The Kiss

by Joan Lingard

  Sullenly Davy begins the hunt for socks. ‘Can’t find two that match,’ he announces triumphantly, laying out a red one and a white one with a black and yellow stripe round the top.

  ‘Let me look.’ Cormac tips out the contents of a green and white sports bag and picks his way through a heap of washed-out T-shirts, socks and underpants. What a lot of wretched-looking garments his son has! How has it come about? He and Rachel are what people would call ‘caring parents’ (how he dislikes the word!), who have washed their children’s clothes regularly, and as far as he is aware, reasonably carefully, even though they didn’t always find the time to iron them. He must do something about Davy’s wardrobe, if it can be described as such. He will as soon as he gets some extra cash. ‘You’ll just have to wear two odd socks.’

  ‘Everybody will laugh at me.’

  ‘They won’t even see them. Not under your trainers.’ Which reminds him: Davy needs a new pair. This lot, although only two months old, look as if they’ve been kicked through every mud heap in Edinburgh. Davy is kicking mad, like most of his pals. Preferably of footballs. But if none is available any old piece of rubbish will do. The soles of the trainers are beginning to gape. ‘Now, listen Davy, I can’t take much more of this. So get a move on.’

  ‘My jeans are all scrumpled.’

  ‘Give them to me. I’ll put them in the dryer.’ Cormac holds out his hand, then remembers that Rachel has taken the dryer, on the grounds that Sophie generates more laundry than anyone else in the family. ‘They’ll have to do as they are. The heat of your body will help to take out the creases. And don’t forget to go to the loo.’

  ‘I hate that loo. It’s like sitting in a cupboard under the stairs.’

  ‘It is a cupboard under the stairs.’

  Finally, Davy stands, ready for school, clutching his Tupperware box, his feet shod in the disreputable trainers, his backpack sagging from his shoulders, his anorak gaping open, exposing his stomach to whatever winds may blow. He has refused to zip it up, or to put on his woollen hat, for which he has declared outright hatred. Grandma Aherne knitted it for him with her arthritic fingers, though Cormac does not think this is the reason for Davy’s dislike. One thing is certain: Grandma Aherne would never have tolerated all this nonsense. Davy would have been in school hours ago, neatly dressed and pressed, with a well-scrubbed face, and his breakfast egg inside him.

  ‘Right then, boyo, it’s off to work we go!’

  Their bicycles take up most of the space in the minute hallway, which makes going in and out something of a problem. Cormac’s machine sports two side panniers and a large wicker-covered basket attached to the front handlebars that is handy for shopping. Rachel has the car since she needs it for work. She is a full-time general practitioner.

  On opening the door they see that rain has begun to drop from a leaden sky in large gobbets. It looks like being a good downpour but there is no question of waiting for it to go off.

  ‘Put up your hood!’ shouts Cormac, as Davy goes bumping down the steps in front of him.

  Bulging sacks litter the pavement looking like giant black blisters, alongside sodden cardboard boxes jammed with empty bottles. It is bucket day. Sad-looking fir trees sprawl, their branches browning, shedding needles. The end of the old year’s garbage. Pity one couldn’t clear the rubbish out of one’s life as easily, Cormac reflects, and have it taken away in a truck.

  They wheel their bicycles across the main road, then they mount to take on the track that the kids call the Snakey, which curves upward to the lofty Georgian splendour of Saxe Coburg Place. Davy goes ahead, his bottom high above the saddle, his feet pushing strongly down on the pedals. Cormac finds himself puffing a little. He ought to get in shape, go to a gym or something like that. No, not a gym, he still remembers the awfulness of that at school, not having any talents in that direction. With the start of another new year the newspapers are full of healthy living plans, telling you what to eat and mostly what you must not (or drink), and which exercises will develop your weaker parts. All his parts feel weak at this time of the day. He always hated nine o’clock classes when he was teaching. He never got quite into his stride until after morning break.

  He catches Davy up and in five minutes they reach the school. The puddled playground is deserted except for one or two stragglers dawdling towards the main door. It doesn’t seem to matter what time they get into primary school these days. In his era it was almost a hanging matter to arrive after the bell. He was never late; his mother saw to that.

