And the Land Lay Still

by James Robertson

  Again, he lets that one go. She says, ‘Do you ever hear from Adam?’

  ‘Occasionally. We exchange Christmas cards. He’s in Barcelona.’

  ‘I know. He comes back now and again. He came to see me last year.’

  ‘With the new boyfriend,’ Mike says. ‘You told me.’

  ‘So I did. Well, anyway. So you’re fine and you’re settled in Angus’s old hideaway. But what do you do? You don’t produce books or cards or have shows of your own. Or do you?’

  ‘No, nothing like that. I’m busy enough. I get obsessed with things and can’t stop taking pictures of them. Last week it was seaweed, next week it might be driftwood or drystane dykes. It’s not just taking the pictures, it’s manipulating them later. But I suppose I have been marking time a bit, ever since I moved up there.’

  ‘Ever since Angus died, you mean. That was nearly three years ago, Mike.’

  ‘I know. But the archive, and now this exhibition, they’ve been taking up a lot of time too. And with him leaving me the house and some money, and the odd local job now and then, I’m not really in any hurry. I lead a pretty frugal life.’

  ‘Why do I always think there’s a mismatch between being gay and frugality?’

  ‘We’re not all Elton Johns, you know.’

  ‘Well, all I can say is you’re far too young to be winding down,’ Jean says. ‘And far too young to be celibate.’

  ‘I’m not winding down,’ he says. ‘I’m consolidating.’

  ‘What you’re doing,’ she says, ‘is talking shite.’

  §

  My contribution to the cause: Jean’s words. But what was the cause? It’s easy to remember what they stood against: Thatcherism, London rule, the destruction of old industries, the assault on the Welfare State, the poll tax. But what were they for? A Scottish parliament, of course. But now they have it, what is it for? Forget smoking bans and other worthwhile legislation, what is its primary function? Maybe it’s for saying, Look, listen, this is who we are. And maybe that is no insignificant thing, and the purpose of a parliament is to say it again, over and over. What can be more important, politically, than to know who you are, and to say it?

  Mike likes to consider these things. It’s only with the passing of time that the picture comes fully into focus, as the present slides and settles into history. Who are we? One of the unintended effects of Margaret Thatcher’s revolution, he sees now – and let’s face it, that’s what it was, a revolution – was to destroy Scottish loyalty to the British state. If it didn’t provide you with a job, if it didn’t give you a decent pension or adequate health care or proper support when you were out of work, what was it for? It wasn’t for anything – except maybe things you didn’t want or believe in, like nuclear weapons on the Clyde, or the poll tax. In the Thatcher years the great presumption of the left – that the industrial working class would eventually tame capitalism – came crashing down. The class war may not be over but it’s certainly not what it used to be. In its stead there are many creeds, ancient and new, ethnic and national and religious and green, all jostling for position; and though Mike has escaped from the din, he still likes to ask what the din is all about.

  Is his kind of solitude – call it independence if you like – different from Jean’s? Does it diminish the whole, or does the whole diminish it? And is Highland privacy different from Lowland, or Scottish privacy different from English? By becoming more private do we become less of a community? Probably. Less Scottish? He doubts it. We just become different versions of ourselves.

  §

  Jean is still in her bed when he goes out in the morning. He has a meeting with the publicity and marketing manager at the National Gallery of Photography, followed by another with Duncan Roxburgh, looking at the space and a plan of how the photographs will be arranged. Duncan is very proud of the fact that there is no ‘Scottish’ in the title of his gallery. ‘I’m sick of the word,’ he says. ‘Why do we always have to be qualifying ourselves like that? The English don’t do it. They just assume.’ The NGP is located in the former High School on Calton Hill, a building that in the 1970s was earmarked as the future home of a Scottish assembly; then, when that came to nothing, it was mothballed during the eighteen years of Conservative government. For the last five of those a vigil was kept outside the gates, from a ramshackle caravan, by an organisation called Democracy for Scotland. Appropriately, one of the last photographs in Angus’s exhibition will be from that period: it shows a couple of bearded Democracy for Scotland campaigners in big jumpers sharing a flask of tea with two laughing traffic wardens beside a blazing brazier. There’s an Angus angle to this image, because the way he’s taken it draws the observer’s eye away from the people and towards the brazier. The thing that catches the attention is a piece of burning timber stamped with the words THIS SIDE UP.

