Black Sheep (2 page)

She had given up worrying about him now.

‘Look at it like this,' John had said once, ‘he's never going to leave here to wed, he's never going to strike up a conversation with any girl, he'll be bringing his wage home till the time comes when he hangs up his boots.'

‘And then what? Two great pairs of legs stuck out of the chairs for me to trip over half the day.'

But the idea that she would never be left on her own had been soothing.

She put cold potatoes on to fry up and the cold joint out to slice. Monday dinner. Rose mangled. The kitchen smelled of hot wet sheets and the sun came out over the top of Paradise and slanted down onto the brick wall.

Rose had a fine head of hair, she thought, watching her daughter straighten up to haul a sheet from the tub, thick hair and wavy and gleaming like conkers.

Evie knew full well about the pillowcases and tablecloth, because Aunt Etta had told her, and besides, Rose had not been as quiet as she'd supposed, the bottom of the trunk always scraped on the floor however silently she tried to open and close the lid. She wondered why Rose wanted to keep it secret. She was only a few years off being a respectable age to marry and every other girl started a bottom drawer. When the time came, she herself had some things stored away to give to her, as her own mother had done for her. But Rose was not like the rest of them, any more than Arthur was, and it sometimes troubled Evie that she had given rise to two what you might call ‘misfits' – though never for long, because her days were too full.

She carved the meat into slices, and the end bit into three small chunks. The apple pie was untouched, as she always baked two identical, one for hot at Sunday lunch, the other for cold supper Monday, and a slice for Ted's bait. Ted. She had wondered if he would be another misfit but he seemed to be growing up ordinarily, joining up with friends on the corner, playing out with them, thumping and getting thumped, asking John about the pit. It hovered on the farthest edges of Evie's mind sometimes, that Ted ought to have something else to look forward to than the pit, something better, more . . . what? Adventurous, she had once answered herself, and almost laughed aloud. What would anyone do with an adventure? Ted was up to where he ought to be at school, though no further. He was growing, though he was still alarmingly thin, he chattered, he scabbed his knees and banged his head, like the rest of them. Ted would not be a misfit and marriage to the right boy would set Rose back in the fold, too. It was only Arthur.

‘Rose, haven't you got the last of those whites out of the tub yet? It's gone twelve. Come here, I'll take them, you can do the privy scrub. And don't look at me like that, girl.' For Evie felt a rush of impatience with her daughter, standing with her hands still on the tub, looking at nothing out of the door. What was life about?

At five, the washing for Alice was ready to be carted up to Paradise, on the pram. Evie had done her mother-in-law's washing as well as her own for the last three weeks, because Alice was weak in some way, couldn't lift her arms properly and got white with tiredness. ‘I'm beyond tired,' she had said several times. Evie understood. Tiredness was usual, especially at the end of every working week, your entire body was cried out with tiredness. But a night's deep sleep without having to set the alarm on Sunday morning generally sorted it out. Alice looked as if the tiredness had settled in the marrow of her bones.

‘What's wrong with Alice?' Evie had asked her father-in-law. ‘Has she said anything? Have you asked her? Have you even noticed?'

But Reuben Howker noticed nothing. ‘She says she's ailing somehow.'

‘Yes, but what-how?'

He shook his head, turning his eyes back to the Book. ‘She's not very swift about the place.'

Evie could have shaken him until his brains rattled, could have picked him up and kicked him out of the door and down the hill from Paradise to Lower and on down to the pit, which he had left one day nine years before and never returned to, saying he had seen the Devil below and been tempted, saying he could never go back for fear of losing his soul. Evie had wanted to shake him that day and every day after. His description of the Devil had been vivid and horrifying, others had murmured their sympathy, some had crossed the street to avoid being in any form of contact with him, and many had thought he should have been sent away. Only Evie, and perhaps John, though his conscience half told him he should side with his father, refused to believe any of it. Reuben had always hated the pit and been off sick whenever he could manage it, sustained this or that generally invisible injury, had left the work to Alice and sat in the corner with his Bible all day and half the night. Only Evie had had the nerve to call him idle to his face.

