Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [74]
He got up and led Thaw from the summit by a fall of granite blocks which presented so many horizontal surfaces that he went down it like a flight of giant steps, hopping nimbly from one to another, using the umbrella to balance him in awkward places. Thaw jumped and scrambled sullenly after him. When they reached the more grassy slopes Thaw let the distance between them increase until the minister vanished behind a boulder; then he turned left and scrambled round the mountainside until a sufficient girth of it was between them and then set off toward the hostel.
The sun had set by the time he reached the road but it was still the gloaming, a protracted summer gloaming with the land dim but the sky lively with colours. He limped in at the hostel gate, the hard tarmac hurting his feet, and went by two straight paths to the manager’s bungalow. His mother sat knitting on a deck chair on the lawn. Nearby his father stabbed casually with a hoe at weeds in a small rockery. As Thaw approached Mrs. Thaw called reprovingly, “We were beginning to worry about you!”
He had meant to keep quiet about the climb as he had made it wearing sandals, but standing between his parents he said,“I bet you don’t know where I’ve been!”
“Well, where have you been?”
“There!”
Behind the hostel’s low straight roofs Rua showed like a black wedge cut out of the green rotund-looking sky. Soft stars were beginning to shine between a few feathery bloody clouds.
“You were up Ben Rua?”
“Aye.”
“Alone?”
“Aye.”
His mother said gently, “That could have been dangerous, Duncan.”
His father looked at his sandalled feet and said, “If you do it again you must tell someone you’re going first, so we know where to look if there’s an accident. But I don’t think we’ll complain this time; no, we won’t complain, we won’t complain.”
CHAPTER 15.
Normal
The Thaw family came home to Glasgow the year the war ended. They arrived late at night as thin rain fell, took a taxi at the station and sat numbly inside. Thaw looked out at a succession of desolate streets lit by lights that seemed both dim and harsh. Once Glasgow had been a tenement block, a school and a stretch of canal; now it was a gloomy huge labyrinth he would take years to find a way through. The flat was cold and disordered. During the war it had been let to strangers and the bedding and ornaments locked in the back bedroom. While his father and mother unpacked and shifted things he looked at his old books and found them dull and childish. He asked his mother, who was dusting, “How long will it be before we get back to normal?”
“What do you mean, normal?”
“You know, settled down.”
“I suppose in a week or two.”
He went to the living room where his father was looking through letters and said, “How long will it be before we get back to normal?”
“Maybe in two or three months, if we’re lucky.”
Mr. Thaw spent the next months typing letters at his bureau in the living room. With each post he got back letters with printed headings which he gave to Thaw, who drew on the blank backs. Thaw sat drawing and writing for hours at a tiny desk in the back bedroom, wearing a dressing gown and an embroidered smoking cap which had been his grandfather’s. He seldom looked at the letters whose backs he used, but once his eye was caught by the heading of the factory where his father had worked before the war. He read:
Dear Mr Thaw,
It would seem that a prophet is not without honour save in the city of his birth! I congratulate you on having done so well with the now defunct Ministry of Munitions.
Unfortunately we have no vacancy for a personnel officer at present. However, I am sure your manifest abilities will have no difficulty in finding employment elsewhere. Our hearty good wishes to you.
Yours faithfully,
John Blair
Managing Director
One day at dinner Mr. Thaw said to his wife, “I took a walk out Hogganfield way this morning. They’re building a reservoir to serve the new