The news of Mick waited among them like an awkward stranger against whom their deliberate intimacy was a defence. They took their time, waiting for it to find some way of introducing itself into their lives. Jenny and the others were one multiple presence, the fears of one a part of and intensified by the fears of the rest. She didn’t know, for example, if Conn could hear what Tam had to say, while Conn, absorbing without comprehension his mother’s misgivings, enlarged them, was prepared for the unspeakable to be spoken. His very real dread was compromised by a growing curiosity. All anxious for word of Mick, their anxiety became so neurotically intense that it paralysed itself. The war, for so long a terrible thing that happened, like death, to others, had happened to them. It was an event Mick would have to live with for the rest of his life. And they were Mick.
Tam’s hesitancy wasn’t a decision, merely a fact. He had arrived ahead of his understanding, still didn’t know what it was he had seen. There were things he had to say, of course. But these were all so closely involved with things he was determined he wouldn’t say that to his usual problem of articulacy was added that of suppression, which was a new experience for him. His home had always been to him the place where he existed with a kind of absoluteness. From swearing to religion he allowed himself full range. It wasn’t tyranny in him or lack of consideration for his children, but simply that he believed children had the right to exposure as well as protection. The only legacy he could give them was himself. Even outside, a reluctant, chafing silence was the closest he could get to compromise. Now this ignorance of the art of pretence irked him.
‘Well,’ he said, taking his soup. ‘Ah seen the man.’ The gallousness emerged from his search for an idiom. He was assessing their preparedness. Jenny had found some clothes to fold. It occurred to him how often she did that. Under pressure, it was habitual for her to move about building up those small mounds of cleanliness like sandbags. The realisation hurt him. Kathleen fussed needlessly over the soup-pot, as if broth were a potion against the powers of change. Angus sat with the paper. Conn just sat. ‘He seems no’ bad. No’ bad at a’. Considerin’.’
‘Will he be a’ richt?’ Kathleen’s voice inched open their apprehension, afraid of what it would admit.
‘Ah’d say that. He wis mair annoyed aboot hoo things were goin’ wi’ youse than aboot himsel’. He says dae Conn an’ Angus still fight as much.’
‘He’s no’ shell-shocked or anythin’?’ It was a term Kathleen had merely heard, a name for the nameless.
‘He’s come through a lot. But he’s come through. He’s goin’ tae be a’ richt.’
Tam looked round them as if what he’d said wasn’t a statement but something to be decided by vote.
‘When will he get hame, feyther?’ Conn asked.
‘No’ that long, Ah’d say. Maybe a month or two. But the great thing is that his war’s bye. The Docherties have declared peace on the Kaiser. That’s whit he said.’
Kathleen and Angus encouraged each other into a smile.
‘Tam!’ Jenny held a rough pit-towel folded square in her hands, staring at it. ‘Ye’ll tell us noo, Tam. Aboot oor Mick!’
That’s whit Ah’m tryin’, Jenny.’
‘Ah need tae ken hoo he is.’
Tam felt ashamed of his attempts at going round it. The simplicity of her stance chastised his pretence. She demanded her grief to be given honestly.
‘He’s woundit in the leg. But that’ll get better. His sicht is back. In wan e’e, onywey. An’ he’s lost an airm.’
His voice trailed to a whisper. Jenny sat down almost formally on one of the high-backed chairs, her hands restlessly smoothing the towel on her lap. She emitted breath in one long, sustained shudder. ‘Aw, Mick,’ she said, ‘son, son. Whit’ve they done tae ye, son. O my Goad. Whit’ve ye been through, son. Whit hiv you been through.’ She started very quietly to cry, her body hunched, her head sideways as if trying to turn away from something. The tears fell on the towel. ‘He’s jist a boay. He’s no’ twinty yet. Aw. No, no, no. Ye’re a’ richt noo, Mick. Ye’re a’ richt, son.’
None of the others moved or tried to speak. The room was held in the trance of Jenny’s grief. She keened on, communing with nothing, seeming to see what wasn’t there, like a priestess in a terrible ecstasy. Very slowly, she subsided. When she rose, the room became normal again. Tam finished his soup and sat by the fire. They all talked quietly, making tentative plans against Mick’s coming back. But Tam remained taut, his mind clenched on what he had seen. Jenny knew it. About half past eight, she said, ‘Why no’ go doon an’ hiv a pint, Tam?’
