Road to Berry Edge, The (7 page)

*

Nancy gave Michael the back room. It was no hardship, the children slept with her. He stayed the following night too. Nancy panicked during the day. Not that he had been any bother, he had asked for nothing, would have gone off to work without eating. Nancy despised herself for taking Michael in and feeding him, but when he came back that night and asked if he could stay again Nancy wanted to say no and couldn't.

‘Just for tonight. I don't want my mother going on at me about this.'

‘You should leave home,' Nancy said.

‘I can't. I'm going out now. I'll come back not too late and just sleep and I'll be gone in the morning before you get up.'

‘Indeed you won't,' Nancy said roundly. ‘I promised William you'd read him a story when he goes to bed. And you can get your clothes off and get washed properly, I'm not having any mucky pitmen in my house.'

‘Nancy—'

‘I've got all Sean's clothes. God knows they fit you,' she said.

*

Michael might not have been Harry Shaw but he cleaned up a treat, Nancy thought, looking critically at him later. He was thin because the only times he ate much were when he went out and that was probably rubbishy pies and the like, but he really was nice looking. She fed him a big dinner. He didn't criticise anything. He put the bairns to bed while she washed up, and when they
sat down afterwards she said, ‘You can have Sean's chair, if you like.'

‘No, you have it Nancy. You think I'm too much like him already.'

Nancy sat down.

‘When I saw you standing outside my door last night my heart nearly stopped,' she said. ‘Drunk and fighting. Sean was nice like you are until we got married. After I fell pregnant with our William he never spoke another kind word to me.'

‘He was always like that, you just couldn't see it,' Michael said.

‘I only had my dad to go on. I didn't know much about men.'

‘Your dad was the exception.'

‘I didn't know that. I didn't realise your Sean was a good looking nowt or I would never have married him. And there's no good you saying you're nothing like him. I've had your mother around here half a dozen times crying, thinking you've got some lass into trouble.'

‘That's just for your benefit. Wait ‘til she finds out I slept here, it'll be all over Berry Edge by Thursday.'

‘I don't care what your mam says.'

‘I know, otherwise I wouldn't have asked to stay.'

‘I think I can hear Clarrie crying,' Nancy said, starting to get up.

‘Stay there, I'll go,' he said and went.

*

When Nancy got back from work the following day his mother arrived just as Nancy was sitting the children down for their tea.

‘You've got a nice job at Mrs Berkeley's, eh? That lad was a nogood,' Alice said. ‘Drove his mother to despair and his father nearly to death after he killed their John. I wouldn't have him back in my house.'

Nancy concentrated on cutting bread for William and
said nothing. It wasn't Rob she was thinking about, it was Michael. She hoped that he wouldn't come back again that night; she was obviously incapable of saying ‘no' to a McFadden, and he was so easy. He would eat anything and was complimentary so that she wanted to plan meals. He hadn't gone out the night before for a drink, they had sat by the fire and talked - Nancy didn't remember the last time she had done that with a man - he had brought Clarrie downstairs and rocked her back to sleep.

That morning he had left before she was awake, everything spotless as though he had not been there. The loaf of bread had been smaller but he had cleared up after himself.

As for Rob, he had been a complete surprise to her. She remembered him vaguely as a boisterous young man who worked hard, but he was so genuinely polite, so well spoken, so careful of her and caring, asking her about her wages and her hours and her family circumstances. Rob was obviously the kind of man who could sort things out, Nancy thought, and it was a rare quality. On top of that he was a picture, with enquiring grey eyes and cool elegant manners.

Harry was more open than Rob, he chatted and smiled and his eyes were rather warmer on her than Nancy felt comfortable with, but, since his actual behaviour was very proper, she felt safe to meet his gaze and enjoy his teasing.

Another maid was to be started so that Nancy could go home at Friday teatime and not be there on Saturdays or Sundays. She would have liked to argue with Rob about this because she was convinced the Sunday dinner could not happen without her, but she could tell that he wouldn't tolerate argument from anyone, so she had said nothing and been grateful for his help.

‘I understand my Michael spent the last two nights here,
Nancy,' Alice said now. ‘I thought you called yourself respectable.'

Nancy, to her own annoyance, began to blush under her mother-in-law's harsh gaze.

‘You took my Sean and look what happened,' Alice said. ‘Michael's all I've got left.'

‘It's nothing like that,' Nancy said quickly.

‘What is it like then? My son in your bed.'

‘He wasn't in my bed!'

‘He's a good looking man, Nancy. There's plenty after him and you know what people will think.'

‘I don't care what people think. He got knocked about in a fight, he didn't want you worrying.'

‘I worry more when he doesn't come home. I wonder which slut has him in her bed. One of these days he'll get it wrong and have to marry some lass I wouldn't even want in my house. Then what will I do?'

‘If Michael had wanted to get married he wouldn't have waited until now, Alice. He's just a wage packet to you, isn't he?'

‘I know about widows,' Alice said, ‘young lasses like you who are used to a man in their bed. He's a good wage packet, I don't want you pinching him.'

‘Don't worry, I won't be,' Nancy said.

The steelworks at Berry Edge was a shock to Harry. He had never seen such a big business in such a bad way. He and Rob walked slowly around it, to the various shops and mills where the different goods were made for mines, ships and railways. They went into offices where nothing seemed up to date and there were few orders. Rob took Harry around the yards and the different processes, and in all the buildings and grounds, over the railways where the ore came from Spain and the coke came from the various pits around Berry Edge, which the works owned and where the coal was made into coke. Harry found from the beginning that he loved the way the different processes were carried on and how it all meshed together: the ores from different parts of the world blended red, the coke being brought in from the mines, the melting troughs, the openhearth processes, the way that it took so many hours to produce the steel. He liked to watch it being tapped out into ladles and into ingot moulds and seeing it cool and solidify. He liked the care that was taken to make sure that it was the right temperature and the right consistency. He liked to watch the steel running white, orange, red and blinding. He liked the sparks which flew in all directions when the men were making the steel. It was almost like the day he had stolen into the kitchen as a child and watched the cook making cakes, the various ingredients added and mixed to change texture and colour
and consistency, finally poured out into tins and put into the oven; except that no cake had ever been so white and so perfect and so exciting to him as when the steel poured in a sleek white stream into the moulds.

