The Kiln (19 page)

Aileen, Clive's wife, was talking to Alice and Frank Spiers. He had known Aileen at school as well. She had been very attractive then, seemed to him in his awestruck innocence somehow what girlness was, quick and usually a little breathless, as if she were hurrying to somewhere the rest of them were plodding towards. Her laughter evoked barely understood stirrings in the boys around her. She had been a pleasantly disturbing presence.

She was still attractive but in a slightly caricatured way now. Breasts and bum had exaggerated themselves to the point where she was beginning to look like a seaside postcard. She had acquired a coarsening of nature to match the physical change. The Cunningham effect? Tom wondered. He had a moment he didn't like of pondering what things might be like between them in bed. Did Clive turn towards her in the darkness and murmur, by way of subtle foreplay, ‘Darling, have you heard the one about . . .?’

Contemplating Alice Spiers didn't help to lighten his mood. That way guilt lay. Frank was Alice's second husband. They were only recently married. During the time that Alice had been separated from her first husband something had happened between them.

It was one night during a previous incarnation of marital disillusionment. He no longer recalled which great issue sundered their marriage that night. It could have been Sandra Hayes' beauty. Or it could have been the fact that Gill insisted on pronouncing ‘liqueur’ as a French word, the phoniness of which drove him crazy. He thought it probably dated from the cordon bleu cookery course, an event he might cite as a co-respondent in the divorce, since it was also there that she met Aileen Cunningham - an ill meeting by gaslight, as it had brought Clive, whom Tom had thought safely stored in the past, back into his life.

Whatever cosmic issue had reminded them that they were,
each of them, engaged in a psychic struggle to what might be the death, they finished by withdrawing behind their favourite separate modes for such occasions. He started to rant, a meaningless convoy of obscure rage within which any rational significance had as much chance of occurring as a daisy has of taking root on a motorway. Gill told him that she would be sleeping downstairs from now on, rather in the manner of God banishing Cain to the east of Eden. He thought the news was supposed to have made him a broken man but he felt at the time that he'd rather cuddle up to a buzz-saw. Anyway, he was used to this tactic and the accompanying threats of testes lopped off when he was sleeping if he dared to force his way into her bed. One time she had kept this isolationist policy up for six full weeks, presumably waiting for his exploding sperm to bring him to her, screaming for mercy. What killed Tom was what she said when, at the end of that time, she came back into their bed. She felt safe in doing so, she said, because obviously he was homosexual. Who else but a raging queen could have avoided sexual contact with her for six weeks? He succumbed to the cold logic of it. Sweet is woman: sometimes he thought she was a question which, no matter how you answered, you must get wrong.

He had brought their quarrel to a close with fine masculine originality. He went to the Akimbo Arms, a pub he had used to refresh his sense of himself and where he came from. The public bar there was a time-lock of the fifties. But it didn't help much. Harry was on duty that night, the only barman he knew who insisted on telling you
his
troubles.

Tom drank too much and stumbled out at shutting time, bearing the woes of the world on his innocent shoulders. The scene outside didn't lessen his self-pity. There were girls in twos and threes everywhere, done up like circus performers. There was a group of them queuing at an autobank. He realised they were heading for the discos that had proliferated recently in Graithnock, like cake shops where bread was scarce. He seemed to be travelling through a forest of walking women and he was alone and aging, listening to the circus leaving town. Poor Tom. What had he ever done to deserve this?

He needed to share the amazing injustice of his life with
someone. He couldn't go home. Gill was waiting there like a computer in which were stored all the inadequacies of his past. On impulse he went into a phone box and looked up Alice's address (her name was Johnson at that time). The phone book had been dismembered by some happy vandal but he must have become bored before he completed the job, because one of the few intact pieces contained Alice's number.

He rang. That seemed simple. But given how drunk he was, it was an achievement on a par with inventing the wheel. He spoke to two puzzled voices, one of them a man who threatened to come through the phone to him, before he reached the haven of Alice's breathy tones.

