The Kiln

by William McIlvanney

  BUT that day of the funeral he was simply standing, loathing himself, when Maddie Fitzpatrick came up to him.

  ‘Hullo. You're Tom, aren't you?’ she said.

  He just about managed to realise that he was. He had noticed her as soon as she came in. He couldn't imagine doing anything else. He had been trying not to watch her all the time as she moved around the room, talking easily with whoever was beside her. Once she leant and kissed his grandmother. The demure black costume that she wore was defeated by her body, became, in spite of its plainness, a strikingly sensuous outfit. He had been frightened that, if he kept thinking about her, he would get an erection. That would be the final expression of his inability to feel what he should feel - an erection at a funeral.

  Now, her beautiful face looking straight at him with its flecks of delicate brown in the eyes, the guilt of what he had been thinking surfaced in a blush. She smiled at him. Would she still be smiling if she could see inside his head?

  ‘I'm Maddie Fitzpatrick,’ she said. ‘We were friends of your Uncle Joe's. My husband and I.’

  Naming his uncle as ‘Joe’ was like hearing her mention someone other than the man he had known. He wondered what they had talked about, although it was probably politics, he thought. He knew that she and her husband were members of the Communist Party, too. About all the Communist Party had meant to him so far was going to charity dances in the Bethany Hall and sliding up and down the floor with the other children while the grown-ups danced.

  To the guilt of not being able to mourn for his uncle and the guilt of thinking lustful thoughts about a woman at a funeral was added the guilt of being jealous of the time his uncle had spent with Maddie Fitzpatrick. He was a guilt machine today. Behold the evil one. He had to try and say something before he grew horns and cloven feet. Or before she decided he hadn't learned to talk yet.

  ‘He said,’ he said.

  He blushed again.

  ‘He said about you.’

  He felt like an Indian, talking in the basic way they talked in Hollywood films. How! Maybe that's what she liked about him. For she smiled again.

  ‘Your uncle talked about you a lot. He expected great things of you. I can see what he meant.’

  He couldn't see what she meant. He tried to smile and his upper lip froze above his teeth. But it wasn't like Humphrey Bogart. Humphrey Bogart wouldn't have been blushing again.

  ‘It's the eyes,’ she said. ‘You have sensitive eyes.’

  Where he came from people didn't say things like that. He could find no way to react. He thought the redness of his face must be as bright as a poster colour. She took pity on him. She squeezed his arm gently.

  ‘Try not to get too hurt,’ she said, and moved on.

  That was it, one moment when a shining presence had paused, like a film star, and autographed his life - ‘with best wishes’. He had never forgotten that occasion and sometimes-perhaps when he wasn't feeling good about himself, which was often enough -he would take it out again and hold it in his mind as if it were a talisman.

  He had seen her again several times over the last couple of years. Once, in the street, they had stood and spoken for about an hour. She was always open and friendly to him, without a trace of that patronising distance some adults seemed to need to put between them and younger people. Yet he somehow managed to put that distance there himself, measured in awe. Why couldn't he be as open towards her as she was to him? He suspected it was because he thought of her in a way she didn't realise. He had a guilty secret about her, one he couldn't share with her. That guilt had grown as he grew up a little more. It was because he wanted to be so close to her, like inside her pants, that he couldn't come close at all, in case he betrayed himself and her horrified shock spread to his family and everyone he knew.

  Now, in the library, he stares at her secretly and longingly. He gets so excited that he has to walk away. If he goes up to speak to her, he is liable to start touching her curiously, like that Indian in the Western seeing his first white woman. He tries to lose himself in the labyrinth of books. He is picking books at random and opening them. He isn't seeing the words. Each page might as well be blank, a screen on which he is projecting his thoughts. The thoughts are wildly improbable.

  (‘Hullo, Tom. My car's outside. Let's go to my house.' The background music is Nellie Lucher:

  Comeona my house, my housa come on,

  Comeona my house, my housa come on.

  Comeona my house, to my house,

  I'm gonna give you candy.

  Comeona my house, to my house,

  I'm gonna give you apple ana plum

  Ana pomegranate, too.)

