And the Land Lay Still (26 page)

The woman’s brow furrowed up. ‘Can I help you?’

‘We’re the Lennies,’ Liz said. ‘I’m Liz and this is Don and that’s oor wee lad, Billy. Don kens your husband. We were oot for a walk and thought we’d chap your door and say hello.’

The woman looked bewildered, as if nobody had ever called on her before. She stared at Liz and her mouth opened but she didn’t say anything.

‘You must be Sarah,’ Liz said. ‘And
you
,’ bending her knees, ‘must be Barbara. I would get doon and say hello properly, but I’m no very good at getting back up again just noo.’

‘Oh,’ the woman said, as she took in the expanse of Liz’s belly. ‘I’m sorry. You must be tired. Would you like a glass of water?’ She had a frail, uncertain, English voice.

‘If it’s nae bother.’

Sarah Gordon seemed not to know whether to leave them on the step or ask them in. Billy had run out of steam and come up to the door, and was eyeballing the girl hiding behind her mother.

‘Would your little boy like something too?’ Sarah managed.

‘That would be grand. Would ye like something, Billy?’

‘Some milk perhaps?’ Sarah said.

Billy nodded. ‘Whit dae ye say?’ Liz prompted. ‘Yes, please,’ he said. Don stood awkwardly behind his family. Sarah moved back as if she felt them pressing against her, and without having been invited they found themselves inside, following her and the girl through a cool, dark hallway into a bright kitchen with pale blue doors on the cupboards. Everything was spotlessly clean and well ordered.

‘By, ye keep a trig hoose,’ Liz said. ‘Ye pit me tae shame, so ye dae.’

‘Jack likes things tidy,’ Sarah said. ‘We both do. We don’t like clutter.’

She started opening cupboards, getting out a glass for Liz, mugs for the children. Barbara stayed close to her mother, while Liz tried to restrain Billy’s inclination to test the feel of every surface in reach.

‘Ye’re no frae round here, then?’ Liz said. ‘I mean, ye don’t sound it.’

‘No,’ Sarah said. ‘I’m from the south. Dorset.’

‘That’s a long way. How do ye find Wharryburn?’

‘It’s fine. People are kind.’

‘It’s funny we’ve never met,’ Liz said. ‘A wee place like this.’

‘No,’ Sarah said. ‘I don’t go out much.’

Don felt he was too big for the room. ‘Jack hame, is he?’

‘In the garden,’ Sarah said. ‘You can go out the back door.’

He stepped out. The same precision here. A weedless path, trees that looked like they’d been reprimanded for not standing up straight, a flower bed with perfect edges and in it a company of uniformly shaped rose bushes. Jack, at the far end, was standing on another path, raking a square patch of soil into submission. He was wearing khaki-coloured cotton trousers and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up above his elbows. His brown, shiny forearms looked as if they were made of wood.

‘Jack,’ Don called when still some distance away. It was best not to give Jack any surprises.

Jack went on raking for a few seconds, then slowly raised his head, as if his brain had taken that long to register the sound.

‘What are you doing here?’ It was almost an accusation.

‘We were oot for a walk. Liz wanted tae stop by and say hello. She wanted tae meet Sarah.’

He walked over to where Jack stood inspecting the raked patch. Close up, Don could see that it was not entirely flat. There were drills across it, but raised so slightly that the ground looked as if it were undulating, like the surface of a loch on a nearly windless day.

‘Why?’ Jack said.

‘Why what?’

‘Why did she want to meet Sarah?’

What kind of question was that? ‘Just tae be friendly, Jack,’ Don said. He pointed at the ground. ‘What’s gaun in there, then?’ A winter crop of some sort, he presumed.

‘Potatoes,’ Jack said.

‘Bit late, are ye no? I had mine in six weeks syne.’

Jack ignored him. ‘A great insurance,’ he said. ‘If you have a supply of potatoes you’ll never starve.’

‘I ken, but –’ He stopped himself. This was the man’s home territory. He could plant his tatties whenever he liked. Don tried to think of something else to say. It was like talking to a wall.

‘I’ll tell ye something,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen a better-dug bit o ground. There’s no a weed on it. No a daud o earth oot o place.’

‘You have to prepare the soil properly,’ Jack said. ‘You have to make the conditions right. Otherwise there’s no point. You’d be better not planting at all.’

‘I’m no sure aboot that,’ Don said. ‘But then, I’m no a perfectionist.’

‘I realise that,’ Jack said.