‘Hello?’

‘Allah? Tom hee. Yew alrih? Howsa go?’

‘I'm sorry. Who is this?’

‘Allah. Smee. Howsa go? Eh?’

‘Listen. Who
are
you?’

His last few surviving brain cells caught a faint glimmer of what was happening. Alice thought she had a heavy breather on the line. He knew that somehow he had to say something sharp to set her mind at rest, something really intelligent. His mind made a supreme effort.

‘Tom,’ he said. ‘Tom Docherty.’

‘Tom! Where are you?'

‘Box. Box on street. King Stree.’

‘God, what's happened?’

‘Huh! Watsappen.’

It was at this point that three young men took up their positions outside the box and started to tap on the glass. One of them pressed his lips against the glass derisively. Tom gave them all the fingers and continued to converse in his mysterious way with Alice.

‘Watsappen, Alice? Eh? Watsnotappen? Don belee this. Dew?’

Various oaths were coming from outside and the three young men were trying to force their way into the box. He tried to wedge himself against the door and dropped the phone. Dangling there, it must have given Alice the impression she was plugged into a riot.

‘Pissaw.’

‘Get the bastard.’

‘Shove, shove, shove.’

‘Get los, ya buncha turs.’

‘He's goin’, boys, he's goin'.'

‘Heave ho, me hearties!’

Tom was knocked against the phone and his elbow came down, cutting the connection. It was his good fortune to have picked a fight in a phone box. The young men were fighting with each other rather than Tom in their desperation to get in a telling hit, be the one who could claim Tom's scalp. They heaved uselessly around one another like armless boxers. They would probably all have died of asphyxiation without an effective blow being struck if the police hadn't arrived. One of the young men saw the car rounding the corner and shouted a warning. The phone box suddenly felt very roomy. By the time the police car had pulled up, the young men were gone.

‘Are you all right, sir?’

Does the corpse feel well?

‘What was all that about?’

He had come out of the phone box. Sweat dried on his forehead as if it were ice being held there. He'd always found one policeman equivalent to about four cups of black coffee. There were two of them. They didn't seem particulary friendly.

‘A loada nothin’,' Tom said.

‘That's not what I would call it. It looked like a disturbance of the peace.’

‘Not disturbin’ any peace, me. Trying to make a phone call there. Three mugs. Forced their way into the box.'

‘You sure that's what happened?’ the other one said.

Tom nodded.

‘You feeling all right, sir?’

‘Fine.’

‘You look under the weather to me.’

They really develop their powers of observation in the police. Finger-counting would have been higher mathematics for him at that moment. They decided to give him a bit of the treatment.

‘What do you think?’ one said to the other.

‘It might be for his own good to take him in,’ the other said.

‘Hm.’

‘Aye.’

Tom couldn't resist it. Just as the alcohol had assured him that he could insult three young men with impunity, it now convinced him that he was witty and could take the mickey out of the police.

‘What's the charge?’ he asked. ‘Molesting a phone box?’

‘Listen, you—’

And another car pulled up at the kerb. Providence seemed to be running a taxi service for Tom that night. Things sometimes happen that way when you're drunk. Out of the car stepped Alice and the talking policeman lost his train of thought. She was tall and willowy, with very long black hair you felt you could get lost in. She was wearing an astrakhan-type coat with the high collar up, and long black boots.

‘Tom!’ she called as she got out of the car. ‘Where have you been?’

She shook her head in a long-suffering way at the policemen.

‘Celebrations,’ she said to them. ‘This is him supposed to be enjoying himself. I'm sorry. Officers, has there been some trouble?’

She had neatly created the assumption that she was his wife. His status had risen in the eyes of the two policemen. He might be a drunken nyaff but he had quite a woman to drive him home.

‘There could have been,’ one of them said.

‘We just got here in time,’ said the other.

‘Is it all right if I get him home now?’

They enjoyed taking their time about the decision and watching her.

‘Well, all right, madam. But just make sure he's not back out on the streets tonight. He could be a danger to himself.’

