The Kiln

by William McIlvanney

  ‘Hullo there,’ the man said, and shook hands.

  He sat down without introducing himself. He was middle-aged and balding, with a slightly disconcerting fixity in the eyes. He had put the holdall at his feet. Tom assumed that the calculated brusqueness of his manner was a way of making it clear that he wasn't exactly impressed by meeting Tom. But then nobody had assumed he would be. Tom began to feel as if he was the one who had asked for the conversation. He began to feel that, as Sanny might have said, the omens were not propitious.

  ‘Well,’ the man said. ‘Ah've been wanting to meet you for some time.’

  ‘Oh.’ That seemed safe enough.

  ‘Aye,’ the man said. ‘Ye're not very highly thought of in Onthank.’

  Onthank was a district in the north of Graithnock.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Ah'm sayin’. They don't think too much of you in Onthank.'

  ‘Why would that be?’

  ‘Well, we've got a writers’ club up there. And you've never been to visit us.'

  The fixed stare might as well have had a judge's wig round it.

  ‘Actually, you're wrong,’ Tom said. ‘I've been to Onthank Writers’ Club. Did a reading. Answered questions for an hour and a half, two hours.'

  The eyes were still in no mood for an acquittal.

  ‘Well, Ah wasn't there,’ the man said.

  ‘Well,’ Tom said. ‘Ah don't really think that's my problem, is it?’

  Some strangers are stranger than others, Tom thought.

  ‘Anyway,’ the man said. ‘How would you go about getting a novel published?’

  ‘Well, first of all, you would write it.’

  The man was staring at him.

  ‘Ah mean, you've written a book?’

  The man smiled. He reached down and Tom had never before realised what a dread sound the unzipping of a holdall could be. He couldn't believe it was happening but it was. The man took out about six or seven pages of handwritten words and passed them to Tom. What was he supposed to do? Put them on the table in front of him and genuflect? He was supposed to read them. The man was waiting. Instinctively, since he carried his spectacles in his left-hand inside pocket, Tom patted the right-hand side of his jacket. The jacket pluffed emptily beneath his hand.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I haven't brought the bins with me.’

  He was congratulating himself on quick thinking when the man took the sheets back and started to read aloud.

  ‘It was raining in Copenhagen when Manson's flight came in. Gustavsen wasn't there to meet him. This could mean one of two things. This was a double-cross. Or Gustavsen was dead ...’

  Lucky Gustavsen. There were people shouting orders at the bar, two men were playing the fruit machine, piped music surrounded them, the multiple conversations sounded like the monkey-house at the zoo. And a man was reading the first six pages of his novel to him. There were no books of etiquette that told you how to handle this. Tom had a poignant moment when he noticed what could have been beer or coffee stains on some of the pages. He thought of the lonely compulsiveness of his own attempts to write. The man was in full flow now, locked into the compulsive readability of his own words.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Tom said. ‘Excuse me.’

  It took a moment for the man to pause and drag his eyes irritably away from the page.

  ‘I'm sorry. But this is hopeless. I can't hear you. I mean, this is a pub we're in.’

  The man stared at him and shook his head slowly and sadly. He put the sheets back in the holdall and zipped it shut. He stood up, carrying the holdall. He looked down at Tom.

  ‘You are an arrogant bastard,’ he said.

  ‘Sure,’ Tom said. ‘And you must visit Planet Earth some time. It'll make a change for you.’

  The man stormed out. Tom was aware of the people looking at him, perhaps wondering how badly he had behaved towards the man to make him leave like that. Thank you, Sanny Wilson. You can't disown your past without becoming no one. But there can come a time when your past disowns you. This could be one of those times. A bad day at the Bushfield.

  He had already had some bad moments before the arrival of the manic novelist. He had met Ted Hayes. The meeting had been blessedly brief. Ted and the man he was with had had to get back to Ted and Sandra's, where the man and his wife had been invited for a meal. The thought of several hours trapped at table with Ted seemed to Tom a dangerous prospect, during which the will to live might be lost. Sunday lunch with the Borgias. Hearses at four.

