Free The Kiln by William McIlvanney

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