And the Land Lay Still

by James Robertson

  ‘That would be grand. Would ye like something, Billy?’

  ‘Some milk perhaps?’ Sarah said.

  Billy nodded. ‘Whit dae ye say?’ Liz prompted. ‘Yes, please,’ he said. Don stood awkwardly behind his family. Sarah moved back as if she felt them pressing against her, and without having been invited they found themselves inside, following her and the girl through a cool, dark hallway into a bright kitchen with pale blue doors on the cupboards. Everything was spotlessly clean and well ordered.

  ‘By, ye keep a trig hoose,’ Liz said. ‘Ye pit me tae shame, so ye dae.’

  ‘Jack likes things tidy,’ Sarah said. ‘We both do. We don’t like clutter.’

  She started opening cupboards, getting out a glass for Liz, mugs for the children. Barbara stayed close to her mother, while Liz tried to restrain Billy’s inclination to test the feel of every surface in reach.

  ‘Ye’re no frae round here, then?’ Liz said. ‘I mean, ye don’t sound it.’

  ‘No,’ Sarah said. ‘I’m from the south. Dorset.’

  ‘That’s a long way. How do ye find Wharryburn?’

  ‘It’s fine. People are kind.’

  ‘It’s funny we’ve never met,’ Liz said. ‘A wee place like this.’

  ‘No,’ Sarah said. ‘I don’t go out much.’

  Don felt he was too big for the room. ‘Jack hame, is he?’

  ‘In the garden,’ Sarah said. ‘You can go out the back door.’

  He stepped out. The same precision here. A weedless path, trees that looked like they’d been reprimanded for not standing up straight, a flower bed with perfect edges and in it a company of uniformly shaped rose bushes. Jack, at the far end, was standing on another path, raking a square patch of soil into submission. He was wearing khaki-coloured cotton trousers and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up above his elbows. His brown, shiny forearms looked as if they were made of wood.

  ‘Jack,’ Don called when still some distance away. It was best not to give Jack any surprises.

  Jack went on raking for a few seconds, then slowly raised his head, as if his brain had taken that long to register the sound.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ It was almost an accusation.

  ‘We were oot for a walk. Liz wanted tae stop by and say hello. She wanted tae meet Sarah.’

  He walked over to where Jack stood inspecting the raked patch. Close up, Don could see that it was not entirely flat. There were drills across it, but raised so slightly that the ground looked as if it were undulating, like the surface of a loch on a nearly windless day.

  ‘Why?’ Jack said.

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why did she want to meet Sarah?’

  What kind of question was that? ‘Just tae be friendly, Jack,’ Don said. He pointed at the ground. ‘What’s gaun in there, then?’ A winter crop of some sort, he presumed.

  ‘Potatoes,’ Jack said.

  ‘Bit late, are ye no? I had mine in six weeks syne.’

  Jack ignored him. ‘A great insurance,’ he said. ‘If you have a supply of potatoes you’ll never starve.’

  ‘I ken, but –’ He stopped himself. This was the man’s home territory. He could plant his tatties whenever he liked. Don tried to think of something else to say. It was like talking to a wall.

  ‘I’ll tell ye something,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen a better-dug bit o ground. There’s no a weed on it. No a daud o earth oot o place.’

  ‘You have to prepare the soil properly,’ Jack said. ‘You have to make the conditions right. Otherwise there’s no point. You’d be better not planting at all.’

  ‘I’m no sure aboot that,’ Don said. ‘But then, I’m no a perfectionist.’

  ‘I realise that,’ Jack said.

  From the house came the sound of a child’s voice protesting at something. It wasn’t Billy. Jack didn’t appear to have heard it. He was still gripping the rake handle, and now he turned and began raking the soil again.

  ‘I better go and check if everything’s all right,’ Don said. ‘We should be getting along onywey. Liz just needed a drink of water.’

  ‘I thought she wanted to meet Sarah,’ Jack said, not looking up.

  It was something beyond rudeness. Don felt completely wrong-footed. It was his own fault, Liz’s fault. They shouldn’t have come, shouldn’t have intruded. A man’s own house was his own house.

  ‘I’ll be away, then,’ he said.

  ‘Will I see you at the Blackthorn?’ Jack said. There was a different note in his voice, anxious, as if Don might not appear. He stopped his raking.

