The Kiln. William McIlvanney

       “Rock Around the Clock,” written by Max Freedman and Jimmy DeKnight, © 1954 Edward Kassner Music Co. Ltd. for the World. Used by permission, all rights reserved.

      Copyright © 1996 William Mcllvanney

      This digital edition published in Great Britain in 2014 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

      First published in 1996 by Hodder and Stoughton

      The moral right of the author has been asserted

      All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

      British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

       A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      ISBN 9781782111917

       www.canongate.tv

      For Joan and for my nephews and

      nieces and their families –

      theirs is the true story.

      At the moment of writing the author is Active. Only the story is real.'

      – Tom Docherty

      ‘You must find the way to let the heat of experience temper your naivety without reducing your idealism to ashes.’

      – Jack Laidlaw

      Contents

       VORFREUDE?

       IT IS SUNDAY MORNING

       TE AMO DEL UNO AL NUEVE

       FATHER'S OCCUPATION:

       THAT WINK STANDS LIKE A MONOLITH IN HIS MEMORY.

       HE COMES UPON THE CASANOVA METHOD.

       MADDIE FITZPATRICK'S SHOES THAT DAY.

       GET YOUR GLAD RAGS OFF AND JOIN ME, HON.

       AT LEAST WITH HIS FATHER THERE HAD BEEN SOME WARNING.

       THE HERO MAKES A LIFE-AFFECTING DECISION.

       THE KETTLE SCREAMS AS LOUD AS A FACTORY WHISTLE.

      IT IS AS IF, he would think, who I thought I was has dried up like a well and I have to find again the source of who I am.

      HE WOULD REMEMBER THE JOURNEY back home from Grenoble through Heathrow Airport, the uncertainty of it, how it is better to travel in doubt than to arrive, and how every stage of his returning reminded him forcefully that the man who was going back to Graithnock was still the boy who had left it, and that the summer of the kiln continued to happen in him.

      He would be puzzled by repeating moments of that summer, their small persistence, amazed at the disparity between the triviality of the incident and the longevity of its endurance, like coming upon an octogenarian mayfly. They came, it seemed, of their own volition. No doubt they were occasioned by some sequence of thoughts which he could not retrace. But they were for him not logically explicable. Whatever purpose he had been imagining himself to have in wandering whatever corridors of the mind, it seemed the purpose had been ambushed. It was as if a door, in some corridor down which he was passing, were suddenly to open for no reason, spontaneously.

      And there in a long-forgotten place, lit by a long-dead sun or by a light-bulb which had burned out years ago, were places and people he had known. The places were as they had been, unchanged. The long-abandoned furniture was neatly in place. The people were still talking animatedly about problems long since resolved, still laughing, still saying words that he could hear, still brewing tea that had been drunk. They could be young who were now old. They could be alive who were now dead.

      ‘OH, HERE,’ Auntie Bella says.

      She stops at the living-room door with her leather message-bag. She's so notorious for taking slow departures that nobody ever sees her to the front door any more. It can get too cold. She seems to remember everything she had originally meant to say just as she is leaving.

      ‘Ye can watch the seasons change just listenin’ to Bella sayin' cheerio,' Tam's father has said.

      ‘Ah met Mary Boland at the shops there. She was tellin’ me whidyimacallum's been in a car crash.'

      Eventually, she finds the surname she is looking for. It belongs to a well-known and very right-wing politician. His name has for a long time been the equivalent of a swear-word in the house, about as pleasant to contemplate as Sir Anthony Eden's election win for the Tories in May.

      ‘Oh, that's right,’ Tam's mother says. ‘It was in the six o'clock news. Wasn't it. Conn?’

      ‘Well?’ Auntie Bella is waiting. ‘What's the word?’

      ‘Said his condition was very satisfactory,’ Tam's father says. So Ah'm assumin' he's dead.'

      HERE HE WOULD SIT, he decided, remembering both the journey from Grenoble and the earlier summer it had reactivated, as if they were the latitude and longitude of a confused life by which he might fix where he was, beyond the physical. The physical was simple enough. It was a rented flat in Edinburgh, near the Water of Leith. The way he felt, it might as well be the Water of Lethe. For he was aging and so many of the things he dreamt would happen hadn't happened and wouldn't happen for him now. And what had happened, he still couldn't be sure. By the waters