Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [179]
Not necessarily. In 1956 there were a hundred and fifty officially recognized murders in Britain, a third of them unsolved. Thaw certainly felt he had done something foul but denouncing himself to the police needed effort, so he thought as little and slept as much as possible. He didn’t dream nowadays. His mind was under a cold bandage of dullness.
He had a bruised hand, malnutrition and bronchial asthma, and received cortisone steroids, a new drug which healed the asthma in two days. The other things took longer. The hospital almoner wanted to contact his father but Thaw withheld the address. He said he would visit Mr. Thaw when he got out, not really meaning to.
He was released, went home, and packed a small canvas knapsack with some clothes and a shaving kit.
“You said he had given up shaving.”
He resumed it after the Evening News article in order not to look like his newspaper photograph. The knapsack contained one of Mr. Thaw’s old compasses. With over nine pounds in his pocket he went to the bus station at the end of Parliamentary Road. He thought of going to London, of sliding down the globe into the cluttered and peopled south, but at the station the needle of his mental compass swung completely and pointed to the northern firths and mountains. He decided to visit his father after all.
Consider him passing along the route described at the start of Book One, Chapter 18 only he dozes most of the way and gets out at Glehcoe village. He walks up a narrow road to the youth hostel, a road through a tunnel of branches. It is autumn, when the highlands are rich with purples, oranges and greeny-golds which would look gaudy if the grey light didn’t soften them.
“Leave out the local colour.”
All right.
It isn’t yet five o’clock and some climbers are waiting on the hostel steps. Thaw walks round the side of the building to the warden’s quarters at the back, but before knocking at the door he looks through a window. The room is a neat one with small watercolours of Loch Lomond on the walls which used to hang in the living room at Riddrie. He recognizes also a bookcase, writing desk and wooden tobacco jar carved in the shape of an owl. His father sits reading in an easy chair by a warm stove. There is a teapot under a cosy on a low table at his elbow, some cups, a cut-glass sugar bowl, milk jug and plate of biscuits. Two women sit on a sofa opposite. One is grey-haired and sixtyish; the other might be her daughter and is dark-haired and fortyish. The older woman knits, the younger reads. The quiet interior has a completeness, a calm contented polish, which Thaw feels should not be touched. He can break it, not add to it, so he finds a gap in the hedge leading to the road and returns to the village.
He has tea in a restaurant for tourists and wonders what to do. Going back to Glasgow feels impossible so he goes toward Fort William.
The lochside road is a dull one and at the dreary slate-bings by Ballachulish his breathing worsens and later makes him sit on a low wall beside a line of cars queuing for the ferry. An American lady stands by her car staring up the hill at a whitish stone thing like an old-fashioned petrol pump in the woods above. She asks, “Do you know what that is?”
He tells her he thinks it marks the spot where Colin Campbell, nicknamed the Red Fox, was murdered. She smiles slowly and says, “Did I read about that in Robert Stevenson’s Kidnapped?” Thaw says it is possible. She says, “You don’t look too well. Can I do anything to help?”
He mentions the illness and says it will pass. She says, “My husband is also a sufferer,” and gets back into the car. Then she comes out and hands him a paper tissue with some blue and pink torpedo-shaped pellets in it. She says, “Try one of these, they’re new.”
He swallows one and a moment later a happy warmth spreads through him. He looks at her lovingly. She says, “Don’t take more