And the Land Lay Still (40 page)

Maybe he should have.

In early 1963 the Profumo revelations were still not out in the open and the collapse of public faith in Macmillan’s government was yet to take place, but the Vassall incident had been a warning shot. Kim Philby, the ‘third man’ despite the pack of lies Macmillan told the Commons back in 1955, had just shipped out of Beirut for Moscow, a nasty reminder of past scandals. You could smell it in the air: the whiff of decay mixed with the scent of spring. Wind of change, right enough. You were waiting for something to happen, something you didn’t yet know about but maybe you’d recognise it when it came along.

The February sky outside his window was as drab as the walls of his office. The window was so small and so high that the only thing you could see through it
was
the sky. Canterbury came in, as usual without knocking. Peter hated that: the presumption of senior rank, which was really the presumption of having been to a top public school and Oxford. Christ, you might have just dropped a really poisonous one, or be playing with yourself behind the desk. Not that he would be, but it was the principle. No bastarding way he could ever walk into Canterbury’s office without knocking and waiting for an answer.

Bond! Canterbury said, in that irritating manner he had of sounding surprised to find him there. No, don’t get up. How are things?

Fine, sir.

Good. Somebody mentioned to me the other day that you’ve started calling yourself Peter.

Yes, sir.

Why is that?

Too much confusion with the other James Bond, sir.

Canterbury’s sceptical gaze swept round the barren room. Do you think so? he said. I haven’t seen this film, what’s it called –?

Dr No
.

– so I couldn’t comment. Never read any of the books. Never met Fleming. Before my time. Colourful character, apparently. More fancy than fact. The film certainly sounds a little colourful. Racier than, ah, this. Do you really think people will be confused?

Possibly, sir. Or make unhelpful comparisons.
Like they already do every time I go for a piss.

Nothing to do with the other
Doctor
films, is it? The ones with Dirk Bogarde?

Nothing at all, sir.

I find them rather amusing. Anyway, about changing your name, is this a permanent decision?

Yes, sir. I’m not really changing my name. It’s more of an adjustment.

Redeployment of existing resources, eh? Well, you should run these things by me but I can see your point. Once knew a chap. Scientist. Surname Duck. First name Donald. Absolutely genuine.
One of yours, Aberdonian I think. Brilliant mind, but nobody really took him seriously once the Walt Disney duck came along. Well, I expect you’ll survive. This other James Bond business sounds very far-fetched. Shouldn’t think it’ll last.

I think it’s caught the public imagination, sir.

Canterbury was staring at some marks on the wall where there had once been, before Peter’s time, a row of pictures. Really? he said.

Like the Beatles, sir. Who were going to be huge too, Peter knew it. ‘Please Please Me’ was at number one in the pop charts. Outside of his working life, he could feel change everywhere.

The Beatles, Canterbury repeated. Yes, well, we’ll see. It wasn’t clear which he was dismissing as worthless, Peter’s judgement or the Beatles’ music. Maybe both. Probably he was trying to remember what the pictures on the wall had been of. Whereas Peter was thinking: Donald Duck, James Bond, the Beatles. These names happen and they change everything. The world shape-shifts in the wake of their arrival. We must be, we have to be, aware of this.

Canterbury had sent him a note a few days earlier asking him to look out what they had on C. M. Grieve, better known as the poet Hugh MacDiarmid. He was a member of the Committee of 100, a group of prominent troublemakers set up by Bertrand Russell a few years before to promote civil disobedience in protest against nuclear weapons. MacDiarmid was always firing off letters to the press, and made frequent trips behind the Iron Curtain to give poetry readings. Peter had summarised the files on Grieve on a single sheet. Canterbury glanced over it.

What do you think? Dangerous? Conspiring to bring down the state?

Was Canterbury just testing him or did he genuinely want to know? And how could he possibly
not
know?

Not much of a conspirator, sir. Whatever his opinions are, he doesn’t keep them hidden.

Still a thorn in our flesh, though, would you say?

He makes a lot of noise, sir, but very few people pay him much attention.

That doesn’t mean he’s not dangerous.

