Not long afterwards Jimmy was on a bus going to Drumkirk and a couple of young, bearded men in duffelcoats started to sing:
O, Sky-High Joe was on the go, some gelignite tae buy,
Sae he goes tae the Carron Iron Works tae get a good supply,
Ricky doo-dum-day, doo-dum-day,
Ricky-dicky doo-dum-day.
They sang two or three verses and broke into laughter at the end, and the weird thing was the other, older folk on the bus didn’t object, they laughed too. And Jimmy thought, how did the police manage not to catch him, this mysterious saboteur with a pantomime sense of humour? Had they not been watching that pillar box day and night? Well, they had but they couldn’t go on doing that for ever, and they’d had to leave its mouth open for the general public to stick their legitimate mail in. Sky-High Joe had not been working alone, Jimmy concluded. There’d been folk looking out for him, telling him when the coast was clear. The cops were useless. He’d have caught Joe. He knew even then that he had the right temperament, the patience, to be a spy.
But maybe he wouldn’t have handed him in. Maybe he’d just have observed, let him get away with it. The way his cheeky demolition job had pissed off the stuffed shirts, people like Canterbury, it would have been worth it.
A voice in his head. Or he hopes that’s where it is, anyway. Let’s say he’ll be happier if that’s the case. Voices outside his head but inside the flat he does not need.
Peter, Peter, in 1963 what were you? You were twenty-three, a servant of Her Majesty’s Secret State. You should have felt guilty about these seditious musings, but you didn’t, did you? You couldn’t help it, you were infected with the spirit of the age. You despised the values and attitudes of the people you worked for. But do you think they couldn’t see that? Do you think they were really that stupid?
He remembers thinking that they were. He remembers thinking that he was smarter than them, that they didn’t know him deep down. He remembers saying to himself, I’m not going to rock their boat but I’m not bailing it out for them either.
He pours another drink, just a splish. Another. Splosh. Another. Splash. More. Fool. Him.
Something in his attitude must have got under Canterbury’s skin, though. Not so stupid. He kept coming back with supplementary questions. What do you believe in? God? Doesn’t matter. Country? Good, but which country? Scotland, England, the United Kingdom? Not England, Peter said, to get a laugh out of him. It was the wrong thing. Canterbury had no sense of humour when it came to such matters.
Look here, Bond, you’re sailing a little close to the wind, you know. It’s all very well you saying that kind of thing to me, within these walls, but it could lead you into some very dark places indeed.
It sounded like a warning against the perils of masturbation.
What do you mean, sir?
Separatism, Bond. Nationalism. Fascism, even. Didn’t the Scottish Nationalist Party – Canterbury was constitutionally, interesting word, incapable of giving the SNP its correct title – publish a pamphlet a few years ago asking whether we were human? We the English, I mean. My God, that’s only a step away from building gas chambers.
I think the title was tongue in cheek, sir. (The English: Are They Human? There was a copy in the files.) It was put out by a group within the party. The 55 Group. Formed in 1955. The party expelled them shortly after. You won’t find a more cautious, respectable independence movement in the world than the SNP, sir.
I’d rather not find them at all.
Later, Peter ordered up the pamphlet, just to remind himself that it was as harmless as he recalled. Actually it was pretty strong stuff. He was surprised at the vehemence with which it condemned the English: putrid with sexual perverts and shameless adulterers in high places. Not pleasant. But the leadership had swiftly ejected the troublemakers. You got the impression that the SNP just wanted a quiet life.
Just shows how wrong you can be. A few years down the road you could hardly hear yourself think for all the noise the Nats started making. As for the adulterers in the English establishment, their day was just around the corner.
He comes to with a start. Must have dropped off. Something on his arm, fuck fuck fuck he brushes it off furiously, okay it’s okay, nothing there.
He’s out in a sweat. He’s wrapped in a sheet of sweat.
There’s something in the room with him.
