The Kiln (15 page)

HE IS WORKING FROM NORTH AND HILLIARD
, that textbook which has begun to oppress him with how little he knows, how much he will never know, no matter how hard he studies. Those two names have assumed a vaguely menacing significance for him, like strangers who have been given authority over his life. North and Hilliard: who are they? What do they look like? North is fat and Hilliard is thin. They live in Oxford. They meet nearly every evening in a room overlooking a quadrangle. As the sun slowly sets over a spired and castellated skyline, they do not notice outside their window the kingdom of golden towers and purple clouds they have casually fallen heir to. They are too busy unsmilingly devising tortures for the minds of pupils all over Britain. Like religious fanatics, they know that all the apparent wonders of the world are just dross concealing the true meaning of life, which is Greek syntax. One day they will come for him, sadly shaking their heads, and lead him away to the place where failed Greek scholars are condemned to decline meaningless nouns and parse incomprehensible sentences for ever.

Meanwhile, he wrestles for salvation. Jacky, the incredible thinking dog, lies at his feet, whimpering peacefully in a dream.
Tam envies him. It's a dog's life? It doesn't seem too bad to Tam. Jacky doesn't have to remember how to conjugate γνω⊝ειν. His mother comes into the kitchen. He is dimly aware that she has come in and then aware that nothing appears to have happened since she came in. He looks up. She is standing with her hand on the door-jamb, smiling at him.

‘You fancy goin’ to the dancin', Tam?'

She puts her hand on her hip, elbow out, and lowers her head, looking at him through fluttering eyelashes.

‘What?’

‘Ah'm invitin’ ye to the dancin'. What's the problem? Ye think Ah'm too old for ye?'

‘What?’

He is still wandering in a labyrinth of Greek syntax, unable to find his way out.

‘Anybody in? Yer father an me's goin’ to spectate at the Grand Hall. Ah think he just wants to check up on Allison and Michael. Ye want tae come?'

‘Ah've got this exam on Monday, Mither.’

‘So. This is Saturday. Ye've all day Sunday.’

‘Ah don't know. It's a lotta work. It's Greek.’

She comes towards him, takes the textbook in her hand and closes it. North and Hilliard are demystified into a plain, closed book. Their power over him will be neutralised until he opens the book again.

‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Let's go. Ye can overdo it, son. Ye can work again the morra. If ye're havin’ trouble, Ah'll help ye. Ah'm an expert in Greek. Everything's Greek tae me.'

With that casual exchange his mother pushes him out into another stage of his life, as she has done so often before, as if she were rebirthing him. She was the one who, when he was still quite small, had kept putting books in his way, unobtrusively and with apparent cunning indifference, until he fell hopelessly in love with them. Now she has closed one of these books with instinctive timing and is his guide beyond its covers. The message coded into the ordinary moment she has made might read: ‘There's more to life than this, son.’

And there is. The evening is transformed. Perhaps it is the spontaneity that gives what happens such impact on him. (He has
always loved unforeseeable events: the older cousin who arrived without warning, his new girlfriend with him, and suddenly there was a blonde stranger in the house, telling them unimagined facts about her family and exuding a ravishing scent that made him find excuses for going near her.) Perhaps it is the unexpectedness with which he is volleyed out of the arid recesses of the mind into a night that jostles with rude life. Perhaps it is just that he will never lose his addiction to contrast and paradox.

—
AFTERWARDS
, he would write:

The heartbreaking complex of paradoxes at the centre of Gerard Manley Hopkins's nature: so ascetic that a crumb of bread could ravish his palate; so dedicated to poverty that his senses reminted the world every day into uncountable wealth; so physically chaste that his sensuousness became an orgy.—

SOMETHING LIKE THAT HAS HAPPENED TO HIM NOW
. From studying the skeletal past stretched out in diagrammatic form upon the page, he is thrust into the pungently fleshy present and the shock of the transition brings him startlingly alive.

