Lanark: a life in 4 books (34 page)

“Ten bob a week for food. Your tram fares won’t come to more than five shillings, so here’s a pound.”

“That’s too much.”

“Regard the extra as pocket money. No doubt you’ll want a coffee with a friend sometime.”

Thaw had hoped for more pocket money. He said in no particular tone of voice, “Thanks very much.”

“And Duncan, five shillings a week isn’t much pocket money for a boy who’ll soon be eighteen. If you ever want to take a lassie out, let me know and I’ll give you more.”

Garnethill was one of several whale-shaped hills lying parallel to the Clyde and the school was on a quiet street along the spine of it. The main part was an elegant building designed by Mackintosh in the eighteen-eighties but Thaw entered the annexe across the road: a terrace of old houses with new additions among them. He walked down a twisting corridor with so many unexpected descents that it seemed underground. The studio at the end was filled with clear grey morning light from windows in the girder-supported roof. Among tall easels, plaster statues and draught screens some girls crowded loosely in a space like a forest clearing, and boys sat on stools talking nonchalantly in couples. Some smoked and Thaw envied them, for a cigarette would have employed his hands. He could have opened a book and sat behind something reading it, but he was tired of being thought a bookish hermit and meant to forge a new, confident, sardonic, mysterious character for himself; so frowning and leaning against the wall he pretended to see nobody, though glancing furtively at one of the girls. She sat cross-kneed on the pedestal of the discus thrower, sometimes talking to the girls nearby, sometimes tilting her head back to exhale smoke from her nostrils. She wore a suède jacket and tight skirt, and a blond curl curved down to half hide her left eye. Thaw covered his own eyes with his hands as if shielding them from light and stared between the fingers at the other girls. Altogether they gave an impression of bright mirthful sexuality, but separately their attraction was lessened by something schoolgirlish in the dress or markedly individual in the face. From the babble of their conversation only the voice of the blond girl reached him distinctly. Her low notes impressed his ear as velvet impresses fingertips. “I’m glad they couldn’t send me to university, actually, ‘cause actually art school is more relaxing….”

A brisk white-haired little lady entered and softly called their names from a register. She told them their curriculum, dictated a list of materials and gave the numbers of lockers to store them in.

“Each month you will paint a picture in your own time to be exhibited in the assembly hall. We on the staff look forward to these exhibitions with great interest and even excitement, for they show how well you have grasped what we teach you in class. The theme of your first painting is”?she took a slip of paper from her register and examined it?“the subject is
Washing Day
and must contain a minimum of three figures.” Then she ordered them to get paper and a drawing board from the school shop, made them sit in twos before high-legged narrow tables, and went round with a basket of burned-out light bulbs, placing one on each table to be drawn in careful outline. Later she moved among them, giving quiet words of correction and encouragement and making feathery little sketches on the sides of papers to show how the bulbs should be represented. Thaw worked stolidly, his face sometimes expressionless, sometimes bewildered as he fought a gathering rage and disgust. Once he muttered to his neighbour, a square-faced, fair-moustached, well-dressed student, “This is incredible.”

“What is?”

“Art from a dead light bulb.”

“Not exciting, I admit, but perhaps we should learn to walk before we run.”

He had a bland fee-paying school dialect and Thaw detested him.

Halfway through the morning the bell rang and they straggled through the corridor to the refectory, a large low-ceilinged place packed with students who seemed at home there. Thaw stood for ten minutes at the end of an untidy queue. People kept leaving the head of it with coffee and biscuits while others kept joining friends in the middle, so he returned to the studio. Two boys sat in a corner drinking tea from thermos flasks and discussing landladies in a severe border dialect whose words seemed cut in coarse granite. They fell silent as Thaw approached. He nodded at the flasks and said, “That’s a good idea. The refectory’s too crowded for comfort.”

“Aye, and too dear. On a grant like ours we’ve to economize.” The other said accusingly, “Judging by your face you don’t think much of the lesson.”

“No. It’s rotten, isn’t it?”

“Is it? Have we not to master the techniques before practising them?”

