you go?’ he said. While Charlie ran.
Chapter 3
‘HE’S AWAKE UPSTAIRS,’ JOHN SAID. ‘THE DOCTOR WIS in this mornin’ tae give ’im morphine, but he wouldny have it till he’d seen you. He hasny long, Charlie. Maybe a matter of hours.’
John was wearing his good clothes. He couldn’t have been to work at all that day. He had an air of harassed competence in his official capacity as elder son. Elizabeth was sitting in statuesque misery by the fire. Her cheeks looked as if there had been acid on them. She had started to cry all over again when Charlie came in, as if his presence brought the fact of her father’s death nearer.
‘Why the hell wis Ah not told aboot this, John?’ Charlie said, filibustering with the facts. Now that he was here, Charlie felt himself inadequate to the moment of facing his father, and instinctively postponed it a little longer. ‘Ah knew nothin’ aboot it. Then Ah get this telegram. Ye coulda told me sooner than this, John. Ma feyther musta been ill for a long time. How long has he been lyin’? Whit is it, anyway?’
‘Look, Charlie. You musta had some idea. Ye kent ma feyther had T.N.T. poisoning durin’ the war. An’ every night fur mair than fifteen year he coughed for hours in that bed up there. Ye don’t go on like that an’ nothin’ happens. Somethin’s got tae happen.’
‘So what? Am Ah a clairvoyant? How does it happen now? Whit is it, anyway?’
‘It’s cancer, Charlie,’ John said. ‘That’s whit it is.’
Charlie’s ears suddenly had hands of silence to them and sound was a closed circuit inside his head. He was aware of the pneumatic thrust of blood against his brain and the metallic click of his tongue sticking and unsticking on the roof of his mouth and his throat constricting on a lump of panic it could not swallow. The word ‘cancer’ kept blaring in his head like a klaxon, startling into his mind confused images of emaciation and the memory of a poster showing a man caught in the coils of a green snake.
‘Cancer?’
John said nothing. Charlie stood enclosed in that moment of bright silence like a thrown net. That word conveyed his father’s death to him, was as final as if it had been carved in stone. Cancer? he asked the wooden figure of a woman with a child on the mantelpiece, who had always been like a cipher of security for him. Now she stood there like a sinister totem, carved out of indifference. The enormity of the situation grew around him like a glacier.
‘Ah shoulda been told,’ Charlie said suddenly, chipping at it with the first thought that came to hand. The sheer fact of his father dying was too much to be withstood, swept all reactions and attitudes before it, and he had to canalize it into something more manageable, anger that he had not been told sooner. ‘This musta been goin’ on for some time. Ah shoulda been told sooner.’
‘That’s the way ma feyther wanted it, Charlie. He knew ye had examinations comin’ off an’ he didny want tae worry ye.’
‘Didny want tae worry me? For God’s sake, John. Didny want tae worry me.’
‘Ye know whit he’s like about university an’ that. Ah mean a’ he wants is for you tae make the grade. That’s what’s been really preyin’ on ’him. He wisny wantin’ tae let anythin’ put ye off. Ah think he felt he could hold out all right tae after yer exams were finished. Ah don’t think he realized how near it was. Ah don’t think anybody did. Ah mean, maybe Ah shoulda told ye sooner, Charlie. But this was the way ma feyther wanted it. An’ it meant an awfu’ lot tae him. So Ah went along with it. Whit else could Ah dae?’
Nothing else. Charlie’s brief recriminations turned shamefaced from John’s question. Behind it, making it unanswerable, lay the attitude of his father, and Elizabeth and, to a lesser extent, John himself to all that the university meant. To them it was something of immense importance and impregnability, a fortress of fabled knowledge that they could never gain access to, and they never quite became blase about the fact that one of their family had managed to penetrate it. They maintained a certain deference, not to him (for he was still to an extent the familiar fixture he had always been about the house, reading and self-absorbed, to be met with suddenly, vegetating quietly in a chair, and everywhere he went books and magazines and ties and pullovers grew like a fungus, so that Elizabeth had to keep following him up and pruning his untidiness before the furniture got submerged), but a deference to that part of his life that took place in Glasgow, that consisted of lectures and notes and books with portentous titles. Because of this, he was accorded certain concessions. Into their thinking had been introduced a special clause of consideration that affected their reactions to many of the things he did. If he were short-tempered or inconsiderate or uncommunicative, allowance had to be made. He was ‘studying’, he was ‘at university’. And had Charlie done anything to discredit this attitude? Had he not enjoyed to a degree this special consideration for what he was doing? Had he not on occasion fostered it by deliberate reference to some abstruse work or to ‘Anglo-Saxon’, which he knew would create a measure of awe among them? He couldn’t now blame John for something which emerged from a situation he had himself helped to create. John’s question was unanswerable. It stood like a wall before his recriminations, the stronger because he had helped to mortar it himself, and his anger struck ineffectually against it and washed back on himself. For his anger was really directed against himself, he realized. It was not so much that he blamed John as that he had sought to divert any blame from himself, and now he admitted to himself that he was in part to blame. He was the one who had been content to stay in Glasgow and concern himself almost exclusively with his own problems and his own life. John and Elizabeth had been here, knowing and worrying about his father, and trying to look after him. What right had he to blame anyone?
‘An’ anyway,’ John went on superfluously, ‘it’s all happened so quick. Ah mean, ma feyther got the X-ray, and then they had him in for observation fur a wee while, and then they just sent him hame tae dee. There wis nuthin’ else fur it. They said it wis too late. Ah think ma feyther musta been nursin’ this fur a long time, Charlie, without tellin’ anybody.’
‘Ah know, John,’ Charlie said. ‘It’s just somethin’ ye canny get tae believe all at once.’
Elizabeth was still sitting staring into the fire, clutching her handkerchief in a wet ball. Charlie stood looking at her, and in the firelight tiny filaments of vein scarred the whites of her eyes.
‘Ye better go up noo, Charlie,’ John said. ‘The doctor said he would be back in this efternin tae give ’im the morphine. He might no’ come out it again. This might be the last time he talks. He might be in any time now.’
Charlie nodded. He felt like some sort of prodigal son. Well, he was here now, anyway. A trifle late, it was true. But he was here. He went up the stairs slowly, over the worn flowers of the carpet, and he was thinking that his father would never step on them again. Each step seemed to settle in a slough of reluctance to face what was ahead.
‘Charlie?’
Charlie stopped as if trying to locate where the voice had come from. It seemed to dirl from a distance further than the room above him. The door was open, but he knew he wouldn’t see his father until he was in the room, because of the position of the bed behind the door. He went on up and stood still a moment at the door. In the wardrobe mirror he could see the outline of his father’s legs beneath the covers and one hand laid waxen on the counterpane. It looked as fine as filigree. Illness must have sculpted long and patiently at the flesh to make anything as pale and fragile for aesthetic death. It lay motionless, as if life had already left it.
‘Is that you, Charlie?’
The voice drifted thin as smoke from the room.
‘Aye, Feyther. It’s me,’ he said, and went in.
Nothing could have prepared Charlie for this. In his youth his father had made a fetish of fitness because, being little more than literate, he carried most of his assets in his body, a body made hard by the pits and pick-and-shovel labouring through many years before he was smitten by the