And the Land Lay Still (72 page)

‘Do,’ David finished helpfully.

‘Quite. Now we need to identify a rock-solid Labour seat. That’s where you have to make your mark. It’s a bit of a baptism of fire but we’ve all had to do it. If you can show you’ve got the guts to fight the blue corner in one of those places where they weigh the Labour vote rather than count it, you’ll earn respect. Meanwhile, you and Melissa should come up as often as you can. The Argyll and Sutherland Ball. Fund-raisers, dinner dances and so forth. You know the kind of thing. Then we can arrange a smooth succession.’

‘But there’s a process, surely?’ David said. ‘I can’t walk in just like that.’

‘Certainly not. You have to be a suitable candidate, the
right
candidate. But you are – or you
will
be with a bit of campaigning experience under your belt. I had to run the gauntlet three times, you know, before I was selected for Glenallan. Once in Airdrie and twice in Ayrshire. Have you ever been to Airdrie, David?’

‘No.’

‘Awful. Have you ever been to Ayrshire? Not Ayr, Ayrshire?’

‘No.’

‘Ayrshire – the bit I was standing in, anyway, the eastern half – makes Airdrie look positively idyllic. Miles and miles of bog interspersed with miserable cottages and even more miserable towns. I was there for three weeks each time and I don’t think it ever stopped raining. There was one particular night at a hustings when I thought I was going to be lynched, just because of how I spoke. The irony was, the natives were completely unintelligible. You’ll get your reward in heaven, my agent used to tell me. Actually, I got it in Glenallan. Top us up, will you? Where was I?’

‘Selection process,’ David said, as he lifted the decanter. Roderick seemed to like having a subservient son-in-law to talk to. At least in this household there was no shouting.

‘Yes, well, procedures are more rigorous than they used to be, and there are always plenty of applications for the nomination, but most of the applicants are quite unsuitable. Anyway, strings can be pulled. Like it or not it’s the only way to get the correct outcome. Don’t you worry about that side of things.’

‘I hadn’t really thought that far ahead,’ David said.

‘You don’t have to. I’m not budging for at least five years, remember? All you have to think about is the next election. There has to be one in the next two years, and my bet is Ted will go sooner rather than later. So get your skates on and find a rotten constituency to stand in. I can point you to a couple where they’re desperate for a good young candidate such as yourself. One thing, though. I shouldn’t say anything to your father about all this, not until we’ve got things settled. Wouldn’t want him to think we were doing things behind his back, eh?’

David nodded his agreement. He knew he was thus signalling his engagement in some kind of plot, a form of betrayal, but this did not stop him nodding. He felt that his father was deserving of the betrayal.

§

Melissa was pregnant. Off-limits. They were fine, the two of them, of course they were. But he looked at her swelling belly and the slow, graceful way she adapted to her condition and something went out of him, the passion that had never really been there, and something else came back in. He wanted to explode.

Maybe he was queer. There was no logic to this thought, but it occurred to him nevertheless. Lying beside her as she slept, patient and cowlike, growing the child inside her, he felt slightly revolted by her. At the same time he remembered his schooldays, those brutal manipulations practised on and by other boys, and was excited by the memory. Had he been missing something about himself all along? Had that other thing, the deviation Melissa had killed off with her innocence, been a diversion from something else? He felt an urgent need to find out.

Almost immediately he had the opportunity. They spent August in Glenallan and he left Melissa there for a couple of days and went with Freddy to Edinburgh, where they took in Fringe shows and drank and ate too much, and David wandered around eyeing up shabby buildings in desirable locations. They met one of Freddy’s old schoolmates and suddenly David had an opportunity to put his new theory to the test. Michael Pendreich, nice-enough guy and very handsome, but one frolic in the undergrowth was enough to
convince David that, whatever else he was, he wasn’t
that
. Schoolboy nonsense. An embarrassment. He came back to Melissa determined to love and appreciate her properly. If she noticed a change, if she suspected anything, she said nothing. He was grateful, but he knew he was in trouble. While she prepared to give birth to their first child, the thing that had lain dormant in him twisted and stirred anew. And now he knew he could not deny it.

