For the politician, every party, every social engagement, is a puzzle, a crossword to be solved. There are hidden clues, connections to be made, information to be passed on. You solve the puzzle. And then you leave.
The Master
Ten years earlier, when the new century was still a kid, that invitation had been new, stiff and with a thin line of gold leaf around its edges – just one of several hundred dropping that morning into letterboxes around London, Edinburgh, the Cotswolds. Each had the name of the recipient handwritten at the top in faultless italic, clearly by an expensive fountain pen held by an expensively educated hand. Then came swirls of black, embossed Gothic print. ‘Neil Savage invites you to his All Hallows Party. Formal wear. Absolutely no partners. Refusals only.’
The party had been held at Worcestershire Hall, in Worcester Square, Mayfair. One of the last grand Edwardian houses still in private hands in central London, the address underlined the lavish nature of the invitation, and refusals had been few. Neil Savage – more properly, Lord Lupin – was not, in any case, a man accustomed to being refused. Private banker, art collector, philanthropist, crossbench peer, he was known for his foul temper and his brilliant wit. ‘Often disliked, never ignored,’ he said of himself, with intense satisfaction.
And that Halloween, as the black German limousines nudged one another around the dark and windy square, the party had begun with a certain style. Young men, their gold-sprayed torsos bare despite the cold, stood at intervals along the front of Worcestershire Hall holding blazing torches, so the arrivals had to squint against the billows of smoke, and brush small embers off their clothes. Straggling up the Portland stone stairs and into the house, they were greeted by servants in white tie and tails offering cocktails with squid ink and peppers, vodka and absinthe. Champagne was available for the weak-stomached.
Lord Lupin himself, dressed all in black with a red bow tie, whiskers painted onto his chalky face, gave a passable imitation of Mephistopheles as he greeted the guests one by one. In they flowed: one former prime minister – no, two former prime ministers; half a dozen other senior politicians from each party; once-feared newspaper editors; minor royals, portly and inclined to be affable; radical playwrights with long, well-cut grey hair; radical establishment artists who made large plastic eggs for the Chinese market; gelded rock musicians; celebrated lawyers; notorious bankers … plus, of course, the shadowy PR men who kept the country moving – in the wrong direction. By 7.30 p.m. it was already clear that this was a party like no other; not a single face here, not one, was anything other than exceedingly famous.
In those days Worcestershire Hall had not yet been gutted; but it was dilapidated. Chilly, underlit rooms, with dusty curtains and dirty Dutch pictures, led off from one another in endless confusion. ‘No Old Masters here, I’m afraid. Just Old Pupils. The family …’ Lupin said. Dark little staircases spiralled up and down, apparently pointlessly. Only when the guests reached the old ballroom, laid out for a feast and glittering with hundreds of wax candles, was there any real glow of welcome. At one end, a small Baroque orchestra was playing melancholy and haunting music, a tripping gavotte, a dying fall. In front of the orchestra, exquisite young men and women dressed as satyrs and fauns were performing some old, complicated dance, as if in a Peter Greenaway film.
The guests gathered in knots, broke up again and re-formed as they circulated around the house. In even the most neglected rooms there was always a candelabra and a sofa, where a journalist or a photographer might be placed. The flashes of photography ricocheted through the house like perpetual lesser lightning. And there was plenty to photograph – all those seamed, creased, famous faces: the curving eyebrows and drawn, tortured, gathered-up and stitched flesh of actresses better known for who they had bedded than for their talent; the pendulous, hairy jowls and stained-toothed smiles of public servants. There a law officer, here a criminal; and here the two together, a hand resting lightly on a shoulder. Swarming through the dark honeycomb of the house, human crocodiles, human lampreys, human prairie dogs, all jostling and snapping when they spoke.
And, just as there was plenty to capture, so there was plenty to speak about, so many old friends to discover. Stories of old political battles, long-forgotten legal suits and complicated love tangles were being rehearsed as the drink disappeared. Good old Burgundies, flinty unoaked and vintage Chardonnays circulated on the silver trays – sweet, succulent southern sunshine for gaping, dusty northern gullets. For those who preferred, the best Islay malts and vintage brandies were there to scald and burn on the way down. The massive mahogany table at one end of the ballroom was expertly stripped by the beautiful staff, who brought round plates of bloody grouse, like the aftermath of a Balkan massacre, and slivers of white halibut, and dishes of oysters.
