And the Land Lay Still (13 page)

‘Just like that.’

‘Aye. But you know the funny thing? He was smiling at me as we were talking, quite friendly like, and when he was telling me we weren’t ready for independence – because that’s what he was saying, we weren’t ready so it wasn’t going to happen – it wasn’t like he was dismissing it, or us. It wasn’t like he was chalking up a victory. It was like an objective assessment.’

‘If he was a spook that would have been his job, to assess and report back.’

‘That’s true, he would have had a control. But there was something about him that made me think he was out on his own. Like he’d lost them, or they’d lost him. Lost control, you could say. You know those lines from Yeats?
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/ Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.
I don’t think he was necessarily opposed to the idea of an independent Scotland. I think he quite liked it.’

‘And you really think he was a spook?’

‘He wasn’t the only one. They were getting pretty paranoid about Scotland. We were a hard one for them to get their wee heads around. I mean, Northern Ireland was easier for them to understand – there were bad guys shooting at them. They kept thinking all hell was going to break loose here too and it kept not happening. When I showed your man Duffelcoat Dick the exit, as he went by me I said, “Do you think we’ll ever be ready?” and he looked at me – I remember this as clear as anything – and he said, “Couldn’t tell you, Jean. We might just drift into it without meaning to.” I often think of him saying that. Maybe that is what we’re doing, drifting; but we know it’s happening and we like the direction of travel. We’re on a journey and sooner or later we’ll get to wherever we’re going.’

§

As soon as Catriona and he had redefined their relationship, Mike was hit by an overwhelming need to make up for lost time. He was nine
teen and had no sexual experience. Suddenly he wanted to do for real things he’d hardly allowed himself to imagine. Where did you start, where did you go? There were a few very camp students at the art college, but he felt he had nothing in common with them except his sexuality. He thought of the places Sam had mentioned. He didn’t want to run into Sam again but maybe those places would be his way in.

He opted for the Kenilworth in Rose Street. Everybody knew its reputation, so simply pushing through its doors was an act of self-recognition. But he was very nervous. He bought a pint and got talking to an older man sitting at the bar who said his name was John and that he was a lawyer. Maybe it was and maybe he was, it was no less likely than that Mike’s name was Mike and he was a student. John was guarded at first. Later he explained that in his professional life he sometimes had to deal with men facing ruin because they had fallen for handsome young policemen in public toilets. When the pub closed, everybody spilled on to the street and headed en masse towards Frederick Street. ‘Crawford’s Tearooms,’ John explained. ‘Last chance for a cup of something and a fairy cake. It’s fun, but you and I don’t need to go there tonight.’ His home was in Heriot Row and he invited Mike back. It was a basement flat, stylish and expensive. He made coffee in a cafetière and they went into the sitting room and John closed the shutters and put some Bach on the stereo. All of this – the cafetière, the shutters, the classical music – was new to Mike and so was the kissing and fondling on the settee that followed. Then John said, ‘What do you like?’ ‘This,’ Mike said, ‘I like this.’ ‘Do you like to gie it or take it?’ There was something wonderfully salacious about the fact that he said
gie
, just the one word like that. ‘I’m not sure,’ Mike said. ‘This your first time, eh?’ John said. ‘Well, we’ve got all night.’ And they had. John pushed him out of the door at five o’clock in the morning. ‘I don’t do relationships,’ he said, ‘but we can do
that
again some time if you want.’

By nightfall that same day Mike wanted very much to do it again. At nine o’clock he walked down Lothian Road past the glassy, bright, scary bars Eric the medic said it was best for students to avoid at the weekend, and crossed over to the New Town. He went down the steps to John’s flat and rang the bell. Nothing happened, although a light was on. He rang again. He heard movement, and the door was opened on the chain.

‘Hello,’ he said. He half-expected John to be fresh from the bath, in his silk dressing gown, but he was fully dressed, in jacket and tie. The door was not unchained.

‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ John whispered. There was no trace of the previous night’s kindness in his voice. Then, loudly: ‘No thanks, goodnight.’ And the whisper again: ‘Don’t ever,
ever
, come here like this again. Understand?’ The door shut in Mike’s face. He heard John’s voice retreating down the hall. ‘Jehovah’s bloody Witnesses, can you believe it, at this time of night?’

