The Miner’s Girl

by Maggie Hope

‘Of course not,’ his colleague replied. ‘And please offer my most sincere condolences to your stepmother.’

  Tom went in search of a pot of tea in the kitchen. Goodness knows what state Bertha might be in when she awoke.

  Twenty-Eight

  Merry was tidying up after morning surgery when she saw the news article in the Chronicle. Dr Macready liked her to do the cleaning in the surgery rather than leave it to Maisie, who was all right, and was good at cleaning but he still wasn’t sure she understood about asepsis or things being surgically clean or simply clean. And she had a habit of polishing everything in sight.

  ‘Of course I don’t mind doing it, Doctor,’ Merry had said when he mentioned it to her. ‘I’ll do anything at all, anything you think I should.’

  So she was putting the things on his desk straight when she happened to glance at the article in the newspaper he had been reading while he drank the cup of tea she always made for him when surgery was over and before he started his rounds.

  The article was on the front page which was enough to attract Merry’s attention. The headline was: ‘Accident at Winnipeg Colliery. Owner dead and local mine agent injured.’

  Most pit accidents where only one man was killed usually rated little more than a few lines in the local paper but of course this was an owner, a gentleman, not an ordinary miner.

  What she read next made Merry sit down hurriedly in Dr Macready’s chair.

  Mr Frederick Porritt, the well-known businessman and mine owner, was tragically killed on Sunday morning while he and his son-in-law, Mr Miles Gallagher were down Winnipeg Colliery on an inspection tour. Mr Gallagher was slightly hurt when a roof support sagged and there was a slight fall of stone. Unfortunately his father-in-law was killed outright. Mr Porritt leaves a daughter but no other issue. Mr Gallagher is the mine agent for Arthur Bolton and Company, the ironworks in Middlesbrough. Both men were very experienced in mine-working.

  Unfortunately, it was a public holiday and the mine was not working. However there was a group of safety men working nearby and they reached the injured man and brought both to bank.

  Ben couldn’t have had anything to do with it. It was crazy to even think it. How would he have got down Winnipeg pit anyway? And it was Miles’s father-in-law who had been killed, not Miles. She was being silly, thinking such wild thoughts, she told herself. Ben wasn’t like that, he had been a gentle child. No, it was wicked of her even to think such a thing.

  Merry got to her feet and cast a last look around the surgery before going upstairs to her own flat. Benjamin was lying on the clippie mat on the living-room floor, a large pad of paper in front of him, drawing. He was concentrating so hard, the tip of his tongue peeping out from the corner of his mouth, that he didn’t even hear her come in. She looked down to see what he was drawing and he glanced up quickly before putting a protective arm around his work.

  ‘Don’t look,’ he said. ‘It’s not finished yet. I don’t want you to see it until it’s finished.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ Merry said. ‘How about a cup of cocoa? It’ll warm you up.’

  ‘I’m not cold,’ Benjamin replied and watched her until she walked away towards the kitchen. She had meat already stewed for a pie and she began to make pastry, including some extra so there would be enough for Ben if he came. Surely he would come tonight. She needed to see him, to reassure herself that he had had nothing to do with the accident even though common sense told her he couldn’t have.

  She spooned meat into the oven dish before inserting an upside down eggcup in the centre of the dish, then she covered it with a thick layer of shortcrust pastry. The oven at the side of the range was hot and she slipped the pie inside to cook.

  She worked automatically, slicing apples for an apple pie, peeling turnips and potatoes to go with the meat pie and putting them on to boil; meanwhile her thoughts were busy elsewhere – not with her brother or her son but with Tom. It wasn’t often she allowed herself to think about Tom. Long ago she had decided it was a waste of time yearning for him. He simply must not want her; what had happened between them should not have happened. He must have regretted it almost at once, otherwise why hadn’t he got in touch with her? He didn’t want her, she just wasn’t good enough for him. Well, she had managed without him all these years.

  Still, whenever she did think of him there was a place inside her that seemed to melt. Suppose he had lost his father in the Winnipeg mine and suppose Ben had had a hand in it. Merry was horrified at the turn her thoughts had taken. It hadn’t happened and it wouldn’t happen either. Ben was not like that no matter how much he hated Miles Gallagher for what he had done. She would tell him what had happened, or perhaps he already knew.