  Since Gill and Tom had gone to Grenoble, Ted had suffered a heart attack. He was apparently fully recovered and Tom was glad for him. But, listening to Ted, it again struck Tom how much crap was talked about the transforming effect near-death experiences had on people. It was his sense of it that, once the danger was over, most people became even more confirmed in the natures they had had.

  (Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death yet shall I change not a whit. For my prejudices are with me and mine adamantine self-satisfaction that is an hugeness nought can diminish and they comfort me. And though death rage at mine ear and the fire burn with great noise yet shall I emerge therefrom as big a shit as in I went.)

  In Ted's case, it seemed to Tom, this meant that he had become a bigger bore than ever. Never mind articulated lorries, he could now tell you his experience of the big one. It was a subject that would last him all his life. It was all they talked about in the brief time they had together. Michael's death became an excuse for Ted to describe to them in endless detail how he had nearly died. He had finally discovered the theme that allowed him to make an art-form of his boringness, to become mind-numbingly self-absorbed. He had turned himself into an oral Finnegans Wake. And Finnegan was still alive. Even the final point of the boringness didn't exist. Hell is Ted Hayes.

  And then he saw Sammy Clegg peering in the window.

  ‘Jesus,’ somebody said. ‘A Clegg on the horizon. Sew up your pockets. Look at ‘im. Like a piranha checkin’ out an aquarium.'

  When Sammy came in, Tom understood the remark. He bummed a drink off Tom and one other person. Then he left, presumably to prospect pastures new. Their attempted conversation had been nothing. Once Sammy had the drink from him, he had nothing else to ask of him. Tom felt sad. All that sweet innocence of the past had converted to cynicism. What the world did to people.

  One man he had met before he came to sit alone had redeemed a little the darkness of his thoughts, infiltrated them with a faint light. His name was John Kellner. He was an Englishman who had lived in Graithnock in the twenties and travelled a lot since then and come back to Graithnock in old age. His talk of the values he had found here and which had brought him back had brightened Tom's day briefly.

  But, sitting alone and reflecting on John Kellner's words, Tom had saddened again. He sensed those values under constant erosion all around him. Michael's death began to feel for him like the end of more than a private era. The lessons of previous generations in solidarity and mutual concern were being forgotten.

  IT'S NOT TRUE THAT WE LEARN FROM OUR MISTAKES. If we did, he would be wiser than the British Museum. He'd made enough of them.

  He lay in bed at Warriston and wondered why he never seemed to learn. Not just him. The world itself was a fair old dunce. Look at Britain. For the last fifteen years or so it had been rushing forward into the nineteenth century. He couldn't believe how quickly a largely decent society had been conditioned to prey on itself. The misgivings he had felt that day in the Bushfield had hardened into bleak realities. One woman, with all the vision of a soldier ant, had managed to screw up the UK. Dehumanisation by statute. There is no such thing as society. A self-fulfilling idiocy.

  He supposed, in the face of that, you should at least try to continue to live on your own terms. He had been doing that. But he was being ambushed by the same old patterns of behaviour. What did you do to cure that? Even that thought was itself a repeated pattern.

  He had been here before oft
en enough. He remembered being here when Brian and Elspeth Alderston had gone home after the night of the Sandra Hayes beauty contest.

  Brian had started to lecture him paternally about his behaviour. It seemed that he lacked self-control, that he was hypersensitive, that he should learn to take things more easily. He wasn't too receptive. He wasn't in the mood for a lecture. He rarely was. He hated monologues - better a dialogue of any kind, even spears of hurt hurled at each other. At least what Gill and he had been up to was some form of life, however undomesticated. Brian sounded like a recording of a gravestone, everything settled, neatly buried in certainty.

  Tom told him so. He told him that doubt was the most fructifying thing in the world and that, by that criterion, Brian's head was a desert. There was more of the same.