  ‘Aye, if ye’re gaun?’

  Jack nodded. He seemed both to want to say something else and unable to do so. Finally he managed, ‘Eight o’clock as usual?’

  And Don felt like telling him to forget it, but couldn’t. ‘Aye,’ he said.

  ‘See you later, then,’ Jack said, and went back to work.

  In the kitchen, the two women were sitting at the table, Barbara curled up on her mother’s lap while Billy stood beside Liz and she stroked his hand. He was too big for her to pick up in her condition. Don didn’t get the sense that he’d interrupted a deep conversation.

  ‘Everything all right?’ he asked. ‘I heard somebody starting tae greet.’

  ‘Barbara wanted Billy’s mug,’ Liz said. ‘But we’re fine now. Aren’t we, pet?’

  Barbara put her face to her mother’s insubstantial bosom.

  ‘She’s shy with strangers,’ Sarah said.

  ‘We should be on our way,’ Don said. He reached for Billy and hoisted him up. ‘Will we go hame, wee man?’

  He hadn’t finished the sentence before Sarah was on her feet, holding her daughter. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it was kind of you to come.’ She sounded regretful and relieved at once.

  ‘I’ll come again,’ Liz said. ‘Another day.’

  Out on the street, Don put Billy on his shoulders and they started down the hill.

  ‘Satisfied?’ he said to Liz.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s a sad hoose. There’s plenty no right there. A sad hoose and a sad woman, and a poor bairn. How was Jack?’

  Don shook his head. ‘I wouldna ken how Jack is,’ he said.

  ‘I could hardly get a word oot o Sarah,’ Liz said. ‘Hardly a word.’

  ‘She looks like she’s no weel.’

  ‘It would mak ye no weel, living wi a ghost. I saw ye talking tae him through the windae. That’s what he’s like, a ghost.’

  He knew exactly what she meant. He felt haunted by Jack. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling, just strange. He felt there must be a reason for it. There was a reason for everything.

  §

  Their conversation that night might have been about Korea. The Communists had overrun virtually the whole peninsula apart from the south-east corner around the port of Pusan. A vast American army had been pouring into Pusan throughout August. British and other Commonwealth troops were being dispatched there too. It looked like the start of the next world war, but Jack seemed completely uninterested. What he wanted to talk about was ‘the Covenant’, a document drawn up by a non-party organisation, the Scottish Convention, established by a Glasgow lawyer called John MacCormick. MacCormick had been leader of the tiny Scottish National Party but, tired of moderating between neo-Jacobites on his right and pan-Celtic revolutionaries on his left, had left the party during the war and set up the Convention instead. The Covenant was his dream of a cross-party, non-party declaration of intent. It was a three-paragraph statement that began ‘We, the people of Scotland who subscribe this Engagement’ and ended with a ‘solemn pledge’ to do ‘everything in our power to secure for Scotland a parliament with adequate legislative authority in Scottish affairs’. In not much more than a year this document had secured the support of more than a million people across the land, who had added their names to copies of it from Glasgow to Wick, from Stornoway to Dunbar. It had even gone the rounds of Scottish soldiers serving in occupied Germany and bits of the s
hrinking British Empire. Jack said that all these signatures represented a stirring of the popular will. Don thought they represented a monumental irrelevance.

  ‘Ye’ve pit your ain name tae it, then?’

  ‘Of course. What Scotsman wouldn’t?’

  ‘I’ve no, and nor will I. The world’s aboot tae go up in flames, Jack, and ye’re bothered aboot getting a wee talking shop tae sit in Edinburgh and tell us what tae dae. I’ve nae time for it. Dukes and bank managers strutting aboot like puffed-up doos? No on my account. And that MacCormick, what’s he noo he’s left the Nationalists? Is he a Liberal? Or a Tory in disguise? He’s no Labour onywey. I canna be daein wi him.’

  ‘Forget about MacCormick,’ Jack said. ‘He’s just one man. What matters isn’t what he wants, it’s what the people want. What do they think they’re signing up for when they sign the Covenant? They think they’re signing up for Home Rule within the United Kingdom because that’s what the document says, but the days of wanting Home Rule are already over. The people don’t yet know what they want, they can’t articulate it, but something is happening deep within them, something instinctive and fierce that isn’t about the average weekly wage or the net surplus or deficit of the Scottish economy or whether we would have higher income tax or lower stamp duty if we were free. They’re making a pledge, a promise to themselves about who they are. That’s what the Covenant means and that’s why it’s important. It’s the first stage of a process.’

