The Private Side of Friendship, page 11
Angela was seated ahead of Ian and Georgia, who occupied seats next to one another. She turned round and gave Georgia a searching look. “Meaning?” she asked.
Georgia said, “Meaning that you’re going to get away. You already have.”
“Get away from?”
There was a familiar note of resentment in Angela’s voice, and this was picked up by Ian.
“She means that you’re not going to be living in Armadale all your life,” he offered. “Not that everybody wants to get away, I imagine. I’m sure there are people who prefer living in a small town to living in a city. It makes sense.”
Angela said, “I could end up going back. It’s easier to be in Edinburgh while I’m at uni, but, who knows, I might go back.”
Georgia looked doubtful. She glanced at Ian, as if to ascertain whether he believed this. He remained impassive. Now she said, “We all want to get away, don’t we? I definitely do. I don’t want to go back to Surrey. It’s all too . . .” She broke off, and made a face.
“Comfortable?” asked Ian.
“Yes.”
This time it was Angela who looked doubtful. But she said nothing.
“Let’s face it,” said Ian. “None of us wants to be our parents. We want to be who we are, which is not the same people as them.”
Georgia gave him a playful look. “So, what’s wrong with where you come from, Ian?”
He looked out of the window. Angela gave Georgia a sharp look from the seat in front. Did she not know that Ian had lost his mother? How could she be so insensitive?
Ian eventually replied. “There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s a farm. It’s a long way from anywhere, though.”
“So you don’t want to be a farmer?” asked Georgia. “I don’t blame you. Getting up at five in the morning to milk cows.”
“That’s dairy farming,” said Ian. “We don’t have cows.”
“Or cleaning out the barn, then.”
Ian corrected her. Georgia was English; she didn’t know the words. “Actually, we call it a byre in Scotland.”
Angela smiled. “It’s not Georgia’s fault she’s English.”
This brought a reaction from Ian. It was a common thing in Scotland to speak disparagingly of the English – a habit that went back centuries. People thought it was all right, but he did not.
“I like English people,” he said. “I always have.”
Angela was defensive. “I was only joking. I’ve got nothing against the English.”
Ian was not prepared to let it go so readily. “It really gets to me,” he said, “when you hear people in Scotland saying they’ll support any team playing against England in anything. The English are our neighbours. They’re not exactly strangers. Why hope that the Spanish or the French beat them in some football match or other? Surely you should support your neighbour. Isn’t that the normal thing to do?”
Angela defended herself. “The English can’t complain. They lorded it over everybody for ages. They thought themselves superior to the Scots and the Irish, and everybody really. So should they be surprised if people occasionally object to this? I don’t think so.” She paused, and then returned even more forcefully to the theme. “Look at what happened in Ireland. The English treated them as a colony –”
Ian interrupted her. “Excuse me, what about the Ulster Plantation? Where did those people come from when they colonised Ulster? I’ll tell you – Ayrshire. They were Scots. And they behaved every bit as badly as the English did down in Kerry and Cork and wherever.”
“Well, I wasn’t going to deny –”
Again, Ian cut her short. “You’re probably one of those people, Angela, who claims the British Empire was an English business and nothing to do with the Scots. You know the argument? It was the English who were responsible for Empire – not us. We Scots were an oppressed minority.” He paused. “Which is complete rubbish. We Scots were right in there with the imperial project. Big time. We were in the army – generals and so on, as well as ordinary private soldiers. We were engineers and officials and everybody, really, who kept the Empire going. We have as much blood on our hands as anybody else.”
Angela shook her head. “It wasn’t working-class Scots who did all that. It was the people who identified with the English. It was a class thing.”
Georgia sighed. “Do we have to?” she asked. “Do we have to go over the past all the time. You did that, no you did it. That sort of thing. Isn’t it a bit tired now? An endless blame game?”
Angela did not agree. “You may want to forget the past,” she said. “But have you asked yourself why? Is it because you don’t like what you see when you look too closely?”
There was a brief silence. Ian rubbed his hands together. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe we should talk about something else. Tell us about Armadale, Angela. What do people do there?”
“They work in coal mines,” Angela replied. “Or they try to. Mrs Thatcher has other ideas.”
Georgia stared at her. Angela had answered Ian’s question, but she felt that the response was directed at her. “I don’t like her,” she said. “You may not believe it, but I really don’t.”
“Yes,” said Ian. “Don’t make assumptions about people, Angela.”
Angela stole a reproachful glance at him. Whose side was he on? Did he like her? She wanted him to, but not quite as much as she wanted Neil to like her. It upset her that Ian seemed keen to defend Georgia, and indeed had invited Georgia in the first place. She was sensitive to her position in the flat: she was the only one who came from what she would describe as an ordinary background. The rest of them came from privilege of one sort or another, although they were careful not to show it. You could never get over where you came from, no matter how hard you might try to create a new identity for yourself. If you had been brought up in some leafy Surrey suburb, then your attitudes would always be shaped by those beginnings. If you came from a mining town in West Lothian, then that was what you were in your essence. You carried that deep within you whatever you might do to distance yourself from those early influences. And no matter how hard you tried to free yourself of prejudice, you would always think the way those with whom you were brought up thought. Were we that trapped by the constraints of home and upbringing? Angela thought we were.
