The Big Man

by William McIlvanney

  ‘What a night!’

  ‘The day Thornbank came to town.’

  ‘Better than winnin’ the Junior Cup.’

  Dan loved the generosity of their responses and saw its danger. These men had a worrying adaptability. They could cultivate pleasure anywhere. Put them on a battlefield and they would be grateful for every poppy that they found. They would improvise songs out of whatever was going on but they were a chorus that, often unable to see what was taking place, would chant a song of celebration as events dragged them down. He loved the tune but he had his own still-forming idea of what the words should be. They gave him the old ones.

  ‘The man himself!’

  ‘What a fight, what a night!’

  ‘We’re goin’ to get them to put up a statue in Thornbank. The Dan Scoular memorial.’

  Two blind men trying to gouge each other’s eyes out, Dan thought. They were squeezing his arms and touching his back. They were honouring a cheque that, had he been only his past, was certain to bounce. But he would turn it into real currency.

  ‘That Matt Mason knows how to lay it on, eh?’ Sam MacKinlay was saying. ‘Some man, that.’

  Dan looked at Sam’s flushed face and added it to what was owed. Sam was the sort of guest who would have thanked the Borgias for a lovely meal.

  ‘How’s Cutty Dawson, Dan?’

  The voice introduced the possibility of an alternative sense of things. Dan was grateful to Alistair, baffled listener into other people’s lives.

  ‘He might be blind,’ Dan said.

  Cutty was the guest they hadn’t realised was at the party. They felt guilty at ignoring him. They all stood with the wind in their hair and realised it was cold. Feeling the sense of the night change around him, Frankie spoke like an MC trying to rally their mood.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ he said. ‘It’s not your fault, Dan. It was a fair fight.’

  ‘Aye,’ Dan said. ‘If you weren’t in it.’

  The others murmured their penances.

  ‘Pair sowl.’

  ‘That’s a bad break.’

  ‘Hope he gets over it.’

  ‘We’ll see ye when ye get back down, Dan?’ Alistair said. ‘Ye don’t want a lift just now?’

  ‘No. Thanks, Alistair. Ah’ve a man to see.’

  ‘Maybe just as well,’ Sam said. ‘We’ll probably all be dead wi’ frostbite when we get there. There’s a windae we canny shut.’

  ‘Maybe we should phone Geordie Parker,’ Harry said. ‘Find out the secret spell ye use tae get it shut. Everything else in the bloody car has a mind of its own.’

  The levity was a rehearsal, not an achieved performance. As they walked away to find the car, debating where they had left it, Dan could imagine them having trouble finding their way home, but perhaps not as much as he might have.

  Inside, the party was hectic. Dan realised that it was still early, for some. Noise was round them like a plastic bubble. The doorman he had told to mind his own business seemed to be doing that. He was talking (confidentially) to two other men and he had his hand resting casually on the blonde woman’s thigh. Eddie Foley was one of the other men. Tommy Brogan was standing alone at the bar.

  ‘Dan.’ Frankie appeared at his elbow, having been speaking to one of the other doormen. ‘Matt an’ the others are up at the house. We’ve got to go on up there.’

  Dan felt as if he was seeing it for Cutty Dawson. It was, it seemed to him, like walking into a fancy restaurant straight from the slaughterhouse. Frankie was fidgeting.

  ‘Dan,’ he said. ‘We’re wastin’ time.’

  ‘Ah don’t know,’ Dan said. ‘Sometimes the way ye go gives ye a better view of where ye’re comin’ to.’

  SEVEN

  It was the first time he had been aware of seeing the house. When they had brought him earlier today, the place had been just part of a continuing confusion of sensations, the clean smell of the hallway, the plushness of carpets, the soothing bath. Seeing it from the outside as Frankie turned the Mercedes riskily into the driveway, and gave himself a last thrill before he handed over the keys, Dan was struck by the size of the building.

