The Kiln. William McIlvanney
smoke the pipe.’
Anger would have been easier to take. The gentleness of his father's voice is very painful, kindness as whiplash. His father is reading the paper again, repeatedly pushing up his glasses with his forefinger as they repeatedly slide down his nose. Tam is still standing. His father glances up again.
‘It's okay, Tam. Ah've got the pipe here.’
‘Aye.’
The border is closed. He feels again that sense of his parents' dismay with him. What's their problem? ‘Where did we go wrong, Betsy?’ his father will say. ‘What did we do to deserve this?’ his mother will say. Come on. He's not an axe murderer - though if they keep this up, who knows? Tommy Borden with an axe … If they only knew some of the things he wants to do, fantasises doing. They should count themselves lucky, he has often thought. They should think about how some parents must really wonder how their children turned out the way they did.
He turns away and comes upstairs and shuts the door of Michael and Marion's room.
(Dear Parents of Attila the Hun,
Where do you think you went wrong?)
BRIGHT SUNLIGHT INFUSES THE ROOM. It says in the papers that this July could have the highest sunshine figure for any month of any year since they started keeping records in 1921. It certainly makes things look better. Seen in this light, the place looks like an advert for domestic life. The permanently set-up card table with its chequered cover, where Marion and Michael take their meals, resonates with sharp colours of red and white. The floral easy chairs with wooden arm-rests sit on each side of the fire. Michael and Marion have the only bedroom with a fireplace, because this is their living-room as well as where they sleep. The fire is cleared and set with firelighters and rolled-up newspaper and a few sticks and small pieces of coal, waiting for the first match of autumn. This looks like a good place to be.
He comes here every Sunday, when Marion and Michael stay overnight at her mother's, to replenish his purposes at the beginning of each week. This is one of the essential places of the summer, along with the kitchen, the Grand Hall, the Queen's Cafe, the brickwork, the countryside round Bringan, the pictures, the inside of a book. These are landmarks for the wild wanderings of his mind. Here Sunday merges with Sunday - different occasions, same troubled and unresolved time.
Sometimes the scene excludes him. He doesn't belong. This is a place for people who seem to know who they are, what their lives are about. They seem to have things worked out. He tries to fit in.
He takes Michael's ashtray and places it on the tiled hearth beside Michael's chair. He sits down and lights a cigarette. He begins to read the paper. He smokes. He has seen his father do this. He has seen Michael do this.
But it doesn't work. He feels like a bad actor. He is imitating the attitudes of others without personal conviction. Self-doubts invade him. He thinks of The Chair. Even when it sits empty at the piece-break, it is more full of Cran than this chair is full of him at the moment. He is simultaneously smoking suavely and brimming with panic, the terror of having to be who he doesn't know how to be.
He leaves his cigarette burning in the ashtray and crosses towards Marion's dressing-table. He kneels down in front of it, as if it were an altar. He does this every Sunday and every Sunday his image floats back at him like a ghost. He stares at himself in the mirror. Who is that? It could be anybody. What is the secret people like his father and Cran and Michael have? Michael is only eight years older than he is but he seems like an awfully big brother. He's married now and working in the creamery and Marion is pregnant. He has done his National Service. He served in Berlin at the time of the Berlin Airlift. He seems so relaxed about everything. How do you get like that?
Tam watches his own jumpy eyes in the mirror. He has no substance as a person, he realises with panic. The mirror is composed of one centrepiece and two side flaps, which move on hinges. He pulls the flaps in towards him so that by looking in one flap he can see the back of his head in the other. That is what people coming behind him see. It looks solid and masculine. Maybe he should practise walking backwards so that people won't see the nervousness in his eyes.
(‘There's a real man. He walks funny, right enough. But he looks like a real man.')
He studies himself frontally again. The nose is all right.
(‘Where d’ ye get that nose, our Tam?' Michael once said. ‘It's the only straight wan in the family. It's about half the size o’ ma feyther's.'
‘When God wis givin’ them out,' his father said, ‘Ah thought they were for eatin’. So Ah took the biggest one Ah could find.'
‘Naw, it's odd, though,’ Michael said. ‘You didny have a wee thing wi’ a passin' gypsy. Mammy?'
‘Aye,’ his mother said. ‘But that wis you. Dark-haired and shiftless. Except that you're blond. It was a blond gypsy.’)
The hair could be better. There is plenty of it but it's much too fine. He insisted on getting a crew-cut last year, against the advice of Mr Guthrie, the barber who is also a phrenologist. (‘You're an intellectual, son. I can tell by the bumps.’) The result was an unqualified disaster. Separate strands of hair kept waving in all directions. He went about for a fortnight like a porcupine. That was his first experience of being a recluse.
He stares in the mirror and wishes he were John Garfield. He is not. He is Thomas Mathieson Docherty, who still hasn't come near to fulfilling any of the five ambitions he set for himself this summer: to have sex (preferably with a human being but let's not be too choosy); to face up to Cran; to read as many books as possible; to come to terms with his partial estrangement from his family and friends; to begin his life's work as a writer.
He has told John Benchley about wanting to start what John calls ‘the magnum opus’ before the end of the summer. It seems a reasonable enough idea. His example is Thomas Chatterton, ‘the marvellous boy’. But he feels he should make a few modifications to the model. The fact that Chatterton committed suicide at seventeen doesn't seem to him an example he should necessarily follow, especially since he hasn't really written anything he likes yet and this doesn't give him much time. He will be eighteen in November. What does appeal to him about Chatterton was his hunger for fame while he was more or less young enough to enjoy it. For anything beyond about twenty-five seems to him to be bordering on the twilight world.
(Dear Thomas Chatterton,
Could you not have given it another week or two?)
But that project isn't going well. He has just abandoned his second attempt to find the form for what he wants to say.
The clock striking another nail into my tomb.
The creak of darkness closing in the rain—
This painted night locks up her hired room.
Straightens her clothes and takes to the streets again.
My mind like a miser huddled on his hams
Counts his beliefs like pennies in his palms.
The loose change of my father's prodigal ease,
A vast inheritance of verdigris.
The future flutters fiercely for release.
Caged in the rusty past.
The present's fingers bleed on the rusted bolts.
The key is lost.
Each man who lives must live towards a grief
And while he lives must bear mutation out.
The world turns not on faith but disbelief
And here the final certainty is doubt.
We meet no god in names that we create.
We meet our own refusal to continue.
God waits for us in loving and in hate.
In action's arm and in endeavour's sinew.
Himself he gave us in the things we are
And