Free The Kiln by William McIlvanney Page B

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