And the Land Lay Still (69 page)

His father glared at him. ‘What if she did? Doesn’t help me, does it? Bitch. Not dignified, having to ask for pocket money at my age. Anyway, I assume you’ve invested it wisely. Cleverly.’ A sarcastic edge came into his voice. He held the cigar in one hand, picked at a mole on his neck with the other. David could hear the horny click of his nails.

‘I think so.’

‘Stashed it away neatly. Tidily. For a rainy day.’

‘That’s what I’ve done.’

Sir Malcolm cleared his throat noisily, as if to get the sarcasm out of his system, and fitted a request in at the end of the prolonged rasping. ‘Wouldn’t like to invest in your old man, I don’t suppose?’

This was what it was all about, then: lunch, the club membership, the barely concealed contempt for his success. Mother held the purse strings and father wanted to tap him for a loan. Possibly even an outright gift. Or maybe the two of them were in it together. David wondered how Q would have reacted. Not with the civilised restraint he himself was showing, anyway. But then, Q wouldn’t have got through the door.

‘It’s all tied up,’ David said. ‘Couldn’t even if I wanted to.’ Which was, they both understood, a lie. Sir Malcolm understood it so perfectly that he feigned deafness, pretended he’d never asked in the first place. He picked at his neck more furiously.

‘Bugger,’ he said. ‘Made myself bleed.’

He reached into his trouser pocket for a handkerchief and held it to his neck. ‘Hear you’re making a name for yourself in the party. Kensington, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right.’

‘The Kensington people are stuck up their own arses. Always were, probably always will be. Important people to know, some of them, but they have everything stitched up. You’ll wait years for a chance at a seat down here. Presume you want a seat?’

‘I wasn’t thinking along those lines just yet.’

‘No point being in politics if you don’t. You should get yourself nominated for an unwinnable. North of England. Scotland, even better. Glasgow. Darkest Lanarkshire. Put up a good fight, show you’re willing, next time they’ll give you something marginal or better.’

‘Something safe would be good,’ David said.

‘There’s still a few left in Scotland. An Edinburgh seat, or Perthshire, or the north-east. Get yourself one of those, they even give you a bloody pension these days.’ Another illustration of his father’s financial ineptitude: he’d stood down the year before a pension scheme for MPs was first set up. ‘Should never have resigned. Your mother insisted. Bloody doctors. Eight years ago. Look at me, fit as a fiddle.’

He looked as if his boiler could burst at any moment.

David said, ‘Perhaps I should try for Glenallan.’

‘Hmph. Don’t think Braco’s ready to step aside for some time yet. You know I’m no longer constituency chairman, don’t you?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Some stickler for the rules said I couldn’t have a third term. By the way, his daughter’s in town, do you know her?’

‘No, not really.’ David remembered a girl, his own age or perhaps a year older, at a Conservative ball. He must have been about fifteen. She’d held no interest for him whatsoever.

‘Turned into a peach. Don’t know what she’s doing down here. Not much, I shouldn’t think. Why should she? Braco’s as rich as Croesus. Now there’s a thing.’

This was Plan B, David thought. Somehow his father had to stay attached to the possibility of sources of wealth other than Lady Patricia. Himself, Braco, it didn’t matter. If he could maintain contact some of it might trickle his way eventually. It was pathetic.

David saw Roderick Braco from time to time at party functions. He said he would make a point of asking after his daughter.

‘I should. Could do a lot worse. Wouldn’t mention that you’re thinking of standing for Parliament though. To him or her. Might put the wind up him. Might make him think you had, you know …’

‘I’ve forgotten her name,’ David said.

‘Melissa,’ Sir Malcolm said without hesitation. ‘Ulterior motives. Nice name. When are you coming home next? Your mother misses you.’

‘I was only there at Christmas,’ David said. Four days of the usual drinking, eating and shouting. The notion that Lady Patricia missed him already, or at all, was as laughable as his father’s attempts at matchmaking.

‘How’s Freddy?’ he asked.

Sir Malcolm frowned. ‘Freddy? Fine, as far as I know. Why?’

‘Just wondered.’

‘He wants to live in America. Can’t say I blame him. Friend of ours down in Dorset keeps his garage full of jerrycans of petrol and his motorboat stocked with Scotch. When the Reds take over he’s ready to zip across to Guernsey. Good thinking. Plan ahead.’

‘I don’t think things are quite that bad,’ David said.

‘Things are bloody awful,’ Sir Malcolm said.

After a suitable pause, David said, ‘I don’t suppose my sister’s been in touch, has she?’

