The Big Man (35 page)

‘Glad Ah picked this side of the bed,’ Dan said.

‘Why?’

‘Because you’re nearer the light. Gonny put it out?’

‘You mean that’s it?’ Betty said.

They laughed.

*     *     *

The sound of her key in the lock was a whispered promise. He quickened into expectation and wanted to know what it was saying. When she came in, her face was heightened with the night air and her eyes, adjusting to the light, seemed startled by the room, the strange place where he was sitting. He caught a whiff of where she came from, spoor of an evening he would never know. He was jealous of her acquaintance with the night. She crossed and kissed him.

‘I could use a coffee,’ she said. ‘You want one?’

‘Aye. Why not, love?’

‘The boys all right?’

‘They’re sleeping.’

She took off her coat and threw it on the couch and, as he heard her feet go up the stairs, the anger came. His rage was with her, with Gordon Struthers, with the innocence of the children, but mostly with himself. He should not have let her go. He should have done more than this. But he clung to the sound of her checking the children while the rage passed through him like a small hurricane, leaving him shaken. The sounds of her in the kitchen, the kettle being filled, the gas going on, cups finding their places in saucers, reminded him that he might not have them long. He wondered what she was thinking.

She was thinking that these sounds told her what she had done, and she was glad. She had given up an idea for a passion. She knew that the intensity she felt towards him was the greater for its foregoing of alternatives. She wanted to tell him so much and she made him coffee. Every smallest thing she did reaffirmed the passion of her choice. She hoped that somehow he might understand.

When she came back into the room, she loved the modesty of his uniqueness. He sat pursing his mouth into a thought. His blue eyes were vivid against the darkness of his hair. His face was a shape she wanted her future to have. He glanced at her and winked. The moment claimed her. Her heart rose in her like applause. She knew all the things he was balancing in himself and he did it with grace. His amazingness was utterly practical. She didn’t know how to express what she felt. She gave him a
cup of coffee. Returning the gorilla’s banana, she thought, and knew they were a code no one else could crack.

Thanks, love.’

He was grateful for the colour of her hair, those eyes so dark, they burned him. For he was glad he had made such provision as he could, taken the trips to Graithnock. He raised his coffee cup to toast her. They sat drinking together, haunted by the future. When she had finished her coffee, she came and knelt beside him.

‘Forgive me,’ she said.

His fingers were testing the texture of her hair, as if he had just discovered it.

‘Only if you’ll forgive me,’ he said.

She partly knew and partly didn’t know what he meant. The part she didn’t know didn’t matter, for his ignorance was as great as hers.

‘Agreed.’

‘Agreed.’

When they went upstairs, they made love and fell asleep and Betty woke suddenly, aware of Dan watching her in the dim light from outside. It was as if he had stared her awake.

‘What?’ she said.

He smiled and stroked her hair.

‘What time is it?’ she asked.

He said nothing. She turned her head round and peered at the digital alarm through her sleepiness. It was 2.28. They lay touching and stroking, and murmuring as if they were creating new words. Betty wanted to blindfold the alarm. She recalled a childhood desire of hers and felt it repeat itself in her now. It was to have a machine that could control the clock of public lives, put it back and let others go on sleeping until Dan and she had reached the limit of the moment, were ready to face them again. But she was thirty-two now and there was no such machine.

With the dressing-table mirror tilted up, he combed his hair carefully. The bruising on his face had almost gone. There was
a slight yellowness around one eye. He didn’t hear her coming in. She spoke from the doorway of the bedroom and when he glanced up he knew from her stillness that she had been watching him for some time.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Oh not again,’ he said. He was smiling. ‘Do we need this rigmarole every Sunday night?’

Her expression refused to join him in the joke. She stared at him and the fear in her eyes shamed his attempted flippancy. It was a fear he shared and their mutual acknowledgment of it estranged them from the room. What had been familiar became sinister. The bed looked cold and uninviting. The mobile of metal butterflies hanging from the ceiling found wind where there was none that they could feel and it span, clashing softly. The accoutrements on the dressing-table were an array of vanities.

