§
Saleem said, ‘I’m very sorry to hear that your wife has passed away, Don. Very sorry indeed.’
‘Thanks, Saleem,’ Don said.
He was in for milk and his paper, same as always except that he’d missed a day. This was Tuesday. Liz had died on Sunday. And the word was out. Betty Mair would have told Saleem and it would have been round the whole village in minutes. Not that it was unexpected, with Liz having been so ill.
Milk and a paper. The wee things didn’t stop. In fact they were what kept you going.
Saleem asked, ‘When is the funeral?’
‘Next week. Monday morning at the crem in Drumkirk.’
‘And what time?’
‘Eleven o’clock.’
‘I don’t know if I can be there.’
‘Ye’d be very welcome.’
‘It depends if I can get Nasreen to look after the shop.’
‘I understand,’ Don said. He was standing with his paper under his arm, a finger hooked through the handle of the plastic milk carton. ‘I hardly ever see her these days,’ he said.
‘I am an abandoned man.’ Saleem smiled. ‘First my children leave me, then my wife. She prefers being a granny,’ he said. ‘You know our daughter has a wee lassie herself?’
‘Aye, ye told me that.’
‘Nasreen can’t stay away. She’s always going to Glasgow to be a babysitter. She goes for two days and stays for a week. She says this is so our daughter can go to work. She’s back part-time, you know. She’s a biochemist.’
‘Aye, I ken,’ Don said. Saleem was extremely proud of his daughter and her achievements – almost more so than he was of his son, who was an accountant.
‘But actually, I know this is not the real reason why Nasreen goes,’ Saleem said. ‘The real reason is, she’s tired of being a bloody shopkeeper. So she goes babysitting instead.’
‘And you’re left here.’
‘That’s right. Abandoned. The last of the Khan bloody shopkeepers. Somebody has to do it, though.’
Don couldn’t think of a time when he’d heard Saleem say ‘shopkeeper’ without sticking ‘bloody’ in front of it.
‘Ach, weel,’ he said, ‘I’d better get up the road.’
‘Right then, Don,’ Saleem said. ‘You know what?’ he added.
‘What?’
‘If Nasreen isn’t here, I’ll close the bloody shop. I would like to pay my respects to you, to your wife. Liz. I liked her very much.’
‘Me tae,’ Don said, and laughed, and Saleem smiled. ‘We had oor ups and doons, but we came through them maistly. We were fine at the end.’
‘That is important,’ Saleem said. ‘After someone has gone, you cannot say sorry.’
‘We said sorry,’ Don said.
§
On a clear, cold January morning David met Lucy, for the first time in over a year. They’d had very little contact since he was first elected. This was hardly surprising: she had been in Glasgow for most of those years, and she’d also made it clear that his parliamentary career had pretty much wiped out any residual sisterly affection she might harbour for him. But she still accepted cash donations from him. In fact, she took cheques these days, which meant she’d compromised with capitalism enough to open a bank account.
He’d lost track of which movement, party or pressure group she was in. Frankly, he didn’t care any more, and when she got in touch, in a note sent to his parliamentary office saying she required an urgent meeting about something important, he was irritated. Typical Lucy. It would doubtless turn out to be supremely unimportant. One thing he detested about the left in general was its self-righteous arrogance. The farther left, the more bloody arrogant. It was a fact of life, he had come to recognise, that people who went on and on about humanity and democracy and rights for all and how putridly evil and nasty the establishment was, tended to be the most vicious, dictatorial, backbiting, cynical, self-seeking, prejudiced, petty bastards around; whereas your average old-school Tory – the kind of person supposedly intent on grinding the faces of the poor – was generally polite, generous, warm-hearted, affable and kind. Of course, the lefties would say that your average old-school Tory was well-heeled enough to be able to afford the luxuries of affability and kindness, so was still scum. You couldn’t win.
