Black Sheep (8 page)

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.

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.

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 kind 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.

‘I wish you weren't down the pit,' Rose said quietly. ‘I fear for you every day.'

Ted shook his head. ‘We've had our turn.'

‘Doesn't follow. Wouldn't you rather be up there, out in the open with the sheep?'

‘Yes.'

‘Then you should go back.'

He left the room without a word. But when Rose went out just after eight o'clock that Friday night, he stood at the window watching her go and nursing a dark tight fear inside himself, because she was meeting Lem Roker and he believed that she would flaunt herself with him carelessly at the Institute rooms. He had known little of Charlie and that little he had not greatly liked, but he wanted order in a world which had so recently been blown apart and scattered and his sister's marriage represented that order.

Just before half past eleven he went out. The night smelled cold and the trails and whorls of stars were mirror bright in the dark sky. The music of the band came up the terrace through the open windows and door. Ted leaned back into the shadows when it stopped and almost at once people started to come out, talking and laughing. There were plenty before Rose and Lem Roker and then they came out, sidling past a gang of others who were singing. The man's hand was on her arm. Ted waited. Watched. Followed. And then they were out of sight, somewhere away from the rest and shielded by the darkness.

He did not know what to believe. If Rose had told him the truth, then he had no worry and he should not be following them. If she had not, what could he do? But he felt it keenly that he was the only man in the Lower Terrace house now, the only one to defend his sister against the spiteful tongues and stand up for her to Evie. The only one Rose could rely on. But perhaps she neither needed nor wanted him.

The dancers separated and floated home like clouds parting and being blown away, and in minutes the lights had gone out in the Institute rooms and Mount of Zeal was silent again. The stars burned bright and cold.

IT WAS WELL
into autumn before Ted was on Lem Roker's shift. It came about one September dawn when he was walking through the soft air and thinking of how it smelled and how it would be on the hill among the sheep, how their coats would be pearled with drops of moisture and the spiders' webs dewy on the gate. The mist would be a ghostly shawl over the high ground.