Lanark: a life in 4 books (46 page)

“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.”