I was studying a document when my attention was nagged by some difference outside the printed paper. I examined the top of my desk. It had been polished wood with a slightly rippled grain, but now the grain had vanished and the surface was as blank as a sheet of plastic. I looked round the office, which was furnished in the modern manner for I detested fussy details. The white walls and plain carpet were as usual but the view through the window had altered. What had been a typical street in the business centre of an old-fashioned industrial city, a street of elaborately carved and pillared façades, was now bordered by blank surfaces punctured by rectangular holes. I saw at once what was happening. Not content with showing itself in poorer materials than it kept for others, reality was economizing further. Where I had once seen irrelevant details and colours I saw none at all. Stone, wood and patterned surfaces became plain surfaces. The weaves of cloths were indistinguishable, and all doors looked flush-panelled.
Yet I did not feel ill-treated, for there was still enough outer reality for me to work with and in some ways I could work better. On entering a room of employees before this I usually had to look at several before recognizing the one I wanted, which wasted time, especially if I felt obliged to smile or nod at the men I noticed first. Now, when I entered a room, everyone but the man I wanted was as faceless as an egg, so I knew him at once. And later I only saw the man I wanted—nobody else was visible, unless they were slacking or wanted to speak to me, in which case they displayed enough substance to let me deal with them. You may wonder why I never collided with those surrounding me. Well, in my office it was other people’s business to keep out of my way, and when driving there I noticed traffic signs and adjacent vehicles, though pedestrians and scenery were invisible. But one day I parked the car in the usual side street, opened the door to walk to the office and could see neither street nor pavement, just a clear general greyness, and leading through it to the dim silhouette of my office (there were no other buildings) a line of solid, pavement-coloured stepping stones, each the size and shape of the sole of my shoe. I could only leave the car by walking along these; each vanished as I took my weight from it; I had spasms of vertigo and was in terror of what would happen if I stepped between the stones. On reaching the office doorstep (which was completely visible) I squatted and moved the palm of my hand experimentally down into the emptiness. A piece of pavement the shape of the hand appeared underneath it. Simultaneously three clerks solidified round me, asking if I felt unwell. I pretended, not convincingly, to tie a shoelace.
Later I sat on a swivel chair above fathoms of emptiness, grey emptiness all around except where, six feet to the right, a pencil moving on its point across an angled notepad showed where my secretary was taking down the words I dictated to her. My right hand felt as if it rested on my knee, but I could see nothing but the dial of the wristwatch. At half-past five a line of carpet-coloured stepping stones appeared which released me from the chair, but walking on them was hard for I could no longer see my feet, and when I reached the end, instead of the linoleum-coloured stepping stones of the lift floor I saw nothing: the emptiness before and behind was total and complete. I saw nothing, heard nothing and felt nothing but the soles of my feet pressing the floor under them. Suddenly I was too tired and angry to continue. I stepped forward and nothing happened, except that the pressure on my feet vanished. I neither fell nor floated. I had become bodiless in a bodiless world. I existed as a series of thoughts amidst infinite greyness.
At first I was greatly relieved. I have never been afraid of loneliness, and the previous days had been more of a strain than I had let myself believe. I slept almost at once, which means that I stopped thinking and the surrounding greyness went black. After a while it grew light again and for the first time in my life I was idle. Every life has blank moments when we stand waiting for a bus or a friend and there’s nothing to do but think. In the past I had filled these moments by calculating how an unexpected war or election would affect the wealth entrusted to me, but I had no zest for calculation now. Money, even imaginary money, needs the future to give it force. Without future it is not even ink in a ledger, paper in a purse. The future had gone with my body. There was nothing to do but remember, and I was depressed to find that the work which had given my life a goal and a decent order now looked like an arithmetical brain disease, a profit-and-loss calculation lasting years and proving nothing. My memory was a catalogue of things I had ignored and devalued. I had enjoyed no definite friendship or love, no intense hatred or desire; my life had been stony soil in which only numbers grew, and now I could do nothing but sift the stones and hope one or two would turn out to be jewels. I was the loneliest and most impotent man in the world. I was about to turn desperate when a lovely thing appeared in the air before me.