  ‘See you later!’ Cormac taps his son on the bottom, hopes that the gesture will not be misconstrued by hidden watchers, watches while the boy stows his bike in the shed, carefully padlocking the front wheel and then flees into school without looking round to wave. Fair enough. Cormac doesn’t mind. He didn’t look round at his mother, either. His father never took him to school; at this time of day he was intent over his last, working on his shoes, totally absorbed, as intent as any artist. And when he gave that up, in order to better himself and so please his wife, he was away from home much of the week, out on the roads of Ireland, selling shoe polish.

  On the way back Cormac goes by a longer, more devious route. He cannot seem to resist it. Of course he could resist anything if he wanted to, couldn’t he? That is what Rachel would tell him. He is far too conscious of what other people would tell him. Does it indicate a lack of self-regard?

  The playground is empty of people. The teachers’ cars are lined up in their allotted places. He recognises most of them, though not a red Citroën. He wonders if it might belong to his successor, a young woman, not long qualified, whom he has heard likes the kind of art that wins the Turner prize. This very moment she might be saying to a class, ‘Now take Rodin – or rather, don’t take Rodin. He was a tremendous sculptor of course, no one really could deny that, but his approach is old hat nowadays. You want to move forward with the times. You want to start thinking in terms of dead sheep or cow heads in formaldehyde. Shake up the world! That’s the artist’s role.’

  He shook with laughter when the preserved dead sheep came to Edinburgh and the art gallery-goers looked round at him as if he was off his head. ‘What a con man, eh!’ he said to Rachel, who would never let herself get so far out of control as to laugh too loudly in a public place. ‘What a brilliant con man! But if people are fool enough to go for it good on him!’

  Leaving the school Cormac cycles up to the High Street where he has an errand to do at the City Chambers, then decides to have a coffee before starting work. The city is bristling with new coffee houses offering cappuccino and caffé latte and croissants plain, almond, or au chocolat. He took up the café habit after his suspension, working his way round a large and varied selection. He had to do something, he’d have gone clean off his rocker if he’d sat in the house all day watching old films, and he couldn’t bear to go up to his studio at the top of the house. The piece he’d been working on before he went to Paris had gone dead on him. Nearly every aspect of his life had died a death. His marriage, friendships. He avoided friends to spare them their embarrassment. Whenever he passed someone he vaguely knew he’d suspect they suspected him, were pointing the finger. Look, there he is! The one who? Yes, the one! That’s him! Chinese whispers creeping along the streets, swelling to an uproar. That’s him! The monster! To think that a man like him was in charge of our children! He knew that even hardened criminals abhorred child abusers, gave them a hard time in prison. During broken nights when he rose from the marital bed sweating at the thought of being incarcerated, an outcast from society, any kind of society, he’d descend to the kitchen where he’d open the back door and stand gulping in the night air until the terror passed.

  He puts thoughts of such nights behind him and cycles on down the Royal Mile. He brakes outside a café called Clarinda’s. Why does he do this to himself? He is not sure. He tells himself that this establishment, being along the lines of an old-fashioned type of tearoom with scones and apple tart (he has
been here before, more than once), has an appeal after so much chrome and fizzy milk and cries of short-semi-caffé latte. He tells himself, too, that he has no need to run away from a café simply because it bears a particular name. He goes in and sits at a table with a lacy-edged cloth and orders straight black coffee.

  Clarinda’s mother is a Burns fan. She is passionate about the poet; hence the naming of her one and only child. Burns’ Clarinda in real life had been a Mrs Agnes McLehose, a widow woman, but Mrs Bain would have ignored that. She took what she wanted out of any situation. The name Clarinda would have suggested romance to her and that was enough. She has a photograph of the poet on top of her piano and another on her bedside table. She recites one of his poems every night before she goes to sleep. You could say she was obsessed, Clarinda told him, laughing. She knew that Cormac was interested in other people’s obsessions. She was his most attentive pupil in class, the most ardent.