  In the afternoon Mike goes for a walk around the town, wandering in and out of second-hand bookshops, pleased to be back but thankful he’ll soon be leaving. Edinburgh is hardly overwhelming, it isn’t that kind of city, but already he misses the Highlands – the sense of space, the mountains, the water, the absence of people. What is it, this desire in him for retreat? There’s Murdo, of course. Does he miss him? He does, and this makes him fearful.

  In a café in the Grassmarket he orders a coffee. The place is quiet, a couple of women in one corner, a guy reading the Scotsman in another. He sits in the window and watches people passing by. Edinburgh in March: so long as there isn’t a rugby international, it’s one of the quietest months, with hardly any tourists. The man reading the paper looks pretty ragged: he’s unshaven, keeps sniffing. An old fellow, mid-sixties maybe. Mike has to check himself for thinking that. Old? The guy’s probably only ten years older than he is. Bang. One minute you’re a student, the next you’re a pensioner.

  When he gets back in the early evening Jean is up and about, has applied make-up and put on some clean clothes, and looks altogether more like herself. She’s hungry too, and recommends an Indian restaurant ten minutes’ walk away for a carry-out. ‘We’ll phone in an order,’ she says, scrabbling about for a menu, ‘but you’ll have to go and collect it. They tried to deliver once but you know what it’s like finding this place if you’ve never been.’

  An hour or so later they’re pushing the cartons and plates aside and sitting back in their seats at the kitchen table. Jean’s at first keen appetite deserted her after a few minutes and Mike has tried to compensate but can eat no more. She tips the remains, curry and rice together, into one carton and sticks it in the fridge. ‘I’ll have it for breakfast.’ Then they retreat to the front room, light the gas fire, and open the first bottle of whisky.

  He has brought the picture proofs of the book and they spend some time passing these between them. He is anxious to know what she thinks of his selection.

  The first proof is of one of Angus’s signature photographs: Funeral of Sir Harry Lauder, Hamilton, 4 March 1950. In it, a line of bareheaded men and headscarved women stretches along the street. They’re all looking away, following the route of the cortège, except for one small boy among them, who stares directly into the camera. He seems oblivious to the sense of occasion, the fact that he’s at the funeral of a ‘great man’. A cheeky happiness lights up his face. ‘Wonderful,’ Jean says.

  Then for a while she says nothing as she turns the loose sheets. There are two photos taken at Arbroath Abbey in April 1951. She looks at them both carefully and he watches her doing it. She glances across at him.

  ‘I’m surprised more of these aren’t familiar to me,’ she says defiantly.

  ‘But those two are.’

  She ignores this. ‘It’s a terrible title, by the way. Was that your idea?’

  ‘It was the only title, realistically. It’s the phrase everybody recognises. Angus’s unique take.’

  She goes through some more images, stopping at Elvis Presley, Prestwick, 3 March 1960. This is one of the few pictures Angus liked to talk about. He was in Glasgow wh
en he heard a rumour that somebody special was going to be landing on Scottish soil. Elvis had finished his military service in Germany and was heading home to the USA, and these flights often stopped to refuel at Prestwick. So Angus rushed down there along with a number of other pressmen. The news had leaked out, and there were dozens of fans waiting when Elvis stepped off the plane. It was the only time he was ever in the British Isles. In Angus’s image, Elvis is on one side of a wire fence chatting to a crowd of young women on the other side. He looks spruce and fresh in US Army uniform and cap. Three sergeant’s stripes and the word ‘Spearhead’ are on his sleeve. He is smiling, relaxed, slightly bemused. The women, many holding out pen and paper for his autograph, are probably mostly teenagers. Several are wearing headscarves, all are in heavy, shapeless winter coats. He’s twenty-five, but they look older than him, and their expressions range from happy to disbelieving to slightly desperate, as if they know this may be the most exciting moment of their lives. The picture is really more about those women than about Elvis.

  Mike says, ‘Do you think there’s a good-enough spread of his work?’

  ‘Depends what you’re trying to do. Are you trying to represent the range of his work or are you telling a story with these pictures?’

