Shelter from the Storm (26 page)

Vinia burst into the office then, rather like the clerk had on the first day, and Joe jumped and spilled tea all over his fingers, which weren’t in any wonderful shape, anyhow, from helping underground.

‘They say you’re going to stop,’ she said, glaring at him and slamming the door.

‘What?’

‘That the roof fall is too bad and you’re going to give up.’

‘Who said so?’

‘My Tom is still down there, and his brother.’

‘I do know that,’ Joe said, short of sleep, food and temper.

‘Joe —’ Thaddeus offered and Joe glared at him.

‘You said we were going to give up?’

‘No, I haven’t said so.’

‘But you think I should?’

Thaddeus didn’t reply and looked away. Vinia searched Joe’s face and then Thaddeus’s for clues.

‘You aren’t going to leave them down there?’ she said accusingly.

‘They’re probably dead,’ Thaddeus pointed out, meeting her eyes.

‘Dead?’

‘There’s no air getting in or out,’ Joe said.

‘Tom’s not dead! He’s not dead. You get down there and you get him out!’

She had reached Joe’s desk and was leaning over it in a threatening manner, both hands on the top.

‘Men are risking their lives all the time,’ Thaddeus said.

‘You get down there and get them out!’ she told Joe.

‘Mrs Cameron, you’re going to have to leave this to the experts,’ Thaddeus said.

Vinia turned to him. Her teeth were set and her eyes glittered.

‘I don’t see any experts,’ she said. ‘You shut up!’ She turned on Joe. ‘You get them out of there.’

Thaddeus left the office. Joe wasn’t surprised that he couldn’t stand any more. As soon as he had gone she began to weep, not politely and softly into a handkerchief as Joe knew ladies did, but all wet and noisy and without retreating a single step or caring what her face looked like, and all the time she glared at him as though the tears had nothing to do with her.

‘We quarrelled so badly and I let him go,’ she said.

Joe didn’t feel like a magician any more, he felt like an undertaker — Dryden and Tom buried under all that rock, or on the other side of it, he didn’t know, just that they had dug for four days and found nothing. He had stopped wishing he could produce a miracle and felt that he would be grateful even for a body so that at least he would not have to make such an awful decision. He didn’t care very much about Tom beyond the bounds of humanity, but he found that he did care about Dryden. Sometimes he hated him because of Esther Margaret and often he was reminded that but for Dryden he could have been dead, but he didn’t ever feel indifferent when it came to Dryden.

‘One more day,’ he told Vinia, ‘but after that, if we don’t find anything, I’m going to give it up.’

They worked all that night and most of the next day and Joe got past exhaustion, he got to the stage where he couldn’t see what he was doing or remember why he was doing it. His whole being was focused on that fall of rock and he was determined to beat it, to find the end of it, to reach a satisfactory conclusion, if it killed him. He did not think he could cope with having to call off the rescue and leave two good miners to die, though he, like Thaddeus, was half convinced that they were dead already. He felt that if he did not get Dryden out of there he would never sleep easily in his bed again. He also knew that this stubbornness or unwillingness to take responsibility was costly. The men helping him were worn out, disheartened, ready to give up.

All that day Joe fought with himself over it, and then finally, when he was just about to call the whole thing off, there was a shout from one of the men and Joe believed for the first time that he might win. There was what looked like the end of the fall, the beginning of space, the chance of finding … what? Joe went cold with the image in his mind of Dryden and Tom dead. It was no longer enough to find them. He wanted this to be a total victory, just for once to beat the earth at this game. If he could bring them out he swore to God he would never again ask for
anything. His heart beat hard like a rock because there was no sound coming from the other side, and though the men shouted as the hole got bigger no reply came from beyond. When it was big enough for a man to crawl through Joe took a lamp and wriggled and pushed and shoved his way in.

It was the hardest thing he had ever done and he regretted every negative thought that he had had about Dryden. He was cut and bruised and sore by the time he got there and more tired than ever before, and his dread of finding no one alive almost consumed him, and then he managed to scramble through, and when he got there and lifted the lamp his heart stopped. The two brothers were lying close together, perfectly still, Tom on his back and Dryden on his side with one arm around him. Joe had seen dead men before but he hadn’t got used to it and he didn’t want to. He made himself crawl up to them. Dryden was warm and Joe’s fear was that he had not been dead long.

