Shelter from the Storm (25 page)

They stopped to have something to eat and Dryden reconstructed the last few days in his mind so that none of this had happened and he was living with them and there was nothing beyond the nice day-to-day monotony that seemed to be as much as he could hope for. He would have liked that, sleeping in a soft bed and having meals prepared and not having to fight with anybody.

After a short time they went back to work, but they had not been started up again for very long when Dryden thought he heard something that sounded like distant thunder, a rumble and then another rumble and then something louder. He stopped and the men around him, after a few more seconds, stopped too. They weren’t confused, it wasn’t thunder, it was the ground moving, shaking, altering. You didn’t know necessarily where it was coming from or going to and everybody stopped because you had to know which way to run if there was going to be a problem. There was no more noise. Dryden listened hard but it was silent. He relaxed. And then there was a huge noise, ear-splitting; it hurt and suddenly everybody was running everywhere and some of them were getting tangled up in other people. He could hear Tom cursing and somebody else shouting.

The ground shook, everything shook, and then it was like when you were tossing the die in a game, it all got mixed up round and round and the whole area started coming apart with a huge noise and then it began to cave in. That was the most frightening part of it. It didn’t matter where you went, it seemed to him, though people pushed and shoved, it was like a game with everybody going crazy, and then there was the biggest noise of all, so big that his ears wouldn’t take it, and he could hear Tom’s voice and he began to run in that direction and everybody else was going the other way, as they did in crowded streets. Tom’s was a voice in pain, a cry of distress. The air was full of
dust, thick so that he couldn’t see, until there was nothing in front of him but the sound of his brother shouting for help.

*

Joe was sitting at the desk in his office trying not to think about the taste and feel of Luisa McAndrew’s body. Thaddeus was sitting in the office with him, puffing at one of his blessed cigars, filling the place with smoke. Having done the right thing did not make Joe want to go on doing the right thing; he wanted to go up to Scotland and grab her and run away with her like some stupid man in a poem, dashing off with her on a horse.

Luisa, Joe thought, was like a party, and his life had been particularly bereft of parties. Thaddeus was going on about markets and demands for coal and steel and the problems of pricing and all the things that usually were of great interest to Joe, but today he couldn’t bring then closer than the edge of his mind. The rest of his mind was full of Luisa’s eyes and mouth and the way that he missed her carelessness, her levity, the fun that she had brought with her. She had no plans to return, Thaddeus had said. Joe knew this was sensible but he was tired of being sensible.

One of the clerks burst into his office just as the pit siren screamed.

‘Mr Forster!’

Men were brought to the surface almost immediately. Thaddeus insisted on going down with Joe to see how extensive the fall had been. The men were collected by their families as they came to the surface. Joe found Vinia at his shirtsleeve.

‘Tom and Dryden are both down,’ she said. ‘What are you doing?’

‘When you let go of my coat I’m going down to have a look.’

‘How bad is the fall?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ Joe said patiently as he disentangled her. ‘I haven’t seen it. Just wait.’

Joe felt reassured as more men were brought up. It was like
being a magician at a fair, magicking them before people’s eyes, but when the flow of men stopped and he and Thaddeus went below ground and saw the fall Joe felt sick.

‘How far back do you think it goes?’ Thaddeus said, and his voice sounded ghostly, unearthly, as though people might already be dead. Joe tried to push the thought away.

‘No idea. We need to get working. We need to organise.’

Thaddeus went up to deal with this. Joe refused to go, staying there to help. Thaddeus ascertained that fourteen men were missing. Joe felt even more sick then — all those people trapped.

They worked for several hours before they broke through, and even before that Joe could hear the sounds, the men’s voices, and he was so glad he prayed and thanked God and hoped they were all there; there was a good chance they would all be saved and he could go home and sleep soundly in his bed. He helped bring the first men through the narrow opening they had sweated for, and as he did so he looked each time for Tom and Dryden but twelve men were counted out and Tom and Dryden were missing. When they were all out Joe went back himself, and he could see that beyond there was another fall.

