The Kiln

by William McIlvanney

  ‘Hemingway? Why?’

  ‘Ah'd like a drawin’ of him. Bigger than that, like.'

  ‘Ah'll try. What's with the coat an’ scarf?'

  ‘Ah'm goin’ out.'

  ‘Ah didny think ye were goin’ to yer bed. But it's a nice day.'

  ‘Ye think so?’

  ‘Jesus. What's up wi’ you? Is it a funeral ye're goin' to? Where ye goin'?'

  ‘Just out.’

  ‘But where?’ ‘Just out.’

  To avoid further questions, he gets up and walks to the door.

  ‘Condolences to the bereaved,’ Michael says.

  IT WAS A SOLEMN MAN who came to Mrs Fitzpatrick's door. Little did she know that the ordinary-seeming person who approached her house had made deep and irrevocable decisions about his life. Had she but realised that he was setting out on a lifetime of unbroken celibacy, she might well have been amazed. She might even have tried to dissuade him. So young, she might have thought, and so determined to deny his very nature. But all expostulations would have been in vain. (Expostulations is a good word.) Words do not bend iron. His measured walk was going where no one could stop him. His level gaze saw far beyond these grey-stone houses, this gravelled driveway, this manicured garden, the imposing door with its beaded panel of coloured glass. His hand on the button rang the knell of all possibility of physical love for him. He would become a recluse, he had decided, something like that ancient mystic he read about. Saint Simeon. Lived on top of a pillar. Let the world try to bother you in those circumstances.

  (Dear Saint Simeon Stylites,

  Room for one more up there?)

  ‘Hullo, Tom,’ she says.

  Her face is like a festival on a dull day. Graithnock's in black and white, she's in Technicolor. Her eyes are so vivid and so elusively hued. You could write an essay on trying to define their colour. Her mouth's amazing. She has enough black hair for twins. Maybe it's the way the sunlight catches the opaque panel on the door, making it look like the stained-glass window of a church, or maybe it's the thin floral dress she wears, but she looks like something out of one of the William Morris poems she read to him at the party. This can't be Graithnock. She seems genuinely pleased to see him. But this can't be him. Who was it supposed to be who turned up at the door?

  ‘What an opportune visit! Come in, come in.’

  Opportune visit. She might as well have opened the door into a book by Jane Austen. He would be as much at home there. His feet on the wooden floor of the hallway make him feel as if he's wearing hobnailed boots.

  (‘Aarh, Mistress. Ah just be here to see if ‘appen Maister be wishin’ me to plough the nether field.')

  Having closed the front door, she walks ahead of him into the living-room. She is bare-legged and wearing strapless, high-heeled white shoes. The way he's dressed, he feels like an Eskimo parachuted into the Riviera. She must have blood as thick as treacle. Do rich people live in a different climate from the rest of us? Do they order the season they want like new wallpaper? In Dawson Street just now, you moved four yards from the fire and you could feel winter limbering up, practising to freeze your back and put an ice-clamp on your nose. Here, they still seem to be dressing for summer.

  ‘Here, let me take your coat and scarf,’ she says.

  She goes out to the hall with them. Feeling intimidated by the place, he stands waiting aimlessly. He can barely remember this room from the party. It feels so different. He must have been blind with nerves that night, for now he notices for the first time why she is dressed so lightly. The room has central heating. How could he have spent a few hours here and not have seen that there are radiators? Perhaps they were hidden by furniture. The room does look rearranged. Also, the fireplace, which was covered by a wooden screen during the party, is now revealed and glowing warmly.

  ‘Sit down, Tom. Sit down.’

  He heads for the nearest armchair and sinks so far into its soft upholstery he thinks he may need a block and tackle to get back out. She chooses the end of the couch near him, kicks off her shoes and tucks her legs under her. Her skirt flurries slightly as she settles herself. Her pants are blue. He feels like a creep for having noticed.

  ‘Well. To what do we owe the honour?’

  ‘Oh, yes. That's right. I brought your book back. Excuse me, where's my coat?’

  He has managed to get out of his chair with all the ease of a fallen climber emerging from a crevasse. John Garfield that wasn't.

