Slanting sunshine lit a cut-glass vase of cowslips and canterbury bells on Mr. Clark’s table. Thaw sat in an armchair admiring the butter-yellow cowslips with pale green drooping stems, the dark spear-leaved stalks with transparent blue-purple bells. He whispered, “Purple, purple,” and the word felt as purple to his lips as the colour to his eyes. A nurse making Mr. McDade’s old bed said, “You’ll have to be on your best behaviour today, Duncan. You’re getting a new neighbour. A minister.”
“I hope he isn’t talkative.”
“Oh, he’ll be talkative. Ministers are paid to be talkative.” She placed screens round the bed and someone with a suitcase went behind them. The screens were removed and a small grey-haired man in pyjamas sat against his pillow receiving elderly lady visitors. These talked in quick, low, consoling voices while the minister smiled and nodded absentmindedly. When they left he put on spectacles with lenses like half-moons and read a library book.
After dinner that day Thaw sat in bed sketching when a voice said, “Excuse me, but are you an artist?”
“No. An art student.”
“I’m sorry. I was misled by your beard. Would you mind showing me that drawing? I’m fond of flowers.”
Thaw handed over the notebook, saying, “It’s not very good. I’d need more time and materials to make it good.”
The minister held up the book before his face and after nodding once or twice began turning the earlier pages. Thaw felt worried but not annoyed. The minister had the quality of a mildly shining, useful, grey, neglected metal; his accent was the one Thaw liked best, the accent of shopkeepers, schoolteachers, and working men with an interest in politics and religion. He said, “Your flowers are beautiful, really beautiful, but—I hope you’re not offended—the earlier drawings confuse me a little. Of course I can see they’re very clever and modern.”
“They’re doodles, not drawings. I haven’t been fit enough to draw properly.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Six weeks.”
“Six weeks?” said the minister respectfully. “That’s a long time. I expect to be only a few days myself. They want to make certain tests and see how I react. The heart, you know, but nothing serious. Now tell me, because I’ve often wondered, what makes people artists? Is it an inborn talent?”
“Certainly. It’s born into everyone. All infants like playing with pencils and paints.”
“But not many of us take it further than that. I, for instance, would like nothing better than to sketch a nice view, or the face of a friend, but I couldnae draw a straight line to save my life.”
“There are very few good jobs for handworkers nowadays,” said Thaw, “so most parents and teachers discourage that kind of talent.”
“Did your parents encourage you?”
“No. They allowed me paper and pencil when I was an infant, but apart from that they wanted me to do well in life. My father only let me go to an school because he heard I might get a job there.”
“So your talent must be inborn!”
After pondering awhile, Thaw said, “Someone might work and work at a thing, not because they were encouraged, but because they never learned to enjoy anything else.”
“Dear me, that sounds very bleak! Tell me, just to change the subject, why are modern paintings so hard to understand?”
“As nobody employs us nowadays we’ve to invent our own reasons for painting. I admit art is in a bad way. Never mind, we’ve some good films. So much money has been put into the film industry that a few worthwhile talents have got work there.”
The minister said slyly, “I thought artists didn’t work for money.”
Thaw said nothing. The minister said, “I thought they toiled in garrets till they starved or went mad, then their work was discovered and sold for thousands of pounds.”
“There was once a building boom,” said Thaw, growing excited, “In north Italy. The local governments and bankers of three or four towns, towns the size of Paisley, put so much wealth and thought into decorating public buildings that half Europe’s greatest painters were bred there in a single century. These bosses weren’t unselfish men, no, no. They knew they could only win votes and stay popular by giving spare wealth to their neighbours in the form of fine streets, halls, towers and cathedrals. So the towns became beautiful and famous and have been a joy to visit ever since. But today our bosses don’t live among the folk they employ. They invest surplus profits in scientific research. Public buildings have became straight engineering jobs, our cities get uglier and uglier and our best paintings look like screams of pain. No wonder! The few who buy them, buy them like diamonds or rare postage stamps, as a form of non-taxable banking.”
His voice had grown shrill and he gulped rapidly from a glass of water. The minister said, “That sounds rather communistic, but in Russia I believe—”
“Russia,” cried Thaw, “has a more rigid ruling class than ours, so while western art is allowed to be hysterical, eastern art is allowed to be merely dull. No wonder! Strong, lovely, harmonious art has only appeared in small republics, republics where the people and their bosses shared common assemblies and a common—”
He coughed violently.
“Well, well,” said the minister soothingly. “You’ve given me a lot to think about.”
He began reading again. Thaw stared back at the flowers, but delight and freshness had leaked out of them.
Next morning Thaw sat in the armchair while the minister, hands clasped on chest, lay gazing at the ceiling. He said suddenly, “I’ve been thinking that maybe you should talk to Arthur Smail.”
“Who?”
“He’s our session clerk, a young man, very enterprising and full of modernistic ideas. Would you open the drawer of my locker, please? I’m not supposed to move. Do you see a wallet? Take it out and look inside and you’ll find some snapshots. No, put that one back, that’s my sister. It’s my church I want you to see.”
