Docherty (17 page)

Two places in particular were special for him, drew his injuries to them like foxes hunted to their earths. One was the lake in Crawfurdland, the better for being forbidden – a big stagnancy of water, mocked frequently into small waves by the wind, haunted fitfully by wild ducks. Sedge made inroads into it, lilies drowned. Trees grew thickly, making colonnades of gloom along its edge.

The other was Moses’ Well. He didn’t know why it mattered so much to him, but its hold on him was potent as a shrine’s. How many times he slid precariously down among the trees that overhung the river to reach the niche hollowed from the rock by the water – polished and slippery like green glass, damp and vapoury, largely screened by ferns and fronds of weed. The water didn’t fall but hung, bright and still as an icicle which is melting from within, so that it seemed to shiver inwardly in a tremor of light. It was only at the base of the niche that you were aware of movement, as the water broke itself across a sycamore leaf (who kept renewing it?). The frozen length of water melted onto the leaf, delicately filming its intricately grained texture with the finest veneer until it channelled to the centre-tip, spouting into the air. That was where you drank.

But these places themselves, like the fantasies in which he had once clothed them, became residual. The lake and the well turned into the past, as if they contained sloughed selves. As he grew, the Bringan, which he thought he had used, had really been using him, had taken over a part of him. Always inclined to be withdrawn, he had allowed himself to become so addicted to the silences of Bringan, the shelter of its trees, the languor of its fields, that set against the demands which High Street made on his growing, it caused a conflict in him.

Holding him in a vice between them, Bringan and High Street squeezed him into puberty. In his emergence, what was left behind was what Bringan had meant to him. What stayed with him was High Street. Later, when he thought of his boyhood, it was Bringan he would remember. But, ageing towards work and responsibility within his family, his times in Bringan came more and more to seem like truancy from himself, the person he had to learn to be.

So, as time passed, returning in many dusks from Bringan, he was burying his boyhood, not once but again and again, as if it was a corpse which had to be disposed of gradually, limb by limb. And each time High Street took him to itself more firmly, claimed him as part of itself. Scattered throughout Bringan, buried several autumns deep like the traces of distant picnics, lay hopes of an impossibility such as only a boy’s heart can encompass, preposterous ambitions, fragile dreams.

Instinctively, he had come to know that this was who he was. The geography of his future would be discovered among these things that greeted his return: the massive women folded like sphinxes on their window-sills; the pub that burst with laughter as he passed it; the dark archway where coopers hammered – the three men returning from the day; welcomed by a dog, a bundle of barking chained to their iron heels. One day he would be one of them. And he was glad.

BOOK II

1

London and Berlin were two places but one scene. On balconies appeared figures, too distant from the crowd below to be recognisable to them. In the streets surged people, too distant from the figures above to be recognisable to them. The people cheered. The gestures enlarged the cheers, the cheers enlarged the gestures. The languages were different but, since no words were audible, the sounds became identical. Straw boaters, waved aloft, pitched above the abandoned faces like the heads of lopped off flowers.

High Street was less hysterical. As a mere distant province of the truth, it received the news already modified by its having happened, as if the distance it had travelled from the capital had left its regal livery stained a little, as if the things that lay between, the sheep rooted in their hillsides, the factory-towns preoccupied with their smoke, the rivers thin with summer and the farms, had all given it accretions of their disbelief, indifference, dismay. Like a messenger who has come so far that he forgets exactly what his message is, word of the war limped stammering into High Street, barely audible above the shouts of children, needing to repeat itself to housewives sleeved in suds, having to wait for a man to turn from his loom and listen.

That evening men gathered at the corner in large numbers. Their muttered conversations were a council, for, faced with the alien presence of a war, they had to relate it communally to what they understood, and what they understood best was one another, the accidental interweaving of their pasts tightening under pressure to the necessity of dependence on one another. Their ignorance and bafflement made their proximity mutually unenlightening but all the more compulsive for that. At least to have your incomprehension shared was some kind of comfort. In any case, they had nowhere else to be.

