The Kiln

by William McIlvanney

  Tam's father comes back in and takes the butt of his cigarette off the mantelpiece. He sits down, finds a match and holds its head against the hot grate till it flares. He lights his cigarette and throws the match in the fire. He looks across at Tam's mother and, beginning to smoke, he winks.

  THAT WINK STANDS LIKE A MONOLITH IN HIS MEMORY.

  —ATERWARDS, he would be talking to his aged mother and she would mention his dead father. He would see her dimming eyes go suddenly and preternaturally bright, as they did in those days when an image of the past renewed itself without warning in her and her eyes grew momentarily younger to meet the memory. He loved that brightness but it gave him a pang as well. Out of the deepening darkness, another moth of memory had collided with the dying flame of her life. How many more would come? And she would say:

  ‘If he was back just now. Ah would change that many things. Wouldn't everybody? There's a lot Ah wouldn't put up with. That man could be an awful trial. But Anil tell ye one thing, son. When he was here. Ah could leave the front door wide tae the wall an’ sleep like a wean. Nobody and nothing was goin' tae come in that door an' hurt me. He was always problems but he was always man. An' the problems were the careless daftness of his nature. They were never malice. As a financial provider, he was a disaster. An' Ah blame him for that. But in other ways, in a livin' way, he was a true protector.'

  And he decided he knew at last the answer to that space on those forms.—

  FATHER'S OCCUPATION: MAN. Maybe that would be as much as his children would be able to say about him. Or maybe it would be more than they could say. He wasn't too sure he qualified even in that category. When he thought of the stable lives his friends seemed to have made for themselves, he wondered how he came to be here, staring across the road at Warriston Cemetery. Waiting in the anteroom.

  Why did he sometimes feel betrayed? When he was young - at university, for example - they had seemed to be so many, setting out together towards the identified enemies of materialism and selfishness and careerism and denial of the community of being human. You became fewer. Then suddenly it was dark and it was cold and you were tired and you could see those enemies no longer as abstractions but real and immediate as skinheads closing in and, as you moved towards them, you felt you were on your own. You looked around and thought, ‘We used to be a crowd.’ What lighted houses had they ducked into, what private comforts? And there seemed nowhere to go but on. You had narrowed your choices to this.

  How had he managed to do that? Did the answer lie in some uncertain responses to the experiences of that summer, how they precipitated him into who he was to be?

  HE SITS IN A CHAIR and he can see himself sitting in a chair. It is one of those moments when the self-consciousness of what we are doing makes us audience as well as actor. He watches himself with not a little amazement. This is an important thing he is going to do. Is he really going to do it? The hero makes a life-affecting decision.

  The chair is outside the Rector's office. As he sits here, he can listen to the sounds of the school all around him. The building is a three-storeyed square tower with a central well. Noise carries. On C Flat above, someone is getting a row outside a room.

  ‘How dare you! Are you insane? Well. Are you?’

  It seems a curious question to Tam. According to something he heard, if you think you are, you aren't. So if you say no, presumably the question remains open. No way to answer.

  ‘I asked you a question.’

  Not really, Tam thinks. The voice belongs to Mr Fenwick, Principal Teacher of Modern Languages. As the only male in the department, he affects a kind of hysterical masculinity as if to compensate for the feminine gentleness all around him. This takes the form of cosmic rages about anything from a dropped participle to an unlocated fart.

  ‘I'm waiting!’

  The indecipherable answer seems non-committal.

  ‘Well, if you aren't, there's no excuse. Only a plea of insanity would suffice. A shitty? A shitty? How do you do a shitty?’

  For a moment Tam thinks it is Mr Fenwick who is insane. He has finally cracked. Maybe all those rages were just practice for the big one. His interest quickens. He may be overhearing a historic moment.

  ‘The verb is acheter. And well you know it.’

  Tam understands. Someone has been trying to be subversive and get away with it. Under the pretext of enquiring about the conjugation of acheter, a bad word has been introduced, like someone smuggling a mouse into the classroom and then disclaiming it. It has to be a first-year class Mr Fenwick has. Only in first year could a question about acheter pretend to be real.

