And the Land Lay Still

by James Robertson

  You’re sending me back to Scotland?

  We’re not sending you anywhere. But in the circumstances …

  But I don’t want to go, sir. There’s no need. My mother is perfectly fine.

  I understand, Canterbury said. Look, he said, this is going to happen, whether you like it or not. Whether we like it or not. You will no longer be employed by the Service. But we value you, Peter. We’ve invested in you. We don’t want to cut you adrift.

  That’s decent of you, Peter said. If Canterbury heard the irony, he chose not to acknowledge it.

  We do what we can. But you can do something for us too, if you go back to Scotland.

  What do you mean?

  Let’s say this would be about redefining our relationship. You know the lie of the land up there. Your particular strengths have been underutilised here. In Scotland, you would be of immense use to us.

  I’ve disappointed you in some way, Peter said. You’re getting rid of me.

  Not at all. Don’t see this as a step back. The world is changing. London is no longer the centre of everything. Scotland …

  Scotland what? Peter said. He could have wept. They were going to send him back. Like faulty goods.

  Things are happening in Scotland, Canterbury said.

  What the fuck was he talking about? At the General Election Labour had wiped the floor with the other parties in Scotland, gaining two-thirds of the available seats. The Nationalists had managed to contest just twenty-three seats and lost their deposits in ten of them. Nothing was happening in Scotland.

  But we have people there already, sir, he said, aware that he sounded pleading.

  That’s true. We have the political parties covered, the trade unions, CND. But what are we missing, hmm? What are we missing? He lapsed into silence once more. Then: Unfortunately, as far as you’re concerned, we have a problem.

  We do? Peter said.

  You’ve been inside. Once somebody’s been inside, that’s it, strictly speaking. Agents are agents and the Service is the Service and never the twain shall meet. Well, obviously the two do meet, but you understand my meaning. In your case, however …

  Peter waited.

  We need to be flexible, Canterbury continued. You need to be flexible. We have a role for you, if you want it.

  Peter said nothing.

  It would be, shall we say, freelance. Floating. You’d be an agent. We’d give you an officer contact.

  Someone who’d run me, Peter said. I’d be outside.

  More useful outside. There’d be a period of no contact whatsoever. Then, when we were ready, we’d get in touch. We’d want you to identify what’s bubbling under rather than what’s already on the surface.

  Now Peter knew he was being both screwed and shunted. Because, whatever Canterbury pretended, London was still the centre of everything.

  Nothing is definitely decided, Canterbury said, but I didn’t want you being left in the cold while plans that will affect you are being formulated.

  Nothing is definitely decided except that everything’s already been decided, Peter said. And I’m out of a job.

  Canterbury sighed. Well, yes, there is that. But flexibility, that’s the name of the game, Peter. I assure you, we will be in touch. And now – he sighed again, and slowly, respectfully, like a hospital visitor beside the bed of a dying patient, got to his feet – now you need to go and see Personnel.

  Peter looked blankly at him.

  About relocation, job options, severance pay, that kind of thing. He waved his hand vaguely, indicating that such matters were not really his concern, then added, We look after our people, you know, when this happens.

  When Peter didn’t move, a kind of mild horror spread over Canterbury’s features.

  Obviously, this is with immediate effect. You understand that, don’t you? You can’t stay on here now. Not since I’ve told you all this. Security, you know. You do see that, don’t you?

  He could only nod at his own stupidity. Obviously he would be escorted off the premises. Obviously that would happen at once. Obviously it wasn’t even a question of clearing his desk. Someone else would do that.

  There were two things in Scotland that the Service cared about. One was the presence of nuclear weapons in the Firth of Clyde: American submarines armed with the Polaris missile system were based in the Holy Loch and it was important to keep the Americans sweet since they had agreed to supply Polaris to a new fleet of four British submarines, in the process of being constructed, that would also be based on the Clyde, at Faslane. It was vital to keep the anti-nuclear lobby under surveillance, limiting its ability to exert any serious influence on either public opinion or Labour in government.

