‘Shut up!’
‘Yes, darling…’ His jocularity was cut short by the honk-honk of a car horn, and he turned his head sharply and exclaimed, ‘Ah, good. Here’s David;’ then he added immediately, with less enthusiasm, ‘Good God! he has Dan with him.’
Half turning towards her, he exclaimed, ‘I’m sorry about this, dear. It’s David’s father-in-law; he can be a bit of a trial. Sorry.’
The car that drew up slowly against the kerb was a 1912 Rolls-Royce. The back of it was cab-like; the front, although roofed, was open at the sides; and at the wheel sat a very tall man, who on first sight appeared to be black-skinned, although closer inspection showed him to be a half-caste: his skin was a deep chocolate-brown; his hair was black but not frizzy, and altogether he looked a handsome young fellow. In contrast, his father-in-law, Dan Egan, was an undersized man with a thin face, one cheek of which was scarred as if by a sword thrust.
‘Hello there, David.’
‘Hello there, Joe…Hello…hello, madam.’ David had hesitated on the word, and Elaine, looking hard at him, merely inclined her head by way of reply.
‘Did you have a good journey?’
‘Yes, amazingly so, David; hardly anyone on the train.’
‘They’re frightened to come ’cos they won’t get back; the whole bloody lot stops the night. We’ll show ’em.’
Both Joe and David exchanged glances as Dan Egan, addressing himself solely to the windscreen, went on, ‘The country’s behind us, every man jack. I’ll bet they’ll remember the third of May, nineteen twenty-six, for years to come. We’ll show ’em.’
Joe settled his wife into the back seat, then took his place beside her; and David, after stowing away the luggage, got behind the wheel again and started up the car. And all the while Dan Egan went on talking. And it was impossible not to listen to him; the only alternative would have been to close the dividing window, but Joe couldn’t do that.
‘Less wages and longer hours. By God! would you believe it. But we won’t budge. No, not a bloody inch. Not a penny off the pay, not a minute off the day, that’s Cook’s law, and of every man jack of us. Baldwin, Churchill, the lot of ’em…somebody should put a bullet through Churchill; he calls us the enemy; the working man’s the enemy of the country, he says. Aye well, by God! he’ll see what enemy he’s up against afore we’re finished with him. The Samuel Commission. Did you ever hear owt like it?’ He now turned to glare at David. ‘Improve the industry, they said; amalgamation of smaller pits, they said; better working conditions, they said, such as pit-head baths. Pit-head baths, I ask you! Longer hours and less pay they’re offering us, but they’ll go to the expense of pit-head baths. They talk like bloody maniacs, the lot of ’em, bloody maniacs. Baths…clean their arses…’
‘Dan!’ Joe was leaning forward now, tapping him on the shoulder. ‘You know what they say in the club; ladies present.’
Dan Egan glanced over his shoulder and met the cold gaze of Elaine, and his head made the slightest movement of acknowledgement as he said, ‘Aye, well, I’m a bit het-up, you see. Sorry.’ Then looking full at Joe, he added, ‘I suppose you think I’m taking a liberty ridin’ in your car; well, I never asked to. I was on me way back on me feet when David here spotted me and he said you wouldn’t mind.’
‘No, no, of course we don’t mind. And we understand it’s a very testing time.’
‘Testin’!’ The head was turned away now, the gaze and the voice directed towards the windscreen once more. ‘Testin’, that’s puttin’ it mildly, lad; there’ll be skull and hair flyin’ afore this is over, you mark my words. At midnight a national strike starts: transport and railway workers, heavy industry, gas, electricity, the whole blo…lot. The whole country’s behind us.’
Squeezing Elaine’s hand, Joe looked at her helplessly as Dan continued to talk while the car sped over the bridge into Gateshead and through the town and on into Fellburn; and there it skirted the docks and Bog’s End, ran by the park and up Brampton Hill, past the large residential houses standing in their own grounds, and on through the new suburbs which were built on yet another hill, from which could be seen the headings of the Beulah pit and the pit village in the distance; then past the walled estate of Lord Menton, which gave way to a stretch of open country that rose slowly upwards to Joe Remington’s home, the house known as Fell Rise.
