And the Land Lay Still (77 page)

§

It was the era of postcards selling sex. They filled the interiors of phone boxes from Euston to Charing Cross. When you went into some of them around Leicester Square you could hardly see out through the glass for postcards. That was good, as it meant no one could see in as you pretended to make a call to your wife or bank manager while you read the invitations. Every sexual service, every deviant desire you could imagine, was stuck up there, with phone numbers and photos, or with old-fashioned line drawings that David Eddelstane found more subtly enticing. And sure enough, when he looked, there were cards for what he thought he wanted. He picked them off and stuffed them in his coat pocket. His hand trembled as if at any moment the door would be forced open and the world would be outside pointing and jeering at him. Get a grip, he told himself, nobody cares. It isn’t anybody’s business but yours. But it was, because he was an elected representative of the people. It would be everybody’s business if they ever found out. In the Islington flat – which he’d held on to all through the 1970s and was now very pleased he had, as the street had become extremely desirable and the place was worth six times what he’d paid for it – he shuffled the cards in wonder and fear. There was one that kept coming
to the top of the pile. It was inevitable that he would eventually dial the number.

‘I know what you want, love,’ the woman at the other end of the line said. ‘You come and see me and I’ll make you happy.’ He asked a question or two, and she supplied the right answers. She gave him the address and a time, and he went. Walked up and down past the door, round the corner, was he going to do this, was he really going to do it? If there was a newshound on his trail he’d be better off the street than hanging about like an idiot, so back he went, terrified, and rang the bell.

Terrified was what she expected. She was older than he’d assumed from her voice, but that was okay; in fact it was reassuring. Somehow he persuaded himself he could trust her because she was older. He felt the years falling away even as she invited him to sit down and tell her again what he wanted. Then she instructed him to undress. He was a little boy again. ‘You’re here and you don’t even know why,’ she said, ‘but I do. I know what you want before you ask for it.’ He thought he was going to swoon. ‘Relax,’ she said. ‘Deep breaths. This can take as long as you like. You and I are going on a journey together.’

§

Here is a situation: a country that is not fully a country, a nation that does not quite believe itself to be a nation, exists within, and as a small and distant part of, a greater state. The greater state was once a very great state, with its own empire. It is no longer great, but its leaders and many of its people like to believe it is. For the people of the less-than country, the not-quite nation, there are competing, conflicting loyalties. They are confused. For generations a kind of balance has been maintained. There has been give and take, and, yes, there have been arguments about how much give and how much take, but now something has changed. There is a sense of injustice, of neglect, of vague or real oppression. Nobody is being shot, there are no political prisoners, there is very little censorship, but still that sense persists:
this is wrong
. It grows. It demands to be addressed. The situation needs to be fixed.

So there are gatherings and debates. There are long arguments in pubs and round kitchen tables. People write discussion papers, and
meet to discuss them. There are music sessions, poetry readings, lectures and political seminars. There are statements of principle, voices of dissent, angry walkouts. There are lines people will not cross, but which, on reflection, they will. There are conversations and compromises. People learn how to talk to each other and how to listen, because the alternative is endless defeat. Gradually it becomes possible for a kind of socialism and a kind of nationalism to exist in the same person, in the same room, in the same political party. And these locations, private and public, no longer have to be battle zones.

There were magazines recording and encouraging this process of self-exploration. They were small-scale, low-budget, sporadic affairs, and their sales were tiny – a few hundred, a very few thousand – but the people running them weren’t doing it for the sales. They were doing it to address that pervasive sense of wrongness. And the people who read them – culturally aware, politically active people – were hungry for what they provided. More than anything, perhaps, the magazines said:
you are not alone
.

Mike knew this because it was how he felt. He read the magazines from cover to cover. They filled the gaps of what he didn’t learn from Adam or from his wider reading. They gave him the sense that he belonged to a political community that was not being dictated to or managed by the mainstream parties. There was an undercurrent of desire for change, and these publications and anyone involved with them, even if only as a reader, were part of it.

