Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [115]
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,