Docherty (22 page)

For Conn later understood what was so obvious, that his father couldn’t have afforded to keep him on at school anyway. It had never been a serious possibility. It did, in fact, take all of Tam’s tenacity not to accept exemption for Conn, by which he would have been able, due to financial stances, to start work at twelve. So why had his father taken so much trouble so often to try to convince him of the wisdom of staying on? Was he perversely hoping that Conn would convince him that it was better to leave, and so assuage his guilt? Or did he console himself with attempting to establish in Conn at least the principle of continued education if he couldn’t present to him the fact of it? Was he teaching Conn to condemn his own inability to keep him on at school by way of an apology?

It was to seem to Conn that those evenings, so apparently incidental at the time, their content totally unmemorable, contained the baffling essence of his relationship with his father, that their shy attempts at thought and hobbled gestures held a communication which no eloquence could have paraphrased, and the irrelevant book, which had fallen accidentally between them, was a bridge across which they had trafficked with themselves. The constraint and hurt that traffic had sometimes involved wasn’t to be regretted, because it was real.

‘Read us somethin’ else, son.’

Conn crouched forward in his seat, holding the book almost vertically towards the fire. He flicked the roughly cut pages, looking for a bit that wasn’t too big. The heading ‘Nature’s Records’ attracted him. He read aloud:

‘Nature will be reported. All things are engaged in writing their history. The planet, the pebble, goes attended by its shadow. The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountain: the river its channel in the soil; the animal its bones in the stratum; the fern and the leaf their modest epitaph in the coal. The falling drop makes its sculpture in the sand or the stone. Not a foot steps into the snow or along the ground, but prints in characters more or less lasting a map of its march. Every act of the man inscribes itself in the memories of his fellows and in his own manners and face. The air is full of sounds; the sky, of tokens; the ground is all memoranda and signatures, and every object is covered over with hints which speak to the intelligence.

R. W. Emerson

Representative Men’

The room had now abandoned the definition of its contours to the darkness. Only the fire salvaged them a space. But Tam made no move to light the mantle. His face was tightened on itself in concentration, as if the words were a knot he couldn’t unravel.

‘Read that again, Conn.’

While someone released a flare of laughter in the street outside, Conn read again, wishing his mother and Angus would come back, the strangeness of some of the phrases occurring like discomfort in his mouth, and his father listened in utter stillness, as if they were the pagan scriptures.

8

The two columns passed each other in the street. Some of the men going out waved and shouted, ‘Leave some mam’selles for us.’ ‘Whit size dae ye take in a German? Ah’li bring ye wan back.’ They were clean and brisk. The men coming back were mud-stained and walked as if they were still up to the ankles in foot-sucking clay. Their smiles and gestures happened far in the wake of the remarks they were meant to answer.

Together, the two columns were like parts of the same conveyor-belt. It was like being back in the factory, Mick thought. But he didn’t think it for long. Today it wasn’t his war. The day after tomorrow it would be again. That was soon enough.

He levered water from the pump in the yard and savoured it. Water was a marvellous thing. Stripped to the waist, he luxuriously splashed his body, finding delight in the simple fact that it was still all there. He dried himself with a towel that felt like sand-paper, lovely agony, and went back up the stairs.

This time in Bethune they were billeted in a loft above an archway leading to a carter’s yard. The only two still left in the place were Danny Hawkins and Auld Jake.

‘You took yer time,’ Jake said. ‘Whit were ye daein’? Coontin yer fingers?’

‘There’s only wan thing Ah coont,’ Danny said. ‘Every mornin’, first thing. Ah check tae see ‘e hisny desertit. An’ he’s always there. Standin’ tae attention. A regiment o’ wan.’

‘Ah like it here,’ Mick said. He was dressing beside the one small dusty window.

‘Ah don’t want ony medals,’ Danny was saying. ‘Ah jist want ma auld man hame wi’ me. He’s gonny hiv his work cut oot when this is by.’

Mick buttoned his shirt. This place reminded him of the Foregate in Graithnock except for the noise. Danny hated the noise. It went on day and night.

‘Come oan, Mick,’ Danny said. ‘Let’s get oan wi’ it. Ah jist want tae pu’ some wumman ower ma heid an’ forget aboot it.’

‘You go oan. Ah’ll see ye roon there.’

