“Thank you, sir,” said Thaw, standing up. “Some sketching in the vivisection room is really necessary at this stage.”
“Dissection room.”
“Pardon?”
“You said vivisection room.”
“Did I? I’m sorry,” said Thaw, confused.
He ran back to the classroom to work off his exhiliration. McAlpin stood at an easel near the door. Thaw stopped and muttered to him, “Peel’s getting me permission to sketch in the university dissection room.”
“Good! Good!”
“I’ve not felt so happy since I invented the bactro-chlorine bomb.”
McAlpin bent over and emitted muffled bellowing laughter. Thaw went to his seat thinking what a waste of time unfriendliness was. Later on their way to the refectory he said to McAlpin, “Why didn’t you ask me to your party?”
“We had only a few tickets for the fancy-dress ball and had to give them to people who had asked Judy and me to their parties. I wanted to invite you but—er, it just wasn’t possible. I thought you wouldn’t mind because you were taking out that girl you picked up. How did you get on with her?”
CHAPTER 23.
Meetings
One evening Thaw came down to Sauchiehall Street when the air was mild and the lamps not yet lit. So fine a lake of yellow sky lay behind the western rooftops that he walked toward them in a direction opposite home and was overtaken by Aitken Drummond at Charing Cross.
“This isn’t your usual territory, Duncan.”
“I’m just walking.”
“I suppose you’re waiting for the ball to start?”
“Is there a ball tonight? No, I cannae afford a ticket.”
“I admit money is useful but don’t bother about a ticket. Come with me.”
They walked past the Grand Hotel then turned down a stunted unlit lane into a cluttered little yard. Thaw made out heaps of coke and coal, bins overflowing with garbage, stacks of milk, beer and fish crates. Drummond opened a door.
They entered so hot an air that Thaw felt stifled for a minute or two. Below a weak electric bulb an old man in a boiler suit sat smoking a pipe beside the furnace door. Drummond said, “This is Duncan Thaw, Dad. We’re going to the art school ball.”
Mr. Drummond took the pipe from his mouth and directed Thaw to an empty chair with the stem. His amused sunken mouth indicated a lack of teeth; his nose was almost as big as his son’s but more craggy; spectacles were pushed up on his brow, the legs mended with insulating tape. He said, “So you’re going dancing? It’s a waste of time, Douglas, a damned waste of time.”
“He’s called Duncan!” shouted Drummond.
“That doesn’t matter, it’s still a waste of time.”
“Who’s in the kitchen tonight?”
“Eh? Luigi.”
“Why not get Duncan and me something to eat? He’s hungry.”
“No, I’m not,” said Thaw.
Mr. Drummond left the room. Drummond pulled his father’s chair to the furnace door and opened it, showing a red-hot gullet of flame-roaring coal. He sat and spread his palms to the blaze saying, “It’s only a coincidence that I look like the Devil but I do enjoy heat. Pull your chair nearer, Duncan.” Mr. Drummond returned with a big plate of sandwiches and placed it on the floor between Thaw and Drummond. He said, “There’s cheese, there’s egg, there’s salmon, there’s meat paste. Help yourselves.”
He brought another chair from a corner, sat down and lifted a library book from the floor. “Do you read this man, Duncan?” he asked, showing the title of a novel by Aldous Huxley.
“Yes, but he annoys me. He shows a world with too little in it to believe or enjoy.”
“Too little?” said Mr. Drummond with a cackle of anarchic glee. “He leaves you with nothing, Duncan. Nothing whatsoever. Nothing at all. And he’s right.”
He turned a page and read while Thaw and Drummond ate.
“Tonight’s pay night!” said Drummond suddenly in a loud voice. Mr. Drummond looked up.
“I said you got paid tonight. Can I have some money?”
“The Glasgow Corporation, Duncan, gives this man one hundred and twenty pounds a year. He spends it on nothing but clothes and pocket money. He lives—”
“And materials,” said Drummond.
