And the Land Lay Still (60 page)

She overheard Mr Hogg in the street one day, speaking to her Dey: ‘I see your Mary’s Jock was hame again. Is that him awa?’ ‘Aye.’ ‘Aye dodging awa up in the glens, is he? What is it he’s up tae noo?’ And her Dey said, ‘Ach, ye ken Jock, he does a wee bit o everything.’ ‘A wee bit o everything and no a lot o onything, eh?’ Mr Hogg said in a joking tone but there was an edge to it. And her Dey came back, ‘Weel, he’s working onywey. Aye sending his wage hame.’ The way he said it, half-heartedly, she knew there was something in what Mr Hogg said. She wanted to go out and shout at him, kick him, defend her dad’s name, but she knew she couldn’t.
Dodging awa
. He was a dodger, which was one step from being a waster. And if he was doing all those different jobs, how come there was never any spare money in the house, and her mother was always scrimping and saving? Adam and Gavin cost a bit, no doubt, but only in food, and she herself hardly cost anything at all. The
Children’s Encyclopedia
was the one luxury they had – although to Ellen it wasn’t a luxury, it was a necessity. She didn’t know at first what it was for, but it was definitely for something. Later, she found out what. If you were going to go out into the world, it was necessary first to understand it.

§

The world was – always had been – intense to David Eddelstane. It pressed itself upon him in the stuffy, airy, hot, cold, bright, gloomy rooms and passages of Ochiltree House, dripped from the towering cedars of its garden, pointed lewd, sticky rhododendron buds at him, pricked him with the stems of huge, pink, scent-laden roses. Life wrapped around him and he pushed through it as if through dense drapes: the blue or grey linen of the day sky, the star-spattered, blue-black velvet of the night. Hedges were heavy tapestries he brushed against, daisies and long grass and tulips were made of lace and cotton and silk. It was like being in a Fuzzy Felt world, but with an infinite variety of fabrics.

His mother, Lady Patricia Eddelstane, when she had nothing better to do, sometimes deigned to read him a bedtime story. Winnie-the-Pooh wanted a balloon so he could float up in the air and reach the bees’ honey, but should it be a blue balloon to merge with the sky or a green one to merge with the tree? Pooh couldn’t decide. David, at five, felt the intensity of that dilemma. His mother dashed through the pages – she’d come to his bedside equipped with a cigarette and a gin and tonic and both were soon over – and grew frustrated when he insisted on her going back to the bit about the balloon colours. ‘Oh
come
on, darling, it’s only a
story
.’ And so it was, a funny one, but he took it very seriously.

He took everything seriously then, including the rows between his mother and his father, which, no matter how often they occurred, always felt like the opening salvos of a full-scale war. He never witnessed actual physical blows, but a lot of missiles flew through the air: spoons, shoes, books, the occasional plate. Once at Sunday lunch Lady Patricia shied an orange at Sir Malcolm’s head. He had just announced a three-month freeze on the Jenners account. ‘Miser!’ she screamed as she let fly. Sir Malcolm ducked and the orange smashed through the French window behind him. ‘Missed,
you bitch!’ he bawled, glanced over his shoulder at the broken glass then carried on with his meal. It was January: a cold wind blew in through the window. David and Lucy quaked in their chairs. They were eight and five. Even if they had understood that their mother had no intention of observing the Jenners embargo and their father none of enforcing it, the exchange was too loud, too aggressive for comfort. Lucy started to wail. ‘Stop that,’ her father ordered. She did. David’s bottom lip came out, quivering. ‘Don’t you start,’ his mother warned. He didn’t. Only Freddy, three years old and perturbed by nothing, not even the plummeting room temperature, appeared not to care.

It never occurred to Sir Malcolm and Lady Patricia that such behaviour might be detrimental to the healthy development of young children. It was part of the rough-and-tumble of daily life and if the children didn’t like it they would just have to get used to it, just as they would have to get used to being present and correct whenever there were guests, which was often. On these occasions – dinner parties, cocktail parties, shooting parties – David, Lucy and Freddy were expected to play their well-mannered parts in a family display of love, sweetness and light. David, for the first seven years of his life, lived a double life, privately absorbing the sounds and sights of his parents’ spiteful, ramshackle relationship with each other or conspiring in their smooth, charming public relationship with the rest of the world. Sometimes they heaped on him so much praise and jollity in front of visitors that he was almost persuaded they loved him. At other times, when everybody else had gone, he’d catch them, individually or as a pair, giving him baleful stares as if they couldn’t quite believe he was theirs. But he was, and would continue to play the dutiful eldest child into adolescence and eventually adulthood. All he wanted from them in return was that they sometimes leave him in peace.

