Lanark: a life in 4 books (36 page)

Ruth stood in the kitchen doorway with a milk jug in her hand. Thaw looked at her and said coldly, “Yes. What I’m doing just now is more important than anything else happening in this whole city.”

“You’re mad!”

“Mibby.”

He turned back to the picture. Ruth came over and held the full milk jug above it.

“How would you like a dirty big puddle in the middle of your important picture?”

“Your actions aren’t on my conscience,” said Thaw, working. Ruth tipped the jug slowly forward until a trickle of milk spattered onto the centre of the paper, leaving a small puddle.

Thaw rose and went into the kitchen saying, “That was a wrong and childish thing to do.”

He brought back a clean cloth, wiped up the milk and continued working. Ruth watched him ominously, jug in hand, then said, in a low vibrating voice, “God, how I hate you! How I hate you!”

“At present, yes, but you’ll soon stop. It’s a tiring emotion.” “Oh, I’ll keep it going! Don’t you
worry
.”

She flung the jug to smash in the hearth and ran from the room, slamming the door after her. Four minutes later she returned with homework notebooks and sat studying them by the fire, her lips pressed tightly together.

Suddenly Thaw jumped up, crying out on a rising note, “Oh! Oh!
Oh!
”

He had been drawing with waterproof ink on stiff paper. He had thought the milk had fallen on a dry part of the picture, but it was not completely dry, and now that the damp had evaporated a grey smear stained the centre. He had not expected this. He turned to Ruth, his head craning toward her and swaying a little at the end of the neck. With fists clenched he advanced on her whispering, “By God I’ll hurt you for this, my dear.”

She retreated into the bay window. In former fights she was usually the aggressor and he coldly or hysterically defensive. Now she sank to the floor, protecting her head with her hands, and he stooped and twice drove his fist hard into her stomach, then went back and glowered at the picture. A new wave of rage rose in him and he turned vengefully to her again. She lay curled on herself with her eyes shut, drawing choking breaths and looking very white. He went to the front bedroom and lay on the bed, feeling nothing now but listlessness and defeat, and the fading daylight in the room, and the occasional shout of children playing in the street. After a while he heard Ruth go to the lavatory and taps rushing and the cistern flushing. She looked into the bedroom for a moment and said sobbingly,

“Duncan, you’ve hurt me. You don’t know how you’ve hurt me.”

He said coldly, “I’m sorry.”

He could only think of the grey smear on the picture. Coldness and indifference spread through him like a stain. Later he heard his father come in and murmurs of conversation from the living room. Mr. Thaw opened the bedroom door abruptly saying, “Duncan! Did you punch Ruth in the stomach?”

“Yes. We were fighting.”

“Look, Duncan, I’m glad you’re prepared to defend yourself but you should
never
punch a
woman
in the
stomach
.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know how to hurt women properly yet.” His father left and he lay inert, thinking of the picture. ‘I can’t do it all again’ he thought, then sat up, shaken by a new idea. For an hour before Ruth spoiled the picture his pleasure in it had vanished and now he knew why. The moon was wrong. It did not belong to such a picture; it was a piece of sentimental overemphasis, like a serenader with a guitar. The picture should be made bigger with no sky showing at all.

Mr. Thaw made tea that evening and the family ate in silence. Inside himself Thaw was very cheerful indeed but hid the feeling because the others could not share it. Afterward he began the picture again and finished it three days later.

He brought it to art school and it hung in the assembly hall, where he moved about among the other thoughtful or chattering students. He was sick of it now, it seemed overworked and dull, but he had still expected it to eclipse the work of everyone else and was depressed to see two other pictures equally good. They showed ordinary kitchen interiors. Their paint was carefully used to represent solid figures and the space between, and their common depth of light and air was finer and saner than the unique sombreness of his own rigid composition. Other pictures interested by their oddity. Molly Tierney showed a tropical landscape where twenty or thirty blondes like herself washed their hair in a waterfall. Macbeth’s picture looked like a forgery of a painting by Van Gogh. A plump white-haired white-moustached teacher entered and walked up and down before the pictures talking in a lordly way about the aims of art and indicating with a plump white hand those paintings whose qualities or flaws illustrated his ideas. Once or twice he paused and regarded the tree picture thoughtfully, then moved on leaving Thaw’s nerves jangling with colliding messages of anticipation and resentment. The criticism ended without his picture being mentioned and for several hours disappointment worked in him like a speck of acid.

