She’d gone to Edinburgh for the day to do some shopping. It was 8th January 1992, a Wednesday. The sales were on. I returned home from a round of visits at half-past six. Normally when I came in for the evening my first act was to remove the clerical collar and change into casual clothes. On this occasion I went straight to the television to catch the Scottish news: somebody had told me that British Steel had made the long-expected announcement that the Ravenscraig steelworks at Motherwell were to close, with the loss of 1,500 jobs. A reporter read out the company’s statement, which was terse and to the point: market forces dictated that the plant was no longer viable. Adding insult to injury, the chairman, Sir Bob Scholey, was not available to comment. Various Conservative politicians appeared, stammering about sad truths and hard facts; they looked ashen, as if ‘Black Bob’, as he was known, was an old buccaneering crony who had tipped them the black spot. Union officials and red-faced MPs from other parties talked of betrayal, economic disaster, social devastation. But they’d all known it was coming: Ravenscraig, a symbol of the former might of Scottish heavy industry, had been taking cuts and blows for years, and now the big axe had been wielded. Somebody said something about the plant having finally been put out of its misery. Workers driving away wound their windows down and said they were gutted. ‘Nae comment,’ one said, with a face that commented all too plainly.
I was watching this with a kind of futile anger when the doorbell rang. Irritated, I went to answer it. The fact that Jenny was late back hadn’t even entered my mind.
The policeman at the door was one of my congregation, a young lad called Andy McAllister. I said, ‘Oh, Andy, come in. I’m just watching this Ravenscraig shambles.’ Andy had his hat under his arm. He said, ‘I’m really sorry, Mr Mack, I’ve some bad news for you.’
The accident had happened ten miles from Monimaskit, on a twisty stretch of road known as the Glack. Andy didn’t know the exact details, but it seemed that her car had skidded on a downhill bend, maybe on some black ice, and gone into a spin. A lorry was coming the other way. The car slid, driver’s side first, into the front of the lorry. The lorry-driver was unhurt. He scrambled out of his cab to help but couldn’t reach her. It was the days before the ubiquitous mobile phone: he had to run a quarter of a mile to the nearest house to make the call. By the time the emergency services arrived – actually, long before that – Jenny was dead.
We stood in the hall with the TV still going in the background and me staring at Andy in disbelief till suddenly something snapped in me. ‘I’ll just turn that fucking thing off,’ I said, which I did, giving Andy time to recover from one of the biggest shocks in his life. He was well meaning but had a conventional mind: he probably thought ministers had such language scrubbed out of them at college. I came back and said, ‘Sorry, Andy. Are you all right?’
‘Actually, it’s the first time I’ve had to do this,’ Andy said. ‘I just wish it didn’t have to be you, Mr Mack.’ At which point it struck me that he was telling the truth; that what was happening was real, it wasn’t an item on the news about someone else, it was about Jenny, my wife, she was dead, and I was going to have to deal with it.
I leaned against the wall. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I see. I wish it wasn’t me too.’
‘I’m not to leave you alone,’ Andy said. ‘Not unless I’m sure you’re all right.’
‘Where is she?’ I asked.
‘Dundee,’ he said. ‘Ninewells.’
‘I need to go there.’
‘Are you all right to drive? I don’t know if I can take you all the way to Dundee…’
‘I’ll get John Moffat to come with me. I’ll go via his house.’
‘I’ll follow you,’ Andy said, ‘make sure you’re okay. Make sure he’s in.’
‘Andy, you don’t need to do that,’ I said, but I could see that he wanted to, that it would make him feel better to be the minister’s escort at least for the first leg of this difficult journey. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Maybe you’re right.’
We drove in convoy down the coast road. The night was clear and cold: the moon threw a long yellow rope of light across the dark water of the firth. Because it was a minor road the gritters hadn’t been on it yet, and I kept my speed down. I felt as if I was in a motorcade, a funeral procession already. Everything in my life seemed to be in the past. I looked in the mirror and saw the police car keeping a respectful distance behind me. I half-expected Andy to put his flashing blue light on. This is an emergency, I thought. Why are we travelling so slowly? But of course it wasn’t an emergency. The emergency was already over.
John was alone in the house, making the tea; Elsie was on a late shift at the library and wouldn’t be in for another half-hour. Andy came to the door with me. ‘John, something’s happened,’ I said. I turned to Andy and said, ‘Thanks, Andy, we’ll be fine now.’ ‘Okay,’ Andy said, ‘I’m really sorry,’ and he nodded at John, got back in his car and drove away. ‘What?’ John said. ‘What’s happened?’ ‘Jenny’s been in an accident,’ I said. ‘I need you to come to the hospital with me.’ I couldn’t bring myself to say what I had to say. ‘Is she badly hurt?’ he asked. ‘I’ll tell you in the car,’ I said. He turned the oven off, scribbled a note to Elsie and came outside. ‘Do you want me to drive?’ he said. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll drive there, you drive back. I’ll need you to drive back.’ It wasn’t till we were moving that I told him, ‘John, it’s the worst thing you can imagine.’ I needed to be driving. I gripped the wheel so hard I thought it would come off in my hands. ‘Jenny’s dead.’
