‘If I had offered him money, Dandy, we’d never have got through,’ Alec said. ‘And I’d be on every TUC blacklist in the land.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘Do you think so? You seem to have got a very romantic view of miners from that hour in the clay pit years ago. Or was that just a story? Splendidly quick-thinking if it was, I must say.’
Again he said nothing, his silence going strong until we were well onto the South Bridge, where we saw another collection of men at the side of the road outside the university. ‘We might just slip straight through here if we’re lucky, Dandy,’ Alec said, ‘since they’re concentrating on the student volunteers, but you’d better get in the front seat beside me anyway, just in case. I’m sure that’s what made the last lot think I was a taxi.’
‘No need,’ I said. ‘There he is now – look.’
Up ahead of us I had glimpsed the white-blond hair and the determined set of the thin shoulders and indeed it was Mattie, weighed down by two huge baskets from Mrs Hepburn, half a mile into his nine-mile trudge home to his mother for the day. Alec touched the horn as we drew up beside him and Mattie smiled at the two dogs who were standing on the front seat, with their heads nosily out of the side window. Then he frowned in puzzlement as he glimpsed me. I opened the back door.
‘Hop in,’ I said. ‘I’m coming with you, Mattie. Mistress’s idea – mistress’s orders, in fact. We’ll take you there and back and have a nice chance to talk without those girls listening.’ I gave him a bright smile and although his face fell he knew that argument would be fruitless. Pushing his baskets in in front of him, he joined me.
After that, although we were stopped by another three checkpoints before we made it out of town, Mattie was the golden key which unlocked all doors. He only had to mention his surname – MacGibney – and say where we were bound and the linked arms unlinked themselves and rose in the air to wave us on our way.
‘Very good of you too, sir, madam,’ said another of the badged leaders, not half so grim-jawed or cold-eyed as the first, now that we had Mattie to our credit. ‘And you tell your grandad that Wullie Armstrong was asking for him, son, eh?’
Between all these stops, there was less time than I had imagined to pin Mattie back against the upholstery and begin to extract from him the secrets I was sure he was keeping, but leaving him to stew with nothing more than my confident assertions and vague threats for his mind to work on would, I told myself, lead to a greater unburdening in the end.
‘It’s the doors, you see, Mattie,’ I said. ‘Mistress and I and Superintendent Hardy have been talking over and over this terrible business and we know that there’s something fishy going on about the doors.’
Mattie gave a fearful look at the back of Alec’s head.
‘Don’t worry about Mr Osborne,’ I said. ‘He’s helping Hardy get to the bottom of all this for mistress. Anything you want to tell me you can safely say in front of him. And if you don’t tell me today, it’ll be Superintendent Hardy tomorrow, maybe in the house but maybe in the police station. So be a good sensible boy. I know you know more than you’re telling.’
‘You’re wrong, miss,’ said Mattie. ‘I d’ae ken nothing about what happened to master that night. Not a thing. Swear on my life.’
‘You know something you
think
is nothing to do with what happened to master,’ I said. ‘But you must tell me – or Mr Hardy tomorrow; that’s your choice – and we will decide whether what you know is important.’
‘I d’ae ken nothing,’ he said again.
‘We’re here,’ said Alec from the front seat. ‘Best leave it for now.’
We had to pass right by the colliery to get to Mattie’s village and, although Alec cruised along quite unconcerned and Mattie even waved out of the window at his acquaintances, I could not help drawing back into shadow at the sight near the gates to the mine. There were perhaps a hundred strikers there: wiry, hard-bitten, dirty-looking men in caps which hid their eyes. Some were singing in rough and raucous voices and some were silently smoking thin, home-made cigarettes but all had their fists clenched and were beating time against their legs and stamping their feet too. Once again, there were no police to be seen, only three men in the grey suits and round collars of clerks, whistles around their necks and sticks in their hands, watching the strikers with impassive faces from inside the chained gates.
We passed this dreadful tableau and followed a bend in the road to find ourselves at one end of three long rows of brick terraces with washing strung between them, filling their little yards. It was unlike any village I had ever seen: no shops, no real streets, and no church spires nor inns nor schoolhouses – nothing except those three long straight rows set down at the edge of some rough fields. Women began to appear at the doors and come out into the yards at the sound of the motorcar, and when Alec pulled up and Mattie stepped down one of them rushed forward and gripped his arm.
