Lanark: a life in 4 books (53 page)

She is clearly going to make a generous suggestion so Thaw interrupts by saying that a good night’s rest is worth any expense. They all get out of the car and enter the hotel. At the reception desk he says he isn’t hungry and will go straight to bed. They bid him goodnight.

The hotel is vast and he is surprised by the smallness of his room. He is very breathless but gets into bed, takes two torpedo pills and sinks into sleep at once.

Twice or thrice next morning he dimly hears someone knocking and calling the time and he rises at last about eleven. He breathes easily but his mind is stupid, his body heavy. He has missed breakfast and takes coffee and toast uneasily in the corner of a huge lounge. He pays his bill at the reception desk and goes outside. The day is windy and overcast. A dislike of returning makes him unwilling to face the long drive-way; besides, the wind is pushing him the other way. He walks round the hotel and over some lawns, fingering the last half-crowns and coppers in his pocket. Passing a rectangular pool of waterli-lies he flings them in. A path leads through a rhododendron shrubbery to a gate onto a moor. He goes through.

The moor rises to a ridge between two rocky hills. There is no path, and sometimes the heather gives way to mossy patches where his feet sink and squelch. He takes two or three hours to reach the ridge and rests on the leeward side of an untidy heap of stones. The heather before him slopes down to the ocean, but a hump of it hides the shore. He sees arms of land dividing the grey water, some patched with fields, others rocky and sloping up into mountains. He thinks one might be Ben Rua. He notices that a nearby stone in the heap has a surface carved with words:

Upon
THIS SPOT
King Edward
had lunch after stalking
28th August, 1902

For some reason this seems funny and he laughs a lot but isn’t really happy. He takes another pill which makes him slightly happy, but not much, so he throws the rest away. The wind feels colder. He stands and idly consults the compass. The needle directs him downhill.

After walking for a while he sees the ground sloping away on each side as well as in front. He seems to be on a promontory, but the wind and the slope and his instinct make it easier to go on. The promontory ends in many little cliffs with slopes of heather and tumbled rocks between. Descent is easy at first, then he comes to steeper rocks and must scramble down gullies of loose stones that collapse and slide. He falls the last few yards and lies under boulders among withered bracken, thinking, I’m sore and don’t like it. There is a bleeding scratch along one leg and a shoulder aches. He feels sticky and sweating, his heart hammers and he thinks, I need a bath. He pulls off knapsack, coat, jacket, jersey, and then feels the cold and walks down a steep beach of big pebbles like stone eggs and potatoes. They slide awkwardly. He stumbles across them.

The first wave is no shock but the beach shelves steeply and the next, which is large and sudden, slaps his chest, floats him off his legs and knocks him backward onto the sliding pebbles in two or three feet of water. He rises spluttering, the shirt sticking and rasping on his skin. Laughing with rage he pulls it off and wades out against the sea shouting, “
You
can’t get rid of me!” He bows his head into the slapping waves, struggles through them with his arms and finds he is rising higher and higher out of the water. His feet are on a submerged ridge, he is waist deep when he reaches the end and steps forward onto fluid. He wallows under, gasping and tumbling over and over in salt sting, knowing nothing but the need not to breathe. A humming drumming fills his brain, in panic he opens eyes and glimpses green glimmers through salt sting. And when at last, like fingernails losing clutch on too narrow a ledge, he, tumbling, yells out last dregs of breath and has to breathe, there flows in upon him, not pain, but annihilating sweetness.

CHAPTER 31.

Nan

Lanark opened his eyes and looked thoughtfully round the ward. The window was covered again by the Venetian blind and a bed in one corner was hidden by screens. Rima sat beside him eating figs from a brown paper bag. He said, “That was very unsatisfying. I can respect a man who commits suicide after killing someone (it’s clearly the right thing to do) but not a man who drowns himself for a fantasy. Why did the oracle not make clear which of these happened?”

Rima said, “What are you talking about?”

“The oracle’s account of my life before Unthank. He’s just finished it.”

