A couple of hours later, maybe, after Speyside of the malts and bleak Drumochter, we were in the long and beautiful glens between Blair Atholl and Dunkeld. On one side of the line were streams full of trout and turbines, on the other hillsides buzzing with the saws and drills of workshops. The train stopped for five minutes at Dunkeld. A small, old town of stone, still with its Christian cathedral.
Merrial looked out of the windows, around at the scene, and sat back with a slight shudder.
“A strange place,” she said, “with the hills around it like an ambush.”
“But that’s why it’s a great place,” I said, and told her the story of how the Cameronians had held off the Highland host and saved the Revolution to which they owed their freedom. She listened with more interest, even, than my telling of the tale deserved, and leaned back at the end and said, “Aye well, maybe there’s some use to history, after all. I’ll never be afraid of these hills again.”
It was two in the afternoon by the time the train reached Glasgow’s Queen Street Station, and glad enough we were to get off it. Sometimes two people who can fascinate each other endlessly when alone together, and who can spark off each other in convivial company, find themselves inhibited among strangers who are unignorably in earshot, and find themselves growing shy and silent and stale. So it was with us, towards the end of that journey. I couldn’t even find it in my heart to talk about the Battle of Stirling when we passed through the town.
We both brightened, though, on jumping down on the platform. The familiar Glasgow railway-station smell—of currying fish, and curing leaf, and spark-gapped air, and old iron and wood-alcohol and hot oil and burnt vanilla—hit my sinuses like a shot of poteen. Menial, too, seemed invigorated by it, taking a deep breath of the polluted stench with a look of satisfaction and nostalgia.
“Ah, it’s good to be back,” she said.
I glanced sidelong at her as we walked down the platform. “When were you in Glasgow? And how could I have missed you?”
She smiled and squeezed my hand. “Oh, I forget. Ages ago. But the smell brings it back.”
“That and the noise.”
“The what?”
“THE—”
But she was laughing at me.
We crossed the station concourse, agreeing that, on balance, pigeons were a worse nuisance than sea-birds (though, as Menial gravely pointed out, better eating). This comment, and some of the more appetising components of the smell, reminded us that we were ravenous, so we bought sandwiches and botties of beer from a stall in the station and carried them out to George Square.
We sat down on a bench by a grassy knoll under the statue of the Deliverer.
“Shee that,” Menial said, pointing upwards as she munched. “It’sh mean.”
“ What?”
She swallowed. “The statue. The old city fathers must have been a bit stingy.”
I looked up. “No argument about the city fathers,” I said. They’re still tight-fisted. But that statue looks fine to me.”
“The horse is black,” Menial pointed out. She tapped the handle of her knife on a fetlock. “And cast in bronze. The lady herself is green—just copper. They got out the oxy-acetylene torches and hacked off the original rider, a king or general or whatever, and stuck the Deliverer in his place!”
I stood up and paced around it, peering.
“You’re right,” I said. “You can see the joins. I must have looked at that statue a hundred times, and not noticed anything wrong with it.” I looked up at the lady’s head. “And she has a different face from the one in Canon Town, and they’re both different from any pictures I’ve seen of the Deliverer.”
“Well, there you go, colha Gree,” she said. “Some things a tinker can teach a scholar, eh?”
“Oh aye,” I said. I sat down again. “Mind you, it could hardly be just parsimony—it’s a fine piece of work after all, and they’ve done her hair in gold.”
Ton’s gold paint,” she said scornfully. “And as for artistry, the breed and the trappings of the horse are all wrong for the time and the circumstances.”
She was right there, too, when I looked. This was no steppe horse, bare-back broken, roughly saddled, such as was shown quite authentically in Canon Square. Instead, it was a hussar’s mount, in elaborate caparison. But I thought then, and still think, that the representation of the Deliverer herself was well done. A fine example of the Glasgow style; which, perhaps, makes the equine bodge appropriate, and part of the artist’s point.
We binned our litter and headed for the nearest tramway stop, in Buchanan Street. The transport system is one of Glasgow City Council’s proudest public works, a more than adequate replacement for the great Underground circle, which was—it’s said—one of the wonders of the ancient world. Judging by the remnants of it that here and there have outlasted centuries of flooding and subsidence, it is quite possible to agree that such it must have been.
The tram came along, bell clanging, and we jumped on and paid our groats and clattered like children up the spiral steps to the upper deck. The bell rang again and the tram lurched forward, creaking up Buchanan Street and swaying as it turned the corner into Sauchiehall.
Glasgow’s main drag looked clogged with traffic, but everything—steam-engine and motor-car and horse-cart and bicycle alike—made way for the tram’s implacable progress. The pedestrians, at this time of the day, were mosdy women shopping. But all of them, whether young lasses just out of school or mothers with young children or retired ladies at their leisure, had to pick up their skirts, their pokes or their weans and run for their lives when the tram bore down on a crossing. The shops and offices from recent centuries are built of logs and planks, and rarely go higher than two storeys. The older, pre-Deliverance buildings are of stone; some have as many as five floors. In ancient times there were much higher buildings, but most of them were made of concrete, which doesn’t last well, and—agonising though it may be for archaeology—almost all of their structures have long since been plundered for steel and glass. Their foundations give rectangular patterns to the growth of trees in the forests around Glasgow: Pollock Fields, Possil Wood, Partick Thorn.
Farther away, to the west, we could just make out the haze and smoke from the Glydeside shipyards, on which most of Glasgow’s prosperity depended. The shipyards were the seedbed of the skills which—along with Kishorn’s deep-water dock, almost unique on this side of the Atlantic—had made Scotland the logical site for the launch-platform’s construction.
At the top of Sauchiehall there’s a new stone bridge, to replace the original concrete one that has crumbled away. It carried us over the Eighth Motor Way and into Woodlands Road, which runs along beside the Kelvin Woods. (They, and the river that runs through them, are named after Lord Kelvin, who invented the thermometer.)
We stepped off the tram at the crest of University Avenue, and stood for a moment looking at the main building, a huge and ancient pile called Gil-morehill. It looks like a piece of religious architecture that has run wild, but it is solely devoted to secular knowledge, a church of Man.
“It’s not as old as it looks,” Menial said, as though determined not to be impressed. “That’s Victorian Gothic.”
I didn’t believe her, but I didn’t argue. I had felt in its chill stone and warm wood the shades of Scotus and Knox and Kelvin, of Watt and Millar and Ferguson, and no disputed date could shake my conviction that the place was almost as old as the nation whose mind it had done so much to shape.