The Kiln

by William McIlvanney

  He notices, as he arrives back at the house, the saucer with some of the beer still in it and the empty chair sitting facing the open door of the kitchen. He finds a surprising poignancy in those two objects resting in conjunction, rather like looking at a house where he has had good times but from which the friend who owned it has long since moved. He takes the chair back into the kitchen. When he has managed to work his way through the bodies back into the living-room, he sees two images which will fix the specialness of this party always in his mind.

  MARGARET INGLIS, standing in a corner by the window, leaning against the wall. She is listening to someone. Her head turns slowly towards him. She flicks her blonde hair in the direction of outside and smiles a wide, slow smile and stares at him.

  MATT GLOVER standing beside the door as they go out. He has a girl hanging onto his arm, a glass of beer in his hand and, preposterously, a cigar in his mouth. He winks at Tam.

  —AFTERWARDS, he would hear news of Big Matt's death in Australia at the age of forty-two. He would remember an afternoon in the reading room at the Dick Institute. They both happened to have gone there to study for exams. They didn't do much studying. They played shove-ha'penny and talked. That was when he understood the anguish Matt was going through. He was asking Tam for advice. His family were Close Brethren and every natural impulse Matt followed crippled him with guilt. He masturbated compulsively while thinking it would drive him straight to hell. He must have been one of the glummest self-pleasurers on the planet. He was forbidden to go to the pictures and the first film he went to see was The Seven Deadly Sins, not to further his religious education. He was wracked with self-doubts while they talked. It was like seeing Gulliver bound by a million threads. For Matt was big in body and big in spirit. When he was sixteen and working on a building-site during the summer, he had fought one of the labourers for taking the Lord's name in vain. That was presumably worse than wanking. They had talked for hours but the resolution of the problem remained down to Matt. When told he had died of a heart attack, he would feel sorry but take solace from the fact that he had seen him on the night he started to live as he wanted.—

  GET YOUR GLAD RAGS OFF AND JOIN ME, HON.

  THE PARK IS MOONLIT and they are walking in it. There are clouds, the torn clouds that sometimes blow about the sky at night like refuse. The clouded moonlight makes the distance smudgy. He is briefly a connoisseur of moonlight. Nervousness scrapes the scum off your eyeballs. It's maybe a false perspective, like a microscope, but it makes you notice things. He is noticing moonlight.

  He is walking with Margaret, at last. Walking is an interesting thing. He has his left arm round her shoulder and her right arm is round his waist inside his jacket, her thumb hooked on his belt, giving him nervous spasms. His right hand is vaguely around her left breast. Her left hand is touching his stomach. Their heads are leaning together. Every step, they jar each other's heads, grind hips, bump arms. This is no way to walk. They move like a malformation through the park. But he is afraid to disentangle himself in case something is irrevocably lost, some door to some sanctum that he senses inching open slammed shut.

  In the middle of that bodily discomfort, in the gabble of expectations and fears and thoughts of dire diseases and flashes of half-remembered teenage advice that make his mind and nervous system like a telephone exchange where all the wires are crossed, his nose, maybe deciding that central government is lunatic, declares independence. It makes a putsch for total power. He can smell everything.

  His nose is the Tower of Babel. Messages pour into it out of the darkness, most of them incomprehensible. He knows the grass all right, not long cut and remorselessly calling him back, like the smell of childhood. He never loses the pungency - from a nearby farm or from the nursery above the park? - an occasional whiff of acrid, as if the wind were burping and had dung on its breath. But mostly he smells mystery. The world is a foreign language he wonders if he is ever going to learn.

  They are moving towards the lake. He has a plan. It is a plan the way a straw may be a plan for a drowning man. Something abjectly determined in him, which is perhaps manhood, is insisting that he go through with it. He is going, he is going. The blind man's stick in his trousers is feeling the way. None of the names in which he has learned to dress it to make it sociable or anti social, none of the roles, from the comic to the mythic, in which he has learned to cast it, fits. He feels that now. It shucks them off like its foreskin. It is itself. It is his and he is its.

  The plan is the wooden building beside the lake. This is a plan? Somewhere in him an incubus has its face in its hands and is groaning. And the almost mystical power he has been ascribing to the building seems to move further away the closer they get. It won't work. It's not exactly dinner at the Ritz.

  He doesn't know what they use it for, perhaps for storing tools. It is a small hut, its slatted wood weathered grey and mossed with age in the crevices, set back about twenty yards from the lake in the shelter of trees. They move clumsily towards it until her back is against the wood and he is facing her.

  They cuddle without talking, almost as if they are wishing each other luck. It seems they both want more to happen and don't know how, nor what it will feel like if it does. This is a tricky moment, he knows, one of those when, if you don't get your timing right, your ardour will frost on you like cooling sweat. But from previous scufflings, he has evolved a kind of technique. It is not a sophisticated technique. You grope and mouth around until something happens.

