Lanark

by Alasdair Gray

  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. “Remembe
r, 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.

  “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 a
nd 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.