All was going swimmingly until, about an hour into the party, something strange began to happen.
It was like a quiet but irresistible wind. The susurration started at the downstairs bar, worked its way up the main staircase, arrived in the ballroom, and then pushed outwards into numerous smaller rooms and crowded corridors. As it shouldered its way through the guests, the disturbance gained strength. Gasps spread with the speed of an epidemic; mutters grew to the volume of a waterfall. Everywhere there was a shaking of the atmosphere, a shared shock you could touch and watch move from group to group. ‘It’ was nothing but comprehension, Lupin’s boldest artwork taking shape. It was an awakening, the more real the more the guests looked around.
Almost every single person there, they realised, was not just famous, but infamous – disgraced. There in one corner were those who had lied while taking Britain towards damaging and dishonourable conflicts. Opposite them was a clutch of politicians who had been caught hiring themselves out like common prostitutes – and look, the men who had hired them – and observing it all from the other end of the room were the prominent, well-paid journalists who had ignored it because they were too busy bribing officers of the law in order to destroy decent people. Eating their canapés were NHS bosses who had tried to conceal deaths caused by incompetence and cruelty. Swilling down their wine were bankers who had destroyed their own banks and scurried off with barrowloads of money to roll in after they were stripped of their knighthoods. Loud laughter came from popular entertainers accused of raping young fans, and ex-DJs whose paedophile obsessions had become public. All evening Neil Savage, Lord Lupin, had been waiting, wondering when the penny would drop.
The very few who hadn’t already been disgraced looked as guilty as if they expected it at any time. There, for instance, nursing a whisky, was the Conservative peer Lord Auchinleck, with a face like a swollen, furious baby’s and pouchy eyes, his little pot belly squeezed into tartan trews of his own design.
Hardly anybody had been invited to Neil Savage’s most lavish party who had not been publicly exposed for their greed, lust or overweening ambition. But mostly greed. Almost without exception, every person there had once been on the front page of a newspaper, looking ashamed – or shocked, as a photographer tripped over in front of them.
What kind of honour was this? What species of revelry? The wind of panic grew stronger. Within minutes, people were uneasily shuffling towards the front door, only to be confronted by another row of cameras. At Worcestershire Hall that night there was no hiding place.
It was a one-time lord chancellor, who’d lost his job because of his addiction to rent boys and cocaine, who confronted the host. ‘What the fuck? What the fuck?’ he spluttered as his large purple forefinger jabbed Savage.
Lord Lupin smiled coolly back. ‘Fanny, Fanny, we’re all friends here. What’s the problem? Don’t like the food? Don’t like the music? You clearly do like the booze. So maybe it’s the company?’
‘This is some kind of sick trial by media, you ghastly little shit. Some kind of joke, and we are all the punchline,’ replied the elderly man. ‘I feel like making you my punchline, actually.’
‘Calm down, Fanny.’ By now there was quite a circle of equally upset men – and a few women – crowding around the banker-philanthropist host. ‘Yes, all right, I am making a point this evening,’ said Lord Lupin. ‘You are the people they would like to disappear. You are the people they would like, for their own paltry peace of mind, to think are villains, rare creatures who break the rules. But you are not – none of you – anything more or less than ordinary human beings, with your appetites and your competitive instincts and – forgive me – your swollen cocks. And you are still here. I am still here. So laugh at disgrace, I say. Mock the smug hypocrisy of the herbivores and dreary midgets who pretend to judge you. Raise your glasses, drink deep and – Welcome to the Underworld.’
Lord Lupin regretted the party when he awoke around mid-morning the following day. After a lifetime of political interference, he’d learned that some of his best jokes had unexpected consequences. It was Lupin, back then simply Neil Savage, the aspiring rock guitarist, who had dissuaded the young Tony Blair from a career at the bar and pointed out to him that the then-failing Labour Party provided the smoothest route into Parliament and onto a front bench. It was he who, as a young man, had turned Boris Johnson away from his youthful Eurocommunism and towards the Bullingdon Club. Neither of these pranks had turned out exactly as he had expected.
And now there had been a death. It was most unfortunate. The ex-lord chancellor had followed Lupin’s speech with a bellow, a flailing fist, and a heart attack. Central London roadworks ensured that the ambulance arrived late, and the overweight grandee expired. On the night for dead souls, there was now one more to remember.
