And the Land Lay Still Read online

  By the same author

  The Ragged Man’s Complaint

  The Fanatic

  Joseph Knight

  The Testament of Gideon Mack

  And the Land Lay Still

  JAMES ROBERTSON

  HAMISH HAMILTON

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  HAMISH HAMILTON

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published 2010

  Copyright © James Robertson, 2010

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-14-195939-9

  This book is dedicated to the memory of two other Anguses and one other Jean. All three were, and continue to be, influences in subtle and special ways.

  Angus Matheson 1926–2007

  Angus Calder 1942–2008

  Jean Bonnar 1923–2008

  Contents

  The Summons

  PART ONE: The Mouth in the Box

  PART TWO: The Persistence of Memory

  PART THREE: The Original Mr Bond

  PART FOUR: Scenes from Olden Days

  PART FIVE: Questions of Loyalties

  PART SIX: The Gift of the Moment

  Acknowledgements

  The Summons

  The year was ending, and the land lay still.

  Despite our countdown, we were loath to go,

  kept padding along the ridge, the broad glow

  of the city beneath us, and the hill

  swirling with a little mist. Stars were right,

  plans, power; only now this unforeseen

  reluctance, like a slate we could not clean

  of characters, yet could not read, or write

  our answers on, or smash, or take with us.

  Not a hedgehog stirred. We sighed, climbed in, locked.

  If it was love we felt, would it not keep,

  and travel where we travelled? Without fuss

  we lifted off, but as we checked and talked

  a far horn grew to break that people’s sleep.

  – Edwin Morgan (from Sonnets from Scotland)

  Sometimes it felt like walking, sometimes it felt like flying. Or it felt like floating, or drifting, or like nothing at all. No motion. Just, there you were – in, on – and there it was – below, around – a splash of land on the ocean, a splatter of stone soil grass forest road town city, and broken-off bits scattered across the great wet belly of the world. And over it splashed lochs and rivers and burns, so much cold, clear water you’d think the land would drown in it, but it didn’t, it lay there still, breathing – sodden and bogged down in some parts, rock-hard and ragged in others, but still breathing. And the sea breathing its endless breaths around it, in out in out in out, great white waves crashing on black rocks, exhausted waves flopping flatly on deserted beaches, weed washing back and forth in bays and inlets, and fish eels lobsters seals ebbing and flowing in the tidal inhalations, exhalations, and sometimes a seal watching you, ten twenty thirty minutes an hour, submerging then resurfacing, always watching you, coming closer, keeping a distance, and you watching the seal, pacing it along the shore, connected but never connected, always apart. The source of stories and legends was in those long mutual observations, those reachings for the unreachable, yearnings for the unobtainable. But that was what they were, unobtainable, and so you turned and came away from the edge, and there was the land again, the earth – rich poor red black brown – and grass flowers trees crops grew from the earth and were nourished by it. And farmers broke the earth and turned it, and that was humankind’s relationship with the land, to need it and love it and break it into giving. When you first set out there were still heavy horses pulling the ploughs but before long they were all but gone, and chugging tractors slogged their way across the patterned fields, between drystane dykes and hedgerows and fences and stands of trees, and white plumes of gulls followed the tractors by day, and black parliaments of crows convened in the trees as night fell. And in the days of early summer you might walk on through the empty hours if there was enough light and you weren’t tired. So you walked and you were alone, and later you’d lie down to rest, to sleep in the sun you’d once toiled and starved below. At other seasons, or if it was cold or wet, you found a barn or a byre or a shed or some other shelter and you bielded there and you were alone; but if the night was dry and looked like staying that way you wrapped yourself in your many layers and your big coat above them all and found a place to lie among trees, or in the lee of a wall or a hedge, you could make your bed anywhere if you were away from people, if you were in the country, and even in the wettest weather you could find shelter in caves and crannies, in empty structures made and left by men, or deep in under the thickest, lowest trees. You could lie for days if days of lying were required, measuring out what food you had, closing down your energy. Nothing was more comfortable to you than the hard roughness of the ground beneath you, nothing more comforting than darkness and utter silence or the cry of owls hunting in the moonlight and the sudden scuffling of their prey among leaves, the strange and familiar signals of night creatures going about their business. Small living things that crept near you, around you, sometimes over you. They did not frighten you, they reassured you. You could sleep like a bairn in such circumstances, hours and hours of dreamless sleep, then waking in the early light, grass heavy with dew and your breath white in the air. You’d stretch and get to your feet, stamp them, warm yourself with violent self-embraces of the arms, you’d reach into your pocket for a bit of bread or something else you had there, or if there was nothing there was nothing, you’d be off anyway, walking again. You were safe then, you were alone, you could breathe easy, and you did.

