And the Land Lay Still (59 page)

‘Come in and I’ll show ye something,’ Denny said. ‘It’s a beezer. Ye’ll no believe it.’ They went inside and he opened the door to the front room. Auld Mrs Hogg was lying like an oversized doll, propped up on pillows in the narrow bed from which she hadn’t stirred for weeks. The curtains were drawn but with the door ajar a little light came in from the passage and fell on the old woman’s face. Denny and Ellen stood and watched her. If you held your own breath you could almost imagine she was still breathing, that she wasn’t empty and hollow. The room smelled damp, but then it always did. Was Auld Mrs Hogg damper dead than she’d been alive? And how quickly did a dead body start to go off? Ellen had no idea. She’d never been in the presence of one before.

‘Dae ye want tae touch her?’ Denny whispered. She shook her head. ‘Watch this then,’ he said, and he crept across the room and put a finger to his granny’s cheek, as if performing a dare. Then, placing both hands on the blankets above her middle, he pushed down with sudden violence. He hurried back to the door. ‘Listen,’ he said, and she held her breath again and suddenly there it was, unmistakable, a long, whining pump from the bed, like a squeaky door hinge. The two of them went into kinks.

‘She’s been deid three oors and she’s farting away the same as ever,’ Denny said.

Suddenly Ellen stopped laughing and had an intense need to get out into the open. Denny came with her to the door but he wouldn’t leave the house. Ellen felt as if she’d grown taller just by stepping into the light. It was like going from a story into real life, or maybe the other way round, because a strange, unreal figure was coming down the street towards her, a man. She knew everybody in these streets but not this one. He was thin, oh so thin, in a long heavy coat done up to the neck and with a bag slung over his shoulder, if he’d had a stick and a spotted bundle in a handkerchief hanging from it she wouldn’t have been surprised, and his face was made of the same material as Auld Mrs Hodge when she was alive and more so now she was dead, leathery-looking, brown and hard. She imagined her Dey’s insides looked much the same. And the stranger came towards her and he fixed her with piercing yet distant eyes. She might have been frightened but she wasn’t, there was something sad about the man as if he were searching for something; he looked at her to see if she was it but she can’t have been, for on he walked, right past her, straight and silent. And then he stopped, in the middle of the street, and turned round. He beckoned to her and although she knew she mustn’t go she went, but not all the way to him. He reached into his pocket and took something out and bent and laid it on the ground, and gave her that strange stare again. Then he turned and was gone. And Denny was away back inside and hadn’t seen him. Nobody else was in the street. Nobody saw him but herself. She could almost believe he hadn’t been there at all, except he had. She went to the spot where he’d bent to the ground and saw it, a smooth white pebble like a huge peppermint. She picked it up and held it, and it was the proof that he had been there. She took it home and kept it, but she didn’t say anything to anyone because there was nothing to say, and she didn’t write it down in her notebook because it was a secret thing that she could not explain even to herself.

§

And soon after this there was Harold Macmillan telling the British people they didn’t know they were born, or words to that effect. ‘Indeed let us be frank about it – most of our people have never had it so good,’ the Prime Minister said in a speech to the Tory faithful at Bedford. ‘Go around the country, go to the industrial towns, go
to the farms and you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my lifetime – nor indeed in the history of this country.’ Well, maybe there was some truth in what he said but you would never have got the miners of Borlanslogie to admit it. ‘
Maist
o oor people,’ her Dey stressed. ‘He’s saying
maist
o oor people. He’s no including us, then. He canna be. He disna ken onything aboot
us
.’ ‘We’re no haein it as bad as we usually dae, that’s aboot the best ye can say,’ was her Nana’s opinion. If there were Kremlin-watchers in Whitehall, there were Whitehall-watchers in Borlanslogie, analysing what the capitalists said, dissecting and rubbishing the fat lies every night over their tea, with or without the assistance of the
Daily Worker
.

