The Kiln

by William McIlvanney

  Maybe he needed that summer to be so lambent, he would think in Edinburgh, so clear in the memory because it mattered so much to him, had become a kind of magnetic north of the mind from which he subsequently took his bearings. Maybe he had made the summer as much as the summer had made him. But, if so, it was an honest making. Being unable to remember everything, memory is obliged to edit. And even the passion with which we misremember may be a kind of truth, an error which, in pushing aside a surface fact, may admit light to the darker reaches of wish and longing where our natures most intensely live.

  Then he would realise that, while all such memories were somehow about that summer, they were by no means all memories of that summer. That interested him. It was as if that summer were a kind of lodestone of his experience up to that time, drawing all previous memory towards these few warm months and defining its significance in relation to them.

  The moments might seem to come back haphazardly. But no matter how aimlessly they drifted into his consciousness, he knew they related somehow to that summer. They led him to that time, pointing him - in their confused and preoccupied ways - towards the direction he had needed to take to search for himself.

  The searching would probably never be over while he had breath and the wit to understand what was going on around him. But those wandering memories all seemed to converge for him, as at the cross of a ghost town, in the summer where perhaps the search had seriously begun. Before then he suspected that he had merely happened, like a series of accidents. This was the summer when he started learning to become himself.

  THIS WAS 195 5. This was a different time and a different place.

  This was when he was seventeen and experience was coming at him like flak. Everything seemed to be beginning, perhaps because there was nothing he had managed to finish yet, unless you counted school. He was such a welter of impressions, he never seemed actually to go places. He always found himself in them. Everything was an ambush - a girl's face, the shape of a tree, a film, a book that was going to change his life, a cripple seen in the street, a girl's face.

  This was when he was still a virgin and determined not to be one. But he was a secret virgin. Outside, he had some of the mannerisms of a man of the world. He could smoke like Humphrey Bogart.

  This wasn't too long after he had given up the compulsion to write on bits of paper: Thomas Mathieson Docherty, 14 Dawson Street, Longpark, Graithnock, Ayrshire, West of Scotland, Scotland, Great Britain, Europe, the Northern Hemisphere, the World, the Solar System, the Universe, the Cosmos, Eternity. Maybe he was trying to work out where he was.

  This was the summer of the kiln, a ghetto in time, when rock ‘n’ roll was just a whispered rumour of new things and divorce was something he thought people did in America and sometimes people visited a house to see a television set and post-war rationing had ended and drugs were pills you bought at the chemist and the town had seven cinemas, each showing a main feature and a supporting feature twice weekly, and sex was a fabulous mystery and radio was a major force in most households and the presence of Cran hung over his life like the coming of the Kraken and cigarettes were stylish and one of his many ambitions was to be a writer and cars were what other people had and Maddie Fitzpatrick was his unattainable ideal of what a woman should be and the world seemed as young as he was and Sammy Clegg would ask him every so often, ‘Have ye done it yet?’

  This was when, regardless of the weather outside, he lived in a private climate where it was always raining questions. Everything in him and around him seemed to be in doubt.

  How could the Christian God be just if the ancient Greeks were born too early to know about Jesus? How can we bear to go on living if we are certain to die? Did Margaret Inglis not know that every time she stooped or leaned over, he could see, like a draped sculpture, her incredible shape, and he wanted to pull up her skirt, ease down her pants and put his hands on those bare mounds of flesh, regardless of what happened afterwards? If she found out, would she tell the police? If Alexander the Great hadn't cut the Gordian knot, would civilisation be different? Is it possible to get syphilis from a lavatory seat? If it is, will he die of a sexual disease before he manages to have sex? If he does, is there reincarnation? Why did Oscar Wilde change his name to Sebastian Melmoth? What's the point of plooks in the great scheme of things? Where is Macao? Why does he keep a secret notebook in which he writes down quotations and one-sentence reviews of books he hasn't written yet (his favourite is ‘Makes Tolstoy look like a miniaturist’) and thoughts about experience? What experience? Why has he started writing imaginary notes in his head to dead or fictional people? Dead letters, right enough. Is he mad? Will he ever get past being seventeen?

