The Kiln

by William McIlvanney

  But he is sorry he has spoken. Why does his mouth declare independence from his brain so often? As Bobby gathers himself up and cycles off, Tam becomes his stand-in for the others. They are looking at him as if he somehow doesn't belong in their group. Some of them look embarrassed for him. In their eyes he has committed a social gaffe. Others are feeling contempt. Beef Bowman is sneering.

  ‘Oh-ho,’ he says. ‘What's this we've got? You wan o’ them as well? Maybe we'll have tae start callin' ye Thomasina. Do ye want to do it wi' boys, son?'

  And John Garfield stands beside him.

  ‘Well,’ he says, ‘It won't matter who you want to do it with, will it? You make the Phantom of the Opera look like Errol Flynn. The only thing that could make love to you's yer right hand.’

  There is a tense pause during which he remembers something his father once said to him: ‘You're too smart for yer ain good, son. Wan o’ these days ye're gonny dig yer grave with yer mouth.' This could be the day.

  Beef charges at him. His six months at the Old Mill Road Boxing Club, during the phase when he had decided that his future lay in becoming a world champion, stand him in good stead. Beef is as strong as an elephant but he has the same nimbleness of foot. As Tam side-steps him easily, he can see exactly where to hook him. Fortunately, he decides not to. For if he hits him the fight is real and it will only take Beef to fall on him for the future of literature to be impoverished. Taking his customary minute or two to turn. Beef charges back. Tam waits, matador-style, until he can see up Beef's flaring nostrils. Then he side-steps again and trips him as he passes. The ensuing laughter relieves the tension of the situation. Someone goes to retrieve the ball and the rest of them come between Beef and him and jostle the situation into mockery and tell them to behave themselves. He is glad to agree. The game restarts. Luckily enough, he is playing on the same side as Beef.

  But, standing in the library, he plucks from the thorns of the past the rose of potential. Homosexuality. How about that? He ponders.

  (The scene is the Dean Park in summer. Margaret Inglis and he are sitting on the grass and talking. Her floral skirt has ridden gently up to reveal a band of firm, white thigh. Her body strains against her blouse. They are talking of things they hope the future may bring.

  A young man and woman cross their vision a few yards away. The man swings his child down from his shoulders. She is giggling. He sets her on the ground and, about one year old, she begins to stagger happily back and forth between them, as if every footstep hovers on the edge of a precipice. They are all laughing. Margaret and he are smiling in that transfixed, slightly idiot way people do with children.

  ‘What about children?’ Margaret asks softly.

  His smile freezes on his face and she notices.

  ‘Tom?’

  He stares at his hands.

  ‘I don't know that that could ever happen.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don't know how to tell you this, Margaret.’

  She is staring at him tenderly. He forces himself to look at her. His eyes are wounded. Their pain is being reflected in her own.

  ‘I think I may be homosexual.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I just know.’ No. That's too definite. How can you influence what has already happened? ‘It's not how do I know. It's how do I not know.’

  She looks puzzled.

  ‘I mean, I've never experienced sex. I may be homosexual for all I know.’

  ‘You're not, Tom. You're not.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Don't say maybe. You're not.’

  ‘But I don't know.’

  ‘Well, I know.’

  ‘I wish I did.’

  There is a long pause in which he can feel that wonderful feminine compassion gather and focus itself on him. She must save him from his darkening despair.

  ‘You will,’ she says. ‘You will know.’

  She takes his hand. And suddenly that marvellous, rich body is stretching itself erect and pulling him up after it. She walks him boldly towards the wood at the edge of the park. As they come under the foliage, shadows claim them and leaves whisper conspiratorially around. As they walk, the shadows deepen and her smile is a glimmering promise in the gloom.)

  And his imagination walks into a real tree.

  It wouldn't work. Well, it might work but, if it didn't, you would be in worse bother than you had been trying to get out of. Where he lived, there were a lot of girls just as severe on what they considered deviant behaviour as the boys were. They wouldn't be slow to pass the word around. By the time it took you to find the compassionate one, you could be a social outcast, living in a cave on Craigie Hill with passing children chucking stones at you for sport. No, it was too dicey.