Georgia felt uncomfortable about the atmosphere that seemed to be developing. She felt awkward enough about muscling in on Angela’s outing; how much worse it would become if she were to fall out with her while they were, in a sense, her guests.
She tried to sound as placatory as possible. “All I want to do is see at first-hand what’s happening. I want to hear what the miners think. I want to find out what people think. Most issues have two sides, after all.”
Angela listened to Georgia’s words, but said nothing. She wanted to say something about middle-class deprivation tourism; she wanted to say that people in mining towns wanted none of that. Those outside the labour movement were welcome to give their support, but people did not want well-meaning spectators drifting in and out of the dispute. She said nothing, though, because she had invited them to do just that – to come and see. She remained silent for the rest of the short journey to Armadale while Georgia and Ian conducted a sporadic and muted conversation behind her, but she made out little of what was said.
Angela had said that her parents’ house was only a couple of blocks away, and they could go there before they went on to the union relief centre where she knew some of the volunteers. “Mick Johnston is speaking at three,” she said. “We’ll have plenty of time to get to the hall.”
“Have you heard him before?” asked Georgia.
Angela nodded. “Once or twice.”
“And?”
“He’s a powerful speaker,” said Angela. “He takes no prisoners.”
“I like him,” Ian said. “I like people who say what they think. I like people who are not afraid to speak what’s on their mind.”
“Like Margaret Thatcher?” said Angela, and laughed.
“She does that,” said Georgia. “But not everyone likes what’s going on in her mind, do they?”
“No,” said Ian. “They don’t. Particularly in Scotland. She’s so . . .” He did not finish.
“English?” asked Georgia.
Ian shrugged. “Well, yes. She represents a certain sort of Englishness that doesn’t go down well here.”
“You can say that again,” said Angela. “Somebody said to me the other day, ‘What’s the opposite of Margaret Thatcher?’ And you know what the answer was? ‘Scotland’ – that’s all.”
Ian looked bemused. “No offence, Georgia. It’s just that Scotland is different. We believe in –”
“Community,” interjected Angela.
Ian hesitated. “Yes, but—”
“But we do,” said Angela. “Liberal individualism is going to end up separating us from people around us. It will be everyone for themselves.”
Ian thought about this. “Yes, but what I was going to say was that we also believe in people being independent and working hard to get somewhere in life. That’s a Scottish tradition too, remember.” He paused. “It’s a question of balance, isn’t it? You want people to look after themselves and not expect others to do everything for them. But at the same time, we also want those who need help to receive it. That’s why we have free medical care.”
“I can’t believe what happens in America,” said Angela. “If you get ill – I mean, seriously ill, with cancer or something – it can bankrupt you. Medical bills can eat up every cent you have. And if you can’t afford to pay for treatment, you don’t get it.”
Georgia said that she found that abhorrent. “Nobody should die from lack of money,” she said.
Ian raised a fist in the air. “That’s a great thing to say. Nobody should die from lack of money. But I’m afraid, that’s exactly what a whole lot of people – all over the world – die from: lack of money. Because lack of money means lack of food and lack of housing and a lack of money to buy medicines to treat diseases like malaria – just for instance. There are far too many ways of dying from lack of money.”
The bus on which they were travelling turned off the main road.
“We’ll be there in five minutes,” said Angela.
Georgia looked out of the window. They were passing a corner store, a small newsagent and grocery store at the side of the road. A woman was wheeling a pram past the store’s front door. She was smoking, and a small greyish white cloud rose briefly above her, and was then dispelled. Everything had become smaller, it seemed to Georgia: the houses, the road, the trees, the skies.
Ian also gazed out of the window. He was thinking of Neil. Neil had said to him that if he came back in time that evening, he would make spaghetti Bolognese, and they could eat it together. They could go to the pub afterwards, if Ian wanted to. He had a vague arrangement to meet a couple of people from the athletics club in the Golf Tavern. It was nothing definite, but Ian was welcome to come if he wanted to.
Ian said, “Of course I do. That would be great.”
“I don’t know these guys well, although one of them is from Orkney. And one of them knows a nurse who’s from Stromness and who’s training in Edinburgh. She might be there.”
“I’ll be back in time,” said Ian. “I’d like to go to the pub.”
“Good. I’m sick of work. I’ve had this project to hand in, and I just want to get out.”
“I know how you feel,” said Ian. And he thought: I want to be with you. It doesn’t matter where. Anywhere will do.
The bus took a turning. In the distance, the wheel of a mineshaft was silhouetted, unmoving against the sky. It was such a backdrop that had been used for any number of news reports, accompanied by a soundtrack of angry voices, of shouted slogans.
“We’re here,” said Angela, rising to stand. The bus was still in motion, and she steadied herself by grasping the top of a neighbouring seat. “Time to go.”