Rima said firmly, “In the first place that oracle was a woman, not a man. In the second place her story was about me. You were so bored that you fell asleep and obviously dreamed something else.”

He opened his mouth to argue but she popped a fig in, saying, “It’s a pity you didn’t stay awake because she told me a lot about you. You were a funny, embarrassing, not very sexy boy who kept chasing me when I was nineteen. I had the sense to marry someone else.”

“And you!” cried Lanark, angrily swallowing, “were a frigid cock-teasing virgin who kept shoving me off with one hand and dragging me back with the other. I killed someone because I couldn’t get you.”

“We must have been listening to different oracles. I’m sure you imagined all that. Is there anything else to eat?”

“No. We used it all up.”

With a clattering of purposeful feet a stretcher was pushed into the ward among a crowd of doctors and nurses. Munro marched in front; technicians followed dragging cylinders and apparatus. They went behind the screens in the corner and nothing could be heard but low hissing and some phrases which seemed to have drifted from the corridors.

“… the conceived conceiving in mid conception …”

“….. inglorious Milton, guiltless Cromwell …..”

“Why inglorious? Why not guilty?”

“She came naked. That helped.”

Munro came over and stood at the bed’s foot regarding them gravely. He said, “I’ve arranged a meeting with Lord Monboddo three hours from now to authorize your departure from the institute. I had meant you to wait here till then but we’ve had an unexpected delivery of human beings. They’re in good condition, but feeble, and will die if someone puts them off their food. A nurse is bringing your clothes. You can dress and wait in the staff club.”

“No need,” said Lanark. “We wouldn’t spread our opinions in a case like this.”

Munro asked Rima, “Do you agree?”

“Of course, but I’d like to see the staff club.”

“If I can trust you I’d like you to stay here. This is a lonely ward and company would help the woman feel at home.”

Rima said brightly, “I’ll be delighted to help you, Dr. Munro, but will you do something for us? Get Monsignor Noakes to send more of his lovely food. It will be easy to not mention food when we have some.”

Munro walked away saying grimly, “I promise nothing, but I’ll do what I can.”

Lanark stared at her and said, “You are unscrupulous!”

She asked in a hurt voice, “Aren’t you glad I’m not like you?”

“Very glad.”

“Then show it, please.”

They heard the technicians and their apparatus leave the ward. Only a few doctors were busy behind the screens when a nurse came to Rima and Lanark with an armful of clothes and a couple of fat rucksacks and said, “Dr. Munro wants you to dress now. He says the rucksacks are full of food for your journey and you can start eating it when you like.”

Rima seized the female garments and stroked them with her fingertips. They were blond and velvety. A small excited smile curved her lips. She sprang naked from bed, saying, “I’ll dress in the bathroom.” She ran to the door at the end of the ward and Lanark examined the rucksacks. Each contained a rolled-up leather overcoat and hard little blocks of compressed fruit and meat wrapped in rice paper. One held a red thermos flask of coffee and a flat steel flask of brandy, the other a first-aid kit and an electric torch. Departure from this far too warm, too insulated place seemed disturbingly near. Lanark got up and carried his clothes to the bathroom.

Rima stood before a mirror, brushing her hair downward over a shoulder with slow, even strokes. She wore a short, amber-coloured, long-sleeved dress, and sandals of yellow leather, and Lanark stood half-hypnotized by her cool golden elegant figure. She murmured, “Well?”

He said, “Not bad,” and started washing at a basin.

“Why don’t you say I’m beautiful?”

“When I do you disparage me.”

“Yes, but I feel lonely when you don’t.”

“All right. You’re beautiful.”

He dried himself and began putting on a grey tweed suit and pullover. She tied her hair carefully with a dark yellow ribbon, looking sad and thoughtful. He kissed her and said, “Cheer up! You’re the light and I’m the shadow. Aren’t you glad we’re different?”

She pulled a face and went out, saying, “It’s hard to shine without encouragement.”