  He was talking about Rodin. At the end of the afternoon, in the dying moments of his last class of the day, which tended to be one of his older classes, he sometimes talked about the sculptor and showed slides of his work. He always felt relaxed when he got on to his pet subject; it was like coming home. He could start to unwind.

  When he looked up from the slide projector he saw that Clarinda Bain was listening intently, elbows propped on desk, her face resting in the cup of her hands, framed by her pale shoulder-length hair. She sat very still in class compared to most of the others who tended to wriggle and twitch and shift on their seats and her eyes, a deep, intense blue bordering on violet, framed by exceptionally long dark lashes, held a level gaze when studying an object or a person. When talking to the class he often found himself looking in her direction. One tended to look at the pupils who were the most responsive so that one felt encouraged to go on. She was one of the high flyers in her year, referred to as ‘bright’ by members of staff in all departments, a bit of a loner, not in with a crowd, which seemed not to trouble her.

  He looked back at the screen, at the image reflected on it of the bust of a young woman with head inclined and eyes closed.

  ‘This is Le Sommeil,’ he said, ‘one of Rodin’s most tender pieces. Can you see how soft and sensual her face is? You won’t be able to appreciate his work fully until we go to Paris and you see it in the flesh. That’s what it feels like when you stand in front of one of his sculptures: you feel you can see the flesh that inspired him.’

  At the mention of flesh one of the two boys at the back who had appeared to be asleep roused themselves to ask if anything but sex and women had inspired Rodin. Somebody whistled. The boy who had asked the question was a Damien Hirst fan, and unlikely to be converted to Cormac’s own passion, but he was himself quite a promising artist while lacking that commitment that would lift him into another sphere. He was young, though; Cormac had to remind himself of that when tempted to judge his pupils too harshly.

  ‘Nature inspired him, and life itself,’ he responded, though he had to admit that it was true that Rodin had been obsessed by women and their sexuality. His sculptures demonstrated that fully and gloriously.

  ‘Would you call them erotic?’ asked a boy called Jason, tongue in cheek, as Cormac was aware. Jason had brought in a piece of work decorated with dog shit on one occasion and had pretended indignation when asked to remove it. ‘What about those pictures daubed with elephant shit? They were hung in a gallery.’ Cormac had said that the ordure of elephants obviously could not smell as strongly as that of dogs.

  ‘Or pornographic,’ put in Robbie, the Damien Hirst fan, and then answered himself. ‘It might be if it was on page three, mightn’t it?’

  Cormac inclined his head, acknowledging his point.

  ‘Do you think an artist’s personality is reflected in his work?’ asked Clarinda, frowning a little.

  ‘What do you think?’ Cormac asked the class.

  ‘I reckon it was with Jason’s dog shit,’ said Robbie, which caused some laughter and meant that he had to duck out of Jason’s range.

  ‘I think we could say that Rodin’s personality is reflected in his work,’ said Cormac, bringing them back to the central topic, though he enjoyed it when their discussions wandered off at tangents. ‘He was a very passionate and sensual man. His work is charged with emotion and energy, you can tell that even seeing it here on the screen, two-dimensionally.’

  ‘Did he have it off with his models then?’ asked Robbie.

  ‘As a matter of fact, yes, he usually did.’

  The room was warm, the discussion genial. Cormac felt in good form and was not even riled when one of the boys asked him if he had any other heroes but Rodin, making him sound like a football follower.

  ‘Don’t you feel a need to move on?’

  ‘I hope I have moved on, in that I have looked at other things and I admire many of them, though I do confess – without shame! – that I find it difficult when it comes to sculpture to go past Rodin. To my mind he is the king.’

  Cormac left school that afternoon, feeling buoyant, to walk home. Teaching got a sad press but he enjoyed it, most of the time. He’d had a good afternoon.

  He sometimes thought he had better conversations with his students than he did when he and Rachel went to dinner parties, especially those given by colleagues of his or hers. They talked about Edinburgh restaurants and foreign holidays. He and Rachel usually went to southern Europe, to France, Italy or Spain, and so could not compare notes on Bangkok, Bali or Copocabana Beach.

