Peter didn’t think he was. He wondered if Canterbury had put him up to it: let’s test the oik. Again, he felt he was watching a double act, only this time one half was offstage.
He said, And what’s your motto?
Mine? Well now. Croick stared into the drift of smoke above his head. The old grey smile appeared on his face. A law unto himself, he said. However, this isn’t about me. We were talking about the failings of the democratic system. But the problem isn’t democracy, it’s how you manage it.
You said that before, Peter said. That’s what you do.
Exactly, Croick said. Fundamentally, it’s a management problem. Same again?
Nine days later democracy brought out the worst in people again, when the SNP candidate, Margo MacDonald, stormed to victory in a by-election in Govan.
Croick said, See what I mean? Still plenty of work left for you and me.
It must have been around then that Peter first landed up at Jean Barbour’s. He was spending more and more time in Edinburgh, and thinking he might try to engineer a flit through to the east. He arrived at her place one night having got in tow with a handful of members of something called the Clan Alba Society. The name had echoes of Clann Albainn, a secret organisation MacDiarmid had supposedly been involved with in the 1930s, and Peter had thought it worth checking out. The Clan Alba Society was indeed a front, but not for insurgency: it was a group of whisky enthusiasts who’d cobbled together a constitution, and nominated a secretary and a treasurer in order to claim funds from the Student Association, which they then spent on expensive malts. Too bloody expensive for Peter’s taste or pocket. Still, they had their uses, such as gaining him access to Jean Barbour’s flat. For a year or so he came and went, watching and listening. He wore a fawn duffelcoat, a kind of homage to those students on the bus who’d sung about Sky-High Joe, all those years ago. There were other private residences into which he got himself admitted, but hers was the one he liked best. There was a kind of comfort in being there. He used to tell himself he was still working when he was at Jean’s, the way Croick claimed he worked in his sleep, but deep down Peter knew it wasn’t true. He didn’t gather Intelligence there, he didn’t learn anything that wasn’t already obvious. Aye, all right, leave aside the dram-tasters of Clan Alba, some genuinely dodgy customers appeared from time to time: boys with tenuous links to the Workers’ Party of Scotland or Boothby’s Army of the Provisional Government, plus a few freelance fantasists. Maybe he was one himself. But the main thing about the gatherings in the Barbour flat was their sociability. He enjoyed being there. He liked the kind of people that turned up, the Catrionas and Helens of young Scotland, even if they didn’t much like him. Duffelcoat Dick they called him, behind his back. Once somebody who didn’t know it was a nickname called him Dick to his face and barely stifled giggles followed. He didn’t care, he didn’t blame them for not liking him, he still liked them. He liked the songs. He liked the stories, the long rambling ones told by Jean, the one-liners and jokes that flew around the room all the time. He would sit there with a glass of somebody else’s wine or a filched bottle of beer and think how normal it all was, and then a pang of jealousy would come as he saw that once again he was in a state of limbo, inside and yet still an outsider. He was part of it and yet alienated. Was it because of who he was or because of what he was? What was he? A nobody, no wife, no kids, no friends, nothing. The Highland girls were lovely, but they weren’t interested in him. He thought of his mother, whom he never saw, and the way she’d believed he was bound for glory. He thought of his father, ye shouldna joke aboot these things, son, dead. He thought of Canterbury and Croick, the weird non-twins of his other world. He knew nothing about their other lives, their family lives, if they had them. The contents of his mind slid again into that dark, sloshing corner where there were no coincidences, only obscure designs and unfathomable plots, off-off-official secrets like there were off-off-Broadway shows. The deeper you went into the shadows and side streets, the greasier the greasepaint. If it was legitimate to infiltrate illegitimate organisations attempting to undermine the state, was it illegitimate to infiltrate legitimate social gatherings? It couldn’t be. There were, after all, a few individuals he recognised at Jean Barbour’s who crossed and recrossed the line. They were compromised, and so they compromised everybody with whom they came in contact. He himself was compromised. And he realised that, for someone like Croick, maybe Canterbury too, there was no line. Everything was legitimate, or illegitimate, these words were meaningless. Nothing was off-limits. They secured the premises, Croick had said. It was who they were. It was what they did.
