The Kiln (8 page)

‘D'you see that?’ he said involuntarily.

‘What?’ Gill said.

She was checking Megan, who would be two years old at that time and strapped into the child's seat in the back, and he felt the wantonness of the betrayal and compounded it with deceit.

‘Barefoot in this weather,’ he said, and stored in his head that image, innocent enough in itself but also like a talisman betokening the continuing possibility of an unforeseen and chance future which would not grow naturally out of his present.

And within the car within the cafe, like a box within a box within a box, he remembered sitting in a bus in Graithnock on a day of intense heat, and he would know again the feelings of that summer, that they were not dead but boarded in him somewhere still, lonely and gibbering and dissatisfied, like Mrs Rochester in her attic, denied by practical circumstance and the pretences of society but denying them in return, haunting them with longings they could not meet.

A GIRL COMES ON TO THE BUS
who is a woman walking naked with clothes on. She wears a blue cotton dress. She has black hair, so carelessly abundant that he feels he could make his home there. Her face is broad and sensuous, with lips that seem poised for the next bite. The eyes, ah well, the eyes. He suspects they are the sort of eyes the passionless would describe as ‘come-to-bed’ eyes. They aren't come-to-bed eyes. Who needs a bed? All Tam knows is that when he looks in her eyes he thinks he can see all the way down to the dark place.

Her body isn't describable by him any more than he could inventory the happening of a thunderstorm. It drenches him in its presence, that is all. When the dusty bus, which on this hot day is like a decrepit sauna on wheels, rattles to a halt, she comes on, looks at him, takes him in and turns away, yanking his heart out of his body as if it were attached to a string.

It no longer matters where he is going. Where can he be going that is more important than where she is? He experiences instantaneously the awesome sensation that he could forget he has relatives, abandon friendships, live anywhere, wrap his past up in the one small parcel and put a match to it, just to be with her.

She has noticed him. She has three friends with her and they all sit down across the passageway, taking up two double seats. She is at the window of the further forward of the two seats and, as she sits with her back against the glass, turning towards her friends, he and she can see each other. She will take a smile that she is giving to one of her friends and pass it on to him. Her eyes keep coming back to his, resting on them thoughtfully, and he seems hardly capable of looking away from her at all. They are having a brief affair of the eyes, optical copulation in public. There is no self-conscious regality about her but you can see that her friends are her ladies-in-waiting. She's the one, dispensing a shower of light in which they bathe.

The longer she sits, the more intimately interlocked their eyes become. But she and her friends rise to go several stops before he is due to get off. She pauses briefly in passing and looks down at him. The proximity of her vivid face and body blots out the rest of the day. She smiles at him and then her lips form an infinitesimal ‘ooh’ sound and she is gone.

As he sits stunned in his seat while the bus pulls away, he looks out of the window. She has been walking off, chatting to her friends, when she suddenly, and obviously without warning to them, turns away from them and back towards the bus. She stands quite openly on the kerb and stares at him and smiles and waves. Her face seems to him to be expressing a kind of wistfulness that nothing more has happened between them.

He is breathless with longing. He feels a panic that makes him unable to sit still. He has never seen her before. Some phrases
of conversation he has caught tell him that she isn't Scottish. Maybe she is visiting relatives and will leave for ever tomorrow, or today. The way she looks, maybe she is the Lady of Shalott just out on a day-trip to the twentieth century. This could be his only chance.

He gets off the bus at the next stop. He runs all the way back to where she had stood on the kerb. Obviously, she isn't there. He starts to wander the streets around the area. He looks in shops. He checks a couple of cafes. Nothing else matters. He has become a mad seeker for lost love. For more than two hours he scours the day, drenched in sweat that comes partly from the heat but partly from the imagined possibilities that hold him in a fever. As each compulsive, desperate step seems to bring him relentlessly nearer to the final and irrevocable admission that she is no longer there and may never be again, he curses himself as a weakling, a bloody robot so programmed into habit that when experience suddenly opens up before him and says. Turn here for El Dorado,' he is likely to reply, ‘Sorry, that would be great. But it's not on my itinerary for today. I've arranged to go to the shops.’

