The Kiln

by William McIlvanney

  There took place then a civilising ceremony: Monet, Vivaldi, coffee and biscuits - a small brightness in the emptiness of the night. The street was quiet, most people in bed. Upstairs, Alice's two children slept safely. They sat opposite each other and talked, Alice demure in her housecoat, Tom rather red-eyed from his sojourn on the streets. He sensed rationality slowly return, felt the gentling effect men and women can sometimes have on each other. The bruises on his mind faded to mild discolorations.

  He didn't remember much of what they talked about at first - probably the ridiculousness of the incident at the phone box, Alice's dramatic intervention, how the children were getting on at school, the feints and side-steps by which we draw nearer to each other. But they moved on to more confessional matters, the problems of living alone, the problems of not living alone, inspection of the corpses of small dreams, the griefs of marriage. The propriety of it was marvellous. There were no innuendos, no phoney looks of longing passion. He enjoyed the complete innocence of Alice sitting in her housecoat and him with not even his jacket off, taking coffee and biscuits and talking. They were outside any assumed role they should be playing. Then it happened.

  Alice had moved the table away from between them so that she could go round and turn the tape. When she came back she didn't return to the chair she had been sitting in. She sat down on the settee, a little along from him. They were still just talking interestedly. He made a remark about the sadness of the way couples become indifferent to each other's secret fears and thoughts and delicate aspirations, the very things that generated intimacy in the first place.

  The comment was one of those accidentally stimulating contacts, a touch in exactly the right place at the right time. Alice became very animated, flicking her long black hair away from her face. She told him about an apparently irrelevant incident that had meant a lot to her at the time. He could see why.

  She had been out for a night with some girlfriends. Her marriage to Harry wasn't going well at the time. The night had affected her with an awareness of what other women were doing and therefore with an alternative sense of what her own life might be like. She had been propositioned at least three times and had turned them all down. When she came home, Harry was in bed. He had asked a couple of perfunctory questions about her evening. Alice had wanted to talk to him, somehow to earth her restlessness in his reassurance, to neutralise her mood by sharing it with him. But she didn't want to tell him explicitly about her evening. Harry was the kind of man who sifted her glances and put her smiles under the microscope. If she had mentioned being propositioned, Harry would have wanted to know immediately what she had been doing that anybody would think he could approach her. Some men use their own cultivated casualness of response as if it were a charm against their wife's attractiveness.

  Alice started to tell Harry about something that had happened when she was a child. Like a lot of the things we say, it was only in the telling of it that she realised how important it was to her. She was sitting at her dressing-table mirror, brushing her hair as she told him. She was transported into the past. Details she had long forgotten came back to mind and she supplied them excitedly. When she finished, she was almost breathless with wonder at what the incident meant or what effect it might have had on her. She asked Harry what he thought. Harry was sleeping.

  An echo of that moment's hurt appeared on Alice's face. Tom remembered Harry's own almost incoherent indignation about his relationship with Alice and, without warning, a caption came to mind to go with that blissfully unconscious figure, whose marriage was perhaps finally disintegrating at that very moment. It was a caption a lot of men could adopt as their marital epitaph: ‘I don't know what went wrong with my marriage. I was asleep at the time.’

  What happened next began innocently. Alice looked so sore that he couldn't just leave her sitting there alone. He reached across and touched her cheek with his palm. The gesture, light as it was, sprang her. She closed on him, starved of touch. They held each other.

  They cuddled. But comfort was just a staging-post to passion. When they kissed, their intellects abdicated, abandoning the premises to a riot of instincts. Alice, adept housewife, peeled him of his jacket and slipped his tie and undid his shirt buttons with a couple of mystic passes as easily as if they had been a zip. Her hands on his nipples had them aspiring to be obelisks. Confused movements were taking place in his trousers. He managed to pull Alice's housecoat off her shoulders and down her arms and with it her low-cut nightie and, having started on that route, was too excited to rethink the logistics of dismantling her social defences. He pulled both garments down to her feet and beyond, knocking off her slippers as he went, and she lay, long and small-breasted, with only her silk knickers on, from which some black hair curled. She had his belt unbuckled, and unveiled what he had to offer and stripped him naked as he wrestled off her pants.

