The Kiln

by William McIlvanney

  That turned him sullen and his sullenness began to show.

  Gill caught the feeling and reciprocated generously. She had been for a long time getting weary of the vagueness of Tom's ambitions. A quarrel of mood was already happening. Any healthy married couple can quarrel about anything. They have so many related resentments all over the place that, once they feel they're going to a quarrel, they jump on any excuse like the first bus that comes along. It doesn't matter where it's going, their anger is sure to find a home there.

  Gill had set up this whole evening to convince Brian Alderston of his wisdom in spotting Tom as an heir apparent and he was coming across like a boor. He resented having their house used to tout for professional support. He never entertained the boss. If he didn't come as a friend and no more, he could stay away. Their motives were already there. They were only looking for the pretext. When they found it, it must have seemed to an outsider as daft as the War of Jenkins' Ear.

  They were in the lounge when the guns went off. He thought he remembered it pretty well. He had exceptional recall. A critic had once said of him that he was one on whom nothing is lost. A lot of the time he wished it wasn't so. He wouldn't have minded losing a lot of the stuff he remembered.

  They were in the lounge. Brian was nursing a Remy Martin. Gill and Elspeth were drinking Cointreau. Tom was on the good old whisky, bottled aggression. They were all boring one another politely to death in the usual way - around the world in eighty clichés.

  (‘Blah,’ someone would say.

  ‘Blah?’

  ‘Blah.’

  ‘Surely blah, blah.’

  ‘No. Blah.’

  ‘Blah? What about unblah?’

  ‘Yes, unblah.’

  ‘No. Blah.’

  ‘I think what we all mean is half-blah, half-unblah. Eh?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘That's it. Half-blah, half-unblah.’

  ‘Or, if you like, half-unblah, half-blah.’

  ‘Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.’)

  It was all slightly less interesting than an Andy Warhol film when Elspeth innocently released the safety-catch. Elspeth would. She had the dangerous innocence of the truly boring. What makes boring people dangerous is that they keep forgetting that other people are present. They wander through life in a kind of holy idiocy, believing that the rest of the world's population consists entirely of ears. Ears never take offence. Only the entities attached to them do that. Thus, your bore is always amazed at causing trouble. You were only there to listen, after all. Nobody asked you to react.

  To be fair to Elspeth, she didn't really say anything wrong. The way Gill and Tom were feeling about each other at that moment, if Elspeth had said, ‘I love you both,’ they would have been snarling at her to make her choice and stop hedging her bets. What she did say was, ‘Sandra Hayes. There's someone I would say is beautiful.’

  ‘I pass,’ Tom said.

  Gill raised her head slightly and turned it towards him at a quizzical angle. As a veteran combatant, he knew war had been declared.

  Sandra Hayes was one of those handy instant quarrels married couples always have in stock in case they haven't time for a three-course barney. She was pre-cooked disagreement. Elspeth wasn't to know it but, between Gill and Tom, Sandra had often stood in for an hour too long in the pub or no clean shirts or a day of small frustrations. Part of her usefulness was that she crystallised differences in their attitudes, the incompatibility of their tastes. She was the painting Gill insisted on hanging up that made Tom puke.

  Sandra had been a friend of Gill's for a long time. She was one of those enigmas of the life they were leading he didn't expect ever to understand. She was spectacularly popular. People kept festooning her with words it seemed to Tom she contradicted almost perfectly. ‘Beautiful’ was one. People kept calling her that. She had, it seemed to Tom, a kind of shallow prettiness. Fair enough. But if we keep breathing reverently that our Sandra Hayes are beautiful, what are we going to say about Greta Garbo? ‘Witty’ was another. Sandra was trivially facetious. But then, to be fair, so were a lot of people he knew who were given this accolade. True wit is one of the great weapons of the spirit, he thought, a refusal to surrender to experience - not picking your neighbour's pocket. ‘Vitality,’ they said of Sandra, and appeared to Tom to mean supermarket enthusiasm. Sandra enthused about everything. Show her any top and she would go over it. She created oral poems to wall plaques and new refrigerators. ‘Very intelligent,’ people said, and he had never heard Sandra utter an original or perceptive remark. If Sandra should ever have an original idea, he pitied it, for it would die a lonely death in search of company in there.

