The Big Man (21 page)

When he followed Dan out a moment later he found him staring at the ring. Tomorrow was a rest day. This was the last time he would see it. Matt Mason looked at Dan Scoular looking at the ring and wondered what he was seeing there.

There is a pub in Graithnock called the Akimbo Arms where the lounge bar and the public bar, though separate, are linked by an arched doorway from one gantry to the other. It means the same bar-staff can serve both places and so, like a reversible raincoat, it is an economical way of presenting two images to the changing times.

The public bar is what the pub originally was, a place where men drank. But it is smaller now, having been rendered peripheral by the encroachments of the lounge, where men and women drink together on soft seats and under alcove wall-lights. Sometimes women go into the bar but not often. When they drink there, it is usually because there is someone they want to meet and, occasionally, for the making of a point or from a self-conscious decision to go slumming. But they never become regulars.

The connecting door between the two is most commonly used for access to the men’s lavatory or the pay-phone, both of which are in the public bar. The old bar largely retains its identity as
a shrine to a traditional Scottish sense of manhood, though attracting fewer devotees than formerly. The rituals haven’t changed much but the punctilious practice of them is less fanatically adhered to. Swearing is no longer compulsory. Indeed, it is rare enough for some traditionalists to savour a fine, orotund obscenity when they hear it, like a memory of when the service was in Latin.

It was in the public bar Dan Scoular stood on the night Frankie White missed him in Glasgow. On the occasion of the meal with Matt Mason and the others he had found himself unable any longer to drown with talk the pain of the wound Wullie Mairshall had put in his mind. It was Wednesday. He had risen from the table and phoned the Red Lion. Wullie, like an anti-doctor always on call, had been ready with ointment to exacerbate the sore. His informants had supplied him with it: Thursday was the night. They would be going to a place called the Akimbo Arms. ‘A daft name,’ Wullie said, ‘whatever it means.’ Wullie was a thorough practitioner, he even provided directions on how to get there.

Not knowing there were two parts to the pub, Dan, screwed up to cope with whatever he would find, had blundered into the public bar. He found some men looking at him curiously. There were no women. As both an expression of relief and a cover for his embarrassment, he ordered a pint. He felt stupid standing here as a projection of Wullie Mairshall’s imagination, dream of the working-class avenging angel. It was then he saw them.

Framed in the archway leading to the lounge, lit attractively by a wall-light, she sat, like an unholy icon. The image, once seen, was a brand on the eyeballs, blinding him for the moment to everything else. Irrevocability was the first pain he felt, a lifetime fact expressing itself in an instant. I’m here to stay, the moment told him. You remember me till you die. Countless invisible props to his sense of himself, masculine vanities so secure it must have been years since he checked them, attitudes he had hardly questioned, went up like tinder in one sudden flame. It was lurid in the light of it that he saw the other man’s face and vaguely remembered him as someone he had seen at a party. But that was a long time ago. Could it have been going on as long as that? The tremors from his collapsing present ran
back into his past. Not only did he not know where he was. He didn’t know where he had been. Suspicion had become fact and fact became again suspicion.

Why then did he not move through to the lounge and confront them immediately? He was to wonder about that. That was what, if he had been asked to imagine the scene, he would have been sure would happen. It surely couldn’t have been because he became aware of the barman lugubriously paging his attention with ‘All right, sir?’ The fact that he found himself automatically conducting the trivial business of paying couldn’t have been enough to divert him from acting. It might have been connected with the disorientation from the centre of himself he had felt since going to Glasgow. It might have been partly because he knew what Wullie Mairshall expected him to do. It might have been because he sensed the situation was too important to be expressed in a single action.

All he knew for sure was that he stood there and, in the time it takes to deny a reflex, felt fall from him like protective clothing his complacent assumptions about himself. He had unconsciously rehearsed for such a moment innumerable times. Since adolescence, the gruff, ritual responses had been taught to him and his friends from anecdotes and in answer to the speculative catechism, ‘What would you do if . . .?’ ‘I’d have him first. An’ then we’d see.’ ‘They like lyin’ thegither, they could have the same grave.’ ‘Kick baith their ribs in.’

