The Kiln (4 page)

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 quarter of an inch and she would have been a Cyclops.’

The displaced cruelty marriage can give rise to appalled him even as he expressed it. You're so determined to get at your partner, you trample over innocent people to do it. Sandra was really quite attractive. Why did he have to scrawl his graffiti all over her face?

‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ Gill shouted. ‘Robert Redford?’

‘No. I don't kid myself. I'm not entering any beauty contests. It was you that put Sandra in for one.'

‘That takes me to the fair. It really does. Men.' Gill was looking solely at Elspeth now. Brian was being helplessly herded into the same pen as Tom for slaughter. They think they've got the right to sit there and pass judgment. It doesn't matter that they look like something the cat brought in.'

‘You
asked
my opinion. I don't have any illusions about me.’

‘Don't have any illusions? I've seen you shaving.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I've seen you shaving.’

‘Please, darling. Not such intimate secrets in front of our guests.’

‘You know what I mean. The way you look at yourself.’

‘That's quite a handy thing to do when you're shaving. What do you want me to do? Shave with the light out?’

‘The
way
you look at yourself. From this side and that side. Head back, head forward.’

‘Jesus Christ!’

Elspeth froze. She hated swearing. He had heard Brian say ‘Damn!’ once. He thought it was during an earthquake.

‘Uh-huh,’ Gill was saying. ‘For someone who seems to be so ugly, Sandra's done all right for herself.’

Tom's advance observation post went into action, assessing the range. He knew where the next attack was coming from. She was shifting position to hit him where he was weakest, as the successful provider, the man who was all for his family. She was also bringing Brian in behind her (she already had Elspeth) with the heavy artillery. The big guns of ‘career consolidation’ were trundling behind her.

‘Look at the husband
she
has.’

He needed a pre-emptive strike. First obliterate Elspeth - one fewer to worry about. Then a diversionary tactic.

‘Oh, Jesus, Jesus Christ!’ he said. Elspeth took both barrels and spoke no more. ‘Before this conversation finishes up being conducted in Sanskrit. Two things. I didn't
say
Sandra was ugly. And I'd rather not look at Ted Hayes. If I can help it.’

‘What? Is there something wrong with Ted Hayes now?’

It had worked. He concealed his success under exasperation.

‘Holy bejesus!’

‘It's incredible.’

‘Hear, hear.’

‘It's incredible. According to you, there's something wrong with everybody. God and I both feel . . .’ She hit home there. It wasn't that he thought there was something wrong with everybody but he couldn't see the amazing rightness that everybody else seemed to see. He was aware of an awful lot wrong with him - but what exactly? Gill was always ready to help him with that one. ‘You're a creep. You don't approve of Ted Hayes either? Is there something wrong with him?’

‘Aye! As a matter of fact there is. He would bore the shite out you at a hundred yards. That's what's wrong with him. If
they bottled him, they could sell him in Boots the chemist. As a bloody sedative!’

‘No, you wouldn't approve of him, would you?’

‘He's a uxorious wee turd.’

‘Oh, we're on the Eng. Lit. words now, are we? “Uxorious.” But the last one let you down a bit, didn't it? Like a birthmark. Uxorious! That just means he's nice to his wife. Doesn't it? Of course, I can see how that would be an insult in your vocabulary.’

‘What it means is he runs after her like a wee waiter. He probably bottles her farts for posterity. He needs her round him like an oxygen tent. If she goes out the room for five minutes, poor wee bugger's gaspin’ for breath.'

He was cresting the hill of his rage like Alaric the Goth. But suddenly Rome was shut for the night. Gill sat back without warning and sighed and shook her head with something that looked like sad contentment. It seemed she hadn't been taking part in an argument, just a demonstration. He stood fully caparisoned with no enemy in sight, only some bemused tourists thinking: ‘Look at that funny man. Why is he so excited?’

Childe Roland had come to the dark tower and set his slug-horn to his lips and the tower had disappeared. Hm. Well. All he could think of to do was give the solitude he found himself in a final defiant blast.

‘Anyway,’ Gill was saying to Elspeth and Brian. ‘They seem happy.
Their
lives are completely unruffled.’

‘So they should be,’ he said, unnecessarily loudly. ‘They're as good as dead. Nothing out of the ordinary's ever going to happen there. Any time life comes near wee Ted, it falls asleep.’

The room went quiet.

AS QUIET AS A ROOM IN EDINBURGH
, to which his seemingly incurable discontent with things would bring him. He stared at the fading, leafy pattern on the carpet. It might have been an old forest he was lost in. Was there some wrong turning he had taken when he was young? Perhaps seeing so many films in his
boyhood and adolescence had helped to confuse him about who he was. Maybe his multiple-identity problem came, in the first place, from growing up in a small town where there were seven cinemas.

There was the Plaza and there was the Empire and the Regal and the Palace and the Savoy and the George and the Forum. He found something appropriate in the grandeur of the names, the way they resonated in his head. For these were embassies of world experience located in his home town. Just by entering their doors he could learn, however haltingly, the foreign inflections of other people's lives, usually translated very wilfully into a broad American idiom that became his second language.

