The Miner’s Girl (29 page)

Miles was very pale and there was a small cut on his cheek that was blue-black with the coal. He also had a bandage on his hand but as far as Tom could see that was the extent of his father's injuries and he sighed with relief.

‘Father!' he said, ‘I was worried about you.'

‘I'm all right,' Miles said briefly, crossed over to where Bertha was standing by the window and took her hand.

‘I'm sorry, Bertha,' he said.

‘It's true then?' she asked and he nodded.

Bertha shook off his hand and strode to the fire where she turned and stood, legs apart and with her hands on her hips. Her face twisted with anger, not grief. Tom, watching, though she must be holding off her grief by whipping herself into a rage and he bit his lip.

‘How could you do it?' she screamed at Miles. ‘Why did you take him down the mine? Why?'

‘I–I couldn't stop him, it was his idea, he—'

‘Rubbish, you could have stopped him, he's an old man!' She was glaring at him, her face suffused with colour and her eyes bulging.

‘Bertha,' said Tom, moving towards her and laying his hand on her arm. ‘Sit down, Bertha, please. You've had a terrible shock.'

‘A shock is it? My husband leads my father to his death and then hasn't the nerve to come and tell me himself? He sent an overman for God's sake, an overman from the pit.' She shook off Tom's arm in the manner she had shaken off his father's. Her whole body was trembling with the depth of her feeling. ‘Well? Have you nothing more to say to me?' she shouted.

‘I'm sorry, Bertha, I really am,' said Miles. Tom looked at him.

‘I think you had better sit down, both of you in fact,' he said and Miles made to sit but Bertha screeched at him again.

‘Don't you dare sit on any of my chairs, Miles Gallagher, you've been down the pit, haven't you? Look at you, you're filthy. Go and clean yourself up. Go on, I can't bear the sight of you.'

Miles shrugged and glanced at Tom, then walked to the door like an old man. It was the first time Tom had seen him like that so he strode quickly to the door himself and opened it.

‘Will you be all right?' he asked in a low voice as his father went out. ‘Shall I come with you? She doesn't mean any of this, you know. Shock takes people in different ways.'

Miles shook his head and headed towards the stairs. Tom glanced back into the room and seeing Bertha's figure beginning to slump decided he had better see to her first. He was just in time to catch her as she fell and laid her on the chaise-longue. The faint lasted only seconds though and she sat up and looked at him with pain-filled eyes.

‘Keep still,' he ordered. ‘It was just the shock.'

Bertha began to cry as at last the grief for her father hit with full force. She lay back against the raised end
of the chaise-longue and sobbed. Tom got her fresh tea, adding brandy and sugar, and she sipped at it between hiccuping and dabbing at her eyes. After a while she became quiet.

‘Are you all right?' he asked and she nodded. ‘I'll just go up and see how my father is,' he added. ‘Shall I call the maid?'

‘No.'

Tom gazed at her with concern until she said, ‘Oh for goodness sake, leave me alone and go and see to your precious father.' He nodded and went out and up the stairs. Miles was in the bathroom looking at the cut on his face in the mirror over the basin.

‘I must get rid of the coal mark,' he said to Tom.

‘I doubt you can, but we can try,' Tom replied.

He dabbed at the small cut with cotton wool soaked in a solution of hydrogen peroxide. ‘It could put a dressing on it but really it is better open to the air,' he said. ‘How do you feel now? I could give you something—'

‘No, I don't want anything, I told that Doctor whatshis- name at the pit.'

‘Sure?'

‘I'm sure,' Miles said shortly. ‘For God's sake don't fuss.'

Tom shrugged. ‘All right. But take it easy, please. Have a warm bath, not too hot, and a rest. I'll stay and attend to whatever has to be done.'

Tom was at the door when Miles said suddenly, ‘Were you up at the pit yard this morning, Tom?'

‘No, of course not, I was at home. I had just come not long before you came in, Bertha telephoned me. Why?'

‘Nothing, I just thought I caught a glimpse – no, it was nothing.' Tom nodded and went out. No doubt his father had been suffering from the effects of the accident and then the sudden emergence into the light as he came to bank.

