And the Land Lay Still

by James Robertson

  So Michael was used to not seeing his father for long periods, even before the divorce. After it, the phone would sometimes ring early on a Saturday morning during the school holidays, and Michael would rush to answer it before his mother could, and it would be Angus saying he was in Glasgow and did he fancy a day out? He’d arrive an hour later, honking his horn outside the gate so that none of them had to bear the strain of him and Isobel failing to communicate. They’d go to Edinburgh or Glasgow, to see a film or an exhibition and go for a meal. When Michael got home Isobel would ask what they had done, and sniff at what he told her. It was all very well for his father to appear once in a blue moon and spoil him but what about her? How did he think it made her feel, after all she did for him? And she was right and justified and Michael despised her for it, and longed for the next time the phone would ring.

  Even better, Angus would turn up at Kilsmeddum Castle, unannounced, during term. He would time it so as to arrive at the end of morning classes on a Saturday, and take Michael to Perth for the rest of the day. The school objected, of course, but Angus overruled the objections: he was paying good money to have his son educated there and he reserved the right to remove him whenever it suited him. The school would subsequently complain to Isobel, who would forbid Michael to go with his father if he tried it again. When he tried it again, Michael would at once go with him. They saw Where Eagles Dare, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Diamonds are Forever, Soldier Blue (gleefully sneaking Michael in since it carried an X certificate). They ate Chinese, Wimpy and anything else exotic that Perth had to offer. For Michael, the trouble that ensued at school and at home on these occasions was easily worth it.

  It was on one of these outings that Angus presented him with his first real camera. Up to then he’d played around with a couple of cheap and easy models, but he was ready for something more challenging. He wanted something new but what he got was a second-hand Pentax Spotmatic, a model that had only been around for three or four years. It was the first serious camera to have a built-in light meter that really worked: you focused first, then flicked a switch to activate the metering system, and set the shutter speed and aperture yourself by lining up two needles in the viewfinder. The great virtue of the Spotmatic was its simplicity; Michael learned a huge amount about light exposure and depth of field by the time-tested method of trial and error.

  And then there was Sutherland. Every summer, Angus spent a month at Cnoc nan Gobhar, and Michael would go by train to join him for the middle two weeks of his stay. These were the times when he first became ‘Mike’, and this was another bond between father and son, since Isobel was averse to his being anything or anyone but ‘Michael’. They barbecued sausages and burgers in front of the house, went for huge walks into deserted glens, climbed the great hulks of Ben Klibreck and Ben Hope, fished in lochs and rivers and afterwards sat together, Angus drinking pints of beer and Mike half-pints of shandy, in musty, antler-festooned, wood-panelled bars where no one ever questioned Mike’s age. Sometimes they drove over to the west, camped by the white beaches of Assynt, swam in the ice-cold Atlantic, and greedily viewed the strange mountains of those parts: Suilven, Stac Pollaidh, Quinag. And they did work on the house, or Angus engaged others to do it, men like Murdo’s uncle, while they played. For eight successive years they had these fortnights together, all through Mike’s years at boarding school, and he loved them, and loved his father because of them.

  Often there was a woman, Angus’s latest, at the cottage: always younger than him, always bonnie, smiling and kind to Mike, behaving almost as if she were a wife and mother, and treated by Angus with breathtaking casualness. These women were of a certain type – sunny, ambitious, not very clever. They were often English, or spoke as if they were. They were light and airy and entirely lacked the burden of responsibility that Isobel carried like a cross. They had a breathy confidence that suggested nothing would ever go much wrong in their lives. ‘Your father’s little friends’ was how Isobel described them, as if she felt sorry for them because they did not see that their participation in his life would be only temporary. Whether there was heartbreak when it was over, as it always eventually was, or whether they were actually stronger in themselves than Isobel could ever understand, the following summer Sally or Mandy or Katy would be gone and a successor installed. Mike didn’t mind in the least: he enjoyed being made a fuss of by the little friends, and having vague crushes on them that didn’t quite make sense either to them or to him. There was a Julie who lasted two years, right at the end of the sequence, whom he particularly liked. When he thinks about it now he wonders if it was his fortnight at Cnoc nan Gobhar that precipitated the end of each of these relationships. Angus seemed more or less to abandon the girlfriend as soon as Mike arrived, and by the time he left had probably lost the desire to reconnect with her. And though Mike knew his father was at fault in the way he treated his women, as he had been in the way he treated Isobel, it wasn’t until that second fortnight with Julie that he felt his loyalty diminish a little.