You couldn’t see anything of the house until you topped the Rise and there, in the distance, you saw what looked like a miniature church spire. Not until you were well past the belt of trees, past a large paddock and had turned in through the iron gates and up a drive bordered by larches, did you realise that the spire was the roof of what appeared to be a glass observatory.
This part of the square tower rose above a number of red-tiled roofs and was enclosed in glass from where the whole surrounding countryside could be viewed. One could imagine too that each room on the second floor of the house had its own separate roof for there were four lead-lined gutters running into pipes down the front of the house. Below the deep eaves the walls were covered to almost the ground-floor windows with wooden scrolling. All the woodwork was painted red, as was the main door, from which four shallow steps led down to the shingled drive.
To the left of the drive the shingle gave way to a paved courtyard, one side bordered by outhouses and stables, the latter now used as a garage. At right angles to this were the kitchen quarters; and set deep into the wall of the third side of the patio, in the main house, was a huge stained-glass window.
To the right of the drive the house was bordered by a narrow terrace from which two sets of steps led down to a wide lawn. This itself was edged by the netting of a tennis court; and around the whole area were well tended flower beds. The remainder of the seven acres of grounds lay at the back of the house: there was a kitchen garden, at the end of which were four long greenhouses, and a formal rose garden; then a small lake and woodland.
As David drew the car to a stop in front of the main door, Joe jumped out, then held out his two hands to Elaine, saying, ‘Well, here we are! You’re home, Mrs Remington.’ He assisted her from the car, took her arm and escorted her to the foot of the steps; but there he pulled her to a momentary halt and called over his shoulder, ‘Be seeing you, Dan. Thanks, David.’
There was no reply from Mr Egan, nor one from David, except that David inclined his head towards him, smiled and nodded.
‘Must you, darling?’
‘Must I what?’
They were at the top of the steps now and Elaine, smiling faintly, said, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter; I suppose it’s you.’
‘Oh, you mean saying goodbye to old Dan?’
‘Yes, I suppose that’s what I mean.’
‘Well—’ There was a slight alteration in the expression on Joe’s face: the buoyant breeziness faded for a moment and his broad features became set as he stared at her before saying, and with no lightness in his tone now, ‘You don’t understand them yet; but then, you’ve got a lifetime for that.’
As he went to open the door it was almost pulled out of his hands, and they were confronted by a small stout woman, and when she exclaimed, ‘Well! well! I was up with himself and didn’t hear you,’ he replied jovially, ‘Hello there, Mary. Well, here we are then.’
‘And only just in time, I’d say; another day and you wouldn’t have got back.’
Mary Duffy was speaking to Joe but she was looking at her new mistress, and to her she now added politely, ‘I hope I see you well, ma’am, and you enjoyed your honeymoon.’
‘Yes…yes, Mrs Duffy; thank you. Although naturally I was sorry it had to be cut short.’
‘Well, there’ll be more than that cut short afore this is over, I’m thinkin’…I’m glad you’re back.’ She was looking at Joe again. ‘Himself is still away up there; his legs are givin’ him gyp, an’ don’t I know it: he must have sharpened his temper at the same time he was stropping his razor this mornin’ ’cos he hasn’t got a civil tongue in his head, not even for the cat.’
‘Well’—Joe pushed the old woman gently in the shoulder—‘don’t tell me you can’t deal with his temper, you’ve had plenty of practice. The day you let him off with anything I’ll know you’re slipping.’
He turned now and looked to where his wife was ascending the stairs; then, bending swiftly to Mary, he said, ‘A nice tea, China, in about twenty minutes. And I hope there’s plenty of hot water.’
‘It’s as usual.’
Mary Duffy watched young Joe, as she thought of him, running up the stairs after his wife, and when he had disappeared from view she did not immediately return to the kitchen quarters but remained perfectly still, for in her mind’s eye she was picturing a little boy descending the stairs for the first time on his own, one small hand trying to encompass the stout rails of the balustrade, while the other pushed off the hand that would have assisted him.
