The Kiln (7 page)

On the way home it started to rain and they took shelter in a phone box in which someone had broken the light. It became the most erotic experience of his life so far. He does not know why it should have been so intense. Maybe it was the excitement of being simultaneously so public and so private. There was glass round them on three sides and yet they were invisible, at least from a distance. The rain came down like a defensive wall. Maybe it was the inescapable closeness, as if just by entering the phone box they had gone past each other's inhibitions. There were no gestures of distancing they could make in this confined space. Every movement became an involvement with the other.

They became impassioned before they knew it was happening. She had her hands inside his shirt, kneading him roughly, and his right hand was inside her pants, feeling the awesomeness of that bristly, secret hair, when she suddenly said, ‘Wait, there's someone coming.’ They pulled apart. She adjusted her skirt. He buttoned his raincoat over his open shirt. They stood casually with their backs to the street, as if they were innocently talking. ‘You're too dangerous for me,’ Margaret said mysteriously. The glass of the phone box was opaque with their breathing. He heard footsteps coming nearer. They stopped. There was a long moment while he wondered if it was a policeman. The door opened. He couldn't believe it. He turned round slowly and saw a man with a soft hat looking in.

‘This is an offence, you know,’ the man said, and let the door close and waited.

‘Oh my God,’ Margaret said. ‘That's my dad.’

He was a very big dad. They had no time to synchronise reactions. Margaret stepped out of the phone box immediately and Tam followed her, having buttoned up his coat.

The three of them stood in sheeting rain. Margaret put up
her umbrella. Tam envied her possession of a prop. It gave her something to do. All Tam could do was stand there swaying slightly with nerves, like a potted plant, being battered by the rain. He felt disadvantaged by her father's hat. He felt as if he had wandered into a scene from
The Maltese Falcon
by mistake, one in which he had no lines.

‘You,’ Margaret's father pointed at her. ‘Home, lady. You,’ he pointed at Tam. ‘I've a good mind to take you over the park and give you a hiding.’

‘And what will Ah be doin’ while you're doin' it?' Whose voice was that? It wasn't him speaking. It was some instinct he hadn't known was there, expressing itself through him. ‘Ah wouldn't let ma father do that? Why should Ah let you?’

That sounded good. It sounded really good. His voice had somehow transformed his fragile timorousness into something strong and threatening, a chihuahua barking through a megaphone. It had worked. But it had worked too well.

‘Right. Come on. Let's see.’

Suddenly, they were walking towards Piersland Park. This was ridiculous but Tam couldn't think of anything else to do except walk beside the stranger. With his shirt unbuttoned to the waist inside his closed raincoat, he was freezing, but he didn't think it would be a good idea to button it up just now. That wouldn't be an action calculated to calm this big man down. Tam was wondering if he could turn embarrassing partial nudity to advantage by stripping off coat, jacket and shirt as one when they reached the park. That might look impressive. Come ahead. You're dealing with somebody here that's keen for action. That might give him a head start. ‘Half of fightin's psychology,’ his father had told him once. ‘Most losers lose of a fractured heart.’ But what about the other half? He remembered Michael clapping him on the shoulder once, withdrawing his hand in mock pain and saying, ‘Christ, Ah've cut maself. Tam, you've got shoulders like razor-blades.’ Tam Docherty stripped was not going to be the most intimidating sight. He was probably going to get hammered.

How did he get from the warmth of Margaret's body to this? The prospect of rolling about in the rain getting his head punched in? And Margaret was clicking along behind them. What was she going to do? Referee? Life was ridiculous.

‘This is ridiculous,' her father said.

He had stopped. Tam stopped. Margaret stopped.

‘Just leave my daughter alone. Okay? Come on, Margaret.’

The two of them walked away. Tam stood alone in the rain. He was both relieved and cheated. He knew this was just postponement of the inevitable. For he would have to find out some time what it would have been like in that darkened park - and it might have been better to find out from Mr Inglis than some of the Teddy-boys at the dancing.

‘Remember. Leave her alone,’ Mr Inglis shouted back.

But he hadn't. There were still those anarchic schooldays just before the summer holidays, when senior pupils lounged in the prefects' room and played shove-ha'penny and chess and briefly acted as if they owned the school. He talked to Margaret a lot and eventually she agreed to meet him outside Boots on Friday night. She agreed on the day he was leaving to look for a job. He didn't go back to school.