  §

  He finished at Kilsmeddum at Christmas 1972. He’d had enough of the school and the school had had enough of him. He had the Highers he needed to go to art college and had filled in the appropriate forms. He was quite skilled at drawing – he’d produced a set of drooling, ghoulish caricatures of the teaching staff of which even the mob approved – but his real interest lay in photography. What was the point of staying on to sit more exams? Angus agreed, and since he paid the fees Isobel couldn’t argue against it. From Christmas until the summer Mike was at home in Doune, taking photographs, drawing, listening to music. To keep Isobel at bay and demonstrate that he had more of a sense of responsibility than his father, he got a part-time job in a local hotel, working in the kitchen. He began to take an interest in food and how to prepare it. Sometimes he’d make the evening meal at home, surprising Isobel with his skills, although she was suspicious of the ingredients he sought out, things that were still almost exotic: garlic, red peppers, pasta that wasn’t macaroni. She was suspicious of anything ‘creative’. If only he’d been inclined towards teaching, or the law, he might have made her happier. She worked part-time as a typist and receptionist for a firm of solicitors in Dunblane, and made futile attempts to interest him in conveyancing. Photography, being what his father did, was bound to end in tears.

  They maintained a truce over those months, in order to keep life tolerable. Sometimes they watched TV together. There was a political thriller, Scotch on the Rocks, running that spring. A group called the Scottish Liberation Army was busy blowing up statues of Queen Victoria and the toll-booths at the Forth Road Bridge. They kidnapped some Unionist bigwig called Lord Thorganby and for good measure drowned the Secretary of State for Scotland. It was fanciful stuff but it was on the BBC so Isobel watched it with absolute trust, as if it were a documentary. It fed her fears that the country was about to descend into anarchy and it fed Mike’s gut sense that he was some kind of nationalist, even if it wasn’t the M. Lucas kind. At the end of the series the SLA’s rebellion fizzled out and normality was restored, to Isobel’s relief and Mike’s disappointment.

  §

  It was the final evening of Mike’s stay at Cnoc nan Gobhar, and Angus, Julie and he were in the sitting room, drinking bottles of beer. They’d been outside, catching the last of the sun, but the midges had driven them in. Angus was explaining how he wanted to make the side window into a door and build a sun lounge on, so that one could go on enjoying the view without being eaten alive. He was going to get Donald MacKay on to it.

  ‘That’ll be nice,’ Julie said, and Angus said, ‘Yes, it will,’ and the way he said it made Mike think it unlikely that Julie would get the benefit. In the morning Angus was going to take him to the station at Lairg. He’d go back to his hotel job for a few weeks, then he’d be off to Edinburgh, to art college. Angus was about to go to America for three months, and wouldn’t be back until the autumn. Wherever Julie was going, it wasn’t to America.


  ‘You should look up Jean Barbour when you get to Edinburgh,’ Angus said. ‘She’d love to meet you.’

  ‘Who’s she?’ Mike said.

  ‘Just an old pal.’ Angus was on his third beer and was a little drunk. ‘Haven’t seen her for years, but I can’t imagine she’s any different. You’ll like her.’

  ‘What does she do?’ Julie asked. She gave Mike a smile. They both knew better than to ask how Angus and Jean Barbour had met.

  ‘Do? She doesn’t have a job, if that’s what you mean. She never used to have, anyway.’ Never normally reluctant to lambast the idle rich, he sounded slightly repelled by the idea of Jean having to work. He turned away from Julie and said to Mike, ‘She was involved in a bookshop but that was ages ago. The thing about her is she gathers people around her. There’s always a get-together of some kind at Jean’s. Always something going on.’

