Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [121]
“You’re mad!”
“Mibby.”
He turned back to the picture. Ruth came over and held the full milk jug above it.
“How would you like a dirty big puddle in the middle of your important picture?”
“Your actions aren’t on my conscience,” said Thaw, working. Ruth tipped the jug slowly forward until a trickle of milk spattered onto the centre of the paper, leaving a small puddle.
Thaw rose and went into the kitchen saying, “That was a wrong and childish thing to do.”
He brought back a clean cloth, wiped up the milk and continued working. Ruth watched him ominously, jug in hand, then said, in a low vibrating voice, “God, how I hate you! How I hate you!”
“At present, yes, but you’ll soon stop. It’s a tiring emotion.” “Oh, I’ll keep it going! Don’t you worry.”
She flung the jug to smash in the hearth and ran from the room, slamming the door after her. Four minutes later she returned with homework notebooks and sat studying them by the fire, her lips pressed tightly together.
Suddenly Thaw jumped up, crying out on a rising note, “Oh! Oh! Oh!”
He had been drawing with waterproof ink on stiff paper. He had thought the milk had fallen on a dry part of the picture, but it was not completely dry, and now that the damp had evaporated a grey smear stained the centre. He had not expected this. He turned to Ruth, his head craning toward her and swaying a little at the end of the neck. With fists clenched he advanced on her whispering, “By God I’ll hurt you for this, my dear.”
She retreated into the bay window. In former fights she was usually the aggressor and he coldly or hysterically defensive. Now she sank to the floor, protecting her head with her hands, and he stooped and twice drove his fist hard into her stomach, then went back and glowered at the picture. A new wave of rage rose in him and he turned vengefully to her again. She lay curled on herself with her eyes shut, drawing choking breaths and looking very white. He went to the front bedroom and lay on the bed, feeling nothing now but listlessness and defeat, and the fading daylight in the room, and the occasional shout of children playing in the street. After a while he heard Ruth go to the lavatory and taps rushing and the cistern flushing. She looked into the bedroom for a moment and said sobbingly,
“Duncan, you’ve hurt me. You don’t know how you’ve hurt me.”
He said coldly, “I’m sorry.”
He could only think of the grey smear on the picture. Coldness and indifference spread through him like a stain. Later he heard his father come in and murmurs of conversation from the living room. Mr. Thaw opened the bedroom door abruptly saying, “Duncan! Did you punch Ruth in the stomach?”
“Yes. We were fighting.”
“Look, Duncan, I’m glad you’re prepared to defend yourself but you should never punch a woman in the stomach.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know how to hurt women properly yet.” His father left and he lay inert, thinking of the picture. ‘I can’t do it all again’ he thought, then sat up, shaken by a new idea. For an hour before Ruth spoiled the picture his pleasure in it had vanished and now he knew why. The moon was wrong. It did not belong to such a picture; it was a piece of sentimental overemphasis, like a serenader with a guitar. The picture should be made bigger with no sky showing at all.
Mr. Thaw made tea that evening and the family ate in silence. Inside himself Thaw was very cheerful indeed but hid the feeling because the others could not share it. Afterward he began the picture again and finished it three days later.
He brought it to art school and it hung in the assembly hall, where he moved about among the other thoughtful or chattering students. He was sick of it now, it seemed overworked and dull, but he had still expected it to eclipse the work of everyone else and was depressed to see two other pictures equally good. They showed ordinary kitchen interiors. Their paint was carefully used to represent solid figures and the space between, and their common depth