Lanark: a life in 4 books (37 page)

“I am. At the moment,” said McAlpin, watching the sunlight move among rooftops.

“So am I,” said Thaw, wondering what had happened to his argument. After a moment McAlpin said, “So you paint to give Glasgow a more imaginative life.”

“No. That’s my excuse. I paint because I feel cheap and purposeless when I don’t.”

“I envy your purpose.”

“I envy your self-confidence.”

“Why?”

“It makes you welcome at parties. It lets you kiss the host’s daughter behind the sofa when you’re drunk.”

“That means nothing, Duncan.”

“Only if you can do it.”

“Ten weeks is a long, long holiday,” said Mr. Thaw that summer. “What’s your friend Kenneth doing?”

“Working on the trams. Almost everyone I know is taking some kind of job.”

“And what are you going to do?”

“Paint, if you let me. There’s an exhibition when we go back with a competition for a picture of the Last Supper. The prize is thirty pounds. I think I can win it.”

He walked the streets looking at people. He used the underground railway where passengers faced each other in rows and could be examined without seeming to stare. Folk near the river were usually gaunter, half a head shorter and had cheaper clothes than folk in the suburbs. He had not seen the connection between physical work, poverty and bad feeding before because he came from Riddrie, an in-between district where tradesmen and petty clerks like his father lived. He noticed too that the sleek office faces and roughened workshop ones had the same tight mouths. Nearly everyone looked anxious, smug or grimly determined. Such faces would suit the disciples, who had been chosen from labourers and clerks, but they wouldn’t suit Jesus. He began looking for harmonious faces whose mouths closed serenely. Most children had these when they sat still, but the people who kept them after adolescence were usually women with a mild, mysterious, knowing look. For a while he thought this might be the incarnate God’s expression, for Leonardo and the carvers of oriental Buddhas had thought so. One morning he found it on the face of a three-inch embryo in the university medical museum. The huge little head nodding over the bent-up knees, the great closed eyes and subtly smiling mouth seemed dreaming of a satisfying secret as big as the universe. And he saw such an expression could not belong to Christ, who had looked steadily at the people around him. He needed the face of a mature, sane, outward-looking man whose love abolished all advantage over whom he beheld, a face without triumph or blame in it because triumph is smug and condemnation is Devil’s work. He raked for a Christian expression among old drawings. A sketch of Coulter showed a calm unafraid friendly face but was far too wistful, and one of McAlpin was calm and strong but had disdainful eyelids. He decided to steal a face from a masterpiece, but in Glasgow Art Gallery the only good Christs were infants, apart from Giorgione’s “Christ and the Adulteress,” where the painter’s modesty or restorer’s cowardice had kept the holy face in shadow. He took a day trip to the National Gallery in Edinburgh and at last found the face in a trinity by Hugo Van der Goes. It came from the fifteenth century when the Flemish masters discovered oil paint and made brown the subtlest colour of all while keeping the crisp brightness of tempera. God sat on a clumsy gold and crystal throne floating among gaudy turbulent clouds. He wore a plain red robe with green lining and was preventing, by a hand under each armpit, a pained, thin, dead, nearly nude Christ from sliding off the seat beside him. A white pigeon hovered between their heads. God had the same ordinary thin brown face as his son and a look of pure sorrow without bitterness or blame. In spite of the golden seat neither he nor his son looked like well-paid men. They had the thin faces of providers, not owners or directors. And the suffering father, not the dead son, had Thaw’s sympathy. This was the face of his Christ, and he knew he could never paint it. Nobody can paint an expression that is not potentially their own, and this face was beyond him.

In the end he decided to imagine the supper as Jesus would see it from the head of the table. On each side of the board the disciples, anxious, hopeful, doubting, delighted, hungry, replete, were craning and leaning for a glimpse of the viewer’s face. The only visible part of Jesus was his hands on the tablecloth. They entered the picture from the bottom margin, and Thaw copied them from his father. He took so long preparing this picture that there was no time to paint it so he submitted the black and white cartoon.

The picture won no prize but was easy to photograph, and
The Bulletin
showed Molly Tierney and Aitken Drummond in front of it. A caption said, “Art students discuss Douglas Shaw’s interpretation of the Last Supper at the opening of Glasgow Art School’s summer exhibition.” Thaw took a copy of the paper into a lavatory cubicle to gloat over it. Though sick of the picture the published photograph gave him a moment’s pleasure of almost sexual potency. He went over to the refectory in a mood of unusual confidence and sat by Judy, who asked in a friendly way, “Duncan, did you enjoy drawing those unpleasant people? Or does your picture shock you as much as us?”