He wasn’t, therefore, in the best of moods when he met Lucy, for old times’ sake, in the café off the Portobello Road. Only it wasn’t the same café, it had been replaced by a cheerful Mediterranean-coloured tapas-coffee-wine bar, which lightened David’s heart a little, especially when he saw how much Lucy hated it. She kept sniffing and looking around nervously as if she were transgressing some rule of comradely misery just by being there. She was wearing a long black woollen coat, not cheap by the look of it, and a black beret pushed back on her head. He noticed grey flecks in her hair, deep tracks between her eyebrows. For the first time he was struck by how much she resembled their mother.
It was half past ten. They were almost the only customers. She didn’t know what she wanted to eat or drink, so he ordered himself a cappuccino and pecan pastry, and she said, ‘Oh, I’ll just have the same, then.’
‘How are you?’ he asked.
‘All right, I suppose.’
There was a silence. He thought, is she refusing to ask how I am or does it just not occur to her?
He tried again. ‘So, where are you these days?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s a simple enough question, isn’t it? Where are you? Physically, not ideologically. Glasgow? Here? Somewhere else?’
‘Here,’ she said. ‘And Edinburgh sometimes.’
‘Really?’ He was quite often in Edinburgh. He’d rather it was a Lucy-free zone.
‘I’ve got a friend there I can crash with. I think I may move in with her.’
‘Oh. So you’ve left Glasgow?’
‘Glasgow’s finished. You shits have destroyed it.’
‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘There’s to be a garden festival there this year. That’s millions of pounds’ worth of public and private investment. Then it’ll be European City of Culture in 1990. Glasgow’s being reborn.’
‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ she said. ‘Flower beds instead of shipyards? Fucking opera? City of unemployment and poverty more like.’
‘You’re not a philistine, Lucy,’ he said, flashing her a patronising smile because he felt like winding her up, ‘however much you try to be one. The only thing that’ll destroy Glasgow will be if it tries to live in the past. Anyway, if that’s how you feel, shouldn’t you be showing some solidarity? How come you’ve left the sinking ship? If it is sinking, which I don’t accept.’
‘I’m not even going to debate it with you, asshole,’ she said. He noted the Americanism, in amongst her unconvincing effort to sound working class, and was tempted to mock her for it, but did not. He thought, so maybe I’m screwed up, and probably Freddy is in some way I don’t know about, but surely neither of us are even a tenth as screwed up as Lucy.
She’d eaten half of her pastry and pushed the plate with the other half away, a kind of feeble protest. She seemed very deflated and in the past this would have aroused his sympathy, but now he wondered, without much hope or patience, if she could finally be coming to her senses.
‘So what do you want to talk about?’
She threw him an accusatory glance. ‘I don’t know.’
‘For God’s sake, Lucy. You said you had something important to discuss. You wrote me a letter to that effect.’
‘Okay, okay. But I’m your sister too, aren’t I? Can’t I just want to see you?’
‘Yes, but you never do. Just want to see me. You only get in touch when you want something. What is it this time? Money, I presume.’
‘I think I’m due a bit, don’t you?’
‘What’s it for? I’m not giving to any more lousy causes.’
‘You don’t have to. It’s for me. I’ve decided to buy somewhere to live.’
‘I thought you said you were moving in with a friend in Edinburgh?’
‘I said I’m thinking about it. I’ve got to have a roof over my head, haven’t I? But if I’m going to buy a place I need a deposit, and then enough to pay the mortgage.’
This was amazing. She really seemed serious.
‘That’s quite a change,’ he said. ‘I thought you were against private property.’
‘Are you going to chuck everything back in my face today, is that it?’
‘No, Lucy. I’m pleased, very pleased. How much do you want?’
She rolled her head, looked at the ceiling, then back at him. ‘A hundred thousand.’
‘What?’
‘A hundred thousand pounds.’
‘You’re kidding.’
But she wasn’t, any more than he had been about Glasgow’s renaissance. She said, ‘It’s not as if you don’t have it. You and Freddy cleaned up between you when the dinosaurs died. Don’t think I don’t know how much you sold Ochiltree House for. And there was our grandmother’s money before that. I’ve never seen a penny of any of it. I mean, actually, if you divide it by the number of years since I left home I’m hardly asking for anything. Five thousand a year or something. I just want it in a lump sum, that’s all.’
