They danced and he gazed fascinated at her blond hair and naked shoulders. She giggled and said, “You don’t remember me, but you should. I was the first girl you ever danced with. Ever, ever, ever.”
He grinned thankfully and said, “I’m very glad.”
“Do you remember what you thought I was like?”
“Marble and honey.”
“Am I still like that?”
“Yes.”
“What a relief. You see, I’m marrying a solicitor next month. He’s very rich and sexy and what more can a woman want?” Her manner was strained and cheerful and he didn’t understand it. She said, “I’m a terrible woman, Duncan. I’ve still four or five boyfriends and I play them against each other, and at the moment I rather fancy that woman talking to Aitken. Have you ever fancied a man?”
“Not in the cuddling way,” said Thaw.
His head lay on her shoulder and his hands clasped the halves of her bottom. She said, “Stop touching me, Duncan.”
He said, “I’m sorry,” and went over to a table of drinks, filled a tumbler of whisky and forced it quickly down him like medicine. It tasted horrible. The words “Stop touching me, Duncan” were sounding in the centre of him. He couldn’t bear them, but they were in his centre. He filled and drank a tumbler of sherry, which tasted better; then one of gin, which tasted much worse; then he went upstairs to the lavatory.
When he got inside the room was visibly whirling. He closed his eyes and felt it drop like a crashing aeroplane. He fell to the wall, then to the floor. He embraced the narrow part of the lavatory pan and lay shivering and wishing he was unconscious. Whenever he opened his eyes he saw the room whirl: when he closed them he felt it fall. There were hammerings and voices shouting, “Open the door,” but he said, “Go away, I’m cold,” and after a while they went away. Later he heard such an odd scratching and tapping that he sat up. The tapping was mingled with faint cries of “Let me in!” and the bluster of strong wind. There was a white mouthing face behind the black glass of the window and he felt a pang of superstitious terror, for he remembered the lavatory was on the second or third floor. At last he crawled over, reached up a hand and raised a catch. The window swung in and Drummond jumped through with a gust of rain. He said, “Don’t worry, Duncan,” and wiped Thaw’s face and shirt with a sponge. Thaw said, “I’m cold, leave me alone.”
Two people helped him downstairs through an empty house. A door was opened and he was taken into a dark shed with a concrete floor. He screamed, “This is a cold place, I don’t want to be here.”
He was laid on the skin of a cold sofa, some doors slammed and a voice said, “Where do you live?”
“Cowlairs Parish Church.”
“For Christ’s sake where does he live?”
A voice gave an address on the Cumbernauld Road and the sofa throbbed and swung forward. It was clearly part of a car, and when it stopped outside the close in Riddrie he was able to get out and walk upstairs alone. Luckily his father no longer lived there.
A week later he recovered enough self-esteem to return to the church. The mural broke upon him in an altogether fresh way. He chuckled and skipped about, looking at it from different angles, his mind brightening with new ideas. He was laying paint on his palette when the minister came in. He said, “You took a holiday, Duncan. Good. You needed a rest…. I’m afraid I have bad news. The Glasgow Presbytery have been here and … they’ve seen it and they’re not very happy. Of course, our publicity was bad and the colour of Adam was rather a shock. I told them you could change that, but it was the
principle
of the thing they disliked. I’m afraid we’re going to lose our church.”
Anger flooded Thaw’s veins with adrenalin. He laid his ladder against the wall and said, “When?”
“In another six or seven months. Sometime early in the coming year.”
“At least it gives me time to finish the mural,” said Thaw, mounting the ladder.
“I’m sorry, but you’ll have to stop.”
“Why?” said Thaw, staring.
“We’ve had complaints from the congregation. They’d like to worship without this mess of ladders and pots and drips on the chancel floor. The session say you must stop. Even Mr. Smail says so, and he was a great supporter of yours.”
“When?”
“Next Sunday.”
On Sunday the minister came an hour before the service and said, “Well, Duncan.”
Thaw climbed wearily down the ladder for he’d been working all night. He said, “That’s the best I can do in the time.”
“It looks just fine.”
“If anyone wonders about these marks tell them they would have become a herd of cattle.”
“Oh, no one will ask. It looks fine.”
