And the Land Lay Still (63 page)

‘It’s serious, isn’t it?’ Liz said.

‘Naw,’ Don said. ‘Not at all.’ But he was thinking of Billy’s determination. Maybe it was serious. And could Billy really look after himself?

They sat in silence. Gunshots sounded from the front room. Charlie was in there with the newly acquired rented television. Slouching, no doubt. Charlie watched the TV in a slouch that said he was neither awed nor puzzled by it, as everybody else was. It was as if there’d never been a time when he didn’t watch television. Don thought of Billy with his anxious permission-seeking, his diary, the neatly torn page, his clap-along songs. Charlie despised his brother for these things, and Liz was disappointed by them, that was what Don thought. For all that she wanted to control Billy, for all that he was more controllable, she’d have preferred him to be more like Charlie, to walk a little closer to the edge.

§

Sir Malcolm Eddelstane, after a prolonged argument with Lady Patricia, succumbed to her advice and stood down prior to the 1964 General Election. The Profumo affair, the general disarray of Macmillan’s government and a wider change of mood in the country, she said, signalled not only that the Conservatives were due for a spell in opposition but also that a more modern type of candidate would increasingly be required to counter the appeal of Labour. Sir Malcolm was only fifty-five, but looked much older, and was definitely on the traditional wing of the party. ‘Choose the time and manner of your departure,’ Lady Patricia said. ‘Don’t be the victim of a plot.’ ‘I’m not a coward,’ Sir Malcolm said. ‘I’m not going to cut and run.’ ‘Make a dignified exit,’ she replied. ‘That’s a better way of putting it.’ He blustered and sulked for a few weeks, but saw what she meant. Then, fortuitously, he had some heart trouble. Nothing too serious, a touch of angina, but it gave him an excuse, enabled him to announce that he wanted to spend more time at home, in the bosom of his devoted family. Of course he’d be damned if he was going to give up London entirely, and Lady Patricia didn’t insist on this. She did, however, require the sale of the flat, which she
suspected as the scene of infidelities, in order to release some capital. Now whenever he left Ochiltree House for London he put up at his club.

Roderick Braco, QC, an Edinburgh lawyer with a house in Glenallan, stepped into his political shoes. Sir Malcolm, not wishing to seem entirely washed up, eased himself into the chairmanship of the constituency association. He was loath to admit it, but Lady Patricia’s assessment of the way things were going politically was pretty astute. It was time to get himself out of the direct line of fire.

As it turned out, Glenallan and West Mills stayed Unionist at the election but the margin of victory was much reduced. You could blame the times, or you could blame Braco for not having put in enough effort, or you could say his face wasn’t yet well known enough but everything would be all right next time round. You could argue, as Sir Malcolm did loudly and repeatedly, that there had been a substantial personal vote for himself, and that Roderick Braco would have to work hard in the future to earn the equivalent. But after you’d said all that, nobody could afford to be complacent, not even Sir Malcolm. Something would have to be done.

Perhaps the Boundary Commission could be persuaded to redraw the electoral map, someone suggested, at an association meeting called to inspect the damage. The constituency could do with a bit more Glenallan and a bit less West Mills. Somebody else thought that would be tantamount to gerrymandering, and a third person said that it
was
gerrymandering, an observation that was greeted with wounded looks. Sir Malcolm said he’d see if he could have a word with somebody. It was perfectly obvious that the constituency was an odd shape, an unnatural shape, with the two parts having little in common with one another. One could rely on farmers, he said, apart from the Liberal ones. And professional people, the middle class, by and large, one could be sure of them too. But the traditional working-class Unionist vote, where was that these days? And he eyed the room and didn’t find any of it present.

He did have a word, but whether or not it was with the right somebody the Boundary Commission took no notice. The constituency shape remained unnatural, and two years later Sir Malcolm had to revise his analysis. It seemed one couldn’t be sure of the middle class either. People who ought to have known better were
switching in droves to other parties. In the mid-1950s the Unionists had managed to win half of the Scottish vote and thirty-six seats. In 1966 they were down to twenty seats and it was Labour who polled nearly 50 per cent of the Scottish vote. Roderick Braco survived, but what on earth was going on? There was an undercurrent of growing support for the Scottish National Party, but that – surely – was just a temporary protest, an annoying but understandable reaction to the government’s obsession with central planning. (At a performance of
The Mikado
put on by the Glenallan Amateur Operatic Society, how the audience had hooted at the inclusion, on the Lord High Executioner’s little list, of both a Red-Hot Socialist and a Scottish Nationalist!) Sir Malcolm found himself lamenting the prominence given to the word ‘Conservative’ in the new formulation Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party. The Conservatives were an
English
party. What the hell was wrong with the old terminology? Three horrible thoughts occurred to him almost simultaneously: one, that he was becoming a bit of a Scot Nat himself; two, that perhaps religion didn’t matter much to the working class any more; and three, that even the middle class might be thinking they were better served by socialists than by men with names like Sir Malcolm Eddelstane, Roderick Braco, QC, and, in the next-door constituency, Sir Alec Douglas-Home.