“But technique and practice are the same thing! We can draw nothing well unless it interests us, and we only learn to draw it well by first drawing it badly, not by drawing what bores us stiff. Learning to draw from dead bulbs and boxes is like learning to make love with corpses.”

One student grinned and muttered that that depended on the corpses. The other said sternly, “Are you a Communist?”

“No.”

“Are you a Bevanite?”

“I agree with Bevan that Britain should not make atomic bombs.”

“I thought so.”

The teacher entered and Thaw returned to his seat feeling that he had somehow betrayed himself.

At noon he put the new materials in his locker, left the building and went down to Sauchiehall Street where the pavement was busy with a crowd he could feel anonymous among. He bought a pie from a dairy and wandered, eating thoughtfully, into Sauchiehall Lane, which was quiet except for pigeons cooing and pecking casually between the cobbles. The morning had been like the first morning at any school. It had left a feeling of anxiety, overcrowding and dry curriculums, of minds herded into grooves. Nothing had enriched or warmed except the sight of a certain girl, and that had less warmed than scorched him into a different kind of unease. But now he began to relax, feeling (in that obscure channel between tenement backs) a comfort he sometimes found in graveyards, the canal and other neglected parts of the city. The stone walls, stapled over with iron pipes, seemed to hold something grander and stranger than the builders knew. He looked through a doorway and saw a huge unhealthy tree. It grew in a patch of bare earth among pale-green rhubarb-shaped weeds; it divided at the roots into two scaly limbs, one twisting along the ground, the other shooting up to the height of the third-storey windows; each limb, almost naked of branches, supported at the end a bush of withered leaves. Thaw stared and munched for several minutes then moved away feeling triumphant. It was not a feeling he understood. It might have come from identifying with the tree, with the confining walls or with both.

The afternoon was spent in the modelling department making a clay copy of a plaster lip. At four-thirty he went to his locker and found it empty. He stared dispassionately at the vacant space, knowing the shock of it would break on him in three or four minutes. To prepare for this he said aloud, “I have done a stupid thing.”

A student at a nearby locker said smoothly, “We all do, from time to time.”

“I have let myself be robbed of three pounds’ worth of goods.” The student came over and looked at the empty locker. He said, “You should have got a padlock before leaving anything valuable there. You can get a fairly good one for two or three shillings in Woolworth’s.”

Thaw recognized his fair-moustached neighbour of the morning who had wanted to walk before running. A flash of intuition separate from logic or evidence made him sure this man was the thief. He said harshly, “You are right,” and left the building.

At home over the teatable Mr. Thaw said cheerfully, “Well? How did it go?”

“All right.”

“You don’t sound very sure.”

“I’m tired.”

“Did you get much in the way of materials?”

“A drawing board, a folder, cartridge paper, a metal-edged ruler. I … I had them stolen.”

“My God! How? How?”

Thaw told him how.

“And how much did they cost?”

Thaw put a hand in his pocket and grasped the crumpled invoice tight. “Nearly a pound.”

“
Nearly
a pound?
Nearly
a pound? How much did they cost?” “Fifteen shillings.”

Mr. Shaw stared at him disgustedly then said, “Never mind. Just get another lot on account tomorrow.”

In bed that night Thaw realized his father would expect the stolen goods to be replaced for fifteen shillings, so to keep his lie a secret he would need to save three pounds minus fifteen shillings multiplied by two. It struck him that if he had a key in the side of his head and could die by turning it, he would gladly turn it now.

Next morning he rose at seven, walked to school to save tram fares and dined on a cheap pie. This left him hungry but came to seem sufficient in two or three days, then he lost appetite for it and drank a cup of milk instead. Daily his stomach grew content with less. His mind was clenched, his surface reinforced against surrounding life. Normal hesitancies of voice and manner vanished. Often a line of words sounded in his head:
clean bleak exact austere rigorous implacable
. Sometimes he whispered these words as though they were a tune his body moved to. Walking down streets and corridors his feet hit the ground with unusual force and regularity. All sounds, even words spoken nearby, seemed dulled by intervening glass. People behind the glass looked distinct and peculiar. He wondered what they saw in gargoyles, masks and antique door knockers that they couldn’t see in each other. Everyone carried on their necks a grotesque art object, originally inherited, which they never tired of altering and adding to. Yet while he looked on people with the cold interest usually felt for things, the world of things began to cause surprising emotions. A haulage vehicle carrying a huge piece of bright yellow machinery swelled his heart with tenderness and stiffened his penis with lust. A section of tenement, the surface a dirty yellow plaster with oval holes through which brickwork showed, gave the eerie conviction he was beholding a kind of flesh. Walls and pavements, especially if they were slightly decayed, made him feel he was walking beside or over a body. His feet did not hit the ground less firmly, but something in him winced as they did so.

