The Kiln

by William McIlvanney

  The first sign that all was not well was the whiff of butter beans from the plate. Jesus, he thought, I didn't know that butter beans could defecate. The taste confirmed the smell. He retrieved the can from the waste-bin and read it. The beans had been in brine, which should have been drained off. The butter beans were out.

  The potatoes had been mistimed. They were raw inside. That left the brisket. But he couldn't cut it. He sat for a while gesturing at it with his knife and fork but the meat refused to co-operate. He was miming having a meal. Suddenly he was shouting at the plate. ‘You brisket bastard! What's the point of meat like you?’

  He began to rave at the room. His head was spinning from no food and too much wine. He found two slices of stale bread and dipped them in the casserole where the melted butter was flavoured with the meat. The pretence of culinary sophistication collapsed into atavistic frenzy. The bread, impregnated with the ghost of what should have been his meal, was stuffed into his mouth with his fingers. He dumped the plateful of the inedible into the bucket, washed and dried his hands, filled out the last glass of wine. He stood briefly in the doorway with his wine, stared round the kitchen like King Lear looking at his daughters, and went to bed. He lay with the duvet up to his chin, trying to make his wine last, staring ahead, cursing the world and daring it to come near him until he sent for it. The discarded apron lay on the floor of the bedroom like the costume for a part he would never be able to play convincingly. It was 8.15 in the evening.

  Now he settled for boiled-egg sandwiches, two chocolate biscuits and coffee. Know your limits. He carried them through to the table by the window in the living-room. From here he could look out at the old Warriston Cemetery across the road. He sometimes walked there. He liked cemeteries. Paradoxically, they recharged him, seeming to remind him that he was still outrunning the headstone. His favourite was probably Pere Lachaise in Paris, a real city of the dead with streets and monuments like little houses where the famous and the unknown had addresses beside each other, still at home to visitors. But Edinburgh had a graveyard almost as good - Dean Cemetery, a lesson in Scottish history set in stone, what happened when Scottishness as a way of life gave way to Britishness as a career. Home is the Scotsman who has been on the make.

  He sipped. The coffee now was made from granules, not chicory essence as it had been that day in Maddie's kitchen.

  He could still see her crawling away from him across the floor to reach up to switch the kettle off, beautifully naked. He watched her flesh move, not quite like a sea-anemone, but near enough. This was a respectable woman in her kitchen, moving as a wonderful beast, without shame or self-consciousness. His sense of things had been irrevocably altered and he was glad. The socially practical contained the wildly sensual. The wildly sensual contained the socially practical. In the tension between the two you had to learn to live. Well, he would try. Life could be rugged but there it was.

  She turned round and smiled a soft, wet smile and stood up slowly, letting him see what he had been allowed to enjoy. Maybe she knew it was the first time he had seen a fully naked woman, for she stood watching him watch, letting his eyes graze on her body. She seemed to him the most perfect being he had ever seen. They can make people like that?

  (And the Lord beheld His work and He saw that it was good. And He looked upon Maddie that was called Fitzpatrick and He spake thus. ‘Yes!!! That's what I meant by a woman. I knew I would get it right some time.’)

  She started to laugh at his wonderment and walked towards him. She reached down and took his head gently and pulled it into her thighs. It was furnace-warm in there and he thought he might suffocate but there were worse ways to die. It must have been then, he would decide, that he knew he was in love with her.

  He was not to remember the rest of that time at her house too clearly. Too many strangenesses had fallen on his head. First wine, first naked woman, first annihilation of inhibition, first making of full, physical love. Not only had he entered into a different and much deeper relationship with her but with everything else, it seemed. He was calling her ‘Maddie’ and it was as if he were on first-name terms not just with her but with the world. He felt oddly at home in himself and things took on a settled shape and colour and were there for his personal enjoyment - the floral curtains in the sitting-room, the warm wood of the table where they laid their coffee cups (she said it was yew), the print of Peasant Digging on the wall.

  (Dear Camille Pissaro,

  How is it you can paint the air?)

