Lanark: a life in 4 books (49 page)

“Oh, no. I’ve never been christened.”

“Then why are you so religious?”

“I’m not. I never go to church services. Sunday is my day of rest.”

“Then what makes you paint a religious work without payment?”

“Ambition. The Old Testament has everything that can be painted in it: universal landscapes and characters and dreams and adventures and histories. The New Testament is more single-minded. I don’t enjoy it so much.”

“Look at these rabbits beside the pool, Miss Byres,” said Mr. Smail. “You can almost hear them nibbling.”

The reporter looked at the Eden wall and said, “Who’s that behind the bramble bush with a lizard at his feet?”

“God,” said Thaw, glancing uneasily at the minister and Mr. Smail. “The lizard is the serpent before his legs were removed. God has his back to us—you can hardly see his face.”

“But what we can see looks very … looks rather …”

“Enigmatic,” said Thaw. “He’s not just watching Adam and Eve make love, he can see the expulsion afterward and the river of bloody history down to the wars of the apocalypse. We’ve had a lot of these wars recently. He can even see past them to the just city predicted by St. John, Dante and Marx. I haven’t read Marx but—”

“These birds in the tree of life are miracles of delicacy, aren’t they, Miss Byres?” said Mr. Smail from a distance.

“But why is Adam a Negro?”

“He’s actually more red than black,” the minister murmured, “and the name ‘Adam’ derives from a Hebrew word meaning ‘red earth.’”

“But Eve is white!”

“Pearly pink,” said Thaw. “I’m told that for a few moments love makes different people feel like one. My outline shows the oneness, my colours emphasize the difference. It’s an old trick. Rubens used it.”

“Did you draw Eve from a model?”

“Yes.”

“A girlfriend?” asked the reporter, with an arch smile.

“No, a friend of a friend,” said Thaw, who had drawn Janet Weir. He added glumly, “Most girls will pose naked for an artist if he only wants to draw them.”

The reporter tapped her lip with the pencil, then said, “Do you find life a tragedy or really more of a joke?”

Thaw laughed and said, “That depends on the part of it I’m looking at.”

“And what will you do when you’ve finished here?”

“I hope to paint some commercial murals. I’ll need the money.”

“Do you like the mural, Miss Byres?” said Mr. Smail.

“I’m afraid I’m not an art critic. The
Evening News
doesn’t have a regular art critic. Duncan, would you go up your ladder and pretend to paint Adam and Eve for a minute? We’ll take a photograph, anyway.”

He bought the paper on Saturday and carried it eagerly into the pulpit. The article began:

ATHEIST PAINTS
FACE OF GOD

Most people think artists are mad. The wild-bearded figure in the paint-stained dressing gown who haunts Cowlairs Parish Church will hardly reassure them on that point. And Duncan Thaw, a self-proclaimed atheist and Marxist, freely admits he is painting a large mural there with nothing in mind but the lust for fame.

His eyes clenched shut in horror. Eventually he opened them and skimmed quickly through the rest.

He has a terrifying laugh, like the bark of an asthmatic sea lion, and produces it unexpectedly for no reason at all. I sometimes wondered if it was caused by something I had said, but on reflection I saw this was impossible….

Was Adam a Negro? Duncan Thaw thinks so….

“I have no trouble finding nude models,” he remarks, with something suspiciously like a wink….

He hopes this will be the first of many murals. He hopes to make a lot of money this way. He says he needs it.

He felt as if there was poison in his chest, as if half his blood had been removed. He sat still until the old minister wandered in and asked, “Have you read … ?”

“Yes.”

“It’s unfortunate. Unfortunate.”

“Surely she was trying to be cruel!”

“No, I don’t think so. I met many reporters when I was chaplain at Barlinnie Jail and on average they’re no more wicked than other people. But their job depends on being entertaining, so they make everything look as clownish or as monstrous as they can. If any more reporters come, Duncan, my advice is to tell them nothing you really feel or believe.”

A reporter came that evening, took Thaw for a drink in a pub and explained that he too would have been an artist if his uncle hadn’t opposed the idea. Thaw said, “Please tell your readers I am not an atheist. I may have my own conception of God, but it doesn’t clash with the opinions of the church, my employer.”

This appeared two days later under the heading:

NOT AN
ATHEIST

The Cowlairs “mad muralist,” Duncan Thaw, has denied he is an atheist. He says he has his own conception of good but it doesn’t clash.