  ‘Well, both. I’ve picked images for their quality, of course. But I do think there’s a narrative running through them.’

  ‘A narrative of what?’

  ‘What the subtitle says. Fifty years of Scottish life.’

  ‘Ah, but is that a narrative Angus would have acknowledged, or have you imposed it on his photographs?’

  This question has been bothering Mike greatly, sometimes even waking him in the night. Is he adding something to his father’s work, or stealing from it?

  ‘I don’t think he would have approved,’ he says. ‘He didn’t like structures much. And yet, this is the story I see in his work.’

  ‘So it’s about you as much as him,’ Jean says.

  ‘It’s about us all,’ Mike says.

  He’s also brought what he’s written so far of the introductory essay. He hands it over, and she fires up a new roll-up and reads through it while he refills the glasses and sifts, for the thousandth time, through the pile of images.

  ‘It’s not exactly impassioned, is it?’ he says, when she’s finished. ‘Not the warm tribute of an admiring, grateful son.’

  ‘Is that what you want it to be?’

  ‘It’s what it should be.’

  Jean makes a gesture that is half-nod, half-shrug: I’ll come to that later. ‘ “Chronological order”,’ she says. ‘Interesting phrase. Arranging things by time. It seems to be the natural way of releasing a narrative, but maybe it isn’t. It’s not how we remember our own lives, our own stories, after all. Bits of them come at us in any old order. Mixed-up memories. So maybe chronology is just a regime to stop us going insane. Sensible, but not very … imaginative.’

  ‘Most of us can only take so much chaos,’ he says.

  ‘I’ll tell you something I’ve always wanted to do, Mike. I’ve always wanted to tell a story with no beginning, no middle and no end.’

  ‘How would that work?’

  ‘I’m not sure. That’s the point. There’s a tyranny about beginnings and endings and the routes between them but we seem to like being tyrannised. And I’ve been wondering if I could do it differently.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Bloody-mindedness, probably. Because stories aren’t supposed to be like that.’

  ‘And yet,’ he says, ‘they almost always are. All the years I came here, listening to you, it was like dipping into this big swirling pot of stories. There was always another bit at the end of this one, or there was a different version to that one, or it was just a wee path off the main track. You know what I mean. One thing leads to another.’

  ‘I suppose that’s right enough. Everything’s connected. But lately I’ve been thinking over exactly what a story is.’

  She rolls another cigarette. He waits. They respect each other’s intervals, and this is one of the things that has kept them friends. Two and a half years is just a longer interval. He watches her shaping the words in her head before she lets them out. There is something hugely civilised about allowing long pauses in a conversation. Very few people can stand that kind of silence.

  She lights up, inhales, speaks again. ‘A story is a whole mass of details that come together and form a narrative. Without that coming-together they’re just a lot of wee pieces. So what happens if you take a story and break it into its wee pieces? When you put it back together again, will it turn out the same way?’

  ‘Like a jigsaw puzzle,’ he says.

  ‘Exactly. It’s like you’re making a jigsaw puzzle. You cowp this thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle on to a table and turn all the pieces right way up and then you stare at them. Where do you start? But what I’m thinking is that this particular puzzle came in a big plastic bag, not in a box, and there’s no picture to guide you. You don’t know what the hell the picture is you’re supposed to be making. You have to start somewhere, so you look for the bits with straight edges. And the four bits with two straight edges that mean they’re the corners. But maybe it doesn’t have corners and straight edges. Anyway. You find bits that are the same shade of red, the same shade of green, you sort them into separate piles, and occasionally you find two bits, three bits, that actually seem to fit together. And gradually, spread out all over the table, this picture begins to emerge.’

  ‘That’s assuming you have all the right pieces,’ Mike says. ‘Which means you’re relying on somebody else. Somebody else already made the jigsaw puzzle, the picture, and cut it up, and put it in the plastic bag.’

  ‘Right,’ she says. ‘Well, that’s okay up to a point. The storyteller has to get her material from elsewhere. But I’m bothered by the idea that somebody else already made the picture. So maybe a story is more like a painting than a jigsaw. You’re the creator, but you’re working from life, putting what you see on the canvas but with your own take on it. And when it’s finished, there are all kinds of things going on at once, and you can look at the whole thing or you can look at the detail, but it’s all there, all the parts moving in and out of one another. Like a complex piece of machinery – working, but captured, held. Motionless motion.’

