Lanark: a life in 4 books (31 page)

“Hullo, hullo! There’s a voice I’ve not heard in many a long day. How are ye, Jim?”

“No’ too bad. A beautiful service, wasn’t it?”

“Aye, beautiful. I liked that bit the minister read out in the middle.”

“Ye cannae beat good neighbours.”

“Aye, but she deserved good neighbours. She was one hersel’.”

“Who’s that waiting by the gate? Don’t tell me it’s auld Neil Bannerman?”

“Aye, it’s Neil Bannerman.”

“My God, he looks done. Really done. Fancy auld Neil Bannerman surviving Mary Thaw. Last time I saw him was at her father’s funeral ten years back.”

“Is it true, er, there’s a quantity of refreshment, er, available somewhere?”

“Aye, man, there’s a tea laid on at the Grand Hotel at Charing Cross. Come in my car.”

The male relations gathered in a private room of a hotel in Sauchiehall Street and ate a high tea of cold ham and warm vegetables. They chattered about old acquaintances and football and the days when the local churches had their own football teams. Thaw sat silent among them. At one point Bernard Shaw was mentioned and he was asked to tell an anecdote about him. It was well received. Afterward he returned with his father in someone’s car. The rain was falling heavily now. He thought how pleasant it would be to get home and sit by the bedroom fire drinking tea with his mother, then remembered this was impossible.

Mr. Thaw wanted his wife’s ashes scattered on a hillside overlooking Loch Lomond where they had walked together in their courting days. One windy and sunny spring morning he journeyed with his children to Loch Lomond by train. Thaw held the oblong deal box with the ashes in it upon his knee.

The lid lacked hinge or fastening, and he raised it once or twice and looked curiously at the soft grey stuff inside. It was exactly like cigarette ash. Mr. Thaw said, “Be careful, Duncan.” Duncan said, “Yes, we don’t want to spill her before we get there.”

He was surprised to see his father look shocked. They climbed the hillside by a stony lane sunk among bracken and budding hedges. Higher up this became a cart track over a green field, then they went through a gap in a dry-stone dyke and it became a sandy path among heather with curlews crying around it. Near the path lay a flat rock with a hole in the middle where the Colquhoun clan once stuck their banner pole when gathering to fight.

“I suppose this place is as good as any,” said Mr. Thaw.

They sat and rested, looking down on the loch and the green islands in it. Northward the jagged wall of the highland bens looked distinct and solid enough to bang the knuckles against. They waited till a young couple who had paused to see the view passed out of sight, then opened the box and flung handfuls of ash into the air. The wind whisked it away like smoke into the heather.

A fortnight after Mr. Thaw sat at his desk in the living room and said, “Duncan, come here. I want ye to look at this. It’s the bill for your mother’s funeral. A fantastic figure, isn’t it? You’d think cremation would be a lot cheaper than burial, but no. The costs are practically the same.”

Thaw looked at the bill and said, “Aye, it does look a bit extravagant.”

“Well, I’m not going to have that sum of money wasted on me, so I’m arranging to give my body to science. Would ye sign this paper? It’s to prove that as next of kin you have no objection.”

Thaw signed.

“Good. The arrangement is that when I die you inform the medical faculty of the university and they call and collect me with an iron coffin. If you do that within twenty-four hours, you and Ruth will be given ten pounds to divide between you, so you see it’s not only cheaper, it’s profitable.”

“I’ll spend the money drinking to the health of your memory,” said Thaw.

“If you’ve sense you’ll spend it otherwise.”

Almost a year later Thaw was looking through a drawer when he found a letter in his mother’s handwriting. It was written very faintly in pencil and was a rough draft of a letter she probably never got round to sending. It was superscribed to the correspondence page of a cheap woman’s magazine.

I have enjoyed very much the letters from your readers telling about the funny mistakes some children make. I wonder if you would like to print an experience of mine. When my wee son was six or seven, we left the house one night quite late and were looking up at the stars. Suddenly Duncan said, “Where’s the tractor?” His father had been teaching him the names of the stars, and he had got mixed up with the plough. I have not been very well recently and have had to spend most of the time in bed. I find my main pleasure nowadays in memories like these
.