His own life, with its early aggressions and apparent endorsement of hard values, had been an implied subscription to that automatically shared ethos. Now experiencing the reality of it, he had hesitated and he wondered how many others would have behaved as he had done in practice. Those hard threats he had so often heard uttered against the possibility of a wife’s adultery seemed to him here less statements of what would certainly happen than charms to frighten such an event out of taking place.

He moved slightly down the bar, away from the possibility of being seen by them, and with the one small, lateral movement seemed to shuck the code he had thought was his, became not the master of that rough ethic’s baying principles but their prey.
He felt unmanned. He became for himself an impostor among these men of raucous certainties and instant responses. Their laughter excluded him.

‘It’s true,’ one of them was saying. He was in his fifties, his face lit from within by the beer like a Hallowe’en lantern. Sitting down, he held the attention of several men at the bar who were turned towards him. He had the sonorous delivery of a man who was used to being listened to. ‘Apart from churches, the auldest thing in this toon’s Tammy Bruce. An’ even he’s condemned. Ye seen him lately? What? He’s no’ gonny last. A waste o’ time for him to wind up his watch. Naw. Nearly every buildin’ in this toon is since the Thirties. Think about it. That’s a fact. They’ve ta’en our past away from us. A sign o’ the times.’

They all went on to argue and compare buildings and evoke past people. Dan’s thoughts were a personal descant on their public theme, elegiac with self-pity. What they were discussing as an abstraction he felt he was experiencing. He saw himself briefly as the victim not of personal circumstances but of something larger. These were the changes that were all around. He was just a part of them. This wouldn’t have happened before. He thought vaguely of his parents’ house and evoked in himself a misty ambience of warmth and brightness and stability. He managed to believe in the image for a moment, like one of those coloured pictures he had stared at as a child, wishing he could go there, where flowers of different seasons bloomed together and wormless apples grew and no hen-shit clogged the tails of fluffy chickens. But now, as then, reality blocked his way, this time in the shape of a memory he never welcomed.

After his father died, he had gone round as often as he could, or as often as he told himself he could, to see his mother. Her life was contracting then to a narrowing circle of daily trivia and that in itself was painful to look on at, for her generosity of nature began to atrophy with disuse. Small, uncharacteristic bitterness tarred her speech and her mouth seemed often tasting aloes. Then one day she changed in the passing his sense of his own boyhood.

They had been talking about someone who lived locally and who was a little older than Dan. His habit of not giving his wife
enough money was mentioned. Dan was laughing at the man’s reputation for meanness.

‘About as bad as yer feyther,’ his mother suddenly said.

‘What?’ Dan thought she was joking.

‘About as bad as yer feyther. A penny rolled a long, long way wi’ him.’

‘Come on, Mither. That was oor joke.’

‘Was it? He woulda skinned a louse for the tallow. Ah think he was feart Ah would save up the bus fare tae Graithnock an’ no’ come back.’

The coldness of her voice chilled the air in the room. He stared at her in the twilight she would let turn almost to darkness before she pressed the switch, for the habits of a lifetime saw only financial waste in light that you weren’t using to look at anything in particular. The fire was embers to which a few fresh nuggets tried to give the kiss of life. Perhaps it was what she had become herself she was accusing his father of. Perhaps the accusation was that he had made her so. Years of assumptive laughter went hollow for Dan.

Sitting with a stranger, he began to question her and she animated under his questions, almost shone eerily in the dusk with a truth she had found the occasion to tell and in the telling defined it for herself. She told him of slights so small you would have thought no memory could retain them. But hers had. There were embarrassments in shopping, masculine insensitivities, small things impossibly longed for – the terrible lifelong minutiae of unshared pain. There was the wish that she had the chance to do it again and the avowal that so many things would be different.

