The Big Man by William McIlvanney Read Free Book Online Page B

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 brieflyachieved 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 and they were like men reluctant to abandon their places round a fire, though they know it’s going out.
    Alan Morrison shared their feeling. He was simply holding out as long as he could. He knew that his monthly accounts were an unanswerable argument, but buying the hotel twenty years ago, after years of careful saving, had never been primarily an act of commercial logic. It had been the fulfilment of a dream for him and, being a stubborn man, he simply refused to wake up, though these days it was taking more and more whisky to keep him like that. For a while, knowing how badly things were going and lacking sufficient belief in new ways to change, he had settled for being a pedant of his own condition, a theorist about why things were so bad.
    At one time he had blamed the Miners’ Welfare Club. Everybody wanted to be a capitalist, he said. When that closed down, he decided that television was the cause. People sat at home drinking out of cans, he said. That annoyed him for a while. Some evenings in the quietness of the pub, he would stand withan abstracted air, tuned out of whatever muffled conversation was taking place, as if listening for the chorus of beer cans hissing open in all the houses of the town. When the television set he installed in the bar didn’t help, he retired further into his whisky for deeper contemplation of the problem.
    The answer he came out with was an old man’s frozen reflex to the changes in the world, not so much a rational process as a mental snarl, the rictus of an animal that has died trying to intimidate the trap which has caught it. He became a kind of King Lear with a hotel, dismissive of all the world except his clientele. The commercial failure of his hotel wasn’t the reason for his baffled anger, merely its rostrum. His wife had died of cancer. His only son emigrated. His own heart was giving out. The state of his trade was just external confirmation, like an official letter from the fates.
    His son became his scapegoat. Alan Morrison somehow managed to hallucinate a great inheritance for his son if he hadn’t gone to Australia.