Chapter 11: Picture Show

Before my family had landed at Heathrow, I had signed a lease for several square miles of heather and bog and was walking along a street in Glasgow city centre wondering where Eddie had got to. I had telephoned him when the deal was signed and he had told me the street I was to walk along, although he was vague about where exactly he would meet me. It was the sound of powerful airbrakes, loud in the man-made canyon, which alerted me to his presence, perched high in the cab of a tractor unit hauling a double-decked trailer.

An hour earlier I had entered the office of Mr Mason, where my solicitor was already waiting for me. Sean Flack was in my class at school and that was why I had chosen him to represent me in Scotland. I kept meeting people who recommended friends of theirs to me so I had decided that I might as well give some patronage to my own friends.

Not that Sean and I had been especially friendly at school. He was one of the sailors, spending most of his energy in righting a capsized dinghy – at least that is how it looked to me as a rather bored observer. I knew that he had become a solicitor, but I checked on his reputation before I approached him. Hugh McLean gave him a clean record and Richard Devine, my London solicitor, had also heard of him. I suppose every profession has an underground communications system, but solicitors seem to be very thorough in that respect. I guess the opportunities for wrong doing are so great that they are especially sensitive to a hint of scandal.

Sean does most of his business with naval officers posted to the Clyde Submarine Base. Since this work involves buying and selling property across the national border, it is likely that he will have greater contact than many others with English lawyers. I telephoned him, reminded him of our school days and offered him the appointment. He kept me waiting while he used Hugh to check that I was not trying to use him to launder ill-gotten gains; Hugh was amused by the irony of both parties using his services.

Sean and I are the same age, and it is thirty odd years since we last met but I think I would have recognised him even without the clue provided by his presence in Mason’s office. His face was tanned but it looked more like the effect of wind than of sun, so I assumed that he is still sailing dinghies. From him, I looked at Mason and almost choked. The only other time I had seen him he was pasty-faced, wearing a shabby suit but now he was tanned and had on a gaily striped shirt and a smart blazer; the grey wings of hair that once framed his ears had gone and the whole head of hair seemed to me several shades darker.

The contracts were ready, and Sean had checked them so I was able to scan through them and sign the lease. In return for a fixed rent, the estate of Olaf Ogilvie, deceased, permitted me, my heirs and assigns to raise sheep to a number not exceeding one thousand on the property outlined on the attached map and commonly known as ‘Duchlage’.

The map was a copy of the Ordnance Survey sheet with clear lines detailing the precise boundaries of the leased land. I had been there, and I can promise you that things looked very different on the ground. In one respect the Survey had things wrong: they marked a building at the end of the moor as being a ruin. Thanks to the efforts of Kate’s foster brother Eddie, the hut had a roof and door; it might lack the amenities of a Hilton Hotel, but it would provide shelter to a benighted traveller.

Mason came with us to his outer office where he mentioned that he was meeting Miss Mathieson for a business dinner on the following Monday. It took a moment for me to realise that he was talking about Anya. I blurted out that I hoped it was not just a business meeting. He immediately returned to his most pompous mode, telling me that it showed my total ignorance of legal courtesies to suggest that business could be combined with pleasure.

“In that case, do the business first and then the dinner can be purely pleasure.”

I was not prepared to let Anya suffer a disappointment without making some effort.

He mumbled about not being on social terms with the lady, but I was by then connecting my phone to Anya’s number. When she answered, I told her that the lease was signed, and I said that Mr Mason wanted to cancel the business dinner. She replied that she was disappointed since she had been looking forward to the occasion.

“How would you feel about changing it from a business meeting to a date?”

“That would be even better, Fergus, but do you think Jerry would agree to that?”

I handed the phone to the lawyer whose face had turned crimson.

“Oh, Miss er ... Anya. I don’t know what to say. I’m afraid Mr Galbraith is something of a joker.”

“Don’t you want to take me Jerry? I mean it’s all right if you don’t, but I would have liked it.”

“Oh well, of course, I would like it too, but I didn’t want to presume.”

“So, do you mean you want to take me on a dinner date? No business talk, just the pair of us chatting?”

“I would like nothing better, my dear – oh, I mean Anya.”

“I liked the ‘my dear’ bit, Jerry. See you on Monday!”

All this had happened while we were standing in his outer office, in the presence of his secretary, a pretty girl who was drinking in every word.

“If you breathe a word of this Angela, I’ll find something to charge you with that will jail you for six months!”

“But it’s so romantic Mr Masters. Can I not at least tell my Mum?”

Sean and I left at that point. We had sandwiches in a Subway while I told him what to expect in the coming weeks. He would have liked to understand the reasons for my interest in the Retreat, but I hardly knew myself, so I am sure that I sounded less than convincing. He wanted a more comprehensive briefing, but I had to cut him short since I had a date with a shepherd.

Eddie grinned at me as I climbed into the cab beside him.