The picture in her mind moved on, and she saw the boy at the age of seven standing practically on the spot where she was standing now, his eyes and throat full of tears, and endeavouring not to let them flow while he waited for his mama to come down the stairs and escort him to the boarding school for young gentlemen. That had been the end of one long fight and Mama had had the final word. ‘Justice is a woman,’ she had been fond of saying. Aye, and she was right, justice was a woman, and she had passed sentence on himself; she had made him pay for his misdeeds, more so than if he had stood before the final judge.
And now it was as if the years had slipped away and the past was the present, for that bit of short-skirted humanity who had just gone up those stairs was as like his mam in face and manner as if she had been born again. It was strange, very strange that he should choose one like that…
Still, things were more even now. Young Joe might be like his father in lots of ways, stubborn, self-willed, and vulnerable, aye, vulnerable, but he had one up on his father: he’d had education and he could use his tongue; he wouldn’t have to resort to bloodies and buggers and blasts and sods to get over what he meant, and in doing so scorch the sensitive ears of his lady wife. No, young Joe could sieve the thoughts in his head through his teeth, and when they hit you they stuck in like splinters. No, that young madam wouldn’t have it all her own way as his mother had had, and she thanked God for it. But as yet he was running like hot butter all over her.
Tea, he said, in twenty minutes, China. She swung her heavy body around and walked slowly towards her kitchen.
Elaine had removed her outer clothes and was now taking in the sitting room that adjoined the bedroom, the room Joe had said was once known as the boudoir. It still had traces of that boudoir about it, which Elaine had already decided in her mind she would eliminate as soon as possible, for the betasselled velvet pelmets cut down the light from the two windows, one at the front of the house looking south, the other set in the west wall, giving a view over the gardens. Then there was the Louis XV suite: a very nice framework, but the tapestry had lost all its original colour and was threadbare in parts. Well, she would alter that too.
‘What were you saying?’ She looked up at Joe as he bent down towards her and repeated, ‘I was saying, Mrs Daydreamer, how would you like to accompany me to the floor above and say hello to your father-in-law?’
‘Oh, Joe!’ She gave a little impatient movement of her head, even while smiling at him. ‘I want a bath and a change of clothes, and more than anything I want a drink.’
‘Well, as I told you, tea should be up at any minute now. No; I said twenty minutes.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Another ten minutes. But it isn’t tea you want, is it?’ He poked his face down towards her, and when she smiled at him with compressed lips he kissed them before straightening up, pointing his finger at her and saying, ‘No drink before dinner.’
‘Don’t bully me.’
Again he was bending over her; again his lips were on hers; then, holding her face gently between his hands, he said, ‘Who could ever have the heart to bully you? Persuade, coerce, flatter, beg, but not bully.’
Gently she pressed herself from him and laid her head against the back of the couch, and, smiling at him softly, she said, ‘Go and see your father. Tell him I’ll be up as soon as I’ve had a bath and changed and had…a sup of tea.’ She mouthed the last words in an imitation of the Northern dialect.
Joe smiled happily as he left the room, hurried across the wide square landing and ran up the stairs to the second floor, where his father had spent most of his time for the past three years.
Why a man who was suffering from severe arthritis in most of his joints should want to spend his time in this part of the house, where the four large rooms were partly attics, was puzzling until you actually entered the rooms; then the views from the windows provided one answer. But the main reason that kept Mike Remington up here most of his time was that two of the rooms were used as his workshops.
Mike had been an engineer before he became a businessman; now incapacitated, he had returned to his original trade. In a small way, it could be said, for he worked in wire and wood. Slowly and painfully he created churches, houses and ships. However rough he might be with words and towards people, he was, and always had been, tender with wood.
The last but not the least of the attractions of the second floor was that if you had the agility to climb the steep staircase, you had a view from an observatory that was second to none in the county, for on a clear day you could see beyond Fellburn to the bridges that spanned the river at Newcastle; and in the opposite direction, away over the pit-heads, you could see the upper outline of the mighty cathedral at Durham.