‘Ah’m fine, hen,’ he said.
‘Oan ye go. It’ll ease ye.’
After some persuasion, he went down to Mitchell’s pub. As he drank, his meeting with Mick hung brightly in the centre of his thoughts, an icicle unthawed by beer or conversation or the whisky Tadger Daly bought him. Reflecting against the hardness of that scene, the smiles were tinsel, the friendliness was mockery. He saw them all like children capering around the stillness of his son. He remembered Mick’s eyes so bright that they looked wet, but Mick didn’t cry. Mick talked quietly, kidded just a little. The two of them had played successfully towards each other. It was only when he came away that Tam thought over Mick’s remarks and found in every one of them a wound. Every joke contused in him. One memory was the core, in which in reaching for his son he had touched stone. Mick said, ‘Whit’s happened tae me isny important, feyther.’
Tam felt his mind dilate, admitting darkness, and he seemed to become no more than a part of his own anger, like flotsam on a tide. Possible reasons, explanations for what had happened to Mick shivered to aimless fragments, as distant and irrelevant as stars. In all of it there was no sense and no direction. It was only by coming back that Tam discovered where he had been. Here, in the warmth and custom of Mitchell’s pub, he finally managed to hear what Mick was saying. Around him voices eagerly gleaned chaff, heads nodded like so many glove-puppets. The comfort he had so often found here was gone. Tonight was a wake for it. Composed in death, its features became clearer.
The comfort had come from a faith he experienced here, a sensation of being inexplicably recharged. At the heart of his refusal to admit futility had always been a tacit awareness of something irreducible in himself. Circumstances could take whatever shape they liked, they finally had to come at him on his terms. Secreted so far inaccessibly inside him had been an undefeated sense of purpose, a private place where he had his dignity, that no happening could pillage, no failure violate. Through it, everything could be transformed. The unfair conditions of his work became the triumph of his physical strength. The lack of opportunity open to his children measured the remarkableness of the people they managed to be. Poverty became the defiance of itself.
The key had been a deep physical pride. He had believed himself capable of confronting any man or any situation and surviving intact. He had once lost a fight to big Dan Melville. But when Tam, the skin around his eyes still gentian and pouchy from subsided swellings, went looking again for Dan, Dan didn’t want to know. He said he had been lucky to catch Tam when he stumbled in a rut of the field where they fought, their bodies shipping sweat and stained with the dirt of their falls. And Dan had apologised, because defeat had made Tam stronger. There were a lot of men he knew he couldn’t beat. But there was nobody he wouldn’t have fought. Similarly, there had been no situation he felt unable to face. From that pride radiated the force that had given his life any sense of purpose it possessed. He felt at least able to give his family the protection of himself and at the same time to pass on to them an awareness of the importance of themselves.
Now he stood at the bar, where before the company of his friends had approximated to a congregation, a confirmation in mass of his personal conviction, and he felt himself participating in a useless ritual, mechanically lifting and lowering a glass, savouring the sourness of his past. He saw Mick as a son abducted and dismembered, and he was without re
sponse save anger, without recourse not just to defence but even to understanding. Tam felt redundant to his own life. His previous authority over his own experience was a joke. He was like a gunfighter, practised to perfection, unafraid, heroically hard, and pitted against germ warfare. That evening standing there, smiling now and again, being patted on the back by a passing friend, a terrible erosion began to happen in him. Having withstood the bruisings of despair for years, at last he began to haemorrhage. What had always been his own was invaded, broken up, trampled on, his past certainties demolished, his hopes gutted. His dreams were raped. Tam had come home.
In the house they waited for him. Old Conn had come in from his Saturday evening walk and the pint which he took in a different pub every week. He was told about Mick and would be praying for him. He had reached a point where he no longer had any private griefs. His only perspective on events was a formal one, the important and the trivial distinguished by the number of Hail Marys and Our Fathers each received. Experience had become for him an endless circular journey round his rosary. Kathleen had waited on, uncertainly wanting more before she went home. She needed for them to fix among them what had happened to Mick, to give it a more definite shape. Alec had been wakened and been fed, and Jenny nursed him for a long time in the shawl, reluctant to let go, reliving through the weight of his small body the time when her own children had been safe. She was still holding him when Tam came in.
