The Kiln

by William McIlvanney

  He tried to think of her in Edinburgh. She might be in a bar now or with a boy or reading a book. The risks for her appalled him. But she was strong and properly determined to work out everything for herself, including her mother and him. He trusted her. That didn't mean he trusted her to do what her parents wanted. He trusted her not to do that. He trusted her to live with what she did.

  Feeling slightly elegiac about her and Gus as he sensed them growing away from Gill and him and into themselves, he wondered what they had given them. More specifically, he wondered what he had given them. The thought depressed him, for he could think of nothing definite to attach it to.

  WAS THAT HIS AND GILL'S FAREWELL PARTY TO THEIR MARRIAGE? How could you tell precisely when successive mutual disenchantments congealed into hopelessness? It was such a gradual process. It had probably begun many years earlier, as early as the party they gave the week after the dinner party with Elspeth and Brian Alderston, just before going to Grenoble. His dubiety about that one was probably an omen in itself.

  IN SPITE OF HIS LACK OF ENTHUSIASM when Gill had mentioned the party, he found himself caught up in the preparations. He made several trips to an off-licence to buy the booze, remembering piecemeal particular drinks that certain people liked. Gill had an impressive buffet set out in the sitting-room. The downstairs bedroom was the bar. The lounge was to be the orgiastic centre of the party, ringing with epigrams, awash with warmth and wit and muted sexuality.

  It was a nice thought. He almost believed it for a while. Even when Brian and Elspeth Alderston arrived first, he didn't give up hope. It was true that they were to parties what a pail of cold water in the face is to euphoria. But he was already feeling the primitive thrill in the blood that comes from the presence of men and women mixing in a bright room, a muted tomtom. So his goodwill repaired perhaps a little of the damage he had done the week before. And as the other guests began to come, he started to enjoy himself.

  He wasn't aware at the time that the party might be a kind of terminal experience for him, the end of something, the writing on the wall of the mind, although it might take him many more years to decipher it. He took pleasure in the early stages because he was so busy. He was welcoming the people and giving them drinks and making sure they knew where the bar was so that they could help themselves. His sense of the party was by pleasant proxy, like the smell of good food which other people are eating.

  Once the preliminaries were over and he was able to be not merely a waiter but a participant, he found it harder to maintain a sense of enjoyment. Familiarity made of his eyes an X-ray plate in which he was aware of distressing symptoms in some of their guests. He tried not to see such things but it wasn't easy. There were depressing phenomena present which he couldn't avoid.

  For example, Clive Cunningham was telling his jokes. Tom had heard two before he could get out of earshot. He regarded even two as a dangerous level. Fortunately he couldn't remember them, which might mean he had escaped permanent brain damage.

  Clive had decided that his role in life was to tell jokes. Tom hated set jokes, which were to humour what masturbation was to sex. Especially, he hated Clive's set jokes. They were all about girls doing it and ways of getting it and cuckolded husbands. He suspected that in Clive. The jokes were always accompanied by this big, deep, masculine laugh he had been practising for years. Laughter seemed to Tom one of the least effectively fakeable things in the world. But nobody had told Clive that.

  Perhaps nobody had told him because he was six feet two and an ex-rugby player. He was standing like a barn door with a suit on, a whisky glass like a thimble in his hand. Two women and a man were his audience. They were laughing at the right time. The right time to laugh at Clive's jokes was when he laughed. Sandra Hayes, she of the remorseless intelligence, was laughing louder than anyone. Why do women accept such crap from men? Why didn't Sandra get a step-ladder and spit in his eye?

  ‘Have you heard this one, Tom?’ Clive said to him.

  ‘Aye, when I was ten.’

  Clive laughed the laugh he probably wrote away to Charles Atlas for. He and Tom had an understanding: he couldn't stand Tom and Tom couldn't stand him. But at least he didn't attempt his overwhelming physicality bit with Tom. No doubt he could beat Tom's head in but no doubt he also knew that, even caved in, it would still work better than his.

  Probably Clive's standing off from Tom related to their time at school together. Since that time, he knew that Tom knew that he knew (complicated are the rules of macho head-wrestling) that Tom was better at playing rugby than he was. Yet Tom gave it up. He suspected this had troubled Clive in some dark recess of himself. What fulfilment in life could Tom have found that was better than rolling about the ground on a bitterly cold Scottish Saturday, up to the arsehole in muck and with a fourteen-stone troglodyte trying to stand on your face?

  He played rugby for only one season at school and scored a lot of tries. But he could never quite see the point of all that bodily contact. He was a fast runner and his keenness not to be groped by a lot of boys made him a very fleet wing three-quarter. But if he could shake off tackles, he couldn't do the same with his sense that it was fundamentally ludicrous for thirty boys to spend eighty minutes in sweaty pursuit of what is, after all, a symbolic testicle. It was a manhood test he didn't believe in, a degenerate modern equivalent of knights trying to win their spurs - boys trying to win their balls. It was a good game, though, but not as good as football.