It took us forty minutes to get to Ninewells Hospital in Dundee. You think, on such occasions, there will be hours of sitting on plastic chairs in hospital waiting-areas; hours of waiting. But she was dead, there was nothing to wait for. We were there around half-past seven. By nine o’clock we had seen her, spoken with everybody we needed to speak to. A doctor explained that there was nothing the people at the scene could have done to save her: she’d been crushed between the lorry’s engine, her steering-wheel and the car’s bodywork. The fire brigade had had to cut her free. What must it be like, I found myself thinking, working away in those circumstances, to free somebody already dead?
One of the ambulance crew was still there, he’d finished his shift. ‘I ken this isna much comfort,’ he said, ‘but it would have been over in a second. She probably didna even feel it.’ I thought of that second. I’d never been in an accident but I imagined it to be something like what I’d experienced that time with my arm, only more intense: I imagined the slow unravelling of everything, the helplessness, the dreamy horror of waiting for the impact. The ambulance man was trying to make it seem better, but I knew a second could last a long time.
The lorry-driver, who was being checked over at the hospital for shock and whiplash, had been breathalysed. He was not at fault, the police said. They’d be making a full report, of course, but their view was that the accident was simply that, an accident: a momentary lapse of concentration, a loss of control on a tight bend, maybe some ice; nobody was to blame. John and I listened, and I knew what they were really saying, as kindly as possible: if anybody was to blame, it was your wife. ‘It’s just one of these things,’ one of the policemen said.
We identified her together, John and I. I’ll always be grateful to him for that. She was in a little room in A&E, a room where hundreds of bodies must have lain prior to being taken to the mortuary. There were cuts on her cheeks and forehead – ten, I counted them – and some bruising, but they’d cleaned her up and she looked astonishingly unhurt. I began to turn the sheet down below her neck, and the doctor put a hand out to stop me. I closed my eyes. I thought, how do I want to remember her, remember this? The doctor was right. When I opened my eyes she was still lying there, unhurt, the red lines of the cuts like bits of thread placed artistically on her creamy skin.
Then without warning I was outside myself looking down, just as I had been on that previous occasion. I saw my hand touching the dark, thick hair that framed her face. My fingertips touched her lips. ‘Oh, Jenny, what have you done?’ I heard myself say. Tears that had nothing to do with me poured from my eyes. John was crying too. I saw us clinging to each other like two old drunks. We staggered from the room, and as we did so the sensation ended, and I was back in my body again. I could not speak. Seconds after it was over I wasn’t even certain it had happened.
There were forms to sign. The hospital staff had taken off her rings, earrings and a bracelet and put them in an envelope. I had to sign for them too. John fetched some tea in two polystyrene cups and emptied several sachets of sugar into each, even though neither of us took sugar. He called Elsie from a public phone in the corridor. Then he took my arm and led me away.
At the main entrance to the hospital a man and a woman were standing in a clumsy embrace. They were middle-aged, in their fifties maybe, and were both haggard and pale, as though they’d just been told that their son or daughter had not come through some difficult operation. Even in the midst of what was going on I could not help noticing them. The man was in a blue boiler-suit. He was much taller than the woman and leaned over her like a sick tree trained to a stake; he wore a neck-brace and he was weeping, dabbing at his eyes with a filthy handkerchief. She was short and fat, in a tweed coat; she had her arms around his waist and was speaking quietly, trying to draw him towards the exit. Between dabs the man saw us approaching. He broke away from her and said, ‘I need to speak to you.’ It took me a moment to realise that he was addressing me.
‘No, no, Duncan, no,’ the woman said, but the man said again, ‘I need to speak.’ He bent sideways to try to look into my eyes. ‘You are the minister, aren’t you?’
I shook my head. I’d never felt less like a minister in my life. John said, ‘The chaplain, you mean? I’m sorry, this isn’t the chaplain. This is another minister. I have to take him home.’
‘But you are the minister,’ the man said, more definitely. ‘It was your wife in the car, wasn’t it? It was my lorry. I was driving the lorry.’
‘Not now, Duncan,’ the woman said, but he couldn’t stop. ‘I could see it was you,’ he said. ‘From your collar and that. And your face. They tellt me she was a minister’s wife. I kent it must be you. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. But I couldna do a thing. She was on to me before I kent what was happening. I couldna do a thing. I’m so sorry.’
I let go of John and stood in front of the lorry-driver. He was solid and broad-shouldered, about my height. His eyes were red with weeping and there were snotters hanging from his nose. He was like a big, blubbery, giant-sized bairn.
I said, ‘Please don’t distress yourself. I know it was not your fault.’
‘No, it wasna my fault,’ the man said. ‘No. Thank you, thank you. I’m so sorry.’ He seemed rooted to the floor. The woman tugged at him as if he were an obstinate weed in her garden.
‘I need to go now,’ I said. ‘I need to go home. You should go too.’
‘Come on, Duncan,’ she said. ‘Let the minister go home.’
And so we went, they to their house of misery, and I to mine.