The Kiln (3 page)

Was this the source of his many impressive achievements in the genre of social mayhem? How often had his despondent anger turned a dinner party or a night out with friends or an arranged celebration or a conversation in a pub into the Somme in civvies and left him firing at will at any head that came above the parapet? Did the root cause lie in the fact that the event had yet again failed to live up to his overblown idea of what it should be? That seemed far too simple.

There was, for a start, the booze. When he had enough to drink, he could imagine that somebody who nodded to him was trying to put the head on him. Midges of perception developed messianic delusions. Small, slighting references inflated to amazing proportions until the air was filled with barrage balloons of insult. All you needed to do to cure that was to stop drinking as much.

And yet. Drink might render the form of expression grotesque. But sobriety didn't eradicate the content which the form had obscured with its exaggerations. After such times, he always felt guilty. But there still nearly always flickered within the guilt, a minnow in a murky pond, something of what he had felt which refused to die, refused to succumb completely to the condemnations of others. And he somehow knew that, if it did, if it finally went belly-up with the toxin of other people's idea of him, he would lose a crucial part of his sense of himself and start to imitate who they expected him to be.

It was the extremity of the form, he kept thinking, which had been wrong - not what he saw but the way that he said it. If he thought somebody was full enough of his own shit to start a sewage farm, he could perhaps find a better way to say it. Perhaps. His intellectual and emotional antennae were preposterously sensitive. There was nothing wrong in that. What was wrong was what he did with the effects of that sensitivity. He demanded too much from people and events.

He had always suffered, he decided, from a kind of elephantiasis of the occasion, wanting an event to be bigger than it could be and
to bear more weight of human truth than it could possibly bear. When it collapsed under the strain, he was inclined to shoot it (usually without a silencer) to put it out of
his
misery. That was hardly fair.

He must do something about that, about his
Vorfreude.
Maybe that had been part of the problem between Gill and him. Maybe what he had been expecting of marriage had always been unrealisable. Perhaps she just got tired of living with Peter Pan. She certainly got tired of his social tantrums. Eventually, she developed a technique of setting them up in public.

There were two basic methods involved. One way was to initiate a topic in company about which they had both reached agreement in private. Once he had started to expatiate on their shared position in the matter, she would suddenly abandon it, inviting everybody else to join her. His outrage would leave him like a dancing bear, frothing slightly and bumping into the furniture. Such occasions made him think that he could always have behaved more properly towards her in public if only he had never had to meet her in private.

The other way was to introduce a subject, or at least seize on one, about which she knew he was likely to disagree with everyone else. It came to be as if, unable to stop his tendency to go over the top in argument, she decided to stage-manage it. Mrs Barnum. Presenting My Husband, The Man Whose Reactions Overflow Every Context. He Will Now Attempt To Stage An Opera In A Phone Box.

He would laugh to himself when he thought of those occasions. Happy Times. His memory had a library of them, all filed under C for catastrophe. Pluck out any one, it would show the same, recurrent symptoms - like the dinner party before they had gone for that year to Grenoble. By that time, Tam had been reclassified as Tom in the mouths of most of his friends, perhaps in an attempt to confer a status more befitting a teacher. Gill invited his headmaster at that time and his wife, Brian and Elspeth Alderston. Tom had made the mistake of telling Gill that Brian had singled him out as someone he wanted to push for promotion. He had taken Tom into his office twice to say he thought Tom had ‘headmaster potential’. He said it as if he were bestowing a knighthood. Tom thought it sounded like a disease
for, judging by the deterioration he observed in most teachers who were promoted to headmasterships, he had decided it was a job you didn't get so much as contract.

But Gill was determined to lay the ground for their return from France before they left, which seemed to Tom rather to contradict what was supposed to be the ground-breaking boldness of the move in the first place.

‘LET'S DO SOMETHING ADVENTUROUS, DARLING
- I'll bring the insurance policies.’