That was a lesson. A few weeks later he saw John again, in another bar, and he apologised, and so did John. The thing was, John said, there were rules. Some played by one set of rules, some by another. With him, the rule was, you met in a public place. Then maybe you went home, maybe you didn’t. But you didn’t just turn up. Anybody could just turn up, and that was risky. Anybody could already be there. John wasn’t really ‘out’. Most of the men he knew, professional men, weren’t. ‘And another thing,’ he said, tapping Mike’s camera in its case (he’d been taking pictures earlier in the evening, and still had it with him). ‘Leave that at home. That makes me nervous.’

§

He told Isobel. He knew it would upset her, which was why he told her. He’d already told Angus. Telling them in that order was also calculated to upset Isobel.

Angus said he didn’t give a damn. Mike was disappointed. He’d hoped for a little more than that.

Isobel said, ‘You can’t be.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because … because …’

‘Because you never thought it would happen to you?’ Mike said. ‘And before you start trying to make excuses, it isn’t a phase and I don’t need to see a doctor. This is who I am, so you may as well get used to it.’

She kept looking at him as if trying to spot the difference between Michael at Christmas and this new, adulterated Michael. They were in the kitchen, he at the table, she backed up against the worktop
where she’d been making a pie. Her hands were covered in flour, and she held them away from her as if they cradled an invisible bomb.

‘Nothing’s changed,’ he said. ‘The only thing that’s changed is now we both know.’

‘Of course something’s changed,’ she snapped. ‘How
could
you?’

‘How could I what?’ He’d come home to appal her, and she was appalled. Now he could be angry with her. He’d brought an overnight bag but he’d be going straight back to Edinburgh. Perhaps somewhere deep inside he’d hoped for a miracle, an acceptance, a new and better understanding between them. And perhaps he’d just wanted to hurt her.

‘Do
those things
,’ she said in a shocked whisper. ‘I can’t bear to think about it.’ And she went to the sink to wash her hands.

‘Then don’t,’ he said. ‘I’m not asking you to. I’m just not going to go on pretending I’m something I’m not. You must have had an idea, surely?’

‘Why would I have suspected
that
? You always seemed perfectly normal to me.’

‘Maybe you weren’t paying attention,’ he said. ‘When I was at home, that is.’

She spun round, hands dripping. ‘Oh, you’re going to blame it on being sent to boarding school, is that it?’

‘I’m not
blaming
anything. I don’t feel bad about it, not any more. I feel good about it.’

‘Well, I’m glad for you, Michael,’ she said, ‘because I don’t.’ She dried her hands and stood in the middle of the room with them on her hips. ‘And before you accuse me of not paying you attention, when was the last time you gave me any consideration? Well? And how long have you “known”?’ He could hear her putting the inverted commas round the word.

‘Not long enough,’ he said. ‘But I do now.’ He twisted the knife a little further. ‘And so does Dad.’

‘For God’s sake, you’ve not told him, have you?’

‘On the phone, yes.’

‘And he approves?’

‘He doesn’t disapprove.’

‘He wouldn’t, would he? He’s always indulged you. The only thing I can say is you didn’t get
that
from him.’

‘It’s not a disease.’

‘Is it not? It’s a sickness, that’s what I think.’

‘Don’t be so ignorant.’

‘Don’t you dare speak to me like that.’

‘Don’t speak to
me
like that.’

It was hopeless and horrible and predictable but even then Isobel’s sense of propriety began to assert itself. Something closed over her face. Already she was working out how to accommodate the dreadful fact into the other facts of her existence.

‘Well, we’ll just have to get on with it, won’t we? When you said you were coming I invited Bob Syme round for dinner, since you seemed to hit it off at Christmas. So. Can we agree that we won’t discuss this in front of him?’

‘Don’t you think he’ll be able to handle it?’

‘I don’t think,’ she said, ‘it’s something we’ll want to talk about while we’re eating.’

‘I’ll tell him before, when he’s got a big whisky in his hand. That should help.’

‘You really are making this as difficult as possible for me, aren’t you?’ she cried. ‘I’ll just have to phone Bob and put him off.’

‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘I’m not staying.’

‘But I’ve bought all this food.’

