Lanark

by Alasdair Gray

  A spruce fresh-faced man of about thirty sat by the minister, who said, “Duncan, this is Mr. Smail, our session clerk. I’ve been showing him your new designs and he’s quite pleased with them.”

  “Very impressive,” said Mr. Smail, “though, of course, I’m no judge of painting. My concern is with the practical side, and I’m heartily glad we’ve got it moving at last. With your permission I’ll show these sketches to the kirk session next Sunday.”

  He patted a glossy briefcase on his lap.

  “I can make more elaborate designs if you like,” said Thaw. “Oh, no need at all. If the minister’s pleased nobody else will complain—not openly, at any rate. You know, of course, that we’re a poorly endowed church and can’t pay you. However, I think I’ve enough contacts to ensure a fair bit of publicity when the work’s complete. No, we won’t hide your light under a bushel. Now, how long will you take?”

  Thaw pondered. He had no idea at all. He said cautiously,

  “Perhaps three months.”

  “And when can you start?”

  “As soon as I’m well again,” said Thaw, suddenly feeling well, “In fact I’m getting out on Friday.”

  “So you’ll be finished by Christmas. Good. That will give us time to clear the scaffolding out for the Watch Night service. Perhaps the dedication ceremony and the Christmas service might be combined?”

  “I don’t think so,” said the minister. “No. But it could be combined with the service at Hogmanay.”

  “Good. A newly decorated church by the new year. That will give the Presbytery something to think about.”

  Thaw felt a hidden alarm within him. He said, “It’s a huge area. I’ll need a lot of help. Not skilled help—just folk who can lay a colour inside the shapes I chalk for them.”

  “Oh, I’ll help you myself. I’ve been practising on the kitchen ceiling. And Mr. Rennie, who’s going to lend the scaffolding, I’m sure will lend a hand as well. We’ll have no shortage of helpers.”

  Thaw took nail scissors from the minister’s locker and snipped a corner from his dressing gown. He said, “First of all the plaster surfaces in the chancel must be painted this colour, a dark blue inclining to violet, in good-quality oil paint, eggshell finish, at least two coats.”

  Mr. Smail made a note in a pocket diary and shut the half-inch of cloth between the pages saying, “Leave it to me. And mibby sometime next week you’ll give me a list of your materials. With my contacts I’m sure I can get them at a discount.” Thaw lay down on his bed with a sensation of Napoleonic power.

  On Friday he was ill again. The night before, the ward sister had given him a hypodermic needle, cotton wool, surgical spirit and a rubber-capped adrenalin bottle. She had shown him how to use them and later his father arrived with clothes and money. Now he laboriously dressed, glanced unhappily at Mr. Clark (who was smoking again) and said goodbye to the minister. In the reception hall he phoned for a taxi, then huddled on the back seat, soothed by the sizzling of the tyres on the wet roads, for at last the weather had broken.

  He got out at the art school and slowly climbed to the hall called “the museum” where several students were writing at tables. He filled the registration form for his final year and carried it down a corridor, noticing that the dark panelled walls, white plaster gods and tight-trousered girls no longer seemed excitingly solid but shallow, like a photograph of a once-familiar street. There was a queue outside the registrar’s door so he stepped into an empty studio and squirted six minims of adrenalin into his calf muscle. He entered the registrar’s office shortly after, feeling businesslike on the outside but relaxed and dreamy within. He handed over the form and was asked to sit down.

  “Well, Thaw, how are you getting on?”

  “Not badly, sir. I’ve been offered a really big job.” He explained about the mural and said, “Do you think I could work on it till Christmas?”

  “I see no reason why not. When your diploma exam comes along next June the school could take the assessors to the church to see what you’ve done. Talk it over with Mr. Watt.”

  “Can I tell him you approve of the idea?”

  “No. I neither approve or disapprove; it has nothing to do with me. Mr. Watt is your head of department.”

  “He may not want to give me permission.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “He has already allowed me a great deal of freedom—freedom to paint in my own studio, I mean.”

  “Well?”

  “I have nothing to show for it; no finished work, I mean.” “Why?”

  “Ill health. But I’ve recovered now. If you like I can prove it with doctors’ certificates.”

  The registrar sighed, rubbed his brow and said, “Go away, Thaw, go away. I’ll speak to Mr. Watt.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Peel,” said Thaw, briskly standing. “That is abnormally decent of you.”

  In the tram home he sat beside a lady with a shopping bag who eyed him for a while out of a sharp profile and at last said, “You’re Duncan Thaw, of course.”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t remember me.”

