“Only to an extent?”
“It depends. There’s a lot that I find boring. I don’t really enjoy the European stuff. The Holy Roman Empire. The endless wars. I like Scottish history.”
Angus said that he thought Scottish history was a bloody enough affair. “I thought our past was a long story of plots and betrayals and scraps with the English.”
David laughed. “I suppose our dealings with them were a bit fraught.”
“Well, they kept invading us, didn’t they? There was that small matter with Edward . . . ”
“Yes,” said David. “But then we so enjoyed stealing their cattle.”
“And so it goes,” said Angus. “But we do like to see ourselves as the victims of the English, don’t we? We always have. David and Goliath – and we were always David.”
“Perhaps we were. Stronger powers have always tended to lean on their weaker neighbours. They cast an eye on what they’ve got. In one view, that’s the key to all history – a fight over territory: a struggle for dominance.”
Stromness was in sight, and the conversation had ended there. But that evening, in the hotel, they were able to meet in the bar after they had been given their instructions for the next day.
“I’m going to be hopeless with flies,” said Angus.
“Concentrate on the rowing,” advised David. “The client will know what flies to use – and if he doesn’t, recommend the Butcher. You can’t go wrong with a Butcher.”
The hotel bar was busy, and a group of folk singers was expected. They arrived late, but to a rousing cheer from the locals who were drinking in the bar. David bought Angus a pint of Guinness; he blew the froth across the top of his glass. The folk singers struck up as somebody in the bar called out, “Callum, you’re the man! You’re the man!”
“My love’s in Germany,” announced Callum.
“Germany!” somebody shouted.
The musicians started. My love’s in Germany, send him hame, send him hame . . .
Angus listened to the words. This is very sad, he thought.
My love’s in Germany, fighting brave for royalty,
He may ne’er his Jeanie see;
He’s as brave as brave can be,
Send him hame, send him hame . . .
They finished, the last chord followed by silence. Then there was applause, and shouts of appreciation. David looked at Angus. “It makes some want to cry, that song,” he said. “It’s about . . . Well, what do you think it’s about?”
“About being separated from somebody you love?”
“Yes.”
Angus looked down at his glass. Had it ever happened to him? Had he ever been separated from somebody he loved? No.
“Or not being able to speak about how you feel,” said David.
Angus was not sure what to say. He was nineteen; what time was there to be separated when you were still nineteen? Separation, he thought, would come much later.
“Where does that come from?” asked Angus.
“Here,” said David.
“Here?”
“Yes, the music was written by an Orcadian. He was called Thomas Trail. And the words are from a poem written way back. Seventeen-something, I think.”
Angus was impressed. “How do you know about that?”
“I just do. I listen to songs. I learn the words. I know who wrote them.” He paused. “Sometimes I feel that the people who wrote these songs – you know, the people way back . . . I feel that they’re talking to me. Personally. I feel I know them.”
Angus raised an eyebrow. “Although . . . ”
“Although it was a long time ago. I still feel that.”
Angus took a sip of his Guinness. The singers had moved on. Love is Teasing. The words were clearly articulated; they were full of longing.
I wish, I wish, I wish in vain,
I wish I was a young lad again,
But a young lad I will never be,
Till apples grow on an orange tree;
For love is teasing, and love is pleasing;
Love is a pleasure when first it’s new . . .
He looked at David. There was a smile playing about the other young man’s lips. “Do you wish you could stop the clock?”
Angus asked him what he meant.
“I mean, keep the feeling of a particular moment alive. Right now, for example. Wouldn’t you like to keep hold of this moment? Us sitting here in Orkney, with these people singing these particular songs? Scotland . . . the whole works. Keep it as it is?”
Angus did not reply.
“Because I would,” said David. “I like where we are, if you see what I mean. I find that just as I get used to something, the future comes and takes it away. So when you’re happy being nineteen – that’s us – somebody says: But you’re going to be thirty, one of these days, oh yes you will, and then forty.”
Angus leaned forward. Without knowing why, he put his hand on David’s forearm. David looked down, and Angus withdrew his hand. You did not do that, even in a bar in Orkney, with songs being sung about being away in Germany and friendship, and talk about being nineteen, and loss, and the still evening and the light, the light, reminding you where you were.
At the Italian Chapel
Two weeks later the manager of the anglers’ hotel gave them both a day off. There was a break in the hotel’s bookings, with one set of guests leaving the day before another large party arrived.
“You boys have been doing a good job,” he said. “Go fishing.”
They both laughed. Even David had had enough.
They caught the post bus to the other end of the island and got off at St. Mary’s Holm, a small village on the edge of Scapa Flow. “Now?” said Angus.
David pointed. “Over there. You can just see it. That low white building.”
“Everything’s low here,” said Angus. “The houses look as if they want to burrow back into the land.”
“The wind!”
“And no trees!”
“The wind!”
They walked slowly along the road that led to an island causeway. On the other side, barely a few hundred yards away, was the island of Lamb Holm, and on it the small building David had pointed out.
