Authors: William McIlvanney
That should have mattered, Charlie knew. But to him it didn’t. There was no alternative. What he felt was separate altogether from policy, seemed somehow to preclude comparison or perspective. That was the trouble. There was no
measurement of it, nothing that he could set it against and see it take on meaningful dimensions. He had no yardstick against which to comprehend what he felt. Nothing was adequate to it, not the grief of his family, the funeral, the talk, not anything they could do or say. These gave him a footrule with which to measure the magnitude of his father’s death. This room could never contain the answers to his questions, it could only erase them. They simply could not exist for John or Margaret, were inadmissible here.
But they went on talking in preference to silence, each listening only to himself, until Margaret came back, having given them long enough for any problem to be settled. John immediately enlisted her support, explaining that Charlie was still undecided about going back to university.
‘Don’t you be daft, Charlie,’ she said automatically as she went about tidying the room. ‘You keep in at the college. Ye’ll know the benefit afterwards. A collar-and-tie job, an’ the heaviest thing ye have tae lift’s a pencil. It’s just no’ tae be considered, anything else.’
She was right in her own terms. From her point of view there
was
nothing else to be considered. Charlie could almost envy her her bovine acceptance. The fireplace was the capital of her world, the shops its periphery. She might pretend concern in other things, but her son and her husband were all that really mattered to her. Family had become her private zodiac, determining her future. You could see what was ahead of her, the things that would amuse her and concern her. Young John would soon be at the stage of uttering his famous first words. There would be other children, and the small worries they brought with them, measles and cuts and disappointments. There would be days with the curtains drawn to protect a sick child’s eyes, hours after tea when lessons would be considered, noisy outings to the seaside that were full of minor mishaps. There would be pride in small things, jackets straightened, admonitions given with bus money, reprimands at table. Each hour was ringed with practical concerns.
Reducing Charlie to one of them, she said she would go through and make a cup of tea, but Charlie said he would have to go. John told him to stay and Margaret said the kettle was already on. But it wasn’t tea he had come for, and he got up to leave.
Margaret asked Charlie what had happened to his face. It was the first time she had really looked at him. Her conversations were always incidental to something she was doing, knitting or dusting or sewing. He explained again that he had bumped against something. In a way it was true. The fight had been no more than a pointless collision and the fact that Mick’s hand had done the damage and not an inanimate object was by the way.
John was still obviously perturbed because Charlie had not reached any definite decision. At the door John touched his arm and said, ‘Ah’ve got a headstane for ma feyther, Charlie. It should go up this week. It’s no’ a big yin. Ah canny afford much. But it’s a marker.’
Charlie felt slightly ashamed. John had given his own memorial, in his own way, as best he could. Where was Charlie’s?
John stood watching him walk away for a little while, looking puzzled, his hair blowing in the wind. Charlie looked back once at the bright square of the window. Then he went on, with his breath for company, through the cold streets where some houses echoed the brightness of laughter, others shrouded a conspiracy of silence. Above the roofs the sky was massed with white, as if each house had its private star. Somewhere, Charlie’s had broken from its orbit.
Chapter 11
‘ “
BE RESTRAINED AND TOLERANT WHATEVER THE PROVO
cation – you are inclined to fly off the handle.” ’
‘Which, considering that you couldn’t burst a paper poke, is hardly advisable.’
‘A good week for kicking your friends’ tripes in. Avoid people called Andy Layburn. “You must be especially careful not to upset elderly relatives.” God, that means Ah’d better no’ write a letter tae ma feyther. He’ll just have learned tae live wi’ the fact that Ah must be dead by now. Here’s the best bit, though. Listen tae this. “You will receive a surprise invitation. Think carefully before accepting it.” He will be six feet two and fifteen stones and desirous of giving you a mouthful of zodiacal headers. Be careful about accepting his invitation to go round the back. It could be detrimental to your health.’
Jim pulled the magazine he was reading over his head like a blanket and it heaved with his laughter as if he was making love to himself. Andy lay full-length on Mrs Wright’s second-best settee, pen in hand, notepaper and a volume of Browning’s collected verse in front of him. Their concentration had reached one of the intellectual lay-bys that mark an evening’s study. All night Jim had been as restless as a class-bound child in summer. He had set out to revise
Richard
///, and only got as far as literally capering in a lady’s chamber to the lascivious pleasing of his own imaginary lute before Andy had told him to shut up. He had then branched out into a textual commentary on the exact significance of ‘lady’s chamber’, and what he called ‘the difficulty of capering therein’. Now, as he lay sprawled in his chair in a self-inflicted agony of wit, one of his feet was bare because earlier he had been examining himself for what he termed ‘Peruvian footrot’. His preliminary tests,
he claimed, had been positive and he would have to forward the foot to the Central Laboratory to have new toes fitted.