  It was a detached house set on a small prominence, having two gateways to it joined by a crescent of driveway that hemmed in a semi-circle of lawn with some trees. Built in grey sandstone, it belonged to a time before the aquarium school of modern architecture. Glass was used discreetly here. The downstairs bay windows were large but the overall size of the place made them seem modest. Upstairs, the solid base of the building began to be full of its own importance, turning whimsical. Several little turrets appeared, defying any purpose you could imagine. Crenellation ran along the roof-edge as if the house had begun to mistake itself for a castle.

  The fortress-like impression made Dan realise suddenly that it was a building out of his childhood. It merged for him with some houses he had seen in and around Thornbank when he was small. Often enough, out playing or coming back from a walk in the country, he had stared at a house like that and wondered what it must be like inside. How many rooms would there be in a place like that? Would they have servants? What sort of people would live there? What would they talk about?

  The vagueness of those other buildings, wrapped in mists of dreaming fancy and ignorance and incomprehension, had crystallised into this one. This was the house he had wondered about. He had been a long time getting here by a devious route but he had arrived. Mystery had an address.

  As he got out of the car, he remembered the sitting-room where they had been drinking earlier and, thinking of the room and trying to work out its position in the house, he reckoned it must be an extension. The thought gave him a perspective different from the one he had had as a boy. Even these big solid houses that looked like immovable facts were changing and adapting subtly. They might still look from the front like statements that nothing could challenge but discreetly they were inserting extra clauses in the declaration they made, admitting qualifications. The realisation made them less awesome.

  He was interested to be back here, having gone through the experience of the night. Knowing the little more he knew about Matt Mason, he was surprised how easy it was to walk in. Frankie rang the bell and pushed down the handle of the door and it opened. There was no guard, no grille, no Doberman. Perhaps Matt Mason’s reputation was around it like a moat.

  Matt Mason looked out from the sitting-room as Frankie closed the door, laying the car keys on the hall table, and he waved them into what Dan felt was the core of the evening. They went into the room and, while Matt Mason got them a drink, Dan saw who was there. It seemed to him as if the evening had been panned of all its dross and only the hard value remained. Cutty Dawson was stowed in hospital. The Thornbank men had gone home. The residue of the party was twitching itself to death in the Black Chip.

  This was what the day had been about. Here was Matt Mason, whose money and power had controlled the events of the day. Here was Roddy Stewart, the mechanic who made sure the machinery of that power developed no hitches. Here were their women. Here were Melanie and Sandra, reward for the labourer, reward for the hirer. Matt Mason gave Dan and Frankie their drinks and they sat down.

  Atmosphere redecorates a room, heightens certain features, mutes others. The spaciousness of earlier in the day, with the sunlight and the garden beyond, was gone. Dan was aware of the solidity of the furnishings, of how the chairs and the couch created alignments among them, made a group statuary that had a coherent meaning. The curtains weren’t drawn across the french windows and their images were repeated out into the darkness, as if they were all there was.

  Small whorls of reflective laughter from something Roddy Stewart had been saying eddied around them. Dan realised how comfortably they had been absorbed into the room, as if they were already a natural part of it. Melanie’s shoulder brushed his, familiar as a habit. Everybody was relaxed. The ease with which Matt Mason referred to Cutty Dawson conveyed that they were all confederates here.

  ‘You
saw him then, Dan?’

  ‘Cutty? Aye.’

  ‘How was he?’

  ‘Not so good. They think he’ll maybe finish blind.’

  The words were like a draught through the cosiness of the room, a window blown open. Melanie put her hand on Dan’s arm.

  ‘It’s not your fault, Dan. Don’t blame yourself.’

  ‘Of course it’s not,’ Margaret Mason said.

  ‘Ah don’t know,’ Dan said. ‘Ah was slightly involved at the time. Ah mean, Cutty didn’t walk into a tree or anything.’

  ‘You ran the same risk as he did,’ Alice Stewart said.

  ‘No’ quite.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ It was Matt Mason, watching him and smiling. He gave the impression of being further back from the conversation than the others, letting it happen but monitoring it.

  ‘Cutty’s eyes were dicey before the fight started. He knew that. So did Tommy Brogan. He tipped me the wink. Did ye know yerself?’

  ‘I’d heard things. But you hear a lot of things. What difference does it make?’

  ‘Quite a lot to Cutty.’