Gavin Shaw was on the editorial board of one.
Root & Branch
, it was called. At the time of the Glasgow conference it had produced only a couple of issues. He came round to the Tollcross flat one evening, on the off chance, so he said, of catching Mike in. Mike made coffee and they sat in the kitchen turning the pages of the first two issues. ‘We’re trying to build bridges, open dialogues,’ Gavin explained. ‘What will this country look like in ten or twenty years? We take the view that any viable future for Scotland has to include a strong measure of self-government – let’s not be more specific than that – but otherwise we don’t have a fixed agenda. We’ll publish contributions from anybody if they have something interesting or innovative to say.’

Everybody involved with the magazine, he said, wanted to
improve the general design and layout, and to make the covers more striking without increasing the costs too much. Also, they badly needed photographs – other than those they borrowed or stole from elsewhere, which tended to be of poor quality – to illustrate some of the articles with.

‘Adam’s talked to me a bit about this,’ Mike said. ‘He thought –’

‘He thought you might lend a hand,’ Gavin said. ‘He helps out a bit, but he’s too busy with other things. And you’ve got some of the skills we need. There’s no money in it, of course. You’d be like the rest of us – doing it for the cause.’

‘For the cause?’

‘Totally.’

‘A lot of the work I do is like that.’

‘I know. That’s why I’m asking you.’

‘I can’t really afford the time.’

‘I know. None of us can.’

‘On the other hand …’

‘Yes?’

‘… can I afford not to?’

‘That’s how we all feel.’

‘Okay. Count me in.’

‘Brilliant. There’s an editorial meeting tomorrow evening. Are you free?’

‘What’s tomorrow, Wednesday? Yes, I can do that. I can’t do Thursdays or Fridays, I work in a restaurant those nights. That’s just for future reference.’

Gavin held out his hand. ‘We’ll bear it in mind.’

§

Mike has a complete set of
Root & Branch
on his shelves at Cnoc nan Gobhar. Because it was run on a shoestring budget, the magazine relied on income from sales of one issue to pay the printers for the next, and its appearance was therefore irregular. It also depended on the willingness of its contributors to write for nothing. To have produced twenty-five issues under these conditions seems now not far short of miraculous. Once every two or three months, armed with scalpels, steel rules and Tipp-Ex, the entire editorial team gathered for a weekend, and spent it cutting up the bromide sheets
of typeset text, spray-mounting them and sticking them down by hand, page by page, before delivering the whole thing to the printer. Then, when the printed copies came back, another evening was devoted to sending them off to subscribers, and packing orders to bookshops, art galleries, health-food shops and other outlets. A meeting to plan the next issue followed hard on that, and the routine of commissioning, writing and image-gathering would begin again. Even then it was a process being superseded by new technological advances. Tw0 decades on, it seems antique to Mike, belonging to another age altogether.

Sometimes he’ll pull an issue down and glance through it, and is still surprised by the range of people who wrote for the magazine: ecologists, feminists, anarchists, churchmen, poets, playwrights, filmmakers, historians, social scientists, retired diplomats, civil servants, and politicians and party workers of every hue – even some renegade pro-devolution Tories. Some of those contributors are dead, some retired, but others are senior members of governments in either Edinburgh or London, and many of the non-politicians have become prominent in their own fields. The rebels became professors, the barbarians walked through the palace gates and took over. And not a shot was fired.

Mike remembers clearly the night Gavin asked him to be involved. He had no hesitation in saying yes. He attended the meeting the next evening and from then on, for five years, supplied photographs, designed covers, worked on the layout, and rediscovered his schoolboy talent for cartooning. Others, led by Gavin, later joined by his cousin Ellen Imlach, drove the magazine editorially. Mike was happy in his back-room role. There were other, more visible, magazines with similar agendas that achieved much more in political terms, but Mike still feels a touch of pride when he looks at a copy of
Root & Branch
. And yet the argument that was conducted in its pages, as it was in the pages of those other journals, should not have been necessary. What was it again? It was, in the end, so convincingly won that it is hard to reconstruct it. Did the professors, when they were rebels, have a clearer sense of direction than he did? It seemed at the time that they did, but perhaps that wasn’t the case. Sometimes, he thinks, the surest thing you do is a confused scuffle with fate. You push forward into the dark, not with certainty but
with determination. If you keep going forward, you may eventually come out of the dark and into a place you recognise.