There was nothing to surprise them in Angela’s home. Her mother served them tea and sandwiches in a neat parlour at the front of the house. There was a television set, a small bookcase, and a sofa. There was little room for anything else, beyond three easy chairs covered in a green tweedy material. There were two framed photographs on the wall, and a reproduction of a Trossachs scene – a steamer crossing the mirrored surface of Loch Katrine. There was a Wemyss Ware china cat, painted in the way typical of the pottery, with unlikely roses. There was a figure of Tam O’Shanter on his mare, poised in hectic flight. The mare’s tail streamed out behind her, although a small piece had broken off the tip. The steamer, the loch, the Burns character, were Scotland. There was tea and a plate of shortbread fingers. They were Scotland too.
Ian looked around him. Was this what lay ahead – this utter ordinariness? He could understand why Angela had been keen to move into Edinburgh. Had he lived here, in this cramped house with its low ceilings and its trinkets, he would want to go – of course he would. And yet this is what most people had to put up with. Most people lived on this scale – some in far more restricted spaces. At least this was clean and cared-for and warm enough.
Georgia watched Angela. She had said nothing about her mother, who had appeared in a faded housecoat. She wondered why people should wear such garments – they were so very unflattering. Were they meant to protect you from the mess of your daily round of cleaning? She smiled at Angela’s mother, who returned the smile, even if rather hesitantly. There was an air of defeat about her.
“You must forgive me,” she said. “We don’t get many visitors. I hope you don’t mind shortbread – I would have baked something but my husband, you see, needs to have somebody helping him with one thing or another, and that means that other things remain undone.”
“I love shortbread,” said Ian.
Angela said, “Shortbread . . .”
“You used to make wonderful shortbread when you were young,” Angela’s mother said. “You’d bake a whole tray and then I’d take it to the Heart Foundation shop. It was meant to be sold for the cause, but somebody told me that they saw them eating the shortbread themselves – the volunteers who ran the shop, that is.”
“They shouldn’t have done that,” Angela said. “I didn’t bake the shortbread for them.”
There was a silence.
“An angel passing overhead,” said her mother. “That’s what they say when there’s a sudden silence.”
“Angels don’t exist, Ma,” said Angela.
Her mother turned to face her. “You may say that, sweetie, but what about your name?”
Ian burst out laughing. “Yes, Angela. Why call yourself Angela if you don’t believe in angels. A bit inconsistent, don’t you think?”
Angela reddened. “Who chooses their own names?” she asked.
“Or the place they’re born,” Georgia added.
Angela’s mother looked at her, uncertain as to whether this was comment on their home.
“It doesn’t matter where you’re born,” she said. “That’s not the point.”
Angela shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “Georgia didn’t mean anything.”
Georgia blushed. “I just meant that we all start with what we’ve got. That’s all.”
The conversation drifted. Angela’s mother talked about what the doctor had said to her about her husband’s diet; about how a car had been driven onto the bowling green at the miners’ social club – “nothing to do with the strike, just boys joyriding” – and about how a neighbour’s cat had had eight kittens in a single litter, and one had gone missing somewhere in the house and could not be found. Angela looked embarrassed, but Ian saw that she smiled from time to time, indulgently; she loves her mother, he thought, in spite of the limitations to her world, the shortbread, the china knick-knacks; of course she loves her mother because that is the most natural thing in the world, our first love. The problem was that some people never get beyond that, and the memory of maternal love crowds out the possibility of new loves. He had lost his mother when he was so young and he sometimes wondered now what it would be like to have an adult relationship with your mother – to be an independent person in a relationship that starts off so unequal and dependent. Perhaps you had to free yourself of that earlier love and let it become a form of disinterested love, like agape, that love of humanity that had so inspired him when the school chaplain had first told them about it. He had been sixteen when he first heard about agape and had thought it was something to which he should aspire. He wanted to love someone – anyone would do, he thought. My dearest friend; my dearest friend . . . But he did not dare, because if he loved someone he was sure that the person he loved would not love him back. And there was a reason for that – it was too deep-seated. He liked those who would not return his feelings in the same way. It was like living in France and wanting to live in Italy. It was that simple. So you had to bottle up your feelings and pretend they did not exist – so that nobody would object. But if you loved people equally, whoever they were, then everyone would agree that you were doing the right thing. And not only that – surely you would be surrounded by a feeling of warmth and resolution. If you hated nobody, then what could touch you? Other people might be malevolent and hateful, but not to you; they could not harm you. “Christian love is like that,” the chaplain had said. “It’s like a suit of armour. Think of it that way.” Was it? he wondered. Did it help the Christians in the Coliseum when the lions were let loose? He had asked that when the chaplain had finished his talk, and had been drawn aside. “There are different sorts of armour, Ian,” the chaplain had said. “Some protect the body; some protect the soul.” He had looked away, because he always had difficulty in meeting the chaplain’s gaze. He thought that was because the chaplain could tell that he did not believe what he wanted him to believe. He did not believe that anybody could rise from the dead, nor turn water into wine, nor do any of those things. He did not imagine that there was a divine being somewhere who was in the slightest bit concerned about what he was thinking, what he was dreaming of. God didn’t care if he liked other boys – why should he? Yet others did care; there was a certain symmetry, he thought: someone who did not exist did not mind, and those who did exist, most definitely did mind.