Most of the Scottish people don’t even know he’s talking, let
alone what he’s talking about. You could say he’s completely out of touch. Or they’re out of touch with him.

There’s a difference, is there?

Yes, sir. One school of thought says he’s ahead of his time, and always has been.

Canterbury looked at him strangely, as if he’d just said something self-incriminating. Which school of thought is that, then?

Among the literati – some of the literati – he’s regarded as a prophet. Others just hate his guts.

We’ve been watching him for thirty years, I see.

Yes, sir. He’s an old man now. I can’t see the point really.

Canterbury frowned. Can’t see the point? Constant vigilance,
that’s
the point. Goodness, you’ve been with us long enough now to know that. What about his connection with the Nationalists?

They threw Grieve out years ago. He’s a Communist.

I’m well aware of that, Bond. And I also know there are parts of Scotland that are little less than Soviet fiefdoms. The question is, are there connections between the Nationalists and the Communists? Are Grieve and his associates able to make those connections and cause any serious trouble?

In my view, sir, no. Absolutely not. Yes, there are pockets of support for the CP still, but they’re getting fewer by the year. And the Scots aren’t about to vote for independence either. There’s nothing in it for them in material terms. Anyway, who would they vote for? A few poets and a couple of farmers? They haven’t got the imagination. He was surprised at how angry, almost impassioned, he sounded.

Canterbury assumed a grave, headmasterly expression. We’re not concerned with voting, though, are we? Not our business. But tell me more about the poets. Poets can be trouble. Look at the Irish. What do we have on Grieve that’s recent?

Nothing of any substance. Most of what we do have is pre-war.
This man is a menace. This man and his wife are sworn enemies of the British state.
That’s what we were saying then. The British state doesn’t need to lose any sleep over Hugh MacDiarmid.

In your opinion.

And the state’s presumably, sir. It’s been paying him a Civil List pension since 1950.

Attlee, Canterbury said, as if he’d just trodden on a slug.

Grieve’s seventy, Peter said. He’s been spouting the same claptrap for decades. Have you tried reading his poetry?

That’s your job.

Well, it’s impenetrable. We should ignore him. Everybody else does.

Not true. The literary world had fêted him on his seventieth birthday even if it was divided about him. A collected edition of his poems had been published to mark the birthday and Peter had stolen a copy from Foyles so he could see what the fuss was about. He could have bought it and put in an expense claim but he preferred to steal. He didn’t understand much of what he read, except the obviously polemical stuff, but there was something in the earlier work – the lyrics MacDiarmid had made up, so it was said, by trawling through old Scots dictionaries – that he found disturbingly fascinating. They lured you in, hooked you. It was weird, because if he stood back from them he could see them as mere sterile arrangements of dead words. But they were more than that. He felt, reading them, that they put him in touch with some kind of throbbing undercurrent of life, something simultaneously ancient and modern, tiny and huge, parochial yet soaring into space. They made him feel uneasy. But they were just poems, so how could they possibly have that kind of effect?

When Peter urged Canterbury to ignore MacDiarmid it was almost like he was trying to keep the poet to himself. He didn’t know if he believed the old man to be harmless. He kind of hoped he wasn’t.

Canterbury said, His wife said she’d like to cut the Queen’s throat, if I remember rightly?

Peter pulled himself back. Yes. Again, pre-war. Referring to the Queen Mother, of course. Valda Grieve thinks Cornwall should be independent.

So what do we conclude? That they’re powerless?

Powerless and penniless. The more Scottish Nationalism is associated in the minds of the people with Grieve and others like him, the less likely it is that it’ll ever have any kind of mass appeal. Let them get on with it.

He supported the extremists who blew up pillar boxes when the present Queen came to the throne.

He was bound to, sir. He’s a republican. He doesn’t believe in monarchy and in particular he doesn’t believe in the English monarchy. It was the presence of the numeral in ‘EIIR’ that people really objected to. Since there never was an Elizabeth I of Scotland.

People?

Some people, sir. The extremists.

Canterbury said, Do you know, Bond, you almost sound sympathetic. How old were you when the Coronation Stone was … stolen?

