his early thirties, would become. And as Buff was Tam’s future, so Tam was his past. The mere presence of one enlarged the other, so that now just by sitting here they were a dialogue, a way of ordering the uncertainty of this night into sense.

At ten to twelve a sound came. It was a tear in the stillness of the night, high, cold and forlorn, seeming to pass on through the house as if it would unravel the silence of the town itself. Through the hole it made there bled a steady crying. Looking at each other across the sound, their eyes enlarged into laughter.

‘Somebody’s arrived,’ Buff said.

Tam was on his way to the door when Buff stopped him.

‘Hing oan noo, Tam.’ Buff was on his feet himself. ‘There’s things tae be done yet. They’ll send fur ye when ye’re wanted.’

The next few minutes had no purpose in themselves but only as an anteroom. Tam walked up and down in them, rounding the stool crossing to the window, and coming back again, making the room a landscape of his impatience. Every time he passed Buff he would nod and smile at him inanely, or wink, or say ‘Eh!’ as if Buff were several acquaintances and each had to be acknowledged, however absently. A couple of times he punched his right hand into the palm of his left and said, ‘Come oan, then,’ in a tone of brisk challenge. Once he stopped dead, muttering, ‘It must be a’ richt,’ confidentially to the floorboards, and then went on with measured steps, as if pacing out the exact dimensions of his happiness.

‘It’s no’ short o’ lungs, onywey,’ Buff said. ‘Is it no’ hellish, though. Ye go through a’ that bother tae get born. An’ the first thing they gi’e ye is a skelp on the erse.’

The remark opened a valve on the tension of the whole evening, and they started to laugh. Tam’s worry ran out in a kind of controlled hysteria. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Aye.’ They nodded and smiled. The moment was a conspiracy, a compact sealed - two men agreeing that the fear of each hadn’t been noticed by the other.

The door opened and Aggie came through.

‘A’ richt, then?’ Tam had already started to go past her.

‘Wait, wait. Fur Goad’s sake, man.’ She was flushed with the excitement of the sanctum. For a few seconds her experience worked an alchemy on her, made her incongruously almost girlish, a sixty-year-old coquette. ‘Whit dae ye think she’s been daein’? Passin’ wind? Give ‘er time. She’s no’ ready for ye yet.’

‘Are things a’ richt?’ He knew from her face they were, but he felt a superstitious need for the humility of such a question, as if presumption would be punished.

‘Everything fine, Tam. Jist fine.’ Her reassurance became licence for more teasing. ‘Nae thanks tae you. If ye saw whit your pleasure costs that lassie. We had an awfu’ time bringin’ that wee yin intae the world.’

He couldn’t feel chastised. Everything that touched him was transmuted into pleasure, even his impatience.

‘Whit is it?’ he asked.

‘It’s a lassie. Naw. Ah mean it’s a boay’. Her excitement had left her honestly confused.

‘Hell, wumman!’ Buff said. ‘You’re a handy messenger. If it’s no black, it’ll be white. Clear as mud.’

‘Shut up, you.’ The child was everybody’s excuse for having a holiday from habit. ‘Whit would you ken aboot it? When you rolled ower an’ went tae sleep that wis your joab done, as far as you were concerned.’ It was a bitterness fermented over years and only served up now when occasion made it palatable. ‘Naw, Tam, that’s richt, son. It’s a boay.’

‘It’ll be an auld man before Ah get tae see it.’

A tap at the door refuted him. It was Mrs Ritchie. Going through they formed a little jostling cavalcade behind her, Buff being the tail of it. As soon as he entered the room, Tam took it over. His pride was the master of ceremonies. He flicked his right hand at his wife in a private tic-tac of affection and smiled at her. Freshly washed, her face was a gentle bloat of weariness on which her smile floated, fragile as a flower. Her eyes were already palling with sleep. Tam lifted the child in its sheet and, checking by the way that Aggie’s second thought was right, held him up in his hands to inventory his perfection. He had hair, black, a rebellion of separate strands, going in all directions. One temple was badged with dried blood. His face made a fist at the world. The twined remnant of umbilicus projected vulnerably. Hands, feet and prick. He had come equipped for the job.