by Diana Norman
She went back to Raby as often as she could; Betty and Philippa were there. But of necessity her visits were short and infrequent.
She made sure her discussions with Andra Hedley were even shorter and more infrequent. In any case, he was as busy as she was and virtually lived in a cubicle at the pithead filled by papers, drawings, dockets and noise. With both of them stressed and exhausted, their meetings were edged with temper.
It seemed to her he was dismissive of how difficult it was to be a woman negotiating with men who displayed the amusement—and then the impatience—they’d accord to a talking beetle. Of the degradation in bartering with keelmen who were rude or lecherous, mostly both, and thought it their duty to charge her more than they would anyone else.
Of trying to join the Grand Alliance, a cartel of the big colliery-owners, who laughed her out of court. Of dealing with contractors who were slow with services but quick to present bills.
‘You’ve no idea of my problems,’ she said.
‘I’ve got my own.’
To make the point, he walked her round the pit head, pointing out engines that broke down and had to be adapted, ventilation doors that warped, the necessity of a viaduct to correct the wagonway’s gradient, the damage to the staith by a violent wave that had taken away part of its foundations.
All she saw was money draining out. More investment had been needed; this time she’d raised it in London, from Susan’s willing Jews. ‘And what are you wasting it on?’ She pointed. ‘Luxury bloody houses.’
At the moment their miners were being accommodated in tents but from this hilltop she and Hedley looked down on a rising village of sturdy, slate-roofed cottages, two up, two down, with gardens and pigeon lofts. With Northumbrian logic the village was already referred to as ‘Collory Raa’, though in fact the houses were not a row at all but would eventually form neat squares around a school.
‘They’ll lodge better than I do,’ she said, resentfully.
‘And me,’ he said. He still lived in the but ’n’ bens. ‘But we’re not the poor sods riskin’ wor lives hewing coal. I’ll have decent conditions here or you’ll find yourself another partner.’
‘Don’t think I can’t.’
It was a lovely autumn day. Some terns were squabbling out at sea where the damaged staith’s drunken shape was perfectly reflected in the water. Suddenly she wanted nothing so much as to be out in a boat.
‘Oh, Mr Hedley,’ she said wearily, ‘what are we doing here?’
His arm shifted as if he would put it round her but instead he smiled. ‘We’re having the time of our lives, pet,’ he said.
The next year Raby went into full production. The year after it sank another shaft and began tunnelling under the seashore. A steady river of coal began an uninterrupted journey down the wagonways to the staith, to the Tyne, to the Thames, into the voracious fires and furnaces of London.
And as coal flowed out, money began to flow in.
Aaron heard his sister’s voice through the screech of the cranes loading and unloading the keels further along the quay, the rattle of coals pouring into holds, the shouts of dockers and sailors.
‘ . . . ye knacky-kneed donnart, ballast tha bloody keel wi’ this muck again an’ Ah’ll skelp yer arse . . .’
She was standing on the deck of a boat moored to the quay, shaking her fist at a salt-stained, coal-pigmented seaman who was shuffling his feet and listening to her with abashed admiration. Men loading nearby had stopped work and, as Aaron opened his mouth to call her, one of them nudged him. ‘Whisht, sor, when the Missus’s seein’ reed ’tis a privorlege t’hear her.’
‘ . . . Ship it again, yer scarecraa, an’ Ah’ll swing thee fra nearest stob and God hev mercy on yer sowl, ye divvil.’ She waved her fist one last time under the seaman’s nose, turned and strode down the gangplank.
‘Hello, Mrs Burke,’ Aaron said.
She flung herself on him. ‘When did you arrive?’
‘Just now. What has that unfortunate gentleman done?’
She got angry again. ‘Brought rubbish as ballast on the voyage back from the Thames. If I’ve told him once . . . I want good china clay, we’ve started a pottery business beyond Close Gate. What’s the point unless I can make a profit going and coming?’
‘What indeed?’
She held him at arms’ length to admire him for a second. The showiness had gone; he was dressed with taste. Among the detritus of the quay he stood out slim and sleek—like a clean young carrot, she thought. She tucked her arm under his. ‘Come to the office while I finish.’ The dockers whistled at them as they went off and she grinned at them: ‘Howay, ye whaups, he’s me brothor.’