But Peter himself. He recognised that there was a line. He just didn’t know where it was, or at any given moment which side of it he was on. He thought he was so much more clued-up than these happy folk. But they had good reasons for laughing at him.
And then the Demon Barbour confronted him.
EDGAR (as JEAN BARBOUR): What is it you’re looking for?
BOND: A corkscrew.
BARBOUR: You know what I mean. (She shuts the kitchen door and stands with her back to it. A wee sharp-faced woman, no longer beautiful but he can see she once was.) You sneak into my home and sit in the shadows with your lugs waggling like antennae and you think I don’t know who you are? Don’t worry, I’m not going to blow your cover, but what’s so special about us?
(BOND tips the last of the bottle into the glass. The bottle is thick and heavy in his hand. A portly chap, the High Commissioner, even when vacant. He can hear her voice, a husky, sexy voice, and his own voice, dull and calculating, and underneath both of them his breathing, which sounds like the breathing of another man, the hand clutching the glass is the hand of another man, the man slipping down on the settee, staring up at the abandoned webs round the light fitting, is another man. The haar is back. He peers through it, looking for EDGAR. He sees a figure in the other chair, dimly shimmering.)
BOND: You still here?
EDGAR: I’m still here.
BOND: With Jean Barbour there never was any point in pretending. (To BARBOUR) There’s nothing special about you. Do you think this is the only place I go?
BARBOUR: I don’t care where else you go or who else you like eavesdropping on, but I’m interested to know what you’re doing here.
BOND: The same as I’m doing everywhere. I’m trying to gauge whether we’ve reached point critical.
BARBOUR: Meaning what?
BOND: The point of no return. The point where you can’t stop it even if you want to.
BARBOUR: And have we?
BOND: No.
BARBOUR: And can you?
BOND: Can I what?
BARBOUR: Stop it if you want to?
BOND: No.
BARBOUR: Do you want to?
BOND: No.
BARBOUR: You don’t want to?
BOND (louder, so she gets the fucking message): No. Even if I could I don’t want to.
BARBOUR: Well, then, I’ll not need to come here any more.
(And in spite of everything he doesn’t want her to go but she goes anyway and he is incapable of stopping her, he is incapable, she steps over a collapsed pile of newspapers and into the passage and over to the front door and he hears the door open and the swishing sound of it pushing junk mail back and the door closing and she’s gone.)
BOND (looking around for EDGAR, panicking a little): Don’t go. Please don’t you go too.
EDGAR (homing back into view): I’m still here. For the time being.
BOND: I just … I just like to talk.
EDGAR: I like to listen. Where were we?
BOND: 1974. Every time there was a council by-election the SNP seemed to win it. Their opinion-poll rating was consistently good, especially among young people. They were on a roll and the roll looked unstoppable. Everybody else was getting very nervous. When I think about it now …
EDGAR: Yes?
BOND: When I think about it now it’s clear enough. Those months between the
two General Elections that year, that was when the whole direction of Scottish politics for the next three decades was laid down. The SNP won seven Westminster seats in the February poll and came second to Labour in thirty-four more. Bound to loosen the bowels a bit, eh, if you were a Labour MP? So the party machine clanked into reaction. Wilson told the Scottish leadership they were going to have to go down the devolution road, like it or not, in order to shunt the Nats into the ditch. Result? Five years of bluster and barter, a failed referendum, eighteen years of Tory rape and pillage, ten years of Labour-led devolution and, at the end-up, a Nationalist government in Edinburgh.
EDGAR: Some might call that a waste of effort.
BOND: Aye, but think of all the oil and gas extracted from the North Sea over those years. Some might call that a good return.
EDGAR: That’s a very cynical view.
