And the Land Lay Still (67 page)

Q was five years older than David. He intended to be a millionaire before he was forty. He was affable, self-contained, supremely self-confident. He explained things to David with barely concealed impatience, as if it was adding a year on to his target but couldn’t be helped because this was what John Harris had asked him to do. Q didn’t drink and he didn’t smoke and he thought drugs were as ridiculous as the hippies who took them. He passed through Swinging London every day on his way to and from the office or on site visits, and was untainted by it. He despised them all, the louche pop stars, the self-obsessed artists, the flower people, the junkies, the dropouts, the lefties, not because of how they looked or spoke or what they said but because they were deluding themselves. We all live in a yellow fucking submarine? Not Q. They were so busy agonising and protesting, navel-gazing and peace-signing, tuning in and chilling out that they were missing the main action. Well, it was their loss.

David made a half-baked attempt to excuse them. ‘Maybe they just need to let off some steam,’ he said. ‘Maybe we’ve all been repressed for twenty years. Ever since the war.’

Q gave him a look: do
I
look repressed? David backtracked. ‘Or probably it’s just me. I’m too square. I can’t help it but I am.’

‘Don’t feel bad about it,’ Q said, ‘don’t feel ashamed. You’ll still be here in ten years’ time. Half of those idiots will be dead, and the others will be trying to catch up with you but they won’t because their brains will have turned to fucking mush.’

‘I can’t even swear the way you do,’ David said.

‘Listen,’ Q said, ‘what is it everybody needs? Forget your free love and flower power and your Hare fucking Krishna. People need houses. They need jobs and places where they can do them. They need medicine when they get sick. They need their dinner. A drink to wash it down with. Not me, but I’m not everybody. They need protection, security. They need fuel for their cars, electricity for their washing machines. They need washing machines. They need weapons. You can gamble on everything else and get lucky, but those are the certainties. We do property and that’s fine but I’m investing the money I earn in other things too. Have you got any money? Don’t spend it on beads and pot. Stick it in the certainties. Spread it around.’

‘I don’t have any money,’ David said.

He didn’t, not right then, but there was some coming.

§

It was around this time that Lucy showed the first public signs of … what? Mental imbalance? Emotional starvation? Or an intense desire for self-preservation manifesting as self-destruction? Until she was eleven she’d floated around like a timid, idle fairy, easily provoked to tears, underperforming at the village school and generally behaving as if she didn’t belong there or anywhere else on the planet. Then she went to a boarding school in Fife. After four years there she shed her fairy wings and emerged as a revolutionary socialist. It was 1969, the summer of unlove. In her last school year she wrote to the embassy of the People’s Republic of China requesting two dozen copies of Mao’s
Little Red Book
, which she distributed among her classmates. She also smuggled in a small quantity of hashish and was caught smoking it, for which she was expelled. Returning to Ochiltree House, she gathered a few personal belongings and then was off again, pausing only to explain to Sir Malcolm and Lady Patricia that she hated them, their house and everything they stood for, that she was severing all links with them and going to live in a squat in London.

Freddy, home from school for the weekend, was present on this occasion, and reported it later to David. ‘I asked her if she hated me too, and she gave me a look that would have turned a lesser being to stone and said I was an obnoxious, bloodsucking letch. Or was it leech? So then I asked her if she hated you, and she said no, she just felt sorry for you because you don’t have any guts. I bet that makes you feel good.’

David had already been in London two years. What did Lucy expect him to do, denounce their parents as she did while developing his career in property speculation and beginning to dabble in Conservative Party politics? He might not be courageous but he wasn’t a total hypocrite. She, on the other hand, wasn’t even consistent. Not long after arriving in London she dropped Maoism and became a vegetarian anarchist.