  Seventeen - that doesn't feel like a year, it feels like a decade, one of those years you think you'll never get out of. Time doesn't seem to go forward. It seems to go round and round, an endless stationary journey in which he keeps coming back to the same places, has to wrestle with the same insoluble problems. His only chronology seems to be perpetual now, mind-shadowed by the future and the past. Now. And now. And now.

  AND NOW HE IS PLAYING FOOTBALL in the Kay Park. It is late June. An empty Sunday has suddenly filled with raucous voices and the thud of foot on leather. The goalposts are discarded jackets. Sweat binds them together into a fierce intensity. Time stops. Everything contracts to reflex and instinct - move left, turn, release the ball, collect the ball. People are shapes that loom and recede, colliding energies. Nothing else matters. There is only the game. They make a small conspiracy there in the pale sunshine, twenty-odd disparate teenagers who have melted the complexity of things down into brute energy, a brief, invented passion whose relevance is consumed in its happening.

  ‘Next goal wins,’ somebody shouts.

  And they score. His side has won 15-14.

  They collapse on the grass and become themselves again. It was only a game of football after all and it has solved nothing for him. He is ejected suddenly out of the almost mystical completeness the game had given him into the tics and worries of his individuality. As if he has just descended from a different planetary sphere, he sees the strangeness of his fellow earthlings. Beef Bowman's attempt to grow a moustache makes his upper lip look like a caterpillar when he talks. Tommy Sutton's glass eye stares at Tam accusingly. Many years ago he pinned Tommy to the ground and wouldn't let him up until he had explained to him what was different about his eye. The thought of it now is a double scar on his memory: nobody has the right to be as insensitive as he was and no writer should be that dumb. Sammy Clegg is passing his laughter among the group as if it were an alms-cup - like me, like me. Tam does.

  They are talking in a desultory way, conversational jazz, a thought thrown out, taken up, developed, moved on from. Two girls pass in the park, fifty yards away. Shouted invitations are issued. They discuss the girls' departing shapes as if they had a right to. He participates but his remarks are not really him. They are the camouflage he wears.

  An altogether different conversation is taking place inside his head. It is an endless hubbub of voices in there, a talking multitude who seem to him to have been at it as long as he can remember. Will they ever agree about anything? There are countless suggestions about what he should be. For, although it was decided by someone in him when he was fourteen that he should be a writer, this is a decision which is constantly under review. There are so many other possibilities. He often wonders why that other, distant summer afternoon, when he lay on the grass of the back green, should be allowed to have such a definitive effect upon his life.

  He discovered The Three Musketeers and the day fused. The sun receded to a night-light. He became D'Artagnan and Ayrshire was Gascony. Called in for a meal that had nothing to do with him, he found it awkward to sit at the table with his sword on.

  He has never been the same since. His world has become interwoven with the world of books, to the frequent confusion of himself. Besides reading with manic ferocity, he has been trying to write and his min
d has become a literary salon where Hemingway argues with Dickens and Dumas with one book of Jane Austen and Kafka will barely nod to anyone. And his mother keeps butting in too and his father and people he meets in the street and things he reads in the paper and everybody, all talking through one another. It's chaos in here. How is he supposed to sort things out?

  Maybe he should just try and become a professional footballer. That would simplify things. The man who runs the amateur team he has played for has said he thinks Tam could do that and Smudger, the gym teacher at Graithnock Academy, told him more than once he had a natural and exceptional talent for the game. But how do you combine that with writing a masterpiece? It isn't easy.