‘Whae’s this?’ she said. ‘What have you done now?’ She looked too old to be the mother of the boy but was surely too young to be his grandmother and no one else would grip his arm and shake him in that way.
‘They’re chums, Mammy,’ said Mattie, standing up well to the grabbing and shaking I thought; clearly it was no more than he was used to. ‘Miss Rossiter is one of the maids at ma work and Mr Osborne is mistress’s auntie’s chauffeur that’s gave me a lift.’
Mattie’s mother let go of his arm and brushed his hair back, just once and rather briskly, by way of an affectionate greeting. I felt a flush of guilt at my first reckoning because, on closer inspection, she was probably younger than me, only rather tired and ill served by her coiffure and her toilette in general. She had Mattie’s fairness, and such looks take careful managing in the middle years.
‘And look, Mammy,’ Mattie said, dragging one of the baskets out of the motorcar. ‘From Mrs Hepburn. Cakes and pies and cheese and all sorts.’
At this a few of the neighbour women who had drawn close to watch, shifted from foot to foot and looked sharply at Mrs MacGibney.
‘Well, that was good of her,’ she said. ‘That’s the wifie that’s the cook, eh no? That’s very kind. Well, you take one and maybe Mr Osborne would take the other one and get them over to the institute for sorting.’
The women who had been watching her stepped back a little then and seemed to let go of a collective breath. Mrs MacGibney did not miss it and she turned on them.
‘What?’ she said. ‘Did you think I would jist . . . Tchah!’
‘I have a few bits and pieces in the boot too,’ Alec chipped in. ‘Where is the institute, Mrs MacGibney? Perhaps I could just drive right to its door.’
Unseen by us all, a man had joined us, a fair-haired, stringy man, resting on a crutch and with one trouser leg swinging empty below his knee.
‘Bits and pieces o’ whit?’ he said. ‘We’ll have none of your blacklegged muck in our village. Who are you, anyway?’
Alec went around and threw open the boot. The women clustered in and the man with the crutch, surely Mattie’s brother, hobbled over to peer at a perfect cornucopia of loaves, waxed butcher’s parcels and bottles of beer.
‘It’s all from the Co-operative Society,’ said Alec. ‘And I’ve got the chit if you want to see it. I told them it was for you out here and they let me take as much as I could carry.’
The wiry man pushed his lips out and in for a minute or two and then, tucking his crutch further under his arm, he held out his hand to shake Alec’s.
‘John MacGibney,’ he said. ‘Much obliged, brother.’ Then his face finally cracked into a grin. ‘It was the beer that swung it, mark you.’
‘Now, get you away in and say hello to your grandad, Mattie,’ said Mrs MacGibney, ‘and I’ll get over to the gates and get the sorting committee off the picket to see to this lot. We cannae leave meat to spoil, the warm day it’s getting.’
Mattie ran ahead into one of the cottages, taking the dogs (they had been a great hit with him), but I dawdled, keeping step with John MacGibney on his crutch.
‘Is it as bad as all that then?’ I said. ‘Already? Are there no shops nearby?’
Mr MacGibney gave me the kind of look one would bestow on an idiot child.
‘Mr Mair that manages this place shut the shop when he locked us out on Monday,’ he said. ‘And between the two wee shops in the toon there’ – he gestured over the hills with his crutch although no sign of a town could be seen – ‘one willnae serve any of us – it’s one of the Scott chain and Mr Scott plays golf with Mr Mair – and the other one’s full of blackleg stuff they’ve got they bloody students bringing in from Leith so it would choke us. Pardon me, miss, eh?’
‘So you’ve no food?’ I said.
‘Not so bad as all that,’ he said. The way he spoke told me that his pride was pricking him and I kicked myself. ‘The Congress have been good to us – sent a Co-op van out on Wednesday and the weans get their piece and milk at the school but it’s no’ long running out again.’
‘I knew the stories of striking teachers weren’t true,’ I said. ‘Yesterday’s bulletin said the teachers were more likely to be spreading propaganda for Churchill than coming out in sympathy.’
Young Mr MacGibney gave me a sideways look and for the first time I saw a trace of Mattie’s fine looks about him.