‘You walked out. You wanted nothing to do with our parents. You never spoke to either of them again. I’ve been giving you money for nearly twenty years – not much, I know, especially to begin with, but not chicken feed either, if you add it all up. Which I don’t do, by the way. I don’t keep a tally. And now you want me to write you a cheque for a hundred thousand quid just because you’ve woken up to the fact that the world isn’t ever going to be a communist veggy-paradise or whatever the hell it is you believe in these days. Well, sorry, Lucy, I may be a mug but I’m not that bloody stupid.’
He was quite pleased at how rapidly his anger had boiled over. After all these years of indulging her – because that’s what it was, pure bloody indulgence – he’d finally had enough.
‘You owe me it,’ she said.
‘I owe you nothing. Let me underline that, Lucy. I owe you nothing. The world owes you nothing.’ He dropped his voice, because a woman sitting a couple of tables away had glanced up from her glossy magazine, but speaking quietly only seemed to add intensity to his words. ‘For years now you’ve sponged off me, and I’ve let you because I felt sorry for you.’
‘Listen, don’t think –’
‘No, you listen. You’ve come to me with this cause or that cause in your pocket, and despised me for my politics while expecting me to subsidise yours in whatever pathetic form they take. You know why I’ve done it? Because I care about you.’
‘You don’t care about me.’
‘Yes, I do. Why else would I have gone on handing you cash? I did it so you could feed yourself and pay your debts, and if that meant you carried on in some disastrous relationship with whoever happened to be your ideological flavour of the month, Sharky the beagle liberator or Leon the black brother or whoever, well, that was too bad. My God, I even paid you through your lesbian phase.’
‘Those aren’t real names,’ she said, like a child catching another child out.
‘I know that, Lucy. That’s the point I’m making. Have you ever picked a partner because you actually liked them and not just their politics? As a real person?’
For a moment she looked so hurt he felt guilty. Then she came back at him.
‘So what are you saying? That’s what you did, is it? Melissa fucking Braco wasn’t the perfect political choice for you?’
The woman two tables away cleared her throat disapprovingly.
‘I expect that’s how it looks from where you are. But Melissa and I happen to love each other.’
‘Well, lucky you. How convenient. She ticks all your boxes, you tick hers. That’s all your kind of love is.’
‘And what’s your kind of love?’
‘It’s precisely the opposite. It’s about difficult choices. It’s about commitment.’
He felt completely in control. ‘We’ll have been married fifteen years this September. That’s commitment. We have two children we would do anything for. That’s commitment. They have an aunt they’ve never met, but that’s another story. Fifteen years, Lucy. Most of your relationships are in trouble after fifteen days.’
‘That’s not true. Anyway, the only reason you’re so smug is because you’ve never had to struggle. You don’t know what the word means.’
He’d had enough. He drained the cold last inch of his cappuccino. ‘You never had to struggle, Lucy. You never had to struggle. You decided to struggle. But that doesn’t make it heroic or admirable. I can admire single mothers in sink estates trying to bring their children up to be decent human beings. I find people scraping a living from rubbish tips in Mexico City heroic. But I just find your kind of struggling infantile and useless.’
‘Plus,’ she said, as if she hadn’t heard any of that, ‘you’re so hypocritical. Playing happily families with Melissa and your brats, as if everything’s bloody perfect. You’re all the same. You’re all cheats and liars. Cecil Parkinson set the standard, smiling that smarmy smile while he was busy shagging his secretary. So who are you shagging, I wonder? Or maybe you’re into something a bit more interesting. A bit more Cynthia Payne, perhaps?’
For a moment his sense of control wobbled. Payne was a celebrated madam whose customers had needs not entirely dissimilar to his own. Did Lucy know something? How could she know something? She hardly knew him. She couldn’t know anything.
‘If that’s the level we’ve descended to, I’ve nothing more to say.’
‘So you’re not going to give me my money?’