It was a cream-coloured wall patterned with brownish-pink roses. A beam of early morning summer sunlight shone on it and on me. I was sitting in bed with the wall on one side and two chairs on the other. It seemed a very big bed, though it was an ordinary single one, and two chairs had been placed to stop my falling out. My legs were covered by a quilt on which lay a tobacco pipe with a broken stem, a small slipper and a book with bright cloth pages. I was perfectly happy and singing a song on one note: oolooloolooloo. When tired of that I sang dadadadada for I had discovered the difference between loo and da and was interested in it. Later still, having tired of singing, I took the slipper and thumped the wall until my mother came. Each morning she lay in bed with a thin solemn young man on the other side of the roses. Her warmth reached me through the wall so I was never cold or lonely. I don’t suppose my mother was unnaturally tall but she seemed twice the size of anyone else, and brown-haired, and regally slender above the hips. Below the hips she changed a lot, being often pregnant. I remember seeing her upper body rising behind the curve of her stomach like a giantess half-hidden by the horizon of a calm sea. I remember sitting on that curve with the back of my head between her breasts, knowing her face was somewhere above and feeling very sure of myself. I can’t remember her features at all. Light or darkness came from them according to her mood, and I am certain this was more than the fantasy of a small child. I remember her sitting very still in a room of chattering strangers and steadily reducing them to whispers by the sullen silent fury she radiated. Her good moods were equally radiant and made the dullest company feel gallant and glamorous. She was never happy or depressed, she was glorious or sombre, and very attractive to modest dependable men. The men I called father were all of that kind. Apart from loving her they had no peculiarities. She must have attracted them like an extravagant vice for she was a poor housekeeper; on coming to live with a man she tried to prepare meals and keep things tidy, but the effort soon waned. I think the first house I remember was the happiest because it had only two small rooms and my first father was not fastidious. I believe he was a garage mechanic, for there was a car engine beside my bed and some huge tyres under the recess bed in the kitchen. As I grew older my mother was less ready to come when I thumped the wall, so I learned to crawl or stagger to the bed next door and be pulled in. She would lie reading newspapers and smoking cigarettes while my father made a hill under the blankets with his knees and suddenly flattened it when I had climbed on top. Later he would rise and bring us a breakfast of tea and fried bread and eggs.
The house was in a tenement with a narrow, busy street in front and a cracked asphalt yard at the back. Behind the yard was the embankment of a canal, and on sunny days my mother dragged me up this by straps fastened to a harness round my chest and we made a nest in the long grass beside the mossy towpath. The canal was choked with rushes and leafy weeds; nobody passed by but an old man with a greyhound or boys who should have been at school. I played with the tobacco pipe and my slipper, pretending I was my mother and the pipe me and the slipper my bed, or pretending the slipper was a car with the pipe driving. She read or daydreamed as she did at home, and I know now that her power came from these dreams, for where else could an almost si
lent woman without abilities learn the glamour of an enslaved princess, the authority of an exiled queen? The place where we lay was level with our kitchen window, and when my father returned from work he would prepare a meal and call us in to eat it. He seemed a contented man, and I am sure the quarrels were not his fault. One night I was wakened by noise from the dark wall at my ear, my mother’s voice beating like high waves over protesting mutters. The noise stopped and she entered the room and lay with me and hugged me hungrily. This happened several times, filling the nights with anticipation and delight and leaving me stupefied all day, for her thundering kisses exploded like fireworks in my ears and for long spells annihilated thought entirely. So I hardly noticed when she dressed me, and packed a suitcase, and took me away from that house. I don’t remember if we travelled by train or bus, I only remember that as night fell we walked along a track between trees whose high branches crashed together in the wind, and the track brought us to a farmhouse where we lived for over a year. My sister was born soon after we arrived.
My mother’s ominous attraction is shown by the fact that even in a visible state of pregnancy, with a two-year-old son, she was employed as a housekeeper by a thrifty farmer whose wife had died. For the first few weeks I was happy. We slept together in a small low-ceilinged room at the back of the house and ate by ourselves. I remember us sitting furtively in a corner of the cosy parlour while the farmer and his children dined before the fire. My mother was singing softly in my ear:
“Wee chooky birdy, tol-lol-lol
laid an egg on the window sol.
The window sol
began to crack,
Wee chooky bird roared and grat.”
Soon afterward we all began eating together and I slept in the little low room by myself. My mother spent most of the time in an upstairs room I could never visit and an old woman came each day to do the housework. I believe the old woman was first employed as temporary help while the baby was born, but she was still cleaning the house and making meals many months later, and carrying eggs and toast upstairs on a tray while the farmer, his children, and I breakfasted on porridge at the kitchen table. All my memories of the farm have eggs in them. When exploring the barnyard one day I found a great cluster of brown eggs in a clump of nettles behind an old cart. It was a surprising sight, for our eggs usually came from wooden henhouses in a nearby field. I trotted into the kitchen to tell someone. The farmer was there, and he explained that hens sometimes laid astray in an effort to get their eggs hatched instead of eaten. I led him to the eggs; he gathered them in his cap, praised me and gave me a peppermint. Whenever I felt lonely after that I would crawl into a henhouse through one of the tiny doors the hens used, steal an egg from under a sitting fowl and go to the stackyard or byre and pretend to find it under hay or among the cowcake. Then I took it to the farmer, who always patted my head and gave me a peppermint. I think he must have known where I got the other eggs, but it was friendly of him to pretend otherwise. He probably liked me.
