The Kiln (17 page)

‘I vote for the latter theory,’ Michel said.

‘Thanks.’

Tom abraded the salt from his fingers into the ashtray.

‘I am sorry to have heard about your troubles,’ Michel said.

‘Yes. I'm not too pleased myself, I have to say.’

‘You are close?’

‘At one time, very. One of the compasses of my life.’

‘At least it will not be long now till you are home.
Colette arrive.’

Tom watched her walk. She was still unaware of them and Tom saw her as if she were a stranger, preoccupied in crossing the wide intersection outside the Cafe de Flore, just another Parisienne. He noticed how attractive she looked. It wasn't that she was conventionally pretty. It was that she rendered conventional prettiness irrelevant. She was so effortlessly and self-confidently herself. She looked womanly and strong, with that chic that seems to be genetic in some French women. He liked that in her.

He understood so many women's current dismissal of the need to look determinedly feminine, perhaps having been prepared by his awareness of the penal clothes Garbo had taken to in her retirement, as if serving a life sentence to atone for her earlier submission to the demands of her own beauty. And he would allow that the fifties might not have provided him with the ideal conditioning for seeing gender clearly. But then neither, as far as he could see, did the seventies. The distortions of conditioning were an inevitable part of growing up, he thought. No time's nurture was without its impurities.

What mattered, he supposed, was the justness of the tension you maintained between conditioning and the rational analysis of that conditioning. In that tension was developed honest selfhood. The conditioning remained a valid part of yourself. How could it be otherwise? To claim to have abandoned it entirely was to become an identikit of attitudes, not a person. A lot of people were guilty of that these days, he felt, preferring to stand on the stilts of a cause rather than wait to grow up into the impure complexity of being an individual.

You can't disown your past without becoming no one.

To challenge conditioning without trying to eradicate it, to modify it honestly in the light of individual thought, was to become yourself. The rest was an act of psychic self-deceit. He wouldn't be pretending to be who he wasn't.

ONE THING HE HAD TO ADMIT
. If he died dreaming of a woman, she wouldn't be wearing Doc Martens.

MADDIE FITZPATRICK'S SHOES THAT DAY
.

HE SEES HER IN THE LOCAL LIBRARY
in the Dick Institute. Can we create what we want to happen by imagining it intensely enough? Do we project events, precipitate them out of thoughts and wishes as well as having them simply occur to us? He has sometimes thought mistakenly that he has seen someone in the street only minutes before he sees that person in fact. Has he wished her into the library?

He sees Maddie Fitzpatrick. The very name, incanted like a silent charm in his mind, creates an aureole in which she stands. She is at the end of a corridor of books. Sunlight glistens the black, drooping hair that makes her face a secret between her and the book she is holding open. He shouldn't be able to tell that it is her but he can tell. The awkwardness of his breathing is instant recognition. Nobody else could make a yellow linen skirt, a yellow blouse and fawn high-heeled shoes seem to him as exotic as a yashmak. Her stockingless legs are unbelievable, light brown with summer. They keep making his mind follow them to where it shouldn't. Where she is the air looks clearer, a pellucid patch. Somehow she seems to consolidate the space about her, make it her own and distinct from the rest of the room, as if she creates a composition from whatever is around her and she is its centre, like the subject of a painting. This one is by Vermeer, whose work he has seen in an art book he found in this library. It was through the eyes of Vermeer he first saw the kind of light she stands in.

He doesn't approach. You cannot enter a painting. She stands there surrounded by the unimaginable difference of her experience and he is afraid. How can he ever come near her? How would he know what to say? The different, isolated space in which she stands leads from a past he will never know and towards a future he cannot imagine. He is a stranger in both places. Also, he associates her with his Uncle Josey. It was from him that Tam first heard her name and it was at his uncle's funeral that he first saw her and was spoken to by her.

She came up to him while he stood around aimlessly in his grandmother's house after the funeral. It had been a weird day. There was a service in the house without any ministers - just Alf Hanley, his Uncle Josey's best friend, speaking for several minutes. Then some of the men spoke at the graveside while
they all listened in a whipping wind - two dozen empty suits, Tam thought, his own included, flapping round a hole. Back at his grandmother's house, his social behaviour stalled on him completely. He couldn't participate. People were talking and drinking tea and eating sandwiches and some women were crying with his grandmother. He couldn't do anything. He didn't want to talk. He certainly couldn't cry.

Yet he thought he had loved his Uncle Josey. What was wrong? It was as if he felt resentment of his uncle. It was as if he needed to change his sense of him now that he was dead. He found himself remembering against his will things which he regarded as failings in his uncle. He hated himself for doing it but he couldn't stop doing it. Why?

