Docherty by William McIlvanney Page A

she saw only the shapes of her own atrophied prejudice. High Street was to her just the dregs of humanity, riff-raff, scum. Even living among them, she had remained a tourist, clinging to her past like a passport. Now that she was trying to effect a rapprochement for the first time with one of them, the only role she could condescend to play was that of enlightener. She was going to do some missionary work in darkest High Street. Just as natives are lured with coloured beads, so Conn was to be enticed with sweets.
    ‘Just a moment, please. Conn. Isn’t it? You see, I know your name. Do you know mine?
    ‘Yes, miss. You’re Miss Gilfillan, miss.’
    Emerging quickly from the shadow of the entry, she had seemed out of place in the sunlight. Conn wondered if he was going to get another penny from her.
    ‘I want you to do something for me. Here’s a note with some things I want you to get from Mrs Daly’s shop. I’ve put two shillings inside it. Will you do that for me?’
    ‘Yes, Miss Gilfillan.’
    When he got back to her house, the door was very slightly ajar. He knocked as if he was afraid he might be heard. Her voice was a funny sound, like singing when the person doesn’t know the tune: ‘Is that Conn? Come in. But wipe your feet on the mat first. Very, very thoroughly.’ He made it six wipes for each foot. ‘Now close the door.’ He did it reluctantly. He was inside Miss Gilfillan’s house.
    He felt lost at first. It was dark and there seemed to be furniture and brass and pictures and ornaments everywhere. On the other side of the room, like someone lost in a maze, sat Miss Gilfillan. She smiled.
    ‘Aha. A gentleman to see me.’
    Conn looked over his shoulder.
    ‘I mean you, young man. Wouldn’t you like to be a gentleman?’ Conn nodded placatively. ‘Well, you will be. I can teach you.’
    She signalled him towards her. Among the things she had asked him to buy were sweets.
    ‘These are for you,’ she said. ‘But I shall keep them here. And every time you come, you can have one or two. Would that be nice?’
    ‘Thank you.’
    She gave him a couple now, and he didn’t like them. They were chocolate on the outside, jelly-soft inside, mushy to the teeth the way he imagined snails would be. He liked hard sweets. He wondered why she hadn’t let him choose for himself, if they were to be for him.
    The small gift and what it meant to him epitomised their times together.
    He came quite often after that. Always before he left, she would arrange the next time for him to come. Sometimes she would have him go an errand for her. The house became familiar to him in separate pieces: the photographs on the sideboard that made their own little frozen landscape, a man with a big moustache appearing in so many of them that he conveyed to Conn the godlike ability of being in many places at once; the small table where the brass ornaments were always shining and always in exactly the same positions; the huge grandfather clock that stood forever with its hands just after twelve – noon or midnight? But the place remained in total a stranger to him, perhaps because he had to leave so much of himself at the door.
    Mud on one of her frayed and fading carpets sent her into a frenzy which would have been adequate to the first signs of the plague. She conquered human nature by ignoring it, forbidding it to affront her. Coming into her room, Conn always felt lumbered with himself, a nose that would sniff at awkward times, hands like cumbersome deformities. He didn’t even breathe freely in the stuffy atmosphere, as if deep breaths were indecent. Once, awesomely, he farted. It pluffed insidiously into the cushion where he sat, and became a smell – rank as original sin. Miss Gilfillan didn’t seem to notice but Conn sat surrounded by his own unworthiness.
    Miss Gilfillan had noticed. But since such things didn’t really exist, she could have no reaction. Like all Conn’s lapses into himself, it merely seemed to render him