Lanark: a life in 4 books (29 page)

Suddenly he was sitting up and laughing in the darkness. He had been thinking about the key, or perhaps dreaming of it, and now he saw the universe and the meaning of things. It was hard to put his vision into words but he wanted to share it. “Everything is hate,” he gabbled dreamily. “We are all hate, big balloons of hate. Tied together by Ruth’s hair ribbons.”

The two women screamed. Mrs. Thaw said in a high-pitched voice, “That settles it. We’re going back. We’re going back tomorrow. There must be
somebody
who knows how to cure him.”

Ruth yelled, “You’re selfish, utterly selfish! You just don’t care about anyone but yourself!” and started crying. Thaw felt puzzled, knowing the words had not conveyed what he meant to convey. He tried again.

“Men are pies that bake and eat themselves, and the recipe is hate. I seem to be buried in this rockery …” for though he could dimly see the bedroom, and knew where his mother and sister lay, he also felt buried up to the armpits in a heap of earth and rocks. Mrs. Thaw shouted, “Shut up! Shut up!”

Next morning Thaw and his mother returned to Glasgow. Ruth was allowed to stay behind. That day a boat called at Kinlochrua and Miss Maclaglan drove them to the pier and waved from it as they put to sea. The sun shone as bright as when he had arrived five days before, and for the first time since arriving he saw the great green side of Ben Rua. A clean hard wind was blowing. A member of the crew, a thin boy of Thaw’s age, leaned against the funnel playing a concertina. Gulls with spread wings hung above in the rushing air. Thaw sat on a ventilator which stuck out of the deck like an aluminium toadstool, and nearby his mother waved to the figure on the receding pier. On the mountaintop he could make out the white dot of the triangulation point. He thought of the previous night and tried to recover from the muddle of darkness and crying his vision of the key. He seemed to have thought that, just as hydrogen was the basic stuff of the universe, so hatred was the basic material of the mind. In the fresh sunlight it was not a convincing idea. He felt amazingly weak, yet liberated, and while sitting still was not conscious of asthma at all.

Two days later Thaw walked jauntily into town with Coulter to visit the Art Galleries. He talked about the visit to Kinlochrua and what the doctor said. Coulter became angry. “That’s daft!” he said. “Everybody masturbates at our age. It’s natural. We produce the stuff; how else can we get rid of it? Five times a week sounds about normal to me.”

“But that doctor said that in lunatic asylums they do it all the time.”

“I believe him. Lunatics are like us. They arenae allowed to have sex in other ways. And what else can they do with their time?”

“But whenever I do it nowadays I have another attack.”

“I can believe it. That doctor made you think you would have asthma when you masturbate so you have asthma. Anybody can make you believe anything if they try hard enough. I remember once making you think I was a German spy.”

Thaw started grinning. “The funny thing is,” he said, “that doctor had me believing in God as well.”

“How? No, don’t tell me, I see how,” said Coulter with disgust,

“I bet you felt very special and superior, being punished by God for something he doesnae give a damn for in other folk. Well, I hate to disappoint you, but ye may as well leave God and masturbation out of it and go back to having asthma in the normal way.”

CHAPTER 19.

Mrs. Thaw Disappears

Thaw opened his diary and wrote:

“Love seeketh not itself to please Nor for itself hath any care But for another gives its ease and builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair,” So sung a little Clod of Clay trodden by the cattle’s feet, but a Pebble of the brook warbled out these metres meet. a “Love seeketh only Self to please, to bind another to Its delight, Joys in another’s loss of ease, and builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.”

Blake doesn’t choose, he shows both sorts of love, and life would be
easy if women were clods and men were pebbles. Maybe most of them
are but I’m a gravelly mixture. My pebble feelings are all for June
Haig, no, not real June Haig, an imaginary June Haig in a world
without sympathy or conscience. My feelings for Kate Caldwell are
cloddish, I want to please and delight her, I want her to think me
clever and fascinating. I love her in such a servile way that I’m afraid
to go near her. This afternoon Mum was operated on for something
to do with her liver. It seems that for the past year or two old Doctor
Poole has been treating her for the wrong illness. I’m ashamed to
notice that yesterday I forgot to record that she’d been taken into hospital.
I must be a very cold selfish kind of person. If Mum died I honestly
don’t think I’d feel much about it. I can’t think of anyone, Dad,
Ruth, Robert Coulter, whose death would much upset or change me.
Yet when reading a poem by Poe last week, Thou wast that all to
me, love, for which my soul did pine, etc., I felt a very poignant
strong sense of loss and wept six tears, four with the left eye, two
with the right. Mum isn’t going to die of course but this coldness of
mine is a bit alarming.

