“Why can’t they examine me in standing on my head balancing chairs on my feet? Homework for that might improve my health.”
“And do you really think you know what’s good for you better than the teachers and headmasters who’ve studied the subject all their lives?”
“Yes. Yes. Where my own needs are concerned I do know better.”
Mrs. Thaw put a hand to her side and said in a strange voice, “Oh, bloody hell!” Then she said, “Why did I bring children into the world?” and began weeping.
Thaw was alarmed. It was the first time he had heard her curse or seen her weep and he tried to sound reasonable and calm. “Mummy, it doesnae matter if I fail those exams. If I leave school and get a job you won’t need to work so hard.”
Mrs. Thaw dabbed her eyes and resumed sewing, her lips pressed tight together. After a pause she said, “And what job will you get? An errand boy’s?”
“There must be other jobs.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know, but there must be!”
“Hm!”
Thaw shut his books and said, “I’m going for a walk.”
“That’s right, run away. Men can always run away from work. Women never can.”
There was daylight in the sky but none in the streets and the lamps were lit. Boys of his own age strolled on the pavements in crowds of three and four, girls walked in couples, groups of both sexes gossiped and giggled by café doors. Thaw felt inferior and conspicuous. Overheard whispers seemed to mock the absent look he wore to disarm criticism, overheard laughter seemed caused by the upright hair he never brushed or combed. He walked quickly into streets with fewer shops where people moved in enigmatic units. His confidence grew with the darkness. His face took on a resolute, slightly wolfish look, his feet hit the pavement firmly, he strode past couples embracing in close mouths feeling isolated by a stern purpose which put him outside merely human satisfactions. This purpose was hardly one he could have explained (after all he was just walking, not walking to anywhere) but sometimes he thought he was searching for the key.
The key was small and precise, yet in its use completely general and completely particular. Once found it would solve every problem: asthma, homework, shyness before Kate Caldwell, fear of atomic war; the key would make everything painful, useless and wrong become pleasant, harmonious and good. Since he thought of it as something that could be contained in one or two sentences, he had looked for it in the public libraries but seldom on the science or philosophy shelves. The key had to be recognized at once and by heart, not led up to and proved by reasoning. Nor could it be an article of religion, since its discovery would make churches and clergy unnecessary.
Nor was it poetry, for poems were too finished and perfect to finish and perfect anything themselves. The key was so simple and obvious that it had been continually overlooked and was less likely to be a specialist’s triumphant conclusion than to be mentioned casually by someone innocent and dull; so he had searched among biographies and autobiographies, correspondences, histories and travel books, in footnotes to outdated medical works and the indexes of Victorian natural histories. Recently he had thought the key more likely to be found on a night walk through the streets, printed on a scrap of paper blown out of the rubble of a bombed factory, or whispered in a dark street by someone leaning suddenly out of a window.
Tonight he came to a piece of waste ground, a hill among tenements that had been suburban twenty years earlier. The black shape of it curved against the lesser blackness of the sky and the yellow spark of a bonfire flickered just under the summit. He left the pallid gaslit street and climbed upward, feeling coarse grass against his shoes and occasional broken bricks. When he reached the fire it had sunk to a few small flames among a heap of charred sticks and rags. He groped on the ground till he found some scraps of cardboard and paper and added them to the fire with a torn-up handful of withered grass. A tall flame shot up and he watched it from outside the brightness it cast. He imagined other people arriving one at a time and standing in a ring round the firelight. When ten or twelve had assembled they would hear a heavy thudding of wings; a black shape would pass overhead and land on the dark hilltop, and the messenger would walk down to them bringing the key. The fire burned out and he turned and looked down on Glasgow. Nothing solid could be seen, only lights—streetlamps like broken necklaces and bracelets of light, neon cinema signs like silver and ruby brooches, the ruby, emerald and amber twinkle of traffic regulators—all glowing like treasure spilled on the blackness.
He went back down to the dingy streets and entered a close in one of the dingiest. The stair was narrow, ill lit and smelling of cat piss. Before a lavatory door on a half landing he stepped over two children who knelt on a rug, playing with a clockwork toy. The top landing had three doors, one with
FORBES COULTER
on it in Gothic script among gold vine leaves, framed behind glass which the passage of years had blotched with mildew on the inside. The door was opened by a small woman with an angry cloud of curly grey hair. She said plaintively, “Robert’s down in the lavatory Duncan, you’ll just have to come in and wait.”
