To their canon of occasions another night had been added. That was how they had felt. That was how they all remembered each other, haloed in a certain incident, incarcerated in an anecdote. They met each other fitfully, in the cleft of a phrase, in casual moments. When Charlie thought his way through the past six years, trying to place the terrible image of the father he had found in that death-room, trying to match it with another, he could not. All he could remember were those brighter rooms, moments of laughter, incidents that refused to be taken seriously. He could remember many things about his father, but almost all of them seemed redolent with humour. He could remember the time his father had risen at three in the morning to listen to the world championship fight from America. He made tea and sandwiches, arranged his armchair by the wireless. He filled a pipe meticulously. He sat with his tea before him, the quilt from the bed draped round his shoulders, the wireless tuned in, and, with the match raised to light his pipe, the fight was finished in the first round. Charlie remembered his father sitting there, resplendent in bedclothes, the match burning his fingers, his face sagging with disbelief, crowned with rumpled hair, King of Incredulity. He remembered the time his Uncle Hughie had interrupted their record session with some folk-singing of his own. They had all been listening to the records which seemed to have been in the house before they were, when his Uncle Hughie had dropped in, almost literally, and insisted that they should listen instead to his own repertoire of favourites for inebriates. He asked them, with unconscious irony, what was their pleasure, and proceeded to sing his own. ‘The Lea Rig.’ He rearranged himself in his chair, coughed the loose phlegm from the back of his throat, and swallowed it, kneaded his lips, fluttered his eyelids, and started to sing (with Charlie’s father descanting at the ends of lines and interpolating ironic commentary, ‘On ye go then . . . Can ye beat ’im . . .? Awfu’ guid . . . Clear as a bell ...?’):
‘Whe-hen owes the hull yon eastren staaar
Tells bughtin’ ti-hime is near my Jo-ho . . .’
His Uncle Hughie never actually sang a song. He simply shouted the words as loudly as he could and left the notes to fend for themselves. His eyebrows assumed an acrobatic existence of their own, lifting and lowering with random suddenness. His Adam’s apple bobbed alarmingly like a float under pressure from a porpoise. His eyes scuttled in their sockets like mad mice. Convulsive breathing made a bellows of his body, and huge arms were liable to be flung straight out at any moment in massively dramatic gestures. To anyone new to the experience it must have been a fearsome prospect, like the death throes of a mammoth. But through it all there was a ponderous sincerity to his performance. He was able to let a song possess him utterly, like an insane demon, so that once started nothing would stop him till the last line had been exorcized. He sang on relentlessly and where he didn’t know the words he simply improvised with a weird keening mouth-music of his own, or else stretched one word out like elastic until it filled a line:
Down by the burn where yon birk trees
Wi’ dew are ha – a-a-a-aangin’ . . .’
That ludicrous sound had never faded from his memory. It was strange how he could remember so much that was casual and trite. He seemed to move among memories of his father that mocked the enormity of his dying. He found only trivia to recall. Broken fragments of small enjoyment littered his memory like a child’s discarded toys, aimless and inconsequential, seeming to have no connection with what had happened in that final room, with what must have been happening for years inside his father, while no one had been taking any notice. To have had laughter was good, but when the banter and the jokes were set against his father rotting twice in that little room – when they were all there was to set against it – they seemed a bitter insult to his dying. It was like a conspiracy of smiles against the truth. Something terrible had happened to his father, perhaps because six years ago his wife had left him, perhaps because of other things, perhaps because of many things. But it had happened. He had been destroyed as a man and the fact had registered nowhere except in himself. His own family had not even acknowledged it. Their lives had gone on superficially while he had lived at that awful depth, completely alone.
He thought of his father nursing the broken pieces of himself and being jocular. Even when he talked of himself as he did sometimes, perhaps sitting by the fire with Charlie, he would talk mainly of times far in the past, as if at some point something had happened that negated himself and he had only those things to remember from a better time. When he talked like that it was like a ritual. The same stories recurred and Charlie came to learn them, his father’s private mythology, the accidental debris of a man that he took out from time to time to look at and be nostalgic over. They were pathetic in their motley variety of the funny and the ridiculous and the gently sad. He might recite the one about Lubey’s fabled methods of obtaining drink. How he once told a barman that for a half of whisky he could rid him of the flies which came in plagues from a rubbish-dump behind the pub. The barman, like most figures of authority in legend, must have been somewhat gullible, for he duly set up a half. Lubey downed it, jumped back, put up his dukes, and said, ‘Send the buggers out one by one’. There was the series about Alec Nine-toes, whose boyhood must have been like a sort of re-enactment of the plagues of Egypt. He was a walking monument to human vulnerability. He broke limbs as casually as matches. He once broke both legs simultaneously, jumping a wall to evade the police. He got his nickname from the time when he was looking down a pen for frogs and the grid fell and consigned a fair proportion of his big toe to the sewers. He went on from boyhood to manhood, living always between the plaster and the poultice, weaving uncertainly along his private zodiac, until one night, when he was drunk on the money from a modest pools win, he and a double-decker bus converged on King Street and it was as if all his past life had only been a rehearsal for that moment. He was the incarnation of the god of chance in the private pantheon of Charlie’s father, and the evocation of his image was always accompanied by reverential shakings of the head, as if to appease his spirit.
But the part of the past Charlie’s father returned to most frequently was properly not one story at all. It was rather a small plexus of memory, and to touch any part of it would stir a series of connected responses. It concerned Sanny, the younger brother of Charlie’s father, and it was sensitive to a variety of pressures. You might touch upon it by an incidental reference to the past or by reiterating a saying which for Charlie’s father belonged essentially to his brother’s canon or by mentioning the war. The war was the commonest point of contact. Sanny had been killed at Monte Cassino and Charlie’s father still kept the last letter he had written – a letter Charlie had seen many times himself-on thin, unlined paper fraying along the folds so that you had to open it very carefully, in pencilled words that the years since the war had all but erased, in illegible handwriting,"/>but erased, in illegible handwriting, with wrong spellings, and with almost no punctuation, but suffused with a courageous unconcern that made it for Charlie’s father like an illuminated manuscript. Usually when he spoke of it he would rise at some point to fetch it from the drawer that held the photographs, bringing as illustrations to its text a dun photograph, scarred with handling, that showed Sanny in battledress, flanked by two anonymous comrades, all three grinning determinedly out from a frame of flags. He would hand you the letter as if it were an undiscovered manuscript of the Apocrypha. When you had read it for yourself, he would read it to you. And when