‘No,’ Sir Malcolm said.

‘You don’t know how she is?’

‘Haven’t a clue. Your mother won’t have her spoken of.’

David had an address for Lucy in Glasgow, but had failed to see her at Christmas. Hadn’t tried in fact. From what little he knew of Glasgow, he imagined a grimy tenement near the grimy Clyde, full of wire-haired old women and aggressive little men with impenetrable accents. Broken glass everywhere, for some reason. The idea of standing as a Tory candidate in such a place made him shudder.

‘Of course, your mother’s plan backfired when it came to that money,’ Sir Malcolm said. ‘She thought if that girl didn’t get any there’d be more coming to her. What she forgot was that her mother was as much of a bitch as she is. Which is why you and Freddy got second helpings.’

David said, ‘You might at least call her by her name.’

‘So might you,’ his father said, and then muttered, as if trying to put a face to the name, ‘Lucy.’

‘You know she’s in Glasgow?’ David said.

‘What on earth’s she doing there?’

‘Supporting the shipyard workers.’

‘Oh for God’s sake,’ Sir Malcolm said. He lapsed into silence, puffing angrily at his cigar and periodically inspecting the bright red spots on his handkerchief.

David drank his coffee. In both social and business situations he was party to a lot of worried talk about the coming revolution, couched in the same language he’d heard at the presentation at Brighton. He picked up hints of connections between SAS operations in Northern Ireland and something called the Resistance and Psychological Operations Committee. There were mentions of ‘volunteer forces’ and ‘retained counter-insurgency units’. Words like ‘safety’ and ‘action’ and ‘freedom’ stood out from the shadowy mass of such talk.
Constant vigilance
. ‘Have you read that thriller by Douglas Hurd?
Scotch on the Rocks
? Bit of fun, but, believe me, it could happen. If not the Nats then the Reds. More likely the Reds.’ To the people who talked in this way it was a game, David thought,
but a serious one nonetheless. He played along, nodding and saying very little. Couldn’t do any harm. Anyway, there were some truly dangerous people in the unions. And in Labour. If it came to it, he knew which side he’d be on.

§

The chief beauty of the Islington flat was that he lived there on his own. He could afford to. It was a little out of the way, beyond the Circle Line – the outer limit of London as far as most of his political connections were concerned – but it suited him well to be somewhat apart. It was a sanctuary, the place he could retreat to when, as it did every month or so, the need to indulge himself became intolerable.

After work sometimes, if he had a free evening, he would go up to Soho and, heart pounding, dart into this or that shop. He had an instinct for finding places that didn’t luridly advertise themselves on the street, but that had the kind of material he was looking for. Things, he imagined, had moved on a lot since the
Lady Chatterley
trial: these places were full of magazines whose existence he couldn’t even have dreamed of twelve, thirteen years before.
Shoe Worship
,
Stiletto
,
Heel Boy
. They might have been made especially for him but apparently there were hundreds, thousands, of other men out there with similar desires twisting in their stomachs. He sifted through the magazines, trying to second-guess the contents beneath the sealed cellophane wrappers. Sometimes he got it right, and a whole weekend of frantic but ultimately unsatisfying masturbation ensued; sometimes he got it wrong, and found that these productions were not made especially for him at all. Actually, this was how it was most of the time. That was the thing about porn, it never quite hit the mark. It always disappointed, always promised more than it could deliver, always failed to match the fantasy he thought he had in his head; always, sooner or later, sent him back to the shops for more.

He had a collection of shoes too. A man buying shoes for his wife or his girlfriend wasn’t that rare, the shop assistants didn’t usually blink, even when he went for heels that were cartoonishly high, shoes you could commit murder with. It wasn’t as if he were asking for outlandish sizes such as a man might wear, but still his heart went into overdrive whenever he summoned up the courage to
acquire a new pair. Like the magazines, though, they were dissatisfying even though he longed to be satisfied by them. In the end they were useless without the woman they were meant to go with. There had to be a woman. It didn’t matter who she was, so long as she was right. But there was no such woman. She existed, incompletely, only in his imagination.

Every so often he’d drain himself so thoroughly of his strange desire that he’d think he really had got it out of his system. He was cleansed, healthy, normal. He’d take the shoes out two or three pairs at a time and dump them in litter bins; the same with the porn, thrown triumphantly away on an evening stroll. He strolled, he strode out. He was free. And then a few weeks later, for no reason that he could discern, the thing would be stirring in him again.

