And the Land Lay Still (33 page)

Don didn’t think so. It sounded planned to him. He reckoned
Jack could survive on almost nothing – he’d had plenty of experience. He’d be back only if he wanted to be. But what
did
he want? Was he trying to get away from Sarah and Barbara in their spotless house with its barren vegetable plot and immaculate flower beds, or was it more that he was trying to reach something? But what? Don thought of the sheet of paper covered in MacLarens. Maybe he was still trying to succeed where MacLaren had failed, still trying to get back to some distant, dreamed-of Scotland.

Two more days passed. Liz walked up to Sarah’s in the afternoons with the boys, sat with her for a while, came away with no news. She seemed to have got over the notion that there was or had been anything between Don and Sarah, or at least she never raised it again. The weekend came and Don went to the Blackthorn at eight o’clock, just in case. Jack failed to show. Bill Drummond was there. Because the police were involved, everybody knew. Most people thought Jack was cracked. They didn’t hold out much hope for him. The Japs had a lot to answer for.

Don spent an hour with Bill, then headed off. He thought about calling in on Sarah but decided it wasn’t worth risking Liz’s wrath. He walked round the village, wondering what the English nurse was doing, if she were on a shift or out on the town, smoking and drinking. Somehow he felt justified thinking about her because Liz had been so wrong about him and Sarah. Then he went home, made himself a cup of tea, checked on the boys, took
The House with the Blue Door
by Hulbert Footner from Liz’s sleeping fingers and creaked in beside her.

After a week they feared he was dead. After two they wanted his body to be found, at least. After three they thought it unlikely it would be. He’d gone to the coast and drowned himself and his body was at the bottom of the sea; or maybe he’d not actually killed himself but had killed the person he’d been and was starting afresh, in England or Ireland or wherever, a man trying to leave Jack Gordon behind for ever. Could he have got right away, to Canada, say, or Australia? There was no trace of him, no sign, no sighting. The police said this wasn’t that unusual. Even in normal times, they said, you’d be amazed how many people just vanish. But these weren’t yet quite normal times: the war was still only six years over, there were people on the move all over the British Isles, all over Europe,
leaving their old losses and injuries behind. Don understood this. When you saw newsreel of London or Coventry or Berlin at the pictures, what you were watching was destruction already being built over. When you saw films like
Hue and Cry
and
Passport to Pimlico
the high jinks of Alastair Sim and the like might make you laugh but also you saw a ruined landscape through which people were moving in an endless stream. Why would Jack not be part of that? Why not, unless he was dead?

It was still early April when the Stone of Destiny was deposited among the ruins of Arbroath Abbey, then bundled back south under a police escort. For a day or so Don thought it possible that there was some connection, that with the stone’s reappearance Jack might also emerge from wherever he’d been hiding. But he didn’t, and Don heard Jack’s clipped tones dismissing the idea.
Come on, Don, what are you thinking of?
The stone was a sideshow after all, a distraction, and in any case the one taken back to London was a fake, the genuine article was lying in a peatbog or some forgotten vault in a castle or wherever it was supposed to have ended up. Like that original stone he believed in, Jack was gone for good.

Three months, six months, a year passed. Sarah waited. There were financial difficulties. Jack’s employers were sympathetic, but they couldn’t go on paying for him not being at his work. There were some savings in the bank: Sarah lived on them for a while. As soon as Barbara was old enough for school Sarah got a job in the post office as a counter clerk. Most days Liz collected Barbara from school along with Billy, and Sarah picked her up on her way home. Barbara was clever, industrious, isolated. She and Billy developed a kind of silent mutual affection and tolerance that the adults – and Charlie – were excluded from. Sarah was grateful that her friendless daughter had at least one friend. Liz and Don were less sure it was good for Billy, but what could they do?

Usually by the time Don came home the Gordons would be away, but sometimes Liz, in spite of her determination not to get closer than she had to, would have them stay for their tea. Over the years she became not exactly Sarah’s best friend, but her most reliable support. Yet when Liz spoke about her to Don when they were on their own, it was to wonder why she didn’t pack up and go back to Dorset where she belonged.

‘Maybe she feels she belongs here,’ Don said. ‘And what if Jack turns up and she’s away doon sooth?’

