Road to Berry Edge, The (19 page)

‘You've got to me.'

‘That's only because you think I'm Sarah.'

He hadn't been looking at her for several seconds but he did after that.

‘I don't think anything of the kind.'

‘Yes, you do. I'm dark like she was and pretty and independently minded, and you confuse the two. You want to because it makes your life tolerable. And if you should marry me, you would realise straight away that I'm really nothing like Sarah and this so-called love which you have for me would not survive that realisation; and then do you know what would happen? You would despise me. I don't think I could bear that.' Rob said nothing to this. ‘You know I'm right,' Susannah told him. ‘I'm a substitute, quite a good one up to now, but we don't live together so that illusion isn't shattered. You can pretend to yourself that I'm Sarah all the time we're together. Isn't that so?'

‘No!'

‘It's just a reflection that you see, Rob, it's just the missing of Sarah.'

‘How could it be when I haven't felt like this about anybody else?'

‘You didn't go to bed with anybody else, did you?'

‘You think I don't love you.'

‘Yes.'

‘And you don't love me? Go on, say it. I know what you think and feel about men, you don't have to pretend to me all the time.'

‘I don't pretend to you.'

‘Yes, you do. I'm just money to you.'

‘That's not true.' Susannah would have got hold of him but he was getting up. ‘Rob …' Susannah watched him walk away up the beach and out of sight.

*

Later, much later when he had not come back for lunch or for dinner, Susannah went to their room. He was standing looking out over the bay.

‘We ruined the day as though we had so many,' she said, shutting the door behind her. ‘Please don't be angry. You didn't really think we were going to get married?' He didn't answer. ‘Try to be reasonable. Am I going to lose you because I won't marry you?'

‘Why worry? You've made a lot of money out of me. You'll manage.'

‘You don't mean it. You can have me as much as you want—'

‘You don't understand, do you?' Rob said, turning around and looking at her. ‘I'm tired of the desperation of it, Susannah. I want to have time to think about other things, to do other things, to be able to leave you without feeling that heavy regret, not to long for you every night. I want to see you as my wife. At the moment I can't bear to let you out of my bed or my sight, I want you so much. It's like dying of thirst and from time to time being given half a glass of cold champagne. I can't think about anything but you and I don't think I can stand it any more. I'm going to pack my things and leave.'

‘No!' Susannah ran over and got hold of him. ‘No, Rob, no!'

‘Don't worry, I'll give you some money,' he said.

‘I don't want your money,' Susannah declared. ‘No, Rob, don't. Don't go, don't.'

She clung and kissed him and pleaded and all the time her mind told her that it was much too late for this. He had run out of patience. There was even a part of her glad that
he was hurt, triumphant that he was leaving, a part of her nature that had never been happy to be with him, that had waited for him to betray her in some way as other men had. When he had not done, she worried that he would come to mean so much to her that she would imagine that she could not survive without him.

But there was a good reason for her to make him stay. Her body shrieked at her to keep him there any way that she could, to agree to anything because now she needed him as never before.

He pushed her from him. Her dark side wanted him to do more, to do violence, to knock her down so that he could be condemned, so that she would be free.

She cried. It would have turned many a man back to her, but Rob was not made like that and she knew it. Crying for effect was no good. After he had gone she cried in earnest, wetly and hard, trying to hate him for her own self-protection, trying to tell herself that she was better without him, that life could be as it was before she met him, that she didn't love him, had never loved him, would not miss him, did not want him. She crawled into bed and cried until she was exhausted, until her eyes stung heavily, until there was even comfort in listening to her own sobs gradually lessen and then cease. In the quietness, in the bed, Susannah went to sleep.

That autumn the miners rose up; that was how his father would have described it, Rob thought, as though they were some huge kind of wave about to break across a pier so hard that they would damage its very heart.

Amongst the miners' leaders was Michael McFadden. Michael gave no indication that they had ever met before, that they had been boys together or fought. His clipped tones and cold gaze enraged Rob. So far he and Harry had agreed on conciliatory action when dealing with the men, but Rob was getting tired of it. Always they wanted more, more money, more time to themselves, better housing, schools, places of leisure, churches, even improvements in the bloody park. And he knew that his anger was misdirected. The men worked hard, they were entitled to safe conditions and decent wages and better houses. His company ran their lives for them in ways which would have made him as bitter as Michael was now; but Rob felt the responsibility, and it was huge.

Harry was more sympathetic. Rob thought in his honest moments that that was why he wanted Harry there, to be between himself and the men. Under Harry's shrewd direction the company had begun stockpiling coal some time back, because they had seen this coming. The miners had barely let Rob re-establish full time work here before they began to threaten him in all kinds of ways. They wanted
better wages. The men at the steelworks did too, but the miners were the worst. Some of them did little, some of them took Friday and Monday off. Rob could not run the mines and the steelworks like that, to suit their needs. He had his orders to fill. But they lived in that little town on the moors at his direction so that he could make money. Some were idle, lazy, drank, never went to church. There was little point in the schools when many would not send their children or sent them for so few hours that it was a waste of time.

This particular morning he was for once letting Harry take the weight. He was standing by the window, leaning there and looking out over the works. Harry was handling Michael McFadden and his fellow union men. Rob was thinking about Susannah. He missed her. He longed for her. In a way he missed her doubly because he always missed Sarah. Susannah had taken some of that hurt away. He couldn't believe that he had left her, that he had walked out on what he had promised himself would be a perfect holiday. He had ruined not just the holiday but everything they had together with his stupid demands. Susannah must have thought he was losing his mind. What man would marry a woman when he could have her without? But it was not just that. When you had been married you knew what it was like to be well loved, to be the joy in another person's life, to be at the centre of everything that mattered, to go to bed together and talk over your world, to turn in the night and feel her sweet warm body there.

