And the Land Lay Still (11 page)

At Christmas Mike went back to Doune – ‘Doom’, Angus had taken to calling it, more or less from the minute he left – to spend a chilly week with his mother. He resented having to go, resented being an only child, resented his father for being back from America but not being at home. He was in Sutherland, or Glasgow, or London, wherever the hell he was it wasn’t Doom. Mike missed Catriona but not with passion and he knew this represented a crisis of some sort. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror, wondering who he was and whether to try to train his desire or let it off the leash entirely. When he went back to Edinburgh, he decided, things were going to be different.

Relations with Isobel were strained, as usual. She was convinced that the country was about to succumb to revolutionary socialism. Her own circumstances encouraged this belief: just on the edge of the really rich county set, she shared their views and opinions but lacked their financial and architectural insulation from real or imagined political troubles. She found crushed lager cans and cigarette packets in her front garden and interpreted these as menacing signals from the Perthshire proletariat. Every flicker and dim of electric light was a portent of class war.

Mike had a war of his own going on inside him and showed her no sympathy; she, quite rightly, thought he was siding with the enemy. Fired up by Catriona’s rants against Highland landowners, he managed to upset his mother two days before Christmas by describing Sir Alec Douglas-Home as an antique joke. Home was Ted Heath’s Foreign Secretary, and Isobel had a sighing respect for him, tinged with mourning because he was having to deal with the Chinese and the dreadful natives who wanted to take over Rhodesia. ‘How can you say he’s a joke?’ Isobel said. ‘He used to be the Prime Minister!’ ‘Exactly,’ Mike said, and they argued about privilege and wealth until Isobel went to bed with a headache.

On Christmas Eve she said, ‘You won’t want to come to church tomorrow morning, will you.’

It was more a statement than a question. He couldn’t work out if she didn’t want him to join her or was already disappointed that he wouldn’t. ‘Wasn’t intending to,’ he said.

‘That’s fine,’ she said swiftly. It seemed he’d given the right answer. ‘I’ve asked Mr Syme to come back for a drink afterwards,’ she hurried on, turning pink. ‘You know, Mr Syme, along the road. He’s a widower. I feel sorry for him spending Christmas on his own. Do you mind?’

‘You’ve already asked him,’ Mike said, ‘so what difference does it make if I mind or not?’

‘Don’t be so ungracious,’ Isobel said. ‘I’m trying to be neighbourly.’

‘So why don’t you ask him to share the turkey with us too?’

She looked affronted, as if he’d suggested a post-service orgy. ‘If you’re not coming to church,’ she said, ‘perhaps you could get the glasses and things ready before we come back.’

‘What does he drink?’

She seemed to consider this for a moment. ‘Sherry, perhaps. Or whisky. I think there’s some whisky.’

There was a bottle and a half of Famous Grouse in the drinks cupboard. This was odd, as Isobel didn’t touch the stuff. Or maybe not so odd: Famous Grouse turned out to be Mr Syme’s favourite tipple. He liked it in generous measures – ‘Keep going, Michael’ – and he didn’t want much water in it either. He was manager of a branch of the Clydesdale Bank in Stirling, bald and plump and very genial, and in spite of being childless and having lost his wife to cancer looked like the last person Isobel needed to feel sorry for. In fact it occurred to Mike that Mr Syme might well regard Isobel, sipping her sweet sherry as if it were about to catch fire, as a charity case. Mike had hardly ever spoken to him before but he seemed quite at home in their sitting room, and didn’t have to ask where the downstairs toilet was. He also seemed to know quite a lot about Mike.

‘I gather you’re a bit of a Scottish Nationalist,’ he said. ‘A bit of a radical too. So your mother tells me anyway.’

Mike was drinking a beer. He looked over the rim of his tumbler at her. ‘Am I?’

‘You’re almost a red,’ she said. ‘But don’t let’s talk politics today of all days.’

Mr Syme, however – ‘Call me Bob, Michael’ – was desperate to talk politics.

‘I must be the Antichrist as far as you’re concerned,’ he said. ‘A bank manager! God help us! You probably want to string people
like me up on lamp-posts.’ He said this with a beaming smile and considerable relish.

‘No, not really,’ Mike said.

