And the Land Lay Still (8 page)

‘Do? She doesn’t have a job, if that’s what you mean. She never used to have, anyway.’ Never normally reluctant to lambast the idle rich, he sounded slightly repelled by the idea of Jean having to work. He turned away from Julie and said to Mike, ‘She was involved in a bookshop but that was ages ago. The thing about her is she gathers people around her. There’s always a get-together of some kind at Jean’s. Always something going on.’

‘Sounds good,’ Julie said, sounding doubtful.

Mike was also unconvinced. ‘Yes, it does,’ he said – to Julie, because he wanted to counter the way Angus was excluding her – and then, to Angus, ‘So have you got an address or something?’

‘That’s the thing. She’s just off the Royal Mile. I could take you there, but I couldn’t tell you the name of the close or the house number. It’s not that easy to find.’

‘Great,’ Mike said. ‘This is going to be simple, isn’t it? Do you even have a phone number?’

‘It’s been more than twenty years,’ Angus said. ‘She didn’t have a phone then.’

‘Maybe she’s not there any more,’ Julie said, trying to stay in the conversation.

‘
She
won’t have gone anywhere,’ he said. There was an unpleasant edge to his voice now. ‘Jean’s steadfast, a fixture.’ Outside, the loch and the land lay still, but in the room the atmosphere was suddenly bristling. ‘Look,’ Angus said, ‘sooner or later you’re bound to come across her. Edinburgh’s a village. Just remember her name, Jean Barbour.’

He’d known her in the late 1940s, early 1950s, he said. He wasn’t long out of the army, and was working freelance for magazines, mostly, although he had a brief spell at the
Scotsman
. He always tried to look for the pictures nobody else was taking. Often he simply turned the camera away from the obvious subject and photographed something in its shadow, or somebody looking at it. The ridiculous next to the sublime, the commonplace made special by association. That was all there was to it. It was then that someone came up with the ‘Angus angle’ tag. He didn’t like it much but it opened a few doors. There was plenty to photograph in Edinburgh – it was the early days of the Festival and there were all kinds of characters on the streets and in the pubs. And Jean Barbour, whom he met in this bookshop, had also recently arrived but somehow she had a lot of contacts. She moved between two Edinburghs, the semi-bohemian festival city and the poker-faced Presbyterian one, and she was useful.

‘Useful?’ Julie said.

‘She made herself useful, yes,’ Angus said. ‘She knew a lot of people.’

It was obvious to Mike that Jean and Angus had been lovers. Julie saw it too. The word ‘useful’ seemed to goad her into action. She stood up, said she was going to make some food, and went through to the kitchen. Mike thought she was stifling tears. Angus made a face and Mike thought, aye, if it was me I’d cry, you bastard.

‘I’ll go and give her a hand,’ he said, getting out of his chair.

‘If you see her, tell her I’m asking for her. Jean, I mean,’ Angus said.

§

Edinburgh in the early 1970s had a special, dowdy kind of magic, especially in streaming, wind-chilled winter: the marvellous and the mundane inhabiting the same stairs, worlds of night and day rubbing shoulders both begrudgingly and with relish, often without
acknowledgement and sometimes without realising it. Shoppers at a bus stop might breathe in a hint of marijuana drifting from some shaded window and, not knowing what it was, find this exotic invasion of their senses oddly, dreamily pleasant. Tourists perambulating the cobbled streets of the New Town could remark on the quiet, sober appearance of a particular Georgian terrace, unaware of the brothel operating behind one solid, firmly shut door. In lanes behind the noble, upright department stores of Princes Street drunk men swayed and vomited, while a few yards away, in Rose Street pubs, staff from Jenners and R. W. Forsyth jostled to get served alongside rugby players, actors, bankers and Lallans-spouting poets. In Marchmont and Stockbridge young women yawned and poured themselves more vodka while their boyfriends did the cheese-shop sketch from Monty Python yet again. In the Old Town, nationalistic students at all-night parties roared, over and over, the chorus of a new song they’d recently, imperfectly, learned: ‘Flower of Scotland’. They said ‘Kiss my arse’ in Gaelic and discussed the proposition ‘It’s Scotland’s Oil’ until the sun came up and they could no longer sing or speak. Up the Dalry Road folk put Billy Connolly on the hi-fi, cracking up as he went on about jobbies and willies, and recognising themselves in his outrageous jokes. Jakies in coats that smelled like hill sheep slipped into oblivion in the Grassmarket. Book-laden, bespectacled academics trailed between the university and the National Library. Beacon-nosed advocates in High Street bars patronised hippyish, long-limbed feminists whose politics they dismissed as infantile, and the feminists were mildly flattered by the attentions of middle-aged men they in theory, and when sober, despised. Businessmen going home to their families in the suburbs diverted of an evening to Calton Hill, searching among the trees or gravestones for some nameless stranger and a brief release from their hypocrisy. All over the city there was hypocrisy, and irony, and heroism: fabulous views from despoiled viewpoints, squalor and refinement propping each other up, dissolution in progress behind impregnable façades, and dreams of glory in crumbling tenements.

