Читать книгу The Kiln - William McIlvanney - Страница 9

IT IS AS IF, he would think, who I thought I was has dried up like a well and I have to find again the source of who I am.

HE WOULD REMEMBER THE JOURNEY back home from Grenoble through Heathrow Airport, the uncertainty of it, how it is better to travel in doubt than to arrive, and how every stage of his returning reminded him forcefully that the man who was going back to Graithnock was still the boy who had left it, and that the summer of the kiln continued to happen in him.

He would be puzzled by repeating moments of that summer, their small persistence, amazed at the disparity between the triviality of the incident and the longevity of its endurance, like coming upon an octogenarian mayfly. They came, it seemed, of their own volition. No doubt they were occasioned by some sequence of thoughts which he could not retrace. But they were for him not logically explicable. Whatever purpose he had been imagining himself to have in wandering whatever corridors of the mind, it seemed the purpose had been ambushed. It was as if a door, in some corridor down which he was passing, were suddenly to open for no reason, spontaneously.

And there in a long-forgotten place, lit by a long-dead sun or by a light-bulb which had burned out years ago, were places and people he had known. The places were as they had been, unchanged. The long-abandoned furniture was neatly in place. The people were still talking animatedly about problems long since resolved, still laughing, still saying words that he could hear, still brewing tea that had been drunk. They could be young who were now old. They could be alive who were now dead.

‘OH, HERE,’ Auntie Bella says.

She stops at the living-room door with her leather message-bag. She's so notorious for taking slow departures that nobody ever sees her to the front door any more. It can get too cold. She seems to remember everything she had originally meant to say just as she is leaving.

‘Ye can watch the seasons change just listenin’ to Bella sayin' cheerio,' Tam's father has said.

‘Ah met Mary Boland at the shops there. She was tellin’ me whidyimacallum's been in a car crash.'

Eventually, she finds the surname she is looking for. It belongs to a well-known and very right-wing politician. His name has for a long time been the equivalent of a swear-word in the house, about as pleasant to contemplate as Sir Anthony Eden's election win for the Tories in May.

‘Oh, that's right,’ Tam's mother says. ‘It was in the six o'clock news. Wasn't it. Conn?’

‘Well?’ Auntie Bella is waiting. ‘What's the word?’

‘Said his condition was very satisfactory,’ Tam's father says. So Ah'm assumin' he's dead.'

HERE HE WOULD SIT, he decided, remembering both the journey from Grenoble and the earlier summer it had reactivated, as if they were the latitude and longitude of a confused life by which he might fix where he was, beyond the physical. The physical was simple enough. It was a rented flat in Edinburgh, near the Water of Leith. The way he felt, it might as well be the Water of Lethe. For he was aging and so many of the things he dreamt would happen hadn't happened and wouldn't happen for him now. And what had happened, he still couldn't be sure. By the waters of Leith, we sat down and wept when we remembered Graithnock. Oy vey, with a Scottish accent.

‘I have seen the future and it works’ (Lincoln Steffens). He had seen the present and it didn't work. He looked round the apartment where he was holing up, surrounded by someone else's furniture. This was what he had achieved? He was a recluse among half a million people. He owned nothing but some books - no house, no car, no prospects. He hadn't just burned his boats, he had burnt the blueprint for them. He had stopped visiting old friends, owing to his present tendency to bleed verbally all over their carpets. He was trying to stop inhaling whisky as if it was an oxygen substitute. His finances were a shambles swiftly degenerating into a chaos. This was what he had earned? Lodgings in a stranger's place? Emotional destitution? The melodramatic possibility of suicide nipped in and out of the flat like a dubious friend wondering if he could help that day. Otherwise, things were fine.

He was trying to do that sum again, the addition and subtraction of experience - what did it come to? How did you quantify the dreams that died, the gifts you gave and were given, the promises you thought the world made and then broke, the remembered moments that still shone like pure gold, the wonderful faces, the death of the best, the laughter that turned banality into carnival, the purifying angers, the great dead minds that whispered their secrets to you in the early hours of many mornings, the bitter sweetness of family, the incorrigible contradictoriness of living? By remembering?

HE SITS UP IN BED SUDDENLY and says, ‘Mahatma Gandhi.’

He is staring into a dimness delicately brushed with half-light from the greying embers of the fire. The furniture of the living-room has a sheen of gentle aging. The sideboard could be an antique. The biscuit barrel sitting on top of it, where his mother keeps the rent money, might as well be an Etruscan vase. The clock above the fireplace is keeping a time that doesn't seem the present. He is awake in a room he cannot recognise.

He is frozen at the sound of his own voice. Where did that come from? He has been experiencing that familiar sensation of standing at the edge of a clifftop on which the ground is crumbling under his feet and he is falling when the speaking aloud of that name jerks him clear and leaves him sitting upright in his bed.

He listens. He is glad no one has heard. It's a good thing he sleeps in the fold-down bed in the living-room. He can keep his madness private. His family are sanely asleep upstairs.

Mahatma Gandhi? Where did he come from? Almost immediately Tam knows that the small, skinny man in the Indian frock has wandered out of his own most potent obsession: his wondering about ways of how people get it.

‘It' - in the darkness of his head he lets that cryptic cipher open out into some of the variations he has heard it given and repeats them to himself like a satanic litany: your hole, sex, rumpy-pumpy, intercourse, making love, houghmagandie, ‘you know’ (with a smile), a ride, a bit of the other, a shag, hi-diddle-diddle, copulation, sexual union, ‘Christ, it was incredible!’

Why were there so many names for it? Were there that many different ways to do it? And if it was so various, springing up everywhere like a genus of weed with a thousand species, how come you'd managed to avoid it so far? You had heard it called about a hundred things. (You could almost bet that any euphemism you heard and didn't understand, that's what it meant.) But you'd never had it. You had read it, thought it, heard it, certainly mimed it, and once been sure you smelled it, but you had never felt it. To judge from what you'd been told, it was running amuck like the bubonic plague and you were boringly, agonisingly immune.

He can't believe it. It winks and nods at him from everywhere but won't come out to play. What is wrong with him?

He remembers having to translate The Anabasis in the Greek class. And that's another thing: Latin and Greek at school - what does that have to do with living in Graithnock? He can't remember the woman's name now but it was someone who came to see Cyrus of Persia about something. At least he thinks it was Cyrus. It could have been Xerxes. But he had to translate the passage.

He had looked up the words. When the Greek appeared before him, he said, ‘It is said he lay with her.’ He got it right. He was good at translation. He could translate one word into another word. But what the hell did it mean? It is said he lay with her? All right, he was in third year at that time but he was fifteen going on five. He lay with her?

All Dusty Thomas said was, ‘Well done, Docherty.’ That was well done? He had translated it from one foreign language into another foreign language. He felt like screaming, ‘But what did the bastard do? (He likes swearing in his head.)

He hasn't just read about it in Greek. Being so bookish, he has tracked it down in a lot of places. He has even memorised some of the references. ‘His need pistoned into her.’ ‘She screamed in agonised ecstasy.’ He sometimes says the words to himself like a wine-taster with no taste-buds. He follows the spoor of those references round and round without finding any corresponding reality in his own experience until he begins to think that he is tracking a beast which, perhaps only in his private world, has become extinct.

But he continues to brood on ways of how to get it. No medieval alchemist was ever more obsessive in his search for the philosopher's stone. Out there is gold - pure, undiluted sex. He has to discover the formula that will transmute the base metal of cafes and the dancing and brassieres that seem welded to the body and skirts that defy levitation into the transcendental shining of doing it.

He studies much. He will read or hear things that will stop him dead and leave him staring into space, wondering if he has come upon the key that will unlock the golden hoard. Sometimes the revelation will only come in retrospect. He will be lying, as now, in his fold-down bed in the living-room, the house quiet as a mouse's breathing, and the turmoil of his mind will become very still, transfixed. That thing he has read or heard. Of course. Is that what he has been looking for? Has he reached the culmination of his quest?

Yes. That is the news the Mahatma brings him. For he read recently of Gandhi's determined search for physical purity. Apparently he thought that intercourse with women (and, therefore, presumably with men) should be avoided because they took away a man's vital juices. (To judge by that criterion. Tam must be so full of vital juices they are coming out his ears. Purity? He sought physical purity, did he? No problem. Here was the answer in three words: be Tam Docherty.)

The person who was writing about Gandhi was full of praise for the Mahatma's constant need to prove how pure he was, how immune to temptation. In order to do this, he would take different young women to bed with him. They must sleep together without having sex. That way, he could prove his purity was still intact. The writer was in awe of such holy self-denial.

Sitting up in bed. Tam realises that his own reaction is completely different. How could he have read so carelessly as to let the writer's attitude simply become his own, without examining it? He is always doing that. He reads something in a book or a newspaper, or he listens to someone, and it may be two days later when he thinks, ‘What a load of shite that was! Why did I accept it?’ He feels that now.

The thought that comes to him as he sits upright on his lonely bed, bathed in illumination, is a simple one, stunningly clear. ‘Mahatma, you fly, old bastard.’ For it was perfect, wasn't it? You had it either way. You couldn't lose. If you didn't manage to perform, your purity had triumphed. If you had sex, it was a sad lapse from your desired standards and you must try again. And again and again and again. Ya beauty. No pressure. The ultimate, self-indulgent con. The man was a genius.

Tam is staring ahead, hardly daring to breathe in case he displaces the brilliant idea that is forming in his mind. He is already calling it The Gandhi Technique. It is a marvellous way to get a woman into bed. He finds himself going through a leisurely selection process. This sustains his exhilarated optimism for fully half an hour until realism intrudes like a burglar into the privacy of his meditation.

To make the technique work, you first of all have to become more or less world-famous. It is dependent on the veneration of others, their preparedness to believe whatever you say is your motivation. That seems to let him out.

When he explains to them the lofty reasons why they must come to bed with him, his eyes brimming with religious sincerity, he can't imagine any of the girls at the dancing saying, ‘I hear and obey, o holy one.’ No. Such divine lack of scepticism doesn't go along with a woollen sweater to accentuate your tits, a tight cotton skirt and cigarettes and matches held in one hand while you dance forehead to forehead with a plumber's mate. And there must be few people who have ever jitterbugged themselves on to a plane of metaphysical understanding. Perhaps when he is famous and revered throughout the world, the technique may provide him with a pleasant way to pass his seventies. But at the age of seventeen it's about as useful to him as a French letter to a eunuch.