CHAPTER 22.

Kenneth McAlpin

Once a week they queued outside the lecture theatre for a talk on the history of art. Everyone seemed friendly; lightly chattering currents of emotion flowed easily between them and Thaw stood in the flow feeling as dense and conspicuous as a lump of rock. One day he arrived when the queue had gone in but before the lecturer came. Pausing outside the door he made his face expressionless, softened it with a thoughtful frown and entered. There was an explosion of laughter and someone shouted, “This was the noblest Roman of them all!” The theatre confronted him with a collection of grinning, glaring and roaring heads. The mirth crashed like a wave into his shell of loneliness and gravity. He grinned and said, “Is my nose green or something?” sitting down beside the fair-moustached student he had once instinctively hated.

“No, but you looked like Caesar pondering over the head of Pompey.”

After the lecture they walked to the refectory together. The moustached student was called Kenneth McAlpin. Thaw said, “It’s queer to be enjoying a coffee here.”

“I’ve noticed you hardly ever use the place.”

“I never know where to sit. The world sometimes seems a chessboard where the pieces move themselves. I’m never sure what square to go to. Yet it can’t be a difficult game, most folk play it instinctively.”

“The rules are fairly simple,” said McAlpin. “You stick near pieces like yourself and move along with them. The people at that table are in the school choir. The clan over there are highlanders. These four in the corner are serious Catholics. After the second year your group is usually decided by the subject you specialize in.”

“Have you a group?”

McAlpin pursed his lips then said, “Yes. I suppose I’m a snob. My family used to be rather well off so I’ve grown up feeling a bit grander than the majority, and I’m slightly uncomfortable when I’m in a group who don’t feel the same. I suppose the people I sit with are snobs too. They’ll be here soon, so you can judge for yourself.”

Thaw smiled and said, “I’ll leave when they come. I don’t want to embarrass you.”

“Actually I’d be glad if you stayed. I enjoy your conversation more than theirs. With the exception of Judy, of course.”

“Judy?”

“My girlfriend. Don’t mistake me, they’re nice people, you know some of them already. But it’s snobbery which keeps us together, I sometimes think.”

Judy and Rushford arrived. Judy was a handsome, sturdy girl with a vaguely displeased expression. Rushford wore an embroidered waistcoat copied from one worn by Benjamin Disraeli. “The Victorians were far from being the stuffy monsters we used to assume,” he said in a fluting, meticulous voice. Molly Tierney arrived followed by Macbeth and some others, and the group was complete. Macbeth looked lost and unhappy because Molly ignored him but Thaw felt perfectly comfortable. The conversation was about people he never met and parties he never visited but his occasional remarks were heard politely.

After this Thaw and McAlpin worked side by side in the studio, drank coffee together, brought to school books they enjoyed and read the best parts aloud to each other. Thaw preferred poetry and drama, McAlpin music and philosophy. They discussed these but avoided politics in case their opinions divided them. Once or twice they had tea in each other’s homes. McAlpin lived in the small posh suburban town of Bearsden. The house had a garden round it and warm well-carpeted rooms. The furniture was large and beautifully kept with Indian cabinets and Chinese ornaments. Mrs. McAlpin was small, brisk and cheerful. “This is the tiniest of the houses we owned when Kenneth’s father died,” she said with a faint sigh, pouring tea into thin cups. “Not that I wanted the others, even if I could have afforded to keep them. We really were rather prosperous once. Kenneth, for instance, had a nanny when he was small …”

“We keep it, stuffed, in a cupboard under the stairs,” murmured McAlpin.

“… we had a chauffeur too, Stroud, a delightful character, a real Cockney. I do miss the car. Still, if I had it I would probably use it all the time because I’m naturally terribly lazy. I suppose running up and down to the shops helps keep me young. Another thing we don’t do much nowadays is entertain. Still, I want Kenneth’s twenty-first birthday party to be one he’ll really enjoy. You’ll come to it, Duncan, I hope? Kenneth often talks of you.”

“I’d like to,” said Thaw. He sat on a sofa so deep that it supported the whole length of his legs, and he sipped tea and wondered why he felt so much at home. Perhaps when he was small his own house had seemed as spacious and secure.