The Glenallan Eddelstanes were at the upper end of the social scale but financially they had peaked a generation before. Somewhat thin and frayed bloodlines connected them to the heroic military Eddelstanes, the renowned engineering Eddelstanes, the revered theological Eddelstanes and the brilliant mathematical Eddelstanes; but, lacking the inventiveness and dynamism of these kinsfolk, Sir Malcolm’s forebears had invested money in other people’s enterprises rather than establish their own. Over the decades they had done very well. But they were money-made, these lesser Eddelstanes, not land-made, and so they stood slightly apart from, and rather less firmly rooted than, the lairds and aristocrats at the core of Scottish Toryism. They were not law-made either, that other, Edinburgh-centred strand of which Roderick Braco was a fine representative. And now the Eddelstane money was draining away fast. Sir Malcolm’s father had lost vast amounts of it in 1929, and Sir Malcolm himself kept buying shares in ventures that
promptly bellied: an oil-exploration company in Burma (collapsed when oil production was nationalised by the bloody Burmese socialist government in 1963); the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company on the Clyde (filed for bankruptcy in 1965, bailed out by the bloody British socialist government but too late for Sir Malcolm’s cash). Ochiltree House might be a substantial pile in the Scotch Baronial style, with a vast garden, including tennis court, maintained by the full-time if ageing McLeish; Sir Malcolm and Lady Patricia might be able to employ Mrs Thomson five days a week to cook, clean and generally keep them functioning somewhere in the second half of the twentieth century; they might be able to bring in catering companies to manage their various parties; they might be able to dispatch their sons to semi-respectable boarding schools, and they might have the wherewithal to send their daughter away too, in order to knock some sense into her airy little skull; but despite all this, there were cracks in the Ochiltree House walls and a certain desperation in the amount Sir Malcolm and Lady Patricia drank and the way they endlessly socialised and the volume at which they raged and railed at each other and their offspring. And their oldest child, David, from his bedroom window at home, or from the distant perspective of his boarding school, could see that by the time he inherited whatever assets his mother and father had left, they would not amount to very much at all.

Boarding school was Kilsmeddum Castle, where Sir Malcolm himself had been in another age, acquiring the grace and dignity of his later years. It was the kind of place, in other words, that might – and did – destroy many a more sensitive soul. David was sensitive but he was saved by sport. A modest performer in the classroom, he excelled at rugby, cricket, running, jumping, swimming and skiing, and this made him reasonably popular with other boys who, if they’d thought about it, would have been hard-pressed to identify any particular thing about him they liked. That was the point, he was one of the crowd, he didn’t threaten and he didn’t invite attack. He was safe.

The unsafest thing he did was skiing. You had to be a little bit mad to ski in Scotland in the 1960s: you had to climb to the top of a mountain with your skis on your back and then ski down again, no pistes, no fences to keep you away from hidden precipices, just you
and snow, ice and rock. Or you went to Glen Shee for weekends – a long, slow, twisting journey from Kilsmeddum – you and a bunch of other slightly mad boys and a partially crazed master or two, to indulge in the steamy camaraderie of wet boots, porridge and sleeping bags. There were only a few tows in Glen Shee then, and such intrusions seemed dwarfed by nature, mere blemishes, not the scars that development would later bring. David loved the different textures of the winter glen, the glide and rasp of ski over snow, over ice, the wind and the sun, the fog and occasionally the blizzards. You were in a group, but you were also apart, yourself. You could
be
yourself. Everything was rough and unpredictable, including the weather, but this, so the masters claimed, would stand you in good stead for whatever the future might fling at you. As if life were a Highland hillside. And maybe it was. You pointed your skis and off you went.