The vision disperses. The embers have died in the fire. The room has lost its magic, gone grey again. This isn't the enchanted land where sex can happen. It's 14 Dawson Street, Graithnock. The drab furniture mocks him with the unchangeable ordinariness of his life. It isn't going to happen, it tells him. Whatever you thought would happen, it won't.

He huddles down in his bed, feeling suddenly cold. What's the betting even his dreams are in black and white?

THAT WOULD BE TOWARDS THE BEGINNING of the summer of the kiln, before the weather warmed. Otherwise, why would the fire have been on? He sat in his flat near the Water of Leith and he could hear a ringing phone. But he knew that it wasn't ringing here. It was ringing in Grenoble, in the darkness. Perhaps he shouldn't have answered it. But what else could you do? And that call he received led to others he must make.

‘NE QUITTEZ PAS,’ the woman's voice had said.

No, he wouldn't be quittez-ing. Fat chance. He was joined to whatever dull information she would give him about flights as compulsively and inexorably as he was joined to the boy thinking of Mahatma Gandhi on his bed.

They might cut the umbilicus but you carried your end of it in you everywhere, even here in Grenoble. The first place you left followed somewhere behind you always, like a lover who couldn't bear to part, so that you could spend the rest of your life going back to take repeated farewells of it and thinking, ‘Why the hell can't you leave me alone? It's over now. That's not who I am any more.’

But it was. It always was. You can't disown your past without becoming no one. He felt that now, holding the phone. He would go back in body now as he had gone back so often in his head. Perhaps he had never really left.

The woman told him some times of flights from Paris to London. He could busk it from there. He thanked her and the ‘merci’ sounded ambiguous in his mouth, plea as well as thanks. Forgive me, old places, old times. I may have been untrue. For now he had to go back not just across space but across time, to the summer when, effectively, he left.

HE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN, even as it happened, that he would always think of that summer as one of the definitive seasons of his life, its seemingly dull colours made not less but more vivid with time, and he was someone realising in retrospect that what might have been mistaken for the ordinary was the unique travelling incognito.

He would have been inclined, for example, to think that memory had made the weather impossibly bright, like a crude restorer retouching old scenes with anachronistic new paint, except that he knew the newspapers of that time had been given to stating that this was the hottest Scottish summer since records were kept. That scientific fact was objective confirmation of something he had felt subjectively. This summer wasn't just special to him. It was special of itself.

Maybe he needed that summer to be so lambent, he would think in Edinburgh, so clear in the memory because it mattered so much to him, had become a kind of magnetic north of the mind from which he subsequently took his bearings. Maybe he had made the summer as much as the summer had made him. But, if so, it was an honest making. Being unable to remember everything, memory is obliged to edit. And even the passion with which we misremember may be a kind of truth, an error which, in pushing aside a surface fact, may admit light to the darker reaches of wish and longing where our natures most intensely live.

Then he would realise that, while all such memories were somehow about that summer, they were by no means all memories of that summer. That interested him. It was as if that summer were a kind of lodestone of his experience up to that time, drawing all previous memory towards these few warm months and defining its significance in relation to them.

The moments might seem to come back haphazardly. But no matter how aimlessly they drifted into his consciousness, he knew they related somehow to that summer. They led him to that time, pointing him - in their confused and preoccupied ways - towards the direction he had needed to take to search for himself.

The searching would probably never be over while he had breath and the wit to understand what was going on around him. But those wandering memories all seemed to converge for him, as at the cross of a ghost town, in the summer where perhaps the search had seriously begun. Before then he suspected that he had merely happened, like a series of accidents. This was the summer when he started learning to become himself.

THIS WAS 195 5. This was a different time and a different place.

This was when he was seventeen and experience was coming at him like flak. Everything seemed to be beginning, perhaps because there was nothing he had managed to finish yet, unless you counted school. He was such a welter of impressions, he never seemed actually to go places. He always found himself in them. Everything was an ambush - a girl's face, the shape of a tree, a film, a book that was going to change his life, a cripple seen in the street, a girl's face.

This was when he was still a virgin and determined not to be one. But he was a secret virgin. Outside, he had some of the mannerisms of a man of the world. He could smoke like Humphrey Bogart.

This wasn't too long after he had given up the compulsion to write on bits of paper: Thomas Mathieson Docherty, 14 Dawson Street, Longpark, Graithnock, Ayrshire, West of Scotland, Scotland, Great Britain, Europe, the Northern Hemisphere, the World, the Solar System, the Universe, the Cosmos, Eternity. Maybe he was trying to work out where he was.

This was the summer of the kiln, a ghetto in time, when rock ‘n’ roll was just a whispered rumour of new things and divorce was something he thought people did in America and sometimes people visited a house to see a television set and post-war rationing had ended and drugs were pills you bought at the chemist and the town had seven cinemas, each showing a main feature and a supporting feature twice weekly, and sex was a fabulous mystery and radio was a major force in most households and the presence of Cran hung over his life like the coming of the Kraken and cigarettes were stylish and one of his many ambitions was to be a writer and cars were what other people had and Maddie Fitzpatrick was his unattainable ideal of what a woman should be and the world seemed as young as he was and Sammy Clegg would ask him every so often, ‘Have ye done it yet?’

This was when, regardless of the weather outside, he lived in a private climate where it was always raining questions. Everything in him and around him seemed to be in doubt.

How could the Christian God be just if the ancient Greeks were born too early to know about Jesus? How can we bear to go on living if we are certain to die? Did Margaret Inglis not know that every time she stooped or leaned over, he could see, like a draped sculpture, her incredible shape, and he wanted to pull up her skirt, ease down her pants and put his hands on those bare mounds of flesh, regardless of what happened afterwards? If she found out, would she tell the police? If Alexander the Great hadn't cut the Gordian knot, would civilisation be different? Is it possible to get syphilis from a lavatory seat? If it is, will he die of a sexual disease before he manages to have sex? If he does, is there reincarnation? Why did Oscar Wilde change his name to Sebastian Melmoth? What's the point of plooks in the great scheme of things? Where is Macao? Why does he keep a secret notebook in which he writes down quotations and one-sentence reviews of books he hasn't written yet (his favourite is ‘Makes Tolstoy look like a miniaturist’) and thoughts about experience? What experience? Why has he started writing imaginary notes in his head to dead or fictional people? Dead letters, right enough. Is he mad? Will he ever get past being seventeen?

Seventeen - that doesn't feel like a year, it feels like a decade, one of those years you think you'll never get out of. Time doesn't seem to go forward. It seems to go round and round, an endless stationary journey in which he keeps coming back to the same places, has to wrestle with the same insoluble problems. His only chronology seems to be perpetual now, mind-shadowed by the future and the past. Now. And now. And now.

AND NOW HE IS PLAYING FOOTBALL in the Kay Park. It is late June. An empty Sunday has suddenly filled with raucous voices and the thud of foot on leather. The goalposts are discarded jackets. Sweat binds them together into a fierce intensity. Time stops. Everything contracts to reflex and instinct - move left, turn, release the ball, collect the ball. People are shapes that loom and recede, colliding energies. Nothing else matters. There is only the game. They make a small conspiracy there in the pale sunshine, twenty-odd disparate teenagers who have melted the complexity of things down into brute energy, a brief, invented passion whose relevance is consumed in its happening.

‘Next goal wins,’ somebody shouts.

And they score. His side has won 15-14.

They collapse on the grass and become themselves again. It was only a game of football after all and it has solved nothing for him. He is ejected suddenly out of the almost mystical completeness the game had given him into the tics and worries of his individuality. As if he has just descended from a different planetary sphere, he sees the strangeness of his fellow earthlings. Beef Bowman's attempt to grow a moustache makes his upper lip look like a caterpillar when he talks. Tommy Sutton's glass eye stares at Tam accusingly. Many years ago he pinned Tommy to the ground and wouldn't let him up until he had explained to him what was different about his eye. The thought of it now is a double scar on his memory: nobody has the right to be as insensitive as he was and no writer should be that dumb. Sammy Clegg is passing his laughter among the group as if it were an alms-cup - like me, like me. Tam does.

They are talking in a desultory way, conversational jazz, a thought thrown out, taken up, developed, moved on from. Two girls pass in the park, fifty yards away. Shouted invitations are issued. They discuss the girls' departing shapes as if they had a right to. He participates but his remarks are not really him. They are the camouflage he wears.

An altogether different conversation is taking place inside his head. It is an endless hubbub of voices in there, a talking multitude who seem to him to have been at it as long as he can remember. Will they ever agree about anything? There are countless suggestions about what he should be. For, although it was decided by someone in him when he was fourteen that he should be a writer, this is a decision which is constantly under review. There are so many other possibilities. He often wonders why that other, distant summer afternoon, when he lay on the grass of the back green, should be allowed to have such a definitive effect upon his life.

He discovered The Three Musketeers and the day fused. The sun receded to a night-light. He became D'Artagnan and Ayrshire was Gascony. Called in for a meal that had nothing to do with him, he found it awkward to sit at the table with his sword on.

He has never been the same since. His world has become interwoven with the world of books, to the frequent confusion of himself. Besides reading with manic ferocity, he has been trying to write and his mind has become a literary salon where Hemingway argues with Dickens and Dumas with one book of Jane Austen and Kafka will barely nod to anyone. And his mother keeps butting in too and his father and people he meets in the street and things he reads in the paper and everybody, all talking through one another. It's chaos in here. How is he supposed to sort things out?

Maybe he should just try and become a professional footballer. That would simplify things. The man who runs the amateur team he has played for has said he thinks Tam could do that and Smudger, the gym teacher at Graithnock Academy, told him more than once he had a natural and exceptional talent for the game. But how do you combine that with writing a masterpiece? It isn't easy.

Besides, what he gets out of playing football has no practical application that he can see. It's not about tactics and wearing down the opposition and hitting on the break. It's a feeling. It's a feeling of belonging, of things being right. He reaches a place where he just loves the sound of feet striking the ball, the hastened breathing, the shared exertion. This will do, he thinks. This will do for the time being. He doesn't want the game to end. He doesn't even care too much what the score is. He doesn't think that would go down too well with a professional team. He can imagine coming into the dressing-room after playing for Graithnock FC.

(‘What a feeling, eh? That was some feeling. Did you get that feeling? That sense of the rightness of things? I hope I can get that feeling again next week. And maybe we won't lose 10-0 next week as well.’

The dressing-room reverberates with delighted laughter and applause.)