BOND: Cynical? I’ll tell you a story about cynical. Everybody was lining up to say devolution was the way forward. The STUC was for it, even the CBI wasn’t totally against it. Wilson was making public noises about the virtues of bringing power closer to the people, but privately telling his Cabinet it was the only way to dish the separatists. But a lot of folk in Scottish Labour didn’t agree with his analysis, thought it was playing straight into the SNP’s hands. There was a meeting of the party’s Scottish Executive. A list of five devolution options, drawn up by Wilson’s advisers in London, was on the table for discussion but the general principle of devolution wasn’t. Or at least it wasn’t supposed to be. It was a Saturday, late June. The World Cup finals were on in Germany and a Scotland team had reached them for the first time since the 1950s. They were playing Yugoslavia that afternoon. They’d already beaten Zaire and drawn with Brazil. Drawn with Brazil! Fuck’s sake, there was a real possibility they might progress to the next round! Even Willie Ross was in Frankfurt for the game. Scotland versus Yugoslavia or block grant versus tax-raising powers? Nae contest! The patriotic tendency on the Executive chose the game and who could blame them? Eighteen out of twenty-nine members didn’t turn up to the meeting. The anti-devo faction found itself with a majority of one and rejected every Home Rule option on the agenda. No extra time for constitutional tinkering, they decided. Probably about the same time Scotland drew 1–1 with Yugoslavia and went out of the competition on goal difference.
EDGAR: I have never had the slightest interest in soccer.
BOND: That’s obvious. So Wilson had to bring the lads to order. Force them to swallow Home Rule and if it made them choke, well, it was for their own good. He wanted to turn his minority administration into one with an overall majority as soon as possible, but he could do this only if he turned the Nat tide. No point in beating the Tories in England if honourable members were being huckled out the back doors of Scotland and Wales by the SNP and Plaid Cymru. The Jocks and the Taffies might be awkward buggers but between them they’d delivered more than sixty seats to Labour, and it was essential to keep all those and if possible add a few more. It was a tricky fix, but Harold would find a way: fixing was what he was best at.
First, he ordered the Scottish party to convene at a special conference. There was to be just one item on the agenda, devolution, and Wilson made it clear there was to be just one outcome, a reversal of the Executive’s position in June. Next, he got the union leaders who were in favour of devolution to deliver their block votes and persuade their doubting comrades that this was what was needed to keep Labour in power. There was support from the constituencies too. Even Willie Ross gritted his teeth and agreed that there didn’t seem to be any other way of stopping the Nats. The conference was held in August, at the Co-operative Hall in Dalintober Street, Glasgow. It was a dirty business, a grinding, clinical performance – Yugoslavian, you might call it – but it swung Scottish Labour behind Home Rule, committed it to a directly elected legislative assembly and freed Wilson to go to the country in October, when Labour won an extra seat in Scotland and an overall UK majority of …
EDGAR: Three. Again, one might ask whether all the effort was worth it.
BOND: It was enough to be going on with. The SNP gained another four seats, but all from the Tories. The Labour vote held up pretty well. Everybody in the party breathed a sigh of relief, then started tearing lumps out of each other. The devolvers talked about how the Scottish Assembly would be a ‘powerhouse’, an engine for change and renewal, and this set alarm bells ringing all over the place. MPs from the north of England thought Scotland would have an unfair advantage over their areas, which faced the same problems of industrial decay, bad housing and unemployment. Left-wingers like Robin Cook in Edinburgh and Neil Kinnock in South Wales believed in British working-class solidarity and that any constitutional concessions to Scotland or Wales would be a betrayal of that solidarity. Even the Cabinet was full of sceptics who thought devolution was a slippery slope and a diversion from more pressing issues. Meanwhile the Tories dumped Ted Heath and replaced him with Margaret Thatcher, who started undoing the party’s dalliance with devolution. Apart from the SNP’s eleven, some Liberals and a handful of renegades from the two big parties, there wasn’t much enthusiasm at Westminster for the idea of siphoning political power off to the provinces. When the government presented its devolution White Paper at the end of 1975 it was torn to shreds – too weak for the devolvers, too strong for the centralists – and had to be withdrawn for major revisions.