§

Liz wanted a job. The boys didn’t need so much looking after. She was bored. The extra money wouldn’t hurt either. But what kind of work? She had no qualifications and felt it was too late to get any. Maybe she could be a cleaner. The folk in the big houses at the top end of the village were always wanting cleaners. Betty, her neighbour, had done two mornings a week in one of those houses for years. Liz had never fancied clearing up other people’s mess just because they could afford not to have to do it themselves, it went against the grain somehow, and Don, she was sure, would object. Betty told her not to be so daft. It was no worse than any other kind of work. Better than slaving away in a factory with some gaffer cracking the whip. The woman she worked for was dead posh but nice, wouldn’t dream of criticising Betty’s standards (which were higher than her own) and was so embarrassed by dirt that she usually tidied up before Betty arrived anyway. There was another house up there that had changed hands a few weeks before, a surgeon at the infirmary had bought it, he had a wife and they had three kids, all away at boarding school, and Betty had been asked if she knew anyone reliable who might clean for them. Why didn’t Liz apply?

She did. The surgeon’s wife, Mrs Cotter, was English and glamorous and wore tartan trousers and a cashmere jumper, neither of
which had come out of a jumble sale, and spoke like a film star as she showed Liz around the house, from top to bottom. This took about twenty minutes without dawdling. The bedrooms, six of them, were enormous. There were three bathrooms: one for the Cotters, an en-suite in the main guest room, and one for the children when they were back from their schools. Plus a downstairs cloakroom and a lavvy, beside the laundry room, which Mrs Cotter very diplomatically indicated was the one Liz should use if she had to. There was a ‘small’ sitting room bigger than any room in the Lennies’ house, and what Mrs Cotter referred to as the ‘drawing room’ contained, among other things, a baby grand piano, two three-seater sofas, two massive armchairs and a fireplace you could have roasted a sheep in. The dining room gleamed with an array of silver candlesticks, wine coasters, napkin rings and cutlery, which Mrs Cotter would like cleaned once a fortnight. As they went through each room she pointed out the things she particularly wanted to be washed or dusted or polished on a regular basis. They finished in the ultra-modern kitchen where Mrs Cotter made coffee and offered Liz a biscuit.

It seemed they’d hit it off. Liz was just what Mrs Cotter was looking for, and the fact that she was from the village, a friend of her neighbour’s cleaner – well, it couldn’t be better. Would she take the same hourly rate? Liz said yes, having established from Betty that the rate was four shillings an hour. How many hours a week, Liz asked, did Mrs Cotter want her to come in? Mrs Cotter looked at the ceiling as if calculating the rooms in a column above her head: she thought three hours on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays would seem about right. Could Liz manage that? Liz did her own calculation. That was nearly two pounds a week and even with the size of the place and the amount of silver and ornaments and polishing the brass door handles and scrubbing the baths till they dazzled and beating rugs and vacuuming the acres of carpet she couldn’t imagine how she was going to fill the nine hours. Aye, she said. Yes, that would be fine. And Mrs Cotter said that was settled then, with a beautiful smile, and explained that she’d always be there at nine o’clock to let Liz in but would she mind sometimes being left on her own, and locking up when she’d finished, because she herself intended to play golf every Wednesday, went shopping most
Fridays and often had other commitments on a Monday? Liz said she’d not mind.

And Don, to her surprise, didn’t mind either. She’d assumed he would resist the idea but the only thing he couldn’t get his head round was that the Cotters had five different places to go for a shit. He thought the job would do her good, and it was handy, so why not?

She started the following week. Before long she felt she’d been working there for years. Mrs Cotter continued to be charming and on the rare occasions she was still there when Liz’s three hours were up she sat and drank coffee with her. She expressed her extreme happiness with the quality of Liz’s work. Mr Cotter was hardly ever home. When he was, he smiled and said, ‘How are you?’ as if she might be one of his patients. She suspected he spoke to his children in the same tone. The children were so polite and so careful not to get in her way during the school holidays that she sometimes forgot they were there. It was all more than tolerable, but what Liz loved most was when she was alone in the house. Then the three hours went fast enough. They filled her with a weird kind of delight. She’d pause beside the piano and touch a key and hear the note absorbed by the room and wonder at the tranquillity of the rest of the house, the gentle creak of old floorboards, the quiet tick of the grandfather clock in the hall, the light that flooded in through the bay windows, and outside the sweep of the front lawn and the grandeur of the lovely trees. She’d stand at an upstairs window and the view was so spectacular she had to tell herself, out loud, to get on with her work. Mrs Cotter had said she was welcome to have the radio on but why would she, when what she valued was the silence, the emptiness of the house, the fact that for those hours she alone held it in trust? In short, she loved her job.