First, you know nothing – but they like you. Then, second, you know stuff, but they hate your guts. Between popular uselessness and loathed effectiveness, you have – how long? About a weekend.
The Master
The funeral had been a long one, in a polychromatic Anglican church so high that the streets for half a mile around smelled of incense. It had, apparently, been the ex-lord chancellor’s wish to inflict on all his atheist friends the full rigour of a proper funeral service. A wit and a man of faith, as well as pederast, he had long abhorred services with Beatles music and heart-tugging slide shows of the deceased as a young child. Ritual was the best sedative for sorrow – common wisdom which had been forgotten. So all of those milk-and-water agnostics and politically-correct pew-dodgers had had to sit through endless readings from the penitential Psalms, from Corinthians and Revelation from the St James Bible, to kneel for prayers, shuffle forward for the Eucharist, and sit again for a socking long sermon that made disapproving reference to the All Hallows party.
The ex-prime minister, universally known as the Master, who was in his way a serious believer, had read one of the lessons. After the service, with the coffin taken away for burial, half a dozen members of his former cabinets had stood around stretching their backs and rubbing their buttocks and wondering about lunch. The Master had a brace of limousines waiting, and he took them half a mile away, beyond the reach of the paparazzi, to a quiet public house, The Moon in Her Glory.
A back room, once reserved for ‘the ladies’. A battered round deal table, half a dozen Victorian chairs, and a hatch for the beer.
‘White-wine spritzers, everyone?’ asked the former prime minister, slapping his hands together.
‘A wee spritzer?’ spluttered Murdoch White, the former foreign secretary and defence secretary. ‘Hell’s bells. You always were a degenerate metropolitan ponce. A small whisky and a half of IPA for me.’
‘Murdoch, Murdoch. So predictable. You’re an incorrigible dinosaur. You’re like a bigoted, scaly old sea monster that only comes up once a decade to roll your eyes at us. Anyway, that was what we always drank.’
‘Aye, when you were sodding prime minister it was. We’d have drunk cabbage water if you’d told us to. Now you’re not.’
One by one the others – Margaret Miller, former home secretary; Sally Johnson, former party chair; Alex Brodie, industry and then briefly chancellor; the sly, Machiavellian figure of Leslie Khan, the party fixer and Northern Ireland secretary – ordered their drinks. None of them asked for a spritzer.
The Master recovered quickly. ‘Well, it may not be a proper oak table, but here we are assembled, the Knights of the Grail, together again for the first time since my esteemed former chancellor broke the enchantment and cast us out … Yeah, yeah, I’m joking guys, come on … But it’s kind of good to be together again, isn’t it?’
‘Bloody sad too, though,’ said Murdoch in a gravelly Ayrshire growl.
‘Yes. Poor old Simon. What a way to go. He had many more years in him, I’d have thought,’ said the ex-prime minister.
‘No, no, I didn’t mean that,’ said Murdoch. ‘Though it’s a pity the poor bastard died with the anger on him. No, I meant it’s a bloody pity we’re all here, out in the cold, fuck-all use to anybody. Just – sad.’
Miller and Johnson, the two gatekeeper women who had supported the PM to the last, and beyond, broke in, protesting. Their leader, the Master, was doing good work in the Middle East, and raising large sums for Africa with his speeches. They both spoke at some length, and the Master had the grace to look faintly embarrassed. When they’d finished he shook his head, rapped the table as if calling for silence, and began to talk in that familiar tone of unctuous, confiding seriousness.
‘No, Maggie, no, Sally. Murdoch makes a very good point. Yes, of course, we all do what we can. Public service runs through us; it’s in our DNA. But where it counts most, here at home, we’ve become completely voiceless. New Labour has vanished back into the Labour Party – with, I have to say, entirely predictable results. The Tories have ripped us out of Europe. The Scots are off – partly, I confess, my fault. It’s back to a choice, apparently, between permanent class war or heartless free-market fundamentalism, fairness or efficiency – but never both. Exactly the choice we devoted our lives to eliminating. I’ve never been as depressed about this country as I am now. We have capitalism, but we have no social democracy. It’s a bloody waste …’
‘And the worst of it is,’ Leslie Khan interjected, ‘we’re all actually at the height of our powers. I know things I learned the hard way as a minister, and I’ve learned new things in business since. I know how to make a government department work, and I know how to rally public opinion. But I can’t get a hearing. The newspapers, for what they’re worth, won’t commission articles from any of us. They don’t even pick up on our blogs or tweets. That little shit who made fools of us all at his damned party had a point, perhaps. We are the politically undead. We live in limbo. We’ve always been frank with ourselves, so let’s be frank now. This is a convocation of fucking zombies.’