“See those barriers?” said David. “The Churchill Barriers. They built them to keep U-boats out during the War. They managed to sneak in at the beginning and get our ships. The Italians built them – Italian prisoners.”
Angus looked up at the sea. The wind had risen again, and there were waves against one side of the barrier. “Aren’t you glad,” he asked, “that you weren’t around then?”
“Why?”
“Oh, everything,” said Angus. “Having to join the navy, for example. Having to be in a ship on that . . . ” He gestured towards the sea, “Knowing that there was somebody out to sink you, to kill you.”
“And nobody wants to kill us now?”
Angus shook his head. “Not immediately. They’re not actually hunting us down.”
“I suppose you’re right,” said David. “I imagine they didn’t think about it too much. You did your duty. You just did it, like everybody else.” He paused. “How brave would you have been?”
Angus smiled. “Not at all. I expect I would have been scared stiff.”
“I don’t think so,” said David.
“I do.”
They walked the rest of the way in silence – each alone with his thoughts. Angus thought of the sea, and of its colour, a blue that shaded into emerald in the shallows. And then there was the land itself, with its intense Orcadian green and the greys of the stone dykes, stretching across the fields in the gentle curve of the hillsides. And black rock at the edge of the sea; angular black rock. There would be a palette for this place, he thought, that would be different from the palette he used for other parts of Scotland.
Once on Lamb Holm they had only a short distance to walk to reach their destination.
“The Italian Chapel,” said David.
Angus
looked at the building before them. It had been built around a curved tin Nissen hut of the sort used in older military camps. The façade, which was only slightly higher than the low-slung hut, would not have been out of place in an Apennine village: a white church front, pillars to each side of the front door, with a small arched recess for a bell. It was very small.
Angus felt awed. “They built this while they were prisoners? Here . . . in the middle of nowhere?”
David smiled. “Yes. The prison camp was over there.” He pointed to the field behind the chapel. “That was full of these huts. They’re all gone now. This is all that’s left.”
They went inside. The arched roof had been painted with trompe-l’oeil brickwork and stone arches. Behind a screen of elaborate metalwork, an altar had been set against the back wall of the hut; a mural showing the Madonna and Child, along with saints and angels as envisaged by the Italian imagination, formed the backing of the altar.
David went forward to the screen. He crossed himself. Angus caught his breath. It had not occurred to him.
“You’re Catholic?”
David nodded. “Yes. Should I have told you?”
“Not at all.”
David moved forward. “Look at these lovely paintings.”
Angus winced. It was typical Mediterranean religious art; over-stated, sentimental, naïve.
David noticed. “You don’t like the subject? Does it offend your Presbyterian soul?”
Angus tried to make light of it. “Some people like this sort of thing.”
David looked serious. “But these men were so far from home. They were just trying to create something that would remind them of their past – trying to make something beautiful.”
Angus reassured him. “Oh, I can see that. And, look, I understand what this means.” He paused. “Do you want me to leave you here for a few minutes?”
David looked amused. “So that I can pray?”
“If that’s what you want.”
David shook his head. “I haven’t been to Mass for over a year. I stopped when I was eighteen – when I left school.”
“I see. So you no longer believe?”
“Not in all this,” said David. He pointed to the saints. “Yet for me it’s still the thing I don’t believe in, if you see what I mean. It’s where I’m from, I suppose.” He stared at the mural behind the altar. “I think this place is all about forgiveness.”
Angus frowned. “Why do you say that?”
David did not answer. “We should be getting back,” he said. “We’re going to have to hitch back to Kirkwall.” And then he said something that Angus did not at first understand, but came to do so years later. “The Church doesn’t really want me, you know.”
They left, and fifteen minutes later were in the back of a chicken farmer’s van, heading for Kirkwall. When they arrived back at the anglers’ hotel, they walked down the staff corridor to the rooms they occupied at the back of the building. David stopped. “Thanks for today, dear friend.”
Dear friend. “That’s all right. I enjoyed myself too.”
“It’s going to rain tomorrow.”
Angus made a gesture of acceptance. “It always does.”
The next day, heavy squalls moved across the loch, whipping the water into white-topped wavelets. A recently arrived angler, impatient to begin fishing, persuaded David to take him out in one of the boats; no trout would take a fly in that wind, but he was determined. In the middle of the loch, a gust of wind tipped the boat and David and his charge fell in. They might have drowned, but David was a strong swimmer and dragged the fisherman to the shore.
He was blamed, and dismissed by the manager. “I cannot have you risking the lives of our guests,” he was told.
Angus said goodbye to him in the car park behind the hotel. David was on the point of tears, ashamed and embarrassed. Angus put his arms around him. “Dear friend,” he said.
And now, with this mention of Orkney, so many years later, he thought of all this: of the trip to the Italian Chapel; of forgiveness; of friendship; of the future that takes the present away from us.
Irene Prepares Stuart
“Now, just keep calm, Stuart. Keep calm.”