Thaw looked at two photographs showing the inside and outside of an ordinary Scottish church.
“Cowlairs Parish Church. Not grand maybe, but I’ve been there thirty-two years so I like it. I like it. Since the engine works closed the district has gone sadly downhill, I’m afraid. And the Presbytery have decided that next year our congregation and the congregation of St. Rollox must combine, for there aren’t enough members to justify the upkeep of two establishments. St. Rollox is a church round the corner from us. Do you follow me?”
“Yes.”
“Now the two congregations are nearly equal size, so Arthur Smail thought that if we cleaned and rewired our fabric, the Presbytery would send the congregation of St. Rollox to us instead of we to them. Am I boring you?”
“No.”
“Mr. Smail belongs to a firm of shopfitters and we have Mr. Rennie, a painter and decorator, and two electricians, so we had the necessary skill and any number of willing helpers. The church is cleaner and brighter than I’ve known it for years. Unluckily, however (though quite understandably), St. Rollox have done the same thing and done it better. A member of theirs who did well in Canada sent a donation which let them clean the outside stonework, a thing we can’t afford. So Mr. Smail came up with a new idea…. Have you ever attended a church of Scotland?”
“When I was at school.”
“Then you may have observed that in the last century a lot of features were brought back which our ancestors had cast out. Nothing harmful, of course, like prayer books and bishops, just small embellishments: side pulpits, organs, stained-glass windows and even, in a few cases, crucifxes on the communion table. But a modern mural painting would be a complete novelty; newspapers, wireless and even television might take note, which would put an extra card up our sleeve in dealing with the Presbytery. So Mr. Smail wrote to the director of the art school asking if he could recommend a student who would like to take on the job. Because, you see, we couldn’t pay him. The director wrote back saying it would be a shame to spoil an old building with the work of inexperienced hands. Mr. Smail was much annoyed. Excuse me telling you this, I have very little to do with it.”
Thaw stared into the photographs. From in front the church looked like a blackened stone dog kennel with a squat little tower, a tower no taller than the tenements on each side. The interior was surprisingly spacious, the exact pattern of the church used by Thaw’s old school. A balcony surrounded three sides and the fourth was pierced by a high arched chancel with three lancet windows in the back wall and an organ in the left. Intuitively he stood under the arch appraising the flat plaster surfaces. A sudden dread filled him that he wouldn’t be allowed to decorate this building. He returned the snapshots, muttered “Excuse me,” and hurried off down the ward.
He crossed bright lawns between vivid flowerbeds and sank, wrestling for breath, upon a bench. He shut his eyes and saw the inside of the church. Images were flowing up the walls like trees and mingling their colours like branches on the ceiling. He opened his eyes and stared across fields and woodland at the dip in the heat-dimmed Campsies. Self-pitying tears sprung on his cheeks and he whispered at the blue sky, “Bastard, giving me ideas without the strength to use them.” He punched the side of his head, muttering, “Take that for having ideas. And that.”
He broke into a fit of giggling, got up and returned to the ward.
“I must explain something,” he said, sitting down by the minister. “I am not a Christian. I have a sort of faith in God but I can’t believe he came down and made wheelbarrows in a shop. I like most of what Christ taught and I prefer him to Buddha, but only because Buddha started life with exceptional social privileges. I also want very, very much to paint this mural.”
Thaw wondered if the minister was smiling, for he had hidden his face by a hand adjusting the spectacles, but when he lowered it he said gravely, “If you are willing to help and your design satisfies the kirk session well be perfectly content. There are no inquisitors among us.”
“Good. The chancel ceiling is divided by plaster ribs into six panels. The most suitable theme for them is surely the six days of creation: Genesis, chapter one.”
“The ceiling? … Mr. Smail thought the wall facing the organ would be the best place.”
“The wall facing the organ will show the world on the seventh day, when God looks at it and likes it.”
“That sounds acceptable.”
“Good. I’ll make sketches.”
The ideas he scribbled in the notebook grew so fast that they burned up energy needed for breathing and he had to stop twice for injections. God was the easiest part of the design. He came out strong and omniscient, like Mr. Thaw, but with an unexpected expression of reckless gaiety got from Aitken Drummond. Next evening he showed sketches to the minister. “I’ve decided to begin with the universe before creation starts, when the spirit of God moves on the face of the deep. I’ll paint it on the back wall round the three windows.”
“Dear me, that’s a very large area.”
“Yes, but I’ll make it a simple deep, dark blue with silver ripples. Modern science thinks the primordial chaos was hydrogen. I can’t paint hydrogen so I’ll stick to the old Jewish notion of a universe filled with water. The Greeks believed everything was made of water too.”
“I thought they believed the original chaos was a mixture of atoms and strife, with love outside it. Then love worked its way in, driving strife out and linking the atoms.”