But there were difficulties over the
Worker
. The stories of atrocities and then the stream of refugees coming out of Hungary after the Soviet invasion the year before had led to more arguments in the cottage in 7th Street. Her Nana was inclined to keep faith with Khrushchev: if he didn’t take a strong stance the anti-revolution movement, urged on by the capitalists, would infect not just Hungary but every other Communist country, and the great hope of the working classes in the West would be destroyed for ever. Her Dey wasn’t so sure. ‘We kept faith wi Stalin till Khrushchev denounced him,’ he said. ‘And if it taks tanks and bullets and mass arrests tae convince the people what’s good for them, can it be aw that good for them?’ He was especially vexed that the
Daily Worker
’s cartoonist, Gabriel, a Glaswegian called Jimmy Friell, had parted company with the paper after it rejected one of his cartoons. Friell had been ruthless for decades in his depiction of fascists and capitalists alike, but when he produced a picture comparing what the Russians were doing in Budapest with what the British and French had tried to do in Egypt during the Suez crisis, the
Daily Worker
refused to print it. He’d resigned, along with a number of others – a sign, if any were needed, that Dey and Nana’s lifelong dream was fading. Polish Patrick still came round with the paper every night, and Dey still bought it off him, but there was something suspect about the transaction now, as if Patrick knew he was selling shoddy goods and Dey knew he was buying them, but force of habit and faith prevented either of them admitting it.

The dream was of a land of equality and peace and plenty. Ellen
read a long, glowing description of life in the Soviet Union in Volume 9 of Arthur Mee’s
Children’s Encylopedia
. When her Dey dreamed she thought that was probably what he dreamed of, in the way other people dreamed of heaven; and she decided that both places sounded far too good to be possible. She was ten and spending more time back in her own home, not just because it was the summer holidays, but because of Arthur Mee. Adam and Gavin, at thirteen, were supposed to keep an eye on her and make sure she didn’t burn the house down, but really she was just as responsible as they were so they often left her on her own. And she was happy to be left – happiest of all when she had the place to herself – and the reason was the recently arrived
Children’s Encylopedia
. It sat on a shelf in the front room, in ten hefty volumes, and Ellen felt that the world – the whole universe in fact – had somehow entered their house and that her life would never be the same again.

Mary had ordered the
Encyclopedia
from a door-to-door salesman and had signed up to pay for it on a two-year plan. It was costly, but she’d calculated she could meet the payments even without any of the money that periodically arrived from Jock. The books were rich and splendid in their burgundy covers with the lettering picked out in gold. Mary made a rule: you could take down only one at a time, or one plus the last volume, which contained the index. Ellen was determined to read the lot from cover to cover.

They were for her and her cousins, Mary’s compensation for not being around as much as she felt she should be, and an investment in all three children’s futures, but to Ellen they felt like hers alone because Gavin and Adam didn’t have her staying power. They flicked through the pages looking for the colour plates of ‘Fishes swimming in foreign seas’, and butterflies and moths, and tried to learn tricks such as ‘The Inexhaustible Matchbox’ and ‘The Wizard’s Handkerchief’, but they were intimidated by the densely packed pages of print, diagrams, maps and photographs. For Ellen, these were the
Children’s Encylopedia
’s chief attraction. Knowledge, layer upon layer of it, seven hundred and fifty pages per volume. She could be engrossed for hours with a photographic sequence on ‘What Happens in an Ironworks’, an explanation of ‘The Willow-Pattern Plate’, seven pages on ‘The Birth, Life and Death of a Flower’, ‘Music – the Meaning of Dots’, and seventeen pages on
‘Napoleon and His Conquerors’. She read without judgement or preference, equally entranced by Bible stories, basic lessons in French, nursery rhymes and ‘The Right Way to Cook Vegetables’. Although she knew it could not really be the case – and later discovered that he’d in fact died years before, during the war – she half-believed that Arthur Mee had written every word and chosen every image in the books. She was flattered by his easy, avuncular style, the way he explained things as if nothing could be beyond either her intelligence or her imagination. She thought of him as a family friend, old-fashioned but not dull, and she wanted to know everything that he knew. When she read about primates, ‘The Animals Most Like Men’, and that gorillas were ‘peaceful giants, only roused to wrath if their homes are invaded’, she immediately liked gorillas and felt that Arthur Mee must have been among them and liked them too. And when he told her that they were entirely confined to ‘the dim forests of the western half of Equatorial Africa’ and that ‘when civilisation reaches there the gorilla will vanish from the Book of Life’, she was almost reduced to tears, and felt that when that day came the page she had just read would also, by some fateful mechanism, be removed from the
Children’s Encyclopedia
.