  “Were you a friend of my mother?”

  “A friend of your mother? I was the best friend Mary Needham had. I worked beside her in Copland and Lyes long, long, long before your father appeared on the scene. Mind you,” she added musingly, “a lot of folk thought they were Mary’s best friend. She knew so many and they all trusted her. Neighbours would confide in her who hated each other like poison. But there, she’s gone. And so has your grampa, that good old man.”

  Her tone irritated Thaw. He could hardly remember his mother’s father, a tall man with a white moustache who lived in a semi-detached villa a block away. The woman sighed and said, “Of course, your granny was the first to go. You were very fond of your granny.”

  “Was I?” said Thaw, startled, because he couldn’t remember having a granny.

  “Oh, yes. Whenever you quarrelled with your mother (you were always a difficult lad) you ran to your granny’s house and she petted and spoiled you and gave you everything you liked. You were very upset when she died. You would go to her back door and lie there crying for her.”

  “Aren’t you mixing me with someone else?”

  “Who else? Surely not your sister. She was barely two at the time. A wild girl, your sister.”

  A moment later the woman chuckled and said, “Mind you, Mary was a wild one too in her day. Oh, she shocked me all right. I was one of the mousey kind. I remember two lads from haberdashery arranged to meet us at the Scott monument one Saturday. It was my first date and I was there punctual to the minute, dolled up to the nines. So were the lads. We waited half an hour and then by strolls Mary, arm in arm with a six-foot Australian soldier. Glasgow was full of them that summer. She strolled past without a word, just a sort of sideways wink at me. Wee Archie Campbell was heartbroken. Next day I asked her,’ How can you be so cruel?’ She said, ‘Ach, how else can you treat men who wear spats?’ Another time she was out three nights running with three different boys. ‘How can you?’ I asked. She said, ‘It’s the opera this week. I cannae afford to go three nights running by myself.’ One of these boys was your father. Nobody was more surprised than me when Mary Needham married Duncan Thaw. Well, she learned.”

  “Learned what?”

  “Nothing, but it was surprising. He was the last man I’d have thought she’d marry. Four years passed before you appeared on the scene.”

  Thaw got home three hours before his father returned from work. The fire was set. He lit it then took a pile of sheet music from the piano stool and spread it on the hearth rug: cheap adaptations from Rossini and Verdi, the songs of Burns and sentimental translations from the Gaelic: Ca’ the Yowes and By the Light of the Peat-Fire-Flame. His mother’s unfamiliar maiden name was written in neat copperplate in faded brown ink on the inside cover, and his grandparents’ address on the Cumbernauld Road, and the dates of purchase: none earlier than 1917 or later than 1929, when she marri
ed.

  With sudden curiosity he looked at a wedding photograph on the mantelpiece. His father (shy, pleased, silly and young-looking) stood arm in arm with a slender laughing woman in one of the knee-length bridal dresses fashionable in the twenties. Her high-heeled shoes made her look the taller of the two. Thaw could think of no connection between this lively shop girl full of songs and sexual daring and the stern gaunt woman he remembered. How could one become the other? Or were they like different sides of a globe with time turning the gaunt face into the light while the merry one slid round into shadow? But only a few old people remembered her youth nowadays and soon both her youth and her age would be wholly forgotten. He thought, ‘Oh no! No!’ and felt for the only time in his life a pang of pure sorrow without rage or self-pity in it. He could not weep, but a berg of frozen tears floated near his surface, and he knew that berg floated in everyone, and wondered if they felt it as seldom as he did.

  He fell asleep with his head on the heap of music and woke an hour later feeling so fit that he flung the syringe and adrenalin into the rubbish bin and drank a mouthful of the surgical spirit. It affected him like a glass of whisky taken in good company but the taste was so abominable that he poured the rest onto the packet of cotton wool and flung it on the fire. It boomed up the chimney in a satisfying flame.

  CHAPTER 28.

  Work

  Two and a half weeks later he stood with chalk and measuring rod on a plank platform forty feet above the chancel floor. As he scribbled on the blue vault he sang aloud:

  “Immortal, invisible, God only wise,

  In light inaccessible hid from our eyes,

  Most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days,

  Almighty, victorious, you knew what you were about when you created me.”

