And the Land Lay Still (82 page)

He was quite pleased at how rapidly his anger had boiled over. After all these years of indulging her – because that’s what it was, pure bloody indulgence – he’d finally had enough.

‘You owe me it,’ she said.

‘I owe you nothing. Let me underline that, Lucy. I owe you nothing. The world owes you nothing.’ He dropped his voice, because a woman sitting a couple of tables away had glanced up from her glossy magazine, but speaking quietly only seemed to add intensity
to his words. ‘For years now you’ve sponged off me, and I’ve let you because I felt sorry for you.’

‘Listen, don’t think –’

‘No,
you
listen. You’ve come to me with this cause or that cause in your pocket, and despised me for my politics while expecting me to subsidise yours in whatever pathetic form they take. You know why I’ve done it? Because I care about you.’

‘You don’t care about me.’

‘Yes, I do. Why else would I have gone on handing you cash? I did it so you could feed yourself and pay your debts, and if that meant you carried on in some disastrous relationship with whoever happened to be your ideological flavour of the month, Sharky the beagle liberator or Leon the black brother or whoever, well, that was too bad. My God, I even paid you through your lesbian phase.’

‘Those aren’t real names,’ she said, like a child catching another child out.

‘I know that, Lucy. That’s the point I’m making. Have you ever picked a partner because you actually liked them and not just their politics? As a real person?’

For a moment she looked so hurt he felt guilty. Then she came back at him.

‘So what are you saying? That’s what you did, is it? Melissa fucking Braco wasn’t the perfect political choice for you?’

The woman two tables away cleared her throat disapprovingly.

‘I expect that’s how it looks from where you are. But Melissa and I happen to love each other.’

‘Well, lucky you. How convenient. She ticks all your boxes, you tick hers. That’s all your kind of love is.’

‘And what’s your kind of love?’

‘It’s precisely the opposite. It’s about difficult choices. It’s about commitment.’

He felt completely in control. ‘We’ll have been married fifteen years this September. That’s commitment. We have two children we would do anything for. That’s commitment. They have an aunt they’ve never met, but that’s another story. Fifteen years, Lucy. Most of your relationships are in trouble after fifteen days.’

‘That’s not true. Anyway, the only reason you’re so smug is
because you’ve never had to struggle. You don’t know what the word means.’

He’d had enough. He drained the cold last inch of his cappuccino. ‘
You
never had to struggle, Lucy. You never
had
to struggle. You
decided
to struggle. But that doesn’t make it heroic or admirable. I can admire single mothers in sink estates trying to bring their children up to be decent human beings. I find people scraping a living from rubbish tips in Mexico City heroic. But I just find your kind of struggling infantile and useless.’

‘Plus,’ she said, as if she hadn’t heard any of that, ‘you’re so hypocritical. Playing happily families with Melissa and your brats, as if everything’s bloody perfect. You’re all the same. You’re all cheats and liars. Cecil Parkinson set the standard, smiling that smarmy smile while he was busy shagging his secretary. So who are you shagging, I wonder? Or maybe you’re into something a bit more interesting. A bit more Cynthia Payne, perhaps?’

For a moment his sense of control wobbled. Payne was a celebrated madam whose customers had needs not entirely dissimilar to his own. Did Lucy know something? How could she know something? She hardly knew
him
. She couldn’t know anything.

‘If that’s the level we’ve descended to, I’ve nothing more to say.’

‘So you’re not going to give me my money?’

‘No, Lucy. It’s not yours. You made choices a long time ago about that. I’ll write you out a cheque for five hundred pounds right now. No, let’s make it a thousand, so you won’t starve and can pay your rent this month. But this is the last. You’re going to have to stand on your own feet from now on. I realise, especially listening to the spiteful things you’ve just come out with, that me helping you out over the years hasn’t done you the slightest bit of good. Time for a bit of tough love, perhaps.’

It was a phrase he’d heard quite a bit lately, in relation to curbing youth crime or drug addiction. Don’t indulge, kill the dependency, foster self-reliance and responsibility. It made the kind of American sense he liked, whereas ‘asshole’ he just found lazy and second-rate.