He was a young man with prospects and a flat of his own. Girls found him attractive for all the wrong reasons. He was careful to keep at bay the ones who knew other people he knew, the Kensington and Chelsea set. He let himself be chatted up by secretaries, office girls he met in the pub after work. There was a bad experience when he took one back to the flat. They’d kissed a bit on the street, something he felt he had to do, to get to the next stage. He bought a bottle of wine on the way home, to make it easier. They drank a glass or two, then they were in a clinch on the sofa, then on the floor, then he asked her to sit on the sofa again. She indulged him for a while – ‘You’re a legs man, are you?’ – but then he became too much of a legs man, a shoes-and-feet man. ‘Stop it, David.’ He stopped it. ‘You’re weird,’ she said, and hurriedly put herself back together again, looking round the walls of the flat as if they were closing in on her. She left without finishing her wine. He was appalled that he’d frightened her. He meant her no harm. He wasn’t a rapist or a murderer. He was just an ordinary young man with prospects. And a twist.

He met Melissa Braco again, and immediately liked her. Liked her for herself. She was, as his father had put it, a peach. She was also gentle, generous and trusting, and she seemed to enjoy David’s company as much as he enjoyed hers. She was innocent, and experienced London with the open-minded optimism of an innocent, and yet she was not entirely naive. When he talked about his difficult relationship with his parents, she understood. (Hers with her
own parents – she was an only child – was seemingly perfect, a mutual exchange of respect and love.) She sympathised when he talked about Lucy. She tried to relate to people less fortunate than herself. She was the beautiful only daughter of rich people and David realised that he would never meet anybody more likely to make him a better wife. They got on so well, in fact, that he would have spilled out his heart to her, confessing his deviation (he thought of it as such now, a kind of sexual wrong-turning, kinder-sounding than ‘perversion’) and asking her to help him overcome it, except for one astonishing thing: for three, six, nine months, for the whole first year of their relationship, it was not there. It had vanished utterly, was never in his thoughts unless he thought about its absence; it simply wasn’t an issue at all. It was all her doing, he concluded. He had met the girl who put all that sad obsession into perspective and made it worthless. They had fumbling, cosy, slightly apologetic sex, and, both being virgins, thought their pleasure and performance adequate and the start of something deep and lasting that would only get better. They were in love. Yes, David decided, that was what it must be. For the first time in his life, he felt content.

Even the two sets of parents, who despite their shared political allegiance had always viewed each other with suspicion, seemed pleased. On a Saturday in late September 1973, between the military coup in Chile and the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East, at Glenallan Parish Kirk and afterwards at the Monkbarns House Hotel, David, son of Sir Malcolm and Lady Patricia Eddelstane, and Melissa, daughter of Roderick and Julia Braco, were married.

§

Billy and Barbara had been an item for nearly ten years. They’d been to university together, then to teacher-training college. He was a historian, she was a mathematician, both teaching in Glasgow schools. They made the occasional trip to Wharryburn, and Don was always welcoming but Barbara knew she wasn’t liked by Liz. Mostly they stayed away.

They lived a couple of streets apart, near Victoria Park, but spent nearly all their time at Barbara’s. When her flatmate moved out it
made financial and practical sense for Billy to move in with her. For a while they said nothing to anyone about this new arrangement. Eventually, however, it could no longer be disguised. Barbara’s mother didn’t object, but there was a row with Liz, especially when it became clear that they had no intention of getting married. Barbara said she didn’t believe in marriage as an institution, and Billy agreed with her. They didn’t come back to Wharryburn for a while after that.

Living together
. Don felt uncomfortable about it at first, but was amazed at how rapidly he got used to the idea, and how little he cared. He had another son who was likely to end up behind bars, so did it matter at all? No, except for the rift it opened up between Liz and himself. ‘So much for them gaun their ain ways,’ she said pointedly. ‘Why cast that up tae me?’ he said. ‘They’ve proved their commitment so why no accept it?’ ‘It’s their commitment I dinna like,’ Liz said. ‘Well, as lang as they’re no mairrit they can aye split up easy enough, is that what ye want?’ Don said. ‘What kind o basis for a relationship is that?’ Liz demanded, and Don threw his arms up in surrender. The basis of
their
relationship was that they’d made their bed years ago and they’d lie in it till doomsday. Fine, he just wished for a wee bit more when they were there. From himself as much as from her. Not that long back he’d overheard a woman on the bus say in too loud a whisper to her friend: ‘My man’s good tae me noo. He kens no tae bother me.’ And he imagined Liz saying something similar to Joan Drummond or Betty Mair and curled up inside at the thought.