  ‘Up, up. I'll show you how not to do acheter.’

  There is the thwack of leather on flesh. Tam's memory winces. He counts. Only two. A door opens and closes with a bang. There is comparative silence. Just an average day at the two-way trauma factory.

  From his lofty position as a fifth-year pupil he finds the apprentice rebel pretty pathetic. Apart from mistaking cheek for protest, his technique is crass. If he really wanted to be a bampot, he should have taken lessons from Gorman, who had been in Tam's year.

  Gorman came out of the part of Graithnock that was nicknamed Tintown, from which stories emerged of coal kept in the bath and skirting-boards ripped up for firewood. Gorman hated the Academy from the beginning. He had done quite well in his qualifying exam and must have been bright enough. But whatever intelligence he had was steadily converted to negative cunning. His ultimate educational achievement was to devise a method of swearing in class with impunity.

  What he did was develop a stammer. It happened when he came back from the Easter holidays in the third year. It may have seemed to the more sympathetic teachers that the pressure of academic failure had reduced him to an exaggerated inarticulacy, as if he were acting out his inner feelings of inadequacy. But the pupils noticed that he stammered only in the class. It soon became clear to them why. It was his last defiant gesture before he left in the summer.

  It allowed him to look for the first syllables of words which would have been, in isolation, swear-words. He could then say them several times before adding the rest of the word, thus claiming innocence. His greatest triumph was probably a question he put to Miss Stevens in the English class.

  ‘Please, miss. Arse-cunt - arse-cunt - arse-cunt - are Scunthorpians people who come from Scunthorpe?’

  Miss Stevens's eyes widened fearfully, as if she were standing on an edge so high that she couldn't see all the way down. She blinked and stepped back from the brink.

  ‘I believe so, Gorman,’ she said.

  Gorman smiled a bitterly happy smile.

  Isn't education wonderful, Tam thinks. Sitting here, he realises how important this old building has been for him. He feels nostalgic for a lot of people, though not quite Gorman. That would be like feeling nostalgic for a dose of the pox you once had. Thinking of which, here comes Dusty Thomas. He stops in front of Tam, looking down on him. He would be, wouldn't he?

  ‘Well, Docherty. What have you done now?’

  ‘Nothin’, sir.'

  ‘I find that hard to believe.’

  ‘No. Ah haven't done anything, sir.’

  ‘So why are you here?’

  ‘An interview with Mr MacGregor.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘It's personal, sir.’

  Dusty stares at him.

  ‘Huh. I'll bet.’

  What the hell does that mean? But old Dusty smiles in a self-satisfied way and walks off. Why do teachers, when they're stuck for a riposte, say the most banal crap with clipped and meaningful delivery, as if it is an aphorism they've only just invented?

  Why does Dusty Thomas hate him so much? It must be because he gave up Greek in favour of French. But what kind of reason is that? He used to think Tam was somebody special. When he scored ninety-eight and a half in first-year Latin, Dusty said he had never given a mark as high as that before. So he seemed to decide that Tam belonged to him. Then, as soon as Tam gave u
p Greek, he was disowned. He changed overnight from being a classical scholar to a hooligan. Out of my sight. You have pissed upon the tomb of Agamemnon. Okay, Dusty. Who was it that got the mark in the first place?

  The door of the main office opens and Mrs Ainslie, the school secretary, comes out. She is a stern woman who looks as if her idea of a good time would be knitting, preferably under the guillotine.

  ‘Mr MacGregor will see you now,’ she says.

  She knocks at the Rector's door and opens it.

  ‘Docherty's here, Mr MacGregor. Shall I show him in?’

  ‘All right.’

  She gestures Tam into the room and closes the door. This is the ritual - no unauthorised knocking at the Rector's door. Maybe the chapped hands of the plebs would defile the sanctum. Tam wants to think it's ridiculous but he has to admit it works. The few times he has been in this room have not seen him at his most self-confident. This time is no exception. He stands awkwardly inside the door.

