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By Root 1460 0

for pills and he began fighting it with his only other weapon. Withdrawing to the centre of his mind he recalled images from bookshop windows and American comics: a nearly naked blonde smiling as if her body was a joke she wanted to share, a cowering dishevelled girl with eyes and mouth apprehensively open, a big-breasted woman with legs astride and hands on hips and a sullen selfish stare which seemed to invite the most selfish kind of assault. His penis stiffened and he breathed easily. He fixed on the last of these women and her face became the face of big June Haig. He imagined meeting her in the precipitous waste landscapes through which the bus was rushing. She wore white shorts and shirt but high-heeled shoes instead of climbing boots, and he raped her at great length with complicated mental and physical humiliations. To stop these thoughts from coming to a climax of masturbation he sometimes wrenched his mind from them and sat amazed that thought could make such strong bodily changes. As his penis shrank the asthma got hard and heavy in chest and throat; then his mind gripped the image of the woman once more and a tingling chemical excitement spread again through his blood, widening all its channels and swelling the penis below and the air passages above. And behind it all suffocation waited like an unfulfilled threat.

The bus stopped in a street of uninteresting houses on the shore of a loch. Thaw and Ruth got out and found their mother’s friend awaiting them in a car. Ruth sat in front beside her. She was a small lady with a tight mouth and an abrupt way with the gear lever. Thaw, dumb with sexual broodings, sat in the back seat hardly listening to the conversation.

“Is Mary still working in that drapery?”

“Yes, Miss Maclaglan.”

“A pity. A pity your father can’t get a better job. Won’t these open-air organizations he does so much for pay him anything?”

“I don’t think so. He only works for them in his spare time.”

“Hm. Well, I hope you’re very helpful to your mother around the house. She isn’t at all well, you know.”

Ruth and Thaw gazed out of the window in embarrassment. The road undulated in slanting sunlight over a great boggy moor with small irregular lochans in the folds of it. The summit of a conical peak arose beyond the curve of the moor’s horizon, and Thaw saw, with distaste, it was Ben Rua. To keep sexually excited he had been forced to imagine increasingly perverse things and now whatever in the outer world recalled other experiences upset him by its irrelevance. They came to the height of the moor and descended toward an arm of the sea with Kinlochrua on the other side, a strip of cottage-flecked lands beneath a grey and grey-green mountain. The tide was out and the clear shallow brine, reflecting blue sky over yellow sands, made a colour like emeralds. A sudden muffled clattering hurt their eardrums. Miss Maclaglan said, “They’re testing something at the munition factory. Let’s hope it isn’t atomic.” “Wasn’t the munition factory shut down when the war stopped?” said Ruth.

“Yes, it was shut for almost a year; then the Admiralty took it over. They’ve taken over the hostel too but they haven’t opened it yet, more’s the pity. The hostel was the best thing that ever happened here, it shook up their ideas a bit. Kinlochrua was dead before and it’s been dead since. Do you know that Mary Thaw is the only real friend I’ve made in the place? How can you be friendly with women who’re afraid to knit on Sundays because of what the minister will say? What has nosey old McPhedron to do with their knitting? Your brother isn’t too well, is he?”

Ruth turned and gave Thaw a glance which meant, Pull yourself together. She said, “He’s having one of his wheezy spells, but he’s got pills for it.”

“Well, I think he should go straight to bed the moment we get to the hotel.”

At the hotel Miss Maclaglan showed him upstairs to a small clean flower-patterned bedroom. He undressed slowly, removing a shoe and staring for ten minutes through the window, postponing from moment to moment the effort of removing the next. Outside