And the Land Lay Still (3 page)

§

Holiday over, they got home to Doune, their Perthshire village, and the next morning Angus took Michael into Stirling and bought him
the new Beatles single, ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, six shillings and eightpence from Hay’s Music Shop, and when they came back Michael went into the sitting room and played it on the gramophone, first the A side then the B side, ‘Things We Said Today’, and wondered what he would do, apart from that, for the rest of the holidays. And then Angus came in and waited till the record finished for the sixth time and said he quite liked it and how would you fancy a couple of weeks’ extra holiday? Because your mother and I have been talking things over and we think it would be better if you don’t go to the local school any more but go away to a boarding school, they have the English holidays so you wouldn’t start there till September. So where is this school, in England? No, it’s not far up the road, near Aberfeldy. So why do they have English holidays? They just do, it’s a different system, you’ll get longer holidays at Christmas and Easter too. And if it’s at Aberfeldy would I have to stay there? Yes, you’d board, it’s a boarding school, it’s too far to drive there every day. But you said it wasn’t far up the road. Well, it’s not, but that’s not what I meant. Anyway, these schools, you get the most out of these schools if you board. But why can’t I just stay where I am? Because I’m away so much. What’s that got to do with it? Well, it would be helpful to your mother. Your mother thinks – we both think – you’ll get a better education at this other school, and from there you can go on to another boarding school, it’s a great opportunity, it’s not cheap but we can manage it.

They talked about it some more but Angus had already sold the idea with the bit about longer holidays. Also, there were two other boys who lived in a bigger house in the village who went away to school, and Michael had always kind of envied them although he didn’t know them, he only knew
of
them, and maybe that was why he envied them, they were remote, almost anonymous. That was one of the things that would happen if he went away, he would become anonymous. He’d be distinct from the other kids in the village, and this appealed to him because he suspected that in some deep way he already was. And then Isobel came in and reinforced everything Angus had said, which was strange because they so seldom backed each other up. Michael was only nine so he didn’t fully see that they were conspiring against him; that Isobel, being a snob, had always wanted him to have a private education, and Angus, who
was vaguely opposed to it in principle, was willing to concede the principle because that would offer a solution to his own problems. For Michael was indeed the reason why he was still with Isobel and if that reason were removed then he could go off and have the life he wanted with the women he wanted to be with. Michael didn’t understand all this, not then, but he knew his father was in some way at fault. He still loved and admired him, though. He still thought he wanted to be like him.

So that afternoon they drove the forty miles to the school near Aberfeldy, an establishment called Bellcroft House, where it turned out an appointment had been made to see the headmaster before they’d even gone on holiday. The headmaster had doubtless seen it all before, middle-class people looking for a safe place to dump their inconvenient offspring, and treated Michael with a rough kindness that was intended not only to put him at ease but also to allay any parental fears or suspicions. They were given a tour of the empty buildings, and Michael was given an inquisition, because it seemed
he
was on trial not the school, even though Angus was going to be forking out hundreds of pounds to send him there. But to no one’s great surprise he was acceptable and therefore accepted, and the three Pendreichs came away smiling, all for their different reasons. And in September, kitted out with a new school uniform, Michael entered a new phase of his life.

§

And now Dounreay is being decommissioned at a cost of God knows how many millions, possibly billions, of pounds, and they still haven’t worked out what to do with the waste: the stuff, that is, they can account for, the stuff they haven’t chucked down shafts or allowed to piss out into the Pentland Firth and wash up on the beaches in tiny ticking wee cancer-bombs. No doubt there’s more they’ve not told anyone about, because one thing Mike believes about governments and government agencies is that they won’t tell you anything bad if they can possibly avoid doing so. Even an outright denial – for example, that depleted uranium shells have ever been used on the Cape Wrath firing range – only inclines him to believe the opposite. Perhaps, however, that says more about him than about the Ministry of Defence.