That's a definite problem he has. His sense of purpose is always being waylaid by the moment for its own sake. He remembers once in an examination he was going well when he happened to glance up from the question he was answering. He saw the examination room filled with frozen sunlight. It was beautiful and the bowed heads had the dignity of statues - a boy with his hand on his neck and a girl's dark hair falling, screening her face. He knew in that instant that everybody here was their own purpose and their preoccupation with other things was missing the point. He wanted to get up and share his revelation with everyone, declare a celebration of just being there. He didn't but he must have lost at least twenty minutes in purposeless wonderment. It was lucky he passed.

Maybe that was one of the reasons he hadn't made it all the way with a girl yet. The underground oral Handbook of Machismo they passed among them might have programmed him for merciless seduction but the way she smiled would render him idiot with enjoyment or the soft flesh of her upper arm would delay him indefinitely and he would forget what he was supposed to do. Why is he like this?

VORFREUDE?

GRETE TAUGHT HIM THE WORD, he would remember in Edinburgh. Never having learned German, much to his regret (Ancient Greek had 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.

They were in the lounge when the guns went off. He thought he remembered it pretty well. He had 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.

‘You're always doing that,’ she said. ‘Your memory's pathetic.’

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.

There were no tapes of Garfield's films, which was maybe just as well, for he feared looking at former magic and finding it had been reduced to a few tricks. But there was the book of John Garfield's life and it talked him through a part of that winter like a friendly ghost. If you're in the shit, it said, I've been there too. Remember the way I was? And he did. How he entered rooms as if he were challenging their contents; the jutting face that prowed bravely into whatever was happening like a ship cleaving unknown waters; the hurt puzzlement of the eyes looking into their own wrongdoing.

He faced a bad time and stared it down. John Garfield helped. But he was still left wondering how far he had travelled towards being whoever he really was.—

MIRROR, MIRROR, ON THE WALL, Who the hell am I at all? He wondered how many times he had looked in a mirror for confirmation of himself. He was doing it again. He saw the reflection of the open suitcase that was behind him on the bed. His attempt at packing was a mess. Not only had he never learned to pack, he suspected he had never learned to unpack.

‘What are you staring at. Dad?’

Megan stood in the doorway. She was giving him her own stare, those remorselessly innocent eyes that made him feel he was facing a plenary meeting of the Spanish Inquisition.

‘Nothing, Meganio.’

‘You were so.’

‘No. Ah was just lookin’.'

‘You were so. You were staring and staring. Into the mirror.’

‘Ah wasn't really staring and staring. Ah was just staring. I was just checking I was there.’

That seemed to make sense to her.

‘This it. Dad?’

She held up his toilet-bag.

‘It is, it is. You are a total cracker.’

She came across and handed him the bag.

‘I put things in.’

‘Thank you, Princessa.’

He dropped the bag on the bed and, as he turned back, he noticed the self-containment of her standing there. He felt the utter wonder of her presence and he lifted her up and spun her in the air, laughing. She was smiling calmly. He set her down on the floor.

‘Is that all?’ she said.

‘Well. Ah suppose it'll have to do. Where's Gus?’

She shrugged and walked out.

He picked up the toilet-bag. He smiled at how well Megan had done. Then he noticed that she had also included Gill's L'Air du Temps. He laughed to himself and put the perfume on the window-ledge. He looked at the open suitcase. Was that enough? He could never tell. At least he had his one formal suit in it. Just in case. Just in bloody case. He thought of taking the suit back out, for packing it felt like signing the death certificate already. You should never welcome the bad stuff. If it wanted to come in, let it beat the door down. No. The suit stayed. Superstition doesn't change the rules, it just lets you refuse to learn them. You have to learn them. Would he ever learn them?

He crossed to the window and looked out at Grenoble. He fingered the bottle of L'Air du Temps. Perhaps Megan thought his uncertainty about himself extended to gender. Or did she see him as inhabiting the same not quite reachable place of certainty where he had sensed his own father to be? He hoped not. He hoped it was different for girls. He hoped it would be different for Gus, too. He hadn't even been able to tell his father about Cran, though he had wanted to.

Two feelings had held him back, instinctively. The first was that it seemed unmanly. He was seventeen and had left school. He should be able to look after himself - too late to run home from the playground, picking hardened blood from your nostrils, to receive from your mother the sweet solace that the rest of the world is wrong and a plate of tattie soup that warms your insides like ointment for the soul, to receive from your father advice on the politics of fear and kitchen lessons on how to deliver a good left hook. There had to come a time when the womb was shut, owing to the fact of your being too big for effective re-entry. It was a pity, though.

The second was, paradoxically, that his father would have understood Cran and the cavernous brutishness where so much of his nature seemed to reside, littered with the bones of dead compassion. For part of his father, too, lived in those shadows. The very fact that his father would have recognised Cran, though he had never met him, had created in his mind a bond between the two men, one which excluded him. Somehow he must have sensed that you didn't gain admission to that dark brotherhood by invitation. You had to earn it for yourself. Somehow he had come to know it was his father most of all who blocked the entrance, shaking his head, acknowledging his own powerlessness to let Tam pass, implying with every spontaneous gesture of his nature that the only way past him was through him.

(There is a code of rules here I didn't make and don't control, he seemed to be saying, and the core of the code is this: no entry but by the force of your own nature. I will offer help but it will be weirdly codified help and it's down to you to crack the code. Take me on and win your entry. Don't and stay outside.)

IT IS SUNDAY MORNING

HE LIES AWAKE IN MICHAEL AND MARION'S BED, luxuriating. (As usual on a Saturday night, they have been staying at Marion's mother's.) He reflects on his talent for long, deep sleeps. He can do this even in the living-room with noise all around him. (‘If sleep wis brains, son,’ his father has said, not without a hint of jealousy, ‘you'd be a genius.’) He thinks of the girl he took home from the dancing last night. Marilyn Miller. It was pleasant - bruised lips and delicate adumbration of firm breasts. He has discovered the word ‘adumbration’ recently. He likes it. Adumbration. To adumbrate. He had done some adumbrating last night, but nothing more. Only adumbrators need apply was obviously Marilyn Miller's motto. Adumbration. One for the files. He would have to find an excuse for using the word in front of his father.

(‘Okay, smartarse, so ye've swallied a dictionary. Noo tell us whit ye mean.’

‘Look, Feyther, I'm just tryin' to adumbrate this basic idea.')

Marilyn Miller. She has an auntie who lives in Melbourne and it seems that this auntie once lost a baby. The night before the miscarriage, Marilyn's auntie dreamt that a nun stood at the foot of her bed, sneering and shaking her head. That is amazing, isn't it? A prophetic dream, one that's definitely got the edge on Auntie Bella's dreams about nocturnal visits to the shops. Isn't it strange how two dances with a stranger can open doors on to experiences you never imagined? People are amazing.

Marilyn Miller. He likes her but he doesn't think they'll be trying it again. He's pretty sure Marilyn would prefer it that way. Everything was fine between them but nothing was more than fine. Nothing really happened, no thunderbolts, no tidal waves in the blood. It was more like a school trip to the seaside where the water remained too cold to do more than paddle and there was shared conversation like stale sandwiches. He is glad she introduced him to her auntie but he and she parted without having really met. Sorry, I thought you were someone else. He doesn't know who she mistook him for. But he suspects that he knows who she wasn't. Margaret Inglis. He sighs and thinks about getting up.

And Sir Alexander Fleming died this year. Penicillin. It must be wonderful to have discovered something that benefits the whole world. You could really say that Fleming changed the terms of human life. It's enough to make God get fidgety. And Fleming was born just a few miles from here, up the road in Darvel. An Ayrshireman did that. There's hope, there's hope. Tam remembers a newsreel where you saw Fleming in his laboratory. He was pottering about with a cigarette hanging from his mouth, like a man mending a fuse or something. He's seen his father like that when he was fixing a wireless or, in the case of Bryce the Grocer, blowing one up. He loves that image of Fleming. For him it's a symbol of the democracy of achievement. You don't need to have been born in a big estate or talk as if your mouth had piles or act pompously to achieve great things. Maybe it would be good to be a doctor. But would medical science ever discover an antidote to Margaret Inglis?

He gets up and pulls on a sweater and the trousers he was wearing to the dancing. He pads on bare feet downstairs and into the kitchen, where his mother makes him a cooked breakfast.

‘Let ‘im fend for himself! Breakfast's like a Jew's weddin’ in here,' his father is shouting through from the living-room.

‘Thank you. Pater,’ Tam calls back. ‘May I have the Bentley today?’

‘A kick in the arse. That's what ye can have.’

Ah, the sweet, domestic sounds of a peaceful Sabbath. He is flicking through the Sunday Post.

He finishes his breakfast and decides that what he'll do is get the packet of ten Paymaster from his raincoat pocket in the lobby, go upstairs with the paper and have a quiet smoke, like a gentleman in his club. He never smokes in the house. He hardly ever smokes anywhere, mainly just at the dancing and even then only a few. Cigarettes are for him essentially a prop, only appropriate to certain social scenes. You really have to smoke at the dancing, he has decided. It's hard enough trying to camouflage yourself as a tough guy as it is. Go in there without cigarettes and it would be like wearing a blouse.

He has never smoked at the brickwork, it occurs to him. Would that help? Cran might have to take him seriously then. What could be more manly than giving yourself lung cancer? Anyway, Michael smokes and nobody will notice the difference of a little more smoke in the bedroom. And Tam has only recently begun to realise how good a cigarette tastes after food.

He rises and rinses his crockery and cutlery at the sink, laying them on the draining-board.

‘Here,’ his mother says. ‘You've got yer good trousers on. Who d'ye think ye are? Beau Brummell? Change them.’

‘Aye, Mither,’ he says abstractedly.

He hardly hears her. The thought of smoking at the brickwork has brought the image of Cran from the edges of his mind, where he constantly loiters, until he is looming darkly in the forefront. He is thinking that perhaps he should mention Cran to his father, as he goes to fetch the Paymaster from his coat pocket. He reaches absent-mindedly into his left-hand pocket, then into the right-hand one. He pauses. He thinks back through last night. He only smoked three. The insult of it jars him into action before he has time to think. He is standing in the living-room.

‘Here,’ he says.

The aggression in his own voice takes him by surprise. His father looks up from his newspaper, observes him over the top of his glasses.

‘Somebody's nicked ma fags.’