—
AFTERWARDS
, he was to be several times in the company of an old man after the man's wife had died suddenly. The old man's grief began by iconising his dead wife. Her perfection was untarnished. Then, as time slowly and painfully passed, he began to desecrate the icon he had himself made. There was a story he was inclined to repeat about something which had happened over forty years ago.

The story was this: during the war, when fruit is a luxury, the man's mother comes to visit at his and his wife's house. The man is out at his work and, therefore, doesn't meet his mother but his wife tells him of her visit. A week later, the man visits his mother and she asks him how he enjoyed the bananas. He doesn't know what she is talking about but says they were fine. When he returns to his own house, he asks his wife what this means. His mother left him two bananas but his wife and her father ate them without mentioning them to him.

When he thought of the old man's story, as he sometimes did, he would wonder what it was exactly the old man had been doing in burnishing this story like an ornament he didn't like and giving it, however briefly, pride of place in his mind. How could something so minute give rise to such long pain? Then he would imagine that an untreated hurt might last for over forty
years. He would wonder if we need, somewhere in us, secretly to hoard the hurts those we love give us, to store them even against our conscious will, so that we may protect ourselves with them against the agony of an impossibly continuing love after those loved have left us. And he would wonder if that was what the old man had been doing and if that was what his teenage self had been doing when his Uncle Josey died.—

BUT
that day of the funeral he was simply standing, loathing himself, when Maddie Fitzpatrick came up to him.

‘Hullo. You're Tom, aren't you?’ she said.

He just about managed to realise that he was. He had noticed her as soon as she came in. He couldn't imagine doing anything else. He had been trying not to watch her all the time as she moved around the room, talking easily with whoever was beside her. Once she leant and kissed his grandmother. The demure black costume that she wore was defeated by her body, became, in spite of its plainness, a strikingly sensuous outfit. He had been frightened that, if he kept thinking about her, he would get an erection. That would be the final expression of his inability to feel what he should feel - an erection at a funeral.

Now, her beautiful face looking straight at him with its flecks of delicate brown in the eyes, the guilt of what he had been thinking surfaced in a blush. She smiled at him. Would she still be smiling if she could see inside his head?

‘I'm Maddie Fitzpatrick,’ she said. ‘We were friends of your Uncle Joe's. My husband and I.’

Naming his uncle as ‘Joe’ was like hearing her mention someone other than the man he had known. He wondered what they had talked about, although it was probably politics, he thought. He knew that she and her husband were members of the Communist Party, too. About all the Communist Party had meant to him so far was going to charity dances in the Bethany Hall and sliding up and down the floor with the other children while the grown-ups danced.

To the guilt of not being able to mourn for his uncle and the
guilt of thinking lustful thoughts about a woman at a funeral was added the guilt of being jealous of the time his uncle had spent with Maddie Fitzpatrick. He was a guilt machine today. Behold the evil one. He had to try and say something before he grew horns and cloven feet. Or before she decided he hadn't learned to talk yet.

‘He said,’ he said.

He blushed again.

‘He said about you.’

He felt like an Indian, talking in the basic way they talked in Hollywood films. How! Maybe that's what she liked about him. For she smiled again.

‘Your uncle talked about you a lot. He expected great things of you. I can see what he meant.’

He couldn't see what
she
meant. He tried to smile and his upper lip froze above his teeth. But it wasn't like Humphrey Bogart. Humphrey Bogart wouldn't have been blushing again.

‘It's the eyes,’ she said. ‘You have sensitive eyes.’

Where he came from people didn't
say
things like that. He could find no way to react. He thought the redness of his face must be as bright as a poster colour. She took pity on him. She squeezed his arm gently.

‘Try not to get
too
hurt,’ she said, and moved on.

That was it, one moment when a shining presence had paused, like a film star, and autographed his life - ‘with best wishes’. He had never forgotten that occasion and sometimes-perhaps when he wasn't feeling good about himself, which was often enough -he would take it out again and hold it in his mind as if it were a talisman.

He had seen her again several times over the last couple of years. Once, in the street, they had stood and spoken for about an hour. She was always open and friendly to him, without a trace of that patronising distance some adults seemed to need to put between them and younger people. Yet he somehow managed to put that distance there himself, measured in awe. Why couldn't he be as open towards her as she was to him? He suspected it was because he thought of her in a way she didn't realise. He had a guilty secret about her, one he couldn't share with her. That guilt had grown as he grew up a little more. It was
because he wanted to be
so
close to her, like inside her pants, that he couldn't come close at all, in case he betrayed himself and her horrified shock spread to his family and everyone he knew.