‘No, Lucy. It’s not yours. You made choices a long time ago about that. I’ll write you out a cheque for five hundred pounds right now. No, let’s make it a thousand, so you won’t starve and can pay your rent this month. But this is the last. You’re going to have to stand on your own feet from now on. I realise, especially listening to the spiteful things you’ve just come out with, that me helping you out over the years hasn’t done you the slightest bit of good. Time for a bit of tough love, perhaps.’
It was a phrase he’d heard quite a bit lately, in relation to curbing youth crime or drug addiction. Don’t indulge, kill the dependency, foster self-reliance and responsibility. It made the kind of American sense he liked, whereas ‘asshole’ he just found lazy and second-rate.
‘Fuck off,’ Lucy said. She pushed her chair back noisily and stormed out. But he knew her too well. She strode up and down outside, fuming, pretending not to look through the window while he got out his chequebook. Tough love. He imagined himself using it in an intervention in the Commons as he bent over the tiny table and wrote out the cheque. Then he stood up to leave.
‘Sorry,’ he mouthed to the woman with the magazine, who gave him an imperious stare, as if she had no idea who he was, which was probably the case. A little thrill of desire went through him. He paid the bill and stepped out into the cold sunshine.
‘Here,’ he said, and Lucy grabbed the cheque and stuffed it into her pocket.
‘Goodbye, Lucy,’ he said.
‘I hate you,’ she said. Then she turned and marched off.
‘I know,’ he said to her retreating figure. She hated him. What he didn’t yet understand was how much.
§
Jock came home to die. Mary phoned Ellen and said, ‘If ye want tae see him ye’d better no leave it ower lang.’ The next weekend, a hot, dusty Saturday in July, Ellen left Robin and Kirsty in Joppa and drove north to Borlanslogie. The town’s High Street was almost deserted, half the shopfronts shuttered or boarded up. When she turned off the engine and got out she felt the air heavy with despair. Three years since the miners’ strike, two since the pit closed, and the place was dying. She walked to the end of the street and turned left, then second left, the route home. It all looked familiar but felt alien. Did I really come from here
? she thought.
Mary had set Jock up in their old bedroom. She’d made a bed up for herself in the front room. ‘Come ben for a cup of tea first, afore ye go in,’ she said, ushering Ellen through to the kitchen. And while she made the tea she said, ‘He’s no looking good, Ellen. Ye’ll be shocked at the change in him.’
‘Why did you take him back after all this time?’ Ellen asked. ‘He never supported us. Why are you supporting him now?’
‘Because we’re man and wife,’ Mary said. ‘I ken he’s no been the best but he hasna been the worst. We’re aye mairrit, efter aw.’
‘But he never –’
Mary cut her off. ‘What was I tae dae, turn him frae his ain door? He’s my husband. And your faither.’ She paused. ‘But I dinna blame ye for no liking him. He wasna there much for ye.’
‘It’s not a question of liking him. I liked him well enough when I saw him. I just feel I hardly know him.’
‘Ye hardly dae,’ Mary said.
She had made the double bed up with extra pillows and a white duvet. Jock, lying in the middle of it, looked like a bird in a patch of snow. He seemed to have shrunk to half his real size. He was dozing when Mary pushed her in – ‘Here’s somebody special tae see ye, Jock’ – but he woke up soon enough and Ellen could have wept at the smile he gave her. ‘It’s yersel, lass,’ he croaked, and then he had a coughing fit and between them the women helped him sit up against the pillows and take a drink of water till his chest calmed down again. The doctors said it was silicosis he had, and maybe that was true, because God knows what was in him from the years of working on the dams; he’d have inhaled clouds of concrete dust in the damp Highland air and maybe there was asbestos in there too, but anyway his lungs were choked and on top of that he’d smoked all his life so one lung was cancerous and they’d taken it out, and now the other didn’t have much more than a month of breath left in it. This was what Mary had told her in the kitchen. ‘I’ll no be able tae keep him here,’ she said, ‘no when the pain gets really bad. I dinna hae the facilities.’ She shook her head as if this were a failing on her part. ‘He’ll hae tae gang tae the hospital at the hinner end.’
And the Land Lay Still Page 66