  Mr MacGregor sits behind his large desk, preoccupied. He looks impressive enough like that but, standing, he must measure six feet two. He has a large, carved face and rich, silver hair. He looks positively biblical. He stares over his glasses and points Tam to the seat in front of his desk. Tam sits down. Mr MacGregor goes on looking at the papers on his desk and writing things on them. Whatever he is doing, he makes it look very important. Perhaps he's rejigging the Ten Commandments.

  The room doesn't help, Tam decides. It looks as if it has more books in it than the Bodleian Library which Boris told them about. The bookcases look like antiques. The air is pungently heavy, a mixture of musty volumes and dispersed pipe-smoke and furniture polish. It's as if only grave business may enter here. This is the opposite of what Auden said about Macao: And nothing serious can happen here. And nothing trivial can happen here. (Where is Macao, anyway?) You feel that, if a fly came in here, it would apologise on its way back out the window. He feels maybe he rates about even-steven with the fly.

  ‘Well, Docherty?’

  The glasses are off. Tam looks into the deep-set, self-assured eyes and tries not to let his own self-assurance founder there.

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘What is it this time?’

  ‘I'm applying for university. I just wanted to tell you, sir.’

  ‘Of course you are. Next year.’

  ‘No, sir. This year. Ah'm leaving at the end of fifth.’

  Mr MacGregor lifts his ready-filled pipe and a box of Swan Vestas. He lights up carefully, ceremoniously, and puffs out smoke. He now looks even more Old Testament. For burning bush, read burning bowl.

  ‘Oh, Docherty. You've had the fidgets all this year, haven't you? What is it with you, boy?’

  (Have you got a spare week? How many answers do you want? Like, my imagination's a harem and my reality's a eunuch. I'm seventeen and I might as well be ten. Would you not be fidgety if you'd never had it? I'm fed up trying to walk about like John Garfield when I feel like Peter Pan. If it goes on like this, I'm liable to jump Mrs Ainslie. And neither of us would like that. In fact, now that I think about it, do you mind if I go to the toilet? Back in two shakes. Well, maybe more than two. Aaaaaaaaaaagh. Does that answer your question?)

  ‘What was it last time? Before Christmas. Dropping Greek, wasn't it?’

  ‘That's right.’

  ‘And now this. This would mean you couldn't sit the Bursary Competition.’

  ‘That's right.’

  The Bursary Competition is a big deal in the school. It is a series of subject exams taken by pupils all over Scotland. The results are published in the Glasgow Herald and a high placing is supposed to bring honour to the school.

  ‘I have high hopes for you in that.’

  ‘I'm sorry, sir.’

  ‘You've thought about this?’

  (No, I just made it up sitting outside your door.)

  ‘Yes, a lot.’

  ‘Do your parents know?’

  In the innocence of the question Tam sees the different set of assumptions from which he and Mr MacGregor come, making it difficult for them to meet. Tam regards both his parents as seriously intelligent people but that intelligence has never been allowed access, due to their time and circumstances, to such esoteric issues as whether it is better or not to do a sixth year at school. They will be guided by whatever Tam thinks. They haven't the information to do anything else.

  ‘Yes,’ Tam says simply. ‘We've discussed it.’

  ‘Ah, well,’ Mr'MacGregor says, i suspect economy is involved in this somewhere. And it is hard to argue against the economic circumstances by which other people are obliged to make their choices.'

  Tam is reminded of why he likes this man as well as respects him. It is perhaps a surprising liking for him to have. Mr MacGregor's style is patrician and authoritarian. He always seems to Tam like someone out of Tom Brown's School days, which is not his favourite book. In Tam's mind he occupies approximately the same position as one of those Victorian statues you sometimes see at the centre of a town, striking a heroic pose and staring into some lost horizon of idealism, while the present throws chip-pokes around its feet and chalks graffiti on its plinth. But within the stony rigidity, he knows that there lives a perceptive and humane man.

