The Kiln

by William McIlvanney

  ‘Look,’ she says. ‘You've finally come out to meet me.’

  She looks up at him with savage gentleness.

  ‘So this is who you are, shy boy. Pleased to meet you.’

  As she bends again, her hair falls, obscuring everything but itself.

  ‘Thomas,’ she murmurs.

  Then she flicks her hair into a new chaos through which her watching eyes look strangely disembodied, dryad in a dark wood.

  ‘John Thomas.’

  Her amusement is eerie, like laughter in a far room.

  ‘John Thomas! You've read Lawrence?’

  The name jars him the way an alarm clock would. There's another world besides the one he is in? Lawrence? Who the hell is that? Lawrence Sterne? He's heard of him. Is she so familiar with his stuff, she calls him by his first name? Lawrence of Arabia? A small and boring brain cell somewhere continues to concentrate on the problem, like some workaholic still at his desk while the office party is going full swing downstairs. D.H. Lawrence. By the time the answer arrives, there is no one there to receive it. He's glad he doesn't have to say no, he hasn't read him, except for The Man Who Died.

  She is licking him again without taking her eyes off his face. Is she checking his expression? The way he feels, he can't imagine that he has one. His features appear to be floating on his face. He must look like anybody, or nobody.

  ‘You look like Billy Budd,’ she says.

  What is this? The Graithnock Literary Appreciation Society's sexual outing? This at least is a reference he knows, the only book of Melville's he has read. It's lucky she didn't compare him to Moby Dick. The only thing he knows about that book is that the title sounds like a social disease. Billy Budd. Angelic. Beatific. (That's a good word.) That must be what she means. Well, given the right conditions, who can't look beatific?

  THAT TIME WITH MADDIE, he would think, was probably when his adolescence ended. That afternoon was a crash course in growing up. Summertime was officially over. He learned that intensity of feeling doesn't automatically generate itself in the other and that making love doesn't necessarily mean making soul-mates. This surprised and saddened him.

  His initial purpose of renouncing his feeling for Maddie had evaporated within seconds of entering the house. She kissed him at the door and led him to the bedroom. After two hours of making love in ways that had been unimaginable even to someone as imaginatively preoccupied with the subject as he was, he knew that they must spend the rest of their lives together. He explained this to her as they were drinking wine again at the yew table.

  Smiling, she explained that she was married.

  He understood that but they would tell Eddie together.

  That was hardly necessary.

  There couldn't be any way to keep it from him.

  They wouldn't have to.

  He didn't understand.

  Eddie knew already.

  He didn't understand.

  She had spoken to him on the phone.

  The muffled nature of that conversation had always haunted him, like attempts to communicate from different planets. And when the line finally cleared, the realisation was suddenly deafening. He sat with his love poem in his pocket and understood that this was something Maddie had done often enough before and would do often enough again. It was something Eddie agreed to. Strange rules they played by in the adult world.

  His departure was not too fast, at least not as fast as he would have wanted it to be. At the door she had kissed him lightly on the cheek and her lips felt searing, as if they might burn that place and leave it for ever numb. She told him to keep the book as a memento of her but he couldn't imagine that he would.

  HE WALKED ON, away from the house where she had lived. She died of a massive stroke before she was fifty. Allison had told him the news on the telephone. He was glad they weren't face to face or she might have noticed the effect her words were having on him, how personally he was taking her voice. Bright images of Maddie came and dimmed and everything seemed a little darker.

  He had never given her the words he had written for her, his first, brief love poem. They were written on the back of a Monet painting of water-lilies, a page he had cut carefully from one of Michael's art books, hoping that Michael would never notice. As he walked home that day from her house, feeling stupid and infantile, he had taken the painting from his pocket and, without even glancing at his words, he tore it into very small pieces and dropped it in a litter-bin. But, if he had managed to erase the evidence of his embarrassing folly, he had never been able to erase the words from his memory.

  These water-flowers, as in a glass.

  Can watch their own brief beauty pass

  And envy you your loveliness

  That ages but does not grow less

  And cuts the heart as sharp as when,

  A woman new, you wounded men.

  Immortal dagger - mortal sheath—

  That brightens more the more you breathe.

  Nor could he forget the few lines he had written a couple of days later, sitting alone in Michael and Marion's room feeling his life blighted by an insurmountable and unrequited love.

  In rooms where I shall never be

  She is. Each day's a perfect glass

  My breath can't fog and where

  The bright impossibilities beck and pass.

  I stroke the falling absence of her hair.

  That must have been my mirror-and-breathing period, he thought.

  HE WOULD STILL HAVE THE BOOK. He felt sure of that. He didn't think he had read it since that summer. For a time after Maddie had given it to him, it was all he read, again and again. It was very short. He loved the poetry but perhaps the intensity with which he read it over and over might have had something to do with trying to find Maddie Fitzpatrick in it, a breach by which feeling might get into her fortress of sophistication. It was certainly passionate poetry.

  (Is she putting a secret key in his hand? Is she giving him a sign? Is he mad?)