Thaw stood awhile with the letter in his hand. He remembered the night she spoke of. It had been at the hostel in Kinlochrua at Christmas. The family had been going to a concert in the main building, and the question had been asked by Ruth. Mrs. Thaw had always preferred him to Ruth and had unconsciously transferred the incident. He put back the letter and shut the drawer. Grief pulled at an almost unconscious corner of his mind like a puppy trying to attract its master’s attention by tugging the hem of his coat.

CHAPTER 20.

Employers

The Higher Leaving Examination results were not yet published, but almost everyone knew how well or badly they had done and the school was full of excited discussions about maximum salaries and minimum qualifications. Employment officers came and lectured on careers in accountancy, banking and the civil service. A lawyer talked about law, an engineer about engineering, a doctor about medicine and a major about the army. A Scottish Canadian lectured on the advantages of emigration. Students argued in groups about whether it was best to stay a sixth year at school and win more certificates or leave at once for university or commercial or technical colleges. Mr. Thaw said, “So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you want to do?”

“That’s irrelevant, isn’t it?”

“Face facts, Duncan. If you can’t live by doing what you want, you must take the nearest thing to it you can get.”

“I want to write a modern Divine Comedy with illustrations in the style of William Blake.”

“Well, surely the sensible thing to try for is work as a commercial artist?”

“For that I need four years at art school and you cannae afford to send me.”

Mr. Thaw looked thoughtful. He said, “When I worked for Laird’s, the box-makers, I was fairly friendly with Archie Tulloch, who was head of the art department. They used to take in boys of sixteen or seventeen then. They designed labels for packages and cartons, you know, and patterns for wrapping paper. That might not gratify your bohemian soul, but it would be a start. If I wrote to Archie Tulloch he would likely look your work over.”

Thaw got an afternoon off school and walked down into Bridgeton wearing a newly cleaned overcoat and with a folder of work under his arm. The factory was near the river and he descended to it by narrow streets where many small factories stood between tenements and scrapyards. The sky was grey and beyond the rooftops the Cathkin Braes looked flat and dark like a wall shutting the city in, though he could make out the silhouettes of trees on the skyline. He remembered his mother talking about these trees when he was very small. They had reminded her of a line of camels in the desert. The ceiling of cloud pressed lower and released a thin smirr like a falling mist. It glazed the streets until they reflected the pale sky, a seagull skimming above the street appeared as far below it. The city seemed hung among distances of grey air, and windows were raised from the bottom and hands placed potted ferns on the sills to be watered. The rain soothed Thaw’s misery. He started to feel confident, and to imagine coming often this way to Laird’s. Even when very rich he would walk through these streets with such regularity that folk who lived there would set their clocks by him. He would be part of their lives. He came to a factory which was a huge brick cube at the junction of two streets. He straightened his tie, ran a hand through his hair, gripped the folder tightly and pushed through a revolving door of brass, glass and carved mahogany.

The entrance hall was a bare place with a small door marked
INQUIRIES
. He turned the knob and entered a wedge-shaped room with a switchboard and an elderly lady shut in a corner by a counter of polished yellow wood. The lady said, “Yes?” “I’ve an appointment; that’s to say I’m expected. Mr. Tulloch expects me.”

“What is your name, please?”

He said shyly, “I am Duncan Thaw.”

The lady moved her fingers among clicking plugs and said, “Mr. Tulloch? A Mr. Thaw to see you. He says he has an appointment…. Very well.”

She deftly fingered more switches.

“Would you send down a junior? To take a Mr. Thaw to the waiting room? … Very well…. Would you wait here a little while, sir?”

“Yes, please,” said Thaw, humbled at being called sir. He went to a low table with magazines arranged neatly on top in overlapping rows. Lacking the courage to disturb their order, he was content to look at the covers:

The Executive—
A MAGAZINE FOR THE MODERN BUSINESSMAN
.

Modern Business—
A MAGAZINE FOR THE EXECUTIVE
.

Ingot−
THE THUNDERHAUGH STEEL GROUP MONTHLY BULLETIN
.

Automobile—
THE CAR DEALERS’ MONTHLY BULLETIN
.

They had the thin glossy covers of obscene novelettes and were mostly pictures of people in expensive clothes sitting behind desks.

