And the Land Lay Still

by James Robertson

  ‘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.

  ‘Sadly, Angus isn’t here to object to how I’ve arranged his work. Fifty years of Scottish life, 1947–1997. History is written by the survivors, but what is that history? That’s the point I was trying to make just now. We don’t know what the story is when we’re in it, and even after we tell it we’re not sure. Because the story doesn’t end. As William Faulkner put it, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” ’

  Got it in! Fine. He catches Walter’s eye, is he looking bored or contemplative? Walter, who’s always seemed about sixty to Mike since they first met thirty-five years ago, but must in reality only be in his seventies now, is as grudgingly generous as ever. In a minute Mike will invite him to sing. ‘Something appropriate for those fifty years,�
�� he said, when he spoke to him about it on the phone a few weeks ago. ‘I leave the choice to you.’ And Walter said, ‘Only fifty years? You’re narrowing my options there.’ Mike posted him an early copy of the exhibition book so he could get a feel for the range of images, knowing that he would weigh against them what he might or might not sing, and he does not doubt that Walter will come up with the goods.

  ‘I’m going to shut up now …’ A ragged cheer from Eric, Jeremy and some others. The Polish and Romanian girls and boys in their black aprons are lining up on the outskirts with replenished trays of wine and fizzy water. What happens when you leave a country, when you arrive elsewhere? Do you take your own story with you? Or are you like a new character entering an old story? Those intersecting, overlapping map lines again. You see the ones you want to see.

  ‘I’m going to shut up now, and Walter Fleming’s going to step up and sing for us. But before he does …’ He pauses again. What is it, this precious, ponderous thing that he holds, that he wants to give to these people, that he wants them to take away, back on to the streets, into the bars and restaurants, into their cars and the last trains to Glasgow and Stirling and Dundee, back to their homes and their own private and personal griefs and joys, their family gatherings and their couplings and their solitudes? What is it he has for them? ‘Before he does, I want to pass something on, something that was said to me recently by an old and dear friend who can’t be here tonight. You have to go away and think about this. It seems very simple but I think it’s profound. Trust the story. That’s all. Trust the story. Whatever it is these pictures tell you, individually or collectively, trust the story. We’re only human after all. Whatever else we put faith in will, in the end, betray us or we will betray it. But the story never betrays. It twists and turns and sometimes it takes you to terrible places and sometimes it gets lost or appears to abandon you, but if you look hard enough it is still there. It goes on. The story is the only thing we can really, truly know.’

  A suitable silence. He steps back from the microphone. The clapping starts. He used the word ‘profound’ and immediately he’s beset with self-doubt, wondering if they’ll think him the very opposite of profound. Maybe they’ll go away empty-handed. What the hell was that about? But the applause goes on and he feels its warmth again, as if – even if they don’t understand what he’s said, even if they don’t believe it – they accept his offer, accept that he wants to give them something. And this is doubly strange because he feels remote from their warmth; he’s come down from the north and he’ll retreat there again in a day or two, and does he really have a connection with them, here in bustling, packed Edinburgh at the start of August? If he does, why does he feel such an overwhelming need to withdraw, to get away from them again?

  He has a sudden yearning for Murdo. He wishes he had come. Yet is glad he chose not to.

  He moves into the crowd as Walter, passing him with a smile, goes to the microphone.

  §

  Trust the story. Ellen thinks she knows what Mike means. She’s also identified the absent source, though: Jean Barbour. What if you don’t trust the storyteller, Mike? But as soon as the question forms she sees how he would answer it: the storyteller may dissemble and deceive, the story can’t; the story can only ever be itself.

  Aye, weel, mibbe. It’s her own comment but the voice in her head is her mother’s. Eighty-three when Mary’s number was finally called last year. She didn’t come out to the fish van and the fish man knew there was something wrong, keeked through the window and saw her lying on the sitting-room floor. He forced a window to get in and she was still alive but cold as one of his fish; she’d been there all night and it was February. The television blethering away in the corner. He phoned for an ambulance and sat with her till it came but she couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. While he waited he became aware of a burning smell and went through to the kitchen just in time to lift a pan of what had been tomato soup off the ring as it caught fire. ‘Burned my bloody fingers daein it,’ he told Ellen later, ‘but at least the hoose didna go up. She was a good customer tae me, your mither, and she never owed me a penny.’ She can hear the fish man, she can hear Mary. Aye, weel, mibbe. By the time Ellen got to the hospital Mary was hooked up to everything. ‘Dinna let them resuscitate me,’ had been her plea to Ellen and the boys. ‘See if I ever keel ower and if I come back I’ll be a vegetable, dinna let them resuscitate me.’ And there she was, hooked up, but she was never coming back. She didn’t speak another word before she went. Ellen sat beside her, trying to mind the last time they’d spoken on the phone, what they’d said. Her mother’s last words to her. And she couldn’t remember even though it had been only a couple of days before. So does that mean they said nothing of any consequence? Surely the thing of consequence was that they’d been speaking. The importance of banalities. ‘My mother made it clear,’ she told the doctor, ‘that in these circumstances she just wants to go. So if there are machines here that are just keeping her going, without which she’d be away, switch them off, please.’ The doctor nodded. It wasn’t quite that simple. But he got the message. Three hours later Mary was, as she’d wished, away.

