Lanark: a life in 4 books (30 page)

“Do you know something, Duncan?” said Mrs. Thaw. “Ruth will appreciate that a thousand times more than Kate Caldwell.”

“I know. I know,” he said. There was an ache between his heart and stomach as if something had been removed.

“Ach, son, son,” said Mrs. Thaw, holding out her arms to him, “never mind about Kate Caldwell. Ye’ve always your auld mither.”

He laughed and embraced her saying, “Yes, mither, I know, but it’s not the same thing, it’s not the same thing at all.”

The Higher Leaving Examination arrived and he sat it with no sense of special occasion. In the invigilated silence of the examination room he glanced through the mathematics paper and grinned, knowing he would fail. It would be too conspicuous to get up and walk out at once so he amused himself by trying to solve two or three problems using words instead of numbers and writing out the equations like dialectical arguments, but he was soon bored with this, and confronting the supervising teacher’s raised and condemning eyebrows with an absentminded stare he handed in his papers and went upstairs to the art room. The other examinations were as easy as he had expected.

Mrs. Thaw had grown gradually stronger but at the time of the exams she caught a slight cold and this caused a setback. She only got up now to go to the lavatory. Mr. Thaw said, “Don’t you think you should use the bedpan?”

She laughed and said, “When I can’t go to the lavatory myself I’ll know I’m done for.”

One evening when Thaw was alone with her in the house she said, “Duncan, what’s the living room like?”

“It’s quite warm. There’s a good fire on. It’s not too untidy.” “I think I’ll get up and sit by the fire for a bit.”

She pulled the bedclothes back and put her legs down over the edge of the bed. Thaw was disturbed to see how thin they were. The thick woollen stockings he pulled on for her would not stay up but hung in folds round her ankles.

“Just like two sticks,” she said, smiling. “I’ve turned into a Belsen horror.”

“Don’t be
daft!
” said Thaw. “There’s nothing wrong that another month won’t cure.”

“I know, son, I know. It’s a long, slow process.”

At this time Thaw slept with his father in the bed settee. He did not sleep well, for the mattress had a hollow in the middle which Mr. Thaw, being heavier, naturally filled, and Thaw found it hard not to roll down on top of him. One night after the lights were out he remarked how pleasant it would be to get back to the usual sleeping arrangements when his mother was better. After a pause, Mr. Thaw said strangely,

“Duncan, I hope you’re not … hoping too much that your mother will get better.” Thaw said lightly, “Oh, where there’s life there’s hope.”

“Duncan, there’s no hope. You see, the operation was too late. She’s been recovering from the effects of the operation, but it’s a recovery that can’t last. Her liver is too badly damaged.”

Thaw said, “When will she die then?”

“In a month. Mibby in two months. It depends on the strength of her heart. You see, the liver isn’t cleaning the blood, so her body is getting less and less nourishment.”

“Does she know?”

“No. Not yet.”

Thaw turned his face away and wept a little in the darkness. His tears were not particularly passionate, just a weak bleeding of water at the eyes.

He was wakened by a crash and a great cry. They found his mother struggling on the lobby floor. She had been trying to go to the lavatory. “Ach, Daddy, I’m done. I’m done. Finished,” she said as Mr. Thaw helped her back to bed. Thaw stood transfixed at the living-room door, his brain ringing with echoes of the cry. At the moment of waking to it he had felt it was not an unexpected thing, but something heard ages ago which he had waited all his life to hear again.

Two days later Thaw and Ruth came home from school together and had the door opened to them by Mr. Thaw. He said, “Your mother has something to tell you.”

They entered the bedroom. Mr. Thaw stood by the door watching. The bed had been moved to the window to give her a view of the street, and she lay with her face toward them and said timidly, “Ruth, Duncan, I think that one day soon I’ll just … just sleep away and not wake up.”

Ruth gasped and ran from the room and Mr. Thaw followed her. Thaw went to the bed and lay on it between his mother and the window. He felt below the covers for her hand and held it. After a while she said, “Duncan, do you think there’s anything afterwards?”

He said, “No, I don’t think so. It’s just sleep.”

Something wistful in the tone of the question made him add, “Mind you, many wiser folk than me have believed there’s a new life afterwards. If there is, it won’t be worse than this one.”