At the refectory table he often heard parties and excursions planned. McAlpin took little share in the plans for in that group practical details were left to the girls, but Judy brought him in by asking, “What do you think, Kenneth?” or “Have you any ideas about that?” while Thaw sat hoping to be invited and wondering why Aitken Drummond was always invited. Aitken Drummond was not a member of the group. He was over six feet tall and usually wore green tram conductor’s trousers, a red muffler and an army greatcoat. His dark skin, great arched nose, small glittering eyes, curling black hair and pointed beard were so like the popular notion of the Devil that on first sight everyone felt they had known him intimately for years. Drummond was always asked to parties and next day stories were told of him amid mocking, slightly horrified laughter. Thaw envied him, but the question “Can I come to the party, Kenneth?” though often in his mind, was never asked. He was sure McAlpin would answer “Yes, why not?” with hurtful coolness. Yet coolness was the quality in McAlpin he most admired. It showed in his polished solidity, his relaxed confidence which nothing, nobody, seemed to perturb. It showed in his calm robust body, his good manners and good clothes, in the finely rolled umbrella he carried with careless ease when the weather was cloudy. It showed most of all on the few occasions he spoke of his private life, as if that life were entertainment he watched, with ironical sympathy, from a distance. One day he said to Thaw, “I behaved badly last night.”

“How?”

“I took Judy to a party. I got rather drunk and started kissing the host’s daughter on the floor behind the sofa. She was drunk too. Then Judy found us and was furious. The trouble is I was enjoying myself so much I couldn’t even pretend to be sorry.”

He frowned and said, “That was bad, wasn’t it?”

“If Judy loves you, yes, of course it was bad.”

McAlpin looked gravely at Thaw for a moment, then flung his head back and roared with laughter.

One morning Thaw and McAlpin went into the Cowcaddens, a poor district behind the ridge where the art school stood. They sketched in an asphalt playpark till small persistent boys (“Whit are ye writing, mister? Are ye writing a photo of that building, mister? Will ye write
my
photo, mister?”) drove them up a cobbled street to the canal. They crossed the shallow arch of a wooden bridge and climbed past some warehouses to the top of a threadbare green hill. They stood under an electric pylon and looked across the city centre. The wind which stirred the skirts of their coats was shifting mounds of grey cloud eastward along the valley. Travelling patches of sunlight went from ridge to ridge, making a hump of tenements gleam against the dark towers of the city chambers, silhouetting the cupolas of the Royal infirmary against the tomb-glittering spine of the Necropolis. “Glasgow is a magnificent city,” said McAlpin. “Why do we hardly ever notice that?” “Because nobody imagines living here,” said Thaw. McAlpin lit a cigarette and said, “If you want to explain that I’ll certainly listen.”

“Then think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively. What is Glasgow to most of us? A house, the place we work, a football park or golf course, some pubs and connecting streets. That’s all. No, I’m wrong, there’s also the cinema and library. And when our imagination needs exercise we use these to visit London, Paris, Rome under the Caesars, the American West at the turn of the century, anywhere but here and now. Imaginatively Glasgow exists as a music-hall song and a few bad novels. That’s all we’ve given to the world outside. It’s all we’ve given to ourselves.”

“I thought we had exported other things—ships and machinery, for instance.”

“Oh, yes, we were once the world’s foremost makers of several useful things. When this century began we had the best organized labour force in the United States of Britain. And we had John McLean, the only Scottish schoolteacher to tell his students what was being done to them. He organized the housewives’ rent strike, here, on Clydeside, which made the government stop the landlords getting extra money for the duration of World War One. That’s more than most prime ministers have managed to do. Lenin thought the British revolution would start in Glasgow. It didn’t. During the general strike a red flag flew on the city chambers over there, a crowd derailed a tramcar, the army sent tanks into George Square; but nobody was hurt much. Nobody was killed, except by bad pay, bad housing, bad feeding. McLean was killed by bad housing and feeding, in Barlinnie Jail. So in the thirties, with a quarter of the male workforce unemployed here, the only violent men were Protestant and Catholic gangs who slashed each other with razors. Well, it is easier to fight your neighbours than fight a bad government. And it gave excitement to hopeless lives, before World War Two started. So Glasgow never got into the history books, except as a statistic, and if it vanished tomorrow our output of ships and carpets and lavatory pans would be replaced in months by grateful men working overtime in England, Germany and Japan. Of course our industries still keep nearly half of Scotland living round here. They let us exist. But who, nowadays, is glad just to exist?”