And the Land Lay Still (30 page)

After a few more seconds the nurse returned the baby to the crib, and came back to him. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she whispered. And they returned the way they’d come, out from the maternity ward, along the corridors and down the stairs, into the entrance hall and past the night porter, who raised his head from his paper just enough to nod and say, under his breath, ‘Well done, sir. Congratulations,’ as they went, out into the cool September night. And the nurse stopped and breathed out a big sigh of relief.

‘I’d be dismissed on the spot if I was caught doing that, but it doesn’t seem right, you dads being kept out of it so much.’

He liked the way she said ‘you dads’. There was something pleasingly different about some English accents, especially when it was a young woman speaking.

They walked away from the entrance, along a path under horse chestnut trees towards the nurses’ quarters.

‘I’m really grateful,’ he said. ‘I mean, what mair can I say?’

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I liked doing it. It was an adventure, wasn’t it?’

‘Aye,’ he said.

‘You haven’t got a cigarette on you, have you?’ she asked.

‘No, I’m sorry, I dinna smoke.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Gave it up when I came oot the army. Canna afford it. Couldna afford
no
tae afore, when we got them in oor rations.’

‘I love to smoke,’ she said. ‘We’re not allowed to here, of course. Not even when we’re off duty in the nurses’ home. But we do, leaning out the windows when Matron’s gone to bed. It’s like a row of factory chimneys sometimes.’

‘I’d buy ye a drink,’ he said, ‘if there was onywhere open. Tae thank ye, like.’

‘I’d let you,’ she said, ‘if there was anywhere open.’

He saw the silhouette of her curls in the moonlight and a shiver went through him. Her mouth pouted up at him, a cigarette-sucking shape. He wanted to kiss it. Mad, he knew. It was Liz he loved. It was just madness because of everything that was churning inside him.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Southampton, eh? How’d ye end up here?’

‘I was evacuated to Scotland during the war, when I was thirteen. My little brother and me. You just got a label stuck on you and were sent anywhere. We ended up in a village in Fife. And you know, even though I couldn’t understand a word anybody said, I liked it. People were kind. We were there for about a year but I always said I’d come back. And here I am.’

‘Here ye are,’ he said. ‘Dae ye no miss your hame?’

‘Southampton?’ She laughed. ‘Nothing left to miss. The Germans bombed it flat. The docks, the Spitfire factory, everything. It’s a mess. I don’t think it’ll ever be the same again.’

‘I really wish I could buy ye that drink,’ he said. A ridiculous thing to say: he’d never bought any lassie a drink, not Liz, nobody. Why did he want to buy this English nurse one?

‘Well, thanks anyway, but I’d better be going,’ she said, ‘or I’ll be locked out.’

The nurses’ home was round the side of the hospital, whereas his road lay directly ahead, through the gates on to the road. ‘We wouldna want that,’ he said. ‘Another time, then.’

She gave him a look. ‘Yes, another time.’

Yet he did not move, and nor did she. And then she shivered and said again, ‘I’d better be going.’

‘Aye,’ he said. ‘I’ll need tae go tae. Well, goodnight.’

‘Goodnight, Mr Lennie,’ she said with a kind of laugh, and she started to move away, and it was so strange, after what she’d done for him, to hear her address him in that formal way, that he turned and caught her elbow, and she turned back. ‘Oh,’ she said, a daft response that didn’t make any sense. It was as if they were both disturbed by something beyond their reach, something wondrous and fearsome loitering in the dark grounds of the hospital.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked. ‘I don’t even know your name.’

‘Marjory,’ she said. ‘Marjory Taylor. What’s yours?’

‘Don.’

‘Goodnight, Don,’ she said.

‘Goodnight, Marjory,’ he said. And suddenly their hands clasped, and they were kissing, a hard, hot, mind-spinning kiss, he could taste the sweetness of her but just as suddenly she broke away, and said ‘Oh’ again, and then turned and hurried off, breaking into a trot, along the front of the hospital and towards the nurses’ quarters. And he stood and let her go.

