The Kiln

by William McIlvanney

  ‘SO WHAT'S HAPPENING?' Gill said.

  The remark was innocent as an ambush. He thought of the talk between husbands and wives, the tripwires of hurt that could be hidden in a phrase, how casual conversation became mined with the resentments of the past and needed careful stepping, a delicate evasiveness, zig-zagging answers. What's happening? We're losing ourselves down endless quarrels. We're discovering that betrayal may be buried but doesn't die and that no place can be as lonely as a bed. What's happening?

  ‘Ah have to go back tae Scotland obviously,’ he said. ‘Come on. Gill. We've talked about this.’

  ‘You're definitely doing it?’

  ‘Ye think Ah've got an option?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Ah suppose ye're right. Ah could always be a bastard.’

  ‘What do you mean “could be”?’

  ‘Oh, aye.’

  He recognised this bleak terrain. He should do. He had helped to make it. This was where rusted hopes lay abandoned and the ground was trafficked into mud where nothing grew. This was no-man's land. Across it they observed each other, sniping casually and sporadically.

  She was unpacking the things she had bought. Hopelessness goes on shopping. Even futility has to be fed. He noticed hurtingly how attractive she was, someone he could have fallen for in another situation, rather like a soldier realising that he might have been best mates with one of the enemy if there hadn't been a war on. She put the three baguettes on the table. Bread-shells.

  ‘Have you phoned already?’ she said.

  ‘Ah phoned Michel. I go from Grenoble to Paris by train. He's going to meet me at the station. We go to the Cafe de Flore. Colette'll pick me up there. She'll drive me to Charles de Gaulle. I get the plane to Heathrow. Heathrow to Glasgow.’

  ‘It's well organised, isn't it?’

  ‘That's what you do when you're travelling. It's got the edge on hitching.’

  She put the melon in the fridge. He was trying to choose a book to take with him from the four he was holding.

  ‘You're all packed, I notice,’ she said.

  ‘You're the one who wanted to bring us to Grenoble,’ she said.

  ‘What about your students?’ she said.

  ‘So what about Megan and Gus and me?’ she said.

  ‘We're your family, too,’ she said. ‘Or is family only where you come from?’

  She had seen the suitcase in the hall. To call his vague gathering of chance clothing ‘packing’ was a misuse of a word. At least he had put in his one formal suit, just in case. Just in bloody case.

  They had discussed coming to Grenoble and they had both agreed on it.

  He had phoned Joe and postponed his classes. It was just a matter of tying up the loose ends of the semester. Anyway, did she think that was a major issue in the scale of what was happening?

  She reminded him of the first inspector who had assessed him at the end of his first year of teaching in a secondary school. He sat in on several lessons and then told Tom that he was a competent teacher. But there was one serious problem. Tom's record of work was not up to date. Any teacher taking over from him would be confused as to exactly what stage the classes had reached on the course. The inspector stared solemnly at Tom, as if he had terminal cancer. Had he realised the gravity of this?

  ‘Imagine it,’ the inspector said. ‘What would happen if you were knocked down by a bus? What do we do then?’

  (Tom had a sudden, dislocated image of himself lying under the wheels of a bus. A solicitous crowd has gathered. As they bend over him, straining to catch his last words, they eventually realise that he is gasping, ‘My . . . record . . . of . . . work. Is. In my desk in Room Two. It's . . . under the register. It's not’ - tears course down his cheeks - ‘up to date.’ He dies unfulfilled.)

  Tom stared solemnly at the inspector, as if he had terminal cancer. What do we do then? ‘Shove your record of work as far up your arse as you can get it,’ he wanted to say. ‘I'll have more to worry me.’ Instead he looked away in embarrassment, hoping his expression was conveying an adequately chastened awareness of what was important in life, as indeed it was.

  Gill and Megan and Gus would probably survive for a little while without him. Did love of the family you came from diminish your love for the family you made? He would have thought it would augment it. I could not love ye, kids, so well loved I not others, too. The best gift I can give you is the truth of myself, as benignly and as honestly as I can give it, and that includes a passionate concern for people living beyond the enchanted circle of us four.

