And the Land Lay Still (79 page)

Don only had two months left till he turned sixty-five and he knew the miners’ strike would be won or lost regardless of his intervention but nevertheless he went back to Wullie Byres.

‘What’s gaun on, Wullie?’

‘What dae ye mean?’

‘Ye ken fine. Ye’ve pulled half your lorries aff the usual jobs and they’re aw cairrying coal intae Ravenscraig.’

‘So ye ken fine yersel. What are ye asking me for?’

‘Ye’re making money hand over fist and ye’re helping tae break the strike.’

‘What dae I care aboot the strike? It’s a job.’

‘What I care aboot is it’s scab work.’

Wullie raised himself off his chair and leaned on his knuckles across the desk.

‘Dinna you fling that socialist shite at me, Don Lennie. The miners’ strike is nane o my concern. If they want tae die in the trenches for that arsehole Scargill that’s their business. My business is tae take a contract when it’s offered and deliver on it. Dae ye think I’m gaun tae leave it tae Yuill and Dodds tae make a killing? The money’s too good no tae take. And, by the way, it’s keeping the likes o yersel in a job. So dinna gie me ony mair shite aboot scabs.’

‘Ye’re paying the drivers bonuses for gaun in there.’

‘Aye, and what for no? It’s dangerous work. Ye seen it on the telly? If that mob gets a haud o them they’ll be torn limb frae limb.’

‘The lorries are getting damaged. These extra guys ye’re hiring think they’re Starsky and Hutch. They don’t gie a damn aboot onything forbye the cash they get in their pockets.’

‘Och, Don, come doon aff your soapbox. Was there ever onything else
worth
giein a damn aboot? Oh, and by the way, I can see where this is heading. Ye’ll no service ony vehicles that are being used tae cairry coal, is that it? Ye’ll no repair a lorry that’s been driven by a scab? Ach, well, it’s your choice. Ye’ve been here a lang time, Don, ye’re weeks awa frae your pension and I wouldna like tae see the back o ye afore ye’re ready tae go, but listen hard tae me. If ye start ony o that secondary action nonsense ye’ll be oot, and sae will onybody else that joins in wi it. That’s no an idle threat and this time I’d hae the law on my side and you wouldna hae a leg tae stand on.’ He paused for a moment, breathing fiercely, and then his big ugly face split into a grin. ‘Or even a soapbox. Noo fuck off, will ye. I dinna like playing the heidmaister tae a man o your years.’

Don had always thought a principle was a solid rock standing against the tides of compromise and storms of greed. To his dismay, he found principle crumbling like sand, and that half the men in the shop didn’t give a toss about it. ‘Aye, it’s aw very weel saying support the miners, but what aboot supporting the steelworkers?’ And even the ones that were sympathetic sighed and said, ‘What can ye dae?’ And what about himself? The best he could do without the support of the other men was to go slow on the tools, take longer to fit a new part or sign off a job, but it wasn’t heroic, it wasn’t noble, and it went against another principle – his belief in doing a sound job.
Basically, he was pissing in the wind. He felt old, ashamed. God knows what he was going to do when he retired – there was only so much gardening a man
could
do – but as the day loomed, for the first time he began to look forward to it.

He’d always had a fancy to read the classics. Dickens and suchlike. Maybe he’d read his way through Charles Dickens.

§

David Eddelstane woke in the dark and the low rumble was there at once. He lay still and listened, trying to identify its source. Refrigerator, dishwasher, plumbing? No. Digestive system at work? No. Melissa’s snoring? No. Melissa didn’t snore, she breathed like a princess. Gossamer breaths. She slept deep and dreamed sweet dreams. So did the children. Not like him. When had he last had a decent night’s sleep? And he remembered about the rumble, how there wasn’t any point in trying to locate it. It was a noise that woke him most nights but it wasn’t really a noise at all.