‘I see you speak the language.’
‘Only one they understand.’
The brass plaque on the door in Merchants Court read simply: ‘Burke and Hedley’. She’d extended the premises since he’d last seen them, its ancient woodwork was freshly oiled and there were boxes of pale geraniums in its windows. The noise from a shed next door was ear-shattering.
‘What’s that?’
‘What? Oh, that’s Mr Palmer’s shop . . . Evening, Mr Palmer . . . he’s invented a new form of anchor. Doing very well.’
‘Can’t he do it somewhere else?’
‘Hasn’t got time to find new premises, too busy making a profit.’
That’s Newcastle all over, Aaron thought. Everywhere he’d passed, ancient frontages decorated with gargoyles were, in fact, producing up-to-date manufacture; the town had no street lighting but there was no need of it when everywhere was illuminated by the flame of furnaces.
Inside the offices clerks were busy writing at high desks and stood up politely as Makepeace entered. ‘You look well,’ she said.
‘So do you, but what on earth are you wearing?’ She was in widow’s weeds of differing black, the skirt dusty from hem to hock, her hair entirely hidden by a scarf underneath a battered, greenly aged tricorn. The mobile face, which had now lost years rather than gained them, peering out from such elderly swaddling added to the scarecrow effect.
She looked down at herself. ‘It’s not Mme Angloss exactly, but . . . well, I’m playing a character, I’m not supposed to be fashionable.’
‘You’re not supposed to be an eyesore. Haven’t you anything else?’
‘Only my best. I haven’t got time . . .’
He made her close up the office and hustled her to Middle Street where, he remembered, there were some decent drapery shops—or as decent as drapery went in Newcastle—to buy her a made-up bodice and skirt to go with the lawn shawl he’d bought her from Dublin, where his company had been playing to packed houses. He scandalized the girl assistants by scrutinizing every item and rubbing it between his fingers for quality. Newcastle men didn’t do that.
‘Whisht,’ she said, ‘they’ll think you’re a puff.’
He smiled. ‘They’d be wrong.’
She loved his poise. Mr Burke’s Touring Company was gaining a reputation for excellence and had staged a private performance of Goldsmith’s The Good-Natured Man before Their Majesties. In the gossip newspapers his name was constantly linked with beautiful women, several of them titled. She’d offered to set him up a theatre in Newcastle now that she had money to fund one but he’d said his future was in London and Dublin—he was finished with the provinces.
She was renting an apartment in the Side to live in, larger but not much more comfortable than her original room. After completing their purchases they set off towards it. ‘For Heaven’s sake,’ he panted as they climbed the hill, ‘it smells of cheese round here.’
‘It’s handy though. Near enough to the office and the right side of town for Raby. Hildy looks after it, I only sleep in it.’
Once inside, Aaron saw that Makepeace extended the indifference she showed towards her personal appearance to the furnishing of her home, which was good but sparse, and lacking ornaments. It reminded him of the Roaring Meg but without the cheer and fellowship; it smelled
of lye soap, like the cottages of the cleanly poor. His own fashionable rooms in London were scented with beeswax and pot-pourri.
‘Oh, I leave all that to Hildy,’ she said.
‘Where’s the kitchen?’
‘There’s only a scullery. We get food from the tavern down the hill.’
God, Aaron thought, even the Roaring Meg had lobsters. So when she’d dressed in her new clothes, they went to dine at the Pilgrim’s Inn in a private room. He noticed that she took pains to introduce him to its landlord as ‘my brother’.
‘Can’t afford gossip,’ she said, ‘not in Newcastle.’
The meal was good but, again, an anachronism. There was caviare brought in by ice-boats from the Baltic, but for the Pilgrim Inn, as with the rest of Newcastle, the potato had yet to make its debut.
Aaron was relieved to find that she had at least not cut herself off from London. Andrew Ffoulkes visited on his way to friends in Edinburgh, so did Dr Baines. She was in touch with Susan through the Jews—though her correspondence was more with the Jews than Susan.