‘Jack’s never coming back,’ Liz said. And though Don knew she was probably right, he himself kept a small hope burning. Even if Sarah goes, he thought, I’ll be here if he ever comes home.

He still went to the Blackthorn once a week. It was like keeping a pledge. Eight o’ clock every Saturday. A couple of pints, standing at the bar, talking to whoever was there, or not talking. And most Sunday mornings he took Billy for a walk up in the woods. When Charlie was big enough he took him too. A long lie for Liz and time with the boys for him. It wasn’t that Liz and he didn’t get on, it was that they knew each other too well, had nothing much left to say. It was what happened.

For a while Liz took the boys to church and the walks were shunted to the afternoons. He decided not to make an issue of it and it didn’t last. He was glad. He didn’t believe in God and didn’t want his boys indoctrinated. The church he took them to was the big outdoor one, the cathedral full of trees and flowers, bees and creepie-crawlies, cows and sheep and birds. He tried to teach his sons the names of things, as many as he knew. Billy absorbed, Charlie got bored. Don didn’t like to admit it, and tried not to show it, but he had a favourite son: he enjoyed these walks most when it was just himself and Billy. At such times he felt a reason for being a father, a reason for Billy being his son.

Sometimes he’d catch himself searching the trees ahead, as if Jack and his nephew might suddenly be there, as if they’d never been away. Sometimes he thought he glimpsed them.

Time quickened. It wasn’t just the speed at which the boys grew, it was the way he felt himself being left behind by change in general. The 1945 General Election had seemed to be the dawn of a bright new day, but it wasn’t turning out as he’d hoped. Labour, exhausted, had been put out in October 1951 and Churchill had come back, seventy-six, imperious, ill, but a hero to millions. Liz had voted for him. They’d had a row over that, and from then on hardly discussed politics again. Don missed that as much as anything from his Saturday nights – how Jack had always had an opinion about what was going on in the world. A couple of the men at Byres Brothers were up for political talk, but it wasn’t the same.
There was a lot of ignorance about, especially when it came to anything abroad, a place full of dirty wogs, ungrateful niggers and treacherous Russians. He read about the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya and the way it was being repressed and longed to discuss it with Jack. The name of a Scottish colonial police officer, Ian Croick, came up often: described as a no-nonsense chap who knew how to deal with the natives, he sounded cold, hard and brutal to Don. He listened to reports from Malaya praising the way the British were combating the Communists there, and wondered what the real stories were there too. Jack would have had a view.

Then Churchill retired and suave, handsome Sir Anthony Eden took over. Women couldn’t see past his looks, his sophisticated manner. Don thought he was incompetent, but that didn’t stop the Tories winning another election in 1955. The Labour Party didn’t seem to know what it stood for any more. Don voted for Attlee even though he was due to retire. Liz voted for Eden’s moustache. The Tories won more than half the Scottish vote. The SNP contested just two seats and lost their deposit in one of them. So much, Don thought, for Jack’s age of small nations.

Could a man really just vanish? Don thought of Jack stepping out in sunshine along a country road, a car slowing to offer a lift, Jack waving it on. He wouldn’t take assistance but the driver would remember him, surely, give the police something to go on? He thought of him trudging through rain. He’d need to take shelter, dry off. There were byres and barns and, with all the reduction in farm labour, plenty of disused cottages scattered about. Maybe he’d earn his breakfast or a bob or two doing a bit of gardening work at a big house somewhere, for an old dame that couldn’t get the staff any more. Make himself a nest in one of the outhouses. No names, no pack drill. It mightn’t be a bad way to live over the summer months, but then would come winter. And someone would be bound to say something to somebody. Word would filter back. He must be dead. It was the only explanation.

Where did ye go, Jack?
Every time some big thing happened, Don would wonder if Jack knew about it, what his opinion might be. When Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, he thought of Jack: everybody from Churchill to Wullie Byres, even senior figures in the Labour Party, was badmouthing the Egyptian leader, calling him
the new Hitler, but what would Jack think? Then Eden resigned, grey and shattered, the shine off his shoes, and Don wanted to know what Jack thought of Macmillan, of Gaitskell, of Alec Douglas-Home. What about the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban-missile crisis? Did he think Kennedy clever or scheming, lucky or foolhardy? Was Khrushchev a shoe-banging boor or a match for the American upstart? A year later, Kennedy was shot in Dallas. Everybody was supposed to remember where they were when it happened. Don was on the bus coming home from his work, a Friday afternoon: when he got in and switched on the news on the newly rented television, there it was, but where was Jack? When the Buddhist priest set himself on fire in South Vietnam, did Jack see it? When Profumo resigned, when Harold Wilson won the election in 1964, and again in 1966, when England won the World Cup, when Celtic won the European Cup the following year and Winnie Ewing won the Hamilton by-election, was Jack alive to care?

