And the Land Lay Still (68 page)

§

It was only a year since the election but things were tough politically. Ted Heath was fighting an exhausting campaign with the unions over pay restraint, and there were rumblings in Tory circles about what to do when he lost. No doubt he was doing his best but his best wasn’t good enough. Northern Ireland was looking ever grimmer, prices and unemployment were on the rise, there were new strikes every other day and a lot of older industries were on their knees. Furthermore, a growing number in the party were dismayed by the country’s approaching membership of the European Common Market. Many on the right weren’t convinced of the vaunted economic benefits, but more profound was their fear that Heath was throwing away a thousand years of heritage, and selling the best bits of the Commonwealth, the white bits, down the river in order to gain entry to a club dominated by the French and the Germans. Something precious and irretrievable, they felt, would be lost when the day came. In the same way, even though it had been planned for years, the arrival in February of a new decimal currency, in place of lovable, weighty old pounds, shillings and pence, had
been like a slap in the face of Britannia. Bit by bit the country people loved was being taken from them.

David had until then thought Heath an appropriate man to lead the modern Conservative Party, but increasingly at Tory gatherings he found himself in a minority. It was not in his nature to enjoy being in a minority. He shuffled rightwards until he felt more comfortable, nodding agreement with men and women twice his age who believed that Heath was not equipped to prevent a general slide towards chaos. A new direction was urgently required, within the party itself and beyond it. David picked up hints: phrases like ‘contingency plans’, ‘fallback positions’.

At the party conference at Brighton in October his attention was caught one evening by a poster that read
IN SEARCH OF FREEDOM? – THIS WAY
. He followed a series of signs that brought him to the back of a packed meeting just as the speakers were being introduced: a former SAS man and an American economist with the clean-cut look of a Mormon about him. It was familiar stuff – the creep of socialism, the suffocating hand of government, the erosion of choice – but there was an urgency, a seriousness about the way the men spoke that couldn’t be ignored. People listened intently, as if at last someone was telling them what they’d both longed and dreaded to hear. When the questions started it seemed as if half the audience was composed of men who’d once been in the army or police: the other half were angry businessmen who couldn’t move for red tape, some of their wives, a few MPs and councillors, and David. When somebody talked about setting up a ‘resistance network’ if the social and political order collapsed there was an eruption of applause. It was all, at first, as alien to him as the King’s Road on a Saturday afternoon. Then rapidly it became less so. These people spoke the same language as his parents, but they were harder, more clinical in their analysis, and they seemed to believe passionately in what they said they believed in.

Back in London he discovered that he too could create a grave, nodding, attentive silence among the very people he had formerly deferred to, by giving his own ‘first-hand’ account of the nation’s decline. He was indebted, for the details that gave his stories the feel of authenticity, to the SAS man, and to Lucy. A group called the Angry Brigade had been planting bombs in boutiques and car
showrooms and at the homes of a couple of Cabinet ministers, causing damage and inconvenience but – so far – no deaths and no serious injuries. It was a campaign which Lucy not only approved of but about which she also seemed to have quite detailed knowledge. Omitting any mention of his sister, David gave a good impression of a sensible but streetwise young man who understood what was going on out there and wanted to do something to stop it. There didn’t seem to be any downside to developing this role – in fact it was enjoyable racking up the sense of impending doom – so long as he kept Lucy out of the picture. His biggest fear was that she might actually be involved with the Angry Brigade, and would be arrested and charged, tainting him by association. He was much relieved, therefore, when at the end of the year she converted to Trotskyism, attached herself to the International Marxist Group and headed for Glasgow to support the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in.