Mick watched Danny walking up and down. He wondered how many folk from High Street would recognise him now. Sometimes Mick himself wasn’t sure he knew him. Terror had reduced him to what Jake called ‘a porter fur his prick’ and whenever they got a few days from the trenches Danny spent the time plunging off in whatever direction it pointed. Mick felt the life in the trenches that was waiting to ingest them again intrude briefly like a horrible machine but he didn’t want to think about it. This place, with the sun-motes in its stillness, was to be taken as itself, like an antidote. Only, noticing Danny, he couldn’t help wondering how the war was reducing himself, into what simplified shape he was being whittled.

Like the wood in Auld Jake’s hands. Mick couldn’t make out what it was going to be yet. An animal of some kind, because Jake only made animals. He had been a farm-labourer. He sat in the only chair in the place, beside the small window to have the best of the light, carving patiently at the wood.

‘Come oan, Mick,’ Danny said.

‘Naw, you go oan. Ah’m gonny take a walk furst.’

‘Whit fur? There’ll be a queue a mile long. Well Ah’m awa’. Ah’ll see ye.’

‘Don’t come moanin’ tae me wi’ yer coack in a soack,’ Jake said.

Mick finished dressing and didn’t want to go out just yet. He didn’t want to displace the stillness of the room, the peace it gave him. He checked that he had the letter on him. Then he sat down on the old mattress that was his bed.

‘Whit’s that gonny be?’ he asked.

‘Hedgehog.’

‘Why dae ye jist make animals, Jake?’

‘Ah like them. Ye learn tae make somethin’, some o’ whit it’s goat micht jist rub aff oan ye.’

‘Whit’s a hedgehog goat?’

‘Caution. Disny take too many chances, this bugger.’

‘Whit aboot yon badger ye made?’

‘Well. Hoo mony badgers huv you seen?’

Mick laughed. He lit a cigarette.

‘Whit age are ye, Jake?’

‘Ah’m foarty-wan. Comin’ oan fur ninety.’

‘An’ ye’ve been in fae the stert.’ Mick shook his head, smiling.

‘Whit’s the secret o’ yer long life?’

Mick was trying to coax Jake out because he had only once heard him talk at any length and it had been good. Jake, cultivator of long country silences, felt a conversation emerge.

‘Releegion,’ he said.

‘Whit church did ye go tae?’

‘The holiest place Ah go tae is ma bed. Naw. Ah mean Ah’m that feart, it’s a releegion wi’ me.’

‘Oh, if that wis whit it wis, we’d a’ leeve furever. We’re a’ natural cowards.’

‘Aye, but youse boys is amateurs et the gemme. Ah’m a devout, devout man. Ah’ve hud tae be.’

‘Hoo dae ye mean?’

‘Ah’m mair feart than you, that’s a’. It’s hard tae think o’ onythin’ Ah’m no’ feart fae.’

There must be some things.’

‘Oh, Ah huv lapses, richt enough. We’re nane o’ us perfect. But Ah’m workin’ oan them. There used tae be a lot o’ things Ah wisny feart fae. A cat, a moose, a tablespinfu’ o’ waiter. A needle in a heystack. Ah wisny a very releegious man. But Ah’ve studit a bit an’ thocht a bit. An’ a cat can sit oan yer face when ye’re sleepin’. Snuffed oot. Watch oot fur the cats.’

Mick laughed. Outside, the noise was unceasing of the rattling of a gun-carriage or the whine of a despatch-rider’s motorcycle or the guns rupturing the air in the distance or the throb of an ambulance, leaving empty, coming back loaded with injured – what Jake called the butcher’s van. Inside, Jake’s philosophy was an ironic descant.

‘Mice is vermin. Their wee paws is daith warrants. A septic needle can poison the bluid. Deid in a matter o’ ‘oors.’

He whittled on, knowing Mick would have to ask.

‘Whit aboot the waiter?’

‘That. Get a tablespin’ o’ waiter up yer nose an’ ye’ll droon. Ah read that ance. Ah ken ma scriptures.’

They sat on in the room, silent except for the scraping of Auld Jake’s knife. Mick got up to leave.

‘Watch oot fur the earthquake,’ Jake said.

‘Whit earthquake?’

‘The wan that’s due here.’

‘There’s never been an earthquake here, Jake.’

‘That’s whit Ah mean.’

