a second’s hesitation. She gave a little snort of self-deprecation. ‘Look at me. My heart’s all a flutter over a couple of pounds of bacon. That’s what Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill have done between them.’ She shook her head. ‘Thank you, Tom. You’re a good man.’
He looked away, unsure what to say or do. His eyes fixed on the clock. ‘Do you not need to pick up the bairn? I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking about the time when I was waiting, I just wanted to…’ He got to his feet, his face pink. ‘I’ll come again.’
She heard the stumble of his boots in the hall then the click of the latch. She tossed the bacon on to the counter and turned off the pan of water. It would be a different soup now.
Moira had always been the lucky one.
Thursday 28th June 2007; Newton of Wemyss
Jenny’s eyes came off the middle distance and focused on Karen. ‘I suppose it was about seven o’clock when it dawned on me that Mick hadn’t come home. I was angry, because I’d actually got a half-decent tea to put on the table. So I got the bairn to her bed, then I got her next door to sit in so I could run down the Welfare and see if Mick was there.’ She shook her head, still surprised after all these years. ‘And of course, he wasn’t.’
‘Had anybody seen him?’
‘Apparently not.’
‘You must have been worried,’ Karen said.
Jenny shrugged one shoulder. ‘Not really. Like I said, we hadn’t exactly parted on the best of terms. I just thought he’d taken the huff and gone over to Andy’s.’
‘The guy in the photo?’
‘Aye. Andy Kerr. He was a union official. But he was on the sick from his work. Stress, they said. And they were right. He’d killed himself within the month. I often thought Mick going scabbing was the last straw for Andy. He worshipped Mick. It would have broken his heart.’
‘So that’s where you assumed he was?’ Karen prompted her.
‘That’s right. He had a cottage out in the woods, in the middle of nowhere. He said he liked the peace and quiet. Mick took me out there one time. It gave me the heebie jeebies. It was like the witch’s house in one of Misha’s fairy stories - there was no sign of it till suddenly you were there, right in front of it. You wouldn’t catch me living there.’
‘Could you not have phoned to check?’ the Mint butted in. Both women stared at him with a mixture of amusement and indulgence.
‘Our phone had been cut off months before, son,’ Jenny said, exchanging a look with Karen. ‘And this was long before mobiles.’
By now, Karen was gagging for a cup of tea, but she was damned if she was going to put herself in Jenny Prentice’s debt. She cleared her throat and continued. ‘When did you start to worry?’
‘When the bairn woke me up in the morning and he still wasn’t home. He’d never done that before. It wasn’t as if we’d had a proper row on the Friday. Just a few cross words. We’d had worse, believe me. When he wasn’t there in the morning, I really started to think there was something badly wrong.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I got Misha fed and dressed and took her down to her pal Lauren’s house. Then walked out through the woods to Andy’s place. But there was nobody there. And then I remembered Mick had said that now he was on the sick, Andy was maybe going to go off up to the Highlands for a few days. Get away from it all. Get his head straight. So of course he wasn’t there. And by then, I was really starting to get scared. What if there had been an accident? What if he’d been taken ill?’ The memory still had the power to disturb Jenny. Her fingers picked endlessly at the hem of her overall.
‘I went up to the Welfare to see the union reps. I figured if anybody knew where Mick was, it would be them. Or at least they’d know where to start looking.’ She stared down at the floor, her hands clasped tight in her lap. ‘That’s when the wheels really started to come off my life.’
Saturday 15th December 1984; Newton of Wemyss
Even in the morning, without the press of bodies to raise the temperature, the Miners’ Welfare Institute was warmer than her house, Jenny noticed as she walked in. Not by much, but enough to be perceptible. It wasn’t the sort of thing that usually caught her attention but today she was trying to think of anything except the absence of her husband. She stood hesitant for a moment in the entrance hall, trying to decide where to go. The NUM strike offices were upstairs, she vaguely remembered, so she made for the ornately carved staircase. On the first-floor landing, it all became much easier. All she had to do was to follow the low mutter of voices and the high thin layer of cigarette smoke.
A few yards down the hall, a door was cracked ajar, the source of the sound and the smell. Jenny tapped nervously and the room went quiet. At last, a cautious voice said, ‘Come in.’
She slid round the door like a church mouse. The room was dominated by a U-shaped table covered in tartan oilcloth. Half a dozen men were slouched around it in varying states of despondency. Jenny faltered when she realized the man at the top corner was someone she recognized but did not know. Mick McGahey, former Communist, leader of the Scottish miners. The only man, it was said, who could stand up to King Arthur and make his voice heard. The man who had been deliberately kept from the top spot by his predecessor. If Jenny had a pound for every time she’d heard someone say how different it would have been if McGahey had been in charge, her family would have been the best-fed and best-dressed in Newton of Wemyss. ‘I’m sorry,’ she stuttered. ‘I just wanted a word…’ Her eyes flickered round the room, wondering which of the men she knew would be best to focus on.
‘It’s all right, Jenny,’ Ben Reekie said. ‘We were just having a wee meeting. We’re pretty much done here, eh, lads?’ There was a discontented murmur of agreement. But Reekie, the local secretary, was good at taking the temperature of a meeting and moving things along. ‘So, Jenny, how can we help you?’
She wished they were alone, but didn’t have the nerve to ask for it. The women had learned a lot in the process of supporting their men, but face to face their assertiveness still tended to melt away. But it would be all right, she told herself. She’d lived in this cocooned world all her adult life, a world that centred on the pit and the Welfare, where there were no secrets and the union was your mother and your father. ‘I’m worried about Mick,’ she said. No point in beating about the bush. ‘He went out yesterday morning and never came back. I was wondering if maybe…?’
Reekie rested his forehead on his fingers, rubbing it so hard he left alternating patches of white and red across the centre. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he hissed from between clenched teeth.
‘And you expect us to believe you don’t know where he is?’ The accusation came from Ezra Macafferty, the village’s last survivor of the lock-outs and strikes of the 1920s.
‘Of course I don’t know where he is.’ Jenny’s voice was plaintive, but a dark fear had begun to spread its chill across her chest. ‘I thought maybe he’d been in here. I thought somebody might know.’
‘That makes six,’ McGahey said. She recognized the rough deep rumble of his voice from TV interviews and open-air rallies. It felt strange to be in the same room with it.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘Six what? What’s going on?’ Their eyes were