This isn’t supposed to happen. It can’t be happening. He’s not off the booze. Dimly he makes out the bottle of High Commissioner. That proves it. Far from off the booze. But there’s something in the room, a scratching sound, he can hear it, maybe whatever was on his arm is now somewhere else in the room.
The problem’s not the drink. The problem is he’s not drinking enough. Got to keep the fuckers at bay.
Or is this the endgame, the other endgame, not the political one, when the drink can’t keep the horrors at bay and the horrors can’t keep you off the drink? Is that where he’s got to?
The sound was not, definitely not, in his head. It came from a corner of the room, a splashing in the paper swamp of political ideas. A sound like a mouse riffling through the pages of Scottish Vanguard, Scottish Worker, Red Weekly, Red Rag, 79 Group News, Crann-Tara, Radical Scotland. Too big for a mouse though. More like a rat. Oh fuck, has he got rats? He doesn’t think he could handle rats.
He peers through the haze. Hopeless. Realises he’s gone to sleep with his reading glasses on. No wonder he’s toiling. There’s an east coast haar smeared all over the lenses. He takes them off. Can see the High Commissioner better now. Clutches him by the neck and tips him to the glass. Thank you, Your Excellency. Ah yes. Much better.
Or maybe not, because he catches something in his side vision. There’s a kind of gremlin thing sitting on top of the piles of magazines. A gremlin? Concentrate. He looks straight at it, it disappears. Looks from the side, there it is again. Like a troglodyte, no not troglodyte. Scandinavian goblin thing. Troll. Could be cave-dwelling right enough. Ugly wee fucker. Grey-brown, pointy lugs, wicked teeth, lizardy skin. Couple of feet tall. Just sitting there, watching him. Concentrate and it’ll go away. Does he want it to go away? Yes, please. He’s seen its sisters and brothers before. The last time he stopped for a few days they came out of the walls at him, dozens of them, it was all he could do to keep them off, swinging wildly, flinging cushions, papers, pushing them back under the fucking wallpaper with the long-handled brush. So what the fuck is this one doing out on its own? Not a rat, thank fuck, but still.
Thought you wanted somebody to talk to? So talk to me.
Strangulated sort of voice. Sounds like it’s got a cold. Like himself. He’s got a cold. A permanent dreep at the nose, rasping noise in the throat whenever he speaks.
He’s puzzling this one out, trying to establish if he said it or the beastie did, when, from over his shoulder –
Don’t listen to that brute. Talk to me.
Nasal tones but no cold this time. He recognises it – the first voice from a while back. He turns round but it’s not a gremlin or a troll, it’s a butler. Aye, a fucking butler holding a silver salver with a white serviette draped over one arm, and speaking like Michael Jackson. No, not Michael, the other one, that heid Scotch lackey in Upstairs, Downstairs. Gordon Jackson, keeper of the keys, holding the downstairs mob back from rushing upstairs and slaughtering their masters and mistresses with their own silver cutlery. Hudson, that’s who this butler sounds like. Black trousers and tails, white tie and stuffed shirt, you can just see the glisten of his silvery chest poking through between the buttons. Eh? The what? Oh fuck, it’s not a man, it’s a fish posing as a butler. The black breeks turn into a kind of tapered skirt at the bottom and coming out of it is a fishtail, on which the butler is balancing.
The troll on the other hand is naked.
A kind of merbutler, only all fish. Apart from the clothes. A buttlefish.
What the fuck is going on?
Is it them? Croick and Canterbury come back to freak
him into throwing himself through the window? Two storeys down and splat on to the tarmac? But which one’s which?
Well, he thinks. I’m no fuckin daein it.
Right, he says, and it is definitely him this time, he knows it because the butler has shuffled round on his fishtail and taken up position alongside the troll but just out of touching range, so he can see them both at once and neither of their mouths is moving, just the malevolent fish-eye of the one and the evil wee glint of the other. Right. Since we’re all here.