If it had not been for Alice, she would never have set foot in their house again, and instructed her family to do likewise. But she loved Alice, who was tested beyond human endurance and put up with it all meekly, she would help Alice while she had strength in her body, and her family followed suit.

‘Rose!' But as Ted had come in from school, Rose had slipped out of the door and vanished like a soap bubble when it touched the door frame. So Ted would come with her, pushing the old pram by holding one side of the handle while Evie held the other. ‘You're as good as that lump of a sister any day,' Evie said, though in truth it was harder on her to have just him lending his weight, because there was so little of it. Ted was thin enough to go through a crack in the door, and pale-skinned, fair-haired, like a wraith. But he pushed without complaint or suggesting a pause and together they manoeuvred the pram full of clean washing up the steep path to number 8 Paradise.

Rose had weighed it up and decided the risk was worthwhile. She resented being the only girl and so the only skivvy, with her mother, to five males, while knowing perfectly well that it was usual.

Mary Roberts was on the corner of Middle, near the last house before the track that led to the school. They sneaked through the side gate of the chapel and came out in the stretch of open grass where the youngest kids had playtime in fine weather. Nobody else was about.

‘I got one,' Mary said, grinning to show her black front tooth, and dived into her pocket for the cigarette, which was slightly flattened and ragged where tobacco was pulling out of the end. The matches were hidden in the bole of the single tree that stood beside the gate.

It was Mary who had started it, bringing a cigarette from her father's pocket one day the previous summer. It had taken Rose a long time to get used to the taste and the smell, and even now, she felt sick for the first few puffs, though she would never have admitted it. None of the men in her own house smoked, apart from her father, who had a single pipe every Saturday night. Mary's mother and elder sister smoked, it was easy to get hold of them furtively.

They leaned against the tree, taking turns at the cigarette, holding it out on an extended arm between first fingers, or cupped backwards in their palms, getting the feel.

They said nothing. No one was about. The Monday suds had dissolved away now. The pit smoke clouded the air and the smoke from their cigarette, wispy and pale, couldn't hold out against it.

‘I saw Harry,' Rose said, looking right away from Mary. ‘He was with Roy.'

Mary said nothing. It was her turn for the cigarette.

‘They'll be there together then. I expect.'

‘I expect.'

Harry Murdon and Roy James, the same age as Arthur, but there the likeness began and ended. Arthur would never have gone to the Institute Saturday night, nor learned how to eye a girl without appearing to, nor had a close friend.

Rose threw the cigarette down, disliking the strong smell of the butt end on her fingers, and ground it with her heel.

‘You'll be for it,' Mary said.

‘So will you.'

They burst out laughing.

‘
THY WORD IS
a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.
'

Reuben sat in the corner of the room, the Bible open on his knee. Ted sat on the window ledge, looking down the slopes to the top of the pit winding gear, just visible from here. If he went and stood on the front step of 8 Paradise, he could see it clearly.

‘
For he is our God and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his land.
'

His grandfather's voice rumbled on and the murmurings of his mother and grandmother in the room above formed a lighter descant to it.

‘Do you have anything you can say, our Ted?'

Ted struggled. They had a Bible reading every morning at the start of school, and a Religious Instruction class once a week, but he never remembered much, though he liked the sound of the words, as he liked to hear his grandfather read the Bible aloud, since it was the earliest sound he could remember, and so a familiar comfort to him.

‘
Before the mountains were settled before the hills was I brought forth
,' Ted said, closing his eyes to help him remember right.

His grandfather grunted.

Ted looked at him, then out of the window again.

‘You give me chapter and verse, boy, chapter and verse.'

But Ted could not.

The voices of the two women went on like a bubbling stream above.

