And the Land Lay Still (62 page)

Sometimes he thought about being in the hospital with the English nurse, and if she could have made a mistake. If she’d picked up the wrong bairn to show him, or the bairns had got mixed up some time before, or later, and Charlie wasn’t his at all, because how could he be so different from Billy? They didn’t even look alike. But then as they grew it became obvious that Billy favoured his father while Charlie favoured Liz, so they did both belong, but in different ways. He asked Liz once, did Charlie feel more like hers than Billy did, because of the looks? She said of course not, what kind of question was that to ask, and gave him a hard, accusatory stare. But Charlie still didn’t feel like
his
son, he just didn’t, and Don wondered in weak moments if – the daftness that had come on him that night, the daft emotion he’d felt towards the English nurse – if fate, in which he didn’t believe, had reached down and punished him for it even though he’d done nothing, they’d done nothing, there had just been the kiss, but fate had seen something pass between them and said,
I’ll bloody show ye.

He deplored violence. He’d intended never to have to raise his voice or his hand against his own children. But with Charlie, sometimes, he had no option.

The English nurse
. As if he couldn’t remember her name. As if it wasn’t in him like an old lover’s carved into a tree. Marjory Taylor.

§

Charlie lifted a bike from where it was leaning outside the post office, rode it halfway to Drumkirk, crashed it into a dyke and
buckled the front wheel, then abandoned it. It only emerged later that he was the culprit because Bill Drummond, driving in the other direction, had spotted him freewheeling downhill.

Charlie used a neighbour’s greenhouse for target practice with a slingshot.

Charlie put a cricket ball through the window of a moving bus.

This was
Beano
stuff, the kind of thing most kids do, or miss doing by luck as much as choice, or narrowly get away with. What Charlie didn’t get away with, he got leathered for by Don. But every year he got away with more. What was scary was the stuff he wasn’t caught for, the stuff for which there was no proof. It didn’t matter whether it was Liz, Don, a teacher or a policeman doing the interrogating, Charlie never cracked. It wasn’t Charlie who fired the hayricks at Hackston’s, it wasn’t Charlie who vandalised the school or tortured three cats to death. And even when one of the small gang of followers he’d gathered around him confessed to some misdemeanour or other, he never shopped Charlie. He had a power over them, partly physical and partly psychological, and they feared or admired or envied that and the way they showed it was through silence.

§

The grandparents were dying. First Liz’s mother went with cancer, just shrank away to nothing in a matter of weeks, it was in her stomach, her spine, bones, everywhere; then her father, who’d never had a day’s illness all his working life, caught the flu and before a fortnight was out was dead from pneumonia. Liz felt the loss greatly. Both of them gone in eighteen months, and neither of them seventy. She felt, too, the final loss of her childhood: without them there, Hackston’s Farm wasn’t her territory any more. Every weekend she had walked the two miles and back to see them. Now, with no reason to go, she stopped going.

Don had sometimes gone with her. He liked walking for the sake of walking, whether it was out to the farm or up in the woods. There didn’t always have to be a destination, an objective. You could just
be
, out in the fresh air, the countryside, the moody weather. Couldn’t you?

Liz said, ‘What’s the point?’

In Drumkirk, the council finally knocked down the tenement where Don had grown up, and built a new scheme on fields out at Granthill. Don’s parents, Will and Molly, moved there, into one of the four-storey blocks dotted like Lego across the open spaces. Their two-bedroom flat had windows looking north to the hills and west into the prevailing wind and rain; the living room was big and bright; the kitchen and bathroom full of shiny new appliances. Their own bathroom! At first they loved it, despite the few shops and the infrequent buses into town. But after the first winter the problems started: the condensation, the ill-fitting window frames, the thin walls and the neighbours’ bairns with nowhere to play. Then the old man suffered a heart attack, clung greyly on to life for a few months, and died. Now only Molly remained, a captive of the radio, television and her weakening legs. Don visited every week, taking the messages that were too heavy for her to carry. He did what repairs he could to keep the decay and wild kids at bay, complained with little success to the housing department, and feared for what would happen next. Granthill lost its shine in just a couple of years. People in Drumkirk started to use the name as shorthand for everything that was going wrong with society.