  Other things happened, unimagined but with a natural and undeniable rightness. She put on a red silk dressing-gown and he, not knowing the form in a situation like this, put his clothes back on. He found it astonishingly erotic to sit clothed and drinking coffee with a woman whose breasts kept almost appearing and whose naked legs invaded every thought. It was the ordinary transformed into the endlessly exciting, a dream of what life should be like that had often haunted him.

  They talked about what he could never remember. All he would remember was the effortless pleasure of the talking, as if they had always been sitting in this room. The exotic and the practical embraced in their words, like long-lost friends. ‘Lapis lazuli’ was like the meaning of life in a poem, Eddie was on business in Holland and Tom would come back the day after tomorrow. She had friends coming tomorrow. He felt jealous about that.

  When he had reluctantly put on his coat to go and was standing in the hallway, she pulled him back into the doorway of the sitting-room and undid his trouser-front. (Strange how trousers used to button at the front. Maybe the invention of the zip was the prophetic heralding of a freer attitude to sex.)

  As she knelt there sucking him voraciously, the dressing-gown slipped off her shoulders and the doorbell rang. Someone was there. He could imagine the shadow against the coloured glass. He panicked. But she looked up at him, her shoulders hunched, her hands cupping him, her mouth opening around him like a flesh-eating flower, and her opaque eyes hypnotically commanded him to do nothing but submit to being devoured. He did, some part of him realising that he was having his very own dangerous liaison. Here was fantasy made flesh in the sperm that creamed on her smiling lips. The doorbell had rung twice more and whoever it was had gone away, like his inhibition.

  Out in the street eventually, he moved through the town on a private escalator. This must be what euphoria meant. Life seemed spread before him, a banquet to choose from. The town was his own in a way it had never been before. Life was not to be worried about but enjoyed. Even the recent past was transformed. Times that had been ordinary in their happening were now sauced with present well-being and made piquant with a new-found sense of self, to be savoured as he chose.

  LET IT BE MORNING. Let the sun be up but still too feeble to have softened yet the mild chill of the night, so that you can taste the crispness of the air. Let Hilly Brown and Jack Laidlaw be walking beside you.

  You're grubby from a night-shift at the brickwork and pleasantly tired from your exertions. You've been working nine hours in the dark, while everybody slept, and now you know you have earned every fresh, clean breath you take. The air, it seems, belongs to you personally. Don't anybody challenge your right to the pleasure of it.

  You're going home and everybody else is walking past you, poor zombies, their heads still fogged with sleep, moving towards a day that's not their own. You'll buy twelve rolls in Ingram the Baker's and six of them you'll eat when you get in, spread thick with white butter and washed down with two cups of strong, sweet tea. You'll have a long, slow bath. You'll take a book to bed with you. You probably won't read much of it. When you fall asleep, the book will be beside you, comforting as a child's teddy bear, dreams to share.

  Sometime in the afternoon you'll waken and you'll do whatever you want to do. You might read some words, you might sit in the darkness of a cinema, you might just walk the streets of your familiar town and watch the passing girls. For she's there, the unknown woman, waiting to be made flesh by chance or circumstance or un
foreseen event.

  Anything you choose to do will be good, for you are seventeen and you are going to university at the end of the summer, and you are probably going to be a writer, though nobody knows that but you, and you feel you have enough energy to populate a small country.

  THAT DISCOVERED POTENCY OF SELFHOOD, he would remember, stayed with him even in the house. He had a phase of feeling almost condescendingly tolerant towards his family. His mother and father could be forgiven for not noticing the difference in him. It must be so long since they had been where he was. He could allow Marion and Michael their illusion that he didn't understand what happened between them. Allison's tendency to treat him as an intermittently tolerable nuisance now amused him. He wondered if he had arrived at this new place before she had. He remembered an incident that had happened between them a long time ago, when he was fifteen.

