Road to Berry Edge, The (10 page)

‘I never liked you,' was all she could think to say.

‘I never liked you either. You were always in the way. Our John would never play with me because you were there.'

Faith hadn't heard the familiar use of John's name in years and it sounded very strange.

‘You sat me in a puddle once.'

‘Faith, if there was one near enough I'd do it now.'

Faith actually smiled. She tried not to. Rob came to her.

‘Won't you be friends with me?'

‘No.'

‘Not even bad friends?'

‘I can't,' Faith said, and she ran from the room.

When she had gone Harry poured some more coffee. Rob refused. Harry didn't drink his.

‘It's funny how it works,' Rob said. ‘I hated him but I miss him so much. It's like a lost opportunity, we could have been different, should have been but we weren't. It's almost as though that was how it had to be, like it was mapped out—'

‘I thought you didn't believe in fate.'

‘I don't, at least I didn't. I don't know now. I have the feeling she's crying her eyes out in the hall. Go and look, will you?'

Harry put down his coffee cup and saucer and ventured into the freezing dimness of the hall. Sure enough, there she was, standing in the draught by the front door, crying into the coats. He had no idea what to do. Sarah would never have made such a performance, but then Sarah had never had to face such a thing, and his only experience of loss was his sister.

Faith was not the kind of woman he was used to. His mother was open about her hurts and feelings and other women were too remote for him to be concerned. Faith had been quite a surprise to Harry. He couldn't have imagined a brother of Rob's falling in love with and wanting to marry such a skinny, plain, badly dressed woman. She was offensive, unmannerly, pious, sanctimonious and she had attacked one of the few people whom he loved, but she was standing there crying and hanging on to the coats, her face buried in the material, with no regard that anyone should hear her. Harry ventured nearer.

‘Perhaps you would like to go home, Miss Norman?' he said.

The crying stopped instantly, silenced in embarrassment because she had suddenly realised that he was there. She cleared her throat hard.

‘No, I … no, really I … it's just across the way.'

‘Is this your coat?'

Faith moved back to see the one he indicated and wiped her face ineffectually with her fingers.

‘No.'

‘This one?'

‘No, it's … it matches my dress.'

‘Oh yes.' Harry didn't look at her. He well knew by now that women were made ugly by crying and Faith was bad enough to begin with. He didn't want to see her spotty face and red-rimmed eyes, even less her moist nose, but he helped her on with her coat and was quite surprised. Her wet eyes were a shade between green and brown that only an unimaginative man would have called hazel, her eyelashes were darkened with tears, her mouth was pink and trembling and her nose was her most attractive feature to begin with so it wasn't a problem.

Harry put on his own coat and went with her. The night was icy. He put her hand through his arm without asking, the streets were treacherous. She fastened her hands around
his arm and he felt in those seconds a real desire to protect her which he had never felt before for another person. He didn't think he had ever met another person who needed protecting. His mother had his father, his sister had had Rob and all the girls he knew were from families who looked after them. This woman was small and hurt and vulnerable. When they reached her front door he turned her to him.

‘You won't cry any more, will you?'

‘I'm so ashamed. What must you think of me?'

Faith smiled just a little and Harry thought her eyes were really quite beautiful.

‘I'm sorry,' she said before she went inside.

Harry walked slowly back down the bank the short way. There were sounds of revelry from the pub at the bottom of the bank. Rob was standing by the fire in the little back room.

‘If you ever take up sword-fencing you'll kill somebody,' Harry said as he walked in.

‘She thought I was John.'

‘What?'

‘I look like John.'

‘Very like him?'

‘Almost more like him than he did as far as Faith's concerned now. John looked older than he was and, God forbid, I think I look younger.'

‘And what was that meant to be, disillusionment?'

‘What was I supposed to do?'

‘I don't know. God almighty, Rob, that dress. It has a matching coat, you know.'

‘It doesn't, does it?'

‘I've got some brandy in my room,' Harry said, ‘I could go and get it.'

‘It's the best idea you've had all day,' Rob said.

Rob had forgotten what his home was like, the house seemed so small, the people so intolerant and insular. He could remember being sent away to school because he had turned into that worst of things, ‘an impossible child', and wanting to come back to Berry Edge so much that he thought he would die if he didn't. How could he ever have loved the foundry and the countryside? He remembered breaking out of school, and the various ways that he had contrived to come home, because he knew that however bad things got he could not live without the town and the moor where he had been brought up. No matter what happened, no matter how often he was beaten and banished or hurt, he would spend his last breath crawling towards the fell that belonged to him.

All that was gone now. There was nothing here that had anything to do with him, and in some ways the life that he had found for himself with Vincent Shaw and his family made coming back here all the more impossible. It didn't seem strange that the mother he hadn't seen for ten years shouldn't want to kiss him or hold him. Ida kissed him and touched him so much that it should have been odd when his own mother did not, but his mother had never touched him. Ida treated him just like she treated Harry. She called him ‘young man' when she was angry with him, whereas in fact he had been almost twenty two when he met her so she
had never known him young. Ida was his mother now and he adored her. John had been dead for almost a year when he met the Shaws and Rob was already a different person.

He had travelled a lot that first year, working in various foundries but moving on after a few weeks because there was no reason to stay until he reached Nottingham, and there Vincent Shaw and others were building yet more railways and setting up businesses. Rob was fascinated.

Nottingham was everything to him that Berry Edge was not. The city was so exciting and everybody was in work. They were making lace, stockings and bicycles. There were foundries and factories producing parts for new machinery. Jesse Boot had already overturned not just the pharmaceutical industry but the whole concept of marketing with his new ideas of buying in bulk and selling cheaply to the public. He had changed the face of shopping.

Girls there were independent because they worked in the lace and hosiery factories. He would listen to their confident voices and see their uplifted, laughing faces and be glad.