The men were taken to the surface. It was a slow process because some of them were hurt though nobody was too bad and no one was dead, and he started the rescuers digging again farther back but the tunnel was blocked completely and by the end of that first day Joe wanted to sit down and cry.

*

After Tom had gone to work that morning Vinia tidied up and then she walked slowly to the shop. She couldn’t give up no matter what Tom did because it had cost too much to get this far, but she was afraid of the immediate future, of Tom and his mother, but most of all of herself. She had not realised that she would fight so hard for something she had wanted for so long. She thought that she had probably always wanted this more than anything in the world except her husband. That morning was the
first time ever that Tom had left without kissing her, and the significance did not escape her. He must be very upset indeed to break the code like that but she didn’t care, she wanted him never to touch her again. This was going to be a long, hard battle of wills between them, and she did not know where it would end.

The sign-painter had finished. She walked up the other side of the street and stood for a few moments admiring her name, and various people stopped and remarked on it and several women said to her how nice it would be when there was a proper ladies’ clothing shop in the village, and did she think they could bring in various pieces of cloth to be made up, and when she walked across the street one woman stopped her and said that her daughter was getting married before Christmas and was she really going to think up the ideas herself and put them on paper for people to see?

The news had certainly travelled fast, Vinia thought. She assured Mrs Jamieson that this was so and thought that if people were going to treat her as well as that she might have a good chance of making this work. It cheered her considerably to think that it had not necessarily been nothing other than the best dream of her life, that other people might see it as reality.

She unlocked the door and walked into the shop. Sunlight was spilling in through the windows and across the bareness of the big room, and suddenly a huge excitement filled her and ousted the awful thoughts about herself and Tom.

It would get better; it had to. She would tell him all about this when he came home, how keen people were, how admired the shopfront had been. It was hers. She had had a house of her own before but not a business, not an enterprise. She wanted to hug it to her. She walked round and round and after a while she sat down and began sketching, her favourite occupation. She had arranged to see a woman who would help with the sewing, Miss Little, who lived in the village and made her own clothes. She hoped she would need more than one person after a while, but she thought that to begin with if she took care of the front shop
and there was somebody to do the sewing and alterations in the back that would do very well. She showed Em Little the sketches she had made.

‘I thought if we could make some of these up and a variety of hats and put them into the window it would give people some idea of what we could do. A lot of them mustn’t be too expensive. I don’t want to frighten folk away.’

Miss Little was enthusiastic and ready to start, so they sat down in the back to begin together, and Vinia began to think about the fabrics she would need and other materials. They talked about it and decided to go to Bishop Auckland that afternoon to find what they needed and to speak further about this great new venture.

Vinia had almost forgotten about Tom when she heard the pit siren blow. It was the most frightening sound on God’s earth when it went off like that at the wrong time because it meant only one thing.

*

When Dryden came back to consciousness it was the biggest nightmare of his life come true. He had no idea how long he had been there but he remembered what had happened. He was not hurt. He sat up carefully. There was no light, he couldn’t even see the fingers in front of him, but there was space around him and at least there was water, he could feel the damp beneath him. He listened in the silence for somebody else’s breathing and thought he could hear the shallow sounds of pain.

He moved carefully with his hands in front, and after a few feet of crawling he came across something solid and heavy and warm to the touch, and he knew with the finality that has no illusion that it was Tom.

‘Tom, can you hear me? Tom?’

There was no response; nobody spoke. Dryden would have given anything to have heard Tom speak. He moved his hands over Tom’s body and found the faint beating of his brother’s
heart. He moved away as far as he could, which was not far, but there seemed to be nobody else, nor could he hear anything at all. He went back and lay down beside Tom and listened to the reassuring sound of Tom’s heart. He didn’t sleep. He had never been so wide awake. It was strange. The only way that you knew your eyes were open was by blinking. The darkness was so thick, he imagined that being dead was like this. Or perhaps they were dead and the blackness was a tomb. He couldn’t think about that, it made him panic, but he thought that Tom was not obviously hurt.