Very gently he slid out of bed, found his slippers and put on his dressing gown. At the door he paused. There was a night-light on the landing and in its dim glow he looked back to see Melissa’s curled shape beneath the covers. If she’d heard him get up she wasn’t acknowledging it. He felt an urgent need to protect her from everything. He creaked softly along the passage and checked in each of the children’s bedrooms. Both out for the count, as sound as their mother. Jessica, nearly twelve, about to leave childhood behind, lay with one arm flung out as if she were hailing a taxi. Daniel, approaching nine but small for his years, had his hands crossed on his chest, a mouse at prayer. Another surge of love went through David. He went downstairs to the kitchen, boiled the kettle, made himself a mug of weak tea. The oven clock said 03:15. He padded along to the study and sat at his desk, switched on the green-shaded lamp and turned it away so it shed only a little, calming light on the desk. There was a box of Kleenex. There was also a small pile of correspondence from constituents, a much larger one of briefing papers and policy documents from party HQ and God knows what else but he hadn’t come here to deal with any of that. He actually enjoyed the paperwork; he liked being an MP; he felt a real pride in the role. But he was here now because it was the
middle of the night and he could be alone and, relatively speaking, at peace.

He’d read somewhere that lots of people heard background noise – a rumble or a distant whine – and that there were many weird and wonderful theories about what it was they were hearing. All bollocks, as far as he was concerned. If he sat here long enough the rumble would diminish and, if he did what he needed to do, it would stop altogether. He knew what
his
background noise was. It wasn’t external at all. It was inside his head and it was the sound of existential panic. Some had black dogs, some had nightmares; David Eddelstane MP had a low, constant rumble.

The nearest real sound he could liken it to was the drone his father, Sir Malcolm Eddelstane, made for two days on his deathbed, slipping in and out of consciousness. As if he were trying to laugh, or trying not to, as what was left of his brain blundered off into the dark after seventy-three years of self-indulgence, most of them drink-sodden.

If Lady Patricia made a noise when she followed her husband into the great unknown two years later, nobody knew what it was. She died at the breakfast table not long after the first slice of toast and the second cup of coffee. Massive stroke. Only sixty-five. Mrs Thomson’s daughter, who’d ‘inherited’ the job of cleaning Ochiltree House from her mother, found her. David imagined his mother might have said, ‘Oh, hell’s bells!’ or ‘Not now, for God’s sake!’ before putting down her cup and heading off with whoever’d come to get her. He wondered if it had been his father.

The low sound of panic. He heard it fading a little. The silence that grew to replace it was wonderful.

Freddy, now living in New York, where he worked, if that was the word, in publishing, had come home for both funerals, naturally. Lucy hadn’t, naturally. But even Freddy had seemed supremely indifferent to the passing of his parents. For himself, David had been surprised – and still was, at unexpected moments – at how upset he was to lose them. They had been such big, spoiled children. He just wished he could have understood them better, not been so intimidated by their rosy-cheeked loudness. Too late now, though. His father would tell him to stop snivelling. His mother wouldn’t be far behind.

He suffered from the panicky sense of always being trapped, pulled between opposing desires, contrary forces. The desire to please others, the desire to please himself. The forces of moderation and restraint, the forces of radical action. Politically this division manifested itself simultaneously in, on the one hand, appreciation and awe for the dynamic, deadwood-slashing verve of Mrs Thatcher and her most devoted disciples, such as the Member for Stirling, Michael Forsyth; and, on the other hand, a strong preference for the company of Tories of the old school, the lawyers and landed gentry he understood. Men like his father-in-law, Roderick Braco, from whom he’d ‘inherited’ Glenallan and West Mills at the ’79 election. They were all, without question, wherever they were on the dry–wet spectrum, immensely grateful to their leader; they admired her to a man for her conviction, and perhaps not only in David’s case there was the added frisson of sexual fear and desire; and to the question that she now no longer needed to articulate – ‘Is he one of us?’ – they all responded, self-referentially, with enthusiastic affirmatives. But sometimes, in a secluded corner, one or other of the old school would, tentatively, advance the view that yes, well, that might be the case, but … ‘
She’s
not really one of
us
, is she?’