‘Agreed,’ said the Master. ‘Lurid language, but not so far from the truth. It might be a limbo of air-conditioned offices and first-class flights, with the occasional television studio thrown in, but it’s a limbo nevertheless. Whenever I think I’m going to be let back into the conversation – when there’s the right Newsnight moment, or whatever – I do my bloody best, but it’s all “Yadda-yadda-yadda, Iraq, illegal war, liar, blah, blah, blah.”’
‘Fucking cunts,’ interjected Murdoch. ‘Hypocritical little shits. God, I hate the fucking Guardian.’
That got everybody, even Leslie Khan, who had once worked there, nodding their heads and grunting.
‘It goes back to my old paradox’ – the Master again. ‘When you first arrive in power, you have maximum authority. You are the people’s choice. You have momentum. The wind at your back. But you don’t know how to do anything. By the time you’ve learned the lessons, worked out where the levers are and how to use them, sucked up all the tricks of survival, then ten to one your authority has gone. You’ve become discredited, disgraced, or merely boring. It’s all over. You can have either wisdom or power, but never both at the same time. So my question is this: under such an arrangement, how can a serious democracy ever be properly run?’
There was a silence. The chips and the sandwiches arrived. Even they looked sad.
The former prime minister continued. ‘You end up with the next lot of innocents, perhaps not making exactly the same mistakes, but lots of new mistakes of their own. Miliband. Grimaldi. And by the time they’ve learned from them, again, it’s too late and they’re out. For the past few years I’ve worked on the assumption that there’s nothing that can be done about this. Our faces are no longer welcome. Nobody listens to us any more, and they never will. So all that accumulated understanding, from a little wisdom to a lot of gamesmanship, is just going to go to waste. But recently I’ve been wondering – Leslie, Murdoch, girls – need it be so? If our faces are too old, let’s find some new faces. If we can’t use what we know for ourselves, why can’t we use it for others? When the left, the unions, don’t like the way the party’s going, they don’t just sit back. They organise, as we know to our cost, and they try to take the power back. Is there any reason we can’t do the same?’
Khan was brushing his little beard with tapering fingers. A little smile of delight appeared on his face. ‘Oh Master, you’re not suggesting we run moles, are you?’
‘Entryists? Like a bunch of Trots?’ barked White.
‘No, not as such. But if we could identify just a few bright, talented, potential new leaders, and help them up the ladder, we could control the party by proxy. Fresh skins, sleepers – call them what you will. But sleepers for common sense, moles for the American alliance, entryists for a sensible European future – all that.’
‘Manchurian candidates?’
‘Well,’ said the former prime minister, ‘we don’t need to go as far as brainwashing, still less assassination, do we? Just a little help here and there. A team. And we give the party a new leader, a better leader. A leader we have shaped, and who we control. Once we thought the future was ours. Let us dare to think it again.’
If you want to survive in politics, you need to have deep roots. And if you don’t, you have to pretend to.
The Master
For a small country, Scotland is geographically complicated. Parts of Ayrshire, for instance, look like the Highlands, particularly when the cloud is low. Shaggy, dun-coloured moorlands are populated by shaggy, shitty-bottomed sheep, crowding across roads that weren’t resurfaced during the long reign of Queen Elizabeth. Just as in the Highlands you drive past grey, harled, barrack-like settlements of 1960s council housing, their desolate gardens fenced in with wire, and defeated Co-op stores, and scowling public houses with wired windows. But when the clouds lift, the absence of soaring mountains becomes apparent. Instead, weak riffs of sunlight show giant A’s of steel and collections of industrial buildings. For this was once mining country, with conical bings like the burial mounds of ancient Strathclyde kings – and even now, years after Margaret Thatcher’s death, the rusting steel sheds and the pervasive layer of coal dust haven’t gone.