  There was laughter from the helpers on the lower levels of scaffolding and on the ladders against the walls. They came two evenings a week: Mr. Smail, Mr. Rennie the decorator, a young electrician and a girl of sixteen who wanted to go to art school. Mr. Rennie was the most useful, a robust man of sixty who had attended evening classes in sign writing. With a skilled hand and loving patience he covered the tall arched deep-blue window wall with a fluid pattern of silver scrolling ripples. The others worked less finely but just as hard, excepting the girl, who had no head for heights. Most of the time she sat in the front row of the pews sketching the others at work. They liked her because she was good-looking and made tea and sandwiches.

  At the start of November the ceiling was so full of different shapes that the delicately patterned window wall looked insipid, so Thaw chalked boulders, flames and clouds on it and prepared new cans of colour to paint them. When his helpers came that evening Mr. Smail climbed to the platform and said, “I’m afraid you’ve hurt Mr. Rennie’s feelings.”

  “Why?”

  “He put a lot of hard work into that wall. He was proud of it.”

  “No wonder. It was beautiful. I was only able to think of this better idea because he carried out my first one so well. And a quarter of his water will still be visible when the fire, clouds and rock are painted in. I’ll go down and explain.”

  But when Thaw got down Mr. Rennie had left, and he didn’t return. After that the other helpers stopped coming. Thaw missed them, for he liked working with people and enjoyed chatting over tea and sandwiches. But the main areas had been filled so he could now starting changing and refining by himself.

  Each morning his palette, cleaned and laid out with new paint, looked prettier than any picture. While climbing to the platform he almost regretted that these tear-shaped pats of intense colour (Naples and marigold yellow, Indian red and crimson lake, emerald green and the two blues) could not be spread on the walls in their tropical vividness. To show distance and weight they had to be mixed with each other and white, black or umber. Yet it was magical that pig bristles fastened to a stick, spreading oily brown mud on a pale grey surface, could make a line of hills appear against a dawn sky. As he applied the paint his mind became a mere link between hand, colour, eye and ceiling. On descending to see the work from the church floor he had sometimes moments of selfish excitement, but his mind was sick of domineering over something as ramshackle as himself and glad to climb up again to where sight, thought, limbs, paint, feelings and brushes were a kit of tools the picture needed to complete itself. When busiest in this pure kind of work he was often visited by bizarre sexual fantasies. He got rid of them by quickly masturbating a few times, which left him free for a couple of days afterward.

  When he paused to listen the usual sounds were from traffic outside and the clicklick … clicklick of the clock in the tower. Sometimes steps resounded from a warren of meeting rooms, kitchens and corridors at the back of the building and around noon on weekdays came a muffled clangour from a hall used as a dining centre by a local school. The only regular visitor was the old minister, who came in the evening after seeing people in his vestry. He sat so still in the front pew, staring so quiet and open-mouthed at the ceiling, that he was usually forgotten until Thaw, finding some flaw in a cloud, wave, or animal, yelled, “That’s not how you should be!” then looked down and added, “I’m sorry,” but the minister only smiled and nodded. One evening when Thaw descended to wash brushes he said, “You won’t have it finished for the Watch Night service, will you?”

  “I’m sorry. Probably not.”

  “Oh, that’s a pity. You see, people are starting to complain. When do you think it will be finished?”

  Thaw winced and said, “When will the Presbytery need to see it?”

  “June, I suppose, at the latest. But surely you can finish before then? How about Easter Sunday? That gives you at least four extra months.”

  Thaw said cautiously, “Oh, I’ll probably have it done by then.”

  “Now is that a promise? Can I tell the kirk session that?”

  “Yes. A promise,” said Thaw gloomily.

  Shortly before Christmas he was eating lunch at the communion table when a middle-aged lady came in. Her hair was a cloud of angry grey curls. She wore a white smock, and stared at him, glanced once at the mural and stared back. He hurried over saying “Mrs. Coulter!”

  “Well, Duncan?”

  “What are you doing here? Are you working on the school dinners?”

  “It brings in the pennies.”

  “How are you? How’s Robert?”

  “Not bad, I suppose. Of course, he’s not very pleased with you. You could at least have come to the wedding.”

  “Robert married? I never knew.”

  “You were sent an invitation three weeks ago.”

  “But I’ve not been home. I’m sleeping here just now.”

  “Here?”

  “I’ve a mattress behind that pew over there. How’s the engineering?”

  “Oh, he gave that up a year ago. He’s in Dundee writing the sports page for the North East Courier.”

  “Robert a journalist?”

  “Aye. He was always keen on the writing.”

  “He never told me that!”

