The Big Man (3 page)

Their name for him was, perhaps, a clue. They called him ‘the big man’. It was an expression used of other men in the town, of course. But if the words were used out of any explanatory context, they meant Dan Scoular. Though he was six-feet-one, the implications were more than physical. They meant stature in some less definable sense. They had to do with his being, they suspected, in some way more inviolate than themselves, more autonomously himself. They had to do, perhaps most importantly, with the generosity and ease with which they felt he inhabited what was special about himself, his refusal to abuse a gift or turn it unfairly to his own advantage. For he could be quietly kind.

Yet the image the people of Thornbank had of him was false. They had mythologised his past and falsified his present. They had made him over into something that they wanted him to be. ‘He’s never picked on anybody in his life,’ was a remark so often made in Thornbank in relation to Dan Scoular that it had acquired a seeming immutability, like a rubric carved on a plinth. It was a lie. It conveniently excised from public recollection a few years
of his youth when his prodigious capacity for aggression had functioned on his whim and no casual encounter in a pub or at a dance was safe from its explosive arbitrariness.

‘He’s never looked at another woman,’ the oral history said. Perhaps they should have asked his wife Betty, an attractive and spirited woman, about that.

‘He’s his own man, that one,’ was a refrain that no one contradicted. But it was more an appearance than a fact. Dan Scoular didn’t know who he was. He felt daily that people were giving him back a sense of him that in no way matched what was going on. His statue didn’t fit.

But what they needed him to be they had partly accustomed him to pretend to be. He meant something in the life of Thornbank and he tried to live inside that meaning as best he could, like a somnambulist pacing out someone else’s dream. They looked to him to confirm that things were more or less all right. If he was as he had been, living along among them, coping quietly, things couldn’t be that bad. Like the Mount Parish Church clock, he was a familiar fixture by which they checked how things were going. Like that notoriously erratic timepiece, he was misleading. Thornbank was in no better state than Graithnock. It was just less aware of its condition. Dan Scoular was becoming desperately aware of his.

Failing marriages are haunted. They have lost the will for mastery of the present and the future looms as re-enactment of the past. Every day is full of the ghosts of other days, most of them emitting unassuaged rancour at small and large betrayals. New possibilities drown in their lamentations.

That Sunday Betty had wakened first. She heard the voices of the boys downstairs, beginning the statutory quarrel. The sound pulled at her mind like a tether: did you imagine your thoughts could wander off for a moment by themselves? She wondered briefly if their noise had wakened her or if they had been waiting poised like demonic actors, cued into automatic conflict by her consciousness. She rose and put on her housecoat, careful not to waken Dan. It wasn’t something done out of consideration but because it postponed the time when they
would have to talk. That was the first small, renewed betrayal, confirmation of where they had come. It was a message in code, delivered to him though he was asleep. He would understand it when he woke.

As she crossed to find her slippers under the dressing-table, the noise downstairs subsided to a civilised murmur and she paused, having lost her motive for getting out of bed. She knelt in front of the mirror, picked up the hairbrush and made a couple of passes at her hair. She noticed herself in the glass and stopped. She was aware of the dishevelled heap of Dan’s body on the bed, reflected from behind her. It was perhaps his humped image beside her face which triggered the memory.

‘And I’d also like to thank my own parents. Apart from the obvious trick they pulled in bringing me about. Although I have it on very good authority that Mrs Davidson isn’t too sure that’s how it happened. She still thinks I fell off the back of a lorry.’ (There was the kind of laughter people laugh at public events, as if a joke were a charity auction and they want to be seen to be bidding.) ‘But apart from that. I’d like to thank my parents for what they did as soon as they realised Betty and me were getting married. They stopped taking any money from me for my keep. It’s helped us a lot. They decided we needed all the money we could get to set up our own house. We’d both like to thank them for that. Mind you, I think they were beginning to get panicky towards the end there. I think they thought we were gonny have a seven-year engagement. Ah mean. I think they feel they’re not so much losing a son. They’re losing a liability. For the past year or so, if we’d been a Red Indian family . . .’ (titters greeting amazing concept) ‘. . . where they’ve got funny names like Running Bear and Running Water. The only appropriate one for me would’ve been Running Sore.’ (Total surrender to helpless mirth, corpulent uncles having cardiac arrests and aunties squawking like parakeets getting plucked alive.) ‘Anyway, my wife and I . . .’ (Stamping of feet, whistling, applause.)

