He cleared his throat.
‘I’d think twice about that, son. It’s up to yourself, of course. You’ve been ill, remember. I mean if it’s the money . . .’
‘Not that kind of work. Nothing heavy. Not real work, just studying. Playing on my backside.’
Still without looking at me, he wondered, ‘Could you not do that at home?’
‘I wouldn’t have the books. They’re too dear to buy. I can work in the library – at the Mitchell or the University. It’s a good time to get the books, being quiet in the summer.’
He sighed out a breath.
‘Aye, well, the studying comes first. I can see you would need tae get back.’
Back. To my good friends with the big cars.
EIGHTEEN
The car rolled to a stop and he said, ‘I leave the main road across there, but you’ll have no bother getting another lift.’ I climbed out and, to prove his truthfulness, he signalled carefully right, turned across the three lanes and slipped out of sight under an arch of branches.
About it being easy to get another lift, he had made a mistake. Cars came fast and showed no inclination to stop. A cluster of three went by like that and then a big Ford trundled along sedately. The driver, an elderly man in glasses, leaned forward to hold my gaze until at the last moment he gave me two fingers and accelerated away.
After that, the entry under the arch of branches on the other side of the road seemed cool and secret. I looked at it while cars snarled past, and then crossed over. Beyond the arch there was a narrow lane sloping sharply down. Under the big intermingled screen of beeches, it would have been easy to miss. In the still air, under the dappled light, it was like going down a tunnel, except that fields showed between the trees on either side, unpleating over little hills. Half way down there was a patch of waste ground and a young couple beside a car making apologetic noises to a tall stooped man with the look of a farmer. As I walked down, they disappeared into the car and began to edge it back and forward trying to turn. I stood aside to give them room and at last they beat a retreat up towards the highway.
‘They didnae understand a word.’ The farmer shook his head at me.
‘They were German,’ I said. ‘At least that’s what the plate on the back said.’
‘Ah couldnae make them understand there’s a bit ground on the far side o the brae would’ve done them fine. They were settan up a tent here – but there’s nae water and God’s plenty o midges.’
Tumbled stones of a ruined but and ben cottage were almost buried among chickweed and dandelions.
‘I’ll sleep here,’ I said. ‘If it’s okay with you.’
‘Ye’ll be eaten alive.’
‘I’m immune to midges.’
The farmer laughed and as he walked away a black dog that had been crouched in the grass sprang up and followed him, looking back at me over its shoulder. When he had gone, I walked up the brae until I found a good site. I unrolled the sleeping bag and lay listening to the burn and eating the last of my chocolate; over and over in the trees behind me, a chaffinch did his run-up-and-bowl song; it sounded sweeter than the ones at home, but like people chaffinches have different dialects; I thought about that and then I thought about sleeping and then I told myself it didn’t matter as long as I rested. A fox barked. Waves kept running up the shore and I came properly awake and it was traffic on the main road and I was out of that night into another day.
‘Ye changed your mind then.’
It was the tall stooped farmer. His face was brown with deeply scored lines in the cheeks.
‘That’s right. I decided against the midges.’
He walked at my side back across the long field.
‘This is the life,’ I said, ‘We could be a million miles from anywhere. We could be on an island out in the middle of the Atlantic.’
‘An island . . .’ He spat into the grass. ‘Ah canna bear the sea. Ah’ve bided here all my days. Except the one time. And ah got all the travellan ah’d ever want oot o that. In a khaki uniform tae the other side o the world. The Japs took us the same day the auld “Prince o Wales” was sunk. This place does me fine – ah’ll no leave it a second time.’
At the top of the slope, we were ambushed by the main road. Container lorries in convoy shook the air and left an ache of silence. ‘Ah don’t regret going. It was a thing that had tae be done. Mind ye,’ he finished with a serious nod, ‘thae three years ruined me.’ I had no answer to that, and he walked back through the washed early morning light with the black dog at heel.
Later in the afternoon, I was going through a village when I heard my name called. ‘This is me at home,’ Donald Baxter said, picking seeds from the pouch of his lower lip. I had thought he lived in an armchair at the Men’s Union, the oldest student in captivity. Despite the plaid shirt open at the neck, his concession to countryside and summer, I suspected the woollen underwear would still be there and all the way down to his ankles. Clutching a bunch of black grapes, he had appeared from a dark little cave of a village store and stood blinking in the sunlight. ‘Back to the big city? Why not?’ he pondered. ‘Any excuse for a party.’ He came back in a clapped out Marina, one wing punched in and gaping from a past collision. As he braked to a violent stop, flakes of blue-daubed rust detached themselves from the injured part. ‘Auntie’s car,’ he said, and somehow that explained what ‘home’ meant and in getting away from there I knew he was doing himself a favour. It was nice not to have to feel grateful. A day-old copy of The Herald was lying on the front passenger seat; as I shifted it to make room for myself, I saw a banner headline telling of murder and a picture of the old politician who had died in the Riggs Lodge Hotel. Glancing, Donald Baxter said, ‘Full of years and dishonour. A treacherous old bastard from a long line of them going back to Flodden. In any decent country of self-respecting Christians, he would have been assassinated long ago.’ Driving one-handed, he groped on the shelf and produced as in a way of celebration a bottle of whisky. We passed the bottle back and forth.
Passed it too often. Drunk on an empty stomach, I ended up in Baxter’s room intent upon getting drunker. At some moment during what followed, he made the old silly jibe of calling me the Homicidal Pacifist and, when I objected as before, reminding him that he had been a conscientious objector during the war, he cried, ‘Not a bloody pacifist! Not then or now. Like Young, I held to the articles of the Treaty of Union. I would join no army but the army of an independent Scotland.’ That seemed so silly to me, I began to laugh, but then when I thought of what I had read about the Nazi horrors and remembered that poor devil of a farmer I had met in the morning, I grew angry and told him that he might not be a bloody pacifist but he was certainly either a bloody coward or a lunatic.
‘I understand why people get irritated when Scots go on about independence,’ Baxter said in a tone of disinterested kindliness. ‘I feel the same about Shetlanders – or about the Orkneys. Little piss-pot islands. Whining, “We’re Orcadians. We’re not Scotch.” Bugger them, I think. Let’s send a gunboat. A wee gunboat. A wee wee particularly wee gunboat,’ and collapsed laughing at his own joke.
Later we were bottle friends and comrades and I heard myself telling him about Brond; about Kilpatrick; about Muldoon being tortured; but not about how Kennedy died. In the still centre of my drunken brain, an ape congratulated itself upon being too cunning to tell him how Kennedy died.
‘That’s not real,’ he said, his great dish face pouring sweat. ‘That stuff you’re telling me. Don’t try to kid a kidder. That stuff doesn’t happen in never-never land. I don’t believe you. Nobody here would believe you. We know real things happen on television and always somewhere else. Not here. If you want to pretend something that matters is happening here, you’ll have to tell it in dreams and parables. Dreams and—’