The Northern Clemency (64 page)

“They couldn’t find anything to pin on her,” Bernie observed, later that night, as they were getting ready for bed. He took off his string vest, dropping it in the bedside laundry basket, and then his old watch with an unhooking gesture. He laid it carefully on the bedside table next to the alarm clock. He sneezed, and shivered in his pyjama bottoms, string-tied at the waist. He rubbed his sides.

“I don’t think there’s anything there
to
pin on her,” Alice said, sitting up in bed, looking over her book—she’d been reading
The Far Pavilions
for four weeks now, persevering with it; handling seemed to have increased its bulk by half as much again. “She didn’t know anything about any of it.”

“She must have wondered,” Bernie said, and sneezed again.

“I worry that you’re not eating properly,” Alice said. “That’s the fourth night running you’ve come in late and just picked at cold.”

“It’s nothing, just a summer sniffle,” Bernie said. “It can’t be helped, working late at the moment. I don’t like it any more than you do, you know. It’s not like you to start nagging.”

“I’m not nagging,” Alice said, astonished that Bernie could even think such a thing. It must be his tiredness. “I’m just worried about you, working all the hours God sends. We didn’t move up here so that you could start knocking yourself out like this. You’re working yourself to a frazzle.”

“Won’t go on for ever,” Bernie said. “They can’t last six months.”

“Who can’t?”

“The miners, love,” Bernie said, laughing despite his exhaustion. He never got over how vague Alice could be about what he did at work for the Electric. There was a day, when they’d been married five years, when he actually asked her what she thought they made electricity out of. He’d never do anything so cruel again—it was agonizing, how painful she found the explication of her own ignorance. “I’ll tell you something—if I were Scargill, if I wanted to make things difficult, I wouldn’t have called a strike in spring. Look at the weather—demand for coal’s never been so low.”

“That’s what Malcolm was saying,” Alice said, cautiously and nervously. “At least they’re having nice weather for their strike.”

Bernie wondered again, but left it. “So she’s in the clear?” he said.

“In the clear? Katherine. Yes, I suppose she is,” Alice said, obscurely.

“They couldn’t pin anything on her, as I say,” Bernie said.

“Yes,” Alice said. “Yes, that must be right.”

“So—”

“What do you mean, so?”

“What’s on your mind, then? You don’t seem relieved that she’s out of trouble.”

Alice paused, setting down her book on her lap. That was true. There was some kind of fret tinging her thoughts when she contemplated Katherine’s escape. And there had been something in the constantly maintained dissatisfaction and bewilderment in Katherine’s face that made her think that Katherine, too, couldn’t understand why she wasn’t more relieved. Alice felt that Katherine, much as she loved her, had got away with something that she’d actually done. She hadn’t cooked the books, she wouldn’t know how—Alice often found it difficult to ascribe skills to women she knew that she herself didn’t possess and couldn’t have mastered. But she’d done something wrong, she knew that, and she wasn’t being held to account for it. Where the court was that would judge Katherine, and find her definitively guilty or not guilty, that Alice didn’t know, and understood that Katherine didn’t know either. Those decisions had been promised, and now she was back where she had always been, with the ongoing sensation, not the single redemptive statement of guilt.

“She’s still got to be a witness,” Alice said.

“She won’t like that,” Bernie said. “Either sticking up for Nick or owning up to what he’s done. She’d decided she didn’t want anything more to do with him, yeah?”

“It’s not a pleasant situation,” Alice said.

“It’s her own fault,” Bernie said. “I don’t know how Malcolm puts up with it, to tell you the truth.”

“I don’t think he does,” Alice said. “What time do you have to be up in the morning?”

“Six thirty, love,” Bernie said. “I’m sorry about all this. It’s not going to go on for ever. You should find yourself a nice posh boyfriend with a flower shop, keep yourself busy while your husband’s fannying about and worrying himself to a frazzle over the levels of coal stocks.”

“That’s not funny,” Alice said, getting out of bed in her summer nightie, frilly and halfway down her thighs. “I’m just going to put my face on,” she said, sitting down at the dressing-table and pulling the jar of cold cream as she always did.

“Not just yet,” Bernie said, as he always did.

