by Susan Hill
There was a jerk into life again, people took hold of one another and went onto the floor to dance, the band quickened up. They had lost interest in her, or pretended to.
‘You like dancing,’ Lem Roker said, ‘so finish that and we’ll dance.’
‘I shouldn’t dance, not tonight.’
‘Why else did you come?’
Why else?
She sensed that someone was looking at her. Mary, a few yards away, eyes on Rose’s face, telling her not to dance, not to stay in a corner alone with Lem Roker, urging her to leave. Rose looked away.
Mary watched them dance, following every move, and without glancing at her Rose knew what her expression said. Mary was right but now the band was playing with even more life and energy and she loved this dancing. Lem, was good at it for all his size, quick on his feet and with an easy rhythm. People watched them and forgot to look away and Rose felt defiant and light as air.
He would walk her home, he said, and what did it matter if they were noticed and remarked upon, she might not be safe alone.
Rose laughed. ‘It’s safe enough here. Nothing ever happens.’
‘Nothing at all.’ Then they both laughed and he would have taken her arm, but they had neared the corner from which they could see her house, and the light on in the front window.
‘Charlie.’ She pulled away from Lem and flew down the street, hearing voices of others coming from the Institute but not daring to glance back.
11
THEY WERE SITTING in the midday sun, can of tea between them, cheese and bread and pie just crumbs on the slab of rock.
‘That was a good day when you found your way up here,’ William said. Ted drained his tea and wiped his mouth. The July warmth fed his bones. He had no need to reply. They both knew. Whenever he clambered down the steep track home he felt the walls closing in on him and his spirit shrivel and darken. He went for his mother’s sake. If she had not been there he would never have left the farm.
He lay on his back, arms behind his head. William was trying to get his pipe to light. The sheep were quiet. Afterwards, Ted’s single frozen moment of memory was of the quietness, the heat of the sun, the smell of the first thin plume of tobacco smoke, the taste of tea in his mouth, the firmness of the ground beneath him. They seemed to be caught and held. Time had stopped. But that was afterwards.
The sound of the explosion rocked the hill, as if it had happened in the earth immediately below them but then broken open the sky too. The reverberations went on and on. The sheep took off, bleating wildly, surging away up the steep track. William was on his feet first, Ted scrambling up while he was still bewildered by the vastness of the sound. William was yards ahead of him while Ted was standing like a boulder.
‘Run, boy, run.’
‘What happened?’
‘Pit explosion,’ the farmer shouted over his shoulder, slipping and almost falling on the dry track, recovering his balance and bounding on. ‘Run, boy!’
Ted ran.
Every door stood open, every man and woman in Mount of Zeal who had use of their legs was making for the pithead, men who five minutes before had been asleep pulled on clothes as they ran, women scooped babies out of cribs and carried them swaddled, and dragged small children. William and Ted were behind but they caught up and raced on down, Ted jumping over walls and taking steps three at a time. The whole area round the machinery was filling up. Men were surging forwards, shouting out that they had come to help, where should they go, women edged close to one another and simply stood. There were shouts, and then vehicles and gear and fire engines, then the whole paraphernalia of disaster attendance. Police came, held people back, shouted at the women not to go nearer.
No one knew, no one came forward to explain, no one had time. Murmurs went round, rumour after rumour flew.
Ted and William Barnes were pushed back.
‘Nothing you can do yet, they’re sending the search crews down, nothing you can do.’
Ted looked round for his father and mother, saw neither at first but then there was his mother, scarf to her face, eyes huge with fear. He reached her and she clung to him, hardly breathing, her body like a rod.
And after that, all they could do was stand and wait, as the cages went down and eventually came up again, teams emerged, returned, went to report. They stood hour after hour and for the most part they were all silent. Only a child called here and there, or a baby wailed. Once, a dog set up howling like a terrible banshee and would not stop until someone threw a brick and it fled, tail down. A few went away and came back with tins of tea. Children were taken home. School had been let out as soon as the blast came. But the inner core of women whose men were below stayed, silent, grey-faced, watching, watching. Waiting.
It fell dark and they brought storm lights and the lights turned the women’s faces moon-coloured and hollowed out their eyes.
It had been clear but after midnight cloud trailed across the sky, thickened and ballooned out. A thin rain fell.
More cans of tea came, and rough-cut slabs of bread and cheese, chunks of fruit cake. More tea. The rescuers stood briefly, downing pint after pint of it and scoffing handfuls of food before getting into the cages and descending again to the hell below.
It went on until dawn. But as a wan light stained the terraces of Mount of Zeal, the lift came up once more and unloaded men whose skin was stained worse than coal black, and who smelled of acrid smoke. And then the lift gates stayed open. No one else went down. A couple of wagons started, revved and drove away. A gang of firemen stood hopelessly together, helmets on the ground beside their feet.
A woman started to keen aloud, and another took up the crying, but they were both shushed into silence, for the noise unnerved the rest of them.