When he was a baby, in the pram that they had just pushed up the slopes full of clean washing, Ted had been put with his grandfather and left to listen to the words of the Bible, which Reuben read day and night, sometimes in silence, often aloud. The deep voice and the words had been the background to Ted's waking and sleeping, and as he grew older, to his pottering about the room, in and out of the door, back again, clambering over the steep step. The voice had always been there, like the air and the light.

‘
I made me pools of water, to water therewith the wood that bringeth forth trees.
'

He did not know the meaning of the words but they slipped over him, wrapping him in an assurance of safety even when they were in the Old Testament's most thundering and vengeful strain.

At eight now, he understood a little more and sometimes longed for a phrase or two of gentleness. He wanted to ask questions too, but knew better, for Reuben would never answer except with another river of words.

Ted leaned his head against the pane and watched for the file of men to come trailing up the slope at the end of their shift.

In the bedroom above, Evie sat on the straight-backed chair beside the bed.

‘Well, if you won't show me at least describe to me what it's like.'

Alice's back was turned away from her. She fidgeted constantly with the button on her blouse.

‘Don't tell him,' she said for the hundredth time. ‘Don't say a word.'

‘I've promised, haven't I? Am I a liar?'

Silence.

‘He knows there's something wrong, Alice.'

‘What has he said?'

Evie hesitated, then repeated the one thing. ‘That you're not very swift about the place. Which is plain for all to see.'

‘I seem to have no stuffing left in me.'

‘I can tell.'

Alice had lost more weight. Not that she had ever been stout. The flesh seemed to have peeled off her bones and the skin hung loose.

‘If you'd show me.'

‘I've shown no one. I get dressed and undressed in the dark.'

Evie tutted, and then decided. She got up and went to stand in front of the other woman, took Alice's hands in hers and held them firmly away, then started to undo the buttons of her blouse, from the top. Alice took a breath, then let it go. Let Evie carry on.

She opened the blouse carefully. Alice sighed.

The swelling was the size of an apricot, pushing against the skin. Evie pulled her hand away sharply.

‘Oh, Alice.'

Alice's expression was blank but when Evie looked into her eyes she saw fear there.

‘You have to see the doctor. You have to go at once. Go tomorrow.'

Alice shook her head and started to put her clothing straight again.

‘I know what it is, Evie, I know there's nothing he can do or say. And so do you if you'll be truthful.'

Evie did know.

She put her hand on the other woman's arm and rested it there, and so they stood, both silent, as if they were staring into the depths of the same river but from opposite banks.

DURING THE WEEKS
going into that winter, Mary took up with Charlie Minns, whose father was one of the pit inspectors and lived in a house set apart from the terraces, and after that, although Rose saw her here and there, things were never the same between them and there were no more sneaked half-hours with giggling and cigarettes. But one afternoon when it was wet and the sky seemed to have been lowered, to hang heavy over the village, Rose was sent to the shop to buy extra flour and there was Mary, in a new skirt and woollen jacket, and with her hair curled up. Rose took a step back as she saw her, uncertain and tongue-tied.

Mary looked her up and down and shifted her neck a little inside the collar of the new jacket. She was buying soap.

‘Would you wrap it please?'

Mrs Leather gave her a hard look, which pleased Rose.

‘Your mam never asks. I don't have wrapping paper to burn.'

Mary put her hand up and pulled the lapel of the jacket straighter.

She doesn't want to be seen carrying soap, Mrs Leather's look said to Rose.

‘Oh, never mind.' Mary put the money down and took up the soap bar, holding it slightly away from her.

‘Hello, Mary,' Rose said, quite at ease now.

Mary stopped. ‘Oh, Rose . . . I didn't catch sight of you there. How are you getting on?'

‘Very well, thank you.'

‘I'm so busy I don't have much time to see anyone these days. Why don't you come to the Institute on Saturday night? We don't always go there now, me and Charlie, we like to venture a bit further afield, you know how it is, but we'll go Saturday, show you who's who. Will you?'