  (‘Hullo, Tom. I've had enough of this pretence. I want you. What I want, I get. There's a park near here. It won't be busy just now.’

  Ah, the delicious martyrdom of being an object of compulsive desire. Depravity without guilt. Who could blame a naive boy for being led like a lamb to the slaughter of his innocence? You could have it both ways. You get the pleasure, you don't pay the bill.)

  (‘Hullo, Tom. I don't know how to say this. It's not the kind of thing you say in Graithnock library. I love you. I can't help it. Whatever you want to happen is what will happen. I'm in your hands.’)

  (‘Tom?’)

  The word is real. Maddie Fitzpatrick is standing beside him. He couldn't be more embarrassed if she had recognised him coming out of a brothel.

  ‘I thought it was you.’

  But is it really him? She hasn't a clue about the rabid imaginings of the person standing in front of her. She mustn't know.

  ‘Hullo, Mrs Fitzpatrick,’ he says and, under the circumstances, that phrase, which is spoken in a steady voice, feels to him like an act of brilliant and elaborate duplicity.

  ‘I wasn't sure at first. You seem to be growing up more by the week these days. Like something in a hothouse.’ Maybe that's what happens when your foetid thoughts seem permanently to inhabit the tropics of desire. ‘You're quite the young man now. I heard you did very well in your highers. One more year at school then university, eh?’

  ‘No. Ah go in October.’

  ‘Oh. You really are in a hurry to grow up, aren't you?’

  He almost wants to tell her that there's one crucial element missing for him in the process of growing up, and maybe she could help him there. But his mind puts a grille across the dungeon where such dark and misshapen wishes scream and gibber for release, while he tries to starve them to death. She reaches across and turns the book in his hand towards her, so that she can see the title on the spine. She bursts out laughing. She is laughing. She is looking at him wide-eyed. He realises with surprise what the book is. He is mortified. The hypocrisy of his pin-stripe behaviour is revealed. He might as well be a bank manager carrying around a placard reading: Head Full of Dirty Thoughts.

  ‘Dangerous Liaisons?’ she says. ‘Tom. What are you up to? Are you using this as a manual?’

  He tries to laugh. It sounds like a clogged sink trying to drain.

  ‘Ah just picked it up there.’

  ‘Uh-huh. I assumed it hadn't jumped into your hand right enough.’

  ‘The French teacher's mentioned it. She told the class about it. Laclos.’

  The mention of the author's name is an attempt to legitimise his prurience. He is a scholar with a rather clinical interest in the classics of French literature. One has a duty to read such things in the quest for erudition. He doesn't add that when Miss Kimberley told them the name in French, the words almost gave him an orgasm. Les Liaisons Dangereuses. He couldn't have explained the effect those syllables had on him. But they went straight to his groin. God, did he want some sort of liaison that was amazingly dangereuse. The words connoted for him mad passion, sudden and cataclysmic, happening just out of sight of people going on with their routine lives. And afterwards, somehow, he and some mysterious woman reappearing, dressed in the pretence of nothing-has-happened, like a mask behind which they are smiling secretly at each other.
/>   He also doesn't add that, since he has heard of the book, he picks it up almost every time he comes into the library and flicks through it, looking for the dirty bits. He has not been hugely successful. He has never quite recovered from his initial disappointment in discovering that the book is a bunch of letters. You wouldn't expect too many lurid details in a letter, at least not in any he has seen. (‘The weather hasn't been too great here lately but maybe it'll pick up.’) But he keeps trying. One day he is going to get up enough nerve to brass out the disapproval of the woman at the counter, the one with the grey hair and glasses and the big mole on her cheek. She's the one who threw him out for having dirty hands the first time he came in.

  Now she seems to want him to wash his mind. When he took out The Man Who Died, he thought she was going to phone the police. (How did she know what it was like anyway? The title told you nothing. Has she read everything in the library? Or was it just because the author was D.H. Lawrence?) He's going to take Dangerous Liaisons up to the counter and get it stamped and bring it home so that he can conduct a proper search. But, obviously, it won't be today.

