And the Land Lay Still (61 page)

But this was nothing like other Hitchcocks they’d seen.
To Catch a Thief
or
North by Northwest
had been thrilling but they were romantic and full of humour too, and Liz and Joan were daft for Cary Grant. There wasn’t anything romantic about
Psycho
: it was seedy and malevolent and any humour in it seemed cruel, disturbing. All through the film the Regal resounded to collective gasps, cries and screams. Some people forgot to smoke, others couldn’t stop. Quite
a few left during or immediately after the shower scene. The rest, Don reckoned, couldn’t have got out of their seats even if they’d wanted to. His upper arm ached where Liz gripped on for most of the film. At crucial moments she turned her face into his shoulder.

Afterwards Bill lingered on the steps, ogling the poster of Janet Leigh in her white brassiere, nudging Don with his elbow, but the women hurried them away, past a stern-faced Alfred Hitchcock pointing at his watch and warning
NO ONE
…
BUT NO ONE
…
WILL BE ADMITTED TO THE THEATRE AFTER THE START OF EACH PERFORMANCE
. A new queue was waiting to go in for the next showing, and Don found himself looking away in case he caught the eye of someone he knew, someone from his work perhaps. He didn’t want them to know what they were letting themselves in for. Is that what you were meant to do? Were you meant to come away feeling sullied, like you’d participated in something wicked? And what if you were a woman? How different would you feel then?

It was a thick, damp night, the pavements were slimy and the fog seemed to swallow them. When Bulldog slipped ahead and then jumped out of a close with a sinister laugh, Liz and Joan both screamed, and even Don’s heart quickened. ‘That’s enough, Bill, eh?’ he said, and Bill looked sheepish for all of ten seconds.

Rinaldi’s was bustling and noisy, cigarette smoke hanging in the air, the windows steamed up, diners packed in at the wee tables and a queue for carry-outs at the far end of the long counter. The smell of chips and the café clatter were reassuring, familiar. Faith in human nature was restored, almost. But Liz was still white-faced. ‘I hope the boys are all right,’ she said, as if somehow the awful things that had happened on screen could happen in real life, just up the road in their own village of Wharryburn. She stared at Don and he remembered Janet Leigh’s dead eye staring at them from the shower stall. He remembered the water running with blood, the heaviness of the rain Janet Leigh drove through after she stole the money, the brittle shriek of the music, the frenzied attacks in the shower, on the stairs, the chair swinging round in the fruit cellar with the corpse of the mother in it. None of it made sense, and then you saw the crazed figure in the dress and wig wielding the knife, coming to get the sister, and it kind of did. Liz looked like she’d never be able to get the film out of her head.

‘They’ll be fine,’ Don said. ‘Betty’ll be looking efter them.’ The boys had gone next door for their tea, and would be happily watching Betty’s television, an item the Lennie household hadn’t yet acquired, till they got home. Billy was thirteen, quiet, selfless, responsible. Charlie was a different case but Don trusted even him to behave himself at Betty’s, because he knew if he didn’t he’d not be allowed back to watch TV.

‘We’ll get hame just as soon as we’ve had oor supper,’ Joan said. ‘Bill will bring the car tae the door here, won’t ye, Bill?’

‘Aye, door-tae-door service, that’s me,’ Bill said. ‘Eh, what aboot that car sinking in the swamp, though? Wi aw that money in the boot. What a waste, eh?’

‘I thought it wasna gonnae go doon,’ Don said. ‘It stuck for a minute. I thought he’d had it then.’

‘It wasna just the money in the boot,’ Joan said. ‘
She
was in the boot, poor thing.’

‘Ach, she shouldna have stolen the money,’ Bill said. ‘That’s what ye get if ye’re dishonest.’

‘She didna deserve
that
,’ Joan said.

‘I didna say she
deserved
it,’ Bill said. ‘But it was like that’s what happened tae her
because
she was on the run, because she checked in at
that
motel …’

‘She would hae taen the money back,’ Don said. ‘Ye could tell that was what she’d decided tae dae. But it was ower late.’

‘I’ll tell ye one thing,’ Liz said, and because she’d been so quiet they all shut up and turned to her expectantly, ‘as long as I live I will never go in one of thae things.’

‘What, a car?’ Bill said. ‘Ye’ll need tae if ye’re coming hame wi us.’

‘No, a shower,’ Liz said. ‘I could never get in a shower and pull the curtain shut. I’d be thinking somebody was gonnae come at me wi a knife every second.’