  THE EVENING DIDN'T SO MUCH COME TO AN END AS IT BROKE UP. Tom had the impression Gill didn't feel things had gone well. Not that she said. The evening went into its coda, one of those haunting adagio movements you seem to have experienced a thousand times, in which you imagine you can maybe hear an echo of your own dying. Gather ye debris while ye may. Collect the sticky glasses. Put the uneaten peanuts in the bin. Make a formal composition of the scattered furniture. He aimlessly rearranged some apples in a bowl. It is the apple we didn't eat that poisons us to death. He felt that residual taste of malice in his mouth from bad things said. His rage had turned to acid in his guts.

  They were both in bed before Gill spoke, with a Grand Canyon of cold space between them. She lay on her usual left-hand side of the bed. His eyes were open towards the curtains, a negative of their pattern showing in the light from the lamp-post outside. The room had a dim, subaqueous glow. It was one of those moments when night-thoughts scull among their own strange, sunless vegetation.

  They might as well have been lying exhausted on the shore of their separate desert islands, watching the wreckage of their dreams float in the bay. So many ambitions shared, so much time travelled to be lying here in mutual loneliness. Any attempt to communicate had as much hope of arriving as a message in a bottle. But Gill was trying.

  ‘I still don't believe it,’ she said.

  The stillness took her quiet voice without a ripple.

  ‘I don't believe it. Why? That's all I ask. Then we can leave it. Why?’

  He let the question pass him by like someone he didn't recognise.

  ‘Nobody would believe that. Out of nothing. The man was just giving his opinion. You attacked him like a mugger. He's your headmaster. That's all. That's all I'm asking. Just tell me why? Then I'll take my overdose and you can get some sleep.’

  He thought that maybe the question wasn't entirely unrecognisable. It had the kinship of impossibility with so many of the questions we ask each other. It was a mutant relative of that question people in love ask, ‘What are you thinking?’, though it was a long time since they had asked each other that one.

  ‘Oh boy,’ Gill said. ‘I thought Elspeth was going to have a heart attack. Did you notice her face? You bastard. You nearly gave her a cardiac arrest. What gives you the right to do that to people?’

  She was right. For too long now he had been disrupting what were supposed to be pleasant social occasions with noisy opinions, sometimes roughly clad in swear-words - John the Baptist of the sitting-room.

  ‘Your headmaster. And you come on like Tarzan of the Apes. What must they have thought? Why?’

  He was doing things he no longer believed in, he thought. Perhaps that was it, or at least part of it.

  ‘Don't tell me. I really don't want to know. I couldn't stand to listen to one of your boring lectures about working-class life. Still, maybe it would put me to sleep.’

  He recognised a familiar tactic, the calculated use of insult to provoke a response. He reflected dispassionately that it was one of Gill's favourite techniques to attribute to him something so out of context that he would deny it and she would have him involved in one of those interminable exchanges of inaccurate venom, dance of the blind, spitting cobras.

  ‘All he does is write a report about you every year.’ Returning to the theme of ‘career consolidation’, she had left him behind. He was still thinking of what she had said earlier. ‘All you did was volunteer for a letter-bomb. Maybe when we come back from France you can get a job helping the janitor.’

  The silence reformed like icicles in the air. They lay back to back, book-ends with no books. The gathered significance of their relationship was emptiness.

  It's not that the evening with the Alderstons was so significant in itself. In the scale of his life's failures it ranked small. It was simply when it came. The last step of a pilgrimage is no different from any other but after it you know that you've arrived. He had reached some sort of destination, some terminus of exhaustion. So had Gill. No matter how long it took them to admit it to each other, they both knew that they eventually went different ways from here.

  He lay working on and abandoning makeshift maps. Career was out. Career had always been out. He didn't believe in turning the sequential mystery of his days into currency and buying his future in bulk.

  He had a sudden memory of standing on the steps of Glasgow University Union, haranguing a group of his friends. It was not as bad as it sounded, though maybe nearly. They had been walking down from a lecture. Their final examinations were near and they had all been talking about what they were going to do, the jobs they might get.

