Docherty (27 page)

Every day it was the same. The need to start anew was not unpleasant, had something almost of excitement in it. There was a recurring moment that he loved especially. It happened most often in the morning but could occasionally be found at other times of the day, as if a time-lock had occurred and a new day was beginning in the middle of the old one. It was when he was at just the right distance from the room to see the sunlight and nothing else. Along the room large windows faced each other, and the sunlight took place at regular intervals, lying from window to window in vast, unbroken blocks. The room then derived a purpose, was purified simply into contours for containing these – like a hangar for stored sunlight. That was the time. The sunlight lay waiting like great luminous slabs of Carrara marble, from which he could with patience tease the shapes and presences already implicit in it. It felt almost like hope.

There were even days when hope seemed justified. The room was completed. The whole preposterous structure was painstakingly built up fragment by meaningless fragment, teetering with absurdity. Achievement had gone beyond that. In moments of particularly intense concentration, he had managed, still keeping everything in place, to know the room in its horizontal solidarity, a firm projection of stone. The grass beyond it was also permissible. In the last of those moments the word ‘hospital’ firmed in his mind through a series of almost insensible jolts, like a recently erected building settling.

These times became more common. Then it was that he fully rejoined his body, became properly a part of the words he said every day to whoever happened to be sitting beside his bed. The room ceased to be a collapsing collection of things and resolved itself into a continuing and actual place with beds and people and occurrences that were sequential. But the attainment of this condition, as he discovered, did not necessarily mean its permanence. Days still came when his mouth was left to carry on a charade of conversation, his body to profess a firm certainty in which he himself couldn’t share. And even though the actuality of the room became more easily realisable, though it became more natural to see it solid, even to identify the people in the various beds, to say their names, to talk to them – the most hazardous part of all remained. This was not to locate the existence of the room, but to locate the existence of himself within the room.

It was long and lonely for him trying to catch up with his body on the bed. How many times he returned to terrible events, still sheeted in the flames of their happening, how many times sheered off in remembered terror, only to lug himself back again and again, in an attempt to find lost pieces of himself. Between the fear of his past and the fear of his present he shuttled, desperate to salvage what was left of him from his experience.

His own body was his only certitude. It was the best way to come at what had happened, meant the past. Frequently he would inventory his wounds, without pity or, indeed, feeling of any kind, but with the mechanical repetitiveness of a prayer recited under stress. The sight of one eye was restored. The other was permanently useless. This in itself was to be counted as a gain, since he had been for a time totally blind. Besides, as had been pointed out to him, the ruined eye was not significantly disfigured. A slight scar showed near the temple. All it meant, he had been told, was the need to take special care of the eye that functioned. The leg, he was assured, would heal. ‘Complete mobility,’ the doctor said. That left only the arm, the right one. The surgery on it was finished now. They had begun by taking off the hand, then part of the forearm, and had finally stopped above the elbow – an almost shy progression, as if the truth were diffident. And thus, the map of his recent past was made complete.

With its help, his experience almost became possible. It wasn’t so much that his wounds measured what had happened to him but rather that they indicated what hadn’t happened. He hadn’t hung on wire, discharging a refuse of guts and moaning till one of his own men shot him from a trench. He hadn’t stepped back from the parapet, saying mildly ‘fuck it’ to nobody in particular, and sat down gently dead, a sardonic medal of blood on his tunic. He hadn’t run screaming in an attempt to put himself in the path of the mortar that cartwheeled clumsily through the air. He hadn’t ended as a talking torso, like some remnant of statuary unfortunately damaged in transit. He was simply going to be blind in one eye and minus an arm.

That wasn’t bad. The biggest immediate disappointment was probably that he was less relieved than he had expected to be, that he felt less of everything than he would have imagined in his desire to get out of the trenches. Incapable of formulating an explanation for himself, he nevertheless remembered an incident when he had arrived at understanding, not as a rational process but as an observed fact, physically enacted. It had been when he was wakening after one of the operations. At the foot of his bed a doctor was talking to someone else about him. The doctor’s voice was pleasantly matter-of-fact. Mick felt for his hand and it wasn’t there. Another time, if he had been more himself, he might have responded with anger or outrage, adopting the common enough stance of resenting being treated as a number. But, too weak to have an automatic reaction, he was obliged to have a real one. He saw that he felt not the slightest offence at the way the doctor was talking. He saw that he wasn’t being treated as a number – he
was
a number. And the doctor was merely another one. Outside the walls, the machinery was clanking on, and whether it needed your hand or your eyes or your legs or yourself to run on made no difference to anything. That was simply what it needed. That was all that mattered. You didn’t. Personal responses were irrelevant.

