Docherty (11 page)

It was hopeless from the beginning. Conn was at first frightened by the ghost ceremonies Miss Gilfillan practised, whispering and moving eerily around her musty room, creating a charmed circle in which she tried to resurrect the past. She initiated him into the uses of cutlery with a ritual solemnity that suggested they were the only weapons that could reduce life to order and sense. She took tea with him as if it were a sacrament. Eventually the word ‘daft’ kept coming into his head like a bad angel. When she finally neglected to tell him to come back, neither regretted it, since they had never met each other.

But all those moments stayed engraved on Conn’s memory, weird hieroglyphics which experience would eventually translate into some kind of sense. Looking back on it much later, he had the feeling of having been in a mausoleum.

With his departure, Miss Gilfillan sealed the door on herself. In a sense, his visits had served their purpose. His indifference to all her kindness was somehow related in her head to the scrawny, frightened boy her father had dismissed from his bakery. Conn’s ingratitude absolved her father.

11

This is Jack, mither.’

The name had for Jenny the impact of a secret formula, contained as much potency as ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ or ‘Rapunzel’. It introduced change into their lives. Normally, a girl would only bring one young man into her parents’ house. If by the end of her courting days it had extended to two, she had been flighty, and to have her married was probably a relief. Three suggested infiltration from Gomorrah.

‘Hullo, Jack,’ Jenny said to Kathleen’s future husband. ‘Sit yerself doon, son.’

‘Hullo, Mrs Docherty. Thanks.’ Conscious of scrutiny, Jack Farrell felt awkward, and slightly belligerent because of his awkwardness. He hung his bonnet on his knee and resented immediately the stare of the boy sitting by the window, nursing a neatly bandaged hand – that would be Conn.

‘Yer feyther’ll be in soon, Kathleen,’ Jenny said. ‘He’s et the stables in Soulis Street. Wullie Manson’s horse again. Takin’ canary-fits. Jumpin’ a’ ower the place. Yer feyther’s helpin’ tae calm it doon.’ That was a code message. Since Kathleen knew all this, she realised her mother was suggesting that Jack should still be here when her father got back.

‘Jack and me’s supposed tae be gaun fur a walk, mither.’

‘He’ll no’ be long. Whit wid ye make o’ this boay, Jack? He wis doon at the stables wi’ his feyther. An’ he wantit tae see if ferrets bite. He kens the answer noo, onywey. Ah doot Wullie Manson doesny feed thae ferrets, Conn. We had tae clean it and bandage it fur fear of infection, didn’t we, eh?’

‘The dirt that’s aye oan his hauns, ye should’ve cleaned the ferret. It’s probably goat hydrophobia by noo.’ It was a self-conscious remark, Kathleen being smart for Jack’s benefit.

‘Ah’ve heard a lot aboot Conn,’ Jack offered.

There was a pause during which Kathleen and Jack used Conn as an escape from their embarrassment, looking at him as if he were a picture.

‘Well. Ah’ll just get ready, Jack,’ Kathleen said.

‘Fine, Kath.’

The shortened form of the name made a momentary window for Jenny, through which she saw their inaccessible intimacy, a strange area encroaching on their lives, into which Kathleen was withdrawing more and more, and where she would eventually live almost entirely. The experience of it was a wistful instant, happiness shaking hands with sadness. As she ironed a semmet, she had a sense of big things happening almost unnoticed round the corner of each trivial task, powerful laws moving in strange conjunction with small accidents, like a tumbril passing a house in which children play.

‘Well, oan ye go then,’ she said to Kathleen, who was still standing indecisively, vaguely wanting to act as interpreter for her mother’s first impressions. ‘Ah think Jack’ll survive five meenits withoot ye.’

‘Huh.’ Kathleen went through to the boys’ room, which was accepted as being hers in the early evening.

‘Ye’ll excuse me if Ah go oan wi’ this ironin’, Jack.’

‘Aye, surely. Ah’ve jist left ma ain mither daein’ that. Ah thocht fur a meenit Ah hidny left the hoose.’

It was a good beginning, implied simultaneously that his mother was a good housewife and that he felt at home with them. Jenny was encouraged.

‘Ye’re never done, richt enough. Yer mither’ll no be lost for somethin’ tae dae. How mony in your faimly?’