So this is a country where it’s easy to answer the question: why do folk get involved in politics? If you relied on the papers, you’d think it was pure greed, with a pinch of vanity; and you’d be wrong. In David Petrie’s Ayrshire, being Labour was like going to Mass, like learning to drink half-and-halfs, like supporting Kilmarnock, and like not hitting your women. It was what a proper, decent, grown man did. The folk memory of the miners’ strike, the poll tax, the closure of Ravenscraig, was transmitted almost wordlessly, father to son, mother to daughter. And if a man needed any more explanation, the pudgy, braying faces on television – though Blair, mind you, was as bad as a Tory – rammed the lesson home. There were sides. Us, and them. Them, us. Chrissakes, pal, what more did you need to know?
It wasn’t like that now, though. The Labour folk had been split and scattered by the 2014 independence referendum. These days, the Nats were better organised, strutting through the streets, ‘Yes’ badges all over the place, cocky as you like. A Saltire flew over the council chambers. But it wasn’t always so. Back then, being Labour was bleeding obvious. The system, the whole bloody world, was set up to screw the working classes. The working classes had no choice but to fight back. Only the odd funny-looking Tory, in tartan trews maybe, or Presbyterian minister, or some kind of Orangeman, didn’t get it. Davie Petrie had known this all his life.
Later on, when he was famous, everybody got Petrie’s story subtly wrong. Wikipedia, the BBC website, profiles in both the Spectator and the New Statesman and a hurriedly-written biography by a rising young journalist, all missed what really mattered. Yet nobody would ever be able to say that Davie himself had lied about his own background. The public story, the official story, was all boot-strappy and hard graft: David Petrie had grown up in a working-class family in a village south of Glasgow, joining the trade union movement early and working his way up through scholarships to create his own building company, paying top-dollar wages to his boys, handing over chunks of his profits to local causes. It was a story of Catholic self-improvement, of the importance of family, the story of a clean-limbed hero. No university drinking clubs; no wealthy, behind-the-scenes patrons; just a simple, passionate, moderate, justice-loving man of the streets.
And a lot of that was true; but it was a sunny painting without shadows or dark corners – so much so, that the truth was a lie. There had been little that was decent or working-class about David Petrie’s early life. He had been born in a privately owned bungalow in an Ayrshire village to an alcoholic local builder, a formidable bully, and his long-suffering, though in fact highly intelligent, wife.
Later on, David Petrie would be famous as a kind of survivor, like the sole cavalryman making it back from the Khyber Pass, all his comrades lying slaughtered in pools of their own blood. That is, he was a rare Scottish Labour MP after the Nationalists had poured down the mountainsides in 2015. Somehow, like a burr, he’d clung on. As Scottish voices had begun to disappear from London public life, Petrie’s Ayrshire tones were still being heard in Parliament and on the BBC, an almost reassuring reminder of times that had gone. ‘I feel like a dinosaur, to be honest, woken up to find the mammals have taken over,’ he’d once said on Breakfast News. But like the dinosaurs, there was something unshakeably tough, almost stony, about the man.
David’s first memories were of fear and pain. His father’s head was out of focus, a blur of grey and red; but his hands and feet were close. Knuckles, the signet ring, the smell of shoe polish, a boot in the arse, a giant hand scrunching his jumper and lifting him up. Bellow, skelp. Sometimes, when the gate slammed and he heard Da’s feet come up the steps, he filled his pants and trousers with hot pee. Then he was disgusted with himself, and almost welcomed the belting. It was an old, weathered black belt with a metal buckle. The boy David was also smacked, punched, left out in the garden in all weathers, and subject as he grew up to all the torments a self-pitying builder could devise. A Christmas holiday full of unlikely winks and vague, enticing promises would be followed by a Christmas morning, silent and present-less – Da oot, Maw locked in her bedroom.
Da oot, mind you, was a damn sight better than Da in.
‘Come awa, son. It’s time you came down to the fitba. Dinnae look so bloody scared. We’re going to have a good time, you and me.’ And sometimes, good things followed. A chip butty, a can of icy Irn Bru; being taught how to take a drag, deep and fragrant and blue.
But Da’s moods were as changeable as scudding clouds. One can too many. A missed scoring opportunity. Cheek from the visitors’ terrace. Then he’d feel a sudden poke on the nape of his neck.
‘See ma boy? A wee Jessie I’ve got, is all. Doesn’t understand a bloody thing about the game. Don’t know why I bother bringing you, do I, Dolores?’
Even Da’s mates thought he went too far. ‘Dolores, big man? Where the fuck’s that come from?’
