‘And what is the rest of the day’s target?’
‘I was hoping to make a start on the glazing.’
‘May I help? I’ve never done it before, but I’ve watched men at work.’
‘That’s all I can say for myself. But you’ll get filthy dirty.’
‘I promise to wash before my next meal.’
So he delayed his return to the roof to show her how to mix the putty, though she was itching to get to work independently. Then, perched up overlooking the slag-heap of the Drift, knocking in a nail to hold the last of his slates, he could no longer see her, could only hear the occasional scratch of her scraper against the woodwork, the tap as she drove in a tack to hold a pane.
Before she left, he told her that he had to be away for the next three days. It suddenly loomed large to him that there must be no misunderstanding between them. She must not come here and find him missing, thinking him perhaps gone away for ever, so that a week or two might pass before it came to her ears that he was back again.
Yet while he was away, she did actually ride over to look at the site. And how pathetically bare and barren it looked to her now: the new, freshly creosoted woodwork sealing off the entrance tunnel to the mine, the austere and solid, impervious front door that he had fixed to the cottage; the formidable padlocks hanging from the hasps. She held her hands beside her eyes and peered through the window – the lights that she had fixed for him herself. Inside, everything looked much more spacious than she had ever imagined, and clinically clean – as clean, at any rate, as untreated limestone walls and a trodden soil floor could be expected to be.
Lomas knew that she had been. She must have sat for an hour and more on the gangue – the accumulation of mineral waste of the generations of earlier strugglers – knocking one fist-sized cobble against another to chip out the morsels of shining ore too insignificant for previous attention. She had produced enough in all to fill about three tea-cups. And she had wrapped it in a neckerchief, knotted at the corners, which she had left on a corner of his doorstep: her contribution to his dish.
Although I am writing with hindsight, not putting pen to paper until the whole story was closed, I do not find it easy to write of Isobel Fuller’s developing feelings for Frank Lomas. I must not make too much of a woman’s natural bent for helping out in a domestic emergency – or of her possibly disinterested admiration for an Augean project. Lomas on the other hand was frankly in love with her from the moment she had almost walked on to his clenched fist. He told me so freely; and although he recognised that there were enormous difficulties of practicability and status, he accepted the situation with typical cheerfulness.
Miss Fuller was naturally less forthcoming when I came to question her. She had had a shock which led quickly to a complete breakdown. When I talked to her, she was barely in command of herself, and there were confusing contradictions in some of what she said.
But I heard another haunting story when Frank Lomas was ultimately in confessional mood. In the early days of their acquaintance, she had found herself becoming obsessed by the thought of his wounded leg. She wanted to see him take off his repulsive boot, to look at the scarred and mangled flesh, the unnaturally twisted knots of torn and atrophied muscle. She knew she would want to avert her eyes, but she wanted to make herself stare until the sight became innocuously familiar to her. Then she brought herself to stretch out her hand and smooth her fingers over the cold wound. Lomas was afraid she would dream of it at night.
Three days after leaving Margreave, Frank returned, riding with his crippled leg outstretched over the shafts of a borrowed carrier’s cart, loaded with second-hand furniture: a bed and bedding, a cupboard, a whitewood table, two kitchen chairs, two foot-stools, fire-irons, cooking pots, a wash-hand stand and a framed (and damp-stained) lithograph of Lord Roberts directing a charge against Botha at Bergendal. It was a slow, rumbling, jogging load of miscellaneous necessities and comforts which he drove along the rutted track to Dead-Nettle Drift.
He stabled the horse and worked by storm-lantern well into the night, deploying his effects about the cottage. With little more than three hours’sleep – on the first bed that he had owned in his own right ever in his life – he was away at dawn to return the cart to the carrier, returning on foot about midday. He worked all the afternoon, clearing rubbish from the mouth of the mine, but looking often over his shoulder so as not to miss a full view of Isobel when she rode up through the pasture behind the cottage. And she did just that, at what he was already beginning to think of as her usual time.