“And painting materials. He lives at home—he’s twenty-four—he pays nothing toward his rent or rates or fuel or light or food—”
“Food!” cried Drummond triumphantly. “I’m glad you mentioned food! Do you know what my father gave me for dinner today, Duncan? Fried kippers. Kippers, mind you, and fried with their heads and tails on.”
“Well, if you don’t like it you know what to do,” said Mr. Drummond mildly, returning the pipe to his mouth.
“Give me ten shillings,” said Drummond. His father fished four half crowns from his overalls pocket, handed them over, saw the plate was empty and stood up.
“Have some more sandwiches,” he told Duncan.
“No thanks, Mr. Drummond. That was good, but more would be too much.”
“Well, the cook’s a friend of mine. I’m not buying them and I’m not stealing them. You wouldn’t like some more?”
“No thanks, Mr. Drummond.”
“Duncan has to go now, Dad. We’ve an appointment. Would you like more coal?”
“If you can spare the time from your urgent appointment.”
A wooden hatch opened upon the coal heap outside. Thaw and Drummond pulled lumps onto the boiler-room floor with clumsy wooden rakes. Drummond shovelled them into the furnace and they left after washing their hands below a tap in the darkened yard.
They walked into the Cowcaddens and entered a close where the narrow stairs were worn to such a slant that the foot trod them uneasily. Thaw grew breathless and leaned a moment on a windowsill. He could see the flat back of a dingy church across a window box in which the soot-freckled crests of three stunted cauliflowers rose above a clump of weeds. On the top landing, Drummond pushed open a bright yellow door (the lock was broken), stuck his head inside and shouted, “Ma!” After a moment he said, “Come in, Duncan. I have to be careful in case my mother’s at home. If she dislikes someone she’s liable to retire to her bedroom and burn a pheasant’s tail feather.”
“What does that do?”
“I shudder to think.”
Thaw entered the queerest house he had ever seen. Parts of it were very like a home but these lay like valleys between piled furniture and objects salvaged from scrap heaps, middens and junk shops. As he edged into the kitchen he felt threatened by empty picture frames, stringless instruments and old wireless sets. The ceilings were loftier than in his own home but there was no open space and no planning.
“Excuse the mess,” said Drummond. “I haven’t had time to tidy up. I’m hoping to get a studio nearer the art school soon. What can we use?”
He began shifting things from in front of a cupboard. Thaw bent to help but Drummond said, “Leave it to me, Duncan. If you shift these I won’t know precisely where to find them.” When the cupboard door could be opened about twelve inches Drummond thrust his arm into the crevice and brought out, one at a time, a top hat, a Roman helmet, a pith helmet, a deerstalker, a mortarboard and an Indian feathered headdress, all with labels saying they belonged to the Acme Costume Hiring Agency.
“I used to work there,” said Drummond. “They stored their best things with an almost criminal carelessness.”
Drummond put on the top hat, a tail coat and spats. He cut himself a gleaming shirtfront, collar and cuffs from a sheet of glossy cardboard and fixed these in place with pins and drops of glue, then took a long pair of green rubber fangs from a drawer and inserted them carefully between his teeth and upper lip. He rubbed green greasepaint into his cheeks and, glaring balefully, asked with difficulty, “Dracula?”
“Oh yes,” said Thaw, nodding.
Drummond slipped the rubber teeth into his pocket and said, “Who do you want to be?”
“A sorcerer. But
I’ll settle for an academic.”
He put on the mortarboard.
“Not enough,” said Drummond. “Go in there.”
He moved a tailor’s dummy and opened another door. Thaw entered a neat little room which clearly belonged to a woman. There were flowered curtains, striped wallpaper and a pink satin quilt on the bed. There was a scrolled and gilded bird cage, an ashtray shaped like a skull, and sweet peas blooming in a window box.
“Open the wardrobe,” commanded Drummond from outside. “I don’t think I should be here.”
“You should do exactly what I tell you.”
The wardrobe door was ajar and as Thaw opened it a ginger cat strolled out.
“Is there a black silk dressing gown among the coats to the right?” called Drummond.
“Yes.”
“Bring it here. Touch nothing else.”
