Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [145]
“Goodness, Duncan. What a lot of good work. You make me feel very lazy.”
He put the work away and returned to the hearth. It was nearly dark outside and most of the light came flickering from a sheaf of vivid flames in the grate. Marjory looked up at him and smiled. Her hands were folded in her lap. Thaw stood by the table and felt a silence like the silence in the mathematics room when the teacher had asked a question he couldn’t answer.
“You know I’m afraid of you, Marjory,” he blurted.
“Why, Duncan?”
“I suppose because I … I like you very much.”
“I like you too, Duncan.”
There was more silence. He thought to break it with a joke. He said derisively, “Do you know that a while ago I actually believed you were going out with another man—”
She interrupted at once. “Oh, Duncan, I meant to tell you about that. I know a boy at the university, he … takes me sometimes to dances and things, but I—I don’t know how to say this without seeming vain—I think he … likes me more than I like him.”
“That’s all right,” said Thaw abstractedly. He sat on the hearth rug by her feet and laid his head against her knee.
“I … oh, I …” he murmured.
His intellect had dissolved. He shaped words with his lips but only one or two became sound: “mother” he said once, and shortly after that “world,” but he was unconscious of thoughts and later could not remember thinking.
“And yet you …” he murmured, reaching up and touching her cheek curiously. She stirred a little. “I think I’ll have to be going home now,” she said.
“Of course,” he said, standing up. “I was dreaming. I’ll see you home.”
He helped her on with her coat and they went downstairs.
He stopped outside the close mouth and pointed across at the sighing silhouette of the park trees. “Let’s go through the park.”
“But Duncan, the gates are locked.”
“There’s a railing missing here. Come on. It’ll be a shortcut.” He helped her through the narrow gap and down an embankment on the other side. Their feet rustled dead leaves. They crossed dark smooth lawns and walked round a splashing fountain among the dumpy bodies of holly trees. Two glimmering swans paddled drowsily in the black water of the ornamental pond and they heard the somnolent squawk of a goose from the island in the middle. There was a wide bridge over the Kelvin with lightless iron candelabra on plinths at each end. Thaw rested his elbows on the parapet and said, “Listen.”
Nearby an almost full moon was freckled by the top leaves of an elm. The river gurgled faintly against its clay bank, the distant fountain tinkled. Marjory said, “Lovely.”
He said, “I’ve once or twice felt moments when calmness, unity and … and glory seemed the core of things. Have you ever felt that?”
“I think so, Duncan. I once went with friends onto the Campsies and I got separated from them. It was a lovely warm day. I think I felt it a little then.”
“But must these moments always be lonely? Won’t love let us enjoy them with somebody else?”
“I don’t know, Duncan.”
Thaw looked at her. “Yah. Come on,” he said genially. “And please put your arm through mine.”
Beyond the bridge the road divided and a monument to Carlyle stood in the fork. It was a rough granite pillar with the top cut in the shape of the prophet’s upper body. Moonlight lay like white frost on brow, beard and shoulders and left the hollow cheeks and concave eye sockets in gloom. Thaw shook his free fist and shouted, “Go home, ye spy! Go home, ye traitor to democracy! … He follows me everywhere,” he explained to Marjory, and helped her over a locked gate into the lighted street.
As they passed the university Marjory said, “Duncan, have you had much experience of girls?”
“Not much, and all of one sort.”
He told her about Kate Caldwell, Molly Tierney and June Haig, speaking lightly and jokingly. She punctuated the story with murmurs of “Oh, Duncan.”
“And there you have my experience of girls,” he ended.
“Oh, Duncan.”
The phrase was so loaded with affectionate pity that he began to think he had