That pause before the last word. Canterbury’s idea of a trap, to see if he’d dispute the terminology.

Ten, sir.

And how did it make you feel?

Feel, sir?

Yes. Did it make you feel good? Did your heart do a wee Highland fling?

Peter’s expression was deadpan but
Fuck off, you patronising bastard
was what he was thinking.

I don’t remember feeling anything very much, sir, he said. (Delight, elation, euphoria.
Good on you, whoever you are.
The same when the Edinburgh pillar box blew up.)

One thing leads to another. We don’t want bombs going off in Scotland again.

I think that’s a very remote possibility.

One of Grieve’s acolytes might try something.

I doubt it, sir. But if by some miracle one of them did gain the technical ability to make a bomb they’d almost certainly blow themselves up with it. So we’d gain both ways. There’d be some good bad publicity about extreme nationalism, and there’d be a dead extremist as well.

There was a pause. Canterbury looked at the ceiling, around the room, up at the window. His gaze ran along the row of absent pictures. As if what Peter had said had never occurred to him before. Eventually he spoke.

We don’t want it to get that far. We want to stop things long before they happen.

Why?

Why? Because it gets messy, Bond. And there’s always the
danger, you know, that one creates martyrs. The last thing one wants is a martyr. Our policy is containment, not persecution. If we ever have to resort to persecution, then we’ll have failed. You understand that, don’t you?

Yes, sir.

Good. Well, nothing more to be done for now. But constant vigilance, Bond, constant vigilance. We don’t want to get caught napping.

When the pillar-box campaign started Jimmy was twelve, a good age to appreciate it. It was half-comedy, half-adventure, like the
Beano
and the
Wizard
simultaneously. But Jimmy Bond read about it avidly in the senior section of the public library in Drumkirk, where they’d allowed him a ticket because he’d read everything in the junior section. He went there on Saturday mornings and sat with the old men in heavy overcoats, turning the pages of the
Glasgow Herald
, the
Weekly Scotsman
,
Punch
and the
Illustrated London News
. The pillar box that received most attention was in a new housing scheme on the south side of Edinburgh. The Corporation had decreed, apparently believing in the power of historical romance to ennoble ordinary lives, that all the streets in the scheme be named after characters from Walter Scott’s novels: Redgauntlet Terrace, Ravenswood Avenue, Balderston Gardens, and so forth. In November 1952, nine months after Elizabeth became Queen but seven months before her coronation in Westminster Abbey, a new Royal Mail pillar box bearing the legend ‘EIIR’ is installed on the corner of Sir Walter Scott Avenue and Gilmerton Road. Three days later its bright red paint is covered with tar. It’s cleaned up. A week later the police, acting on a tip-off, retrieve an envelope full of explosive from the box. Shortly after that the numerals in ‘EIIR’ are obliterated with white paint. It’s cleaned again. A week later there’s another attempt to blow the thing up, and a month after that the numerals are freshly vandalised and further repairs take place. Finally, the day before St Valentine’s Day, somebody puts the pillar box out of its misery with a parcel of gelignite. When it is replaced, only a Scottish crown adorns the new box, without any letters or numerals. The Postmaster General has got the message, and the new monarch remains anonymous on all Scottish post boxes
installed thereafter. A victory for common sense, or common hooliganism, depending on your point of view.

Not long afterwards Jimmy was on a bus going to Drumkirk and a couple of young, bearded men in duffelcoats started to sing:

They sang two or three verses and broke into laughter at the end, and the weird thing was the other, older folk on the bus didn’t object, they laughed too. And Jimmy thought, how did the police manage not to catch him, this mysterious saboteur with a pantomime sense of humour? Had they not been watching that pillar box day and night? Well, they had but they couldn’t go on doing that for ever, and they’d had to leave its mouth open for the general public to stick their legitimate mail in. Sky-High Joe had not been working alone, Jimmy concluded. There’d been folk looking out for him, telling him when the coast was clear. The cops were useless.
He’d
have caught Joe. He knew even then that he had the right temperament, the patience, to be a spy.