  He had to draw back a bit because it wasn't Sandra he resented. What he resented was the burden of false glamour Sandra was made to carry. It was what she represented in the life he found himself living that he resented. For although the quarrel Gill and he had about her that night seemed irrelevant and disproportionate, it wasn't quite as irrelevant or disproportionate as it seemed. They knew in a way what they were talking about, although they couldn't expect anybody else to.

  The reason Sandra had been one focus for their quarrels hadn't entirely escaped their comprehension. She was valid battleground. What their friends did with Sandra Hayes was, Tom thought, what they tried to do with life generally and it was something he had been fighting against for a long time. In falsifying Sandra, they were falsifying their sense of their own lives. In elevating her, they were elevating themselves. It was a simple act of cultural appropriation.

  One way to avoid the awesomeness of mountains is to live where it is flat as far as the eye can see and never travel. Psychologically, that's what their way of life was doing. If Sandra Hayes was beautiful, then you could find your Naked Majas and Olympias on page three. If she was very intelligent, then so were they, because they could appreciate her intelligence. By an inverted alchemy, they could transmute the rare gold of the world into the ubiquitous base metal of their own lives.

  Ah, the polite viciousness of bourgeois life that with false generosity to some bestows mediocrity upon all. The key is language. When words depreciate, our awarenesses go with them. Intensity dilutes and a gantry of potent spirits is replaced by the insipid afternoon tea of complacency. He supposed Sandra was for him some kind of high priestess of that decadent cult.

  For a long time he had feit himself a heretic among them, writing his own apocrypha - not just in the books he had published. He had developed such anti-social tendencies that he had started to write a sort of private dictionary, a notebook where he tried to establish his own understandings, his own definitions of honour and pride and tragedy. This notebook was his conspiracy with himself, a linguistic revolutionary caucus of one. He had shown it to no one but that hadn't stopped Gill from finding it. Fortunately, she seemed to have skim-read it, so that her mockery was generalised and felt a bit like being beaten with a loofah.

  ‘Sandra Hayes is beautiful,’ Gill said.

  ‘I pass,’ Tom said again.

  Did he hell! But he might as well let Gill start the fight. He liked counter-punching. ‘She is beautiful.’

  He was aware of Elspeth glancing at Brian, baffled by the tension she had created. Brian responded by adopting a jocular interventionist voice.

  ‘Who's this we're talking about, you two?’

  ‘Sandra Hayes,’ Gill said as if that explained everything.

  ‘You know her, Brian,’ Elspeth said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Sandra Hayes!’

  There followed a fairly long discussion between Elspeth and Brian about who Sandra Hayes was. It was one of those ‘That party where the woman fainted’ conversations, getting lost among memories that led to other memories that became a labyrinth where everybody seemed to be wandering except Sandra Hayes. Brian steadfastly didn't know her. You could see the suspicion begin to grow in Elspeth that Brian was being deliberately obtuse. She was becoming querulous, perhaps convinced that he was hiding from h
is responsibility to take her side. How could he defend her opinion of Sandra Hayes if he couldn't remember her? She was getting so exasperated that she was going in for a little role reversal - the headmaster as dumb primary pupil.

  ‘You're always doing that,’ she said. ‘Your memory's pathetic.’

  It looked as though they might be having a doubles match. It occurred to Tom that Brian might be consciously teasing things out to give Gill and him time to cool down. It was possible. Like most modern headmasters, he suffered from the Pontius Pilate syndrome, mentally washing his hands a hundred times a day. If that was his ploy, it didn't work. By the time Elspeth had established Brian's immutable stupidity to the satisfaction of the company. Gill was still waiting to impugn Tom's character.

  ‘I hate it when you tell a deliberate lie,’ she said.

  ‘It's not a lie. It's what I think.’

  ‘What weird taste you must have!’

