The Kiln. William McIlvanney

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СКАЧАТЬ much to answer for in his life), he seized on the word as if it might somehow help to plug him into German culture, rather like a day-tripper to Boulogne trying to convince himself that he has explored France. The Greeks had a word for it, they said. He would often think, with sorrow for missed opportunities: no, the Germans did. Schadenfreude. Doppelganger. Zeitgeist. Weltschmerz.

      Vorfreude. ‘Pre-joy’, she said it meant. He didn't catch any nuances since they were both naked in a wood near Cramond at the time, and the picnic basket didn't contain a dictionary and the wine said school's out and the finer points of connotation were not their chief concern just then. But the word stayed with him and acquired in his mind the accretions of private meaning he quite wilfully gave it. Often when he thought of it, it came attended by slats of sunlight pushing through thick trees. It was the least of the gifts she gave him but, as a smoothed stone found casually on a beach may stand as cipher for a bright and happy day, it reminded him of them. And just as that stone may become something it was never intended to be, such as a paperweight, so he was never to be sure what precise relevance the word had to the use he made of it.

      In his private dictionary it didn't just mean anticipation or expectation. It was a means of bringing into focus a tendency which had troubled him since childhood. It was a lens through which to see more clearly an error of which he was too guilty, an experiential tic he would have liked to cure. His Vorfreude meant the imagining of a coming intensity of experience which no actual set of circumstances could quite deliver, a kind of over-rehearsal for life.

      Was this the source of his many impressive achievements in the genre of social mayhem? How often had his despondent anger turned a dinner party or a night out with friends or an arranged celebration or a conversation in a pub into the Somme in civvies and left him firing at will at any head that came above the parapet? Did the root cause lie in the fact that the event had yet again failed to live up to his overblown idea of what it should be? That seemed far too simple.

      There was, for a start, the booze. When he had enough to drink, he could imagine that somebody who nodded to him was trying to put the head on him. Midges of perception developed messianic delusions. Small, slighting references inflated to amazing proportions until the air was filled with barrage balloons of insult. All you needed to do to cure that was to stop drinking as much.

      And yet. Drink might render the form of expression grotesque. But sobriety didn't eradicate the content which the form had obscured with its exaggerations. After such times, he always felt guilty. But there still nearly always flickered within the guilt, a minnow in a murky pond, something of what he had felt which refused to die, refused to succumb completely to the condemnations of others. And he somehow knew that, if it did, if it finally went belly-up with the toxin of other people's idea of him, he would lose a crucial part of his sense of himself and start to imitate who they expected him to be.

      It was the extremity of the form, he kept thinking, which had been wrong - not what he saw but the way that he said it. If he thought somebody was full enough of his own shit to start a sewage farm, he could perhaps find a better way to say it. Perhaps. His intellectual and emotional antennae were preposterously sensitive. There was nothing wrong in that. What was wrong was what he did with the effects of that sensitivity. He demanded too much from people and events.

      He had always suffered, he decided, from a kind of elephantiasis of the occasion, wanting an event to be bigger than it could be and to bear more weight of human truth than it could possibly bear. When it collapsed under the strain, he was inclined to shoot it (usually without a silencer) to put it out of his misery. That was hardly fair.

      He must do something about that, about his Vorfreude. Maybe that had been part of the problem between Gill and him. Maybe what he had been expecting of marriage had always been unrealisable. Perhaps she just got tired of living with Peter Pan. She certainly got tired of his social tantrums. Eventually, she developed a technique of setting them up in public.

      There were two basic methods involved. One way was to initiate a topic in company about which they had both reached agreement in private. Once he had started to expatiate on their shared position in the matter, she would suddenly abandon it, inviting everybody else to join her. His outrage would leave him like a dancing bear, frothing slightly and bumping into the furniture. Such occasions made him think that he could always have behaved more properly towards her in public if only he had never had to meet her in private.

      The other way was to introduce a subject, or at least seize on one, about which she knew he was likely to disagree with everyone else. It came to be as if, unable to stop his tendency to go over the top in argument, she decided to stage-manage it. Mrs Barnum. Presenting My Husband, The Man Whose Reactions Overflow Every Context. He Will Now Attempt To Stage An Opera In A Phone Box.

      He would laugh to himself when he thought of those occasions. Happy Times. His memory had a library of them, all filed under C for catastrophe. Pluck out any one, it would show the same, recurrent symptoms - like the dinner party before they had gone for that year to Grenoble. By that time, Tam had been reclassified as Tom in the mouths of most of his friends, perhaps in an attempt to confer a status more befitting a teacher. Gill invited his headmaster at that time and his wife, Brian and Elspeth Alderston. Tom had made the mistake of telling Gill that Brian had singled him out as someone he wanted to push for promotion. He had taken Tom into his office twice to say he thought Tom had ‘headmaster potential’. He said it as if he were bestowing a knighthood. Tom thought it sounded like a disease for, judging by the deterioration he observed in most teachers who were promoted to headmasterships, he had decided it was a job you didn't get so much as contract.

      But Gill was determined to lay the ground for their return from France before they left, which seemed to Tom rather to contradict what was supposed to be the ground-breaking boldness of the move in the first place.

      ‘LET'S DO SOMETHING ADVENTUROUS, DARLING - I'll bring the insurance policies.’

      THE MEAL HAD BEEN GOOD. If only they could have eaten it in silence. Brian and Gill were engaged in a very unsubtle conspiracy, like whispering through a tannoy. Brian said things about Tom ‘getting it out of his system’ and ‘career consolidation’. Gill talked about when they had ‘done the Bohemian bit’. They dangled the prospect of a dazzling career in teaching before Tom as if it weren't a contradiction in terms, while Elspeth kept chiming in with details of Brian's meteoric rise from assistant teacher to headmaster in twenty-five years.

      Tom experienced a feeling that had been becoming more and more familiar since Gill had completed her course in cordon bleu cookery. It was a feeling of being caught in a montage sequence from a film he didn't want to be in, a dinner-time equivalent of the breakfast scene in Citizen Kane. He seemed to be for ever at the dinner table arguing with people and every time he looked up from his plate he was arguing with someone different and, while the plates came and went, he knew himself aging remorselessly.

      That turned him sullen and his sullenness began to show.

      Gill caught the feeling and reciprocated generously. She had been for a long time getting weary of the vagueness of Tom's ambitions. A quarrel of mood was already happening. Any healthy married couple can quarrel about anything. They have so many related resentments all over the place that, once they feel they're going to a quarrel, they jump on any excuse like the first bus that comes along. It doesn't matter where it's going, their anger is sure to find a home there.

      Gill had set up this whole evening to convince Brian Alderston of his wisdom in spotting Tom as an heir apparent and he was coming across like a boor. He resented having their house used to tout for professional support. He never entertained the boss. If he didn't come as a friend and no more, he could stay away. Their motives were already there. They were only looking for the pretext. When they found it, it must have seemed to an outsider as daft as the War of Jenkins' Ear.

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