Shelter from the Storm (15 page)

‘What?’

Thaddeus hesitated again.

‘It doesn’t matter what it is, you can say it,’ Joe prompted him.

‘Your father was never an easy man to deal with and he’s not
a good businessman but I think you could be given the chance and a bit of help. You’ve got the men back to full-time work through your own efforts—’

‘I don’t know how long it’s going to last.’

‘I could introduce you to people. George wants nowt to do with my business and I’m hurt by it but you and I might deal well together.’

‘A partnership?’

‘Aye, summat like that. I wouldn’t do you down, Joe, don’t go thinking it. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, you know, and it’s a bloody sight heavier when there’s nobody to talk to.’

‘I can’t say I know much about foundries.’

‘You could, though, and I do know summat about pits. I started off as a pitman.’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘It isn’t summat I spread about. I started at the bottom. You’ve started at the top and come down, at least your father did. Your grandfather left a good pit here when he died. He’d got it nicely under way and then your father took over. Mind you, I do think times were easier then but I’m sure we all think that. It’d be a bit of a challenge to try and help it and get my mind off weddings and the like and that bugger McAndrew. I don’t like him. I’m disappointed but he’s a shrewd businessman for all that and she cares about him so it will have to do. This place needs investment, it needs capital. I have money doing nothing I wouldn’t mind sacrificing for it. Why don’t we try?’

Joe was inclined to be suspicious, even though his father thought well of Thaddeus and his grandfather had thought well of Thaddeus’s father and he could well believe that Thaddeus was quite alone at the top of his little empire. Of late Joe had felt so solitary — nobody to talk to or help, nothing to make the business worthwhile, and having to make the decisions alone, nobody to blame.

‘It seems you made an impression on Alice. She knew your mother well. She talks about her even now and you are like her.’

‘I know.’

Thaddeus looked uncomfortable for a few moments before saying, ‘I asked your mother to marry me but I wasn’t good enough for her parents. They knew I’d been a pitman whereas your father had been born to own the pit and that draughty bloody place you call home and it seemed like a better idea to them, I’m sure.’

‘Did she care for you?’

‘No, I was too rough for her. I married Alice to spite her because they were such good friends and she didn’t really like me neither. It was her parents’ idea, God rot them, they made her do it. The mistakes we make.’ He shook his head. ‘But I could do you a good turn, Joe, as your mother’s son and because I cared, and you could do me a good turn by learning about my business and we could run things together. I don’t see why not. You don’t have to answer me, I know your father’s name is on everything, but we could have summat drawn up to suit both parties. Think about it.’

Joe did think about it, especially after seeing Esther Margaret and realising once and for all that he could not have her. His brain had known it all along but his stupid heart had hoped somehow until then. Now it didn’t. Seeing her lying there and the look in her eyes since she had lost Dryden’s child had finished him off. Joe could not go on hating Dryden because Dryden had risked his life to save Joe, and he could not go on coveting Dryden’s wife. Dryden had nothing except her and they had lost their child, and it was too much for Joe’s honour to bear, loving hopelessly in such a situation.

He went home, and there was nobody to look after his horse, nobody to give him comfort of any kind. His father was snoring by the study fire and Jacob was snoring by the kitchen fire, and that finished him off too. He could not do any worse than to go in with Thaddeus Morgan.

That weekend Thaddeus asked Joe — and his father, but that was only for politeness’ sake — to stay overnight at his house in
Wolsingham. His father refused and Joe had had so little experience of any kind of society that he was worried he might do or say the wrong thing. Luckily Luisa was not there, she was in Scotland visiting her future family, and he saw again the goodness and kindness of Alice, who came to him, smiling and clasping his hand.

‘Joe,’ she said, ‘my dear boy, how lovely to see you again.’

