by Archie Hind
But he resisted thinking about writing. True, he was really discontented with his lot. Living in the small house on a small wage and having to count and scrape the money all the time – this made him dream sometimes of the kind of freedom and comparative opulence which was the life of a writer. But that was no real reason to write, it was in fact the most frivolous of reasons. Mat’s moral sense told him that the only real or valid artistic impulse came through the creative need itself and not from something extraneous to it like ambition, or the lack of money. Something in him, a moral fastidiousness, made him feel concerned that his impulse to write should not rest on a mere contingency. But as the days and weeks went by Mat became aware of something growing within himself, the strengthening of an impulse which however much it was generated by the particular or circumstantial side of his life had a general relevance which satisfied and quietened that moral aspect of his nature.
9
IT WAS ABOUT eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning. Work was slack in the slaughter-house. Already half the slaughter-rooms were empty and Mat himself was finished. The last two beasts were hung up on their cambrels and the offals had been cleared from the room. Mat had taken off his apron, his belt, and his bloody dungarees, had washed the grease from his knives and was now busy honing them. They had worked hard that morning, missing breakfast so that they would be finished all the earlier. Now Mat was clear of the constricting apron and belt which hampered his movements and free of any obligation to work he was enjoying the leisurely task of honing his knives and the earliness of the day. When the knives had been honed down to a fresh bright razor edge he wrapped them carefully in a thick wad of muslin and put them away in his haversack. After he had put away his blood-stiffened dungarees, taken off his rubber boots and put on his shoes, he washed himself from the hot water tap in the room, combed his hair, put on his pullover and jacket so that he looked quite tidy. The place was now quiet. There were few cattle left in the pens and all that could be heard was the swish of hoses and the scraping of a coarse brush on concrete. He smoked for a while, sitting on the side of a bogey with a piece of newspaper under him. Jake was busy in the room loading into a bogey some sheets of clean fat which had cooled and stiffened.
‘Have you not got a home to go tae?’ Jake said.
Mat sat and kept on smoking. He looked forward all day to finishing work, then when the time came he’d linger about, sharpening his knives, or if there was anyone still working he’d stand at the door of the room and talk.
‘I’ll just finish my fag.’
‘Me,’ said Jake, ‘I’m for out of here as quick as I can go.’
‘It’s early,’ said Mat. ‘Are ye for anywhere in particular?’
‘Something to eat in the town,’ said Jake, ‘then the pictures.’
‘Wait a minute,’ said Mat. He put his hand in his pocket and took his money out and counted it. Helen would be out the whole afternoon until teatime so he needn’t be home until then. ‘I’m flush. I’ll come with you.’
When Jake had got ready and cleaned himself up he looked quite spruce. Soft shirt, expensive woollen tie. He always came to work well dressed for he kept his clothes in a locker while working. Mat felt untidy beside him, although he didn’t look any more untidy than someone who had been working in a shop say, or a warehouse.
‘We’ll go down to the market first,’ said Jake. ‘I’ve got to collect Jimmy Aitken.’
They walked down the long tarmacadam pass to the meat market. The sheepery was still working and there were loads of mutton being pushed down into the market. The pass was still unwashed and they had to watch that their shoes didn’t get dirty. When they got into the meat market there were just a few odd lorries and vans in the place. Business at this time on a Tuesday had come to a standstill and with the exception of a few porters sweeping up sawdust most of the men were standing about in groups, talking, laughing and shifting their feet restlessly. It was half day in the market and it would soon be time for them to be finishing. Jimmy Aitken was standing among a group of men and when he saw Mat and Jake coming he waved his hand to them and turned away from the men. He looked back, said something and there was a burst of laughter, then he turned and came towards Jake and Mat. It was characteristic of Jimmy that he always left laughter behind him; it was also strange that the quality of the laughter always disturbed Mat with its ugly derisive note. Yet he felt drawn towards Jimmy for the deprecating grin which would come over his face after he had caused such laughter. Just now as he came towards them he was shaking his head back at the men he had left and with this sour smile still on his face.
‘I’m starving,’ he said. ‘Where shall we eat?’ His face took on an anxious speculative look as it always did when he talked about food.
‘We’ll eat,’ said Jake, ‘don’t worry.’
Outside the market as they waited for a tram the sun was very hot and Mat felt the stiffness and dampness dry out of his shoulders as he felt the heat through his jacket.
‘Not be long now,’ said Mat.
Jimmy sighed and turned up his eyes with a comic ecstatic expression. He hated his work and lived for his holidays every year when he went off to Paris and lived the gay life for a fortnight. He was a small man, dark, with a round chubby face and moist brown eyes. He was a good tradesman, so good in fact that he did all the cleaver work for his own squad. Doing this for years he had developed powerful arms and shoulders, yet when he was dressed he looked oddly slight.
‘Wake up and live,’ Jimmy said.
There were girls in summer dresses walking about and the few porters still carrying beef through the market entrance were sweating. The street was dry and each vehicle that passed threw up a cloud of dust and chaff into their faces. It was going to be a really hot day.
‘You’re a natural son of the south.’