  Besides, what he gets out of playing football has no practical application that he can see. It's not about tactics and wearing down the opposition and hitting on the break. It's a feeling. It's a feeling of belonging, of things being right. He reaches a place where he just loves the sound of feet striking the ball, the hastened breathing, the shared exertion. This will do, he thinks. This will do for the time being. He doesn't want the game to end. He doesn't even care too much what the score is. He doesn't think that would go down too well with a professional team. He can imagine coming into the dressing-room after playing for Graithnock FC.

  (‘What a feeling, eh? That was some feeling. Did you get that feeling? That sense of the rightness of things? I hope I can get that feeling again next week. And maybe we won't lose 10-0 next week as well.’

  The dressing-room reverberates with delighted laughter and applause.)

  That's a definite problem he has. His sense of purpose is always being waylaid by the moment for its own sake. He remembers once in an examination he was going well when he happened to glance up from the question he was answering. He saw the examination room filled with frozen sunlight. It was beautiful and the bowed heads had the dignity of statues - a boy with his hand on his neck and a girl's dark hair falling, screening her face. He knew in that instant that everybody here was their own purpose and their preoccupation with other things was missing the point. He wanted to get up and share his revelation with everyone, declare a celebration of just being there. He didn't but he must have lost at least twenty minutes in purposeless wonderment. It was lucky he passed.

  Maybe that was one of the reasons he hadn't made it all the way with a girl yet. The underground oral Handbook of Machismo they passed among them might have programmed him for merciless seduction but the way she smiled would render him idiot with enjoyment or the soft flesh of her upper arm would delay him indefinitely and he would forget what he was supposed to do. Why is he like this?

  VORFREUDE?

  GRETE TAUGHT HIM THE WORD, he would remember in Edinburgh. Never having learned German, much to his regret (Ancient Greek had much to answer for in his life), he seized on the word as if it might somehow help to plug him into German culture, rather like a day-tripper to Boulogne trying to convince himself that he has explored France. The Greeks had a word for it, they said. He would often think, with sorrow for missed opportunities: no, the Germans did. Schadenfreude. Doppelganger. Zeitgeist. Weltschmerz.

  Vorfreude. ‘Pre-joy’, she said it meant. He didn't catch any nuances since they were both naked in a wood near Cramond at the time, and the picnic basket didn't contain a dictionary and the wine said school's out and the finer points of connotation were not their chief concern just then. But the word stayed with him and acquired in his mind the accretions of private meaning he quite wilfully gave it. Often when he thought of it, it came attended by slats of sunlight pushing through thick trees. It was the least of the gifts she gave him but, as a smoothed stone found casually on a beach may stand as cipher for a bright and happy day, it reminded him of them. And just as that stone may become something it was never intended to be, such as a paperweight, so he was never to be sure what precise relevance the word had to the use he made of it.

  In his private dictionary it didn't just mean anticipation or expectation. It was a means of bringing into focus a tendency which had troubled him since childhood. It was a lens through which to see more clearly an error of which he was too guilty, an experiential tic he would have liked to cure. His Vorfreude meant the imagining of a coming intensity of experience which no actual set of circumstances could quite deliver, a kind of over-rehearsal for life.

  Was this the source of his many impressive achievements in the genre of social mayhem? How often had his despondent anger turned a dinner party or a night out with friends or an arranged celebration or a conversation in a pub into the Somme in civvies and left him firing at will at any head that came above the parapet? Did the root cause lie in the fact that the event had yet again failed to live up to his overblown idea of what it should be? That seemed far too simple.

  There was, for a start, the booze. When he had enough to drink, he could imagine that somebody who nodded to him was trying to put the head on him. Midges of perception developed messianic delusions. Small, slighting references inflated to amazing proportions until the air was filled with barrage balloons of insult. All you needed to do to cure that was to stop drinking as much.

  And yet. Drink might render the form of expression grotesque. But sobriety didn't eradicate the content which the form had obscured with its exaggerations. After such times, he always felt guilty. But there still nearly always flickered within the guilt, a minnow in a murky pond, something of what he had felt which refused to die, refused to succumb completely to the condemnations of others. And he somehow knew that, if it did, if it finally went belly-up with the toxin of other people's idea of him, he would lose a crucial part of his sense of himself and start to imitate who they expected him to be.