He cannot believe it. For several long, luxurious minutes, an amazing possibility has shimmered before him. Five minutes later, it is gone - for good, he fears. He stands breathing heavily on the corner of a street that is busy with everyone in the world, it seems, except her. He knows, he just knows, that if only he could meet her again, something wonderful and important and maybe life-changing would happen between them. And he goes on looking.

And he never sees her again.

IDEALS
, he would sometimes fear, were like items you packed in your luggage and took with you everywhere and then never got to wear. For they never really fitted anyone. But you kept looking at them lovingly in private and trying them on secretly from time to time. They were the you you longed to appear as but couldn't quite find the occasion for.

Perhaps that was why he sometimes felt that everything he did was just a substitute for what he should really be doing, whatever that was. There was often the sense of being a surrogate of himself, an impostor in his own life, the servant of his circumstances and not their master. He supposed the feeling might be related to his attempts to write, that compulsion that precluded him from merely accepting who he was and sharing it with others. He must always be trying to use his own experience to project imaginatively into experience he had never had. The other self that was the writing could ghost through the most ordinary actions, haunting them with dissatisfaction, some vague demand for more.

Such talent to create as he had, he thought once, was like having an elephant on a leash. It complicated your entire life. It forbade the using of itself merely for enjoyment. It seemed to invite you to a banquet of life and then you found that you couldn't get through the door to where the revelry was without leaving it behind. And if you did leave it behind, you couldn't be sure it would be there when you came back.

These self-doubts left him vulnerable daily to a host of practical questions most other people dealt with automatically.

‘
SO WHAT'S HAPPENING?'
Gill said.

The remark was innocent as an ambush. He thought of the talk between husbands and wives, the tripwires of hurt that could be hidden in a phrase, how casual conversation became mined with the resentments of the past and needed careful stepping, a delicate evasiveness, zig-zagging answers. What's happening? We're losing ourselves down endless quarrels. We're discovering that betrayal may be buried but doesn't die and that no place can be as lonely as a bed. What's happening?

‘Ah have to go back tae Scotland obviously,’ he said. ‘Come on. Gill. We've talked about this.’

‘You're definitely doing it?’

‘Ye think Ah've got an option?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Ah suppose ye're right. Ah could always be a bastard.’

‘What do you mean “could be”?’

‘Oh, aye.’

He recognised this bleak terrain. He should do. He had helped to make it. This was where rusted hopes lay abandoned and the ground was trafficked into mud where nothing grew. This was no-man's land. Across it they observed each other, sniping casually and sporadically.

She was unpacking the things she had bought. Hopelessness goes on shopping. Even futility has to be fed. He noticed hurtingly how attractive she was, someone he could have fallen for in another situation, rather like a soldier realising that he might have been best mates with one of the enemy if there hadn't been a war on. She put the three baguettes on the table. Bread-shells.

‘Have you phoned already?’ she said.

‘Ah phoned Michel. I go from Grenoble to Paris by train. He's going to meet me at the station. We go to the Cafe de Flore. Colette'll pick me up there. She'll drive me to Charles de Gaulle. I get the plane to Heathrow. Heathrow to Glasgow.’

‘It's well organised, isn't it?’

‘That's what you do when you're travelling. It's got the edge on hitching.’

She put the melon in the fridge. He was trying to choose a book to take with him from the four he was holding.

‘You're all packed, I notice,’ she said.

‘You're the one who wanted to bring us to Grenoble,’ she said.

‘What about your students?’ she said.

‘So what about Megan and Gus and me?’ she said.

‘We're your family, too,’ she said. ‘Or is family only where you come from?’

She had seen the suitcase in the hall. To call his vague gathering of chance clothing ‘packing’ was a misuse of a word. At least he had put in his one formal suit, just in case. Just in bloody case.

They had discussed coming to Grenoble and they had both agreed on it.