‘Fuck off,’ Lucy said. She pushed her chair back noisily and stormed out. But he knew her too well. She strode up and down outside, fuming, pretending not to look through the window while
he got out his chequebook. Tough love. He imagined himself using it in an intervention in the Commons as he bent over the tiny table and wrote out the cheque. Then he stood up to leave.

‘Sorry,’ he mouthed to the woman with the magazine, who gave him an imperious stare, as if she had no idea who he was, which was probably the case. A little thrill of desire went through him. He paid the bill and stepped out into the cold sunshine.

‘Here,’ he said, and Lucy grabbed the cheque and stuffed it into her pocket.

‘Goodbye, Lucy,’ he said.

‘I hate you,’ she said. Then she turned and marched off.

‘I know,’ he said to her retreating figure. She hated him. What he didn’t yet understand was how much.

§

Jock came home to die. Mary phoned Ellen and said, ‘If ye want tae see him ye’d better no leave it ower lang.’ The next weekend, a hot, dusty Saturday in July, Ellen left Robin and Kirsty in Joppa and drove north to Borlanslogie. The town’s High Street was almost deserted, half the shopfronts shuttered or boarded up. When she turned off the engine and got out she felt the air heavy with despair. Three years since the miners’ strike, two since the pit closed, and the place was dying. She walked to the end of the street and turned left, then second left, the route home. It all looked familiar but felt alien. Did I really come from here? she thought.

Mary had set Jock up in their old bedroom. She’d made a bed up for herself in the front room. ‘Come ben for a cup of tea first, afore ye go in,’ she said, ushering Ellen through to the kitchen. And while she made the tea she said, ‘He’s no looking good, Ellen. Ye’ll be shocked at the change in him.’

‘Why did you take him back after all this time?’ Ellen asked. ‘He never supported us. Why are you supporting him now?’

‘Because we’re man and wife,’ Mary said. ‘I ken he’s no been the best but he hasna been the worst. We’re aye mairrit, efter aw.’

‘But he never –’

Mary cut her off. ‘What was I tae dae, turn him frae his ain door? He’s my husband. And your faither.’ She paused. ‘But I dinna blame ye for no liking him. He wasna there much for ye.’

‘It’s not a question of liking him. I liked him well enough when I saw him. I just feel I hardly know him.’

‘Ye hardly dae,’ Mary said.

She had made the double bed up with extra pillows and a white duvet. Jock, lying in the middle of it, looked like a bird in a patch of snow. He seemed to have shrunk to half his real size. He was dozing when Mary pushed her in – ‘Here’s somebody special tae see ye, Jock’ – but he woke up soon enough and Ellen could have wept at the smile he gave her. ‘It’s yersel, lass,’ he croaked, and then he had a coughing fit and between them the women helped him sit up against the pillows and take a drink of water till his chest calmed down again. The doctors said it was silicosis he had, and maybe that was true, because God knows what was in him from the years of working on the dams; he’d have inhaled clouds of concrete dust in the damp Highland air and maybe there was asbestos in there too, but anyway his lungs were choked and on top of that he’d smoked all his life so one lung was cancerous and they’d taken it out, and now the other didn’t have much more than a month of breath left in it. This was what Mary had told her in the kitchen. ‘I’ll no be able tae keep him here,’ she said, ‘no when the pain gets really bad. I dinna hae the facilities.’ She shook her head as if this were a failing on her part. ‘He’ll hae tae gang tae the hospital at the hinner end.’

She left them to it then, Ellen and Jock, and Ellen sat on a chair beside the bed and talked about Kirsty, whom he’d seen once, when she was about three, and now she was at the big school and thriving, and Robin, whom he’d never met, was fine, and life was fine and she was getting plenty of work, so much that she was turning some down, she had articles every week in the papers and was working on another book so, aye, everything was fine. Jock listened and she held his hand and sometimes she could tell his mind went away for a moment to cope with the pain.

‘Is it sair, Dad?’ she said.

‘Aye, but it’s better than working.’ As if even dying was a bit of a skive.

She said, ‘Dae ye mind all those stories ye used tae tell me?’

‘What stories?’

‘From the hydro schemes. A guy called the Marble Arch, and enormous midges and everything.’

‘Oh aye, them.’

‘I used tae think they were true,’ she said.

