And the Land Lay Still (15 page)

Later, trailing back to Tollcross, Eric expressed the view that the Eddelstanes were toffee-nosed wankers, quite amiable wankers maybe but if he had to be in their company all the time he’d be reaching for his revolver. ‘Especially David. I mean, what a wanker.’ And Mike wondered if he’d guessed that something had happened, if he’d seen some signal and his overuse of the word was his way of saying that he knew. But no, it was pure coincidence. And then Eric said, ‘Mind you, he must have something going for him, he’s got the most gorgeous wife.’

‘He’s
married
?’ Mike said. But why was he surprised?

‘Oh, aye,’ Eric said. ‘Hitched to the beautiful Melissa Braco. Her dad’s a Tory MP. He got the seat David’s father had, what is it, Glenallan and something? It’s close to where you’re from, isn’t it?’

‘Glenallan and West Mills,’ Mike said. ‘It’s next door.’

‘Well,’ Eric said, ‘that’s who he’s married. Keeping it in the family, I guess.’

§

Work did come to Mike from those Festival pictures, sporadically at first, and much of it unpaid, and then more and more through word of mouth. He was competent and cheap. A theatre group doing
Macbeth
set in outer space wanted a record of their production, photos of every scene, and publicity shots too. The show was crap
but they paid him a tenner. The man who ran the venue saw the results and liked them. His daughter was getting married. Would Mike take the pictures? They negotiated a price and nothing went wrong and everybody was happy. The new academic year started and he found more work coming his way – another couple of weddings, and some publicity shots for another theatre company about to follow in 7:84’s footsteps on a Highland tour. A publisher doing a guide to Edinburgh pubs wanted a mix of exterior and interior shots capturing the character of each establishment. It wasn’t art but Mike learned more on these jobs than he was learning at college. He turned up there less and less, doing just enough to keep his supervisor off his back.

The pub guide came out and on the strength of it an advertising agency hired him for a one-off job, a series of portraits for a life-assurance company. People looking relaxed and content in different situations. The message was that they were safe, their loved ones were covered. The campaign ran on buses and he was amazed how often he found himself staring at his own images. The agency paid £50 for two days’ work, untold riches. He had business cards printed. People he gave them to sometimes asked, ‘Any relation to Angus Pendreich?’ and nodded knowingly when he said yes. ‘Oh, I
love
his work,’ one woman gushed. She didn’t hire Mike.

Angus was in London. Mike had a number for him there. When Angus came north he based himself in Glasgow, but he hardly ever seemed to have enough time to fit in a meeting with his son. They saw each other maybe twice a year – about as often as Mike made the trip home to see Isobel, out of a continuing sense of duty he couldn’t account for.

When he phoned the London number a woman answered and said her name was Cindy. Surely not, Mike thought. ‘I hope we’re going to meet some time,’ she said, in a sexy, rich, little-friend voice. ‘I hope so,’ he said. She passed him on to Angus. After a few preliminaries Mike told his father he was beginning to make some cash with his camera, and was thinking of dropping out. The conversation went downhill from there.

Angus said, ‘What do you want me to say?’

‘I don’t know. I thought I’d run it past you.’

‘I can’t advise you. I didn’t go to college. But you’re there, the
government pays your fees, you get money from me every month, and at the end of it all you’ll get a degree – so why would you drop out? Doesn’t make sense to me. Can’t you carry on as you are, do a bit of both?’

‘I could get more work if I didn’t have to study. The course isn’t right for me. I feel like I’m wasting my time.’

‘Have you talked to your mother about it?’

‘No. I’m talking to you.’

‘Mike, do what you have to do. It’s your call.’

‘Is that it?’

‘What do you want me to say? That I’ll put in a word for you at the
Observer
? You can’t ride on my coat-tails, you know.’

‘I don’t want to ride on your fucking coat-tails.’

‘Good. Just checking. Look, you’re young enough, if it doesn’t work out you can do something else, so just do it.’

‘I will. I don’t intend to do anything else.’

‘Are you broke?’

‘I’m okay.’

‘I’ll keep sending you money. As if you were still a student, is that reasonable? Until you tell me I don’t have to.’

‘You don’t have to.’

‘Don’t be daft. What about equipment? Lenses, a back-up camera. How much are you shelling out for film?’

‘I’m fine, honestly.’

‘How’s the rest of your life?’

‘Fine.’

‘Do you want to elaborate on that?’

‘Not really. How’s yours?’