“Well, all right, then,” Alice said, wondering whether there was anyone else in the world who still went to bed together, meaning, well, went to bed, every night, as the two of them did after thirty years of
marriage. She didn’t much care whether anyone else did or not. Good old Bernie.

“I saw him once,” Bernie said, nuzzling into her neck and taking the hem of her nightie, scrunching it up on either side in his fists, in the way he had. He had lost his pyjama bottoms. She felt the sharp hair on his back and shoulders against the soft skin under her chin as he buried his face in the gap, which, yes, it seemed her neck and shoulder naturally made for it, yes, it did. “I saw him once, her Nick. I went into the shop, and I bought a bunch of flowers. Kept him running around. I was playing the Cockney big-shot, didn’t know what I wanted, might be orchids, might be roses, might be lilies. Couldn’t believe his luck. Running around with his ‘Yes, sir, no, sir, a very wise decision, sir.’ Posh little sod, isn’t he? Not much sense in his face, though. I wouldn’t lend him twenty quid and hope to see it again.”

“You never brought me flowers home,” Alice said.

“I’ll tell you why. That’s because I gave them flowers to me girlfriend,” Bernie said.

“Get off,” Alice said. She didn’t even have to think about it.

“No, straight up,” Bernie said, but he couldn’t keep it going, and started laughing in the middle of what he was doing, perhaps envisaging the girlfriend he could never have had. “To be honest, what I did, I asked him to make up this bunch of flowers, told him I was just taking a leisurely stroll around the block to collect, I can’t remember what I told him, say it was my dry-cleaning I had to collect. And would he make it up before I got back. Forty-pound bunch of flowers it would have been, like a bleeding wreath. And then I strolled round the block all right, but I strolled round the block to the car and I drove home.”

“Bernie,” mock-pushing him away, “that’s terrible.”

“Getting my own back, or not my own back, revenge on Malcolm’s behalf. Husbands sticking together. Little sod.”

“I still think that’s a terrible thing to do. He’d not done you any harm.”

“Course, she’d stopped working there by then, or it was her day off or something, she wasn’t there or she’d have recognized me. She’d have known I wasn’t serious. Forty-pound bunch of flowers.”

“He’d have told her about it—Bernie, hang on, just a second, let me—I said, he’d have told her about it when she came in the next day,” Alice said. “Described you. She’d have known who it was.”

Because for Alice, there was only one person in the world who could ever have looked like Bernie.

“I’m not surprised you keep out of her way now,” Alice said.

“Oh, I don’t care,” Bernie said. “He probably sold the whole bunch to the next mug who came in, anyway.” And, pretty soon, Alice didn’t much care either. There were things that were always worrying Katherine, making herself fret and nag on the other side of the road. There always had been and there always would be. In Bernie’s arms, though he had to get up in seven hours’ time, Alice thought there had never been much reason to join in, and that was the end of it.

The heat of the morning was turning even Orgreave into an idyllic setting, it seemed. Tim and Stig had been dropped by Trudy, who had hurtled away, hardly even slowing to let them out, and they had taken an indirect route through the little town, not wanting to be seen by any of the groups of policemen gathering at the street corners. They were trying to look as much like sons of the miners living in Orgreave as possible, and dived down one cul-de-sac after another, jumping over back walls and into back ginnels, kicking over dustbins. They only had the faintest idea of where they were going; the coke works was at the far end of the town, they knew, that was all. “Oi!” a woman shouted from her back door, and they jumped over another wall and ran.

They came to the back end of a cul-de-sac, and paused; there was no one around, but you could feel something brewing nearby in the tension in the air. It was just heat; it was just the pressure of history in the air; it was just the mutter of voices somewhere within a few hundred yards. One of those. Stig straightened in an unsuspicious way, gesturing with his thumb, and in a second, joyously, Tim and Stig were suddenly among what must have been a late group of miners, slipping down against all attempts by the oppressive forces of the police, and there they were in a crowd of T-shirted and bare-chested miners at the gates of the coke works. There they were.