  Merry put the apple pie on the oven shelf above the meat pie and closed the oven door. She picked up the poker and poked the fire closer to the vent that sent hot air round the oven, and raked more coal onto the fire.

  ‘Is the dinner ready yet? Mrs Macready is taking me out to the dam head; she’s going to show me how to sketch the water. She said half-past one and I can’t be late, Mam.’ Benjamin put his head round the kitchen door and Merry was so lost in her own thoughts she jumped.

  ‘Lay the table then, it’ll be ready in twenty minutes,’ she replied. It was Mrs Macready this and Mrs Macready that, she thought grumpily. Sometimes it felt as though the boy was no longer her own. But the doctor and his wife had been so good to them that Merry felt a twinge of guilt at even thinking such a jealous thought.

  ‘Why are you in such a hurry?’ Merry asked Benjamin. He was spooning his meal into his mouth so hastily he couldn’t possibly be chewing it properly.

  ‘I told you, Mam, me and Kirsty are going out to the dam head.’

  ‘Mrs Macready and I,’ Merry corrected him. ‘Anyway, she’ll wait for you, I’m sure.’ But Benjamin had finished his dinner. He drank his milk and looked expectantly at his mother for permission to go.

  ‘Go on then, have a good time,’ she said. ‘Behave yourself, mind.’

  That afternoon Merry was busy in the surgery making up bottles of cough mixture from the large demi-john which had just been delivered. She would have liked to have gone to Old Pit to see if Ben was there but she had to man the telephone for Dr Macready. Her thoughts went from Ben to Tom and from Tom to Ben; vague unformed worries about them both dimming her normally good spirits.

  It was midnight when she heard the rattle of gravel against her window and hurried down to let Ben in. She was filled to overflowing with questions but first she put the pie in the oven for him and made tea from the kettle that was simmering on the hob.

  He stretched his feet out on the fender and sighed. ‘By, it’s good to be here, our Merry,’ he said. She had brought up Dr Macready’s discarded Auckland Chronicle and now she handed it to him, pointing out the article about the mine accident.

  ‘Mr Gallagher was lucky,’ he observed after having read it. ‘A shame about the other fellow though.’

  Merry gazed at him as he seemed to know already about it and her anxiety deepened. He frowned as he saw her expression.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did you know about it? Was it anything to do with you?’

  The meat pie in the oven was beginning to smell deliciously and he sniffed the air. ‘By, I’m starving,’ he said. ‘Is it ready?’

  Merry took a cloth from the line and lifted the pie from the oven to the table. She said nothing.

  Ben sat down and began to eat. It was very quiet in the room, and Merry became very aware of the ticking of the wall clock. Ben finished his meal, picked up his pot of tea and took a long swallow.

  ‘Well?’ Merry asked.

  ‘Well what? Do you think I found a way to sneak down Winnipeg pit and tamper with a pit prop or something? Did you?’

  ‘No, no, I’m sorry, of course not.’ Put like that it did sound ridiculous, she thought.

  ‘Mind, if I had done it I would have made sure it was bloody Miles Gallagher that was under the stone
, not the poor old gaffer.’

  ‘Ben, you wouldn’t.’

  Ben laughed, a hard bitter laugh. ‘I dreamed about it often enough – never think I haven’t. I thought about it most in the early days when I was slaving in the heat and dust of that hell in South Africa. I plotted and planned what I would do if I ever got the chance, but that was when I was only a lad. Now, I don’t think he’s worth making myself a murderer for. No, no indeed.’

  Ben drank from his pot, swallowing until it was empty before putting it back on the table by his empty plate.

  ‘That was grand,’ he said by way of thanks and went back to his seat by the fire. He stared into the glowing embers for a few minutes, lost in thought. Merry cleared the table in case Benjamin should get up in the morning and wonder who had been in, then sat down opposite him. It was getting on for a quarter to one and she had to be up early in the morning to open the surgery, but she still didn’t want Ben to go. She had things to tell him first and she had to get it over with, although it was Ben who started talking first.