His father takes off his glasses. The newspaper settles, rustling across his knees. Tam is embarrassedly aware of the silliness of the ‘somebody’. There is only his father in the room. Marion is out for the day with her friends. His father's eyes haven't left Tam's face.

‘Ah wonder who it could be?’ his father says. ‘D'ye think yer mammy's started smokin’?'

‘No, but,’ Tam says, and he feels the lameness of his remark even before he makes it. ‘Ah bought them.’

‘D'ye want the money?’

‘Naw, it's no’ that.'

‘“Nicked” yer fags? Strangers nick, son. Families share.’

They stare at each other. Tam is cringing at the way he has created a crisis out of nothing. Suddenly, it's Cigarette Fight at Sunday Creek. Tam continues to return his father's stare because he doesn't know what else to do. But he has become sickeningly aware that his gun's empty. His father leans towards the hearth and picks up the Paymaster packet.

‘Here,’ he says. ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy. Ah believe this is your property.’

He throws the packet to Tam and, in having to crouch in order to catch it, Tam has the involuntary sensation of bowing, as before a superior force. He straightens up quickly but he still doesn't feel much taller than a bug. He despises himself for having been so stupidly mean as to grudge his own father a few cigarettes. Was he supposed to waken Tam up and ask permission? Seventeen years of providing for him hasn't earned his father the assumptive right to take a couple of fags when he feels like it? Oh, Jesus. Tam can't believe who he is, what a crummy person he can be. Will he ever get it right?

He stands uncertainly in the middle of the living-room. He struggles to find something to say.

‘It's okay, Feyther,’ he says. ‘You can have them.’

‘Naw, it's all right, son. Ah'll smoke the pipe.’

Anger would have been easier to take. The gentleness of his father's voice is very painful, kindness as whiplash. His father is reading the paper again, repeatedly pushing up his glasses with his forefinger as they repeatedly slide down his nose. Tam is still standing. His father glances up again.

‘It's okay, Tam. Ah've got the pipe here.’

‘Aye.’

The border is closed. He feels again that sense of his parents' dismay with him. What's their problem? ‘Where did we go wrong, Betsy?’ his father will say. ‘What did we do to deserve this?’ his mother will say. Come on. He's not an axe murderer - though if they keep this up, who knows? Tommy Borden with an axe … If they only knew some of the things he wants to do, fantasises doing. They should count themselves lucky, he has often thought. They should think about how some parents must really wonder how their children turned out the way they did.

He turns away and comes upstairs and shuts the door of Michael and Marion's room.

(Dear Parents of Attila the Hun,

Where do you think you went wrong?)

BRIGHT SUNLIGHT INFUSES THE ROOM. It says in the papers that this July could have the highest sunshine figure for any month of any year since they started keeping records in 1921. It certainly makes things look better. Seen in this light, the place looks like an advert for domestic life. The permanently set-up card table with its chequered cover, where Marion and Michael take their meals, resonates with sharp colours of red and white. The floral easy chairs with wooden arm-rests sit on each side of the fire. Michael and Marion have the only bedroom with a fireplace, because this is their living-room as well as where they sleep. The fire is cleared and set with firelighters and rolled-up newspaper and a few sticks and small pieces of coal, waiting for the first match of autumn. This looks like a good place to be.

He comes here every Sunday, when Marion and Michael stay overnight at her mother's, to replenish his purposes at the beginning of each week. This is one of the essential places of the summer, along with the kitchen, the Grand Hall, the Queen's Cafe, the brickwork, the countryside round Bringan, the pictures, the inside of a book. These are landmarks for the wild wanderings of his mind. Here Sunday merges with Sunday - different occasions, same troubled and unresolved time.

Sometimes the scene excludes him. He doesn't belong. This is a place for people who seem to know who they are, what their lives are about. They seem to have things worked out. He tries to fit in.

He takes Michael's ashtray and places it on the tiled hearth beside Michael's chair. He sits down and lights a cigarette. He begins to read the paper. He smokes. He has seen his father do this. He has seen Michael do this.

But it doesn't work. He feels like a bad actor. He is imitating the attitudes of others without personal conviction. Self-doubts invade him. He thinks of The Chair. Even when it sits empty at the piece-break, it is more full of Cran than this chair is full of him at the moment. He is simultaneously smoking suavely and brimming with panic, the terror of having to be who he doesn't know how to be.

He leaves his cigarette burning in the ashtray and crosses towards Marion's dressing-table. He kneels down in front of it, as if it were an altar. He does this every Sunday and every Sunday his image floats back at him like a ghost. He stares at himself in the mirror. Who is that? It could be anybody. What is the secret people like his father and Cran and Michael have? Michael is only eight years older than he is but he seems like an awfully big brother. He's married now and working in the creamery and Marion is pregnant. He has done his National Service. He served in Berlin at the time of the Berlin Airlift. He seems so relaxed about everything. How do you get like that?

Tam watches his own jumpy eyes in the mirror. He has no substance as a person, he realises with panic. The mirror is composed of one centrepiece and two side flaps, which move on hinges. He pulls the flaps in towards him so that by looking in one flap he can see the back of his head in the other. That is what people coming behind him see. It looks solid and masculine. Maybe he should practise walking backwards so that people won't see the nervousness in his eyes.

(‘There's a real man. He walks funny, right enough. But he looks like a real man.')

He studies himself frontally again. The nose is all right.

(‘Where d’ ye get that nose, our Tam?' Michael once said. ‘It's the only straight wan in the family. It's about half the size o’ ma feyther's.'

‘When God wis givin’ them out,' his father said, ‘Ah thought they were for eatin’. So Ah took the biggest one Ah could find.'

‘Naw, it's odd, though,’ Michael said. ‘You didny have a wee thing wi’ a passin' gypsy. Mammy?'

‘Aye,’ his mother said. ‘But that wis you. Dark-haired and shiftless. Except that you're blond. It was a blond gypsy.’)

The hair could be better. There is plenty of it but it's much too fine. He insisted on getting a crew-cut last year, against the advice of Mr Guthrie, the barber who is also a phrenologist. (‘You're an intellectual, son. I can tell by the bumps.’) The result was an unqualified disaster. Separate strands of hair kept waving in all directions. He went about for a fortnight like a porcupine. That was his first experience of being a recluse.

He stares in the mirror and wishes he were John Garfield. He is not. He is Thomas Mathieson Docherty, who still hasn't come near to fulfilling any of the five ambitions he set for himself this summer: to have sex (preferably with a human being but let's not be too choosy); to face up to Cran; to read as many books as possible; to come to terms with his partial estrangement from his family and friends; to begin his life's work as a writer.

He has told John Benchley about wanting to start what John calls ‘the magnum opus’ before the end of the summer. It seems a reasonable enough idea. His example is Thomas Chatterton, ‘the marvellous boy’. But he feels he should make a few modifications to the model. The fact that Chatterton committed suicide at seventeen doesn't seem to him an example he should necessarily follow, especially since he hasn't really written anything he likes yet and this doesn't give him much time. He will be eighteen in November. What does appeal to him about Chatterton was his hunger for fame while he was more or less young enough to enjoy it. For anything beyond about twenty-five seems to him to be bordering on the twilight world.

(Dear Thomas Chatterton,

Could you not have given it another week or two?)

But that project isn't going well. He has just abandoned his second attempt to find the form for what he wants to say.

The clock striking another nail into my tomb.

The creak of darkness closing in the rain—

This painted night locks up her hired room.

Straightens her clothes and takes to the streets again.

My mind like a miser huddled on his hams

Counts his beliefs like pennies in his palms.

The loose change of my father's prodigal ease,

A vast inheritance of verdigris.

The future flutters fiercely for release.

Caged in the rusty past.

The present's fingers bleed on the rusted bolts.

The key is lost.

Each man who lives must live towards a grief

And while he lives must bear mutation out.

The world turns not on faith but disbelief

And here the final certainty is doubt.

We meet no god in names that we create.

We meet our own refusal to continue.

God waits for us in loving and in hate.

In action's arm and in endeavour's sinew.

Himself he gave us in the things we are

And bade us worship him with every scar.

He named himself in everything we do.

And shall we dare to christen him anew?

This isn't any good, he feels now. He can't believe that, when he finished it maybe eight weeks ago, he thought it was worth memorising. It is part of a 800-line poem he wrote in a fortnight called ‘Reflections in a Broken Mirror’. It was meant to be more or less his philosophy of the world. But then what does he know about the world? It's embarrassing. After he had finished it, he wrote a letter to T.S. Eliot, offering to let him see it. For three weeks afterwards, he suspected the postal service of incompetence or T.S. Eliot of having died. But when no news arrived of the death of a major poet he got his sister Allison to make a typescript surreptitiously at her work and he sent it off to Chatto and Windus. A nice letter came back, talking of ‘great intellectual vigour’ and the impossibility of publication. He keeps the letter in his notebook, regarding it as his first review.

But now he wishes he could forget those lines he memorised. They keep coming back into his mind and suffusing it with the intellectual equivalent of a blush. They have become especially embarrassing because they led him into yet another misjudgment with a girl.

He was sitting in the Queen's Cafe with her and she discovered that he was trying to write. She asked him what he was writing. Suddenly, he was quoting the lines. Once he had started, he couldn't manage to stop. It was as if he had taken a mental emetic. He looked on in dismay as his mouth careered on and she looked as if she was going to fall asleep. When the words ran out, there was an awkward pause, rather as though someone had farted and they were waiting for the smell to dissipate.

‘But that's not poetry,’ she said at last.

She was voicing something he had himself been suspecting. Those words seemed somehow like an anteroom to writing, not the thing itself. For a start, he thought forlornly, you don't put nails in a tomb. You put them in a coffin.

How could he have written anything so self-absorbedly inaccurate? Writing, he has already decided, is making love. It's not masturbation. (Is that why he can't do it yet, since his only experience so far lies in the second of these areas?) Whatever it is you're trying to relate to must be justly learned, not pre-decided or merely imagined. Lose the details, you lose the lot. One compass he has given himself in his uncharted creative ambition is to distinguish between details and trivia. A detail becomes a detail by acquiring specific separate relevance to the whole. It achieves identity in conjunction. A triviality is interchangeable with other trivialities. It remains functionally anonymous. In that one line he has turned a detail into a triviality.

The clock striking another nail into my tomb. Crap. In that imprecision he sees the loss of the whole poem, as if one careless compass reading has multiplied the error of direction in the whole thing until it finds itself not in the New World he had imagined but standing in Antarctica in tee-shirt and jeans and doomed to instant death. That bastard nail had made a tomb of the poem, or a coffin.