He at once went in to make tea, the kettle already filled and waiting only to be pushed back on the hob. He could not wait to show her round his home. She laughed at his boyish sense of urgency.
‘But it’s lovely.’
There were a chair and stool on either side of the hearth. She forbore to comment on it.
‘Did you find –?’
‘Your lead chippings? Yes. Every little helps.’
He did not tell her that he would not be using them.
He had decided that to use gangue chippings to help fill the dish would have been cheating the Bar Master.
‘I felt as if I was really getting you going,’ she said. ‘I got lead from the mine before you did.’
She looked up at the appalling lithograph, and said nothing.
‘I’ve got a few bits and pieces that I’ll bring over. We’ve some old rush matting that’ll come to no harm on this floor.’
‘One day I shall pave it with bricks. Or pammets. That can wait. First things first, I always say.’
‘And you need a cloth for the table. Curtains. I’ve got one or two things that I’d collected to give to the cottagers, only they didn’t seem to want them.’
‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you come and have supper with me? Next week. Tuesday. There’ll be something to celebrate on Tuesday. That’s when I aim to have filled my dish.’
‘I don’t know what on earth my father would say.’
‘Bring him with you.’
Scintillant laughter. When she had gone, he was uncertain whether she had agreed to come or not. He looked for her on the days in between, at what he now thought of as tea-time, but she did not come. He went into the town to stock up with provisions, had a mutton stew simmering in his pot. The thought began to needle him that he might be building for himself a monumental illusion.
She did come. Without her father. But they were not alone together for long.
Leitmotif: unforeseen callers.
Chapter Five
‘Of course,’ she said, ‘you’re no stranger to mines.’
‘To lead-mines I am.’
And he told her of his boyhood near the Nottinghamshire border: how he had left school from Standard Five to follow his elder brothers down the pit. He described the back-to-back terraces curling over the slag valleys. He spoke of the long months, from mid-autumn to mid-spring, when he had never seen daylight from Monday to Saturday: the jungle-beat of clog-irons downhill through cruel morning frosts, the afternoon shift dispersing through the shunting wagons at the pit-head, the last gesture of day a bloody wound in the shale-coloured skies behind the winding-gear (she thought again of his ruined leg).
As a boy he had been gullible, the butt of every practical joker on the playground, street and shift. He knew it himself now, could laugh about it with rehearsed, detached wisdom. But there were some things, she knew, that he would never tell her, admissions that he still had not made, even to himself.
On his first day at the face some irresponsible buffoon had sent him along a forgotten gallery on the sort of tom-fool errand with which impressionable apprentices are tormented in every walk of life. Go to the store-shed on H Gallery, ask for Tom Tweed. Ask him for a straight S-hook for Billy Haigh’s team. Make sure you sign for it. Within minutes he was lost, turning back in panic, certain that it was here he had turned left and there right. He only half understood his Davey lamp, was certain it wa
s showing a concentration of gas. In the distance a leak in a drainage channel sounded like a waterfall. He came into a tunnel that looked better used – fresh propped and vetted, metal rails shining with a high polish. Then thunder, an onslaught of murderous wheels. Get back where you should be, you bloody young fool: a train of six wagons hurtling past him with inches to spare, white eyes in a black face under a veteran’s helmet cursing him to perdition.
His father rapidly became ashamed to have him in the same pit, his mother even more distraught as she saw all hopes recede that he might ever grow into a man. His uncles, his cousins, the demagogues of the union, they all cursed the owners, the fire-damp, the afterdamp, blue scars on their foreheads, the dust in their lungs. Yet they clung to the rock-face, in love with their own martyrdom. Grow up and show you are a man. Men never turned their backs on trouble.
On Sundays there was daylight, even sunshine, slanting down through the dust from the chapel windows. Chapel on Sunday mornings, Young Men’s Bible Class on Sunday afternoons, Chapel again in the evening. Chapel taught you that dissatisfaction with your lot was a sin.