He got as close as he could and put an arm around Tom, closed his eyes and buried his face against Tom’s warm body. They would be rescued; Mr Forster wouldn’t let them stay down here. Something would be done. He listened carefully for the sounds of people trying to reach them but there was nothing, which worried him. After a long time he could feel himself drifting into sleep and he was grateful. Maybe when he woke up someone would be there, or it would all have been one of those particularly nasty dreams that you were pleased to come back out of.

He didn’t quite sleep, he was aware all the time of where he was; he would almost get there and then come back to consciousness again, as though he could not quite let go of the circumstances, alert when he needed to conserve his energy. From time to time he thought that he and Tom were back in the house in Prince Row and Vinia was there and sometimes Esther Margaret was there too, it all got mixed up, but there was a space in his mind that was fully aware of where he was and of Tom’s breathing, which seemed to him to get shallower, with more time in between each breath. Dryden stopped breathing himself quite a lot so that he could make sure that Tom was still with him.

‘Don’t die, Tom. Don’t die and leave me here, please. I don’t care if you never speak to me again, just don’t die. Are you listening to me?’

His own voice was quickly lost in the thick blackness. Tom lay there beside him and didn’t move.

*

Mary Cameron fainted at the pithead when told that Tom was trapped underground but she would not go home and when the other twelve men were brought to the surface she screamed and screamed and tried to get into the cage with the rescue workers so that Alf had to force her to go home. When Vinia went to see her Mary was huddled over the fire like an old woman in a thick shawl.

‘You let that lad into your house,’ she said. ‘And now look at you. Messing about with shops when my Tom could be dead. You’re unnatural. I never wanted him to marry you. Where are the grandbairns I wanted, eh?’

‘Don’t take on, Mary,’ Alf said.

Vinia had not been to the shop again after that first day; it was as though the place itself were some kind of judgment against her. She had gone against Tom and was to be robbed of him because she had done so. Mary’s face was red and lined with crying but she couldn’t cry; all she could think was that she had let Tom go without making up the fight over the shop. And Mary blamed her, just as she blamed her for everything. Dryden’s name was not mentioned by anyone. It was strange, almost as though Tom were there alone. There was nobody to come to the pithead for Dryden. If he came out of there alive there was nobody to claim him for theirs as other families had done.

*

They dug for four days. The men came and went in shifts and Thaddeus eventually came down and told Joe that he ought to go back to the surface. In the office with the rain coming down beyond the windows, Thaddeus gave Joe tea and tried to make him eat a sandwich and then he sat Joe down. The grave look on his face took away the very small appetite that Joe had attempted to summon.

‘I don’t want to hear this,’ he said, throwing down the sandwich so that the egg fell out of it. Egg was disgusting, he thought, as the yolk parted grey and yellow from the white.

‘Drink your tea,’ Thaddeus urged him.

‘I don’t want it.’

Thaddeus’s face was sagging with fatigue.

‘That roof fall could go back and back. You know that. There’s no saying how far and … Sometimes,’ he went on, his voice very steady, ‘being a good pit manager is making a decision you don’t want for the sake of the rest of your men. You can’t go on digging for ever. Sooner or later you have to stop. Only the pit manager makes that decision. Are you going to make it?’

Joe felt sick, dizzy.

‘Dryden saved my life. I can’t give up on him now. He and Tom are two of my best hewers and Tom’s married and …’ Joe got up as though being on his feet would help. ‘And he has that dreadful mother. How would I explain myself to Mary Cameron? She would run me through with her knitting needles.’

Thaddeus smiled in acknowledgment of Joe’s attempt at lightness and then shook his head.

‘Dryden’s a pitman, Joe. He understands death just as well as the next man. So does Tom. We’re risking other men’s lives all the time. Do you think they would want that? Let it go.’