Molly said it wasn’t too bad but then she didn’t go out much, she didn’t see the deterioration. Her mind wasn’t what it was. Perhaps she’d have to come and bide with them. But how could she? They didn’t have room for her. She had a couple of neighbours who kept an eye out for her, but they could only do so much and Don didn’t blame them. They were not to blame. Nobody was to blame.

§

Billy, as a teenager, got into folk music and Ban the Bomb marches. Don approved, even went with him to a rally in George Square in Glasgow. He didn’t believe unilateral disarmament was sensible, or feasible, and they had long discussions about that, but he respected and admired Billy’s convictions. They
were
convictions, though curiously unimpassioned. It was good that his son had a cause, and that it was a left-wing cause.

He remembered talking with Jack about how Jack wouldn’t have been there if they hadn’t dropped the Bomb. But Jack
wasn’t
there. Were the rest of them still there because of the Bomb or in spite of it?

Then Billy went to the Holy Loch to protest against Polaris, and away down south in the school holidays to march from Aldermaston to London. Liz grew nervous. What else was he getting up to, tagging along with a bunch of strangers? Kids with wild ideas and grown-ups leading them God knows where. What if he was arrested? Or abducted? Don told her to relax. Billy could look after himself. Liz raised her brows at him. ‘Ye think so?’

Meanwhile, Charlie curled his lip and mocked his big brother for singing ‘baby songs’:

He did a devastating imitation of Billy being both earnestly adolescent and pathetically childlike. Don disliked it intensely, because it was so accurate. Such cynicism in a twelve-year-old was disconcerting. Liz excused him: he was too clever for his age and easily bored. She was proud of him, as Don was proud of Billy.

Two brothers. You expected them to fight. You expected the older one to bully the younger, but it was Charlie who intimidated Billy. At two, five, seven, Charlie knew how to work his brother, trigger his sense of fairness or guilt or fear or generosity to get the toy, the food, the attention he wanted. At first it was amusing, intriguing, like watching monkeys socialising at the zoo. By the time it stopped being entertainment it was an established routine. Charlie’s key weapon was his willingness to resort to violence, not something that exploded berserker-like out of tantrums, but a sustained, deliberate, controlled violence. Billy had to try to manage being exploited. Fighting back didn’t work because Charlie had an appetite for a fight, whereas Billy thought the best form of attack was defence. The fact that they had to share a room didn’t help. They had territories with invisible but very real boundaries – their own beds, their own drawers for clothes, their own shelves, their own routes to and from the bedroom door. These had been worked out over time but because they were invisible they weren’t fixed, and Charlie was skilled at extracting further concessions in return for staying off Billy’s ground.

Don was aware of all of this. Sometimes he tried to sort it out, but it was exhausting. He vaguely resented that Liz didn’t manage it better. She argued that Billy had to stand up for himself. He was three years older than Charlie, even if he was slighter and softer. She couldn’t fight his battles for him, and neither should Don.

§

One day Billy came home from a demo in Dunoon and said, coyly, ‘Guess who else was there? Barbara.’ For a moment Don didn’t know who he meant, then he did. Jack’s daughter. ‘Barbara Gordon?’ he said. ‘Aye,’ Billy said, ‘she was on the march tae.’ ‘Is that right?’ Don said. ‘Young Barbara. And how has she turned oot?’ He glanced at Liz and found her looking at him as if it was his fault. A chill went through him, remembering the quiet, strange, intense wee girl of years before.

Billy said, ‘She’s in CND tae, she’s a youth organiser in Fife, she’s much mair involved than I am. I’m gaun across there some time. It’s no just CND, she’s in aw kinds o things.’

In fact he went the following Saturday, and the one after that, off on the bus early and not home till late. Then came the request, at tea one evening, to stay away overnight, for a dance at a youth club in Glenrothes. ‘Barbara’s mother said I could.’

‘Barbara’s mother said I could,’ Charlie mimicked.

‘Cut it oot, Charlie,’ Don said. His big hand landed palm down on the table. Charlie shut up. Don had to look away. The expression on the boy’s face made him want to thump him, the churn in his belly made him not want to. He’d done it often enough, though not recently. But Charlie was growing fast. In a few years he’d be able to fight back.

Liz regarded Billy steadily. ‘She did, did she?’

‘Aye,’ Billy said.

‘And when’s that supposed tae happen?’

‘Next Saturday.’

‘How is she?’ Don asked.