THE MEAL HAD BEEN GOOD
. If only they could have eaten it in silence. Brian and Gill were engaged in a very unsubtle conspiracy, like whispering through a tannoy. Brian said things about Tom ‘getting it out of his system’ and ‘career consolidation’. Gill talked about when they had ‘done the Bohemian bit’. They dangled the prospect of a dazzling career in teaching before Tom as if it weren't a contradiction in terms, while Elspeth kept chiming in with details of Brian's meteoric rise from assistant teacher to headmaster in twenty-five years.

Tom experienced a feeling that had been becoming more and more familiar since Gill had completed her course in cordon bleu cookery. It was a feeling of being caught in a montage sequence from a film he didn't want to be in, a dinner-time equivalent of the breakfast scene in
Citizen Kane.
He seemed to be for ever at the dinner table arguing with people and every time he looked up from his plate he was arguing with someone different and, while the plates came and went, he knew himself aging remorselessly.

That turned him sullen and his sullenness began to show.

Gill caught the feeling and reciprocated generously. She had been for a long time getting weary of the vagueness of Tom's ambitions. A quarrel of mood was already happening. Any
healthy married couple can quarrel about anything. They have so many related resentments all over the place that, once they feel they're going to a quarrel, they jump on any excuse like the first bus that comes along. It doesn't matter where it's going, their anger is sure to find a home there.

Gill had set up this whole evening to convince Brian Alderston of his wisdom in spotting Tom as an heir apparent and he was coming across like a boor. He resented having their house used to tout for professional support. He never entertained the boss. If he didn't come as a friend and no more, he could stay away. Their motives were already there. They were only looking for the pretext. When they found it, it must have seemed to an outsider as daft as the War of Jenkins' Ear.

They were in the lounge when the guns went off. He thought he remembered it pretty well. He had exceptional recall. A critic had once said of him that he was one on whom nothing is lost. A lot of the time he wished it wasn't so. He wouldn't have minded losing a lot of the stuff he remembered.

They were in the lounge. Brian was nursing a Remy Martin. Gill and Elspeth were drinking Cointreau. Tom was on the good old whisky, bottled aggression. They were all boring one another politely to death in the usual way - around the world in eighty clichés.

(‘Blah,’ someone would say.

‘Blah?’

‘Blah.’

‘Surely blah, blah.’

‘No. Blah.’

‘Blah? What about unblah?’

‘Yes, unblah.’

‘No. Blah.’

‘I think what we all mean is half-blah, half-unblah. Eh?’

‘Of course.’

‘That's it. Half-blah, half-unblah.’

‘Or, if you like, half-unblah, half-blah.’

‘Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.’)

It was all slightly less interesting than an Andy Warhol film when Elspeth innocently released the safety-catch. Elspeth would. She had the dangerous innocence of the truly boring.
What makes boring people dangerous is that they keep forgetting that other people are present. They wander through life in a kind of holy idiocy, believing that the rest of the world's population consists entirely of ears. Ears never take offence. Only the entities attached to them do that. Thus, your bore is always amazed at causing trouble. You were only there to listen, after all. Nobody asked you to react.

To be fair to Elspeth, she didn't really say anything wrong. The way Gill and Tom were feeling about each other at that moment, if Elspeth had said, ‘I love you both,’ they would have been snarling at her to make her choice and stop hedging her bets. What she did say was, ‘Sandra Hayes. There's someone I would say is beautiful.’

‘I pass,’ Tom said.

Gill raised her head slightly and turned it towards him at a quizzical angle. As a veteran combatant, he knew war had been declared.

Sandra Hayes was one of those handy instant quarrels married couples always have in stock in case they haven't time for a three-course barney. She was pre-cooked disagreement. Elspeth wasn't to know it but, between Gill and Tom, Sandra had often stood in for an hour too long in the pub or no clean shirts or a day of small frustrations. Part of her usefulness was that she crystallised differences in their attitudes, the incompatibility of their tastes. She was the painting Gill insisted on hanging up that made Tom puke.