  ‘Hanging in the hall.’

  He goes into the hall, trying not to make his steps reverberate too much. He finds his coat, puts his hand in the right-hand pocket, puts his hand in the left-hand pocket. He freezes. He starts to pat his coat all over with both hands. There's no book there. He can't believe it. Where is the bloody book? He laid it out before he left the house. How could he have forgotten to bring it with him? What does he do now? She will think the book was only an excuse. Maybe she's right. If his sole reason for coming here was just to give her back the book, how has he managed to leave it in the house? (On Michael's bed, that's where it is.) But he didn't know she would be alone. Yes, he did. How many husbands are at home during the day? You would expect Eddie Fitzpatrick to be at his hosiery at this time. He doesn't know what to do. He stands with his hand on his coat, wondering if he should just take it and leave.

  ‘Tom?’

  He could leave now. He wouldn't have to face her, have to explain. They don't exactly move in the same circles.

  ‘Tom? You see your coat?’

  THE HERO MAKES A LIFE-AFFECTING DECISION.

  HE WENT BACK IN. And it was like boarding a random express train that was going he didn't know where and they talked and she opened a bottle of wine and he didn't tell her he had never tasted wine before and the word Frascati kept rising in his mind like a curl of smoke that was confusing him about where he was and they talked and she seemed to recede before his eyes and then come unnaturally close, all without her moving, and the room seemed drifting and he had no idea how much time had passed and she opened a second bottle and she stared at him and said she would make some coffee and he should come through to the kitchen with her so that they could continue talking and he stood vaguely watching her move about the kitchen.

  ‘WHY DON'T YOU TOUCH ME?’ she says.

  He knows he has fantasised the question. He will have to keep better control of his imaginings. He actually heard what she cannot possibly have said. The sound vibrated in the room, passed through the air like an electric charge. Yet she cannot have said it. That is not what people say. He must maintain his hold on reality. It must be the wine. Maybe the coffee will help.

  They are in the kitchen now. She has filled the whistling kettle and put it on the cooker and ignited the ring with a gas gun. She is spooning chicory essence from the Camp bottle into two cups. This is a very ordinary scene. Remember that. This is Mrs Fitzpatrick making coffee in her kitchen. There is a calendar on the wall. The picture for October is English Bay, Vancouver. Perhaps she has relatives in Canada. The window lets in dazzling sunlight. The Venetian blind has been pulled up until only a few slats show at the top of the window. This is the first house in which he has seen Venetian blinds.

  The sunlight is hypnotic. Is that what wine does to you? He is in a kind of trance where time seems to have stopped. He feels as if he has been in her house for days. He can hardly imagine being anywhere else. Maybe he was born here. He can see himself standing at the kitchen window. He can see her standing with her back to him. He feels strangely diffuse, as if the edges of his body have become blurred. This is a dangerous relaxation. He misses his inhibitions. They are old friends who have deserted him. Anything is perhaps possible. But anything is not possible. He is imagining the freedom of this moment as he has imagined her question. This is a very ordinary scene.

  ‘Why don't you touch me?’

  She is saying it. She is saying it again. She screws the top back on the bottle. She licks the spoon and lays it on the work-surface beside the
bottle. She doesn't turn round.

  ‘You know you want to touch me,’ she says. ‘You've been wanting to touch me since you came in. Why don't you do it?’

  Her voice has become different. It is raw and husky. There is no gloss of social inflection to it. It has a basic, primal sound. It is a voice gone naked. The timbre of it makes this not a kitchen, just a place, receptacle for two people and some sunlight.

  He looks at her and sees not Mrs Fitzpatrick but a woman. She assumes a deeper identity before his eyes. The voice has dispelled the obfuscations through which he has been seeing her - friend of his uncle, wife of a man he knows, sophisticated older person, middle-class intellectual - and the social mists have cleared. Her body palpitates before his eyes, breathing through the thin dress. He is aware of its beautiful solidity, the contours of it, as if the heat of the flesh is melting the cloth that contains it. Her legs are blonde with sunlight, astonishingly vivid, the calves tensed from the high heels she is wearing. The dress moulds itself to her buttocks and thighs. Her back is firm and strong. He wants to smell her hair.