‘Well, look at the wee girl, with her big dark eyes. Disnae need mascara. Did you ever see sic a sight?’
And his Da was always right, of course; the tears stung their way down the side of his nose, and mixed with snot, and hung on his lip. He’d have his grey woollen jersey on, bought from the Co-op, and he’d wipe himself with the sleeve. And then his Da would whack him across the side of his face, and his Da’s friends would go Chrissake, Boabie, but mebbe laugh. And the boys on the field would win or lose, but it didn’t matter much. He wasn’t a great boy for the football.
And then back at home, the belt. Thick, black leather, with wee yellow lines where it was cracking and with the metal thistle buckle at the business end. Beer and the belt. They went together like love and marriage.
Many years later, the adult David Petrie was told while being examined after a skiing accident that he had broken no fewer than four ribs as a child. He remembered the sleepless nights, all right. At the time there was no question of hospital. But a few deep white scars, like chalk marks, still remained on his back and legs.
The adult David Petrie was known as a snappy dresser – flash suits. The truth was, he bought suits with braces. He never wore belts. The adult Davie Petrie enjoyed a drink – a beer, a glass of wine, a gin and tonic. But the very faintest smell of Scotland’s national drink, the sick-sweet scent from his father’s open mouth, brought an instant queasiness. He simply couldn’t stand the stuff.
His dad, Bob Petrie, was a very popular man. David only realised this much later: Da was liked. Other men wanted Da to be their friend. Out of the house, he told jokes. People laughed at them. Big Bob was a good workman and a relaxed boss. He liked a drink, everyone knew that, and where’s the harm there? The bungalow was on the very outskirts of the village, surrounded by its own hedge. In space, enough space, a wee bit lawn around a wee bit house, no one can hear you scream.
Big Bob’s big laugh, though, was well known in the pub. A low staccato series of growly grunts – heuch, heuch, heuch – building up to a full-throated har, har, har. There was a lot of laughing. His business grew fast, swollen by contracts from the local council. This was Labour territory, Labour people, Labour laughing. Bob was friends with the councillors, and actually a Labour Party member himself, although he never turned up at ward meetings – ‘Nae time for blethering, no offence boys, I got a business to run.’
Only later on would Davie understand the kickbacks, the backhanders, the no-nothing-for-nothing; those raucous sessions in the bar were always about business first. Heuch, heuch; har, har. Big Bob sweated easily as he grew ever larger, but he was not a man to waste energy or time.
Neither David nor his mother Eileen were seen much in the village. They felt as they looked – at the edge of things. Sunday school, the Scouts, even lining up to jeer the idiot Orangemen, all passed them by. Bob was careful not to hit his wife on the face or arms – one of those tricks of civilised life passed down from some fathers to some sons. As David grew older and bigger, Bob’s weekly beltings were replaced by the more painful methods of verbal terrorism. Jibes about his voice, mockery of his changing body. A hot, moist, whiskery, whiskied mouth at a bright red ear, a finger and thumb pulling him up by his sideburn. Big girl’s blouse, ya. Once, just once, when he was changing for football at school, a teacher, Miss Leckie, had seen fresh welts on his legs. A social worker had come round to the house. David could still remember the tense little quartet of them sitting in the best room, his father forcing smiles and ‘joshing’. Heuch, heuch, har, har. Like one of those plays from the telly. There was never the slightest chance of David being taken into care. Nobody wanted that. Bob’s connections made it completely impossible; anyway, Davie would have hated leaving his mother alone in that overheated but cheerless house.
Mere misery doesn’t kill you, not in Scotland. Davie grew up to be a silent, handsome, self-possessed young man. Layer over layer. Skin on thickening skin. And life got better. He found schoolwork ridiculously easy. The school library was small enough, but he read his way through it, the whole damned room. Maths, encyclopaedias, cowboy stories, it didn’t matter. His second great escape as a teenager was discovering a natural talent for, of all things, football. He made the school team a year early. Bob, the big man, found this very hard to deal with: for years it had been an important part of his story that his son was a ‘Jessie’. Yet here he was, big long legs, scoring goals and coming home covered in mud and bruises week after week. Grudgingly, Bob made his way to the touchline once or twice. Laddie worth something after all? Maybe he and David would finally have a real conversation – a Scottish one, of course, elliptical and self-mocking, more silence than words, but ending in grunts of assent and a feeling not unlike warmth.
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