EDGAR: As I’ve already had occasion to comment, your powers of recall are remarkable. But why such attention to party politics? That wasn’t your area of interest, surely?
BOND: It was all connected.
EDGAR: What was?
BOND: Everything. Everything was connected.
Twin track. The lines on that graph do their jerking, swooping tango across the paper, across Peter’s mind. 1975 was the year the Intelligence community decided it had had enough of Major Boothby. That was the year they gave him enough rope to hang himself, so to speak. If he’d ever really ‘belonged’ to them, as Croick had claimed, by 1975 he was no longer considered a valued possession. Maybe he’d outlived his usefulness. Maybe he’d become a liability. Maybe he was about to blow his cover. Or maybe none of those things. Peter still doesn’t know. Sometimes he wakes in the middle of a night, in the middle of a day, in a chair, on a floor, and in the brief flicker between coma and consciousness it bears in upon him that Major Frederick Boothby wasn’t a spy or a stooge or an agent provocateur; he was just a man with delusions of adventure who really believed all the crap he printed and spouted.
Whatever the truth, the APG trial was a total gift to the opponents of the SNP.
Croick said, as if he wanted Peter’s opinion, Have we made progress, do you think?
Well, Peter said, they’re all inside. I’d say the Army of the Provisional Government has carried out its last campaign. (Its only campaign, he could have added.)
But is that progress? Croick said. He sounded genuinely unsure. They didn’t bring the big fish in for us, after all. We just netted a bunch of sprats. Maybe we should have left them out there longer.
Wouldn’t have made any difference, Peter said. You were hoping for links to the SNP, and there aren’t any.
Was that what I was hoping for?
That’s what you said.
And is that what you think? There are no links?
Aye.
So we’ve been wasting our time?
Well, like you said before, these people are prepared to use guns and bombs, rob banks.
They’re not really important, though, are they? These people.
Peter had never known Croick ask so many questions, look so doubtful. He said, So why have we been wasting our time on them?
A misguided sense of duty, Croick said. Then he brightened. We’ll just need to try harder. Take better aim.
Everything had finally gone belly up for the Army of the Provisional Government. The previous year one of the Merseyside bank robbers had been released after serving three years of his five-year sen
tence. Before long he was back in touch with Boothby, or Boothby with him. Others too: a boy recruited in Perth Prison; a couple of hardmen from Aberdeen and Glasgow; some guys who played in a band together. And there was somebody else. A guy Croick had moved in, Peter reckoned, but what the fuck did he know? Because Croick was shutting him out, closing him down, that’s what it felt like. He had to work it out for himself, and there was always the nagging, growing fear that he was working things out wrong.
The APG needed funds. The hardmen had weapons and had identified a couple of possible sources, more banks in Glasgow. In January the boys in the band hired a van and drove it through to Glasgow and everybody piled in and cruised the streets till they found a bank that was actually open. In they went with a shotgun and out they came with eight thousand pounds, much of it in specially marked notes kept in the bank for just such an eventuality. The gang split. The money went in several directions too. By the end of the month all the men involved had been picked up, a couple of them after a prolonged drinking spree in London. Then the police, acting on information received, maybe from Croick’s plant if there was one, dropped in on Major Boothby’s cottage and took away a few pieces of possibly incriminating evidence. That was in February. At the end of March they came back for Boothby himself. In May eight members of the APG went on trial and were put away for various crimes, for periods ranging between one and twelve years. Hugh MacDiarmid appeared as a character witness for Boothby, which may or may not have helped the Major’s case. He got three years.
What about Boothby? Peter said. Did you want him in the net or wasn’t there any choice? He wasn’t involved in the bank raid. But then he wasn’t involved in the other ones, was he?
Croick didn’t rise to it. All roads led to Boothby, he said. He’ll be all right. He’s a tough old bugger.
He’s sixty-five. He’s not keeping well.
Your concern is touching, but unnecessary. I’ve told you before not to waste your sympathy. He’ll be out in no time.
And the Land Lay Still Page 38