From the house came the sound of a child’s voice protesting at something. It wasn’t Billy. Jack didn’t appear to have heard it. He was still gripping the rake handle, and now he turned and began raking the soil again.

‘I better go and check if everything’s all right,’ Don said. ‘We should be getting along onywey. Liz just needed a drink of water.’

‘I thought she wanted to meet Sarah,’ Jack said, not looking up.

It was something beyond rudeness. Don felt completely wrong-footed. It was his own fault, Liz’s fault. They shouldn’t have come, shouldn’t have intruded. A man’s own house was his own house.

‘I’ll be away, then,’ he said.

‘Will I see you at the Blackthorn?’ Jack said. There was a different note in his voice, anxious, as if Don might not appear. He stopped his raking.

‘Aye, if ye’re gaun?’

Jack nodded. He seemed both to want to say something else and unable to do so. Finally he managed, ‘Eight o’clock as usual?’

And Don felt like telling him to forget it, but couldn’t. ‘Aye,’ he said.

‘See you later, then,’ Jack said, and went back to work.

In the kitchen, the two women were sitting at the table, Barbara curled up on her mother’s lap while Billy stood beside Liz and she stroked his hand. He was too big for her to pick up in her condition. Don didn’t get the sense that he’d interrupted a deep conversation.

‘Everything all right?’ he asked. ‘I heard somebody starting tae greet.’

‘Barbara wanted Billy’s mug,’ Liz said. ‘But we’re fine now. Aren’t we, pet?’

Barbara put her face to her mother’s insubstantial bosom.

‘She’s shy with strangers,’ Sarah said.

‘We should be on our way,’ Don said. He reached for Billy and hoisted him up. ‘Will we go hame, wee man?’

He hadn’t finished the sentence before Sarah was on her feet, holding her daughter. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it was kind of you to come.’ She sounded regretful and relieved at once.

‘I’ll come again,’ Liz said. ‘Another day.’

Out on the street, Don put Billy on his shoulders and they started down the hill.

‘Satisfied?’ he said to Liz.

‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s a sad hoose. There’s plenty no right there. A sad hoose and a sad woman, and a poor bairn. How was Jack?’

Don shook his head. ‘I wouldna ken how Jack is,’ he said.

‘I could hardly get a word oot o Sarah,’ Liz said. ‘Hardly a word.’

‘She looks like she’s no weel.’

‘It would mak ye no weel, living wi a ghost. I saw ye talking tae him through the windae. That’s what he’s like, a ghost.’

He knew exactly what she meant. He felt haunted by Jack. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling, just strange. He felt there must be a reason for it. There was a reason for everything.

§

Their conversation that night might have been about Korea. The Communists had overrun virtually the whole peninsula apart from the south-east corner around the port of Pusan. A vast American army had been pouring into Pusan throughout August. British and other Commonwealth troops were being dispatched there too. It looked like the start of the next world war, but Jack seemed completely uninterested. What he wanted to talk about was ‘the Covenant’, a document drawn up by a non-party organisation, the Scottish Convention, established by a Glasgow lawyer called John MacCormick. MacCormick had been leader of the tiny Scottish National Party but, tired of moderating between neo-Jacobites on his right and pan-Celtic revolutionaries on his left, had left the party during the war and set up the Convention instead. The Covenant was his dream of a cross-party, non-party declaration of intent. It was a three-paragraph statement that began ‘We, the people of Scotland who subscribe this Engagement’ and ended with a ‘solemn pledge’ to do ‘everything in our power to secure for Scotland a parliament with adequate legislative authority in Scottish affairs’. In not much more than a year this document had secured the support
of more than a million people across the land, who had added their names to copies of it from Glasgow to Wick, from Stornoway to Dunbar. It had even gone the rounds of Scottish soldiers serving in occupied Germany and bits of the shrinking British Empire. Jack said that all these signatures represented a stirring of the popular will. Don thought they represented a monumental irrelevance.

‘Ye’ve pit your ain name tae it, then?’

‘Of course. What Scotsman wouldn’t?’

‘I’ve no, and nor will I. The world’s aboot tae go up in flames, Jack, and ye’re bothered aboot getting a wee talking shop tae sit in Edinburgh and tell us what tae dae. I’ve nae time for it. Dukes and bank managers strutting aboot like puffed-up doos? No on my account. And that MacCormick, what’s he noo he’s left the Nationalists? Is he a Liberal? Or a Tory in disguise? He’s no Labour onywey. I canna be daein wi him.’