Into all this, at the age of eighteen, Mike Pendreich wandered, an innocent. He came with a purpose – to be a photographer. He was enrolled at the art college to do drawing and painting. There wasn’t a degree course in photography then, but he could do it as an
elective. He was inspired by Angus and wanted to emulate him. And, like all sons following on the trail of their fathers, he wanted in time to surpass him.

Edinburgh to him was like a place out of legend or a fantastic novel. It had seven hills, a castle on one of them, neo-Athenian ruins on another, and on a third, Arthur’s Seat – which was not far short of being a mountain – a flock of sheep. The great area of the city that stretched from there westward, from Holyrood to Tollcross, was soiled and seedy and vibrant. In the old streets of the Southside, he found plenty to intrigue him: a mysterious bookshop that sold titles no other shop stocked; pubs stained and rich with the smoke of pipe tobacco and the smell of sweet black sixty-shilling ale, places so narrow men had to shuffle themselves like cards in order to get served; steamy, dripping cafés patronised by noisy crowds of upper-class students, who adored the chipped cups, the tarnished cutlery, the chewable tea and especially the abuse heaped on them by the coarse-tongued women who served them; sweaty markets and small, incense-hazy shops selling records, posters, Afghan coats, Navajo jewellery, tie-dyed T-shirts, cheesecloth smocks, denim jackets and cowboy boots. In all this there was a sense of something about to happen, of things already happening in rooms just out of sight and reach.

And there was Sandy Bell’s – the pub where Angus had taken pictures fifteen, twenty years before: of Hamish Henderson, the folklorist; of Stuart MacGregor, the wild medical student who’d sung of the men building the hydro schemes in the Highlands; and of numerous other singers, musicians and neglected geniuses. It was still going strong: any night of the week you could reckon on some decent music to go with your pint, and there was always a chance that Hamish – or one or more of his cronies – would drop in. Mike found his way there early on. Apart from anything else it was en route from the college to his digs in Newington.

And it was in Sandy Bell’s one November night that, as Angus had predicted, Jean’s name came up in conversation. Mike was standing on his own but – the way it sometimes happens in a crowded pub – not in isolation. In the back of the bar a guy with a guitar was alternating between Jacobite laments and protest songs. To one side of Mike a heated political discussion was in progress.
There were three men involved: a long-haired, long-bearded student in an army-surplus greatcoat; a bald man in a biker’s leather jacket; and a middle-aged-looking guy in a brown duffelcoat. The argument had started about Chile, where two months before the elected socialist government had been ousted by a military coup led by General Pinochet. The question was whether Allende, the deposed president, had shot himself or been killed by soldiers. The student in the greatcoat was emphatic that Allende had been murdered. This was an article of faith to him: it was inconceivable that the fascists were not responsible. The biker, on the other hand, didn’t think it mattered either way: his understanding was that the Allende regime had been corrupt and on the point of collapse anyway. The man in the duffelcoat seemed to float between them, saying ‘Aye’ and ‘Maybe’ but not much else. When they ran out of things to say about Chile, Greatcoat wanted to know what the biker thought about what was going on closer to home. The National Union of Mineworkers had announced an overtime ban; the electricity engineers and train drivers had done the same; and now Ted Heath, the Prime Minister, had countered by declaring a state of emergency. Where did he stand on
that
, then? Duffelcoat nodded fervently and waited for the biker’s answer.

On Mike’s other side, listening to the singer and throwing occasional, irritated glances at this trio, stood a heavy, hard-faced man who looked like he could deck the lot of them with a single punch and might be about to do so.

The biker said he’d noticed there was a stock of candles behind the bar and if Ted Heath was calling it an emergency
he
called
that
pretty smart planning by the Sandy Bell’s staff.

