And the Land Lay Still (4 page)

Gradually, by such exchanges, they learned about each other: how both sets of parents fought incessantly but only Michael’s were splitting up; that Michael was an only child whereas Freddy had an older brother called David and an older sister called Lucy. What was it like, having a sister? Terrible, because she was insane. Freddy’s brother was weird and his sister was insane. In fact, Freddy said with pride, his whole family was insane: his father was barking, his mother was bonkers, and even the gardener was a bad-tempered old lunatic. The gardener! If Michael hadn’t been laughing so much already he would have been astonished at the idea of a gardener. Freddy could make him laugh very easily. He had a plummy voice, the face of an ugly old man, and a clumsy, carefree attitude to life, and almost everything he said seemed funny to Michael. In his Sunday letters home, which for the rest of that term began ‘Dear Mum and Dad’ because his mother didn’t tell him till Christmas that his father was no longer there, Michael wrote about how Eddelstane and he had done this or that, and that Eddelstane told good jokes and said Michael could go and stay with him in the holidays.

Isobel, having worked out that this Eddelstane was the son of Sir Malcolm and Lady Patricia Eddelstane of Ochiltree House, Glenallan, would have been delighted if this had happened, but it never did, because Freddy never got around to organising it. It meant nothing to him, throwing out such an invitation, except that he liked Michael well enough to say it.

The teachers at Bellcroft were a collection of unworldly oddities, most of whom looked as if they had awoken from one strange dream only to find themselves in another. Michael felt he had something in common with them, from the impossibly shy, tongue-tied Mr Veitch, who taught Geography and, after a fashion, Science, to the French master, Monsieur Lucas. M. Lucas was a dishevelled, shambling, straggle-haired man of uncertain vintage, with a tendency to conclude his sentences with a shout. He and his wife lived in Aberfeldy with their three sons, who attended the local school. He was Belgian, or half-Belgian, and proud of it. ‘Je suis belge, Monsieur Michel,’ he said, ‘et je ne l’oublie
jamais
.’ He called all the boys ‘monsieur’, except when he called them ‘mon ami’, which was equally pleasing. There was an air of mystery about him, enhanced both by his penchant for recounting tales of the supernatural and the fact that he had a life outwith the bounds and hours of the school. He often arrived looking as if he hadn’t gone to bed the previous night, or had slept in the clothes he was wearing if he had. Maybe he was a poacher? Maybe he had been in the Resistance during the war? ‘Peut-être,’ he said, when the boys asked him. ‘I resist
everything
.’ He corrected their vocabulary tests with flamboyant ticks, crosses and exclamation marks, and read their feeble efforts at composition with his nose an inch from the jotter, being severely short-sighted although he resisted wearing
les lunettes
. They loved it when he bellowed at their stupidity, for, loud though he barked, his bite was non-existent, and he was easily distracted from the task in hand by a well-timed question about the war, or ghosts – or politics. For M. Lucas was so unbalanced as to be a member of the Scottish National Party, and went to political meetings and conferences and rallies, and wrote letters to the papers on the subject of independence for small nations, and saw it as his duty to tell his pupils stories of Wallace and Bruce and the Black Douglas so that they would have a true understanding of the history of their country. Once,
when Winnie Ewing won her famous victory at the Hamilton by-election in 1967, he was so carried away that the entire lesson was given over to an analysis of the campaign and its implications. But another time, during a particularly long, loud and gory session on William Wallace, the headmaster opened the door suddenly and asked if he could speak with M. Lucas for a moment, outside, and when M. Lucas came back he was glum and roarless, and for a fortnight thereafter would not be diverted. But then he forgot, or remembered that he resisted
everything
, and life returned to abnormal. All this endeared M. Lucas greatly to Michael.