‘Forget about MacCormick,’ Jack said. ‘He’s just one man. What matters isn’t what
he
wants, it’s what the people want. What do they think they’re signing up for when they sign the Covenant? They think they’re signing up for Home Rule within the United Kingdom because that’s what the document says, but the days of wanting Home Rule are already over. The people don’t yet know what they want, they can’t articulate it, but something is happening deep within them, something instinctive and fierce that isn’t about the average weekly wage or the net surplus or deficit of the Scottish economy or whether we would have higher income tax or lower stamp duty if we were free. They’re making a pledge, a promise to themselves about who they are. That’s what the Covenant means and that’s why it’s important. It’s the first stage of a process.’

A queer kind of distance was in his eyes. For the first time really, Don, who had always made allowances for Jack because of the war, thought he might be slightly insane.

‘I ken where that kind of process ends up,’ Don said. ‘Flag-waving and folk goose-stepping round city squares. I’m a socialist, Jack. I’ve mair in common wi a bus driver in Manchester or a welder in Wales than I’ll ever hae wi the Duke o Montrose. And you too. Why are ye cluttering your heid wi that mystical rubbish? Ye’ll be speaking aboot souls next. Ye’ve nae mair insight intae what the people of Scotland want than I dae. Why are ye mixed up in aw this?’

‘I’m not mixed up in anything. I’m just observing. It’s too early to get involved. The soil is still being prepared.’

‘Ah, right, I’m wi ye noo. This is like your tattie patch, is it? Sae, when are the tatties gaun in, Jack?’

‘You can laugh,’ Jack said, ‘but I know what I’m talking about. This Labour government’s done some good things, some principled things, I don’t deny it, but it’s on its last legs and when it falls the principle that will survive will be that London knows best. Everything must be controlled from London. Folk get a taste for that and they want to hang on to it. The Tories won’t let it go. They’ll build on it. And if Labour get in again in a few years they’ll build on whatever the Tories leave them. It’s not about left and right, it’s about power. And the people of Scotland are just like people all over the rest of the world. They sense it when somebody is just dictating to them, not listening, and they don’t like it. They’ll turn against it, sooner or later. They’ll want power here. The Covenant is only the beginning.’

‘Your wife’s English,’ Don said. ‘What does she think aboot it?’

‘She doesn’t think about it,’ Jack said.

‘She must hae an opinion, surely?’

‘She’s not interested in these things. We don’t discuss them.’

‘How did ye meet her onywey?’ Don found himself quietly belligerent. Jack’s attitude, his strangeness that afternoon, had made him so. He wanted Jack to give him something more.

‘When we came back in ’45,’ Jack said, ‘we landed at Southampton. They sent me to a place near Bournemouth to convalesce. Not that I needed to go, I was pretty fit by then after the voyage, but you know the army, no point in arguing. Sarah was working there.’

‘A nurse?’

‘I didn’t need nursing,’ Jack said sharply. ‘No, she was in the office, doing the paperwork. Signing us in, signing us out, all that. The men liked the female company, didn’t matter if they were cooks or cleaners or office girls, they just liked talking to them. They’d been starved of it for years. Starved of everything, of course, but the company of women, they really missed that.’

Don noted how Jack managed to exclude himself from his own analysis. Was he a loner even then? Before? Maybe it wasn’t the Japs that had done the damage. Maybe he’d always been like this.

‘Anyway,’ Jack said, ‘in the end I got her.’

There was something hard and ungenerous in the way he said it. He might have been talking about catching a cold, or drawing the short straw. Don saw him in the hospital, or commandeered hotel or country house or wherever it was they’d put him, setting himself apart from the others, untouchable. I bet she took pity on you, he thought. Or maybe you pitied her. Either way, Don reckoned it was a poor thing to build a marriage on.

‘And when I was passed fully healthy, and demobbed, we were married and came home.’

‘No
her
hame, though,’ Don said. ‘Does she like it?’

‘Aye, I think she does,’ Jack said, as if he’d never considered it before. ‘Apart from the cold, which she’s not used to. It’s a better life. We could have stayed there, I suppose, but why would you? It’s a bloodless kind of place. She’s well out of it.’

He said it thin-lipped. He seemed to be talking not about his wife, the mother of his child, but an evacuee that had been foisted on him, someone for whom he felt a vague sympathy but no deep affection. His coolness was beyond Don’s comprehension.