  ‘He should’ve thought of that. Was he complaining?’

  ‘Naw. That’s the most depressin’ bit about it. He talks as if it wis an act of God.’

  ‘Wasn’t it?’

  Dan looked across at him.

  If it was, Ah can give ye God’s address.’

  It was the kind of frontal remark that in another context Dan would have expected to be taken as a challenge. Said to Dan’s father or to a man in the pubs he knew, it might have meant a physical confrontation. In this room it evoked laughter. Matt Mason led the procession, closely followed by Roddy Stewart and the women, except Melanie. Frankie joined in, belatedly but enthusiastically – out of relief, Dan suspected.

  ‘Well, I’ve been called many a thing,’ Matt Mason said.

  ‘Maybe I should be prostrate in your presence.’ Roddy Stewart was miming his idea in sketch form.

  ‘I should be keeping my head covered in bed,’ Margaret said.

  Dan felt the moment like a more complicated variant of his talk with Cutty Dawson. With Cutty, what he was trying to say hadn’t been taken seriously either. But there the reaction had been closed, determined, could admit only one form of response because otherwise the complex content of what was happening would have been overwhelming. Here the reaction was open, relaxed. They played with the form of what he had said – Matt Mason as God – because they had pre-decided the ridiculousness of the content. They couldn’t take seriously the fact that Cutty’s blindness could in any way be traced back to this house. Their laughter wasn’t malicious. In the way they looked at Dan and shook their heads, there was something like affection.

  ‘Ah’ll tell ye something even funnier,’ Dan said.

  ‘I don’t know if I can take it,’ Alice said.

  ‘Cutty Dawson got nothin’ from the fight.’

  ‘What?’ Melanie was interested.

  ‘He got no money. The deal he had wi’ Cam Colvin gives him nothin’ because he lost.’

  ‘I don’t believe that,’ Alice said.

  ‘Maybe you’ve cleaned him out completely, Matt,’ Roddy Stewart said.

  ‘It’s a hard life,’ Matt Mason said.

  They talked around it some more but Dan took little part in the conversation. He didn’t see the point. He thought of how often, when he was younger, he had argued against the kind of isolation from others he felt in this room. But he sensed that if he did it here he would become no more than an entertainment. He felt his awkward difference from them, as if he spoke in a moral dialect strange to them, learned from his parents and his past. They would merely And it quaint, that idiom by which us and them desired to be the same.

  What they seemed to be dealing with was a debating point and what he had in his mind was the intractable image of Cutty Dawson lying on his bed. In this room that was inadmissible evidence. He felt an echo of this morning, breakfasting in the hotel before the fight. The others had seemed to know the nature of the event before it happened. He thought of the things they had said to him afterwards, telling him what he had done. Like their conversation, they pre-empted the reality of events. They were as much manipulated by Matt Mason as he had been.

  ‘Anyway, I’m not cleaned out,’ Matt Mason said. He winked at Dan. ‘Margaret. You make sure the drink doesn’t dry up?’

  He stood up and looked at Dan, raised his eyebrows. Dan put down his drink and followed him out.

  In the hall he opened the door of a room and put on the light. ‘What do you think of this?’

  It was a dining-room, wooden-floored and with a huge sideboard on which a hot-plate and metal serving dishes sat. A chandelier hung brilliantly from the ceiling. Dan studied it all and looked at Matt Mason. He was watching Dan expectantly. Dan nodded in a way he assumed was appreciative. Matt Mason put out the light and led him to another room. Dan recognised the study from which he had phoned Betty.

  With the door closed, the room shut off the others’ conversation. It was surprisingly still in here, as if it was lined with cork. If the house had seemed to Dan on arriving the centre of the night, this room was the core of the core. Very much Matt Mason’s place, it was small and cluttered with objects in a way that intimidated sudden movement. The dominant feature was a big leather-topped desk with a cushioned wooden swivel-chair behind it and a deep leather chair in front of it. There was a painting of horses on the wall above the wooden chair and an abstract painting on the facing wall as you came in the door. On the desk were a heavily ornate silver box and a big vase, the glaze filamented with age. Dan had stared at that vase while he was phoning Betty and the boys and, confronting him now, it was a kind of accusation.