It had been something like that. That was how Betty remembered it. Apart from having been there at the time (although she sometimes wondered if it was really herself who had been
there), she had, the day before, found the piece of paper on which Dan had made the notes for his speech. She had remembered how much he had wanted to get that speech right, his nervous determination. He knew her parents’ disapproval of him and the superciliousness of some of her aunts and uncles. He had felt like the champion of his ‘side’, not about to let them down, ready to demonstrate that he could string a few words together. He had made the best speech of the wedding and then almost undone his success by quarrelling in the lavatory with one of her cousins, who had expressed amazement at how well Dan had spoken. She heard later from an outraged uncle that Dan’s immediate response had been, ‘I’m not amazed at your amazement. The next time you get anything right’ll be your first.’

Betty had been looking for the insurance policy for the house contents the day before when she had come across that folded, scuffed and fading piece of paper. She had opened it out carelessly and it had hit her like a jack-in-the-box with a knife. She had read it slowly, her stomach feeling slightly mushy with guilt, for in the words she sensed a confident assertion that was like a contract they had both failed to keep. She had remembered the moment when those words were said.

She remembered that moment now, as she knelt at her dressing-table mirror: ‘My wife and I . . .’ Staring at herself, she saw that other face, as if her past were a helpless spirit hovering over her present. In retrospect, the brocade wedding-dress and veil seemed somehow preposterous, a grotesquely ornamental, weird costume for a part nobody knew how to play. They gave you a few lines of ritual dialogue that came from God knows what lexicon of antiquated male prejudice and the rest of your life was endless improvisation, entirely up to the two of you.

She saw Dan standing making his speech, confidently belying his nervousness, herself sitting in demure white, the audience looking on, seeing what they wanted to see. As she remembered it, they both seemed to her, in a simple and not very dramatic way, sacrificial. She remembered a joke she had heard somewhere about married people, comparing them to swimmers in
freezing water, shouting, ‘Come on in. The water’s great.’ ‘My wife and I . . .’ It didn’t seem to her to be imagination that she could remember a slightly derisive tone to some of the applause.

Watching her face without make-up, she remembered an expression that had fascinated her as a girl. She had always applied it to herself in the third person, making herself in her mind into the woman she imagined she might become. ‘She put on her face.’ The statement now seemed to her utterly apposite, an ambition that had closed around her like a trap. She put on her face. The face she had remembered in its veil was somehow lost, hadn’t merely changed.

These days she built an alternative in front of her mirror, created a role as self-consciously as an actress might with stage make-up: the wife. In some way that threatened the convincingness of her performance, it wasn’t truly her. Staring at herself, she vaguely felt that the accretions of experience she saw there weren’t an expression of her at all. They were a denial of some basic potential in her. Perhaps what we see in older people, she thought, are the complex stances and tics they have developed in response to the reactions to their original selves – not them so much as the camouflage they have had to become.

‘Leave it alone!’ Raymond shouted. ‘Or you’re gettin’ battered.’

As Betty straightened up, she heard a knee crack like a reminder of human frailty, a warning that she had better try to realise herself before it was too late. But the awareness was smothered at birth. She put on her slippers and they might as well have been bindings for her feet, so much they hobbled her to the day’s limitations. By the time she reached the bottom of the stairs, she had become ‘the mother’.

Raymond and young Danny were quarrelling over the pack of cards. Her arrival encouraged them to push their respective attitudes towards caricature. Raymond became innocently preoccupied in laying out the cards, his monkish dedication astonished at her arrival. ‘Oh, hello, Mum.’ Danny’s arms went out in outrage at the cruelty of man’s ways. ‘Mum!’ She felt she couldn’t face their trivial intensity at this time of the day. But
Danny jumped up and danced before her eyes like a midge with messianic delusions (Those who are not for me are against me’).

‘Mum! He’s playin’ patience!’

‘Shurrup. So what?’ Raymond said.