  He puts Casanova back and wanders round the library. All this experience, and when will he get his share of it? He suddenly remembers a book they used to have in the house. He wonders what happened to it. It was called, intriguingly. Fifty Greatest Rogues, Tyrants and Criminals. Or was it One Hundred . . .? There were a lot of them, anyway. How had that book come to be in the house? He suspects the source may have been his father's preference for fact over fiction. It was a big book, bound in red leather with an embossed cover. There was an illustrative scene for each rogue, tyrant and criminal - a black-and-white line drawing. They were all pretty interesting. But there was one chapter which had fascinated him utterly. He was maybe thirteen when he read it, or rather when he started to read it. For it became a compulsion with him to read it again and again. He used to read it as an almost daily ritual until the book disappeared. Maybe the book disappeared because someone had noticed how often he was reading it and had checked which part he was reading. It was easy to tell. If you held the book shut, a line of grime betrayed which few pages his grubby fingers had been nervously fretting for weeks.

  The chapter was called ‘Messalina, The Illustrious Harlot’. Once he had looked up ‘illustrious’ and ‘harlot’ (‘the’ was no problem), he knew he was on to something. Messalina had been the wife of a Roman emperor. He was certainly sorry for her husband, Claudius. But mainly, he had to admit, he just wished he had been there at the time. It seemed Messalina would do it with anybody, so even he must have had a chance. The illustration showed her reclining voluptuously. (He knew that was how she was reclining because it said it in the text.) Her face looked attractively mad and the rest of her just looked amazing, and hardly dressed for a Scottish winter. Around her what appeared to be dying men lay abandoned.

  For a time after the book disappeared, it didn't really matter for he had memorised whole sentences and moments. He especially liked the part where she pushed an exhausted wreck off her couch on to the floor and shouted to wake old so-and-so, he would do next. In his mind he was stepping between her and old so-and-so and waving hopefully. But as his memory of her exploits began to fade, he missed being able to revisit Messalina.

  In the library, he reflects that he had the right idea at thirteen.

  Back to plan A. Invent a time machine. And he thinks of Greta Garbo.

  Will he ever learn to live outside of books and films?

  (Dear Messalina,

  Why did you leave no forwarding address?)

  ‘ET LE ROMAN?’ Michel said.

  ‘Ça ne marche pas en ce moment.’

  ‘Ah, Thomass, Thomass. Monsieur Angst.’

  ‘Oui, c'est ça.’

  ‘Ce que tu peux être écossais. J'aime discuter avec toi. Mais des fois ça pése un peu lourd. Toujours à la recherche du sens de la vie. Tom Docherty ou le livre vivant.’

  ‘Tu exagères pas un peu?’

  ‘Pas vraiment, non.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Maintenant on parle anglais? I see.’

  ‘Well, at the moment I don't feel like trying to feed the rawness of my feelings through the gracious formalities of la belle fucking langue. Ye know?’

  ‘Okay. Entendu.’

  In the bistro a man was readin
g Le Figaro. Tom took a boiled egg from the middle of the table, peeled it, salted it and began to eat. He wondered why he was doing this. He wasn't hungry. Maybe he was eating Scotland to remind him of who he was. Boiled eggs were an Esperanto food, something he had been familiar with all his life. He felt the need for things familiar. Even the smells here were in a foreign language.

  He remembered coming back from a dinner party at Michel and Colette's place near the Pont Neuf. It was early morning and he was wandering beside the Louvre, looking for a taxi. The quiet darkness erupted suddenly into violent voices and, drawn to the sounds, he watched mesmerised as a man began to kick a taxi. It was a passionate performance. His rage exorcised, the man wandered off, still shouting at the dark. Tom thought he understood the man's frustration. It was presumably occasioned by the tendency of Parisian taxi drivers at certain times not to accept your fare if you were heading somewhere that was off their route for going home. It worked to Tom's advantage that night. The driver was prepared to go to Boulevard Haussmann. But as he sat in the cab, the scene of assault on a taxi and the memories of the dinner party (that sense of intellectual chic, of ideas being worn rather than inhabited) made him feel terribly alien. He had a sensation of urban panic, of being adrift in a vast strangeness.