But if schools like Bellcroft House were outposts of an alien system, sometimes infiltrated by men like M. Lucas, then the places you went on to from them were veritable fortresses of the occupation. And this network of garrisons had its own complex pecking order. If you went to a certain prep school – one, say, in the vicinity of Edinburgh – then you would probably go on to one of three or four ‘public schools’ in or around the capital. If you were at a certain ‘public school’ then you had probably come from one of half a dozen prep schools which supplied that school with its annual intake. In this pecking order Bellcroft House came close to the bottom. It was one of the reasons why Angus Pendreich could afford it. It did not, generally speaking, turn out high-academic performers and even when it did there was no guarantee of admission to one of the ‘top’ schools. There existed, however, a ready-made receptacle for the products of Bellcroft House: located a dozen miles deeper into the wilds of Perthshire, it was called Kilsmeddum Castle. At Bellcroft, the underlying ethos was benign. Kilsmeddum was a crumbling, damp, cultureless hellhole infested with mice, where greed, selfishness, snobbery and bullying were the order of the day. The Oxbridge third-raters who posed as teachers, far from feeling thankful for having found sanctuary from the world, as Mr Veitch did at Bellcroft, resented being there and took their resentment out on their charges. In every respect, Kilsmeddum Castle was the last place a loving parent would deposit a loved child.

Within a few days of arriving there Michael detested the place and never wavered from this antipathy. He put up with it because by then there seemed little point in objecting – and because Angus did, albeit sporadically, come to rescue him.

Freddy Eddelstane was there too, as his brother had been. Michael didn’t get this. Why, with their background, weren’t they sent to a more prestigious school, possibly one south of the Border? Freddy said his father was a cheapskate, but even if he weren’t it wouldn’t make any difference. ‘We’ve got loads of house,’ he said, ‘rooms and rooms and rooms of it, but no money.’ But, Michael wondered, what did ‘no money’ mean when your father was a ‘Sir’?

They stayed friends, kind of, but more and more Michael learned to rely on his own resources, distancing himself from the crass obscenities and boorishness of the mob. Whatever it was he wanted, he knew it wasn’t that. Some of the mob grew suspicious and cornered him. ‘Are you a poof, Pendreich?’ He realised that how he responded would determine how, or whether, he continued to survive. For the first and only time in his life he punched someone in the face. A bright red stream spurted from the boy’s nose and he started to cry. Michael was as surprised as any of them at what he had done but managed to conceal it. They left him alone.

Later, Freddy caught up with him. All the slight exaggeration of features that had made the child Freddy ugly had burst forth at adolescence into loose-fleshed, ogre-like coarseness. He was a kind of human toad. As such he was regularly set upon by the mob, but had learned to deflect the aggression by becoming a self-mocking court jester to the ringleaders. So he had to be careful about displaying any loyalty to Michael.

‘I heard what happened,’ he said. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Nothing happened.’

‘Yes it did.’

They were in a corridor, with other boys coming and going. Freddy dragged him to the changing rooms, where they were alone among the rows of pegs, each loaded with its boy-shaped, sweat-and-mud-streaked collection of tracksuits and rugby shirts. The place was rank with boy smell.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked again.

‘I’m fine.’

‘What happened?’

Freddy was impressed by Michael’s hitherto unrevealed capacity for violence, but what interested him more was the psychological element of the confrontation.

‘Well, are you a poof?’

‘What?’

‘Something made you hit him.’

‘Well, I’m not a poof. Are you?’ Michael really didn’t want to have to punch Freddy too.

‘No.’

‘Fine. That’s that settled then.’

Michael wanted to get away, and started walking towards the door. Suddenly Freddy said, ‘But I think my brother is.’

This was astonishing news. It seemed to reveal to Michael something not about Freddy’s brother, not even about Freddy, but about himself.

‘Really?’

‘Maybe.’

‘You always said he was weird, but weird’s not the same as queer, is it?’

‘No.’ He smiled, or scowled, it was hard to tell which because he was so ugly. ‘Maybe he’s just weird.’