This grace has been purchased at infinite cost,
And all who reject it must die.
(Lomas had gone to Chapel in the Market Square on his first Sunday evening in Margreave, and had not missed a Sunday evening since. He wore a black suit in the style of the 1880s that he had preserved somewhere amongst his belongings, and stood with his hair fiercely brushed, drowning all his neighbours in his toneless tenor. Chapel was against strong drink. It was the only respect in which he was a back-slider – except on Sundays. He never went into the Adventurers’Arms on Sundays.)
‘No wonder you went into the army,’ Isobel Fuller said.
In advance, she had decided to be gracious about the mutton stew. It tickled her to think what her father might have said, if he could have seen her at the table in front of such a bowlful. It was high amongst his illusions that he had risen to refined gastronomic standards. But Frank Lomas’s stew turned out to be one of the tastiest dishes she had ever eaten. She happily accepted a second helping.
‘It wasn’t as easy as that,’ Lomas told her. ‘The army was no sacred cow in our valley and street. It was coal that made men of us, not charging the kopjes. I did have a letter from my father at last, while I was waiting for overseas draft, somewhere along the south coast – months after I’d given up hope of ever hearing from him again. He wished me well – but I’d hurt him and disappointed him. He didn’t say so in so many words, but he’d credited me with more common sense than to enlist for a soldier. And I know he thought that I was running away, turning my back on my difficulties instead of seeing them through. I’d never be able to hold up my face amongst miners again. And suppose that the troops were called in for strike-breaking?’
Isobel Fuller looked at him for a moment with such penetration that he turned his eyes away.
‘So that’s why you’ve come back to mining,’ she said.
‘It isn’t the same.’
‘It would serve your purpose, if you could make your living from it, wouldn’t it?’
‘I hope I shall chip out enough for my daily bread.’
‘So why choose Dead-Nettle Drift? It’s common talk that there are twenty or thirty mines within a two-mile radius of here where there are seams enough still for a life-time of hacking. They only want outlay on drainage – plus staying-power, which you have in abundance. But there’s nothing in Dead-Nettle. Even I can see that.’
‘I think I shall be proving you wrong.’
‘You think you have what they call inside information?’
Lomas signified that he had – and had no reason to doubt it. But his usual prattling candour seemed to dry up. He was not going to tell her about it.
‘From whom?’ she asked bluntly, trying to maintain the inconsequence of table-talk.
‘From a man I can trust.’
I think that Isobel first felt the pangs of a kind of jealousy in that moment. There was a wing shuttered off in his life that he did not want to open up to her. Perhaps she might have gone on to force his hand.
But at that juncture there were horses arriving with ebullient noise on the rubble outside, the extroversion of men of high spirit challenging the world at large; men for whom the peace and privacy of the people about them were something that had to be punctured.
‘It looks as if old Frank’s got the place stockaded up for a siege.’
‘Come on, Frank, open up, let’s be having you, on parade, show a leg, show us one of them, anyway. By God, I do believe he’s got a woman in there.’
Frank Lomas had drunk two pints of beer in the Adventurers’ Arms most week-nights since his arrival in Margreave, and there had been some subtle change in the attitude of the regulars to him. But there was no open hand of friendship. No man would have shown pleasure to see him come in, but he was treated less now as if he were some hidden menace. They thought of him mostly as a harmless kind of fool. He had faced a similar attitude in the coal-pit as an adolescent; again as a recruit on the parade-ground. But these men in the pub played no practical jokes on him. They were too set in their ways, too staid, almost too dull in spirit for that. There was no youth left in them – and besides that, to have pulled his leg would have been too far along the road to admitting him to equality.
