And the Land Lay Still (89 page)

‘So why are ye fucking boasting aboot it?’

‘I’m not boasting about it. I’m ashamed of it. I just said it because there he is in the news and I remembered.’

‘So ye should be fucking ashamed. Was he an MP when ye had your wee fling?’

‘No. It was years before that.’

‘He was still a Tory. Once a Tory always a fucking Tory.’

‘So am I contagious? Am I only allowed sex with card-carrying members of the Labour Party?’

‘So ye did have sex wi him.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Ye just admitted it.’

‘I didn’t admit it and I don’t have to admit or deny fucking anything.’

Adam stared at him coldly. Then he turned and walked out of the room.

‘Adam!’ Mike called.

The front door slammed.

He didn’t come back for hours. Eventually Mike went to bed. He thought he wouldn’t sleep but sleep came and so did a dream about David Eddelstane – a dream so vivid that when he woke it took a minute before he was sure it
was
a dream. David and Melissa and Mike were on holiday together – some weird location that might have been a Hebridean island but could equally have been a Greek one – and they were talking about Kilsmeddum Castle and David said, ‘My son’s just finished there.’ ‘You sent your son to Kilsmeddum? But it’s a dump.’ ‘No it isn’t.’ ‘That time we met in Edinburgh, we discussed it and we agreed it was a dump.’ ‘Well, it is a dump, but it’s still a great place to spend your formative years. Character-building. Didn’t do me any harm.’ And Melissa said, ‘You met in Edinburgh?’ And David said, ‘Not married yet, Mike?’ And Mike said, ‘No, I’m gay, remember?’ ‘Oh, surely not?’ ‘Yes, like you.’ ‘I’m not gay. I like women. Well, I like their shoes.’ ‘No, you’re gay. I can prove it.’ And Melissa said, ‘No you can’t.’ ‘I can.’ She said, ‘Well, don’t. Please. Just don’t.’

He woke and the words were clear in his head. And Adam was getting undressed, climbing into bed. ‘Where have you been?’ ‘Walking. Go to sleep.’ And they did, and in the morning for a moment it was as if none of it had happened, but it had.

They never really repaired it. They apologised, as they had in the past, but sometimes you know that the wound is deep and the
patching-up inadequate. It was as if they realised they only had to keep things going a little longer, and then they could stop pretending.

§

1 May 1997: there was the usual gathering at Jean’s on election night: Adam, Mike, Ellen, Robin, Walter, a few others. Everybody came in disguise: after the disappointment of 1992, nobody dared show any optimism for the outcome, whatever the opinion polls were saying. The polls had been wrong last time. But this time they weren’t.

It wasn’t until past midnight that they realised it was really true, that the eighteen years were over. They cheered and applauded as, one after another, heartily loathed Tory MPs were tumbled from office. Some poor woman, parachuted into Glenallan and West Mills as a last-minute substitute for David Eddelstane, was dispatched without mercy at about half past two, shortly after Michael Forsyth. As the extent of the Conservatives’ defeat became clear – their complete extinction in Scotland and Wales – the mood changed to one of wonder and joy. It was a drunken night in that plenty of booze was consumed, but it wasn’t especially riotous. More than anything, there was a sense of relief at having completed a long journey. It was, Mike remembers, like coming home after years away and finding everything familiar, and yet also different, because you yourself have changed. Everything is as you thought you left it, but you did, after all, leave it. And so in the sense of regaining there was also a sense of loss.

Around half past three, after John Major had publicly conceded defeat, Ellen cornered Mike. ‘What’s going on with you and Adam? You’ve hardly looked at each other all night.’ ‘Och,’ he said, ‘we’re going through a rough patch.’ ‘Go and speak to him,’ she said. ‘He’s in the kitchen.’

Mike went. He hadn’t noticed, or much cared, that Adam was missing from the front room. He was on his own, leaning out of the wide-open kitchen window.

‘Adam.’

He pulled himself in and turned round.

‘All right?’

‘Aye,’ Adam said. ‘Just needing some fresh air and contemplation.’

‘What are you contemplating? Not jumping, I hope?’

‘I’m just thinking aboot tonight,’ he said. ‘We’ll no see the likes o this again, ye realise that? This is history. Efter tonight, naething will ever be the same again.’

‘I know,’ Mike said.