Sarah and Barbara were long gone by then. Through the years Sarah had struggled to keep up the payments on the house, gradually diminishing the savings in the bank. She had some help from social security, but there was the awkward issue of Jack’s status. Unless his body or some other convincing evidence could be produced, the law presumed he was alive. But as far as his estate was concerned, and Sarah’s marital status, after seven years the law said she could act as if he were dead. He was neither one thing nor the other. When the seven years elapsed Sarah got the court ruling she needed. She had to do it, she explained: otherwise nothing else could happen.

‘Have ye gien up hope for him, then?’ Liz asked.

‘Yes, I have,’ she said. ‘But’ – and a gleam of defiance came into her eyes, lighting up her pallid face – ‘I’ve not given up hope for Barbara. I don’t care about myself but Barbara deserves a fresh start. That’s why we’re leaving.’

She’d been offered a full-time job in another post office. It was forty miles away in Fife, in a place that was hardly on the map as yet: Glenrothes, one of the new towns going up in different parts of the country, so modern and important they were given capital letters, New Towns. The mortgage was too hard for her, she would sell the house and use the money to pay off her debts and start again. They
would get a brand-new corporation house, be part of a new community. Barbara was eleven, she’d finish up at the village school and then transfer to a secondary school that was barely a year old. Folk were moving to Glenrothes from all over. There were paper mills there already, but what was really drawing them in was coal. Miners from old, tired coalfields in Lanarkshire and the Lothians were coming with their families, lured by the promise of a lifetime’s work in the best of conditions. The Rothes Colliery was going to be a Super Pit. It would need five thousand miners to work it, extracting five thousand tons of coal a day. The coal would go all over the country from great railway yards. There was enough to last a hundred years. The future of Glenrothes would be built on this vast black treasure vault, and the whole economy of Fife would be powered by it. The New Town would be a shining place of clean concrete, broad roads and precincts of neat, comfortable houses in rows and circles and crescents. There would be green parks and gardens, a covered shopping centre. There would be people walking dogs, cycling to work, going to the shops by bus and car. It would be safe. It would feel young. It would be a better place for Barbara to be.

‘It’s a big decision,’ Liz said, ‘but ye’re right. It’s an opportunity for ye baith. I would dae it if it was me.’

‘Would you?’ Sarah said.

‘Definitely,’ Liz said, as if the one thing she was determined on was to see Sarah and Barbara on to the bus to Glenrothes. ‘Ye’ll no regret it.’

‘The only thing is,’ Sarah said, ‘she’ll miss your Billy.’

‘No, she’ll no,’ Liz said. ‘Maybe for a few days, but once she starts at her new school, she’ll be fine. She’ll no be the only new face, they’ll aw be looking for friends. And Billy’ll be fine tae.’ She could hardly keep the enthusiasm out of her voice, and Don had to come in at the back of her and say, ‘Onywey, it’s no like ye’re emigrating. Ye can aye come back and see us.’

‘She’ll no hae the time,’ Liz said. ‘A fresh start, Sarah, that’s what ye said. Ye canna aye be looking ower yer shooder.’

Every time Don threw Sarah a rope, Liz hauled it back. She wanted the Gordons out of their life and maybe she was right. They’d only been connected by two unlikely friendships – the one between Barbara and Billy and the one between Don and Jack. No doubt the
children would grow out of theirs, and Don’s, well, it was with a man who didn’t any longer exist. They would all move on. They would have to. The world wouldn’t wait for them if they didn’t.

§

There was that one September night, walking back from the Blackthorn, when Jack came into his own. Whenever Don considered it in later years, he understood why he’d tolerated him, why he’d liked him in spite of everything, why he continued to remember him: because of that night. Everybody has a still, sheer place in them where light doesn’t penetrate. It had always seemed to be Jack who struggled with bad memories, but on this particular night, it was Don who found himself looking over the edge of the cliff.