‘Aye you do,’ Bob insisted. ‘You want to string us up.’ He took a slug of whisky, as if to buck himself up enough to face his own brutal murder, and resurfaced radiant as a martyr. ‘You may not think so but that’s what it would come to. Believe you me, Michael, I’m the first to admit the system, as you call it’ – Mike hadn’t in fact called it anything – ‘the system isn’t perfect, but it’s the best one we have. You can put another system in its place and it won’t work, it’ll just create misery and mayhem, and you know who’ll suffer the most? The people at the bottom of the heap. They always suffer the most. People like me are insulated. We plan. We protect ourselves. Which is why we’ll all end up dangling from lamp-posts.’

‘Please, Bob, that’s quite enough,’ Isobel said.

‘It’s all right, Isobel, we’re not going to come to blows, are we, Michael? Anyway, we’re not that different underneath. I used to be a bit of a rebel myself when I was your age. I think it’s perfectly normal for you to have these ideas, it’s probably a good thing. But I guarantee, in twenty years – ten years – you don’t believe in socialism any more.’

Mike laughed. ‘I don’t think I really said –’

But Bob wasn’t letting him off the hook. ‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’ll bet you. Ten quid. In ten years you’ll say to me, “Bob, you were right, I’ve grown out of it.” ’

‘I don’t bet,’ Mike said.

‘Spoken like a true comrade,’ Bob said. ‘Surprised you’re not teetotal. But it won’t last. Ten years I give you, if that.’ He twisted in his armchair to fish for his wallet, pulled out two Clydesdale Bank fivers, and slapped them on the table between them. ‘There. Just to prove I’m not a heartless bastard. You’re an impoverished student, I’m a banker. We’ll make it a one-sided wager. You have that ten quid now, for party funds and I’ll not ask whether it’s the revolutionary party or the all-night party, and if you’re still a socialist in ten years, you can pay me back. With inflation the way it is, you can’t lose.’

‘That’s so kind of you, Bob,’ Isobel said. ‘Isn’t it, Michael?’

‘Happy Christmas,’ Bob said.

‘Happy Christmas,’ Isobel said, and giggled.

Mike left the money on the table but they all knew he’d take it. ‘Happy Christmas,’ he said, feeling thoroughly depressed.

There was a silence, and into it Isobel inserted her own bit of festive madness. ‘Here’s to Iona,’ she said. Mike stared at her. Why was she toasting an island? Bob seemed a bit nonplussed too, then recovered. ‘Iona,’ he said. Isobel turned and mouthed at Mike, ‘
Bob’s wife
.’ ‘Oh,’ Mike said. ‘To Iona,’ he said.

Bob sat looking appropriately glum for all of ten seconds. They all did. Then Bob had had enough.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘Iona didn’t like Christmas much anyway. Thought it was all a bit pointless without kiddies. But
I’m
enjoying myself. Happy Christmas.’

What depressed Mike wasn’t that Bob Syme was a windbag. He was, but he was quite an amiable windbag. It was that he stayed three houses along the road and was therefore geographically the most convenient single man his mother could have picked. Mike could tell that she found Bob a wee bit
coorse
, and that this, perversely, gave her a thrill. The way he said he wasn’t a heartless bastard: he was like a rotund version of Mike’s father, with all the grace and danger removed. Was that what she wanted? And what was in it for Bob? Isobel had been a beauty in her twenties, and was still good-looking, but did Bob see anything else in her? They seemed happy together. Mike couldn’t work it out. If he had, he might have suspected himself of envy.

By Hogmanay he’d had enough of Doom. He caught a bus back to Edinburgh. Midnight found him in a hot, beery, sweaty crush at the Tron Kirk on the High Street. The ceilidh at Jean’s that followed went on till dawn, 1974.

§

That was the night Walter Fleming sang a song called ‘The Wee Magic Stane’. Before he did, he had to explain what it was about, since most people in the room hadn’t been born when the event it celebrated happened. It was, Walter said, a true story that became a myth even as it was unfolding. Early on Christmas Day, 1950, somebody broke into Westminster Abbey and removed the great block of sandstone known as the Stone of Destiny or the Stone of Scone from its place under the coronation chair behind the altar. It had
been there since 1296, when Edward I of England had carried it south from Scone as a trophy of war and a symbol of his dominion over the kingdom of the Scots. Tradition held that the Scottish kings had been crowned on this stone for centuries before that, so whenever an English sovereign sat over it, he or she was effectively renewing Edward’s claims on Scotland. And since the Union of Crowns in 1603, the presence of the stone under the chair at every coronation had reinforced the idea that the two nations were joined in perpetuity under one monarch. But in 1950 somebody challenged that notion by levering it out of its space and making it disappear, and this was what the song was about.