But peace was a rare commodity at Ochiltree House. Unless guests were imminent, the whole place was in permanent turmoil, a kind of playground littered with discarded books, newspapers, cups, glasses, cigarette stubs, shoes, boots, carpet slippers, fishing tackle, shotguns, cartridges, hats, coats, underwear, dog hair, dog bowls, handkerchiefs, socks and unfinished snacks, as Sir Malcolm and Lady Patricia roared and rambled through their day. Outside
were gun dogs barking in kennels, hens, a family of ferocious geese, and bad-tempered McLeish, the gardener. All of these, apart from McLeish, periodically gained entry to the house as well. The Eddelstane grown-ups were huge, unruly, selfish children, bullies who had no idea they were bullies. The Eddelstane young were their victims, and two of them, at any rate, knew it only too well. Not Freddy, who took no notice of anything, whether it was his mother shouting or himself trailing hen shit round the house; but Lucy stored her victimhood up for a great explosion years later; and David cycled or ran to escape, hid up trees or in his bedroom or in the attic, or followed behind Mrs Thomson, the housekeeper, as she went from room to room tidying, collecting, rearranging, repairing, dusting, wiping and sweeping. Mrs Thomson and he didn’t have a lot to say to each other but at least what she said was delivered in a consistently reasonable tone. He might even have come to think of her with unsuitable fondness – unsuitable, because, for all her understanding of the need to make the Eddelstane household look respectable when the outside world came to call, she was only a woman ‘from the village’ – had he not been relocated to boarding school at the age of seven. Mrs Thomson, his mother and Lucy – and Freddy, except for one year when they overlapped at prep school – became people with whom he shared only a third of each year.

He saw even less of his father, who was away much of the time, having been elected to the House of Commons as the Member for Glenallan and West Mills in the year of David’s birth. He had a flat in London – the word ‘flat’ sounded unbelievably modern, not at all the kind of place an Eddelstane would stay in – and travelled there by sleeper when Parliament was sitting. Occasionally, under protest, he took his wife with him. For fourteen years he did his political bit, a sozzled, soup-stained, alternately angry and accommodating backbencher offering more or less loyal support to four successive Tory Prime Ministers – Churchill, Eden, Macmillan and Home. In 1960, somewhat prematurely, he had received his reward, a knighthood.

During the 1950s Glenallan and West Mills was solidly Unionist – full of farms, respectable wee villages and half-forgotten clusters of cottages, and, at its eastern extremity, a run of industrial villages, the Mills, still reliant on textiles and papermaking for their survival.
As a Tory MP one could expect support not only from the rural, more affluent parts of the constituency, but also from that sizeable chunk of the working-class population which still defined itself politically through its adherence to Protestantism. This was the Unionism of Scottish politics then – born not from loyalty to the Union between Scotland and England (for who in their right minds was against
that
?) but from opposition to Irish Home Rule and Roman Catholicism. Privately Sir Malcolm didn’t give a damn whether God was pink, blue or yellow as long as He kept His distance, but he was brusquely grateful for the Orange vote. He himself wasn’t interested in that kind of tribalism. The English, in his opinion, had it about right when it came to religion: bend the knee, pay due homage, then get on with life. But this wasn’t England, and he wouldn’t look a gift-horse in the mouth. If people wanted to vote for him because they thought he would keep the papists at bay, who was he to argue?

But by the early 1960s Sir Malcolm was beginning to worry. It wasn’t just that the Conservative government was running out of steam and its financial ineptitude was making Labour look economically competent. Nor was it simply the disrespect he detected in so many young faces. Something else was going on: hard to say what, but it felt threatening. An undercurrent. He didn’t like it.

Was it sex? Perhaps it was. He’d sown a few wild oats in his time, still did when he got the chance, so there was nothing wrong with him in that department. He hadn’t married till he was forty, and Lady Patricia was only ten years behind him, but her production of three children in the space of five years proved everything was in working order. Suddenly, though, everybody was
talking
about sex. Why? Sir Malcolm knew:
that
book, and
that
trial. Let sleeping dogs lie, was his view. By stirring things up the Puritans just drew attention to the fact that people, perfectly respectable people,
extremely
respectable people, had secondary lives. Friendships that were nobody’s business but their own. Understandings. Everybody knew it went on but why did they all suddenly want to
talk
about it? Why couldn’t they just shut up and let things carry on as normal?

