And the Land Lay Still (94 page)

‘Of course it would.’

‘Sunday?’

‘That would be lovely, if you’re not doing anything.’

‘That’s what I’m doing. A day in Joppa. Ask Robin to cook us something amazing.’

‘And we’ll go for a walk on the beach.’

‘Brilliant.’

The house in Joppa is tall and narrow, on three floors. On the top floor are two long, narrow attic rooms with coomed ceilings and dormer windows looking out on to the firth. Up there you feel like you’re miles above the cars and buses, the people exercising their dogs on the beach. One room is Robin’s studio, the other is where Ellen works. Between the rooms, at the top of a steep staircase, is an alcove with a sink, a kettle, tea, coffee and mugs. Every so often one of them switches on the kettle and they come together for a twenty-minute break. Interludes of quiet conversation or comfortable silences. There is a window seat in Robin’s room and sometimes they just sit there gazing out at the sea and towards Fife, so close on some days, so distant on others. The studio seems to Ellen like the control room of a spaceship floating high above the earth. It throbs with energy: there are light-boxes, drawing boards, a huge expanse of desk, racks stacked with pencils, pens, scalpels, scissors and geometric instruments; there are drawers full of other equipment,
shelves crammed with art books and design manuals, the iMac loaded with sophisticated software, a scanner, a laser printer that purrs when it prints; and in one corner is an acoustic guitar that Robin plays for half an hour at the end of each working day. His sign-off music. Everything about him is calm and measured. He seldom goes to the theatre or cinema or to art galleries, in fact he hardly ever leaves Joppa and can usually be found, if he’s not at home, walking on the beach. And yet somehow he keeps abreast of the latest news, cultural events, new voices in music and literature. He’s the most thoughtful, unflustered, courteous, gentle, well-read person Ellen has ever met and she still can’t quite believe that she is now into the fourth decade of living there with him, ever since he rescued her. Does he love her? She never doubts it, even though he doesn’t often tell her. Does she love him? Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes. And Kirsty too. They are, as Robin always said they would be, surrounded by love.

Kirsty drained her glass. ‘God, that’s gone straight to my head. I feel like something exciting’s going to happen. That’s stupid, isn’t it?’

‘Probably,’ Ellen said, ‘but if we have any more nothing at all will happen because we’ll not be able to stand up. Come on, let’s move.’

So they moved. And now they’re here, and Ellen glances at Kirsty again, with her empty wine glass, and wonders if she drinks too much. And if she’s going to find a good man, and if they’ll have children. And even now, with Kirsty in her thirties, Ellen still looks for traces of Charlie, and is always relieved not to find many. Kirsty is overwhelmingly her mother’s daughter. Charlie’s long gone, as out of their lives as he’ll ever be.

She sees Gavin making his way towards them. She’s about to point him out to Kirsty when Walter starts to speak.

‘Two songs. Mike asked me tae choose something that would be right for the half-century that these photographs represent. An impossible task. Weel, I thought I’d try tae find something frae the beginning and something frae the end but the trouble wi songs is they’ll no stay in their place. They keep moving and they keep resonating in unexpected ways. So in the end I just looked at the pictures in the book and ye can call me perverse but I kept thinking
o aw the folk that weren’t in them. Men and women, and some men in particular, and that gave me the first song. And the second song, weel, these photographs go aw roond the country and that’s what the second song does. That’s the best I could dae. Mike, the first yin’s ootside your fifty-year period by two or three years and the second yin’s oot by a lot mair than that, but that’s the way it is.’

Then he switches the mike off and steps away from it, to the side, almost as if he doesn’t want to be there, a kind of practised modesty. And he takes a breath and his voice rolls out into the room.

§

Walter sings, and Mike absorbs it, the song and all it contains. Something happens when he is this focused, he slips beyond himself, is present but also apart. He hears the words Walter sings, he sees the past the song describes but also he thinks of the time that’s coming. The time of change. The time when Murdo will say, ‘No, wait, let’s do something different.’