A small neat pretty girl came in and said, “Mr. Thaw? Will you come this way, please?”

He walked behind her across the bare hall and climbed some wide metallic stairs. She hurried ahead of him through corridors of glass and cream-coloured metal, smiling downward as if sharing a tender secret with her bosom, and left him at a door labelled W
AITING ROOM
. Inside four men sat round a table, one of them saying in an English Midland dialect, “Yes, but what I don’t understand is—”

“Will you excuse us?” said another man swiftly to Thaw. Thaw sat down in a comfortable chair and said, “Certainly. Please go on. I’m only here to wait.”

“Then would you wait outside?” said the swift man, rising and opening the door. Thaw sat feeling insulted on a sofa against the corridor wall. It occurred to him that the men inside were capitalists plotting something. This floor of the factory was cut up into offices by glass screens supported by metal walls. The glass was rippled so that only shadows could be seen through it, and the bleakness, coldness, metallicness of the place gave a resounding quality to footsteps, clattering typewriters, ringing telephones, and the mutter of administrative voices. Two long spectacled men paused at a corner.

“I think I’d better check that teller.”

“No no. No need for that at all.”

“Still, if the figures aren’t exact—”

“No no. Even if his figures are a hundred percent out, that’s enough for my purpose.”

Thaw realized Mr. Tulloch was beside him. He was a weary, paunchy man who said, “Duncan Thaw? … Yes …” and sat down.

“I haven’t much time. Show me your stuff.”

Thaw suddenly felt competent and businesslike. He opened his folder and said “Here is a series of watercolours, a series dealing with acts of God. The Deluge. The Tower of Babel. The Walls of Jericho Falling Flat.”

“Um. Mmm. Next?”

“Penelope unweaving. Circe. Scylla and Charybdis. The last is least successful because at the time I was equally influenced by Blake and Beardsley and the two sorts of outline—”

“Yes. And this?”

“The Cave Artist. Moses on Sinai. Greek Civilization. Roman Imperialism. The Sermon on the Mount. Vandals. The Cathedral City. John Knox preaching to Mary Queen of Scots. The Factory City. The—”

Mr. Tulloch suddenly sat back and Thaw grinned at the air before him and shuffled the pictures back into the half-emptied folder. Mr. Tulloch was saying, “… take them at intervals of five years, so you see we really have no room for you. Your work, however, is very promising. Yes. Perhaps something in the illustrative line. Have you tried McLellan the publisher?”

“Yes, but—”

“Oh, yes, ha, ha, well of course the business is overcrowded just now…. Have you tried Blockcrafts, Bath Street? Well, try them. Ask for Mr. Grant and say I sent you….” They stood up together. “Apart from that, you see, there’s nothing I can do.”

“Yes,” said Thaw. “Thankyou very much.”

He smiled and wondered if the smile looked bitter. It felt bitter. Mr. Tulloch conducted him to the head of the staircase and gave him a tired smile and an unexpectedly firm handshake. “Goodbye. I’m sorry,” he said.

Thaw hurried into the drab street, feeling cheapened and defeated. He remembered with an odd pang that Mr. Tulloch had not once asked about his father.

A week later Thaw and his father saw the headmaster of Whitehill School, a white-moustached man who regarded them kindly from behind his desk. He said “Duncan, Mr. Thaw, has very strong imaginative powers. And undoubted talent. And his own way of seeing things, unfortunately.” He smiled. “I say unfortunately because this makes it hard for plodding mediocrities like you and me to help him. You agree?”

Mr. Thaw laughed and said, “Oh, I agree all right. However, we must do our best.”

“However, we must do our best. Now I think Duncan would be happiest in some job without too much responsibility, a job that would leave him plenty of spare time to develop his talents as he pleases. I see him as a librarian. He’s good with books. I see him as a librarian in some small highland town like Oban or Fort William. What do you think, Mr. Thaw?” “I think, Mr. McEwan, it is a very satisfactory
idea
. But is it a
possibility?
”

“I think so. To enter the library service two higher and two lower certificates are required. Duncan’s higher art and english and lower history are guaranteed. The maths results aren’t out yet. How do you think he did?”