From the bedroom window he looks out on the Atlantic every morning, sixty miles from Dounreay, and there is something ironic about the fact that he’s chosen to be here for the tranquillity, to inherit the peace and quiet that Angus found when he bought the place, when for half a century the whole area’s been used as a kind of open laboratory and he suspects he’s looking out not on wild, unspoiled beauty but on a silent, pernicious sickness. And yet it doesn’t make him afraid or want to leave, it just makes him want to record it, endlessly: the ocean, the land, the light, the weather. There’s no doubt in his mind: there, in his father’s house, sorting out Angus’s work and engaging in his own, is where he wants to be.

§

They’ve eaten the trout, and the dishes are piled in the sink and Mike will do them later, after Murdo has gone. They’re in the sun lounge with an electric fire on, whiskies in their hands, looking out at the dark sea loch and the shoulders of the hills, and clouds building around the moon. They are reminiscing – or, rather, Mike is – about 1964: the year he went away to school, the Forth Road Bridge opened, and he saw
Mary Poppins
with his mother and
Goldfinger
with his father.

‘I managed to miss
Mary Poppins
,’ Murdo says, ‘I am pleased to report.’

‘
Goldfinger
was great,’ Mike says. ‘My dad took me to see it on my first half-term break. He fetched me from school but instead of going straight home we went to the pictures in Perth. I think he just wanted to stay out of the house because he and my mother were fighting about everything by that stage. Politics included. There’d been a General Election the day before and when we finally got home that was what they fought about. Mum in the blue corner, Dad in the red. Labour had won the election but only by four seats. My mother took it personally because the outgoing Tory Prime Minister was our own MP, Sir Alec Douglas-Home.’

‘You are a font of knowledge,’ Murdo says. ‘Or should that be a mine of information? I couldn’t have told you about the four seats, but I’m guessing the Labour leader was Harold Wilson?’

‘It was.’

‘Now there was a slippery customer.’

‘Aye, but my dad kept saying how wonderful he was, just to infuriate my mum. He wasn’t a very profound socialist – my dad, I mean – he’d just enrolled me at a prep school, after all – but he believed in the Welfare State and the general idea of redistributing other people’s wealth. And he despised Sir Alec Douglas-Home, whom my mother admired. But something else happened at that election: right there, in our very own constituency, Hugh MacDiarmid stood for the Communist Party.’

‘The wild-haired poet,’ Murdo says.

‘Yes. It was sheer provocation. He made inflammatory speeches against capitalism and rude remarks about the person of the Prime Minister, and although –’

‘Rude remarks?’

‘He said he was a zombie.’

‘Good.’

‘And a yes-man of the Pentagon –’

‘Very good.’

‘– and although MacDiarmid didn’t have an earthly chance of winning, neither did the Labour candidate, so my dad, who’d met MacDiarmid in Edinburgh and taken pictures of him, not only decided to vote for him but went around telling everybody that’s what he was going to do. My mother was horrified.’

‘I imagine it didn’t do much for her social standing,’ Murdo says.

‘Not a thing. MacDiarmid came bottom of the poll with a hundred and twenty-seven votes,’ Mike says, ‘and apparently demanded a recount because he said there couldn’t possibly be that many good socialists in Kinross and West Perthshire. My dad spent the weekend telling this story to anyone we met, the man in the paper shop, the neighbours, anyone. “I was one of them!” he said. Shouted, in fact. It was quite embarrassing, even for me. I think if my mother could have cited political incompatibility as grounds for divorce, she’d have done so. But she didn’t have to, because by then he was having an affair with a woman in the BBC in Glasgow and was about to move out. I knew something was afoot, because he spent part of that weekend packing things into boxes in the garage. And when he took me back to school on the Monday the car was laden with his stuff, whereas I just had my toothbrush. He must have gone
straight back to Glasgow. I don’t think he ever slept another night in our house.’

‘It must have been upsetting for you,’ Murdo says. ‘Divorce wasn’t exactly common in those days. Even in the fleshpots of Doune, I would guess. It was practically unheard of here.’

‘No, I don’t remember being that upset. I just got on with it. But that was the first Christmas I had without my father.’

‘Christmas was practically unheard of here too,’ Murdo says.