The holiday had made it worse, shown him what he was missing, brought back to him the delights of his marriage to Sarah. Susannah was right in some ways. He did want that back. More than that, he wanted the future back, that which always now eluded him, the looking forward, the making plans, the idea of home and children. He wanted that more badly than he had ever wanted anything in his life. And worse than that now, he would have settled for anything,
he missed her so much. His body was knife-edged with want for her. It clouded everything. He would have gone back to the beginning, back to nothing but Saturday nights if he could have. His pride was all gone.

He had even, he could hardly bear to think about it, gone up the steps to the house in Durham, to beg her to have him back; but the house was closed up. Enquiries brought him nothing. He had been there several times, almost ready to kill someone in the end in order to gain entry, in order to see her. She was not there. He had thought at first in dubious mood that she must be at the fishing village, that she had not come back, and he had gone there. That was the hardest thing of all, remembering how she had cried and pleaded and hung on to his sleeve so that he wouldn't go. Every woman he saw now he thought was Susannah, any tall dark woman, any shadow. He remembered her on the beach, he remembered her in the hotel, but most of all he remembered her in the bedroom at the house in Durham which stood above the Wear. He remembered her there in all her moods and in his arms. She was gone and he couldn't find her.

‘Things aren't the way they were,' Harry was saying to the men. Rob knew the argument well. He had heard Vincent saying the same thing and he knew that Harry was right. Other countries produced iron and steel more cheaply. People might say that things in England were getting better, but it was all over for England to be the best. America and Germany did these things just as well. England's days as a world power were numbered; he knew it but these men could not see it. They saw nothing but their own lives, their wages and their families, and they thought that they could hold some kind of power here when in fact prices were dropping all the time. He listened from his stance by the window as Harry explained the situation. He looked out over the works, and all he wished was that he could be like them - to go home to his wife and his tea and a child
or two, and for everything to be different. They had these things, they were so much better off than he, yet they didn't know it, they didn't see it. They thought that money freed a man. They thought he had everything.

He thought about Sarah, and some part of him which he had believed was gone forever, when he married her, made its twisted way up inside him. He could no longer pretend that she was somewhere waiting for him, that they would have children and see time and grow old together and look back on the years with affection. None of that was to be. He wished that there was somebody to hate, someone to rail against, some space in his life which was not filled with the loss.

He wondered whether somewhere in Sarah's subconscious mind there had been an inkling of what was to come. During their short marriage they had been happier than Rob could ever have imagined anybody might be. That was what made it so good and so bad. To know that happiness was something few people ever did, but to have that happiness taken away from him made him wish sometimes that he had never known it. It was to fall out of heaven, to drop off the cliff edge into the darkest, deepest sea that he had ever known. He had never been so far down; to know the heights, to feel the sweetest made the rest so low and so bitter. Sometimes he did not think any of it was possible, that he would wake and be a child again and have nothing and expect nothing, and exist in that void which he had thought never to experience again. It seemed to him now that he was back there, unhappy and powerless to change that unhappiness. He wished he could hold her again, just once.

At the end he could barely hold her in his arms any more, she was like some costly ornament that would break. Finding Susannah had stopped the hurt part of the time and now she too was gone.

Behind him he could hear Michael McFadden's voice so reasonable, so secretly threatening. He cut in now.

‘Do you know what's going to happen, McFadden?' he said. There'll come a time soon when there won't be any work—'

‘Oh, I see.' Michael got to his feet, knowing, Rob thought admiringly, that he was bigger than anyone else in the room, especially bigger than Rob. ‘You mean the good times are over, Mr Berkeley?'

Rob hated his intelligence, hated his slow, sarcastic, northern voice. He hated the fact that Michael would fight battles which he well knew he could not win, which he might even have wondered were worth the effort, to gain just a little over his masters.

‘People are going bankrupt in this business,' Rob said. ‘We need to expand to keep up with other countries, we need modern thinking, modern processes or we won't survive, and those cost a great deal of money. If I compromise, if I pay you more, then I won't have enough money to make sure that the works survives. We have to grow and we need to manage our resources carefully in order to do this. We have to find and take on new kinds of work and we need the machinery and the skills to do it. If we don't we'll get left behind. Now, I am trying to build good houses, to make things better and there's full time work again. When I can afford to, I will pay you better wages, but I don't have the money to do it right now. I can't do any more, Michael, I can't afford any more.'

‘I don't believe that, and I know that you're stockpiling coal. I know that you're afraid of what will happen when that coal runs out. How will you run your precious steelworks then? And do you seriously think that hundreds of miners are going to sit at home putting their feet up while you move that coal to the mills in order to keep this place working? All we want is a decent wage.'

‘You've got a decent wage, and I can't afford to pay you any more.'

*

When the meeting was over, Harry was still sitting at the table, frowning.

‘They're going to strike any minute, I can see it.'

‘It won't get them anywhere,' Rob said.

‘It will if they manage to keep it up until we run out of coal.'

‘We can worry about that when it happens.'

*

When Susannah had arrived home two days early, Claire sat her down and made her some tea.

‘He left me,' Susannah said finally.

‘Never in this world.'

Susannah got up and took the pins out of her hat and the hat from her head. ‘Yes, he did. He got tired of me.'

‘Susie, the man is in love. How could he get tired in three days?'

‘He asked me to marry him.'