“And if they say the sky is cluttered, tell them I meant to simplify it.”
“It’s beautiful, Duncan, but you could be an eternity on it. An eternity.”
“And if they say the events on the horizon distract from the big simple foreground shapes, tell them I’d begun to notice that, but this was my first mural, I’d seen nobody else paint one, and I’d to teach myself as I went along. Tell them I couldn’t afford assistants.”
The minister hesitated, then said firmly, “Finish the mural when you like, Duncan. Pay no attention to them. Work on it as much as you like.”
“Oh!” said Thaw, and wept with relief. The minister patted his shoulder and said kindly, “Just you go ahead and pay no attention to them.”
CHAPTER 29.
The Way Out
He could no longer ask the church to pay for materials. When only ten pounds remained he knew he would be a desperate man when it was spent; on the other hand if he survived without touching it he could probably last forever. A smell of boiled cabbage from the depths of the building suggested an idea. In the early afternoon he went to a lane behind the church where rubbish bins stood and found scraps from the school dinners tipped there. He started bringing a plate round and picking out slices of bread and mutton, lumps of macaroni and dumpling. One day he heard someone cry “Duncan Thaw!” and looked into the accusing eyes of Mrs. Coulter. He said defensively, “I’m not stealing this. Nobody wants it.”
“You should be ashamed, a well-brought-up boy like you!” He walked past her with the heaped plate, but around noon the next day she brought a large covered bowl into the church and set it on the end of a pew saying, “Your dinner.” He said irritably, “You don’t need to do that Mrs. Coulter.” She snorted and went out and did the same every following weekday except Friday, when she left two bowls. And the decorator, Mr. Rennie, arrived one evening and said abruptly, “Do you still want help?”
“More than ever.”
“Right. I’ll give you a couple of nights a week.”
He began changing into overalls and Thaw, who wept easily nowadays, hurried to a quiet corner of the church. Then he returned and said, “You see my tree of life, Mr. Rennie? It’s big and beautiful and in the wrong place. Far too central. It must be shifted two and a quarter inches to the left, fruit, birds, squirrels and all. Do you see why?”
“Don’t ask me why, just show me how to do it.”
“I will, Mr. Rennie. Excuse me if I chatter nervously, I’m afraid of you vanishing. And could you lend me scaffolding again for a few days? I want to get back to the ceiling.”
“That won’t please the minister.”
“Just for a few days.”
The help of Mr. Rennie, though only six hours a week, was so welcome that Thaw found comfort in addressing him when he wasn’t there.
“We aren’t working on the rim of the universe, are we, Mr. Rennie? No, no, Cowlairs is a historic region. A cinema down the road has a granite slab set in the wall above a bunged-up drinking fountain. It must have lain flat once, for the inscription says James Nisbet lies under it who suffered martyrdom there in 1684. I suppose the district was wild moorland then. He was shot by government troops for worshipping God without a prayerbook, just making up the words as he went along. … A bad business? No, a question of law and order. Men who refused to pray out of a properly licensed book might undermine the government by asking God to change it. So
bang
-
bang
, cheerio, Jimmy Nisbet. But four years later came a different lot of politicians who found it easy to govern Scotland without prayerbooks. So the troops stopped chasing Presbyterians, who wouldnae pray out of books, and returned to chasing Catholics, who prayed out of Latin ones. And a slab was laid over Nisbet’s bones on the site of the Casino picture house (they’re turning it into a bingo hall next year) and a slipshod verse was carved on it which ends with the rousing words:
As Britain lyes in guilt, you see, ’Tis asked o reader, art thou free?
Are we free, Mr. Rennie? Of course we are. We’re making our own model of the universe and nobody gives a damn for us….”