  He felt something like that now. He thought of some of the other dinner parties to which Colette had taken him, to be joined later by Michel. She had a small notebook in which she kept the combination numbers to her friends' apartments. Standing beside her at a locked door while she found the numbers she would have to press to open it, he had sometimes thought that Paris for Colette and Michel and their friends was like a series of private chambers with interconnecting secret passageways. Maybe he hadn't been living in Paris at all, just a mental village within it. Maybe the continuing strangeness of the place had made it more difficult to finish the novel, since its contents seemed hardly relevant to the alien life here. Michel echoed his thoughts, as if he were reading them.

  ‘Perhaps because you are trying to think in French, you will be finding it difficult to write in English. To finish the book.’

  (‘What are you doing these days?’

  ‘Trying to finish a book.’

  Since he had been about twenty, that had been his standard answer to the question. It made his life sound as interesting as the sex life of a stick insect. He would have to think of something else to say.

  ‘Designing an eighteenth-century garden.’

  ‘Sleeping rough.’

  ‘Planning the revolution.’

  ‘Having an affair with three lesbians.’)

  ‘Maybe you're right, Michel,’ he said eventually. ‘I've been thinking about that. It's bound to have some kind of effect, I suppose. An occupational hazard of living in a foreign country. You know what I was thinking? Hemingway. I sometimes wonder if his style had something to do with how stilted his French and Spanish may have been. That maybe he learned to break down the problems of vocabulary into simple circumlocutions. You do that when you're struggling with a language. Find the most basic way to say things. Reduce it all to prepositions and simple nouns and verbs. Mind you, I suppose the theory depends on how good he was with French or Spanish or Italian. Maybe I'm just talking about myself. Lumbering him with my own linguistic incompetence.’

  ‘I vote for the latter theory,’ Michel said.

  ‘Thanks.’

  Tom abraded the salt from his fingers into the ashtray.

  ‘I am sorry to have heard about your troubles,’ Michel said.

  ‘Yes. I'm not too pleased myself, I have to say.’

  ‘You are close?’

  ‘At one time, very. One of the compasses of my life.’

  ‘At least it will not be long now till you are home. Colette arrive.’

  Tom watched her walk. She was still unaware of them and Tom saw her as if she were a stranger, preoccupied in crossing the wide intersection outside the Cafe de Flore, just another Parisienne. He noticed how attractive she looked. It wasn't that she was conventionally pretty. It was that she rendered conventional prettiness irrelevant. She was so effortlessly and self-confidently herself. She looked womanly and strong, with that chic that seems to be genetic in some French women. He liked that in her.

  He understood so many women's current dismissal of the need to look determinedly feminine, perhaps having been prepared by his awareness of the penal clothes Garbo had taken to in her retirement, as if serving a life sentence to atone for her earlier submission to the demands of her own beauty. And he would allow that the fifties might not have provided him with the ideal conditioning for seeing gender clearly. But then neither, as far as he could see, did the seventies. The distortions of conditioning were an inevitable part of growing up, he thought. No time's nurture was without its impurities.

  What mattered, he supposed, was the justness of the tension you maintained between conditioning and the rational analysis of that conditioning. In that tension was developed honest selfhood. The conditioning remained a valid part of yourself. How could it be otherwise? To claim to have abandoned it entirely was to become an identikit of attitudes, not a person. A lot of people were guilty of that these days, he felt, preferring to stand on the stilts of a cause rather than wait to grow up into the impure complexity of being an individual.

  You can't disown your past without becoming no one.

  To challenge conditioning without trying to eradicate it, to modify it honestly in the light of individual thought, was to become yourself. The rest was an act of psychic self-deceit. He wouldn't be pretending to be who he wasn't.

