And the Land Lay Still (91 page)

Neither of us seemed to want to leave, and neither of us had to. It wasn’t as if we had to get home for anybody else. He’d come into Drumkirk on the bus – never had a car in his life, he told me, he could service one, repair one, drive one, but he’d never owned one, didn’t see the need – so I offered him a lift home. We put our shopping in my car but before we drove off he said, Do you fancy a walk by the old infirmary? So we went down by the river, and parked and went for a walk. The new hospital’s out of town, and the old one’s been converted into flats and the grounds are all landscaped. It looks very nice but the prices are insane. Anyway we walked by the river, just talking and talking, me telling him about my children and grandchildren and him laughing and saying how lucky I was, and on the way back we wandered in through the old infirmary gates and had a look at the place. Over there’s where you asked me for a cigarette, he said. So of course we had to go and admire the trees, even bigger than they had been then, and where the nurses’ home used to be there was a brand-new building, another block of flats with cars parked in numbered spaces. There was a woman with a dog, she was picking up its business with a trowel and putting it in a plastic bag and the look of disgust on her face made us both laugh. As if she was thinking, did that really come out of
my
dog? And then a
man came over with a disapproving look on
his
face and asked if he could help us. Don said he didn’t think so. This is private property, the man said. Well, Don said, we’re not doing any harm, my son was born here, and this lady used to work here as a nurse. In fact she helped deliver my son. The man looked a bit fed up, as if this happened all the time. I see, he said, it’s just that we get all these kids coming in here, causing havoc. We’re not kids, Don said. What do they do, these kids? I asked. They ride their bikes all over the grass and drop litter everywhere, the man said. Don said, Terrible, isn’t it? They should reintroduce National Service. Absolutely, the man said. And the birch, Don said. And hanging, the man said. And send all the darkies hame, Don said. And at that point the man realised he was being made a fool of, and he went very crimson and turned on his heel and stalked off and we went back through the gates laughing and then I said, It
is
terrible, though. A lot of people really think like that. I ken, Don said.
He
does, for a start. I loved the way he spoke, I could listen to that voice all day, I thought.

I drove him home and we passed a nice-looking hotel and he said, What about that drink? I could buy you it in there, and I said, Okay, but not today, because I was feeling a little overwhelmed at the pace we were setting. Tomorrow then, he said, and I agreed. He said, They’ve got a good restaurant, let me take you for a meal, and I agreed to that too. And when we got to Wharryburn he invited me in for a coffee and I didn’t even hesitate, in I went. The house was fine, a little austere in the way men on their own often live, but very clean and quite spacious. It was mad but I was doing that thing already, sizing it up, thinking about what I would do with it. We sat in the kitchen looking out on the garden, which was immaculate, full of flowers and shrubs and vegetables. He took me out and showed me up and down the grass paths he’d made, pointing out different things. He said, The garden’s been my territory for years. My zone of influence. Liz’s zone was indoors, the house. I’m still getting used to that being mine too. I said, You make it sound like the Cold War and he said, Well, at times it was, but we learned to be tolerant. What’s that thing called, MAD? Mutually assured destruction. We knew which buttons not to push. But we’d kind of lost each other and then I retired and it was like we woke up, we saw what a poor way of living we’d got into. And we started to make it
better and she gave up the cleaning job she’d had but she got ill almost at once. The truth was she’d been ill for a long time but I didn’t know. She was in pain, she was sick, and eventually she couldn’t deny it any more,
we
couldn’t deny it. She had breast cancer and they operated but it was too late, it had spread, what’s that called again when it spreads? Metastasis, I said. Aye, he said, that’s what had happened. It was in her bones. They gave her six months. She said she’d thought there was something wrong with her for years but she couldn’t face it, she put it down to the menopause or working too hard or anything except the truth because she was too frightened. Her mother went the same way. If we hadn’t drifted apart maybe I’d have made her do something about it earlier, but I didn’t. I’ll never forgive myself for that. We had some good times before she went though. In the end she managed eight months. We had wee holidays together, just a few days away here and there. We found each other again. And Billy was a great support, he was brilliant in fact, he was on his own at that time and he helped look after his mother right to the end.

What about Charlie? I asked. Was he still alive when his mother died? Aye he was, Don said. He came to see her a couple of times. He’d have come more often but he was in the army by then, you see. He came these two or three times and while he was seeing her I came out here into the garden. We hardly said a word to one another. When we knew she hadn’t long left I got a message to him through his regiment and he came one last time – compassionate leave – and I asked him if he’d come back for the funeral and he said, No, why would I do that? He’d said goodbye to her and he didn’t need to say anything to anybody else. And he went back to the army and that was the last time I saw him.

He looked at me and said, Listen to me, I’ll be frightening you off spouting all this stuff at you. I said he wouldn’t and then it just kind of happened, I took his hand to assure him of that, and we went back into the house holding hands and we didn’t let go till he made some more coffee and that was when he told me more about his sons. And our hands met again over the table and that was it really, I knew we were going to be together even though nothing else happened that time, we just held hands.

