The Kiln (39 page)

THAT WAS WHEN
he found for the first time the generous giving of a woman's body and the darkness of its hunger. She had taken what she needed from him but she had given him in return some edges of himself, a compass for his lostness, a map of longing. He had received from her more than he knew how to give but he might learn and he was grateful. Even the first sound of his own voice she had given him in a few lines that might matter to no one else but mattered to him.

He heard faint within the words he had written to Maddie a strange voice talking and was amazed to think it was his own, the first time of its hearing. It was his own not because it spoke well or wisely but because it said what it was totally compelled to say, an utterance that grew undeniably out of his own experience. It was querulous and lost, like a cat long in the cold, but it was there and he might find it again.

THAT WAS WHEN
he knew what Pushkin meant. ‘Not all of me is dust.’ It seemed to him one of the bravest and most human things that anyone could say. It refused to be more precise than it could honestly be. There is more than this because I have experienced so. But the more there is will in no way denigrate
what has been. Unless it includes without reservation all that has been, it cannot be more. QED.

THAT WAS WHEN
a seeming infinity of situations and conversations and people and feelings and ideas and sights and places and sounds and thought fused slowly out of fragmentary chaos into a shifting and volatile and dynamic coherence of experience, an imperfectly grasped significance that still tremored on the edge of transformation with each approaching happening, became a past whose only purpose was to be the future in embryo, a future which only the perpetual present could deliver. Now. And now. And now.

AND NOW HE WOULD PAUSE THERE
. Tom stood up from the table and put down his pen. The book is as good as finished.

He can remember when he had finished what he was sure would be his last book of poetry. He had known that the poetry was the sum of something in him and he had to admit to himself that it didn't seem to add up to a lot. His poetry had been a thirty-odd-year gamble. He thought, even before the book was published, that he had lost, so that he wasn't surprised when it sank without trace. But at least he had ridden with the bet. That was his last wager on the same old number and he could feel himself walking out before the croupier called.

This was just another bet. This time he could imagine himself saying to the croupier, ‘Hold the wheel still. Don't call just yet. There's something Ah have to do first.’

Okay, Tam, he says to himself. Let's do it.

He goes through to the small kitchen and opens the door of the refrigerator. One heel of cheese is all it shows. But in the door of the fridge is the bottle of champagne he has been saving for this moment. The coldness of its neck almost sticks to his hand as he takes it. He elbows the door of the fridge shut. As he crosses to the
sink, he rips off the foil, drops it on the draining-board, unwinds the wire. His thumbs jockey the cork up the neck of the bottle till it pops and fires itself into the curtain. It is darkening outside.

He loves the gushing of the juice that wants out and lets some of it splatter into the sink. Where there is spontaneity, there will be waste. This stuff is like good moments. When they come, you have to take them there and then. There is no postponing. You can't put the cork back on champagne.

He licks the neck of the bottle. He lifts an upturned glass from the draining-board and goes through to the living-room. The sun is setting on this side of the house and it glows in the room. He fills a glass as he walks and goes to the table at the window and puts the bottle down there. The sunlight makes jade of it. Tangled among trees and dripping red, the sun lays its warm light on his papers and seems briefly to bless their irrelevance as it blesses everything indiscriminately.

He looks across at the old graveyard of Warriston where the cluttered headstones are casting darkness before they become it. He holds up his glass to the dead.

He drinks off his glass and fills out another.

One thing he hopes he has got right is how the social life seems to him a farce and how the individual life seems a tragedy. And, since all of us are individuals first, it would seem to follow that life is a tragedy performed by farceurs. Enjoy the play.

He drinks to that. He has spoken to Phil. He will be leaving here soon. He will go somewhere else, catch another train, stoke up the kiln. Impossible to get in touch with Vanessa now. But he must have Grete's number somewhere. It would be good to talk to her.

He raises his glass above where the dead are, to the sun that still smoulders dimly among the trees.

As he drinks, he imagines he can hear the whir and clatter of a spinning wheel. He'll abide the outcome. He fills out another glass and drinks to the self he has met again in the summer of the kiln.

THAT WAS WHEN
he walked in the air of early morning through the town towards the railway station. And the self-conscious and solemn progress of his purpose was waylaid by the remorseless and dynamic irrelevance of the moment.

‘Aye, Tam,’ Hilly Brown shouted from across the street, on his way home from the brickwork. ‘What's wi’ the briefcase? Takin' yer case to a higher court?'

Suddenly, he felt released by Hilly's irreverence. He laughed. He waved with exaggerated panache.

‘To the higher court of human understanding,’ he bellowed in a ludicrously portentous voice. (Valentine Dyall would have been proud of him.)

‘That'll fuckin’ do me,' Hilly shouted back. ‘Put in a word for me.’

He burst out laughing. He would try. For all of them.

GERONIMO
, his mind is shouting.