On the grassy slopes about the gates to the works were hundreds of idling miners, like seals on a beach, or perhaps like pleasure-makers in a municipal park. It was already hot, and most of them were lazing in the sun; booted and trousered, but in T-shirts, like Tim and Stig, or bare-chested, as if they were sunning and tanning themselves. Tim and Stig walked a little way up the slope, sat down in an empty stretch, reclining back on their elbows. Stig set down his rucksack with the radical leaflets inside; they’d distribute them later. “Who the fuck are they?” Tim heard someone say, and was about to turn his head to stare.
Stig murmured, “Don’t look round,” and he was right; some of these people had a weird proprietorial attitude towards their legitimate protest; some even objected to the presence of people like Tim and Stig, directing the ideological aspect of the martial festivities. It didn’t seem to occur to these people that they might be doing the ruling class’s bidding, policing the substance of the protest on their behalf. It didn’t seem to occur to these people that this struggle was not just a battle over pay and conditions, another in the long line of particular protests. This was a battle over the substance of the country, the nature of the land and who owned it, and it was not just for the miners, the card-carriers, to fight, but for the people of the land, all of them, the concerned ones. So if an unenlightened miner said, “Who the fuck are they?” you didn’t turn round. You didn’t turn round and say, “I’m fighting for you, but I’m fighting for everyone, too.” In any case, at the moment, everyone was sitting enjoying the sunshine on the grassy slope, so it would have sounded a bit daft.

Everyone, that is, apart from the policemen. The town had been full of policemen, standing around on street corners like old women nattering; they’d been there to stop people like Stig and Tim, but Stig and Tim had got through. Down here by the coke works, there were lines of them by the gate. They hadn’t been allowed to take off their shirts and jackets; they were red-faced with the heat already at nine thirty in the morning. They looked good-humoured, and were even swapping caustic comments with the groups of miners down there, some kind of tense banter, you could see. Behind them, the police vans; spilling out of them, like a mound of winged insect carcasses, the riot shields, the helmets, that might be needed later.

Tim started to look around him, now that they were settled and somehow absorbed in the group, a little less the object of curiosity. There were small islands of miners here and there, some reclining like them or sitting, others squatting or standing, their characteristic bow legs apart, their hands up to their eyes, shading them. They were gossiping, swapping stories, in high good humour. Some of the men were going from group to group, bearing information, instructions. He couldn’t imagine what this could be, until one passed them, and, looking at them with only a touch of scepticism, said, “The scabs’ coach, it’s set off now.” At the top of the hill, there was a phone box, and men were crowding round it. That, clearly, was the nerve centre of the operation, the place where information spread from, a field telephone in a red box with broken glass windows. Tim looked back, towards his
nearer neighbours, and the lad in the group next to him, reclining just like them, gave him a frank grin and, with a disclosing gesture, lifted up the edge of his screwed-up T-shirt on the ground. It was covering half a brick. Tim grinned back, self-consciously. He wished he’d thought of that. Give them something to do with the riot shields.

“There he is,” Stig said, in a voice that said he’d been expecting this all along. Tim looked and he was right: it was Arthur there, visiting the men, striding from group to group with a little entourage. He was dressed more like your dad on a weekend, and his hair, complicated in arrangement but perfectly held, glistened in the sun like a badge of distinction.

“Who’s that with him?” Tim said.

“You’re kidding,” Stig said.

“No,” Tim said. “How the hell did he manage that?”

Because at the back of the little entourage, there was Vikram, of all people. He didn’t seem to be with any of the others from their gang, and it was pretty clear from the way Scargill’s temporary friends and associates were looking at him that they didn’t know who he was, and didn’t think he should be around. He must have found himself in the midst of the Scargill entourage, and taken the opportunity to tag along, but if he had any sense he’d peel off soon. Tim restrained the urge to wave; anyway, Vikram was looking directly towards them without making any gesture of recognition.

Time passed; it was quite pleasant sitting there. You almost wished you’d brought something to eat, a picnic. The policemen went on chatting; the miners wandered from group to group, and it looked, as the half-hour succeeded the hour, much more like social exchanges than the dissemination of strategy or tactics. It occurred to Tim that this might, in the end, turn out to be nothing much, that their information was wrong. They’d sit in the sun for a few hours, and drive home with burnt red face and arms. He’d put some factor sixteen on before he left home, slightly embarrassed about it; but he did burn, and it was painful when it happened. If they were there for more than three or four hours, he’d burn anyway.