The Kiln. William McIlvanney

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