They lavished their hospitality upon him. Joe had a bedroom that looked out across the dale and was glad that the weather had turned chilly because a fire was lit and burned brightly there all day and most of the night. They had company, but not the kind to which a young man might object, just half a dozen people to dinner, and such a dinner — beef and roast potatoes and good wine — and Thaddeus introduced him to the other men and they talked about business and Joe began to feel quite at home. On the Saturday he visited the foundries — there were two of them, one at Deerness Law and the other in Wolsingham — and Thaddeus explained the various processes that the iron and steel had to go through and Joe talked to the skilled workmen and the office staff.

On the Saturday night there were only the three of them, and to Joe it was almost like having a family, something he had not experienced, sitting over the fire with Thaddeus, talking, and Alice doing her needlework, and it made him realise how much he had lost and how much more he had never known, and in a way it made him the more lonely, all those evenings with no one to talk to, all the days without people of his own. He could not be comfortable because he knew that the following night he would be back in his room, keeping away from his father, eating the messes that Jacob provided instead of food, no fires, a few paintings on the walls or elegant furniture or servants or a carriage or any of the things that he might have been entitled to as the pit-owner’s son.

He could see that he took the hardship and the responsibility without any of the benefits, and the more he listened to
Thaddeus the more he was inclined to take the risk and go in with him. What would become of himself and the pit and the people otherwise? He had no money to improve conditions and he wanted to do so much. Thaddeus and Alice showed him all the wasted years, all the loneliness, all the things his father could have been to him. In some ways it was worse being there because he could no longer comfort himself that other people were worse off than he was. It was true, of course, but you didn’t think of that, only that other people were better off, so much better off. Even Dryden and Esther Margaret could turn over in the night’s darkness and reach out, and although he knew that Thaddeus and Alice were not always happy they sat by the fire together and lived in relative luxury. Envy, Joe knew, was a bad sin, and he would have to alter his life so that there would be no more of it.

Therefore two weeks later he was able to pass Esther Margaret in the street and merely smile and nod. It didn’t hurt any more. He couldn’t allow it to.

*

The days were short and dark and wet as Christmas approached. Vinia tried to cheer Esther Margaret up but nothing seemed to shift her mood, and every time Vinia visited she was sitting by the window staring out at the road that led past the Black Prince Pit and up on the moors. She did little. When she had been unwell after the death of the baby Vinia had kept on going to the house to see to the fire and the cooking and Esther Margaret went on being incapable of doing anything. It was hard. If Vinia left her to do anything she got it wrong because she was not thinking about what she was doing, but when Vinia had to keep going day after day it became very hard. First there was the question of money.

‘I’m doing the shopping. I need to be able to afford it,’ she told Dryden flatly.

He nodded in the direction of the mantelpiece.

‘It’s always in there,’ he said.

When he had gone to work Vinia took down the little wooden box he had indicated. It was stuffed with money. Esther Margaret could not have spent much in weeks, and he was obviously taking nothing from it other than beer money. Even so she used as little as possible when buying the food.

It was unfortunate that Dryden and Tom were almost always on the same shift; it meant that she had to leave Dryden’s dinner in the oven and everything prepared and run home before Tom got there. After a fortnight of this they went on to different shifts, which would make it impossible. Dryden caught her as she was there cleaning the house.

‘This has to stop,’ he said.

Vinia paused in washing the kitchen floor.

‘You’ve got a better idea, have you?’

‘She does nothing all day.’

Vinia got up, leaning wet hands on the bucket.

‘And you’re going to get her to do something more?’

‘I have tried to talk to her,’ he said.

Vinia had tried too, but she did it again when he had left for work. She went through into the front room. As ever Esther Margaret was sitting on a kitchen chair by the window. There wasn’t much to see. The road disappeared into fog, everything was wet and the day was dark and gloomy. She kept a fire on in there because it was so cheerless. They had no furniture. She thought they could have afforded some by now from somewhere, but neither of them had the heart to care about things like that.

Esther Margaret heard her and stirred.

‘The road seems as if it goes into the clouds there, Vinia, look. It goes into nothing, disappears.’

‘We should go out and get some holly this afternoon,’ Vinia said.

Esther Margaret frowned, though she did not take her gaze from the scene outside.

‘Shall we?’ Vinia said after waiting for her reply.