The door opened and somebody came in, a prefect. ‘What are you two doing here?’

‘Nothing,’ Freddy said.

‘Well go and do it somewhere else.’

They went, and nothing more was said.

§

‘Did you make any progress with that introduction?’ Murdo asks.

‘I read over what I’d already written and then tinkered with it,’ Mike says. ‘Not at all productive.’

‘I wouldn’t know where to start,’ Murdo says. ‘I’ve not tried to write anything since I was at school.’

He picks at the window ledge beside his chair, and looks round at the rest of the sun lounge.

‘This place needs a coat of paint.’

‘I know. Outside and in.’

‘More than paint. You’ve let the woodwork go.’

‘Do you want to do it?’

‘I will if you want me to.’

‘I’ll pay you for it.’

‘Aye, you will. Used notes only.’

Murdo can turn his hand to just about anything. His cousin took over the uncle’s building business and Murdo sometimes works for him. He also does painting jobs and other repair and maintenance work for people who either can’t or don’t want to do it themselves. He services his own van and will do other people’s vehicles if they’re not too fussy about them. He does Mike’s car although he says it would be kinder to roll it over the edge of a cliff. His customers pay him in cash and if he doesn’t declare more to the taxman than what he earns from the cousin nobody is blaming him for it. God knows it’s hard enough making an income around here, they say, and one thing about Murdo, he’s no scrounger, you’ll not catch him sitting on his backside claiming benefit like some. Sometimes folk are short of money and they owe him it, or they pay him in kind – a lamb for the freezer, a fill of red diesel from the farm tank. ‘It’s how a real economy works,’ Murdo says. ‘Not that you’d expect economists to understand.’

‘How long would it take you?’ Michael asks.

‘Two days. Maybe three. It depends on the weather. Also on how much of the wood needs to be replaced.’

‘Well, I’m going to have to go to Edinburgh some time soon. To do with the exhibition. You could do it then.’

‘Aye.’

‘I’ll let you know when I’ve arranged the dates.’

‘I’m sure we’ll sort something out.’

They have run out of things to say. This is fine. They sit in companionable silence and the night grows around them. This is absolutely fine.

§

By morning the weather has changed back. It’s warmer, but the cloud is low on the hills and there’s a steady downpour. Mike has another look at the introduction, essay, memoir, whatever it is he’s trying to write. That’s the problem, he doesn’t know. But a deadline is looming: it’s March and he has until 1 May to deliver the final text. He should be writing about Angus – the photographer, the father – and has made several stabs at it but it just isn’t happening, he doesn’t seem to be touching him at all. Faced with the blank
computer screen and that deadline, and the memories provoked by those photographs at Dounreay, he is also confronted, and not for the first time, by the possibility that he didn’t really know his father at all. He looks again at the family in the photograph: the tall man, the cold woman, the fragile boy on the tartan rug. Angus is dead, but physically Mike has grown to replace him. Isobel, though so much older, still looks like Isobel. It is the boy who has completely gone. How did we get from there to here, Mike wonders. How did
I
get to here? His fifty-three years, and all that they contain, seem suddenly elusive and intangible.

Still, it’s Angus he’s supposed to be making some sense of. Everything else is in place. He has the title – ‘The Angus Angle’ – easy and obvious, for exhibition and book, and Duncan Roxburgh at the National Gallery of Photography agrees. He’s selected the images down to the last three or four. The original prints are being used where possible and if they’re not good enough new ones are being made and will be mounted and framed by the gallery. He’s written notes to go with the pictures in the book. He has a set of the picture proofs. All that’s left is the introductory essay, and he can’t get a fix on it. The more he worries over it the worse it becomes.

Duncan has been no help. ‘How long should this essay be?’ Mike asked, and Duncan said, ‘As long as it needs to be. Three thousand words, five thousand, ten thousand. Whatever you feel comfortable with.’ So far he has about four hundred and sixty, and he doesn’t feel comfortable with them at all: