The Big Man (4 page)

‘Uh-huh.’ Danny put his last piece of toast in his mouth and crossed towards Raymond. Raymond threw the cards on to the floor. Danny painstakingly picked them up.

‘Right, Raymond,’ Betty said. ‘You don’t want to play with Danny, you don’t want to play. But just make sure you leave him alone.’

She heard Dan coming downstairs as Raymond brushed past her. When she went into the kitchen, Dan was standing, wearing only a pair of old trousers and looking drowsily into a packet of cornflakes as if there was a message there he must decipher. His rumpled presence somehow provoked her and one of those familiar quarrels over nothing already hung in the air around them. The rules for such quarrels were that the cause of them should be irrelevant and that the venom they evoked should be out of all proportion. Raymond had exiled himself to the back green and she could hear him kicking a ball steadily against the wall of the house as if he was trying to tell her something. Danny
was pretending to play with the cards that had caused the trouble but he had put the television on. Dan shook the cornflake packet and its contents rustled faintly. The sound made her grit her teeth.

‘Oh-ho,’ Dan said. ‘No cornflakes.’

He said it gently enough but it was audible.

There’s some in it. I can hear them,’ Betty said.

Dan pulled open the packet and held it towards her.

‘If ye’ve got a microscope, Ah’ll show ye them.’

‘You normally take cornflakes for your supper?’

‘It’s ten past ten.’

‘The money I’m getting, we’re lucky we’ve got bread.’

He crushed the packet with unnecessary force and put it in the bin.

‘Your period due?’ he said.

It was the remark that rendered any mediating sanity powerless to intervene, the unfair reprisal that escalated the conflict. Until then she would have been herself inclined to admit that he was the offended party to begin with, but his spite had wakened to the possibilities quickly enough and she was content that the war was on, both sides wheeling out their weaponry.

They traversed some familiar ground, littered with the dead of old campaigns. Her contempt was loud for his need to relate any recriminations of hers to the menstrual cycle, as if having a womb precluded having a mind. He touched again on how she made a crisis out of every casual conversation, saw deliberate attacks in accidental gestures. The structure of the day was set, an expression of the complex of devious failures and abandoned possibilities and secret chambers of hurt where their lost hopes lived alone.

The fact that they weren’t going anywhere that day seemed simple enough. But behind it lay a reminder that they had recently had to sell the second-hand car. Just staying in the house compounded her frustration at the way they had to live, his sense of how he was failing them. Lunch was communication through the boys.

When he took Raymond and Danny out the back to play with the ball in the afternoon, she sat indoors with her coffee, reading
her own alternative text in the glossy magazine she leafed through. It was how she might have been living, somewhere among those advertisements. She wouldn’t have minded that but the text between adverts depressed her, suggested that perhaps the price was too high. The bright preoccupied tone, so full of blind assurance, was like a more intellectual version of her mother set in type.

She thought about her mother. Were daughters condemned to fulfil their mothers’ worst fears for them as punishment for disobedience? But then her mother’s fears for her had been so chameleon that they would have been able to fit in with whatever habitat Betty had chosen, found a niche there and been ready to feed on any stray passing thoughts of hers, as now. Protectively, Betty reminded herself of her mother’s desperately self-limiting philosophy, like a cage to keep her in. It was the cage she had kept herself in.

Her mother had known things with a certainty beyond the power of reason to refute. She had known that housework put off is housework doubled. She had known that you would see things differently when you were older. She had known that a girl shouldn’t cheapen herself, steam irons never get the job done properly, once a Catholic always a Catholic, educate a girl you educate a family, some men only want the one thing, if she had her life to live again she would do it differently, you’re only a virgin once, nobody needs to be out at two in the morning, they should hang them, the truth never hurt anyone, marry in haste, repent at leisure and Dan Scoular wasn’t good enough for her daughter.