  He heard Megan and Gus playing in another part of the house. May his and Gill's damaged lives never quite reach them. Forgive us for the gifts we give our children.

  He chose the poems of Catullus, translated by Frederic Raphael and Kenneth McLeish - immortal trivia, living disrobed of false ideals, the scurrility of unacknowledged individual experience within social pretence. The randomness of the choice didn't help his state of mind. Did anything form a coherent pattern? He watched while Gill moved about the same room as he sat in but a different one. He couldn't quite believe that this was Grenoble or that he was going back to Graithnock.

  He remembered a feeling that had often come upon him in his teens. He would be reading and suddenly a perfectly ordinary word - it might be ‘doorway’ or ‘bus’ - would turn into a weird hieroglyph. He couldn't imagine where the word came from or what it was supposed to mean. The continuity of the text fused and only that single word palpitated and glowed in the surrounding darkness, as if a flying saucer had arrived from another universe and he was the only one to see it. And through that fissure in assumed normality poured the overwhelming mystery of things.

  Or he was in a room with which he was familiar, perhaps in John Benchley's house. He knew every piece of furniture and an armchair suddenly disjointed from the coherence of the room and was an incomprehensible extrusion, an alien in an ordinary day. The pattern of the cloth which covered it seemed impossibly intricate and bizarre. He wondered who could have made it and how it came to be in this place. It was as if he became immediately aware that all the contexts of his life, among which he moved so confidently and assumptively, were as fragile and as wilfully invented and as unreal as a backcloth in a theatre, and the cloth had just ripped and he glimpsed beyond it the real, ubiquitous, breathing and impenetrable dark.

  Why did that feeling happen to him?

  ‘YOU'RE REALLY A MYSTIC,’ John Benchley replies. ‘But then a lot of teenagers are.’

  He is in the sitting-room of his manse where he lives with his very elderly housekeeper, Mrs Malone, whose smile is a wince in disguise. The manse is on a hill beside the church and evening is gathering slowly in the room. Through the wide window a long low bank of cloud is reddening like a hillfire. The books that line the walls are receding into darkness, as if rejoining the past from which they emerged. The coal fire is hypnotic with blue flame.

  ‘All young people are expatriates, I suppose. They come from another country and they haven't quite settled in this one. They don't quite know the customs here. Some learn more slowly than others.’

  ‘I just wish I would hurry up.’

  ‘Maybe you shouldn't. Your self hasn't formed yet. Your social identity is still intermittent. Fragmentary. And nature keeps coming through the gaps. What's wrong with that?’

  ‘It can be embarrassing for a start.’

  ‘Embarrassment's all right. Never confuse embarrassment with shame. Embarrassment's when you can't bear others to see your secret self. That's a healthy instinct. Shame's when you can't bear to see your secret self. One's maintaining an honourable contract with yourself. The other means you've broken that contract. So be embarrassed.’

  ‘That's easy to say.’

  ‘Come on, Tom. A red face isn't fatal.’

  ‘Not so far.’

  John laughs his thin laugh. Tam likes him so much, he always wishes he could laugh better. It's too small, that laugh, as if he knows he h
as restricted rights in this area. Tam thinks of his Uncle Charlie laughing like a chaotic symphony. If laughter's an orchestra, John Benchley is playing the triangle in it. Maybe that's what happens living with Mrs Malone.

  ‘There's an essay by Harold Nicolson. ‘In Defence of Shyness’. ‘A Defence of Shyness’? Anyway. He makes the point that shy people often have further to grow up to. I think there's something in that. If you know how to conform too quickly, you lose your originality. You can start to mimic other people instead of finding out who you are. Don't undervalue awkwardness. It's often just the truth clumsily refusing to be denied.'

  ‘I must be full of the truth, then.’

  ‘Like those times you were talking about. When you lose touch with the practicalities of what's going on. You see things out of context. That's you catching experience raw. Not dressed up in the purposes to which we insist on putting it. That really is a low-grade mystical experience. You're in touch with something beyond other people's preconceptions. You're seeing things fresh.’