  ‘Sounds good,’ Julie said, sounding doubtful.

  Mike was also unconvinced. ‘Yes, it does,’ he said – to Julie, because he wanted to counter the way Angus was excluding her – and then, to Angus, ‘So have you got an address or something?’

  ‘That’s the thing. She’s just off the Royal Mile. I could take you there, but I couldn’t tell you the name of the close or the house number. It’s not that easy to find.’

  ‘Great,’ Mike said. ‘This is going to be simple, isn’t it? Do you even have a phone number?’

  ‘It’s been more than twenty years,’ Angus said. ‘She didn’t have a phone then.’

  ‘Maybe she’s not there any more,’ Julie said, trying to stay in the conversation.

  ‘She won’t have gone anywhere,’ he said. There was an unpleasant edge to his voice now. ‘Jean’s steadfast, a fixture.’ Outside, the loch and the land lay still, but in the room the atmosphere was suddenly bristling. ‘Look,’ Angus said, ‘sooner or later you’re bound to come across her. Edinburgh’s a village. Just remember her name, Jean Barbour.’

  He’d known her in the late 1940s, early 1950s, he said. He wasn’t long out of the army, and was working freelance for magazines, mostly, although he had a brief spell at the Scotsman. He always tried to look for the pictures nobody else was taking. Often he simply turned the camera away from the obvious subject and photographed something in its shadow, or somebody looking at it. The ridiculous next to the sublime, the commonplace made special by association. That was all there was to it. It was then that someone came up with the ‘Angus angle’ tag. He didn’t like it much but it opened a few doors. There was plenty to photograph in Edinburgh – it was the early days of the Festival and there were all kinds of characters on the streets and in the pubs. And Jean Barbour, whom he met in this bookshop, had also recently arrived but somehow she had a lot of contacts. She moved between two Edinburghs, the semi-bohemian festival city and the poker-faced Presbyterian one, and she was useful.

  ‘Useful?’ Julie said.

  ‘She made herself useful, yes,’ Angus said. ‘She knew a lot of people.’

  It was obvious to Mike that Jean and Angus had been lovers. Julie saw it too. The word ‘useful’ seemed to goad her into action. She stood up, said she was going to make some food, and went through to the kitchen. Mike thought she was stifling tears. Angus made a face and Mike thought, aye, if it was me I’d cry, you bastard.

  ‘I’ll go and give her a hand,’ he said, getting out of his chair.

  ‘If you see her, tell her I’m asking for her. Jean, I mean,’ Angus said.

  §

  Edinburgh in the early 1970s had a special, dowdy kind of magic, especially in streaming, wind-chilled winter: the marvellous and the mundane inhabiting the same stairs, worlds of night and day rubbing shoulders both begrudgingly and with relish, often without acknowledgement and sometimes without realising it. Shoppers at a bus stop might breathe in a hint of marijuana drifting from some shaded window and, not knowing what it was, find this exotic invasion of their senses oddly, dreamily pleasant. Tourists perambulating the cobbled streets of the New Town could remark on the quiet, sober appearance of a particular Georgian terrace, unaware of the brothel operating behind one solid, firmly shut door. In lanes behind the noble, upright department stores of Princes Street drunk men swayed and vomited, while a few yards away, in Rose Street pubs, staff from Jenners and R. W. Forsyth jostled to get served alongside rugby players, actors, bankers and Lallans-spouting poets. In Marchmont and Stockbridge young women yawned and poured themselves more vodka while their boyfriends did the cheese-shop sketch from Monty Python yet again. In the Old Town, nationalistic students at all-night parties roared, over and over, the chorus of a new song they’d recently, imperfectly, learned: ‘Flower of Scotland’. They said ‘Kiss my arse’ in Gaelic and discussed the proposition ‘It’s Scotland’s Oil’ until the sun came up and they could no longer sing or speak. Up the Dalry Road folk put Billy Connolly on the hi-fi, cracking up as he went on about jobbies and willies, and recognising themselves in his outrageous jokes. Jakies in coats that smelled like hill sheep slipped into oblivion in the Grassmarket. Book-laden, bespectacled academics trailed between the university and the National Library. Beacon-nosed advocates in High Street bars patronised hippyish, long-limbed feminists whose politics they dismissed as infantile, and the feminists were mildly flattered by the attentions of middle-aged men they in theory, and when sober, despised. Businessmen going home to their families in the suburbs diverted of an evening to Calton Hill, searching among the trees or gravestones for some nameless stranger and a brief release from their hypocrisy. All over the city there was hypocrisy, and irony, and heroism: fabulous views from despoiled viewpoints, squalor and refinement propping each other up, dissolution in progress behind impregnable façades, and dreams of glory in crumbling tenements.

