The Kiln. William McIlvanney

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СКАЧАТЬ exceptional recall. A critic had once said of him that he was one on whom nothing is lost. A lot of the time he wished it wasn't so. He wouldn't have minded losing a lot of the stuff he remembered.

      They were in the lounge. Brian was nursing a Remy Martin. Gill and Elspeth were drinking Cointreau. Tom was on the good old whisky, bottled aggression. They were all boring one another politely to death in the usual way - around the world in eighty clichés.

      (‘Blah,’ someone would say.

      ‘Blah?’

      ‘Blah.’

      ‘Surely blah, blah.’

      ‘No. Blah.’

      ‘Blah? What about unblah?’

      ‘Yes, unblah.’

      ‘No. Blah.’

      ‘I think what we all mean is half-blah, half-unblah. Eh?’

      ‘Of course.’

      ‘That's it. Half-blah, half-unblah.’

      ‘Or, if you like, half-unblah, half-blah.’

      ‘Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.’)

      It was all slightly less interesting than an Andy Warhol film when Elspeth innocently released the safety-catch. Elspeth would. She had the dangerous innocence of the truly boring. What makes boring people dangerous is that they keep forgetting that other people are present. They wander through life in a kind of holy idiocy, believing that the rest of the world's population consists entirely of ears. Ears never take offence. Only the entities attached to them do that. Thus, your bore is always amazed at causing trouble. You were only there to listen, after all. Nobody asked you to react.

      To be fair to Elspeth, she didn't really say anything wrong. The way Gill and Tom were feeling about each other at that moment, if Elspeth had said, ‘I love you both,’ they would have been snarling at her to make her choice and stop hedging her bets. What she did say was, ‘Sandra Hayes. There's someone I would say is beautiful.’

      ‘I pass,’ Tom said.

      Gill raised her head slightly and turned it towards him at a quizzical angle. As a veteran combatant, he knew war had been declared.

      Sandra Hayes was one of those handy instant quarrels married couples always have in stock in case they haven't time for a three-course barney. She was pre-cooked disagreement. Elspeth wasn't to know it but, between Gill and Tom, Sandra had often stood in for an hour too long in the pub or no clean shirts or a day of small frustrations. Part of her usefulness was that she crystallised differences in their attitudes, the incompatibility of their tastes. She was the painting Gill insisted on hanging up that made Tom puke.

      Sandra had been a friend of Gill's for a long time. She was one of those enigmas of the life they were leading he didn't expect ever to understand. 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.

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