He hauled himself an inch off the pillow. ‘What dae ye mean? They
were
true.’ And she laughed but he wouldn’t give way. ‘It was hard, hard labour, lass, in hard, hard weather. Oh aye. But I stuck it oot. Sent the wages hame every week. I did it aw for you, d’ye ken that? And look at ye, ye’re thriving. But I’ll tell ye something, Ellen.’ He had another bout of coughing and needed more water before he could continue. ‘I’ll tell ye something. I’m glad I never went oot
there
.’

With a bony finger he pointed at the window.

‘Where?’ she said.

‘Oot
there
. The rigs. I ken there was big money tae be made but ye’d never catch me sitting on a Meccano set in the middle o the bloody North Sea. Nae chance. Maks me seasick just thinking aboot it. And onywey, forbye the danger there wouldna hae been enough places tae hide frae the gaffer. And noo this Piper Alpha thing. Horrible, horrible. Jump or burn, that’s what I heard. It was jump or burn. Jesus, I canna imagine it.’

But clearly he could. He fell silent imagining it and then he said, ‘Aw the things I’ve seen and done in my working life, I never saw onything like that. And I’m grateful for it, I’ll tell ye.’

He was quiet again, but only for a minute. ‘I did it aw for you, lass,’ he said, as if he’d got stuck in a kind of loop. ‘But I never would hae gane oot there.’ He closed his eyes, and she moved from the chair to the edge of the bed and said, ‘Dad?’ but he was asleep. And she watched him, a wee fledgling, skeletal, with a soft, downy growth of beard on his sunken, papery cheeks and his hand on the duvet so fragile and fleshless she was afraid to take it in case it broke. But she did take it, and she held it as his breath rasped in and out, ten long minutes watching her father ebbing away, and then she let go and went through to the kitchen where Mary was waiting for her.

When Ellen repeated what Jock had said, about doing it all for her and sending his wages home, Mary gave a short, bitter laugh. ‘Believe that and ye’ll believe in fairies,’ she said. She sounded hard and she looked hard but there was something else, a softness seldom revealed but Ellen had known it was there as long as she could remember.

§

After the miners’ strike many Conservatives thought they were invincible. Nothing could stand in their way. This was an illusion, of course, but an intoxicating one. It took the poll tax to shatter it.

The poll tax – or community charge, as it was officially known – was born of the Scottish rates revaluation of the early 1980s. When property owners saw what their new bills were likely to be, they howled, and the Scottish Tories, anxious to appease their own natural supporters, badgered the government to come up with something – anything – with which to replace the rates. It happened that a group of radical right-wing intellectuals, who had first coalesced around the University of St Andrews and later developed their ideas in think-tanks named after luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment, had a solution. They had dreamed up a scheme whereby almost every adult, regardless of circumstances, would pay the same amount for local services: a levy per head of population, or poll tax. This was an offering of such pure simplicity that nobody bothered to consider whether it would actually work. It was seized upon as the answer to the Scottish rates crisis. Margaret Thatcher and others in her government enthusiastically endorsed it, and decided it could be implemented in England and Wales too.

Because the problem and the panacea both emanated from Scotland, it made sense, if you accepted the logic of the tax, to introduce it there a year ahead of everywhere else. But what if you thought the whole idea unjust and unworkable, the tax regressive and grossly unfair? What if you didn’t believe the Conservatives had a mandate to govern Scotland anyway? And what if, after an election in which the proposed tax had been a key issue and the Tories had lost half their Scottish seats, the government nevertheless insisted on imposing it? You might, as Mike did, think that your country was being used as a guinea pig for a massively unpopular tax. You might, as Mike did, recall M. Lucas’s call for resistance. The question was, how to resist?

As with devolution ten years before, there were two opposition camps: there was a non-payment camp, inhabited by the hard left,
anarchists, Nationalists and many others of no particular political affiliation; and there was a camp that held that non-payment would be counter-productive, resulting in reduced income for local government. This second camp was dominated by Labour politicians in the tricky position of having to administer both the poll tax and the services it paid for. They believed they had to behave ‘responsibly’. The first camp thought that the second camp would be doing the Conservatives’ dirty work for them by administering and collecting the tax. The second camp thought that the first camp would be doing the Conservatives’ dirty work by forcing cuts in local services. Together, the two camps might have stopped the poll tax in its tracks. Apart, and fragmented even within themselves, they could only disrupt its implementation.