He knows that time is coming because already today, in the late afternoon, Murdo has done something different, something rare and wonderful. He has telephoned. This was so unexpected that when Mike answered, standing alone in the middle of the exhibition space, it took him a second or two to realise who was speaking.

‘How is it all going?’

‘Murdo?’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s yourself.’

‘So it would seem.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing that I’m aware of.’

‘I thought maybe my house was on fire or something.’

‘Why would it be? And if it was I would have put it out. I am right in front of it now and there isn’t a trace of smoke.’

‘You’re at Cnoc nan Gobhar?’

‘Aye. There were a couple of things still to fix in the sun lounge. I thought I’d take the opportunity.’

‘You got in all right?’

‘And out. I know where you keep the key, remember?’

‘Of course. Oh well, thank you.’

‘That’s not why I am phoning you,’ Murdo said. ‘It’s a beautiful day here, but that’s not why either. I wanted to wish you luck.’

‘With the opening?’

‘Yes, what else but that? And to say I’m sorry I am not there.’

‘You didn’t want to come.’

‘No, I didn’t. But I am sorry not to be there. With you.’

Mike’s heart gave a wee lurch. ‘I’m sorry too,’ he said. ‘But there’ll be other times. You can come and see it later.’

‘I would like to.’

‘Let’s do that then. Come to Edinburgh together to see it.’

‘Very good.’

‘Murdo?’

‘Aye?’

‘Thank you.’

‘You enjoy yourself now. When will you be back?’

‘Monday, I think. Sunday or Monday.’

‘Let me know and I’ll meet you at the station.’

‘I will.’

He wanted to say something more but then he didn’t. And now he’s glad no more was said. It can be said later, before or after or at the same time as Murdo says, ‘Let’s do something different.’

And whenever that is, it will be between Murdo and him and no one else, past or present, and it will be good. And afterwards they’ll sleep, both of them, and the night will pass into morning and they’ll wake together. Maybe Murdo will have a mug of tea and a slice of toast before he goes off to whatever work he has on that day. Goes from the house, and returns to the house. And while they’re eating and drinking there will be a question in Mike’s head and it will be this: ‘When will they know?’ And another: ‘Will it matter when they do?’ The questions will be for Murdo not for Mike, because Mike will be happy, happier than he’s ever been, and so he won’t really care what anyone thinks, but he cares about Murdo and the place where he’s lived all his life. He cares so, so much, and hence the questions. And Murdo will know what Mike is thinking. He’ll take Mike’s unworked hand in his rough, hard one – almost, Mike sees, almost as a father might take a son’s – and he’ll speak, or he won’t speak, but what he’ll be saying with the gesture, with the
words if there are words, is, ‘Don’t worry. It will be all right.’ And it will be.

§

The Gents is down a corridor off the main lobby. Don is alone. The place has a tiled coolness, a clean hush, that pleases him. He unbuttons and waits. Typical. You feel you need to go and then when you’re standing at the ready nothing happens. Patience. This is not a false alarm. The brain has sent the message all right, it’s just that the messenger is old and doddery and takes a while to get down to the nether regions where the machinery is a bit decrepit and the operator’s deif, but he
is
on his way. Finally, finally, the trickle starts. And Don has that usual moment of anxiety, in case this is a dream and he’s actually pissing the bed, but he’s not, if he’s checked then he’s awake, it’s when he doesn’t check he needs to worry, by which time it’ll be too late anyway. Hasn’t happened yet, thank God. Marjory, being a nurse, would cope, but he doesn’t want her to have to.

