Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [104]
“A beautiful service, beautiful.”
“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