When Joe pushed open the first door on the landing he was surprised to see his father sitting by the window that overlooked the drive, his gnarled, twisted fingers idle for once.
When the head was turned towards him, Joe said quietly, ‘Hello, there. What’s the matter? Have you decided to go on strike before the others? You can be blacklisted for that, you know.’
He was now standing in front of the man whose shoulders covered the back of the chair and still gave off the impression of strength, as did the big iron-grey-haired head above them. Although the flesh on the face was sagging, particularly around the eye sockets, his father was still handsome. But it was the clear steely blue of the eyes that gave power to the face, and now they were directed on his son, and what they saw made some part of him ache, for it was as though he were looking inwards at himself when his body had been vital, his back straight and his joints moving freely in their sockets.
‘You’ve been in the house fifteen minutes,’ he said accusingly.
‘Have I?’ Joe looked at his watch. ‘Yes, you’re right; fifteen minutes. What did you expect me to do? Bound up the stairs and leave my wife, my new wife, to find her way around?’
‘Summat like that.’ There was a quirk on Mike’s lips now which gave way to a smile, then a chuckle, in which Joe joined.
‘Well, how did it go?’
‘Like any other honeymoon.’
‘That’s not sayin’ much.’
Joe now turned and, pulling a chair forward, sat down, saying, ‘Everything’s fine, except that we could have done with another week. I cursed the strike.’
‘You wouldn’t be the only one; there’s going to be hell to pay afore this lot’s over. Just imagine it: the whole bloody country coming out; everything at a standstill; it’s unbelievable.’
‘How about our lot?’
‘Oh, our lot.’ Mike scratched his ear. ‘Well, you’ve got something on your hands there, lad, I can tell you.’
‘But more than half of ours aren’t union men.’
‘No, that’s true, but a good third of them are. And if sympathy doesn’t get the rest to join, the name blackleg hurled at them often enough, or being dragged up an alley and the guts beaten out of them, might help to change their minds.’
‘Aw, I don’t think it’ll get that far.’
‘Lad, you know nowt about it; so far in your life you haven’t seen men really hungry. An
d that’s not the worst. They can go without it themselves, but when their wives and bairns have cramps in their bellies for want of a bite, then I say, look out!’
‘What does Geordie think? He’s in charge, he should know the feeling.’
‘Aye, he does, ’cos like me he’s seen this happen afore. Oh aye, he knows the feeling all right; he’s got reason to. He remembers being punched silly by some bloke from Birtley. He was in the pits then, just a young lad. His father had died and was buried down below—they never found him—and he had to support his mother and four young ’uns, an’ so he went back, along with some Irish the owners had brought in. He said never again, never again. There was no room in the pits for him after that, and that’s when he came to me. Oh, Geordie knows the feeling all right. He’s particularly mad at this minute ’cos of the order that’s just come in.’
‘What order?’
‘Well, what were you after afore you went away.’
‘Oh, you mean the wireless cabinets. It’s clinched?’
‘Aye it’s clinched.’
‘Oh, that’s splendid.’
‘Splendid? Yes, as you say, splendid, if you’re able to make them, but if they come out, what about it?’
‘Well, it’ll certainly hold things up, but I can’t see them being out for more than a couple of weeks or so; the country wouldn’t stand it.’
‘You’d be surprised, lad, what the country’ll stand. An’ you’ll be surprised at what those bloody miners’ll stand to get a fair deal. Mind, I’m not for them’—he stabbed his finger at his son—‘but at the same time I’m not agin them, for God knows only starvin’ men and bloody madmen would go down a pit anyway.’
‘Some like it.’
‘What?’
‘I said some like it working down the pit. It’s a way of life. You know it is.’
‘I know no such bloody thing. They go down because there’s no other way for them to get their bread. Anyway, after you’ve had a bite I think you’d better get along there and have a crack with Geordie. You won’t see any of the men, they’ll likely be gone by then, but try an’ find out what that Barry Smith and Bill James is up to, because they’re two bloody red Russians, and they’re the ringleaders, if I know anything. I should ’ave given them the push years ago.’
Justice is a Woman Page 2