§

He went to see his parents. The homestead was crumbling about them. Lady Patricia’s face seemed to be caving in at about the same rate. Her lipstick was too red, making her look like a clown or a corpse. One of her eyes was cloudy. Almost the only times she stopped smoking was when she put a glass to her mouth.

‘Mother,’ he said, ‘this is probably a silly question, but did Margaret Thatcher –?’

‘Who?’

‘You know, Margaret Thatcher, the Education Secretary. Did she ever visit us years ago? When I was quite small?’

Lady Patricia stared at him. ‘Why would she do that?’

‘I don’t know. I just have a vague memory …’

‘But what on earth would she have been doing in Scotland? And why would she have come here?’

‘Some party connection? I’m not sure, but perhaps …’

‘But she’s a grocer’s daughter or something, isn’t she? From Gloucester.’

‘Grantham,’ he said.

‘Well, precisely. Your father rather admires her, but as for coming to visit us, well really …’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I see. My mistake. Don’t know what I was thinking of.’

§

He’d noticed her, of course – she was a senior member of the government after all – but to begin with she didn’t stand out. She’d gone the same sort of route to Westminster as David was about to follow, standing twice in a solidly Labour seat in the early 1950s, hunting around for a safe Tory one and finally getting Finchley in
1959. In opposition during the Wilson years she’d spoken in turn on fuel, transport and education. She was in favour of capital punishment and birching, against easier divorce, but voted to legalise abortion and also for the decriminalisation of homosexuality. As Education Secretary she’d had to take responsibility for ending free milk in primary schools, and she’d shown a certain sympathy for comprehensive secondary-school education at the expense of grammar schools. She made robust speeches at conference attacking Communism and its fellow travellers, and the rank and file responded with enthusiasm. But she wasn’t hugely loved, it seemed to David. She also appeared to be somewhat isolated in the Cabinet, as if Heath and his closest male ministers didn’t take her altogether seriously. He felt – almost – sorry for her.

Or would have done, except that there was a frisson-inducing something about Margaret Thatcher that banished pity, sent it scurrying off into shadowland. She would despise anyone who felt sorry for her, he thought. She had a self-belief, not yet perhaps even fully formed or recognised by herself, that made him both admire her and fear for anyone who stood in her way. He thought about that, standing in her way, and far down inside himself the deeps parted and rolled asunder. At one crowded conference-do he observed other men, from opposing wings of the party, watching her slyly as she passed among them. He was not alone, he saw, in the way he was affected by her: she was not desirable but she was to be desired; she was not touchable but she could be worshipped;
she
was not winnable but she might make
you
hers with a smile. At last his turn came. He was introduced. She took his hand and leaned in towards him to catch his name. The warmth of her smile as they talked, the earnestness with which she listened, the conviction in her eyes as she expressed a view, were almost enough for him. Then as she moved on he cast his own eyes down and saw her legs, her shoes, and his conversion was complete. It was the nearest he would ever get to a religious experience.

§

Liz had an arrangement with Charlie, which at least meant they maintained contact. (She and Don had a phone in the house these days but Charlie never called.) Once a week she went shopping in
Drumkirk and on her way to the bus stop with the messages she would stop in at Rinaldi’s for a coffee. Half eleven, every Thursday. If he hadn’t turned up by midday he wasn’t coming. She never asked what kept him away. That was off-limits. So was any mention of his father. But she was always there and most weeks, looking as if he were not long out of his bed, he joined her. He’d have a coffee himself, and a fag, and they’d talk, but there was little in her life he wanted to hear about and little in his he was willing to discuss. When they’d finished their coffees he walked her over to the bus stop. Once, when she had more bags than usual, he drove her home in his car. He helped carry the bags to the door but wouldn’t come in. She saw the disdain on his face: did I really grow up in this dump?