  PART ONE

  The Mouth in the Box

  Mike is at the bedroom window, taking in the view of the water, the road and the scattering of cottages along it, when he sees Murdo’s red van come round the end of the kyle. The van disappears for a few seconds, then begins to climb the hill. It slows, and pulls in at the gate. After a minute, as if he’s been plucking up courage or maybe just thinking something over, Murdo gets out and starts up the track. By the time he arrives at the back door Mike is there waiting for him. With a shy, almost sly grin Murdo proffers a plastic bag. Mik
e unwraps the newspaper bundle it contains and there are two rainbow trout shining in the morning sun.

  ‘They’re beautiful,’ Mike says.

  ‘Fresh from the loch last night,’ Murdo says. ‘Can you make use of them?’

  ‘Of course. I’ll cook them tonight. Will you come for your tea?’

  ‘Och, they’ll just do yourself nicely.’

  ‘Nonsense. There’s one each.’

  ‘They’re not that big.’

  ‘They’re fine. I’ll make plenty of tatties. Will you come?’

  ‘I might at that. I have a few things to do first.’

  ‘Well, it’s only ten o’clock. You have all day. But come any time you like. I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘I will then.’

  The necessary negotiations over, they stand enjoying the sun, of which there has not been too much lately. Mike says, ‘Do you have a moment just now?’

  Murdo looks down at the van and shrugs. ‘There’s nothing that won’t keep.’

  ‘I want to show you something.’

  ‘Aye, do you?’

  Inside, Mike puts the fish in the kitchen sink. They go into the hallway, past the front door that’s never used, through the sitting room and into the sun lounge that Murdo’s uncle built at the side of the house thirty-five years ago for Mike’s father.

  ‘I was at my father’s archive again yesterday,’ Mike says, ‘trying to impose a bit more order on it. And going through the photographs for this exhibition, yet again.’

  ‘The one in … Edinburgh?’ Murdo makes it sound not just two hundred and fifty miles away but as if it’s on another continent.

  ‘Yes. I keep thinking I’ve made the final selection, and then I find I haven’t.’

  ‘And there’s to be a book as well?’

  ‘To go with the exhibition, yes. I’m trying to write the introduction, but it’s not going too well. Anyway, I was sorting through some boxes and I came across this photograph.’

  He hands over the print. Murdo holds it by the edges with his calloused fingers and looks at it thoughtfully, as he might at a diagram of how to assemble a new tool.

  ‘I’d never seen it before last night,’ Mike says, ‘but as soon as I did I remembered everything about it. You’re looking at probably the only photograph in existence of the three of us together. My father, my mother and myself, I mean. Maybe my mother has some others secreted away, but I doubt it.’

  ‘It’s your father right enough,’ Murdo says. ‘A good-looking man. And is that your mother? She’s a bonnie woman. She doesn’t look very pleased though.’

  ‘She wasn’t very pleased,’ Mike says, thinking that being pleased hasn’t ever been one of Isobel’s strong points, not that he can remember. ‘That was the first time I was ever in these parts. July, 1964. We were on holiday. That’s Dounreay, of course, in the background.’

  ‘Aye. Awful-looking place, isn’t it?’

  ‘At the time we didn’t think so. It seemed clean and bright and modern.’

  ‘I never liked it, right from the start. They only put it there in case it blew up. Who’d care if it blew up there? It employed a lot of people over the years, I suppose, but what are they all meant to do now?’ He reins himself in. ‘But you surely didn’t spend your holiday at Dounreay?’

  ‘No, it was just a stop on the way. We had a week and we drove over to the west, then round the north coast, down to Inverness and home again.’

  ‘That’s a fair distance in a week.’

  ‘It certainly was then. There were no bridges. It was all ferries and some of them only took a couple of cars at a time.’

  ‘There wouldn’t have been so many cars though.’

  ‘No, not many. Anyway, I just wanted to show you. My family, such as it was. My father moved out later that year and they got divorced not long after that.’

  ‘And this is yourself. How old are you?’

  ‘I was nine.’

  ‘You have very thin legs,’ Murdo says. ‘In the picture, I mean.’

  ‘I look a bit delicate, don’t I?’

  ‘If you’d lived here we’d have toughened you up.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘We’d have been at the school together. I’d have beaten you up regularly.’

  ‘There’s three years between us. You wouldn’t even have noticed me.’

  ‘Believe me, boy, there was no way you could not be noticed. Everybody noticed everything about everybody.’

  ‘And do they still?’

  ‘Not so much. You incomers guard your privacy well. But people around here have always been pretty discreet, you know, whatever they notice.’

  He hands back the photograph, and they go outside again, round to the front of the house, and there they pause before Murdo takes his leave, standing beside the rowan tree Mike planted for his father. Angus’s rowan. It is naked but looking resilient. It’s too early yet for there to be new growth.

  ‘I wonder how long this will last,’ Mike says, meaning the weather.

  ‘Ach, just until it’s over.’

  The air is cold, but there’s hardly a cloud in the sky and the sunlight is catching every ripple in the water. Maybe Mike will go out for an hour with the camera after all. On the other hand, he has to get on with preparing for the exhibition and the book.