His favourite was the Savoy because, having fallen on hard times and being very run-down, it never showed the new films. It recycled old pictures endlessly and it would be much later that he would realise why that battered building had meant so much to him, why he would always remember with affection the wooden benches for children at the front (where, if a friend arrived late, you could always make a space for him by a group of you sliding along in concert and knocking off whoever was sitting at the end of the bench) and the padded seats that sometimes spilled their wiry guts like a device to keep you awake during the film.

It had been, without his knowing it, his personal art cinema, where he could re-read films the way he could re-read books and develop unselfconsciously his own aesthetic of the movies and confirm what kind of man he was going to be, what kind of woman he would marry. He watched and listened attentively, his face pale as a pupa in the back-glow from the screen while the gigantic figures raged and kissed and taught him passion and style and insouciance and stoicism, before he knew the words for them.

‘
FRANKLY, MY DEAR, I DON'T GIVE A DAMN
,' Clark Gable tells Tam more than once.

‘Made it. Ma - top o’ the world,' James Cagney seems often to be shouting.

‘Do you always think you can handle people like, eh, trained seals?’ Lauren Bacall says.

‘Where do the noses go?’

‘Never's gonna be too much soon for me. Shorty.’

‘Does that clarinet player have no soul?’

‘We are all involved.’

‘By Gad, sir, you're a chap worth knowing. ‘Namazing character. Give me your hat.’

‘Get yourself a phonograph, jughead. I'm with him.’

And Garbo stares at him and Ava Gardner lounges barefoot. Peter Ustinov preserves his tears in a phial. Charlton Heston fights Jack Palance to the death. Rhonda Fleming makes him wish for a machine by which you can grow up instantly because he is going to be too late. And Cagney shrugs and Bogart's lip curls over his top teeth and Silvana Mangano is standing in a paddy-field and he would die to be standing beside her.

In his head the endless voices are talking like so many crossed transatlantic lines he will sometime unscramble and the endless images move in and out of one another like a phantom selfhood he will one day discover how to make flesh. There in the darkness he is secretly practising himself.

So he has already been in love with many women, though nobody knows it, not even the women. He must have the most promiscuous mind in the world. Their names are a private harem: Greta and Rhonda and Alida and Lilli and Viveca and Lana and Ava and Olivia and Paulette and Vivien and Hedy and Maureen and Silvana and Sophia and Gina and Ingrid and … He is a virginal roue, he realises with horror when he discovers the word ‘roué’. (He has hoped that Frank Sinatra never learns about him and Ava, for he seems to be an angry wee man.)

If they ever found out about him, he would have a board of censors all to himself. Even Margaret Dumont, the big woman in the Marx Brothers' films, has evoked some stirrings in him. There is something in that statuesque presence that makes him want to climb it.

But it is true that Marjorie Main has so far remained immune to his talent for falling in love. He
likes
Ma Kettle but he doesn't love her. This gives him some hope for himself. Hope that he may survive his own promiscuity (and avoid dying of mental
sexual exhaustion before he is twenty) is further confirmed by the fact that, no matter how often his affections stray, he keeps coming back to Greta Garbo. He is not sure why this should be but it has something to do with the way her gaze seems to him like a continent he would love to explore.

He has been more faithful to the screen men in his life. James Cagney was probably the first actor he adopted as his secondary father, then Errol Flynn, then Bogart. But they have turned out only to be surrogates for John Garfield, his man of men. It isn't just that Garfield does look a little, it seems to him, like his real father. It is that Garfield exudes a style that might have come off the streets where Tam is living. Of all his heroes, Garfield translates most easily into his own idiom. Tam feels as if he's seen him at the dancing.

Recently, though, Garfield's pre-eminence has been under threat. When Tam saw
On the Waterfront
, he knew immediately that Marlon Brando was the best actor he had ever seen. In fact, he decided he knew that Marlon Brando was the best actor anybody had ever seen. And when James Dean loped through
East of Eden
, he became instantly iconic in Tam's thoughts.

Still, Garfield may be dead but he lives on, his place not quite usurped, there beside Greta Garbo. This summer is still theirs. When he feels he has been kidding himself about the significance of yet another girl, he thinks of Greta Garbo. When he senses himself threatened by the arrogance of yet another hard-case, John Garfield stands beside him.

—AFTERWARDS
, he would be living alone in an attic flat in the Boulevard Haussmann in Paris. It was a bitter winter and lonely as a cabin in the Yukon. He shivered in his eyrie and went out into the cold for coffees and
tartines beurrées
to eke his money out and came back in to the novel he was working on and it sat staring at him silently as if it were a former friend who didn't wish to speak to him any more.

But Francois, the man who had loaned him the flat, had the French intellectual's passion to make a library of experience.
He had one room full of books and tapes of old films and pornographic magazines. One of the books was a biography of John Garfield. Reading it, he knew he had been right about Jules Garfinkel all those years ago. He still loved this man, his trying to stay true to where he came from, the intensity of his political beliefs, the passionate dishevelment of his life, the dread of betraying his friends that finally burst his heart and left him lying dead in an awkward place before he had time to testify in front of the Un-American Activities Committee.