He was simply the man without gumption, the man with no notion about what he was doing: who didn’t know how to hang a door over an adit (though in fact his carpentry was as good as any of theirs). He had spent a small fortune that he was never going to retrieve, he had ordered the wrong tools from the blacksmith, he was preparing to winter in quarters that were surely going to tumble about his ears. They were prepared to believe no good of him, and had settled down to wait for a gratifying catastrophe.
But he was beginning to make some sort of progress with them. The night he entertained Isobel Fuller to a mutton stew, he was actually missed in the Adventurers’Arms.
‘Where’s the old hand, then?’
‘Fallen down one of his ten-inch shafts.’
‘Gone to Derby to settle with the Railway Board. They’re running a heavy goods branch-line, out from Wirksworth up to Dead-Nettle.’
But a few minutes later the Adventurers’Arms received a visit that was to unsettle the local peace for some weeks to come.
Two men came in, one of them obviously the shadow and tool of the other – men aged on the thirty mark, hearty complexions and bodies in the full flush of fresh air and vigorous living. They seemed to have travelled some distance, for their clothes, though not of working cut, bore a certain weariness of the cloth, the nap worn, and with a bagginess at the knees that belied their evident concern about their appearance. There was dust encrusted in the welts of boots whose fastidious polish was normally buffed up with a soft cloth several times a day. The more forward of the two had slickly pomaded hair and a moustache with waxed tips that proclaimed him a military man – or was intended to give that impression. Both were wearing black satin ties, the leader’s tied in a faultless Windsor knot, his friend’s in an Academy bow.
The effect of their entry on the men in the Adventurers’was complex. It was less of a corporate reaction than the one which had first greeted Frank Lomas – as if they had known within themselves that he was not a man to be feared, merely to be mocked, whereas there were unknown possibilities in these two that demanded circumspection.
The man with the military air asked for rooms for the night – but without that touch of polite humility that might have increased his chances in a strange community. There was a threat of irritability about him, as one accustomed to having servants at his beck and call: an ill-judged approach in the Adventurers’Arms. I do not know whether two bedrooms might have been available for single men. This man destroyed by the curl of his lip their chances of getting them if they were. They were offered a shared bed, and saw that they had to accept it or move on.
‘Ay, well, it’ll be better tha
n Spytfontein.’
‘Aye – or Reddersburg.’
Some of the men in the inn were quicker than others at putting a name to the principal visitor’s face, but one who had no difficulty, even from the first, was Tiggy Slack. The little grocer, in his own semi-circle of cronies, seemed to take a half step back into the shadows as the couple came in round the outside door, and he crept out behind them while they were still negotiating with the landlord. The man with the moustache, however, wheeled round suddenly and insolently watched him go, as if enjoying the satisfaction of something he had expected.
They knew now: Gilbert Slack – but there was no move to acknowledge him. Most assemblies of men include one sycophant who will weaken a common front, but no one played out of turn here.
Conversation became subdued on both sides, Slack and his companion muttering over their plans for looking over the neighbourhood. The others returned before long to the well worn idiocies of Frank Lomas.
‘How long do we give him, then – another month? Then he’ll be sitting in the Market Place with his cap on the pavement and a row of chalk pictures on the slabs.’
‘He’s been to the Hall. Maybe he’s talked the old man into chucking some funds down the Drift.’
‘And would the old man do that without having the place surveyed?’
They had supreme confidence that nothing could happen in Margreave without their knowledge.
‘Fuller didn’t make his kind of money by adventuring in places like Dead-Nettle.’ (The Adventurers’ Arms is named, not after romantic swashbucklers, but after bygone investors in mineral working.)
‘Dead-Nettle?’
Gilbert Slack did not appear to have been listening, but he swung round at the mention of the mine. The previous speaker took a breath, as if making up his mind whether to answer or not.
‘Did you say Dead-Nettle?’
‘An old stope on the north-east flank of Whim Hill.’
‘I know damned well where Dead-Nettle is.’ There was something in his voice that was not accustomed to being played with.
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