Of course David agreed with the dismantling of the excesses of the Welfare State. Of course he wanted to see an end to the dependency culture, especially in Scotland where it was so deep-rooted. He favoured the reining in of the trade unions, the control of irresponsible local authorities, the outsourcing of services to private contractors, the privatising of the utilities, the reduction of income tax, the sale of council houses, the renewal of the independent nuclear deterrent. Of course he supported these policies, and voted for and defended them whenever and wherever he was called upon to do so. As you unfettered capital, and made it easier and more profitable for people to do business, capital would grow and businesses flourish. This was obvious and he himself was proof of it. He had extensive property portfolios in London and Edinburgh, and shares in various companies collecting refuse, repairing roads, supplying electricity and providing care for the elderly. These were only the start. He was a rich man. He had already been rich when he and Melissa moved into her parents’ Glenallan home and the Bracos retired to one of David’s finest properties in the heart of Edinburgh’s
New Town. He had been made richer by the sale, after Lady Patricia’s demise, of Ochiltree House. With its idyllic setting and its two acres of ground (complete with planning permission for a sixteen-house ‘executive-style’ development with the main house to be renovated and divided into four ‘luxury apartments’) it had been very desirable indeed, and had realised a handsome sum – just as well, as there had been precious little hard cash in the parental coffers. Freddy had received half the proceeds and David the other half, Lucy still being a non-person, or non-Eddelstane at least, when it came to legacies. They had talked about a ‘goodwill gesture’ towards their sister but Freddy hadn’t seen any reason for one, and when David had said he’d helped her out in the past and would do so again if required, Freddy had said that was his choice, but nothing to do with him. ‘You won’t get any goodwill back,’ he’d warned, but David already knew that.

On paper and in property, if not in actual cash, David had long since made that first million Q, his old mentor when he’d first gone to London in the 1960s, had dreamed of. Neither he nor his family were ever going to starve. And in time jobs and enterprise and prosperity would trickle down to the bottommost layers of society. Yet despite all this – the rolling back of socialism at home, the crumbling of Soviet power abroad, his own personal success – he had qualms. He had, and not just in the middle of the night, panics.

He wondered what they had unleashed. He had thought it would be beautiful but sometimes it wasn’t, it was ugly. He disliked the appearance of Qs everywhere, brash and callous and uncaring of anyone beyond their own circle. Was this snobbery on his part? Certainly. The Qs were the human expression of precisely the trickle-down effect he wanted to see happen. So what was his objection? Perhaps it was a deep-seated mistrust of the excess, the flaunting of wealth, the fact that more and more people seemed to be able to make vast amounts of money out of nothing. He was a part of it but nervous of what might flow from it. Where did it all come from? Yes, of course, at one level he knew the answer, he knew how he himself had made his fortune. But while all this was going on the country appeared to have given up making
things
, real, hard
things
. And the communities that had made things had been flattened. Had it really been necessary to lay Teesside and South Wales and Lanarkshire
so utterly to waste? Was it necessary to humiliate and destroy the miners quite so completely? Wouldn’t that all be visited upon the nation somewhere down the line? What if it all went hideously wrong? What if Great Britain plc collapsed?

He wished somehow – impossible, he knew, but still he wished – things could be as they had been. Settled rural communities. Cities and industrial areas doing their bit, and places like Glenallan able to go on quietly being themselves. But the Thatcherite revolution – and he applauded it, he really did – had ended the idea of quiet continuity.

He thought of the oil pumping ashore north of Aberdeen. Astonishing feats of engineering had been performed to extract oil and gas from the depths of the sea. Amazing ingenuity combined with hard sweat and great braveness had achieved a daily production of two and a half million barrels of North Sea oil. Without that the public finances would be a disaster. Nobody mentioned this fact. The SNP whined about how prosperous an independent, oil-rich Scotland could be, and the other parties rubbished their claims, partly because they didn’t dare admit that without the oil revenues the whole of the UK would be bankrupt.
Don’t mention the oil!
It was the great unspeakable of the age.

In 1983 his vote had gone up slightly on the previous election. Given the landslide victory nationwide, he should have won by ten thousand. In fact his majority was barely half that. On such a showing his fellow Conservative MPs in England would be looking around for a safer seat. But Glenallan and West Mills was about as safe as it got in Scotland. Not safe at all.

His left hand clutched the mug of tea. His right hand clutched his penis through his pyjamas. Like a nervous wee boy. This was the thing, then: he didn’t feel safe any more.

There was no
reason
for his panic. There’d be another election in a year or eighteen months and there was absolutely no
reason
to suppose Maggie wouldn’t romp home again. Maybe there would be some casualties. Maybe he’d be one of them but he didn’t think so. Glenallan couldn’t go any other colour than blue, surely, and West Mills was getting nicely divvied up between the socialists and the Nats so he should be all right. Throw in a scattering of Liberal supporters and all he needed was about 35 per cent of the vote. He
remembered his father worrying about this kind of thing, and thinking Roderick would come a cropper. Well, that was more than twenty years ago and here
he
still was. There was no reason to panic.