‘Dryden?’

Joe put down the lamp and reached for his water bottle, and he moved Dryden away from Tom and turned him over and supported him and pressed the bottle to his lips.

‘Come on, Dryden, don’t give up on me now,’ he urged. He managed to get water between Dryden’s lips and then Dryden opened his eyes.

The only light in them was the reflection of the lamp, and his voice was a cracked whisper.

‘Tom’s dead,’ he said.

*

There had been the question of who was to tell Tom’s mother. It was late at night when they brought his body to the surface, and by then, as on each day since the beginning, Alf had finally managed to persuade her to go home. The rain was pouring down, giving everything a sheen. Dryden leaned against Joe in the pit yard and let the rain hit his face, and Joe didn’t know what to do.

Vinia was there, bending over Tom’s body and letting little sobs escape to reach Joe’s hearing from time to time. Joe was worried that Dryden would collapse. He wouldn’t see the doctor. The man had pronounced Tom dead and retreated gratefully into the night and most of the rescuers, exhausted, had gone home. Those who remained accompanied Vinia and Tom’s body back to her house, where Tom would be laid out in the front room until the funeral.

‘I’d better go and tell Tom’s mother,’ Joe said as he and Dryden and Vinia stood about awkwardly in the kitchen.

‘I think I should do that.’ Dryden’s voice was hoarse with lack of use.

‘Is that a good idea?’

‘Probably not, but I think I should.’ Dryden glanced around as Vinia went into the pantry for something and added softly, ‘I can tell them he died straight away.’

It was what he had told Vinia when they brought Tom to the surface. Joe thought of Carrington’s death and wanted to hope that it had been the same, but he knew by the way Dryden spoke that he had listened to his brother die slowly.

Joe offered to go with him to see Mary and Alf but Dryden shook his head. Vinia made tea. It was the only comfort any of them had — the ritual of the tea-making and drinking. Joe was glad of it. The house and the tea seemed so normal after the horror of the last six days underground. He had been lucky to lose only one man, but that was not how it felt. It always felt like his fault because it was his responsibility, his pit, his loss. Tom had been one of his best hewers, but even if he had been the worst miner ever to go underground Joe would have been sorry at the loss. As it was he was glad to find Dryden alive, glad of the thirteen out of fourteen men, sad, sorry, bereft over Tom.

Vinia suddenly stopped drinking her tea and set down her teacup and saucer and then she got up. She had spent six days waiting at the pithead in the hope that Tom and Dryden were still alive. Every time Joe had come back to the surface she was
there. It had only been when they finally brought up Dryden alive and his brother’s body that Joe realised she had nobody, no parents, no family, and Joe knew that Tom was the kind of man who would not have tolerated other people in his house, so it was unlikely that she had any friends. He had the feeling that her life with Tom had not been easy. There were bruises on her face and a bleakness in her eyes. He knew that Tom was a hard-drinking, hard-working, hard-fighting, opinionated man. When she had seen his body any hope in her face died. She had ignored Dryden. Joe wasn’t sure that she had even seen him.

Now she ran out of the back door and into the lane as though she would follow Dryden, as though she had suddenly realised that he had been in the house and gone and about his mission and how impossible it was. When Joe went after her she was standing in the street, the rain plastering her hair and clothes. She gazed towards the Cameron house and said, ‘He can’t go there.’

She began to weep hopelessly and Joe did the only thing he could think of other than urging her inside, which she resisted. He put an arm around her, and she turned to him as though she had had no one to turn to in her life, surprised, hurt, unable to bear any more. She put both arms around his neck and hid her face against him.