  Aileen, Clive's wife, was talking to Alice and Frank Spiers. He had known Aileen at school as well. She had been very attractive then, seemed to him in his awestruck innocence somehow what girlness was, quick and usually a little breathless, as if she were hurrying to somewhere the rest of them were plodding towards. Her laughter evoked barely understood stirrings in the boys around her. She had been a pleasantly disturbing presence.

  She was still attractive but in a slightly caricatured way now. Breasts and bum had exaggerated themselves to the point where she was beginning to look like a seaside postcard. She had acquired a coarsening of nature to match the physical change. The Cunningham effect? Tom wondered. He had a moment he didn't like of pondering what things might be like between them in bed. Did Clive turn towards her in the darkness and murmur, by way of subtle foreplay, ‘Darling, have you heard the one about . . .?’

  Contemplating Alice Spiers didn't help to lighten his mood. That way guilt lay. Frank was Alice's second husband. They were only recently married. During the time that Alice had been separated from her first husband something had happened between them.

  It was one night during a previous incarnation of marital disillusionment. He no longer recalled which great issue sundered their marriage that night. It could have been Sandra Hayes' beauty. Or it could have been the fact that Gill insisted on pronouncing ‘liqueur’ as a French word, the phoniness of which drove him crazy. He thought it probably dated from the cordon bleu cookery course, an event he might cite as a co-respondent in the divorce, since it was also there that she met Aileen Cunningham - an ill meeting by gaslight, as it had brought Clive, whom Tom had thought safely stored in the past, back into his life.

  Whatever cosmic issue had reminded them that they were, each of them, engaged in a psychic struggle to what might be the death, they finished by withdrawing behind their favourite separate modes for such occasions. He started to rant, a meaningless convoy of obscure rage within which any rational significance had as much chance of occurring as a daisy has of taking root on a motorway. Gill told him that she would be sleeping downstairs from now on, rather in the manner of God banishing Cain to the east of Eden. He thought the news was supposed to have made him a broken man but he felt at the time that he'd rather cuddle up to a buzz-saw. Anyway, he was used to this tactic and the accompanying threats of testes lopped off when he was sleeping if he dared to force his way into her bed. One time she had kept this isolationist policy up for six full weeks, presumably waiting for his exploding sperm to bring him to her, screami
ng for mercy. What killed Tom was what she said when, at the end of that time, she came back into their bed. She felt safe in doing so, she said, because obviously he was homosexual. Who else but a raging queen could have avoided sexual contact with her for six weeks? He succumbed to the cold logic of it. Sweet is woman: sometimes he thought she was a question which, no matter how you answered, you must get wrong.

  He had brought their quarrel to a close with fine masculine originality. He went to the Akimbo Arms, a pub he had used to refresh his sense of himself and where he came from. The public bar there was a time-lock of the fifties. But it didn't help much. Harry was on duty that night, the only barman he knew who insisted on telling you his troubles.

  Tom drank too much and stumbled out at shutting time, bearing the woes of the world on his innocent shoulders. The scene outside didn't lessen his self-pity. There were girls in twos and threes everywhere, done up like circus performers. There was a group of them queuing at an autobank. He realised they were heading for the discos that had proliferated recently in Graithnock, like cake shops where bread was scarce. He seemed to be travelling through a forest of walking women and he was alone and aging, listening to the circus leaving town. Poor Tom. What had he ever done to deserve this?

  He needed to share the amazing injustice of his life with someone. He couldn't go home. Gill was waiting there like a computer in which were stored all the inadequacies of his past. On impulse he went into a phone box and looked up Alice's address (her name was Johnson at that time). The phone book had been dismembered by some happy vandal but he must have become bored before he completed the job, because one of the few intact pieces contained Alice's number.

  He rang. That seemed simple. But given how drunk he was, it was an achievement on a par with inventing the wheel. He spoke to two puzzled voices, one of them a man who threatened to come through the phone to him, before he reached the haven of Alice's breathy tones.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Allah? Tom hee. Yew alrih? Howsa go?’

  ‘I'm sorry. Who is this?’

  ‘Allah. Smee. Howsa go? Eh?’

  ‘Listen. Who are you?’

  His last few surviving brain cells caught a faint glimmer of what was happening. Alice thought she had a heavy breather on the line. He knew that somehow he had to say something sharp to set her mind at rest, something really intelligent. His mind made a supreme effort.

  ‘Tom,’ he said. ‘Tom Docherty.’

  ‘Tom! Where are you?'

  ‘Box. Box on street. King Stree.’

  ‘God, what's happened?’

  ‘Huh! Watsappen.’

  It was at this point that three young men took up their positions outside the box and started to tap on the glass. One of them pressed his lips against the glass derisively. Tom gave them all the fingers and continued to converse in his mysterious way with Alice.

  ‘Watsappen, Alice? Eh? Watsnotappen? Don belee this. Dew?’

  Various oaths were coming from outside and the three young men were trying to force their way into the box. He tried to wedge himself against the door and dropped the phone. Dangling there, it must have given Alice the impression she was plugged into a riot.

  ‘Pissaw.’

  ‘Get the bastard.’

  ‘Shove, shove, shove.’

  ‘Get los, ya buncha turs.’

  ‘He's goin’, boys, he's goin'.'

  ‘Heave ho, me hearties!’