Later, Adam came round to it. Ellen found him one afternoon with three or four volumes spread out on the floor, and was about to nag him for breaking the rule, but he was so intent, and when he looked up gave her such a smile, that she just said nothing but sat down next to him and they spent an hour reading articles out to each other. ‘Where’s Gavin?’ she asked. ‘Dinna ken,’ Adam said. ‘He wanted tae dae something ootside but I didna want tae, sae I didna.’ They must have had a fight, she thought, but said nothing. A space had opened up between the twins, and a new bridge lay between Adam and herself. After that Adam’s thirst for information grew rapidly, till it was almost as great as her own. She liked that, but she still liked it better when she had the
Encyclopedia
to herself.

She came across a sequence of photographs about water power, including images from the Highlands, where her father worked. Water poured over a dam at Loch Ericht: the caption read, ‘Tunnels through the solid rock lead the water to the turbines in the powerhouse below.’ Jock was home for a fortnight that summer – between jobs, he said – and she showed him the pictures. ‘Aye, lass, that’s
what I build, dams like yon.’ She wanted to know exactly what he did and it appeared he did everything: putting up or taking down scaffolding, laying pipes, shifting machinery from one place to another, digging roads, blowing up rocks, pouring concrete. He worked in all weathers too, in waist-deep snow, week-long downpours, Arctic gales that would knock cows over, and in summer, sweltering, tropical, midge-swarming heat, the midges were the size of wasps and if you hung your socks out of the window at night there’d just be a heel left on the ground in the morning, the hard matted bit even they couldn’t chew through. There was one time he was working up in Ross-shire, mixing concrete day after day to make huge sections of a dam on some scheme or other, it was winter and nobody had any gloves so first thing in the morning your hands would stick to anything iron and some lads left their fingertips and had to go back for them at dinner time when the sun was up and you could gently ease them off, but the cold preserved them and if you stuck them back on in just the right place they joined up again. And icicles would grow in your beard, all different lengths so you could play a tune on them like it was a xylophone, ‘The Campdown Races’ maybe or ‘I’ll Take You Home, Kathleen’, whatever you fancied. And you were tipping sack after sack of cement, and it was raining and you were sweating so you got concreted yourself, you were like a harled wall by the end of the shift and had to walk back to your digs like a robot, it was all you could do to eat a meal and then you just wanted to sleep so you didn’t bother to wash, you fell on to your bed in a straight stiff line and when you woke in the morning you had to crack your breeks in order to bend your legs and you were dropping grit and concrete lumps off you for the first hour of the day. You were always busy, you never stood still, och you didn’t dare, there was a big man from Aberdeen called Archie, the Marble Arch they nicknamed him, and he stood still once, just thinking about something or other, and a boy in a crane thought he was a concrete buttress and picked him up by the collar and if they hadn’t all waved and roared Archie would be part of the Cluanie Dam now. On and on with his stories, ones she knew were pure nonsense and ones which were half or maybe even three-quarters true, and funny and heroic and exciting though it all sounded something wasn’t right, and it was this: Ellen
knew that most men did one job, all the time, and here was her dad doing half a dozen. She didn’t know him at all, her own father. She wanted to: she liked him, and he seemed to like her, filling her head with story after story about the folk he worked alongside: daft, roaring Irishmen, quiet Poles and Lithuanians, a German or two left over from the war, even the odd Englishman. The men he spoke about were so real and lifelike, the stories so bold and monumental, yet there was something shifting and insubstantial about himself. Even though he was so much bigger than her she felt she was the more solid.

More serious, certainly: when she showed him the pictures in the Arthur Mee books she turned the pages with confidence and read the text studiously, while he only glanced, his gaze sliding away, his mind always flitting off somewhere. She wanted to find out, whereas he had the look of a man about to
be
found out. He could never settle to anything for more than ten minutes. When Mary came in from her work and they were all having their tea together he’d be constantly glancing at his watch, not listening to her attempts at conversation, scraping back his chair and off out the door even as he forked the last bit of food from his plate into his mouth. There was beer on his breath, more often than not, and he smoked Woodbines ferociously, right down to the nip, and his thumb and forefinger were yellow and hard where the tobacco burned them.