When he went out Miles locked the bathroom door, ran the bath and climbed in. He had been going to anyway. He stretched out on the deep iron-enamelled tub and let his thoughts wander back over the happenings of the day. Bertha he didn't give a second thought to. Oh, he had said he was sorry and he was, but not for what had happened to her father. The old sod was past it anyway, so he was better out of the road. Now he could put the next stage of his plan into action.

No, what he was sorry about was that it hadn't turned out the way he had planned. And he had planned it meticulously, prodding the old man to go down to the second level with him and without the manager, on a day and at a time when there were few men in the mine, so it was easier to make sure there were no witnesses.

‘I think it is important to keep a thorough watch on the way the seam is being worked out,' he had said to
old Porritt. That was how he thought of him, always old Porritt. ‘Carney is as trustworthy and efficient as most managers but after all, he is just an employee. Employees haven't got your interests at heart, of course they haven't. No, I think we should go down ourselves and then we'll know exactly what he's talking about.'

Carney, the manager had reported that the pit props all needed replacing as the roof was showing signs of sagging in one particular area. Near where they were thinking of going down a level, it was. He wanted good Norwegian spruce pit props and a more efficient ventilation engine than the ancient one in use.

‘It works perfectly adequately,' old Porritt had protested and sent Miles down to look at it. It was a long time since he himself had ventured down the mine. For Miles it was the perfect opportunity to put his plan in motion.

‘You must come and see for yourself,' he had told the old man. ‘It is not too far from the shaft bottom, so you won't find the walk taxing. In any case, I'll be with you.'

It would be easy, he had thought. All he had to do was walk behind old Porritt and hit him with a lump of stone when he wasn't looking. It would look as though the stone had fallen from the badly supported roof. But in the event, part of the roof
had
fallen as a pit prop cracked and sagged, and stone had fallen on Porritt's prone body.

He had had a bad fright, Miles told himself as he stretched out in the warm water. He had actually been hit himself by flying debris and had had to jump back and run for the main way, stumbling over the rails and falling, hitting his head on a rail. By, that was a bad moment.

Still, it had lent his story credence. Miles reached to the side for the loofah and soap and scrubbed at his arms. Gingerly he felt the small wound on his cheek. He hoped Tom had got rid of the blue coal scar, he thought. Such scars were the marks of the common pitmen and not suited to someone of his status, for he was now an owner besides being the agent for Arthur Bolton and Co. Or he soon would be – there was only Bertha in the way now.

It was as he was pulling on his robe that he remembered the man he had seen in the pit yard. It was funny that – for a minute he had been sure it was Tom. But Tom hadn't been there, so it must have been his imagination or a trick his eyes played on coming out of the pit into the bright light on top.

For the first time in years he thought about the boy he had put on the boat at Hartlepool. With hindsight it had been a daft thing to do, he reckoned. Much better to have done what he intended to do in the first place – put him in the old ventilation shaft or throw him over the roof fall in the drift mine. Yet somehow he hadn't found himself able to do it.

He was letting his imagination run away with him, he decided as he reached for the bath towel on the rail above the bath. It must have been another fair-haired man he had seen, he told himself. The other one would likely be dead by now and if he wasn't he wouldn't have the means to come back and seek revenge. He was half-dead when he last saw him.

He stood up and wrapped the towel round himself and climbed out of the bath before rubbing himself dry. He felt strangely lethargic yet exhilarated. No doubt it was something to do with the brush with death he had experienced. He went into the bedroom and climbed into bed. No need to face Bertha again today. Tom would look after her. That lad was altogether too much like his soft-hearted mother.

When Tom looked in the bedroom a few minutes later Miles was fast asleep and snoring. He stood and gazed down at his father for a few minutes; felt for the pulse at his temple. It was a little fast but quite strong and steady. He pulled the eiderdown up round his father's shoulders and went out, closing the door quietly after him. The rest would do him good and besides there would be things to see to tomorrow.

Downstairs Bertha was also asleep, lying on the chaise-longue and making small bubbly noises through her rather thin lips. Tom pondered what to do, then went to the telephone in the hall and rang his deputy in
Borden and asked if he minded taking over for another day or so.

‘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.

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.

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.