The Big Man. William McIlvanney
day. A lot of times.’
‘Well. Don’t go again. It’s a Tory council.’
Vince was contemptuous and Frankie White was laughing into his glass when Matt Mason and Billy Fleming walked in. Matt Mason came in first and Billy Fleming followed close, like a consort. Everybody else in the bar paid attention but not much. Strangers dropped in from time to time, on their way from somewhere to somewhere, but seldom stayed long.
‘Yes, sir?’ Alan said.
‘A gin and tonic,’ Matt Mason said, ‘and a pint of heavy.’
A small, barely perceptible event occurred in the room. Sam MacKinlay, one of the domino players, lifted his pint and sipped it briefly with his pinky out. Amusement almost happened between the other two domino players but didn’t quite manage to survive the look that Billy Fleming sent over like a sudden frost. Matt Mason, watching Alan put tonic in the gin and begin to pull the pint, added to the chill with his preoccupied stare. The occurrence had been fiercely concentrated, was over in a moment, but it was as if the others had been shown a capsule it would be dangerous to swallow. In case they had missed the significance of their experience, Matt Mason imprinted his voice on it quietly.
This it?’ he said.
Alan was confused. He looked at the gin with half of the bottle of tonic poured into it and the pint, which had a perfect head on it.
‘A gin and tonic and a pint of heavy,’ he said.
‘You never heard of lemon?’
Alan bristled for a second, looked and understood what he was seeing.
‘We’re just out of lemon, sir.’
‘Ice?’
‘Ah’ll get ye some.’
He did. Matt Mason paid and walked over to the table beside the window, with Billy Fleming following. On his way, he glanced briefly at Frankie White, who was watching him. Before sitting down, he looked out of the window.
‘A ringside seat,’ he said quietly to Billy Fleming as they sat down.
They didn’t have long to wait. Dan Scoular came in. He brought a change of atmosphere with him. He tended to make other people feel enlarged through his presence, through his physical expansiveness to make expansiveness seem natural. He never intimidated. When he came in, you felt he was for sharing. Coming in this time, he was the occasion for talk about the rain, which hadn’t happened. Frankie White joined in the conversation pleasantly. The room relaxed. The domino players rediscovered how involving dominoes were. Alan and Vince stalked each other again through separate labyrinths of preconception. Dan Scoular tried to drown his sadness in his pint.
The beer seemed to turn sour as it touched his lips. He felt at once as if coming to the pub had been a mistake, one of the many things he did these days without being sure why he did them. It was as if habit was keeping appointments at which the largest part of him didn’t turn up. Frankie White’s calling him ‘big man’ hadn’t helped. Big man. The implied stature beyond the physical the words sought to bestow on him was an embarrassment. He remembered an expression his mother had used to cut him down to size when he was in his arrogant teens and impressed by the status he felt himself acquiring. ‘Aye, ye’re a big man but a wee coat fits ye.’ She hadn’t been wrong. His sense of his own worth at the moment could have been comfortably contained in a peanut-shell. But the people he came from kept stubbornly dressing him up in regal robes of reputation, not seeming to realise he had abdicated.
Wullie Mairshall was an example. Coming out of the house tonight, with his sense of Betty’s growing disregard for him making him feel guilty, Dan had been met by Wullie.
‘Hullo. It’s Dan the Man. How’s the head man gettin’ on?’
Wullie was obviously coming from where Dan was going. Jim Steele had been with him. Steelie had a carry-out of cans of beer and they were at that stage of drunkenness of taking hostages.
‘Dan,’ Wullie said. ‘You come with us. We’re goin’ up tae see auld Mary Barclay. Discuss the state of the world. The world!’ he had suddenly declared to the houses around him. ‘Find out what happened. Where the working class went wrong. Was a day, Dan, men like you woulda been ten a penny. Now you stand alone. Steelie! He stands alone!’
‘Alone!’ Steelie confirmed and offered him a can from his carry-out with sombre dignity.
‘No, thanks, Steelie. Ah’m just goin’ for a drink. Take care, you two.’
But Wullie had gripped Dan’s arm.
‘Don’t let us down, Dan,’ Wullie said. ‘You know what Ah mean. Eh? You know, Steelie.’
‘Ah know. Don’t let us down.’
‘He won’t let us down!’ Wullie snarled at Steelie, as if it was a ridiculous idea Steelie had broached from nowhere. ‘Big Dan won’t let us down. Ye know what Ah mean, Dan. We all know. Steelie knows.’ His arms gathered them into a conspiracy. ‘We all know. We know.’
Steelie nodded. Wullie slapped his hands together like applause for their communal wisdom. Everybody seemed to know but him, Dan had thought. Yet his knowledge of Wullie Mairshall was a kind of sub-text to the ridiculousness of the conversation, a gloss that shed some meaning on its cryptic nature. Wullie Mairshall was a believer in the working-class past and how the present had failed it. He spoke of the thirties as if they were last week. In the pressure of those times he had been formed and it was in relation to what he had learned then that he judged everything else.
What he judged mainly was the present, and found it wanting. In his search for something to continue having faith in, for some residual sign that the quality of the past was not entirely lost, he had – for reasons that baffled the subject of his choice – picked Dan. If he were honest with himself, Dan Scoular understood quite clearly the meaning of that drunken exchange outside his house, the nudges, winks and loaded phrases, secret as passwords. He was being reminded that he had been entrusted with the heritage of Wullie Mairshall’s sense of working-class tradition and he must stay true to it. He had been given a commission.
But it was one he wasn’t sure he believed in any more. And he felt that he wasn’t the only deserter. Standing now in this pub, he felt alone. He knew most of these people he stood among. He liked them. But he no longer felt the sense of community he had once known with them. They had somehow grown apart. There was a time when he thought he could have gone into any pub like this in Scotland and sensed kinship, felt wrapped round him instantly the warmth of shared circumstances, of lives a central part of which was concern for how you were living. But he had lost his awareness of that. After his few years in the pits, he couldn’t find it. He was never sure how far the failure was his and how far his observation was the truth.
But he had looked hard enough. He had worked as a general labourer, he had worked in the brickworks, on the roads, on the high pylons, he had worked Sullom Voe. And he had progressively seen himself merely as an individual who happened to be working in these places, someone ‘on for himself as they said. He remembered some of those journeys on the train down from Aberdeen. Men whose parents had had the same kind of lives as his own talked among themselves of what they were individually getting out of it, compared themselves rather condescendingly with mates who had been made redundant at the same time as themselves and hadn’t done nearly as well. It was as if every man and his family were a private company. Once, thanks to a man he had made friends with in Fraserburgh, he had gone out to make some extra money on a boat that fished out of Mallaig. Even those fishermen, brave, and kind to him, had sounded like wealthier versions of the men on the train.
He had wondered often if he had all his life been pursuing the wrong dream, since it was supposed to be a shared dream and so few other people seemed to be having it. More and more, he understood Betty’s dismay at him. Lately, he had been thinking he should look more to his own perhaps, make what he could for Betty and the boys and forget anything else. It seemed a way he might win Betty back, for he dreaded he was losing her. Maybe it was just his preoccupation with that dread