Irene Pollock was addressing her husband, Stuart, in much the same voice she used when telling Bertie what to do. Boys and men were much the same general proposition, she thought: they needed firmness, they needed to be told what to do, and how to do it; they needed to be watched.
“Of course I’ll keep calm,” said Stuart. “I always do.”
“No, you don’t, Stuart; you just don’t. You have a tendency to speak too quickly when under stress. You’re not quite as bad as Glaswegians in that respect, but you do speed up and that’s not the way to get your message across.”
Stuart said nothing. He had Glaswegian grandparents and he did not like the way Irene spoke about Glasgow. One could get oneself head-butted for less, if one spoke that way in Glasgow itself. Not that Glasgow really went in for head-butting, of course: the “Glasgow kiss” was a canard put about by people who did not really understand the city and its warm and affectionate ways. But one could never be too cautious.
“So,” continued Irene, “when you go into the interview take a deep breath and try to smile a bit – but not too much. Remember: you’re there on sufferance, Stuart. You’re a man – you’re there on sufferance. Then, once the conversation gets going, make sure you get your points across. I’ve told you what they should be. Transparency. Sensitivity to the needs of stakeholders. Compliance with broader social policy goals.” She paused. “And most importantly, Stuart, gender-neutral toilets. Make sure you mention those.”
“Yes, I’ve got all that,” said Stuart somewhat wearily. “And what about statistics? This is, after all, a senior statistician’s post.”
“That’s not the issue,” said Irene dismissively.
“Not the issue? But the job is about statistics. Surely my track record . . . ”
Irene made an impatient sign. “No, Stuart, you’re just not getting it. You’re still thinking in a linear, male way. This job is about how the civil service is responding to needs. In a very real sense it is about toilets. It is not about statistics; it is never just about statistics or whatever. Never. There’s a socio-political context, Stuart.”
“I see. So should I say nothing about my experience? Should I say nothing about those papers I published?”
Irene sighed. “We’ll take that point by point, Stuart. Firstly, your experience: experience tells us one thing – you have used your inherent advantages to claim contested territory. You have occupied a post that has given you experience that others have not been able to have.”
“But if somebody else had occupied it, then I’d have been denied the experience myself.”
Irene was not impressed. “Yes, but remember you got where you got through inherent advantage. You didn’t deserve it.”
Stuart drew in his breath. “Really? Didn’t deserve to be where I was? How about all my hard work, making up figures for the Scottish Government? How about the first class honours degree? How about the couple of years of postgraduate work? How about those papers I wrote?”
Irene had an answer to this. “Those were all things that came to you in the context of your privileged position.” She paused; she was clearly getting irritated. “Really, Stuart, I’m surprised that you can’t seem to grasp that things have changed. You seem to believe in some sort of . . . some sort of . . . ” She waved a hand airily. “ . . . in some sort of meritocracy.”
“Yes, I do,” said Stuart.
“Well, you’re completely out of date. Belief in meritocracy is naïve.”
“So the best qualified person shouldn’t get the job?” He paused. “Or get to go to the toilet?”
Irene glared at him. “Not funny, Stuart. Not in the least funny.” She sighed. “How many times do I have to explain it? Really, Stuart, it’s like talking to somebody of Bertie’s age. Qualification is a shifting co
ncept. The least well-qualified person in terms of diplomas and degrees and whatever might be the best-qualified in terms of social goals – in terms of how an appointment may progress the objective of a fairer society.”
Stuart gritted his teeth. He hated arguing with Irene . . . but, but . . . It was a shocking moment of realisation. Irene was an unrepentant social engineer. She was post-factual. She was a . . . He searched for the metaphor, and then he found it. She was an archetypical named person! He closed his eyes. Well, it would soon be over. She would be off to Aberdeen where she could talk to her heart’s content to Dr. Fairbairn, who was her lover, after all, about Kleinian theory and such matters.
He heard her saying something else. He had stopped listening, but her words gradually began to impinge on his consciousness.
“ . . . so that’s your only hope, you know. Embrace change. Try to persuade them that you subscribe to their objectives even if – as I fear is the case – you don’t understand them or support them. Accept the new agenda. Show them that you are ashamed of what you are and that you would much rather be something else.”
He did not reply – what was there to say? And anyway, it was time for him to leave the house if he were not to be late for the Board. So he said goodbye, cursorily, and made his way out into Scotland Street. In an hour’s time he would be waiting outside the room where the Board was due to sit, and yet it was not too late to pull out. He could still withdraw his candidacy, and that would mean that he would be saved the indignity of failure. Yet somehow he could not bring himself to do that. There was an awful fascination about what he was about to do; it was like going to the dentist for root canal treatment without the benefit of anaesthetic; it was like standing in the dock in court and awaiting sentence; it was like an interview with the bank manager when you had knowingly exceeded your overdraft. It was like all of that, and were there a bell, it would be tolling for him, loudly, incessantly, and ominously. And then he thought: Scotland is becoming a tiny bit like North Korea – just a tiny bit, of course, no more than a smidgen, but enough to notice. Or was he imagining it? Was it just because he was married to Irene that he felt that way?