The waitress arrived with two platefuls of fish and chips and peas, a scliff of lemon on the side of each plate. She went away and returned with the other two plates, for the men, and Bill picked up his knife and made repeat stabs in the air above his fish while imitating the screeching violins from the soundtrack. There was a bottle of tomato sauce on the table and he shook it and splattered a quantity on his chips. ‘Blood, blood!’ he squawked. ‘Oh God, blood!’

‘It’s not funny, Bill,’ Joan said. But she was trying not to smile and then she couldn’t stop herself, she did laugh, and Don knew she’d enjoyed the whole experience, including having the wits frightened out of her. She was different from Liz. He wished …

In a couple of days it would be Halloween. The boys would go out guising, in black cloaks and hats, and ghoulish flour on their faces and trickles of red sauce strategically placed. Billy was really too old for it now. This would be his last year. He’d go because Don would tell him to, to keep an eye on his brother. Not that Billy had any control over Charlie, it was usually the other way round. When Billy sang songs or recited poems or told jokes he did it with anxious, imperfect effort but folk applauded and handed over sweeties, sometimes even a few pennies. Charlie wanted a reward just for chapping the door. He knew a couple of poems and he delivered them without fault, machine-like, but there was a kind of edge to the way he did it, a threat.
You’d better pay up when I’m finished.
Don had seen it when he’d gone with them two years back, standing in the background as they performed. Even then he’d been worried about Charlie. Now he worried even more. Some kids got into trouble on Halloween, used it as an excuse for a bit of mayhem. That was why Don wanted Billy out with his brother, this year at least, as a witness. Charlie didn’t like witnesses.

He wished the English nurse could have been cuddled into him in the dark cinema. Ten years on, yet she still came into his mind. He’d never seen her again.

There was comfort in the good, hot food. The four of them ate, saying little. And then Don voiced the other thing that had been bothering him. ‘I ken it’s no right,’ he said, ‘but I felt sorry for him.’

‘Who?’

‘For the son. For Norman. I feel sorry for him.’

‘You’re as sick as him then,’ Bulldog said.

‘Can we talk aboot something else?’ Liz said.

‘His mother sent him round the bend,’ Joan said. ‘I didna feel sorry for him, but he was mad, so I suppose it wasna his fault.’

Bulldog speared a long, thin chip and held it up. ‘They should’ve sent him tae the chair. Fried him like this chip. But I suppose he’ll spend the rest of his days in the loony bin. The doctors say he’s no right in the heid so he gets away wi it.’

‘I don’t think,’ Don said, ‘he got away wi onything much. He was a tortured soul, a misfit. He didna fit in at all.’

‘Don aye feels sorry for tortured souls,’ Liz said. ‘Like Jack Gordon. He felt sorry for him tae.’

There was a brief silence round the table, as everybody considered Jack.

‘Dae ye ever hear frae Sarah?’ Joan asked Liz. ‘That’ll be, what, two, three year since she left?’

‘Aye, aboot that. She sent us a caird the first Christmas, but that was it.’

‘The lassie, she’ll be half-grown up noo,’ Bulldog said.

‘Barbara,’ Don said.

‘Same age as oor Billy,’ Liz said.

‘And what aboot Jack?’ Bulldog said. ‘Never a trace of him, Don, eh?’

‘Never a trace,’ Don said.

He shook his head, and as he did so he saw a look on Liz’s face that he didn’t understand, but it was the briefest of moments and then she glanced away and the talk shifted to some other subject.

It was only later, back home, with the boys away to their beds and Liz making a last cup of tea while he had all the shoes out on a newspaper and was polishing them up, that she suddenly said, ‘I saw him, ye ken.’

‘Saw who?’ he said, hardly looking up.

‘Jack Gordon. I saw him.’

He stopped his brushing and stared at her. ‘When?’

‘Aboot four year syne. Maybe five.’

‘Five years? But Liz, that was … that was afore Sarah got the court ruling. How did ye no say onything?’

‘I didna ken if it was really him,’ she said. ‘I was gaun intae Drumkirk, and the bus had stopped at the lights and I looked oot and there he was, gaun in the other direction.’

‘What, walking?’

‘Aye, walking.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘Just the same, only thinner if that’s possible, and kind o scruffier. He had a lang coat on, that’s all I really noticed. But I saw his face, and it was him.’

‘But how did ye no say? If he was there in Drumkirk, and ye never said onything?’

‘I thought it couldna be him,’ she said. ‘He’d been missing for years by then. It was just a glimpse I got, and then the bus moved on again. I thought it couldna be.’

