And the Land Lay Still (49 page)

BOND
: I hope I’ll be able to get you to sign my copy.

GRIEVE
(
chuckling
): I hope I’ll still be alive to sign it.

Peter had come down from Edinburgh, an hour and a half by bus. When he’d walked up the farm track to the tiny cottage and chapped the door there’d been a squall of barking, and then a solidly built woman with bright orange hair, holding a wild-looking terrier of some kind by the scruff, had appeared from
round the side of the building. She was wearing red trousers and a multicoloured shirt but the hair was the most striking thing about her. That, and the scowl on her face and the way she asked bluntly who he was and what he wanted.

Peter wasn’t too good around dogs, especially slavering ones that seemed to think of him as dinner.

I’ve an appointment to see Dr Grieve.

Oh have you? The dog lunged and she hauled it back. What’s in the bag?

One of his books. And a bottle of whisky.

Just what he doesn’t need. What kind of whisky?

Bell’s.

I’ll take charge of that. She held out her free hand and he passed over the bottle.

Now I’m going to let the dog go, she said.

I’d rather you didn’t, he said.

She let the dog go. It launched itself at him and he retreated before its snarling teeth until he was backed up against the garden gate.

Don’t try to pet him, the woman said, or he’ll bite you. He might bite you anyway. After that he’ll settle down.

The dog grabbed the cuff of his trouser-leg and worried it, then gave up and left him alone.

You must be Mrs Grieve, Peter said.

I am, she said. But you can call me Valda.

He was taken aback at her surrender.

Thank you, he said. Valda.

Don’t try to fucking butter me up, she said. She folded her arms, still clutching the bottle, and stuck her jaw out, defiantly pleased that he’d fallen into her trap.

I wasn’t trying to butter you up, he said.

Just as well, she said. He’s inside. What’s your name?

Peter Bond, he said.

You know he’s very unwell, I suppose?

He said something about it in his letter.

Come away in then.

She led him in through the front door and half-opened another door on the left.

Christopher, you have a visitor. He says he made an appointment. Peter Bond.

Peter heard a quiet, slightly protesting voice: Who?

He says his name is Peter Bond.

I wrote to you, Peter said over her shoulder.

Yes, yes. Come in, Mr Bond. Valda likes to think of herself as a kind of warder, keeping my visitors at bay.

It’s as well for you that I do, Valda said, or you’d have been trampled to death long ago.

Although it was a summer afternoon, the room was dark, smoky and not particularly warm. The breeze blowing through the open window was dry and hot, but inside the air felt dampish, heavy with residual smells – tobacco, old books, dogs, food, coal. There were shelves stacked with books all round the room, and on the walls between the shelves and the low wooden ceiling numerous paintings and photographs of Hugh MacDiarmid striking combative bardic poses, often in a kilt. The man in the room was the same man in the pictures, but different too. It was Grieve, not MacDiarmid, who rose from a brown leather armchair, laying a book on top of a pile of others on the bed that was pushed up against one wall, and held out his right hand. The bowl of a lit pipe rested in the palm of his left. He was wearing a tweed suit, a checked shirt and plain tie. Slippers on his feet. The unmistakable forehead rose to a thick crop of white hair. Peter had seen him often, in photographs and in the flesh, but never this close. The man’s head seemed huge, but the body frail, the suit too big for it.

Peter shook the outstretched hand.

Please, Grieve said, sit down. He indicated a chair on the far side of the unlit fireplace. The shelves next to it were full of green and orange Penguin paperbacks. Peter glimpsed names like Erle Stanley Gardner, Rex Stout, P. G. Wodehouse. He thought, why am I surprised?

Valda said, I’ll make some tea.

Tea would be good, Grieve said, but what’s that I see under your oxter? We’ll have some of that to be going on with.