The magazine slid down to his feet. Jim knuckled the tears from his eyes and picked it up.
‘Ah wonder who makes it up,’ he said. ‘He’s a star turn, anyway.’
‘What about mine then?’ Andy said.
‘You’ll be Virgo, Ah suppose?’
‘Taurus. May the third. What is wrote in the stars for me, O wise man?’
‘Actually, yours is quite sensible. “Give all your money to a friend,” it says. “A safe period for emotional experiments.” You’ve never had it so good. In fact, you’ve never had it.’
‘An’ you’re about to get it.’
‘Naw. This is it. Gen. Straight from the bull’s mouth. “There will be a tendency to overspend on the one you love most.” ’
‘Ah wonder what Ah’m goin’ to buy maself.’
‘ “Children’s needs could be the cause of heavy expenses this week” – i.e. twelve-and-six and a bag of coal. “Wednesday to Friday are the danger days.” ’
‘What the hell does that mean? Danger days? This is Wednesday the day tae. Ah’ve been crossing roads an’ everything all day.’
‘Aw, ye’re all right, though. There’s an astral P.S. here. When Mars is in conjunction with Crookedholm, it will be safe to go out without an overcoat. On Friday at ten past six you may go out and enjoy yourself with an easy mind, provided you’re back in by quarter past.’
‘It’s all right for you. But Ah’m the one that’s walkin’ about tempting the fates.’
‘Never mind. Ye can hole up here till Saturday. Ah’ll get Mrs Wright tae shove yer chuck under the door.’
They had played it out, and Andy resumed his reading. But his concentration was gone, and Browning seemed to echo Jim’s nonsense.
Jim threw the magazine on to the chair opposite him.
‘A load o’ crap,’ he said. ‘Mrs Wright must be a severe case of arrested development. A tanner for that.’
He retrieved his sock and put on his shoes.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’ll go down to Willie’s cafe and abduct a coupla doughnuts.’
The suggestion was accepted at once by Andy. Since the evening was without perspective, immediacy was a fair substitute for urgency. While Andy got dressed, Jim rose and combed his hair down over his eyes. Stuffing one of Mrs Wright’s scatter-cushions up the back of his pullover, he muttered, ‘Richard’s himself again’, and started to hobble round the room. As he came back to the mirror, still mouthing, he stopped and lifted a letter from the mantelpiece.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Whit about Charlie’s wee sister? Dae ye think we should answer her letter?’
‘Naw,’ Andy said. ‘She’ll no’ be wantin’ Charlie tae know she wrote tae us. We’ll just drop in on him.’
‘It can’t be this week-end,’Jim said. ‘We’ve got those dates fixed up for this week-end. First things first.’
‘Aye.’ Andy was putting on his jacket. ‘It’ll need tae be a week on Saturday, O Humphy One.’
‘A week on Saturday it is,’Jim said. ‘That’s Charlie’s horoscope fixed up, anyway. “Saturday is your day of danger, when you will meet a humphy stranger.” ’
They stood like grinning Gemini, Jim in the ascendant.
Chapter 12
THE WAITRESS, LOOKING UP FROM HER READING, COULD
only see their bodies from the shoulders down, their hands loosely linked. Their faces were neatly blocked out by the white square of the menu-card that was pasted to the window. They looked like people in a newspaper photograph where anonymity has to be preserved. She hoped they would keep it that way and walk on past. Ralph and Paul were in the middle of a violent argument over Lorraine. It looked as if they would come to blows and she was anxious to see which would win. She hoped it would be Ralph because of the way Paul had treated Lorraine at the office party. But just as Ralph was standing over Paul and calling him a ‘rotten coward’, she felt the draught on her legs from the door being opened, and they were coming in.
