The Kiln. William McIlvanney
He can't cope with this. When he has settled down, he goes to hide in the bar in case another woman asks him to dance. His Uncle Charlie buys him a half of shandy and looks at him.
‘Anythin’ wrong, son?' he says.
He has always been able to talk to his Uncle Charlie and he is so guilty he has to find a confessor.
‘Something terrible happened there,’ he says. ‘Ah was dancin’ with ma Auntie Bella. And Ah got a hard-on.'
He waits for his uncle's reaction to establish a scale of horror for what he has done.
‘Ah hope she noticed.’
‘Uncle Charlie!’
‘Naw, Ah hope so. She'd be tickled pink. Ah bet she doesn't have that effect too often on yer Uncle Davie these days. She's probably in the toilet puttin’ on her make-up. Singin' “Oh, how we danced on the night they were wed”.'
Then he sang the next bit: ‘We vowed our true love though a word wasn't said.’
‘It was terrible. Ah'm frightened to dance with anybody. In case it happens again.’
‘If it does, give us a shout. Ye can pass it over.’
‘Ah'm that embarrassed.’
‘No. Ye just think ye are. See when it doesn't happen? That's when ye'll be embarrassed. Come on, kid. Relax. A limited number of boners in any man's life. Enjoy them while they're there.’
Uncle Charlie has always had a rough ability to put things in perspective for him. But he also has a strain of gentle wickedness. Later, when the singing has started and Auntie Bella is innocently belting out ‘Lay that pistol down, babe’. Uncle Charlie taps him on the shoulder.
‘Ye think she's tryin’ to tell you something, Tam?' he says.
BUT IF HE HAD BEEN ABLE TO TELL HIS UNCLE CHARLIE about the problem, he cannot tell John Benchley. He is a minister of the church. He has told Tam to call him John but that isn't the same thing as saying, ‘Use my carpet for disgorging the sewer of your mind any time.’ Yet he is tempted.
Fortunately, he delays so long that John stands up and crosses to put on the light. The dark crystal of the room is shattered and his memories of the wedding dissolve. Magic has again dissipated into mundanity. The harsh brightness makes this just a bleak, modern room, its coldness thawed somewhat by ageless fire and the books that lag its walls. John goes over to the sherry decanter, comes to the small table beside him and fills him out another glass.
And that's another thing. In that simple action he is conscious yet again of the contradictory cross-references in his life. How will he ever reconcile them? Sherry? Every time during these talks John gives him two sherries. He has wondered if John is trying subtly to civilise him beyond his working-class habits while, by restricting his intake to two glasses only, ensuring that he doesn't corrupt him in the process. He is a very measured man.
This is the only place Tam has tasted sherry. Holding the stemmed glass in his hand with its hoard of yellow light, he feels its strangeness. It glows mysteriously, a prism of contradictions in which he sees himself. He drinks sherry and talks about mysticism and has an erection at his brother's wedding and talks rough with his friends and is supposed to be going to university and wants to be a writer and lusts after strange girls and wonders what he is doing here. He starts to talk again, donning the camouflage of normalcy.
‘What about church attendance?’ he asks. ‘Numbers okay?’
‘Well, we're under no pressure to build an extension.’
‘Maybe television affects it. I thought Billy Graham would have helped.’
‘The crusade had a big enough impact while he was here. But I certainly don't notice any lasting effect on my congregation. Maybe Graithnock's particularly stony ground. Though I don't like to think so. Perhaps that's just making excuses for myself.’
‘You've done well. The congregation must be bigger now than before you came.’
‘I don't know that I've done so well. I've managed to reduce the congregation by at least one.’
He looks at Tam sadly.
‘That wasn't you. I just became an agnostic’
‘You make it sound so positive.’
‘I think it is. I think it's the only thing to be.’
‘You trying to convert me?’
He looks so forlorn, Tam feels guilty. He is almost sorry to have become an agnostic. John Benchley has mattered to him over the past couple of years. His gentle wiseness has saved Tam, during his frenetically religious phase, from going quietly mad with impossible holiness. When he was fifteen, he had wanted to become either a minister or a priest - a priest for preference, because that was harder and more demanding and seemed to him to reduce the complexity of life to one massive, final gesture. Attending his church and talking to him, Tam had realised how ill equipped he was to become the apprentice saint he had hoped to be. He finds rectitude boring. Girls fascinate him. How could he forswear life before he has tasted it?
No, he can't regret having become an agnostic. In a way, John has helped him to become one. Much as Tam likes him, he has to admit that he is glad to have forsworn the religious life if John is an example of what it does to you. He seems to Tam like someone who endures life as if it were influenza and hopes to get over it soon. Maybe his generosity to others relates to his belief that we are all ill with living and in need of psychological medication. Maybe it's not so much a careless gift of largesse as a measured bartering of mutual inadequacy. Can even kindness have dark and twisted roots? Does everything have dark and twisted roots?
His confusion is more or less total. He might as well be back in primary school, faced with one of those forms on which the unanswerable question has appeared.
FATHER'S OCCUPATION:
MAYBE THE PROBLEM IS GENETIC, he would think. He looked at himself with some of the soap still on his chin. The small round mirror he was using for shaving looked like a porthole through which, as he kept moving to get the angles right, he seemed to see a version of himself who was drowning. Maybe that was why he didn't bother to shave every day, to avoid having to see the drowning man he didn't seem able to save. Or maybe it was just another expression of his social isolation at the moment, a rehearsal for being a down-and-out. Or maybe it was because he was more and more aware of the resemblance to his father.
As the shaving soap was removed, there kept looming out at him a past he wasn't sure he could move beyond. Was there a Docherty gene, or maybe a Mathieson one, that condemned him to perpetual failure to fulfil himself, an inability to decide what he ought to do or what he ought to be? Was he sentenced to be like his father in that respect? Or like his Uncle Charlie?
His mother used to talk more than once of a recurring moment she had learnt to dread. It was when she would go upstairs to get ready for bed and his father was already there, lying with his head cupped in his hands.
‘Betsy,’ he would say, his eyes gazing at the ceiling as if it were the promised land. ‘Ye know what Ah've a helluva notion o’ tryin'.'
And she would scream silently. Another money-making project was threatening their lives.
No wonder the uncertainty of what his father was had troubled him. It must have been like living with X the unknown. After leaving the pits he seemed determined to try everything. When Uncle Josey challenged him for being a working-class entrepreneur, he said, ‘Negative capitalism, Josey. Ah'm tryin’ to get the wealth intae the hands of the workers. Then we can share it out more fairly.'
The most intense expression of his confusion with his father always came at primary school. Every so often they were given forms to fill in. He hated forms, always would. But he could always handle these questions easily enough, except for one. He always checked the form over first before writing anything down, to see if that one dreaded question was there, and it seemed it always was.