‘Very good, actually.’

‘Cindy sounds nice.’

‘She is.’

‘Is that her real name? Like the doll?’

‘Aye, but with a C. C-I-N-D-Y.’

‘Isn’t that how the doll’s spelled?’

‘No, the doll has an S.’

‘Is that right? I didn’t know that. Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’ A note of irritation was in Angus’s voice now.

‘Oh. Is that her place or yours?’

‘Ours. We’re renting it. Listen, Mike, I have to go. We were just on our way out. You’re okay though, eh?’

‘Sure.’

‘All right. Let’s get together when I’m next up. Have you seen any more of Jean Barbour, by the way?’

‘Aye, I saw her just last week.’

‘That’s good. I’m glad you made contact. She’s some woman, isn’t she?’

‘Aye, she is. You should go and see her yourself.’

‘Maybe I should.’

They said goodbye and Mike hung up and swore. He imagined Angus telling Cindy what a waste of space he was. He’d only suggested that he go to see Jean because he knew there wasn’t a chance of it happening. Angus didn’t revisit the past, not physically anyway. Angus was with Cindy, for as long as that lasted. Jean was Mike’s now. He didn’t want his father involved with her.

§

‘What about you and him?’

Jean shakes her head. ‘I told you, it was a long time ago.’

‘So?’

‘So what’s the point in raking over old ashes?’

‘Isn’t that what we’ve been doing all night?’

‘Aye, but.’

‘Well, come on then.’

‘I’m tired, Mike. What time is it?’

‘It’s not even midnight. Jean, how long have I known you? Thirty-five years or thereabouts. And I only know you because you once knew my dad. It’s because of him I’m here now. But I don’t know anything about what you had, the two of you. You’ve never talked about it, he never talked about it. Every time I tried to ask, you found a convenient way of not answering. So I stopped asking. It always seemed to me that you were special to him, but maybe that’s me being sentimental. Maybe he was as much of a shit to you as he was to Isobel and the others. I’d just like to know. Especially if you’re about to peg out.’

‘I could quite possibly be gone by morning, the way you’ve been pouring these drams. At the very least I’ll be on my hands and knees for two days.’

‘I am absolutely not accepting responsibility for that.’

‘You sound just like your father. Sorry, bad joke. I’m not blaming him for who he was. I knew what I was getting into. But when you fall for someone who makes you happy, and you think you make him happy, and then he tells you he likes his own company best, and not long after that he marries somebody else you know he’ll never be happy with, it leaves you a wee bit bruised. And you don’t always want to relive the experience.’ She raises her glass. ‘But here’s to him anyway. Cheers, Angus.’

Mike picks up his own glass, which still has a dribble of Highland Park in it. ‘Angus,’ he says. And then, before she can move on, ‘What about that time in Arbroath, Jean? Won’t you tell me about that?’

She hesitates.

‘I really need to know.’

‘When the stone was delivered there,’ Jean says. Her terminology is bland yet precise.

‘Aye. You told that story once, about the man and woman turning up at the abbey just at the crucial moment. I mind when you told it, somebody asked if it was you, and you gave some evasive answer. I didn’t need to ask. I knew it was you and my father.’

‘How could you have known that?’

‘I just did. The way you looked. However many people were in this room, that part of the story was for me.’

‘I’m sure I didn’t intend it to be. Anyway, in 1951 your father wasn’t your father, was he? You were four years away. He hadn’t even met your mother then.’

‘But it was you, wasn’t it? You and him?’

There is a long pause.

‘Aye it was. And what you said just now, about me maybe being special to him – well, if I was, then it was then. A special time.’

After another thought-gathering silence, she says, ‘You must have realised when you first saw those photographs at the abbey. You must have put two and two together.’

‘Long before that. I didn’t see them till after he died – till I was preparing this exhibition, in fact. But the moment he first mentioned you I knew you’d been more than just a friend. The more casual he pretended to be about something, the more important it probably was. And then, when I met you, all the things you didn’t say made
me certain of it. I may have been innocent, Jean, but I wasn’t a total idiot.’

‘They’re not very good, are they?’ she says. ‘As photographs, I mean.’

‘Technically, no. But as historical artefacts, they’re pretty special. That’s why I’ve included them. The one of the keeper, standing beside the stone, that’s okay. But the gem is the one of the three men through the arch, with the stone at their backs. It’s a bit blurred, but it’s a moment in history that nobody else captured. It places them at the scene. And yet it doesn’t really, because it’s taken from behind, and they’re in silhouette. Three anonymous men and yet we know who they are. A typical Angus angle. And you were there when he took it.’