  He was sitting in the living-room, leafing through a dictionary, asking Allison the meaning of random words. She was putting in her curlers at the mirror above the fireplace. He had asked her ‘causeway’ and ‘chalice’ and she had got them both and he felt the need for something more difficult. He came upon a word he had never seen before. It looked a cracker.

  ‘Chancre,’ he said, pronouncing it as a French word.

  There was silence.

  ‘You've got me there,’ Allison said. ‘Ah give in.’

  But by now he had read the meaning, which made him blush instantly: ‘the hard swelling that constitutes the primary lesion in syphilis’. ‘Lesion’ he wasn't sure of but ‘syphilis’ would do.

  ‘No, that's not the one,’ he said quickly. ‘Sorry. This is it. Wait till ye hear this one. Chaparral. Eh?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Chaparral.’

  Fortunately, he was boring her so much that she noticed neither that he was blushing nor that an abandoned word had been unexplained.

  ‘Spell it,’ she said.

  He did.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Dense tangled brushwood.’

  ‘Hm,’ Allison said. ‘That's a handy word for Graithnock. Ah must remember it the next time Ah'm in the main street.’

  What a quaint boy that had been, sitting with a dictionary on his knees, trying to find the meaning of experience in a book when it was growing wild all around him, ripe fruit just waiting to be plucked. He could sigh now for the folly of wasted time.

  He could now sit among the same old conversations, smiling to himself, holding his secret as if it were uncountable wealth they didn't know he had. But he soon discovered the inverted alchemy of secrets, how they can tarnish in the dark and begin to corrode the holder.

  MAN WITH BUNION DIES IN HOSPITAL. The incidental, ludicrous headline would come back to him in Edinburgh, showing him how old news can be a source of memory clusters, a public troopship from which the piquancy of individual memories can disembark.

  HE HAS COMMITTED ADULTERY. He has committed adultery. Suddenly, the Bible which he used to read so keenly feels as if it is personally addressed to him. Jehovah, twiddling his cosmic thumbs through many millennia, stirs in the heavenly regions. His eyes flash fire.

  (And the Lord spake and he was exceeding wroth, ‘I knew somebody was going to do it, I just knew it. It doesn't matter how often you warn them. You can carve it in stone. No. It still won't work. There's always going to be one. Well, he can't say I didn't warn him. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Did he think I was kidding?’)

  There is no escaping from this. You have done it. It is there, final, irrevocable. It is you who have done it, nobody else.

  (‘Tam Docherty? 14 Dawson Street? Right. We've got a real one here. No mercy. What justification could he possibly have for this? I'll tell you. None. For the Lord thy God is an angry God.')

  ‘What's wrong with you, boay?’ his mother says. ‘You liked macaroni and cheese last week.’

  ‘Maybe he's went vegetarian,’ his Auntie Bella observes.

  She is arranging her headsquare in front of the oval mirror that hangs on a chain from the living-room wall. She has refused her tea, saying, ‘Ah've the five thousand tae feed up there.’ (The biblical reference gives a new and sharp pang of guilt.) But she has still been sampling a few chips from his plate. She ruffles his hair as she does so.

  ‘What part of an animal does macaroni come fae?’ his father asks.

  He is looking up, puzzled from his newspaper where Tam has noticed the headline ‘Man with Bunion Dies in Hospital’. He probably thought he had problems. If that's what happens to you for having a bunion, what could be in store for him?

  ‘The cheese!’ his Auntie Bella says, as if she finds it wearisome having to explain everything to humbler intelligences. ‘The cheese. That's from a cow, intit? Milk. To butter. To cheese.’

  She pats the knot on her headsquare with the complacency of the well informed. His father is staring at her. His mouth shapes itself a couple of times towards speech. But whatever he is thinking appears to be inexpressible. He goes back behind his newspaper. From there his final comment is issued.

  ‘Bella,’ he says. ‘See when you die? See if ye donate yer brain to medical science? Gonny leave directions? So they can find it?’

  His Auntie Bella laughs, happily impervious to his father's lack of appreciation. Her nature, as his father has said before, ‘come intae the world dressed in elephant hide.’