It had a jaunty tune, familiar and easy, but to Mike the humour was quaint and old-fashioned, the words far removed from a land working at 60 per cent capacity and regularly being plunged into darkness. The comic point of the song was that only the Dean of Westminster believed the wee stane had any magic attached to it: the Scots, who were supposed to invest it with all this significance, just thought the whole escapade was a great joke and carry-on. To Mike it seemed an irrelevance. Why make such a fuss about a bit of rock? Yet, from the way Walter described it, an enormous fuss was exactly what had ensued.

Then Jean chipped in. ‘Of course there was an aftermath,’ she said. ‘Removing the thing was all very well, but what did you do with it then? Bury it? Hand it back? Let me tell you what happened. It had broken in two when it was taken, and the two bits were moved around separately for a while, a step or two ahead of the hunt, and eventually they were reunited in a stonemason’s yard in Glasgow. The stonemason was a city cooncillor, and he repaired the stone. He knew what he was doing because years before there’d been a scheme to take the Westminster stone and the cooncillor had made a couple of replicas of it in connection with that plot, which had come to nothing. So this meant, if you believe the rumours of the time, that there were two other stones in existence while the police were hunting for the missing one.

‘The King, George VI, was not a well man, he had lung cancer and various other ailments and there was a certain anxiety among the high heid yins of the realm that if George died and his daughter Elizabeth succeeded him without being crowned sitting on top of
this lump of sandstone it would invalidate the process in some way. So the authorities were keen to get the matter resolved as quickly as possible. It was an open secret by this time that a group of Glasgow students was involved, and they were brought in for questioning by the police. One minute they were warned of the dire consequences of holding out, the next they were promised they’d be let off with a wee slap. In those days the methods of the Glasgow constabulary were infamous. They would use every trick in the book – sectarian chanting, reading the
People’s Friend
out loud, Chinese burns, dead legs – there wasn’t much they wouldn’t do to get what they wanted. One of the students was subjected to hours of interrogation under a bright light until eventually he cracked. “All right,” he said, “turn the light off and I’ll tell you who stole it.” They turned the light off. “Right, who stole it?” He looked at them grimly. “Edward I.”

‘Well, something had to be done to bring the stand-off to an end. These four students couldn’t get on with the rest of their lives until it was. So negotiations were entered into, with sympathetic members of the Scottish establishment acting as brokers, and a plan was hatched that would enable the stone to reappear without anybody being arrested or prosecuted for handling what the government deemed to be stolen goods.

‘One morning in April 1951, a car drives up to the entrance of the ruined Arbroath Abbey, and three men get out: two young fellows and an older man, the Glasgow cooncillor. They must be expected, because there are two Arbroath cooncillors already there. And the janny, the keeper of the abbey, is there too, in his peaked cap and uniform, watching proceedings, but maybe he’s been pre-warned because he makes no attempt to interfere.

‘Why have they come to Arbroath? Because the abbey is associated with the Declaration of Arbroath, a letter sent by the Scottish nobility to the Pope in 1320, asserting not only Scottish independence from England but also the right of the people to overthrow any monarch who tries to surrender that independence.

‘The suspension is down at the back of the car. There’s a block of sandstone on the back seat. The young men unfurl a flag of St Andrew and drape it over the stone. They lift it out and set it on a wooden litter, the kind masons use. It’s a great, heavy thing, this stone, a quarter of a ton it weighs, and one of the Arbroath men
goes to help them. With a man at each corner of the litter, they solemnly carry the stone the length of the nave and set it down where the high altar once stood. Remember, this is a ruin, disused since the Reformation, and the folk of the town have carried away a lot of the stonework to build their own houses over the centuries, so it’s a strange sight, this formal, silent ceremony being performed by a group of bareheaded men in modern clothes amid these red medieval remains. And then the three men shake hands with the two Arbroath cooncillors, and with the keeper, and they go back to their car and drive away. No names, no pack drill, as the saying goes. And one of the Arbroath cooncillors phones the local paper and tells them to get up to the abbey fast and up comes this young reporter with a camera and gets the biggest scoop in the paper’s history. Later the keeper will be asked to give a description of the men. “Well-set-up lads,” he’ll say, but more of a description than that he is unable to give. The registration number of the car? No, sorry, he failed to note that too. You would almost think that they’d not been there at all, that the wee magic stane had just magically reappeared all by itself.’