He was aware of her watching his gloom - Hamlet in the Queen's Cafe. She was not unkind. May Walkinshaw. She might have a sense of poetry as all-inclusive as that of Miss Stevens, his English teacher in third year, who taught the class ‘Daffodils’ for two weeks solid, as if it were the aesthetic Ten Commandments, beating its rhythms relentlessly into their heads with a ruler on her desk. And she might treat her tits as if they were the crown jewels, to be filed past and admired but never touched. But she wasn't unkind.

‘I'm sorry,’ she said. ‘I hope I haven't hurt you.’

‘Naw,’ he said. ‘It's all right.’

But it wasn't. He knew he would never write again. And he thought of Greta Garbo. It was several days before he started his blank-verse play about working-class life. He decided he wouldn't mention it to any of the girls at the dancing.

WHY DOES THE DANCING MEAN SO MUCH TO HIM? He stares in the mirror and wonders. The dancing is the most important place in his life, he thinks. This mirror is in Allison's room. It is Saturday morning. Allison works on a Saturday morning at the office where she is a typist. He can come in here and use it as a dressing-room.

Only when Allison is out can he come into her room. The rest of the time she protects her space with the ferocity of a guard-dog. He feels pissed off about the living arrangements in the house. Where is his space here? On Saturday mornings he may enter the sanctum of Allison's room as long as he leaves no telltale signs of his having been here. Sundays he has access to Michael and Marion's room. Saturday nights he can kip in Michael and Marion's in a real bed. His clothes are kept in his parents' wardrobe. Six nights a week he sleeps in the fold-down bed in the living-room. It's like sleeping in the middle of the road. You have to learn to ignore the traffic. He feels like a refugee living on the edges of other people's lives. How are you supposed to find out who you are when you have to borrow yourself from the leftovers of others like second-hand clothes? No wonder he needs the dancing. At least there he can feel part of a community of nomadic hunters with the same rights as anybody else.

He tries to find a hunter's expression in the mirror. He hopes the dancing will be good tonight. He'll probably go to the pictures as he does every Saturday afternoon, now that the football season's over. Then it will be the dancing.

At least he has no obvious plooks at the moment. The skin of his face is more or less clear. Sammy Clegg's in a bit of a state just now. Plooks. That's a really Scottish word, much more expressive than ‘pimples’. Plooks: the sound of illusions bursting. Why are all things in Scots designated by the least romantic sound the mouth can encompass? Scottish vocabulary is like a fifth column operating within the sonorous pomposity of English, full of renegade plosives and gutturals that love to dismantle pretensions. It's English in its underwear.

He has some plooks on his shoulders but that's no problem. Your shirt conceals them. Just don't go to the swimming-baths. Forehead plooks are bad but things can be done with the hair. He has a theory that the Tony Curtis hairstyle owes its amazing popularity to its effectiveness as a plook-concealer. Plooks on the cheeks are much more difficult. It would take a hairstyle of insane exoticism to cover them. The best you can do is to become elaborately thoughtful for a few days, developing a style of resting the face meditatively on the appropriate hand, or on both hands in time of extreme crisis.

The ultimate cosmetic nightmare is a plook on the nose. You can do nothing with them except suffer. Valderma seems to feed a plook like that instead of curing it.

(Dear Inventor of Valderma,

Don't give up your day job.)

None of the theories current for dealing with them seems to work very well in practice. ‘Squeeze early’ is one school of thought: better a red lump than an angry hill crowned with a white cairn. But he always finds that he is sculpting it to an even greater grandeur, feels he is assisting in the perfecting of his own ugliness. And those ones always seem to come at exactly the wrong time.

Does the adult world realise the significance of plooks? One nose-plook may have affected his chances of happiness for ever. It was so huge, so embarrassingly bright, that he believed it was flashing like a Belisha beacon. It reached maturity on the very evening he was to go out with Margaret Inglis. It was after he had taken her home from the school dance this year.

That was some dance. He knew he was leaving school and he appeared in his new, tight-trousered suit, casual shoes and Michael's maroon waistcoat. (That tie,' his father had said. ‘Like an explosion in a flooer-shop.’) Some of the teachers looked at him askance and Miss Hetherington said in a loud voice as he was passing once, ‘I didn't know they were inviting hooligans this year.’ But Mrs White had stopped him to say, ‘I thought you were staff there, Tom. Then I realised you were dressed too maturely to be staff.’ That had left him wondering.

He had a great night. All his experience at the dancing seemed to pay off. It was like his coming-out ball. He was picked early at every ladies' choice. By the end of the dance there were at least four girls he thought he could ask to take home. But there was only one he really wanted to. Margaret was just finishing fourth year but she didn't look like it. She looked as if she had modelled for the Jane cartoon in the Daily Mirror. And she had given him two ladies' choices.

On the way home it started to rain and they took shelter in a phone box in which someone had broken the light. It became the most erotic experience of his life so far. He does not know why it should have been so intense. Maybe it was the excitement of being simultaneously so public and so private. There was glass round them on three sides and yet they were invisible, at least from a distance. The rain came down like a defensive wall. Maybe it was the inescapable closeness, as if just by entering the phone box they had gone past each other's inhibitions. There were no gestures of distancing they could make in this confined space. Every movement became an involvement with the other.

They became impassioned before they knew it was happening. She had her hands inside his shirt, kneading him roughly, and his right hand was inside her pants, feeling the awesomeness of that bristly, secret hair, when she suddenly said, ‘Wait, there's someone coming.’ They pulled apart. She adjusted her skirt. He buttoned his raincoat over his open shirt. They stood casually with their backs to the street, as if they were innocently talking. ‘You're too dangerous for me,’ Margaret said mysteriously. The glass of the phone box was opaque with their breathing. He heard footsteps coming nearer. They stopped. There was a long moment while he wondered if it was a policeman. The door opened. He couldn't believe it. He turned round slowly and saw a man with a soft hat looking in.

‘This is an offence, you know,’ the man said, and let the door close and waited.

‘Oh my God,’ Margaret said. ‘That's my dad.’

He was a very big dad. They had no time to synchronise reactions. Margaret stepped out of the phone box immediately and Tam followed her, having buttoned up his coat.

The three of them stood in sheeting rain. Margaret put up her umbrella. Tam envied her possession of a prop. It gave her something to do. All Tam could do was stand there swaying slightly with nerves, like a potted plant, being battered by the rain. He felt disadvantaged by her father's hat. He felt as if he had wandered into a scene from The Maltese Falcon by mistake, one in which he had no lines.

‘You,’ Margaret's father pointed at her. ‘Home, lady. You,’ he pointed at Tam. ‘I've a good mind to take you over the park and give you a hiding.’

‘And what will Ah be doin’ while you're doin' it?' Whose voice was that? It wasn't him speaking. It was some instinct he hadn't known was there, expressing itself through him. ‘Ah wouldn't let ma father do that? Why should Ah let you?’

That sounded good. It sounded really good. His voice had somehow transformed his fragile timorousness into something strong and threatening, a chihuahua barking through a megaphone. It had worked. But it had worked too well.

‘Right. Come on. Let's see.’

Suddenly, they were walking towards Piersland Park. This was ridiculous but Tam couldn't think of anything else to do except walk beside the stranger. With his shirt unbuttoned to the waist inside his closed raincoat, he was freezing, but he didn't think it would be a good idea to button it up just now. That wouldn't be an action calculated to calm this big man down. Tam was wondering if he could turn embarrassing partial nudity to advantage by stripping off coat, jacket and shirt as one when they reached the park. That might look impressive. Come ahead. You're dealing with somebody here that's keen for action. That might give him a head start. ‘Half of fightin's psychology,’ his father had told him once. ‘Most losers lose of a fractured heart.’ But what about the other half? He remembered Michael clapping him on the shoulder once, withdrawing his hand in mock pain and saying, ‘Christ, Ah've cut maself. Tam, you've got shoulders like razor-blades.’ Tam Docherty stripped was not going to be the most intimidating sight. He was probably going to get hammered.

How did he get from the warmth of Margaret's body to this? The prospect of rolling about in the rain getting his head punched in? And Margaret was clicking along behind them. What was she going to do? Referee? Life was ridiculous.

‘This is ridiculous,' her father said.

He had stopped. Tam stopped. Margaret stopped.

‘Just leave my daughter alone. Okay? Come on, Margaret.’

The two of them walked away. Tam stood alone in the rain. He was both relieved and cheated. He knew this was just postponement of the inevitable. For he would have to find out some time what it would have been like in that darkened park - and it might have been better to find out from Mr Inglis than some of the Teddy-boys at the dancing.

‘Remember. Leave her alone,’ Mr Inglis shouted back.

But he hadn't. There were still those anarchic schooldays just before the summer holidays, when senior pupils lounged in the prefects' room and played shove-ha'penny and chess and briefly acted as if they owned the school. He talked to Margaret a lot and eventually she agreed to meet him outside Boots on Friday night. She agreed on the day he was leaving to look for a job. He didn't go back to school.

Meanwhile, came the plook - a record-breaking mound of white right on the tip of his nose.

‘That's not a plook you've got there, Tam,' Michael said. ‘Ah think it's a Siamese twin.’

Everything he did to hurry it on only made it last longer. It seemed to have the gestation period of an elephant, which was appropriate to its dimensions. Early Friday evening, he moped in front of Marion's mirror, feeling like a Quasimodo whose hump has transmigrated to his nose. He applied some of Marion's face powder but that only seemed to make it more conspicuous, seeming to him as vivid as the gentian violet that had shamed some of his classmates in primary school. Wiping the powder off, he saw his nose glow blindingly again, a light-bulb with the shade removed.

He stood Margaret up. He stood her up. It was the only time in his life he had done that. He thought if she saw him like that she might not want to see him again. He keeps hoping she will turn up at the dancing. But she never does.

He stares at his plookless face in the mirror and thinks that he looks not bad today. Margaret, where are you now?

‘Tom!’

His mother is calling him down for his dinner. If he had been born into a wealthy family, she would be calling him down for lunch. Or maybe a servant would be striking a gong. (His mother's voice sounds a bit like a gong - To-o-o-o-m.)

Either way, it would still be a pain in the bloody arse -the knight's quest for himself constantly interrupted by trivial irrelevancies.