‘Six. Fower boays, two lassies.’

‘An’ you the auldest?’

‘Aye.’

‘An’ you’ll be whit?’

‘Twinty come ma birthday.’

‘Aye? Ah thocht ye were aulder.’ (Jack understood, ‘Ye’ll no’ be in ony hurry tae get mairrit.’) ‘Kathleen tells me that ye’re in the Skinwork. D’ye like it?’

‘It’s a’ richt. As long as ye can avoid the ticks.’

‘Ah thocht the ticks wid dee when the animals were slaughtered.’

‘They’re dour, the ticks. They hing oan. They’re jist like arrows wi’ bodies oan them. They stick themselves intae yer skin an’ ye canny mudge them. Ye canny scrape them aff.’

Conn, tempted to go outside when they had been staring at him, was glad he had waited. He watched Jack, ‘een an’ mooth’, as his mother called it.

‘Whit happens then?’ he asked.

‘Ye light a fag,’ Jack said.

He halted, enjoying the bafflement on the boy’s face. Conn was trying to focus on the connection. All he could make out was a blurred picture of stoical manhood. When the ticks got a man, embedded themselves in him in their thousands, he knew it was hopeless to pluck feebly at them. They were there to stay. What could a man do but light a cigarette, and smile?

‘Look. Ah’ll show ye.’ Jack took the excuse to light a Woodbine. The tick’s in ma haun’, richt?’ He held out his hand, palm down, tapping the back of it. Conn nodded sympathetically. ‘Ah haud the tip o’ the fag against its bum. An’ it wriggles oot... Ye knock it aff an’ tramp oan it. The heat draws them oot, ye see.’

Conn filed away the information to pass on to his friends, having become an authority on ticks.

The wages are guid enough?’ Jenny asked.

‘Guid enough. Ah can see ma mither richt. An’ then save some. Ye get no’ a bad wage. An’ as mony ticks as ye can cairry hame wi’ ye.’

It was a work joke. Not having heard it, Jenny laughed. Conn’s expression was extravagant praise. Jack thawed out completely. He had arrived in the room.

‘Whit’s yer mither tae her ain name, Jack? Wid she be . . .’

In the next room Kathleen flinched. She knew her mother was moving on to one of her favourite subjects. Jenny carried in her head incredibly complicated interconnections of local families. She was relentlessly accurate about who was so-and-so’s auldest boy, younger brother, hauf-cousin, and who he was married on to. Jack was about to be interviewed by the Keeper of the Records.

Kathleen started to get ready. Up till now, she had been sitting on one of the beds, willing the conversation to come right. She had followed its course like a game of chance, smiling to herself when Jack indicated the similarity between their mothers, grimacing when he used the word ‘bum’. When she turned her attention to the freshly cleaned and ironed skirt and blouse on the bed, it meant she was satisfied that Jack had won her mother’s approval. The rest was for side-stakes, though she still listened.

Checking the collar of her blouse in the mirror that sat on top of the small dressing-table, she admitted to herself the often remarked resemblance to her Granny Docherty – the same bone-structure, the same eyes that were habitually set in an attitude of startled listening. Granny still contrived to look mildly surprised about life, as if she hadn’t quite got used to the whole thing, though not for much longer. Kathleen felt guilty about all the times she had resented being compared to her grandmother, now that her grandmother was dying. She dwelt on their likeness now as a penance. For the first time, some understanding of that resentment was granted to her, like absolution.

It hadn’t been anything personal to her grandmother at all. Old as she was, there was still enough left in her face to take colour from and make credible the descriptions of her past appearance that Tam and others liked to indulge in. Any comparison with their reminiscences was not unflattering. What had irked her, Kathleen saw, was that such comparisons were merely symptoms of a more serious complaint, one that affected her intermittently, so that there had been times when she came down with alienation from her family like an illness.

Sometimes the closeness of her family had almost stifled her. Even her face wasn’t to be her own. They were so much involved in one another that, like grotesque Siamese sextuplets, the pain of one reverberated through all the others. She had for a time enjoyed the packed atmosphere of that small room through the wall, where so much had always seemed to be happening, where so many people carved their convictions into the air, where there was so much laughter, anger, argument and just plain talk that she had believed on occasions that her eyes must be deceiving her, and it had to be as big as a hall to be containing all this. But later, as she grew towards herself and her sexuality taught her separateness, she had felt more and more the need to deny the stridency of their demands for identification with them, the certainty of their assumption that she was just one of the family. Her desire to obey her individuality had put her at odds with them. In her family, you weren’t just a member. You had to enlist.