‘Her mother? She’s all right. She made me my tea. She says I’ve tae call her Sarah. So can I stay there?’

‘I don’t see why no,’ Don said, and Liz fixed that look on him again. ‘If ye’re sure Sarah – Mrs Gordon – disna mind.’

‘She disna,’ Billy said.

‘She must really like ye,’ Charlie said, ‘if she made your tea.’ From anybody else this might have been an innocent-enough remark, but the cold, snake-like way it was said was designed to wind somebody up, Billy or his father. Don turned on Charlie and snapped, ‘Oot. Now.’ Charlie went, with contempt for his father and brother in his eyes.

‘Well?’ Billy said.

‘Don’t
well
me,’ Liz said.

For all his anti-war activism Billy hated confrontation at an individual level, but Don could see him steeling himself, determined not to be overruled, and decided to intervene.

‘There’s nae harm in it, surely?’ he said, just as Billy said, ‘Look, ye can telephone her if ye don’t believe me. I’ve got the number.’

‘Oh, they’ve a telephone, have they?’ Liz said.

‘Aye, it’s because of Mrs Gordon’s job in the post office, I think.’

‘It’s no that we dinna believe ye, son,’ Don said. ‘It’s just …’ But he couldn’t think what it was. Because it was nothing.

‘It’s difficult,’ Liz said.

‘What’s difficult aboot it?’ Billy demanded. He took his diary from his pocket, opened it near the back and was about to hand it over when he changed his mind. He turned some more pages, found a blank one and carefully tore part of it out. He slid the wee pencil from the spine of the diary and copied the number down. ‘There ye are. Would one of you telephone her, please?’

Liz lifted the piece of paper. ‘I don’t like tae,’ she said. ‘I’d be better writing.’

‘It’s for Saturday,’ Billy said. ‘Could ye no just phone her?’

‘I could dae it, I suppose,’ Don said, ‘if your mother really disna want tae.’

‘If onybody’s tae telephone her, it’ll be me,’ Liz said.

‘Well, could ye dae it soon?’ Billy said. ‘So I ken.’ Don had never heard him so impatient.

Billy left them alone. Even with his emotions roused he didn’t slam the door. A few minutes later they heard him slipping out of the house.

‘I’m no wanting him seeing that Barbara,’ Liz said. ‘Ye could have supported me, Don.’

‘Supported ye? What did ye want me tae say? He’s been tae Aldermaston and the Holy Loch. We canna stop him gaun tae Glenrothes tae see a lassie.’

‘I don’t mind him seeing lassies. I just dinna want him seeing
that
lassie.’

‘He’s fifteen,’ Don said. ‘Nearly sixteen. What were we daein at his age? I’d started my apprenticeship and you were working on the farm. Just because he hasna left the school yet disna mean he’s no growing up.’

‘There’s ony number o lassies here he could be gaun wi. His friends’ sisters. Lassies at the school. Why does he have tae pick her?’

‘It’s how things happen, Liz.’

‘It’s no just her. It’s her faither and everything.’

A space lay between them. Billy would be sitting the new ‘Ordinary’ level certificate exams in a few months. Decisions about what would happen after that would have to be made soon.

Liz said, ‘He should be studying mair at weekends onywey.’

‘He studies plenty,’ Don said. ‘Every night here at the kitchen table. Look, we canna stop him making choices. Making mistakes if need be. It’s the only way ony o us ever learn.’

‘God help him if he makes a mistake wi Barbara Gordon.’

‘Barbara Gordon’ sounded to Don like the title of an old ballad with a tragic ending.

‘It’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘They’ll go marching and dancing thegither for a while, then they’ll go their ain ways. But if we try tae stop it, it’ll make them mair determined tae see each other. Is that what ye want?’

‘I dinna want it at aw.’

‘Would ye rather I spoke tae Sarah?’

‘No! I’ll dae it.’

‘Well, ye’d better wait till Billy comes back or he’ll see ye in the queue, and get embarrassed.’

‘What d’ye mean?’

‘That’s where he’ll be away tae, the phone box. He’ll be doon there speaking tae Barbara. Why dae ye think he’s got the number?’

Neither of them thought of a telephone as anything other than an instrument for communicating necessary information or for use
in an emergency. The idea that you might phone somebody just to talk to them seemed absurd, extravagant.