Thaw returned to the chaotic kitchen. Drummond said, “Sorry, I would have fetched it myself but my mother made me promise not to go into her bedroom. Put it on. It’ll work rather well as an academic robe.”
“Won’t she find out?”
“No no. She’s managing a tearoom in Largs and her visits home are erratic, to say the least.”
Drummond took a knobbed cane in one hand and they set off for the ball.
Outside the lamps were lit and tramcars clanged and sparkled. A cryptic drama seemed unfolding throughout the city. An old woman and man argued quietly at a street corner watched by two little girls keeking round the corner of a lighted fruit shop. In a firelit room, seen through a ground-floor window, a man stood with a towel round his neck, shaving perhaps. Near the school they stepped into a room full of smoke, noise and people. Drummond forced a way to the bar and Thaw slid after him between backs and shoulders. Drummond handed him a large whisky and told him to knock it back in one. A blonde and a brunette leaned smiling toward Thaw and the blonde said, “Does your mother know you’re here?”
He said, “Mibby. She’s dead,” and turned away, pleased by his harshness. Drummond bought two cigars. They lit them, went out and marched up Sauchiehall Street issuing smoke like chimneys. Thaw was surprised to find the stares of the bypassers amusing. He began laughing violently but coughed violently instead.
“For God’s sake don’t inhale, Duncan!” said Drummond, slapping his back.
“There’s prestige in looking ridiculous with you, Aitken.”
The door of the annexe was thronged with people trying to buy tickets or bribe an entrance from the doorkeepers. Drummond and Thaw mounted the steps side by side, Drummond cleaving a path with his great axe-blade-edged nose, Thaw opening one with the pallid inclined carapace of his brow. Officials in exotic costumes shouted “It’s the Drummond!” “It’s the Thaw!” and cheerily ushered them in. The janitor gripped Thaw’s sleeve, drew him aside and indicated Drummond, saying, “Beware of that lad. When drunk he’s fit company for neither man nor brute.”
The triumph of arrival faded. He sat at the edge of the dance hall grinning unhappily at the revolving carnival of couples brushing past his knees, his eyes sucking visions of thighs and hips, fluttering breasts, throats and glances. Molly Tierney, dressed like an oriental dancing girl, spun gleefully in the arms of a white-robed Arab who was McAlpin and saluted Thaw with a raised forefinger. Suddenly two girls said “Hullo!” and sat on each side of him. “Don’t you recognize us?” asked the smaller girl on the left.
“I’m sorry, I’ve a poor memory for people.”
“You met us in the pub, don’t you remember?”
“Are you the girls who asked that question? No, I don’t remember your faces.”
“Why?” asked the girl on his right. “Did we look awfully hard and experienced?”
“Not at all,” said Thaw hurriedly. “Are you at the university?”
“No, the art school.”
“Are you in the first year?”
They laughed.
“No, the fourth.”
The pale girl said to the dark, “It makes you feel terribly ageing,” and then, to Thaw, “Why aren’t you dancing?”
“I’ve no sense of bodily rhythm.”
“Oh, we’ll soon teach you that,” said the dark girl, rising to her feet. She led him to a corner and showed him how to move his feet; then she took him onto the floor where he partnered her, feeling clumsy and apologetic and desperately wishing she was the pale girl; then she took him back and gave him to her friend. He felt the difference at once. Her body was firmer, supple without fragility, her hair was pale gold, drawn smoothly back from pale brows to the back of her head. She wore earrings made from small stones hung on thin chains, her dress was black with a square-cut neckline. Sometimes she spoke words directing his steps, sometimes words of congratulation. He looked straight into her eyes, imagined being married to her, thought of Molly Tierney and felt no regret at all. He thought, I’m being ridiculous, and kept looking in her eyes; the dark pupils grew very clear and her face and head became a dim white and gold shape around them. He thought, She’s like marble and honey, and shaped the words with his lips. The music stopped and he had to dance with the smaller girl again. He looked straight across her shoulder and talked about painting and the an school. She said,
“Is your father a minister?”
“No, my father’s a pious atheist. Do I look like a minister’s son?”