But of course it isn’t Croick and it isn’t Canterbury. How could it be? It’s a troll, a fish and Peter Bond. Furthermore, and he sees this with something of an uplift in his heart, what does that look like on the silver salver but another bottle of the High Commissioner?
Did he buy two? He thinks maybe he did. But now the Gordon Jackson creature’s got it. Here’s a test. He reaches out a hand towards the buttlefish and it gives a shimmer, and when he stretches closer it begins to fade. He pulls back, it solidifies again. Okay. Now then. He reaches for the bottle, which is slightly closer, slowly, slowly, don’t panic the buttlefucker, almost there, almost, NOW! He lunges, grabs the bottle round the belly, it slides away for a horrible moment he thinks it’s going to crash but he holds on jarring his knee against the low table in front of him fuck fuck fuck he’s sprawled across the table clutching the bottle it’s all right it’s all right Your Excellency I’ve got you. He pulls himself back off the table, which it turns out is where the second bottle was the whole time, not on the silver tray at all, his knee is throbbing but yes yes yes it’s real, it’s his, numero twa, solid as a fucking rock Your Excellency.
He sits back, rubbing his knee. Looks like it’s going to be a long night.
The buttlefish says, in a completely different, English, voice, So what have you been doing with yourself since we last met?
It’s Edgar! Peter sits up straight, rubs his eyes. The buttlefish has gone, but sitting in the armchair opposite him is the very same guy who interviewed him nearly fifty years ago, and not looking a day older either. This is definitely better. The High Commissioner doing the business. By Christ he doesn’t hang about, sorts the natives out good style.
He hunts around for the gremlin. Gone too, yes!!! Anybody or anything else taken its place? Doesn’t look like it.
I always wanted to know, he says, is Edgar your first name or your surname?
Edgar inclines his head slightly. There’s a kind of delayed-reaction shimmer.
Surname of course, he says. Why would I tell you my first name?
Peter does the same trick with Edgar as he did with the buttlefish. Reaches towards him, pulls back. Edgar fades, returns, fades, returns. And now he understands. Edgar’s dead. This is his ghost. All right. He can handle ghosts. He is neither unfamiliar with nor disturbed by the concept of ghosts. Plus, major benefit, he doesn’t have to offer him a drink.
Where were we? Edgar says. 1963, I think. Would you care to give me your views on the last days of the Macmillan administration?
Peter says, Macmillan’s health wasn’t good, and the political fallout from the Profumo affair damaged him irreparably. He resigned in October, replaced as Prime Minister by Sir Alec Douglas-Home.
EDGAR: A safe pair of hands.
BOND: That’s one interpretation. Or you could say Supermac’s last act is to bypass Rab Butler, the Deputy PM but too liberal by half, and land the party leadership in the lap of another toff. No election, no public debate, just a bunch of grandees sorting it out over the port.
EDGAR: May I remind you that Macmillan’s grandfather was born on a croft in the Isle of Arran?
BOND: May I remind you that Home was the fourteenth Earl of Home until he renounced his peerage, and that both of them were at Eton?
EDGAR: It’s my view that Sir Alec was an honourable and decent man, whatever you may think of his aristocratic background.
BOND: He was a sanctimonious upper-class tosser. What was it he came out with when he was Macmillan’s Foreign Secretary? ‘The British people are prepared to be blown to atomic dust if necessary.’ If necessary? To prove whose fucking point? He never asked me about it.
EDGAR: He was standing up to the Russians.
BOND: Oh, like the way he stood up to Hitler when he was Chamberlain’s bag-carrier at Munich? Fucking marvellous.
EDGAR: I can tell you, young man, you would not have been successful at interview if you had employed that kind of language or displayed that kind of attitude.
BOND: Aye, well, I’m sixty-eight and it turns out I wasn’t so successful anyway, so fuck you.
