And the Land Lay Still (7 page)

‘That’s assuming you have all the right pieces,’ Mike says. ‘Which means you’re relying on somebody else. Somebody else already made the jigsaw puzzle, the picture, and cut it up, and put it in the plastic bag.’

‘Right,’ she says. ‘Well, that’s okay up to a point. The storyteller has to get her material from elsewhere. But I’m bothered by the idea that somebody else already made the picture. So maybe a story is more like a painting than a jigsaw.
You’re
the creator, but you’re working from life, putting what you see on the canvas but with your own take on it. And when it’s finished, there are all kinds of things going on at once, and you can look at the whole thing or you can look at the detail, but it’s all there, all the parts moving in and out of one another. Like a complex piece of machinery – working, but captured, held. Motionless motion.’

‘Suspended animation,’ Mike says. ‘Like a photograph, in other words.’

‘Aye,’ she says. ‘Like a photograph. Okay. Jigsaw puzzle, painting, photograph. Now we’re getting somewhere. Or are we? It’s complicated, isn’t it? Maybe one shouldn’t analyse this stuff too much.’

Another silence. Mike thinks about the complexity and the simplicity of taking a photograph. The tens of thousands he’s taken over the years, each one part of a narrative, following on from the one before, preceding the next. Could he have taken them in a different order? He thinks about what happens when he selects one
image out of, say, every ten or fifty or hundred he takes. How the narrative is reduced, fractured. How the chain is broken. He thinks about Angus, doing it all before him.

‘Dad would have said,
don’t
analyse. As a photographer you just have to be there, take the shot. He’d have said it was partly skill and mostly chance.’

‘I know that’s what he thought,’ Jean says, ‘but I think he was wrong. I envied him, you know. He didn’t seem to have to try. Yes, you have to be there at the right moment, but there’s something else. That’s why I never liked that phrase, “the Angus angle”. It always struck me as being lazy journalese. It suggests that all he was doing was bending down and getting the angle right, the exposure, the focus, ticking those technical boxes. Well, you can have all the technical skill in the world, but that’s not enough. If you’re really good, there’s an instinct in there too, an extra layer of knowledge. You learn it by experience, but it’s like you always had it deep inside. Do you see?’

‘I used to argue with him in just that way,’ Mike says. ‘There has to be more to it than chance, I’d say. A photographer’s an artist, what you do is art. He’d say no, it’s about technique, the quality of your camera equipment and how well you operate it and even then there are too many other external factors – light, movement, colour – for you to be fully in control. An artist makes something, he’d say, I just record what already exists. In the end I gave up arguing, and one of the reasons was because in a way he was right. We don’t really know what we’re creating, we just take the opportunity. In that sense, we’re all chancers.’

‘Well,’ she says, ‘I still think being a chancer takes a certain amount of expertise.’

They sit in contemplation while the gas fire hisses at their pretensions. Then Mike says, ‘So what is it, this story you want to tell? The one with no beginning, no middle and no end. What’s it about?’

‘It’s what you said earlier,’ she says. ‘It’s about us, all of us. It’s the story we’re in.’ And then, after another silence, she adds, ‘But I’m not likely to be in it much longer. Which is maybe why I don’t want it to be finite, why I’m rebelling against the tyranny of time.’

‘But you’re not rebelling,’ he says. ‘You’re not fighting to stay alive. You’re letting go.’

‘That is rebelling,’ she says. ‘Challenging the orthodoxy. Anyway, it’s different. That’s life and death.’

‘The simplest chronology of all,’ Mike says.

§

The divorce was completed in 1965. Angus rented a flat in Glasgow and bought a run-down house, for virtually nothing, at Cnoc nan Gobhar on the north coast of Sutherland. He must have taken note of the location on the family holiday of the previous year. ‘I need a bolt-hole,’ he told Michael, the first time he brought him there. ‘Somewhere I can escape to every so often. This is perfect.’ He paid Isobel whatever she was due, paid the school fees, and then carried on behaving the way he always had.