  It was strange that a book which had once meant so much to him hadn't been looked at again. Perhaps he had been afraid that opening the book would be like opening a wound and he might find blood on the pages. Certainly, the book had followed him around like an old letter resealed to quarantine its contents. It had been in his digs during his last year at university. It had been in the house Gill and he had had in Glasgow. Where was it now?

  He sat staring at the painting Phil and Jane had put above the fireplace, a ship that looked becalmed. The Ancient Mariner's ship. Maybe they were trying to tell him something. Each his own albatross. He was sure the book must be here in Edinburgh.

  Most of his books were still in the coalhouse of his mother's place in Graithnock, in boxes and plastic bags. They had been there for years, since Gill and he split up. He realised it was a ludicrous place to keep books but he hadn't been able to find anywhere else at the time and he had been moving around so much since then. Also, he had been able to raid the coalhouse occasionally for iron rations.

  And, he had to admit, there seemed something genealogically appropriate in his storing his books in a coalhouse. Coal had been his father's chosen way of life. Books were his. There was a kind of symbolic continuity in the arrangement. He also had a strong suspicion that books were destined to become as marginal a form of social fuel as coal now was. For coal, read gas and electricity. For books, read television and the Internet. His chosen occupation was becoming, if not obsolete, a lot less central.

  Most of the books he had brought with him were dumped in the spare bedroom of the flat, where Phil and Jane had put all the old furniture which had been Phil's mother's and which they hadn't worked out what to do with yet. He went through there. He felt a little guilty about pushing the debris of an old woman's life around - dusty lampshades, a small dresser, boxes of what looked like curtains, an old ribbed washing-board. A pram?

  Phil and Jane had been very apologetic about not giving him the use of this room. What would he have done with it?
Hire it out as a disco? He smiled as he thought of them. They didn't exactly fit the contemporary image of grasping landlords. Jane dropped in every so often to check that he was eating properly, bringing pots of homemade soup and food in cellophane, like Red Cross parcels. Phil arrived irregularly, not asking directly for the rent so much as making enquiries about whether he could afford it. There had never been the slightest question of raising the rent he paid.

  He had almost given up when he saw, at the bottom of a box, the three gilt faces embossed on the brown cover of the thin book - Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tyutchev. Three friends from an old summer. He lifted the book, amazed at how light it was, and went through to the living-room.

  The first shock of the old was the number of pages: fifty-six, a continent of imagined experience in a microchip. Then there was the simplicity of the title page: Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev. Poems. Lindsay Drummond Limited, London 1947. Then it was the drawings by Donia Nachsen, endearingly corny. They looked like woodcuts. But the greatest surprise was to see the words. Translated from the Russian by Vladimir Nabokov'. He had no memory of that. The name had meant nothing to him at the time. It was as if he had met someone famous before he was famous and was only now realising that they were the same person. In the introductions to the poets he thought he could catch echoes of that familiar later tone of aristocratic eccentricity.

  He read the poetry again, cover to cover. His favourites then were his favourites now. Was that a good sign or a bad? Youthful perceptiveness or a failure to mature? Maybe it was yet another example of repeated behaviour. But that's how it was. Pushkin's ‘Exegi Monumentum’ (‘Not all of me is dust. Within my song/Safe from the worm, my spirit will survive.’) Tyutchev's The Journey', which seemed to him now like some darker, Russian cousin of Frost's ‘Stopping by Woods on a Sunday Evening’ - darker because it was less philosophically civilised than Frost's poem. And, best of all, was Lermontov's The Triple Dream', so passionate and so controlled.

  He sat, after two in the morning, remembering how much this book had meant to him and wondering if even the way people read had changed. Was that possible? He seemed to have been reading all his life towards a sense of continuity, a desire to find what stays true of our lives. Perhaps that was why he could still remember phrases of these poems after all this time. He suspected that more and more people read as an end in itself, something you did that was expressive of the moment and nothing more. The ability to make lasting judgments was disintegrating. Books were becoming process, not event, fashion not identity, market not morality. Or had it always been like that and his belief in something more just his personal mirage?

  He decided to go to bed. He was tired and couldn't make up his mind if times really changed or if, through aging, we simply lost our ability to engage with them, locked ourselves in a past to which the present couldn't gain entry unless it had a ticket of admission it couldn't have, since it was out of date.

  He lay, thinking that for him the key to any serious understanding of life must lie in some kind of unity between the present and the past, a marriage of equals. He wondered despairingly if he would ever find such a key.