  So much for civilisation. Perhaps those people in the garden at Argenteuil were protecting their eyes from more than the sun. Vivaldi seemed to become more frenetic, as if demanding to be heard. The carriage clock said nothing Tom could hear. They intimidated time into pausing briefly. They rolled across the floor, two naked searchers rooting in the crevices of self, trying to snuffle each other out, wedding saliva, hunting the spoor of sensation along the pores, until the final meeting was achieved in a deep and dark exchange of their hot juices, a shivering mutual surrender of the innermost place.

  They emerged from their private storm drenched in disbelief. What had they been doing? They looked at each other and kissed gently and cuddled, staring past each other's shoulders at what this was going to mean. He felt mugged by the experience. Had it really happened as suddenly as that? Or, when he stood drunkenly in the phone box, was there already a demonic brain cell planning what might happen? Had they really been talking so innocently? Or had they simply been making love to each other's heads before they came to bodies?

  They nursed each other back from the shock of where they had been. Alice was very friendly with Gill, and he assumed it was a reference to that fact when she said, ‘Oh my God,’ several times. His head was like a computer which had taken in a piece of information the implications of which couldn't be foreseen. He would have to wait and see how it would affect the confusion already stored there. Neither of them knew what to do next.

  What they did was become cold and put on their clothes, trying to reassemble normalcy. Dressed, they became again less familiar. The event that had fused them had, by releasing them into separation, become something different for each of them. He suspected in Alice a desire to go off alone with what had happened and work it out for herself.

  ‘You better not be too late back,’ she said. And at the door, ‘Goodbye.’

  Her mode of farewell struck him like a charm, a spell against their moment ever being able to mean more than itself. It felt at the time very hurtful. It was as if she were aborting an embryo they had made together. He wasn't sure what he felt himself but he resented her unseemly haste in refusing to find out. She had her reasons, no doubt. The complications of going on from there terrified him as well.

  But, coming up the road slowly and by a roundabout way, he saw her as belonging in one of those darkened houses, the private temples to an orderly conformity. She was probably even now rinsing out her dark place in case what had happened might take root in her. Fair enough. But he wondered how far Harry had been right. Her elegant coolness began to look more sinister. He could see one of the reasons why she was a friend of Gill. They both took lust with their eyes closed, as it were, perhaps for fear of recognising themselves in it.

  It was something you disposed of quickly, whereas he had always seen lust as an honoured guest, a visiting divinity that imparts a compulsive truth, making us gifts on which to build, not throw away. Lust should be invoked with ceremony, not rendered outcast. To deny his rites was to make his power malignant, resulting sometimes in the ultimate obscenities of rape and murder.

  He formed no plans to see
Alice again. She had phoned once since then when Gill was out. She indicated she was alone but they left it at that. None of them ever referred explicitly to that night. Seeing her at the party with her new husband, he felt that there might never have been anything between them except for one moment when her lips, not showing her teeth, gave him a slow secret smile, like a pressed rose. As far as he was concerned, it had a canker in it.

  That canker began to infect the whole party for him. What he saw as being Alice's hypocrisy to herself, to the reality of our natures, seemed to spread wherever he looked. He wondered how many betrayals, backslidings, lies, equivocations, strangled hopes lay buried in the jollity of this event, what obsequies were represented by that laughter. He wasn't merely being fanciful. He knew a lot of things about a lot of people here, some of whom didn't know he knew.