After this Thaw noticed that journalists weren’t interested in his thoughts, though they asked him what it felt like to sleep alone in a big building and kept photographing Adam and Eve. An exception was a tall man in a beautifully cut grey suit from the
Glasgow Herald
. He sat for half an hour in the front pew staring at the ceiling, then sat on the organ stool and gazed at the Eden wall. At last he said, “I like this.”

“I’m glad.”

“Of course it will be almost impossible for me to criticize it. It isn’t cubist or expressionist or surrealist, it isn’t academic or kitchen sink or even naive. It’s a bit like Puvis de Chavannes, but who nowadays knows Puvis de Chavannes? I’m afraid you’re going to pay the penalty of being outside the main streams of development.”

“The best British painters are that.”

“Eh?”

“Hogarth. Blake. Turner. Spencer. Burra.”

“Oh, you like these? Turner
is
good, of course. His handling of colour anticipates Odilon Redon and Jackson Pollock. Well, I’ll do my best for you, though this is one of my busy weeks. The Glasgow and Edinburgh schools are having their diploma shows, so I haven’t much space.”

At the end of an article about other people the
Herald
said this:

It isn’t easy to discover Cowlairs Parish Church in the depths of northeast Glasgow, but hardy souls who make the effort will find Duncan Thaw’s (unfinished) Genesis mural worth a great deal more than a passing glance.

The newspapers sickened him of the mural. He had taken months to make every shape as clear and harmonious as possible, putting in nothing he didn’t feel lovely or exciting. He knew that reports must always simplify and twist, but he also felt that the most twisted report gives some idea of its cause, and his work had caused nothing but useless gossip. He lay curled on the pulpit floor, dozing and waking till afternoon, then rose and stared, biting his thumb knuckle, at the unfinished wall. All he could see in it now were complicated shapes. With a slam and clattering McAlpin and Drummond came in followed by Macbeth. Thaw gazed at them astonished and relieved.

“We are here,” said Drummond, “because we read in the papers that you are holding weekday services in which Negroes are raped by white women.”

“You will gather that we are slightly puggled,” said McAlpin. “Stotious,” said Drummond.

“Miraculous,” said McAlpin.

“Full,” said Drummond.

They starting running round the church along the backs of pews, zigzagging through the nave and up into the gallery, pausing for new views of the mural and shouting to each other: “I can see the whole window wall from here.”

“Good God, there’s a diver in it.”

“The tree looks best from above.”

“But I see a dung beetle you can’t see.”

Macbeth sat heavily beside Thaw saying, “They’ve got their diplomas. They can laugh.”

They came down at last and Drummond said soberly “It’s all right, Duncan, you’ve nothing to worry about.”

“You like it?”

“We’re envious,” said McAlpin. “At least I am. Come for a drink.”

“Gladly! Where to?”

“Remember I’ve only half a crown,” said Drummond.

“I’ve twenty-six pounds,” said Thaw. “But it has to last till my next mural.”

Drummond said, “This is clearly a Wine 64 night.”

“What is Wine 64?”

“Not a drop of it is drunk before it’s sixty-four days old, yet a tumblerful costs only fourpence. It’s so strong I only drink it once a year. Twice would damage the health. The only pub selling it is in Grove Street, but we’ll be safe because there’s three of us.”

“Four,” said Macbeth, standing up firmly.

Sliding patches of evening sunshine mingled with flurries of so warm a rain that nobody thought of sheltering from it. Drummond led them round Sighthill cemetery, across some football pitches and up a wilderness of slag bings called Jack’s Mountain. From the top they saw the yellow-scummed lake called the Stinky Ocean, then came down near a slaughterhouse behind Pinkston power station, along the canal towpath, between bonded warehouses, across Garscube Road and into a public house. The customers sat on benches against the wall, staring at each other across the narrow floor like passengers in a train. They were all older than forty with very creased faces and clothes. An old lady sitting beside Thaw said quietly, “All God’s people, sonny.”

He nodded.

“And he loves every one of us.”

Thaw frowned. She said, “You neednae be afraid to speak to a granny, son.”

“I’m not afraid. I was wondering about what you said.”

She took his hand. “Listen, son, God was the humblest man who ever walked the earth. He didn’t care who you were or what you did, he still sat with you and drank with you and loved you.”

Thaw was astonished. He imagined the creator as an erratically generous host, not as a friendly fellow guest, but the old woman’s faith had been tested by more life than his so he said gently, “He drank with you?”