Home for the Christmas holidays in 1960, David came across it,
that
book, submerged in a pile of other books and magazines in the morning room, his mother’s territory. He found it before
Mrs Thomson did, and took it off to his bedroom to investigate:
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, a Penguin paperback. He sniffed at it: definitely his mother’s perfume. At his prep school a copy of the
Scotsman
was left in the reading room every day for the boys, so he knew all about the trial that had taken place two months before. He knew that various writers and critics had appeared to defend the book against the charge of obscenity, and he remembered that a lawyer with a double-barrelled name, who’d been trying to get it banned, had been mocked in the press for asking the men on the jury if it was a book they would want their wives or servants to read. That had made him think of his father, and whether he would want Mrs Thomson or McLeish to read it. David had thought at the time that he wouldn’t, but that they probably wouldn’t care to read it anyway. David couldn’t imagine them reading a book at all. But what about his mother? She might. It looked like he’d been right.

It was bright orange, with a drawing of a bird on a bonfire on the front.
Complete and unexpurgated
, it said, for three shillings and sixpence. David was ten. He didn’t know what ‘unexpurgated’ meant but it didn’t take him long to find out. The book fell open at various places where his mother had folded the page corners down. He was a good reader and he was looking for something in the text, though he’d no idea what it was. He read about Lady C. and the gamekeeper, Mellors, and what passed between them. He thought of his mother, Lady E., and the gardener, McLeish, and then he put that out of his mind because the only things that passed between his mother and McLeish were orders and McLeish’s wages. Instead, he concentrated on the intoxicating shapes the words made in his mind. ‘She felt his penis risen against her with silent, amazing force.’ He felt something akin to this stirring in him, not physical but the precursor of something physical. ‘Oh, and far down inside her the deeps parted and rolled asunder, in long far-reaching billows.’ He didn’t fully understand that, but it connected with something he himself felt. The sentences imprinted themselves on his brain and stayed there. He skipped back and forth through the chapters, ignoring the plot, ordering the sequence of sex scenes. He was too young but he understood he had discovered something, a secret. It wasn’t in the book, it was in himself, something that only he knew, even if he didn’t fully know it. After a couple of days he dropped the book
back into the morning room. It wasn’t what he wanted. It wasn’t
exactly
what he wanted.

§

The film already had notoriety, a magnetism that drew people in. The trailers and other publicity had done their business and when Don and Liz Lennie, with Bill and Joan Drummond, arrived at the Regal in Drumkirk they had to queue on the street for half an hour for tickets. While they waited Don felt a growing distaste at the mass curiosity, and about himself being caught up in it. They were all being manipulated.
SOMETHING NEW AND ALTOGETHER DIFFERENT IN SCREEN EXCITEMENT
, the posters proclaimed beside the cinema steps. And everybody was talking excitedly, half-anxious, half-eager, shuffling along like cattle to market. As if Mr Hitchcock himself were herding them in against their better judgement, mockingly corrupting them.
Come on, come on, you know you want to. And you there, complaining about the price, I’ll wipe the moan off your face
.

It had been Bulldog’s idea to go. ‘It’s supposed to be a wee bit … ye ken?’ he’d said to Don, at the Blackthorn the previous Saturday. ‘See if ye can persuade Liz. Get the wives oot the hoose for a change, eh?’ ‘It’s no a sex film, is it?’ Don asked. The title,
Psycho
, seemed alien and unpleasant, he wasn’t sure what it might represent. ‘She’ll no go if she thinks it’ll be dirty.’ ‘No, no, it’s a Alfred Hitchcock,’ Bill said. ‘A thriller, real edge-of-the-seat stuff. Just right for Halloween. But we canna take the kids, it’s X-rated. Joan’s game for it. We dinna go tae the pictures enough these days, no since we got the television. We’ll get the neighbours tae mind oor bairns, and if you can sort oot something for yours we can all go, gie oorsels a bit o a scare, maybe go for a fish supper efter.’ And when Don seemed doubtful he said, ‘Och, come on, everybody loves a Hitchcock flick.’