  She clasps her hands on the edge of the worktop on either side of her. She lowers her head and the suddenly cascading hair reveals the nape of her neck. The sight of that normally hidden place, white and vulnerable, is surprisingly and shockingly erotic. It is as if she has stripped herself before him.

  ‘Do it. Do it now.’

  It hardly seems to be herself that is speaking but a force passing through her. The command comes from some potency of feeling which they have created in the room. It is not to be denied. It galvanises him beyond his own control. It walks him across the floor towards her. She still stands with her head lowered.

  He very gently touches the back of her neck, awed by its smoothness. A shiver goes through her. He traces the shape of her buttocks with his hands. Slowly, very slowly, his hands move up her back and sides, feeling the flesh ripple across the rib-cage. She is leaning back towards him. His hands slide gradually round until, incredibly, they are cupping her breasts. The soft weight of them scalds his palms with passion. His erection is prodding at her thighs. He bends and sucks her neck. That action, so simple yet so unimaginable until it has happened, makes a vortex of sensation in him. He seems to be spinning, detached from the solidity of the floor. Strange images eddy with him in a swift whirlpool that throws up and sucks down debris of perception, shipwrecked pieces of himself: his mother's thoughtful face, a page with his handwriting on it, the Grand Hall full of dancers, Eddie Fitzpatrick staring. Dusty Thomas standing vaguely in front of his class. The unthinkableness of what he is doing flashes before him, how irretrievable all this is, and then it is atomised in an explosion of feeling.

  The room goes seismic and they are caught in the sensation. He does not know what is happening or how it is happening. She turns towards him and closes on him like a trap. Their hands have become a riot, moving madly of their own volition, out of anybody's control, looting touch from each other's body. The sunlit window expands to a vast brightness. Vancouver seems to be in the room with them. The coffee cups are dancing. He and she have been moved across the room by something.

  Her left leg is raised - the foot, still with the white shoe on, is resting on a kitchen chair. The tensed thigh overwhelms him like amnesia. What identity, what world? There's only this. He is a witless devotee of the muscular hollow formed where leg and body meet, as if he were seeing God's thumbprint on beautiful flesh still warm from the making. Her blue pants are crumpled round her right ankle. The skirt of her dress is an impromptu belt, ruched round her waist. The top of her dress is unbuttoned and one breast has spilled out over the brassiere, the nipple like an antenna. Her hair seems impossibly wild, threatening to fill the room. Her eyes are dark as tunnels, sucking everything into them. Her mouth is wide. Her back is to the wall.

  He stands against her. She has not so much unbuckled his belt as tom it apart. His trousers are wherever he has kicked them, to be left until called for. His shirt is unbuttoned. Skin ignites against skin. Somewhere in him there remains the amazed awareness that she had started to make coffee. He came up behind her and put his hands round her and held her breasts. A tremor became a subsidence. How did they come to be here? He is easing her up and on to him. How does he know to do this? He is talking a language he has never heard before and does not understand. She is making a noise that comes from somewhere he has never been, as if her mouth is a shell that knows the sound of the sea. Then she speaks. Her voice comes small and dirling from some far distance, as weird and irrelevant as a crossed line on some very long-distance call.

  ‘Have you got any protection?’ she says.

  He does not know what she means. He thinks she must be referring to her husband. A gun? A suit of armour? Then he remembers Harry Walker going into a chemist's boldly one afternoon while the rest of them waited outside. She must mean an FL.

  DID YOU COME PREPARED? HAVE YOU GOT A DUREX? HAVE YOU GOT ANY PROTECTION?

  No matter what form the question took, he would realise, it was to acquire in time for him a certain irony. He had always been lucky enough to avoid strange night sweats - at least for that reason - or panicked contemplation of genitals in the toilet. But it didn't mean you didn't pay. As his mother used to say, there's more ways to kill a dog than choke it.

  Maybe the biggest damage we do each other in attempting to make love isn't through the body but through the head and heart - those ways in which we dismantle each other's sense of ourselves without knowing how to put the pieces back together again. Penicillin won't cure that. And when will they invent a condom for the head?