  It was the extremity of the form, he kept thinking, which had been wrong - not what he saw but the way that he said it. If he thought somebody was full enough of his own shit to start a sewage farm, he could perhaps find a better way to say it. Perhaps. His intellectual and emotional antennae were preposterously sensitive. There was nothing wrong in that. What was wrong was what he did with the effects of that sensitivity. He demanded too much from people and events.

  He had always suffered, he decided, from a kind of elephantiasis of the occasion, wanting an event to be bigger than it could be and to bear more weight of human truth than it could possibly bear. When it collapsed under the strain, he was inclined to shoot it (usually without a silencer) to put it out of his misery. That was hardly fair.

  He must do something about that, about his Vorfreude. Maybe that had been part of the problem between Gill and him. Maybe what he had been expecting of marriage had always been unrealisable. Perhaps she just got tired of living with Peter Pan. She certainly got tired of his social tantrums. Eventually, she developed a technique of setting them up in public.

  There were two basic methods involved. One way was to initiate a topic in company about which they had both reached agreement in private. Once he had started to expatiate on their shared position in the matter, she would suddenly abandon it, inviting everybody else to join her. His outrage would leave him like a dancing bear, frothing slightly and bumping into the furniture. Such occasions made him think that he could always have behaved more properly towards her in public if only he had never had to meet her in private.

  The other way was to introduce a subject, or at least seize on one, about which she knew he was likely to disagree with everyone else. It came to be as if, unable to stop his tendency to go over the top in argument, she decided to stage-manage it. Mrs Barnum. Presenting My Husband, The Man Whose Reactions Overflow Every Context. He Will Now Attempt To Stage An Opera In A Phone Box.

  He would laugh to himself when he thought of those occasions. Happy Times. His memory had a library of them, all filed under C for catastrophe. Pluck out any one, it would show the same, recurrent symptoms - like the dinner party before they had gone for that year to Grenoble. By that time, Tam had been reclassified as Tom in the mouths of most of his friends, perhaps in an attempt to confer a stat
us more befitting a teacher. Gill invited his headmaster at that time and his wife, Brian and Elspeth Alderston. Tom had made the mistake of telling Gill that Brian had singled him out as someone he wanted to push for promotion. He had taken Tom into his office twice to say he thought Tom had ‘headmaster potential’. He said it as if he were bestowing a knighthood. Tom thought it sounded like a disease for, judging by the deterioration he observed in most teachers who were promoted to headmasterships, he had decided it was a job you didn't get so much as contract.

  But Gill was determined to lay the ground for their return from France before they left, which seemed to Tom rather to contradict what was supposed to be the ground-breaking boldness of the move in the first place.

  ‘LET'S DO SOMETHING ADVENTUROUS, DARLING - I'll bring the insurance policies.’

  THE MEAL HAD BEEN GOOD. If only they could have eaten it in silence. Brian and Gill were engaged in a very unsubtle conspiracy, like whispering through a tannoy. Brian said things about Tom ‘getting it out of his system’ and ‘career consolidation’. Gill talked about when they had ‘done the Bohemian bit’. They dangled the prospect of a dazzling career in teaching before Tom as if it weren't a contradiction in terms, while Elspeth kept chiming in with details of Brian's meteoric rise from assistant teacher to headmaster in twenty-five years.

  Tom experienced a feeling that had been becoming more and more familiar since Gill had completed her course in cordon bleu cookery. It was a feeling of being caught in a montage sequence from a film he didn't want to be in, a dinner-time equivalent of the breakfast scene in Citizen Kane. He seemed to be for ever at the dinner table arguing with people and every time he looked up from his plate he was arguing with someone different and, while the plates came and went, he knew himself aging remorselessly.