It wasn’t until the years of
Root & Branch
that Mike really got to know Ellen, even though when he was first with Adam she was already living in Joppa with Robin Piggott and their daughter, Kirsty. Only Kirsty wasn’t their daughter, not Robin’s anyway. They behaved as if she was, but there was a story there Mike did not know, and that even Gavin and Adam seemed in the dark about. Whatever had happened in the past, Mike decided, it was none of his business. Robin was working for himself. Kirsty was in primary school. Ellen seemed happy. She’d published her first, slim, sparky book,
The Other Lady Macbeth
, a few years before and was at work on a second. The first had been attacked not only by some male reviewers but also, with greater ferocity, by both radical and conservative women. ‘I must have got something right,’ Ellen said. Her journalistic skills and freely donated opinion pieces were major assets for the magazine.

Robin didn’t like to stray far from his nest, so he usually took care of Kirsty after school. Occasionally, following an editorial meeting or some other evening event, Ellen would go with Mike and Adam to Jean Barbour’s for an hour or two. From what Mike remembers, Ellen seemed to enjoy the atmosphere and the conversations, but then would come those moments when everybody had to hush for a song or a story. The fact was, she and Jean didn’t get on. Ellen disliked or was jealous of Jean for having never had to work for a living – and for being, as she saw it, self-indulgent. She baulked at the sight of grown-up people sitting on the floor like schoolchildren before their teacher. On the one hand she thought ‘tradition’ was another word for ‘conformity’; on the other she used to get annoyed at Jean’s penchant for twisting postmodernist knots into the tales she told. If that was what she was doing. ‘Either tell them straight,’ Ellen complained, ‘or don’t tell them at all.’ Eventually she stopped coming, after being asked once too often to keep her voice down.

For her part, Jean disliked the self-righteous streak in Ellen and thought her opinions insubstantial. It was true, Ellen’s book wasn’t remarkable for its footnotes or extensive bibliography, but that wasn’t the point: the point was she wrote cracking polemic. She
was also almost as critical of female behaviour – the ambitions, deceits and treacheries of her various Lady Macbeths – as she was of men, and this was what drew the feminist as well as the chauvinist guns on her. Ellen didn’t care. Mike remembers going out to Joppa one day: Robin answered the door and said, ‘Welcome to Dunsinane,’ and there was Ellen behind him, roaring with laughter. As if the whole thing, the serious import of her book, were nothing but an enormous joke. ‘Don’t believe a word you read,’ she told Mike. ‘Not just in my book. Any book.’ She had in her, she said, in more or less equal quantities, a thirst for the truth and a conviction that there was no such thing. ‘All stories are lies, Mike. The secret is to work out how big the lie is. That’s why we keep believing in a thing called truth. It doesn’t exist but we can’t help looking for it. It’s one of the most endearing of human failings.’

§

Liz stood in the bay window of the drawing room, looking down on the world, and it was green and alive and unbearably beautiful. For weeks now, months, something had been wrong and she could no longer deny it. Even this view didn’t stop the sick feeling she had about herself. It wasn’t that she was in any particular pain, although there
were
pains, sudden and sharp and insidious, it was more the constant exhaustion that told her she was in trouble. Her energy was gone by mid-morning. Lately she’d been stopping twenty minutes early and having a coffee to recover, before walking slowly home down the hill. Then she would sleep for an hour, sometimes longer. She didn’t tell Don about this. But Don would be retired soon and then she wouldn’t be able to hide it from him.

She could hardly believe it but she’d been working for Mrs Cotter twenty years. They’d agreed a few years back – about the same time Mrs Cotter finally said, ‘Liz, this is ridiculous, please call me Elaine’ – to cut her hours to two days a week, but even at that there was very little to do. Maybe she should retire herself, she was old enough, she was already drawing her pension. But if she quit she wouldn’t ever have the house to herself again. And if she couldn’t come to the house then whatever was wrong wouldn’t go away even for those few hours. But the reality was that it didn’t go away. She was going to have to do something.