And the Land Lay Still (19 page)

The Honourable Member for Edinburgh Central, the constituency in which Mike stayed, was Robin Cook, one of the grinders and crushers. Adam, furious at them all, condemned them as backstabbers, betrayers and deceivers. Mike said it could hardly be claimed that Robin Cook had deceived anybody. He was implacably opposed to an assembly and never missed a public opportunity to say so. His
constituents, he said, wrote to him about housing, the health service, schools, unemployment and crime, but he’d never received a single letter about devolution. Adam immediately instructed Mike to write to Cook about it, which he did. The dismissive reply he received riled Mike enough to make him turn up at one of Cook’s constituency surgeries to pursue the matter. Cook, wee, wiry and red-bearded, was more prickly in the flesh than he had been on paper. Mike did not take to him. Unless Cook changed his stance, he said, he wouldn’t be able to vote for him at the next General Election. Cook shrugged, completely unimpressed: then he would have to survive without Mike’s vote; he was pretty sure he would have no difficulty in doing so. He believed that the vast majority of his constituents were profoundly uninterested in a Scottish assembly, and the referendum would prove it because so few would turn out to vote. ‘We’ll see,’ said Mike. ‘Yes,’ said Cook, glancing at his watch, ‘we shall.’

§

In October 1978 the SNP lost another by-election, in East Lothian, this time trailing in behind both Labour and the Conservatives and losing their deposit. It looked as though nationalism might have peaked. Jim Callaghan was personally popular, and Labour were ahead of the Tories in the opinion polls. He still had a year left before he had to call a General Election. He didn’t. He missed his chance.

Collective and separate madnesses bloomed. The unions had had enough of pay restraint and they brought their members out on strike with demands for bigger and bigger wage increases. It was a winter of constant drizzle, damp, slush and grey cloud – or so it seems to Mike, thinking back. A winter of discontent. There were closed libraries, closed benefit offices, picket lines outside schools and hospitals, uncollected rubbish and barely functioning public transport. There was a prolonged strike by lorry drivers, which led to food shortages in shops and material shortages in factories. The crows of
what if
and
if only
gathered in the trees.

Mike sympathised with the strikers, but sometimes they displayed incredible naivety in the way they allowed themselves to be portrayed by the media, and sometimes they displayed incredible arrogance. When Adam came through to Edinburgh at weekends, he and Mike argued. Adam was directly involved – both as a union
activist and as a district councillor – in the turmoil, whereas Mike was only inconvenienced. Adam would not or could not see that the endless wage disputes and the ideological battles within the Labour movement were driving people in their tens of thousands towards the Conservatives – revitalised by Margaret Thatcher, de-cluttered of compromises and consensus, and gearing up for their own kind of revolution. He still thought society was progressing – slowly and with setbacks, but progressing nonetheless – towards a benevolent, municipal kind of socialism under which most people would be healthier, better educated, better housed and better paid. Mike, supposedly the naive one, thought that Adam was deluding himself. But neither of them saw what was really coming.

The referendum campaign for and against a Scottish assembly ran for the month of February 1979. There was a No camp and a Yes camp, but each camp contained factions, some of which detested their supposed allies more than they did the opposing camp. The Yes for Scotland campaign had the support of the SNP, a renegade Tory or two, and various clerics, trade unionists, writers and actors. There was also a Liberal campaign and another non-party grouping called Alliance for an Assembly. But the SNP ran its own separate Yes campaign and some Nationalists wouldn’t appear on platforms with people from other parties. Labour banned its members from any cross-party activity, refused to work within any umbrella group and also ran its own campaign, Labour Movement Yes. Think of a football team lining up before kick-off, each player with a ball at his feet, determined not to pass it to anybody else – except maybe the opposition.

Scotland Says No was the main campaign against devolution. It was composed of an assortment of businessmen, lawyers and Conservative politicians. To the right of this grouping were two hardline Unionist cadres, Scotland is British and Keep Britain United. To its left was the Labour Vote No committee, populated by members of the grinding-and-crushing tendency. The No team was as much of an unholy alliance as the Yes team, but its members had one great advantage: they had just the one ball, and they were willing to pass it around.