Jenny saw at once that what she had expected had taken place. Tam was deliberately drunk. Unwilling to admit the extent of his hopelessness, he had given himself the excuse of being drunk. Putting his jacket over a chair, he sat down by the fire and took off his boots. He set them beside the chair and, although tomorrow was Sunday, automatically reached over for his working boots and put them next to the hearth. The gesture shackled him to the week ahead, to all the weeks ahead.
Watching him, Conn saw the pit-boots quite suddenly as objects in themselves, was made aware of their familiarity enlarged into strangeness, so that he seemed to see every scuff and scratch, to understand the polished corrugations the laces had made, drawn how many hundred times across the dull stiffness of the tongues, to realise the record of bruised bones, humped hutches, sweat lost in the windings of blind workings, all etched indecipherably upon the leather. The boots were in some way a pathetic testimonial to the nature of their lives, a testimonial that Conn could see without being able to read, like a tablet inscribed with a lost language. They represented an insight the meaning of which was that its meaning could never be understood. Disturbed by the atmosphere of lost security which his home had held all evening, he sensed a reason that was outside of comprehension – the utter isolation of one man’s life. His heart took on a knowledge which his mind would never have, the realisation that in each of our lives everybody else is just a tourist.
‘Ah’ve been hearin’ aboot Mick, Tam,’ Old Conn said.
‘Aye,’ Tam nodded, looking into the fire.
‘Ah’ll pray for ‘im, son.’
As Tam turned to stare at his father, his expression was brutal, the eyes a rejection of sight. But slowly the eyes came alive with self-doubt and the hardness of his face gave way around them. He looked at the floor. He nodded, nibbling his lip.
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘You dae that, feyther.’ All his family were looking at him and Jenny saw him dredge his drunkenness for something to say. ‘He’ll need a’ the help he can get. He’s been faur’er than we can imagine. It’s up tae us tae help ‘im.’ The tone was quiet and unfamiliarly constrained, not a personal statement so much as an attempt neutrally to articulate circumstances. The room was charged with the sense of Tam’s tiredness and coercion. It was the first time in the experience of any of them that he had renounced his ascendancy over the future. He was divesting himself of the image they had always given him, and in the moment of losing it their dependence on it became clearer than ever. It seemed intolerable that he was just another bloke. ‘Things’ll soart themselves oot some wey. He’ll maybe be able tae work at somethin’. An’ we can a’ chip in. We’ll see whit happens. We’ll jist hiv tae help each ither. We’ll see, we’ll see.’ It was his abdication speech.
Jenny made a masking of tea, leaving Alec on the bed. They all had some and then found themselves becalmed in their own thoughts.
‘Kathleen, hen,’ Tam said at last. ‘Yer man’ll think ye’ve left him. Angus’ll see ye doon the road.’
‘Richt,’ said Angus.
They walked slowly because Kathleen didn’t want to jostle Alec awake in the plaid. Only odd sounds came, a couple of men murmuring in shadows, a door closing, a phrase drifting through an open window, a soundflake melting on silence – the town talking in its sleep. Once they passed two people, a man and a boy, struggling out of an entry with a small ornate dresser. The man said, ‘Shurrup! We’ve as much richt tae it as yer Uncle Harry has.’ The boy said, ‘Wull ma granny dee?’ The darkness behind them absorbed the scene like a fragment of irrational dream.
Kathleen didn’t relish returning home. She was late. She had been to hear news of her brother, it was true, but Jack wasn’t likely to see that as much of a justification. Lately, the source of his responses to her had become even more muddied, more opaque than it had been in the second year of their marriage. She couldn’t trace it, must just bewilderedly wait for its manifestations in the dourness of his moods, the bitterness of his talk. Was it because of Alec or his failure to be accepted by the army or the loss of his job in the skinwork? He was in the dyework now, and didn’t like it.