  He had an irresistible vision of potential being wasted. He had spent several years among these friends. They had sat at tables in the Union cafe while countless afternoons peeled from the calendar like a ‘time passing’ sequence in an old film. They had converted one another to many crazy ideas of the moment, sung choruses to the genius of Shakespeare, vast as the steppes, been unable to believe the stupidity of some literary criticism, while the spilled coffee fused the cups to the saucers. They had conjured up so many dangerous ideas that the haze from their cigarettes had sometimes seemed to him like the smoke-trail of a summoned devil. They had lived inside one another's heads so much that they often came out on to the street not knowing who was who. The sense those meetings always engendered was of so many things to be done, of almost infinite potential.

  Yet here they were approaching the place where their minds had been broadened to continents, and approaching for near enough the last time, and they were discussing which village of the spirit they would spend their lives in. A few were going to be teachers. One was going into industrial management. One - O Marco Polo, lives thy spirit still? - was thinking of being a journalist.

  He couldn't take it. There, on the steps of the Union, his vision cleft him. In the not quite blinding Glasgow sunlight, he stood and spoke. (Perhaps not just lately but all his life he'd been auditioning for John the Baptist.) It must have been a strange sight to a passer-by: a group clustered unevenly around the steps with briefcases while one of them, tall and lean and with his own briefcase abandoned at his feet, demanded they be true to themselves, frothing with urgency. He didn't say ‘the end is nigh’, although that's largely what he meant. His idea was that there was a conformist fate in store for all of them - to be devoured by their own unacknowledged reality - if they succumbed to social pressures. He had some effect. They all trooped into the Union, brooding on the need not to become stereotypes.

  Then he went into teaching. He didn't go into teaching in the same way as everybody else did, of course. He had a secret plan, infallibly cunning. He would only teach for two years, during which time, making effective use of his weekends and such evenings as he wasn't out on the skite looking for girls, he would write a masterpiece and the world would beat a path to his door. The plan didn't work.

  There were several reasons for this, he thought. First of all, the world took a wrong turning. He did finish a novel of some forty thousand words but nobody would publish it. A few publishers made encouraging noises which kept him fairly buoyant for a time until he realised all that the noises translated into was ‘write s
omething else’.

  Secondly, he discovered to his amazement that he liked teaching. He had entered the profession with no missionary zeal whatsoever. The fools - didn't they realise who had come among them? Were the tweed jacket and slacks enough of a disguise to delude them? But within a month or two he realised this was something he could do and that tended to be a seductive realisation. He remembered passing the boys' cloakroom and hearing two third-year boys who had just been in his class when he taught Saki's ‘The Open Window’. ‘Jesus Christ,’ one of them said. ‘That was one terrific period.’ ‘The best,’ the other replied, i'm for another read at that story the night.' He decided not to chastise them for swearing. Who knows what accidental, drifting feathers of experience land to add their weight to decisions that affect our entire lives?

  Thirdly, he had met Gill. He was in Graithnock railway station, waiting for a train to Glasgow on a late Saturday afternoon. He was going to the dancing at the University Union. He hadn't been back there since he started teaching and he fancied casting the mature eye of a man of the world upon the scenes of his youth. He was talking to a porter he knew since he had spent a summer there working as a temporary porter himself. He had borrowed his cap to try it on, mainly because he felt a porter's cap made him look like Marlon Brando in The Wild One. A girl was walking towards the barrier, fair, well breasted and wearing the stiletto heels of all his fantasies. O foolish man, is that all it takes? On impulse, he smiled at her and said, ‘Excuse me, madam. Carry your ticket?’ It was so witty he was crying still.

  It wasn't that he blamed Gill for any failure of ambition or for his not writing more. You takes your choices and you pays in blood. It was perhaps just that marriage has a hard way with those delicate reaches of the self where creativity grows, those inexplicable feelings that we have no names for - those vagrants of our social conditioning that sleep in the doorways of the heart and the empty spaces of the mind, accosting our preoccupations without warning. He found that marriage kept shaking its head at them: sorry, nothing to spare. When Megan and Gus came along, those vagrants were even less tolerable. Time seemed to chase them away with sticks. He had always been determined that nobody connected with him should suffer because of his writing ambitions. The compulsion to write was his, not theirs. But that determination had taken its toll. He wondered if it had reached its limit.