Nottingham had its slums, it had its back streets but it was going forward at a great pace and Rob wanted to be there among it all, the hum of a hundred interdependent industries, the people who were making money, the prosperous shops in Angel Row and King Street. Nottingham was all contrasts, woods and fields, busy streets, work and leisure, there were music halls and pubs and places you could take pretty girls dancing. There was the famous Goose Fair in October which had once been a place for farmers to hire help and buy and sell stock, but was now a huge entertainment for the entire area. There were rowing and pleasure boats on the River Trent, cricket at Trent Bridge, new schools and public buildings. Nottingham and its surrounding towns and villages was the place that Rob decided he wanted to stay.

Vincent was an engineer, a successful, flamboyant person who already had a number of businesses. He lived in a big
detached house on the outskirts of the city overlooking a park. Rob would have given a great deal to talk to him. He hadn't talked to anybody for a long time other than necessary conversation, but Vincent was clever and educated and had nothing directly to do with the workmen in his foundries and factories. It was one of his biggest failings, Rob thought. Vincent lacked the imagination to see that he kept his workforce poorly in almost every way, and now that Rob had been in so many places he had seen good masters and bad. He knew that although Vincent paid his people fairly he could have done a great deal more for them, and they would have repaid him by working more competently and turning out better goods.

Once a year he invited them to his house. Each winter he provided a party and there Rob went.

He was fascinated by what he had heard about the Shaws, and because they were so prosperous and unconventional the whole town talked about them. It was well known that Ida Shaw, Vincent's wife, had come from a rich, titled family, and that when she married him her family had been shocked because he was so far beneath her. Although his family had been respectable, they were trade, and Vincent was a man who abhorred idleness.

They had a huge London house which had belonged to his wife's parents and from them she had inherited a vast fortune, but Vincent Shaw was the kind of vulgar man who had made his money when he was very young, and it was rumoured that not only did he not care for the aristocratic idlers but that they would have little to do with him. Sarah Shaw, his only daughter, was admired, had come out in London and become engaged to the kind of man her father most deplored. Rob was eager to catch even a glance of any member of the family and he walked slowly around the house taking in everything he saw.

In one of the rooms there was a painting over the fireplace. Rob was drawn to it, having seen it from the
hall, and as he went nearer the painting seemed to come alive. It was a country scene, a farmhouse and the fields, a man with a sheepdog and some sheep, quite a simple painting but it reminded Rob so much of the countryside around Berry Edge that he felt sick to go home.

‘What are you doing in here?'

Startled by the sharp voice, Rob stepped back and Vincent Shaw came into the room.

‘Stealing, are you, boy? Turn your pockets out.'

Rob knew very well that he didn't look his twenty two years. He was thin, the suit he wore was old and shiny with use, and his hair was too long. Under Vincent Shaw's steel gaze Rob turned out his money and a handkerchief.

‘Is that all?' Vincent roared.

‘Yes, sir.'

‘So you work for me, do you, boy?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘And what great service do you render me?'

‘I'm a moulder, sir, in the foundry.'

Vincent laughed. Rob watched him.

‘A moulder? You're a bloody liar, boy. You're not old enough to use a bloody wheelbarrow. The moulders in my foundries are clever, skilled men, not pathetic little lads. Get out of my house, and keep your bloody hands in your pockets!'

It was cold outside. Rob hadn't eaten anything and it was a long walk back to his lodgings. It snowed. It always snowed, Rob thought. Any time when you'd had enough, it snowed and made things worse.

On the Tuesday of that week he was called into the offices. Rob had never been in the office building and it was sumptuous. Up where the important people were, there was a thick red carpet and chandeliers, and a lot of shiny wood; and above all the rest, at the end of a long corridor, was a huge office with a big desk and a view that seemed to him to take in most of Nottingham. Rob couldn't help
but think that Vincent Shaw could have spent less money on his offices and a great deal more on his factories. He stood behind the desk.

‘Robert Berkeley,' he said.

Rob felt sick. He didn't understand what he was doing here. Vincent Shaw didn't dismiss his workmen himself and there could be no other reason for his being here. Rob liked Nottingham, he wanted to stay there. All he had now was his work.

‘I didn't do it,' he said.

‘What didn't you do?'

‘Anything. I didn't … I didn't do anything.'

‘Is somebody accusing you of something? My man in the works who tells me these things tells me that you are in fact a moulder, that you are not the pathetic little runt I thought you were. In fact you even seem bigger than I thought you were. I understand that you are the best moulder we possess. I apologise, Robert Berkeley, from the bottom of my rather shallow soul. Where did you learn?'

‘Durham, sir.'

‘And you speak the Queen's English, other than that appalling accent. How interesting. What have you run from, I wonder? A woman? A baby? A prison sentence?'

‘I left home.'

‘And what did you do to occasion this leaving?'

‘My brother died. We had an argument, a fight. He drowned. People blamed me.'

Vincent Shaw said nothing. Rob listened to the silence in the room and he thought of his work in Vincent's foundry and the losing of it. He had never told anyone before what had happened, he had not expected that he would tell a man like this, a pompous, unfeeling, bombastic master like Vincent Shaw who would surely dismiss him.

‘How long ago was this?'

‘A year. I went to Sheffield for a time and then I went to London.'

‘And now you're gracing Nottingham's fair city with your presence?'

Rob gave him the requisite number of ‘yes, sirs' after that and then he went back to his lodging, packed his things and left. He hadn't been at the station for many minutes when a tall, dark haired man with a long flowing coat grabbed him by the shoulder.

‘Where are you going?' Vincent Shaw demanded.

‘The next train.'

‘No, you're not. How am I meant to manage without my best moulder? You're coming back with me.'