She hoped he wouldn’t hit her tonight, for she was pregnant again. She had been going to tell her mother after she missed the second period but couldn’t. Jenny had enough worries. Kathleen had never told any of her family about the times Jack had beaten her. Twice it was. Fortunately, she had managed to keep the marks concealed under her clothes, shameful as leprosy. She had been afraid of what her father would do. The beatings were the worst of it, denying her attempts to pretend to herself that things were all right by imprinting the ugliness of what was happening to them on her body. Jack’s unmotivated viciousness had caused her to gravitate more and more back to the solace of her family’s company, and this in turn gave him the pretence of a reason. She cared more about them, he said, than she did about her own husband and son. Thus, the means of her defence became the terms of his accusation. It was hopeless.
Tonight, even the refuge of her family had been lost to her. She had felt her father’s sadness perhaps more strongly than anyone else because this evening she had needed his firmness and certainty more than any of the others. With that gone, there wasn’t much she could rely on. Still hardly able to believe it, she tried to talk to Angus about it.
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘He’s gettin’ auld, isn’t he?’
Angus sounded sorry but neither deeply moved nor especially surprised. It was the pronouncement of a man moving towards an impressive physical prime. The animal force in him projected itself innocently into a law for everything. The strong won; if you didn’t win, it meant you weren’t strong enough. Anything else was an irrelevant complication. His words were so far from what she had experienced they came to her like a foreign language, and this was her brother speaking it. She felt alienated from him, from everyone, it seemed, except her mother. In the moment of saying goodnight, she thought she understood her mother’s capacity for endurance. Faced with such a variety of masculine wilfulness, with the naïve indifference she was leaving and the calculated callousness she was going in to, what could you do but endure.
On the way home, for no reason he could think of, Angus tested his strength.
Passing beside the river, he unearthed an enormous boulder, struggled it chest high and heaved it into the water. It was a considerable feat of strength, witnessed by no one, the splash profound. Its only record was the ripples. Coming back into the house, he found his mother and father preparing to go to bed. Conn and his grandfather were already in the other room, where Angus
joined them. He still shared a bed with Conn, while the old man used Mick’s.
Stripped to the waist, Tam sat down again, aimlessly staring at the fire. Jenny left him for a moment, then said, Tam. Come oan tae bed.’
‘Uh-huh.’
He rose, stood a second, bent and lifted the pit-boots to put them somewhere, stopped. ‘O-O-O-Oh,’ he said. Instantly his face had tears. Jenny looked at him, the desire to go to him and the desire to turn away and cover her eyes holding her paralysed between them. She had never seen him cry before and she didn’t understand what was happening in him, but she knew that he was finally at bay. The sound of pain which he hadn’t managed to stifle had broken the sequence of trivia behind which he was hiding, behind which he would hide for the rest of his life, and exposed momentarily to the truth of himself, he acknowledged the pointlessness of what he had been, was, would be. He looked blindly round the room, cringing slightly as if it were attacking him. He looked at the boots in his hands as if he would never understand how they got there. He shouted, ‘Damn them!’ but the shout exploded soundlessly back into his throat, like someone trying to scream under water. His right arm flailed and the boot crashed against the picture of the king salvaged from the house of Jenny’s parents. It hit the corner of the frame. Glass tinkled to the floor, its musical whispering a mocking of his fury. The picture lurched wildly to one side, then to the other, achieved a motion of diminishing pendulum, was still. The king stared out a moment longer in innocent benignity, then slowly, with unchanging dignity, toppled forward on to the floor. The frame hung empty.
Into the following silence came the sound of bare feet in the next room. Tam moved swiftly to the bed, sat down on it, turned away his head.
‘Don’t let the boays see me like this,’ he said.
Jenny intercepted Conn at the door, saying, ‘It’s a’ richt, son. There’s something fell. A pictur. That wis a’.’
Conn back in his room, Tam said, ‘Jenny, Ah’m sorry, Jen. Ah’m awfu’ sorry. Whit ye must think o’ me. Christ, Ah’m ashamed.’ He was genuinely the victim of his own event, completely baffled by the chemistry that transformed the depth of his passion into a farce in the instant of its occurrence, made the absolute truth of what he felt a source of shame as soon as it was expressed. He knew himself ridiculous, a silly man, his grief good substance for an anecdote. Shame precipitated his drunkenness protectively into stupor. ‘Ah’m sorry, love. We’ll be a’ richt. Ah’ll soart things oot.’
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