  ‘She told you about it, did she?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The French teacher. She told you about it, did she? What's her name? Brigitte Bardot?’

  He laughs for real this time. Miss Kimberley as a sex kitten is a gloriously incongruous image, he thinks, like imagining Auntie Bella in her underwear. Miss Kimberley, whom he has always liked, is short and dumpy. Her torso looks as blandly undifferentiated as a pumpkin inside the big costume jackets that she wears and the proximity of any male teacher makes her fluttery. But she has, he remembers, beautifully shapely legs. He suddenly feels guilty for laughing. Maybe she is quite sexy at that. Does this mean that he is able to see beyond sexual cliches or just that he is a sexual maniac, aroused by anybody female?

  ‘She was called Miss Kimberley.’

  ‘Nice name. So what are you doing these days? Apart from reading up on how to have a dangerous liaison.’

  ‘Ah'm workin’ night-shift in Avondale brickwork.'

  ‘Really? How do you find that?’

  ‘All right. Ah suppose.’

  Except that I wish somebody would transport Cran Craig to Botany Bay. (He had looked up ‘cran’ in the dictionary yesterday: a measure of capacity for herrings just landed in port - 37½ gallons. How the hell did that come to be his nickname? Maybe it was the amount of blood circulating in his prodigious body.)

  ‘Hardly seems the ideal setting for an intellectual like yourself. Don't you feel out of place?’

  ‘Only when Ah push the bogey off the rails.’

  She smiles thoughtfully at that. She is looking at him assessingly.

  ‘Listen,’ she says, serious now. ‘We're having a party soon. I'd like you to come. We'd like you to come. The others might seem like old fogeys to you. But I'm sure you can handle it. Will you come?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He can't imagine why she would ask him and he isn't very sure what he is agreeing to but he can't think of anything else to say. Then he does.

  ‘Only thing is. As Ah say, Ah'm workin’ night-shift.'

  ‘Not at the weekend, though.’

  ‘Ah get Friday and Saturday off.’

  ‘Good. There will be some younger people there. It's 14, isn't it? Dawson Street?’

  ‘That's right.’

  How did she know that?

  ‘All right. I'll drop you a card. Time and detailed directions and things. Time you came out into society, Thomas.’

  She leans over and runs her hand gently along the side of his head.

  ‘Bye.’

  She walks away, apparently oblivious to the effect she has had, like some kind of Superwoman who casually touches a building in the passing and doesn't realise that she has demolished it. Her touch judders through him like his small personal earthquake. It's all he can do to keep standing upright.

  HE WOULD ALWAYS HAVE A WEAKNESS FOR PARTIES. The sight of the living-room at Warriston made the thought ironic. This was some one-man party he was having.

  This place is going to drive me even crazier than I already am, he thought. The dust on the ledges was beginning to make them look like indoor window-boxes. The fluff on the carpet drifted back and forth when he moved about, like tumbleweed. There was a cup on the mantelpiece that he couldn't remember not being there. If he looked inside, the coffee dregs would have hardened into porcelain. Like an archaeological site.

  And he was its only archaeologist. Gently unearth the broken pieces of the past. Breathe on them softly, brush them delicately with thought. Let's see if we can make out any pattern.

  Parties. Definitely parties. There had been some significant parties in his life. There was the one at Caroline Mather's house that summer. She met him in the street and invited him and he found Margaret Inglis again and was able to confront her with a plookless nose. But before that there had been the party at Maddie Fitzpatrick's. He had wandered around, awkwardly trying to talk to older people and feeling he had come to the wrong planet, until Maddie Fitzpatrick took him into a small room and read to him some of the poems of William Morris, of whom he had never heard. That was when he knew he had come to the wrong planet. He managed to escape eventually, clutching a very slim book of poetry she said he could return in the free week he had decided to have between packing up at the brickwork and going to university.

  There was the party Gill and he had not long before they separated. It had for him one moment definitive of how his life was going at that time. He had gone upstairs to see how Gus was doing. He would be fifteen then. He had his bed-light on and he was reading.