It’s not hard for Mike to see, in retrospect, how his father operated. He was such a handsome, intelligent charmer that he didn’t have to try very hard to have women fall in love with him. When he and Isobel got married, perhaps she really believed that he would settle down and be hers alone for ever, but it was never going to be like that. Angus enjoyed the company of women – women other than the one he was with – too much. He couldn’t resist making them unable to resist him. He was a wanderer in other ways too. When the Pendreichs still all lived together in the semi-detached villa in Doune that Isobel had inherited from her parents (who were dead before Michael was conscious of them being alive), Angus would go off for a day’s hillwalking, even in the foulest weather, rather than stay at home to be tortured by domesticity. And if there was the possibility of a job that would take him away, anywhere in the British Isles or, for preference, abroad, he would grab it.

So Michael was used to not seeing his father for long periods, even before the divorce. After it, the phone would sometimes ring early on a Saturday morning during the school holidays, and Michael would rush to answer it before his mother could, and it would be Angus saying he was in Glasgow and did he fancy a day out? He’d arrive an hour later, honking his horn outside the gate so that none of them had to bear the strain of him and Isobel failing to communicate. They’d go to Edinburgh or Glasgow, to see a film or an exhibition and go for a meal. When Michael got home Isobel would ask what they had done, and sniff at what he told her. It was all very well for his father to appear once in a blue moon and spoil him but
what about her? How did he think it made her feel, after all she did for him? And she was right and justified and Michael despised her for it, and longed for the next time the phone would ring.

Even better, Angus would turn up at Kilsmeddum Castle, unannounced, during term. He would time it so as to arrive at the end of morning classes on a Saturday, and take Michael to Perth for the rest of the day. The school objected, of course, but Angus overruled the objections: he was paying good money to have his son educated there and he reserved the right to remove him whenever it suited him. The school would subsequently complain to Isobel, who would forbid Michael to go with his father if he tried it again. When he tried it again, Michael would at once go with him. They saw
Where Eagles Dare
,
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
,
Diamonds are Forever
,
Soldier Blue
(gleefully sneaking Michael in since it carried an X certificate). They ate Chinese, Wimpy and anything else exotic that Perth had to offer. For Michael, the trouble that ensued at school and at home on these occasions was easily worth it.

It was on one of these outings that Angus presented him with his first
real
camera. Up to then he’d played around with a couple of cheap and easy models, but he was ready for something more challenging. He wanted something new but what he got was a second-hand Pentax Spotmatic, a model that had only been around for three or four years. It was the first serious camera to have a built-in light meter that really worked: you focused first, then flicked a switch to activate the metering system, and set the shutter speed and aperture yourself by lining up two needles in the viewfinder. The great virtue of the Spotmatic was its simplicity; Michael learned a huge amount about light exposure and depth of field by the time-tested method of trial and error.

And then there was Sutherland. Every summer, Angus spent a month at Cnoc nan Gobhar, and Michael would go by train to join him for the middle two weeks of his stay. These were the times when he first became ‘Mike’, and this was another bond between father and son, since Isobel was averse to his being anything or anyone but ‘Michael’. They barbecued sausages and burgers in front of the house, went for huge walks into deserted glens, climbed the great hulks of Ben Klibreck and Ben Hope, fished in lochs and rivers and afterwards sat together, Angus drinking pints of beer and Mike half-pints of shandy, in musty, antler-festooned, wood-panelled bars
where no one ever questioned Mike’s age. Sometimes they drove over to the west, camped by the white beaches of Assynt, swam in the ice-cold Atlantic, and greedily viewed the strange mountains of those parts: Suilven, Stac Pollaidh, Quinag. And they did work on the house, or Angus engaged others to do it, men like Murdo’s uncle, while they played. For eight successive years they had these fortnights together, all through Mike’s years at boarding school, and he loved them, and loved his father because of them.