  “He didn’t want to. When you get onto your high horse, Duncan, nobody else gets a word in edgeways. Well, the Thomson press was advertising for journalists, and he sent them a story he’d written. I don’t know why, he was doing all right at engineering. Anyway, they took him on, and now he’s married a girl in one of their offices.”

  “I must write to him.”

  “Oh, you’ll never write to him. You’re too full of yourself. But I suppose that’s how people get on in the world … not that you seem to have got very far.”

  She stared at the paint-stained dressing gown he wore on top of his overalls. His mother had made it from a thick grey army blanket and it was warm and draught-proof. He said awkwardly, “Tell Robert I’m sorry I missed the wedding.”

  The pulpit was draught-proof with an electric foot warmer. In frosty weather he found it cosier sleeping curled on its octagonal floor than extended on the mattress, and grew so used to this that h
e continued there when spring came. Small corns embossed the palms of his hands from climbing the tubular steel. The ceiling was finished and the scaffolding removed before Easter, and now he worked from ladders upon the great wall facing the organ. One day Mr. Smail came and asked crisply, “When will you finish this, Duncan?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But good heavens, you asked for three months and have taken seven! And the Presbytery are coming to inspect this in June and we should be arranging favourable publicity as soon as possible!”

  After a pause Thaw said, “You can show it to journalists in a fortnight. It won’t be finished then, but it will look as if it is.”

  “I have your solemn word on that?”

  “Oh, yes, my solemn word, if you want it.”

  When Mr. Smail left he climbed down and glumly considered the tall arched panel. At the top a phoenix sank into flames among the leaves and yellow fruit of the tree of life, whose branches sheltered crows, pigeons, wrens and squirrels. The straight dark trunk divided the wall in half and grew from a lawn in the foreground. Rabbits nibbled cowslips, a mole delved and a roe deer nursed her fawn. There was enough killing to keep predators alive and the herbivores jumpy: a fox brought a pheasant to its cubs, a tawny owl in the tree of knowledge held a vole in a claw while other voles played among dead leaves between the roots. The naked man and woman embracing under the great tree of knowledge were clearly reflected in a pool of rushes and irises. This pool, the source of a river, contained a salmon rising to a gnat and mosaic turrets of caddis larvae on weedy pebbles. So far he was satisfied. His trouble began in the background where history was acted in the loops and delta of the river on its way to the ocean. The more he worked the more the furious figure of God kept popping in and having to be removed: God driving out Adam and Eve for learning to tell right from wrong, God preferring meat to vegetables and making the first planter hate the first herdsman, God wiping the slate of the world clean with water and leaving only enough numbers to start multiplying again, God fouling up language to prevent the united nations reaching him at Babel, God telling a people to invade, exterminate and enslave for him, then letting other people do the same back. Disaster followed disaster to the horizon until Thaw wanted to block it with the hill and gibbet where God, sick to death of his own violent nature, tried to let divine mercy into the world by getting hung as the criminal he was. It was comical to think he achieved that by telling folk to love and not hurt each other. Thaw groaned aloud and said, “I don’t enjoy hounding you like this, but I refuse to gloss the facts. I admire most of your work. I don’t even resent the ice ages, even if they did make my ancestors carnivorous. I’m astonished by your way of leading fertility into disaster, then repairing the disaster with more fertility. If you were a busy dung beetle pushing the sun above the skyline, if you had the head of a hawk or the horns and legs of a goat I would understand and sympathize. If you headed a squabbling committee of Greek departmental chiefs I would sympathize. But your book claims you are a man, the one perfect man of whom we are imperfect copies. And then you have the bad taste to put yourself in it as a character and show that you’re socially repulsive. You’ve never been house-trained. Very few men are as nasty to their children as you are to yours. Why didn’t you give me a railway station to decorate? It would have been easy painting to the glory of Stevenson, Telford, Brunei and a quarter million Irish navvies. But here I am, illustrating your discredited first chapter through an obsolete art form on a threatened building in a poor province of a collapsing empire. Only the miracle of my genius stops me feeling depressed about this, and even so my brushes are clogged by theology, that bastard of the sciences. Let me remember that a painting, before it is anything else, is a surface on which colours are arranged in a certain order. There is too much blue in this picture and I’d better not cover it with more birds. There could be no harm in another cloud, a thundercloud over Sinai, shaped like a chariot with you standing in it, very black-coated and Presbyterian. If I make you small enough Mr. Smail might not notice you and the composition doesn’t need a big man there.”