And the Land Lay Still

by James Robertson

  For posterity, perhaps, is what he thinks now. Maybe Angus already knew he would shortly be leaving them.

  Mike studies his nine-year-old self. The white, hairless legs, poking out beneath the anorak and shorts, do seem pathetically fragile. He studies his mother. She’s thirty-one, still a beautiful young woman if only she’d smile a bit. But Isobel was never going to smile for this photograph, just as the stranger holding the camera – Michael knew this instinctively – was not a man who was ever going to say, ‘Say “Cheese!” ’ And then it was done, and Angus thanked him and took the camera back, and that should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t.

  The man lingered, as if he expected something more than Angus’s thanks. A tip, perhaps? Michael sensed his mother’s rage simmering again. But it was the man who put his hand in his own pocket and drew something out. He stepped towards Michael with his clenched fist extended, and the boy automatically stood up and went towards him. ‘Michael,’ Isobel said, but whatever the mystery was in that fist he wanted it. He held out his hand and the man dropped something in and with a quick, fierce movement closed Michael’s fingers over it. The man’s hand was rough and dry. Michael glanced up at him. His stare was intense and distant, as if he were looking both at and right through him, and then he let go and walked away without a word. He was separate again, he seemed separate from everything, a lonely figure hunched into the wind, and then he stopped and turned and stared at Michael again, and Angus must have seen the potential of that picture, the man in the road staring like a prophet, the cows, the light bouncing between the clouds and the sea, the looming Dounreay dome, and he took it. The decisive moment, Cartier-Bresson called it. And what a great photograph it is.

  When Mike first came upon it, he immediately decided that it would have to be a late addition to the exhibition. But it’s the other one, the not very good one of the family, that he keeps going back to. As if somewhere in it there is a clue, advance notice of how everything was going to be. That was why he wanted to show it to Murdo: to say, look, this is where I come from, do you think that wee boy ever imagined life turning out like this?

  When the man was twenty yards down the road Michael opened his hand, and there in the palm was a pebble. That was all. A small, smooth, disappointing pebble about the size of a broad bean. It could have come from a beach or a field or a garden path – anywhere. Isobel demanded to know what it was, and Michael showed her and she told him to throw it away. But he would not, and when she failed to appeal to his father for support Michael slipped it into his pocket, where he kept it for days, feeling its inconsequential smoothness with his fingers and thinking about the man. Eventually he lost it. It was nothing, but the man had given it to him, and even now when he thinks of the pebble he remembers the intensity of the man’s stare.

  They carried on with their picnic. In the basket was a Thermos flask of Heinz tomato soup, heated up by their landlady of the previous night, and a bread-wrapper full of cheese-and-ham sandwiches she’d also made for them. They drank the soup, dredged their way through the sandwiches. The wind gusting in off the sea made sitting still an endurance. Isobel and Michael stayed on the tartan rug only because it held a suggestion of warmth. He didn’t want to be too close to her because of the mood she was in but he felt a kind of loyalty to her because he suspected that Angus was a bad husband. He wasn’t that great a father either. He spent too much time away, working, or – as Mike now knows – not working. Even at nine years old he had a dim understanding that he was the only reason, if it was a reason, that his parents were still together. And so he felt a childish responsibility towards his mother and her misery, because his father was showing none.

  Angus paced around like an eccentric lecturer, firing information at them between bites and swallows. He was trying to explain how a fast reactor worked: how it produced more fuel than it consumed, converting uranium into plutonium, so in effect could go on making electricity for ever. There wasn’t much uranium in the world but the fast-breeder process meant once you had enough to start a chain reaction you were away. Energy in perpetuity. He wanted to convince them of the significance of where they were, how their lives were linked to the power of the atom. But he was wasting his breath, because Isobel and Michael were hardly listening, they were eating and drinking as fast as they could so they could pack up and move on, so he could take them to John o’Groats, where they’d get out and do whatever you were supposed to do at one end of the British Isles and after that drive on to the God-awful hotel or bed and breakfast he’d earmarked for them for the night, where hopefully there’d be a hot bath and maybe even a fire. That was all. They didn’t care a docken about nuclear fission, and he probably didn’t understand half of what he was trying to explain. They were all out of their respective depths. And so they packed up the picnic things and drove away from the wondrous white-domed building perched on the edge of Scotland, and as they were going Isobel said, ‘That man was a tramp.’

  ‘What man?’ Angus said.

  ‘The man who took the picture.’

  ‘No!’ Angus said, dismissive but quite jovial at first. ‘Surely not? Tramps have long straggly beards and ten overcoats. And they smell. He didn’t smell too bad.’

  She sighed at his childishness. ‘There was something about him.’

  ‘What?’ Michael could tell her sigh irritated his father. There was a tone to it, and a tone to his short response. Two noises full of impatience and disrespect.

  ‘I didn’t like him. Giving that stupid stone to Michael.’

  ‘Och, well, that’s him then, condemned and transported if you don’t like him. Bloody vagrant, handing out stones to kids. Anyway, what if he was a tramp?’ He scowled in the mirror. ‘Michael, do you think he was a tramp?’

  Michael said, ‘His clothes weren’t that dirty, but they were old-looking.’

  ‘You see?’ Isobel said.

  ‘His face looked like it was made of leather,’ Michael said. ‘Like he spent a lot of time out of doors. And I think he had quite a lot of clothes on, but he was very thin.’

  ‘You see?’ Isobel said again, so that Michael, who hated being on her side, had to add, ‘But I don’t think he was a tramp.’

  ‘Well, what was he then?’ Isobel snapped.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe he was mad.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Isobel said. The idea of insanity scared her more than vagrancy.

  ‘Tramps don’t go around handing out stones,’ Angus said. ‘But I don’t give a damn who or what he is. I asked him to do me a favour and he was kind enough to oblige.’

  ‘You’re lucky he didn’t drop your camera,’ Isobel said. ‘Or steal it.’

  Angus muttered something Michael couldn’t hear.

  ‘If we pass him, don’t offer him a lift.’

  ‘I might just do that,’ Angus said. ‘One good turn deserves another.’

  ‘If he gets into this car, I’m getting out.’

  Michael prayed fervently for them to pass the man, just to see what happened, but they didn’t. A heavy, hateful emptiness gathered under the roof of the car. Michael slumped back, pulling the anorak hood up over his head, preferring the seashell effect of the fake fur against his ears to the dead silence that he was learning to recognise as the soundtrack of a marriage beyond repair. And in his pocket he felt for the pebble and wondered why the man had given it to him, and what it might mean.

  Looking at the photograph brings it all back. It’s like a still from a film of other people’s lives. Michael and Mum and Dad. And they became Mike and Isobel and Angus. Shifting, uncertain identities. When he thinks about those shared lives, about human existence in general, he finds there is not much to put faith in. But this he knows for sure: our ability to look back on the past, our need or desire to make sense of it, is both a blessing and a curse; and our inability to see into the future with any degree of accuracy is, simultaneously, the thing that saves us and the thing that condemns us.

  §


  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.