And the Land Lay Still (87 page)

‘I was out of line.’

‘Ye’re closer than ye think.’

They looked at each other. She thought, Charlie Lennie is dead. That’s what I came here to find out. I don’t need to know anything else.

‘I’d better go,’ she said.

He jumped to his feet. ‘Are ye sure? Ye dinna need tae. Ye could wait for Marie and the lassies. They’ll no be lang.’

‘I need to go and see my mother.’

‘They’ll be sorry they missed ye.’ But she knew if she was away before they returned he’d wash her glass and not mention her to them.

They walked across the gravel past the angel or the nymph, whatever she was. At the gate he held out his hand and she took it in both of hers and his other hand came up and joined too, a good hard grasp.

‘Dae ye mind my granny?’ he said.

‘Oh aye, I mind her fine,’ she said. ‘I mind when she died.’

‘She was a wicked auld bitch but I’ll tell ye, she had a great life and we kept her at hame right tae the very end o it. Nooadays folk stick their auld people in nursing hames as soon as they pee the bed. Fucking barbaric that. Nae fucking respect. I thought my gran was a rotten crabbit auld witch but I fucking respected her tae, and I would never hae let her end her days in one o thae shiteholes. And it’ll be the same wi my mither tae. If she canna cope in Spain or doon the road she’ll come here. I look efter my ain. That’s aw ye can dae, Ellen, eh? Look efter your ain and fuck everybody else. Eh?’

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘Maybe you’re right, Denny. But I hope you’re wrong.’

He did the thing with the gadget and the gates swung open and she stepped back on to the road again.

‘I hope I’m wrang tae,’ he said. ‘But I’m no.’

§

Ellen arrived at her mother’s house half an hour after Mike. She apologised for having taken so long. Mary poured her some tea. ‘Whaur were ye?’ she asked.

‘I went to see Denny Hogg. A childhood friend,’ she explained to Mike.

‘Denny Hogg?’ Mary cried. ‘That gangster!’

‘If he’s a gangster he’s been one since he could walk,’ Ellen retorted.

‘Of course he’s a gangster,’ Mary said. ‘Hoo else could he hae a hoose like yon? It’s a ranch, Michael, up on the hill, wi a big wall for keeping the riff-raff oot even though he’s nae better than the rest o us. He thinks he’s J. R. Ewing.’

‘He runs a taxi firm,’ Ellen said.

‘That’s no aw he runs. What did he hae tae say for himsel?’

‘Och, nothing much,’ Ellen said. ‘We were just catching up.’

Mary snorted. ‘He and Ellen used tae play thegither,’ she said. ‘He’s a bad, bad laddie.’

‘Tell me how you got on, Mike,’ Ellen said, unsubtly changing the subject. ‘Did you get any good pictures?’

It wasn’t until they had left Borlanslogie and were driving back to Edinburgh that Denny Hogg’s name came up again.

‘Your ma didn’t seem to have much time for the gangster,’ he said.

‘Denny? No, she doesn’t like him.’

‘You were away for ages.’

‘Denny and I have a long history. He stayed next door to my granny’s house, where I spent a lot of my childhood. Most of it, in fact. He went down the pit but chucked it after a while, and then he got into some trouble and ended up in the jail, but he wasn’t there for long. He’s looked after himself, Denny. He was made for the ’80s: every man for himself, that’s his motto. My mother doesn’t like him because he’s a dealer, or at least he used to be, and because she thinks she knows something else about him. But she doesn’t.’

‘What does she think she knows?’

They were crossing the Forth Bridge and it was gusty but that wasn’t why she gripped the wheel hard and kept her eyes fixed on the carriageway ahead.

‘She thinks he’s Kirsty’s father,’ she said.

‘Ah.’

‘But he isn’t. Her father was a man called Charlie Lennie. It was Denny that introduced me to him. I used to curse him for that, but not any longer. Charlie Lennie’s dead.’ She was quiet for a minute, weighing up what more she wanted to say. ‘I just learned that today,’
she added. ‘I’d thought he might be, but I didn’t know. Denny told me. So I can draw a line. It was a bad relationship. You knew that, didn’t you?’

‘That’s what I guessed.’

‘You guessed right. But that’s it. He’s dead. It’s over.’

‘Do you want to tell me about it?’

‘Not in any more detail than that.’

‘Are you okay?’

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Even if he wasn’t dead I’d be fine.’

‘Will you tell Kirsty?’

‘Aye. I’ll tell her at once. That the father she never knew is dead. And then that’ll be over too.’

‘Did she never meet him?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘And she never wanted to. She has Robin. We both have Robin.’