  The other thing, on the other side of the country, was as yet not even a ripple on the surface of people’s political consciousness. It might not come to anything, but if it did it had the potential to be huge. Great Britain has lost an Empire and not yet found oil, as Mr Acheson might have put it. The government had started issuing licences for oil and gas exploration in the North Sea. Hardly anybody except the licensees were paying attention, and even if they found anything the technical challenges of extraction would be enormous. So far any hopeful signs were in the English sector, but there was an awful lot of sea around Scotland. What nobody wanted was a technical, industrial challenge that turned into a political one.

  *

  Your role would be, shall we say, freelance. Floating. He can still hear Canterbury’s voice, its smug smoothness, the calculation behind the apologies. What he was really saying: you’re not one of us, we’re sending you back, but actually because we’ve brought you this far you can’t go back, not completely, so now you occupy this special place we have for people like you, on the outside of the inside. No man’s land. Ghost territory. You can be useful there. You can be utilised. Naturally we don’t mean that in quite the way we say it. Confused? Good, that’s how we like you.

  Maybe they thought he was a closet Nat. Maybe he was. They were shipping him out in any case, bringing in other people. Correction: they were probably already in place, in another part of the building, or in another building altogether. Sizing up the Scottish problem. He was being forced out and it was up to him if he left London, but if he didn’t, if he didn’t go back across the Border then they would do just what Canterbury had said they didn’t want to do, cut him adrift. Peter couldn’t afford for that to happen. The murky half-world he inhabited meant more to him than a so-called normal life in the sunlight. So all right then. He’d show the bastards. He’d make himself indispensable to them. They’d have to come north or summon him south so often for his angle on things that eventually it would be easier to take him back. He would be the oracle that pronounced on the Scottish Question.

  He played, in other words, right into their hands. And that was even before he was introduced to Croick.

  Peggy said, Have you done something wrong?

  No, he said. I’ve been made redundant.

  I don’t know what that means, she said.

  My job no longer exists so I can’t do it any more.

  You’ve been sacked, she said.

  No, it’s not the same. There are staff cuts right across government. It’s to save money.

  It seems to me, she said, that they wouldn’t sack you without a reason. Not the government.

  He tried again. The reason is they’re economising, he said. Some people were lucky, I wasn’t. That’s all there is to it.

  He’d arrived back off the train, having phoned to say he was coming home for a break. She’d had a phone put in since Hugh died. She’d have guessed something was up from his voice. She hadn’t laid on a feast. But she still stood with her back to the bunker, arms folded, watching him steadily.

  So why didn’t you tell me when you telephoned? You said you were just coming for a few days. How long are you going to be here?

  I didn’t want to worry you. I thought it would be easier if I told you face to face. And I don’t know ho
w long. Not long, I hope. Just till I get my own place. I’ve got an interview for a job in Glasgow.

  In Glasgow? Once she might have thought that a good move, a step up in the world, but not now. What are you going to do in Glasgow?

  It’s a job in a bookshop. I’m in with a good chance. They’ve given me a reference.

  She shook her head at him.

  I don’t have any choice, he said.

  Your father would be so disappointed, she said. He was that proud of you when you went to London. We both were.

  I know, he said, but it can’t be helped. And I’ll get out from under your feet as quick as I can.

  You’ll not be under my feet, she said. He noticed she didn’t call him anything. It had been the same at the funeral. She’d finally accepted that he didn’t answer to James or Jimmy, but she couldn’t get used to him being Peter. Especially now.

  They said you had a great future ahead of you, she said.

  Who said?

  The men that came to talk to us about you, when you were away doing your National Service.

  What men?

  You’d done all these tests and you’d passed with flying colours, they said. And you were just the kind of young man they were looking for. You had a great future, they said.

  Somebody came to see you?

