The Big Man by William McIlvanney Read Free Book Online

feeling a sort of nostalgia for this moment in its passing, that he was performing his own obscure ceremony of lastingness by implanting the same shared memory in each of them. They would all perhaps remember this laughter and this happy exertion in the pale sunlight. The three-fold wrestling match that followed looked to her like rough, amateur faith-healing, Dan’s attempt to cure small alienations by the laying on of hands. He looked up suddenly and noticed her and waved. She waved back.
    But by the time he came in with the boys, they might as well have been waving goodbye. As the late afternoon decomposed into evening around them, they remained as distant from each other as they had been earlier in the day, again only meeting obliquely through the children (Betty re-establishing clear contactwith Raymond over the meal) until Dan eventually stood up and stretched and, as his body relaxed, her body tightened, as if they functioned by mutual contradiction. As he went across to take his jerkin from the back of a chair, she felt beginning one of those exchanges of small utterances that mean so much, phrases packed with years, expressions of the microchip technology of married speech.
    ‘Ah, well,’ he said.
    Her understanding of what he had said was roughly that she knew where he was going, he knew that she knew where he was going since it was where he usually went at this time, that he would prefer not to have any expressions of amazed surprise and he would like to get out the door just once without complications.
    ‘Your homework checked, Raymond?’ she said.
    She was reminding him that they were supposed to be a family, that there were other responsibilities in life besides following your own pleasures to the exclusion of everybody else and that she didn’t see why everything should be left to her.
    ‘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 muchas 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