‘So, what are ye saying, it was or it wasna?’

‘It was,’ she said.

‘But did ye no think tae get aff at the next stop? Did ye no think, Liz? Did ye no think aboot Sarah, wondering if he was alive or deid?’

‘Aye,’ she said, ‘I did think. I thought aboot aw that in the space o a minute and I stayed where I was. It was just a glimpse, he was like a tramp, it probably wasna him at aw, that’s what I thought. And then I thought, even if it was him, she’s better no kennin. She’s better wi him deid.’

‘Och, Liz,’ he said. The empty shoes and the brushes and the tins of polish lay without purpose on the paper. ‘How could ye?’

‘I thought,’ she said, ‘if it was him, it was his ghost.’

This was so far removed from the practical, hard-headed, no-nonsense Liz he was married to that he almost lost his temper at her. And then he thought of his own false sightings, the way Jack haunted him, and he calmed down. He said, ‘But why are ye telling me noo?’

She said, ‘This is gonnae sound ridiculous, but see at the end o that film, the body in the cellar – there was something aboot it that made me think o Jack that time I saw him. If I saw him. He was aye that thin, but when I saw him that day he was like a skeleton, his cheeks had fallen in and his eyes were like caves. That corpse in the film minded me o him. Otherwise I wouldna hae said onything. Maybe I shouldna hae. Ye’re mad at me, aren’t ye? I can tell ye’re mad at me.’

‘I just think, when ye saw him back then, ye should hae said something.’

‘I
thought
I saw him,’ she said. ‘And if I’d said something, what would hae happened?’

‘Maybe I could hae tracked him doon.’

‘What for, Don? What would hae been the point o that?’

He looked at the shoes needing polishing. ‘I dinna ken,’ he said. ‘But if he’s alive …’

‘He walked oot,’ she said. ‘If he’s alive he disna want tae be here, or wi Sarah. If he’s deid he’s deid. But if he’s alive he might as well be deid as far as she’s concerned, so dinna be stirring it aw up again, Don. It’s ower late noo.’

‘He was my friend,’ Don said.

‘He walked oot on you and aw,’ Liz said.

He bent to pick up the black-on brush. ‘I wish ye’d tellt me,’ he said. Back then, he meant.

‘I wish I hadna,’ she said. Just now, she meant.

They looked at each other across a void.

‘Here’s your tea,’ she said. ‘Dae the shoes efter.’

‘Aye,’ he said. He felt suddenly exhausted. She was right. Or she wasn’t right, but he wouldn’t fight her about it. He watched her as she steadily, purposefully poured the tea. He was forty, she three years younger. He wished he still loved her the way he once had.

§

More and more, as the boys grew up, Don found himself gnawing away at a question, or the question gnawing away at him. Was it all settled – your character, the kind of life you’d lead – by the time you were five? Before you even went to the school? Maybe earlier, when you were two or three, before you were speaking properly? He didn’t believe it, he didn’t want to believe it. He believed in nurture because what else was socialism but nurture, improving people’s lives and improving the people as you did that? And yet whenever he looked at the better lives he and Liz were giving their two sons – better by far than the childhood he had had – he wondered if, in the end, it made any difference. If, in fact, you were happy or sad, good or bad, despite, not because of, your circumstances. A voice nagged in his head:
See your nurture, your socialism? – I’ll bloody show ye.
Was that the voice of fate? He didn’t believe in fate, but he watched Billy and Charlie turning from boys into teenagers, from teenagers into young men, and he thought, I could have mapped out their paths, their characters years ago, virtually while they were still in nappies. And he knew – and this was worse because it felt like betrayal when in fact it was only truth – he knew that all the way back there’d been one he liked and one he didn’t; one he trusted to grow to be decent – feckless maybe, but decent – and one who’d be out for himself and
God help anybody who got in his road. And he hated the idea and hated himself for having it.

Decent
was a word he valued.

And
like
was not the same as
love
between a father and a son.
Like
was about mutual respect, give and take. So you didn’t like your own son? That was sore enough but how could you not
love
your son? You couldn’t
not
love him, however much you might not like him. And that was what really hurt with Charlie. The love that he felt for him even as he saw him turn bad. The love that couldn’t stop it happening. The love that raged at him and that seeped out, a little less each time, whenever he had to yell at him, threaten him, take his hand or his belt to him. Till eventually the love would be gone, and all he’d have left would be the empty space it once filled.