The Big Man (34 page)

In search of that strength, he forced himself to look honestly at what he had done, to think over its implications instead of cringing away from them. He had to admit to himself that the money he had given Cutty Dawson was a dubious gift. Apart from the fact that it was too little to be of much use to Cutty, Dan was in no way sure that he would be allowed to keep it. At least, whether it was taken back from him or not, he should be safe from violence. From Cutty’s tone in the hospital, Dan could imagine him making efforts to have the money given back without his having been asked for it.

Yet that moment in the dimly lit room, when he had blindly given a gift that was blindly received, stayed with him as something he couldn’t wish undone, one of the most necessary acts of his life. It was an acknowledgment of faith he had needed to find a way to make. The money, so trivial in itself, had been the only means to hand by which to express his belief. The water in a baptism is just water, the wafer in communion just a wafer. It was what he had taken on with the action that had mattered, where in the doing of it he had irrevocably placed himself.

That, he understood in thinking back to it, must have been one reason why he had done it. It locked him out of compromise, prevarication. He had defined his choices by turning towards what he truly believed and meeting whatever it involved. In the frightening tension of it was the truth of himself.

The clarity of the realisation burned away some of his past confusions like dross. The punch with which he had hit Matt Mason felt to him now like the last one he ever wanted to throw, the last and one true blow of his fight with Cutty Dawson, a paradox of violence terminating itself with violence, a voice speaking in him to say it didn’t wish to speak. He saw the past violence he had offered other men like himself as self-inflicted wounds. If he had to fight again, he wanted it only to be against Matt Mason or whoever was hired by him. He was finished with skirmishes. He was enlisted in a war. He wanted to know who was on his side.

*     *     *

In a sense, they had started making love before the meal. Neither of them could have fixed the moment of its beginning, the time when the pleasure of being together and just sharing the same space, that marvellous rough alloy of looks and accidental brushings and unnecessary things said and thoughts shared without being spoken, began to refine itself into compulsion, to move towards the purity of lust. But by early that Wednesday evening, when Betty was making the meal and Dan was laying the table – while the boys watched television – they were already part of a ceremony being conducted in secret between them. Dan saw Betty reach upwards into a cupboard and her hips innocently achieved the angle of desire. She was aware of how his body seemed not just to be in the room but almost to fill it. Both felt a kindling of want in them.

The distances they had put between each other since Sunday had contracted. He had told her what he had done and the uncertainty of all he knew how to offer. In admitting about Gordon, she had stated no decision. She had refused to succumb merely because he was at risk. He had refused to woo her with false promises just because she held herself apart. Both were aware of lovers’ blackmail and knew themselves in a place too serious for that. They knew how that black art could cripple truth of feeling. They had spoken to each other and listened to each other and they had waited. What happened would interpret. The thoughts were left to grow in acceptance or close in refusal. The risk was necessary, they knew. They were finding what they meant to each other. That wasn’t a decision just for thought or voices.

That evening it was as though their bodies had begun to swim through those thoughts and fears and memories and hopes slowly towards each other. That was a complicated journey, full of treacherous eddies, sudden undercurrents. Past pain pulled against them, past happiness nudged them forward. But the fierceness of their secret, of the places they had taken each other, of the past admissions they had drawn from their own bodies, was gathering its compulsion and threatening to lay waste every other concern. While they moved around the banality of the kitchen, they were tentatively agreeing in coded
looks and touches and feelings that each was where the other’s passion was. Each might live without the other, they were discovering, but if they did, their lives, they believed, would always be less than they might have been. The feeling grew, vivid and wild, in the interstices of the ordinary things they did.

The meal was more than a meal. With remarks and glances and the passing of objects, they were reinforcing where they had been, putting a light in the window for where they might come from. It was a muted conjuration of the past, a sketch that gave the future putative shape. Small moments set up multiple echoes.

‘Oor Danny says he wants to be a pilot,’ Raymond said.