For several days on returning from school he took his shoes off and lay beside his mother holding her hand. It would have been untrue to say he felt unhappy. At these times he hardly thought or felt at all, and did not talk, for Mrs. Thaw was becoming unable to talk. Usually he looked out at the street. Although joining a main road it was a quiet street and usually lit by cold spring sunshine. The houses opposite were semi-detached villas with lilacs and a yellow laburnum tree in the gardens. If he felt anything it was a quietness and closeness amounting to contentment. During this time Ruth, who had never taken much interest in household things, became very busy at cleaning and cooking and made her mother many light sorts of foods and pastries, but soon Mrs. Thaw had to be nourished on nothing but fluids and was too weak to speak clearly or open her eyes. Nobody in the household talked much, but once Thaw made a remark to his sister beginning. “When Mummy’s dead …”

“She’s not going to die.”

“But Ruth …”

“She’s not
going
to die. She’s going to get better,” said Ruth, staring at him brightly.

At school oral examinations were held to corroborate the results of the written exams. The English teacher told his students to learn by heart some passages of prose, preferably from the bible, since they might be asked to recite aloud. Thaw decided to shock the examiner by learning the erotic verses from the Song of Solomon which begin, “Behold thou art fair, my love, behold thou art very fair.” On the morning of the English oral he went after breakfast to say cheerio to his mother. Mr. Thaw was sitting by the bed holding one of her hands between both of his. She lay back on the pillows, a line of white showing below her almost closed eyelids. She was mumbling desperately, “I aw ie, I aw ie.”

“All right, all right, Mary,” said Mr. Thaw. “You won’t die. You won’t die.”

“Uh I
aw
ie, I
aw
ie.”

“Don’t worry, you’re not going to die, you’re not going to die.”

For the first time in two weeks Mrs. Thaw shuddered and sat up. Her eyes opened to the full, she pulled her lips back from her teeth and shrieked, “I want to die! I want to die!” and fell back. Thaw collapsed on a chair, holding his head between his hands and sobbing loudly. Ten minutes later he ran to school across the sunlit slope of the park, loudly chanting verses from the Song of Solomon. When he got home that afternoon Mrs. Thaw lay more quiet and still than ever and breathed with a faint wheezy sound. He put his lips to her ear and whispered urgently, “Mum! Mum! I’ve passed in English. I’ve got Higher English.”

A faint smile moved her mouth, then sank into her blind face like water into sand. Next morning when Mrs. Gilchrist downstairs came in to wash her and pulled the curtain behind the bed she heard a very faint whisper: “Another day,” but in the afternoon word that Thaw had passed in Art and History did not reach the living part of her brain, or else she had grown indifferent.

She died three days later, very early on a Saturday morning. The previous night Mrs. Gilchrist downstairs and Mrs. Wishaw from across the landing sat waiting in the living room and did not move out when Thaw went to bed there. Mr. Thaw sat in the bedroom holding his wife’s hand. When Thaw awoke the light was filtering through the curtains and the neighbours had left and he knew his mother was dead. He got up, dressed, ate a bowl of cornflakes and switched the wireless on to a comedy programme. Mr. Thaw came in and said, slightly embarrassed, “Would you mind turning it down a bit, Duncan? The neighbours might be offended if they heard.”

Thaw switched off the wireless and went for a walk to the canal. He stood at the edge of a deep stone channel and watched without thought or feeling the foam-flecked water swirl between rotting timbers.

In the afternoon he called on Coulter as he had arranged to do some while before. Mrs. Coulter had taken her husband for a walk, and Thaw sat by the fire while Coulter, in vest and trousers, washed at the sink. Thaw said awkwardly, “By the way, Bob, my mother died last night.”

Coulter turned slowly round. He said “You’re joking, Duncan.”

“No.”

“But I saw her two weeks ago. She was talking to me. She seemed all right.”

“Aye.”

Coulter towelled his hands, looking at Thaw closely. He said, “You shouldn’t hold it in, Duncan. It’ll be worse for you later.” “I don’t think I’m holding anything in.”