‘Call it what you like,’ Greatcoat said. ‘It’s not a state of emergency, it’s state repression. You can’t impose a pay freeze on the workers while prices are going up. It’s totally unjust.’

‘Well, there’s a freeze on prices too,’ the biker said.

‘Yeah, but there’s still inflation, isn’t there?’ Greatcoat said. ‘Why is it always the workers who have to make all the sacrifices? The bosses are still lining their own nests.’

‘There won’t be any nests left soon,’ the biker said. ‘Everything’s falling to bits. If you ask me, the whole fucking country’s fucked.’

‘Aye, but who’s responsible?’ Greatcoat insisted. ‘You can’t blame
the NUM for defending their members’ interests. You’ve got to blame Heath and his cronies.’

‘Moscow’s interests, more like,’ the biker said.

‘You think the NUM’s been infiltrated?’ Duffelcoat said, suddenly enlivened.

‘Aye, I do,’ the biker said.

‘No way, man,’ Greatcoat said. ‘That’s bullshit. Capitalist propaganda. The system’s crumbling so they need to find an external enemy. Typical diversionary tactic.’

‘Everybody’s been infiltrated,’ the biker said. He was looking across at Mike, as if for support, even though he wasn’t part of the discussion. ‘The unions, the universities, the boardrooms. They’re all riddled, one way or the other.’

‘The political parties,’ Duffelcoat said.

‘Aye, sure,’ the biker said. ‘Them too. Commies in the Labour Party, fascists in the Tories, all kinds of weird sects in the Liberals.’

‘And in the SNP,’ Duffelcoat said.

‘What’s wrong with being a communist?’ Greatcoat said. ‘
I’m
a communist. I’m a Trotskyist actually – a
true
communist.’

‘Nobody’s what they seem,’ the biker said. And he glanced over at Mike again.

‘Plenty of nutters in the SNP, eh?’ Duffelcoat said. He’d clocked the biker’s glance and followed it. Mike felt he was being assessed in two different ways. There was something about the way Duffelcoat watched everybody.

‘Oh, don’t let me get started on them,’ Greatcoat said.

‘No, don’t,’ the big man next to Mike said under his breath.

‘The Scottish Nutter Party,’ the biker said.

‘Tartan Tories,’ Greatcoat said. ‘What’s the difference between a London capitalist and a Scottish capitalist? Four hundred miles and a kilt. The SNP are a bunch of wankers.’

‘That’s not what they seem to think in Govan,’ Mike said, surprising himself as much as the others. The previous week the SNP had triumphed over Labour in a by-election in Glasgow Govan. It was a depressed, deprived, overwhelmingly working-class constituency and it should have been rock-solid for Labour. But a feisty young woman called Margo MacDonald had snatched the seat for the SNP with a 26 per cent swing.

Greatcoat seemed to welcome somebody new to argue with. ‘A one-off,’ he said. ‘If you ask me, they were voting with their dicks. They were mesmerised by the blonde bombshell.’

‘Even the women?’ Mike said.

‘Very funny,’ Greatcoat said. ‘Listen, it was a by-election, a flash in the pan. They’ll come to their senses. The last thing the Scottish worker needs is to be diverted from the class struggle by pipe dreams about independence.’

‘What about Vietnam?’ Mike said. ‘Or Ireland? I take it you’re not opposed to them being independent countries?’

Greatcoat rolled his eyes at the biker. ‘Listen to Robert the Bruce,’ he said. ‘That’s totally fucking different. I mean, come
on
, man!’

The biker seemed in two minds about whose view to favour. Duffelcoat was staring at the smoke-yellowed ceiling.

‘It’s just that I’ve noticed,’ Mike said, ‘that there’s always one rule for Scotland when it comes to independence, and another rule for everyone else.’

He was aware that the big man had turned slightly and was listening to what he was saying. It made him nervous.

‘In Vietnam,’ Greatcoat said, with the patience he might show a small child, ‘the class struggle and the anti-imperialist struggle are the same thing. The SNP isn’t a working-class movement, it’s a bourgeois pressure group.’

‘Oh,’ Mike said. ‘My mistake then. I hadn’t realised.’ He was trying to be ironic, but Greatcoat seemed to take it as an admission of ideological backsliding and gave him a patronising smile. Greatcoat and the biker moved on to some new subject. Mike stepped away.

The big man had ordered himself another pint. As the barman was pouring it the man nudged Mike and nodded towards the singer, who was retuning his guitar between songs.