Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [120]
“I’m paying that myself. I’ve already saved thirty-five shillings.” “Thirty-five shillings in three weeks! You’ve saved it out of food money. No wonder you’re sick. How can you expect to be well if you starve yourself? How? How?”
“Please don’t attack me.”
“What else can I do?” said Mr. Thaw piteously. “When you were wee you could be beaten, but you’re a man now. How else can I bring home your wrongdoing but by driving at you and driving at you with words?”
After a moment he added quietly, “I would be glad in future if you would trust me with the facts of your condition, however disastrous they may be.”
“I’ll try to.”
“Then get up for your breakfast, son.”
“I want to stay in bed. I feel feeble.”
His father stared at him then left the room saying, “I’ll bring your breakfast in.”
Thaw lay and remembered the night before. Asking for Molly Tierney’s love seemed foolish and unnecessary now, but the decision to do it had cured his fear of decay and disease. When such thoughts came in future he would entertain them calmly, and move on to other thoughts.
For two days his father, before going to work, brought him breakfast in bed. At noon Mrs. Colquhoun downstairs brought up a tray of dinner. Between meals his body basked in unhurried time: time to scribble in notebooks or read or lie thoughtfully dreaming. It was good to be free from the tensions of art school, yet the place haunted him. He had been part of the life of the students there, a voice among voices heard by attractive girls, a face among the faces surrounding them. He wrote:
From under loose sweaters and tight blouses their breasts threaten my independence like the nosecaps of atomic missiles. Cannibal queens carnivorous nightingales why should I feel my value depends on being valued by women, what makes them the bestowers of value? Oh I want to grip them somehow and show them the universe is bigger, stranger, more sombre, colourful and distinct than they know. And how can I do this in a picture called “Washing Day” with a minimum of three figures? Yah what grandeur can be shown in that? I want to make a series of paintings called Acts of God showing the deluge, the confusion of Babel, the walls of Jericho falling flat, the destruction of Sodom, Yes, yes, yes, a hymn to the Old Testament Catastropher who makes things well but hurts and smashes them just as well. Or I would make a set of city scapes with the canal through them. Or
His pen paused above the page then descended and sketched the tree on Sauchiehall Lane, making it larger, and leafless, and among the tenements and back greens of Riddrie. Around it three dwarfish housewives were stretching ropes between iron clothes-poles, and he drew them from a memory of a home help who had looked after the house while his mother was dying. They wore headscarves, men’s boots, and big aprons covered their chests and skirts giving them a sexless, surgical look. At the top of the picture the tree’s highest branch stuck into a strip of sky among the tenement chimneys. He remembered a Blake engraving of a grey ocean with an arm sticking out of a wave, the hand clutching at the empty sky. Another Blake engraving showed a tiny pair of lovers watching a small frenzied figure set foot on a ladder so thin and high that the top rested in the sickle of a moon. A caption said, “I want! I want!” Thaw drew a moon in the sky above the treetop.
Next day he rose after breakfast and sat in a thick dressing gown before the living-room fire turning the sketch into a picture. In the evening Ruth called from the kitchen, where she was making the tea, “It seems to me if you’re well enough to paint you’re well enough to help with the housework.”
“True,” said Thaw.
“Then will you kindly set the table?”
“I’m too busy.”
“For Pete’s sake! It won’t take ten minutes.”
“If I stop now I won’t work so well when I start again.”
“I suppose you think your old picture is more important than anything else?”
Ruth stood in the kitchen doorway with a milk jug in her hand. Thaw looked at her and said