Docherty (13 page)

‘Miss Gilfillan’s keepin’ herself by herself these days.’

‘Aye.’

‘She’s always done that, mind ye.’

‘Aye, but mair so lately.’

‘Pair sowl.’

‘Is she no’!’

‘Aye. But she’s got mair in her heid than the kaim’ll take oot. The same lady.’

‘Goad aye. D’ye hear whit she did wi’ the fellas at her windy?’

‘Ah heard aboot that.’

‘Whit wis that?’

‘Two or three o’ the fellas late at night.’

‘Ah wis wan. It was jist afore we a’ went up hame. We stoapped tae hiv a word ootside her windy. An’ we plants oor bums on the ledge, ye see. Well, we wis talkin’ quiet but it must’ve annoyed her. Afore we kent whit wis happenin’ wur bums is soakin’. She’d eased up the windy awfu’ quiet an’ poored watter richt along the windy-sill. No’ a word spoken, mark ye. But we goat the message.’

‘Whit did ye say?’

‘Whit could we say? Good nicht.’

‘No’ bad, richt enough.’

‘Oh, she’s a winker.’

Andra Crawford rose and crossed towards the door of the house. It was open and he stepped out into the upstairs lobby of the tenement. He wanted to stretch his legs. As he walked up and down slowly, smoking, he could still hear their voices, though the words had no meaning, muffled by the wall. It was pleasant that way, like listening to a muted, improvised music. A Protestant himself, Andra preferred the atmosphere at a Catholic wake. Perhaps it was because he had been a soldier that he responded to the sense of orderliness, the way in which the Catholics present carried in their hands the means to reduce the whole thing to a prearranged pattern. At midnight, someone would kneel down and say the rosary and their words would range themselves in drilled ranks against the fear that surrounded them.

He had come because it was Tam Docherty’s mother. He hadn’t known the old woman very well but he talked to Tam at the corner quite a lot. Old Conn he saw quite often on the streets and he had been watching him tonight, sitting like a monument among them, older than his age, quietly tholing the amputation of a large part of himself.

Andra went down the few stairs to the middle-landing and stubbed his cigarette out on the ledge of the open window. Throwing the stub, he watched it roll down the roof of the wash-house and settle in the guttering. The aimless action, felt suddenly against the size of what was happening in the room above, was plucked from continuity, fell from him slowly, it seemed, suspended upon void, like the descent of a feather measuring a chasm. That fragment of an evening which had come to rest minutely and invisibly among the complex of roofs and buildings below him like a dust-speck on a prairie was himself. He looked above the buildings to the tress in the darkness of the park, fortuitously remembered Africa. Strange rivers. Land that never held a print. A quarrel that was nobody’s. Thoughts drifted in his head like the dust that settles after motion. None of them seemed to belong particularly to him. Except Anderson. A Galloway man lying on a kopje. His chest caved in on one side. The paybook and the photos blown to bits. He thought of Old Conn, weathered and alone, washed up on a single-end in Ayrshire, not having come here, but having been brought. Sarah dead. His own children going to work in the mill. His youngest son with a heart as weak as paper. Six medals in the house. Anderson’s face, the eyeballs hardening. His own father, remembered sitting by the fire, waiting somehow, as if his life was an anteroom to a place he never reached. Andra stood, his mind submerging slowly, drowning among currents he couldn’t overcome.

Into his foundering thoughts came voices. His reactions were unfocused for a moment until he realised that people were speaking quietly, urgently in the lobby above him and that they couldn’t see him because of his position on the landing.

‘It his tae be decided noo.’

That was Lizzie, Sarah’s daughter. Among the consenting murmurs he picked out the other daughter Mary’s voice and what he took to be both their husbands.

‘The auld sowl canny afford tae stey himself,’ Mary said.

‘But we’ve nae room.’ One of the men.

‘Nae mair hiv we.’ The other husband.

There was a silence. It came to Andra as the sound of shame. He wanted to leave, felt as if he was spying on people in the lavatory. But he was unwilling to betray his presence with noise and held in spite of himself by the hypnotism of other people’s dilemmas.

‘Then it’ll maybe hiv tae be the Home.’

Lizzie had been the one with the guts to say it. Andra’s mind automatically translated her euphemism – The Pair-hoose – then instantly substituted another more common euphemism of his own – The Hoose wi’ the Wan Lum.

‘We jist couldny possibly manage wi’ him.’ Mary’s voice was canvassing support.

‘Nane o’ us could.’ Lizzie’s husband it sounded like.

‘Whit does Tam say?’ the other man asked.

