So Netherwood Common, not being of any great practical benefit to anyone, was simply enjoyed by the townsfolk for what it was: a natural open space – rare enough, in this grey industrial landscape – where children could play out of earshot of their mothers and a working man could smoke a Woodbine in peace. The common in its present form had evolved over the past hundred years and it owed its existence to the three collieries that dominated the town, because as coal production replaced agriculture as Netherwood’s raison d’être, the fertile land became infinitely less valuable than the stuff beneath. The area’s farmland origins could still be seen in the hedgerows and ancient field boundaries that criss-crossed the common, but it was over a century now since the soil there had been tilled or crops planted.
Like everything else in the neighbourhood the common fell within the vast acreage of the Netherwood Estate, and from its highest point, and facing south, an observer could map the principal features of the Earl’s Yorkshire dominion. New Mill, Long Martley and Middlecar collieries, positioned respectively north, east and south of the town, dominated the outlook, their muck stacks, headstocks and winding gear stark and graphic against the sky. The residential terraces, long rows of coal-blackened, doughty, stone houses, stood like stocky bulwarks, built to withstand the worst of the four winds. Victoria Street, Market Street and Mill Lane claimed precedence on the south side of town and formed its modest commercial centre, where small shops, stalls and barrows plied their trade and vied for custom with the Co-operative Society, whose premises, like its profits, seemed to grow annually. One town hall. One town hall clock tower. Three public houses. Three churches – one high, two low. And then beyond Mill Lane and Middlecar Colliery, but still visible from the common, the road gradually narrowed and dipped, following the contours of a shallow valley and leading to the gate – one of four – to the ancestral home of Lord and Lady Hoyland, the Earl and Countess of Netherwood.
The great house itself, Netherwood Hall, was tucked away, out of sight, a remarkable feat, given its size, and a fortuitous one. Not only was great privacy accorded the aristocratic family within, but also they were spared the unlovely sight of the scarred landscape of the Yorkshire coalfields.
But beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Eve Williams and Anna Rabinovich, standing on this clear August day on the highest point of the common, saw nothing to offend the eye as they regarded the familiar vista before them.
‘See?’ Anna said, arms spread before her in a proprietorial way, as if she was personally responsible for the view. ‘World at your feet.’ Her accent, her hybrid dialect of Russian and Yorkshire, made most of her statements sound comical. She had no end of colloquialisms to hand, but somehow never remembered to use the definite article.
Eve laughed. ‘Always knew it was only a matter of time,’ she said.
‘But imagine, Eve. All this, ours.’
‘Aye, ours and three thousand other folks’. It’s a common, y’know, not a back garden.’
Anna shrugged. Mere detail, and detail was the enemy of an adventurous spirit. She had brought her friend up here, dragging her unwillingly away from all the things she should be doing, to look at a house. It was the only property on the common, a large, detached villa, deeper than it was wide, double-fronted with generous bay windows and its name and date carved in stone over the door: Ravenscliffe, 1852. Like everything else, it belonged to Lord Hoyland, though it had been designed and built by the same architect who was responsible for most of the dwellings in Netherwood. Abraham Carr had sought and been granted permission from the present earl’s father to erect a house for his own use and at his own expense, and had named it nostalgically for the Yorkshire village of his birth. Then, just five years after taking up residence, he had passed away: born in one Ravenscliffe, died in another. The house was bought by the Netherwood estate, absorbed into all its other possessions and instantly put to work. Various tenants had taken it in the forty years since Mr Carr’s demise, merchants, mostly, or people from the professional classes whose wages stretched further than those of the miners. Now, though, it was empty. Unfurnished. Unloved. And Anna wanted to live there.
Something about the house spoke to her, and you should listen to a house, she believed. She wasn’t in any other way a fanciful person, never looked for meanings or omens in everyday happenings, never tried to interpret her dreams or fathom the patterns of the stars, but a house was another matter. There were good ones and bad ones and the two could look identical, but while one would bring happiness, the other would bring only misery. As a child in Kiev, in another life and time, she had lived in an imposing mansion with towers at each end and six wide steps up to the front door. It was her father’s statement to the world that he was a successful man, but for all its fineness Anna knew, even as an infant, that it was riddled with misery, from its foundations to its roof tiles. She never understood why: some houses were afflicted, that was all. When her parents disowned her for marrying a Jew, when they spat on the floor at her feet and told her never to return, she had thought, it’s the house speaking: you two have been here too long.
This house on the common, though, this Ravenscliffe, held the promise of happiness. Its hearths were empty and cold, but there was warmth here nevertheless. Anna had stood before it, looked it in the eye, and recognised this at once. So her mission in persuading Eve that the rent – though four times what they currently paid – was of negligible concern compared with the ease and comfort it would bring, came directly from the heart. She felt compelled to win this battle, overcome her friend’s reservations, press her point. In any case, from a purely practical point of view, they were bursting at the seams in Beaumont Lane. And when Eve and Daniel were wed, he would be there too, because Eve and the children couldn’t live in that doll’s house they’d put him in at the hall. And then babies might come. No. There was simply no other course of action.
They walked back down towards the house, and Anna could tell that Eve’s mind had drifted elsewhere.
‘Bedrooms for us all,’ she said, to pull her back to the matter in hand. ‘Space for your children and my little Maya. Fresh air.’
‘Mmm, as fresh as it gets round ‘ere, anyroad.’