Ted encouraged his mother to turn for home, but she was riveted to the spot where she had first settled and would not shift. He looked round to try and see William Barnes, even while knowing that the farmer must have gone back up the hill hours before. He should go back too. But Evie’s hand was fierce on his arm and he could not leave her.
Word went round at noon and by then soup had been brought and bread and jam and cake. More tea, with a snuff of brandy for the women who had to wait for the final word. They knew too well but could not go until it was given out loud.
The minister came and read prayers and Ted listened to words from the Bible that were stitched into him. Someone sounded a note and the hymns began, slow and hesitant then rising and swelling until they filled the village and rose up and out to the hill beyond.
It began to rain harder, and then to pour. Scarves were tied more tightly on heads, coats drawn round. But they stayed. Evie had not released Ted’s arm for hours, perhaps was not even aware of its being there, but he felt that pulling himself away would tear the skin from her, as if they had been born melded like this and become one.
Just before four o’clock, the pit owner stood on a platform hastily made from a trolley. Those who were left, perhaps thirty or forty people, stood as silent as when a coffin is lowered into the ground.
He was grey, and sweat poured down his face and neck. His voice was unsteady as he read from a sheet of paper handed to him.
The explosion had started an immediate fire, and there had been a sudden collapse and fall of rock at the same time, making two disasters in one. Rescue workers had brought nine miners to the surface. Two died before they reached the air, one as they put him into the ambulance. Four were taken to hospital. Their bodies were variously broken and burned, and even where their injuries were less severe, the shock could still kill them.
Ten men died underground, and because of the fire and the rock fall, rescue attempts had been abandoned. The lives of the fire crew and others were at too great a risk. Orders had been given for the tunnel and chamber to be sealed and left, an outcome everyone in a pit village dreaded and would have given their own lives to avoid. But sometimes, there was no other way and everyone knew that too. The men had lived, died
and been buried and the mine must be their grave.
James Green
Isaac Howes
Richard Belby
Peter Mates
Joel Dunn
James Sawyet
Silas Fermor
John Howker
Clive Howker
Jimmy Howker
PART THREE
12
THERE WERE CLOSE on two hundred sheep and he went to them one by one, even those that were up on the top outcrop which took some scrambling to reach.
William Barnes watched him from the farm gate. He had known the day would come but had hoped against it, not only because Ted was a good worker and had fitted from the start, but because he loved the place and the animals as if they were his own and had never had a bad day. The time he was half frozen to death had been all he had taken off work and even then he had struggled out before he was properly right.
William sucked on his empty pipe, not being due any tobacco until two days hence. He could find another worker but his heart wasn’t in it, not only because one as good would be hard to come by but because he would miss Ted’s quiet, steady company. He could not speak about it, as he had not been able to say a word against the boy’s leaving. He had a duty in Mount of Zeal now his father and brothers were killed and sealed into their death chamber. His mother needed the wage, his sister was living at home and unlikely to get other work because of the shame that had had her dismissed from behind the shop counter. There might be a bit of money in compensation for the accident, but everyone knew how long that took, if it ever came in at all.
He saw Ted coming down the track towards him, his face fallen in and brooding with the misery he felt. He reached the gate and stood beside William, and looked out at the hill, and neither of them could speak.
He was due to go the next morning but while they were still in bed they heard a faint click of the back door latch.
Gerda touched her husband’s side. ‘He couldn’t bear to leave by the light,’ William said.
And it was in darkness that Ted reached the house on Lower, and slipped into his old room and lay on his unmade bed, and stared at the ceiling until morning.
He was taken on at the pit and started the day they opened up again after the explosion and he dreaded going down into the bowels of the mine, and feared what he might see, and the fact that he would be shut in and close to the charred bodies of his father and brother. But he was sent a distance away, along quite a different working, and in any case, the end that had been blown up had been sealed completely and was not identified, save on papers in the management office. Ted would never know.
They set him to work with the ponies at first so that he felt comfortable at once, though he pined, as he believed they did, for the light and air. He hated the taste in his mouth and the thick black dust he breathed in, and the smell on his skin.
Evie had found him when she had come down to the kitchen early on his first morning back, and silently put her arms round him.
‘Will you stay tonight, Ted?’
‘I’m staying for good.’
She had looked at him sharply. ‘No. I’ve lost too many.’
‘You have me back.’
‘And how long before that pit swallows you?’
‘First accident for forty years and you know it.’
‘And not the last. That pit is cursed now.’
‘That’s superstition. You need the wages, you need me here.’
He had set the kettle on and now it shrieked at them, breaking into their angry talk. Evie went to it, not wanting there to be anger but, all the same, unable to stop it from overwhelming her, when she thought about the mine, even more powerfully than her grief.
Reuben’s voice had been silenced now. He sat, holding the black Bible on his lap, forming the words but only air came from his mouth. He was shrunken small and bent and thin as a twig so that the chair engulfed him. But when Ted came into the room his eyes brightened and he fumbled through the thin paper of the Bible pages to find verses the boy had always liked to hear. When he had them he nodded his head until Ted came over, sat down and took the book from him.