You’ll not have much, Valda said, but something changed in the atmosphere. Suddenly she was kind and solicitous, fetching glasses
and water for the whisky, then going back out to her weeding in the garden, taking the dog with her. Later she would reappear from the kitchen with tea and a huge pile of sandwiches on a tray. But before that, before that …

Peter sat in the chair opposite the old man’s and they began to talk. Peter found himself leaning forward all the time because Grieve was not only quite deaf but also surprisingly soft-spoken. He had an engaging way of cupping his right ear with his hand to catch what Peter was saying. He also had a mischievous smile and his eyes were full of laughter, although he was also obviously in some physical pain. He was happy to talk about anything – the bus journey from Edinburgh, Ezra Pound, whom he’d met in Venice five years before, his childhood in Langholm. Peter was amazed at how gentle and easy Grieve was, nothing like his fiery performances at public events or in print. Even when Peter steered the conversation round to the matter of Major Boothby and whether there was any truth in the rumour that he had been an informer, Grieve refused to get excitable.

You know him, you say? Why don’t you ask him? He’s out of prison again.

I’m interested in what
you
think.

Well, what if he was an informer? He has paid for it now.

If he was, Peter said, he was very close to people like yourself. He could have done a lot of damage. Perhaps he has done a lot of damage.

What does it matter? Grieve said. He did some good work over the years. He kept the pot boiling and we should be grateful for that.

Even if he is a traitor?

At least he has not been an automaton, slavishly, mindlessly serving the establishment. And in any case, if he is a traitor what has he betrayed? There is not, I think you’ll agree, any imminent likelihood of revolution in Scotland.

You seem very sanguine about it all.

I have to take the long view. One grows impatient, of course, but I never doubted but that it would take many years to stimulate the Scottish population into action. That has been my task since I came back from the war – the First World War. To aggravate and
stimulate. I am a troublemaker, and I recognised the same thing in Boothby as soon as he came on the scene. We need people who are prepared to make trouble. We need that kind of person more than anything. What we don’t need is another conformist, another lickspittle of the English ascendancy. Whatever else he is, I don’t believe Boothby has ever been that.

Peter nodded. He remembered those discussions he’d had with Canterbury about MacDiarmid, ten, fifteen years before, and he felt ashamed, and maybe it showed in his face because Grieve said suddenly, And what about yourself? For the first time since his arrival Peter detected a sharpening of tone, a slight hint of violence in the voice.

What, do I believe Boothby has been a conformist? he said. But he knew perfectly well that wasn’t what Grieve meant.

No. You, yourself. What have you done? Have you, consciously or unconsciously, maintained the status quo? Or have you, as I have, worked all your life against it?

Nobody has worked as you have, Peter said.

That is an evasive answer, Grieve said. There was a pause, which to Peter seemed about to stretch across an unbridgeable chasm, and then the old man spoke again.

You have come to see me, to quiz me about Boothby, yet you know him yourself. Do you think I am entirely naive?

No. Quite the reverse.

Grieve coughed and took more whisky.

Listen to me, he said. I am in permanent opposition. It is my nature. I’ll be a Bolshevik until the revolution comes, but after it, when Communism rules the roost, I’ll be something else. And I won’t have shifted
my
position an inch. Does that make sense to you?

Yes it does, Peter said. I understand that completely.

But not everybody can be like that. Someone like myself, a poet, an intellectual, can. I’ve always been a loner, and I have never had anything to lose. But if everybody were in opposition there would be nothing to oppose. And most of them wouldn’t know why they were in opposition any more than they know now why they accept the status quo. He shook his great head. Complacency is the worst enemy, he said. If you grow complacent, you cease to think. And if
you cease to think, you cease to live. You, I can tell, have not ceased to think. It’s one of the reasons you came to see me. But you are troubled, and I know why you are troubled. Grieve pointed an accusing yet somehow not unfriendly finger at him. You have been on the wrong side. Actively on the wrong side. I don’t wish to know what you have done, but I can see it.
You
can see it. The question is, what are you going to do about it?

I’ll need to think about that, Peter said.

The only thing you need to do, Grieve said, is to be yourself.