  ‘Suspended animation,’ Mike says. ‘Like a photograph, in other words.’

  ‘Aye,’ she says. ‘Like a photograph. Okay. Jigsaw puzzle, painting, photograph. Now we’re getting somewhere. Or are we? It’s complicated, isn’t it? Maybe one shouldn’t analyse this stuff too much.’

  Another silence. Mike thinks about the complexity and the simplicity of taking a photograph. The tens of thousands he’s taken over the years, each one part of a narrative, following on from the one before, preceding the next. Could he have taken them in a different order? He thinks about what happens when he selects one image out of, say, every ten or fifty or hundred he takes. How the narrative is reduced, fractured. How the chain is broken. He thinks about Angus, doing it all before him.

  ‘Dad would have said, don’t analyse. As a photographer you just have to be there, take the shot. He’d have said it was partly skill and mostly chance.’

  ‘I know that’s what he thought,’ Jean says, ‘but I think he was wrong. I envied him, you know. He didn’t seem to have to try. Yes, you have to be there at the right moment, but there’s something else. That’s why I never liked that phrase, “the Angus angle”. It always struck me as being lazy journalese. It suggests that all he was doing was bending down and getting the angle right, the exposure, the focus, ticking those technical boxes. Well, you can have all the technical skill in the world, but that’s not enough. If you’re really good, there’s an instinct in there too, an extra layer of knowledge. You learn it by experience, but it’s like you always had it deep inside. Do you see?’

  ‘I used to argue with him in just that way,’ Mike says. ‘There has to be more to it than chance, I’d
say. A photographer’s an artist, what you do is art. He’d say no, it’s about technique, the quality of your camera equipment and how well you operate it and even then there are too many other external factors – light, movement, colour – for you to be fully in control. An artist makes something, he’d say, I just record what already exists. In the end I gave up arguing, and one of the reasons was because in a way he was right. We don’t really know what we’re creating, we just take the opportunity. In that sense, we’re all chancers.’

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘I still think being a chancer takes a certain amount of expertise.’

  They sit in contemplation while the gas fire hisses at their pretensions. Then Mike says, ‘So what is it, this story you want to tell? The one with no beginning, no middle and no end. What’s it about?’

  ‘It’s what you said earlier,’ she says. ‘It’s about us, all of us. It’s the story we’re in.’ And then, after another silence, she adds, ‘But I’m not likely to be in it much longer. Which is maybe why I don’t want it to be finite, why I’m rebelling against the tyranny of time.’

  ‘But you’re not rebelling,’ he says. ‘You’re not fighting to stay alive. You’re letting go.’

  ‘That is rebelling,’ she says. ‘Challenging the orthodoxy. Anyway, it’s different. That’s life and death.’

  ‘The simplest chronology of all,’ Mike says.

  §

  The divorce was completed in 1965. Angus rented a flat in Glasgow and bought a run-down house, for virtually nothing, at Cnoc nan Gobhar on the north coast of Sutherland. He must have taken note of the location on the family holiday of the previous year. ‘I need a bolt-hole,’ he told Michael, the first time he brought him there. ‘Somewhere I can escape to every so often. This is perfect.’ He paid Isobel whatever she was due, paid the school fees, and then carried on behaving the way he always had.

  It’s not hard for Mike to see, in retrospect, how his father operated. He was such a handsome, intelligent charmer that he didn’t have to try very hard to have women fall in love with him. When he and Isobel got married, perhaps she really believed that he would settle down and be hers alone for ever, but it was never going to be like that. Angus enjoyed the company of women – women other than the one he was with – too much. He couldn’t resist making them unable to resist him. He was a wanderer in other ways too. When the Pendreichs still all lived together in the semi-detached villa in Doune that Isobel had inherited from her parents (who were dead before Michael was conscious of them being alive), Angus would go off for a day’s hillwalking, even in the foulest weather, rather than stay at home to be tortured by domesticity. And if there was the possibility of a job that would take him away, anywhere in the British Isles or, for preference, abroad, he would grab it.