When he re-entered the ward, the doctors, nurses and screens had gone and Rima was talking to a woman in the corner bed. He joined them, noticing a small bald wrinkled head sticking from under a coverlet. The mother lay half sunk in a bank of pillows. Her body was slight, there were grey glints in her brown hair and youth and age were equally mingled in her gaunt little face. She smiled wanly and said, “It’s strange seeing you again, mystery man.”

He stared blankly. Rima said, “It’s Nancy. Don’t you remember Nan?”

He sat by the bed almost laughing with surprise. He said, “I’m glad you escaped from the Elite.”

He could not stop grinning. Since entering the institute he had forgotten Sludden and his harem, and now these tangled love-lives seemed wonderfully funny. He pointed at the cot. “You’ve a nice-looking baby.”

“Yes! Isn’t she like her father?”

“Don’t be silly,” said Rima gently. “Babies aren’t like people.

Who is the father anyway? Toal?”

“Of course not.”

“Then who is he?”

“Sludden.”

Rima peered at what was visible of the baby’s face.

“Are you sure?”

Nan smiled sadly. “Oh, yes. I wasn’t his fiancée, like Gay, or his vulgar mistress, like Frankie, or his clever mistress, like you. I was the poor little girl he had been kind to, but he loved me most, though I had to keep that a secret. Whenever I was tired of being neglected and tried to escape he would come to my lodgings and climb drainpipes and break in through windows. Sludden was tremendously athletic. He would hold me tight and tell me that though we’d slept together so often our lovemaking was still fresh and adventurous and it would be stupid to give it up because of the other girls. He said he needed all of you so that he could be lively with me. He was the first man I ever loved and I never really wanted anyone else, though I was always planning to leave him, before my illness got bad.”

“What illness?”

“I began to grow mouths, not just in my face but in other places, and when I was alone they argued and shouted and screamed at me. Sludden was very good with them. He could always get them singing in tune, and when we slept together he even made me glad of them. He said he’d never known a girl who could be pierced in so many places.”

Nan smiled in an almost motherly way and Lanark, with a pang of jealousy, saw the same soft, remembering look on Rima’s face. Nan sighed and said, “But they drove even Sludden away in the end (the mouths did), because as I grew worse I needed him more and he didn’t like that. He was going into politics and he had a lot to do.”

Lanark and Rima cried out together, “Politics?” and Rima said, “He always made fun of people who went into politics.”

“I know, but when you disappeared he replaced you with a protest girl, a big brassy blonde who played the guitar and kept telling us her father was a brigadier. I didn’t like her at all. She said we should prepare to seize the reins of the economy, and it was very important to care for people, but she always talked too much to listen to anyone. While she was speaking Sludden would wink at us behind her back. A lot of the Elite crowd went Protestant then. Hundreds of new cliques appeared with names and badges I can’t even remember. Even criminals wore badges. Suddenly Sludden came in wearing a badge and laughing his head off. He’d gone with the blonde to a protest meeting and been elected to a committee. He said we should all become protestants because nobody had confidence nowadays in Provost Dodd and we had a real chance of seizing the city. None of that made sense to me. You see I was pregnant and Sludden wouldn’t allow me near enough to tell him. When I managed it at last he grew very serious. He said it was a crime to bring children into the world before it had been redeemed by revolution. He wanted the baby killed before it was born but I wouldn’t allow that. Pass her to me, please.” Rima lifted the baby into Nan’s arms. It opened its eyes, gave a small mew of complaint and returned to sleep against her breast. She said,” He called me selfish, and he was right, I suppose. I had never known anyone who wanted me before I met Sludden, and now he didn’t want me at all, and I needed someone else, though the thought of the coming baby often made me quite mad and sick. I felt I was being crushed under a whole pile of women with Sludden jumping up and down on top, wearing a crown and laughing. Then the baby would move inside me and I would suddenly feel calm and complete. I was sorry for Sludden then. He seemed a frantic greedy child running everywhere looking for breasts to grab and mothers to feed him and who would never, never have enough. Did you feel that, Rima?”