  Turning a corner, on his way home, he bumped into Clarinda. At the time that was what he thought: that he had bumped into her, that their meeting was accidental. Later, while walking the streets and sitting in cafés, a suspended man, ruminating over his fate, he would come to wonder if she had been waiting for him that day and other days.

  ‘I really enjoy your classes, Mr Aherne,’ she said.

  He was pleased, even flattered, for who would not be pleased when receiving praise from a pupil? The pupils were the ones that mattered most, after all, not the dreary inspectors who came and sat at the back of the class trying to look benign.

  ‘I do think Rodin’s wonderful, too. I’ve only seen your slides and photographs of course and I know they won’t be anything like the real thing. I can’t wait to get to Paris!’

  Cormac smiled. He had felt like that on the brink of his first trip. His mother had not been happy about him going off to the French capital on his own even though he had been eighteen years old and about to go to art college in Edinburgh. She had not been happy about that, either, of course not. What did he want to go to Edinburgh for when there was a perfectly good college in Belfast and he could live more cheaply at home?

  ‘It’s great to be young,’ he told Clarinda, ‘and to be looking at things for the very first time.’

  Hearing the trill of a bicycle bell, he glanced round to see Alec McCaffy, teacher of geography, his ankles firmly clipped, mounted on his high bicycle. No mountain bike this, it looked like something Alec’s father might have left in the back shed before popping off. Alec still lived in his childhood home, with his mother.

  ‘Oh hi, Alec,’ muttered Cormac offhandedly and turned back to Clarinda.

  She said, ‘I’d love to read something about Rodin.’

  ‘I’ll bring in a couple of books for you,’ he promised, glancing at his watch. ‘I must go. I’ve got to collect my son from the childminder’s.’

  After he’d brought Davy home and given him his customary afternoon refreshment he went up to his studio and looked out some books on Rodin and his times. He gave them a dust. He had read them more than once in times past, when life had been more leisurely. He opened one book and the next thing he knew was Rachel calling from below, ‘Are you in, Cormac?’

  He ran downstairs. She was taking off her coat in the hall. She looked tired.

  ‘How was your day?’ he asked.

  ‘Hellish. I thought I’d never get out of the surgery and when I did I had two emergency
house calls. One died before I got there. I could do with a drink.’

  He poured her a gin and tonic and took a dram for himself. They had the living room to themselves. Sophie wasn’t back yet and Davy was watching television in his room. They had succumbed to buying a set for him in order to get a bit of peace for themselves. Not a worthy reason, they had both acknowledged, but they were full-time working people with fairly stressful jobs and they needed all the help they could get.

  Rachel sighed. ‘That feels better. How was your day?’

  ‘Great,’ he said.

  Next morning, in the staff room, waiting side by side for the kettle to boil for their Nescafé, Alec McCaffy said, ‘You seemed to be having quite a jaw-jaw with Miss Clarinda Bain on the corner there yesterday afternoon. She was hanging onto your every word.’

  ‘We were discussing art,’ said Cormac loftily, lifting the steaming kettle and pouring hissing water onto the brown powder in his mug. ‘In particular, Rodin and his sculpture, in preparation for our visit to Paris.’

  ‘I wasn’t suggesting you were talking about anything else,’ said Alec, with a little smirk that Cormac did not much care for.

  For God’s sake, all he had been doing was talking to a pupil about his subject, in full view, on a corner! She was interested in art, this girl, passionate about it, which he could understand and relate to and he couldn’t help it if some of his colleagues wouldn’t know what the word passion meant. As for Alec McCaffy, staleness came off him and his bicycle clips like bad breath.

  He saw Clarinda in the corridor and told her that he had brought some books for her. ‘Come and see me at the end of the day.’

  His last class on this day was a fourth-year group whom he found dispiriting. At least half of them couldn’t wait to leave school at the end of the year and were taking art, thinking it to be a soft option. They made nuisances of themselves splashing paint about and generally disrupting the concentration of the class, which meant that Cormac had to be constantly sniping at them. He was delighted to see the back of them and pleased to see Clarinda coming in the door with an eager face.