His children did not. There was a garden of tangled grass and stunted fruit trees behind the house, and on warm summer evenings I played there, building nests in the ivy round my bedroom window. One evening the farmer’s daughter came and said, “What do you think you’re doing?”
She may have been less than twelve but she seemed a grown woman to me. I said I was making a nest for a bird to lay an egg in. She said, “A wee chooky birdy? That’s daft. And where did you get the straw?”
I said, “On the ground in the yard.”
“Then it belongs to my daddy and you stole it so put it back there.”
Since I continued building she gripped and twisted my wrists until I kicked her ankle, then she went off screaming she would tell my mother and I would be sent away. I ran crying to the henhouse field, squeezed through a hen door on hands and knees and squatted in a corner of the grain-sprinkled floor till it grew dark. I meant to starve to death there but I heard my mother distantly calling, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, and at last I felt that the misery in her breast and the misery in mine were the same thing. I squeezed through the door and moved among the black henhouses under a high ceiling of stars. An owl was hooting. Suddenly I found her and wrapped my arms round her big stomach and she was kind to me. A few nights later I was wakened by a great uproar and she entered the room and climbed into bed. This was less pleasant than it had been in town, for she brought my sister and the bed was overcrowded. The loving heat she baked me in was still deliriously exciting, but my mind was now too strong to be unmade by it. I was worried, because I liked the farm in some ways. A week later the farmer took us in his pony cart to a railway station, gave me a bag of peppermints and left us on the platform without saying a word.
I understand my mother now. She expected splendour. Most of us expect it sometime or other, and growing old is mainly a way of learning to do without. My mother could never learn to do without so she kept altering her life in the only way she knew, by shifting to other men. She shifted when pregnant because pregnancy made her more hopeful than usual, or because she feared that bearing a child when living with the father would fix her to one man forever. If this is so then I never saw my real father. The third substitute was a bank manager who lived with his widowed sister in a mansion in a small fishing port. He was a gentle, dismal, kindly man; she was an abrupt, unhappy, slightly acid woman, and my mother (with a four-year-old son, one-year-old daughter, five-month-old embryo) charmed and dominated both of them. But three is the smallest number that can make a series, and she no longer dominated me. Perhaps she no longer wanted to. At any rate, when she moved on I was left with the bank manager. My life became calm and dependable. I went to school, was good at lessons, and every evening the manager and his sister developed my powers of concentration by playing three-handed bridge with me, for small stakes, from half-past six till bedtime. That was how I learned to dread the body and love numbers.
Having relived these memories I saw that the path from the sunlit roses to the grey void had been inevitable, yet I was not content. I was appalled at having nothing to do but remember a life like that. I wanted madness to blot out the memories with the strong tones and colours of a delusion, however monstrous. I had a romantic notion that madness was an exit from unbearable existence. But madness is like cancer or bronchitis, not everyone is capable of it, and when most of us say, “I can’t bear this,” we are proving we can. Death is the only dependable exit, but death depends on the body and I had rejected the body. I was condemned to a future of replaying and replaying the tedious past and past and past and past. I was in hell. Without eyes I tried to weep, without lips to scream, and with all the force of my neglected heart I cried for help.
I was answered. A sullen, determined voice—your voice—asked me to describe his past. My experience of void had made me able to visualize things from very slight cues, and that voice let me see you as you were. From the pebble and shell in your hands I deduced the shore where you grasped them, and from the shore I saw a path stretching back through mountains and cities to the house where you were born. You know now why I am an oracle. By describing your life I will escape from the trap of my own. From my station in nonentity everything existent, everything not me, looks worthwhile and splendid: even things which most folk consider commonplace or dreadful. Your past is safe with me. I can promise to be accurate.
Lanark thought for a while, then said, “Your story contains a contradiction.”
Oh?
“You said money can no more exist without objects than mind without body. Yet you exist without body.”
That puzzles me too. Sometimes I think my body is in the world where I abandoned it, lying in bed in some hospital, kept going by infusions into my veins. If so, I have hope of coming alive one day or dying utterly. And now I’ll tell you about Duncan Thaw.
Rima stirred slightly and murmured, “Yes, go on.”
The oracle began speaking. His voice sounded so far inside the head that the story see
med less narrated than remembered. It was not delayed by eating, or going to the lavatory, or sleeping: at night Lanark dreamed what he could not hear and woke with no sense of interruption. All the time they saw through the window people moving in the rooms and streets of a city, though sometimes there were glimpses of mountains and sea, and at last huge waves moving slowly at the foot of a cliff.
CHAPTER 12.
The War Begins
Duncan Thaw drew a blue line along the top of a sheet of paper and a brown line along the bottom. He drew a giant with a captured princess running along the brown line, and since he couldn’t draw the princess lovely enough he showed the giant holding a sack. The princess was in the sack. His father looked over his shoulder and said, “What’s that you’re drawing?”
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