Meanwhile, came the plook - a record-breaking mound of white right on the tip of his nose.

‘That's not a plook you've got there, Tam,' Michael said. ‘Ah think it's a Siamese twin.’

Everything he did to hurry it on only made it last longer. It seemed to have the gestation period of an elephant, which was appropriate to its dimensions. Early Friday evening, he moped in front of Marion's mirror, feeling like a Quasimodo whose hump has transmigrated to his nose. He applied some of Marion's face powder but that only seemed to make it more conspicuous, seeming to him as vivid as the gentian violet that had shamed some of his classmates in primary school. Wiping the powder off, he saw his nose glow blindingly again, a light-bulb with the shade removed.

He stood Margaret up. He stood her up. It was the only time in his life he had done that. He thought if she saw him like that she might not want to see him again. He keeps hoping she will turn up at the dancing. But she never does.

He stares at his plookless face in the mirror and thinks that he looks not bad today. Margaret, where are you now?

‘Tom!’

His mother is calling him down for his dinner. If he had been
born into a wealthy family, she would be calling him down for lunch. Or maybe a servant would be striking a gong. (His mother's voice sounds a bit like a gong - To-o-o-o-m.)

Either way, it would still be a pain in the bloody arse -the knight's quest for himself constantly interrupted by trivial irrelevancies.

AT LEAST HUNGER IS A CONSTANT
, he would think. No matter what pretensions you had about yourself, your stomach was always waiting to bring them down to the ordinary. It was like the man who stood behind the triumphant Roman general on his chariot, while he took the plaudits of the crowd, and said, ‘Remember thou art but mortal.’ Is that what he said? Something like that. Anyway, what your stomach said was, ‘You better eat.’ In the tracklessness of thought, that was some kind of basic compass. In the confusion of selfhood, it was some kind of crude badge of identity. Even in the ecstasies of the mystics, there must have been a lot of bellies rumbling. Maybe that was what they mistook for the music of the spheres. You better eat.

Jesus, look at that fridge. It was like the laboratory of Sir Alexander Fleming. Get your home-made penicillin here. He would soon be frightened to open the door because, when he did, behold - a small abandoned universe of determined life. Cheese where lichen grows. Fruit that nurtures a dark, internal being. All around, small clumps of fungi continue their furious and meaningless existence and, when the god who carelessly created them absent-mindedly shuts the door, are plunged again into cold darkness.

He could forget about something to eat. Suicide by Roquefort. Stick to the liquid nutrition. He'd better clean it out in the morning. Before they all came out to get him like the invasion of the body-snatchers. The bastards.

He filled out another whisky, watered it and went back through to the living-room. Lit only by the light from the gas fire and the reading lamp that made a small bell of brightness on the table by
the window, the darkened room seemed mysterious beyond the purpose to which he was putting it. He crossed it as if it was a walk-through painting of someone else's place.

Shit, he thought as he sat back down at the table, I'll have to stop thinking like this. It's just a room in a rented flat. Why see it in any other way? Was that tendency what had been wrong with his life all along? He hoped not. He distrusted romanticism.

But he wondered about that fixation with Margaret Inglis. Was it not partly about his sense of her as being not quite attainable? And Maddie Fitzpatrick. What chance could he ever have imagined he would have with her? And he remembered the girl on the bus, who had haunted him all that summer.

Something Jack Laidlaw had said some years ago came back to him. Four of them - Vic Vernon, Ray Harrison, Jack and himself - had been drinking in the Admiral in Glasgow. Ray had been teasing Jack about not having settled with a woman after his divorce. ‘Philanderer’ was mentioned.

‘I'm not a philanderer,’ Jack said. ‘Several hundred women will testify to that.’

They had all laughed. But the joke bothered him. He didn't believe it was true of Jack. And he knew it wasn't true of himself. He could only remember about a couple of one-night stands. Otherwise he had only made love within a relationship, even if it was a brief one.

But then why was he sitting here alone? It wasn't because he wanted the freedom to be promiscuous. If it had been, why was he living like a hermit? And he had always suspected sexual romanticism in relationships as being for some a means of justifying promiscuity. He had known people like that, both women and men, but mainly men.