Danny sat staring calmly ahead, chewing.

‘What kind of pilot?’ Dan asked.

‘A Spitfire pilot.’

Betty remembered the Second World War film that had been on television.

‘Ye better get a leather hat then,’ Dan said. ‘Ye canny be a Spitfire pilot minus the leather hat.’

‘You shouldn’t be too busy, anyway,’ Betty said.

‘Aye.’ Dan smiled at her. ‘It’s like the joke about wanting a job as a flag-day collector in Aberdeen.’

‘Ah told him there aren’t any Spitfires,’ Raymond said smugly.

Dan looked at him.

‘You ever travel on the Blackbrae bus?’ Dan said.

‘What?’

Betty laughed and nodded to Dan. She remembered telling him, a couple of years ago last Christmas, of an incident she had seen on the bus from Blackbrae. A woman and a child of about six had been chatting on the bus. The girl had been asking her mother if she was sure Santa Claus would come and how he was going to get into the house, since they didn’t have a coal fire. Betty was aware of a small boy who might have been eight years old. He was sitting across from the mother and daughter, rocking backwards and forwards and clicking his fingers in rhythm to some tune that only he was hearing and he was listening intently to the conversation.

‘But how will he know where we’re stayin? We didn’t stay in this house last year.’

‘Santa knows, love. Santa knows.’

‘Will he come in the window?’

‘He might. Santa’s got his own way of doing things.’

They had all come off the bus at the same stop. Walking behind them, Betty saw the mother and daughter still engrossed in conversation and the small boy drawing level with them, timing his moment.

‘Haw, hen,’ he called as he passed them. ‘There’s nae fuckin’ Santa!’

Then he was off at a run, laughing like a happy bacterium, to spread his disillusionment elsewhere.

‘Ah can still be one if Ah want,’ Danny said.

‘Where? In a museum?’

‘Dad!’

‘Maybe not a Spitfire pilot, Danny,’ Dan said. ‘But ye could still be a pilot. Ye could be an airline pilot.’

‘Ye’ve got to be clever to be that,’ Raymond said. ‘You don’t like arithmetic. Ye would need to be good at arithmetic.’

‘And what do you want to be, Ray?’ Dan asked. ‘A child murderer?’

Betty thought that she would never get tired of seeing Dan’s face and, as they all went on to discuss bizarre ambitions with apparent seriousness, the conversation evoked a mood among them that couldn’t have been explained by the specifics of what they said, no more than the effect of a piece of music could be explained by the notation. The boys projected the future as if it were located just across the room. Dan and Betty, less innocently certain about themselves, nevertheless caught the refraction of mutual possibilities and felt the regenerative force of the rooted past. On that feeling the certainty of what would happen this evening bloomed, like the first signs of possible new growth.

They would make love, were making love. By tone and movement and look, they were engaging in a kind of decorous and subtle foreplay. While experiencing the feeling, Betty was also trying to interpret it. She was aware how dangerous it would be for her to let happen something which she might want
to renege on later. She didn’t want to waken up and find that she had merely been trapped again by habit.

But that wasn’t how she felt it would be. The sensation she had was not of familiarity but of renewed risk. She felt afresh the exciting unpredictability of their two presences. It was a feeling Gordon and she had never created between them. Perhaps that was why they hadn’t tried to realise their relationship more fully. All the possibilities they had talked about were somehow anonymous, like package deals in a brochure. They could have been inhabited by any other two people as well as themselves. They were a shared abstraction, ideas of how a life might be. With some surprise she realised that the feeling she had just now was simply personal to her. It was an irrefutable part of herself, a compulsion that she might resist or try to manipulate but which she couldn’t deny. Anything else was just a holiday, not quite to be taken seriously.

If this was what she meant by ‘love’, it didn’t feel to her safe at all. It felt very dangerous. It had no form that she could trust in. It wasn’t about being married to Dan. It was about their being together for just now. It wasn’t form. It was content, waiting for form.