  ‘Careful. You're going to walk right into your own insult. Let's leave it. Gill. You send your Valentines, I'll send mine.’ Sweet reasonableness, one of the most effective incitements to rage. ‘I just don't think Sandra's beautiful. And I'm sure she'll manage fine without my homage.’

  Brian laughed. Elspeth didn't.

  ‘That seems a reasonable compromise,' Brian said. Accurate observation wasn't his strong point.

  Gill was walking down some private road to confrontation. She took a ladylike gulp of her Cointreau.

  ‘Tell me one thing about her that isn't beautiful,' she said.

  Brian laughed. Tom was aware of the depressing familiarity of that laugh, waved about in times of crisis like a flag of truce. He ignored it and concentrated on Gill's question.

  ‘One thing?’

  ‘One thing.’

  They might have been two gunmen daring each other to draw.

  ‘I'll tell you two,’ he said.

  The room was ridiculously tense, as if a great revelation were at hand.

  ‘Tell me.'

  ‘Her eyes.’

  ‘Her eyes?’

  ‘Her eyes.’

  ‘Sandra Hayes’ eyes?'

  ‘Sandra Hayes’ amazing actual eyes. Those things she's got one on each side of her nose. Only in her case only just.'

  Gill looked at Elspeth and Brian and shrugged with a falsely beatific smile and sadly shook her head. That headshake was a small opera. Behold, it sang, my grief. Thou seest me married badly to a man of infinite malice. My tiny heart is broken. But she recovered quickly.

  Holding her left hand slightly towards Brian and Elspeth as if making sure they were paying proper attention to Tom's next enormity. Gill said sweetly, ‘And what is it that's wrong with her eyes?’

  Realising already that in this conversation he had been modified from a bus into a tramcar, he released the brake and started towards his predetermined destination.

  ‘They're too close together.'

  ‘Too close together?'

  If it's a crash, he thought vaguely through the whisky, let's make it a good one.

  ‘As if they were planning a merger.'

  Gill gave what might have been mistaken for a laugh. It was a high, harsh, sudden sound, as jolly as an axe embedding itself in a skull. Right, he thought. If that's the way you want it.

  ‘Another quarter of an inch and she would have been a Cyclops.’

  The displaced cruelty marriage can give rise to appalled him even as he expressed it. You're so determined to get at your partner, you trample over innocent people to do it. Sandra was really quite attractive. Why did he have to scrawl his graffiti all over her face?

  ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ Gill shouted. ‘Robert Redford?’

  ‘No. I don't kid myself. I'm not entering any beauty contests. It was you that put Sandra in for one.'

  ‘That takes me to the fair. It really does. Men.' Gill was looking solely at Elspeth now. Brian was being helplessly herded into the same pen as Tom for slaughter. They think they've got the right to sit there and pass judgment. It doesn't matter that they look like something the cat brought in.'

  ‘You asked my opinion. I don't have any illusions about me.’

  ‘Don't have any illusions? I've seen you shaving.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I've seen you shaving.’

  ‘Please, darling. Not such intimate secrets in front of our guests.’

  ‘You know what I mean. The way you look at yourself.’

  ‘That's quite a handy thing to do when you're shaving. What do you want me to do? Shave with the light out?’

  ‘The way you look at yourself. From this side and that side. Head back, head forward.’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’

  Elspeth froze. She hated swearing. He had heard Brian say ‘Damn!’ once. He thought it was during an earthquake.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Gill was saying. ‘For someone who seems to be so ugly, Sandra's done all right for herself.’

  Tom's advance observation post went into action, assessing the range. He knew where the next attack was coming from. She was shifting position to hit him where he was weakest, as the successful provider, the man who was all for his family. She was also bringing Brian in behind her (she already had Elspeth) with the heavy artillery. The big guns of ‘career consolidation’ were trundling behind her.

  ‘Look at the husband she has.’

  He needed a pre-emptive strike. First obliterate Elspeth - one fewer to worry about. Then a diversionary tactic.