Total bloody madness.

He looked up at the front of the hospital, with its turrets and dirty stonework, wondering where Charles and Liz were within it. Then he strode off through the gates and towards the part of town where his parents lived.

All he could think of was the kiss, her smell and taste, her loveliness.

There was nobody about, but he’d gone only a few yards when a horn honked and the green Austin was pulling up alongside him.

‘Don!’ Bulldog called. ‘I’ve been sent as a search party. The womenfolk are getting restless upby. What’s the news?’

Don opened the passenger door. ‘A boy,’ he said. ‘A healthy young laddie. I couldna see Liz, it was too late, but they’ve just let me ken. It was a long wait, but everything’s fine, so they tell me.’

‘That’s great,’ Bulldog said, and leaned over and shook his hand. ‘Here, hop in, and I’ll give you a run home.’

Don was on the point of excusing himself – he could do with a
walk, to clear the madness – but the thought of his own bed, a good sleep, and time at home in the morning with Billy before coming in to see Liz, was too appealing. Forget the nurse: it hadn’t happened. So why hadn’t he mentioned her to Bill? The fact that he’d not mentioned her meant that it
had
happened. He climbed in and pulled the door shut. The engine ticking over sent its throbs through Don’s legs and for a second he was somewhere else entirely, sitting in a lorry in a stuck convoy in Italy. Bulldog pulled a slim flask from inside his jacket and unscrewed the top. ‘A wee something to wet the bairn’s head,’ he said, passing it over.

‘What is it?’ Don said, but as he put it to his lips he could smell the whisky smell of it.

‘What would it be but a dram?’ Bulldog said. ‘I know you’re not one for the drink, Don, but you missed yourself at the Blackthorn tonight, and it’s an occasion for celebration, is it no?’

Mention of the Blackthorn brought Jack suddenly to the front of Don’s mind. He took a small mouthful, just to please Bulldog, and swallowed, wishing a life to his new son as he did so. The whisky burning down his throat and into his chest was surprisingly pleasant.

‘Were ye there yersel the nicht?’ he asked. ‘In the pub, I mean?’

‘Me?’ Bulldog said. ‘No me. I’ve been entertaining your wee Billy and generally keeping the ladies happy.’

‘Ye’ll no hae seen Jack Gordon, then?’

‘The Gay Gordon?’ Bulldog said. ‘Haven’t seen him for a while. Find him a bit much, to be honest. A bit too morose for my liking. Why?’

‘No reason.’ Don said. ‘Is that what ye call him, the Gay Gordon?’

‘Aye,’ Bulldog said. ‘He’s aboot as gay as Stornoway on a Sunday. We dinna mean any harm by it, but you know yourself what he’s like.’

Don wondered who the ‘we’ were who called Jack that. He’d never heard the nickname used before, so maybe it was something that Bulldog had just invented. Or maybe this was another example of how he himself was losing touch, not picking up on the Blackthorn banter. What might they call
him
behind
his
back? He took another mouthful of whisky and returned the flask. Bulldog took a swig himself, closed it up and slipped it back inside his jacket.

‘Much obliged tae ye, Bill.’

‘My pleasure,’ Bulldog said, which clearly it was: the drink, the driving, the sense perhaps of being part of something bold and
brave and new. He turned the car and they roared off into the night, and Don, had he not been so tired, had he been able to clear Jack Gordon and Marjory Taylor out of his head, could almost have felt the same.