§

There was somebody from back when he was very small, some woman: not his mother, not the housekeeper, Mrs Thomson, not either of his grandmothers; a woman he found both attractive and frightening. A teacher maybe – there were a couple of female teachers at his prep school, but he could remember them and neither seemed to fit – so probably it was before school; someone associated with his parents. He thought she must have been tall, this woman, yes, that would have been best, but even if she hadn’t been he’d only have come up to her thighs. Her shoes, her stockinged legs, her knees, the hem of her skirt. The world from his height then – when he was what, three, four? – was a world of passing legs and feet, mostly women’s. He kind of resented the fact that women and men were so obviously different in what they wore when he was that age. Maybe that was the trigger. Resented it yet loved it. The silky feel of that woman’s leg, the shine of her black leather shoe, the secret, warm odour he could breathe in when she sat cross-legged and let the shoe hang from her toe, the high heel ticking back and forth beside his head. He sat next to her chair on the floor and didn’t say a word. His mother smiled a warning at him but she didn’t need to: there was something about the other woman that kept him quiet. Did
she
know?

Smell, touch, look, hear, taste. He kept thinking back, trying to pinpoint moments of change. For as long as he could recall, his senses had picked up on everything from the soft, rich, shiny deadness of pheasants hanging in the pantry to the way the pile of a hearthrug felt when you stroked it, this way, that way. Those senses had been teased by words in books, by the deep-rolling sensuousness of
Lady Chatterley
. Then, as he approached puberty, he began to focus on something more urgent, more desperate: that thing which was already in him but had not yet revealed itself. That sinking, sickly, giddy sensation began to acquire an explanation.

Childhood lobbed strange memories at him. What had been his favourite fairy tale? ‘Cinderella’. Not because of the rags-to-riches romance or the pumpkin carriage, not even because of the glass slipper itself, but because of what it meant. In his book there’d been an illustration of the prince trying to force the slipper on to the foot of one of the ugly sisters while the other looked on, towering meanly over him. The prince was bent low, hot with the effort, crouched in obeisance to the foot. It was just a picture in a children’s book, a cartoon almost, but it had stirred something at his quick, made him want to turn the page swiftly, but then – always – turn back again.

He remembered other times when he’d tottered around in his mother’s shoes, feet crammed down into the toes. She’d laughed at him or flung something at his head – another shoe, a hairbrush, anything to hand – as she sat at her dressing table getting ready for going out, or staying in, whichever it was. Once he’d taken the shoes off and sniffed one and made a
phew
noise and she’d laughed again and turned her back on him and as soon as she had he stuck his nose right in, God Almighty, he wanted to inhale the whole shoe. Yes, he’d do it when her back was turned or she wasn’t in the room at all but had swept out in a haze of perfume, shoes and clothes left lying around – the bedroom was always chaotic, his father would trip over the wreckage and stand at the head of the staircase and yell at her why the hell couldn’t she pick her bloody things off the bloody floor – and David would wait till they were both downstairs or out and then he’d go in, alone, so yes even then, even that early, he knew it was wrong, or a secret, something that could trip him up and get him into trouble but something that was his, his own, and even
then, at three or four, he knew deep down that what he really desired was to suck in the smell and taste and texture of the
other
woman’s shoe. The woman who scared him, it was her shoe he wanted.

Shoes, legs, stockings, they were connected but then everything kind of stopped. On the surface he could communicate very well with people but he didn’t
connect
with them. Men or women, they were puzzles he had to deal with and he did that as well as he could, he put on a good show but what he needed was something else, the comfort and safety and danger of a strange woman’s shoes and nylon-clad legs. And that had been his childhood, and then just as he was becoming conscious, dimly aware of what it was he liked, what he wanted, the 1960s happened. Disaster. Women in trousers, women in shorts, girls in socks, or in miniskirts without nylons at all. Jesus. The years went by. Shoe shops: the intense leather-and-feet smell of them; some of the sales assistants gave him suspicious looks, as if they knew what was going on inside his eleven-, twelve-year-old head, even though he didn’t know himself. Then he was at Kilsmeddum. Everybody wanked, as if it were a compulsory extra, like country dancing or the Combined Cadet Force. Sometimes you wanked someone else and he wanked you, in the presence of others, and that was to prove you weren’t a poof, but mostly you wanked yourself, by yourself. You were supposed to think about doing sex but when David wanked or was wanked it was shoes and feet and legs he thought of, innocent advertisements he’d torn out of the Sunday colour supplements or memorised from his mother’s fashion magazines.