  (Dear Casanova,

  I still feel ambivalent about my attitude to your promiscuity. I imagine you must have given the women pleasure. So what's the problem? I suppose my misgivings are not so much moral as experiential. I mean, the crap you must have talked, the fake promises, the lies, the improvised nonsense, saying whatever you had to say to unlock the next corset. And presumably the crap you must have listened to. Didn't that do something to you? I suspect there is a kind of mental clap with which lovers can infect the purity of the act and which they can pass on to each other. If so, you must have been raddled with it, finally gibbering disconnected phrases, from where and to whom you didn't know any longer, trapped in a kind of paralysis of the socially insane. No?)

  ‘NO,’ HE SAYS.

  ‘Oh,’ she says.

  There is a stillness while he wonders what will happen. Perhaps she is waiting for her misgivings to march past in protest. Her objections seem to dwindle. Their mouths leap at each other, pulling them after them. They make the edge of the table a place for a different kind of meal. This is a kitchen? It might as well be a clearing in a wood and them alternating nymph and satyr, pursuer and pursued. They are both completely naked now. They eat, they touch, they knead. She is discovering places in him he hadn't known he had.

  They fall off the edge of the table on to the floor. She is underneath him. What in Margaret Inglis might as well have been a hedgehog has mysteriously turned into a hairy flower. Its petals part so gently and its soft, moist interior receives him. He moves in and out incredulously. She arches herself off the floor and he is rocking in a human cradle, bucking on an unbroken horse, riding lost in a coracle of self across an unknown sea. His mind seems to be expanding as if it will burst. Then it explodes like a Catherine wheel. Who will collect the pieces? He seems to come through his whole body. He is afraid she will ingest his pelvis into her. She claws his buttocks to her and holds him there while he judders as if he's strapped to a machine. Some animal of a species he doesn't know is moaning in him. She wriggles madly on the end of him still in her. She stiffens suddenly, yowls delicately like a cat with a gag on, collapses on the floor. Maybe he has killed her. Maybe she has killed him. He slumps across her.

  THE KETTLE SCREAMS AS LOUD AS A FACTORY WHISTLE.

  AS HE MADE THE COFFEE AND THE BOILED-EGG SANDWICHES, he would worry again, as he did several times a day, abo
ut his inability to cook. Why was he so incompetent in the kitchen? It was pathetic at his age. He would love to be a decent cook. It wasn't for want of trying. He remembered his most recent, determined attempt.

  He had gone to the William Low supermarket nearby and bought brisket. That was his first mistake. It wasn't until he got back to the flat that he realised it wasn't brisket he liked but silverside. In the vagueness that always afflicted him when shopping, a state of mind analogous to looking at a huge menu printed in a language he didn't understand, he had mixed up the names. Staring at the lump of brisket and chastising his lack of concentration, he wondered what you were supposed to do with this. He had intended to casserole (impressive word) the silverside but he had no silverside.

  He phoned a woman friend for advice and she suggested that he boil the meat but he told her his heart was set on having a casserole. That was his second mistake. She wished him well, in the manner of someone responding to an armless man's stated ambition to become a juggler.

  He put on the butcher's apron Gus's girlfriend had bought him (presumably regarding it as appropriately macho kitchen wear for a man). He opened a bottle of wine, filled himself out a glass and began.

  Externally it was a fine performance. He pre-heated the oven, put the brisket in a casserole dish and basted it with butter as it warmed. He peeled potatoes and would try to time their boiling to coincide with the readiness of the meat. He emptied a tin of butter beans into a small pot, to be heated quickly just before the meat was ready.

  For two hours he performed the role of cook as he had seen on television. He was good at it. He walked up and down in his apron, sipping from his glasses of wine and checking things. He must have looked the part. At one point he sliced up part of the brisket to make it more tender. Having started before six, he waited until after eight o'clock before he decided to eat. The timing of things became a little frenetic towards the end but he managed to sit down to hot brisket, boiled potatoes and warm butter beans. The wine was almost finished.