Mike felt an obligation to get involved. Adam urged him on, but he would have acted anyway. He delivered Yes leaflets to hundreds of homes, and handed out many more on the streets. He started off
reasonably sure that, in spite of all the divisions, there was a chance of winning and even of surmounting the 40-per-cent barrier. But as the days went by his confidence waned. There was an office on Leith Walk where he went to pick up flyers and leaflets for distribution. It should have been buzzing, but the first time he turned up the solitary man minding the shop raised an eyebrow at him, indicated the piles of paper and said, ‘Help yersel, son. Naebody else is wanting them.’ On a later visit, one dark afternoon, the place was locked up. Through the window Mike could see the same stacks of material, largely undiminished, piled up in the gloom. He rattled the door but nobody came.

Polling day arrived. Mike went out to vote Yes, but did so more in despair than in hope. Later, Eric came in. By then a houseman at the Royal Infirmary, he had become increasingly exasperated by strikes and bureaucracy. He liked the idea of more political decision-making happening in Scotland but was highly suspicious of the contents of the Scotland Act. He had voted No.

He wasn’t alone. When the results were announced, a third of the country, 1.23 million people, had voted Yes. Slightly fewer, 1.15 million, had voted No. Both of these figures were exceeded by the number of people who didn’t vote at all. The 40-per-cent hurdle was way beyond the reach of the Yes vote. Robin Cook’s prediction proved accurate: the people appeared not to care enough.

The failure of the referendum led directly to the end of the Labour government. In theory Callaghan could have held on till October, but in practice everybody had had enough. What if? If only? It was all over. The SNP tabled a motion of no confidence, the Tories followed up with one of their own, and in the debate that followed the government was brought down by a single vote. Callaghan said the SNP were like turkeys voting for an early Christmas, and in one respect he was right: all but two of its eleven MPs lost their seats in the General Election that followed. Margaret Thatcher swept into power and began the process of rolling back socialism, trade unionism, local government, community, consensus, compromise, Scottish and Welsh nationalism and anything else that stood in her way.

§

‘I’m not proud of myself,’ Jean says. ‘I should have stopped it but I couldn’t. First of all he went to London for a year and we only
saw each other occasionally – sometimes he’d come north on the train and once I went south. That wasn’t very successful. I knew there were probably other women but I didn’t have the courage to confront him about them. Then he came back to Scotland with a lot of commissions and we started being together again but it was different somehow. And then he met Isobel and told me it was over between us but it wasn’t, he still came to see me and I still let him in.

‘I think it was all some long after-effect of the war. He’d joined the army as soon as he left school, and a lot of inhibitions go out of the window when you’re that young and there’s a fair chance you may die before your next birthday. I was only fifteen when the war ended but that sense of “now or never” rubbed off on me too. There were all these young men in uniform making daft wee lassies like me weak at the knees, and maybe that had an impact. You saw uniforms everywhere – men home on leave, boys doing their National Service, even years after they were demobbed some men still put on their battledress to do the gardening or go for a hike in the hills. They wore it till it wore out. The war didn’t suddenly end, it faded away, and some of the attitudes hung on too.

‘Anyway, your father was the handsomest man I ever saw, in or out of a uniform. I was smitten when we first met, and I just let it carry on. I liked everything about him – his looks, his intelligence, his sense of humour, his passion for life, the fact that he stuck two fingers up at anything that didn’t suit him. And I liked the things we did together – the hillwalking, the journeys to different places, the talking, the drinking, the dancing …’

‘The sex,’ Mike says.

‘Thank you for reminding me,’ she says, a little acidly. ‘Yes, I liked the sex. He was a very good lover. I was careful though, even though I was smitten, and I made him be careful. I didn’t want his babies. I point-blank refused to have children. I’ve never wanted them. I wanted to keep my independence. It was one of the things that kept him coming back to me, because I wouldn’t give in. I think your father needed to conquer women by making them beholden to him – emotionally, sexually, domestically, one way or another. As soon as he’d achieved that he got bored. It drove him mad that he wasn’t in control, but he liked it too, my independent streak. And maybe I
didn’t want to be as independent as I claimed, but there we both were, full of contradictions.