She had also been a very good cook and baker and the house had always been tidy, very tidy, but Betty honestly couldn’t remember when her mother had touched her spontaneously. She could recall her mother kissing her goodnight but that was a ritual, something she had decided you were supposed to do, not an unrehearsed act of affection. When she thought of her mother, and she had often tried so hard to do it justly, she thought of that voice like a barking dog forbidding the world to come near her. She thought of
One Thousand and One Nights
of clichés, of a Scheherazade whose frenetic variety of
repetitions was not a postponement of death but of life, a charm against the dread of coming alive.

And her father had fallen in love with that ability. She thought of the way he used to raise his eyebrows and shrug, as if in conspiracy with Betty’s outrage, but really – she had realised how many times since – in conspiracy with her mother. In return for those utterances neither of them could possibly believe, he was given his status, his small, imagined kingship of the house. Betty was, she had slowly and painfully come to realise, irrelevant here. A two-way charade was in progress. Nobody else knew the rules.

Dan Scoular had been an innocent intruder. She remembered them talking to her after his first time in the house, when he was gone. Quietness had been the first thing, her mother moving about and doing things only she could have imagined needed done, her father in soulful conclave with the gas-fire. They were talking to each other with silence and she was excluded, except insofar as she was meant to understand that she had somehow failed them. Their silence was hurt, deep shock which she was supposed to realise she was responsible for.

That night a lot of scattered misgivings about the way she and her parents lived had come together for her, and from them she had begun to make a kind of credo for herself. Her relationship with Dan had already given her an alternative sense of herself, an awareness of her own worth that contradicted her mother’s dismissive criticisms, which ranged from the way she dressed to her inability to cook. But the most painful forms those criticisms took were their trivial, momentary manifestations. It might be the way she had thrown down a magazine or the way she was sitting or a look she was supposed to have given. Her mother seemed capable of arranging endless ambushes in which Betty was taken by surprise and robbed of her self-esteem. Dan restored to her a more balanced sense of herself. His appreciation of her was like a constantly repeated present.

That night, after he had gone, that sense of herself remained with her. His absence had stayed stronger than their presence, had enabled her not to become a part of her parents’ strange ritual but to maintain her own perspective on it and, with a quiet
dismay, understand what was really happening. Her mother had eventually stopped fussing around and sat down across the fire from her father.

The atmosphere was one with which she was familiar. Sometimes, coming in from a night out, she had been invited into the lounge to sit with her parents and their friends. The invitation was usually extended with an elaborately insistent generosity, a privilege self-consciously granted.

They all sat around with their drinks, playing a game Betty had decided to call pass-the-bromide. The reek of complacency in the room was as strong as formaldehyde. She used to wonder if they changed their smiles daily with the flowers. If anything strange were mentioned as having happened, the shock of it was quickly neutered to surprise by common consent.

The only displays of strong emotion she had seen among them took a careful stylised form and seemed triggered by a pre-determined set of values. What was happening outside the immediate range of their own lives was disarmed, could provide no trigger for deep feeling. Things like the rates, the iniquity of conveyancing or the shabbiness of modern workmanship were rich in potential for long, heartfelt diatribes.

Once she had watched a neighbour come apart slowly and with dignity in her parents’ lounge. She cried for several minutes, her mascara spiking the rims of her eyes. Betty’s mother had gone across to comfort the woman. The others looked on in sympathy. It would have made a moving scene in a silent film. But Betty had heard the sound-track. The woman was crying because her teenage son had taken to wearing his hair long and his clothes were casually shabby. Everybody in the room except Betty seemed to understand instantly the grief he had caused his mother, to share in her sorrow at the wantonness with which life inflicts its sufferings. There were murmured condolences, remarks about ‘no matter what you do for them’ and ‘he’ll grow out of it’. Unfortunately, he had. Betty knew the boy, a fragile, earnest teenager, rebellious as a convention of kirk elders. She had been amazed by the scene: all those people huddled together for support against four inches of hair on a harmless boy. It was as if, unable to feel for things that mattered, they all colluded
in exaggerated reactions to trivia, indulged without risk in a ceremony of feeling.