Joe had had a great many people need him during his life as the pit-owner’s son and lately as the pit-owner. He prided himself on doing everything he could for the pitmen and their families after twenty years or more of neglect by his father, but he had never before comforted a woman. He would have liked to have been Esther Margaret’s husband and to have looked after her and had children with her and come home to her in the evenings, but somehow it had taken until this moment for him truly to know the difference between affection and the kind of feeling he had for Luisa McAndrew. At that moment he would have given anything to shield Vinia from what was hurting her, and the regard that he had for her was a very small part of what he felt. He cared about the very air upon the moor, each piece of
ground where the houses stood, the wind and the rain that were the chief source of weather here, the heather above the village, the gorse bushes, the distant farms and each person who lived there. They were his responsibility. He enclosed her in his embrace and after a while he heard her give a sigh of ease. He didn’t think she was even aware of the relentless rain.

*

When Dryden had been a little boy he had often dreamed of being allowed into this house, and in his mind it was full of colour and warm cake and quickening fires, but when he had forced his legs to the back door and Alf had opened it and had admitted him inside without a word it was nothing like he had thought it would be.

You could smell unhappiness, and it was not just the unhappiness of the past week, it was something of long standing. It was not a house where children had played together while growing up with loving parents. It was swept clean and bare, as though Mary Cameron wanted to deny to herself that she had ever had a moment’s levity.

It was the first time Dryden had come face to face with his mother. To him she had always been Tom’s mother, and she would cross the street before she would tolerate Dryden’s presence. He had never before looked into her eyes. They were Tom’s eyes. She backed away.

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, no!’

‘Tom died,’ Dryden said.

She put her hands over her ears.

‘My Tommy’s not dead,’ she said, ‘he can’t be! You’re a liar! You get out!’

Dryden looked at Alf, who lowered his eyes but didn’t move.

‘He died straight away.’

As a pitman Alf would doubt the truth of this. As a father Dryden knew that he needed to hear it as he was being told it.

‘The fall killed him.’

Dryden had no idea how long Tom had lived, how many hours had gone past before he took his last small breath. Underground in the black silence time was different, magnified, something to be feared and respected. He felt as though he had spent one lifetime there before Tom died and another since. Mary Cameron looked at him and there was true hatred in her eyes.

‘How can you be here and my Tommy be dead? How can God be so cruel?’

Alf went to her and Dryden was amazed. They comforted one another. They touched other than for sex or violence. How strange, how apparently civilised, and yet he remembered those long church services, those endless Sunday afternoons at the Harmers’. Jesus had said that even the publicans and sinners should love one another. You were supposed to love your enemies, weren’t you? All those self-proclaimed Christians — Alf and Mary Cameron had given away a tiny child, Mr and Mrs Harmer had mistreated that child, and Tom had professed love for his half-brother and had none. This would have been his home, these people could have given him a childhood. He was being punished by them all for something another man had done. It made Dryden angry, and suddenly he didn’t care about Tom’s death or their grief; their loss meant nothing to him. All the old ideas about what it could be like to have a family and belong to people died right there. He didn’t long for it any more. He turned around and walked out.

Thaddeus and Alice had a party to celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary and Luisa and George came to Durham for the celebrations. Thaddeus had told George of the accident. George looked bored.

‘Really,’ he said, ‘how very trying for you,’ and he changed the subject.

Joe wasn’t in the mood for parties. Thaddeus had had to talk him into it. He went out and walked in the gardens and through the orchard beside the house where the fruit was ripening on the trees. He wondered how many dead men George McAndrew had ever seen that he cared about, how many sleepless nights he had spent worrying about his workforce, how many widows had gone crying in rain-sodden back lanes for men who had treated them badly. Joe had wept for his own shortcomings and for the sight of a good pitman dead and for Vinia and Dryden. Suddenly he heard a noise behind him. It was Luisa.

‘I’m so sorry, Joe,’ she said.

For days Joe had tried to put Tom’s funeral out of his mind — the way Mary Cameron had wept throughout and had to be supported from the church, the way Vinia would have been sitting alone if Joe hadn’t gone with her. Dryden wasn’t there at all. Joe had braved the Black Horse later and had had to practically carry him out. He had taken Dryden back and let
him fall on to Vinia’s settee in her front room, where the late evening sunshine fell so unsympathetically on to her shabby furniture.