  When he announced the new prefects at the beginning of fifth year and made Tam one of them, an appointment not universally approved of by the staff, he made it very clear to the assembled pupils that being a prefect didn't necessitate the wearing of a blazer. As the only casually dressed person in a roomful of blazers, Tam appreciated the public declaration that he was not a pariah.

  ‘Your reason for dropping Greek,' Mr MacGregor says. ‘I seem to recall it was not unconnected with your ambition to be a writer. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes. I remember your saying that it was interfering with your reading. The Greek was. I suggested that perhaps your reading was interfering with your Greek. I think you replied that if you weren't going to be a writer you weren't going to be anything.' Mr MacGregor smiled briefly to himself. ‘Does this present decision relate to the same . . . compulsion?’

  ‘I suppose so, sir.’

  ‘I sometimes think, Docherty, that winning the Rector's Essay Prize has not been good for you. It seems to have given you delusions of grandeur.’

  Tam doesn't mention that he has always had them.

  ‘And now you're going to be a writer. Just like that?’

  ‘No. I realise it might take a few weeks, sir.’

  Tam could have bitten his tongue. He hasn't meant to be smart-arsed. This was meant to be more like a joke between friends. But they aren't friends. Why is he always confusing conversational styles, mixing social genres?

  ‘I don't think it's a laughing matter, Docherty.’

  ‘No. It's just that I've been trying to write for years, sir.’

  ‘You think you'll have more time at university?’

  ‘Well, at least I can concentrate on things that don't interfere with my writing.’

  The pomposity of it seems to make Mr MacGregor realise that he is dealing with someone who is more or less certifiable.

  ‘Good luck, Docherty,’ he says. ‘You'll need it.’

  He returns to his papers. Tam turns at the door. Mr MacGregor has replaced his glasses.

  ‘Mr MacGregor. Thanks for your understanding.’

  Mr MacGregor looks over his glasses.

  ‘No, Docherty,’ he says. ‘Not understanding. Bafflement. Thank me for that. It has made me accommodating.’

  And as soon as Tam comes out of the room, he begins to doubt his decision. He spends the rest of the day feeling nostalgic for the future he has given up, realising in each of the classes he visits that he will not be here next year. He can no longer understand why he is leaving school until he is stopped by Dusty Thomas in a corridor. Dusty has heard the news.

  ‘Docherty.’ The way he says the name makes it sound synonymous with dung beetle. ‘You're a disgrace. After
all this school has done for you, you're preparing to scurry off rather than show your gratitude in the only way you could. By doing well in the Bursary Comp. I've watched you for five years, Docherty. You know what you are? You're an iconoclast. Do you know what an iconoclast is, Docherty?’

  ‘I think so. Isn't it—’

  ‘I'll tell you what it is in your case, Docherty. It means someone who can't say yes. You've done well in the highers. You've got the possibility of a year's more intensive study ahead of you. Culminating in the Bursary Comp. A lot of people have contributed to give you a chance. And you reject it. Go back to your housing scheme.’

  ‘Ah never left it, sir.’

  ‘Oh, how true. You know something? I've a good mind to bounce you off that wall.’

  It must be something about the way he looks. Beef Bowman. Mr Inglis. Now even Dusty, who looks as if walking fast would give him a seizure.

  ‘I wouldn't do that, sir.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I might bounce back.’

  ‘Are you threatening me?’

  ‘Ah thought you were threatening me, sir.’

  ‘I was in the Second World War, sonny.’

  ‘Are ye sure ye didn't start it, sir?’

  Dusty's long stare decides to congeal into distant contempt.

  ‘Leave today, Docherty,’ he says. ‘You have no place in this school. Leave today.’

  In spirit, he does. Dusty has made sure of that by telling him that, after five years, the school only knows him as an adjunct of itself. He feels doubly alienated. The school rejects who he is now but only after educating him into the rejection of who he was before he came here.

  ‘HAVE YE DONE IT YET?’

  This time they are standing in Bank Street. The bright summer has been suspended for the moment. A dim Scottish sun is out, less day realised than day potential, as if God has left on the pilot light. People move above the street in mezzotint. He has bumped into Sammy Clegg and they stop to talk.