Her interest delighted him. He said, “No, I didn’t try to paint unpleasant people. After all, Christ picked his disciples at random, like a jury, so they must have been an ordinary representative lot. I may have drawn them grotesque. Not many of us are as we should be, even in our own estimations, so how can we help being grotesque? But we aren’t often unpleasant.” Judy said, “Draw a portrait of me Duncan, here, on the tabletop.” She kept her head still while Thaw scribbled on the formica surface. He said, “I’ve finished, but it’s not a success.” Judy said, “You see, you’ve made me look evil. You’ve shown my bad qualities.”

Thaw looked at the drawing. He thought he had only shown the shape of her face, and not well. She said, “I know I have more bad qualities than good….” He started to protest but she said, “Look at Kenneth!”

Thaw looked across at McAlpin who had put his head back to laugh at a joke. He had grown a beard over the holidays and the gold spire of it wagged at the ceiling. Judy said, “Kenneth has no bad qualities. If he hurt anyone it would be from stupidity, not deliberately.”

“He’s a gentleman,” said Thaw. “It’s civilizing to know him.”

In the tramcar that evening he felt unusually conscious of his appearance: the paint-stained trousers like a labourer’s below the waist, the collar and tie like an office worker above. Passing the park someone plucked at his sleeve. He turned and saw a plump pretty girl who said, “Hullo there. How are you doing?”

“Fine thanks. And yourself?”

“Not too bad. D’ye live out here?”

“Aye. Opposite the chapel.”

“I’m visiting my auntie. I’ll be seeing you.”

She went downstairs and Thaw wondered who she could be. Suddenly he realized she was Big June Haig who had been to Whitehill School. He went downstairs and stood beside her on the platform. She said, “Oh, there you are.”

“I usually get off farther up the hill,” said Thaw, as if explaining something.

“Your house faces the Chapel?”

The tram halted and they got off.

“No, it’s in the street which runs into the road just opposite the Chapel.”

He stood still, describing this geography with his hands. She gripped his lapel and drew him onto the pavement out of the path of a lorry, saying, “I don’t want to be held as a witness to a road accident.”

“Where are you working just now?”

“Brown’s. I’m a waitress in the dining room.”

“Oh I go there sometimes, but downstairs to the smokeroom.” Thaw described his eating habits in detail and she seemed to listen intently. He showed her the photograph in the paper and she was less impressed than he expected. There were gaps in the conversation in which he expected her to say cheerio, but she stayed quiet until he thought of something new to say. He said, “I’ll walk you to your auntie’s house,” and they set off side by side. June moved with chin held up and vivid mouth set haughtily as if disdaining herds of admirers, and Thaw’s heart thumped hard against his ribs. They turned some corners and stopped at a close. June explained that she visited her aunt twice a week; the aunt was an old lady who had recently had an operation. Thaw made an unsubtle reference to her unselfishness. There was another silence. He said desperately, “Look, could I meet you sometime?”

“Oh sure.”

“Where do you live nowadays?”

“Langside, near the monument.”

“Hm … Where will we meet?”

After a pause she suggested Paisley’s corner near Jamaica Street Bridge.

“Good!” said Thaw firmly, then added, “But we haven’t fixed the night or the hour have we?”

June said, “No. We haven’t.”

After some silence she suggested Thursday night at seven o’clock.

“Good!” said Thaw firmly again. “I’ll see you then.”

“Yes.”

“Well … cheerio.”

“Cheerio, Duncan.”

That night Thaw kept stopping work to walk up and down the living room, chuckling and singing. Mr. Thaw said, “What’s got into ye? Did a lassie look at ye sideways?”

“My painting aroused a certain interest.”

Next morning Thaw told McAlpin about June as they sat in the school library. McAlpin studied the page of a glossy magazine, then said, “Does she smell of the bakery, the brewery, or the brothel?”

Thaw felt shocked and cheapened and cursed himself for speaking. McAlpin glanced at him and said, “All women have an odour, you know. The deodorant adverts pretend it’s a bad thing, which is all balls. If the girl is clean it’s a very attractive thing. Judy has an odour.”