  A queer kind of distance was in his eyes. For the first time really, Don, who had always made allowances for Jack because of the war, thought he might be slightly insane.

  ‘I ken where that kind of process ends up,’ Don said. ‘Flag-waving and folk goose-stepping round city squares. I’m a socialist, Jack. I’ve mair in common wi a bus driver in Manchester or a welder in Wales than I’ll ever hae wi the Duke o Montrose. And you too. Why are ye cluttering your heid wi that mystical rubbish? Ye’ll be speaking aboot souls next. Ye’ve nae mair insight intae what the people of Scotland want than I dae. Why are ye mixed up in aw this?’

  ‘I’m not mixed up in anything. I’m just observing. It’s too early to get involved. The soil is still being prepared.’

  ‘Ah, right, I’m wi ye noo. This is like your tattie patch, is it? Sae, when are the tatties gaun in, Jack?’

  ‘You can laugh,’ Jack said, ‘but I know what I’m talking about. This Labour government’s done some good things, some principled things, I don’t deny it, but it’s on its last legs and when it falls the principle that will survive will be that London knows best. Everything must be controlled from London. Folk get a taste for that and they want to hang on to it. The Tories won’t let it go. They’ll build on it. And if Labour get in again in a few years they’ll build on whatever the Tories leave them. It’s not about left and right, it’s about power. And the people of Scotland are just like people all over the rest of the world. They sense it when somebody is just dictating to them, not listening, and they don’t like it. They’ll turn against it, sooner or later. They’ll want power here. The Covenant is only the beginning.’

  ‘Your wife’s English,’ Don said. ‘What does she think aboot it?’

  ‘She doesn’t think about it,’ Jack said.

  ‘She must hae an opinion, surely?’

  ‘She’s not interested in these things. We don’t discuss them.’

  ‘How did ye meet her onywey?’ Don found himself quietly belligerent. Jack’s attitude, his strangeness that afternoon, had made him so. He wanted Jack to give him something more.

  ‘When we came back in ’45,’ Jack said, ‘we landed at Southampton. They sent me to a place near Bournemouth to convalesce. Not that I needed to go, I was pretty fit by then after the voyage, but you know the army, no point in arguing. Sarah was working there.’

  ‘A nurse?’

  ‘I didn’t need nursing,’ Jack said sharply. ‘No, she was in the office, doing the paperwork. Signing us in, signing us out, all that. The men liked the female company, didn’t matter if they were cooks or cleaners or office girls, they just liked talking to them. They’d been starved of it for years. Starved of everything, of course, but the company of women, they really missed that.’

  Don noted how Jack managed to exclude himself from his own analysis. Was he a loner even then? Before? Maybe it wasn’t the Japs that had done the damage. Maybe he’d always been like this.

  ‘Anyway,’ Jack said, ‘in the end I got her.’

  There was something hard and ungenerous in the way he said it. He might have been talking about catching a cold, or drawing the short straw. Don saw him in the hospital, or commandeered hotel or country house or wherever it was they’d put him, setting himself apart from the others, untouchable. I bet she took pity on you, he thought. Or maybe you pitied her. Either way, Don reckoned it was a poor thing to build a marriage on.

  ‘And when I was passed fully healthy, and demobbed, we were married and came home.’

  ‘No her hame, though,’ Don said. ‘Does she like it?’

  ‘Aye, I think she does,’ Jack said, as if he’d never considered it before. ‘Apart from the cold, which she’s not used to. It’s a better life. We could have stayed there, I suppose, but why would you? It’s a bloodless kind of place. She’s well out of it.’

  He said it thin-lipped. He seemed to be talking not about his wife, the mother of his child, but an evacuee that had been foisted on him, someone for whom he felt a vague sympathy but no deep affection. His coolness was beyond Don’s comprehension.

  ‘She’s gien ye a bonnie wee dochter,’ he said, trying to spark some slight glow of appreciation. ‘But she looked tired this efternoon. Maybe she misses her faimly.’

  ‘We are her family,’ Jack said. ‘Barbara and me. I appreciate your concern, Don, but she’s fine. We’re all fine.’

