The Big Man. William McIlvanney

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      ‘Aye, love. We’ve checked it,’ he said, conveying that he was refusing to get riled and she was wrong to think he would neglect his duties as a father. Putting on his jerkin was a reminder that he was going out anyway, no matter what she said, and wouldn’t it be better to let it happen pleasantly.

      ‘Where are you going?’

      It wasn’t a question, since they both knew the answer. It was an invitation to feel guilt.

      ‘Ah thought Ah’d nip out and have a look at Indo-China.’

      ‘You going to the pub?’

      He nodded.

      ‘You can’t think of anything else to do?’

      ‘Well, you couldn’t last night. Ah don’t remember you gritting yer teeth with those vodkas.’

      ‘But last night wasn’t enough for you?’

      ‘Look, Betty. It’s Sunday night.’

      ‘It’s Sunday night for everybody else as well.’

      They went on like that for a short time, exchanging ritual and opaque unpleasantries, not connecting with each other so much as remeasuring the distance between them. She knew she would remember and examine things he had said, open up a small remark like a portmanteau and find it full of old significances that had curdled in her. As he went out, she didn’t know how much longer she could bear to watch him let circumstances take charge of him, erode him. She knew from a thousand conversations the reality of his intelligence but she despaired that he would ever apply it constructively to the terms of his own life. How often they had tried to talk towards an understanding of what was happening to them and it had been like trying to talk a tapeworm out through your mouth, never to find the head. He seemed to her to live his life so carelessly that everywhere he walked he was walking into an ambush. She was tired of shouting warnings.

      The sky looked different here to Eddie Foley. There was so much of it. Getting out of the car, he felt nearer to the presence of the wind than he did in the city. It seemed to touch him more directly, make him more aware of it. He stood in the car park and stared at the bulk of the Red Lion. It was a strange building with an odd, turreted part at the back of it. There was a big, dark outhouse, the purpose of which he wondered about.

      He breathed in deeply and, finding himself put down here outside his routine, remembered being younger. There had been a time in his early twenties when he and a group of friends used to look for out-of-the-way places like this. One of them could get the use of a car. They had all finally admitted to one another how amazing women were and it felt like a shared secret. Weekends were for them what an unexplored coast might have been to a Viking. They piled into the car and went ‘Somewhere’ and talked among themselves and talked to girls and drank and the password of their group was ‘we’ll see what happens’. He wished he were coming here now on those terms. He wanted just to go into the place and have a drink and see what happened. He wished they hadn’t a purpose in coming. But Matt Mason didn’t seem to have noticed the place as itself, looking up at the lighted window that faced out into the car park.

      ‘Move the car up to opposite the window.’

      Eddie climbed back into the car, drove it towards the lighted window and then backed against the opposite wall of the car park so that the Mercedes faced towards the window. He shut off the engine and doused the lights. Lighting a cigarette, he studied the other two through the windscreen.

      He saw Billy Fleming watch Matt Mason attentively, like a trained retriever waiting for the signal. Seeing Billy’s preoccupation silenced by the windscreen and framed in it, as if through the lens of a microscope, Eddie thought what a strange thing he was – an expert in impersonal violence. He felt no compunction about contemplating Billy so coldly. Billy wasn’t his friend. He wasn’t anybody’s friend, as far as Eddie knew. If Matt Mason had given Billy his instructions and nodded him towards the car, he would have come for Eddie as readily as anyone else. It was how he made his living, being an extension of Matt Mason’s will.

      He did it well. Eddie had several times been astonished by the agility of that hugeness. But the results of that dexterity had made Eddie look away. He remembered one man whose face looked as if it had been hit by a small truck. Could you talk about doing anything well the purpose of which was so bad?

      Eddie would have felt contempt for him except that he was honest enough to admit to himself that he couldn’t afford it. His own position wasn’t so much different. He might spare a thought for the man who imagined he was just coming out for a quiet pint, but that was as useful as flowers on the grave.

      Eddie might like to believe that he still had a conscience but the main effect of it at the moment was to make him glad he couldn’t hear what was being said. It meant he didn’t have to worry about it too much. He just sat, smoking his cigarette and knowing his place. He watched Matt Mason prepare what was going to happen. He looked like somebody setting a trap for a species he understands precisely.

TWO

      The sign of the Red Lion had rebounded on itself a bit, like a statement to which subsequent circumstances have given an ironic significance. It seemed meant to be a lion rampant. But the projecting rod of metal to which the sign was fixed by two cleeks had buckled in some forgotten storm. The lion that had been rearing so proudly now looked as if it were in the process of lying down or even hiding, and exposure to rough weather appeared to have given it the mange.

      That image of a defiant posture being beaten down was appropriate. The place still called itself a hotel, although the only two rooms that were kept in readiness stood nearly every night in stillness, ghostly with clean white bed-linen, shrines to the unknown traveller. The small dining-room was seldom used, since pub lunches were the only meals ever in demand. The Red Lion scavenged a lean life from the takings of the public bar.

      Like alcohol for a terminal alcoholic, the bar was both the means of the hotel’s survival and the guarantee that it couldn’t survive much longer. It seemed helplessly set in its ways, making no attempt to adapt itself to a changing situation. There were no fruit-machines, no space-invaders. There was a long wooden counter. There were some wooden tables and wooden chairs set out across a wide expanse of fraying carpet. There was, dominating a room that could feel as large as a church when empty, the big gantry like an organ for the evocation of pagan moods. Quite a few empty optics suggested that the range of evocation now possible was not what it had been.

      It had its regulars but they were mainly upwards of their thirties and there weren’t many women among them. Except for occasional freak nights when the pub was busy and briefly achieved a more complicated sense of itself the way a person might when on holiday, its procedures were of a pattern. The people who came here were, after all, devotees of a dying tradition. They believed in pubs as they had been in the past and they came here simply to drink and talk among friends, refresh small dreams and opinionate on matters of national importance. It was a talking shop where people used conversation the way South American peasants chew coca leaves, to keep out the cold.

      Most of the men who drank in the Red Lion couldn’t afford to drink much. Sometimes a pint took so long to go down you might have imagined each mouthful had to be chewed before it was swallowed. They had all known better times and were fearing worse. The room they stood in was proof of how bad things were. It was common talk that Alan Morrison’s hold on the premises was shaky and every other week, as the property mouldered around him, another rumour of the brewers buying him out blew through it like a draught. The more uncertain his tenure grew to be, the more determinedly his regulars came. It was a small warmth in their lives СКАЧАТЬ