Dan Scoular was her parents’ equivalent of long hair in their neighbour’s life, the proof that trouble does eventually come to every door. In that family summit meeting it became clear that it wasn’t who he was they had noticed but who he wasn’t. He didn’t have a very cultured accent. He wasn’t at university. He had no prospects of becoming a professional man. Everything they said to her when he was gone was another door closed on the possibility of their seeing him as he was. Their talk was the noise of preconceptions sliding home like bolts: ‘you’re young yet’, ‘more fish in the sea than ever came out of it’, ‘marriage is more than physical’, ‘not what we thought you would finish with’, ‘manners maketh the man’. This last came from her mother because Dan had not cut his piece of cake into segments with his knife but had lifted it whole and bitten into it.

‘Oh,’ her mother had said as if a small, domestic crisis had arisen. She put on one of her favourite expressions of rehearsed surprise. ‘I’m sorry. Didn’t I give you a knife?’

‘Aye, thanks,’ Dan had said. ‘But I never eat them.’

Betty had understood what had often troubled her about her parents’ politeness: it was a form of rudeness. Her mother in that moment had used what she liked to regard as manners to make somebody feel uncomfortable. For her mother and father the manners had become the most important things, because that way they never needed to go beyond them, could make their lives a continuous ritual round of attitudes in which any real feeling occurred like a short-circuit. The natural grace with which Dan had deflected an awkward moment into a joke was something they didn’t appreciate.

Her parents, she had decided, deserved their friends. From that night on, her sense of them had hardened. She realised how her mother’s pride in Betty’s achievements at school had never seriously related to what they meant about Betty herself. It was something her mother could brag about, something to wear like a fancy feather in her hat. She recalled something her mother had said several times when her parents were having what passed for an argument, a monotonous reshuffling of stock
responses. ‘I did my duty by you, anyway.’ She meant she had given him a child. Her daughter was an expression of duty. Her father was always appropriately humble before the resurrected spectre of that often referred to and agonising experience, a nightmare of sickness and contractions and bravely borne self-sacrifice beyond his capacity to imagine. Betty herself had been accused of her mother’s pregnancy but had proved less susceptible to being intimidated by her birth than her father was.

Such memories were a farewell look at where she had been. From her reading she made up her own name for the place she was determined to leave: the lumpen-middle-class. If the dynamic of aristocratic life, she had thought, was the past (you inherited your status), that of middle-class life was the present, what you now materially possessed. For lineage, read money, the mechanical womb in which her parents had conceived her and from which they saw her own children coming. They seemed dead to the possibilities that lay beyond it.

That was one reason why, besides being in love with Dan Scoular, she had felt an intellectual identification with what she understood to be working-class life. The knowledge she had acquired of it through him made her want to be a part of it. From the first image she had had of him at a wedding to which she was taken by somebody else, she had wanted to know more about how he came to be the way he was, with a relaxed assurance and a smile that would have thawed a glacier. The company of his relatives she had found herself among welcomed her as if she belonged to a branch of their family they were delighted to make contact with again.

That same openness was something he had brought to their continuing relationship. She had never quite become immune to the attractiveness of his vulnerability. She had never known a man who was so obviously without effective defences. He didn’t hide behind any pretence of worldly wisdom. He seemed to have no sense of you that you were meant to be able to fit. He had met her with a kind of uninhibited innocence. It seemed to give them licence to find out together about themselves, and they did. Their previous involvements didn’t cause any aggressions
between them. Marriage happened as a natural consequence, or so it had felt at the time.

But somehow the daily proximity of marriage had eventually compromised their original feeling. She began to see less attractive implications in his easiness of manner. She sensed him struggling to come to terms with how many restrictions there were on her apparent acceptance of him as he was. In their coming to understand the small print of each other’s nature, resentments grew.