They made such demands on the other that she must disappoint. The disappointment recreated a romantic vulnerability that made the man attractive to and attracted by a new woman. She thought she would be the one to give his restlessness a home. But in order to do so she would have to kill the very dynamic of his nature - his searching romanticism. His instinctive realisation of this danger made him dissatisfied with her and critical of her and the only mode of survival was by renewal of the quest. The cycle could begin again. Romanticism could only be in the search. To
accept that you had found the object of the search was to commit a kind of suicide of the romantic self.

Also, he thought, sexual romanticism often had a very pragmatic method which it could contrive to conceal from itself in order to maintain its faith in its own romanticism - for example, by keeping many apparently innocent social contacts with women, like lines trawling in the sea. If nothing happened, nothing happened. But if the woman gave a hint of romantic interest the romantic was ready to take advantage of it - the bait had been taken. But the romantic could still convince himself that he had been surprised by coincidence, did not contrive his own ambush. Isn't romance wonderfully, undeniably spontaneous? The machinery of seduction had been kept concealed, was ostensibly separate from the seemingly spontaneous result.

Thus, those who profess the purity of their romanticism, their removal from baser motives of self-seeking and pleasure profiteering, are often street traders in emotion, barrow-boys of the affections - magpies pretending to be lovebirds.

He didn't believe he had done that. But then why was he sitting here alone? He couldn't exactly claim that he hadn't met any terrific women. Why wasn't he with one of them now? Or was it that good creates the appetite for best and baffles choice? At least in some people. To seek the impossible ideal was a perfect way of never connecting finally with anyone.

But that wasn't him, he thought. Surely not. Let us pray. Surely not.

But

TE AMO DEL UNO AL NUEVE

IN A CAFÉ IN BUENOS AIRES
, near the Plaza de Mayo, he would sit with Cristina Esposito and she would be explaining to him the meaning of that sentence. I love you from one to nine.
Without zero.
Sin cero. Sincero.
She had a torn-off piece of grey napkin paper and a biro pen and she was breaking down the words for him as if they were an equation. She was speaking with the preoccupied pedantry of a schoolmistress. She looked as if she were trying to explicate some impractical science of the passions. In the space between her fussy manner and her luxuriance of chestnut hair, the black eyes where tapers of intensity came and went and the astonishingly mobile lips speaking a silent sub-text that sometimes made him forget to hear the real words, he sensed the impossible place where, though he could not remember the moment of choosing, he had perhaps chosen to live, where passionate compulsion could find no way to cohabit with necessary pragmatism.

Across the cafe, a middle-aged man looked up from his thoughts towards them. He smiled and winked, seeming to understand where he and Cristina were. In that generous Latin way of joining in other people's parades, he made an elaborate sidelong glance towards Cristina's intensity.

‘Esta noche,’
he said. He pointed at him threateningly. Tonight. You. He made a throat-cutting gesture.

‘No hay problema,’
he had replied.
‘Viva la muerte,’
grateful for having read Robert Lowell. Manifold were the uses of literacy.

He felt in that moment the strangeness of his being here, simultaneously the joy of Cristina's presence and the anguish of its fleetingness. It was as if the poignancy of this time lay in their inability to sustain it. Maybe if you make what is wild captive, you destroy its nature. He had that familiar, haunting sense that his emotions and his practical experience lived in separate but parallel universes and he wondered if he would ever manage to make them live permanently together. It was a feeling less of déjà vu than
déjà senti
, a sense of the impossibility of what is happening. Was it that very impossibility that attracted him, like a brief escape from the cage of time and circumstance?

Within the cafe, like a box within a box, occurred a car. He was driving with Gill in Ireland. It was the kind of day he associated with Ireland, bright and windy, the weather good enough to let you see the greenery but not good enough to let you luxuriate in it - a beautiful virago. He was rounding a corner when the image of a woman hit the windscreen like a hand grenade, blinding him.
She was tall and her hair was threshing in the wind. She was barefoot and her shoes, the laces tied together, hung around her neck. She seemed to ride the wind like a witch, her simple dress blown along the contours of her rich body. The stunning face, in the second that she looked at him, was smiling - sardonically, it seemed to him, as if she knew that he was seeing the best place there was to be. And she was gone. Two children walked behind her. They were laughing. No wonder they were laughing.