The Black Mountains (18 page)

Gait was O'Halloran's under-manager, and responsible for the day-to-day running of South Hill Pit. He was an untidy, red-faced man, whose waistcoat was always covered by a dusting of ash from his cigarette, and whose baggy suit had seen better days. But in spite of his slovenly appearance he was an ambitious man, with an eye on the general managership when O'Halloran retired.

“And God help us all if he gets it,” Ted thought. For where O'Halloran was generous, Gait was mean, and while O'Halloran put a good deal of thought into improving conditions for the men, Gait thought of no one but himself.

When Ted entered the office, he found Gait sprawled in the round-backed chair behind the desk, hat perched on the back of his head, a cigarette stuck to his lower lip.

“You wanted to see me?” Ted said.

Gait shifted in his chair, peering at Ted through the screen of cigarette smoke.

“Yes, lad, I've been hearing stories about you—that you're thinking of leaving us and going over the water to Wales. I hope there's no truth in that.”

His tone put Ted on the defensive. “And what if there is?” he asked.

Gait rolled his cigarette along his lip, looking at Ted steadily.

“Well, if you were to go off anywhere like that, you'd have to take your father with you, you know, and it might not be so easy for him to get a job at his age,” he said slyly. “Oh, I know what you're thinking—that he's pretty well settled here. But things aren't what they used to be. I've got plenty of good men waiting for your father's job, men that are sound in wind and limb. But a well-trained carting boy like you, Ted, that's something else again. I don't like to lose a carting boy.”

Ted looked at him in disbelief. “Are you trying to tell me…”

“That if you go, there'd be no work here for your father. Yes, that's about the size of it. But it won't come to that, will it, lad? I'd stake my last ha'penny it won't come to that.”

For a moment, Ted did not answer. Anger was boiling up inside him. With a contemptuous movement he unrolled the cap he had kept in his hand throughout the interview as a mark of respect and rammed it on to his head.

“I'd hate to see you lose your last ha'penny, Mr Gait,” he said.

Then he turned and walked out of the office.

Outside, the pale November sunshine was warming the rough-hewn lias stone of the row of cottages, the saw-pit shed and the frame house on the opposite side of the yard, and glancing dully off the grey slate roofs. It was a scene he had come to take for granted over the years, but now he stood staring at it through different eyes.

Until Gait had threatened him, he had given no serious thought to leaving the pit, but now, suddenly, he felt trapped and desperate. He'd been half joking when he'd said to Redvers that they would still be carting in ten years' time—but now it was no joke. All his youth the pit would take from him, and maybe his life, too, and what would it give him in return? A bare living wage, blue veins all over his body, and a bad chest—if he was lucky. And the prospect of being on the scrap-heap by the time he was forty-five, as was his father.

But the door had been closed on his escape. Gait was not the one to make idle threats, and he had the trump card. He knew Ted would never go if he thought it would mean his father losing his job.

“Blackmailing bastard!” Ted muttered over his shoulder. “ You'd do it, too, wouldn't you?”

He'd do it, and it would be the end of James. Ever since he had left school, he'd been in the pits, and it was life and breath to him. Perhaps there was unemployment benefit now for those who found themselves without work, but that wasn't enough. They couldn't dole out self-respect, or a purpose for living.

Restlessness stirred in him and the desire to escape. His flesh crawled with it, and his stomach twisted in anticipation of the sight and smell of new places, where there was no coal-dust. They were out there, somewhere, beyond the black mountains, and he wanted to see them.

What he would do for a living if he escaped he didn't know, and it didn't matter much. He would take whatever came—and it was bound to be better than crawling along dark and narrow passages, steadying tubs down steep topples. Anything must be better than that.

But for the present, escape was out of his reach, thrust away by a vindictive under-manager.

“One of these days,” Ted said to himself, “Gaity will get what's coming to him.”

Jim's baby was born in May—“ Taurus the Bull,” said Dolly, who read the horoscopes with Cook every morning when they had cleared away the breakfast things. “ He'll be just as stubborn as our Jim, wait and see if he's not.”