  MYTHIC REALISM (he would write): a way rationally to depict the irrationality of experience. Since we can't escape the mind, we must find a way to use its own power against it. Mind is the tyrant that never abdicates. Even in madness it will remain the lunatic director and judge of all we do. Like a Chinese emperor who has no serious perception of what is happening even in the adjoining chambers of his court, it will presume to judge and pretend to control an empire of experience vast beyond human imagining. We must never accept its assumptive authority but constantly challenge it with the intractable realities of our lives. While mind seeks to vet our behaviour, the mind itself must be always on probation and must give itself up constantly to have its own behaviour vetted. The mind must be used always partly as a neutralising agent against itself so that it does not merely give us a self-defining cerebral version of ourselves but may restore to us, by acknowledging its limitations, our total nature, which is our only absolute and which, by the fact of being living, must remain a continuing mystery. The key to that depiction lies in the subversion of time, the ultimate tyrant. If we could escape every accident or evil which life may offer, time would still try to define us finally by eroding us to death through the sheer exercise of its own power. Time means death and death is our final enemy, the apparently unconquerable. When the rational mind accepted the authoritativeness of historical time, it volunteered for oblivion. But what if time past and place past are not merely past? What if they live still? What if what has happened still happens in some way, its essence resurrected in other places, other times? Then we will live on in one another, transubstantiated each into us all, ego marrying into species. That was the dark and awesome power myth knew, the defeat of the gods, the Promethean theft of eternal fire. Chronological time is monolithic but mythic time is relative. Whoever has lived will live on in us whether we want them to or not. The gods may be there for all we know and we will parley with their imagined presences but, deceitful as they are, we can outwit them. We will survive without their intercession. The mythic hero teaches us that we are more than time would have us be. Myth is the story of humanity learning to become itself. To partake of time is to be always a part of it. To embrace evanescence utterly is to be humanly immortal. Who were the most alive are the least dead.

  He looked up suddenly from the white, bobbled paper of the table napkin on which he was writing. He saw three separate couples at three different tables in the restaurant, staring at him. One couple were apparently discussing him with some concern. The others seemed to be sitting in four separate amazements, too stunned as yet to share the bizarreness of what they were seeing.

  He wondered why. Then he realised with a shock that he was on his fifth napkin. The other four lay covered with his hieroglyphics on the table around him. The pursuit of what he had thought was a significant insight had driven him through acceptable social behaviour like a runaway horse. For the first time, he was conscious that the people in the restaurant must have seen him get up four times and go to the adjoining table, set for four but unoccupied, and steal a napkin. Thank God he was finished for the moment or he might have found himself grabbing extra napkins out of people's hands. He was briefly and irrationally annoyed with the waiter for clearing the cutlery and the three napkins from his own table because he was eating alone. Worse than the man from Porlock. O Philistine, thou wouldst steal the paper from beneath the writer's hand.

  He was momentarily so embarrassed that he almost wiped his lips with the last napkin and crumpled it up, as if the purely practical action might erase their belief in what they had seen. But the impulse didn't last long. That would be taking social conformity a bit too far. Instead, he gathered his five napkins like Sybil's leaves and arranged them in order of writing. As discreetly as he could, he slipped them into his inside pocket. But his dark and unnatural action was observed. He had revealed himself to all as that worst of social misfits, a secret napkin-writer.

  One of the women in particular, the one who had been seemingly talking about him, looked positively outraged. Attractive and middle-aged, she was more or less making a display of her attentiveness, as if she wanted him to know that she knew what he had been up to. She was also glancing round the restaurant, whether seeking support from a lynch-mob or wanting to complain to the management, he couldn't tell.

  He wondered what she thought he was. An eavesdropper kinky for other people's conversations? But he was too far away from everybody else to hear what they were saying and in her case he was glad. A stringer for a good-food guide? A modern revolutionary equivalent of Marx in the British Museum? A hopeless neurotic let out of his institution for the day?

  The last one was maybe not so far away. How unneurotic was it to sit in an Italian restaurant in Hanover Street and write on napkins about how history is a decadent form of mythology? People had been taken away for le
ss.

  No wonder he often felt alienated from the lives of others. He often felt alienated from his own life. He was sometimes surprised when people recognised him as someone they knew.

  ‘I HOPE YOU'LL FORGIVE ME, TOM,' the voice said. ‘I fully appreciate you're a man endeavouring to have a quiet beverage.’

  He looked up. It was Sanny Wilson.

  ‘I would never wish to intrude on a person's privacy. God knows it's rare enough in these troubled times to find a halcyon moment.’

  It didn't take Tom long to remember one of the basic mechanisms of Sanny's nature. If you met him when he was sober, Sanny might say, ‘Aye, Tom.’ If you met him several whiskies into a night, he was more likely to say something like, ‘Hail, Tom. And where have your peregrinations taken you this evening?’ He seemed to drink out of a thesaurus. This Sunday afternoon he must already be approaching zed.

  ‘I'm also cognisant of your present sad situation. Michael was a prince among paupers. And your grief is no doubt commensurate with such a sad loss. Therefore, I am naturally hesitant to intrude.’

  ‘Sanny,’ Tom said. ‘What is it?’

  ‘There's a gentleman at the end of the bar deeply desirous of making your acquaintance. I said I would enquire re your state of mind. Apropos confabulation with a stranger.’

  ‘Certainly, Sanny. No problem. Tell him to come down.’

  ‘Gracious as ever. I shall instruct him accordingly, Tom.’

  With his right hand, Sanny made a gesture towards Tom, almost like a papal blessing, and moved back up the pub. The Bushfield was busy with lunchtime drinkers. The man who emerged from the ruck at the end of the bar was someone Tom had noticed earlier, talking to Sanny. At one point he had left the bar briefly and returned, carrying a small holdall, which he still held as he came towards Tom. The holdall was ominous.