‘In a lifetime ye ainly get something like this once, twice at maist. The last one was 1945, and you weren’t alive for that and I was just months old. It’s like a door opening. It won’t stay open for lang. But ye never forget the view through the open door.’

‘I understand.’

‘Dae ye?’ he asked. ‘Take it in, Mike. It’s a big moment.’

He was right. The enormity of what had happened politically was worth looking at. But the distance between the two of them was also immense. Of course Mike knew exactly what he was talking about.

‘It’s over, isn’t it?’

‘Aye, I think so.’

‘Let’s not fight any more. Come back and join the others.’

‘Aye, okay.’

Suddenly even this felt better. Mike picked up another bottle of wine and took it through, and it might have seemed to Ellen, if she’d been paying attention, that they’d made it through their rough patch. And maybe they had. There was more drink and more laughter, and a song or two, until at last tiredness overcame them all and light began to fill the world outside. Then Adam and Mike walked home and went to bed together for the last time. And it was true that they didn’t fight any more, because there was nothing left to fight about.

§

It was the summer after the election. Adam was back near Borlanslogie and Mike was still in Edinburgh. They saw each other occasionally, and got on better than they had for years. They were still high from whatever had been in the air on that night in May. Life seemed hopeful: disillusion had not yet set in, despite the still-to-be-leaped-over hurdle of a two-question referendum, which the new government, headed by Tony Blair, insisted would have to precede the establishment of a Scottish parliament.

One day Jeremy Tait, Mike’s boss, told him that the manager of his Perth shop was thinking of leaving. Would Mike consider a move there, to take over? Mike grabbed eagerly at the chance. He was sick of the Tollcross flat, where he’d been for nearly a quarter of a century. A change of scene, better pay, more responsibility – he decided he could handle all of those things.

It turned out that the Perth manager wasn’t going till October. The two-question devolution referendum was scheduled for 11 September. For much of August, on days off and evenings, Mike did his bit for the ‘Yes, Yes’ campaign, stuffing leaflets through doors and handing them out on Princes Street, urging people to vote both for the parliament and for it to have some power to vary the rate of income tax. The spectre of 1979 haunted the campaign. The ‘No, No’ side was understaffed, poorly funded and demoralised: there was little to fear from it. What was to be feared was public indifference or exhaustion, another vote of little or no confidence. A big turnout was needed, an overwhelming affirmation that, whatever else emerged in this new political era, nobody would later be able to say that the Scots had had their parliament imposed upon them.

On the last day of August came the accident in Paris that killed Princess Diana and Dodi Al-Fayed and suspended all politics – virtually all normal life – for a week. It felt to Mike like a massive distraction, as if some external force had lobbed a meteorite at the democratic process and said, ‘Thou shalt not have the undivided attention of the people.’

But, a few days after the princess’s funeral, the referendum did finally happen. Mike went out to vote thinking of M. Lucas and his prophecy at Bannockburn, that a time to accept would come, and that when it did the ghosts of history would whisper in people’s ears. And so it turned out. Overwhelmingly the people voted to have their parliament back. As the results came in, live on television, Labour’s Scottish leader, Donald Dewar, who had the look of a dyspeptic heron according to one commentator, punched the air and it was endearing, not stomach-churning; Alex Salmond of the SNP grinned his widest grin and it didn’t look remotely smug. A few weeks after that, Mike Pendreich closed the door for the last time on the Tollcross flat and drove his few possessions in a hired car to a
new flat in Perth. He was not sorry to go. It was a good time to be on his own again.

Adam and he did not see each other for a year and a half, but they kept in touch, and eventually arranged to meet. One Friday evening Adam came to Perth by train and they went for a meal. There was an underlying restlessness in Adam, kicking against the new politics. The first Scottish parliamentary elections had just taken place, but he had played no part in the campaign. Mike was surprised: he’d thought it possible Adam might stand as a candidate. No, Adam said. Even if he’d wanted to, the party machine wouldn’t have let him. He was Old Labour, not the right flavour these days. Better men and women than he had been vetted and found wanting by the party they’d served for years. Labour had won the election but half of its new MSPs were time-serving nonentities. In every sentence he uttered Mike could hear his disappointment.

‘Still,’ Mike said, trying to lighten the mood, ‘some progress has been made. We’re a dark land now, overrun by homosexuals. Apparently.’

