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 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?”
“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.
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?”
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.”