They entered a vast ward in the Royal Infirmary flooded, through tall windows, with grey light from the sky outside. Mrs. Thaw leaned on her pillows looking sick and gaunt yet oddly young. Many lines of strain had been washed from her face by the anaesthetic. She looked more mournful than usual but less worried. Thaw got behind the bed and carefully combed the hair which lay matted around her head and neck. He took a strand at a time in his left hand and combed with the right, noticing how its darkness had been given a dusty look by the grey threads in it. He could think of nothing to say and the combing gave a feeling of closeness without the strain of words. Mr. Thaw said, holding his wife’s hand and looking through a nearby window, “You’ve quite a view from here.”

Below them stood the old soot-eaten Gothic cathedral in a field of flat black gravestones. Beyond rose the hill of the Necropolis, its sides cut into by the porches of elaborate mausoleums, the summit prickly with monuments and obelisks. The topmost monument was a pillar carrying a large stone figure of John Knox, hatted, bearded, gowned and upholding in his right hand an open granite book. The trees between the tombs were leafless, for it was late autumn. Mrs. Thaw smiled and whispered wanly, “I saw a funeral go in there this morning.” “No, it’s not a very cheery outlook.”

Mr. Thaw explained to his children that it would be weeks before their mother was well enough to come home and some months after that before she was able to leave her bed. The household would need to be reorganized, its duties distributed between the three of them. This reorganization was never effectively managed. Thaw and Ruth quarrelled too much about who should do what; moreover, Thaw was sometimes prevented by illness from working at all and Ruth thought this a trick to make her work harder and called him a lazy hypocrite. Eventually nearly all the housework was done by Mr. Thaw, who washed and ironed the clothes at the weekend, made breakfast in the morning and kept things vaguely tidy. Meanwhile, the surfaces of linoleum, furniture and windows became dirtier and dirtier.

At Whitehill School the pressure of work seemed to slacken for Thaw. The Higher Leaving Examination, the culmination of five years of schooling, was a few months away, and all around him his schoolmates crouched over desks and burrowed like moles into their studies. He watched them with the passionless regret with which he saw them play football or go to dances: the activity itself did not interest, but the power to share it would have made him less apart. The teachers had stopped attending to pupils who would certainly pass or certainly fail and were concentrating on the borderline cases, so he was allowed to study the subjects he liked (art, english, history) according to his pleasure, and in Latin or mathematics classes sat writing or sketching in a notebook as far from the teacher as possible. After Christmas he was told he would not be put forward for his leaving certificate in Latin, and this gave an extra six hours a week to use as he pleased. He used them for art. The art department was in whitewashed low-ceilinged rooms at the top of the building, and nowadays he spent most of his time there making an illuminated version of the Book of Jonah. Sometimes the art teacher, a friendly old man, looked over his shoulder to ask a question.

“Er … is this meant to be humorous, Duncan?”

“No sir.”

“Why have you given him a bowler hat and umbrella?”

“What’s humorous about bowler hats and umbrellas?”

“Nothing! I use an umbrella myself, in wet weather…. Do you mean to do anything special with this when you have completed it?”

Thaw meant to give it to Kate Caldwell. He mumbled, “I don’t know.”

“Well, I think you should make it less elaborate and finish it as soon as possible. No doubt it will impress the examiner, but he’s more likely to be impressed by another still life or a drawing of a plaster cast.”

Occasionally at playtime he went onto the balcony outside the art room and looked into the hall below where the captain of the football team, the school swimming champion and several prefects usually stood laughing and chatting with Kate Caldwell, who sat with a girlfriend on the edge of a table under the war memorial. Her laughter and hushed breathless voice floated up to him; he thought of going down and joining them, but his arrival would produce an expectant silence and revive the rumour that he loved her.

