“Who do you like doing best?” Pat enquired.
Angus Lordie took a sip of his wine before he answered.
“I can tell you who I don’t particularly like doing,” he said.
“Politicians. They’re so tremendously pushy and self-important for the most part. With some exceptions, of course. I’d like to do John Swinney, because he strikes me as a nice enough man.
And David Steel too. I like him. But nobody has asked me to do either of these yet. Mind you, why don’t you ask me who I like doing absolutely least of all?”
“Well?” said Pat. “Who is that?”
“Moderators of the obscure Wee Free churches,” said Angus Lordie, shuddering slightly as he spoke. “They are not my favourite subjects. Oh no!”
“Why?” asked Pat. “What’s wrong with them?”
Angus Lordie cast his eyes up to the ceiling. “Those particular churches take a very, how shall we put it? – a very restricted view of the world. Religion can be full of joy and affirmation, but these characters . . .” He shuddered. “There used to be a wonderful Afrikaans word to describe the position of rigid ideologues in the Dutch Reformed Church – verkrampte. It’s such an expressive term. Rather like crabbit in Scots. All of these words are tailor-made for some of these Wee Free types. Dark suits.
Frowns. Disapproval.”
“But why do you paint them, then?” asked Pat.
“Well, I don’t make a habit of painting them,” answered Angus Lordie. “I’ve just finished painting my first one now. I’d love to paint a resolved Buddhist face or a flashy Catholic monsignor with a taste for the pleasures of the table, but no. These people – the Portrait Gallery people – are having an exhibition later in the year of portraits of religious figures. It’s called Figures of Angus Lordie’s Difficult Task
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Faith, or something like that. And I’ve drawn the short straw. I’ve got the Wee Free Reformed Presbyterian Church (Discontinued).”
Pat laughed. “What a name!”
“Yes,” said Angus Lordie. “These Free Presbyterians are always having rows and schisms. Well, this Discontinued bunch is quite different from the mainstream Free Presbyterians, who are very nice people – nothing to do with them, or with any of the other well-known ones. But they’ve got a couple of hundred members, which isn’t too bad even if it’s the Church Universal.”
Pat smiled. She was enjoying this conversation; there was something appealing about Angus Lordie, something vaguely anarchic. He was fun.
“So I was asked,” continued Angus Lordie, “to paint a portrait of a Reverend Hector MacNichol, who happens to be the Moderator of this particular bunch of Free Presbyterian types.
I agreed, of course, and he came down to my studio for the first sitting. And that’s when I found out that he more or less expressed, in the flesh, the theology of his particular church, which takes a pretty dim view of anything which might be regarded as vaguely fun or enjoyable. There he was, a tiny, crabbit-looking, man – minuscule, in fact – who gazed on the world with a very disapproving stare. He noticed an open bottle of whisky in my studio and he muttered something which I didn’t quite catch, but which was probably about sin and alcohol, or maybe about Sunday ferries, for all I know.”
“It can’t have been easy to paint him,” said Pat.
Angus Lordie agreed. “It certainly was not. I sat him there in the studio and he said to me in a very severe, very West Highland voice: ‘Mr Lordie, I must make clear that I shall under no circumstances tolerate any work being done on this portrait on a Sunday. Do you understand that?’
“I was astonished, but I made a great effort to keep my professional detachment. I’m sorry to say that the whole thing was destined – or pre-destined, as a Free Presbyterian might say
– to go badly wrong.”
“And did it?” asked Pat.
“Spectacularly,” said Angus Lordie.
73. A Dissident Free Presbyterian Fatwa Looking at his new twenty-year-old friend, Angus Lordie, member of the Royal Scottish Academy and past president of the Scottish Arts Club, reflected on how agreeable it was to have a young woman to talk to in a room of his coevals. He liked young women, and counted himself lucky to live in a city populated with so many highly delectable examples of that species, even if none of them ever bothered to talk to him.
“My dear,” he said to Pat, touching her gently on the wrist,
“you are so kind, so considerate, to listen to the conversation of an academician of my years – barely fifty, I might add.”
“I’m interested in this story,” said Pat. “This Moderator person sounds awful. And you had to paint him!”
“Indeed I did,” said Angus Lordie. “But, do you know, as I began the task it seemed to me as if I had become possessed. It was almost as if I had been taken over by an entirely foreign energy. I had absolutely no difficulty in beginning. I saw the portrait in my mind’s eye, even before I began.
“I had set up a large canvas, you’ll understand – I normally paint portraits on a generous scale. But now, as I looked at this tiny, crabbit man, sitting there in his clerical black suit and staring at me with a sort of threatening disapproval, I found that I sketched in a tiny portrait, three inches square, right in the middle of the big canvas. This just seemed to be the right thing to do. He was a small-minded man, in my view, and it seemed utterly appropriate to do a small portrait of him.
“We had several sittings. I didn’t let him see what I was doing, you’ll understand, and so he had no idea of the picture which was emerging in the middle of the canvas – a picture which set out to express all the sheer malice and narrowness of the man.
I thought it was very accurate. I had boiled down his spirit and it came to a tiny half-teaspoon of brimstone.”
Pat listened in fascination. She could imagine what might have happened next; the Reverend MacNichol would see the picture
– which is exactly what happened, as Angus Lordie explained.
“It was during the third sitting,” said Angus Lordie. “I went A Dissident Free Presbyterian Fatwa 203
out of the studio to answer the telephone, and while I was out MacNichol took it upon himself to get up and have a peek at progress so far. When I came back into the studio he was standing there, purple with rage, wagging a finger at me. ‘How dare you insult a man of the cloth,’ he yelled at me. ‘You wicked, wicked man!’
“I tried to pacify him, but he would have none of it. He fetched his hat – a black Homburg which was far too big for a tiny man like that – shoved it down over his ears, and marched out of the studio. But as he left, he turned to face me and said: ‘You will be sorry, Mr Lordie! You will find out what it is to incur the wrath of the Discontinued Brethren!’ Then he left, and I sat down, somewhat shocked, and considered my position.
“What had happened, I was later told, was that he had pronounced some sort of Free Presbyterian fatwa on me. I was shocked. What exactly will they try to do to me? Put me to the sword? Burn me out of my studio? I have absolutely no idea what the implications are, as this happened only a few days ago.”
Pat was silent. Many people find it hard to know what to say to one who has just had a fatwa pronounced on him, and Pat was one of these. Words somehow seem inadequate in such circumstances, and any further enquiry tactless. It might help to ask: “Is it a temporary fatwa, or a permanent one?” But Pat just shook her head in disbelief – not at the story, of course –
but at the mentality of those who would pronounce a fatwa on another.