The building he was in was only one of countless throughout Europe, temples to the modern mysticism. To them came those who, regardless of race, had managed to attain the new Nirvana. They had gone through the novitiate’s visionary instant in the falling flare, understood the words exchanged in darkness, been purified with mud, and reached the final sanctum. Their prophet’s promises hadn’t been in vain. The gods that controlled their lives had admitted them to their presence. Who would be petty enough to quibble about what must be lost in order to gain so much? They returned blind or legless or having left their minds behind. Transformed, indeed enlarged by decimation, they were led or were wheeled or limped among their endless private visions, unutterable to others – therefore, how great. The new elect, they had been placed above the confines of a private life, the folly of ambition, the silliness of ordinary love. Their future was the past.

Absolved of himself, he lay in bed, feeling nothing, waiting for nothing. When he saw the two of them come through the door at the end of the room, recognition didn’t occur to him at first. The orderly pointed. As the other man advanced, Mick’s own tears told him it was his father. The tears meant nothing to him. They just happened, like a wound that was supposed to be healed reopening. They touched his cheeks strangely, as if belonging to someone else. He couldn’t remember when he had felt them last. He wondered if in some way he was crying for his father, for the terrible naïveté of his presence, coming forward now, one hand crumpling his bonnet, staring towards him, looking too physical for the place, and somehow contaminating that clinical atmosphere, awkward as a human being in heaven. He didn’t know. He didn’t realise that he was weeping through his father’s eyes, that, empty as an angel, he could only come alive through the suffering of another.

16

Tam returned from the military hospital on a Saturday evening. He was tired from the journey, and that helped. It softened the directness of his meeting with the family. He was a man back from a distance and familiar roles could be adopted until such time as they all felt able to face the uniqueness of the situation. Kathleen helped her mother by putting plate, spoon and bread out on the table, while Jenny pretended the soup wasn’t quite ready. Conn stoked the fire and Angus brought more coal. Wee Alec, asleep in the plaidie, lay on one of the set-in beds. Tam himself took off his collar, untied his boots, and talked about travelling on trains, as if the whole purpose of his journey had been inspection of the railway system.

The news of Mick waited among them like an awkward stranger against whom their deliberate intimacy was a defence. They took their time, waiting for it to find some way of introducing itself into their lives. Jenny and the others were one multiple presence, the fears of one a part of and intensified by the fears of the rest. She didn’t know, for example, if Conn could hear what Tam had to say, while Conn, absorbing without comprehension his mother’s misgivings, enlarged them, was prepared for the unspeakable to be spoken. His very real dread was compromised by a growing curiosity. All anxious for word of Mick, their anxiety became so neurotically intense that it paralysed itself. The war, for so long a terrible thing that happened, like death, to others, had happened to them. It was an event Mick would have to live with for the rest of his life. And they were Mick.

Tam’s hesitancy wasn’t a decision, merely a fact. He had arrived ahead of his understanding, still didn’t know what it was he had seen. There were things he had to say, of course. But these were all so closely involved with things he was determined he wouldn’t say that to his usual problem of articulacy was added that of suppression, which was a new experience for him. His home had always been to him the place where he existed with a kind of absoluteness. From swearing to religion he allowed himself full range. It wasn’t tyranny in him or lack of consideration for his children, but simply that he believed children had the right to exposure as well as protection. The only legacy he could give them was himself. Even outside, a reluctant, chafing silence was the closest he could get to compromise. Now this ignorance of the art of pretence irked him.