Josey Mackay was out early. He brought with him a paragraph cut out of the
Daily Mail,
quoting the Foreign Office announcement, and pasted – in accordance with some dark, unfathomable purpose – on to a piece of plain cardboard with his name in pencil on the back. He kept passing this out to people as they arrived. Although everyone knew the content by now, they would each read it, as if the words might contain an escape clause they had missed. But the message remained as inflexible as an epitaph: ‘Owing to the summary rejection by the German Government of the request made by His Majesty’s Government for assurances that the neutrality of Belgium would be respected, His Majesty’s Ambassador in Berlin has received his passports, and His Majesty’s Government has declared to the German Government that a state of war exists between Great Britain and Germany as from 11 p.m. on August 4.’

‘Of coorse, 11 p.m. London time is midnight Berlin time,’ Josey said every time he got his card back, glad that he had had the foresight not to include that piece of information in his cutting. He offered the remark always with the air of a man putting the entire complex of international affairs in a new and illuminating perspective. Then he would move along to somebody else, being somehow proprietary about the whole thing, as if the war was a newly discovered and underdeveloped area and he was establishing a stake in it. That weird fragment of officialdom bearing his name meant something to him. It was as though history had visited him personally and left its calling-card. He was to keep it and subsequently, in his seemingly endless old age, take a strange pride in showing it to people, scuffed with the thumbs of men who died in the war. He would nod with the senile complacency of a man who has managed to fingerprint fate.

They found themselves searching the recent past for significant events, like the torn pieces of a picture they had carelessly thrown out. When they had been so busy with what had seemed important, what really had been happening? With the masochism of nostalgia, they tried to confront the ravaged face of that summer they had veiled in a selfish innocence which, it seemed, would never again be possible. It was obvious that Britain was in the war because of Belgium. Somebody pointed out that Belgium was really just a road into France. Another voice was sure that the French were allied in some way to the Russians. But Russia would never have been in the war if it could have helped it. Hadn’t the Russians tried to keep the peace? But Germany had declared war on the Russians on 1 August. That was because of Serbia. Serbia had an alliance with Russia. The moves and counter-moves multiplied themselves into the incompatibility of a game for which they didn’t know the rules. Their attempts to understand what was going on broke down into expletive frustration. That daft bastard wi’ the gun in Serbia,’ Wullie Manson said. ‘He must be aboot as wise as Gibby Molloy.’ ‘An’ where the bloody hell is Serbia?’ somebody wanted to know. Turn left at Knockentiber,’ Tadger said.

The sky, grazing its peaceful clouds above them, was a camouflage that fooled nobody. The mother who shooed her two children home to safety was ironic. A bird sang its idiot song in the eaves of a tenement. Tomorrow was the war. Each wondered what it was going to be like. Only Josey Mackay knew. ‘Oor cavalry’11 rin them intae the grund. The Jerry canny handle a horse the way that oor boys can. An’ then again, we’re in better trim. We’ve focht mair recently. Against the Boers. Ah’ve seen oor men dae things . . .’ Even Andra Crawfurd let him rave. It was not an unpleasant sound, like a song that reminds of an almost unimaginable past. All Andra himself would say was, ‘It’ll be like nothin’ that’s been afore.’ They understood. Their pasts lay like obsolete maps.

Uncertain who would be eligible for enlistment, wavering among conflicting impulses of fear and patriotism and duty and common sense and a feeling of exhilaration in their lives becoming strange, they achieved a temporary equilibrium in angling their reactions towards fantasy. Mock tactics were discussed. Wullie Manson inspired some revolutionary military concepts. His enormous bulk (‘Ah just don’t ken ma wecht. The last scales Ah wis oan surrendered at twinty stane an’ gave up the joab’) had long accommodated barbs without complaint. Told about the unbelievable dimensions of his rump, he would pleasantly reply, ‘Ye need a big hammer fur a nine-inch nail.’ Andra Crawford had once remarked, ‘Big Wullie doesny go fur a walk. It’s a mairch-past. If ye’re waitin’ fur him tae pass, it can take ye quarter o’ an ‘oor tae croass the road.’ Now that remembered image was generously embellished. ‘They’ll probably make Big Wullie intae a regiment,’ Tam Docherty suggested. The Manson Light Infantry’ was someone’s ironic name for it. Tadger foresaw Sir John French deploying his forces skilfully and blocking the French frontier with Wullie Manson.

