And the Land Lay Still (5 page)

At this point he ground to a halt, wondering whether he really believed that last sentence and if so what names he would insert. David Octavius Hill, Harry Benson, Oscar Marzaroli, Albert Watson? Ansel Adams, André Kertész, Henri Cartier-Bresson?
Would oblige me to address a matter … My father’s contribution to that art form was not inconsiderable
… Such a pompous tone! It’s not how he thinks, he hopes it’s not how he speaks, so why does it come out like that? The prospect of continuing in the same vein for another ten or twenty pages makes him want to go out and take some photographs of his own, in spite of the weather, or open a bottle of wine and forget the whole exercise. How can he be writing about his own father and yet seem to be writing about a stranger? How, after a mere four paragraphs, can he have run out of things to say?

He doesn’t need an analyst to work out the answers. Not really.

Nevertheless he picks up the phone and calls Jean Barbour.

‘Mike,’ she says. ‘Well, well. And how is the frozen north?’

‘Wet,’ he says.

‘Not frozen then?’

‘No, just wet.’

‘And yourself?’

‘Keeping under cover.’

‘Are you still being a hermit?’

‘Pretty much.’

‘What do you
do
up there? Apart from take pictures?’

‘That’s what I do. All the time. The beach, the sea, the sky, the hills.’

‘Is there a limit to how many you can take?’

‘If there is, I’ve not reached it.’

‘Then I assume the chances of seeing you are slim.’

Her voice sounds terrible: faded, weak. ‘Are you all right?’ he asks.

‘A dose of the flu,’ she says, ‘but I’m through the worst of it.’

He’s not convinced by this, but lets it go, for the time being.

‘Well,’ she says, ‘
am
I going to see you, or have you just phoned up to tantalise me?’

‘Actually, there’s stuff I have to do in Edinburgh. Any chance of a bed for a couple of nights?’

‘Only if you promise to stay in and talk to me on one of them.’

‘That’s fine with me. I don’t go out on the town these days.’

‘Did you ever? What are you coming down for?’

‘A couple of appointments, to do with this exhibition of my dad’s work. Did I tell you about that?’

‘Months ago. Christmas, New Year, whenever we last spoke. I can’t remember.’

She sounds drunk. It isn’t even eleven. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

‘I’m fine,’ she says testily. So he knows for certain that something is wrong.

‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘apart from all that, I’d like to see you. There’s going to be a book to go with the exhibition, and I’ve to write something for it, and I’m stuck.’

‘Stuck about what?’

‘I’m trying to write about Angus. His career, his character, his significance.’

‘Oh Christ,’ Jean says. ‘Everybody has to have significance these days. Once it was just fame, now it’s significance.’

He knows her well enough to recognise a diversion when she starts one. ‘It’s tough,’ he says. ‘I don’t do words, I take pictures. I thought you could help.’

‘Write it for you? I don’t do words either. Not written-down ones.’

‘No. But I thought you could tell me about him.’

He hears her sigh, imagines her in her big, shabby, cluttered room, Arthur’s Seat visible through the window, through the rain. She says, ‘Mike, it was a long time ago. Him and me, I mean.’

‘I don’t mean that. But you knew him before I was around. Before he married my mother. I can’t talk to
her
about him. Anyway, it’s time you and I caught up properly, face to face.’

‘Aye, well,’ she says, ‘I would like that. How
is
your mother?’

‘Same as ever, as far as I know.’

‘So you’ve not seen her lately either?’

‘We speak on the phone. She’s frighteningly healthy. Still gardening, still going to church, still driving.’

‘Still driving you mad, you mean?’

‘She would if I spent any time with her.’

‘Maybe you should. There can’t be a lot left.’

Again, that slur in her voice. It makes him uneasy.

‘My mother will go on and on,’ he says. ‘Like Margaret Thatcher, her role model.’

‘No she won’t. Anyway, Thatcher didn’t go on. She lost her job, remember? That wasn’t all she lost, in my opinion.’

‘Mother is in prime physical and mental condition, believe me. She thrives on outlasting everyone she knows.’

‘Good for her.’ Very abrupt. ‘Well, when are you coming?’

They make the arrangements. He’ll arrive on the Thursday, see Duncan and anybody else he needs to on the Friday, come home on the Saturday.

