And the Land Lay Still (45 page)

The shimmering Edgar is still there. So is the deputy High Commissioner. His superior has almost expired. One thing about Edgar, he seems to know what Peter’s been thinking.

EDGAR
: Interesting that Boothby used the same terminology as Canterbury.

BOND
: Aye. He sounded like him too. Apart from the beard he even looked quite like him.

EDGAR
: But was there any irony in the way Boothby said it? Did he narrow his eyes at you and nod reassuringly? (
perfectly imitating Boothby
) Don’t you worry, I know
exactly
what I’m doing.

BOND
(
after reflection
): No. Boothby didn’t do irony. He was too anxious to tell me about what he intended to do next.

EDGAR
: And what was that?

BOND
: The SNP’s National Council had voted to expel any party members who were also in the 1320 Club. Boothby was furious, not just with the SNP but with individuals in the club. They had compromised its radicalism already.
Catalyst
had been taken over by the literati. There was an upstart with a degree from Cambridge he was particularly incensed with. The club had lost its sense of purpose, the Scottish Liberation Army was all washed up, he himself could only do so much. And yet there was still the possibility of a genuine resistance. What was needed was a fresh
start, the establishment of a new military force. He wanted me to help that become a reality.

EDGAR
: What did you do?

BOND
: I massaged his ego, paid homage to his efforts, and in return he gave me the identities of men who might be enlisted into this new army. Some I knew, some I didn’t. We discussed them in detail, their backgrounds, their skills, which of them might be willing to carry out operations.

EDGAR
: I want to ask you about Hugh MacDiarmid. Boothby was quite close to him. His wife was a painter and did portraits of both the Grieves. Why didn’t you make contact with him?

BOND
: He was too well known. Plus he was in his late seventies by then. MacDiarmid might inspire the kind of people we wanted but he wasn’t going to give them to us. So I stayed away.

EDGAR
: That was your only reason?

BOND
(
after a pause
): No. (
another, longer pause
) I stayed away from him because even then I knew I was tainted, corrupted. I didn’t want to go anywhere near him.

EDGAR
: You felt you’d defile the great man?

BOND
: I felt he would see through me. Expose my shame.

EDGAR
: Because meanwhile you were giving these names to Croick.

BOND
: Yes. And he was giving me names to give to Boothby.

EDGAR
: Tell me more about Croick.

BOND
: Don’t you know about him? You seem to know everything.

EDGAR
: You tell me about him. This is your version of events.

Croick came to see him that summer. In Glasgow Croick adopted a kind of demob style, corduroys and an open-necked shirt, as if he could afford to let go a bit. He let his language go a bit too, which he didn’t do in Canterbury’s presence, but Peter still couldn’t place the accent.

They arranged to meet at Central Station. There was no luggage or anything else to indicate that Croick had just arrived off a train. It was a Saturday: the bookshop closed on Saturday afternoons. Croick wanted to go for a walk. They went along Argyle Street, up Buchanan Street past all the expensive shops,
then the length of Sauchiehall Street, past the bookshop, on to the museum and through Kelvingrove Park to the university, then down to Byres Road. Some of the more salubrious, prosperous bits of the city, and yet Croick kept repeating, more to himself than to Peter, What a shithole this is.

They’re going to put a motorway through here, Peter said at one point, at Charing Cross. They’re going to pull a lot of this bit down.

Good on them, Croick said. Nobody’ll miss it.

He was more complimentary about Peter’s continuing relationship with Boothby. It was important to keep the Major active, even if he was now working completely outside the SNP, because the SNP surge didn’t seem to be tailing off. In May they’d picked up another raft of council seats and got more than a third of the votes cast in both Glasgow and Edinburgh. Opinion polls suggested if there were a General Election they’d be the most popular party in Scotland. Home Rule enthusiasts in other parties, the Liberals for example, were using the SNP threat to boost their arguments. There was a group of young, sparky, spiky Conservatives, the Thistle Group, who thought it was the only way to make the Tories popular again in Scotland. And at the party conference in Perth that spring, Ted Heath had seemed to agree, declaring himself in favour of change and that he was setting up a constitutional committee headed by that old reliable, Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Similar opinions were beginning to be voiced in the Labour Party, despite Willie Ross’s best efforts to shut them up, and in the wider Labour movement there was further pressure. At the Scottish Trades Union Congress in Aberdeen the miners’ leader, the Communist Mick McGahey, managed to persuade the Congress to support, in the broadest terms, some kind of legislation to satisfy some kind of desire from the Scottish people for some kind of Scottish parliament. Willie Ross didn’t like such loose talk – who knew where it might lead? He warned the unions not to take refuge in the quicksands of nationalism, but that was exactly where Harold Wilson thought Labour had to put at least one of its feet, and Wilson was Prime Minister.