Sandra had been a friend of Gill's for a long time. She was one of those enigmas of the life they were leading he didn't expect ever to understand. She was spectacularly popular. People kept festooning her with words it seemed to Tom she contradicted almost perfectly. ‘Beautiful’ was one. People kept calling her that. She had, it seemed to Tom, a kind of shallow prettiness. Fair enough. But if we keep breathing reverently that our Sandra Hayes are beautiful, what are we going to say about Greta Garbo? ‘Witty’ was another. Sandra was trivially facetious. But then, to be fair, so were a lot of people he knew who were given this accolade. True wit is one of the great weapons of the spirit, he thought, a refusal to surrender to experience - not picking your neighbour's pocket. ‘Vitality,’ they said of Sandra, and appeared
to Tom to mean supermarket enthusiasm. Sandra enthused about everything. Show her any top and she would go over it. She created oral poems to wall plaques and new refrigerators. ‘Very intelligent,’ people said, and he had never heard Sandra utter an original or perceptive remark. If Sandra should ever have an original idea, he pitied it, for it would die a lonely death in search of company in there.

He had to draw back a bit because it wasn't Sandra he resented. What he resented was the burden of false glamour Sandra was made to carry. It was what she represented in the life he found himself living that he resented. For although the quarrel Gill and he had about her that night seemed irrelevant and disproportionate, it wasn't quite as irrelevant or disproportionate as it seemed. They knew in a way what they were talking about, although they couldn't expect anybody else to.

The reason Sandra had been one focus for their quarrels hadn't entirely escaped their comprehension. She was valid battleground. What their friends did with Sandra Hayes was, Tom thought, what they tried to do with life generally and it was something he had been fighting against for a long time. In falsifying Sandra, they were falsifying their sense of their own lives. In elevating her, they were elevating themselves. It was a simple act of cultural appropriation.

One way to avoid the awesomeness of mountains is to live where it is flat as far as the eye can see and never travel. Psychologically, that's what their way of life was doing. If Sandra Hayes was beautiful, then you could find your Naked Majas and Olympias on page three. If she was very intelligent, then so were they, because they could appreciate her intelligence. By an inverted alchemy, they could transmute the rare gold of the world into the ubiquitous base metal of their own lives.

Ah, the polite viciousness of bourgeois life that with false generosity to some bestows mediocrity upon all. The key is language. When words depreciate, our awarenesses go with them. Intensity dilutes and a gantry of potent spirits is replaced by the insipid afternoon tea of complacency. He supposed Sandra was for him some kind of high priestess of that decadent cult.

For a long time he had feit himself a heretic among them, writing his own apocrypha - not just in the books he had
published. He had developed such anti-social tendencies that he had started to write a sort of private dictionary, a notebook where he tried to establish his own understandings, his own definitions of honour and pride and tragedy. This notebook was his conspiracy with himself, a linguistic revolutionary caucus of one. He had shown it to no one but that hadn't stopped Gill from finding it. Fortunately, she seemed to have skim-read it, so that her mockery was generalised and felt a bit like being beaten with a loofah.

‘Sandra Hayes
is
beautiful,’ Gill said.

‘I pass,’ Tom said again.

Did he hell! But he might as well let Gill start the fight. He liked counter-punching. ‘She
is
beautiful.’

He was aware of Elspeth glancing at Brian, baffled by the tension she had created. Brian responded by adopting a jocular interventionist voice.

‘Who's this we're talking about, you two?’

‘Sandra Hayes,’ Gill said as if that explained everything.

‘You know her, Brian,’ Elspeth said.

‘Who?’

‘Sandra Hayes!’

There followed a fairly long discussion between Elspeth and Brian about who Sandra Hayes was. It was one of those ‘That party where the woman fainted’ conversations, getting lost among memories that led to other memories that became a labyrinth where everybody seemed to be wandering except Sandra Hayes. Brian steadfastly didn't know her. You could see the suspicion begin to grow in Elspeth that Brian was being deliberately obtuse. She was becoming querulous, perhaps convinced that he was hiding from his responsibility to take her side. How could he defend her opinion of Sandra Hayes if he couldn't remember her? She was getting so exasperated that she was going in for a little role reversal - the headmaster as dumb primary pupil.

‘You're always doing that,’ she said. ‘Your memory's pathetic.’