Charlie held the door open for Mary. The air in the café came sudden and hot against his face, like someone breathing very close to him. The odours of old meals cooked and fried had been left to rot and moulder in the closed room until the atmosphere was a garbage of corroding smells, and breathing it made you feel as if your breath was bad. For a moment they stood paused at the door, plotting a course among the tables. Then they made their way to an empty one at the far wall, Mary sitting down at the side nearest the window, and Charlie instinctively sitting with his back against the wall, facing out into the room. The waitress gravitated slowly towards them, her eyebrows framing the question her mouth was too bored to ask.
‘Coffee?’
Charlie deferred the unspoken question to Mary. She nodded without looking up.
‘Two coffees, please,’ Charlie told the waitress.
He looked round the café, a waxworks of people, a gallery of boredom. Over by the window, a fat man and woman were finishing a meal. The woman was huge, brooding over her chair, her body swallowing its hardest contours. Her arms overflowed her black crepe frock, elbowless and raw red. The man sitting with her was unmistakably her husband, and went with her so well that one of them in isolation would have been like a single book-end. They sat opposite each other like Gargantuan matching ornaments, and even the precisely timed way he lit her cigarette for her had a quality of clockwork in it. They stared placidly past each other, unspeaking. It was as if nothing new could ever occur between them. Time had filed and dovetailed them so well that every cog fitted. They didn’t have to do anything else. The mechanism was complete. Wind it with sleep and it would run them till they died. In the far corner a little man sat with his coupon and a paper on the table. An old coupon was crumpled in front of him, an empty wrapper for used hope, and, with his head turned sideways to angle away his eyes from the smoke of a cigarette-butt burnt almost to his lips, he was drawing an extra dimension on his newspaper’s headlines with his pen, seeking inspiration for tomorrow. In the middle of the café was a man who looked about thirty-five. He sat swaying things into focus through a distorting lens of liquor, ruminating visibly on some secret concern. Like strangers invited to the same funeral, Charlie thought. For the whole evening had had a sense of waiting like a wake. Everything about it had been enclosed in the same dark mood like a black border. They had gone as usual to the pictures, as if mere place and hallowed habit could restore them to each other. But nothing had happened. They had remained locked in their mutual uncertainty about each other. Perhaps Mary felt that Charlie should make the first move, that he owed her something for the way he had been towards her before. And Charlie himself moved blind in the darkness inside him, tapping his way with caution. Being unsure of what he felt, he kept silent. They had left early and walked aimlessly about the streets for a time
and come in here because they needed somewhere, a place to try and meet and face whatever it was in each other they had to face, to try and find out what it was that had happened.
‘One an’ eight.’
The waitress rang up the price as detachedly as a cash-register, slopping their coffee on the table. Charlie paid her and shaved the bottom of his cup on the edge of the saucer and poured the surplus back into the cup. He watched her return barge-bottomed to her counter-stool, feeling the twinge of an absent reflex where his indignation should have been, like pain in an amputated limb. He saw the cover of the comic-book she lifted to read, bearing a face that was three-quarters manly chin and a title that stirred your very bowels – ‘His love could conquer all.’ He took as long as he could to sugar and stir his coffee, knowing what waited at the end of it – Mary and the need to explain to her what he didn’t understand himself. He looked at her lifting the coffee cup two-handed to her mouth in a gesture that seemed to make her grow down. A strand of hair kept falling on her forehead and she blew it back up absently. It was strange to think of the inconsequential facts he knew about her. She didn’t wear curlers at night. She had an aunt in Perth, Australia. She had been to Spain for a holiday. Her favourite song was ‘Ramona’. She didn’t like people who kept saying ‘As a matter of fact . . .’ There was something sad and forlorn about the small things people told each other, brief flashes of self exchanged across anonymous seas. As if in semaphoric answer to his thoughts, the persistent strand of hair drifted across her forehead, re-asserting her presence to his mind. Her face, familiar to him through all its common changes of mood, looked pathetically comic to him now, wearing as it did an expression of seriousness that seemed somehow too big for its features. He felt guilty that she should look like that. Outside, Friday night was going on and she should be a part of it. For her it should be going dancing and listening to records and just being happy. On
her
face that expression was ridiculously inappropriate, like widow’s weeds on a virgin. And he
had put it there. The feeling that he was to blame brought him out of the lethargy that had held him all evening. The sense of terrible futility that had seemed to stretch aimless and diffuse ahead of him since his father’s death narrowed to this momentary destination. He wanted to erase the sadness from her face, to make the features free to express the things they should be expressing, to let the eyes be casual and let the mouth put out talk the sound of which was its own justification. He wanted to make her laugh.