She nodded and smiled at a sherry on the table before her and squeezed his hand, saying, “Yes, he did, because it lifts the heart. I was reading the
Sunday Post
, and a doctor writing in it said a lot of people died of drink but more died of worry. Now I can come in here on a Saturday night and have a half or two, and I hear folk talking and I feel I love everyone in the room.”

Macbeth leaned toward her. “If God loves us why are we in such a mess?”

He smiled at her as if she was a joke, but she was not offended and not only reached out to squeeze his hand but stroked his hair.

“Because we don’t love God, we mock and despise him. But he still loves us, no matter what we do.”

“Even if we kill someone?”

“Even if we kill someone.”

“Even if you’re a Communist?”

“It doesn’t matter who you are. When God meets you at the gates of pearl and asks who you are and you say to him, ‘God forgive me,’ then it’s ‘Come in. You’re welcome.’”

Thaw had never before met a religious person who thought God’s love an easy thing. He said abruptly, “What if we can’t forgive ourselves?”

She didn’t understand the question and he repeated it. She said, “Of course you can’t forgive yourself! Only God can forgive you.”

“Tell me this,” said Macbeth. “Are you a Catholic?”

“I come from Ireland—I’m Irish through and through.”

“But are you a Catholic?”

“It doesn’t matter who you are….”

Thaw sipped Wine 64 which tasted like watered strawberry jam. In leaning forward to speak Macbeth left a gap through which McAlpin was visible. Thaw told him quietly, “I left the church tonight for a complete change of air and the first stranger I meet is a friend of God.”

“Ah!” said McAlpin cheerfully, setting down his glass. “Shall I tell you about God? I’m unusually lucid tonight.”

Beyond him a haggard man was discussing with Drummond the chances of selling one’s body for medical research while still alive. Thaw said, “Will you take long?”

“Certainly not. God, you see, is a word. It is the word for everything not speaking when someone says ‘I think.’ And by Propper’s Law of Inverse Exclusion (which enables a flea in a matchbox to declare itself jailor of the universe) every single ‘I think’ has intimate knowledge of the surface of what it is not. But as every thinker reflects a different surface of what he isn’t, and as God is our word for the whole, it follows that all agreement about God is based on misunderstanding.”

“You’re a liar,” cried Macbeth, who had caught some of this, “The old woman is right. God is not a word, God is a man! I crucified him with these hands!”

McAlpin said soothingly, “Since competitive capitalism split us off from the collective unconscious we’ve all been more or less crucified.”

“Don’t talk to me about crucifixion,” snarled Macbeth. “How can a man with a diploma understand crucifixion? A year ago a friend said to me, ‘Jimmy, if you go on like this you’ll end in the gutter, the madhouse or the Clyde.’ Since then I have been in all three.”

McAlpin raised a forefinger and said, “To a sensitively poised intelligence like me a wrong note in a Beethoven quartet is as excruciating as a boot up the backside or a fall from Clyde Street suspension bridge is to you.”

“You think you’re fucking clever, don’t you?” said Macbeth. Meanwhile the old lady had jumped up and was shaking everyone by the hand. When she came to Drummond he grinned at her and sang with surprising sweetness:

“The Lord’s my shepherd: I’ll not want. He makes me down to lie In pastures green. He leadeth me The quiet waters by.”

Several people joined in, others laughed and a few frowned and muttered. The old lady caressed Drummond’s hair and said he looked like Christ, then said her name was Molly O’Malley and danced a jig on the narrow floor, calling out to Thaw from the middle of it, “God love you, my boy! God love you, my bonny boy!”

“You’re after the auld woman, eh?” asked an old man nearby.

“Me?” said Thaw. “No!”

“Blethers. I’d have ridden a cat at your age.”

A stout bartender arrived and said firmly, “Right, lads, you’ve had your fun.”

“Fun?” cried Macbeth querulously. “What fun have I had?” But they were forced to leave.

There was a chill wind outside and a sky bright with the green and gold of a slow summer sunset. Drummond said he knew of a party and led them up Lynedoch Street, a normally shallow hill which tonight seemed perpendicular. They avoided falling off by clinging to each other, except Macbeth who drifted away down a sidestreet. The party was in a large, well-furnished house and Thaw found the other guests daunting. They were his own age but had the clothes and conversation of adults with monthly salaries. He found a corner in a dim room where couples clung and turned to the sound of a gramophone. Suddenly a woman in a black dress said loudly, “Good heavens, is that you, Duncan? Won’t you dance with me?”