Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [106]
The entrance hall was a bare place with a small door marked INQUIRIES. He turned the knob and entered a wedge-shaped room with a switchboard and an elderly lady shut in a corner by a counter of polished yellow wood. The lady said, “Yes?” “I’ve an appointment; that’s to say I’m expected. Mr. Tulloch expects me.”
“What is your name, please?”
He said shyly, “I am Duncan Thaw.”
The lady moved her fingers among clicking plugs and said, “Mr. Tulloch? A Mr. Thaw to see you. He says he has an appointment…. Very well.”
She deftly fingered more switches.
“Would you send down a junior? To take a Mr. Thaw to the waiting room? … Very well…. Would you wait here a little while, sir?”
“Yes, please,” said Thaw, humbled at being called sir. He went to a low table with magazines arranged neatly on top in overlapping rows. Lacking the courage to disturb their order, he was content to look at the covers:
The Executive—A MAGAZINE FOR THE MODERN BUSINESSMAN.
Modern Business—A MAGAZINE FOR THE EXECUTIVE.
Ingot−THE THUNDERHAUGH STEEL GROUP MONTHLY BULLETIN.
Automobile—THE CAR DEALERS’ MONTHLY BULLETIN.
They had the thin glossy covers of obscene novelettes and were mostly pictures of people in expensive clothes sitting behind desks.
A small neat pretty girl came in and said, “Mr. Thaw? Will you come this way, please?”
He walked behind her across the bare hall and climbed some wide metallic stairs. She hurried ahead of him through corridors of glass and cream-coloured metal, smiling downward as if sharing a tender secret with her bosom, and left him at a door labelled WAITING ROOM. Inside four men sat round a table, one of them saying in an English Midland dialect, “Yes, but what I don’t understand is—”
“Will you excuse us?” said another man swiftly to Thaw. Thaw sat down in a comfortable chair and said, “Certainly. Please go on. I’m only here to wait.”
“Then would you wait outside?” said the swift man, rising and opening the door. Thaw sat feeling insulted on a sofa against the corridor wall. It occurred to him that the men inside were capitalists plotting something. This floor of the factory was cut up into offices by glass screens supported by metal walls. The glass was rippled so that only shadows could be seen through it, and the bleakness, coldness, metallicness of the place gave a resounding quality to footsteps, clattering typewriters, ringing telephones, and the mutter of administrative voices. Two long spectacled men paused at a corner.
“I think I’d better check that teller.”
“No no. No need for that at all.”
“Still, if the figures aren’t exact—”
“No no. Even if his figures are a hundred percent out, that’s enough for my purpose.”
Thaw realized Mr. Tulloch was beside him. He was a weary, paunchy man who said, “Duncan Thaw? … Yes …” and sat down.
“I haven’t much time. Show me your stuff.”
Thaw suddenly felt competent and businesslike. He opened his folder and said “Here is a series of watercolours, a series dealing with acts of God. The Deluge. The Tower of Babel. The Walls of Jericho Falling Flat.”
“Um. Mmm. Next?”
“Penelope unweaving. Circe. Scylla and Charybdis. The last is least successful because at the time I was equally influenced by Blake and Beardsley and the two sorts of outline—”
“Yes. And this?”
“The Cave Artist. Moses on Sinai. Greek Civilization. Roman Imperialism. The Sermon on the Mount. Vandals. The Cathedral City. John Knox preaching to Mary Queen of Scots. The Factory City. The—”
Mr. Tulloch suddenly sat back and Thaw grinned at the air before him and shuffled the pictures back into the half-emptied folder. Mr. Tulloch was saying, “… take them at intervals of five years, so you see we really have no room for you. Your work, however, is very promising. Yes. Perhaps something in the illustrative line. Have you tried McLellan the publisher?”
“Yes, but—”
“Oh, yes, ha, ha, well of course the business is overcrowded just now…. Have you tried Blockcrafts, Bath Street? Well, try them. Ask for Mr. Grant and say I sent you….” They