The routine that had carried them through a week broke down in that moment and this was as far as it had brought them. They faced each other across a bleak admission. Dan fingered some loose hairs from his comb in a pretence of normalcy. Neither of them was convinced.

‘You can’t go there,’ Betty said.

‘Come on, Betty. Where else would Ah go?’

‘But why?’

‘It’s a thing Ah do. Ah haven’t got much. Nobody’s goin’ to make me settle for less.’

She looked wildly round the room as if it was a trap.

‘I wish we could go away from here.’

‘Where would we go? The Bahamas? Nah, Betty. This is where we live. So do a lot of other good people. We should be trying to improve this place, not go elsewhere.’

‘But this is the most likely night. If they’re looking for you, this would be the night. And the pub would be the place. Not tonight, Dan. Wait even a week.’

‘They’re more likely to wait. Till things’ve died down a bit. Tonight’s probably as safe as it’s goin’ tae get.’

‘But what if they’re there?’

‘Then Ah better be as well. If they’re there and Ah don’t go. What d’you think they’ll do? Leave it at that and go home? They
would come here, Betty. Ah’m not havin’ that. Not at any price. Ah’m goin’.’

‘We could tell the police. I’ve been thinking about that. I think we should tell Scott Laidlaw.’

Dan winked at her.

‘Ah already have. He’s told his brother.’

‘You told Scott?’

‘Of course Ah did. Ah don’t want to take any chances Ah don’t have tae take. If Jack Laidlaw lets it be known discreetly that he’s aware o’ this, should be some kinda deterrent.’

‘But did you tell him you took money?’

‘Skated round that a bit. Ah mean, that’s theft. But Ah don’t think Matt Mason’ll be keen tae file a complaint.’

The mention of the name broke through the numbness Betty had temporarily gained by talking about the practicalities of it. She heard the faint sounds of the television programme the boys were watching downstairs. She tried to think of something else to say but couldn’t. The banal logic of Dan’s reasons defeated her. Standing in the room, staring at her make-up accessories, hearing studio laughter from downstairs, she was horrified at the ordinariness of the terrible. Their lives were overhung by the will of others and the children were watching television and her husband was preparing to go out to the pub and any moment their right to the life they had could be foreclosed on. And who was to help them?

‘It’s going to be all right, Bette,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry.’

‘Dan. Who do you think you’re speaking to? One of the children?’

‘I just think it’ll be all right.’

‘Do you?’

She crossed towards the dressing-table, where her handbag was lying. She opened the bag and took out a folded form. It took Dan a few seconds to recognise the life insurance policy he had arranged during the week.

‘Where did you get that?’ he asked.

‘Where you hid it.’

He had put it in the plastic bag where they kept such things, stored in a downstairs cupboard. Knowing that if anything hap
pened to him she would have to look there, he had secreted it among a lot of other documents. While he was doing it, he had found the notes to his wedding speech, and the two of them held together in his hand, scribbled notes and precisely worded type, had been like a measure of the distance he had travelled since that time: from vague aspirations to a final contract, worked out in hard terms and offering no loopholes.

‘Ah didn’t hide it, Betty,’ he said. ‘Ah just put it in a safe place.’

‘Was that all? I’ve had that in my handbag since yesterday, waiting for you to mention it first. Why didn’t you tell me, Dan?’

‘Ah would’ve done.’

‘When? As a dramatic death-bed confession? Why did you do this?’

‘Seemed like a good time to do it. Ah’m never goin’ to be fitter, am Ah? That’s the time tae let the medical men have a look at ye. An’ Ah’ve got some money.’

‘And you don’t expect to live long?’

‘Who doesn’t?’ He flexed his shoulders and winked at her but she didn’t respond. ‘Strong as a bull. But there’s always the wee heart attacks an’ runaway buses waitin’ to have a go at ye. Betty. You’ve always been on at me to think of the future an’ make some provision.’