  Of course they did. We had to sign the Official Secrets Act because of the line of work you were going to do. I don’t understand it. Why would they go to all that trouble and then sack you, unless you’d done something wrong?

  A dimness came over his eyes, like a veil. He couldn’t be bothered disputing the word sack again. He felt a desperate need for a drink. They came and interviewed you? he said. And you had to sign the Act? Why on earth didn’t you tell me?

  Because we said we wouldn’t, she said. It was a secret, an Official Secret. Your father said enough to let you know we knew, that was all. We kept our side of the bargain.

  What bargain? he said. There was no bargain.

  Oh yes there was, she said. We thought so, anyway.

  Och, Mum, he said. He didn’t know whether to laugh or greet.

  Are you finished? She started taking things off the table, cleared his plate and cutlery away. The next thing her back was to him and she was in at the sink.

  I think I’ll go for a bit of fresh air, he said.

  Nearly six years down there and he’d still managed to fit his life into two suitcases. He wasn’t going to stay in Slaemill a day longer than he had to. He thought of Drumkirk being the nearest town and it killed him. He thought of the dark, unfriendly Toll Tavern and that that was about the only thing to recommend the place. His bedroom was a box of childhood memories he thought he’d left behind. He took a quarter-bottle to bed with him every night and disposed of it in the morning. It was no way to live.

  He was in Glasgow at the start of 1967, installed in a room and kitchen in Partick. His work was half an hour’s walk away. The bookshop, narrow and deep, more academic than general trade, was at the west end of Sauchiehall Street. The job was four and a half days a week, in the mail-order department, processing requests from account customers and occasional buyers in far-flung parts of the country and overseas. There were a lot of orders from schools and other institutions. He worked in a dingy room of dark wood at the very back of the shop. He picked the books from stock or sent away to publishers for them. A man could scrabble away in a job like this for years without anyone noticing, slip out for an hour or two without anyone really noticing. The position was kind of pushed in his direction, or he was pushed towards it, and although it was never articulated there was an ‘understanding’ with or on the part of the proprietor. He knew where Peter had come from and the understanding was that there might be occasions when he would need to take a day or two off at short notice and that would be all right. Peter settled into a life of invoices and string and brown paper and prepared for death by a thousand small boredoms while he waited for the contact that might never happen.

  And then suddenly things looked better, as though events might have conspired to drop him in the right place at the right time. Something, he realised, was stirring in the undergrowth. In March there was a by-election in the safe Labour seat of Glasgow Pollok: the SNP candidate got 22 per cent of the vote, allowing the Tory to slip through and win. In May the Nationalists won a raft of seats at the county and burgh elections and registered twice as many votes as they’d scored in the General Election the year before. The Secretary of State for Scotland, Willie Ross, was scathing, dubbing the Nats ‘tartan Tories’ in his best no-nonsense manner, but what was happening?

  At the end of May Jock Stein’s Celtic won the European Cup in Lisbon, and on 1 June the Beatles released Sergeant Pepper, but Peter didn’t give a toss about either. What caught his attention was the appearance of a new, radical nationalist organisation, the 1320 Club, a ‘research group’ loosely connected, mainly through dual membership, to the SNP. Its president was Hugh MacDiarmid, now in his mid-seventies but apparently as keen to stir things up as he’d ever been. At last there was some meat for Peter to get his teeth into.

  In September, the Queen came to Clydebank to launch the new Cunard liner, the QE2. Thousands of people lined the streets, cheering and waving at the royal party, cheering and waving as the massive ship slid into the water. There was bunting, there were banners and flags, happy smiling people, a sense of achievement and celebration even though the yard that had built the liner, John Brown’s, was losing its name and being absorbed into the new Upper Clyde Shipbuilders consortium. It was a launch, a beginning, but also it was a conclusion. Peter saw a woman turn her head away from the spectacle as if there were something else catching her attention; he saw in a man’s eyes a deeper assessment of what was going on. But what was going on? There was a mood Peter couldn’t quite measure. Was he imagining things?