  He certainly seemed to be doing that all right. He is even doing it while John is talking. He doesn't want this moment to shift. He fears that John will rise and put on the light. He wants the darkness and the gathering sunset and the murmur of their voices in the stillness. It doesn't matter so much what they say. It is that they are talking, making their small human communion in the dusk.

  He wants to say something to keep John talking, to maintain his concentration. But he is baulked by two feelings. The first is petulance that John has referred to his having ‘low-grade’ mystical experiences. It is as if he has failed some kind of exam. The second is the very embarrassment he has been talking about.

  He has thought of an example of what John called ‘nature coming through the gaps’ and ‘the truth clumsily refusing to be denied’. It is a fairly crass example but nevertheless relevant, he feels. He thinks of his erections. They can happen anywhere - on buses, at the dancing, standing in a shop. One had even come upon him at his brother Michael's wedding.

  HE IS DANCING with his Auntie Bella. They are doing a slow foxtrot among the circling relatives, smiling sweetly at each other, when one movement out of rhythm make their bodies come together. He is caught instantly in one of the frames of the American comics he used to read: Bam! Pow! Zowie! Hector is between them.

  (‘Touch of flaccid tit on the port bow, Cap'n. Reporting for duty.’

  ‘Piss off, you dead head. It's ma auntie. She's ma mother's sister-in-law. She's the auntie of the groom, for God's sake.’)

  But he remains adamantly there, nosing blindly about, trying to find out where he is required. Tam is too horrified to notice if she's noticed. He thinks of feigning illness But if he collapsed, that would only advertise the situation. And if he walks off the dance-floor with a small baton in his trousers, he might get lynched for mental incest.

  He starts to dance like Quasimodo. Observing his new, crouched style of dancing. Auntie Bella probably thinks he has gone insane. But that is better than her realising the terrible truth. Then he has the inspiration of becoming suddenly drunk. That would be convincing. He is a boy who has been playing at being a man in the relaxed atmosphere of the wedding. As he mugs outrageously, he hopes nobody notices that his face is really screaming, ‘Don't look at my trousers.’ When the dance ends, he completes his performance by jocularly leaving the floor in the manner of Groucho Marx walking. He subsides on a chair, puts his legs under the table and waits for the rest of him to subside.

  He can't cope with this. When he has settled down, he goes to hide in the bar in case another woman asks him to dance. His Uncle Charlie buys him a half of shandy and looks at him.

  ‘Anythin’ wrong, son?' he says.

  He has always been able to talk to his Uncle Charlie and he is so guilty he has to find a confessor.

  ‘Something terrible happened there,’ he says. ‘Ah was dancin’ with ma Auntie Bella. And Ah got a hard-on.'

  He waits for his uncle's reaction to establish a scale of horror for what he has done.

  ‘Ah hope she noticed.’

  ‘Uncle Charlie!’

  ‘Naw, Ah hope so. She'd be tickled pink. Ah bet she doesn't have that effect too often on yer Uncle Davie these days. She's probably in the toilet puttin’ on her make-up. Singin' “Oh, how we danced on the night they were wed”.'

  Then he sang the next bit: ‘We vowed our true love though a word wasn't said.’

  ‘It was terrible. Ah'm frightened to dance with anybody. In case it happens again.’

  ‘If it does, give us a shout. Ye can pass it over.’

  ‘Ah'm that embarrassed.’

  ‘No. Ye just think ye are. See when it doesn't happen? That's when ye'll be embarrassed. Come on, kid. Relax. A limited number of boners in any man's life. Enjoy them while they're there.’

  Uncle Charlie has always had a rough ability to put things in perspective for him. But he also has a strain of gentle wickedness. Later, when the singing has started and Auntie Bella is innocently belting out ‘Lay that pistol down, babe’. Uncle Charlie taps him on the shoulder.

  ‘Ye think she's tryin’ to tell you something, Tam?' he says.

  BUT IF HE HAD BEEN ABLE TO TELL HIS UNCLE CHARLIE about the problem, he cannot tell John Benchley. He is a minister of the church. He has told Tam to call him John but that isn't the same thing as saying, ‘Use my carpet for disgorging the sewer of your mind any time.’ Yet he is tempted.