It wasn’t the contradiction of his sense of their relationship that was shocking. It was the awareness of the host of denied selves that were dead in her and she mourned for still. As she talked, he caught glimpses of girls she almost was and women she had wanted to be. They came faintly from her dwindling body like an exorcism in the darkening room. In that moment the brutish inadequacy of his past appreciation of her shamed him.

He had always known her life a selfless giving, a bequest from
the living of everything she had. That moment was the codicil, not one that changed what was given but clarified the terms on which it was received. The proviso was the selfishness of others. The beneficiaries could only become beneficiaries through their own greedy indifference. Otherwise, how could they have accepted a gift so destructive of the donor?

Dan had seen a glimpsed truth not only of his mother’s life that day but of whole generations of working-class women. From then on the praises he would hear given to those self-sacrificing many were to have a doubtful ring for him. It was right, justice, that the true heroism of working-class life should be accorded to those women. But like all heroism it was a dubious commodity. That lost army of fraught, unglamorous women, with the coats they had to make last for years and the shoes inside which strips of cardboard, absorbing dampness, recorded the passage of hard times like the rings of a dead tree, had done unbelievable things. But they shouldn’t have been asked to do them.

With a few pounds and some sticks of furniture, they had every day practised a very commonplace white magic. They had sewn comfort out of rags, brewed surprising satisfaction from unimpressive ingredients, calmed storms and taught decency in the face of the injustice their own lives suffered. But the cost of it had often been themselves. They were the ingredients of their own magic, last ounce of spirit, last shred of ambition, smallest fragment of dream. The wastage – the good minds starved, the talents denied, the potential distorted – was beyond computation. So when Dan was to hear afterwards a woman who had married well make a small shrine of her mother, or a man who had been successful praise his mother’s sacrifice, he appreciated their feeling but thought it would have been better not to need to feel it. Those attitudes seemed to him like wreaths laid at the graves of the prematurely dead, ones on which the cards should read ‘With fond misgivings’ and ‘Guiltily remembered’.

The guilt he had felt towards his mother extended now to include Betty. The looks through to the lounge he had continued to take had forced him to see the potential to be someone else that there was in her. He saw not only her attractiveness through
the eyes of a stranger but her interestingness, realising afresh how much he didn’t know about her. It was as if, having found the bay of a continent habitable, he hadn’t explored the rest of it. He suspected it was mainly that honest admission which held him there. He didn’t doubt his ability to go through and deal with the man. But, acknowledging how far Betty – by the very action of being here – had reminded him that she was incomprehensibly herself, he had doubts about the results of his going through the lounge.

He remembered, too, in seeing her, his own misgivings about their life together, his own longings for something other, his own times of unfaithfulness. He couldn’t pretend that she had no right to be the same. The thought was a shared nakedness of doubt with her, a dismantling of his own machismo. Stripped of who he had thought he was, of Wullie Mairshall’s moth-eaten robes of manhood, he felt the chilliness of honesty. He held balanced in himself two forces: a rage that could have demolished the furnishings of this pub and anybody who got in his way, especially Betty, and a certainty of how useless doing that would be. He knew simultaneously his strength and its pointlessness.

He understood how fragile he was and in the understanding, twinned in the same placenta, was his compassion for Betty’s fragility, no matter what she did. One couldn’t be born without the other. And in the realisation of his own rawness and that of others, he saw the flimsiness of the coverings sometimes made for it, the tatterdemalion beliefs, the certitudes any trivial accident could pierce. When he looked back into the lounge and saw that they were gone, it was like looking in a mirror and seeing no reflection.

Before he could stop himself, he had panicked, and gone through to check. Three girls on a night out assessed him calmly. He went out into the street. Two men were taking a prolonged farewell on the pavement. A car was refusing to start. There was only one person in it. Normalcy mocked him. Not knowing what else to do, he went back into the public bar and ordered another pint.

‘John Logie Baird,’ someone was saying. The inventor of television.’

The steam engine. James Watt.’

The phone.’