He tried to look after her, arranging meetings with her once a month in a grubby little café off the Portobello Road that served a
lot of beans and a lot of flapjacks, and sometimes bean flapjacks. Against a backdrop of notices fringed with tear-off phone numbers advertising alternative medicine, guitar lessons and rooms to let, he would hand over some cash and buy her something that passed for a nutritional meal. She wouldn’t accept the money unless he pretended it was a donation to whatever insane cause she was currently espousing. The cause changed every few months, but the money was always taken with the same total lack of grace or gratitude. At one meeting she berated him for his shallow moral values, his failure to understand his own guilt by association with the evil that was world capitalism; at the next she informed him that she had discarded useless concepts like guilt and morality – the condition of contemporary society could be understood only through analysing and exposing the façade of advanced capitalism, and then creating new situations in which human desires could be fulfilled rather than degraded. She was a situationist. Some weeks later she denied this: anti-situationists had sabotaged the idea by taking it literally instead of recognising the inherently theoretical nature of any situationist situation. ‘Say that again,’ David said. ‘No,’ she said, ‘if you don’t get it you don’t get it.’ ‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘That’s because you’re so acquiescent,’ she said. ‘No, you’re complicit. You voluntarily accept the so-called reality of the present moment. I refuse to do that.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because reality is
obviously
always an artificial construct.’ ‘How can reality be artificial?’ he asked, kind of wishing he hadn’t. ‘Oh, David,’ she said, exasperated. ‘The people with economic and political power determine the way the rest of the population perceive the world at any given moment, so it’s only real because they say it is.’ ‘Is this real?’ he asked. ‘What?’ she said. ‘Us, here, eating this ghastly food at this present moment?’ Suddenly she looked as though she was going to burst into tears. ‘Sorry,’ he said. He found arguing with her pointless and exhausting, and did it less and less, absorbing her disdain, much as he had absorbed that of his parents, because it was less painful than exposing her vulnerability. If that made him a coward, he liked to think it was kindness that made him one.

He gathered that she moved regularly from one squalid accommodation to another, and that each change of address usually came with a change of boyfriend. From what she told him, every one of
these seemed as arrogant, whining or deluded as she was. Sometimes all at once. He wanted to ask her why she fell with a kind of deliberate carelessness into one bad relationship after another, but didn’t for fear that she would ask what kind of relationships he had. He felt sorry for her but dared not show his sympathy. Like criticism, like comfort, it was something she couldn’t tolerate.

He would come away from their encounters feeling dirty and sad, and grateful that he was returning to the relative sanity of the world he inhabited. When he’d first arrived in London, he had felt himself on the edge of something different and hedonistic. It was almost – but not quite – infectious. You couldn’t ignore it – the girls in miniskirts with psychedelic carrier bags on their arms, the purple Mini Minors and pink VW Campers, the music of Jefferson Airplane and Pink Floyd pouring out of boutiques and first-floor windows. He’d let his hair grow over his collar, bought a pair of jeans for weekends and a loudish tie for work, but his heart wasn’t really in it. Sometimes he wished he were over thirty and one of the people he wasn’t supposed to trust. It will be over soon, he thought. Order will reassert itself.

In June 1970 the Conservatives, led by Edward Heath, won a General Election. Then, in the autumn of that year, the money happened. His maternal grandmother, who’d lived in Northumberland and whom he’d hardly known, died, leaving him £20,000 after death duties, a huge amount for a lesser Eddelstane. He would have to wait till he was twenty-one to access it, but that was only months away. A similar amount went into a trust fund for Freddy, not to be touched till
he
was twenty-one. A third of the legacy should have gone to Lucy but the old woman, egged on by Lady Patricia, had cut her from her will. David felt bad about this, and upped the fraternal donations for a few months; but he didn’t tell his sister what had happened. She didn’t even care that her grandmother was dead. Neither did he – he’d only met her half a dozen times – but that wasn’t the point. Was it? Applying Lucy’s own logic, he stopped feeling guilty. What would Q have said if he’d known about Lucy? ‘To hell with her,’ probably. Anyway, David assured himself, she’d only have rejected the money or sunk it in some new political idiocy. He could almost persuade himself he was keeping it in trust for her. If she ever came to her senses, he could help her out. Maybe.

