Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [42]
“What about books?”
“Books?”
“I want to read to my patient and I have only these three.”
“Read! How Victorian. Let me see them. Hm. That seems a well-balanced selection. I don’t know how you could add to it unless you borrowed from poor Monsignor Noakes. He always has a fat little book with him. It might be a Bible. Bibles are full of funny stories.”
Lanark said, “Where could I find him?”
“Don’t be in such a hurry—I want to dissuade you from leaving us. Think of the time you could lose by it.”
“What do you mean?”
“In this universe every continent measures time by different calendars, so there is no means of measuring the time between them. A traveller going from the institute to a neighbouring continent—Unthank, perhaps, or Provan—must cross a zone where time is a purely subjective experience. Some make the transition and hardly notice it, but how many years did you lose when you came here?”
Lanark was troubled by a feeling of dread which he hid by standing up and saying abruptly, “Thank you for the warning, but a patient is expecting me. Where is Monsignor Noakes?” “At this hour he is usually in the smoking room watching the bathers. Go through the arches behind me and walk straight ahead. Turn left when you enter the third room, he will be behind the arch facing you.”
Lanark walked from the restaurant into a brilliant room where older people were playing bridge. The room beyond was dim and full of billiard tables with low lights over them. The next room contained a swimming bath. Amid raucous echoes some men and women with the even brown tan that comes from exposure to ultraviolet light were diving or racing or chatting on the edge. Lanark turned left along the tiled slippery platform until he reached a wall pierced by the usual arches. He climbed a few steps into a softly lit, thick-carpeted room full of leather armchairs. Noakes sat near the steps smoking a slim cigar and glancing furtively at the brown bodies refracted by the blue-green water. Lanark sat opposite him and said, “I am Dr. Lanark.”
“Oh yes.”
“A patient of mine needs reading material and I’m collecting books. Professor Ozenfant suggested you could lend me one.” Noakes gave no sign of noticing Lanark was there. He glanced from the bathers to his cigar and spoke quietly and listlessly. “Professor Ozenfant is a noted humorist. He knows I have only my breviary. If your patient had been interested in prayer she would have been my patient.”
“He thought you had a bible.”
“Another joke. I have a Greek testament, and I suppose your patient understands Greek as little as you do. What have you gathered so far?”
He looked at the books Lanark held out and waved wearily toward The Holy War.
“The other two are trash, but that one is good in parts. The main message, I mean, is true. I knew the author slightly. He wrote me as a character into one of his books—not that book, another. His description was malicious but insignificant. He described Ozenfant too, but more truthfully and at greater length. Ignore what I say. Ozenfant has warned you against me.”
“Ozenfant has said nothing against you.”
Noakes stared at the floor and whispered, “Then he has come to despise me as much as that.”
He raised his chin and spoke almost loudly.
“He owes his position to me, you know. It was I who cured him. Ozenfant was a very difficult case, half leech, half dragon. (Nowadays he pretends he was pure dragon. I know otherwise.) I believed that the Mass had cured him, and my prayers and sermons, but it was the music. Ah, what music we had in those days! When I discovered that he had no sense of holiness apart from music I made him our organist. He has risen since then, and I—I have declined. You notice, I suppose, a fretful querulous note in my voice?”
“Yes.”
“Then try to understand why. All these professors and artists and heads of department have become powerful by tearing tiny bits off the religion which cured them and developing these bits into religions of their own. No God unites them now, only mutual assistance