‘He’s a good man,’ she said.

‘Everybody says that,’ Ellen said. ‘Whenever Robin’s name comes up, people say, “He’s a good man.” And you know something? They’re right.’

§

The article appeared in the
Observer
a few weeks later. Ellen subsequently told Mike that she’d had a row with her mother about what she’d written, but that Mary had said she thought his pictures were good. Mike told Ellen that he’d waited in vain for a comment from his father, and that, eventually, when Mike had phoned him, Angus had said he thought it was a fine piece of writing. ‘And the pictures?’ Mike had asked. (They’d used one of the boys on the roundabout, one of the men in the pub, one of the Co-op women, a shot of the main street and a big spread of the pithead.) ‘Aye,’ he’d said. ‘Not bad.’

‘And that,’ Mike said, ‘was that. Not bad.’

‘Old bastards,’ Ellen said. And they both laughed. What else could they do?

§

It felt like a long drop from Westminster to Glenallan these days. When David Eddelstane came back for weekends, held surgeries,
opened a fête or a new industrial estate, it was sometimes hard to believe that anybody at all had voted for him in 1992. He represented the constituency in the House of Commons but he no longer had a sense of who or what he was representing. Four and a half years on the only friendly faces now belonged to old dears in retirement homes who weren’t quite sure if he was the minister or the doctor. Even businessmen and bank managers – the kind of people whose votes the party had once been so sure of it hadn’t even bothered to take them for granted – even they looked pissed off at him these days. They weren’t going to vote for anybody else but by God, their looks said, you’re asking a lot if you expect an X in the box from us, you shower of arrogant bastards. It wasn’t so much the corruption they objected to – although they didn’t like it – it was the fact that government ministers and MPs kept getting found out. Hardly a week went by without some new scandal being gleefully exposed in the media. The utter futility of John Major’s ‘Back to Basics’ campaign, in the face of wave after oily wave of sleaze washing in, was well beyond a joke. Insider trading, cash for questions, dodgy foreign investments, dodgy foreign arms sales, dodgy everything. And then the sex: multiple adulteries, homosexual affairs, affairs with secretaries, love children with secretaries, toe-sucking mistresses, whipping sessions with rent boys, assignations with prostitutes, death by auto-erotic asphyxiation. (That was the one that always got to him. The tabloids had made their usual saucy meal of it, but it was just tragic, a horrible, lonely tragedy.) There was even talk in some circles that the PM himself wasn’t as pure as the driven snow. And he, David Eddelstane, was included in the general denunciation, even though he’d not been found out. Yet. Not been splattered across the tabloids. Yet.

There was a lot of psychobabble in the media every time a prominent public figure was caught in a compromising situation:
he wanted to be found out, he needed to get caught
. Well, perhaps. But David did not want to be found out. Not for the time being, thank you, no. He’d much prefer to lose his seat and disappear into semi-obscurity first. In fact, once you were semi-obscure, nobody gave a damn about your secrets.

Things had never been the same since the poll tax. Internal party splits over Europe hadn’t helped. Fifteen per cent mortgage interest
rates and the meltdown that followed Black Wednesday had dished the myth that the Conservatives were more financially competent than Labour. Sleaze was the icing on the teetering cake. If David represented anything at all, it wasn’t this particular bit of Scotland at Westminster, it was the Tory Party in this bit of Scotland, and frankly, not only was he not making much of an impression, he’d rather have been flogging tickets for a seal cull at a Greenpeace rally.

How glad he was, after all, that he hadn’t been made a minister of state. There had been a Cabinet reshuffle a couple of years back, and the Member for Stirling, Michael Forsyth, had become Secretary of State for Scotland. Forsyth was an ardent, unrepentant Thatcherite in what was supposed to be a post-Thatcherite age. The story was that when the civil servants at St Andrew’s House heard of his appointment they went around picking windows to leave by. Forsyth had been a hate figure as a junior minister and as Secretary of State he attracted greater unpopularity. He’d just engineered the return of the Stone of Destiny in what looked like a desperate attempt to improve the government’s tartan credentials, but even David could see through that one. Here’s a lump of sandstone, okay? So now you don’t need to bother with this devolution/separation nonsense. David didn’t think that was going to make many people change their views, or their vote. The stone came up from London under military escort and when it crossed the Tweed at Coldstream in an army Land Rover Forsyth was there to meet it. ‘A momentous occasion,’ he was quoted as saying. It was all rather embarrassing, and David was content not to have anything to do with it, and not to be any more closely associated with Mr Forsyth than he already was. Head down, fixed smile, see out the last few months – that was his philosophy now.