  People tended to confide in him. He'd sometimes wondered if it had something to do with being a writer. But it had been happening to him since long before he published anything. At school he ran his own teenage agony service. He was giving advice about things he had never experienced. It had continued. A year or two ago, a big man he had known for about an hour in a pub suggested they ‘go outside’. He was very large, with a nose that had obviously been manually readjusted, and Tom declined. But he was very insistent. Finally, thinking that perhaps his end had come and wondering what he had done to offend him, he accepted. When they were outside, the big man started to cry quietly and told Tom he was having trouble with his marriage. He'd never been more relieved at someone else's misery.

  This kind of thing had made him wonder what stigmata he carried that signalled to the unloader of private griefs that he was their man. Perhaps it was just that he found it hard to walk away. Like the wedding guest in ‘The Rime of The Ancient Mariner’, he could hear the music playing in the distance but it would take too harsh a reaction to get there. He had missed some good times that way, so many that he once made up, in a moment of exasperation while listening to a sadness about which he couldn't possibly do anything, his own plaintive wedding-guest poem:

  It is an ancient mariner

  And he stoppeth one of three.

  ‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye—

  Christ, why is it always me?’

  So when he looked round the room, he was seeing, at least partly, what he knew to be there. His vision was informed by a lot of conversations, phone calls when Gill had not been in, meetings in the street, occasional coffees, pub chat - those moments of benign conspiracy when people meet like spies against themselves and confess therapeutically some of the things their lives are determinedly hiding. No doubt they often regretted those times but there were those of them who were doomed to keep repeating them. He was with them. Who wanted to live without being known as fully as possible? It was only by confessing ourselves honestly to one another that we could find out who we were and what life might be.

  Moving among their guests, he knew - provided the confessions were the truth - that one of the couples here hadn't had sex for the last eight years, at least not with each other, that one marriage had never been effectively consummated at all. He knew which woman was ‘only there for the children’ - that strangely obscene moral stance (and one he had often adopted towards his own situation) by which we piss upon life and claim to be consecrating it. He knew there was a woman who had aborted her lover's baby. He knew there was a woman whose husband was having an affair with her sister. The woman was so preoccupied with her own thoughts that, perhaps blessedly, she didn't seem to know what Tom had meant when he said, having been drinking at the time, ‘He has to sleep some time and you must have a small axe somewhere.’

  It was just any average respectable gathering, he supposed. Had they known his thoughts, they would probably have felt, like Brian Alderston, that he was taking things too seriously. Perhaps he was. Maybe it was all a question of style. Maybe the difference he felt between the background he had come from and the foreground he stood in was one of style. Certainly, the essential substance of their lives didn't vary much: thoughts and feelings and love and work and children. There were people in the room who would have found Greek tragedy elaborately nonsensical and yet lived calmly among the material for one, given the sole missing ingredient of passion. At the entrance to some primitive, dark doorway of the heart, they remembered to say ‘So what?’ and turned away, like Ali Babas who have found a formula for closing off admittance to riches that have no place in their lives. Their wealth was wholly practical. It was cars and houses and possessions and a good education for their children. They made sure nothing in them, no experience, supplanted those priorities.

  Tom sensed himself part of a different tradition. He had imbibed other values in the housing scheme he came from, in those continuing arguments his family had into the early hours of the morning. They discussed everything, regardless of whether the facts were able to attend or not. But he never remembered them discussing the importance of possessions. Their search was for themselves. The future he learned like an imperfect map throughout those long exchanges of thought and dream and belief had no imaginary mines of wealth or success located there. It was all forests of sensation to come, cities of shared experience. Money and career and security were luggage you couldn't depend on in that terrain. He had always vaguely believed that he would give up every penny he had rather than settle for being less than the person he could be.

  That belief embarrassed him when he remembered it there at the party. For he was part of the hypocrisy of the event. He, too, was full of unacknowledged areas, longings stashed away inside him that he only took out to look at when he was lying awake at night, large ambitions that shamed him when his thoughts bumped into them, beliefs that his living denied. He felt a traitor to himself.

  Tom's knowledge of those others was also knowledge of himself. The canker in Alice's smile had its source partly in his guilt, towards Gill and towards himself. Perhaps the unease from being among them came from seeing too clearly what he had become.