Having exhausted Big Wullie’s potential, their fancy went further afield, considered Gibby Molloy as Britain’s secret weapon, created Field-Marshal and reducing the enemy to victorious collapse. They saw Josey Mackay as the dreaded talking-machine that would secure German surrender in return for two days’ silence. But, their laughter thinning to a frenetic flippancy, they yielded more and more to the stillness that was growing in each of them as the evening ended.

Opinions were proffered like motions for the future to consider. ‘It’ll a’ be ower in three month.’ ‘Mair like a year, Ah wid say maself.’ ‘They’re too much in the wrang no’ tae loass this war.’ Tam remarked, ‘D’ye think Asquith’s got some kinna pull wi’ Goad?’ Tadger thought, ‘They should’ve sunk the bastards when they had the chance at Kiel in June.’ ‘Ach, we’ll maybe be laughin’ aboot this six months fae noo,’ Danny Hawkins said. ‘There’s no’ much we can dae aboot it wan wey or the ither, is there, then?’ That was Dan Melville. ‘Jine up, Ah suppose.’ ‘Aye.’ ‘Aye.’ ‘That’s aboot it, richt enough.’

The talk gave out. It had all been irrelevant anyway. But, like the nervous words of those awaiting a birth, it had served its purpose of being merely a means of letting something happen. Now, in the darkness constellated with glowing cigarettes, the war had become a fact. Like a minuscule separate state, unmappable except in the perspectives of its people, High Street had declared itself at war with Germany.

Goodnights were muttered. A fist flicked its farewell at a shoulder. Someone lobbed an empty cigarette packet over his arm and back-heeled it into the gutter. The group of men moved in slow, disintegrating vortex, surrendering its solidity in ones and twos. Like all conversations, theirs had been a measurement of the area of their respective silences, and it was silence, now more defined, that each took home with him.

For the war, after all, external artefact though it seemed, accomplished and immutable enormity, would be a different war for every one of them. Having no more than the natures that they stood in, they weren’t fixed in the marble pages of history and it didn’t inhabit its invented logic. They were only themselves, inhaling a troubled and incalculable air. They must compute on their pulses as it came, each as he could. Such computation would involve unknown quantities of eccentricity and trivia, the stink of a trench made more tolerable by the memory of a particular woman or conscience anaesthetised by patriotic slogans or the sufferings of Europe obliterated by the loss of a son, until the war assumed uniqueness in the experience of everyone who lived it.

For them that evening war wasn’t politics or geography or the mobilisation of forces. It was, as they entered their houses, a special diffidence in the eyes of some of their women. It was a sharper etching of objects around them, as if a film had been scraped from their eyeballs. It was how the kettle was a comfort, the battered chair luxurious, the collapsing of a coal-husk in the fire inexpressibly elegiac.

2

‘Ah’m gonny jine up,’ Mick said.

Around his words the casual evening congealed to an event. They passed from a number of people who happened to be in the same room into a family group, frozen inside his statement. The absence of Angus and Conn became immediately inappropriate.

‘Aw, naw,’ Jenny said.

But it was a reflex, the way people shut their eyes on an imminent blow, which doesn’t mean they expect to avoid it. Jenny had known he was trying to decide. She had hoped without conviction that this wouldn’t be his decision. She had been glad he had survived the first fever for enlisting at the start of the war. Otherwise, he might have been dead by now. Some from High Street were. Ypres had already been naturalised to Wipers by the weight of its British dead. But he hadn’t escaped the fever. It had merely been incubating in him.

‘Ah’ve made up ma mind, mither.’

‘But why, Mick?’

‘Ah just think it’s whit Ah should dae.’

‘Ah don’t see why it is. Ah don’t see that at a’.’

‘Ither folk jine up, mither.’

‘You’re no’ ither folk. It’s different when it comes tae yer ain door.’

But it had come and they all knew it, even Jenny. Her voice had been from the first brittle with hopelessness. You couldn’t talk to the war. As Mick put on his jacket and picked fluff from his cap, they seemed already to be spectators in his life, their own lives having become derivative. For the first time, the war was visiting their house. The past few months had been a pretence that had collapsed. They had gone on with their lives in desperate conclave, as if the more determinedly they remained themselves, the less chance the war would have of reaching them. They half-believed it would be over before it became personal to them.