awful life from him. Wasn’t that a terrible thing the last time about him challenging Alec to fight. Alec’s wife, Mary, had been telling Jean the true story. There was Alec laid up in bed, his ribs in plaster. An accident at the work. Some kind of wheel and ratchet thing breaking off. Alec could tell you the way of it, Mary says. There’s Alec, then, in bed. Mary sitting at the fire. The knock comes to the door. Gibby. ‘Mucky fou,’ Mary says. His eyes like penny-bowls. ‘Sen’ oot yer man,’ he says. Forces his way in, is making for Alec. And Alec not able to move hardly off his back. ‘A monkey fur a brither,’ Gibby says. Too lah-di-dah fur me noo, aren’t yese?’ Mary’s frightened Alec will try to rise. She tries to wrestle Gibby out the door. He’s gentleman enough not to put a finger on her, just digs in his heels. Then he falls between sideboard and the table, roaring like a bull. Mary knows that if he rises, the house is wrecked. She puts one hand on the sideboard, one on the table. And she dances on his stomach. By this time Gibby’s mother has been told. She comes round and leads him away like a lamb. The next morning Gibby’s round first thing to apologise. ‘The drink,’ he says. And give him his due, he thanks Mary for protecting his brother, and says he admires her courage. ‘Wan last thing, Mary,’ he says at the door. ‘Ye stertit wi’ a military two-step. But wis that an eightsome reel ye feenished wi’? Ah couldny follow the steps.’ You have to laugh. There’s a likeable bit about him, too.
Jenny remembered Tam saying he had seen Gibby in the pub just a short while back. Tam had said at the time that Gibby was slowly going to pieces. He had taken on the daftest bet you ever heard. Matt Morrison had said, ‘Your attention, please. Gentlemen, my learnt friend on the right will now endeavour to swally the sword.’ And Gibby had started to chew his tumbler, spitting out glass and blood. Brains had never been his strong point. But he was sure enough getting worse. His mother must be wishing they were back in the old days when breaking down the toilet door once in a blue moon was her biggest worry. He wasn’t a well man at all.
That was Buff Thompson away then. It had been a blessing at the end. It was sad to watch when their spirit went before them. Crying like a bairn. And saying some terrible things to Aggie. She would have her own to do now, poor soul, with her son’s wife not giving her the life of a scabby cat. She wouldn’t be long behind him. But he had been a good man, and that was a hard enough thing to be, God knew.
As Jenny left, her mother was methodically wrapping cloths round the corner of the smoke-board. The air of contained expectancy about her gave the impression that she was looking forward to Mairtin’s return. At the mouth of the entry, Jenny bumped into her father. He had had a fair amount, but seemed quite steady.
‘Here, Jen,’ he said. ‘His she got her claiths on the smoke-board yet?’
Jenny nodded.
‘Aye,’ Mairtin sighed. ‘By the time Ah get tae the top o’ these stairs, Ah’ll be awfy drunk.’
‘Och, feyther.’
‘Not tae worry. She enjoys it fine. Makes ‘er feel holy.’
He winked and went in. Climbing the stairs, he broke into loud and surprisingly tuneful song:
There’s nane may ken the humble cot
Ma lassie ca’s her hame.
But though ma lassie’s nay-hameless
Her kin o’ low degree-hee-hee,
Her heart is warm, her thoughts are pure
And aye she’s dear tae me . . .’
Throwing open the door, arms outspread, his voice rising, scouring the ceiling:
‘Her heart is warm, her thoughts are pue-hure,
And aye she’s dea-hear tae me-e-e-e-e-e-e.’
Jean looked sideways at him, lips pursed, nodding as if she read in him a moral she agreed with. He realised quite suddenly that he really was drunk, but not so drunk that he couldn’t retain sufficient craftsmanship to perform his condition with some degree of style. He closed the door, came into the middle of the floor, swaying slightly.
‘Ma bonny Jean,’ he said, waiting for inspiration. ‘Ma bonny, bonny Jean. Ah was once in Graithnock twice. Today a small boy was found lost late last night. Wearing his bare feet and his father’s boots on. Hurling an empty barrow full of straw. The reward will be a fish-supper, a poke of plates, and a bottle of scones.’ Sitting down. ‘Ah could take a bite maself, Jean. A wee pie and a bottle o’ ink wid be lovely.’
‘Ye’ll have the whusky-hunger, like enough.’
They took it from there. He told King George’s photograph what was wrong with the country. She suggested that Mairtin himself was Britain’s biggest problem. He sang ‘Ah’m wearin’ awa’, Jean, Like snaw when it’s thaw, Jean,’ and then gagged. ‘That’s me awa’ noo, Jean.’ She was sure she would be away before him, and he would have been the death of her.
It was a complicated ritual by two people who would never surprise each other again but found pleasure in the repeated patterns of the past – a conversational dance of death, perfected, nicely timed, delicate as a minuet.
9
For Conn, the house at times assuming strangeness: the furniture like props that didn’t fit the action, inappropriate in its cosiness and complacency; established routines giving suddenly like locks, to show the frustrations that padded in them; a frequent and sometimes frightening sense of transit – to where?
A mid-summer evening, first dark. The top halves of the windows had been taken out, left on the floor. The remains of a long hot day decomposed outside, stenching the house sweetly with the exhalations of the park across the river. In the boys’ bedroom, Angus and Conn lay, steeping in tiredness. It was a Sunday. All day they had ‘run the cutter’, as their mother mysteriously called it, as if rehearsing for the holidays, which would be soon. Angus had been examining the hardening skin on the soles of his feet, pleased with the thought that a fortnight would bring them to their summer toughness, and he wouldn’t need boots again till winter. They spoke little, content to be crooned at by soft sounds, the river quietly coughing over stones, a dog worrying distance.
Kathleen and Mick, with the privilege of earners, could be heard still through in the living-room with their parents. Jenny was sewing, making alterations to a dress which Kathleen had been trying on, and, as she did so, was talking to Kathleen. The dress was for a dance and, using it as an excuse, Jenny was gently finding out about the boy Kathleen was going with – Jack Farrell. They seemed serious about each other and Jenny wanted to know what he was like. She knew the family slightly, they were Catholic, though that wasn’t important to her. To Jenny, a man’s credentials were his nature, and she was concerned simply to deduce the true lineaments of the boy from Kathleen’s inevitably idealised picture. Mick was crouched over the fireplace, whittling a boat-shape from a piece of wood, having ignored his father’s mild observation, addressed to the room, that That boay does a’ his work in et the ribs. He’s goat the ausole like a sawmill.’ Tam himself was finding his way through the paper with a kind of patient bemusement that wasn’t just a matter of failing light. He finally put it down like a parcel he couldn’t get into, saying, There’s nothin’ in the papers nooadays.’ It was as if he half-sensed some plot to keep out of print the things that were really happening.
The street was almost asleep. Through the open window drifted the murmur of the few men who were still at the corner, their faces white, upturned blotches in the shadows.
The sound, when it came, took some time to register, it was so alien to its setting. Tam was first on his feet and over to the window, looking down.
‘Aw Christ,’ he said. ‘No’ that.’
The other three had come to stand behind him. What they saw made the sound they had heard meaningful in retrospect. A big man was crouched against Miss Gilfillan’s window, visible in the faint light that came from it. His hands were held side-on to the glass with his face between, so that he could see into her house. The window was slightly lowered from the top. What they had heard was Miss Gilfillan