‘Where is oor Tam onywey?’ Mary said.

‘I telt him tae step oot a meenit. He’s comin’,’ Lizzie replied.

They took refuge again in silence. Lizzie broke it.

‘It’ll a’ hiv tae be seen aboot richt awa.’

The others muttered.

‘Whit’s this?’

Andra recognised Tam Docherty’s voice. Lizzie was the obvious spokesman.

‘It’s aboot ma feyther, Tam. Whit’s tae be done wi’ him? We’ve nane o’ us got room. An’ . . .’

‘Jesus Christ!’

‘Noo listen, oor Tam

‘Listen? Ma mither’s no’ richt cauld an’ ye’re pittin’ the auld man up fur auction.’

‘Ye’ve nae richt tae be talkin’ that wey, Tam,’ Lizzie’s husband said.

‘Ah’ve every richt. It’s ma feyther ye’re tryin’ tae parcel up among ye.’

‘He’s mine tae, ye ken,’ Lizzie broke in.

‘By Christ, ye hide it weel.’

‘Tam!’ Mary was angry. ‘It’ll hiv tae be the Home.’

‘Naw, naw.’

‘But there’s nae room.’

‘Then we’ll make room.’

‘Hoo? Jist tell me hoo!’

‘Listen! Whit’s gaun oan here? Ye should be fighting’ tae take ‘im. No tae get rid o’ ‘im.’

‘Och. Talk sense, Tam,’ Lizzie said. ‘We hivny room!’

‘It’s a bit late fur sense. Hoo mony weans hiv you goat, Lizzie? Five. An’ Mary’s three. An’ Ah hiv fower. If sense came intae it, that wid be twelve weans less tae feed fur a stert. If ye want tae be sensible, take yer weans up tae the market oan Friday an’ sell them. Because that’s what we are. Fuckin’ cattle. Unless we can prove different. Well Ah’m different. An’ Ah’m damned if Ah’ll leeve ma life according tae
their
sense. Whit’s mine belongs tae me. An’ Ah’m no’ askin’
thame
tae come an’ collect him like a bit o’ rubbish. He’s fur nae “Home”. D’ye ken whit it’s like in there?’

‘But d’ye . . .’

‘It’s feenished. He steys wi’ me. Whit are we talkin’ aboot this fur? Can ye no’ see? By the time somethin’ like this gets tae talk there’s nothin’ tae say.’

They all said nothing. Andra heard somebody else come out into the lobby.

‘Lizzie!’ It was a woman’s voice. They’re jist goin’ tae say the rosary noo.’

‘Right, Agnes,’ Lizzie said.

Andra listened, but nobody had moved.

‘Whit’s Jenny goin’ tae say?’ Mary asked.

‘Jenny’ll have him. Ah ken her.’

Andra heard them move along the lobby back into the room. He wouldn’t be going in after them, not just because they might know he had heard them. It was mainly from a desire to keep intact the feeling that was in him. He thought he understood why it was he had always liked Tam Docherty so much. He was more than anything in his life showed him to be, and he knew it. The effect on Andra was as if he had come across some powerful animal in a cage, kept fit on its own frustration, endlessly restless, knowing instinctively that the bars are an invention, nothing final, and feeling contempt for its keepers. Andra sensed quite simply that Tam was not defeated. And if Tam wasn’t, neither was he.

‘Our father who art in heaven . . .’ A single voice began, continued, was joined by others: ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us . . .’

Andra slipped quietly down the stairs and went home to his private faith.

14

The rocking-chair interested Conn – worn, discoloured, chipped at parts, it somehow conveyed to him a sense of other places as well as other times. Whenever he had the chance, he liked to sit in it, gathering speed, as if it were a means of transport. But he didn’t very often get the chance. It was the only piece of furniture his Grandpa Docherty had brought with him and the old man almost lived in it, like a private room. When Tam started to call it ‘the jaunting car’, Conn was puzzled, until he noticed how often his Grandpa talked about Ireland from it, as if he was still seeing it.

The chair was the last prop for the old man’s pride. Hurt by the knowledge that it had taken the family renegade and his Protestant wife to save him from the poorhouse, he continued to convince himself, with commendable inventiveness, that as long as he had the chair he was less a non-paying lodger than a sub-tenant. Swaying gently in it, he would disappear for an hour at a time into martyred silence on which the inscription read: ‘Far be it from me to be a nuisance to anyone.’ It was precisely at such times that his presence tended to irritate. A question met with a response the tired gentleness of which was a remonstrance. Carefully judged attempts to bring him into the conversation were foiled by the deafness which afflicted him in unpredictable phases, sometimes coming and going by the minute. Tam diagnosed him as suffering from ‘politician’s lugs’.