One holiday a strange item from a world that was not the Eddelstanes’ world found its way into Ochiltree House: a home-shopping catalogue. Mrs Thomson had brought it in. David had a vague notion that she wanted to show his mother something in it, ask her advice or opinion, and it sat in the kitchen for a week or so. Mrs Thomson called it a ‘club book’. Other boys from other backgrounds would have known exactly what to do with a club book. You’d take it to the toilet and salivate over the pages of models in bras and knickers, but he, as if pulled in by a magnet sucking at a lump of metal lodged deep in his belly, went to the pages of women’s shoes. He could hardly see for dizziness, nearly fell off the stool at the kitchen table. Erection on him like a cricket stump. It was a relief
when Mrs Thomson took the catalogue away and he couldn’t look any more.

Fashions came and went, good years (stilettos and three-inch-heeled slingbacks) and bad years (clumpy square heels, no heels, clogs for God’s sake). He wandered past the windows of Baird the Bootmaker, Saxone, Clarks and Lotus in a daze, thinking it was like having the flu, eventually it would pass, but already he knew it wouldn’t pass, not ever, he had it for ever. Mannequins were good; mannequins that were just legs, better. Tights: you could imagine they weren’t tights, you could pretend they were still stockings, but more and more you knew that they weren’t, it wasn’t the same. He lay awake at night with thoughts of shoes and feet and stockinged legs tormenting him and sometimes he cried because of what he was stuck with, knowing he would have to go through life disguising it, feeding it, disguising it, feeding it, and that it would always contain the possibility of exposing him to disaster: the fact that he didn’t want to make love to women, he wanted to make love to their shoes.

§

His father invited him to lunch at his club. Sir Malcolm was down in London for a few days, talking to friends and advisers in the City – not David – about how to shore up his investments. It was spring 1972. Economically, things looked grim. The mini-boom had flattened out, imploded. The trade balance was dreadful, inflation over 8 per cent, unemployment touching a million. Northern Ireland was in meltdown following the shooting by the army of thirteen civil rights marchers in Londonderry in January – the sort of incident Sir Malcolm would once have raged about, blaming the demonstrators of course. Yet David found him curiously unmoved, as if all this were only what he had come to expect and, now he was not an MP, it was no longer required of him to be incensed.

One of the rules of the club was that neither business nor politics could be discussed in the dining room. Amazingly – for surely the waiters weren’t going to eavesdrop and report you – the rule was observed. This didn’t leave father and son with much to talk about. They muttered inanities at each other over a bottle of claret and schoolish cottage pie and apple crumble, then retired to a corner of
the lounge where conversation and smoking were permitted. The place was a caricature of a London club: there were two or three old men asleep in armchairs, a couple more with their noses in
The Times
. Sir Malcolm looked perfectly at home.

‘How old are you now?’ he asked, lighting up a cigar. As if he didn’t know. Maybe he didn’t.

‘Twenty-two,’ David said. A waiter brought them white coffees in Denby cups a couple of shades lighter than the green leather upholstery.

‘I could put you up for this place, if you like. Would you like?’

‘That would be kind.’

‘Wouldn’t do it out of kindness. Practical. People who matter are members here. I’d have to find someone else to second you. Shouldn’t be impossible.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I’m not paying for you,’ Sir Malcolm warned, sounding slightly panicky. ‘I hear you’re doing all right. Are you doing all right?’

‘Not too bad.’

‘Making a bloody fortune, your mother says. Maybe you should be paying for me.’

He gave a sort of laugh but it didn’t sound like a joke. David sort of laughed back. ‘I think she’s exaggerating a little.’

‘That money you got from your grandmother was a boost, eh?’

‘It’s helped a great deal,’ David said. ‘It was very generous of her.’

‘Very,’ Sir Malcolm said. ‘She wasn’t famed for her generosity. Better known for her spite. Didn’t like me much anyway. Not a bean,’ he muttered obscurely.

‘Sorry?’

Sir Malcolm turned the volume up. ‘She didn’t leave me a bean,’ he said, with vehemence.

‘Really?’ David said. ‘But she left mother something, surely?’