Jimmy started mimicking one of his stock characters, a French taxi driver slopping wine through his moustache with a spoon. It was a character from a French film, however, and not observed from life. Jimmy gesticulated in a comic-French way and talked with a French accent, but all the time with a pokerfaced irony as if he was watching himself and deprecating his own obsession. It was the same with his other obsession – the theatre. He had a passionate love for the theatre, but on the few times when Mat had tried to draw him into conversation about a play he had seen it had been as if he had committed a clumsy faux pas, for Jimmy had fobbed him off with a riotous burlesque of the play. It was as if he felt that this interest was somehow illicit and that he could only defend himself by pretending to a destructive and ironic attitude towards it. On the other hand when he talked about anything which had to do with everyday life he always seemed anxious and sad.
When the tram came Mat sat in a seat away from Jake and Jimmy and began to feel glum. He had thought of going to the pictures because he felt the need to do something. The trouble was he hadn’t worked for long enough that day to feel really tired and enjoy the mere act of stopping work, but still felt the need for activity in himself. He wanted something to happen, something to disturb the regular course of his life. On the other hand Jake and Jimmy seemed quite content to be finished and nothing else. They were sitting at his back talking in their usual cryptic, allusive way.
Jimmy was a fastidious eater so they went to an expensive restaurant which was full of businessmen in dark suits. Mat felt ill at ease among the waitresses and the paper napkins. He preferred to eat in the market restaurant among the men in dungarees where he could eat his food as if he was hungry. Jake and Jimmy were enjoying themselves, talking away about nothing in particular. When Jimmy had finished his soup he sat picking absently at pieces of dry roll on his plate, then he turned suddenly to Mat.
‘How’s things in the literary world?’
Mat waved his hand in dismissal of the subject. Jimmy started to talk about books. He had just been reading Negley Farson’s book about his life and he retailed with great zest some of the stories which Farson had told. This was
the kind of thing that Jimmy was fond of – books like Axel Munthe’s Story of San Michele or Curzio Malaparte’s Kaputt.
Mat started to tell them the story told in Kelvin Lindemann’s book The Red Umbrellas of Lady Anne Lindsay, the author of the Scots ballad ‘Auld Robin Gray’, who had encountered a goose amid the snows outside her castle in Scotland, and how she owned a necklace of pearls which was celebrated for its lustre, and how she had fed these pearls to the same goose, and how the celebrated lustre of the pearls, which was attributed by all European society to the personal radiance of the lady, was in fact got by their being polished in the craw and bowels of the goose.
‘Good, eh?’ Mat asked them.
To Jake the point of the story was that society had been ‘had’ and he was much amused, but the story seemed to make Jimmy sad and anxious.
‘The earthy basis of our aspirations.’ Mat quoted.
‘Ye labour soon, ye labour late,
To feed the titled knave, man.’
Jimmy broke off quoting Burns to say, ‘One fortnight in the year. It’s ridiculous.’
‘What are you binding about?’ asked Jake. ‘You’re going to the pictures this afternoon.’
In fact Jimmy’s eyes were red rimmed and occasionally he was rubbing his eyes and yawning. ‘I was a bit late last night.’ He rubbed his face and gave his usual rueful grin.
Jake had a newspaper spread out and was looking down columns of adverts to find out the time when the pictures started. ‘Order a cup of black coffee.’
When the waitress came to the table Jimmy looked up at her anxiously. ‘Black coffee – and have you any Danish blue cheese?’
After they had drunk their black coffee they smoked a bit. Special cigarettes with a thick toasted flavour which Jake liked and which he bought in a big fancy tobacconist shop whenever he was in town. When they went out into the street afterwards, out of the dim restaurant, they had to screw their eyes up against the light. The city streets were resplendent with sunlight and colour. It was lunch time and the streets were full of girls in summer frocks and bare shoulders. Jake walked in front of Mat and Jimmy, for the street was crowded, and he stared arrogantly at all the good-looking girls. As he passed them he would give a little quiet whistle, then walk on all casual and debonair in his good sports jacket and flannels, and the girls would either giggle, give a little quiet smile or, more often, stare stonily ahead as if they hadn’t heard him. Mat and Jimmy amused themselves with watching the girls’ reactions.
Jimmy shook his head. ‘He’s a heid case.’
When they had just turned up the side street that led to the cinema Mat changed his mind. ‘Look, I don’t think I’ll bother.’
They both looked at him solicitously. Mat spread his arms out and put his face up. ‘It’s the sun. It puts you out of the mood.’ He felt that he didn’t want to go to the cinema, which would be dark and empty in the afternoon.
‘Ach, c’mon,’ said Jimmy coaxingly.
‘No, I’ll just wander around and see what they have in the bookshops.’
‘O.K. See you in the morning.’ They both waved and walked up the street, Jake with his hands in his pockets and Jimmy just one step behind, carrying the little wooden case in which he kept his knives.
Mat walked on slowly. He felt slightly exhilarated by the sunlight and the colour in the streets, and unusually relaxed with the heat. It was the first hot day they had had that year. He was strolling idly looking at the shops and wondering how all the people in the street had known that it was going to be hot, for they all seemed to be dressed in light clothes.
