they couldn’t do that now, or almost never. Mari had changed from the rosy-cheeked provocative girl she had been when she married into a white, frightened woman. She was afraid of anything worse happening to them, afraid of anything that might disturb the fragile equilibrium they lived by. She was afraid of another handicapped baby. She was afraid for Dickon, now and in the future when the two of them wouldn’t be here to care for him any longer. She was afraid of Nick turning on the Means Test man, who came to peer insultingly at their back kitchen in search of any unexplained luxuries that might point to money coming in beyond the bare minimum they existed on. If there was any hint that they earned money elsewhere, their tiny unemployment benefit would be cut off. She was afraid of any of them falling ill, because there was nothing spare to pay for that. And she was newly afraid of Nick’s convictions, the flaring beliefs that made him revile the soft options, the ‘company unionism’ that was threatening to spread in the hard times, and despise the owners and the government for their agreement that increased the miners’ hours to eight a day underground again, instead of seven and a half. She was afraid that Nick would never get a job again. He had stepped too far out of line. His name was known to the owners and their agents.
And all her fear seemed to trigger off the very opposite in Nick, as if he had to stand firm for both of them. He clung harder to what he believed in, to the socialist ideals that earned the nickname ‘Little Moscow’ for their corner of the bleak, depopulated valleys. It made him angrier, and more determined, and somehow less knowable. It didn’t make him any easier to love. And now he was setting off to march to London, and she was afraid of being without him.
With a sob, she dropped the bag and went to sit beside him. He put his arm around her, warm and protective.
‘Have you got to go?’
‘You know I do. If I don’t, why should anyone else bother? It’s something we can do to make people across the country look at us, and think about us. If we can just get public opinion with us, Mari. The Miners’ executive are meeting MacDonald again, to try to win him over, make him understood what we want, and why. He’s not to be trusted, but Henderson is on our side. The march might make the difference.’
Mari’s face was wet with tears. She hated the words. They were too familiar, too impersonal.
‘Can’t you let the others go for once? Stay here with Dickon and me. We need you more than they do.’
Gently Nick let her go. ‘You know I can’t do that. It’ll only be two weeks. I’ll get a ride back somehow.’
He took up a blanket wrapped in a gabardine cape that had belonged to his father. He strapped it beneath the bag, then swung the bag on to his back. It hung there, tellingly almost empty.
‘Best to be travelling light,’ Nick said. ‘It’s time to be going, love.’
They left the room in silence. It was very early, hardly light yet, and Dickon was still asleep in the other bedroom, no more than a cupboard at the stairhead. Nick stooped in the doorway and knelt by the low bed to kiss him. When the child was asleep he looked like any other little boy, the liveliness briefly rubbed out of his face by oblivion. Nick looked at him for a long moment, hopelessly wishing.
‘You’d better have something before you go,’ Mari said flatly.
She went down to the icy kitchen and stirred the fire under its blanket of coal dust. With a horseshoe of solidly twisted newspaper she coaxed up a brief blaze and set the kettle on it. Then she brought the heel of a loaf out of the pantry and sliced it, spreading it carefully with thick dripping out of a blue-glazed bowl.
‘I don’t need that,’ Nick said. ‘You and the boy have it.’
‘You’ve left us more than enough money,’ Mari said.
That was true. Nick was setting out to walk to London with hardly more than a shilling in his pocket. He sat down in the armchair to pull his boots on, glancing first at the oval patches worn almost through, and the split already gaping between the sole and the upper.
‘You could have done with new boots,’ Mari said.
He smiled at her suddenly. ‘So could every man setting out this morning, I dare say.’
Mari handed him his tea, in the precious china mug that he had bought for her long ago at Barry Island. The tea was sweetened with a hoarded tin of condensed milk. Dickon could finish the rest. He loved licking the thick yellow stuff off a spoon.
Nick drank gratefully, looking at her over the rim of the mug. ‘Remember that day?’ he asked, and she nodded. It had been their day together, and the day of the explosion too. There was no happiness without an equal or deeper seam of sadness, Mari thought bitterly. Even if he were to walk twice round the world, Nick couldn’t change that.
He was anxious to be off now, like a small boy before an adventure. He bit impatiently into one piece of bread and dripping and wrapped up the other to go into his bag.
‘Here,’ Mari said. From a drawer she produced two flat bars of chocolate and slipped them into the bag too. She had put by the money for them secretly, buying less food for the week and doing without when Nick was out of the house. Nick didn’t try to protest. He understood the gesture and the price of it. He smiled crookedly instead, then put his arms round her and kissed her.
‘I’ll eat a square a day, and think of you,’ he promised. She felt light in his arms, birdlike, and small for the weight of responsibility that he felt towards her and Dickon, dependent on him. Nick suddenly thought of saying that he wouldn’t go after all, that he would stay because she wanted him to. But the men were waiting for him at the bottom of the hill. He had to go. He had to act on what be believed in, otherwise how could he justify the belief?
‘I won’t come down with you,’ she whispered. ‘Because of Dickon.’
Nick kissed her again and they shivered, held against one another. Then he lifted the bag and the blanket bumped awkwardly.
‘Two weeks,’ he promised, and walked out into the dark, dripping entry. Someone had scratched WORK, NOT WALKS on the bricks.
Mari listened to his steps receding into silence, and then stared round the kitchen at his empty mug, and the imprint of him in the armchair where he had bent to lace his worn boots.
It was so cheerless without him that she was almost crying again. When he was here they quarrelled, repetitively and wearyingly, and when he was gone she couldn’t bear it.
Upstairs Dickon began calling her. ‘Mam. Maa-am.’ He had only a few proper words. The others that he used most were ‘Dad’ and ‘More’. Even Dickon was beginning to understand that there usually wasn’t any more, but his endless repetition of it was one of the day’s painful refrains. Mari sighed.
‘I’m coming, love,’ she called up to him.
Nick squared his shoulders beneath the straps and set off down the hill. The wet slate roofs of the houses shone like mirrors, and smoke from the chimneys already hung like greasy bunting over them. The air smelt of coal as it always did, gritty and rough at the top of his lungs, cut through with the rival scents of damp and, very faintly, of frying food. The streets were deserted. Those who had work were already there, and it was too early yet for the knots of aimless men to gather and talk on the street corners.
The arranged meeting point for the Nantlas marchers was the old pit gates. It had never reopened after the explosion, and the heavy padlocks and