“You look like a kid of twelve. But you sound like an old highland minister.”
He danced again with the pale girl in a silence which grew desperate, for he knew it must end. So he said, “You’re like marble and honey.”
“What?”
“You’re like marble and honey.”
“Oh. Am I? Thank you.”
She looked at him without smiling and said, “You should dance more often.”
“No, really, I can’t.”
“If you come to more balls I’ll dance with you.”
He grew more worried, feeling she could not dance with him all evening, wondering when and how she would break from him. When the music stopped he excused himself and hurried from the hall.
He went upstairs thinking, ‘I love her,’ and, ‘You’re daft.’ He wondered if she had a boyfriend and why he wasn’t around. Anyway, she had danced with him from kindness; their connection had no equality in it. He imagined her friends mocking the lost look on his face when he danced with her. She would laugh and say, “He’s just a kid!” He looked for a place to hide. Intimate whispers came from all the dark corridors so he opened a door onto the dance hall balcony, a small place used as a store for chairs. A man was slumped there with arms on the balustrade and head on arms. It was Drummond. Thaw had never seen him alone or depressed before. Drummond smiled faintly and pointed to a chair.
“How are you, Duncan? Why aren’t you dancing?”
“I can’t.”
From up here the dancers seemed blind caps of hair with projecting hands and feet like the limbs of starfish. The linked couples twitched and turned as if the music was a fluid vibrating them. When it stopped they hurried to the side of the hall like corpuscles into a clot. Drummond sighed and said,
“They’re villainous, Duncan, downright villainous, absolutely villainous.”
“Who are?”
“Women.”
Drummond gazed down on the dancers and said, “One kept following me around tonight and looking at me … she went off with someone else ten minutes ago. I think I could have had her if I’d wanted. But I saw Molly dancing, and I’d no heart for anything of that kind. I don’t know why. She’s past her best and engaged to an Irish vet and flirting away….”
“Molly Tierney?”
“I used to go about with her. You must admit she’s good-looking. She avoids me now.”
“Why?”
“I suppose because her parents are nice and mine aren’t. My mother told her she wasn’t fit to sleep with a pig. Which forced me into the unenviable position of declaring she was fit to sleep with a pig,”
Th
ey were silent again, gazing on the dancers. Then Drummond said, “I tried to cure myself by imagining her pissing and excreting and menstruating, but the connection made these acts beautiful to me.”
“How do women menstruate? At regular times on regular days?”
“When they reach Molly’s age they can do it running for a tram, or standing before an easel, or at dinner or talking quietly to a friend, as we are. She let me watch her sometimes.”
“What?”
“We shared many little secrets of that kind,” said Drummond gloomily. This aspect of love had never entered Thaw’s fantasies. He rubbed his face in frustration. Drummond said, “You’ll be happier with women when you’re better known−prestige makes a lot of them randy. Janet Weir used to go around with the president of the students’ representative council, but when Jimmy Macbeth grew famous for drinking himself to death she kept company with him for a day or two. Then the film Cyrano de Bergerac popularized long noses and she turned to me. A lot of girls like me because I’m supposed to be a symbol of something. It’s humiliating in some ways but lucky in others. What do you think of Janet?”
“I don’t know her.”
“She looks like the Mona Lisa but has nicer legs. She invited me into her room last night and told me she loved me.”
“Oh, God,” said Thaw, beating his brow. It felt like a gate which had been locked and soldered shut. Drummond stretched his arms and yawned. “Yes, I was embarrassed too. Girls who say they love you expect all sorts of irrational things, like sincerity, in exchange. Still, we passed a pleasant night. She’s a virgin, you know. I’d seen her with so many men that I hadn’t expected that. I was careful not to destroy it. I like virginity; it seems a pity to destroy it for fun. But I suppose she’ll get me doing it eventually. Virgins are terribly single-minded.”
“I’m going to the lavatory.”
Two hours later Thaw leaned despondently on the railings by the entrance watching the last dancers leave in ones and twos. He had stowed the mortarboard and gown in a locker. Drummond, still dressed like Dracula, capered on the pavement among laughing friends.
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