  ONE THING HE HAD TO ADMIT. If he died dreaming of a woman, she wouldn't be wearing Doc Martens.

  MADDIE FITZPATRICK'S SHOES THAT DAY.

  HE SEES HER IN THE LOCAL LIBRARY in the Dick Institute. Can we create what we want to happen by imagining it intensely enough? Do we project events, precipitate them out of thoughts and wishes as well as having them simply occur to us? He has sometimes thought mistakenly that he has seen someone in the street only minutes before he sees that person in fact. Has he wished her into the library?

  He sees Maddie Fitzpatrick. The very name, incanted like a silent charm in his mind, creates an aureole in which she stands. She is at the end of a corridor of books. Sunlight glistens the black, drooping hair that makes her face a secret between her and the book she is holding open. He shouldn't be able to tell that it is her but he can tell. The awkwardness of his breathing is instant recognition. Nobody else could make a yellow linen skirt, a yellow blouse and fawn high-heeled shoes seem to him as exotic as a yashmak. Her stockingless legs are unbelievable, light brown with summer. They keep making his mind follow them to where it shouldn't. Where she is the air looks clearer, a pellucid patch. Somehow she seems to consolidate the space about her, make it her own and distinct from the rest of the room, as if she creates a composition from whatever is around her and she is its centre, like the subject of a painting. This one is by Vermeer, whose work he has seen in an art book he found in this library. It was through the eyes of Vermeer he first saw the kind of light she stands in.

  He doesn't approach. You cannot enter a painting. She stands there surrounded by the unimaginable difference of her experience and he is afraid. How can he ever come near her? How would he know what to say? The different, isolated space in which she stands leads from a past he will never know and towards a future he cannot imagine. He is a stranger in both places. Also, he associates her with his Uncle Josey. It was from him that Tam first heard her name and it was at his uncle's funeral that he first saw her and was spoken to by her.

  She came up to him while he stood around aimlessly in his grandmother's house after the funeral. It had been a weird day. There was a service in the house without any ministers - just Alf Hanley, his Uncle Josey's best friend, speaking for several minutes. Then some of the men spoke at the graveside while they all listened in a whipping wind - two dozen empty suits, Tam thought, his own included, flapping round a hol
e. Back at his grandmother's house, his social behaviour stalled on him completely. He couldn't participate. People were talking and drinking tea and eating sandwiches and some women were crying with his grandmother. He couldn't do anything. He didn't want to talk. He certainly couldn't cry.

  Yet he thought he had loved his Uncle Josey. What was wrong? It was as if he felt resentment of his uncle. It was as if he needed to change his sense of him now that he was dead. He found himself remembering against his will things which he regarded as failings in his uncle. He hated himself for doing it but he couldn't stop doing it. Why?

  —AFTERWARDS, he was to be several times in the company of an old man after the man's wife had died suddenly. The old man's grief began by iconising his dead wife. Her perfection was untarnished. Then, as time slowly and painfully passed, he began to desecrate the icon he had himself made. There was a story he was inclined to repeat about something which had happened over forty years ago.

  The story was this: during the war, when fruit is a luxury, the man's mother comes to visit at his and his wife's house. The man is out at his work and, therefore, doesn't meet his mother but his wife tells him of her visit. A week later, the man visits his mother and she asks him how he enjoyed the bananas. He doesn't know what she is talking about but says they were fine. When he returns to his own house, he asks his wife what this means. His mother left him two bananas but his wife and her father ate them without mentioning them to him.

  When he thought of the old man's story, as he sometimes did, he would wonder what it was exactly the old man had been doing in burnishing this story like an ornament he didn't like and giving it, however briefly, pride of place in his mind. How could something so minute give rise to such long pain? Then he would imagine that an untreated hurt might last for over forty years. He would wonder if we need, somewhere in us, secretly to hoard the hurts those we love give us, to store them even against our conscious will, so that we may protect ourselves with them against the agony of an impossibly continuing love after those loved have left us. And he would wonder if that was what the old man had been doing and if that was what his teenage self had been doing when his Uncle Josey died.—