  He applies it or rather lets it apply him. He hopes it is not as silly a technique as he feels it to be at the moment. It is dimly meant to be a patient way of trying to let honesty happen. They kiss each other, testing for what is there. Their hands are moving uncertainly about each other. What she is thinking he doesn't know, although he suspects her thoughts may be less taken up with nonsense than his are, since even his fragmentary experience - for example, with Senga - makes him believe that women tend to be more honest to their bodies than men are.

  His own thoughts are like a picket line against his instincts. They jostle in his mind, blocking his responses. There are various of them, all dressed in borrowed clothes. They are a formidable bunch, muscular with prejudice and with all the certainty of those who don't have to think any more. They are shouting slogans at him.

  Fragments are penetrating his preoccupation. ‘Show them who's boss.’ ‘Say anythin’ ye need tae say tae get it.' ‘Once ye've got them goin’, no retreat.'

  But none of them relates to what he feels. He's nobody's boss. He is trembiing beyond speech. He knows no conflict with Margaret, only an overwhelming need to meld. As the years of foetid and stale advice withdraw from him, something happens. He senses himself being moved past thought, into self-governing feeling.

  The thighs do it. He has the beauty of female thighs naked before him, not in imagination, not in a book, not in a cracked and thumb-marked picture - but there, offered and waiting in the cool night air. They are awesomely moving, smooth and overwhelmingly powerful, the columns of the temple. Idiot with awe, he touches them and goes into a kind of motionless paroxysm.

  He touches them again and again. He is overjoyed just to touch them. The prolonged, still seizure he experiences is the emotional equivalent of what he imagines Indians must be expressing in a Hollywood film, dancing round whatever they happen to be dancing round. It has often struck him how they seem to forget the object of their ecstasy in their celebration of its presence. They go off on their own, as it were. ‘Ho, ha, hum, ha, hum,’ they chant as they dance, or words to that effect. Their noises translate in his West of Scotland demotic into something like, ‘How aboot this then? This'll do me.’ ‘Ho, ha, hum, ha, hum.’ And his mind dances round and round the beauty of her thighs.

  How long he might have continued his joyous celebrations, he wouldn't know. Perhaps until heart failure claimed him at his post or World War III broke out. But one thought thaws the moment into moving time again. This is a private party he
is having. That isn't fair. Margaret is there as well as him, however distantly in his mind she has become connected to those formidable thighs. She is waiting for something to happen. He'd better try to make it happen.

  Instincts move of their own volition. Margaret's skirt is round her waist. She steps out of her pants and he puts them in his pocket. He moves to push into her and the hair abrades the tender skin. It's like trying to ride a hedgehog. Not that he's tried that yet but if things keep on as they are . . . But suddenly the hair parts wetly and he is entering her slowly.

  ‘Tom,’ she says urgently. ‘Wait.’

  ‘I'VE GOT THE CURSE.’

  The sentence would stay with him, would feel for a time like a statement he could apply to himself. As she pulled away, it was immediately as if all the hope of that summer moved away with her. Initially, he hadn't known what she meant. The term was strange to him. She sounded like someone speaking from inside a fable.

  Once he realised what she meant, he couldn't believe his bad luck. ‘O bloody period!’ (William Shakespeare). ‘I second that’ (Tom Docherty). She explained that she had just realised her period was coming. It could happen as suddenly as that? The expression of panic on her face made him wonder if it was about to take place with a sudden rush on the spot.

  In retrospect he would decide that the worst times of the summer dated from that moment. It was in the following week that his grandmother died. He had known how ill she was but the sadness of her death was compounded by guilt. His self-absorption appalled him. He had been so busy agonising over Margaret that he had let his grandmother die in the wings, as it were. Listening to his gathered relatives talk of her, while her body stiffened in the bedroom, he understood for the first time the remarkable endurance of her living. Her courage and resourcefulness and decency were preserved in anecdote and passed round among them. He remembered a vivid moment from the past—

  HIS GRANDMOTHER IS SAYING, ‘Ah've been readin’ some mair o' that book.'

  She sits at the fireside in her pinny with her grey hair coiled into a bun. Released, that hair still reaches to her waist. He takes a bite of the dry madeira cake and melts it with a mouthful of tea.

  ‘What book is that. Granny?’

  ‘Ye ken the one Ah mean. The one Ah told ye about the last time ye were here.’

  ‘Ah don't remember that.’

  ‘Ye've a memory like a sieve, boay. Whit's his name?’

  He takes some more tea.

  ‘That McGorkey. That's it,’ she says.

  ‘McGorkey?’

  ‘The one yer Uncle Josey gave me tae read. McGorkey.’

  He remains puzzled.

  ‘It's on the sideboard there. Get it and bring it over here.’

  He gets up and crosses to the sideboard. As he lifts the plain brown hardcovered book and turns its spine towards him, he sees the title and the author's name: M. Gorky - Childhood. And as he buckles slightly, clamping his laughter in, the book he holds in his hand, seen in proximity to the porcelain clock that refuses to keep the right time any more, becomes an enduring cipher of his grandmother.