‘Will that give you enough time to do everything you have to?’

‘More than. It’ll be good to see you.’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ she says. ‘I’m not looking that great.’

‘Why? What’s wrong?’

‘Old age, that’s all. Anyway, you’ll have had enough of me by Saturday, I’m sure, but you can stay as long as you like. Are you driving down?’

‘God, no,’ he says. ‘My car can limp around the roads here, but a trip down the A9 would finish it off. I’ll get the train.’

‘Very wise,’ she says. ‘Parking here is impossible unless you’re prepared to pay a fortune for it. Not that I disapprove of
that
, you understand. We’re being killed by cars.’

‘I’ll bring a bottle of whisky to take your mind off it.’

‘Good idea. Better bring two. That’ll help us sort your father out.’

§

Murdo gives him a lift down the strath to Lairg – ‘I need to be going down there anyway for a couple of things’ – for the mid-morning train to Inverness. All the way south it pours incessantly. There are delays caused by engineering works, resulting in a missed connection at Perth, but eventually the train pulls into Waverley in the early evening. The rain appears to be easing off so Mike chances the five-minute walk from the station to the High Street, and gets soaked.

Jean lets him in by means of an entryphone, a new installation. In the old days somebody had to come to the door. By the time he reaches the front room she’s back in her armchair by the fireplace, wrapped in a blanket, a thin roll-up between her lips and a full
ashtray at her side. There’s a new gas fire, one of those glass-fronted, energy-efficient ones, another addition since his last visit. The old radiators under the big windows, which used to wheeze and rattle as they heated the room, are cold and silent. The room is as dusty as ever, but perhaps the contents have been thinned out. Everything is still a mess, but there isn’t so much of it.

‘I’m not getting up,’ Jean says. ‘I’m rid of the flu, but it’s left me like a rag. I’m sore all over.’

She has the grace to take the fag out of her mouth to return his kiss. His hand on her shoulder feels how thin she is. Paper and bone. But it’s she who chides him.

‘You’re wet. You should have got a taxi.’

‘I know that now. I didn’t think it was raining that hard.’

‘It’s been raining all winter. We used to get snow, even here, but not any longer. We’ve knackered the climate.’ It’s one of her pet topics. She’s been on about it for decades, long before it became commonplace. ‘How can we pump all these noxious fumes into the atmosphere and not harm it?’ she would say, lighting another cigarette.

‘You’ll have had your tea?’ she says now, trotting out the old standard about Edinburgh stinginess, and he almost laughs, but she means it. ‘If you haven’t, Mike, you’ll need to get a carry-out. I’m not hungry.’

He had sandwiches on the train and isn’t hungry either. She’s made a bed up for him and he dumps his bags in the room, changes out of his wet clothes and goes back through. She brightens considerably when he puts the malt whisky on the oak table. A Highland Park and a Clynelish.

‘You did bring two,’ she says, sucking the last millimetre from her cigarette and pinching it out. ‘How lovely. I’ll look forward to discussing
them
.’

That voice: once, long ago, Mike told her how sexy it was and she laughed and said he needed his head examined, she was old enough to be his mother, but he was serious. A voice thick with years of storytelling, hoarse from the speaking and the smoking but not harsh; knowing and kind, mostly, though the cutting remark and the quick putdown are not absent from her repertoire. There is still something that stirs Mike down in the depths when he hears her speak. In the days when she still entertained multitudes, she
could hold the attention of the entire room packed tight with people – bodies sardined on to sofas, two to a chair, folk crouched and crammed on the rugs, backed up against the radiators and even a couple squeezed under the round oak table that was always covered with newspapers, bottles and scum-bummed mugs and glasses. Jean could keep that crowd entranced, and not just because the stories she told were good, but because of the voice she told them in. It worked for women as well as men, it didn’t matter if you were gay or straight or didn’t know what you were, as plenty didn’t back then. Maybe it wasn’t just the sound of sex that folk heard, maybe it was also the sound of natural, non-bookish wisdom, that special female quality which, in times past, made some men fear some women and cast them as witches. Whatever it was, Jean had it, and Mike reckons she still does.

