“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 he 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.”
Two days later a telegram was handed to him which said,
RETURN TO ART SCHOOL AT ONCE. DIPLOMA EXAM STARTED
YESTERDAY. PETER WATT
. The art school looked flimsier than ever and as he entered the old studio the other students gave an ironical cheer. Mr. Watt muttered, “Better late than never, Thaw,” and handed him a paper which required him to design a decorative panel for the dining room of a luxury liner. He took a sheet of hardboard and spent the morning filling it with a merman and a mermaid chasing each other’s tails with a knife and fork, then he said, “That’s the best I can do, Mr. Watt. I’ll go back to the church now.”
“Wait a minute! You’re allowed six weeks for this examination. Half the diploma assessment is based on it.”
“I know, sir. I’m sorry, but I must return to Cowlairs. You see—”
“You will not return to Cowlairs. You will come with me, now, to the registrar.”
Thaw was left outside the office door for ten or fifteen minutes and ushered in by the registrar’s secretary, an unusual formality. Mr. Peel and Mr. Watt were seated on the same side of a long table, a single chair facing them at a distance. Thaw sat on it and some seconds of tribunal silence ensued. The two men looked so solidly forbidding that he instinctively blurred them by unfocusing his eyes. At last the registrar said, “Have you any complaint about your treatment in this school, Thaw?”
“None. I have been treated very well.”
“Correct. Yet you have ignored our advice, flouted our authority and not only obliged us to bend our rules but actually to improvise new ones to avoid expelling you. Of course we have been influenced by consideration of your health: and I don’t mean merely your physical health.”
There was more silence, so Thaw said, “Thank you, sir.”
“When you started here you signed an application form. That form was a contract, a contract you have renewed at the start of each school year. Society is upheld by contracts, Thaw. All government, all business, all industry is the result of people making promises and working to keep them. In return for a steady grant of money you promised to qualify for the Scottish Education Department Diploma of Painting. This school exists to award that diploma. Mr. Watt tells me you refuse to sit the examination.”
“But I’ve finished it.”
Mr. Watt said, “What will the other students think of the exam if you are allowed to pass on half a day’s work?”
Thaw said, “Mr. Watt, I realize that schools need examinations, and admit that many students wouldn’t work at all if they weren’t rewarded with paper rolls printed by the government. And, Mr. Peel, I’ve been thrilled to hear you defending contracts and promises, because if these weren’t defended we’d have mere anarchy. I cannot deny your truths, I can only oppose them with mine. This exam is endangering an important painting. It would be blasphemy to waste my talent making frivolous decorations for a non-existent liner. But I see your difficulty. You must uphold the art school, while I am upholding art. The solution is simple. Don’t award me this diploma. I promise not to feel offended. The diploma is useless, except to folk who want to be teachers.”
Thaw leaned forward to see the pleased light of agreement on the registrar’s face, but it was so compressed and wrinkled that he sank back feeling lonely. The registrar said, “I have never in my life heard such a display of intellectual arrogance. You’ve made me more miserable than I’ve felt for many years. You have sat smugly declaiming that black is white and evidently expecting me to agree. I have no advice to give, but I tell you this: If you do not return at once to the examination your connection with the art school ends today, and for good.” Thaw nodded and left the office feeling dazed. He went upstairs to the studio trying to think of entertaining nonsense to add to the background of the examination panel. He climbed slower and slower, then stopped and turned. On the way down he passed Mr. Watt coming up. They pretended not to see each other.
The following evening his father entered the church and cried, “Come down and read this, Duncan!”
Thaw wiped his brush and descended the ladder.
“Read this!” commanded Mr. Thaw, stiffly holding out a letter.
“No need.”
“Damn you, read it!”
“No. It’s from Mr. Peel explaining why I’ve been expelled.”
“My God, you’ve made a mess of your life.”
“It’s too early to judge.”
“How do you intend to eat in future?”
“I’ve still some of my grant money. And the minister says the congregation may hold a collection for me when the mural’s done.”
“What will that bring you? Twenty pounds? Fourteen? Eight?”
“There’s going to be a lot of good publicity, Dad. I may get other mural jobs, paying ones, in cafés and pubs. The ceiling’s finished. What do you think of it?”
“I don’t appreciate painting, Duncan! I take my opinion from the experts. And you’ve quarrelled with your experts.”
“The experts who matter are you and me, the only people here. Please look at my ceiling! Don’t you enjoy it? Look at the hedgehog! I copied her from a cigarette card you stuck in an album for me when I was five. Don’t you remember? Will’s
Wild Animals of Britain?
She fits that corner perfectly. Don’t you like her?”
Mr. Thaw sat on a corner of the communion table and said, “Son, when will I be footloose?”
Thaw was puzzled by the word. He said, “Footloose?”
“Yes. When can I live as I want? I don’t enjoy working as a costing clerk in a city. This summer I meant to get a job with the Scottish Youth Hostels or the Camping Club. The money’s poor but I’d be among hills and able to walk and climb and mix with the sort of folk I like. I’m nearly sixty, but thank God I have my health. I expected you to get a job at the art school. Peel told me it was a probability four years ago. Instead you’ve chosen to become a social cripple. Not like Ruth! She’s independent.”
“I’m independent too. If I’ve recently eaten your food or slept under your roof it’s because I was sick,” said Thaw sullenly. He was disconcerted, for he had never expected his father to become a man who lived by doing what he liked. Mr. Thaw said mildly, “Son, I don’t hate helping you. Listen, I’m prepared to pay the rent of the house for at least another year, even if I’m not living there. We can both use it as a base, a point of departure. Of course, I’d prefer you to pay for the electricity you burn.”
“That’s fair enough.”
“Another thing. Since you were wee I’ve put a few bob a month into a couple of insurance policies for you. It’s time you did that yourself. Keep up the payments, and you’ll get five pounds a week from the time you’re sixty. Of course, if you realize it right away you’ll get less than fifty pounds. That’s up to you.”
“Thank you, Dad,” said Thaw and nearly smiled. He had not lied in saying he still had some grant money left, but it was only a few shillings.
A week later a group containing Mr. Smail and the minister entered. Mr. Smail said jovially, “Here’s a young lady who wants to speak to you, Duncan.”
Thaw came down from the ladder. The lady was dwarfed by a tall man with an expensive camera. The details of her person and dress were slightly sloppy, but she moved with such smiling confidence that this wasn’t seen at first. She held out her hand, saying, “Peggy Byres of the
Evening News
.”
Thaw laughed and said, “Are you going to make me famous?” He talked for six or seven minutes about the ceiling. She glanced at it, scribbled in a note pad and said, “Is your family very religious, Duncan?”