  ‘I worried about you, Merry,’ he said. ‘But when I could write I didn’t know where to write to and besides, I was always afraid Miles Gallagher would do something to you. So what could I do? Then later there was the war an’ all, but I never forgot you and I took the first chance I got.’

  ‘It’s all right, Ben. I was all right.’

  Ben gazed at her. ‘What about your husband, Merry? I found out who it was but I don’t know what happened, why you split up.’

  Merry bit her lip. ‘He’s a violent man, Ben. I should never have married him. But there was the bairn, I was carrying a bairn.’ She looked down at her hands, twisting on her lap and blushed. What would he think of her?

  ‘I should have been here,’ said Ben.

  ‘Well, you couldn’t help that,’ said Merry. She rose to her feet and began to pace up and down the room as she tried to think of the best way of telling him the rest. It was no good, she would just have to come out with it, she thought.

  ‘Ben, there’s more. Robbie wasn’t altogether to blame. The bairn wasn’t his.’

  ‘Did someone take you down? I’ll kill the bastard—’

  ‘No, no, it wasn’t like that,’ she cried.

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘It was a doctor. I loved him. He was good to me when I worked at the workhouse hospital.’

  ‘Who?’ Ben was shouting now.

  ‘Sssh! Don’t wake the lad,’ she begged. ‘It was Tom Gallagher, Ben.’

  ‘Why didn’t he marry you?’

  Merry shook her head dumbly.

  ‘You weren’t good enough for him, was that it? Wait a minute, who did you say? Tom Gallagher?’

  ‘He’s a good man, Ben,’ Merry said but Ben wasn’t listening. ‘Tom bloody Gallagher? That man’s son?’ he persisted.

  Merry nodded. ‘I was still at Old Pit, Ben. I had hurt my ankle and there was a snowstorm—’

  ‘Mam? Mam?’ Benjamin interrupted her attempt at an explanation of what had happened. He came in in his nightshirt, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. When he saw the angry-looking man standing over his mother he ran to her and turned to face Ben, scowling.

  ‘Don’t you hit my mam!’ he shouted. ‘Don’t you dare!’

  Merry put her arms round him. ‘He’s not going to hit me, pet,’ she said. ‘It’s all right.’ The boy was trembling and she realised it must have brought back memories of the violent rages his stepfather used to get into, especially when he had been drinking. She tried to soothe him but he stepped away from her and confronted Ben.

  ‘You’re a nasty man!’ he shouted at him.

  Ben was staring at the boy, his fair hair tousled and his cheeks red, his eyes bright blue. ‘Dear God,’ he said, ‘he looks just like the Gallaghers.’

  ‘He doesn’t, he looks like you,’ said Merry, her voice rising. Ben looked at her holding on to the boy but he was resisting, trying to pull away.

  Ben sighed and squatted on his haunches so that his face was in line with Benjamin’s. Benjamin’s lip quivered but he stood his ground.

  ‘Don’t you hit me neither!’ he shouted.

  ‘I’m not going to hit you or your mother, Benjamin,’ he said and his voice had changed, become gentle. ‘We were just having an argument, that’s all. I love your mother. She is my sister. Do you know what that makes me, Benjamin?’

  Benjamin was still glaring at him but gradually he relaxed, beginning to recognise that there was no threat to his mother or him.

  ‘My uncle. But you’re not my uncle, I haven’t got an uncle.’

  ‘Yes you have Benjamin. You have me,’ said Ben. ‘You were called after me, do you see?’

  ‘Where’ve you been then?’ asked the boy. ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Ah, that’s a long story I’ll have to tell you another time. Now I have to go,’ his uncle replied. ‘I’ll tell you all about it another time.’

  Twenty-Nine

  It was an afternoon in March when Merry met Tom again and the unexpectedness of it took her breath away. For a minute she couldn’t think of anything except the pleasure that ran through her as she gazed up at him.

  ‘Merry,’ he said and stopped in front of her as Benjamin, standing beside her, looked from his mother to the strange man and back again, his brow knitting. For the minute Tom had eyes for no one but the boy’s mother.

  ‘Hello, Doctor Gallagher,’ said Merry.

