Free The Kiln by William McIlvanney Page A

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 phrasesof 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