  Tom was knocked against the phone and his elbow came down, cutting the connection. It was his good fortune to have picked a fight in a phone box. The young men were fighting with each other rather than Tom in their desperation to get in a telling hit, be the one who could claim Tom's scalp. They heaved uselessly around one another like armless boxers. They would probably all have died of asphyxiation without an effective blow being struck if the police hadn't arrived. One of the young men saw the car rounding the corner and shouted a warning. The phone box suddenly felt very roomy. By the time the police car had pulled up, the young men were gone.

  ‘Are you all right, sir?’

  Does the corpse feel well?

  ‘What was all that about?’

  He had come out of the phone box. Sweat dried on his forehead as if it were ice being held there. He'd always found one policeman equivalent to about four cups of black coffee. There were two of them. They didn't seem particulary friendly.

  ‘A loada nothin’,' Tom said.

  ‘That's not what I would call it. It looked like a disturbance of the peace.’

  ‘Not disturbin’ any peace, me. Trying to make a phone call there. Three mugs. Forced their way into the box.'

  ‘You sure that's what happened?’ the other one said.

  Tom nodded.

  ‘You feeling all right, sir?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘You look under the weather to me.’

  They really develop their powers of observation in the police. Finger-counting would have been higher mathematics for him at that moment. They decided to give him a bit of the treatment.

  ‘What do you think?’ one said to the other.

  ‘It might be for his own good to take him in,’ the other said.

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘Aye.’

  Tom couldn't resist it. Just as the alcohol had assured him that he could insult three young men with impunity, it now convinced him that he was witty and could take the mickey out of the police.

  ‘What's the charge?’ he asked. ‘Molesting a phone box?’

  ‘Listen, you—’

  And another car pulled up at the kerb. Providence seemed to be running a taxi service for Tom that night. Things sometimes happen that way when you're drunk. Out of the car stepped Alice and the talking policeman lost his train of thought. She was tall and willowy, with very long black hair you felt you could get lost in. She was wearing an astrakhan-type coat with the high collar up, and long black boots.

  ‘Tom!’ she called as she got out of the car. ‘Where have you been?’

  She shook her head in a long-suffering way at the policemen.

  ‘Celebrations,’ she said to them. ‘This is him supposed to be enjoying himself. I'm sorry. Officers, has there been some trouble?’

  She had neatly created the assumption that she was his wife. His status had risen in the eyes of the two policemen. He might be a drunken nyaff but he had quite a woman to drive him home.

  ‘There could have been,’ one of them said.

  ‘We just got here in time,’ said the other.

  ‘Is it all right if I get him home now?’

  They enjoyed taking their time about the decision and watching her.

  ‘Well, all right, madam. But just make sure he's not back out on the streets tonight. He could be a danger to himself.’

  ‘Thank you. And thanks for helping. Goodnight.’

  It was as easy as that, provided you could wear an astrakhan coat and boots the way she could and live under a waterfall of black hair. When they got into the car and she put in the clutch, her coat fell open and she was bare-thighed to the hem of her shorty nightie. He was being driven along in one of his adolescent dreams, the one where the car pulls up and the woman tells you to get in and you go off to the land where sex actually happens and isn't just talked about.

  ‘My God!’ she said. ‘You look as if you've been in an air raid. What happened?’

  He gave her his version of the phone-box war.

  ‘We better get you sorted out before you go back to Gill.’

  He felt that might take a year or two.

  ‘You ever tell anybody I came out of the house like this to get you and you're a dead man.’

  She turned the car into the runway and they got out with almost the whole of the street in darkness except for her light. They came into the house quietly. She told him the children were asleep upstairs.

  The strange rituals and expressions with which we patrol the edges of our bodies, the sentries of the sanctum, are interesting. Perhaps
often when they profess to be most adamant about keeping us out, they are already suborned and inviting us to come in. Are our bodies busy sending each other subversive signals while our minds fondly think they are in control of the situation?

  That night with Alice occasioned such thoughts. When they came into her house, she left him sitting in the lounge while she put on a dressing-gown and made them coffee. He found the furniture of other people's lives slightly awesome. The carriage clock sounded disapproving, tut-tutting with its brass tongue as if it knew it belonged and he didn't. He wondered where the ornaments had come from, who had chosen which prints. One was Monet's garden at Argenteuil, which seemed to him at the time like a distillation of all the summers he had lost.

  He thought of Harry, the departed husband. He had had a drink with him not long after Harry had left Alice. Harry had been raw at the time, flayed with self-pity, his eyes looking out with painful disbelief on what had happened. It wasn't easy to equate his garbled tale of agonies endured with this nice room. Visiting the scene of the crimes, Tom found no thumb-screws, no iron maidens, no instruments of primitive torture. Had Harry been raving? Or should he flee before the subject of Harry's dark hintings reappeared, perhaps dressed in a black evening dress and carrying a rhino-whip?

  Alice came in wearing the same floral housecoat and mules. She was carrying a tray with cups and a china coffee-pot and a small plate of biscuits. She left the tray on the table beside him, crossed to the music centre and put on a tape. Vivaldi came on quietly in two different parts of the room like ornamental fountains playing there.