‘And kitchen big enough to dance polka. And bathroom, Eve. No tin tubs and outdoor privy.’
‘Yes, Anna. I know. It’s just …’
‘I know. Beaumont Street was Arthur’s home,’ she said, with the slightest hint of weariness, as if she’d heard it once too often.
‘Don’t say it like that, as if it’s not rational of me to think of it.’ Eve, provoked, stopped abruptly so that when Anna turned to face her she had to trot back up the slope a little way.
‘That’s not what I meant,’ Anna said, though it was, in part. ‘What I meant was, I understand how you feel, how leaving Arthur’s home would feel.’
‘It’s not just me,’ said Eve, setting off again. ‘I mean, I’m not only worried on my account.’
Anna sighed. ‘Seth?’
‘Aye. ’e’s already ’ad too much to take on.’
No more than Eliza and Ellen, thought Anna, but she held her tongue. Eve’s oldest child made heavy weather of life, in her view, and was as rude and withdrawn with Daniel as he had been with Anna herself, when she first moved in to Beaumont Lane eighteen months ago, after Arthur was killed. It was a long road ahead for Daniel, if her own experience was anything to go by. All of this ran through Anna’s mind, as the two women walked in silence down the slope, then rounded the bend towards Ravenscliffe. Her heart lifted at the sight of it.
‘Eve,’ she said, quite urgently, so that they both halted again. Her friend turned to her, questioningly.
‘When you and Daniel marry,’ said Anna, ‘wouldn’t it be better for everyone if you made new home, and left one you had shared with Arthur?’
Eve sighed, looked at the ground. This conversation, kindly meant, was nevertheless unsettling. ‘Probably,’ she said. ‘Yes.’
‘Arthur lives on i
n your children, you know, not in bricks and mortar.’
‘Aye. I know that.’ And she did. But still, she thought, it was a link with him. She didn’t want her love for Daniel to eclipse her memories of Arthur: that would be wrong, disrespectful, less than he deserved. While she lived in her little terrace in Beaumont Lane, she could still picture him, at the table wolfing his dinner, or in the tub sluicing off the coal dust. Where would he be in Ravenscliffe?
They went in, though; like a cat burglar Anna had cased the joint and found a sash window that had been left unfastened. She opened it now and ushered Eve through it, holding up her skirts and giving her a gentle push into a large square entrance hall. There was never any resisting Anna when she was on a mission. They stood for a moment in the profound stillness of the empty house.
‘You’ll get us arrested,’ Eve whispered. She was half-impressed, half-scandalised at her friend’s resourcefulness.
‘No need to whisper,’ Anna said boldly. ‘Come,’ and she set off through the ground floor with a certainty of purpose that suggested she’d been here before. There was nothing to be done but follow her, so Eve dispatched her disapproval and allowed herself to be led from one large impressive room to another. Abraham Carr had done a fine job. There was a fair amount of dust, and the spiders had claimed all the corners, but there was no getting away from the fact that this was a glorious house, flooded with natural light, substantially built and sure of itself, adorned with Victorian flourishes – lavishly tiled floors, plaster cornicing, marble fire surrounds, a sweeping, mahogany staircase – and positioned to make the most of the views of Netherwood Common, from the front and from the back. How odd it would be, thought Eve, as she gazed through one of two windows in the large kitchen, to look out every day on grass and trees. Anna joined her and Eve said, ‘Makes a change from looking at Lilly and Maud’s bloomers on t’washing line, doesn’t it?’
‘At least when their bloomers are up you can’t see privvies.’
They laughed, then Anna wandered across to the other window and Eve turned to study the black range. It was rather fine, a Leamington Kitchener, twice the size of her range in Beaumont Lane and with no visible faults that a pot of black lead and a rag wouldn’t solve. It was set back into a recess, which was bordered on its two long sides by carved columns and across its top by a handsome mantel in the same classical style, giving the range the air of a prize exhibit. Eve placed her hands on the top of the stove. She wondered how long it had stood cold.
Anna said, ‘You could watch Seth play knur and spell from here, see?’
Eve turned back to the window and joined her friend, who pointed up the hill outside towards the wide clearing of trampled grass where men gathered most Saturday afternoons with their pummels and knurs. Miners’ golf, some people called it, though it was tougher than golf to master, and as much about strength as strategy. Seth had watched his father play ever since he was old enough to be taken along to matches, and now he used his dad’s pummel, which was too big for him, really, but try telling him that. If the competition wasn’t too fierce or if they were a man short, Seth was asked to join in; along with the allotment, it was the one thing that could make him smile.
Eve moved to Anna’s side, saw the same long wide slope, and the same clearing. But she didn’t see Seth there. She saw Arthur. Jacket discarded on the floor, shirt sleeves rolled above the elbows, facing the spell and its finely balanced knur, his eyes never leaving the ball as the spring launched it up and he swiped it long and true with the pummel his own father had made for him. That’s where Arthur would be at Ravenscliffe, she thought. Not in the house, but up there, on the hill.
She turned and walked out of the kitchen so abruptly that Anna was sure she had taken against the idea of the move, once and for all, and as they clambered back out of the window Eve was silent. But then as she pulled open the front gate, which hung lopsided, its top hinge having splintered away from the post, she said, ‘That’ll need fixing for a start.’
Beside her but unseen, Anna smiled.
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