Docherty by William McIlvanney

pleading with the darkness.
    Next morning, on his way out to school, he crossed to the pen outside Miss Gilfillan’s window. His mother had made a good job of the cleaning. But unnoticed in the darkness, splashes of blood had remained. They showed now, several of them – big and dark, some of them more than a yard apart. As if a giant had been coughing blood.
    10
    Miss Gilfillan felt the need for some gesture of thanks. She had spoken to Mr Docherty, waylaying him as he came home from the pit one day.
    ‘Mr Docherty. I should like to take this opportunity to express my sincere thanks for your kindness in coming to my aid the other evening. I hope I didn’t cause you too much trouble. And I just want you to know that your efforts on my behalf were greatly appreciated.’
    She didn’t say the words so much as she unveiled them. Her rehearsals had paid off. Tam’s expression hid behind the coaldust. He didn’t find it easy to understand that these decorous words were the epilogue to the mêlée of fists and swear-words that had flared up on the cobblestones. He wondered how much she had heard. Tadger Daly, standing at his elbow, was frankly gaping. The expectant silence was as baffling to Tam as RSVP would have been.
    ‘Aye. Well. Fine. Then. Eh . . . That’s very decent of ye, Miss Gilfillan.’
    ‘Not at all. When that dreadful – man -’ she settled on the word as a convention she wasn’t at all sure was applicable in this case – ‘did that, I thought my hour had come.’
    Tam was ransacking his courtliness for a suitable response.
    ‘I think I can fully appreciate what a lady like yourself must have went through.’
    They were both smiling now, communication established.
    ‘Here,’ Tadger suddenly interjected. ‘You two’s guid. D’ye mind if Ah sell tickets?’
    Miss Gilfillan flicked her smile at Tadger like a knife, and fled at a genteel pace, while Tadger took Tam’s reprimand with wicked enjoyment.
    She was pleased with the exchange. It was so seldom that she spoke to anyone. Sometimes she didn’t come out of the house for days, just eating frugally of what she had, preserving a musty stillness where memories grew like toadstools. At first, people had tended to come to the door and check that she was all right. But she had discouraged them. Now they contented themselves with secret reassurances, the open curtains, the single flower renewing itself in the window, and most of all the table set methodically for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with fine china and elaborate arrays of cutlery which she couldn’t possibly be needing. She was never seen eating, but as long as the sequence of settings for meals was maintained, she must be all right.
    Her conversation with Mr Docherty sustained her for a day or two. Sensitised by loneliness, she thought back on her few words as if they constituted an occasion, became almost heady on them, the way an anchorite’s palate might be ravished by wine-dregs. As satisfaction waned, it left the appetite for more. For the first time in years, she wanted to talk with someone other than the voices in her head. She chose Conn.
    She thought about it carefully before she approached him. The more she considered it, the more it appealed. He was young enough for her not to be afraid of him, as she was of most things in High Street. She would be repaying Mr Docherty in a practical way for his kindness, for she could teach Conn things he could never otherwise know about – the graces of life. From the time that she had heard his first cries on the night of his birth, she had felt specially towards him, had found out his name, singled him out from the other children in High Street, watched him play. She was already a secret godmother to him. By the time she decided, Conn had been adopted without his knowing it.
    Her method had a Mary Slessor flavour to it. With the paralysing conviction of someone whose mind had closed a long time ago and in another place, wherever she looked