EDGAR (shimmering): I will leave if you do not restrain your abusive tongue.
BOND (reaching for the bottle): All right, all right. Don’t go. This is getting good. Macmillan resigns, Home takes over, renounces his peerage so he can sit in the Commons. Conveniently the Member for Kinross and West Perthshire has just died and the by-election hasn’t been held, the Unionist candidate George Younger steps aside and Home becomes MP for the safest Tory seat in Scotland, and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
EDGAR: That all seems straightforward enough. Your grasp of the facts is impressive, considering … (he waves a semi-transparent arm at the High Commissioner)
BOND (ignoring him): But his premiership is a holding exercise. The next General Election has to happen by October 1964. The Tories lose, and Harold Wilson is in with a majority of four seats.
EDGAR: I am interested in your interpretation of these events, political and otherwise. Those in the public domain and those … not, as yet.
BOND: You can’t do much with a four-seat majority. So Wilson goes to the polls again in 1966, taking on Edward Heath, who has succeeded Home as Conservative leader, and wins a huge majority.
EDGAR: And what happened next?
Next? Everything went to pigs and whistles. 1966, the year the Daily Worker was relaunched as the Morning Star, the summer of ‘Sunny Afternoon’, ‘Paint It Black’, ‘Yellow Submarine’. Mostly bright, occasional showers. But clouds were gathering in the economy: a growing balance-of-payments deficit, rising prices, rising unemployment. Peter was getting used to the London climate.
Peter! Canterbury said as he walked in. No, don’t get up, he said, as usual, and plonked himself in the chair on the other side of the desk.
Peter was instantly wary. Canterbury had never called him anything but Bond before.
How are things at home?
By home Canterbury meant Slaemill, where Peter had been a month before, shouldering his father’s coffin to its grave.
All right, he said, thinking, why would you give a damn?
How’s your mother coping since your father …?
The kindly way Canterbury didn’t finish the question was intensely irritating. It sounded like he’d taken a course – unwillingly – in how to be sympathetic.
She’s fine, thank you. My sisters are near by. They look after her.
Nevertheless, Canterbury sighed, it must be difficult. He wasn’t very old, was he?
Fifty-three, sir.
Canterbury shook his head. Terrible. It was his heart, I think you said?
Yes, sir. Jesus, what the fuck is this?
Well, it’s been a great shock to you all. Your mother especially. She’d appreciate it if you were nearer, I imagine.
He was imagining rather too much for Peter’s liking. How the hell did he know who’d been shocked and how much? And why was he professing to care? When Peter had taken a week’s leave around the funeral there’d been none of this. And that word nearer. Peter grew more uneasy.
I have some difficult news, Peter. (That was twice. Something was definitely up.) As you know, the present, er, government is facing something of an economic crisis. It has been decreed that savings must be made in public expenditure. Sacrifices are required, right across the board. One would think, of course, that the security of the nation would be protected from the effects of departmental cuts and bureaucratic penny-pin
ching, but one would be wrong.
Peter worked it out just before Canterbury coughed and said, I’m afraid your time with us here is at an end.
I’m being sacked?
Made redundant, I believe the correct term is. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I am, in this instance, only the messenger.
Is anybody else being … made redundant?
I can’t answer that question. Operational reasons. Now don’t despair. We’ll do what we can to soften the blow. Indeed, we can help you to relocate, find new employment and so forth, but there it is, in a nutshell. In the circumstances, however, I mean your personal circumstances, well, perhaps it would be best for you and your family if you were back in Scotland. Yes?
Peter had stood up without intending to. His legs had demanded action if they weren’t going to kick the desk in anguish and frustration. Kick fucking Canterbury with his indeed, we can help. Pompous fucking arsehole. He walked to the wall with the high window in it and looked up. The London sky was blue. Six years of writing and filing reports had earned him a glimpse of blue sky. Now this. He turned.
And the Land Lay Still Page 33