He could only rest when working properly. After sketching bulbs and boxes the class was given plants, fossils and small stuffed tropical birds. Thaw let his eyes explore like an insect the spiral architecture of a tiny seashell while his pencil point marked some paper with the eye’s discoveries. The teacher tried to correct him by rational argument. She said, “Are you trying to make a pattern out of this, Duncan? I wish you wouldn’t. Just draw what you see.”

“I’m doing that, Miss Mackenzie.”

“Then stop drawing everything with the same black harsh line. Hold the pencil lightly; don’t grip it like a spanner. That shell is a simple, delicate, rather lovely thing. Your drawing is like the diagram of a machine.”

“But surely, Miss Mackenzie, the shell only seems delicate and simple because it’s smaller than we are. To the fish inside it was a suit of armour, a house, a moving fortress.”

“Duncan, if I were a marine biologist I might care how the shell was used. As an artist my sole interest is in the appearance. I insist that it appears beautiful and delicate and should be drawn beautifully and delicately. There’s no need to show these little cracks. They’re accidental. Ignore them.”

“But Miss Mackenzie, the cracks show the shell’s nature—only this shell could crack in this way. It’s like the wart on Cromwell’s lip. Leave it out and it’s no longer a picture of Cromwell.”

“All right, but please don’t make the wart as important as the lip. You’ve drawn these cracks as clearly as the edges of the shell itself.”

Behind the teacher’s back several classmates made gestures like spectators at a boxing match, and later Thaw was approached by Macbeth who said, “Where do you go after school these days?”

“Home, usually.”

“Why not come to Brown’s? A few of us meet there. It’s a change from the concentration camp.”

Thaw felt excited. Macbeth was the only first-year student who looked like an artist. He walked with a defiant slouch, wore a beret, rolled his own cigarettes and smelled of whisky in the afternoon. He was often seen on the edge of older groups of students: elegant tight-trousered girls and tall bearded men who laughed freely in public places. In class he did what the teachers wanted with an ease which looked contemptuous, but he impressed Thaw most by keeping company with Molly Tierney, the velvet-voiced girl with blond curls. He sat beside her in class, gave her cigarettes and carried her drawing board from place to place. His face usually had an anxious, babyish look.

Brown’s cakeshop in Sauchiehall Street had a narrow staircase going down to a wide low-ceilinged room. The tobacco smoke and faded luxury were so dense here that Thaw, like a diver in the saloon of a sunk liner, felt them press against his eardrums. In an alcove to his right Molly Tierney reclined on a sofa, smiling and lightly fingering the curl overhanging her brow. Others from Thaw’s class sat at a table beside her sipping coffee and looking bored. Thaw slid into a chair next to Macbeth without being specially noticed. Sounds of people moving and conversing at other tables blurred and receded, but tiny noises nearby (Macbeth’s breathing, a spoon striking a saucer) were magnified and distinct. Molly Tierney came into sharp focus. The colours of her hair, skin, mouth and dress grew clearer like a stained-glass figure with light increasing behind it. Second by second her body was infused with the significance of mermaids on rocks and Cleopatra in her barge. He heard someone say, “Has anyone started their monthly painting yet? I haven’t even thought of it.”

Molly said, “I began mine last night. At least I meant to, only my mother wanted me to watch television and we had a fight. It ended with me being pushed out of doors into the co-o-ld bla-a-a-ck night.” She giggled. “Me! In my high-heeled shoes.”

A voice said venomously, “Parents just won’t allow you a life of your own.”