  Into all this, at the age of eighteen, Mike Pendreich wandered, an innocent. He came with a purpose – to be a photographer. He was enrolled at the art college to do drawing and painting. There wasn’t a degree course in photography then, but he could do it as an elective. He was inspired by Angus and wanted to emulate him. And, like all sons following on the trail of their fathers, he wanted in time to surpass him.

  Edinburgh to him was like a place out of legend or a fantastic novel. It had seven hills, a castle on one of them, neo-Athenian ruins on another, and on a third, Arthur’s Seat – which was not far short of being a mountain – a flock of sheep. The great area of the city that stretched from there westward, from Holyrood to Tollcross, was soiled and seedy and vibrant. In the old streets of the Southside, he found plenty to intrigue him: a mysterious bookshop that sold titles no other shop stocked; pubs stained and rich with the smoke of pipe tobacco and the smell of sweet black sixty-shilling ale, places so narrow men had to shuffle themselves like cards in order to get served; steamy, dripping cafés patronised by noisy crowds of upper-class students, who adored the chipped cups, the tarnished cutlery, the chewable tea and especially the abuse heaped on them by the coarse-tongued women who served them; sweaty markets and small, incense-hazy shops selling records, posters, Afghan coats, Navajo jewellery, tie-dyed T-shirts, cheesecloth smocks, denim jackets and cowboy boots. In all this there was a sense of something about to happen, of things already happening in rooms just out of sight and reach.

  And there was Sandy Bell’s – the pub where Angus had taken pictures fifteen, twenty years before: of Hamish Henderson, the folklorist; of Stuart MacGregor, the wild medical student who’d sung of the men building the hydro schemes in the Highlands; and of numerous other singers, musicians and neglected geniuses. It was still going strong: any night of the week you could reckon on some decent music to go with your pint, and there was always a chance that Hamish – or one or more of his cronies – would drop in. Mike found his way there early on. Apart from anything else it was en route from the college to his digs in Newington.

  And it was in Sandy Bell’s one November night that, as Angus had predicted, Jean’s name came up in conversation. Mike was standing on his own but – th
e way it sometimes happens in a crowded pub – not in isolation. In the back of the bar a guy with a guitar was alternating between Jacobite laments and protest songs. To one side of Mike a heated political discussion was in progress. There were three men involved: a long-haired, long-bearded student in an army-surplus greatcoat; a bald man in a biker’s leather jacket; and a middle-aged-looking guy in a brown duffelcoat. The argument had started about Chile, where two months before the elected socialist government had been ousted by a military coup led by General Pinochet. The question was whether Allende, the deposed president, had shot himself or been killed by soldiers. The student in the greatcoat was emphatic that Allende had been murdered. This was an article of faith to him: it was inconceivable that the fascists were not responsible. The biker, on the other hand, didn’t think it mattered either way: his understanding was that the Allende regime had been corrupt and on the point of collapse anyway. The man in the duffelcoat seemed to float between them, saying ‘Aye’ and ‘Maybe’ but not much else. When they ran out of things to say about Chile, Greatcoat wanted to know what the biker thought about what was going on closer to home. The National Union of Mineworkers had announced an overtime ban; the electricity engineers and train drivers had done the same; and now Ted Heath, the Prime Minister, had countered by declaring a state of emergency. Where did he stand on that, then? Duffelcoat nodded fervently and waited for the biker’s answer.