In January 1976 a portion of the Labour Party in Scotland, fed up with the endless prevaricating and stalling over devolution, staged a breakaway and formed a new organisation, the Scottish Labour Party. The leading figure was Jim Sillars, a charismatic MP from Ayrshire, who could once have challenged Willie Ross for the title ‘Hammer of the Nats’. In the wake of the Hamilton by-election of 1967 he’d issued a pamphlet laying into the SNP and any form of devolution:
Don’t Butcher Scotland’s Future
it was called, but now he’d lost patience with Labour’s failure to get to grips with the Scottish question. The Scottish Labour Party was committed to both socialism
and
a Scottish parliament. For a few months the SLP was buoyed up by good opinion-poll ratings and sympathetic coverage from various parts of the Scottish media. Briefly, it looked as though Canterbury’s nightmare scenario, an alliance of socialism and nationalism, had arrived.

Peter expected to be told to divert his energies towards this new threat to the stability of the British state. But Croick told him on no account to join or get involved with the SLP. Instead, in the wake of the APG’s disintegration, Croick had him chasing other clumps of letters: the SRA, the SCAR, the ASP, the SRSL. It was like stirring alphabet soup, but every time you brought the spoon to your mouth there was fuck-all in it. Meanwhile it looked like the real action was out in the open, being covered by the mainstream media. It made him mad with frustration.

It’s all in hand, Croick said. You sit tight. This will take care of itself, you’ll see.

Sitting tight was all he got to do these days. He broke sweat sitting tight. The weather didn’t help. That summer it didn’t rain
from the start of June to the end of August. Peter, who turned prawn-pink if exposed to the sun for more than half an hour, kept in the shadows, breathless and longing for thunder. Snow would have been heaven. Every day the temperature seemed to hit a new high. Roads melted. Marching bands ran out of spittle and their drumskins split. If a child dropped his ice cream it was milk the second it hit the pavement. The TV news showed footage of Highland farms, even a small village, drowned in the 1950s by hydro schemes, re-emerging, monuments to their own deaths. But Croick, sitting in Peter’s kitchen with a mug of hot tea in his hands and a jacket on over his white shirt, seemed not to have noticed that he was living through the hottest summer on record. Not a bead of sweat on him.

Think of a tree with two limbs, he said. One of those political-cartoon trees from the nineteenth century. One limb says
SOCIALISM
, the other says
NATIONALISM
. And nestling right in the cleft of the tree is this big fat honeycomb labelled
THE SCOTTISH LABOUR PARTY
. And every flying or creeping shit-eating, sugar-sucking creature for miles around is homing in on this dripping feast. How can they resist? The party forgot to make any rules about who could be members. Anyone can be a member. The International Marxists are in there. The Scottish Workers Republican Party’s in there along with anybody else who thinks they’re the true descendants of John Maclean. Everybody’s in there, Peter, which is why you don’t need to be. You’re doing fine sucking shit and sugar out of all the other wee bushes everybody else has forgotten about. There are even some poor honest folk who genuinely believe the SLP stands for what
they
stand for. Socialism with a Scottish accent. Nationalism with a social conscience. Ach well. More. Fool. Them.

He couldn’t keep the derision out of his voice.

By the end of the year, Croick was even happier. He sat on the same chair wearing the same clothes, drinking tea again, and declared himself satisfied with the SLP’s state of impending collapse. It was almost as if he’d never been away.

At its first congress in Stirling, in October, the SLP leadership had tried to clear up the mess it had got into over dual
membership. The idea had been to keep the door open to sympathisers in the Labour Party, but it was the Trotskyites, masters of entryism, who’d swamped some of the branches. By the time of Stirling the SLP had nine hundred members in forty-two branches, some of which were acting more or less independently. A furious battle over resolutions and procedures ensued and the International Marxists were expelled. They marched out of the hotel where the congress was taking place and into another, where they reformed as the ‘Scottish Labour Party (Democratic Wing)’. The official SLP limped on but their membership had just collapsed and the air was poisonous with recrimination and suspicion. Even the sympathetic journalists who’d come to write of hope and idealism could see that there was nothing but bad news to report.

There was even a bit of blood on the tiles in the Gents, Croick said. These people take their schisms and expulsions seriously.

You were
there
?

I dropped in for a bit. Tell you what, you missed yourself.

Peter lost his temper then, half-rose to his feet, banged his fist on the table between them. But you told me to keep out of it, for fuck’s sake!