more than her thirty, but when the pains came they were centuries passing across her face. Each would leave its residue. In High Street primes were not enjoyed for long.
‘Yes I think so. Not long now.’ Washing his hands in the basin, he kept talking, more for Aggie Thompson’s sake than for Jenny’s, who was beyond the use of words as a palliative.
‘You must have a terrible comfortable womb in there, Jenny. Your wee ones are never anxious to come out. They need some coaxing. Towel. Thanks.’
In the street outside somebody had started singing. Aggie tutted in shock: ‘Is that no’ terrible.’
‘I have heard better,’ Dr Allan said, taking out the pad of chloroform. ‘Well, that’s enough pain you’ve been through for triplets, Jenny.’
His hand was a sudden coolness on her forehead. The bottom half of her face came against something soft that seemed to erase her jawline. She fought against a darkness that swooped and then billowed above her and left her falling. Out of emptiness looped one long sound like a rope at which her mind clutched till it snapped: a phrase of song.
‘Josey Mackay,’ Buff pronounced after a few attentive seconds, as if identifying the call of one of the rarer birds. ‘He’s late oan the road the nicht.’
The song diminished into garbled mutterings that suggested Josey was in loud and incoherent conference with himself. It wasn’t long before he had perfected a public statement, delivered through a megaphone of drunkenness: ‘Yese don’t know whit it wis like. Yese haven’t lived. The lot o’ yese. Ah saved yer bacon. Me an’ the likes o’ me. Mafeking. Ah wis there. For King an’ Country. At Mafeking. Queen an’ Country.’
‘Christ, no’ again,’ Buff sighed. ‘It’s weel named the Bore War, eh?’
The Boer War!’ Josey said defiantly. And then more obscurely, ‘Honour the sojer. Wounded in the service of his country.’
‘Josey’s only wound’s a self-inflicted wan. He’s dyin’ o’ drouth. An’ it’s like tae injure a few innocent bystanders. Such as his wife an’ weans. There canny be mony gills o’ his gratuity left.’
‘Sleep soundly in yer beds this nicht,’ Josey urged with unintentional irony. Thanks tae the sojer laddies. Asleep in foreign soil.’
The Last Post came through Josey’s clenched hand. When it was over, they waited for further bulletins. But the silence was restored as abruptly as it had been broken.
‘Ah doobt they’ve goat ‘im,’ Buff said at last. ‘We’ll bury ‘im in the mornin’.’
Outside, Josey had ceremonially unbuttoned himself and was urinating against the wall below Buff’s window. With a soldier’s instinct his eyes scouted the winter street. He was conscious of a face somewhere. Cautiously, he didn’t look back round but reconnoitred the street again in his mind, trying to locate whose face he had seen. Having decided who it was, he made his plan. Wheeling abruptly, he bellowed, ‘Present - arms!’ and presented something else. Then he shambled on up the street, buttoning his trousers.
Miss Gilfillan’s hand jumped away from the window. The lace curtain fell between her and the street, an armour as ineffectual as her gentility. Her heart protested delicately. She almost wept with shame and anger. She withdrew still further, feeling her privacy under siege, when she saw a dark shape at the Thompson’s window.
‘Ah canny see ‘im,’ Buff said. ‘He must be away.’
He crossed and sat back down at the fire.
‘Away tae yer bed, Buff,’ Tam said. ‘Ye’ll be needin’ yer rest.’
‘Naw, naw,’ Buff said. ‘Ah’d like tae see the wean.’
Twenty-past eleven. The minute-hand seemed struggling through treacle. The fire, having forged itself to a block of embers, made the area around it molten with heat, and they sat steeping in warmth. They spoke little. Yet their silence was a traffic, more real than words. They had known each other for a long time and both were miners. Their friendship was fed from numberless tubers, small, invisible, forgotten, favours like help with shifting furniture, talk in the gloaming at the corner, laughters shared. Intensifying these was that sense of communal identity miners had, as if they were a separate species. When Buff coughed, it wasn’t just an accidental sound disturbing the quiet of the room. It was part of a way of life, a harshness bred in the pits and growing like a tumour in his breathing. He was at sixty much of what Tam, in his early thirties, would become. And as Buff was Tam’s future, so Tam was his past. The mere presence of one enlarged the other, so that now just by sitting here they were a dialogue, a way of ordering the uncertainty of this night into sense.
At ten to twelve a sound came. It was a tear in the stillness of the night, high, cold and forlorn, seeming to pass on through the house as if it would unravel the silence of the town itself. Through the hole it made there bled a steady crying. Looking at each other across the sound, their eyes enlarged into laughter.
‘Somebody’s arrived,’ Buff said.
Tam was on his way to the door when Buff stopped him.
‘Hing oan noo, Tam.’ Buff was on his feet himself. ‘There’s things tae be done yet. They’ll send fur ye when ye’re wanted.’
The next few minutes had no purpose in themselves but only as an anteroom. Tam walked up and down in them, rounding the stool crossing to the window, and coming back again, making the room a landscape of his impatience. Every time he passed Buff he would nod and smile at him inanely, or wink, or say ‘Eh!’ as if Buff were several acquaintances and each had to be acknowledged, however absently. A couple of times he punched his right hand into the palm of his left and said, ‘Come oan, then,’ in a tone of brisk challenge. Once he stopped dead, muttering, ‘It must be a’ richt,’ confidentially to the floorboards, and then went on with measured steps, as if pacing out the exact dimensions of his happiness.
‘It’s no’ short o’ lungs, onywey,’ Buff said. ‘Is it no’ hellish, though. Ye go through a’ that bother tae get born. An’ the first thing they gi’e ye is a skelp on the erse.’
The remark opened a valve on the tension of the whole evening, and they started to laugh. Tam’s worry ran out in a kind of controlled hysteria. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Aye.’ They nodded and smiled. The moment was a conspiracy, a compact sealed - two men agreeing that the fear of each hadn’t been noticed by the other.
The door opened and Aggie came through.
‘A’ richt, then?’ Tam had already started to go past her.
‘Wait, wait. Fur Goad’s sake, man.’ She was flushed with the excitement of the sanctum. For a few seconds her experience worked an alchemy on her, made her incongruously almost girlish, a sixty-year-old coquette. ‘Whit dae ye think she’s been daein’? Passin’ wind? Give ‘er time. She’s no’ ready for ye yet.’
‘Are things a’ richt?’ He knew from her face they were, but he felt a superstitious need for the humility of such a question, as if presumption would be punished.
‘Everything fine, Tam. Jist fine.’ Her reassurance became licence for more teasing. ‘Nae thanks tae you. If ye saw whit your pleasure costs that lassie. We had an awfu’ time bringin’ that wee yin intae the world.’
He couldn’t feel chastised. Everything that touched him was transmuted into pleasure, even his impatience.
‘Whit is it?’ he asked.
‘It’s a lassie. Naw. Ah mean it’s a boay’. Her excitement had left her honestly confused.
‘Hell, wumman!’ Buff said. ‘You’re a handy messenger. If it’s no black, it’ll be white. Clear as mud.’
‘Shut up, you.’ The child was everybody’s excuse for having a holiday from habit. ‘Whit would you ken aboot it? When you rolled ower an’ went tae sleep that wis your joab done, as far as you were