And the Land Lay Still (92 page)

PART SIX

Applause. A cheer or two, clapping that roars then dies away like the sea over a pebble beach. He nods, smiles, thank you thank you. Clears his throat and – a hint of nerves? – taps the microphone even though they all know it’s working.

‘Well. Here we are. Thank you, Duncan, for those kind words. I’d like to endorse what you said about Ellen Imlach’s introductory essay. She wrote it at very short notice and it’s both provocative and reflective and says things about my father and his work that I don’t think I could ever have articulated. So, thank you, Ellen. And thank
you
all, for turning up. Actually, thank you for sticking around.’ Laughter from the front rank. ‘As Duncan’s just said, this show has been a long time in the making.’

Here we are. Rows of faces. A semicircle of heads, seven or eight deep. Mike Pendreich can’t quite believe how many people have come. Everybody looking up at him at the top of the short flight of steps. He’s in that slightly hunched position adopted by people who aren’t used to microphones.
The mike stand
– he could take that personally. Duncan Roxburgh off to one side, looking proudly proprietorial, as well he might after the blood and sweat he’s expended, most of it not his, to get this place established. People are craning their necks, shuffling sideways for a view. In other circumstances it would be Mike doing the stretching and shifting, trying to get the right line, the right background. Trying to capture the subject. But today, now, they’re all looking at him. As if there’s a camera inside every head, and every blink is a shutter action. As if all the faces he’s ever photographed are busy taking him with their eyes. And it makes him think of something else and he decides to depart from his prepared speech. Only he doesn’t because he doesn’t have a prepared speech, he was just going to step up to the microphone after Duncan and say a few words people would instantly forget, but suddenly it’s important to say something they’ll remember. He’s never been much good at forward planning. Let the moment dictate what
you say, what you do. And now, this is the moment. He feels the density of it, he hefts it like a glass paperweight, or one of those perfectly smooth, tide-rolled stones from a particular bay on the north coast, not far from Cnoc nan Gobhar, where the retreating waves sometimes sound like rounds of applause, and he wants to hold it out to this crowd of people and say, Look at this. This is what we have. Treasure it. Remember it.

‘A long time in the making,’ he says. He hears himself, the familiar, unfamiliar sound of his own voice amplified. ‘I’m thinking of that massive painting that David Octavius Hill, one of the fathers of Scottish photography, did of the Disruption of 1843.’ Should he go down this road? Will they get what he’s talking about? Too late, he’s started. ‘You know the one I mean?’ A few nods, thank
you
, this is the temple of the camera, the National Gallery of Photography, after all. ‘Over a period of years Hill and Robert Adamson made calotype portraits of most of the ministers who walked out of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland that day to found the Free Church. And then Hill recreated the scene in a painting, using the calotypes as the models for the people in it. And this painting, which hangs in the Free Church buildings on the Mound to this day, it’s huge. How big is it, Duncan?’

‘Oh, about five feet high by twelve feet long.’

‘About five feet by twelve feet. And there are hundreds of people in it, I can’t remember exactly how many …’

‘Four hundred and fifty-seven.’

‘You see how useful it is to have an oracle at your side?’ Laughter. ‘And some of the people in the painting weren’t present on the day but were instrumental in setting up the Free Church, and many of those who
were
present were photographed years after the event, looking much older than they were in 1843, so the whole exercise is like a reverse of the process of airbrushing people
out
of history. Hill brushed them
in
to his painting. Yes, the Scots invented everything – including Stalinist methodology long before Stalin was even born.’ A few knowing, appropriately grim chuckles. ‘So. Not a historically accurate picture, but a representation of a moment, a movement, in history. And it took Hill, with his wife’s assistance, twenty-three years to complete it. A long time in the making.’

He pauses. Some eager, attentive expressions, some glazing over,
a bit more shuffling. He’s trying to say something here, but what? These people have come to celebrate the opening of an exhibition of his father’s work and what do they get? A lecture about a Victorian religious schism most of them, even if they’ve actually heard of it, know nothing about. Make the point, Mike, and move on.