He had phoned Joe and postponed his classes. It was just a matter of tying up the loose ends of the semester. Anyway, did she think that was a major issue in the scale of what was happening?

She reminded him of the first inspector who had assessed him at the end of his first year of teaching in a secondary school. He sat in on several lessons and then told Tom that he was a competent teacher. But there was one serious problem. Tom's record of work was not up to date. Any teacher taking over from him would be confused as to exactly what stage the classes had reached on the course. The inspector stared solemnly at Tom, as if he had terminal cancer. Had he realised the gravity of this?

‘Imagine it,’ the inspector said. ‘What would happen if you were knocked down by a bus? What do we do then?’

(Tom had a sudden, dislocated image of himself lying under the wheels of a bus. A solicitous crowd has gathered. As they bend over him, straining to catch his last words, they eventually realise that he is gasping, ‘My . . . record . . . of . . . work. Is. In my desk in Room Two. It's . . . under the register. It's not’ - tears course down his cheeks - ‘up to date.’ He dies unfulfilled.)

Tom stared solemnly at the inspector, as if he had terminal cancer.
What do we do then?
‘Shove your record of work as far up your arse as you can get it,’ he wanted to say. ‘I'll have more to worry me.’ Instead he looked away in embarrassment, hoping his expression was conveying an adequately chastened awareness of what was important in life, as indeed it was.

Gill and Megan and Gus would probably survive for a little while without him. Did love of the family you came from diminish your love for the family you made? He would have thought it would augment it. I could not love ye, kids, so well loved I not others, too. The best gift I can give you is the truth of myself, as benignly and as honestly as I can give it, and that includes a passionate concern for people living beyond the enchanted circle of us four.

He heard Megan and Gus playing in another part of the house. May his and Gill's damaged lives never quite reach them. Forgive us for the gifts we give our children.

He chose the poems of Catullus, translated by Frederic Raphael and Kenneth McLeish - immortal trivia, living disrobed of false ideals, the scurrility of unacknowledged individual experience within social pretence. The randomness of the choice didn't help his state of mind. Did anything form a coherent pattern? He watched while Gill moved about the same room as he sat
in but a different one. He couldn't quite believe that this was Grenoble or that he was going back to Graithnock.

He remembered a feeling that had often come upon him in his teens. He would be reading and suddenly a perfectly ordinary word - it might be ‘doorway’ or ‘bus’ - would turn into a weird hieroglyph. He couldn't imagine where the word came from or what it was supposed to mean. The continuity of the text fused and only that single word palpitated and glowed in the surrounding darkness, as if a flying saucer had arrived from another universe and he was the only one to see it. And through that fissure in assumed normality poured the overwhelming mystery of things.

Or he was in a room with which he was familiar, perhaps in John Benchley's house. He knew every piece of furniture and an armchair suddenly disjointed from the coherence of the room and was an incomprehensible extrusion, an alien in an ordinary day. The pattern of the cloth which covered it seemed impossibly intricate and bizarre. He wondered who could have made it and how it came to be in this place. It was as if he became immediately aware that all the contexts of his life, among which he moved so confidently and assumptively, were as fragile and as wilfully invented and as unreal as a backcloth in a theatre, and the cloth had just ripped and he glimpsed beyond it the real, ubiquitous, breathing and impenetrable dark.

Why did that feeling happen to him?

‘
YOU'RE REALLY A MYSTIC
,’ John Benchley replies. ‘But then a lot of teenagers are.’

He is in the sitting-room of his manse where he lives with his very elderly housekeeper, Mrs Malone, whose smile is a wince in disguise. The manse is on a hill beside the church and evening is gathering slowly in the room. Through the wide window a long low bank of cloud is reddening like a hillfire. The books that line the walls are receding into darkness, as if rejoining the past from which they emerged. The coal fire is hypnotic with blue flame.

‘All young people are expatriates, I suppose. They come from
another country and they haven't quite settled in this one. They don't quite know the customs here. Some learn more slowly than others.’