“We’ll pick up about three hundred beasts. They’re all SIL – hoggets and ewes.”

There were two young border collies peering out from the accommodation area behind the cab and I am certain that they understood more of that than I did. SIL means ‘scanned in lamb’ showing that the sheep are pregnant. Ewes I had heard of, but hoggets were new to me. Eddie explained that it was something of a misnomer since a hogget is, strictly speaking, a breeding ewe before her first pregnancy.

“I suppose it’s confusing for you, but we tend to keep calling them hoggets amongst ourselves until they actually give birth.”

Well, I did ask.

I was much more interested in his description of the breed of sheep he is planning to buy. The blackface sheep has been reared on Scottish moors since at least the twelfth century. They now account for about one in ten of all the sheep in Britain but they go largely unnoticed since the majority live their lives where visitors seldom go.

“There’s about one blackface sheep for every three people in Scotland so if you take away the city folk, you can see that sheep outnumber people over most of the country.”

The two dogs continued to take an intelligent interest, which made sense since much of the information was more relevant to their lives than to mine. Sheep are territorial but over huge areas. They will stay within an area of several square miles and will seldom wander into the neighbouring area. It is not necessary to fence the grazing grounds on the moors; the sheep respect the boundaries without help from humans.

“We’ll have to watch the beasts at first since they were bred and reared elsewhere but the lambs they are carrying will know that the Duchlage is home.”

One advantage of the land we had leased is that there is no village in the grazing range. Some sheep take their territorial tendency to extremes by adopting a particular garden as their home turf. Cultivated flowers and salad vegetables are, to the sheep, like gobstoppers to kids. Eddie made browsing in a garden sound a lot like living in a sweet shop for a ewe.

I asked if there were adventurous sheep that wandered beyond the boundaries.

“Aye, it does happen once in a while, but it only happens once before the wanderer ends up at the butchers. Since that’s what shepherds have been doing for centuries, I suppose the wanderlust has been more or less bred out of them.”

It was a salutary reminder that the purpose of owning the sheep is to gain commercial advantage. The Bible may talk of the shepherd leaving the ninety-nine safe while he goes out into the storm to rescue the hundredth that has strayed but the economic reality is that the rescued beast will quickly become lamb chops.

“Shearing costs more than the value of the wool,” Eddie astonished me by remarking. “The Italians will buy some for stuffing mattresses but you’re lucky if it covers the cost.”

“Why bother shearing then?”

“That would be indefensibly cruel,” he admonished me. “They would shed the fleece eventually, but you could lose half your flock to flies and other parasites. Even if they survived it would cause them great suffering. You can’t do it, Fergus.”

I apologised and humbly accepted the lesson: the sheep must be cared for while they live and they must be killed humanely when the time comes, but without sentiment.

“Of course, global warming might be the saving of the sheep industry,” Eddie suggested.

Sheep have proved difficult to farm intensively; industrial food production has virtually passed them by although they are still central to subsistence agriculture in much of the world. Pork and chicken, the two most intensively farmed meats, require expensive housing and food supplements. Sheep – blackface sheep in particular – need minimal shelter and can survive all year on naturally growing crops.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if natural fibres made a come-back once the scientists work out the true cost of synthetics.”

Eddie was proving to be a most stimulating companion. Over the years I had talked of global warming and the future of the planet with many people from all walks of life, but he is the first person I had met who found anything positive to say. He sees a means of survival for humanity by developing solutions from them past.

“Do you believe we can feed the population of the world by returning to ancient methods of agriculture?”

He drove for some miles without saying a word. The dogs had gone to sleep, bored now, no doubt, since the conversation had moved from practical animal husbandry to philosophy. When he did speak, it was clear that Eddie shared their view to some degree.

“I can’t speak for the world, Fergus. I don’t know enough to even begin to consider the problems but I’m sure that I and others like me could feed the people of Scotland, by what you describe as ancient methods. Then again, we wouldn’t be short of energy what with wind, waves and water.”

It was my turn to remain silent. I have spent my adult life as part of the new technologies where we think in terms of global solutions to global problems; even my special software was integrated into the world-wide web. I had avoided thinking about the threats to the continuing existence of humanity because I could not conceive of a universal solution. What Eddie had just suggested was revolutionary.

‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; and therefor never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.’

I told Eddie that was from a meditation by John Donne, written in 1624.

“There were blackface sheep grazing on Duchlage moor when he wrote it, I dare say,” was his response

Scotland does not, of course, stand alone. Any solution that aids our survival will necessarily be modified by the impact of other countries on us and our impact on them. Given the external restraints over which our country has no control, is it possible to change the direction of our development? It is certainly a much better response to the tolling bell than to stand helpless, cap in hand, or bury the corpse which seems to be all the world’s politicians can suggest.

Is it realistic to grow a universal solution from a seed planted in the soil of a single, small country? I do not know but it does seem an idea worth pursuing.

