And the Land Lay Still Read Online Free Page A

yes-man of the Pentagon –’
    ‘Very good.’
    ‘– and although MacDiarmid didn’t have an earthly chance of winning, neither did the Labour candidate, so my dad, who’d met MacDiarmid in Edinburgh and taken pictures of him, not only decided to vote for him but went around telling everybody that’s what he was going to do. My mother was horrified.’
    ‘I imagine it didn’t do much for her social standing,’ Murdo says.
    ‘Not a thing. MacDiarmid came bottom of the poll with a hundred and twenty-seven votes,’ Mike says, ‘and apparently demanded a recount because he said there couldn’t possibly be that many good socialists in Kinross and West Perthshire. My dad spent the weekend telling this story to anyone we met, the man in the paper shop, the neighbours, anyone. “I was one of them!” he said. Shouted, in fact. It was quite embarrassing, even for me. I think if my mother could have cited political incompatibility as grounds for divorce, she’d have done so. But she didn’t have to, because by then he was having an affair with a woman in the BBC in Glasgow and was about to move out. I knew something was afoot, because he spent part of that weekend packing things into boxes in the garage. And when he took me back to school on the Monday the car was laden with his stuff, whereas I just had my toothbrush. He must have gone

straight back to Glasgow. I don’t think he ever slept another night in our house.’
    ‘It must have been upsetting for you,’ Murdo says. ‘Divorce wasn’t exactly common in those days. Even in the fleshpots of Doune, I would guess. It was practically unheard of here.’
    ‘No, I don’t remember being that upset. I just got on with it. But that was the first Christmas I had without my father.’
    ‘Christmas was practically unheard of here too,’ Murdo says.
    §
    On the journey back to Aberfeldy, Angus asked Michael if he was happy at Bellcroft House. Mike still believes that if he had said that he was miserable, that he was being bullied, that he hated it with all his heart, Angus would have done something about it. But he didn’t tell him any of those things, because they weren’t true. He’d adjusted without any great difficulty to his new situation. A place away from the parental fighting had something to recommend it. In just a few weeks he’d made it his own. He’d lost touch with the children he’d grown up with and transferred his affections, such as they were, to a couple of the Bellcroft masters, the brusque but motherly matron, and a boy in his year called Freddy Eddelstane.
    §
    Mike’s father was left-leaning politically, at least partly because of his experience during the war. He’d joined up at eighteen and at twenty was doing his bit in the invasion of Europe. The comics Michael read as a boy, which poured in vast quantities from the presses of D. C. Thomson in Dundee, were stuffed with Second World War adventures, and he liked to imagine his dad in one of them, revolver in one hand and a camera round his neck, leading his troops on to a Normandy beach under enemy fire. The reality was less heroic. Angus was a second lieutenant who hardly ever got near the front line, and whose war consisted mainly of organising convoys and fuel supplies. The twenty or thirty photos that survive from his war years are small, creased snaps of groups of men in front of lorries, and some hazy images of ruined Berlin. No sign of the unorthodox ‘Angus angle’ that would later make his name. Once Michael asked him if he’d killed anybody. No, Angus said, there
were plenty of other people doing that. Michael must have looked disappointed. Angus said, ‘I saw people who’d
been
killed.’ ‘Germans?’ ‘Yes. And French and British and Americans. And you know what, they all looked pretty much the same when they were dead.’ Then he went on to speak of the camaraderie of the army, the way the younger, non-regular officers like himself would mix with their men,