It was all over with Charlie by then. He’d been dead a year and
Don could talk about it without too much trouble. Charlie had been wild as a young man, he left home and ended up in Granthill, which is about the worst bit of Drumkirk there is, and he got involved in a lot of crime, gang-related stuff, which was when he and Don fell out, they had a big confrontation and Charlie nearly killed his father, and that was the end of their relationship. Well then, years passed and Liz used to see Charlie but Don and he didn’t communicate and then something happened. Don never found out what it was he did, but he heard things through a friend of his who worked on the local paper. Charlie could be violent and he did something very bad, he overstepped some boundary and the other gangs gave him an ultimatum, it was either get out or they’d shop him to the police, so he got out, he joined the army. And it saved him. No, that’s not true. That’s my interpretation and I don’t know and anyway it didn’t save him, that’s a stupid thing to say. But it changed him, or at least it controlled him. Maybe by going into the army he found a way of channelling all his anger or something. Don and I have talked about that and he says maybe I’m right but it’s not exactly something you want to think about, is it – young men channelling their anger armed with assault rifles. And the truth is we’ll never know and it still didn’t bring about a reconciliation between them, not even when Liz died.

He was in the army for seventeen years altogether. He served in Northern Ireland and the Falklands and some fathers would be proud of a record like that but Don said he’d had enough war fifty years before to knock the pride out of him and anyway the Falklands was the stupidest, most pointless war anyone could have fought in. I didn’t think so and we discussed that but we didn’t fall out over it, we just agreed to differ. And then there was the Gulf War and Charlie was out in it but he came home safely from that too. Don didn’t know this at the time because there was no contact between them. He only found out after Charlie died. An officer came to see him to tell him the news, and it was from him that he learned some of the details of where Charlie had been on service. Don talked about the officer visiting, I think it was the next night, when he took me out for our first meal.

This officer turned up at the door one evening. He asked for Mrs Elizabeth Lennie and Don said she was dead and the officer looked
a bit awkward and asked who he was and Don said he was her husband. The officer asked if he was the father of Sergeant Charles Lennie, and when Don said yes the officer said he had some bad news. He came straight out with it, he said Charlie had been killed during a training exercise on Salisbury Plain. He’d been in a jeep which collided with an armoured vehicle and overturned, there were three of them in the jeep but the other two were thrown clear, only Charlie was killed. He was driving. It seemed the jeep had been in an area where it wasn’t supposed to be and the armoured vehicle came over a hill and pretty much rolled over it. Don said, And how does a thing like that happen? And the officer said, It was an accident, there’ll be a coroner’s inquiry but it was just a terrible accident. One of those things. And that was the irony. Charlie had been in all these places where the enemy had tried to shoot him or blow him up and in the end he was run over by a British tank.

The officer came back a few days later and talked more about the accident and the inquiry, and he had a whole lot of notes in a briefcase, in case Don needed to ask any questions, but Don said he only had one, and that was whether Charlie had made a good soldier.

The officer looked a bit surprised and shuffled through his papers and said yes, he’d been a good soldier, he’d been in the army for all those years, he’d served his country well, that kind of thing. And Don said he didn’t give a damn about any of that, he’d barely spoken to his son in twenty years and maybe he should rephrase the question because what he wanted to know was whether the army had made something of him. And the officer looked through his papers again and said yes, I think we did. It’s not uncommon for there to be disciplinary problems with new recruits, Mr Lennie, but Charlie came through them, and after all he did end up a sergeant. Don asked what he meant by disciplinary problems and the officer said he didn’t have all the details but it seemed Charlie had taken some time to adjust to the military regime. He said, We sorted him out, Mr Lennie. Often young men join us because there is a lack in their lives, and we supply whatever it is that’s missing. A sense of self-worth, duty, comradeship, a sense of family. When your son signed up it was a two-way contract. Perhaps you could say we remoulded him. And then he said that he hoped the answers he’d
given were some kind of comfort, and Don said no, not really, but Charlie was dead now and there was nothing more to be said or done about it.

Obviously I’m paraphrasing. I wasn’t there but when Don talks about something from the past it’s very intense. He didn’t describe what the officer looked like or anything, but it was as if he was there at the table beside us, as if Don was seeing him and not me, having that same conversation with him. But after a minute he was back with me. He said, Marjory, I feel like I can tell you almost anything. And I said, That’s good, that’s the way I feel too. He said, I’d like you to meet Billy some time, I think you’d really like him. And I said, I’d like you to meet my children too. Well, you don’t say things like that at our age without realising the significance. We knew what we were saying all right.

And of course I did meet Billy and I do like him, very much. He’s quiet and deep but he has a generous spirit, like his father. And Billy’s a wonderful father. Another lifetime, or a fair bit of one, seems to have gone by since Don and I got together. Billy and Catriona have their children, growing up bilingual in Glasgow – trilingual, Don says, because he feeds them as much Scots as he can on top of the Gaelic and English – and I have seven grandchildren and there’s a serious danger I’ll be a great-grandmother before I die, I can hardly believe that. And we lead a life of contentment. I don’t know how else to put it. We don’t fight, we don’t argue, and it’s not because we bite our tongues or one of us defers to the other, we just get on. What fortune is that! To live in this beautiful country and be old and healthy and be with someone you love and respect every minute of the day, every day of the week. What fortune is that!

I’ve asked him once what he meant when he said he always kept a thought of me in his heart. He said, I mean just that, I never forgot you. He said, I think most people go through life a wee bit disappointed in themselves. I think we all keep a memory of a moment when we missed someone or something, when we could have gone down another path, a happier or better or just a different path. Just because they’re in the past doesn’t mean you can’t treasure the possibilities. I said, But there was no possibility, not for us, not then. You had a wife and two young children. We weren’t possible then. Aye,
he said, you’re right of course. So we didn’t really miss each other, I said. No, he said, but maybe we put down a marker for another time. And now’s the time. Now we can do whatever we want to do.

And that’s it, isn’t it? We’ve reached that place, that stage. It’s a shame there’s not that much time left, but we can do whatever we like with it. And we do. We do.