‘I think that’s why he was so reckless when he met your mother. She was – well, let’s say she was less liberated than I was. He was certainly the first man she’d been intimate with.’

‘How do you know that?’

She looks slightly abashed. ‘He told me. But it was pretty obvious. Most young women didn’t go to bed with anybody except their sisters or their husbands or
perhaps
their future husbands. Even I’d only had a couple of lovers before Angus.’

‘Did you have a job?’

‘A sort of job, working for a sort of publisher-cum-bookseller, an old man called Henry Kersland who’d been a friend of my father’s. I typed his correspondence, read manuscripts for him and kept his accounts, and generally did everything in the back of his shop on the High Street while he sat in the front pretending he still had a viable business. He was a sweet old boy, but he was about a hundred years out of date. Sometimes I can hardly believe he was a real person. He liked to flirt with me when we had our tea breaks together. It was all quite harmless. He didn’t pay me a wage as such, but every Friday he’d ask if I was all right and I’d say no and he’d pull a few banknotes out of his wallet and hand them to me. And then he died, and I discovered he’d left this place to me in his will. He didn’t have any family.’

‘Did you never have to work?’

‘It’s a terrible admission to make,’ Jean says, ‘but no. Between what Henry left me and what came to me when my parents passed on, I’ve always had enough. I’ve been lucky, I know. Some people would say I’ve had a wasted life, achieved nothing. But my good fortune gave me some space to think, and maybe that meant I was able to give other people space to think. Maybe I’ve been a facilitator. Ghastly word. But anyway, not altogether a wasted life.’

‘There was always a bit of mystery about you,’ Mike says. ‘I remember Walter Fleming telling me that the first time he brought me here. We all thought we knew what the storyteller’s story was, but we didn’t. It got mixed in with all the other stories.’

‘Well, you know now. The shop and the stock that was in it paid for Henry’s debts, which were not inconsiderable, and for his funeral,
which was attended by me and half a dozen of his customers. And I found myself in possession of this place. It was Henry’s home, and it’s been mine ever since. That was in 1954, the year your parents got married.

‘We’d had an argument and Angus walked out and I didn’t see him for a fortnight and in the meantime he met Isobel. It was at some country-house dance and I think she was so
not
his type he saw her as a challenge and had to seduce her. She was, of course, very beautiful. They looked very fine together. I met them for afternoon tea once, in the North British Hotel, so I know. How Edinburgh is
that
for a
ménage à trois
?’

‘Did she know about you and him?’

‘If he didn’t tell her she must have worked it out. Perhaps it was the way the scones passed between us. I mind at his funeral I introduced myself to her, said something about how she probably wouldn’t remember me but we’d met once, and she gave me an icy stare, up and down, and said, “Oh yes, I remember
you
very well.” You were talking to somebody else at the time. Anyway, that’s probably why she finally let him have his wicked way with her, to trump the opposition. He pushed her and pushed her to have sex, and at last she did, and that was that.’

‘That was what?’

‘Well, think about it. She didn’t have the obsession about avoiding pregnancy that I had. Or even the knowledge, maybe. And he would have told her it would be all right. When was their wedding anniversary?’

‘I’ve no idea. They divorced when I was ten. I was never conscious of them ever celebrating their wedding.’

‘Because neither of them thought it was anything to celebrate. They got married in the summer, August, I think. You were born in January 1955. Work it out, Mike.’

But he doesn’t need to. He worked it out a long time ago. ‘I was a mistake,’ he says, ‘and they had to marry because of me. Even if she persuaded herself that it would be okay, that he’d settle down, it never was and he never did. It’s why she resents me so much.’

‘You really believe she does, don’t you?’

‘Of course she does. Seventy-five years old and she still holds it against me.’

‘Well, that’s for you and her to sort out. Think about it from her point of view. That’s what happened back then. People got married because they had to. You couldn’t
be
a single mother. Thank God for contraception and the Abortion Act, I say.’