The American evangelical preacher Pat Robertson had just described Scotland in these terms. There was outrage because the Bank of Scotland was trying to set up a business deal with Robertson, whose extreme, negative views on gays, feminists and the United Nations were well known. Later the bank dropped the idea.

Adam barely smiled. ‘We’re a dark land all right,’ he said.

‘What’s wrong with you? You sound so depressed.’

‘Maybe I am. Or maybe I’m just Scottish.’

After the meal they went for a drink, and then they walked to the station so that Adam could catch the last train. It started to rain. Adam had an umbrella and they huddled together under it. And as they went he couldn’t help himself, he let all the bitterness flood out.

‘I’ll tell ye the truth, Mike, I’ve had enough. Aye, the old political certainties are changing, and that’s aw for the good. It’s what we wanted, and it’s happening. Proportional representation means the parties canna assume old loyalties ony mair. They have tae work for their votes. Onybody can vote for onybody noo and if they dinna like the big parties there are greens and socialists and God kens who else tae vote for. Fine. Or they can vote for naebody. But there’s something I canna get oot o my heid. It’s the thought that just at the point when we’ve won, when we’ve got what we worked for aw
these years, right at that moment we throw it away because naebody can be bothered ony mair. Thatcher won after all, in spite of everything. That’s what I think.’

‘How can you say that?’ Mike said. ‘Her own party chucked her out. She fought against devolution all the way, and we beat her. And the Tories won’t be back in power for years.’

‘They don’t have to be. Blair and Brown are gonnae dae it aw for them. It’s true. The market is king. So what aboot this parliament of oors? It’s twenty years ower late. It’s like we fought our way tae the bar just in time for the barman tae tell us he’s stopped serving.’

‘No,’ Mike protested. ‘I don’t feel that. We’re at the start of something new and different. It
can’t
be like it was before.’

Adam laughed. ‘Like it was in the olden days, ye mean?’

‘The olden days,’ Mike said. ‘My mother used to go on about them. The Middle Ages, knights in armour and no plumbing is what she meant.’

‘Aye, and ye ken what it means noo? It means no that lang ago. When I was young. It’s me that’s middle-aged, and you’re no that far behind me. We’re frae the olden days just the same as Robert the Bruce and Bonnie Prince fucking Charlie.’ The rain came on stronger and a gust of wind tried to jerk the umbrella out of Adam’s hand. ‘I think I’ll dae what he did, go into exile,’ he said. ‘I’m sick of this weather, apart frae onything else.’

In the station they stood on the long, almost empty platform waiting for Adam’s train.

‘What aboot you?’ he said. ‘What’ll you dae?’

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Mike said. ‘I’m sticking around to see what happens.’

‘I hope it’s what ye want, whatever it is,’ Adam said.

‘Remember what I told you once,’ Mike said. ‘Everything comes to he who waits.’

‘Bollocks! It was bollocks then and it’s still bollocks. Look, even this bloody train isna here.’

But a few minutes later it was.

§

Everything from then on is another story. The new parliament, the new country, the personal and the political. From where Mike sits,
looking out from Cnoc nan Gobhar at the hills and the loch, everything beyond that point happened in another life. Except for one thing: the death of his father.

Angus died at Inverness in September 2005. He went to his GP complaining of chest pains and then had a heart attack in the surgery. If you’re going to have a heart attack it’s as good a place as any to have one, Mike thought later, but the doctor could do no more than stabilise him, then have him moved to Raigmore Infirmary by ambulance. There he had a second attack and died before Mike could get up the road from Perth. He’d seen him only a month before, as he’d spent part of August at Cnoc nan Gobhar. One reason for the visit was to encourage Angus to sort out his archive, but he wasn’t interested, so Mike did some work on it himself. The rest of the time they went for short walks on the beach, or Mike went off on his own for an hour or two, leaving Angus with the paper and the crossword. In the evening Mike cooked dinner, while his father sat in the sun room and fell asleep over a book. It was all quite easy but vaguely dissatisfying. However, Mike did at least rediscover how much he enjoyed being in the north.

He organised the funeral at the crematorium in Perth. No more than twenty people attended. In his last years Angus had cut himself off geographically and socially, losing touch with most of his old associates. Male friends had never been that plentiful. Despite a couple of obituaries in the papers, the few still alive mostly didn’t know he’d died till some time later. As for his women, the only two who turned up were Jean and Isobel.