She understood that the risk of looking for that form was loss of self. At the furthest reaches of the intensity of commitment to the other lay the possibility of total betrayal. She thought some people emasculated their passion by calling comfort and withdrawal from doubt by the name of love. Whatever love was, she found it almost frighteningly various. It had many faces, all of them your own, and some of them were as terrifying as grotesque masks.

In the sexuality of Dan and herself, what love appeared to mean shifted bewilderingly. In the extremity of their love- making, she had sometimes been afraid of herself, had suspected love’ of being a noble, ceremonial pretence that individuals conspired in with each other to contain, as with gossamer (the strength of which lay in believing in its strength), the utter rawness and promiscuity of their passion, a way of putting a face on the void, painting a mask on the darkness, the last socially habitable cliff-edge above the abyss of pure animality.

At such moments she depended on the tenderness that followed. That, too, was love – the iron rations of mutual concern they took with them on that most dangerous of journeys towards the truth of themselves, the cache at the last camp, the psychic strength of the other that eventually would be all that you could feed on.

You were taking so many chances. You were going beyond manners, self-censorship, deliberate projection of the ‘good’, conventional kindness, morality, your carefully structured sense of yourself. You were discovering yourself without cerebral protection. You were helplessly becoming who you were.

Knowing, throughout the evening, the intense exchange of selves towards which they were moving, feeling again the mysteriousness of her own body, Betty remembered the effect their early love-making had had on her. Before that, it had seemed to her in retrospect, her body had been like luggage. She felt now again the tremors of expectation, each pore coming alive. But as she moved towards the fulfilment of the feeling, she understood what she was leaving behind. The possibilities she had been imagining with Gordon would be erased for her. She couldn’t release herself into what might happen unless she acknowledged that to herself. The force of what was coming would only yield itself to you if you yielded yourself to it, were prepared to be changed by it. She was prepared and when, with the children in bed, Dan raised his eyebrows in question, she nodded.

As he lay in bed, Dan heard her urinating and the sound excited him. He thought how even beyond the expressions of his love for her he had achieved there was an area that was still his secret, small moments too numerous to inventory to which his hoarded feelings attached themselves. There were movements she made and ways she looked that stirred him inexplicably. When she came into the bedroom, he was waiting for one of those moments. He knew the exact sequence in which she would undress and he watched her surface stage by stage out of her clothes until she was naked. She left the light on as she came into bed.

With their eyes closed, they became touch, a slow braille.
They touched with skin, with hands, with mouths. They lost the sense of each other’s body’s contours and their own, felt themselves extend and drift, dissolving into each other. Coherent thought burnt to a smoke of sensation in which the gaudy images began. Sounds came, brute at first, evolving clumsily into words. The words became hyperboles, groping towards the feelings they tried to reach. They wanted to do more than one thing at a time. They made wild shapes of each other. They caught seen fragments of themselves: the savage eyes, the face a hewn intensity, the arching belly, the writhe of hips. They became lost in waves of feeling, the moiling of their own flesh, and clung to each other like an act of faith, a giving of fierce truth in trust, half-afraid that the other might pull back and leave them stranded there, naked, revealed. The force of what they had felt was only bearable by being shared, by nothing being done that both didn’t want to do. And when they finally came together, they shuddered uncontrollably as if some spirit of each was trying to pass out of the body.

They lay still and held each other. There had been such a welter of tenderness and ferocity and caring and selfishness and submission and control that for a time it seemed that nothing had survived it. But they had had the courage to throw everything into the maelstrom and in the following calm that drifted them away from its whirling power, they found they had emerged with the human gifts of tenderness and passion and kindness cleanly theirs, earned on their bodies, not ingested like socially processed capsules. They had discovered them for themselves through the honesty of their experience. They hadn’t learned them by rote in the abstract.

They faced each other and knew where they were. Nothing was certain. But they would try. They cuddled, which was their passion putting on its working clothes.