And the Land Lay Still Read Online Free PDF Page A

ugly old man, and a clumsy, carefree attitude to life, and almost everything he said seemed funny to Michael. In his Sunday letters home, which for the rest of that term began ‘Dear Mum and Dad’ because his mother didn’t tell him till Christmas that his father was no longer there, Michael wrote about how Eddelstane and he had done this or that, and that Eddelstane told good jokes and said Michael could go and stay with him in the holidays.
    Isobel, having worked out that this Eddelstane was the son of Sir Malcolm and Lady Patricia Eddelstane of Ochiltree House, Glenallan, would have been delighted if this had happened, but it never did, because Freddy never got around to organising it. It meant nothing to him, throwing out such an invitation, except that he liked Michael well enough to say it.
    The teachers at Bellcroft were a collection of unworldly oddities, most of whom looked as if they had awoken from one strange dream only to find themselves in another. Michael felt he had something in common with them, from the impossibly shy, tongue-tied Mr Veitch, who taught Geography and, after a fashion, Science, to the French master, Monsieur Lucas. M. Lucas was a dishevelled, shambling, straggle-haired man of uncertain vintage, with a tendency to conclude his sentences with a shout. He and his wife lived in Aberfeldy with their three sons, who attended the local school. He was Belgian, or half-Belgian, and proud of it. ‘Je suis belge, Monsieur Michel,’ he said, ‘et je ne l’oublie
jamais
.’ He called all the boys ‘monsieur’, except when he called them ‘mon ami’, which was equally pleasing. There was an air of mystery about him, enhanced both by his penchant for recounting tales of the supernatural and the fact that he had a life outwith the bounds and hours of the school. He often arrived looking as if he hadn’t gone to bed the previous night, or had slept in the clothes he was wearing if he had. Maybe he was a poacher? Maybe he had been in the Resistance during the war? ‘Peut-être,’ he said, when the boys asked him. ‘I resist
everything
.’ He corrected their vocabulary tests with flamboyant ticks, crosses and exclamation marks, and read their feeble efforts at composition with his nose an inch from the jotter, being severely short-sighted although he resisted wearing
les lunettes
. They loved it when he bellowed at their stupidity, for, loud though he barked, his bite was non-existent, and he was easily distracted from the task in hand by a well-timed question about the war, or ghosts – or politics. For M. Lucas was so unbalanced as to be a member of the Scottish National Party, and went to political meetings and conferences and rallies, and wrote letters to the papers on the subject of independence for small nations, and saw it as his duty to tell his pupils stories of Wallace and Bruce and the Black Douglas so that they would have a true understanding of the history of their country. Once,
when Winnie Ewing won her famous victory at the Hamilton by-election in 1967, he was so carried away that the entire lesson was given over to an analysis of the campaign and its implications. But another time, during a particularly long, loud and gory session on William Wallace, the headmaster opened the door suddenly and asked if he could speak with M. Lucas for a moment, outside, and when M. Lucas came back he was glum and roarless, and for a fortnight thereafter would not be diverted. But then he forgot, or remembered that he resisted
everything
, and life returned to abnormal. All this endeared M. Lucas greatly to Michael.
    But if schools like Bellcroft House were outposts of an alien system, sometimes infiltrated by men like M. Lucas, then the places you went on to from them were veritable fortresses of the occupation. And this network of garrisons had its own complex pecking order. If you went to a certain prep school – one, say, in the vicinity of Edinburgh – then you would probably go on to one