The Kiln Read Online Free PDF

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 marriedbadly 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