‘Later.’

‘Come and help me. Everything’s to do.’

‘I will.’

But she didn’t and neither did they go out gathering holly. Vinia went by herself one day and it was a relief to get beyond the village down towards the dale and find the holly trees red with berries. It was the sign of a hard winter, she knew, and she didn’t like to take too much because she knew that the birds would depend upon it, but Christmas was a time of hope and she wanted to bring a little of it into the houses. She went home after leaving a meal for Dryden and when Tom went to work, she went back again only to find Dryden sitting alone over the kitchen fire.

‘Aren’t you going out?’ she said.

‘No.’

Every night that week Dryden sat over the kitchen fire and Esther Margaret in the other room. They didn’t speak either to one another or about each other and neither of them was any help. Dryden didn’t go out to the pub at all, even when Christmas drew nearer and the men were making an excuse of something they did all year anyhow. He went to work and he came back and slept.

‘Maybe you could have some new things,’ Vinia suggested brightly one day just before Christmas.

He looked blankly at her.

‘Furnish the front room.’

‘Do you think Esther Margaret would like that?’

‘I’m sure she would.’

But she listened to him suggesting this to Esther Margaret. There was no reply.

‘Perhaps we ought to get the doctor,’ she said, but when the doctor came he could suggest nothing useful and Vinia listened to him briskly telling Esther Margaret that she would have lots more children, she was young, it was nothing to worry about, she had a husband to look after. Vinia felt like telling him that the way these two were going on her chances of having a baby were slight to say the least.

She wanted to suggest to them that they should come and spend Christmas Day at her house. Tom would have liked that, she knew, but they had to go to his mother’s, she wouldn’t have dared suggested anything else, but nonetheless she mentioned it to Tom and he sighed and said, ‘I’m worried about our Dryden.’

Only in her presence did he call Dryden ‘our’ in the family sense.

‘He never comes to the pub any more since the bairn died and he’s got nowt to say at work.’

‘He didn’t exactly behave very well.’

Tom shot her a keen look.

‘No, I know. He made a mess of things from the beginning but he did the right thing, he did marry her. Many a lad would have run away. Since then I don’t think she’s given him a kind word. It was her fault too, you know. Lasses do take part in these things, though to hear them you’d think they didn’t. You’d think they’d held you off with a bloody gun. And anyroad, surely losing your bairn’s enough pay-off for owt. Could we have them over to tea on Christmas Day, do you think?’

Vinia looked at him across the fire.

‘What about your mother?’ she said.

‘After that.’

Vinia suggested it to Dryden and Esther Margaret. Dryden was pleased, she could tell, but Esther Margaret didn’t lift her eyes from the view out of the window, though it was dark and there was little to see.

Christmas Day arrived and they had a lie-in. Vinia was just cooking breakfast for Tom when there was a banging on the door. She opened it to reveal Dryden, wild-eyed and dishevelled. He burst inside.

‘Is she here? Is Esther Margaret here?’

‘No. We haven’t seen her.’

‘She’s gone. She’s gone. I can’t find her.’

Vinia shouted Tom down the stairs. He appeared some moments later, quickly dressed, fastening his shirt.

‘What’s happened?’

‘Esther Margaret’s not there. I’ve been all over. She must have left when it was still dark. Where can she be? She wasn’t there when I woke up and I’ve looked everywhere for her. I thought she might have been here.’

‘She could have gone to her mam’s,’ Vinia said.

‘She never sees them. They didn’t even come when the baby died.’

‘It’s Christmas. Maybe she thought it would alter things. I’ll go, shall I?’

Vinia was glad of something useful to do. Tom put on his jacket and boots and accompanied Dryden, searching the streets. It occurred to Vinia that Esther Margaret was not in her right mind any more, and that anything could have happened. She hurried up the street and the maid opened the door, speaking stiffly and trying not to allow her entrance. Mr Hunter, hearing the fuss, came up behind her and permitted Vinia inside.

He took her into the sitting room, where his wife was standing by the fire, and there she explained calmly that Esther Margaret could not be found.