Her most surprising visitor, she told him, had been John Beasley. She’d taken him to Raby, shown him the colliery, sent him down one of the mines, introduced him to her people—and watched in amazement as he and Hedley became friends.
‘Of all men I can’t think of two more different,’ she said. But Beasley was always attracted by the clever and unpretentious while Hedley, she presumed, saw in Beasley whatever it was that endeared the journalist to his coffee house acquaintances like Joshua Reynolds.
‘They’ve come to some arrangement to get Mr Hedley’s rectangular corves and braged conductors registered with the Patent Office, though they’re both very rude about the place. Beasley says they’re “inefficient fuckers” and Hedley says they’re “porvorse sods”.’
Aaron saw her delight and saw, too, that she forced herself away from it. She began to talk of coal.
‘We’ve paid off the original debt,’ she said. ‘Now we can pick and choose our investors—we have to fight ’em off.’
‘Are you making a personal profit, though?’
‘A lot,’ she said, ‘I just don’t have time to count it.’
She bored him with accounts of negotiations with recalcitrant fellow coal-owners, bloody-minded miners, porvorse sods of keelmen, her new pottery business, contacts with Birmingham, Manchester . . .
He interrupted her. ‘What are you doing all this for?’
‘To become rich, of course.’
‘You are rich. ’Peace, they left you sobbing at their gates, your gates, and cast you into the wilderness, this wilderness.’
‘I haven’t forgotten,’ she said.
‘Isn’t it time you came back? You’re Lady Dapifer, not Mrs Burke. God, it distresses me to see you standing on a coal barge, swearing like a fishwife and dressed like one. I thought we’d finished with docksides.’
This one hasn’t done badly by you, she thought. Her coal had bought him proper scenery, more players and better travelling. But she didn’t say so; she remembered what a Boston dockside had cost him.
‘She was in the audience the other day,’ he said, ‘Mrs Conyers as is. We were doing Cleone. I think she’s completely forgotten you had an actor brother; she’s probably forgotten you, probably thinks you’re dead. Blasted harpy chatted to her friends through the whole damned performance.’
‘I don’t suppose she looked an eyesore, did she?’
‘No,’ he said, grimly, ‘she didn’t. She . . . glowed.’
Makepeace said: ‘I happen to know she’s glowing on borrowed money.’ She leaned across the table and patted her brother’s cheek. ‘I have it in hand, Aaron.’
‘Oh, ’Peace, it isn’t the getting back at them so much—though, Lord knows, I’d like him spitted on the end of a toasting fork—it’s knowing what Pip would say to you having to live and work in this squalor, what he’d say to me for letting you do it. It’s what he took you away from . . .’
She was grateful to see his tears. There were few to cry for her husband nowadays. ‘You loved him, didn’t you?’
‘I’ve never met anyone better.’
‘Nor have I.’
The next day they set off early in her carriage—an equipage more sturdy than smart, like its horse; he wondered if she bothered with anything that wasn’t strictly functional—to see Betty and Philippa. But as they came to the colliery track she turned into it, going under the bridge formed by the wagonway viaduct. ‘You won’t recognize it,’ she said.
They passed by a small village where the sound of chanting came from a schoolhouse and mass washing was spread on bushes nearby. ‘They have to watch the wind,’ she said. ‘If it changes they run out and put it in another field or it gets covered with coal soot.’
A man was walking what Aaron took to be a dog along a stretch of moorland; nearer, the animal on the lead turned out to be a not unhandsome fighting cock. ‘Favourite sport round here,’ his sister said, ‘that and pigeon-racing. Good morning, Joe.’
‘Mornin’, missus.’
Further up, the landscape became a mass of chimneys, wheels, blackened buildings and rails. New mountains of slag were rising out of the earth to disfigure it.
It seemed to Aaron that everything he saw either moved, made a noise or was filthy, mostly all three. A huge wheel turned above one hut which was disgorging a band of fiends from hell: black shapes with gleaming white eyes and teeth.
‘Night shift,’ Makepeace said. ‘Wha’ cheor, lads.’