‘When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained . . .’
Reuben rested his head against the chair back and closed his eyes.
Ted read until his grandfather was asleep, lulled by the words as he had been lulled by them as a child. He had never known what they meant and he did not think he knew now. It did not matter. The words were the background to his entire growing up and woven into his life like another skin. He realised that he had missed nothing of home during his time at the farm but he had noticed the spaces where the words had been.
13
ROSE HAD DONE nothing more than dance with Lem and let him walk her home, and once he had been waiting for her when she left the shop, and walked back with her then. She had made no secret of it and been defiant in her belief that she had done nothing wrong, and if anyone wanted to tell Charlie, let them. He barely needed telling. Word about something of this sort was breathed out onto the air and breathed in again by everyone else in turn until it reached the person for whom it was intended.
Charlie had thrown everything she had brought with her to his house onto the street, Rose herself last of all, and barred the door against her. That had been a week before the pit disaster and which had been worse for Evie Howker to bear could not be told.
Rose had come home in shame but John and Clive had gone down within five minutes to pick up her things and lug them home, to try and put a limit on her disgrace. If everyone knew what had happened at least they would not be given the satisfaction of having clothes and a trunk, a bedspread and an embroidered tablecloth to gaze upon and pick over. Once they had finished and shut the door again on family privacy, John Howker had told Rose that he could not have turned her away but that he could not welcome her either. ‘I’ll put up with you, but I can never like it. I’ll give you a roof again but I can never think of you as anything but a lodger.’
She could not have borne to return to her married home, but she was a stranger in Lower Terrace, her father barely speaking to her, Evie shaking her head and drawing in her breath every time she looked at her. If Ted had been there it would have been easier. Only Reuben knew nothing of what had gone on and showed no interest in her return.
On the day of the explosion she was in the scullery when the men went, had packed their bait tins and set out their boots, as if she were twelve years old again and obliged to help Evie with every chore. The men had gone without a word, though Clive had glanced back and caught Rose’s eye and forever afterwards she was sure that he had winked at her, though if he had it was for the very first as well as the last time.
When she had heard Ted’s voice from below, she had stayed in her room. Evie must tell him. The deaths of the men, the way the disaster had seemed to explode not just part of the coal mine but the lives of everyone in Mount of Zeal, had made Rose’s crisis fade almost to invisibility. She had been needed by Evie, she had taken over the house and looking after Reuben and her mother without a word, and when she went out, no one looked at her in the old way – perhaps they did not even see her. A household whose men have been taken in a pit disaster is not only marked out, it is spared any comment or criticism of any kind, and for good.
She went down now and found Ted washing the pots.
‘Rosie.’
He was the only one ever to call her this and he did not do so often. Now, it overwhelmed her with sadness.
‘I suppose you’ve heard it all.’
‘Enough.’ He turned to find the tea towel but she had it already.
‘I’ve done nothing wrong, Ted. I know what’s believed about me but I’m the only one to know the truth.’
‘And him.’
‘Lem.’
‘You’ve a husband, Rose.’
‘Don’t come like that to me. I know well what I have and what ki
nd of a man I married.’
Ted stopped her arm as it reached for another plate to dry. ‘Did he beat you?’
‘No, no. I’d have left long since. I would never let a man be rough to me, you should know. I’d have come home and . . .’ Tears came without warning. ‘Told Dad. Told Clive or Jimmy.’
‘Told me.’
‘You weren’t here to tell, you were over the hill on a farm, weren’t you?’
‘It’s not across the sea, Rosie. I would have come. I’d have had his head off if he’d touched you.’ He crushed an eggcup in his hand. It snapped off its stem. ‘What will you do?’
‘Look after Mam, look after you.’
She saw Ted, the small brother grown a man and her grandfather an old one grown small again. Charlie’s face and hands and hair were not coated with coal grime, looking after him had not been like looking after a man such as John Howker and the brothers had been. And now Ted. Lem was a pitman, looked after by a landlady, which could not be the same and did not seem right.
‘I don’t say you have to stay with a man who doesn’t do right by you,’ Ted said slowly, as if working it out before he spoke, ‘but I don’t say you should be seen with any other.’
‘You know nothing about any of it.’
‘No. I expect I don’t. But I know you, Rose, and I want you to keep your good name. What will you and Charlie do? Divorcing is a terrible thing.’
‘Why?’
Ted shook his head, not able to give words to the momentousness of it.
‘So I’m to stay at home for ever?’
He did not answer.
‘Charlie won’t be long on his own. He wanted me out, he’ll want someone new in, and there are plenty who would go. He’s a manager. He stays above ground. He stays clean.’
Evie had gone to bed. She went to bed in the daytime often now, being unable to bear the living breathing world. She slept with the covers up over her face, hour after hour, and slept again through a long night. Reuben slept too, the black Bible slipping off his knees onto the floor with a thump that never disturbed him into waking, though sometimes he gave a little moan, or a sob.