There was an air of defeat hanging over the place; there were not enough orders, there was not sufficient work. Michael McFadden had been right, Harry thought. It was almost a graveyard. The men had lost heart. They were often absent or careless about their work. They took no pride in it because there were no management skills here, there was nobody to make it cohesive. Harry was glad that his father was not there, he hated more than anything in the world to see incompetence.

Rob was quiet as they walked, watched and studied, and Harry wondered what he was thinking. There was between himself and the men a huge gap of time and respect which could possibly never be bridged, and the fact was that it should have been taken care of all along by a series of skilled and educated men who would have brought the foundry on and even propped it, while the old man was ill and probably before that. The workforce had been let down like a country estate that Harry had once seen, where the son had been killed in a riding accident and the old man had drunk himself to death. It was a kind of monument to heartbreak and despair, as though it was a fist shaken in God's face, a giving up of the worst kind.

If Josiah Berkeley had run the place efficiently, Harry thought, there would have been no need for Rob to come home. Perhaps the old man had done it on purpose, perhaps he had even run it down because he had known how much love Rob had had for this place. Perhaps he had even hated his second son sufficiently to destroy it so that he would come back and see the ruins, which the tragedy he had brought on them had made.

Rob retreated into a silence so complete over those first few days that Harry was afraid of a gulf between the
two of them, such as had not been there since they first met.

At first Rob wouldn't talk, but Harry persisted. Finally, within the big scruffy office put aside for the foundry manager, Rob sat in the chair behind the desk and Harry sat on the empty desk, since there was nowhere else to sit. As Rob brooded, Harry said, ‘It needs an awful lot of money, my father was right, don't you think? Too much money. What are you going to do, bankrupt yourself over it?'

‘Probably.' Rob looked up. It was the first time he had looked straight at Harry for days. ‘You don't have to stay. Go back to Nottingham.'

‘You need financial help. A lot of your money is tied up—'

‘I'm going to untie it.'

Harry shook his head.

‘I have to do this,' Rob said.

‘You don't have to, Robbo. You can take loyalty too far. Why don't we just go home?'

‘I can't. You go.'

‘I'm not going anywhere. I've only just got away. Besides, I have money—'

‘No! I won't let you do that.'

‘I want to do it.'

‘No.'

‘You can't ask Awkward Features for any. He'll just tell you to bugger off, and if you go down he'll laugh in your face. It's worse than you thought it was, isn't it?'

‘Yes, and I don't want you mixed up in this. Times are hard in this industry. You'd be much better off in Nottingham building bridges and making bicycles. They're sure markets.'

‘Well, at least you didn't tell me to go back and make lace. Am I meant to be grateful?'

‘You don't like it here. If you put your money into it you'd be stuck.'

‘If I don't put my money into it you're going to be stuck.'

‘I'll manage.'

‘You should let it go, speaking professionally.'

‘I would if I could.'

‘You're as bad as Vincent,' Harry said.

*

It was Saturday. If he had been at home Harry would have been getting ready to go out, but nobody said anything. He prowled the house. It was early evening, they had just come back from work. Rob had taken to using his bedroom like an office, since his parents sat in the living room during the late evening now that Mr Berkeley had begun to venture downstairs a little. He had yet to speak to Harry, even though Rob had introduced them, and it was difficult for Harry not to wish that the old man was ill enough to stay upstairs where nobody but his wife could see his scowls and put up with his rudeness.

There seemed nowhere to be. Harry felt he could hardly go downstairs. Reluctantly he opened Rob's bedroom door. Rob was sitting at a table by the window, even though there was no light from it. The day had been dark since one o'clock, cold and damp. The fire burned merrily enough and Rob was going through some papers he had brought back from the office. He didn't look up or acknowledge Harry in any way.

‘Let's go into Durham,' Harry said.

Rob stopped then and looked up briefly.

‘Why?'

‘It's Saturday. I haven't had a drink in a fortnight and even you must be tired of working by now, we've done nothing else. Let's go out.'

Rob looked up again and this time suspiciously. They knew each other too well, Harry thought with a sigh.

‘You've made some kind of arrangement, haven't you?'

‘No.'

‘What then?'

‘Nothing, I just want to go out.'

‘For a drink?'

‘Are you getting hard of hearing? I said so, didn't I?'

‘You can't have met a woman already. You haven't been here long enough.'

‘No.'

‘So?'

‘So … when I went to that meeting in London with Hardisty last month he said that he comes up here on business occasionally and that there is a woman living in Durham called Susannah Seaton. She is very beautiful and she sells her favours very, very expensively. She doesn't work on Saturdays.'

‘You've saved your time by not going then, haven't you?'

‘I thought she might make an exception.'

‘Go then.'

‘I can't go on my own.'

‘You can hardly expect me to come with you.'

‘I doubt she works alone. Come on, Rob.'

‘Certainly not.'

‘Why not?'

‘I don't buy women.'

‘It isn't a sale, it's just a kind of loan. You can borrow her for the evening.'

‘I don't want to borrow her, thank you.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Certain.'

‘How long is it since you had a woman?' Rob glared at him so much that Harry almost retreated. ‘Don't go all northern on me. You haven't spoken a civil word in a week. I know it's difficult—'

‘You don't know anything!'