Now, in the library, he stares at her secretly and longingly. He gets so excited that he has to walk away. If he goes up to speak to her, he is liable to start touching her curiously, like that Indian in the Western seeing his first white woman. He tries to lose himself in the labyrinth of books. He is picking books at random and opening them. He isn't seeing the words. Each page might as well be blank, a screen on which he is projecting his thoughts. The thoughts are wildly improbable.

(‘Hullo, Tom. My car's outside. Let's go to my house.' The background music is Nellie Lucher:

(‘Hullo, Tom. I've had enough of this pretence. I want you. What I want, I get. There's a park near here. It won't be busy just now.’

Ah, the delicious martyrdom of being an object of compulsive desire. Depravity without guilt. Who could blame a naive boy for being led like a lamb to the slaughter of his innocence? You could have it both ways. You get the pleasure, you don't pay the bill.)

(‘Hullo, Tom. I don't know how to say this. It's not the kind of thing you say in Graithnock library. I love you. I can't help it. Whatever you want to happen is what will happen. I'm in your hands.’)

(‘Tom?’)

The word is real. Maddie Fitzpatrick is standing beside him. He couldn't be more embarrassed if she had recognised him coming out of a brothel.

‘I thought it was you.’

But is it really him? She hasn't a clue about the rabid imaginings of the person standing in front of her. She mustn't know.

‘Hullo, Mrs Fitzpatrick,’ he says and, under the circumstances, that phrase, which is spoken in a steady voice, feels to him like an act of brilliant and elaborate duplicity.

‘I wasn't sure at first. You seem to be growing up more by the week these days. Like something in a hothouse.’ Maybe that's what happens when your foetid thoughts seem permanently to inhabit the tropics of desire. ‘You're quite the young man now. I heard you did very well in your highers. One more year at school then university, eh?’

‘No. Ah go in October.’

‘Oh. You really are in a hurry to grow up, aren't you?’

He almost wants to tell her that there's one crucial element missing for him in the process of growing up, and maybe she could help him there. But his mind puts a grille across the dungeon where such dark and misshapen wishes scream and gibber for release, while he tries to starve them to death. She reaches across and turns the book in his hand towards her, so that she can see the title on the spine. She bursts out laughing. She is laughing. She is looking at him wide-eyed. He realises with surprise what the book is. He is mortified. The hypocrisy of his pin-stripe behaviour is revealed. He might as well be a bank manager carrying around a placard reading: Head Full of Dirty Thoughts.

‘Dangerous Liaisons?’
she says. ‘Tom. What are you up to? Are you using this as a manual?’

He tries to laugh. It sounds like a clogged sink trying to drain.

‘Ah just picked it up there.’

‘Uh-huh. I assumed it hadn't jumped into your hand right enough.’

‘The French teacher's mentioned it. She told the class about it. Laclos.’

The mention of the author's name is an attempt to legitimise
his prurience. He is a scholar with a rather clinical interest in the classics of French literature. One has a duty to read such things in the quest for erudition. He doesn't add that when Miss Kimberley told them the name in French, the words almost gave him an orgasm.
Les Liaisons Dangereuses.
He couldn't have explained the effect those syllables had on him. But they went straight to his groin. God, did he want some sort of liaison that was amazingly dangereuse. The words connoted for him mad passion, sudden and cataclysmic, happening just out of sight of people going on with their routine lives. And afterwards, somehow, he and some mysterious woman reappearing, dressed in the pretence of nothing-has-happened, like a mask behind which they are smiling secretly at each other.

He also doesn't add that, since he has heard of the book, he picks it up almost every time he comes into the library and flicks through it, looking for the dirty bits. He has not been hugely successful. He has never quite recovered from his initial disappointment in discovering that the book is a bunch of letters. You wouldn't expect too many lurid details in a letter, at least not in any he has seen. (‘The weather hasn't been too great here lately but maybe it'll pick up.’) But he keeps trying. One day he is going to get up enough nerve to brass out the disapproval of the woman at the counter, the one with the grey hair and glasses and the big mole on her cheek. She's the one who threw him out for having dirty hands the first time he came in.

Now she seems to want him to wash his mind. When he took out
The Man Who Died
, he thought she was going to phone the police. (How did she know what it was like anyway? The title told you nothing. Has she read everything in the library? Or was it just because the author was D.H. Lawrence?) He's going to take
Dangerous Liaisons
up to the counter and get it stamped and bring it home so that he can conduct a proper search. But, obviously, it won't be today.

‘She told you about it, did she?’

‘Sorry?’

‘The French teacher. She told you about it, did she? What's her name? Brigitte Bardot?’