  §

  In the first week of September the news reported heavy fighting all around Pusan, with the Americans punching their way out of their corner, beginning to drive the North Koreans back. Don and Liz sat by the wireless night after night, getting used to the strange names of towns and rivers. He thought of how he’d driven lorries full of equipment up through Italy in ’43, the dust on the dry roads, the mud and slog when it rained, the constant waiting while mines were cleared, roads repaired, Bailey bridges built across slow, brown rivers, the almost total absence of engagement with the enemy because the Germans had withdrawn to embed themselves in a defensive line south of Rome. He thought of the early months of ’44, when that unreal advance against minimal resistance had come to a grinding halt at Monte Cassino. He suspected that what was going on around Pusan bore more resemblance to the carnage there than to the breezy drive north from Sicily.

  Liz was due any time. She’d had a long labour with Billy but no complications so they anticipated the birth happening at home, as Billy’s had. They had two plans. If she went into labour while he was at work she was to get their neighbour Betty Mair to go for Dr Logan, or leave a message for him if he was out. If there was anything wrong Betty was to go to the telephone box outside the post office and phone Byres Brothers to let Don know. ‘But only if necessary,’ Liz said. ‘Nae point in spending fourpence if we dinna need tae.’ Betty would look after Billy till the birth was over. Don didn’t like leaving Liz alone when it could happen any time but what else could he do? He was just the man. ‘Ye gied her the bairn but ye canna cure her o it,’ his mother said. Deep down he knew Liz would be all right. She was sensible, a good woman. Strong and sound physically, too. He couldn’t ask for a better wife.

  If she started in the evening or at night, Don would go for the doctor himself. If anything seemed untoward Bill Drummond, a few doors away, had made them promise to call round for him, whatever hour it was. Bill had a motor car. He’d been in the Royal Army Service Corps supply branch for the last year of the war, and somehow had persuaded the army to sell him a deep green Austin 10HP, an ex-staff car, for a knockdown price when he was demobbed. He’d st
ripped it down and built it back up, repainted and polished it, and loved to take people for rides to show off his driving skills. It was all worked out if an emergency arose and they couldn’t rouse the doctor or he was on a call: Don would run round to alert Bill while Liz got herself ready; then when Bill arrived they’d all climb in, Liz in the front-passenger seat, Don carrying Billy in the back, and drive back to leave Billy with Bill’s wife, Joan, who was five months gone herself. Then it would be down the road to the hospital in Drumkirk. They could call an ambulance from the phone box, but it would take more time. Anyway, Liz would be all right. She might need Bill Drummond’s car but she’d not need an ambulance.

  Bill was a journalist on one of the local papers, the Drumkirk Gazette. He was all right, but he fancied himself like mad. Although his war service had consisted, Don had worked out, mainly of shifting ordnance from one depot to another, from the way he went on you’d think he’d been in the Commandos. He slaistered his hair with Brylcreem and, given his surname and Ronald Colman moustache, he’d gained the mildly mocking nickname ‘Bulldog’, which he took as a compliment. He appeared in the Blackthorn on an occasional Saturday, dropping hints about something afoot in local politics or business that he was keeping his eye on, a big story about to break. But Don reckoned the biggest story on Bill’s horizon was the one he would tell about racing a pregnant woman to hospital beneath the moon and stars. You could tell he secretly hoped it would happen and that it would be the dead of night when Don chapped the door. And if it wasn’t Liz you could guarantee his own wife, Joan, was going to need a hurl into town – in the depths of winter that would be, and with luck there’d be snow about and a good chance of a skid or two on the way.

  The second weekend in September came but still no sign of the bairn. That Saturday Jack wasn’t on the bus into work, and when Don got on the bus to come home at midday Jack’s usual seat was empty again. The sky was grey and there was an autumnal chill in the air. It had been raining all day. It had been raining all week, in fact. All the talk at work had been of a mining accident at Borlanslogie, twenty miles the other side of Drumkirk. On Thursday night there’d been a collapse on the surface, due to the ground being saturated. The land had just given way, and thousands of tons of mud now blocked the roadways of the mine workings below. There were men trapped down there, scores of them. Peering through the streaked, dribbling glass at the countryside, summer just beginning to go brown at the edges, Don thought about that. Another kind of hell. He could never have worked down a pit.