§

On the journey back to Aberfeldy, Angus asked Michael if he was happy at Bellcroft House. Mike still believes that if he had said that he was miserable, that he was being bullied, that he hated it with all his heart, Angus would have done something about it. But he didn’t tell him any of those things, because they weren’t true. He’d adjusted without any great difficulty to his new situation. A place away from the parental fighting had something to recommend it. In just a few weeks he’d made it his own. He’d lost touch with the children he’d grown up with and transferred his affections, such as they were, to a couple of the Bellcroft masters, the brusque but motherly matron, and a boy in his year called Freddy Eddelstane.

§

Mike’s father was left-leaning politically, at least partly because of his experience during the war. He’d joined up at eighteen and at twenty was doing his bit in the invasion of Europe. The comics Michael read as a boy, which poured in vast quantities from the presses of D. C. Thomson in Dundee, were stuffed with Second World War adventures, and he liked to imagine his dad in one of them, revolver in one hand and a camera round his neck, leading his troops on to a Normandy beach under enemy fire. The reality was less heroic. Angus was a second lieutenant who hardly ever got near the front line, and whose war consisted mainly of organising convoys and fuel supplies. The twenty or thirty photos that survive from his war years are small, creased snaps of groups of men in front of lorries, and some hazy images of ruined Berlin. No sign of the unorthodox ‘Angus angle’ that would later make his name. Once Michael asked him if he’d killed anybody. No, Angus said, there
were plenty of other people doing that. Michael must have looked disappointed. Angus said, ‘I saw people who’d
been
killed.’ ‘Germans?’ ‘Yes. And French and British and Americans. And you know what, they all looked pretty much the same when they were dead.’ Then he went on to speak of the camaraderie of the army, the way the younger, non-regular officers like himself would mix with their men, exchanging jokes and ideas and opinions, and how he shared the general view that when it was over and they went home things were going to change. ‘We were all for Labour. It was our war, and it was going to be our peace. Some of the senior officers hated us. Thought we were fraternising with the enemy, politically speaking. But there wasn’t much they could do about it.’

Apart from a commitment to Labour, Angus brought something else back from the war – a Leica IIIc, a hefty camera of impeccable German design, bought for next to nothing in occupied Berlin. It was the camera with which he made his name, and he used it for twenty years until the mid-1960s when he replaced it with a Nikon F, a virtually indestructible beast much favoured by photographers in war zones. Both cameras still sit in their hard, burnished-leather cases on a shelf in the sitting room at Cnoc nan Gobhar. They are antiques now, or soon will be; as redundant as darkrooms or Kodachrome film. But Mike keeps them, because of their intrinsic beauty, and because – who knows? – one day they may come into their own again.

§

There were eighty boys at Bellcroft House, aged between seven and thirteen, doing time in deepest Perthshire because their fathers had before them, or because – as in Michael’s case – one or both parents believed such an incarceration a necessary prelude to a successful social and professional career, or because the parents were overseas with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank or the British Council or the Foreign Office, or because they hadn’t managed to secure a place for their offspring in one of a dozen better prep schools, outposts of an alien education system, dotted about the Scottish countryside. Of those eighty boys, some were bright and others stupid, some fat and others tall, some athletic and others athletically incompetent, some musical and others growlers, and all of them were
white. Perhaps because neither of them quite ‘fitted’ with the crowd, Freddy Eddelstane and Michael began to go about together. If they were not close friends, they were at least mutually tolerant companions.

Back from that half-term break, Michael told Freddy about the election battle – the one between his parents – and how it had come about. Freddy had actually met Sir Alec Douglas-Home, because his father was a Tory MP too, or had been until the election, in the next-door constituency of Glenallan and Somewhere Else, Freddy forgot where. Had he been beaten? Michael wanted to know. It seemed to him that if your father went around in public asking people to vote for him, the overwhelming likelihood was that they wouldn’t, and he would lose. ‘Of course he wasn’t beaten,’ Freddy said, ‘he retired.’ ‘Is he very old then?’ ‘I don’t know,’ said Freddy. ‘I suppose he is, he’s fifty-something. How old is yours?’ ‘Forty.’ ‘That’s not so young.’ ‘It’s younger than fifty.’ But even though fifty was a great age, Michael knew people didn’t retire until they were in their sixties, practically dead. ‘But what’ll he do?’ Fathers earned money. Freddy and his family might starve. Freddy was not in the least concerned. ‘There’s always something,’ he said.