  And then, in November, came the Hamilton by-election, and the summons.

  Canterbury said, How the hell did it happen?

  The room swayed, tipped. Peter righted it by shifting slightly in his seat. He wanted a window open or the door but there wasn’t a window and you didn’t have meetings like this with the door open and anyway clearly the other two weren’t finding the atmosphere as oppressive as he was. Then, they hadn’t endured a seven-hour bevvy session on the overnight train from Glasgow. All in the call of duty, he might have joked, but he was afraid to open his mouth in case he wasn’t able to speak properly.

  He was by now a paid-up member of the SNP, and had been in Hamilton often during the by-election, leafleting, canvassing, watching, listening. The contest had been caused by the resignation of the sitting MP, Tom Fraser, who’d gone off to become chairman of the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board. The Labour Party could be forgiven for a certain level of complacency – Fraser had won 70 per cent of the vote at the General Election – but the man chosen to succeed Fraser, an ex-miner and local councillor called Alex Wilson, failed to convince people that they weren’t being taken for granted. The contrast with the SNP candidate, a vivacious solicitor called Winnie Ewing, was marked. Hamilton wasn’t the most prepossessing place in the world, but Ewing was paying it serious attention. In return, the local people started paying attention to her, and to the wider cause of her party: some gut feeling grew that it was time to do something about who they were and what they wanted, even if it was just putting an X next to the word Scottish. Polling day arrived and at the end of it Ewing had beaten Wilson with two thousand votes to spare.

  After the victory, the triumph. An entire train, dubbed the Tartan Express, was ordered to carry Ewing south to take her seat in the House of Commons, and Peter had to move fast for a ticket to be on it. An opportunity, he thought, to gauge the mood and report in style the next day. A couple of Hillman Imps, symbols of sturdy wee Scotland, were used to bring Ewing and her family to the train. Central Station was crowded, awash with lions rampant and saltires. The train was crammed, everybody desperate to be part of the occas
ion. The singing started before the train pulled out. At Hamilton the platform was lined with cheering supporters, and more folk piled in. At Edinburgh it was the same, even at Newcastle. Then it was non-stop to London. Winnie did a kind of processional through the carriages then retired to the only sleeper carriage so she could be fresh for her induction the next day. For everybody else it was an all-night party. Just when you thought things were winding down another piper would start to blow or a fiddler scrape out another set of tunes and somebody, from somewhere, would produce another bottle of whisky. Sleep no more. Johnnie Walker hath murdered sleep. Peter had managed, finally, an hour of semi-consciousness with another man’s elbow in his ribs before stumbling off the train in search of a café. Then he’d made his way, as instructed, to an alley off a side street a few minutes from King’s Cross. There was an unmarked door at the back of an anonymous building, and a bell. He rang it. After a while a woman opened it, regarded him as if he were a vagrant but let him in anyway, and escorted him along featureless corridors to a featureless room, to meet Henry Canterbury and the man who would be his contact from then on, John Croick.

  A fellow Scot, Canterbury said, doing the introductions, and Peter, peering at Croick through his hangover, thought he looked vaguely familiar but was pretty sure he’d not previously come across him. No surprise there. In the game of circles you didn’t meet people who mattered until they had a reason to meet you. Peter knew at once that Croick mattered.

  Well? Canterbury said accusingly, as if it were Peter’s fault. How does a political party – any political party – come from nowhere, absolutely nowhere, and win eighteen thousand votes and a seat in the Commons? Tell me that.

  Peter had a foul-tasting mouth and a sore head. They couldn’t not be smelling the alcohol on his breath. Canterbury probably thought he’d reverted to type, the drunken Scot decanted on to London’s streets. What a contrast with the thin-lipped, cool, dry-as-dust Croick. Yet in spite of everything, maybe because of everything, Peter didn’t care. Perversely he felt, for once, that he was in charge. Wrong again.