He’s going strong now, a steady stream, and he thinks of the other occasion that always comes to mind when he’s having a pee, every time. It’s like the way a piece of music triggers a memory, instant, beyond your control. With him it’s peeing, and suddenly he’s back there, standing in the trees at Ochtermill, the stars out and Jack Gordon on the road waiting for him, and then there’s the older memory
that
triggers: Italy, the bombs falling, the air thick with mud. So he’s standing in the Gents in the National Gallery of Photography and Jack’s there with him. The other guys are all dead, definitely dead, dead for more than six decades. Jack? Don knows he too must be dead, probably has been for years, but it never quite feels like that, it’s as if he’s still standing somewhere in the shadows, waiting for Don to finish and go on up the road with him. And tonight, in this building full of these people and these photographs, he feels it stronger than ever.

There’s a voice drifting towards him, very faint, a man’s voice singing, as he shakes himself and makes himself decent. He steps away from the urinal and the laser flush kicks in, he loves that, it knows better than you do when you’re finished. He puts his fingers under the tap and hot water squirts out, then when he takes his hands away it stops. Fantastic. He grew up in a tenement in
Drumkirk sharing a toilet with five other families. Hot water frae a tap? Aye, and the King came roond for his tea on Thursdays.

Back out in the corridor the singing voice is stronger, beckoning him, and Don finds himself hurrying across the entrance lobby, back towards the big room where they’re all gathered. A solitary, unaccompanied voice. He knows the tune, he knows the tune, and as he pushes through the doors he knows the words. He can’t believe somebody is singing this song while he’s been in the lavvy. It must be forty years since he last heard it, maybe more. He stands there inside the doors, slightly breathless, and the melody of ‘Lili Marlene’ comes towards him. The singer is a burly, fine-looking character with snowy-white hair and moustache. He’s over there on the steps where the speeches were made, but the words are from another place, they’re the words of all the men Don went through Italy with in 1944:

Don tries to join in, humming the tune, but the sound sticks in his throat. So he mouths the words instead, he has them as suddenly and effortlessly as if he sang them only this morning in the shower, but he never had a singing voice like this man’s, slow and rich and gentle and glorious:

Marjory has half-risen from the bench, waiting anxiously for Don. She knows the tune, of course, and she knows
about
the song, because Don has talked about the so-called D-Day Dodgers, having been one himself, and she thinks she must have heard it being sung
back in the 1940s, and here it is again; it’s travelled six decades and thousands of miles straight into the heart of this gallery in twenty-first-century Edinburgh and probably the one man in the building for whom it has any direct, personal meaning is missing it, and yet everybody else is transfixed by the power and pathos of the tune and the words. She looks frantically towards the exit and then sinks back down with relief because she can see him at the door, not missing it after all. He looks frail and yet strong, she wants to go to him but she waits, afraid to disturb it, him, she’s almost afraid to breathe, and everybody else in the room is standing still, listening to the song, it’s as if they’ve all been frozen in time for as long as it lasts.

Walter’s voice is so quiet by now she thinks it might disappear, but he’s singing into total silence and the words fill the room, they would break your heart if you let them, and Don is standing there, his hand going up to his eye then down to cover his mouth, and she knows he cannot speak, that memories he has never shared with her are brimming up in him. And the people begin to clap, they’re applauding Walter and the song but from where she’s standing it’s as if, without knowing it, they’re applauding Don. Marjory stands and walks briskly over to him and he sees her and the hand comes away from his mouth and she takes it. ‘All right?’ she asks. He nods. ‘Come over here,’ she says, leading him back, and he’s happy to be led, to sit down and get his breath back. And Walter starts his second song, and for a moment Marjory finds herself thinking, Christ, don’t make it another tear-jerker or you’ll finish my dear old darling off, but it’s all right, it’s going at a medium pace, waltz-time, she recognises the tune again but not the words. It’s one of those dust-laden Scottish songs, of which there seems to be an inexhaustible supply, that hark back to old, long-abandoned country ways that people on plastic seats in bars and on sofas in central-heated sitting
rooms still somehow seem to relate to. Sometimes the songs are about battles or feuds or murders, and sometimes, as now, they’re about the road, and there are occasions when it all seems horribly sentimental to Marjory but it’s also what she loves about the land and its people, the clannishness that stretches and twists back into history, the deep-rootedness of it: