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learned talk like that fae oor family,’ he said softly, deliberately.
    Tam’s voice hardly ruffled the stillness: ‘Whit does that mean?’
    ‘It’s a’ richt, Tam,’ Jenny said quietly. ‘Forget it.’
    ‘Whit does that mean?’ Tam shouted.
    The old man looked back at the fire.
    ‘Ah mean whit Ah mean,’ he said.
    ‘Naw!’ Tam was bending over him. That’s the last thing you mean. You mean whit Father Rankin tells ye tae mean. See that.’ He pointed at Conn’s head. There’s nothin’ in there that belongs tae you. They confiscated yer bloody brains at birth. An’ stuffed their stinkin’ catechism in their place. Auld man. Whit gi’es you the richt tae think bad o’ ma wife? Because she’s Protestant. Damn yer stupidity! Look!’ Old Conn’s right hand was in his jacket pocket, and Tam yanked roughly at his arm until the hand emerged, the rosary beads he held in it spilling out roughly, like entrails. Tam took them from him. ‘Bloody toays! Ye’re still playin’ wi’ yer bloody toays!’
    Tam and his father stared helplessly at each other across the rosary as if it was a frontier. On the one side was Old Conn’s unassailable acceptance of his life. On the other lay Tam’s personal experience, a wilderness of raw ideas and stunted dreams, a desperate landscape which this instant set before him like a map. He read in it his own despair, understood it, not rationally, but more deeply than that, because he had learned it in his blood. He saw the bleak terrain of his own life stretching before him without stint. The one oasis was his family. The rest was work that never blossomed into fulfilment, thought that was never irrigated with meaning. The absence of certitude made a moor of the future, and inarticulacy lay over everything like a blight. He felt a grotesqueness in his efforts to impose himself on the forces he was up against, the pettiness of his fights with pit managers, the ludicrousness of a family that had two religions. He had perceptions that enabled him to feel the pain, but not the words to make it work for him. He could only endure.
    In this moment the rosary seemed to divide him from a mysterious contentment, perhaps brought over by his father from the rural Ireland he had never seen, born as he had been among the factories and workshops of Graithnock. Beyond that line was a safe place inhabited by his father. But it wasn’t his, and he couldn’t live there honestly. He realised with sudden hurt that the volume of his voice hadn’t meant anger or conviction, but simply uncertainty. Gently he gave back the rosary, and it was as if he was returning to his father every gift which Old Conn had ever given him.
    ‘Ach, feyther,’ he said. His hand touched his father’s shoulder awkwardly. ‘It’s a’ wan. It disny maitter.’
    He cleared his throat and made an attempt to smile at Jenny. Fumbling for a formula, he said to his father, ‘Hoo’s ma mither keepin’ onywey?’ And then as their alienation from each other swallowed up the question – ‘My Christ!’
    He turned at once and was going out when Kathleen brought Conn back in, informing her mother, ‘Mick an’ Angus are jist comin’, mammy.’
    Their father bumped against them awkwardly. And for a second they were all floundering strangely in the gloom. Then Tam touched Conn’s head in his favourite gesture of affection, and went out, leaving on Conn’s scalp a message he couldn’t understand and which his father couldn’t express.
    4
    Tam didn’t go immediately to the corner that night. Keeping to the opposite side of the street, he cut off down the Twelve Steps, a dark alley, the steepness of which was periodically eased by short clusters of steps that occurred like locks in a canal. It led down to the riverside. He sat on the dyke and watched the water.
    He was waiting for what had happened in the house to catch up with him. What he had said to his father had been not so much a deliberate expression of his