And the Land Lay Still Read Online Free

three Pendreichs came away smiling, all for their different reasons. And in September, kitted out with a new school uniform, Michael entered a new phase of his life.
    §
    And now Dounreay is being decommissioned at a cost of God knows how many millions, possibly billions, of pounds, and they still haven’t worked out what to do with the waste: the stuff, that is, they can account for, the stuff they haven’t chucked down shafts or allowed to piss out into the Pentland Firth and wash up on the beaches in tiny ticking wee cancer-bombs. No doubt there’s more they’ve not told anyone about, because one thing Mike believes about governments and government agencies is that they won’t tell you anything bad if they can possibly avoid doing so. Even an outright denial – for example, that depleted uranium shells have ever been used on the Cape Wrath firing range – only inclines him to believe the opposite. Perhaps, however, that says more about him than about the Ministry of Defence.
    From the bedroom window he looks out on the Atlantic every morning, sixty miles from Dounreay, and there is something ironic about the fact that he’s chosen to be here for the tranquillity, to inherit the peace and quiet that Angus found when he bought the place, when for half a century the whole area’s been used as a kind of open laboratory and he suspects he’s looking out not on wild, unspoiled beauty but on a silent, pernicious sickness. And yet it doesn’t make him afraid or want to leave, it just makes him want to record it, endlessly: the ocean, the land, the light, the weather. There’s no doubt in his mind: there, in his father’s house, sorting out Angus’s work and engaging in his own, is where he wants to be.
    §
    They’ve eaten the trout, and the dishes are piled in the sink and Mike will do them later, after Murdo has gone. They’re in the sun lounge with an electric fire on, whiskies in their hands, looking out at the dark sea loch and the shoulders of the hills, and clouds building around the moon. They are reminiscing – or, rather, Mike is – about 1964: the year he went away to school, the Forth Road Bridge opened, and he saw
Mary Poppins
with his mother and
Goldfinger
with his father.
    ‘I managed to miss
Mary Poppins
,’ Murdo says, ‘I am pleased to report.’
    ‘
Goldfinger
was great,’ Mike says. ‘My dad took me to see it on my first half-term break. He fetched me from school but instead of going straight home we went to the pictures in Perth. I think he just wanted to stay out of the house because he and my mother were fighting about everything by that stage. Politics included. There’d been a General Election the day before and when we finally got home that was what they fought about. Mum in the blue corner, Dad in the red. Labour had won the election but only by four seats. My mother took it personally because the outgoing Tory Prime Minister was our own MP, Sir Alec Douglas-Home.’
    ‘You are a font of knowledge,’ Murdo says. ‘Or should that be a mine of information? I couldn’t have told you about the four seats, but I’m guessing the Labour leader was Harold Wilson?’
    ‘It was.’
    ‘Now there was a slippery customer.’
    ‘Aye, but my dad kept saying how wonderful he was, just to infuriate my mum. He wasn’t a very profound socialist – my dad, I mean – he’d just enrolled me at a prep school, after all – but he believed in the Welfare State and the general idea of redistributing other people’s wealth. And he despised Sir Alec Douglas-Home, whom my mother admired. But something else happened at that election: right there, in our very own constituency, Hugh MacDiarmid stood for the Communist Party.’
    ‘The wild-haired poet,’ Murdo says.
    ‘Yes. It was sheer provocation. He made inflammatory speeches against capitalism and rude remarks about the person of the Prime Minister, and although –’
    ‘Rude remarks?’
    ‘He said he was a zombie.’
    ‘Good.’
    ‘And a