  Mason opened a cabinet and took out a bottle and two crystal glasses. He poured two drinks, making a ritual of it. He kept one, gave one to Dan.

  Tequila Gold,’ he said. ‘To us.’

  Dan sipped it carefully, felt its warmth. He was standing awkwardly like a guest who wasn’t sure what he had been invited to.

  ‘Sit down, Dan.’

  The seat absorbed him in itself, was too comfortable, making him think he might need help to get back out of it. Mason sat behind his desk.

  ‘I owe you money, Dan,’ he said and smiled. ‘But there’s something else I want to talk to you about.’

  He sipped his drink and seemed momentarily to have forgotten what it was he wanted to talk about.

  ‘What do you think of the house?’

  ‘Some house.’

  ‘It’s all right, isn’t it? It’ll do. For the moment, anyway. There’s a lot of snobbery about here. Who cares? I’ve got as big a house as any of them. And it’s paid for. But I think some of my neighbours don’t think I should be here. A boy from the Gallowgate. You know the Gallowgate?’

  ‘I’ve heard of it.’

  Dan knew it was a district of Glasgow and not much more.

  ‘It’s not there now. Not the way it was. It’s not just people that move away, Dan. Places move away. That was some place. Funny mixture. I remember a day. I would be twelve. Two mates and me had booked half an hour on a snooker table. Had scuffled two days to get the money. Ninepence. For half an hour’s snooker. We were all keyed up for it. Like going on holiday. We set up the balls and broke. Two boys about nineteen said, “Right. We’ll take it from there.” They pushed us off the table and took over. We went outside. There was a man we knew standing there having a smoke. A wee man called Johnny Fagan. “What’s the matter, boys?” he says. “Thought youse three were havin’ a frame.” We told him. Throws away his fag and went back in. Ten seconds later, a terrible noise. The two boys carried out. We played our game.’

  In the silence and stillness of the room, the anecdote seemed to acquire a confessional significance. The moment reminded Dan of some of the early-hours drinking sessions he had been involved in when, with the rest of the world seeming to be asleep and reduced to a kind of abstraction, thoughts
stumbled upon and moments remembered became enlarged, as by some trick of mental acoustics, like a whisper in a cave. You were amazed at the importance of the small things you knew. Mason’s brooding silence suggested the importance he was attaching to the story. He fingered the silver box on his desk thoughtfully.

  ‘Johnny Fagan,’ he said, with a kind of reverence. He seemed to be naming one of his spiritual fathers. ‘He taught me a couple of things that my old man didn’t. My old man. Drunk as a monkey most of the time. And spouting politics. He was useless. My mother kept us alive. I used to look at her and think this was her life. All she was ever going to get. And so it was. I helped her a wee bit before the end. But she died before I had made the real money.’ His hand came away from the silver box and gestured at the room. ‘If I’d brought her into this place, she’d probably have got down on her knees and started to clean it. Nah. She died trapped in what she had been. Harnessed to my old man’s life. Social progress, Dan. Let all the lazy, gutless bastards hitch themselves up to the ones that get things done and get a free ride through their lives. The theories are maybe nice but that’s how it works. Truth is, God’s a hard case. He has to be, no? Look at the way he works. He doesn’t hang about when he’s foreclosing on lives. No redundancy payments there. Doesn’t matter whether it’s children or young men or pregnant mothers. When your contract’s terminated, it’s terminated. Try another universe.’

  Dan remembered the moment in the fight when he had thought about something he had once said himself: ‘Living’s the only game in town and it’s fucking crooked.’

  It was a thought which had clarified for him what he had to do, which had helped to bring him through the fight. He couldn’t now simply pretend it wasn’t there. He had to follow where it appeared to lead. He didn’t want the quiet, compelling voice to go on but it did.

  That’s what I’ve got against all the fancy theories. They don’t work. You’re not changing the truth. You’re just giving it a fancy shroud. It’s still a fuck-up. The nice ideas don’t fit us. How many do you know that died poor and tried it?’