Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [100]
“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