  ‘Tom,’ his mother is saying. ‘How can ye work in a brickwork if ye don't eat?’

  ‘He's left the brickwork,’ his father says.

  ‘Oh, so that means he should stop eating?’ his Auntie Bella says.

  (‘Silence, ye little people!’ saith the Lord.)

  Their voices bicker distantly. He is alone with His wrath at his wrongdoing. He has committed adultery. Adultery. The word has attached itself to him like an incurable disease. But nobody else knows he has it yet. He carries it around with him secretly, a sickness that estranges him from normalcy and breeds debilitating questions in him like diseased corpuscles. How can he claim to be a Socialist if he can betray Eddie Fitzpatrick in this callous way? What is the point of trying to write when the pen droops in your hand like a lost erection? What would his family think? Is the day before yesterday the land of lost content? He sees it shining plain.

  The three boys in the Queen's Cafe seem to be living where he used to live. He's in exile now. And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, to the east of Eden. (James Dean would have understood. He wishes, maybe for the hundredth time, he hadn't piled up in his Porsche a few days ago. He misses him like a friend he was only just getting to know.)

  The three of them are laughing a lot. The table they sit at is in the same room as he is but he feels as if it could be a scene from another world. He is sipping a cup of aloes. They seem to have been drinking euphoria, though the empty cups would suggest tea. The one in the middle is conducting their mood. The other two are just following his lead. He holds up his hands. They give him the silence he wants.

  ‘Expeliment on pledictability of human nature,’ he says

  He takes the silver paper from a Player's packet which is lying empty on the table and very carefully pares the lining of rice-paper from it. Taking the rice-paper, he kneads, tears and twists it into an elongated, vaguely human shape, like a figure by Giacometti. He does it all with that exact, fanatic concentration with which Hollywood scientists bend over hissing beakers. The paper man is laid ceremoniously on his side in a saucer from which the cup has been removed. Then the cup, containing dregs of cold tea, is poised precisely above the figure, angled on the axes of the thumb and forefinger. He pauses, looking around with manic mischief in his eyes.

  The moment freezes for Tam as he looks. He sees the boy who is holding the cup smiling in his arrogant handsomeness. He sees the other two watching the boy intently. They are bathed in dull sunlight, like figures in an old painting where the pigment has dimmed. They seem so brief and so poignantly unconscious of their brevity. They are tu
rned in on one another, simultaneously declaring the importance of themselves and concentrating on nonsense. As if he has become an instant geriatric. Tam contemplates the joyous wastefulness of youth.

  ‘Observe,’ the boy says. ‘Confucius, he say: what happen when man pee the bed?’

  He delicately tilts the cup until some drops of cold tea fall on the paper figure. With just the right degree of languor, the figure turns gently in its saucer until it is facing the other way.

  ‘All clear?’ he says. ‘No more confusement? Man loll away from plish. Plish velly wet.’

  They all laugh until it seems that medical attention may have to be summoned.

  Oh, very good. Is that all they have to do with their time? Do they know nothing of the griefs to be endured? Can they imagine having committed adultery? Have they ever wandered through a world blighted by their own evil, a self-made and permanent winter, and found not the solace of one friend? For John Benchley wasn't in.

  The housekeeper has come to the door wearing that perpetual hat she presumably goes to bed in. It is fused for ever to her head as if it has been surgically attached. Maybe it has a religious significance, like that skull-cap Jewish men wear. The cap of devout respectability. No bad thoughts may enter here. It may be raining evil but, behold, it touches me not. Her face looks like one of the prunes they served so often at school dinners. You took them like penance and later, in the lavatory, they purged you of impurities.

  ‘Yes?’ Mrs Malone says, staring at him.

  This is not a red carpet. He feels as welcome as a drunk man at a Rechabite meeting. She has never liked him, perhaps because once, when she was in the room clearing away the tea things, he said, ‘God is dead.’ He was quoting from his skim-reading of Nietzsche at the time.