The trouble was he was so indecisive. He liked the luxuries and kudos that his life brought him. He liked providing for Melissa and the kids, who were now both students, final year and first year. He’d embraced the wealth and privilege of his own upbringing, and by astute dealings increased the former many times over. Was he to be blamed or brought down for doing what most people in the same circumstances would have done? All right, he could have done a Lucy and rejected the lot, but who’d have gained? Nobody. Not
himself, not Melissa, not his children. Certainly not Lucy, wherever she was. He hadn’t seen her for years, not since that last awful meeting in London, and he doubted he ever would again. The idea that he should have sacrificed everything out of some misplaced sense of guilt was absurd. And yet, and yet. There were times when he wished he wasn’t who he was, times when he wanted to hide away, as he had in childhood from his parents’ monstrous behaviour. Oh for the quiet, obscure life! Well, if he’d really wanted that, he should have resigned at the last election, or the one before that. Got out while the going was relatively good. But he hadn’t, and why not? Because he hadn’t wanted to disturb the tricky balances of his life. And he’d been right not to, because it looked like he was going to make it. The election was less than six months away and it was quite obvious that he was going to lose the seat. He was going to be able to ride out these last months, lose with dignity rather than run like a rat,
then
disappear into the backwoods. He might even end up with a knighthood. Sir David Eddelstane. He wouldn’t need to work, wouldn’t need to do anything except be. And that could still include being that part of himself that he kept private and guarded. The time bomb was ticking away but it would cease to tick after the election. He would lose, and after that nobody would care. The malevolent gremlin sitting in the depths of him, waiting to pop its grinning features out into the world when it was likely to cause maximum damage, would have missed its chance. He’d been carrying the little bastard around for decades, caressing, feeding, pacifying, indulging it, and it still wasn’t tamed, still was both part of him and apart from him, still had the capability to humiliate and destroy him – but not for much longer. A few more months, weeks even – that was all he needed.

And dear Melissa, who knew something, need never know the whole truth. After that time she caught him in the study, she’d demanded to know what it was he was hiding. Was he having an affair? No. Was he gay? No, no. Then what? He’d started to tell her but he couldn’t, he didn’t want to sully her with the stupid, sordid details and anyway they were
his
details, he wanted them to himself. She’d said, ‘David, I love you. I don’t know if I can do whatever it is you want, but I love you and I want to help.’ ‘No,’ he’d said, ‘you can’t help.’ ‘Do you love me?’ she’d asked, tears running down her
face. ‘Yes, yes, darling, I love you very much.’ ‘Then don’t reject me.’ ‘I’m not rejecting you, it’s just something I have to sort out in my head. On my own.’ And he’d given her some baloney about the pressures of the job and the exhaustion and the sleeplessness and how it messed you up. A rejection, however he adorned it. ‘So where does that leave us?’ she’d said. ‘Still here,’ he’d said, ‘still together.’ ‘Should I expect anything awful to happen? Exposure, public humiliation, anything like that?’ ‘No,’ he’d said. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not a fool. Everything will be all right.’

So he’d lied to her. Twice. Once throughout all the years she never suspected, or never asked, and again when she did ask. But it had been worth it. He was still in one piece, still undiscovered. It
would
be worth it, if only he could manage the deceit for just a little longer. Then the rumble would be silenced for ever.

§

He came so close, less than a month to go. And then somehow, somebody found out. One minute he was about to emerge from the escape tunnel, the next there were searchlights blazing, loudspeakers and panic. And that was just in his head. He came home one afternoon from the campaign trail and Melissa was standing in the hall with a note in her hand, ashen-faced, saying that some journalist had phoned and refused to speak to her but had a story about him. ‘What is it, David?’ He said, ‘I don’t know,’ but he did. ‘A letter came too,’ she said. ‘Marked “Private and confidential”. I haven’t opened it.’ And then he really felt it, he knew from the emptiness in the pit of him that the gremlin had escaped, the rumble was out, and he took the note and he went into the study and closed the door and read the number and the name Peter Bond and wondered what information he had and how he had got it, and there on the desk was an A5 envelope, unopened as Melissa had said, and he opened it and saw the photograph and thanked God it was what it was because it could have been so much worse, but then maybe there
was
much worse, and he broke into a sweat and wondered if there was even a remote chance that he could save himself and Melissa and the kids but there wasn’t, and he looked at the calendar above the desk, twenty-three days left, and thought, this is it, I’ll stand down, the association will be mad but to hell with them, this isn’t about them
any more it’s about us. And then he lifted the receiver and dialled the number.