AT LEAST HUNGER IS A CONSTANT, he would think. No matter what pretensions you had about yourself, your stomach was always waiting to bring them down to the ordinary. It was like the man who stood behind the triumphant Roman general on his chariot, while he took the plaudits of the crowd, and said, ‘Remember thou art but mortal.’ Is that what he said? Something like that. Anyway, what your stomach said was, ‘You better eat.’ In the tracklessness of thought, that was some kind of basic compass. In the confusion of selfhood, it was some kind of crude badge of identity. Even in the ecstasies of the mystics, there must have been a lot of bellies rumbling. Maybe that was what they mistook for the music of the spheres. You better eat.

Jesus, look at that fridge. It was like the laboratory of Sir Alexander Fleming. Get your home-made penicillin here. He would soon be frightened to open the door because, when he did, behold - a small abandoned universe of determined life. Cheese where lichen grows. Fruit that nurtures a dark, internal being. All around, small clumps of fungi continue their furious and meaningless existence and, when the god who carelessly created them absent-mindedly shuts the door, are plunged again into cold darkness.

He could forget about something to eat. Suicide by Roquefort. Stick to the liquid nutrition. He'd better clean it out in the morning. Before they all came out to get him like the invasion of the body-snatchers. The bastards.

He filled out another whisky, watered it and went back through to the living-room. Lit only by the light from the gas fire and the reading lamp that made a small bell of brightness on the table by the window, the darkened room seemed mysterious beyond the purpose to which he was putting it. He crossed it as if it was a walk-through painting of someone else's place.

Shit, he thought as he sat back down at the table, I'll have to stop thinking like this. It's just a room in a rented flat. Why see it in any other way? Was that tendency what had been wrong with his life all along? He hoped not. He distrusted romanticism.

But he wondered about that fixation with Margaret Inglis. Was it not partly about his sense of her as being not quite attainable? And Maddie Fitzpatrick. What chance could he ever have imagined he would have with her? And he remembered the girl on the bus, who had haunted him all that summer.

Something Jack Laidlaw had said some years ago came back to him. Four of them - Vic Vernon, Ray Harrison, Jack and himself - had been drinking in the Admiral in Glasgow. Ray had been teasing Jack about not having settled with a woman after his divorce. ‘Philanderer’ was mentioned.

‘I'm not a philanderer,’ Jack said. ‘Several hundred women will testify to that.’

They had all laughed. But the joke bothered him. He didn't believe it was true of Jack. And he knew it wasn't true of himself. He could only remember about a couple of one-night stands. Otherwise he had only made love within a relationship, even if it was a brief one.

But then why was he sitting here alone? It wasn't because he wanted the freedom to be promiscuous. If it had been, why was he living like a hermit? And he had always suspected sexual romanticism in relationships as being for some a means of justifying promiscuity. He had known people like that, both women and men, but mainly men.

They made such demands on the other that she must disappoint. The disappointment recreated a romantic vulnerability that made the man attractive to and attracted by a new woman. She thought she would be the one to give his restlessness a home. But in order to do so she would have to kill the very dynamic of his nature - his searching romanticism. His instinctive realisation of this danger made him dissatisfied with her and critical of her and the only mode of survival was by renewal of the quest. The cycle could begin again. Romanticism could only be in the search. To accept that you had found the object of the search was to commit a kind of suicide of the romantic self.

Also, he thought, sexual romanticism often had a very pragmatic method which it could contrive to conceal from itself in order to maintain its faith in its own romanticism - for example, by keeping many apparently innocent social contacts with women, like lines trawling in the sea. If nothing happened, nothing happened. But if the woman gave a hint of romantic interest the romantic was ready to take advantage of it - the bait had been taken. But the romantic could still convince himself that he had been surprised by coincidence, did not contrive his own ambush. Isn't romance wonderfully, undeniably spontaneous? The machinery of seduction had been kept concealed, was ostensibly separate from the seemingly spontaneous result.

Thus, those who profess the purity of their romanticism, their removal from baser motives of self-seeking and pleasure profiteering, are often street traders in emotion, barrow-boys of the affections - magpies pretending to be lovebirds.

He didn't believe he had done that. But then why was he sitting here alone? He couldn't exactly claim that he hadn't met any terrific women. Why wasn't he with one of them now? Or was it that good creates the appetite for best and baffles choice? At least in some people. To seek the impossible ideal was a perfect way of never connecting finally with anyone.

But that wasn't him, he thought. Surely not. Let us pray. Surely not.

But

TE AMO DEL UNO AL NUEVE

IN A CAFÉ IN BUENOS AIRES, near the Plaza de Mayo, he would sit with Cristina Esposito and she would be explaining to him the meaning of that sentence. I love you from one to nine. Without zero. Sin cero. Sincero. She had a torn-off piece of grey napkin paper and a biro pen and she was breaking down the words for him as if they were an equation. She was speaking with the preoccupied pedantry of a schoolmistress. She looked as if she were trying to explicate some impractical science of the passions. In the space between her fussy manner and her luxuriance of chestnut hair, the black eyes where tapers of intensity came and went and the astonishingly mobile lips speaking a silent sub-text that sometimes made him forget to hear the real words, he sensed the impossible place where, though he could not remember the moment of choosing, he had perhaps chosen to live, where passionate compulsion could find no way to cohabit with necessary pragmatism.

Across the cafe, a middle-aged man looked up from his thoughts towards them. He smiled and winked, seeming to understand where he and Cristina were. In that generous Latin way of joining in other people's parades, he made an elaborate sidelong glance towards Cristina's intensity.

‘Esta noche,’ he said. He pointed at him threateningly. Tonight. You. He made a throat-cutting gesture.

‘No hay problema,’ he had replied. ‘Viva la muerte,’ grateful for having read Robert Lowell. Manifold were the uses of literacy.

He felt in that moment the strangeness of his being here, simultaneously the joy of Cristina's presence and the anguish of its fleetingness. It was as if the poignancy of this time lay in their inability to sustain it. Maybe if you make what is wild captive, you destroy its nature. He had that familiar, haunting sense that his emotions and his practical experience lived in separate but parallel universes and he wondered if he would ever manage to make them live permanently together. It was a feeling less of déjà vu than déjà senti, a sense of the impossibility of what is happening. Was it that very impossibility that attracted him, like a brief escape from the cage of time and circumstance?

Within the cafe, like a box within a box, occurred a car. He was driving with Gill in Ireland. It was the kind of day he associated with Ireland, bright and windy, the weather good enough to let you see the greenery but not good enough to let you luxuriate in it - a beautiful virago. He was rounding a corner when the image of a woman hit the windscreen like a hand grenade, blinding him. She was tall and her hair was threshing in the wind. She was barefoot and her shoes, the laces tied together, hung around her neck. She seemed to ride the wind like a witch, her simple dress blown along the contours of her rich body. The stunning face, in the second that she looked at him, was smiling - sardonically, it seemed to him, as if she knew that he was seeing the best place there was to be. And she was gone. Two children walked behind her. They were laughing. No wonder they were laughing.

‘D'you see that?’ he said involuntarily.

‘What?’ Gill said.

She was checking Megan, who would be two years old at that time and strapped into the child's seat in the back, and he felt the wantonness of the betrayal and compounded it with deceit.

‘Barefoot in this weather,’ he said, and stored in his head that image, innocent enough in itself but also like a talisman betokening the continuing possibility of an unforeseen and chance future which would not grow naturally out of his present.

And within the car within the cafe, like a box within a box within a box, he remembered sitting in a bus in Graithnock on a day of intense heat, and he would know again the feelings of that summer, that they were not dead but boarded in him somewhere still, lonely and gibbering and dissatisfied, like Mrs Rochester in her attic, denied by practical circumstance and the pretences of society but denying them in return, haunting them with longings they could not meet.

A GIRL COMES ON TO THE BUS who is a woman walking naked with clothes on. She wears a blue cotton dress. She has black hair, so carelessly abundant that he feels he could make his home there. Her face is broad and sensuous, with lips that seem poised for the next bite. The eyes, ah well, the eyes. He suspects they are the sort of eyes the passionless would describe as ‘come-to-bed’ eyes. They aren't come-to-bed eyes. Who needs a bed? All Tam knows is that when he looks in her eyes he thinks he can see all the way down to the dark place.

Her body isn't describable by him any more than he could inventory the happening of a thunderstorm. It drenches him in its presence, that is all. When the dusty bus, which on this hot day is like a decrepit sauna on wheels, rattles to a halt, she comes on, looks at him, takes him in and turns away, yanking his heart out of his body as if it were attached to a string.

It no longer matters where he is going. Where can he be going that is more important than where she is? He experiences instantaneously the awesome sensation that he could forget he has relatives, abandon friendships, live anywhere, wrap his past up in the one small parcel and put a match to it, just to be with her.

She has noticed him. She has three friends with her and they all sit down across the passageway, taking up two double seats. She is at the window of the further forward of the two seats and, as she sits with her back against the glass, turning towards her friends, he and she can see each other. She will take a smile that she is giving to one of her friends and pass it on to him. Her eyes keep coming back to his, resting on them thoughtfully, and he seems hardly capable of looking away from her at all. They are having a brief affair of the eyes, optical copulation in public. There is no self-conscious regality about her but you can see that her friends are her ladies-in-waiting. She's the one, dispensing a shower of light in which they bathe.

The longer she sits, the more intimately interlocked their eyes become. But she and her friends rise to go several stops before he is due to get off. She pauses briefly in passing and looks down at him. The proximity of her vivid face and body blots out the rest of the day. She smiles at him and then her lips form an infinitesimal ‘ooh’ sound and she is gone.

As he sits stunned in his seat while the bus pulls away, he looks out of the window. She has been walking off, chatting to her friends, when she suddenly, and obviously without warning to them, turns away from them and back towards the bus. She stands quite openly on the kerb and stares at him and smiles and waves. Her face seems to him to be expressing a kind of wistfulness that nothing more has happened between them.

He is breathless with longing. He feels a panic that makes him unable to sit still. He has never seen her before. Some phrases of conversation he has caught tell him that she isn't Scottish. Maybe she is visiting relatives and will leave for ever tomorrow, or today. The way she looks, maybe she is the Lady of Shalott just out on a day-trip to the twentieth century. This could be his only chance.