Nearly half of Wilson’s majority at Westminster was made up of Labour’s forty-five Scottish seats, and he didn’t want to lose any
more of them to the SNP. Also, he didn’t want to be upstaged by Heath. So he set up a Royal Commission to investigate the matter. This was a lot more important-sounding than a few bigwigs sitting round having tea with Sir Alec. The Royal Commission had the added advantage that it would take years to come to any conclusion and any conclusion it came to would probably be inconclusive.

Still, Croick said, all this official and semi-official activity, and the fact that sections of the press are banging the drum for devolution – all this is reason enough for keeping extremism simmering away in the semi-background.
A spectre is haunting the
SNP, he droned,
the spectre of terrorism
. Then, weirdly unloosed for a moment, he made eerie ooh-ing noises at Peter, and laughed.

He had some names to suggest as possible recruits for the Major’s new outfit, the Army of the Provisional Government of Scotland, and as they walked he reeled them off: a few naive patriots, some petty criminals and a smattering of sad, under-educated obsessives. He didn’t seem to care about being overheard, and wanted Peter’s opinion of his little list. Peter knew some of the names: inadequate, lonely, damaged men with big personal problems. More to be pitied than feared, most of them, he said.

What kind of problems? Croick asked.

Psychological, emotional, financial.

Drinkers?

Some of them.

Good, Croick said. The more fucked up, the better. Don’t feel sorry for them. Just feed them to Boothby. Take your time. Boothby’s already thinking along the same lines, he just needs a wee nudge. You’re very good at that, Peter. The wee nudge. It’s your trademark. You probably don’t even know you’re doing it.

What do you want back? Peter asked.

There are bigger fish, Croick said. The SNP claims it’s severed all links with the mad Nats but we don’t think they’re as clean as they think they are. Nobody’s that clean. We think there are quite senior people in the party who are still connected. If Boothby swims out on a long-enough line, maybe he’ll bring them in to us.

Croick impressed Peter in a way that Canterbury never had.
Canterbury had seemed always to be worrying about things he hoped wouldn’t happen. Croick intended to stop things
before
they happened. Or start them. But who did he have in mind? It simply wasn’t credible that the accountants and lawyers in charge of the SNP were in any way mixed up with the mostly mythical Army of the Provisional Government. And nobody in the SNP was that big a name anyway, except maybe Winnie Ewing.

Peter said, I don’t think those links exist. He wanted to call him something, but not ‘sir’, definitely not ‘John’. He only ever thought of him as ‘Croick’.

Croick said, You can’t be sure.

They’d arrived back at Peter’s Partick flat. He made a pot of tea and opened a packet of digestives and they sat at the table. It was absurdly domestic, one man making tea for another man, two men drinking tea together but not in a canteen or on a building site or in a café. It occurred to him that they should really be knocking back whisky in mean wee glasses in a bar in Govan.

As if he’d read his thoughts, Croick said, We could be a couple of queens, eh? Tea and biscuits and a shovel up the coal-hole.

No chance, Peter said. Nail that one firmly to the wall, he thought, just in case.

Still get locked up for it here, though, wouldn’t we? Croick said. Not like the degenerate south. Just shows you, Scotland still has its head screwed on right about some things. Good old Willie Ross. The Henry Dundas of our times. Do you know about Henry Dundas, Peter?

Peter shook his head.