§

He woke at four in the morning, his mind instantly alert, as if some subconscious warning of an intruder had been triggered. But the only sound in the house was the ticking of the alarm clock in its folding leather case on the bedside table, and he knew he was alone. It had been pointless to disturb Billy, tucked up and sound asleep on the Drummonds’ sofa, so he’d left him there for the night. When they’d got back to the village, not far short of midnight, he’d sat for half an hour with a cup of tea, talking to Bulldog and Joan. Again he’d said nothing about seeing the bairn, nothing about Marjory Taylor. Then he’d walked home and gone to his bed. He’d closed his eyes thinking of the nurse – a wee smasher but did she kiss every man she met? – and had kind of hoped he would dream of her but he hadn’t, he’d fallen instead into dreams of miners in cumbersome breathing-gear stumbling in single file along endless passages, the lamps on their helmets scything the blackness. But now he sat up in the dark, head clear. The name of the intruder was MacLaren.

The man who tried to walk two thousand miles to India. The prisoner who wanted freedom at any price. The starving wreck they brought back and finished off with a sword sweep in a jungle clearing. And Jack had made a paper company of him, ranks of MacLarens marching across a page. Why? What was he trying to say? Was he trying to say anything?

Don couldn’t sleep any more. He got up and made a pot of tea, drank the lot thinking about the nurse and then putting her aside and concentrating on the people in his life: Liz, Billy, Charles, his parents, Bulldog, the men at Byres Brothers, but mostly about Jack. It was ridiculous: he was a father again, he had two sons and a wife to look after, and yet it was Jack Gordon he couldn’t stop worrying about. He thought of Jack setting out at this time of the morning the day before, heading for somewhere. Some promise of release, of a life beyond mere survival, of a life that wasn’t destroyed at its core.

At that moment the fear he’d been resisting since Sarah Gordon
met him off the bus, that had underlain his fear for Liz and the bairn all those hours he sat waiting for news in the hospital, came through as an unstoppable certainty. He was convinced that Jack had killed himself.

§

They brought the last of the men up in the early hours of Sunday morning. All those lives surfacing, one after another. Hundreds more, gathered at the pithead like a crowd in some medieval painting of the Day of Judgment. Cheering and weeping, and prayers offered silently into the night. And the ones who had not come back, the seven left to haunt the bowels of the earth, remembered and mourned.

Journalists making notes in shorthand, queuing at phone boxes, heading back to Glasgow, Dundee, London. Through the wireless, a kindly, eager Oxbridge voice asking rescued miners about their experience. ‘What did it look like, this stuff that was coming towards you?’
It was like porridge, thin porridge, a sort of brown colour, that’s when we were at the top of the return airway outlet.
‘And was that where you were trying to get out?’
Aye, but we couldna, so we made doon the hill again tae the main hall, and there it was black, dirty sludge, twelve feet high, just slush, moss.
‘And later, while you were waiting to be rescued, how did you spend your time?’
Well, there were a few songs, and a hymn frae one of the young lads, and we all joined in on that, ‘The Old Rugged Cross’. And tae keep the spirits up there was one or two dances.
‘Dances?’
Oh aye.
‘I bet you were glad, when you first saw the rescuers coming through to you?’
Oh, it was like seeing angels coming tae meet you then, when ye seen the lights of the brigade coming. We knew then there was a great hope.
‘And were any of your own people waiting for you at the pithead?’
Oh aye. In mining towns like this everybody’s their own people, everybody’s alike. We’re all Jock Tamson’s bairns.
‘Yes, I’ve heard that said often.’
It’s true. There was one there, a brother of mine, he flung his arms round my neck, and I don’t mind telling ye the big tear was in my eyes
.