  ‘Oh, Jesus, Jesus Christ!’ he said. Elspeth took both barrels and spoke no more. ‘Before this conversation finishes up being conducted in Sanskrit. Two things. I didn't say Sandra was ugly. And I'd rather not look at Ted Hayes. If I can help it.’

  ‘What? Is there something wrong with Ted Hayes now?’

  It had worked. He concealed his success under exasperation.

  ‘Holy bejesus!’

  ‘It's incredible.’

  ‘Hear, hear.’

  ‘It's incredible. According to you, there's something wrong with everybody. God and I both feel . . .’ She hit home there. It wasn't that he thought there was something wrong with everybody but he couldn't see the amazing rightness that everybody else seemed to see. He was aware of an awful lot wrong with him - but what exactly? Gill was always ready to help him with that one. ‘You're a creep. You don't approve of Ted Hayes either? Is there something wrong with him?’

  ‘Aye! As a matter of fact there is. He would bore the shite out you at a hundred yards. That's what's wrong with him. If they bottled him, they could sell him in Boots the chemist. As a bloody sedative!’

  ‘No, you wouldn't approve of him, would you?’

  ‘He's a uxorious wee turd.’

  ‘Oh, we're on the Eng. Lit. words now, are we? “Uxorious.” But the last one let you down a bit, didn't it? Like a birthmark. Uxorious! That just means he's nice to his wife. Doesn't it? Of course, I can see how that would be an insult in your vocabulary.’

  ‘What it means is he runs after her like a wee waiter. He probably bottles her farts for posterity. He needs her round him like an oxygen tent. If she goes out the room for five minutes, poor wee bugger's gaspin’ for breath.'

  He was cresting the hill of his rage like Alaric the Goth. But suddenly Rome was shut for the night. Gill sat back without warning and sighed and shook her head with something that looked like sad contentment. It seemed she hadn't been taking part in an argument, just a demonstration. He stood fully caparisoned with no enemy in sight, only some bemused tourists thinking: ‘Look at that funny man. Why is he so excited?’

  Childe Roland had come to the dark tower and set his slug-horn to his lips and the tower had disappeared. Hm. Well. All he could think of to do was give the solitude he found himself in a final defiant blast.

  ‘Anyway,’ Gill was saying to Elspeth and Brian. ‘They seem happy. Their lives are completely unruffled.’

  ‘So they should be,’ he said, unnecessarily loudly. ‘They're as good as dead. Nothin
g out of the ordinary's ever going to happen there. Any time life comes near wee Ted, it falls asleep.’

  The room went quiet.

  AS QUIET AS A ROOM IN EDINBURGH, to which his seemingly incurable discontent with things would bring him. He stared at the fading, leafy pattern on the carpet. It might have been an old forest he was lost in. Was there some wrong turning he had taken when he was young? Perhaps seeing so many films in his boyhood and adolescence had helped to confuse him about who he was. Maybe his multiple-identity problem came, in the first place, from growing up in a small town where there were seven cinemas.

  There was the Plaza and there was the Empire and the Regal and the Palace and the Savoy and the George and the Forum. He found something appropriate in the grandeur of the names, the way they resonated in his head. For these were embassies of world experience located in his home town. Just by entering their doors he could learn, however haltingly, the foreign inflections of other people's lives, usually translated very wilfully into a broad American idiom that became his second language.

  His favourite was the Savoy because, having fallen on hard times and being very run-down, it never showed the new films. It recycled old pictures endlessly and it would be much later that he would realise why that battered building had meant so much to him, why he would always remember with affection the wooden benches for children at the front (where, if a friend arrived late, you could always make a space for him by a group of you sliding along in concert and knocking off whoever was sitting at the end of the bench) and the padded seats that sometimes spilled their wiry guts like a device to keep you awake during the film.

  It had been, without his knowing it, his personal art cinema, where he could re-read films the way he could re-read books and develop unselfconsciously his own aesthetic of the movies and confirm what kind of man he was going to be, what kind of woman he would marry. He watched and listened attentively, his face pale as a pupa in the back-glow from the screen while the gigantic figures raged and kissed and taught him passion and style and insouciance and stoicism, before he knew the words for them.