‘Mornin’, missus.’
There were imps among the fiends, swaggering and shouting incomprehensibly in high voices. ‘We don’t use as many boys as other pits,’ his sister said, ‘Mr Hedley won’t have it. Ponies do the pulling. Much more costly, of course, but he doesn’t care for that.’
There was something in her voice that Aaron couldn’t analyse.
He was relieved when she turned the trap and the two of them were trotted away, even more relieved to find that Headington House was being rebuilt for her. One wing had been finished and the wilderness around it was being returned to garden. Even here, Aaron thought, there was lack of attention. The site was lovely but the finished wing promised that the eventual whole would be overheavy and graceless.
‘Why didn’t you bring in Robert Adam?’ he asked. ‘Build something classical?’
‘I just wanted it restored,’ she said, ‘I haven’t got time to fuss about with architects. It’s mainly for Betty and Philippa to live in anyway.’
After a rapturous reunion with Betty in the kitchen, and a meal—also taken in the kitchen—brother and sister walked across the moor to meet Philippa from school. ‘Hasn’t she got a governess?’ Aaron asked.
‘Mr Hedley found an excellent teacher for the school,’ she said, ‘so she goes there with the rest. She seems to have brains, she’s very mathematical.’
‘What about her music? Dancing? Elocution?’
‘Oh well,’ she said, ‘I’ll see to that when I have time.’ She put her arm through his. ‘We weren’t even allowed to dance round a maypole, remember?’
He didn’t answer. Three children were coming towards them chattering in Northumbrian dialect.
One of them, the neatest of the three, had shoes but they were laced together over her shoulder and her prehensile little feet trod the tough grass and heather with apparent imperviousness. She ran towards him: ‘Uncle Aaron!’
She introduced her companions nicely enough: ‘This is Polly, this is John. Polly, John, my uncle Aaron.’
‘Ginny and Jamie’s children,’ said Makepeace. ‘They’re in the Factor’s House now.’
Philippa turned to her mother. ‘Mam, Johnny says there’s greet monsters doon the lonnen, wi’ reet sharp teeth an’ waarts, but tha’s blaa, in’t it, Mam?’
‘Blaa,’ nodded Makepeace. ‘Howay now, pet. We’ll be in when we’ve said hello to Tantaquidgeon.’
Aaron kept his silence until after the visit to the grave
but when she would have returned to the house, he took his sister’s arm and sat her on a tombstone. ‘In the name of God, Makepeace, what are you doing?’
‘What?’
‘Leave aside that you’re content to live as a vagabond, you cannot, you can not bring up Philippa like this, like . . . some gypsy whelp.’
She looked up at him. ‘Is it the shoes? We went without shoes . . .’
‘Yes, we did. But she’s not the child of a shiftless, drunken Irishman, she’s the daughter of Sir Philip Dapifer. Look at her . . .’
From this edge of the graveyard it was possible to see down the hill to the but ’n’ bens, where the children were talking through the window to someone inside. A door was flung open and Hedley came out, growling like a bear, to chase the three as they fled before him. When he caught them he gathered them up. Their laughter was like seagulls’ cries.
‘Look at her, hear her, for the sake of God! Are you so occupied steeping yourself in this northern sinkhole that you haven’t noticed what she’s become? Walking along just now I couldn’t tell her from the pit brats.’
‘There’s time, Aaron,’ Makepeace protested. ‘When I—’
‘You haven’t got time—you keep telling me. But time’s a-wasting, ’Peace, you just haven’t noticed. What is she now? Five? Nearly six? And I wouldn’t dare lead her into a decent drawing room.’
At the shock on his sister’s face, he sat down beside her and took her hand. ‘I’m sorry, my dear, but you must see. Who’s she to marry? Some burly, black-faced miner who’ll beat her and drink her money? You say she’s clever but that’s not good enough, she must be cultured.’
He was becoming moved by his own rhetoric, tears again not far off. ‘Pip was the most cultured man I ever knew. What would he say to what you’re doing to his child? What would he say to me for letting you do it? After all he did for me? Dear God, he’d think I’d betrayed him.’