‘Two canny play patience. Ya bam!’

‘You said you didn’t want to play.’ Raymond was now using carefully formal English, showing his mother how calm he was, how full of rectitude.

‘Ah said Ah didn’t want to play whist. But there’s other games.’

‘That’s right. Patience.’

‘Ah said Ah would play rummy.’

‘I’m not playin’ rummy. You don’t play right. You don’t even know the rules. You make a run outa clubs and spades and everything. You’re daft.’

Danny kicked away Raymond’s line of cards and Raymond lunged to hit him and Betty screamed, ‘Raymond! The two of you! Shut up! For God’s sake, shut your mouths!’ They both looked at her in a shocked way, as if they had just discovered that their mother was mad. Her own next remark made Betty think they might be right.

‘What’ve you had to eat, the two of you?’ she asked and couldn’t herself see how that related to the problem.

‘We had flakes,’ Danny said in passing. ‘Ye know what he did, Mum? He stopped playin’ because Ah was winnin’. Ye did so!’

‘Did not.’

‘Did sot.’

‘Not.’

‘Sot.’

‘Not, not, not.’

‘Sot, sot, sot, sot, sot. Sot, sot. Sot, sot, sot –’

‘Danny! Stop! Stop, Danny!’

In the silence she gathered up the cards and put them on the mantelpiece.

‘Aw, Mum!’ from Raymond.

She resentfully made them a breakfast of sausage and egg
and toast, salving her rebellious conscience by making them lay the table. She tried not to let her affections take sides. But Raymond was so unfairly arrogant, playing his age advantage against Danny. He was thirteen against ten and he used those three years as a brutal birthright. His darkness of hair seemed to her for the moment sinister. Danny, still fair like herself, seemed an aggressed-on innocent, a small boy who sometimes gave the heart-wrenching impression that life was for him like jaywalking at Le Mans. She had a weakness for his passionate desire for justice, even when it was totally misguided.

While she fed them, she remembered an incident last year. She and Dan had been sitting in the house when Danny had rushed in from playing football in the street outside. His cheeks were florid from exertion and his eyes flamed with intensity.

‘Dad! Dad!’ he had been calling from the outside door.

He arrived in the room like the bearer of the news the world had been waiting for.

‘Dad, Dad! Ah told the boys you would know the answer.’

Dan had glanced up from his paper.

‘Twenty-two,’ he said.

‘Naw, naw. Listen, Dad. Andrew got hit in the face wi’ the ball.’

Dan looked at her and rolled his eyes.

‘Hit in the face wi’ the ball!’ Danny said.

‘In the face,’ Dan said. ‘With the ball. Correct.’

‘All right. He was goin’ to tackle Michael. And Michael lashed it. He really thumped it. An’ it hit Andrew right in the face. Full force.’

‘Amazin’,’ Dan said.

‘Naw. But listen, Dad. Is it a foul?’

Dan started to laugh.

‘What d’ye mean?’

‘Is it a foul?’

‘How can it be a foul?’

‘But it hit him right in the face!’

‘Danny! It’s not a foul. Because the ball hits somebody in the face. It’s mebbe an accident. But it’s not a foul.’

Betty remembered Danny’s disappointment and then the hope
that rekindled his eyes, the counsel for the defence who has found the incontrovertible point of law.

‘But, Dad,’ he said. ‘Andrew’s cryin’. He’s really roarin’.’

While Dan explained that tears didn’t make a foul, Betty thought she had glimpsed the core of Danny and remembered why she loved him so much. He believed that circumstances had to yield to feeling. He was such a lover that he couldn’t understand why the deepest feeling didn’t make the rules. As Danny trailed disconsolately back out the house to announce the bad news from the adult world, Betty felt a compassion for him that was out of all proportion to a football match.

It was perhaps that memory that determined how she would decide when Raymond picked up the cards from the mantelpiece as soon as he had finished eating. He was about to play patience again.

‘Raymond,’ she said. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Ah’m goin’ to play at cards.’

‘With Danny?’

‘No way. Danny’s a diddy.’

The venom of it annoyed her.

‘No he’s not,’ she said. ‘You want to play, Danny?’