Thaw stepped across a cupboard-sized lobby into a tidy comfortable crowded room. Wardrobe, sideboard, table and chairs left narrow spaces between them. A tall window had a sink in front and a gas cooker beside it. A shadow was cast over the fireplace by drying clothes on a pulley in the ceiling, and the table held the remains of a meal.
Mrs. Coulter began moving plates to the sink and Thaw sat by the fire and stared into a bed-recess near the door. Coulter’s father lay there, his shoulders supported by pillows, his massive sternly lined blind enduring face turned slightly toward the room.
Thaw said, “Are you any better, Mr. Coulter?”
“In a way, yes, Duncan; but then again, in a way, no. How’s the school doing?”
“I’m all right at art and English.”
“Art is your subject isn’t it? I used to paint a bit myself. During the thirties a few of us—we were unemployed, you know−we got together on Thursday evenings in a room near Brigton Cross and we’d get a teacher or a model along from the art school. We called ourselves the Brigton Socialist Art Club. Have you heard of Ewan Kennedy? The sculptor?”
“I’m not sure, Mr. Coulter. Mibby. I mean the name’s familiar but I’m no’ sure.”
“He was one of us. He went to London and did quite well for himself. A year ago…. No. Wait.”
Thaw looked at Mr. Coulter’s big gnarled hand lying quietly on the quilt, a cigarette with a charred tip between two fingers. “It was three years ago. His name was in the
Bulletin
. He was making a bust of Winston Churchill for some town in England. I thought when I read it, I used to know you.”
Mr. Coulter hummed a quiet tune then said, “My father was a picture framer to trade. He did everything in those days, carving the wood, gilding it, even hanging the picture sometimes. Some of his work must be in the Art Galleries to the present day. I used to help him with the hanging. Hanging a picture is an art in itself. What I meant to tell you was this: I was hanging these pictures in a house in Menteith Row on the Green. It’s a slum now but the wealthiest folk in Glasgow once lived in those houses, and in my time some of them still did, and this house belonged to Jardine of Jardine and Beattie, the shipbuilders. Young Jardine was a lawyer and became Lord Provost, and
his
son proved tae be a bit of a rogue, but never mind. I was hanging these pictures in the entrance hall: marble floor, oak-panelled walls. The frames were carved walnut covered with gold leaf, but the hall was dark because there were no windows opening into it, apart from a wee skylight window that was no use at all because it was stained glass. When I had finished I opened the front door and went down the steps onto the pavement outside and stood looking in through the open door. It was a morning in the early spring, cold, but the sun quite bright. A girl came along and said, ‘What are ye staring at?’ I pointed through the door and said ‘Look at that. It looks like a million dollars.’ The sun was shining intae the hall and the gold frames were shining on the walls. It really did look like a million dollars.”
Mr. Coulter smiled a little.
Coulter entered and said, “Hullo, Duncan. Hullo, Forbes. Forbes, your cigarette’s out. Will I light it for you?”
“Ye can light it if you like.”
Coulter got a match and lit the cigarette, then went to the sink, put an arm round his mother’s waist, and said, “My ain wee mammy, how about a fag? You’ve given my daddy a fag, give me a fag.”
Mrs. Coulter took a cigarette packet from her apron pocket and handed it over, grumbling, “You’re no’ old enough tae smoke but.”
“True, but my wee mammy can refuse me nothing. Have these two been discussing art?”
“Aye, they’ve been talking about their art.”
“Well, Thaw, my intellectual friend, what’s it to be? A game of chess or a dauner along the canal bank?”
“I wouldnae mind a dauner.”
They walked on the towpath talking about women. Coulter had dropped the hard cheerful manner he wore at home. Thaw said, “The only time I reach them is when I speak at the debating society. Even Kate Caldwell notices me then. She was in the front row of desks last night, staring at my face with her mouth and eyes wide open. I felt dead witty and intellectual. I felt like a king or something. She sits behind me at maths now. I’ve made a poem about it.”