‘You’ve been reading the bulletin?’ he said. ‘And you a lady’s maid.’ We were halfway along the row of cottages now – the front row facing out onto the fields and hills – and John turned in to an opening between low walls and pegged across the few feet of tiled yard which made the front garden of the MacGibney residence. The door was open onto a small porch and in it, hung on nails, were two sets of clothes, black as soot and smelling like it too, three cracked and blackened boots resting below them. There were sheets of newspaper pinned to the wall behind to keep the distemper clean.
I edged past the bundles and stepped into a small kitchen-cum-living-room where Mattie was standing in front of a fireplace range, still holding the dogs’ leads while Millie and Bunty submitted to a thorough patting – what, in parts of Scotland, with some accuracy, they call a ‘good clap’ – from an old man sitting there.
If I had seen him in the street I should have guessed at a sailor, from the white beard and the two layers of knitted jerseys, one buttoned tightly over the other and a woollen scarf tucked down inside both. Something about the curve of his pipe had a nautical air too, unlike the usual straight cob pipe of the Perthshire villager I was used to seeing at home. But whenever he coughed, as he soon did and continued to do throughout our visit, it was the cough of a miner; deep, reaching, painful to hear (let alone to produce) and not a souvenir one could possibly have brought home from a life in the salt breezes.
As soon as the paroxysm had passed, he put his pipe back in his mouth and looked up at me out of two very small, very round black eyes (I found it hard to resist the fancy that they were little nuggets of coal pushed in amongst the wrinkles and shining there).
‘And who’s this fine lady you’ve brought home to us, Mattie?’ he said.
‘Fanny Rossiter, Mr MacGibney,’ I said, bobbing a curtsey. ‘One of the maids.’
‘I’m Mr Morrison,’ said the old man. ‘Trudie’s faither, but call me Grandad, hen, like everyone and you’ll no’ go far wrong.’
My smile was not merely a performance of Miss Rossiter’s, judged to be required and delivered accordingly. For one thing, my own grandfathers were a distant memory and I had not used the word for many years. For another, I could not help warming to the easy mucking in and shaking down of the lower orders as I had found them. There were proprieties to be observed, it was true, but it was far from the minefield I had foreseen. Grandad Morrison’s next words confirmed my view.
‘Aye well, you’ve picked a bad time to come looking for a bun,’ he said to me, ‘but there’s tea to spare, so you get it made like a good girlie and I’ll take mine black with three sugars, please.’
‘Grandad!’ said Mattie. ‘Miss Rossiter is mistress’s lady’s maid. She disnae even make her own tea in the house, never mind here.’ But I had taken off my gloves and, grunting a little, had heaved the enormous black kettle off the range and over to the sink to fill it. I was determined to make a good job of this, for the MacGibneys might have tea, but I was sure they did not have
anything
‘to spare’ and I would not be the one to waste what there was. I had just balanced the kettle on the edge of the sink to rest my arms when Mrs MacGibney’s voice came from behind me.
‘What?’ she said. ‘You’ve nae need to be tipping that water oot, it’s this morning’s and it’s fine yet.’
‘Of course, of course,’ I said, flustered. ‘I wouldn’t dream of such a thing. I was going to fill right up and make a good potful.’ Of course it was at that moment that I noticed the lack of any tap spouting out into the little china sink under the window, noticed the two tall cans standing on the wooden draining board at its side, realised that there was no piped water in the MacGibney kitchen and saw that I had just, with my assumption that there would be, played the grand lady far worse than if I had sat down, crossed my ankles and snapped my fingers for my tea. Mattie’s mother had two patches of red across her tight cheeks as she took the kettle out of my hands, set it back on the range and topped it up from one of the cans, all without speaking.
‘So, what can we dae for you?’ said John, ending the silence at last. ‘What brings you out here the day?’
‘Was it not you driving the car then?’ said Grandad. ‘I thought you’d given wee Mattie a hurl.’
‘I came with Mattie,’ I said, ‘because mistress didn’t want him to be alone. He’s been very upset.’ It was the only thing I could think of in time.
Mrs MacGibney stopped with a half-f bottle of milk in mid-air (she had been sniffing it to see if it were fresh enough to put in our tea).
‘What’s wrong?’ she said. ‘What’s happened noo?’
The old man made a noise almost like spitting and John shook his head at Mattie.