  Fortunately, he delays so long that John stands up and crosses to put on the light. The dark crystal of the room is shattered and his memories of the wedding dissolve. Magic has again dissipated into mundanity. The harsh brightness makes this just a bleak, modern room, its coldness thawed somewhat by ageless fire and the books that lag its walls. John goes over to the sherry decanter, comes to the small table beside him and fills him out another glass.

  And that's another thing. In that simple action he is conscious yet again of the contradictory cross-references in his life. How will he ever reconcile them? Sherry? Every time during these talks John gives him two sherries. He has wondered if John is trying subtly to civilise him beyond his working-class habits while, by restricting his intake to two glasses only, ensuring that he doesn't corrupt him in the process. He is a very measured man.

  This is the only place Tam has tasted sherry. Holding the stemmed glass in his hand with its hoard of yellow light, he feels its strangeness. It glows mysteriously, a prism of contradictions in which he sees himself. He drinks sherry and talks about mysticism and has an erection at his brother's wedding and talks rough with his friends and is supposed to be going to university and wants to be a writer and lusts after strange girls and wonders what he is doing here. He starts to talk again, donning the camouflage of normalcy.

  ‘What about church attendance?’ he asks. ‘Numbers okay?’

  ‘Well, we're under no pressure to build an extension.’

  ‘Maybe television affects it. I thought Billy Graham would have helped.’

  ‘The crusade had a big enough impact while he was here. But I certainly don't notice any lasting effect on my congregation. Maybe Graithnock's particularly stony ground. Though I don't like to think so. Perhaps that's just making excuses for myself.’

  ‘You've done well. The congregation must be bigger now than before you came.’

  ‘I don't know that I've done so well. I've managed to reduce the congregation by at least one.’

  He looks at Tam sadly.

  ‘That wasn't you. I just became an agnostic’

  ‘You make it sound so positive.’

  ‘I think it is. I think it's the only thing to be.’

  ‘You trying to convert me?’

  He looks so forlorn, Tam feels guilty. He is almost sorry to have become an agnostic. John Benchley has mattered to him over the past couple of years. His gentle wiseness has saved Tam, during his frenetically religious phase, from going quietly mad with impossible holiness. When he was fifteen, he had want
ed to become either a minister or a priest - a priest for preference, because that was harder and more demanding and seemed to him to reduce the complexity of life to one massive, final gesture. Attending his church and talking to him, Tam had realised how ill equipped he was to become the apprentice saint he had hoped to be. He finds rectitude boring. Girls fascinate him. How could he forswear life before he has tasted it?

  No, he can't regret having become an agnostic. In a way, John has helped him to become one. Much as Tam likes him, he has to admit that he is glad to have forsworn the religious life if John is an example of what it does to you. He seems to Tam like someone who endures life as if it were influenza and hopes to get over it soon. Maybe his generosity to others relates to his belief that we are all ill with living and in need of psychological medication. Maybe it's not so much a careless gift of largesse as a measured bartering of mutual inadequacy. Can even kindness have dark and twisted roots? Does everything have dark and twisted roots?

  His confusion is more or less total. He might as well be back in primary school, faced with one of those forms on which the unanswerable question has appeared.

  FATHER'S OCCUPATION:

  MAYBE THE PROBLEM IS GENETIC, he would think. He looked at himself with some of the soap still on his chin. The small round mirror he was using for shaving looked like a porthole through which, as he kept moving to get the angles right, he seemed to see a version of himself who was drowning. Maybe that was why he didn't bother to shave every day, to avoid having to see the drowning man he didn't seem able to save. Or maybe it was just another expression of his social isolation at the moment, a rehearsal for being a down-and-out. Or maybe it was because he was more and more aware of the resemblance to his father.

  As the shaving soap was removed, there kept looming out at him a past he wasn't sure he could move beyond. Was there a Docherty gene, or maybe a Mathieson one, that condemned him to perpetual failure to fulfil himself, an inability to decide what he ought to do or what he ought to be? Was he sentenced to be like his father in that respect? Or like his Uncle Charlie?