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broken and empty, back into their arms.
    In that moment all the grief that had stayed dammed in them during his dying seemed to break. It was as if his death, which had been happening through many hours, had all the time been unexpected. Women wept terribly. Their faces, abandoned to the distortions of grief, ran with tears and their mouths gave out an inhuman wailing. It reminded Charlie strangely of a word he had always remembered from a Latin textbook at school – úlulare – to wail. The sound they made was what it meant. The men stood silent, though some of them too were crying quietly, trying to comfort their women. Gradually they filed past the bed, laying their last respects like wreaths beside him. Some touched him gently.
    Downstairs, the women went into the living-room and sat nursing their sorrow and commiserating with Elizabeth, who was inconsolable. The men went through to the kitchen. It was done by ritual, as though the two groups had separate functions to perform. A bottle of whisky was produced from somewhere and drinks were distributed. They made a strange tableau, standing sombre in the little kitchen, as if drinking a dark toast to the dead man, while on the table the uncleared remains of a meal testified to the normalcy that would soon resume.
    ‘He wis jist wan o’ the hardest wee men in Kilmarnock in his day,’ Charlie’s Uncle Hughie said, his eyes moist with memory.
    The others nodded and some said ‘Aye’, and they listened, looking at Hughie looming above them, while he talked of his prowess as a fighting man, which in his young days had been considerable. Hughie was brother-in-law to Charlie’s father, married to his older sister, and he had probably been closest to him. They had been born within a year of each other and no more than two pubs and a pawnshop apart. They had experienced the same social crises from the same position. They had both been too young to be fully aware of the reverberations of the Sarajevo bullet. They had gone on strike from the pits and queued at soup-kitchens. They had gone in groups up Sunday morning roads and watched greyhounds chasing hares. They had stood at bookies’ corners, following the progress of the favourites through the card more concernedly than the fate of nations. Something of the waiting at corners and the months without work and the long grass-chewing talks in the park had always remained with them. It was as if all their lives they had waited for things which had never happened, for the Utopia prophesied in bothy and barroom, for the chimerical equality of men, for the manifestation of God’s grace through the treble chance, or for the smaller miracle of the three-cross roll-ups that would givethem independence. And as Hughie spoke, telling of small incidents from Charlie’s father’s life, those who remembered added other parts from that past. They took their farewell of him, remembering what was best in him. It was their own funeral service.
    When they were finished, they went through to the living-room. John had phoned for the undertaker and went upstairs with him when he came, to lay out his father and dress him for burial. Charlie stayed in the living-room with the others. From time to time he could hear John and the undertaker move quietly upstairs, arranging his father’s body, plugging in the smell of decay. In the living-room grief was slowly exhausting its first throes, but there was still the unbearable weeping of women, wrapped in their elemental misery like a shawl, rocking back and forth, cradled in sorrow. Only Charlie was apart from it in a way he couldn’t understand. He had not wept at any time, had not come near to doing so. He could not come to the easy and honest emotion of his Uncle Hughie. That seemed somehow a self-indulgence, a luxury he couldn’t afford at the moment. His feelings were somehow too serious for tears. What he felt was like grief, yet more still than the others’, quieter, unable to make itself