“Every journey starts with the first step, Eddie, so let’s you and me put a few sheep with their unborn lambs onto Duchlage.”

“Aye, but we’ll have a cup of tea first,” he grinned, turning into a motorway service station.

We bought three hundred and twenty sheep at two farms in the Scottish border country and were on our way back home by ten o’clock. Eddie had joined the dogs in the accommodation behind the cab and we were being driven by a shepherd who would spend the next week with the flock helping to get them settled in. They dropped me at Glasgow Airport before parking for the night at Luss. The next morning, they collected two more shepherds, and the four men had the sheep unloaded and nibbling grass before noon on the Saturday.

Eddie is a force of nature; like time and tide, he waits for no man. I had anticipated negotiations taking up most of the weekend, but I was back at my hotel shortly after midnight on the Friday night. I had meetings planned in London from Monday onwards and the following two or three weeks I would be playing the role of impresario.

Finding that the money from the sale of my furniture was in my bank account, I walked to the airport and booked the first flight to somewhere I fancied, which turned out to be Vienna. I attended a concert in the Musikverein on the Saturday evening and spent the day at the Schonbrunn Palace before flying into Heathrow late on Sunday.

I felt guilty at stealing two days off and decided to tell no one about it. Since I had spread the idea that I would spend the weekend with Eddie and our three hundred and twenty pregnant sheep, no one asked what I had been doing. I think the last time I played truant was in my final year at school. I was a model student at university since I rushed home from lectures to slave away building my business. I will sneak away again sometime but I suspect it would pall after a while.

On the morning of Monday, Fourth of November, I had two concerns; I had arranged to meet the parents of Doh, Ray and Me that evening with draft contracts newly prepared by Richard’s team and I had yet to make up my mind what to do about the exhibition of Jenny’s work in Piers’ gallery. I discovered that I was not man enough to turn my back on the event, but I feared that I would disgrace myself if I came face to face with Piers.

On the way to the meeting at Bill’s house, I was still weighing my options, entering what might have been a lion’s den only half-prepared. Doh had done a superb job in convincing four of the six parents: Ray and Michael, like my son, would happily have signed a contract with the devil. It was rather flattering to win the whole-hearted support of both mothers and fathers of the two other boys. My integrity mattered a great deal more to them than my lack of even the most rudimentary knowledge of the task ahead of me. The only opposition came from Rachel and Bill.

“I can see it’s a wonderful opportunity,” Rachel began. “I’m just not sure that this is the right time. The boys have several years of exams, and we’re all agreed that education comes first. And now Donnie is talking about going the Royal Academy of Music. How is he going to fit that in with a stage career, is what I want to know?”

She was looking at Bill all the time she spoke, and he picked up his cue:

“I’m against it,” was his uncompromising view.

The other four parents rose to my support. They expressed their conviction that the group had been the making of the boys; they were achieving better results in school since they began playing together and there had been a marked improvement in their behaviour within the family. The mothers expressed sympathy with Rachel’s point but felt that my role guaranteed the future of their children.

It quickly became apparent that the four of them liked and trusted me and did not like Bill. Ray’s Mum even went so far as to point out that Doh is my son so the decision should properly be mine. There was a good deal of head nodding in agreement with that opinion. Rachel had stopped looking at Bill and was intently studying her hands, demurely clasped in her lap.

It was Michael’s dad who reached for the contract and began to read it. I suggested that they consult their family solicitors and, this being agreed, we called in the boys and told them that we were backing them, provided the lawyers did not quibble. I felt uncomfortable, so I left with the four other parents. Bill came to the door to see us off, but Rachel remained sitting in the living room.

I had just returned to my room in the hotel when Anya called me asking if I could do her a favour. The matter was urgent she insisted, so I agreed to meet her in the bar. There were perhaps a dozen people in the room when she entered, and every head turned to look at her. She was wearing a flowery dress that stopped some way above her knees and there seemed to be an endless expanse of nylon-clad leg before you reached the four- or five-inch heels of the scarlet shoes adorning her feet.

The envy of the other men was like a warm breeze on my back as she swayed over, put both arms around my neck and kissed me lingeringly on the lips.

“How was your dinner with Mr Mason?” I asked, when I had recovered my breath.

“He’s coming to London on Thursday to view Jenny’s pictures and to ravage me.”

She gave me another kiss, with even greater enthusiasm.

“He doesn’t know about the ravishing yet, of course.”

Perched on a bar stool beside me, she was aware of the interest of the other drinkers; she crossed and uncrossed her legs a few times, while smiling demurely at me. I could see lust in their faces when her skirt rose high enough to reveal the tops of her stockings.

“I want to swap favours, Fergus dear. I’ll get you out of Jenny’s exhibition and you’ll take the edge off my carnal appetite before poor Jerome arrives. I had a burger before I went to dinner with him and that worked really well – I was able to eat like a lady instead of a starving wolf. I thought it might work just as well with sex.”