  ‘I’ll see you tonight then?’

  ‘Aye, I’ll look forward to it,’ Murdo says, without a trace of anticipation in his tone. Mike is still not quite sure when Murdo is having a gentle joke at his expense.

  ‘We’ll have a dram or two after we’ve eaten.’

  ‘If you insist. Before, too, if you insist. Will you leave the gate open?’

  ‘I will.’

  So Murdo can drive straight in and park at the back of the house. Mike puts out a hand and touches him lightly on the shoulder, and Murdo gives him a look that barely acknowledges the contact, as if it were accidental. But it is anything but that.

  §

  There is something else unique about the photograph. It is, almost certainly, the only image in the entire Angus Pendreich archive not actually taken by Angus Pendreich.

  It shows the Pendreichs – Angus, Isobel and Michael – picnicking in the lee of what was then the future. That was how it felt and how Angus talked about it. He’d brought them there for that very purpose, to demonstrate his faith in better things to come. On that patch of thin grass above the beach they could be witnesses to a new era. Thirty yards one way the blue-black sea filled the view as it always had done; in the other direction cows grazed green fields bounded by stone slabs embedded in the earth; beyond these was another strip of water, and then the giant golf ball of the Dounreay atomic power plant. The future. The triumph of science. The harnessing of unimaginable might for the eternal benefit of mankind. Electricity so cheap you wouldn’t be able to meter it. Angus wanted to believe all that and he wanted Isobel and Michael – it was always Michael then – to believe it with him. It should have been exciting and heartening, on the second-last day of a trip where almost everything had been new, at least in the sense that Michael had not previously experienced it: the wee car ferries, the twisting narrow roads with passing places, palm trees nurtured by the Gulf Stream. Further west they’d found hairy cows sunbathing on beaches next to children chattering away in Gaelic, but now this was Caithness and the weather had turned cloudy and cold, and, regardless of whatever bounty the future might hold for mankind, as a family unit the Pendreichs were heading for destruction.

  A nuclear family indeed, was Mike’s first thought when he came across the picture. But where did we think we were going to store our poisonous waste? They didn’t, of course, think about it at all. The future wasn’t going to be about waste.

  The only other pictures Mike has of Angus are ones he took himself, and none of these are from before 1970, the year he got his first real camera and made up his mind to be a photographer, like his father. Since Angus was always the one behind the camera, he was always absent f
rom the image. Here he is, though, just as Mike remembers him from that summer holiday – tall, handsome, with thick, dishevelled dark hair and a caddish smile, standing defiantly against the world and the weather. He’s wearing light-coloured, summery trousers and an open-necked, short-sleeved shirt, and he seems to find the wind bracing. His wife and son, on the other hand, crouched on a tartan rug on the grass in front of him, are obviously feeling frozen. The photograph is black and white – of course, since Angus never used colour film in his life – but somehow he looks ruddy and healthy, whereas Isobel and Michael are as grey as the sky. Isobel is in a stylish raincoat with the collar turned up, while Michael sports an unstylish green anorak with a fake-fur-lined hood, although as a concession to the moment he has pushed the hood back from his face. Also, he is wearing shorts. And sandals. Mike knows it’s himself – it looks like him, the way he was – but it doesn’t feel like him. There’s a basket on the rug beside Isobel, elements of a picnic scattered around it. All three of them are raising plastic mugs to the photographer, in a kind of grim toast to holiday fun.

  The photographer? A man who happened to be walking along the road at the time. Angus had already taken a couple of shots of his wife and child, and then the man came by. There was the road, then a rough bit of ground where the car was parked, then the grass, the beach and the sea. Angus called out to the man, would he mind taking their picture? He seemed not to hear at first, maybe it was the wind, but Angus bounded over and asked again. If the man said anything back Michael didn’t catch it. He was whip-thin and yet somehow bulky, very upright, and he had a khaki pack slung over his shoulder. The face was brown and hard-looking. A scrape of beard on the cheeks, that was all. He was wearing a beret so you couldn’t see the colour of his hair or indeed if he had any, but Michael thought that he looked quite old, and then that perhaps he wasn’t much older than his father. The man listened patiently while Angus showed him how to work the camera. All he had to do was look through the viewfinder and press the button. But he did this before Angus was in position, and then it seemed he might have pressed something else by accident and Angus had to go back and check it and then return, and all the time Isobel and Michael were holding their pose in the cold, Isobel with her legs folded beneath her, one hand clutching her mug and the other holding her hair off her face, and Michael on his hunkers a couple of feet away, feeling the pins and needles in the backs of his knees, and he heard Isobel say through clenched teeth, ‘For God’s sake,’ and somehow knew from the way she said it that it was over between his parents and that whatever this photograph was recording it wasn’t family happiness, and he wondered why on earth his father was going to all the trouble.