It is winter. (Of course it is. He had forgotten.) Becoated and scarved and with his mother wearing her headsquare, the three of them hurry through a darkness that crinkles with frost. His father is inexpertly singing ‘Teddy O'Neill’. The night invades Tam, every pore of his senses open. Stars shine as if they have been lit for the first time tonight. He cannot stop staring at them.

At the bus-stop Mrs Tomlinson is standing with a sheepish-looking younger man quite near her. Her concave, scythe-like face (of which his father once said, ‘It would do for yeuckin’ corn') has its customary expression of displeasure with the world. The younger man is standing slightly out of her range, as if he doesn't want to be mistaken for the corn.

‘Jeanie,’ Tam's mother says. ‘A cold night to be out.’

‘Colder for some nor for others,’ Mrs Tomlinson says.

‘Something wrong, Jeanie?’

‘Ye could say that. Oh, ye could say that. Oor Sadie. Rushed intae Graithnock Infirmary. Suspected miscarriage. Her fifth. Her fifth she's carryin’. Who needs five weans? Fower boys. Noo this.' She speaks like a telegram, urgent news the world should get as fast as possible. ‘It's no’ a family her man wants. Ah think. It's a football team. This is him here.'

‘Hullo, son,’ Tam's father says.

The man nods over his shoulder. Tam's mother smiles at him but he doesn't notice. Tam's mother and Mrs Tomlinson go on talking but Tam isn't hearing them. He is awed by the fact that, if he hadn't come out, he wouldn't have known this. A baby may be dying. Greek verbs seem not very important. It is amazing. You could sit in your house and not realise that all over the world people were doing things, loving each other, dying, laughing, having fights, thinking new thoughts, travelling on trains, crying alone.

‘It's always at somebody's door,’ he hears his mother saying.

Her remark seems to him to be profound. It
is
always at somebody's door, isn't it? The variety of living overwhelms him, its endless and relentless happening. And every time it happens, it is new. For the people it happens to, it is new. This is all new. When the bus pulls up at this bus-stop, it will be new. This bus will never before have pulled up at this bus-stop with these five people waiting here and one of them with a daughter maybe having a miscarriage. It is very mysterious.

(About two years later, he tried to write a poem about that remembered moment. He called it ‘A Prayer for Bus-Stops’. The poem was lost and all he was ever able to remember were the last four lines:

When the bus arrives, his awareness of how mysterious things are continues. It is brightly lit and it has an exact collection of
people who have never shared its brightness until now and it is driving through the dark. The driver sits unknown in his cabin, his back towards everybody. He will never know who have been in his bus. The conductress takes the fares without realising that what she is doing is not what she always does. It is different every time. It is different tonight. His mother sits beside Mrs Tomlinson. His father sits beside him. Mrs Tomlinson's son-in-law sits alone, staring out of the window, where Tam can see his sad reflection in the glass.

At the next stop a man comes on. He lurches towards a seat and falls into it. The conductress comes up to him.

‘A day return tae Afghanistan, please,’ he says.

The conductress stares at him.

‘Via the Cross,’ he says.

She takes his money, gives him his ticket and goes away.

And the strangeness of everything becomes just a prelude to the great revelation.

HE SAW THE DANCING
. Carter saw the tomb of Tutankhamen. Livingstone saw the Victoria Falls. Cortes saw the Pacific. He saw the dancing.

He sat on the balcony upstairs with his mother and father and looked down on a wondrous scene - so many people and each one different, a seethe of shifting colours, a cauldron of fiercely attractive energy creating in him a kind of seductive vertigo that made him want to plunge into it. He could pick out from time to time Michael and Allison but they looked different. They weren't just who he had thought they were. They were like strangers who lived in the same house as he did.

He would often wonder later what it was he had experienced that night. Maybe it was a bit like someone who has always lived landlocked seeing his first ocean. Maybe he sensed for the first time the amazing possibilities before him. He could remember glancing at his mother's face and seeing a strange expression there, which he would later identify as wistful serenity. He would feel he had seen surfacing for a moment the face of the
girl she had been before it went under again, long drowned in drudgery.