‘The Disruption,’ he says – and it starts to spill out, it amazes him that he sounds so confident when he feels so unsure, it astounds him that he’s accumulated such vast amounts of information and can access it so easily, but what is it for, what is it for? – ‘the Disruption is a moment from the past that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with us.
What
was it about? Whether a congregation had the right to elect its own minister or was obliged to accept the choice of the local patron? Who gives a damn? It’s hard to believe that an issue like that could split a country down the middle, but it did. It was traumatic and it mattered. It made Francis Jeffrey, one of the founders of the
Edinburgh Review
, say he was proud of his country, that there wasn’t another on earth where such a thing could have happened. How strange is that, to be proud that people stuck to a principle that created division and disharmony throughout the land? Or is it strange? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. We could have an argument about that. We could argue that it was the supporters of patronage, the government, the establishment, who caused the division and disharmony. But even at this distance, don’t we understand precisely what Francis Jeffrey meant? Because although most of us have rejected organised religion and don’t believe in God any more, we absolutely believe that no other bastard, and particularly no other rich bastard, had the right to impose his brand of religion on our ancestors.’

More laughter. Even in this year not of our Lord 2008, some people in gatherings of this kind still get a kick out of the odd mild swearie word relayed through a PA system. Or maybe it’s just relief, he’s lost them with all this talk of painted ministers and calotypes but they appreciate the tonal value of
bastard
. Or they appreciate the historical referencing, the overlap of different eras. What’s that thing William Faulkner’s supposed to have said? ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ Aye, quite. He can use that. Anyway …

‘Anyway, the point of all this is that such moments from long ago do still continue to have something to do with us. Years after the
event, David Octavius Hill knew what the story was he wanted to tell with his great big painting, and he told it. But at the time it happened, who knew what the outcome of the Disruption would be? He didn’t. Nobody did. When we’re
in
the story, when we’re part of it, we can’t know the outcome. It’s only later that we think we can see what the story was. But do we ever really know? And does anybody else, perhaps coming along a little later, does anybody else really care?

‘Certainly, when my father began taking photographs after the war, he didn’t set out to sew a narrative thread from one image to the next. He was creating a body of work but each image was supposed to stand alone, to contain its own story. His famous picture of Harry Lauder’s funeral – the one you see right at the start of the exhibition – isn’t about the grand occasion, it’s about the wee boy looking in the other direction. His picture of Elvis at Prestwick Airport – it’s as if Elvis is just a convenient excuse to take a picture of the fans on the other side of the fence. And neither of these photographs necessarily had anything to do with the other, or with ones he took earlier or later – they weren’t linked in any deliberate, conscious way, except by the method, by his eye. And when he was taking those photos my father had no idea that he’d have a son who’d also be a photographer, and that several years after his death that son would make a selection from his work and mount an exhibition called “The Angus Angle” and try to make a story out of the selected images. But that’s what has happened, and so – here we are.’

Here we are. Who, exactly? A few old friends – Walter Fleming, Ellen Imlach, Eric Hodge, Jeremy Tait, Gavin Shaw. Adam? No, despite being invited, Adam hasn’t flown in for the occasion. Jean Barbour has declined to make an appearance, citing an abhorrence of crowds as her excuse. Mike is staying two nights with her again and is pleased to see that she no longer appears to be dying at quite the same rate, although she’s smoking just as furiously. So, no Adam, no Jean. But his mother has astonished him by turning up, with Bob Syme in tow looking like the next big breath could set off a heart attack. Earlier, when Bob shook his hand and gasped, ‘We’re awful proud of what you’ve achieved here, Michael,’ Isobel warmly agreed. ‘Your father would be proud too,’ she said, and gave him a kiss. Somehow, his family, including Angus but not yet Murdo, are
reunited in this place, on this occasion. Now he catches Isobel’s eye and she gives him a discreet, happy smile.

Bob Syme, worker of miracles.