When the cash was finally his he used some of it to buy a two-bedroom flat in Islington, and took Q’s advice regarding the rest. He spread the money around, into banks, insurance, pharmaceuticals, construction, oil, brewing. He shifted it regularly, kept it working, ahead of inflation and then a bit more. He went back to Q and said, ‘What was that you said once, about weapons?’ Q looked at him quizzically. ‘You told me people need weapons,’ he said, ‘like they need washing machines.’ ‘Well, they do,’ Q said. ‘Do you think war stopped in 1945? Do the sums. There’s been Korea, Malaya, Algeria, Aden. Now there’s Vietnam, Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique. I don’t even know where these fucking countries are but they’ve got a war or they’re about to have one. Use your loaf, invest in it.’ David must have gone a bit pale. Q saw it. ‘Look, it’s a hard world out there. Call it defence, if it makes you feel better. The Ministry of Defence used to be called the Ministry of War. If they can change the wallpaper so can you. People have to defend themselves and sometimes that means attacking the other bastard first. Either way they need weapons and there isn’t a country in the world, believe me, that won’t pay for weapons before it pays for anything else.’

David ditched his guilt again. Each time it was easier. He had a knack for backing good runners which his father entirely lacked. (What on earth could have induced the old fool to put money into Clydeside shipbuilding when it was obvious the glory days were over, and all that was left was crumbs for workers and management to bicker over?) He found that the investments he made in companies with defence interests did better than any of the others. Anyway, it wasn’t as if that was all they did. Ferranti, for example: they made power transformers, electricity meters, computers, semi-conductors (whatever they were), all kinds of components and instruments, only some of which were for military use. You couldn’t separate civil and military technology, that was the bottom line. Same knowledge, different applications. Q was right: the two went hand in hand and better by far that the advances were being made by British companies, or American ones, than by anybody else.

But as David’s confidence grew, so did his frustration. For one thing, he was still working for John Harris, buying and selling properties, and while Harris was now paying him a good salary and
healthy bonuses David knew he could do better for himself
by
himself. For another, the more he learned about the market, the more he saw what was out there with the potential to give a good return, yet so much of it was badly managed, and government red tape choked the rest. Even worse, huge chunks of the economy were nationalised. Not just munitions – heat and light, water, telephones, communications, airports, railways. Even holidays – Thomas Cook was a nationalised company. How on earth had
that
happened? Q felt it too. ‘You’d think this was Russia,’ he said. ‘I know things are better than they were under Labour but I should be making ten times more than I am. In America I’d be loaded by now. It’s not a free market, it’s a constrained one, and that’s even before you hand over a great fucking wodge to the taxman. Something’s got to change, I’m telling you.’

In his own, less brash, way David was as good as Q at playing the game. Maybe better, because for all that he talked about being super-rich, Q never looked like he was going to strike off on his own. According to Q, John Harris always knew best. David didn’t think so. John Harris didn’t think far enough ahead. What was two, even three, years? It was nothing. If you had enough capital to keep on buying cheap, you should aim to hold on to properties for longer and longer periods. Ten, fifteen, twenty years. If you held your nerve, you’d trigger a huge payout eventually. You couldn’t help winning, the money would make more money. He thought about his father and how much he’d lost over the years. It was because he hadn’t kept his eye on the ball. David was extremely focused.

There was a sort of mini-boom going on, but it didn’t feel right. He diversified again, into bricks and mortar. He mortgaged the Islington flat (he’d bought it outright originally), and bought another, cheaper, and rented it out. Property prices were sluggish, but the buildings weren’t going anywhere and people, as Q had pointed out, would always need somewhere to live. No point in selling anyway, the tax would kill him. The income he got as a landlord easily covered the mortgage repayments. He looked around for more property, amazed at his own boldness and at what you could pick up for an absolute song. Thank you, Gran, whoever you were. He kept thinking of Edinburgh too, recalling the semi-derelict state of many of the buildings in the Old Town above ground-floor level,
the shabby potential of certain streets on the fringes of the New Town. Edinburgh was a shadow of what it could be. His next moves were going to be up there.

How grateful he was not to have gone to work as an MP’s assistant! Through a combination of business dealings and family connections he’d been introduced to some high-rankers in the party anyway, and they gave him a lot more respect than they’d have given a penniless researcher. He let it be known that the idea of a political career interested him, and they let it be known that he interested them: he had the family history, which was good, but he was more biddable than Sir Malcolm had ever been, which was better. More modern too. He had the sort of image the party needed: longish but neat hair, good dress sense, clean, quiet – not braying and giving off that tweeds-and-heather smell his father had. David Eddelstane had prospects. Nobody knew what lay beneath the surface. He hardly knew himself. It was pretty much the only thing he still felt guilty about, but provided it stayed hidden, what was there to worry about?