“Yes, a great ground for martyrs, Mr. Rennie. Overby in the cemetery is a monument to Baird, Hardie and Wilson, some weavers who nearly overturned the British government around 1820. The government was very insecure in those days. It had just won a large war and there was widespread unemployment. Mechanization was making the owning classes richer and the working classes poorer—especially the weavers. A secret organization grew up in the weaving towns which planned to call a general strike, assassinate the cabinet, attack the barracks and give everybody the vote. Cunning, eh? The details of the revolt were mostly worked out by government agents, and when the great day dawned they had trouble getting anyone to move. However, in the villages of Strathaven and Bellshill some enthusiasts set out with red flags. Four of them actually hoisted one on Cathkin Braes and then went home to their teas, for clearly nothing was happening. So Baird, Hardie and Wilson were arrested, tried and hung, and the bloody tide of revolution receded. Then one day the government noticed it could give the vote to almost everyone without losing power. The unemployed got assisted passages to Canada, Australia, Asia and Africa, where they prospered by grabbing land from the natives. Britain became an empire, everyone lived happily ever after, and a monument was erected to Baird and Hardie and Wilson who had died to make us free. But don’t think this red-hot radicalism made us less religious, Mr. Rennie. Glasgow is still full of churches built in the last century. Half of them have been turned into warehouses. Perhaps you and I are painting what will become the best decorated motorcycle and television accessories depot in the United Kingdom.”
Later he said, “I apologize, Mr. Rennie, I don’t believe that. I believe this church will be knocked down, but first the mural must be made perfect. When a thing is perfect it is eternal. It can be destroyed afterward, or slowly decay, but its perfection is safe in the past, which is the only inevitable part of the universe. No government, no force, no God can make what has been not have been. The past is eternal and every day our abortions fall into it: love affairs we bungled, homes we damaged, children we couldn’t be kind to. Let you and I, Mr. Rennie, make eternity a present of a complete, perfect, harmonious, utterly harmless thing; something whose every part is the result of intelligent, loving care; something which isn’t a destructive weapon and can’t be sold at a profit by public-spirited businessmen. And remember, Mr. Rennie, we’re doing nothing novel. For five or six thousand years Egyptian and Etruscan and Chinese artists put their best work into graves which were never opened. The old Greeks and Romans had as many Leonardos, Rembrandts and Cézannes as we have, all painting on plaster that’s turned to powder now, apart from a few square yards in Pompeii. I’m not sorry. There are too many colour photographs of the Great Art of the Past. If it didn’t have colour reproduction, the mid-twentieth century would have no reason to think itself artistic at all … and if it didn’t have you and me, Mr. Rennie.”
“Stop condescending to me,” said a voice.
Thaw started and dropped his brush, for it was three o’clock in the morning. He laughed shakily and climbed down the ladder, saying, “I will never condescend to you again, Mr. Rennie, if you promise not to speak to me when you aren’t here. Excuse me, I’m a little tired.”
Sleeping had become as easy as work, for he dreamed he was in the mural. “Here it is: land, sky and sunlight,” he said to God his father as they strolled round the bramble bush, the serpent wagging its tail behind them. It was a clear day and anemones were singing in the tidal pools. “You’ll get it back when I’ve put it in decent order. I don’t like being in debt. As you see I’ve had no trouble with rational pain and death.” They looked up at a hawk with a young rabbit hanging from its claws, then paused on the summit of a cliff. On the river below two swans twined their necks and the first lovers knelt to each other on the far shore. On the western horizon arose the great stump of the Babylonian tower, tiny figures waved flags on the summit; to the east, on Ben Sinai, in a patch of bad weather, the minister was carving the triangulation tables of the law. “Sex and history are problems I can’t solve, so I’m returning them in the form you gave them, though stated a little more clearly. I’ll finish by the new year and then I’ll owe you nothing. Though I’ll be grateful if you give me some paying customers after that, I’ll need the money. Excuse me a moment.” He went up and moved the lightning over Sinai two and a quarter inches to the right, making it echo the rift in the tree of knowledge. He had no sensation of waking. As he lay with closed eyes his mind circled the chancel walls with lazy power, pausing in the vault to choose the area he would work upon that day. He even had a plan view of his body, curled in the pulpit like a grub in a nut, and knew it would soon bring his working weight up the ladder to join his thoughts. Body and mind so completely served the mural that sexual fancies never came to him now and he only knew he needed food when the brush felt too heavy to hold. His strangest, most dreamlike times happened away from the mural. He sat at the communion table eating lumps of custard from Mrs. Coulter’s bowl while the old minister stared at him murmuring, “Oh yes, you’re a real artist. A real artist.”