Often there was a woman, Angus’s latest, at the cottage: always younger than him, always bonnie, smiling and kind to Mike, behaving
almost
as if she were a wife and mother, and treated by Angus with breathtaking casualness. These women were of a certain type – sunny, ambitious, not very clever. They were often English, or spoke as if they were. They were light and airy and entirely lacked the burden of responsibility that Isobel carried like a cross. They had a breathy confidence that suggested nothing would ever go much wrong in their lives. ‘Your father’s little friends’ was how Isobel described them, as if she felt sorry for them because they did not see that their participation in his life would be only temporary. Whether there was heartbreak when it was over, as it always eventually was, or whether they were actually stronger in themselves than Isobel could ever understand, the following summer Sally or Mandy or Katy would be gone and a successor installed. Mike didn’t mind in the least: he enjoyed being made a fuss of by the little friends, and having vague crushes on them that didn’t quite make sense either to them or to him. There was a Julie who lasted two years, right at the end of the sequence, whom he particularly liked. When he thinks about it now he wonders if it was his fortnight at Cnoc nan Gobhar that precipitated the end of each of these relationships. Angus seemed more or less to abandon the girlfriend as soon as Mike arrived, and by the time he left had probably lost the desire to reconnect with her. And though Mike knew his father was at fault in the way he treated his women, as he had been in the way he treated Isobel, it wasn’t until that second fortnight with Julie that he felt his loyalty diminish a little.

§

He finished at Kilsmeddum at Christmas 1972. He’d had enough of the school and the school had had enough of him. He had the Highers
he needed to go to art college and had filled in the appropriate forms. He was quite skilled at drawing – he’d produced a set of drooling, ghoulish caricatures of the teaching staff of which even the mob approved – but his real interest lay in photography. What was the point of staying on to sit more exams? Angus agreed, and since he paid the fees Isobel couldn’t argue against it. From Christmas until the summer Mike was at home in Doune, taking photographs, drawing, listening to music. To keep Isobel at bay and demonstrate that he had more of a sense of responsibility than his father, he got a part-time job in a local hotel, working in the kitchen. He began to take an interest in food and how to prepare it. Sometimes he’d make the evening meal at home, surprising Isobel with his skills, although she was suspicious of the ingredients he sought out, things that were still almost exotic: garlic, red peppers, pasta that wasn’t macaroni. She was suspicious of anything ‘creative’. If only he’d been inclined towards teaching, or the law, he might have made her happier. She worked part-time as a typist and receptionist for a firm of solicitors in Dunblane, and made futile attempts to interest him in conveyancing. Photography, being what his father did, was bound to end in tears.

They maintained a truce over those months, in order to keep life tolerable. Sometimes they watched TV together. There was a political thriller,
Scotch on the Rocks
, running that spring. A group called the Scottish Liberation Army was busy blowing up statues of Queen Victoria and the toll-booths at the Forth Road Bridge. They kidnapped some Unionist bigwig called Lord Thorganby and for good measure drowned the Secretary of State for Scotland. It was fanciful stuff but it was on the BBC so Isobel watched it with absolute trust, as if it were a documentary. It fed her fears that the country was about to descend into anarchy and it fed Mike’s gut sense that he was some kind of nationalist, even if it wasn’t the M. Lucas kind. At the end of the series the SLA’s rebellion fizzled out and normality was restored, to Isobel’s relief and Mike’s disappointment.

§

It was the final evening of Mike’s stay at Cnoc nan Gobhar, and Angus, Julie and he were in the sitting room, drinking bottles of beer. They’d been outside, catching the last of the sun, but the midges had driven them in. Angus was explaining how he wanted to
make the side window into a door and build a sun lounge on, so that one could go on enjoying the view without being eaten alive. He was going to get Donald MacKay on to it.

‘That’ll be nice,’ Julie said, and Angus said, ‘Yes, it will,’ and the way he said it made Mike think it unlikely that Julie would get the benefit. In the morning Angus was going to take him to the station at Lairg. He’d go back to his hotel job for a few weeks, then he’d be off to Edinburgh, to art college. Angus was about to go to America for three months, and wouldn’t be back until the autumn. Wherever Julie was going, it wasn’t to America.

‘You should look up Jean Barbour when you get to Edinburgh,’ Angus said. ‘She’d love to meet you.’

‘Who’s she?’ Mike said.

‘Just an old pal.’ Angus was on his third beer and was a little drunk. ‘Haven’t seen her for years, but I can’t imagine she’s any different. You’ll like her.’

‘What does she do?’ Julie asked. She gave Mike a smile. They both knew better than to ask how Angus and Jean Barbour had met.