Who else? Other photographers and artists and scores of folk from Duncan Roxburgh’s contact database – patrons, founder-members, Friends and sponsors of the NPG, arts-administration heid-bummers and apparatchiks, media persons, critics, reviewers – the usual suspects, in other words. A handful of high-heid-yins from the world of politics: the Presiding Officer of the Parliament, the Deputy First Minister, the Lord Provost of Edinburgh; a smattering of cooncillors and MSPs. The great and the good and the not so. The worse for wear and the better by far. Scotland’s a wee country. When you put a couple of hundred of these folk in a room you’re looking at a spider chart of how the place works. They don’t need to network much because the web’s already there, they were at school together or are cousins or played in a band or were in a folk club or are married to each other or once were or had sex when they were students or last week or grew up in the same street or support the same team or work in the same building. They don’t all like each other and some of them are eaten away with hatred and bile but that’s not the point. The point is there’s always a connection.

‘So in doing what I’ve done, making the selection I have, have I laid a false trail? Or am I simply able, from where I am now, from where
we
are now, to see the route we came, to look back and see the trail clearly marked? If my father were alive we would have an argument about that too. I’d say I can see the lines on the map, and he’d say the map is covered with many lines, you only see the ones you want to see. And we’d both be right.’

There’s a guy from the
Telegraph
, name of Crombie, a black-bearded pugilist who turns up for most things, so says Duncan, who ought to know since he turns up for most things too. Crombie’s a good writer but types wearing knuckledusters, way over to the right in relation to what passes for mainstream political opinion here, not that that’s necessarily a fault, somebody has to challenge the new orthodoxy. He’s hated the whole devolution thing from the start but at least he had the balls to stay and be counted, whereas all the Tory politicians he might once have cheered on slithered off to England after the 1997 wipeout and got themselves new constituencies there,
or became directors of merchant banks or chairmen of southern water boards. Rats leaving a listing ship, which is now, slowly, righting itself. Exception: David Eddelstane, also present – didn’t expect him to turn up but there he is, and looking good, as relaxed in his own skin as David Eddelstane can be in public. He heads up a charity for rehabilitating young offenders through outdoor activities such as mountaineering and skiing, and apparently does it very well. His son, Daniel, works with him. Melissa’s here too, a little less lovely than she used to be but standing loyally by, same as ever. All of this Mike has taken in or takes in as he gets through his speech.

Crombie is standing beside a couple of other journos, one from the
Scotsman
and one from the
Sunday Herald
, both of whom disagree with Crombie’s opinions but they stick together these guys, a kind of mini-pack of newshounds, and somehow they all look alike, they have the blotched, bag-eyed, paunchy newspaper look that tells of too many evenings hammering out eight hundred words with two fingers in twenty-five minutes, too many pints sunk between putting the morning edition to bed and getting home to their own, too many fags sucked dead on chilly street corners outside offices and pubs. These are the political hacks. On the other side of the room is a cluster of feature writers, women mostly, they do arts and lifestyle and the political guys half-challenge half-patronise them all the time: what you lassies write is all fluff and padding, the real bits of a newspaper are politics, sport and business, not always in that order, ask the editor if you don’t believe me, och don’t go in the huff, if you canna take the piss-taking get back in the kitchen, dear. And, standing apart from both these groups, in the same trade but less so these days, still writing what she wants for whom she wants, is Ellen. They all know her, she knows them. It’s an edgy relationship. She looks at them and sees how thin their loyalties have been stretched by successive regimes at their various papers, how insecure their jobs are as newspaper sales slide and news becomes something people snack on 24/7, bite-size, nothing too hard to digest, thank you, and almost always off a screen. They look at her with a mix of admiration and envy. They wish they were in her shoes, they want to tell her she’s a parasite, if it wasn’t for them grinding out papers every day where would she place her opinions? Ellen doesn’t look that fazed. She has Kirsty with her. Even if he hadn’t known
she was coming Mike would have recognised Kirsty. The cool, slightly remote teenager he remembers has turned into a replica of her mother a quarter of a century ago. The same determined set of the jaw, the same alertness, the same stance as they listen to him. Jesus. We are all prisoners of our genes.