Her father stood at the heart of her discontent. Whereas Jenny at the final level
was
the family, she still allowed within its amplitude great freedom and flexibility. There was about her something enduring, enfolding, and ultimately unshockable. You felt that whatever you did, no matter how terrible, she was the one you could tell it to. She might not understand, but she would accept it as a part of you. Her love was a gift, a necessity, yet still a form of freedom for you, and indefinitely extensive, it seemed, like air.

But Tam’s proximity was somewhat more overwhelming. There was a fierceness about his affection, a relentlessness about his commitment to you. In his eyes you acquired an importance that you couldn’t always live with. His love wasn’t like Jenny’s, uncompromised, a gently suffused warmth in which it was comfortable to move about. His was fuelled by odd, apparently disconnected fragments from other parts of his life, his rage at the man-made predestination that loomed over them, his contempt for the acceptance of it in others, his dread that they would none of them have the chance to be what they might have been. All the refuse of his experience was gathered into and consumed by the irrational belief in the worth of people which was as intense as a flame in him. In the middle of that belief, as both benefactors and victims, were his family. More than once Kathleen had been obliged to withdraw from the blast-furnace glare of his concern for all of them.

She had come to find it a burden. She had sometimes thought that if he had only stayed in the Church he would have been happier. He didn’t merely live his life. He had to live it and justify the living of it simultaneously, instead of leaving that to the Church, as she was content to do. Things were neither so bad nor important as he felt them to be. Occasionally, she used amusedly to imagine him descended from an ancient line of dethroned royalty, say Irish kings. It was ridiculous, but staying in that cramped house, labouring every week in the pits, living a pot of soup away from hunger, he was still the proudest man she had ever seen. She had noticed the difference between him and Jack’s father, between him and the men she worked with at the mill.

‘Ye’re no’ ony better than onybody else, and naebody else is better than you,’ he used to say. She had heard other people say that too. But he meant it differently. With them it tended to be a passive article of faith, recourse of the resigned. With him it was a battle-cry, a plea for the clearing of a space, for getting rid of false barriers and obstacles, and then they would see what happened. He seemed to believe that if you broke down the encrusted assumptions of society, each would achieve his own incalculable value.

Between her and such outrageous intensity had come Jack, and Kathleen understood with joy, her dilemma was resolved. What she was doing now, smoothing down her skirt, fixing her hair for the third time, was a vindication of a faith which she had long nurtured and which was now being openly acknowledged by the presence of her boy-friend in the house. Sexual awareness had come on her like a secret formula for transforming the quality of her life. Before she met Jack, it had already removed her from the immediate sphere of influence of her father, had convinced her that his passionate harangues about the state of things were just a masculine attribute which didn’t have any significance beyond itself, like hair on the chest. Her relationship with Jack had completed her liberation.

Her attitude now had the benignly patronising quality of the young in love. Tam, emotional revolutionary, would go on beating his life against walls that would never break. Kathleen, with the simplicity of someone in a fairy tale, had fallen in love, and the walls collapsed. The love of Jack and herself was the force which had transmuted her life into something marvellous.

Almost ready now to go through to him, she felt gratitude as well as love, because it was through him that within herself she had made peace again with her family. By finding her own identity, she was able to give them back theirs, and saw them in a clearer perspective. Having now a choice, she could afford them the full run of their qualities, because they didn’t encroach on her as they had done.

Hearing her father coming into the house, laughing about Wullie Manson’s horse being ‘nearly human – like a pit manager’ and then saying hullo to Jack, she went through herself, hugging the thought that Jack and she had already decided to get married fairly soon. It wouldn’t be long before they told their parents.

She had to wait while Jack and her father talked. It was an easy free-wheeling conversation, but behind its casualness something quite formal was discreetly happening, a mutual assessment. Through anecdote and opinion, Kathleen remained obliquely the subject of what they said: Jack coming to terms with the background she would bring with her like a dowry, Tam judging the kind of future she might have with Jack. They seemed to like each other.