He paused, hoping that Coulter would ask him to recite. Coulter said, “Everybody writes poems about girls at our age. It’s what they call a phase. Even big Sam Lang writes poems about girls. Even I occasionally—”
“Never mind. I like my wee poem. Bob, if I ask you a question will ye promise to answer truthfully?”
“Ask away.”
“Is Kate Caldwell keen on me?”
“Her? On you? No.”
“I think she’s mibby a bit keen on me.”
“She’s a wee grope,” said Coulter.
“What?”
“A grope. A feel. Lyle Craig in the fifth year is supposed to be winching her steady, and last Friday I saw her being lumbered by a hardman up a close near the Denistoun Palais.”
“Lumbered?”
“Groped. Felt. She’s nothing but a wee—”
“Don’t use that word!” cried Thaw.
They walked in silence until at last Coulter said, “I shouldnae have told you that, Duncan.”
“But I’m glad. Thank you.”
“I’m sorry I told you.”
“I’m not. I want to know every obstacle, every obstacle there is. There’s the obstacles of not being attractive, not having money to take her out, not knowing how to talk to her, and now it seems she’s a flirt. If I ever reach her she’ll shift elsewhere and keep on shifting.”
“Mibby it’s a mistake to start with Kate Caldwell. You should practise on someone else first. Practise on my girl, big June Haig.”
“Your girl?”
“Well, I’ve only been out with her once. There’s a big demand for her.”
“What’s she like?”
“She’s got a back like an all-in wrestler. Her arms are as thick as my thighs and her thighs as thick as your waist. Cuddling her is like sinking intae a big sofa.”
“You hardly make her sound attractive.”
“Big June is the most attractive girl I know. She’s exciting and she’s comfortable. Ask her to the third-year dance.”
Thaw remembered June Haig. She was a sulky-looking girl and not as large as Coulter pretended, but she had failed to get out of the second year and was called Big June to distinguish her from the less developed girls she sat among. Thaw felt a pang of interest. He said, “Big June wouldnae come to a dance with me.”
“She might. She doesnae like you but she’s intrigued by your reputation.”
“Have I a reputation?”
“You’ve two reputations. Some say you’re an absentminded professor with no sex life at all; others say that’s just a disguise and you’ve the dirtiest sex life in the whole school.”
Thaw stood still and held his head. He cried, “I see no way out, no way out. I want to be close to Kate, I want to be valued by her, I suppose I want to marry her. What bloody good is this useless wanting, wanting, wanting?”
“Don’t think your problems would be solved by marrying her.”
“Why not?”
“Fornication isnae just sticking it in and wagging it around. You’ve tae time things so that when you’re pushing hardest she’s exactly ready to take it. If ye don’t get this exactly right she feels angry and disappointed with you. It needs a lot of practice tae get right.”
“Examinations!” cried Thaw. “It’s all examinations! Must everything we do satisfy someone
else
before it’s worthwhile? Is everything we do because we enjoy it selfish and useless? Primary school, secondary school, university, they’ve got the first twenty-four years of our lives numbered off for us and to get into the year above we’ve to pass an exam. Everything is done to please the examiner, never for fun. The one pleasure they allow is anticipation: ‘Things will be better after the exam.’ It’s a lie. Things are never better after the exam. You’d think love was something different. Oh, no. It has to be studied, practised, learnt, and you can get it wrong.”
“You’re eloquent tonight,” said Coulter. “You’ve got me almost as mixed up as yourself. But not quite. You see there’s really no connection between—”
“
What’s that?
”
“That? A kid singing.”
They were beside a fence of old railway sleepers planted upright at the towpath edge. From the other side a clear tuneless little voice sang:
“Ah’ve a laddie in Ame-e-e-rica,
Ah’ve a laddie ower the sea;
Ah’ve a laddie in Ame-e-e-rica,
And he’s goantae marry me.”
They looked through a gap in the sleepers onto a road with the canal embankment on one side and the black barred windows of a warehouse on the other. A small girl was skipping with a rope and singing to herself in a circle of light under a lamp. Coulter said, “That kid’s too young to be up at this hour. Wht are ye grinning at?”
“I thought for a moment her words might be the key.”
“What key?”