He gets off the bus at the next stop. He runs all the way back to where she had stood on the kerb. Obviously, she isn't there. He starts to wander the streets around the area. He looks in shops. He checks a couple of cafes. Nothing else matters. He has become a mad seeker for lost love. For more than two hours he scours the day, drenched in sweat that comes partly from the heat but partly from the imagined possibilities that hold him in a fever. As each compulsive, desperate step seems to bring him relentlessly nearer to the final and irrevocable admission that she is no longer there and may never be again, he curses himself as a weakling, a bloody robot so programmed into habit that when experience suddenly opens up before him and says. Turn here for El Dorado,' he is likely to reply, ‘Sorry, that would be great. But it's not on my itinerary for today. I've arranged to go to the shops.’

He cannot believe it. For several long, luxurious minutes, an amazing possibility has shimmered before him. Five minutes later, it is gone - for good, he fears. He stands breathing heavily on the corner of a street that is busy with everyone in the world, it seems, except her. He knows, he just knows, that if only he could meet her again, something wonderful and important and maybe life-changing would happen between them. And he goes on looking.

And he never sees her again.

IDEALS, he would sometimes fear, were like items you packed in your luggage and took with you everywhere and then never got to wear. For they never really fitted anyone. But you kept looking at them lovingly in private and trying them on secretly from time to time. They were the you you longed to appear as but couldn't quite find the occasion for.

Perhaps that was why he sometimes felt that everything he did was just a substitute for what he should really be doing, whatever that was. There was often the sense of being a surrogate of himself, an impostor in his own life, the servant of his circumstances and not their master. He supposed the feeling might be related to his attempts to write, that compulsion that precluded him from merely accepting who he was and sharing it with others. He must always be trying to use his own experience to project imaginatively into experience he had never had. The other self that was the writing could ghost through the most ordinary actions, haunting them with dissatisfaction, some vague demand for more.

Such talent to create as he had, he thought once, was like having an elephant on a leash. It complicated your entire life. It forbade the using of itself merely for enjoyment. It seemed to invite you to a banquet of life and then you found that you couldn't get through the door to where the revelry was without leaving it behind. And if you did leave it behind, you couldn't be sure it would be there when you came back.

These self-doubts left him vulnerable daily to a host of practical questions most other people dealt with automatically.

‘SO WHAT'S HAPPENING?' Gill said.

The remark was innocent as an ambush. He thought of the talk between husbands and wives, the tripwires of hurt that could be hidden in a phrase, how casual conversation became mined with the resentments of the past and needed careful stepping, a delicate evasiveness, zig-zagging answers. What's happening? We're losing ourselves down endless quarrels. We're discovering that betrayal may be buried but doesn't die and that no place can be as lonely as a bed. What's happening?

‘Ah have to go back tae Scotland obviously,’ he said. ‘Come on. Gill. We've talked about this.’

‘You're definitely doing it?’

‘Ye think Ah've got an option?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Ah suppose ye're right. Ah could always be a bastard.’

‘What do you mean “could be”?’

‘Oh, aye.’

He recognised this bleak terrain. He should do. He had helped to make it. This was where rusted hopes lay abandoned and the ground was trafficked into mud where nothing grew. This was no-man's land. Across it they observed each other, sniping casually and sporadically.

She was unpacking the things she had bought. Hopelessness goes on shopping. Even futility has to be fed. He noticed hurtingly how attractive she was, someone he could have fallen for in another situation, rather like a soldier realising that he might have been best mates with one of the enemy if there hadn't been a war on. She put the three baguettes on the table. Bread-shells.

‘Have you phoned already?’ she said.

‘Ah phoned Michel. I go from Grenoble to Paris by train. He's going to meet me at the station. We go to the Cafe de Flore. Colette'll pick me up there. She'll drive me to Charles de Gaulle. I get the plane to Heathrow. Heathrow to Glasgow.’

‘It's well organised, isn't it?’

‘That's what you do when you're travelling. It's got the edge on hitching.’

She put the melon in the fridge. He was trying to choose a book to take with him from the four he was holding.

‘You're all packed, I notice,’ she said.

‘You're the one who wanted to bring us to Grenoble,’ she said.

‘What about your students?’ she said.

‘So what about Megan and Gus and me?’ she said.

‘We're your family, too,’ she said. ‘Or is family only where you come from?’

She had seen the suitcase in the hall. To call his vague gathering of chance clothing ‘packing’ was a misuse of a word. At least he had put in his one formal suit, just in case. Just in bloody case.

They had discussed coming to Grenoble and they had both agreed on it.

He had phoned Joe and postponed his classes. It was just a matter of tying up the loose ends of the semester. Anyway, did she think that was a major issue in the scale of what was happening?

She reminded him of the first inspector who had assessed him at the end of his first year of teaching in a secondary school. He sat in on several lessons and then told Tom that he was a competent teacher. But there was one serious problem. Tom's record of work was not up to date. Any teacher taking over from him would be confused as to exactly what stage the classes had reached on the course. The inspector stared solemnly at Tom, as if he had terminal cancer. Had he realised the gravity of this?

‘Imagine it,’ the inspector said. ‘What would happen if you were knocked down by a bus? What do we do then?’

(Tom had a sudden, dislocated image of himself lying under the wheels of a bus. A solicitous crowd has gathered. As they bend over him, straining to catch his last words, they eventually realise that he is gasping, ‘My . . . record . . . of . . . work. Is. In my desk in Room Two. It's . . . under the register. It's not’ - tears course down his cheeks - ‘up to date.’ He dies unfulfilled.)

Tom stared solemnly at the inspector, as if he had terminal cancer. What do we do then? ‘Shove your record of work as far up your arse as you can get it,’ he wanted to say. ‘I'll have more to worry me.’ Instead he looked away in embarrassment, hoping his expression was conveying an adequately chastened awareness of what was important in life, as indeed it was.

Gill and Megan and Gus would probably survive for a little while without him. Did love of the family you came from diminish your love for the family you made? He would have thought it would augment it. I could not love ye, kids, so well loved I not others, too. The best gift I can give you is the truth of myself, as benignly and as honestly as I can give it, and that includes a passionate concern for people living beyond the enchanted circle of us four.

He heard Megan and Gus playing in another part of the house. May his and Gill's damaged lives never quite reach them. Forgive us for the gifts we give our children.

He chose the poems of Catullus, translated by Frederic Raphael and Kenneth McLeish - immortal trivia, living disrobed of false ideals, the scurrility of unacknowledged individual experience within social pretence. The randomness of the choice didn't help his state of mind. Did anything form a coherent pattern? He watched while Gill moved about the same room as he sat in but a different one. He couldn't quite believe that this was Grenoble or that he was going back to Graithnock.

He remembered a feeling that had often come upon him in his teens. He would be reading and suddenly a perfectly ordinary word - it might be ‘doorway’ or ‘bus’ - would turn into a weird hieroglyph. He couldn't imagine where the word came from or what it was supposed to mean. The continuity of the text fused and only that single word palpitated and glowed in the surrounding darkness, as if a flying saucer had arrived from another universe and he was the only one to see it. And through that fissure in assumed normality poured the overwhelming mystery of things.

Or he was in a room with which he was familiar, perhaps in John Benchley's house. He knew every piece of furniture and an armchair suddenly disjointed from the coherence of the room and was an incomprehensible extrusion, an alien in an ordinary day. The pattern of the cloth which covered it seemed impossibly intricate and bizarre. He wondered who could have made it and how it came to be in this place. It was as if he became immediately aware that all the contexts of his life, among which he moved so confidently and assumptively, were as fragile and as wilfully invented and as unreal as a backcloth in a theatre, and the cloth had just ripped and he glimpsed beyond it the real, ubiquitous, breathing and impenetrable dark.

Why did that feeling happen to him?

‘YOU'RE REALLY A MYSTIC,’ John Benchley replies. ‘But then a lot of teenagers are.’

He is in the sitting-room of his manse where he lives with his very elderly housekeeper, Mrs Malone, whose smile is a wince in disguise. The manse is on a hill beside the church and evening is gathering slowly in the room. Through the wide window a long low bank of cloud is reddening like a hillfire. The books that line the walls are receding into darkness, as if rejoining the past from which they emerged. The coal fire is hypnotic with blue flame.

‘All young people are expatriates, I suppose. They come from another country and they haven't quite settled in this one. They don't quite know the customs here. Some learn more slowly than others.’

‘I just wish I would hurry up.’

‘Maybe you shouldn't. Your self hasn't formed yet. Your social identity is still intermittent. Fragmentary. And nature keeps coming through the gaps. What's wrong with that?’

‘It can be embarrassing for a start.’

‘Embarrassment's all right. Never confuse embarrassment with shame. Embarrassment's when you can't bear others to see your secret self. That's a healthy instinct. Shame's when you can't bear to see your secret self. One's maintaining an honourable contract with yourself. The other means you've broken that contract. So be embarrassed.’

‘That's easy to say.’

‘Come on, Tom. A red face isn't fatal.’

‘Not so far.’

John laughs his thin laugh. Tam likes him so much, he always wishes he could laugh better. It's too small, that laugh, as if he knows he has restricted rights in this area. Tam thinks of his Uncle Charlie laughing like a chaotic symphony. If laughter's an orchestra, John Benchley is playing the triangle in it. Maybe that's what happens living with Mrs Malone.

‘There's an essay by Harold Nicolson. ‘In Defence of Shyness’. ‘A Defence of Shyness’? Anyway. He makes the point that shy people often have further to grow up to. I think there's something in that. If you know how to conform too quickly, you lose your originality. You can start to mimic other people instead of finding out who you are. Don't undervalue awkwardness. It's often just the truth clumsily refusing to be denied.'

‘I must be full of the truth, then.’

‘Like those times you were talking about. When you lose touch with the practicalities of what's going on. You see things out of context. That's you catching experience raw. Not dressed up in the purposes to which we insist on putting it. That really is a low-grade mystical experience. You're in touch with something beyond other people's preconceptions. You're seeing things fresh.’

He certainly seemed to be doing that all right. He is even doing it while John is talking. He doesn't want this moment to shift. He fears that John will rise and put on the light. He wants the darkness and the gathering sunset and the murmur of their voices in the stillness. It doesn't matter so much what they say. It is that they are talking, making their small human communion in the dusk.

He wants to say something to keep John talking, to maintain his concentration. But he is baulked by two feelings. The first is petulance that John has referred to his having ‘low-grade’ mystical experiences. It is as if he has failed some kind of exam. The second is the very embarrassment he has been talking about.