‘Well,’ he said, taking his soup. ‘Ah seen the man.’ The gallousness emerged from his search for an idiom. He was assessing their preparedness. Jenny had found some clothes to fold. It occurred to him how often she did that. Under pressure, it was habitual for her to move about building up those small mounds of cleanliness like sandbags. The realisation hurt him. Kathleen fussed needlessly over the soup-pot, as if broth were a potion against the powers of change. Angus sat with the paper. Conn just sat. ‘He seems no’ bad. No’ bad at a’. Considerin’.’

‘Will he be a’ richt?’ Kathleen’s voice inched open their apprehension, afraid of what it would admit.

‘Ah’d say that. He wis mair annoyed aboot hoo things were goin’ wi’ youse than aboot himsel’. He says dae Conn an’ Angus still fight as much.’

‘He’s no’ shell-shocked or anythin’?’ It was a term Kathleen had merely heard, a name for the nameless.

‘He’s come through a lot. But he’s come through. He’s goin’ tae be a’ richt.’

Tam looked round them as if what he’d said wasn’t a statement but something to be decided by vote.

‘When will he get hame, feyther?’ Conn asked.

‘No’ that long, Ah’d say. Maybe a month or two. But the great thing is that his war’s bye. The Docherties have declared peace on the Kaiser. That’s whit he said.’

Kathleen and Angus encouraged each other into a smile.

‘Tam!’ Jenny held a rough pit-towel folded square in her hands, staring at it. ‘Ye’ll tell us noo, Tam. Aboot oor Mick!’

That’s whit Ah’m tryin’, Jenny.’

‘Ah need tae ken hoo he is.’

Tam felt ashamed of his attempts at going round it. The simplicity of her stance chastised his pretence. She demanded her grief to be given honestly.

‘He’s woundit in the leg. But that’ll get better. His sicht is back. In wan e’e, onywey. An’ he’s lost an airm.’

His voice trailed to a whisper. Jenny sat down almost formally on one of the high-backed chairs, her hands restlessly smoothing the towel on her lap. She emitted breath in one long, sustained shudder. ‘Aw, Mick,’ she said, ‘son, son. Whit’ve they done tae ye, son. O my Goad. Whit’ve ye been through, son. Whit hiv you been through.’ She started very quietly to cry, her body hunched, her head sideways as if trying to turn away from something. The tears fell on the towel. ‘He’s jist a boay. He’s no’ twinty yet. Aw. No, no, no. Ye’re a’ richt noo, Mick. Ye’re a’ richt, son.’

None of the others moved or tried to speak. The room was held in the trance of Jenny’s grief. She keened on, communing with nothing, seeming to see what wasn’t there, like a priestess in a terrible ecstasy. Very slowly, she subsided. When she rose, the room became normal again. Tam finished his soup and sat by the fire. They all talked quietly, making tentative plans against Mick’s coming back. But Tam remained taut, his mind clenched on what he had seen. Jenny knew it. About half past eight, she said, ‘Why no’ go doon an’ hiv a pint, Tam?’

‘Ah’m fine, hen,’ he said.

‘Oan ye go. It’ll ease ye.’

After some persuasion, he went down to Mitchell’s pub. As he drank, his meeting with Mick hung brightly in the centre of his thoughts, an icicle unthawed by beer or conversation or the whisky Tadger Daly bought him. Reflecting against the hardness of that scene, the smiles were tinsel, the friendliness was mockery. He saw them all like children capering around the stillness of his son. He remembered Mick’s eyes so bright that they looked wet, but Mick didn’t cry. Mick talked quietly, kidded just a little. The two of them had played successfully towards each other. It was only when he came away that Tam thought over Mick’s remarks and found in every one of them a wound. Every joke contused in him. One memory was the core, in which in reaching for his son he had touched stone. Mick said, ‘Whit’s happened tae me isny important, feyther.’

Tam felt his mind dilate, admitting darkness, and he seemed to become no more than a part of his own anger, like flotsam on a tide. Possible reasons, explanations for what had happened to Mick shivered to aimless fragments, as distant and irrelevant as stars. In all of it there was no sense and no direction. It was only by coming back that Tam discovered where he had been. Here, in the warmth and custom of Mitchell’s pub, he finally managed to hear what Mick was saying. Around him voices eagerly gleaned chaff, heads nodded like so many glove-puppets. The comfort he had so often found here was gone. Tonight was a wake for it. Composed in death, its features became clearer.