The big tear was in his eyes. This was Scotland in 1950: coast to coast Jock Tamson’s bairns stood or sat, lugs cocked to the wireless for news from home and abroad, from Borlanslogie, from Korea, or tuned in for
The McFlannels
on a Saturday night, or
It’s All Yours
on a
Monday with young Jimmy Logan doing the daft laddie Sammy Dreep, spluttering, ‘Sausages is the boys!’ This was Scotland in 1950: land of 250 pits and 80,000 colliers, 100,000 farmworkers and four universities; land of Singer sewing machines in Clydebank, the Saxone Shoe Company in Kilmarnock, Cox Brothers jute mills in Dundee and the North British Locomotive Company in Springburn, every town and city and every part of every city with its own industries and hard-won skills; land of textiles and paper, hydraulic pumps and valves, carpets and linoleum and twenty-eight shipyards employing 60,000 workers on the Clyde. This was the land recovering from war, the land of nationalisation and council-house building, its old grease-thick, reeking, clanging heavy industries reinjected with life and a grim, tired kind of hope, the grinding last surge of steel and shipbuilding before Japan and Germany got up off their knees; this was the land that had change coming to it, like it or not, the closure of factories and the shedding of skills, the land of £10 emigrants dreaming of fresh starts and sunshine in Australia, of letters written to cousins in Toronto and Auckland and Durban giving dates of expected arrival, of new investment from NCR, Honeywell, IBM, Hoover, Goodyear. This was the land of Leyland Tiger buses from Thurso to Dalbeattie, and double-deckers crowding the city trams towards oblivion, of grandiose department stores and miserable slums, tearooms and single-ends, savage sectarianism and gloomy gentility, no-quarter football and stultifying Sundays. This was the land of few cars and no seat belts, no motorways but a railway station in every town of any size, and marshalling yards full of wagons laden with coal and iron and timber and grain, sleek black cattle and black-faced sheep, towns of 20,000 with three or four cinemas; the land of Tom Johnston’s Hydro Board building new dams at Loch Sloy, Loch Tummel and Glen Affric; the land of old folk in Harris and Wester Ross and Sutherland with no electricity yet and barely a word of English; the land of tatties and herring, of oatcakes and shortbread, of anthrax on Gruinard and no hedgehogs in the Uists. This was the land of Shetland fishermen who despised the mackerel, of children in Skye who grew bored of too plentiful scallops, and crumbling, condemned, crushed-in Glasgow, desperate to disperse its people and breathe a new breath, raze the slums and raise new towns and peripheral estates; this was the land of blackhouses
and prefabs and sandstone tenements, and baronial villas named Woodstock and Ivanhoe in streets named Abbotsford Crescent and Kenilworth Road; the land of railway posters showing golfers and anglers and Highland Games; the land of working men out of Glasgow climbing the Arrochar Alps and women from Aberdeen hiking the Cairngorms from the Linn of Dee, and thousands of thin, pale bodies cramming the beaches at Portobello and Saltcoats and Largs; the land of paddle steamers bound for Tighnabruaich and Rothesay and Millport, weighed to the gunnels with trippers in July; the land of no swings on the Sabbath, no Polaris submarines in Holy Loch, no nuclear reactors at Dounreay, no television, no cassette recorders, no photocopiers, no calculators, no PCs, no mobile phones, no microwave ovens, no supermarkets, no tights, no duvets, no drip-dry shirts, no tracksuits or trainers; the land of semmits and girdles and long, aching-cold Januaries and thirty-foot snowdrifts on Border farms that buried whole flocks, and wet days in March when the air hung with coal dust from Clackmannan to Galston and Kelty to Fallin; the land of TB, of rickets and kinkhoast, measles and buffets, the cartoon land of Desperate Dan and Black Bob, Korky the Cat and Keyhole Kate, Lord Snooty and Pansy Potter, Wuzzy Wiz, Plum McDuff and Biffo the Bear, the Broons and Oor Wullie, Ba-Bru and Sandy. This was Scotland in 1950, when Rangers won the League and the Scottish Cup, and East Fife won the League Cup, and Scotland beat England at rugby but were beaten at football, and the Edinburgh Festival was a three-year-old bairn just learning to talk in a foreign language. A land of rain like thin mist,
smirr
, rain that would not stop, that got into your bones and into your head, that clung to the fabric of Don’s old battledress tunic as he stood, collar upturned, sick at heart, staring at the Gordons’ house at seven o’clock, and then went through the gate and towards the door. His hand was raised to knock when the door opened and Sarah was there, in a dressing gown wrapped tight up to her neck.