Coming out of the yard, Mick found the war confronting him like a poster. The British observation balloon, moored about a mile outside the town, hung nudged by air-currents, the white puffs of spent shells occasionally occurring around it. It reminded him that the war was everywhere. The realisation renewing itself brought back to him Jake’s words. He understood them, that conversation stylised as a vaudeville routine. He made a juggling act of his fear because to let it come to rest was to be finished. It wasn’t bearable as itself. You had to use it in some way, make a style of it.

You had to have a way to hold things at a distance. Mick had his.

He walked until he came to the Grande Place, found a table in the open air, sat down and ordered a beer. A military band was playing. He waited until the beer had arrived before he began, because for him this was a ceremony.

He took a sip of the beer and replaced the glass on the table. Then rather surreptitiously, as if it was a passport somebody might try to impound, he took out the letter from his mother. He spread the two sheets side by side on the table. He kept a finger on each in case the wind would catch them. By this time he had read the letter so often that all the words had assumed a uniform texture, had become a single object, something from home. Therefore, ‘about Conn getting a start in the pits’ had the same weight as ‘your grandfather Mairtin’s death the old soul didny seem to want to go on without my mother he caught a chill and that was it and as your father was saying he seemed to think that was as good an excuse as any’.

From something else she said, ‘sorry to be telling you this your father was saying you cant be short of worries yourself and this is the second time in a row with bad news like this first my mother now my father’, Mick knew that he had missed a letter. He grudged it bitterly. Every letter was a transfusion. Both getting them and sending them, he connected temporarily with a livable life, re-entered a context where the individual happiness and pain were meaningful. When he wrote to them about the trenches, the things he told them became a way of coping with his experience here. His need to lie came to seem like a kind of truth. If he could pretend so effectively that it wasn’t so bad, perhaps it wasn’t so bad.

He folded the letter up. The fact that it moved him so little wasn’t a problem. He had had it for some time now. What mattered was that when he had first received it, it had moved him very much. His own sense of grief had amazed him.

He took another sip of the beer, aware of the letter in his tunic pocket, his identity, his proof that he could still feel things.

9

Empty, the room acquired a simple dignity. Edited of incidentals, it made a small, firm statement. It could be seen for what it was, space formally distinguished from space by a geometry of stone, a walled pocket of air set in mid-air, a private climate hung on faith among wind and rain. Two places polarised the area, gave axis to its void. One was the set-in beds, stripped now to two stained mattresses. The other was the fire, cleaned, sepulchral with black lead – beside it, the empty soup-pot. ‘Fire’s hauf meat,’ Mairtin had often said.

The bland anonymity of the rest was touched here and there with the past. The wall-paper, its vaguely urn-shaped pattern faded to thread-lines that the light erased completely from certain angles, showed fresh where a calendar had been pinned beside the fireplace, preserved the shape of the dresser, was mapped with grease in places. The brown linoleum, like a digging, suggested the shape of what once had been there. Smooth patches were where the furniture had been, the symmetry of the one at the window marred where feet had rested under the table, the two at the fireplace defined by four torn places each, revealing the floor, where the legs of the chairs had sat. Scuffed passages ran between the door and the fireplace, between the fireplace and the table-area.

Mairtin’s pipe rack was still nailed beside the fire, containing one broken clay pipe, bowl and half the stem, baked brown with the burnings of tobacco. Below it lay a little mound of objects to be thrown out: a pair of Jean’s old shoes, ridiculously small, the uppers polished to the yieldingness of chamois, the broken soles counteracted from the inside by two pieces of brown paper, folded several times and each having at its centre a darker brown stain that expired outwards in jagged white spirals; Mairtin’s ‘museum’ trousers that Jean had threatened to cut him out of someday (‘They wid dae fur makin’ soup,’ she used to say); a burst tobacco-pouch; a broken willow-patterned saucer; a shepherdess figurine, roughly glazed and beheaded. Above the fireplace, King George was still enthroned.

Among so many mementoes, Jenny moved in an oblivion of practical involvement. The occasional sighs were a concession to physical effort, nothing more. The brush head knocked sometimes on the skirting as she swept and around her dust sifted, vortexed briefly in the sunlight and resettled. Pinnied, sneezing now and again among frenzied motes, alone in an afternoon that seemed already decaying in this room, although it was still bright outside, she was performing her family’s last traditional act of possession of the house. Her friends had helped. Ornaments and clothes had been disposed of. The husbands had co-operated in getting the furniture out, some taken to their houses, other parts sold to the second-hand shop in the Foregate. This final cleaning wasn’t being done for the factor, but from pride, because, no matter how shabby the house, it had to be left fresh for who came next.