Jenny was best at dealing with him. Her success lay in the way she combined a readiness to accord him privileges with a refusal to grant him concessions. Miraculously, she managed to keep him supplied from the housekeeping with money for tobacco and the clay pipes he smoked it in. She didn’t buy them for him. Every other day, the money appeared on the mantelpiece, and was enough to get him the occasional glass of beer he took as well. It was never mentioned after the first evening when she told him what it was for, and she never handed it directly to him. It might as well have come from an anonymous benefactor. At the same time, she wasn’t inclined to spend a lot of attention on his huffs. Her ability to ignore them made them happen in a void, so that he was glad to come out of them.

When others wanted to complain about him, Jenny would remind them of his hands, as if they were justification enough for any mood. Before, Conn had always been conscious of the hugeness of his Grandpa’s hands. Now they were crippled with arthritis, making him unfit for work. Grotesquely gnarled and knobbed, they seemed only distantly related to his arms, projecting from them like pieces of monumental sculpture. ‘It’s in the breed,’ Old Conn would explain. But Tam, who in his wilder moments would have blamed the weather on the wealthy, claimed they were the result of his work with Kerr the builder. There was a certain amount of proxy justice in Tam’s statement. Kerr had worked Old Conn for a pittance all his life and, when he couldn’t work any more, had dismissed him with a handshake in which all that changed hands was sweat, not Kerr’s. When his father was dead, Tam used to say, they should have the hands mounted and presented to Kerr. Tor above his bloody mantelpiece.’

Once settled in, the old man came to seem not so much a new presence as the acknowledgement of one that had always been there, as the figure of a madonna merely locates an already existing influence. With him ensconced every day beside the fire, the mystique of venerability had difficulty surviving the manual clumsiness, the hoasting, the simply boring repetitiousness of his talk.

Only Conn perhaps felt something like awe, for a short time. He was fascinated by the hands filling the pipe, moving separately like misshapen crabs, the small swirl of sound that began somewhere inside, enlarged slowly, broke in a storm of coughing, the complete stillness which the old man could achieve within the motion of his chair. Also, he was the one his Grandpa liked to talk to. Secretly, Old Conn was paying for his keep by being subversive. Indoors, he talked of Ireland to his youngest grandson, trying to convey to him the sense of Connemara, which had become the landscape of his own mind – those miles of unremitting barrenness through which the rocks rise up like headstones. But outside, on the frequent walks when he took Conn ‘up the country’, he was trying to save the boy from the Protestant limbo in which he lived. He catechised him in the nature of God, spoke familiarly enough of hell to have been there, kept putting the rosary into his hands. Always before they came back to the house, Conn would be reminded of the need for secrecy, as if God were the head of a cabal.

It would all have affected Conn more deeply if it hadn’t been for the counter-influence of his Grandpa Wilson. He too, needing to tighten his grasp on something before it loosened forever, moved closer to Conn, like a rival planet. His love of town rather than country exerted more power.

To walk through Graithnock with Mairtin was to be ambushed at every corner by the past. From the fluted pillar inset in the wall of the Old High Kirk ‘To the memory of Lord Soulis
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1444’ (of whose murder Mairtin was able to give an eye-witness account) to the house of Alexander Smith in Douglas Street (‘a genius wi’ words’ of whom Mairtin hadn’t read a line) the town came alive with ghosts. The industrial school was still to him what it had been – ‘The Place’, Graithnock House, residence of the last Earl of Graithnock, executed for his part in the ‘45 Rebellion after having unsuccessfully demanded that the citizens of Graithnock supply him with their arms. Mairtin liked to repeat how the local people had informed the Earl that if they gave him their guns it would be ‘with the muzzle till him’. Graithnock, Mairtin said with pride, had always been loyal to the crown.

From Maritin Conn learned of ‘The Soor Mulk Rebellion’ of almost a hundred years ago, when housewives drenched baillies and farmers in milk at the Cross, rather than pay the increased prices the farmers were demanding. He discovered who Tam Samson was. He found out that thirty people had once been crushed to death in the old Laigh Kirk during a panic when the congregation thought the roof was falling in. He memorised, like a mystic message of grandeur, the words: ‘Here lies John Nisbet who was taken by Major Balfour’s Party and suffered at Graithnock 14 April 1683 for adhering to the word of God and our Covenant – Revn. XII and II. Renewed by public subscription
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1823.’ ‘Who was taken . . . and suffered’ – the words haunted him.