  Mike has said something else that she wants both to think about and to let pass. It’s the kind of thing that worries her in the middle of the night while Robin sleeps untroubled beside her: does anybody else, coming along a little later, really care? What gnaws at Ellen is the shrug or vacant look Kirsty sometimes gives her when she’s sounding off about this or that political issue; the look that says, why do you get so worked up about this stuff? As if it has nothing to do with her at all. No, scrub the ‘as if’. Politics and Kirsty are total strangers. In Ellen’s mind it’s a kind of moral failing that her daughter doesn’t vote. But whose?

  Kirsty, next to her, is slim and lovely and seems free of care. She’s wearing a green linen dress Ellen doesn’t dare imagine the price of. That’s another generational thing: society hasn’t managed to eradicate poverty but it’s done a good job on wiping out thrift.

  Stop it stop it stop it, she tells herself. She’s your child. Is it her fault that she’s grown up not to be you? Don’t resent that, be grateful for it.

  It’s not just Kirsty though, it’s the world she inhabits. She works for an independent film and TV production company based in a renovated warehouse in Leith. Ellen can never remember her job title but she seems to do a bit of everything across marketing, acquisitions, rights and human resources. It makes Ellen think of Jock, her father, and how, bizarrely, he might have been ahead of his time the way he dodged and danced through his working life, the difference being he did it as a manual labourer. He had plenty of bullshit but no qualifications in it. Kirsty on the other hand has a degree in Language and Communications Studies and an MSc in Media Management. She works long hours, in fact she never seems to stop and yet Ellen can’t help feeling that there’s something phoney about what she does. Even phonier than what she does. With each generation there is less contact – real, physical touch – with the tools, the materials, even the products of its labour. Jock Imlach started as a miner and, even when he moved on to the hydro schemes, concrete and rock and water were what he had to work with or dodge working with, and dust was what killed him. Ellen’s world has gone from roaring, oily printing presses, clattering typewriters and tramping the streets to digital typesetting, research on the internet and articles emailed in from home half an hour before the deadline. It’s decades since she physically put a story on an editor’s desk. Kirsty’s world is a step further along the road, so virtual it’s almost invisible. Meetings about meetings about meetings. Pitches, development, pre-production commissions. Apparently you can turn a profit from not making programmes. It’s the unreality of reality TV, all that crap. Where’s the substance? Ellen feels she’s losing touch.

  §

  On a bench under one of the screened-off high windows, some distance from the back of the standing crowd, an elderly couple sit hand in hand while the speechifying goes o
n. Don Lennie and Marjory Taylor, as was. Later she became Marjory Forrester, and still is, but Don always thinks of her as Marjory Taylor, the English nurse. Don has bought two copies of the Angus Pendreich book, one for them and one for Saleem. Marjory says he should have waited, maybe they’ll give him a freebie when they realise who he is, but that’s not the way Don operates. Apart from anything else, he feels an obligation to buy, since they’re here on false pretences. Billy’s Catriona had rushed in excitedly one evening a few weeks back, waving a big postcard under his eyes. ‘Look!’ she said, and he looked, and there they were, Saleem and him, standing outside Saleem’s shop. ‘It’s an invitation to the opening of an exhibition,’ Catriona explained. ‘It’s come to me because I know the son of the photographer whose work it is. That’s the only reason I can think of. Billy and I can’t go because we’re away on holiday, but you can. You must. You’re in it.’ He studied the card. ‘So it would seem,’ he said. ‘I mind that time. The fellow just appeared one day when we were ootside talking and asked if he could take oor picture and we said aye and then he wrote doon oor names and drove away, and then it was in one of the Sunday papers, but tae be honest I’d completely forgotten aboot it.’ ‘Will you go?’ Catriona said. ‘I’ll email Michael, that’s the son, and tell him you’ll go.’ Don hummed and hawed but Marjory sided with Catriona. ‘You must,’ she said. So he agreed. And here they are.

  The next day he saw Saleem and tried to persuade him to join them but he wouldn’t. Saleem was delighted with the photograph though. ‘We look pretty good, don’t we?’ he said. ‘At least you do. But why aren’t we smiling?’ ‘It was how ye posed for photies in thae days,’ Don said. ‘I probably tellt ye tae wipe the grin aff your face. Weel, if ye’ll no come wi us, I’ll bring ye a book back.’