“You refer to Empedocles. I refer to Thales, who was earlier.” “You’re very erudite.”
“We have to be. Nowadays we cannae depend on the education of our patrons. Traditionally, in the chaos stage, the spirit of God is shown as a bird. I’m making him a man above the point of the middle window. He’s small, and shaped like a falling diver, and in black silhouette so we can’t see if he’s swooping toward us or away. He is the seed fertilizing chaos, the word that will order it into worlds.”
“Perfectly orthodox.”
“Here is the ceiling. The first panel shows Monday’s work, the making of light. A golden egg with God inside floats on the dark water. He’s naked and fully visible and represented conventionally as a middle-aged vigorous man.”
“His expression is rather alarming.”
“I can soften it. On Tuesday we have the making of space. A firmament is set up dividing the waters above it from the waters below. God wades waist deep in the lower waters, raising a tent-shaped sky above his head. The light fills the tent. On Wednesday the lower waters are drawn back and the dry land fixed in the middle and clothed with grass, flowers, herbs and trees. The early Jews seemed obsessed with water, they have God grappling with it for one and a half working days.”
“They lived in the Euphrates delta,” said the minister. “Where water not only fell from the sky but in seasons of flood actually bubbled out of the soil. It nourished their crops and flocks and often drowned them too.”
“I see. Thursday: night and day, sun, moon, stars. Friday: fishes and birds. With each addition to his universe God is more hidden behind it, till on Saturday all we see are his nostrils in a cloud, breathing life into Adam who is wakening among the creatures below. Adam is shaped like God but more pensive. Lastly, here is the wall facing the organ. Adam and Eve kneel cuddling beside the river which springs from under the tree of life. The bird in the tree is a phoenix. I’ve several other details to work out yet.”
After a long pause the minister said, “I admire, of course, the skill and thought you have put into this and so, I’m sure, will the kirk session. But I’m afraid they won’t allow your depiction of God. No. You see, he’ll frighten the children. Everything else is just fine however: light, space, oceans, mountains, all these birds and animals—but not God. Oh, no.”
“But without God we have a purely evolutionary picture of creation!” cried Thaw.
“There is a lot to be said for the Mosaic notion that the Almighty is most present when least imagined. And it would be a pity to frighten the children,” said the minister, closing his eyes. “Very well,” said Thaw, after a pause. “I’ll take him off the ceiling. But I must show him diving through chaos. That is essential.”
“Hardly anyone will notice him there. I’m sure that Arthur Smail will raise no objection.”
At medical inspection next morning the professor paused by Thaw’s bed and said, “Mr. Clark and Mr. Thaw here are our oldest inhabitants. Everyone else in the ward when they were admitted has cleared out or kicked the bucket but these two have got into a repetitive cycle of improvement and deterioration. Mr. Clark is seventy-four, there’s some excuse for him. There’s none for you, Duncan. Why do you do it?”
“I don’t know,” said Duncan.
“Then I’ll tell you,” said the professor cheerfully. “And don’t get angry. You’re intelligent and tough enough to understand me, which is why I’m not whispering behind your back. This patient, gentlemen, is suffering from adaption. Let me give you an example of adaption. A hardworking man of thirty loses his job through no fault of his own. For two or three months he hunts for work but can’t find any. His national insurance money runs out and he goes on the dole. In these circumstances his energy and initiative are a burden to him. They make him want to break things and punch people. So instinctively his metabolism lowers itself. He grows slovenly and depressed. A year or two passes, he’s offered a job at last and refuses it. Unemployment has become his way of life. He’s adapted to it. In the same way some people come here with commonplace illnesses which, after an initial improvement, stop responding to treatment. Why? In the absence of other factors we must assume that the patient has adapted to the hospital itself. He has reverted to an infantile state in which suffering and being regularly fed feel actually safer than health. And mind you, he’s not a malingerer. The adaption has occurred in a region where mind and body are indistinguishable. So what do we do? In your case, Duncan, we’re going to do this. No more ephedrine, isoprenaline, aminophylline suppositories, sedatives or sleeping pills. From now on we give you nothing: nothing but an injection if the attacks are really bad. And if you aren’t well by next Friday we’ll give you a hypodermic needle, a bottle of adrenalin and sling you out. Of course if this were America, and your father were rich, we could make a packet by hanging on to you till you croaked. So think yourself lucky. And now we will look at the heart of the minister of Cowlairs Parish Church. Screens, please.”
Thaw lay trembling with indignation. When the professor left the ward he scrambled up, put on his dressing gown and hurried outside. He found himself running through the grounds muttering, “All right, I’ll leave. I’ll leave now. I’ll demand a taxi and leave now.”
He leaned on the parapet of a bridge across a cutting near the clock tower. Rails at the bottom were hidden by lank grass and a litter of broken wicker baskets. The banks were overhung by elders and brambles, but he glimpsed through them a station platform, cracked, mossy and strewn with rubbish. He returned thoughtfully to the ward.
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.”
“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.”
“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 married.
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.