“That's a lot of nonsense,” Charlotte said shortly. “But you really will be seeing stars, my girl, if you don't get back to service quick sharp!”

Dolly got up, collecting her things. Like the rest of the family, she was mesmerized by the baby. It was strange in a way, for there had never been a shortage of babies in Greenslade Tenace, and it was only four years since Harry had been in the cradle. But there was something special about a first grandchild—or nephew—and Alex, as they were calling him, was a beautiful baby, not wrinkled at all, but pink and placid.

Sarah was not well, though. There had been some trouble with the afterbirth, and Dr Scott had said she mustn't set a foot to the ground just yet. So Charlotte and Sarah's own mother took turns at going over to the cottage to look after things—the rest of the family making that an excuse to call in often.

It was just down the pit path for James, Ted, and Fred, of course. They walked down with Jim in the evenings, and collected Charlotte. Then they all went home together, although sometimes Charlotte left them at the County Stores where she now worked, the men returning home to an empty house and a somewhat inadequate tea that Amy had been left to organize.

Those days they disliked intensely, and for the first time they realized how much they took Charlotte for granted. But there was no way it could be avoided. Sarah had to be looked after, and the job at the County Stores was far too good to risk losing through bad time-keeping or unreliability.

Charlotte had started the job in the spring, taken on when a new manager came from London. It made a welcome change from the dim and dusty Palace Picture House, for although on wet days the floor got filthy, it was a different sort of dirt to the Palace—good, wholesome mud and coal-dust. She was left alone, too, which she liked, for she had soon discovered at the Palace that, if she worked while Bertha gossiped, in the end she usually did Bertha's share as well as her own. And there was another attraction to the County Stores, one which made it different from any of her previous jobs. When the regular counter assistant was indisposed, Algie Smith, the manager, would ask her to help out.

To Charlotte, this was more like a game than work. When she had been in the draper's shop in Bath before she was married, she had always enjoyed serving, and the County Stores presented even more delights. There was the sharp wire for cutting cheese, the big scales for weighing up sugar, biscuits, tea and dried fruit, and the small ones for doing paper twists full of mint shrimp or bull's-eyes for the children. And best of all was the cash railway that whisked the takings to the central till and returned the change—a strange contraption of wooden cups screwed to a system of overhead wires and sent into action by means of a sharp pull on a dangling chain. Charlotte never tired of using it, and while pretending to serve the next customer, she would watch the wooden cup skim along the wire to the cage-like office in the centre of the shop where Christine, Algie Smith's Dutch-born wife, sat in solitary splendour.

Even Harry enjoyed the days when his mother helped in the shop. He was at school in the mornings, but, if Charlotte was working in the afternoon, he could go with her and root around among the boxes and biscuit tins in the small rear yard to his heart's content.

The money was better, too, and that was a great consideration. For Jack was going to take his Oxford Junior Examination in the summer, and, if he passed, he would be going to the grammar school at Wells one week out of two.

“I'm afraid it's going to mean extra expense,” William Davies told Charlotte and James when he called them up to the school to talk to them about it. “ If Jack does as well as I expect him to in the exam, there should be a scholarship for him. But that's not going to cover everything.”

“What do you mean?” Charlotte asked with a sidelong look at James.

“Do you remember me explaining how the pupil/teacher system works when you first decided to let Jack go on with this?” William Davies asked. “ Half the time, Jack will be here with me, helping to teach here, in our school. The rest of the time he will be learning himself, at the grammar school. I've already spoken to the headmaster about it, and he's prepared to let Jack live in with him during the week. Unless you want him to travel daily. But it's an awkward journey and means changing trains.”

“If the headmaster says he can live with him, I should think that would be a very good idea,” Charlotte said “ We'd have to pay his board and lodge, of course.”