‘I was there when he took a lot of his pictures back then,’ she says. ‘For a while we went everywhere together.’ Again she pauses. He knows that she is finally going to talk.

‘We met here in Edinburgh,’ she says, ‘the year before. We just fell in love, or at least that’s what I thought happened. It turned out that I fell in love, and Angus … did whatever Angus did. Imagined he was in love. We used to go off on walking expeditions, long summer weekends in the Cairngorms. He was taking landscapes then but what he really wanted to take were people, so when we weren’t wandering about in the hills we’d go on these outings. All over the country we’d go, places neither of us had ever been to. He would pick up some bit of gossip or local news, and off we’d go to photograph a tinker in Hawick or a blind golfer at St Andrews or something. And this particular time we had two days on the east coast between Montrose and Arbroath. There were all these wee communities there, making hard livings from the land or the sea. We drifted in and out of those places for a day and then the next day we went to Arbroath. Angus was determined to get out to the Bell Rock lighthouse. He found the story of how it was built quite awesome. I don’t mean “awesome” the way kids use that word these days. I mean he was truly in awe of the achievement. It represented the high point of Scottish industrial heroism to him. So he persuaded a man to take us out in a wee boat with an outboard motor. He had to pay him something, quite a lot I think, but he said we might never get the chance again. The lighthouse is about twelve miles off the
coast, a long, cold trip in that boat. It was calm enough when we set out but there was quite a swell by the time we arrived. The sea was smooth and grey and slow and somehow that was more horrible than if the waves had been breaking over the rock. You couldn’t see the rock at all, just this tower rising straight out of the water. It was amazing to think of them building it between tides. It was so obviously solid and man-made and real but at the same time it seemed unreal. It made me feel sick just looking at it. Not the sea, the lighthouse.

‘Anyway, Angus got his photographs, including the one you’ve picked for the exhibition. God, there’s even a twist in
that
photograph. He’s focused on the swell somehow, a lump in the water, that’s what your eye is drawn to, and then there’s the lighthouse off to the side. How did he manage that?’

‘The lighthouse doesn’t dominate the sea, it exists in spite of the sea,’ Mike says.

‘Yes, that’s it, isn’t it? Och well, anyway, the boatman had had enough, and so had I, so we turned back to Arbroath and got in just before the rain came down. We decided to stay the night because Angus wanted to photograph the abbey in the morning. We booked into a crummy hotel – I had a ring that I kept for such eventualities – and we had fish and chips down by the sea. It was bloody cold but I can still taste that fish. And in the morning we went to the abbey.

‘I can’t remember what time it was but it must have been early because the gate was locked. Nobody was about so we found a bit of the wall we could scramble over and got in that way. Angus took some pictures and we were just about to leave when we heard someone at the gate, so we hid behind a pillar. It was the keeper, and not long after he arrived a couple of other men turned up. We waited for a convenient moment to slip out, but they just hung about, talking. Then a car pulled up. Two young lads and an older man got out. There was something odd about all this. They started to get something very bulky and heavy out from the back seat and your father whispered, “I know what’s going on. I know what that is.” And suddenly so did I, because the stone was still in the news and in our minds. So we stayed put and watched the whole procedure as they brought it into the abbey and set it down at the altar.

‘Your father said, “I’m not missing this,” and we edged our way
round so he could get a picture, and he snapped the lads walking away from the stone. But then somebody spotted us. We walked down to where they all were and Angus started whistling the tune. Mr Wishart, the keeper, had a cheerful sort of face but at that moment he wasn’t looking best pleased. He wanted to know how we’d got in and how long we’d been there, and one of the cooncillors wanted to know if we were press and how on earth we’d got wind of it. Angus assured them we were sympathetic and not about to cause any trouble but, he says, could we not just get a picture or two? They said no, absolutely not, which told us that they didn’t realise he’d already taken one. They wanted to get rid of us, so eventually they agreed to let him take a photo of Wishart and the stone on its wooden litter, and meanwhile the three that had come in the car drove away. Angus promised not to sell or use the picture unless or until the stone was permanently back in Scotland, and he kept his word. By the time it did come back, half a century later, it didn’t matter. Or maybe Angus had forgotten about it. Anyway, that picture of the three men and the stone is a real gem for the exhibition.’