One day he came from the art room and saw her walk along the balcony on the other side of the hall. She smiled and waved and on an impulse he glared back timidly, opened the door behind him and beckoned. She came round, smiling with her mouth open. He said, “Would you like to see what I’m doing? In art, I mean?”

“Oh, that would be lovely, Duncan.”

The only other student in the art room was a prefect called MacGregor Ross who was copying a sheet of Roman lettering. Thaw brought a folder of work from a locker and laid the pictures one after another on a desk in front of her.

“Christ arguing with the doctors in the temple,” he said. “The mouth of Hell. This is a fantastic landscape. Mad flowers. These are illustrations I did for a debating society lecture….”

She greeted each picture with small gasps of admiration and surprise. He showed her the unfinished Book of Jonah. She said, “That’s wonderful, Duncan, but why have you given him a bowler hat and an umbrella?”

“Because he was that kind of man. Jonah is the only prophet who didn’t want to be a prophet. God forced it on him. I see him as a fat middle-aged man with a job in an insurance office, someone naturally quiet and mediocre whom God has to goad into courage and greatness.”

Kate nodded dubiously.

“I see. And what will you do with it when it’s finished?” Duncan’s heart started thumping against his ribs. He said, “I’ll mibby give it to you. If you’d like it.”

She smiled flashingly and said, “Oh, thank you, Duncan, I’d love to have it. That’s wonderful of you. It really is…. And what are
you
so busy with?” she asked, going over to MacGregor Ross. She pulled a stool up to MacGregor Ross’s desk and spent twenty minutes with her head close beside his while he showed her how to use a lettering pen.

Mrs. Thaw left the Infirmary early in the new year. Mrs. Gilchrist downstairs and one or two other neighbours came into the house to prepare it for her, and dusted, washed and polished into the obscurest corner of every room.

“You’ll have to be specially nice to your mother and help her all you can now,” they said severely. “Remember, she won’t be able to leave bed for a long time.”

“Interfering old bitches,” said Ruth.

“They mean well,” said Thaw tolerantly. “They just have an unfortunate way of putting things.”

Mrs. Thaw came home by ambulance and was tucked into the big bed in the front bedroom. She was allowed to sit by the fire in the evenings and soon gained enough strength for her children to quarrel with her without feeling very guilty. Thaw brought home the completed “Book of Jonah.” She took it on her knee, looked thoughtfully through, asked him to explain certain details then said seriously, “You know, Duncan, you would make a good minister.”

“A minister? Why a minister?”

“You have a minister’s way of talking about things. What are you going to do with this?”

“I’m giving it to Kate Caldwell.”

“Kate Caldwell! Why?
Why?
”

“Because I love her.”

“Don’t be stupid, Duncan. What do you know about love? And she certainly won’t appreciate it. Ruth tells me she’s nothing but a wee flirt.”

“I’m not giving it to her because she’ll appreciate it. I’m giving it because I love her.”

“That’s stupid. Totally stupid. You’ll have the whole school laughing at you.”

“The school’s laughter is no concern of mine.”

“Then you’re a bigger fool than I thought. You’ve no sense or pride or backbone at all and you’ll marry and be made miserable by the first silly girl who takes a fancy to ye.”

“You’re probably right.”

“But I shouldn’t be right! You ought not to let me be right! Why can’t you … oh, I give up. I give up. I give up.”

The skin disease returned and his throat looked as if he had made an incompetent effort to cut it. Each morning he went to his mother’s bedside and she wound a silk scarf tightly round up to his chin and fixed it with small safety pins, giving his head and shoulders a rigid look. One morning he entered a classroom and found Kate Caldwell’s eyes upon him. Perhaps she had expected someone else to come in, or perhaps she had looked to the door in a moment of unfocused reverie, but her face took on a soft look of involuntary pity, and seeing it he was filled by pure hatred. It stamped his face with an implacable glare which stayed for a second after the emotion faded. Kate looked puzzled, then turned with a toss of the head to some gossiping friends. That night, without any sense of elation, Thaw gave the “Book of Jonah” to Ruth and afterward sat glumly by his mother’s bed.