“Yes. And there'll be books and equipment to find—pens, pencils, an unspillable inkpot, that sort of thing. And a school uniform, too. To set against that, I may be able to get him a small wage for the work he does here with me. But it's still going to be an expensive business, I'm afraid.”

“We'll manage,” Charlotte said quickly. She was anxious to clinch things before James could ask too many questions. He was not as enthusiastic as she was, she knew, and why should he be? To his way of thinking, all this education was above their station.

“You know I'll do all I can to help, too,” William Davies said, smiling. “ I'm so proud of Jack. My butterfly really is finding his wings, isn't he?”

James granted, looking at him suspiciously, and he laughed, a small, nervous sound. “Have you any idea what this means to me, Mr Hall?” he asked “ To see one of my pupils really making a success of an academic career? I've been here in Hillsbridge for nearly twenty years, so you can imagine how many children have been through my hands. They come to me at three or four, bright as buttons, like Harry is now, and so eager to learn it does your heart good. But what happens? By the time they're twelve or thirteen, all they can think about is leaving and getting a job. Some soul-destroying grind that will extinguish all spark. It's sad. Very sad.”

“There's nothing wrong with an honest day's work, Mr Davies,” James said.

William Davies, realizing he was criticizing the system that had moulded James and three of his sons, coloured slightly.

“Not a thing. But it should be each to his own, Mr Hall, the way it is in the world of nature. And that's why I think of Jack as a butterfly,” he said with almost childlike simplicity. “He won't be caught under the ground. He'll be soaring, free, wherever the fancy takes him!”

“He's cracked,” James said to Charlotte when they left William Davies. “He's got a screw loose. Butterfly, indeed!”

“It's just the way he talks,” Charlotte argued. “ He's a clever man, and I don't know where our Jack would be without him.”

“Butterfly!” James snorted again.

“Well, he's keen on them, isn't he?” Charlotte explained. “ Our Jack was telling me he's got cases of them in his house, all stuck on pins. I shouldn't like it myself, but there's no accounting for taste.”

James did not reply, and she took his arm affectionately. “ Cheer up, now. I know you worry about what your mates think, but I'm sure they don't take nearly as much notice as you imagine. Jack will pass his scholarship with flying colours, and you'll be as proud of him as me.”

James gave her a slow, sidelong look while he took two or three long, rattling breaths.

“And have you thought what'll happen if he doesn't pass?” he asked at last.

Charlotte's fingers tightened on his arm. It hadn't even crossed her mind that Jack might fail. She'd taken it for granted that, clever as he was, success was assured. Now, she felt sick, as if James had knocked the ground out from under her.

“He'll pass,” she said “Mr Davies says…”

“Mr Davies isn't going to mark his paper, is he? And Jack's worried about it himself.”

“He never said anything to me!” Charlotte said indignantly.

“Well, you aren't very often there when he is, are you?” James remarked. “ Oh, I know it's no good talking to you, Lotty. That's why I haven't said anything before. But I don't like what all this studying is doing to him. He's as pale as skimmed milk, and heavy-eyed. Now if he was to go out a bit more …”

“But he wouldn't be happy,” Charlotte argued. “He's not the type.”

“No, I can't understand him,” James said heavily. “He's not much like me, I can tell you.”

Again her stomach knotted inside, the sudden chill, the wondering: How can I explain without telling him? Will he ever credit Jack with being an individual, or always compare him with his brothers?

Aloud, she said, “ There's no explaining these things. And he'll pass the exam. I know he will!”

“I hope so.”

“He will.”

“Well, I shouldn't like to be around either of you if he doesn't,” James commented drily.

THROUGHOUT the early summer months, Jack hardly left his books. Often, he was late home from school because William Davies had given him extra tuition after the others had gone, and when he did arrive, he would take his work upstairs the minute he finished his tea. On fine days, at Charlotte's suggestion, he took a chair down to the end of the garden, beyond the beansticks, but the neighbours were all out working in their own gardens, and the small children running up and down the rank to play made such a noise that he found it difficult to concentrate.