He has thought of an example of what John called ‘nature coming through the gaps’ and ‘the truth clumsily refusing to be denied’. It is a fairly crass example but nevertheless relevant, he feels. He thinks of his erections. They can happen anywhere - on buses, at the dancing, standing in a shop. One had even come upon him at his brother Michael's wedding.

HE IS DANCING with his Auntie Bella. They are doing a slow foxtrot among the circling relatives, smiling sweetly at each other, when one movement out of rhythm make their bodies come together. He is caught instantly in one of the frames of the American comics he used to read: Bam! Pow! Zowie! Hector is between them.

(‘Touch of flaccid tit on the port bow, Cap'n. Reporting for duty.’

‘Piss off, you dead head. It's ma auntie. She's ma mother's sister-in-law. She's the auntie of the groom, for God's sake.’)

But he remains adamantly there, nosing blindly about, trying to find out where he is required. Tam is too horrified to notice if she's noticed. He thinks of feigning illness But if he collapsed, that would only advertise the situation. And if he walks off the dance-floor with a small baton in his trousers, he might get lynched for mental incest.

He starts to dance like Quasimodo. Observing his new, crouched style of dancing. Auntie Bella probably thinks he has gone insane. But that is better than her realising the terrible truth. Then he has the inspiration of becoming suddenly drunk. That would be convincing. He is a boy who has been playing at being a man in the relaxed atmosphere of the wedding. As he mugs outrageously, he hopes nobody notices that his face is really screaming, ‘Don't look at my trousers.’ When the dance ends, he completes his performance by jocularly leaving the floor in the manner of Groucho Marx walking. He subsides on a chair, puts his legs under the table and waits for the rest of him to subside.

He can't cope with this. When he has settled down, he goes to hide in the bar in case another woman asks him to dance. His Uncle Charlie buys him a half of shandy and looks at him.

‘Anythin’ wrong, son?' he says.

He has always been able to talk to his Uncle Charlie and he is so guilty he has to find a confessor.

‘Something terrible happened there,’ he says. ‘Ah was dancin’ with ma Auntie Bella. And Ah got a hard-on.'

He waits for his uncle's reaction to establish a scale of horror for what he has done.

‘Ah hope she noticed.’

‘Uncle Charlie!’

‘Naw, Ah hope so. She'd be tickled pink. Ah bet she doesn't have that effect too often on yer Uncle Davie these days. She's probably in the toilet puttin’ on her make-up. Singin' “Oh, how we danced on the night they were wed”.'

Then he sang the next bit: ‘We vowed our true love though a word wasn't said.’

‘It was terrible. Ah'm frightened to dance with anybody. In case it happens again.’

‘If it does, give us a shout. Ye can pass it over.’

‘Ah'm that embarrassed.’

‘No. Ye just think ye are. See when it doesn't happen? That's when ye'll be embarrassed. Come on, kid. Relax. A limited number of boners in any man's life. Enjoy them while they're there.’

Uncle Charlie has always had a rough ability to put things in perspective for him. But he also has a strain of gentle wickedness. Later, when the singing has started and Auntie Bella is innocently belting out ‘Lay that pistol down, babe’. Uncle Charlie taps him on the shoulder.

‘Ye think she's tryin’ to tell you something, Tam?' he says.

BUT IF HE HAD BEEN ABLE TO TELL HIS UNCLE CHARLIE about the problem, he cannot tell John Benchley. He is a minister of the church. He has told Tam to call him John but that isn't the same thing as saying, ‘Use my carpet for disgorging the sewer of your mind any time.’ Yet he is tempted.

Fortunately, he delays so long that John stands up and crosses to put on the light. The dark crystal of the room is shattered and his memories of the wedding dissolve. Magic has again dissipated into mundanity. The harsh brightness makes this just a bleak, modern room, its coldness thawed somewhat by ageless fire and the books that lag its walls. John goes over to the sherry decanter, comes to the small table beside him and fills him out another glass.

And that's another thing. In that simple action he is conscious yet again of the contradictory cross-references in his life. How will he ever reconcile them? Sherry? Every time during these talks John gives him two sherries. He has wondered if John is trying subtly to civilise him beyond his working-class habits while, by restricting his intake to two glasses only, ensuring that he doesn't corrupt him in the process. He is a very measured man.

This is the only place Tam has tasted sherry. Holding the stemmed glass in his hand with its hoard of yellow light, he feels its strangeness. It glows mysteriously, a prism of contradictions in which he sees himself. He drinks sherry and talks about mysticism and has an erection at his brother's wedding and talks rough with his friends and is supposed to be going to university and wants to be a writer and lusts after strange girls and wonders what he is doing here. He starts to talk again, donning the camouflage of normalcy.

‘What about church attendance?’ he asks. ‘Numbers okay?’

‘Well, we're under no pressure to build an extension.’

‘Maybe television affects it. I thought Billy Graham would have helped.’

‘The crusade had a big enough impact while he was here. But I certainly don't notice any lasting effect on my congregation. Maybe Graithnock's particularly stony ground. Though I don't like to think so. Perhaps that's just making excuses for myself.’

‘You've done well. The congregation must be bigger now than before you came.’

‘I don't know that I've done so well. I've managed to reduce the congregation by at least one.’

He looks at Tam sadly.

‘That wasn't you. I just became an agnostic’

‘You make it sound so positive.’

‘I think it is. I think it's the only thing to be.’

‘You trying to convert me?’

He looks so forlorn, Tam feels guilty. He is almost sorry to have become an agnostic. John Benchley has mattered to him over the past couple of years. His gentle wiseness has saved Tam, during his frenetically religious phase, from going quietly mad with impossible holiness. When he was fifteen, he had wanted to become either a minister or a priest - a priest for preference, because that was harder and more demanding and seemed to him to reduce the complexity of life to one massive, final gesture. Attending his church and talking to him, Tam had realised how ill equipped he was to become the apprentice saint he had hoped to be. He finds rectitude boring. Girls fascinate him. How could he forswear life before he has tasted it?

No, he can't regret having become an agnostic. In a way, John has helped him to become one. Much as Tam likes him, he has to admit that he is glad to have forsworn the religious life if John is an example of what it does to you. He seems to Tam like someone who endures life as if it were influenza and hopes to get over it soon. Maybe his generosity to others relates to his belief that we are all ill with living and in need of psychological medication. Maybe it's not so much a careless gift of largesse as a measured bartering of mutual inadequacy. Can even kindness have dark and twisted roots? Does everything have dark and twisted roots?

His confusion is more or less total. He might as well be back in primary school, faced with one of those forms on which the unanswerable question has appeared.

FATHER'S OCCUPATION:

MAYBE THE PROBLEM IS GENETIC, he would think. He looked at himself with some of the soap still on his chin. The small round mirror he was using for shaving looked like a porthole through which, as he kept moving to get the angles right, he seemed to see a version of himself who was drowning. Maybe that was why he didn't bother to shave every day, to avoid having to see the drowning man he didn't seem able to save. Or maybe it was just another expression of his social isolation at the moment, a rehearsal for being a down-and-out. Or maybe it was because he was more and more aware of the resemblance to his father.

As the shaving soap was removed, there kept looming out at him a past he wasn't sure he could move beyond. Was there a Docherty gene, or maybe a Mathieson one, that condemned him to perpetual failure to fulfil himself, an inability to decide what he ought to do or what he ought to be? Was he sentenced to be like his father in that respect? Or like his Uncle Charlie?

His mother used to talk more than once of a recurring moment she had learnt to dread. It was when she would go upstairs to get ready for bed and his father was already there, lying with his head cupped in his hands.

‘Betsy,’ he would say, his eyes gazing at the ceiling as if it were the promised land. ‘Ye know what Ah've a helluva notion o’ tryin'.'

And she would scream silently. Another money-making project was threatening their lives.

No wonder the uncertainty of what his father was had troubled him. It must have been like living with X the unknown. After leaving the pits he seemed determined to try everything. When Uncle Josey challenged him for being a working-class entrepreneur, he said, ‘Negative capitalism, Josey. Ah'm tryin’ to get the wealth intae the hands of the workers. Then we can share it out more fairly.'

The most intense expression of his confusion with his father always came at primary school. Every so often they were given forms to fill in. He hated forms, always would. But he could always handle these questions easily enough, except for one. He always checked the form over first before writing anything down, to see if that one dreaded question was there, and it seemed it always was. The question simply said ‘Father's occupation’ and then a colon and a space to put your answer in. That was an insoluble space for him. He hated that space.

He used to steal glances at his neighbours' forms. It seemed to be for them the easiest question in the paper. Storeman, they'd write. Joiner. Plumber. Fitter at Mason's factory. What the bloody hell is ma feyther? He took venomous delight in swearing in his head towards him. Why did everybody else know what their father was and he hadn't a clue? The bastard. What was he trying to do to him? He made him feel like a dunce.

He would go out to the teacher's desk and begin an elaborate, apologetic mumble. At four o'clock he'd be out of the school like a sprinter - there were no devious routes home taken on those days. He was confronting his mother at five past four, his teeth bared in an imitation of his father. ‘What,’ he once said, feeling as he said it how clever the expression was, ‘is he this week?’ He could be bitter about his father.

Sometimes his mother could answer the question and sometimes she couldn't. Sometimes his father didn't seem too sure himself. He would ponder, picking his way round unimaginable obstacles, and he would say something like. ‘Tell ye what, son. Jist say Ah'm on for maself.’

‘The boay canny say that,’ his mother would say. ‘He needs to say something specific’

‘Unemployed,' his father would say.

Eventually, he found his own way round the problem. He knew his father had been a miner. But that was very specific. Panic can make you understand context in an exact way. (He picked up a lot of words from his mother. She once told him words were power and he took the thought into himself like a secret weapon.) You're either a miner or you aren't. His father was obviously not a miner any longer. He didn't have a lamp for his bunnet and he didn't come home black. Anybody could see him and find that lie out easily.

But he had also been a van driver and a labourer and tried to be a scrap dealer and had been a street bookie. He knew that being a street bookie was illegal because his mother had told him not to mention it to anyone or the police might get to hear of it. That was out. He decided to make his father a general labourer.

It was a genuine inspiration, he felt. No teacher ever questioned it and he came to feel that he had made a contribution to the security of his family, shut out the prying eyes of strangers, given his mother one less worry and protected his father's strangeness.

But it certainly didn't change anything except the ease with which he could fill in forms at the school, he had to admit as he washed the residual soap off his face and dried it. His father had continued to dream incorrigibly about the big breakthrough into wealth.