‘Well, make up your mind, will you?’ he shouted. ‘Do you want me as I am or as you’d prefer me to be? Do you want a happy wee party with your boyfriend where no food gets wasted and nobody says anything that might possibly upset anybody else or do you want a bit of honesty in your life? Do you think Bob will even care? He’ll probably think it’s a huge joke. He’ll probably bet me twenty quid I’ll have grown out of it by the time I graduate.’

She gave him a wounded, contemptuous look.

‘Bob Syme,’ she said, ‘is not my
boyfriend
.’

He went to his bedroom to collect his bag.

§

Jean says, ‘Pour me just a touch more, Mike.’ He breaks the seal on the Clynelish and fills her glass. She says, ‘I don’t suppose this is helping much, is it?’

‘Helping what?’

‘This thing you’re supposed to be writing about Angus. Part of the reason you came was to talk about him, and we’ve polished off a whole bottle of whisky and hardly mentioned him.’

‘He’s not been entirely absent from the conversation.’

‘No, and it’s true we did start with the photographs.’

‘Yes. Was he here often?’

She hesitates, but only for a second. ‘Quite often. Sometimes in the chair you’re in. Does that feel strange to you?’

‘Probably not as strange as it feels to you.’

‘You do look just like him.’ She smiles. ‘But you’re a lot older now than he was when I knew him.’

‘So now you know how he turned out. Like son like father.’

‘Well, I have something to say about that.’ Again she hesitates. ‘And it’s going to be difficult, and my question to you is, do you want me to say it now or in the morning?’

‘Why not now?’

‘Because I want you to remember it.’

‘I’m listening.’ Finally, he thinks, after all these years, she’s going to talk about their relationship. About Angus and Jean.

‘I wouldn’t say this if I didn’t love you, you understand that?’

‘It’s going to be bad, then.’

‘That depends on how you take it.’ She has another roll-up ready, and lights it. ‘So do you want me to tell you, or do you want to tell me? Because unless I’m very much mistaken, you do know.’

‘Stop talking in riddles, Jean.’

‘Okay. The reason why you’re struggling with it? Why you’re not writing it? It’s because you can’t, not without facing up to something.’

‘And what’s that?’ he says.

‘He was better than you. There, I’ve said it. Would you like me to elaborate?’

‘I’d love you to.’

‘Don’t get defensive, Mike, and don’t blame me. It’s written all over your face. You know it as well as I do. You’ve known for years, which is why you hide away up there in the north endlessly photographing the same things in the same places and never showing anyone what you’ve produced. And it’s why you’ve taken it upon yourself to be the custodian of his archive, why you’ve spent the last
two years preparing this exhibition. You set out to be better than Angus at what he did, and it didn’t turn out that way. You’re a perfectly good photographer, but you haven’t got that special thing that Angus had. You just haven’t got it. And you spend your days – I’m guessing, because I don’t know
how
you spend your days – circling round that big, unavoidable truth, dealing with his photographs because that way you don’t have to deal with
it
, or maybe you take hundreds of photos of your own, hoping that just one of them will be better than the photo he would have taken without even thinking about it. Your dad is always going to be better than you. Nothing you can do can change that. Tell me I’m wrong.’

He feels queasy, not with the whisky, not because she’s hurt his feelings, because she hasn’t, but with a kind of excitement. He thinks of his obsessive ordering of digital images, the ranks and ranks of disks marked by date, the other disks containing his best pictures of boats, stones, sand, sea, clouds, heather … So there are thirty thousand negatives in the Angus Pendreich collection. There are three, five times that many digital files in the Michael Pendreich collection. And this is not simply a matter of technological advance. This is not only about hard-drive capacity. There is no mystery in what she is telling him.

‘Of course you’re not wrong,’ he says.

‘So accept it and start engaging with the real world again. Tear up what you’ve written. If you’re going to write about him, do it honestly. Say what a shit he was. Say what a child he was. Say how much you loved him. Did you ever actually tell him any of those things? Or did you just let him get away with it all?

‘Or maybe you shouldn’t write this essay at all. Get somebody else to write it – Duncan whatever his name is. Let the pictures speak for Angus. Cut out the notes unless they’re absolutely necessary. Everything else is a distraction.’