Conn was glad when his mother said, ‘Oan ye go oot, son. An’ play a wee while longer. Kathleen, you watch the wean.’ Kathleen tutted but took him out, his grandfather releasing him reluctantly.
With the children outside, Jenny Docherty put aside her basket of washing, pushed a loosened bang of hair behind her ear, and said brightly, ‘Well. Ah want a word wi’ Aggie. Ah’ll see ye before ye go.’
‘Right, Jenny,’ Old Conn said.
‘Right, nothin!’ Tam’s voice stopped her. ‘Ye’ll wait, Jen. This is your hoose. Y’ve a richt tae hear whit’s said in it.’
‘It’s aw richt, Tam.’
‘Of coorse it is. So jist content yerself.’
Conn’s feet clattered in the entry below them. Then the room filled slowly with silence. Jenny went back to her washing, teasing and folding the clothes repetitively and needlessly. It soothed her, faced as she was with the futility of what was about to happen. This at least was something which offered an immediate return, the comfort and warmth of her family.
It was still light enough outside but the small windows acted as a filter, adjusting the day marginally at both ends, so that dawn was delayed and darkness, as now, was anticipated. The room was already drowning in dusk.
‘The nichts is fairly drawin’ in,’ Old Conn said.
‘Aye. Winter’s no’ faur awa.’
Jenny felt sorry for him, but it was a pity caged in the resentment she felt against the atmosphere he had created. She watched Tam tuck his shirt into his trousers and hoped that he wasn’t going to be upset by the conversation that was ahead. Ladling out his enormous plate of soup and setting it on the table by the window, she felt a helpless love for him. He had been drinking. She knew that was why he had been late. It hadn’t been much, but he did it so seldom that even a glass of beer showed. Each eye glowed with an almost imperceptible fuse of temper.
She had learned to recognise these times and understood them. At first she had tried to oppose them but not now. They were infrequent and, since he disliked them as much as she did, all you could do was minister to them like a nurse until the pain passed. For pain was what lay at the centre of them. Tam despised the way drink was used in High Street as a means of escaping from yourself. There were occasions when he enjoyed having a drink, and that was all right. But there were others, which both of them recognised, when the drink was a toast to his own despair. Of these he was always ashamed.
Tacitly both understood that there was in him a kind of malignancy, a small hard growth of bitterness which lay dormant most of the time but would spasmodically be activated by an accumulation of imperceptible irritations. When that irreducible nub of frustration discharged its pus, it created in him an allergy to his own life. The result was anger against whatever was nearest to him at the moment. It wouldn’t last for very long but, while it did, it was like being locked in with a thunderstorm. His rage might flash out on anything, one of the children, herself, an inanimate object. They still had in the house a clock which his fist had petrified at ten past nine. It lay in a drawer as a bit of family history, an antique of anger. It had become a secret joke between them. Sometimes when his anger was swelling, she would say quietly, ‘Aye, it’ll soon be ten past nine, Tam.’ And he would give himself up to self-conscious laughter.
Another salve she used was to say, canting her head to have him in profile, ‘My! Ye’re gettin’ to look awfu’ like Gibby Molloy.’ Old Mrs Molloy’s only son, who lived alone with her, two entries along from them, was the local exemplar of pointless fury. Every once in a while on a Saturday night he drank himself into a state of revolutionary ardour. Coming home, he would methodically set to work – to a stream of background noises which included an obscene roster of his personal enemies, repetitive denunciations of ‘them’ and ‘youse’, and spontaneous slogans of vaguely proletarian bias – battering down the door of the outside toilet. Every Sunday morning after such a night, he was out early, quietly and efficiently replacing the curtain on that small tabernacle of public decency.
Anyone seeing him on these occasions found him at his most benign and pleasant. He never alluded to the previous night but went about his work with pleasant forbearance, as if he was repairing damage from a very localised storm. Nobody tried to analyse what dark neurosis related Gibby periodically to his toilet in alternate conflict and reconciliation. It was a release which bothered nobody, since the toilet was out of commission for a few hours of darkness once in the space of several months. It became an accepted social phenomenon, an occasional talking-point. Someone might say, ‘He’s surely gettin’ mair regular, is he no’? Wis it no’ jist at the end o’ last year the last time?’ One of the communal jokes was that Gibby was working at the fulfilment of a secret ambition to be a maintainer of toilet doors.
By categorising Tam’s anger with Gibby’s, Jenny could sometimes negate it. But the effectiveness of her kidding was dependent on her knowing the times when it was an impertinence. She was afraid that this might be one. As she watched him sit at the table, his hair still damp from the washing, his hands tearing pieces of bread and dunking them in his soup, she tried to console herself with the thought that if he was entering one of his black phases, he would make up for it later. For afterwards his mood tended to be as expansive as a meadow, and it was like when she had first known him. Placatively, she turned to Old Conn.
‘Wid ye like a plate yerself?’
‘Nah. Thank ye, Jenny. But Ah’m no’ long bye wi’ mine.’
She went back to folding her clothes, abstracting herself from their presence. Old Conn communed with his pipe. Tam ate. The only sign that everything was not normal was that the paper, which Tam usually mouthed over painfully during his meal, lay unread on the table.
‘Weel, feyther,’ Tam said. ‘Whit is it?’
‘Oh, Ah wis jist walkin’, an’ Ah thocht Ah’d look in.’
‘Aye. Jist the same wey as ye hivny done fur a year or twa.’
‘Ah’m no’ as young as Ah used tae be, Tam. Ah don’t get aboot as much.’
‘Naebudy’s complainin’.’
The terms of their exchange were stated. Tam was refusing to meet him anyhow except frontally. Old Conn was habitually a slow talker. Every sentence tended to be the harvest of long thought. He punctuated the silences with words. His inflections, the ghost of slower days in Connemara, made even argument a wistful air, against which his son’s guttural Lallans was a jarring discord.
‘Ye’re a sair hert tae yer mither, son,’ Conn said, still wanting to seduce a response from him rather than demand it. ‘She’s that worried.’
‘Ah see ma mither every week. Ah ken hoo she feels.’
‘Do ye? Aboot the wee one?’
‘Aye. Ah thocht that’s whit it wis. Because he’s no’ et the Catholic schil.’
‘Why is he no’, Tam? Angus wis bad enough. Noo that’s two o’ them at Protestant schil. Why d’ye send them there?’
‘Because it’s nearer.’
‘Oh, Tam!’ The old man gave the words a profound sadness and at the same time a terrible finality, as if they were an excommunication. He seemed surprised that Tam, with such blasphemy scarcely cool on his lips, could still rise from the table, tear a spill from his newspaper, cross to the fire and light a cigarette.
As far as there had been a conversation, it was finished. Old Conn had come up against a familiar opacity that to him was fathomless and frightening. Whatever thoughts he had once had were long since stultified into attitudes, and these were all he could offer a situation which hurt him brutally. He retreated behind them now with a kind of glazed automatism. These formalised exchanges were an area of earned articulacy between them, being a frequently experienced conclusion to their attempts to meet each other on this issue. While Old