Remedy is None. William McIlvanney

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      Chapter 6

      ‘AYE, MAGGIE GOT A QUICK CALL, TOO,’ HIS FATHER said. ‘Big Tam fairly went doon the brae after that. He used tae be a great case before it. Mind it was him that showed us yon trick wi’ the egg, Charlie?’

      Remembering the scene, Charlie was able to recall it complete, existing as it did bright and separate in his memory, like a room where the same people sat for ever saying and doing the same things. All he had to do was re-enter it and set them into motion. His memory, like a skilful stage director, established time and place, arranged them in their positions, gave them their cue. Saturday night. He had come in after seeing Mary home. In the living-room, his father, Uncle Hughie, and Elizabeth. Elizabeth, reading a magazine with that air of detached concentration as if something else was happening at the same time, like having her hair done. His father and Uncle Hughie sitting at the fire with the coffee table laid between them. They collided intermittently on Saturday nights, about half-a-dozen times a year, as if under some planetary influence, and inevitably finished up here, counteracting alcohol with tea. The crumbs on the tablecloth and the ash in the saucers indicated how far they had travelled towards cold sobriety. Charlie sat between them, listening to them pontificate on the General Strike, and local worthies, thoughtfully repeating names from the past, paging images through rooms of memory. Then, in the middle of the perfunctory conversation, his father’s remark about the egg suddenly opened up a whole new moment. It was one of those ‘open sesame’ remarks through which the trivia of a night suddenly fall apart to reveal something memorable. One moment they were seated by the fire talking with perfect sanity, and the next were witnessing something utterly unforeseeable and magnificently ludicrous.

      ‘What wis this about an egg?’ his uncle Hughie asked. He had an insatiable passion for all tricks, riddles, and feats of general curiosity.

      ‘Ye must’ve seen it done,’ Charlie’s father said. ‘It’s just a matter o’ tryin’ tae break an egg longways.’

      ‘An egg?’ Uncle Hughie said incredulously.

      ‘A comming or garding egg,’ Charlie’s father said, warming to the fact that it was new to Uncle Hughie. ‘Ye just haud it at the two tips between yer hands. And ye canny break it. That’s a fact.’

      Charlie’s father demonstrated the prescribed method of holding the egg.

      ‘Ach, get away wi’ ye!’ Uncle Hughie’s lip curled sceptically.

      ‘That’s as sure as Ah’m sitting here, Hughie. Ah’ve tried it maself.’

      Uncle Hughie appealed to an invisible synod. As he looked back at Charlie’s father his scorn was tempered with sympathy.

      ‘Ye mean tae tell me, John, that you’re goin’ tae sit there, a grown man, an’ tell me that ye couldny break an egg?’

      ‘Ah’m tellin’ ye mair than that. You couldny break an egg, if ye haud it the way Ah’m talkin’ aboot.’

      The slur on his manhood was too much for Uncle Hughie, six feet in his woollen socks, half as many broad, with arms like pit-props, reputed to be one of the strongest men in the shire in his prime, who had made a habit of lifting derailed hutches loaded with coal back on to the lines single-handed, who had once carried a huge concrete ball thirty yards from one gatepost to another, whose party piece was so to fill his jacket-sleeve with a flexed forearm that you couldn’t move the cloth a millimetre (though some of the family were cynical about the last achievement, believing it to depend on the connivance of Uncle Hughie’s tailor). Uncle Hughie’s past prowess rose crowing in him like a cock.

      ‘Ah’ll lay a’ the tea in China that Ah can break every egg frae here tae John o’ Groats. An’ the hens that laid them.’ The last thrown in as a magnanimous afterthought.

      ‘Ye can have London tae an orange,’ Charlie’s father said adamantly, not to be outdone in generosity.

      The rather intractable geographical dimensions of the wager were scaled down to the more finite terms of an even dollar, and four bright half-crowns were tiered ceremoniously on the mantelpiece.

      ‘Elizabeth,’ Charlie’s father said. ‘Would ye go through an’ bring us an egg, please, hen?’

      ‘Oh that’s no’ fair, Father,’ Elizabeth’s lips pursed righteously. ‘You ken fine it canny be done.’

      ‘Are you anither yin, Lizzie?’ Uncle Hughie looked like Samson among the Philistines. ‘You go through an’ fetch me an egg, an’ we’ll see if it canny be done. This man’s got you as bad as himself.’

      ‘Anyway,’ Elizabeth said, ‘we don’t hae eggs to throw away like that.’

      ‘Ah’ll buy ye a dozen eggs wi’ ma winnings, hen,’ Uncle Hughie promised.

      ‘Yer egg’ll go back the way it came, Elizabeth,’ Charlie’s father said. ‘Don’t fash yourself aboot that. I’ll have it for ma breakfast first thing the morra mornin’.’

      ‘I’ll get ye an egg,’ Charlie said.

      ‘All right. All right.’ Elizabeth could hold out no longer against a united front. ‘I’ll fetch it for them.’

      Uncle Hughie took advantage of her absence to pivot on his chair and fart thunderously, as if it was some kind of inbuilt fanfare-system.

      ‘Well, if ye haven’t burst yer farting-clappers already, Hughie,’ Charlie’s father said jocularly, ‘ye’ll do it when ye try to break this egg.’

      ‘Better wi’ a toom hoose than a bad tenant.’ Uncle Hughie said cryptically, taking off his jacket prefatory to combat.

      ‘Homespun proletarian wisdom,’ Charlie said.

      But his Uncle Hughie was absorbed in his preparations. He was rolling his already rolled-up sleeves even higher.

      ‘Ye’d better strip to the waist, Hughie,’ Charlie’s father said seriously. ‘It’ll make an awfu’ mess when that egg bursts.’

      Uncle СКАЧАТЬ