  ‘Hullo, Dad.’

  ‘Aye, kid. The noise bothering you?’

  ‘No. What's it like?’

  ‘It's like a party, I suppose.’

  He sat on the edge of the bed. He noticed how big and raw-boned Gus was, his face two fiercely interested eyes around which a bundle of features hadn't yet set properly. His spiky punk hairstyle helped to make him look as if he had always just wakened into the world and was wondering where he was. The colour was pink this week. Tom loved those remorselessly questioning eyes. Sometimes he would tell Gus a fact that had become banal with familiarity for him and he would shoot him a look that seemed to be probing Tom for signs of insanity. Gus had a history of asking interesting questions. One of Tom's favourites was one he had asked him when he was two and a half years old: ‘Does God wear a tie?’ He had gone through a particularly long phase of calling Tom by his first name. In his first primary class the teacher had asked him who his best friend was and he had replied, ‘Tom.’ When she had asked if Tom was a little boy who lived near him, Gus had said, ‘No. He lives in the house with us.’ He was no longer on first-name terms with him but some of the friendship remained.

  These days he was even more disconcerting in the way he switched roles on you. Just when you had him comfortably cast as an awkwardly immature teenager, his Doc Marten boots scuffed from playing football in the street, he would suddenly appear garbed in thoughtful solemnity and wanting to discuss the USA's role in Central America. That night he was in philosophical vein. The eyes assessed Tom compassionately.

  ‘You not enjoyin' it. Dad?'

  ‘No’ much, Gus. No' much.'

  He nodded. They talked. It didn't matter what they talked about. Having taken both of them by surprise by coming upstairs like that on impulse, he saw Gus somehow fresh, his eyes not fully returned from the imaginative distances his reading had taken him to. He didn't see just his son or a recurring worry. He saw an emergent young man, sensitive and thoughtful. He admired him. He was reminded of one night more than a year before when Gill and Megan and Gus and he had driven back from having Christmas dinner at Gill's brother's house more than ten miles away. The roads were snowbound and the driving had been slow and a strain, an unpleasant end to an evening he hadn't enjoyed. But when they got back, Megan and Gus and Tom had created spontaneously one of
those meaninglessly happy times you will never forget. Sitting with Gus in his bedroom he remembered the poem he had written about it and misplaced somewhere. (‘He is one on whom nothing is lost’ - not even unpublishable poems.) It was called ‘Snowball Fight’. As they talked, the words of it played under their conversation in his mind like a descant:

  The accidental manna, how we find

  Things as themselves by coming on them blind.

  A bad drive home, each road a precipice

  Of horizontal falling, garage ground.

  With purpose done, the night became. My son

  Fashioned a snowball, found he'd made a world.

  We dervished in the darkened street an hour.

  Discovering us, my daughter, son and me—

  Snowballs like presents of us. And to see

  Each in a different place, a different time.

  Receding from me helplessly, was good.

  Laughing a lot, we made love to strange life—

  Brief, separate stays in undiscovered land,

  A melting gift, sweet wetness in the hand.

  Perhaps a part of Tom had already taken its leave of him, or at least of the way of life they had shared until then. But he gave no explicit sign of it, probably because he didn't know himself what had happened. He simply felt an undertow of sadness in the pleasure of talking to him.

  When he said goodnight and come out on to the landing he didn't want to go downstairs just then. He went into Megan's room and put on the light and sat on her empty bed. She was in her first year at Edinburgh University and she came back through to Graithnock only on occasional weekends.

  Megan was a keeper of the past, which meant that her room preserved the recessive layers of her experience, like an archaeological site. You could still see the evidence of her babyhood in the first teddy bear she had ever had, sitting propped against the head board, badly beaten up by her affection but retaining those bright, idiot eyes that didn't seem to know that time had passed. Along one wall, where pop stars and film stars stared back at him, he could check the roll of her dream lovers. There was a mobile her first boyfriend had given her. There were old cards. There were books that went from Black Beauty to Pére Goriot. There was the mirror that had absorbed her growing's many faces and stayed as bland as water.