Coulter pulled a shirt and pullover on and said in a worried way, “The bother is, I arranged tae meet Sam Lang at Tollcross playing fields at three. We were going to do some running practice. I thought you wouldnae mind coming along.”

“I don’t mind coming along.”

When he got home the undertaker had called. A coffin lay on a pair of trestles on the rug before the bedroom fireplace. The lid was placed to leave a square hole at the top and Mrs. Thaw’s face stuck up through the hole. Thaw looked at it with puzzled distaste. The features had been his mother’s but though he saw no difference in the shape all resemblance had vanished. The thing was without even the superficial life of a work of art and its material lacked the integrity of bronze or clay. He touched the brow with a fingertip and felt cold bone under the cold skin. This dense pack of dead tissues was not his mother’s face. It was nobody’s face.

In the days before the funeral the bedroom was pervaded by a sweet fusty odour which spread to other parts of the house. Air fresheners of the kind used in lavatories were placed under the coffin but made little difference. On Tuesday the minister of Mrs. Thaw’s church conducted a short service in the living room while the coffin was screwed tight and taken deftly downstairs to the hearse. The living room was crowded with neighbours and old friends and relatives whom Thaw had heard his parents speak of but hardly ever met. Twice or thrice during the service the door was furtively opened and those beside it shifted to admit a stealthily breathing old man or woman. Thaw stood by the sideboard wearing his newest suit. It struck him that the minister had not visited his mother during the last weeks, and this not through failure of duty (he was a young earnest nervous man) but because his presence would have been an intrusion. To Mrs. Thaw and her friends the church had been a gathering place. They went to a service on Sunday, and on Thursday to a social club in the church hall, but none could have been accused of piety. Mrs. Thaw had been shocked when, some years before, Thaw called himself an atheist, but no more shocked than when, shortly afterward, he called himself a Christian and started turning the other cheek in his fights with Ruth. A phrase came into his head: “The consolations of religion.” As far as he could see, his mother had lived and died without consolations of any kind at all.

The service ended and he went down to the cars with his father, the minister and a few others. The cars were shining black Rolls-Royces with silent engines and as they sped through the streets of the northern suburbs he looked out of the window feeling comfortable and privileged. It was a grey day, a lid of grey sky had shut down on Glasgow and thin smirr fell from it. They came to a municipal cemetery so precisely on the edge of the city that on three sides it was surrounded by open fields. There was a delay at the gate. The cars halted in a line behind the cars of a funeral party ahead. After a while the cars in front disappeared and they went up a curving drive between dripping rhododendrons and stopped outside a miniature Victorian-gothic church with a smokestack behind. More neighbours and relatives were waiting at the porch and followed Thaw and his father inside. They stood in the front row of pews and everyone else crowded into the pews behind. Just before them was a tall pulpit, and to the right of it a low platform with the coffin on top. Coffin and platform were covered by a heavy red cloth. After a moment of silence Thaw began to wonder why nobody sat down. The same thought must have struck his father, for he sat down and everyone followed his example. The minister, in the black gown and white bands of a doctor of divinity, climbed into the pulpit, said a prayer and announced a hymn. Everyone stood and sang and sat down again. The minister produced a sheet of paper and said, “Before we proceed with the service I have been asked—er, to read this to you:

“During the last few months of her illness Mary Thaw was completely confined to her bed. I would like to thank those many good friends and neighbours who made these months as pleasant for her as they could. They brought gifts of fruit and of cake, and the even more precious gift of their company. I would like to tell them on her behalf how very much she appreciated their attentions, and to extend to them the thanks that she herself is unable to extend today.”

In the pews behind somebody sniffed and blew their nose. Thaw looked sideways at his father and whispered, “That was very good.” The service continued. At the words “Dust to dust and ashes to ashes,” there began a lumbering rumbling sound and the red cloth began to sag as the coffin was drawn down under it. For a second it bulged up again with a rush of air from below, then flopped so that a rectangular depression appeared where the coffin had been. Thaw was struck by a poignant sense of loss neutralized at once by a memory of a conjuror who had made a scone disappear from under a handkerchief.

Outside the church people squared their shoulders and began talking in loud cheerful voices.

“Well, that didn’t go too badly, did it?”

“A beautiful service, beautiful.”