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By Root 1461 0

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?”