Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [132]
“Is your father a minister?”
“No, my father’s a pious atheist. Do I look like a minister’s son?”
“You look like a kid of twelve. But you sound like an old highland minister.”
He danced again with the pale girl in a silence which grew desperate, for he knew it must end. So he said, “You’re like marble and honey.”
“What?”
“You’re like marble and honey.”
“Oh. Am I? Thank you.”
She looked at him without smiling and said, “You should dance more often.”
“No, really, I can’t.”
“If you come to more balls I’ll dance with you.”
He grew more worried, feeling she could not dance with him all evening, wondering when and how she would break from him. When the music stopped he excused himself and hurried from the hall.
He went upstairs thinking, ‘I love her,’ and, ‘You’re daft.’ He wondered if she had a boyfriend and why he wasn’t around. Anyway, she had danced with him from kindness; their connection had no equality in it. He imagined her friends mocking the lost look on his face when he danced with her. She would laugh and say, “He’s just a kid!” He looked for a place to hide. Intimate whispers came from all the dark corridors so he opened a door onto the dance hall balcony, a small place used as a store for chairs. A man was slumped there with arms on the balustrade and head on arms. It was Drummond. Thaw had never seen him alone or depressed before. Drummond smiled faintly and pointed to a chair.
“How are you, Duncan? Why aren’t you dancing?”
“I can’t.”
From up here the dancers seemed blind caps of hair with projecting hands and feet like the limbs of starfish. The linked couples twitched and turned as if the music was a fluid vibrating them. When it stopped they hurried to the side of the hall like corpuscles into a clot. Drummond sighed and said,
“They’re villainous, Duncan, downright villainous, absolutely villainous.”
“Who are?”
“Women.”
Drummond gazed down on the dancers and said, “One kept following me around tonight and looking at me … she went off with someone else ten minutes ago. I think I could have had her if I’d wanted. But I saw Molly dancing, and I’d no heart for anything of that kind. I don’t know why. She’s past her best and engaged to an Irish vet and flirting away….”
“Molly Tierney?”
“I used to go about with her. You must admit she’s good-looking. She avoids me now.”
“Why?”
“I suppose because her parents are nice and mine aren’t. My mother told her she wasn’t fit to sleep with a pig. Which forced me into the unenviable position of declaring she was fit to sleep with a pig,”
They were silent again, gazing on the dancers. Then Drummond said, “I tried to cure myself by imagining her pissing and excreting and menstruating, but the connection made these acts beautiful to me.”
“How do women menstruate? At regular times on regular days?”
“When they reach Molly’s age they can do it running for a tram, or standing before an easel, or at dinner or talking quietly to a friend, as we are. She let me watch her sometimes.”
“What?”
“We shared many little secrets of that kind,” said Drummond gloomily. This aspect of love had never entered Thaw’s fantasies. He rubbed his face in frustration. Drummond said, “You’ll be happier with women when you’re better known−prestige makes a lot of them randy. Janet Weir used to go around with the president of the students’ representative council, but when Jimmy Macbeth grew famous for drinking himself to death she kept company with him for a day or two. Then the film Cyrano de Bergerac popularized long noses and she turned to me. A lot of girls like me because I’m supposed to be a symbol of something. It’s humiliating in some ways but lucky in others. What do you think of Janet?”
“I don’t know her.”
“She looks like the Mona Lisa but has nicer legs. She invited me into her room last night and told me she loved me.”
“Oh, God,” said Thaw, beating his brow. It felt like a gate which had been locked and soldered