The uncrowned king of Scotland in seventeen something or other. Delivered the nation on a plate to Pitt the Elder, or Pitt the Younger, I can’t remember which. If Dundas said ‘Jump!’ all the Scottish MPs said ‘How high?’ Mind you, it was easier then, only a couple of thousand people had the vote.

Peter tried to get back on track. These links, he said. But Croick was on a roll.

We’ve a long tradition of uncrowned kings, he said. Tom Johnston was one during the war. The Duke of Lauderdale was another back in the days when they were slaughtering Covenanters in peatbogs. I suppose Willie Ross is to Harold Wilson as
Lauderdale was to Charles II. Can’t see Willie in a long curly wig and lace though, can you? Not his style at all.

There was no stopping him. Do you think it makes our job more or less difficult, the legalisation of shirt-lifting? he said. I mean, on the one hand it’s always been useful to know if someone’s queer, and for them to know they can get the jail for it. Good bargaining chip, at the very least. On the other hand your own team can get compromised. The bloke you always thought was meat and two veg and no garnish turns out to be a poof. Believe me, it happens a lot. It’s a weakness, somebody’s bound to exploit it, you or the other side. So now the ground rules have changed. Now it’s okay between consenting adults in private, in England anyway, so maybe we need to move on too. Find other things wrong with people.

He looked at Peter but not as if he were really expecting an answer. Not here of course, he said. Here in the land of Willie Ross we can still send the queer boys to Barlinnie.

Peter thought, is he propositioning me? Aye, maybe. In a repressed wee backwater where you get the jail for sodomy that’s just the way a manipulative bastard like Croick would go about it.

These supposed links, Peter said, trying again, and thought he saw Croick roll his eyes, drag himself back to the day’s business, you can make them between the APG and other groups, but that’s about it. There are still overlaps with what’s left of the SLA. There’s a bunch called the Scottish Republican Army, there’s another called the Scottish Citizens’ Army of the Republic. Basically, take a handful of letters, including an S, an R and an L, maybe a W if you really need to emphasise your left-wing credentials, fling them up in the air and when they come down you’ve got a new movement. Same individuals, different organisation. We’re talking about memberships that don’t reach double figures. They have a shotgun and a couple of air rifles, if they’re lucky an ex-REME guy who knows how to wire up a bomb. But do these people have anything to do with the mainstream Scottish National Party? No, they despise the SNP.

He was aware he’d been speaking fast, to stop Croick
interrupting. It was as if he’d involuntarily gone into competition with him, trying to sound more authoritative.

Croick laughed. Is that the best you can do? Come on, man, what do you think we pay you for? (Because they did, a bundle of notes every time they met, not much but enough to finance Peter’s ever-more intimate relationship with the bottle.) We’re not exactly overworking you.

Peter had been thinking that for a while himself. He filtered the information Croick fed him, he reported back, but otherwise they left him alone. Canterbury had said if he came back to Scotland he’d be useful to them but how was this useful? It didn’t make sense.

I can’t dig up more than there is buried.

Why not?

What do you want me to do, invent stuff?

As soon as he said it he realised that was exactly what Croick wanted. But Croick didn’t acknowledge it. He stood up and went over to the window, which looked out over a shared washing green. Keeping his back to Peter he said, genially enough, Give me some names.

Peter was off guard. He began to answer, Well, I suppose I could try – but Croick cut in, his voice suddenly hard and loud.

Come on, give me some fucking names.

Jesus, Peter thought, what’s this, an interrogation? Kenny McAree, he said.

Electrician, Oban, Croick said. SNP member. Learning Gaelic. Knows how to make bombs. Give me another.

John MacHarg.

Labourer, Alloa. Used to be in the CP, now SNP. Did time for housebreaking. Inclined to violence. Can’t handle the drink. Next.

Dennis Hogg.

Miner, Borlanslogie. No political affiliation. Attracted by any scheme, legal or illegal, for making cash. Acquaintance of MacHarg. Next.

William Teague. What’s the point of this?

Builders’ merchant, Lochgilphead. 1320 Club. Next.

William Nairn.

Works in a butcher’s, Inverness. Ex-SNP. Mentally unstable.
Keep him away from the cleavers. The point, Croick said, coming back to his seat, is that we know these people already. Have I invented anything about them?