He cuddled her and she put the piece of paper back in her handbag and they came downstairs. With the boys watching the television and Dan standing at the table with his jerkin on and discovering something in the paper that appeared to interest him and herself laying out some things for ironing, Betty felt there wasn’t much more to be said. They both knew the fragility of where they were. They shared it beyond speech. It was their element. You didn’t spend time discussing air, you just breathed it. This was normalcy, this preoccupation with small tasks in the face of possible death, this commitment to a marriage you weren’t sure could last, this silent hysteria at the injustice of things. For Dan’s sake, she tried to contain the panic that threatened her. But when he crossed and put his hands on the back of the boys’ necks by way of cheerio and then made to go out, she followed him into the hall.

‘Dan,’ she said.

He turned and smiled at her.

‘You’ve got two hours.’

His eyes widened.

‘Sorry?’

‘Two hours. All right?’

‘Ye mean in the pub?’

‘That’s right.’

The smile enlarged.

‘Ye kiddin’, Bette? What a hen peck ye’re turnin’ me into. Well, can Ah bring one of ma pals in to play when Ah come back?’

‘I’m serious, Dan. You feel you’ve got to do this, all right. I’ll accept it in a limited way. But if you’re not back by that time, I’m going to get May in from next door and come up there myself.’

‘All right, Bette. But Ah think you’re just lookin’ for an excuse for a bevvy.’

‘Uh-huh.’

They laughed quietly and embraced. He felt her holding him tightly.

‘It’s got its advantages, this situation,’ he said into her hair. ‘Every time ye go to the pub ye say farewell as if ye were emigratin’. Ah like it fine.’

Outside, his last remark stayed with him. There was some truth in it. Everything felt heightened for him. He admitted to himself that he did think tonight was probably the most likely time. The awareness of his own danger gave everything around him a sharper edge, the way the threat of losing something intensifies your sense of its worth. Walking to the pub became a small experience. He appreciated the stillness of the evening, the lighted windows of the houses that colonised the darkness. At the same time, he was tense with the fear of what might be ahead.

Some stars were out. They gave perspective to the vastness of the sky, enlarged the night. He was reminded of the moment before the fight with Cutty, his awareness of how big the day was and how unnecessarily small their preoccupation was within it. He felt the same about where he was now.

But he accepted it. All experience was distorting lenses. What mattered was that, through maintaining the act of choice, you kept the freedom of your imagination to interpret the distortions. All anybody ultimately had the right to was their own vision. He had his, won from his own experience. He would abide the pain of his own findings.

He had chosen to live with the threat of Matt Mason’s power and in the choice he had transformed that power. Matt Mason’s power might be planning to determine the meaning of Dan Scoular’s life, what significance it would have, perhaps even when it would end. But Dan Scoular was determining the significance of Matt Mason’s power. By walking towards it, he put it in perspective. It wasn’t master, it was servant to a truth it didn’t realise, a truth Dan Scoular knew. It was Dan Scoular’s sense of his own life given shape. The shape was already there and Matt Mason was deluding himself that he could make it different. So every day was a threat. Wasn’t it always?

He thought of his father’s life. His father, he thought, had taken this walk every day, with so many others. The only difference was in the awareness. He felt he was taking the walk for all of them again but this time with an understanding that was his gift to their baffled experience. He felt them with him. All that had happened between his walk here of a month ago and now was the truth. It lay in the tension between imposed experience and the vision that transformed it. That tension increased the nearer he came to the pub.

When he pushed open the door, the pub burst on his eyes, a sudden gift of colour and noise and smoke and warmth and danger. He was surprised how busy it was. Every table was occupied and there were several men at the bar. Voices greeted him and he tried to acknowledge them. By the time he reached the bar, a pint was waiting.

This one’s on me, Dan,’ Alan said.

He was given his space. Drinking, he looked round in a way that was a habit with a new, heightened awareness concealed in it. All the faces seemed familiar, belonged there. The domino players had a fourth and at another table a second game was happening. He felt his tension tremor, settle for the moment.
People at the bar to order a drink or on their way past to the lavatory would touch him or speak in the passing, congratulating him in a way that suggested they didn’t just mean on winning a fight, or they would stop and talk for a time. Wullie Mairshall was one of them.

‘Aye, Dan.’

‘Wullie.’