And the Land Lay Still (2 page)

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 from 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.

For posterity, perhaps, is what he thinks now. Maybe Angus already knew he would shortly be leaving them.

Mike studies his nine-year-old self. The white, hairless legs, poking out beneath the anorak and shorts, do seem pathetically fragile. He studies his mother. She’s thirty-one, still a beautiful young woman if only she’d smile a bit. But Isobel was never going to smile for this photograph, just as the stranger holding the camera – Michael knew this instinctively – was not a man who was ever going to say, ‘Say “Cheese!” ’ And then it was done, and Angus thanked him and took the camera back, and that should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t.

The man lingered, as if he expected something more than Angus’s thanks. A tip, perhaps? Michael sensed his mother’s rage simmering again. But it was the man who put his hand in his own pocket and drew something out. He stepped towards Michael with his clenched fist extended, and the boy automatically stood up and went towards him. ‘Michael,’ Isobel said, but whatever the mystery was in that fist he wanted it. He held out his hand and the man dropped something in and with a quick, fierce movement closed Michael’s fingers over it. The man’s hand was rough and dry. Michael glanced up at him. His stare was intense and distant, as if he were looking both at and right through him, and then he let go and walked away without a word. He was separate again, he seemed separate from everything, a lonely figure hunched into the wind, and then he stopped and
turned and stared at Michael again, and Angus must have seen the potential of
that
picture, the man in the road staring like a prophet, the cows, the light bouncing between the clouds and the sea, the looming Dounreay dome, and he took it. The decisive moment, Cartier-Bresson called it. And what a great photograph it is.

When Mike first came upon it, he immediately decided that it would have to be a late addition to the exhibition. But it’s the other one, the not very good one of the family, that he keeps going back to. As if somewhere in it there is a clue, advance notice of how everything was going to be. That was why he wanted to show it to Murdo: to say, look, this is where I come from, do you think that wee boy ever imagined life turning out like this?

When the man was twenty yards down the road Michael opened his hand, and there in the palm was a pebble. That was all. A small, smooth, disappointing pebble about the size of a broad bean. It could have come from a beach or a field or a garden path – anywhere. Isobel demanded to know what it was, and Michael showed her and she told him to throw it away. But he would not, and when she failed to appeal to his father for support Michael slipped it into his pocket, where he kept it for days, feeling its inconsequential smoothness with his fingers and thinking about the man. Eventually he lost it. It was nothing, but the man had given it to him, and even now when he thinks of the pebble he remembers the intensity of the man’s stare.

They carried on with their picnic. In the basket was a Thermos flask of Heinz tomato soup, heated up by their landlady of the previous night, and a bread-wrapper full of cheese-and-ham sandwiches she’d also made for them. They drank the soup, dredged their way through the sandwiches. The wind gusting in off the sea made sitting still an endurance. Isobel and Michael stayed on the tartan rug only because it held a suggestion of warmth. He didn’t want to be too close to her because of the mood she was in but he felt a kind of loyalty to her because he suspected that Angus was a bad husband. He wasn’t that great a father either. He spent too much time away, working, or – as Mike now knows – not working. Even at nine years old he had a dim understanding that he was the only reason, if it was a reason, that his parents were still together. And so he felt a childish responsibility towards his mother and her misery, because his father was showing none.

Angus paced around like an eccentric lecturer, firing information at them between bites and swallows. He was trying to explain how a fast reactor worked: how it produced more fuel than it consumed, converting uranium into plutonium, so in effect could go on making electricity for ever. There wasn’t much uranium in the world but the fast-breeder process meant once you had enough to start a chain reaction you were away. Energy in perpetuity. He wanted to convince them of the significance of where they were, how their lives were linked to the power of the atom. But he was wasting his breath, because Isobel and Michael were hardly listening, they were eating and drinking as fast as they could so they could pack up and move on, so he could take them to John o’Groats, where they’d get out and do whatever you were supposed to do at one end of the British Isles and after that drive on to the God-awful hotel or bed and breakfast he’d earmarked for them for the night, where hopefully there’d be a hot bath and maybe even a fire. That was all. They didn’t care a docken about nuclear fission, and he probably didn’t understand half of what he was trying to explain. They were all out of their respective depths. And so they packed up the picnic things and drove away from the wondrous white-domed building perched on the edge of Scotland, and as they were going Isobel said, ‘That man was a tramp.’

‘What man?’ Angus said.

‘The man who took the picture.’

‘No!’ Angus said, dismissive but quite jovial at first. ‘Surely not? Tramps have long straggly beards and ten overcoats. And they smell. He didn’t smell too bad.’

She sighed at his childishness. ‘There was something about him.’

‘What?’ Michael could tell her sigh irritated his father. There was a tone to it, and a tone to his short response. Two noises full of impatience and disrespect.

‘I didn’t like him. Giving that stupid stone to Michael.’

‘Och, well, that’s him then, condemned and transported if
you
don’t like him. Bloody vagrant, handing out stones to kids. Anyway, what if he was a tramp?’ He scowled in the mirror. ‘Michael, do you think he was a tramp?’

Michael said, ‘His clothes weren’t that dirty, but they were old-looking.’

‘You see?’ Isobel said.

‘His face looked like it was made of leather,’ Michael said. ‘Like he spent a lot of time out of doors. And I think he had quite a lot of clothes on, but he was very thin.’

‘You see?’ Isobel said again, so that Michael, who hated being on her side, had to add, ‘But I don’t think he was a tramp.’

‘Well, what was he then?’ Isobel snapped.

‘I don’t know. Maybe he was mad.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Isobel said. The idea of insanity scared her more than vagrancy.

‘Tramps don’t go around handing out stones,’ Angus said. ‘But
I
don’t give a damn who or what he is. I asked him to do me a favour and he was kind enough to oblige.’

‘You’re lucky he didn’t drop your camera,’ Isobel said. ‘Or steal it.’

Angus muttered something Michael couldn’t hear.

‘If we pass him,
don’t
offer him a lift.’

‘I might just do that,’ Angus said. ‘One good turn deserves another.’

‘If he gets into this car, I’m getting out.’

Michael prayed fervently for them to pass the man, just to see what happened, but they didn’t. A heavy, hateful emptiness gathered under the roof of the car. Michael slumped back, pulling the anorak hood up over his head, preferring the seashell effect of the fake fur against his ears to the dead silence that he was learning to recognise as the soundtrack of a marriage beyond repair. And in his pocket he felt for the pebble and wondered why the man had given it to him, and what it might mean.

Looking at the photograph brings it all back. It’s like a still from a film of other people’s lives. Michael and Mum and Dad. And they became Mike and Isobel and Angus. Shifting, uncertain identities. When he thinks about those shared lives, about human existence in general, he finds there is not much to put faith in. But this he knows for sure: our ability to look back on the past, our need or desire to make sense of it, is both a blessing and a curse; and our inability to see into the future with any degree of accuracy is, simultaneously, the thing that saves us and the thing that condemns us.