‘Thank you. And thanks for helping. Goodnight.’

It was as easy as that, provided you could wear an astrakhan coat and boots the way she could and live under a waterfall of black hair. When they got into the car and she put in the clutch, her coat fell open and she was bare-thighed to the hem of her shorty nightie. He was being driven along in one of his adolescent dreams, the one where the car pulls up and the woman tells you to get in and you go
off to the land where sex actually happens and isn't just talked about.

‘My God!’ she said. ‘You look as if you've been in an air raid. What happened?’

He gave her his version of the phone-box war.

‘We better get you sorted out before you go back to Gill.’

He felt that might take a year or two.

‘You ever tell anybody I came out of the house like this to get you and you're a dead man.’

She turned the car into the runway and they got out with almost the whole of the street in darkness except for her light. They came into the house quietly. She told him the children were asleep upstairs.

The strange rituals and expressions with which we patrol the edges of our bodies, the sentries of the sanctum, are interesting. Perhaps often when they profess to be most adamant about keeping us out, they are already suborned and inviting us to come in. Are our bodies busy sending each other subversive signals while our minds fondly think they are in control of the situation?

That night with Alice occasioned such thoughts. When they came into her house, she left him sitting in the lounge while she put on a dressing-gown and made them coffee. He found the furniture of other people's lives slightly awesome. The carriage clock sounded disapproving, tut-tutting with its brass tongue as if it knew it belonged and he didn't. He wondered where the ornaments had come from, who had chosen which prints. One was Monet's garden at Argenteuil, which seemed to him at the time like a distillation of all the summers he had lost.

He thought of Harry, the departed husband. He had had a drink with him not long after Harry had left Alice. Harry had been raw at the time, flayed with self-pity, his eyes looking out with painful disbelief on what had happened. It wasn't easy to equate his garbled tale of agonies endured with this nice room. Visiting the scene of the crimes, Tom found no thumb-screws, no iron maidens, no instruments of primitive torture. Had Harry been raving? Or should he flee before the subject of Harry's dark hintings reappeared, perhaps dressed in a black evening dress and carrying a rhino-whip?

Alice came in wearing the same floral housecoat and mules. She was carrying a tray with cups and a china coffee-pot and a small plate of biscuits. She left the tray on the table beside him, crossed to the music centre and put on a tape. Vivaldi came on quietly in two different parts of the room like ornamental fountains playing there.

There took place then a civilising ceremony: Monet, Vivaldi, coffee and biscuits - a small brightness in the emptiness of the night. The street was quiet, most people in bed. Upstairs, Alice's two children slept safely. They sat opposite each other and talked, Alice demure in her housecoat, Tom rather red-eyed from his sojourn on the streets. He sensed rationality slowly return, felt the gentling effect men and women can sometimes have on each other. The bruises on his mind faded to mild discolorations.

He didn't remember much of what they talked about at first - probably the ridiculousness of the incident at the phone box, Alice's dramatic intervention, how the children were getting on at school, the feints and side-steps by which we draw nearer to each other. But they moved on to more confessional matters, the problems of living alone, the problems of not living alone, inspection of the corpses of small dreams, the griefs of marriage. The propriety of it was marvellous. There were no innuendos, no phoney looks of longing passion. He enjoyed the complete innocence of Alice sitting in her housecoat and him with not even his jacket off, taking coffee and biscuits and talking. They were outside any assumed role they should be playing. Then it happened.

Alice had moved the table away from between them so that she could go round and turn the tape. When she came back she didn't return to the chair she had been sitting in. She sat down on the settee, a little along from him. They were still just talking interestedly. He made a remark about the sadness of the way couples become indifferent to each other's secret fears and thoughts and delicate aspirations, the very things that generated intimacy in the first place.

The comment was one of those accidentally stimulating contacts, a touch in exactly the right place at the right time. Alice became very animated, flicking her long black hair away from her face. She told him about an apparently irrelevant
incident that had meant a lot to her at the time. He could see why.