Granthill was a bigger dump but Charlie had made it his own. She’d not been there since the death of Don’s mother, three years before. Molly hadn’t in the end lost her mind, she’d just entered a kind of dream state in which almost her only requirements were the television, cigarettes and Heinz baked beans. She’d refused Don’s offer to come and live in Wharryburn even though she could have had the boys’ empty room, and Don, knowing that if she did come the burden of looking after her would fall on Liz, hadn’t pushed it. He’d seen her every weekend, timing his visits so that he and Charlie didn’t meet, and sometimes Liz had gone with him and between them they’d cleaned the place and reassured themselves that Molly was all right. It appeared that Charlie didn’t mistreat her. Molly wouldn’t hear a word against him. ‘There’s naething wrang wi Charlie,’ she said, to the end. ‘He’s a good laddie. I canna see what ye hae against him.’ When she said this she included Liz in her accusatory stare, and Liz said, ‘It’s no me, Molly. It’s between Charlie and his faither.’ ‘What is? It’s bloody nonsense, that’s what it is.’ ‘Forget it, Ma,’ Don said. ‘Aye, that’s what Charlie says tae. Bloody nonsense. Ye should grow up, baith o ye.’

She died in her sleep. For the first time ever Charlie phoned Liz, cool as you like, and told her. He’d already had the doctor out and the Co-op were on their way. His grandmother had kept up her funeral plan for decades and given him instructions about what to do. ‘Truce,’ he said to Liz. ‘You can come in here – you and him – and sort oot onything ye want. But one week efter the funeral that’s it. This is my hame and I’m staying here and I’m wanting it tae
masel.’ They managed to get through that week without a fight – without much eye contact or many words spoken between Charlie and Don either – and Molly had been cremated and Charlie took on the tenancy of the flat.

The last time Liz was there was two days after the funeral. Don asked Bulldog to drive them down and they loaded his car with a few boxes of Molly’s clothes and possessions – a pitiful collection of cheap jewellery and photographs – nearly all of which, once they’d gone through it back at Wharryburn, they would throw out. Bulldog stood like a nervous sentinel beside his car while they carried the boxes down. The stair stank of urine, stale drink, and cat. Graffiti was everywhere. GRANTHILL TOI. DRUMKIRK CUMBIE RULE. IRA. GERS CUNTS. KILL ALL POOFS. As if all the poison of Scotland had leached into this tiny part of it. It felt like a vicious, hostile place but Charlie seemed at ease amid the squalor, and his Ford Capri sat outside in the rubbish-strewn street without a mark on it. There was something unnerving about that fact. Bulldog felt it too. Driving away he whistled and shook his head and said, ‘Jesus Christ. I kent Granthill was bad but I had nae idea. Nae idea.’ This from a man whose newspaper was always full of Granthill crime stories – street brawls, domestic assaults, vandalism. But Bulldog, overweight, jowly and short of breath, seldom left the office: he might as well have been editing stories from the dark side of the moon.

At the top of the street Liz looked back and saw Charlie’s car and she understood that the people who lived there knew who her son was, and that they were afraid of him.

§

There were strikes and power cuts and elections and a referendum on staying in the EEC. There was Gary Glitter. There was contraception on the NHS. There were the Bay City Rollers. There was a Sex Discrimination Act and an Equal Opportunities Commission to enforce it. There was punk rock. There wasn’t devolution. There weren’t children.

Billy said, ‘Why not?’

Barbara said, ‘I’m not ready.’

He said, ‘Well, we’ve been together long enough. When do you think you’ll be ready?’

She glared at him. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It’s no supposed tae mean onything.’ On the rare occasions he got passionate his voice shifted out of teacher mode and back into Wharryburn. ‘Are we gonnae hae bairns or no?’

Silence.

‘Because if we’re no, what the hell are we daein wi each other ony mair?’

‘Is that what you think this is about? Us having children?’

‘Well, what is it aboot, Barbara? I dinna ken ony mair. Dae you?’

She said, ‘You sound like your brother.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’ He saw the look in her eyes, which said he’d just confirmed it.

It was about her father. The Lord Lucan of Wharryburn. He knew it was. But her father was forbidden territory. ‘I
don’t
want to talk about it, Billy.’ Whenever they went to Glenrothes he saw the yearning in Sarah’s eyes, her desire for a grandchild. At least that’s what he thought he saw. But he didn’t say anything because he didn’t want to upset her.

He was almost beyond whether he upset Barbara or not.

§

Liz had just taken the first frothy sip of coffee when Charlie arrived and she knew at once that something was different. He came in with a fag already going, looking as if he’d been up all night. He kept checking the street through the window.

‘What’s the maitter, son?’