  He left his drink on a bookcase and started upstairs. Mavis Kerr was coming out of the lavatory. She kissed him lightly on the cheek and said, ‘It sounds like the fall of Sodom down there, eh?’ He went to check that Gus and Megan were asleep. They were. He sat on the edge of Megan's bed, watching her.

  We're in the shit. That was the deep thought that came to him sitting on Megan's bed. Who can choose the moment when our great revelations will come to us? Feeling doubts about the quality of his own parenthood, he generously extended his doubts to everyone else.

  He listened to the whirling merriment downstairs. It sounded so confident, so fulfilled, an orchestral celebration of the conquest of happiness. But, practised listener to the frequently disguised woes of man and woman, he knew the score. Heard from a distance, listened to casually, it swamped you in its own apparent conviction. But he could break that music into its contradictory component parts. Part of the laughter was at Clive Cunningham's jokes - like thinking into a condom. Ted Hayes was there, no doubt telling them the same story he had already heard him tell three times that night. The Epic of Gilgamesh it wasn't. It seemed that Ted had been driving home on the motorway that night and he was overtaking a car when an articulated lorry pulled out right in front of him. Right in front. Three times that happened before Ted managed to overtake, with his life miraculously intact. But that was a shabby summary of Ted's tale. Tom lacked the story-teller's art to convey it in all its human drama, unlike Ted. His listeners were not to know immediately that the horror of his experience had happened three times in succession. They had to wait till the third occasion was actually there, by which time they may have been wondering if the incident was destined to repeat itself twenty-three times. And on the way, what slammings of brakes, what hearts in mouths, what proximities to death, what wrenching of steering wheels would have to be undergone. Down there a woman quaffed and talked and wondered when next her man would screw her sister. There were at least two fairly young couples
who enacted a marriage that stopped at the bedroom door. He listened to the sounds downstairs and compassionately translated them into his mood.

  (Ah, Docherty on Olympus. Ye poor mortals, I condemn ye to being as screwed up as I am.)

  And he supposed most of them were or, if they weren't, perhaps that's what their problem was. How could they accept the way we lived?

  All this pseudo-sophistication, playing musical chairs with our bodies, never-mind-the-quality-feel-the variety, trying to purchase meaning like real estate. What were we trying to do with our lives - build a cut-price Babylon?

  ‘Tom! Tom!’

  The voice belonged to Gill, but it was an echo of other voices that had been attempting to locate him all his life. Ghostly within it were the lost, plaintive callings of boyhood, his friends looking for him in forever darkened streets. There was in it the remembered exasperation of his mother, sadly baffled by the strangeness of his doings.

  ‘Tom! Tom!'

  Who was it that the name was looking for? Which of his split personalities would answer? Dr Heckle or Mr Jibe? The endless internal argument with his own life, the self-appointed seeker after truth? Or the dark joker, prepared to settle for turning the moment into laughter? Or maybe someone else altogether. For in him the highly developed Scottish propensity for duality of nature divided like an amoeba into a small riot of confused identities. He probably was having a nervous breakdown, a part of him reflected calmly, like a doctor observing a patient through a spyhole.

  It was certainly Tom Docherty who rose from Megan's bed, the father reborn confusedly from the child, but which one of him? The prophet of gloom. He came down like Jeremiah from his private mountain to behold the vanity of human pleasures.

  He was also required to help in dishing out the buffet. There was cold ham, cold turkey, chilli con carne and a large bowl of pate, as well as gateau and fresh fruit salad. He opened the wine and left it on the sideboard beside the glasses. He distributed food for maybe twenty minutes, aware that, behind the veneer of suavity he was wearing, there still lurked the ghost of the passionately confused boy, looking for more substantial flesh than this. He was hoping that for Megan and Gus the finding of themselves would prove easier than it seemed to have been for him, especially in the matter of sexual relationships.