  They were outside the Co-op Store in Newgate Street and Merry was about to go in. He looks just the same, she thought, he hasn’t changed at all. Oh God, why had he left her, forgotten about her? He took off his hat and his light blonde hair waved back from the sides of his head in just the way Benjamin’s did. His eyes were as vivid a blue, his lips . . . Benjamin! She moved slightly in a daft attempt to hide Benjamin from him. He looked more like Tom than Ben, she thought in a panic.

  ‘Mam? Mam? I thought we were going for my new trousers for school,’ Benjamin said and as Tom looked down at him his eyes widened. It was plain to see what was racing through his mind.

  ‘He takes after my brother,’ Merry said quickly. Tom said nothing to this, but looked from Merry to the boy.

  ‘Does he indeed?’ Tom smiled and transferred his attention to the boy. ‘What’s your name, lad?’ he asked him.

  ‘Benjamin Wright.’

  ‘Well, Benjamin, would you like to go in to the teashop? They sell good cakes there and your mother and I need to talk.’

  ‘Yes please,’ Benjamin breathed, his eyes lighting up. He loved eating in cafes and he didn’t often get the chance to.

  ‘Emm, we haven’t got time,’ Merry demurred weakly. She felt as though she was being drawn along with no will of her own. ‘I have messages to get and then—’

  ‘Mam!’ cried Benjamin.

  ‘We needn’t be too long, Merry,’ said Tom and held open the door for them. Benjamin raced through and Merry had to follow.

  They walked through the haberdashery department to the teashop. Being Saturday afternoon the place was crowded, yet somehow within a minute or two Tom had them installed at a table in an alcove away from the main floor and a waitress was hovering to take their order.

  ‘Tea and cakes, please,’ said Tom. When she had gone he turned to Merry. ‘Is he mine?’ he asked baldly. Benjamin was watching the bustle around him, happy and wide eyed as if it was Christmas all over again. Though she glanced quickly at him she didn’t think he had heard the direct question.

  ‘Why would you want to know now after all this time?’ she asked. The old hurt when he had walked away and forgotten her still smarted; in fact it swelled within her now.

  ‘Of course I want to know,’ said Tom shortly. ‘If he is, I want to know the answers to some more questions too. Why didn’t you tell me?’ His voice was beginning to rise and Benjamin looked from him to his mother, his happy grin slipping slightly.

  ‘Sssh, you’re worrying him,’ Merry cautioned. Tom glanced at the boy and smiled
, though it obviously took some effort.

  ‘Here’s the waitress coming with a plate of cakes,’ he said. ‘You can have first choice, Benjamin.’

  ‘Can I? Really?’ The waitress put the cakes down on the table together with the tray of tea and Benjamin deliberated over them, all his attention now on what to choose. In the end he picked a large meringue with cream and angelica pieces and was soon absorbed in savouring every mouthful.

  Merry poured the tea and handed a cup to Tom. He watched her broodingly as she offered the cakes.

  ‘No thanks,’ he said in a more normal tone. ‘Are you going to answer my question?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes what? You’re going to answer or yes, he is mine?’

  ‘Benjamin takes after my brother, I told you.’

  ‘Oh yes? But that wasn’t my question was it? You don’t think he looks just a little bit like me?’

  ‘A bit, but he also looks like my brother Ben,’ she insisted stubbornly. She picked up her teaspoon and put a spoonful of sugar in her tea.

  ‘Merry?’

  ‘All right, he looks like you,’ Merry said in an angry whisper. ‘Yes, he is yours.’ She was defeated.

  ‘And you never thought to tell me?’

  ‘Do you think I didn’t try? I couldn’t find you to tell you! You disappeared, so I thought you were keeping out of my way. I thought you were ashamed, you—’

  ‘Ashamed? Ashamed of what?’

  ‘Of me, I wasn’t good enough for you. You didn’t want to know. I went to your house and I saw your father but he told me to be off. What was I to think?’

  Tom bit his lip as he studied her expression. He could see there was anger there and hurt too. He thought back to the time just after the big snowstorm that winter. Not that he could remember a lot about it after the time with Merry and how sweet it had been despite the conditions. The time after that, the time he had struggled to get back to Winton Colliery and tell the men about her injury was like the memory of a nightmare – there were great gaps in it. And afterwards he could just remember sitting in the trap with the snow driving in his face, but no more. He had been ill for such a long time too.