That night he knew he would soon be part of this scene. By the time he was sixteen, he was going every week to the dancing. The compulsion that took him there was a strange compound of opposites. A part of it had the vague intensity of a religious faith, as if he believed he would some night find the Eucharist on the lips of a girl. A part of it was as worldly as the rhythms of the music, a need to work out the practicalities of seduction. Even the gates of heaven, he had heard, are opened with a key.

HE COMES UPON THE CASANOVA METHOD
.

THE LIBRARY IS A PLACE HE IS FREQUENTING THIS SUMMER
, as regularly as a commuter frequents a railway station, and perhaps his purposes are not dissimilar. He, too, is there to make short journeys. By dipping into a random book, he can transport his head to different places, different times. His mind being as full of multicoloured pieces as a kaleidoscope, an odd paragraph can take hold of it and, with a flick of the word, make the pieces assume a new and interesting shape. Many an afternoon, before reporting like a modern Spartacus to the brickwork, he loiters in the Dick Institute, replenishing his imagination against the mental privations that lie ahead.

This particular afternoon, sunlight is pouring in rays from the high window, widening out into the room like the beams of muted searchlights. The effect is reminiscent of one of the covers of
The Watchtower.
Sun-motes drift, making galaxies in the vivid air. In this atmosphere as mysterious as how he fancies catacombs must be, there move among the serried imaginings of the dead a few people whose banality seems to him transformed into something strange. The woman with the leather message-bag isn't just looking for another Barbara Cartland romance. She is
probably trying to find the book which, when she pulls it from the shelf, will - as in some Gothic castle - activate the secret doorway to admit her to a life richer and more dramatic than her own. The ancient man who looks as if it wouldn't be worth his while picking a book of more than two hundred pages is looking for the words that will finally give meaning to who he is before he isn't.

It is an appropriate atmosphere for a small revelation. He has picked up a book without even noticing the title. As he flicks through the pages, a name draws his attention. Casanova. He should know about getting it, if anybody does. It says here that one of his ploys had been to give out to everybody that he was impotent. Ah hah. The idea seemed to be that nobody would give out such humiliating information unless it were true. Therefore, a lot of women's husbands would treat him as a joke and they wouldn't mind if he spent time with their wives. Tam sees the possibilities immediately.

But for his purposes the method would require some modification. Jealous husbands aren't exactly his problem. Unattached girls are, and the defence mechanisms they have acquired from parents and the social attitudes of the time as difficult to unlock as any medieval chastity belt. He needs to find a way past those formidable psychological barriers. Casanova had used the idea of impotence as a weapon of social duplicity, a devious ploy. But what if you used it frontally? Compassion is a great disarmer of people. How many people will remain defensive if they are feeling compassion? He runs a rehearsal through his head.

One of the dance-hall jokes at the time is the one about the man whose chat-up technique is very direct. He takes a girl up to dance for the first time.

‘Do you come here often?’ he says.

‘Yes. Quite often.’

‘Do you fuck?’

‘You must get a lot of slaps on the face,’ someone hearing his method tells him.

‘I do,’ he says. ‘But I also get a lot of fucks.’

He could never be as bold as that. But what about a variation?

(‘Do you come here often?’

‘Yes.’

‘I'm impotent.’)

He tries to imagine the girl's eyes welling up with sorrow for him, her slowly growing determination to save him from his despair. He tries to imagine them leaving the dancing early so that she can restore to him his sense of his own manhood. It isn't easy.

There were two things wrong here. The first was the abruptness of the heartbreaking confession. A thing like that needed a context of mood conducive to the appreciation of its tragic resonances. A dance-hall bristling with libido, with ‘Take the “A” Train’ in the background, was hardly the place. Also, impotence is too clinical, too impersonal.

What about the fear that you are homosexual? That isn't an entirely alien role to play. He has had thoughts about that. Why has he not managed to do it with a girl yet? Is he subconsciously arranging it that way? There have been so many times when he could have pushed it harder, been harsher. Were his attempts at seduction all a pretence, a way of concealing from himself what he really wanted? Was his constant failure a coded message to himself? Is he really a homosexual? After all, given his experience, how would he know? Certainly, he has written a mental note to Oscar Wilde.