She doesn’t want to drink alcohol tonight. He makes a pot of tea instead, pulls a chair across to the other side of the gas fire, and they sit like two old crones and chat away about not very much. Life in the north, life in the city. People who’ve died, people who’ve moved away, people they’ve lost track of completely. Politics, wars, collapsed banks, fallen bankers, dying planet. But they’ve been through all this before, down the phone at least. There is another, more pressing issue. Mike hasn’t seen her since Angus’s funeral, two and a half years before. She was fit and rose-cheeked then. Now she is a grey skeleton.

‘You may as well tell me.’

‘Tell you what?’

‘What the hell’s wrong with you. Other than the flu.’

She looks at him angrily through her smoke. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because there’s no point.’

‘You look awful. You’ve no colour.’

‘Not enough fresh air. I’ve given up the daily run round the park.’

‘Don’t be facetious. You’re clearly not well. Have you seen a doctor?’

‘No.’

‘Why the hell not?’

‘I’ve never seen a doctor in my life. I don’t believe in doctors.’

‘That’s ridiculous, Jean.’

‘No it’s not. Some folk need doctors, some dinnae. I’m one of the dinnaes.’

‘You look like you’ve got cancer.’

‘Thanks a lot,’ she says. Then, ‘Aye, that’s what I think too when I look in the mirror.’

‘This is absurd. Why don’t you go and find out?’

‘Find out what? That I’m going to die? We’re all going to die, Mike.’

‘That’s childish.’ And then, childishly, he adds, ‘And you’re still smoking like a lum.’

‘Don’t start.’

‘Well, it can’t exactly help.’

‘It helps a lot. What’s the alternative? My life is taken over by doctors who cut me open, fill me with drugs, blast me with radiotherapy, or all three of the above, my hair falls out, I can’t manage living on my own here at home, I feel like crap and
then
I die. Delaying tactics, that’s all. Thank you, but no.’

‘So what
are
you going to do?’

‘Let things take their course. It’s time. Look at this place. You might not believe it, but I’m shedding things. Honestly.’

‘That seems a bit premature.’

‘I’m nearly seventy-nine, Michael. That’s late enough. I’ve not had a bad run.’

‘You sound defeated. It’s not like you.’

‘I’m not defeated. I’m actually winning. Don’t tell me I’m defeated.’

‘Are you in pain?’

‘Sometimes. I’ve got lots of different painkillers, though. Amazing what you can get over the counter these days. Drink’s the best, although it doesn’t go very well with some of the other stuff. That’s one reason why I’m a bit down today. I’ve not taken any pills because I want to have a good drink with you tomorrow.’

‘I appreciate that.’

‘It’s for my benefit, not yours, you arrogant wee shite.’

She’s always had a quick temper, although often in the past she would turn it on simply in order to play devil’s advocate more effectively. If you didn’t know her it was disconcerting, watching her switch from revolutionary socialist to diehard reactionary in a moment. The Demon Barbour, someone nicknamed her.

Mike remembers a phone conversation with her from a couple of years earlier, just before the ban on smoking in public places became law. He made some remark about how devolution was going to reduce her rights but she would have to thole it for the good of the nation, and she rounded on him.

‘Don’t knock it. It
is
for the good of the nation. It’ll save thousands of lives.’

‘So you’re giving up?’

‘Of course not.’ There was a shuffling sound at the other end of the line as she lit up. ‘I’ll just carry on in the privacy of my own smelly hoose. But I approve of the ban. It’s not for the likes of me. It’s for the coming generations.’

‘I thought you’d be furious about it.’

‘Why? Because they’re taking away my civil liberties? Rubbish! People like me have had it our own way far too long when it comes to blowing smoke in other folk’s faces. I tell you what, if Scottish human rights come down to being able to light up cancer-sticks and get blootered whenever and wherever you like, we’re in a sorry state. It’s time we stood up for freedoms that really matter. It’s time we grew up.’

‘Anyway,’ she says now, ‘what about yourself? How are you?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘You look well. Still on your own, I take it?’

‘Aye.’

‘Really?’

‘Aye.’

‘That’s a shame. I thought you might have found yourself a strapping young fisherman by now.’

This is so close to the truth that Mike is tempted to tell her about Murdo. But he’s not ready. He shakes his head, not exactly lying.

‘Ironic, isn’t it,’ Jean says, ‘that we ranted on about solidarity and community and standing together against the Tories, and what some of us wanted more than anything was to be alone.’