  —and he felt the wanton carelessness of failing to appreciate her more. He came out of the house and went for a long walk alone. Leaning on the gate of a field, he found that, in mourning his grandmother, he was able for the first time properly to mourn his Uncle Josey.

  —AFTERWARDS, he would write:

  I came across an old book the other day, one of those working-class equivalents of an heirloom; something that is kept and passed on, not because it is supposed to have any intrinsic value but because it evokes a labyrinth of memory to which it acts as a clue. I don't think I'll take it to the Antiques Roadshow in case I am led from the room in a net. But, holding it in my hands, I felt its worth beyond doubt. Like ashes, it doesn't look much. Like ashes, it testifies to an old fire - a passion for social justice that burned undiminished to the point of death in a man in whom I, as an admittedly naive boy, found hardly anything that wasn't worthy of love and admiration.

  The book is Childhood by Maxim Gorky. With the passage of time, the title has acquired an extended significance for me. In writing about his childhood, Gorky incidentally created an object that has become for me a cipher of my own. Handling the book, I found summoned up in me, through the necromancy of touch, reminders of where I come from and why I think as I think and believe as I believe.

  In accordance with the saying, it is not a book to be judged by its cover. It was, as far as I am aware, sent naked into the world without benefit of a coloured jacket. The covers are of a dull, dark brown and rough in texture. It was a publication for people who believed that a book is a collection of words held together in the most convenient and least flamboyant form. I sympathise. The only lettering on the outside is on the spine. It gives the title and the author's name: M. Gorky.

  It is that name which brought back the first memory. I remembered my grandmother referring, in her late sixties, to the fact that she was reading a book by ‘that McGorkey’. Whether that interesting linguistic conflation was the result of her fading eyesight or of her determined tendency to see Scotland as the paradigm of all experience, I'm not sure. But it has a certain aptness for me. She made Gorky a naturalised Scot in the same way that her son, who had given her the book to read, translated the ideological rigidity of the Russian political experience into a much more Scottish humanism.

  My Uncle Josey was an unlikely manner of the social barricades. He had either been born with or acquired a chronically weak heart, a nice irony given the passion of his convictions. The condition wasn't accurately diagnosed until late in his life. But its effects plagued him from childhood. He was frequently housebound. He missed much of his schooling. He could work only intermittently and then usually only at manual work, to which he was desperately unsuited and which, presumably, helped to hurry on his death.

  The death happened in hospital where he was undergoing treatment. It was during the visiting-hour. He had asked to be made more comfortable on his propped-up pillows and, as the members of his family who were there reached forward to help, he said ‘It doesny matter’ and died quietly. He was thirty-four.

  That day in the hospital I had been in another ward, seeing a schoolfriend. As I entered the ward where my uncle was -having come down towards the end of visiting-time - I saw his raised body relax and his head droop, discreet as a closing flower.

  Tragedy can be so quiet and casual and ordinary that sometimes it is gone before we know that it has been. We are left painstakingly to measure its enormity in retrospect. What I glimpsed that day in my first sight of a human death has stayed with me, not in any dramatic way. It was a quiet occurrence and it has stayed quiet. But sometimes without warning he will come again into my mind and I think not of what is lost, but of the privilege I had in being his nephew.

  At first, with the innocence of boyhood, I had thought that my experience of him was who he was. He was tall and pale and thin and shy, with bottle-bottom glasses and a great rampart of crinkly hair. He cared about people with a passionate intensity, too much to let them off with less than the best of what they were. He did the same with me, young as I was.

  Never having been married, he lived with my grandmother until he died and I used to like being around their house. My reasons for that liking were curiously ambivalent. Like most children I had worked out early that the climate around a grandparent is often more tolerant of unbuttoned behaviour than the presence of parents is. Your ego can go barefoot there without catching too many chills of disapproval. But I also liked the fact that my uncle would be around to provide some kind of guidelines for my experiential wanderings, for children like freedom benignly picketed by adults. My uncle provided the limits all right, but he established them not with automatic authority but through reason and discussion. The only rank he ever pulled was logic. But he always did it by trying to understand your terms as well as his own.

  For that reason I'm glad he was the one who often discove
red my misdemeanours first. I'm glad, for example, it was down to him to find out I had been stealing cigarettes, cunningly and stealthily abstracted one at a time from his current packet of Senior Service, as if silence in an empty room were a talisman against the fates. I'm glad he was the one informed by an all-seeing neighbour that a girl of nine and I (by this time a worldly, cigarette-smoking ten-year-old who should have known better) had been seen partially naked, conducting a somewhat puzzled investigation of each other in a rockery. (The choice of venue suggests that even then I had an instinctive sense that the course of true love never would run smooth.) I don't think I would have minded too much if he had been the one to discover that I had been sampling - in the stoical manner of a boy accepting his punishment of manhood - my granny's sweet stout, thus tasting the meaning of misnomer before I knew it. But nobody ever did discover that one.