The Kiln by William McIlvanney

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 satin 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