Outside the Municipal Gallery, glaring in the strong sunlight, was a poster announcing an exhibition of paintings. Mat stood and looked at the poster for a while. It had been mechanically reproduced but it looked as if it had been just written with a large dripping brush. Inside the gallery was another poster taped against the wall with sticky transparent tape and it looked incongruous against the marbled tidiness of the hall and the broad curve of the stairs. He went up the stairs, cool from the marble and comparatively dim from the glare in the street. At the top of the stairs one of the large galleries was open and hung with big paintings all painted in red, orange or ochre colours. There were three or four people wandering round the hall. It was very quiet, just the scuffling of feet and occasionally the tap of heels on the floor as someone shifted self-consciously to a spot in front of the next picture. Near the entrance a man was sitting reading beside a green baize table on which were lying some newspaper clippings, a ball-point pen and an open jotter which was being used as a visitors’ book.
Mat walked round looking at the paintings. They were mostly landscapes drawn in a crude way rather like a conscious stylisation of the kind of marks a child would make when representing rather than drawing an object. The paint had accommodated itself to the style of the drawing by being massed in the spaces between the lines and was all of a violent and glaring quality of colour. Mat had seen this kind of painting before, in fact he knew of a particular French painter who painted like this and whose work repelled him utterly. As he stood staring at the first picture in the gallery he tried to remember the name of the French painter. He moved on round the walls until he noticed that he was catching up with the other people who had come in before him, so he walked back along the row of pictures and started to examine them closely. On closer inspection he noticed that the big swathes of colour had been filled in by the painter with curious little swirls and convolutions and criss-cross marks, which gave the surface of the picture a peculiarly heavy and glutinous look. The artist seemed to have been pursuing some abstract theme entirely separate from the landscape in these minute strokes of the brush. Mat stepped back from the paintings until the separate brush marks merged into a flat textureless colour again. The conscious naïveté, the deliberate atavistic simplicity of the pictures irritated him. He looked along the paintings and noted that in each of them there were curious coloured holes; perhaps at the bottom of a painting, or in the triangular shape of a yacht’s sail, or the irregular shape of a house, or cutting off the corner of the canvas, were great areas of flat colour which were not recognisably anything; like the great tract of chrome yellow lapping over in a bulbous curve from the left-hand edge to the bottom of the picture, which could have been a sunlit rock or the edge of a pond or the petal of a flower in close perspective. Mat felt uncomfortably embarrassed by these holes. He had the feeling they meant no more than the lack of visual purpose in the artist, that groping tentative undecidedness which often falls upon waywardness, or uses the arbitrary as a last resource. He wondered idly about the colour, whether its own violence came from the painter’s sense of his own inadequacy, and about those brush marks which searched and probed desperately all over the canvas after some kind of form. It reminded Mat strongly of something he knew and although he didn’t like the paintings he felt a sort of fellow feeling for the artist, for there behind the flat ineptitude of the pictures were the violent marks of the artist’s struggle against the meagreness of his talent, the signature of failure. He looked around the hall and counted the pictures, about forty in all. Mat knew nothing about painting but he tried to imagine it. Assuming that these were the painter’s best pictures and that the total number of pictures painted in order to show this lot was very much larger; assuming also that the artist’s method of work was as desultory as the feeling suggested by them, then the collection of pictures shown represented a good year or two of work.
Mat sat down on a bench opposite one of the bigger paintings staring at it scrupulously, in the hope that with some act of sympathy on his own part the painting would fire into life. But it kept its orange and green futility. He closed his eyes and was surprised by the vision still retained on his retina of the glaring street which he had left outside with all its flurry and scatter and trafficking; moving people, fluttering dresses, sunlight on the prismatic row of shop fronts, high buildings with the cotton-wool clouds soaring above in the childish blue
sky. In the stillness he could hear from outside, as if from very far away the grinding of gears, the whine of accelerating engines and the thin toot of horns. He could almost imagine the laughter of the girls as they strode along.
A sudden thought made him blush, but he got up nevertheless and walked back to the first painting, then followed the course of the wall right round the room. He wasn’t looking at the pictures any more, but for something else – the little red sticker which proclaimed a sale. There wasn’t a single one in the whole exhibition. ‘What a poor bloody fool,’ he thought, and felt that strange feeling which we have when we see someone doing something ridiculous or absurd or gauche and feel embarrassed for them. He couldn’t have looked at another painting and he made to leave, passing the green baize table by the door.
The man sitting at the table looked up from his book. ‘Could you sign the visitors’ book, please?’
Mat stopped in his rush and walked back to the table and took up the pen. The book was divided into headings Name – Address – Comments. Mat wrote his name and address and put a dash in the comments column. He noticed several of the comments, most of them mentioning colour and one remark written in a large flamboyant hand. The writer had used her (it was a woman’s signature in the ‘Name’ column) own pen, with a broad nib, and had written ‘brave and original work’.
‘Do you like the paintings?’
The young man was looking at Mat with an absent curiosity. He seemed to be asking the question not out of any real interest but in order to note dutifully the reactions of the philistine.