The Kiln. William McIlvanney
She was spectacularly popular. People kept festooning her with words it seemed to Tom she contradicted almost perfectly. ‘Beautiful’ was one. People kept calling her that. She had, it seemed to Tom, a kind of shallow prettiness. Fair enough. But if we keep breathing reverently that our Sandra Hayes are beautiful, what are we going to say about Greta Garbo? ‘Witty’ was another. Sandra was trivially facetious. But then, to be fair, so were a lot of people he knew who were given this accolade. True wit is one of the great weapons of the spirit, he thought, a refusal to surrender to experience - not picking your neighbour's pocket. ‘Vitality,’ they said of Sandra, and appeared to Tom to mean supermarket enthusiasm. Sandra enthused about everything. Show her any top and she would go over it. She created oral poems to wall plaques and new refrigerators. ‘Very intelligent,’ people said, and he had never heard Sandra utter an original or perceptive remark. If Sandra should ever have an original idea, he pitied it, for it would die a lonely death in search of company in there.
He had to draw back a bit because it wasn't Sandra he resented. What he resented was the burden of false glamour Sandra was made to carry. It was what she represented in the life he found himself living that he resented. For although the quarrel Gill and he had about her that night seemed irrelevant and disproportionate, it wasn't quite as irrelevant or disproportionate as it seemed. They knew in a way what they were talking about, although they couldn't expect anybody else to.
The reason Sandra had been one focus for their quarrels hadn't entirely escaped their comprehension. She was valid battleground. What their friends did with Sandra Hayes was, Tom thought, what they tried to do with life generally and it was something he had been fighting against for a long time. In falsifying Sandra, they were falsifying their sense of their own lives. In elevating her, they were elevating themselves. It was a simple act of cultural appropriation.
One way to avoid the awesomeness of mountains is to live where it is flat as far as the eye can see and never travel. Psychologically, that's what their way of life was doing. If Sandra Hayes was beautiful, then you could find your Naked Majas and Olympias on page three. If she was very intelligent, then so were they, because they could appreciate her intelligence. By an inverted alchemy, they could transmute the rare gold of the world into the ubiquitous base metal of their own lives.
Ah, the polite viciousness of bourgeois life that with false generosity to some bestows mediocrity upon all. The key is language. When words depreciate, our awarenesses go with them. Intensity dilutes and a gantry of potent spirits is replaced by the insipid afternoon tea of complacency. He supposed Sandra was for him some kind of high priestess of that decadent cult.
For a long time he had feit himself a heretic among them, writing his own apocrypha - not just in the books he had published. He had developed such anti-social tendencies that he had started to write a sort of private dictionary, a notebook where he tried to establish his own understandings, his own definitions of honour and pride and tragedy. This notebook was his conspiracy with himself, a linguistic revolutionary caucus of one. He had shown it to no one but that hadn't stopped Gill from finding it. Fortunately, she seemed to have skim-read it, so that her mockery was generalised and felt a bit like being beaten with a loofah.
‘Sandra Hayes is beautiful,’ Gill said.
‘I pass,’ Tom said again.
Did he hell! But he might as well let Gill start the fight. He liked counter-punching. ‘She is beautiful.’
He was aware of Elspeth glancing at Brian, baffled by the tension she had created. Brian responded by adopting a jocular interventionist voice.
‘Who's this we're talking about, you two?’
‘Sandra Hayes,’ Gill said as if that explained everything.
‘You know her, Brian,’ Elspeth said.
‘Who?’
‘Sandra Hayes!’
There followed a fairly long discussion between Elspeth and Brian about who Sandra Hayes was. It was one of those ‘That party where the woman fainted’ conversations, getting lost among memories that led to other memories that became a labyrinth where everybody seemed to be wandering except Sandra Hayes. Brian steadfastly didn't know her. You could see the suspicion begin to grow in Elspeth that Brian was being deliberately obtuse. She was becoming querulous, perhaps convinced that he was hiding from his responsibility to take her side. How could he defend her opinion of Sandra Hayes if he couldn't remember her? She was getting so exasperated that she was going in for a little role reversal - the headmaster as dumb primary pupil.
‘You're always doing that,’ she said. ‘Your memory's pathetic.’
It looked as though they might be having a doubles match. It occurred to Tom that Brian might be consciously teasing things out to give Gill and him time to cool down. It was possible. Like most modern headmasters, he suffered from the Pontius Pilate syndrome, mentally washing his hands a hundred times a day. If that was his ploy, it didn't work. By the time Elspeth had established Brian's immutable stupidity to the satisfaction of the company. Gill was still waiting to impugn Tom's character.
‘I hate it when you tell a deliberate lie,’ she said.
‘It's not a lie. It's what I think.’
‘What weird taste you must have!’
‘Careful. You're going to walk right into your own insult. Let's leave it. Gill. You send your Valentines, I'll send mine.’ Sweet reasonableness, one of the most effective incitements to rage. ‘I just don't think Sandra's beautiful. And I'm sure she'll manage fine without my homage.’
Brian laughed. Elspeth didn't.
‘That seems a reasonable compromise,' Brian said. Accurate observation wasn't his strong point.
Gill was walking down some private road to confrontation. She took a ladylike gulp of her Cointreau.
‘Tell me one thing about her that isn't beautiful,' she said.
Brian laughed. Tom was aware of the depressing familiarity of that laugh, waved about in times of crisis like a flag of truce. He ignored it and concentrated on Gill's question.
‘One thing?’
‘One thing.’
They might have been two gunmen daring each other to draw.
‘I'll tell you two,’ he said.
The room was ridiculously tense, as if a great revelation were at hand.
‘Tell me.'
‘Her eyes.’
‘Her eyes?’
‘Her eyes.’
‘Sandra Hayes’ eyes?'
‘Sandra Hayes’ amazing actual eyes. Those things she's got one on each side of her nose. Only in her case only just.'
Gill looked at Elspeth and Brian and shrugged with a falsely beatific smile and sadly shook her head. That headshake was a small opera. Behold, it sang, my grief. Thou seest me married badly to a man of infinite malice. My tiny heart is broken. But she recovered quickly.
Holding her left hand slightly towards Brian and Elspeth as if making sure they were paying proper attention to Tom's next enormity. Gill said sweetly, ‘And what is it that's wrong with her eyes?’
Realising already that in this conversation he had been modified from a bus into a tramcar, he released the brake and started towards his predetermined destination.
‘They're too close together.'
‘Too close together?'
If it's a crash, he thought vaguely through the whisky, let's make it a good one.
‘As if they were planning a merger.'
Gill gave what might have been mistaken for a laugh. It was a high, harsh, sudden sound, as jolly as an axe embedding itself in a skull. Right, he thought. If that's the way you want it.
‘Another