“Good.”

“What you need, Duncan, is a friendly, experienced older woman, not a silly wee girl.”

“But I don’t like being condescended to.”

“I admit she’d have to handle you cleverly. I’m sure there are many women in continental brothels who could do it. Of course there are no brothels deserving the name in Scotland. This is such a bloody
poor
country.”

Thaw said, “Your mind is full of brothels this morning.”

“Yes…. What do you think will happen to you when you leave art school?”

“I don’t know. But I can’t teach children and I won’t go to London.”

McAlpin said, “I don’t want to teach but I probably will. I would like to travel and have freedom before I settled down, visit Paris, Vienna, Florence. There are a lot of quiet little cities in Italy with frescoes by minor masters in the churches and their own wine served under awnings in the squares outside. I’d like to wander around exploring these with a girl, not necessarily a girl I’d marry. Think! After sunset the air is as warm as a fine summer afternoon here … but I can’t leave my mother for long. At least when I do leave her it will be to marry Judy, which—as far as freedom is concerned—will be leaving the frying pan for the fire. Meanwhile I’m getting older.”

“Blethers.”

“Does time never worry you?”

“No. Only feelings worry me, and time isn’t a feeling.”

“I feel it.”

After a moment McAlpin said on a baffled note, “I suspect that if I started living in a slum, and consorting with a prostitute, and wore nothing but a leopard skin, Judy and my mother would visit me four days a week with baskets of food.”

“I envy you.”

“Don’t.”

That afternoon in the lecture theatre Thaw’s body came to an uneasy compromise with the wooden bench and he dozed. Later he heard the lecturer say “… something of a thug. In fact he broke Michelangelo’s nose once, in a brawl, when they were young. It is consoling to remember that he died, most unhappily, a raving lunatic in a Spanish prison, ha-ha. However, that will do for today.”

The lights went on and people crowded to the exits. Thaw noticed McAlpin and Judy ahead of him; they ran hand in hand across the street to the annexe and he followed slowly. They were not in the refectory. He sat down at a table near Drummond and Macbeth. Drummond was saying, “I can’t understand why I’ve been asked. I hardly know Kenneth.”

“When is it?” said Macbeth.

“Tomorrow night. We go to his house for a meal and a booze-up, then to a fancy-dress party at a hotel.”

“How old is he?” said Macbeth.

“Twenty-one.”

A sad kind of shock flowed through Thaw like water. He sat still, not saying much, then went to the counter and brought food back to the table. Drummond left and Macbeth sat in a way which told Thaw he was depressed at not being asked to the party. Macbeth said, “You’re quiet tonight, Duncan.”

“I’m sorry. I was thinking.”

“I suppose you’ve been asked to Kenneth’s party tomorrow?”

“No.”

Macbeth became cheerful. “No? That’s queer. You and Kenneth are always about together. I thought you were friends.” “I thought that.”

He walked a lot around the streets that evening and let himself into the house after midnight.

“Is that you, Duncan?” said his father from the bed settee in the living room.

“I think so.”

“Is anything wrong?”

Thaw explained what had happened. He said, “I can’t get used to this. An acquaintance becomes a friend in a gradual, genial way. The reverse is … shocking.”

“What’s that noise?”

“I’m fiddling with ornaments on the lobby table. In God’s name how can I face him tomorrow? What can I say?”

“Don’t say much, Duncan. Quietly and politely wish him many happy returns of the day.”

“That’s a good idea, Dad. Goodnight.”

“And go straight to sleep. No writing.”

He went to bed, grew breathless, took two grains of ephedrine, slept for an hour and woke feeling excited. He opened his notebook and wrote,
The future demands our participation. To participate willingly is freedom, unwillingly is slavery
.

He scored this out and wrote:

The universe compels cooperation. To cooperate consciously is freedom, unconsciously is
….

Nature always has our assistance. To assist eagerly is freedom, resist-ingly is
….

God needs our help. Giving it joyfully is freedom, resentfully is
….
We have God’s help. To know this is freedom, not to notice is
…. He snarled and threw the notebook at the ceiling where it rebounded onto the top of the wardrobe, dislodging an avalanche of books and papers. He lay feeling happy about the changes in life, then masturbated and fell asleep. His happiness had gone when he awoke.