Nathaniel looked from his elder son to his younger, and what he read in their faces caused him to manhandle their now unresisting bodies away from the cemetery entrance and down into the lane running at the side of the grounds, whereupon he said, ‘All right, let’s have it. You’ve got somethin’ to say, so spit it out.’
‘I’ve got nothing to say.’ This was from Arnold, and it was sullen.
‘Oh, aye, you have, lad, an’ if we have to stand here till nightfall I’ve a mind to do it. You think you know somethin’ about Eva, is that it?’
‘I don’t “think” anything.’
‘You never said a truer word,’ Luke cut in bitterly from where he stood staring at his brother, the hate in his eyes matching that of Arnold’s as his sibling’s gaze turned to him. ‘You just open your gob and to hell with the consequences.’
‘Aye, well, maybe he ought to know, you considered that, eh? If he don’t already, that is.’
‘I’ll bang your bloo—’ Nathaniel stopped, glancing back towards the cemetery and crossing himself, before he continued, ‘I’ll bang your heads together if I have any more of it. You’ve somethin’ to say, so say it, Arnold.’
‘Michael’s not your bairn, is he? He’s no relation to any of us.’
That Nathaniel was prepared in part was evident when he sighed, drawing in a long breath as though begging for patience, before he said, ‘So that’s why he took off, eh? I thought there was more to do with his goin’ than just bein’ upset at findin’ his uncle. There was a row at the farm that Sunday, is that it?’
‘Michael didn’t find Henry.’
‘No?’ Nathaniel’s eyes narrowed. ‘That’s not what you all said.’
‘Aye, well, the fact is, Michael might not know about Henry’s death; he’d gone before we found him. And it wasn’t an accident, you might as well know that an’ all. Henry killed himself. He threw a rope over one of the beams in the barn and hanged himself,’ said Arnold grimly.
‘Henry did himself in?’ Nathaniel’s face had stretched and his mouth hung in a wide gape for a moment before his lips came together with a little snap. Again his gaze moved from that of his elder son, and he held Luke’s eyes for what seemed like a long while before saying softly, ‘You want to tell me why he did it?’
It was the last thing in the world Luke wanted to do. He had gathered that the mystery about Michael’s paternity was not a surprise to his father, but it was also clear that Nathaniel had no idea of who had really sired Michael. ‘He was depressed; the farm’s been failing for a long time—’
‘He’d just found out Michael was his bairn.’
There was total silence after Arnold’s voice had cut in on Luke’s, and then, as his father’s eyes turned to him, their expression made Arnold gabble as he said, ‘He didn’t know, Henry didn’t know. Apparently the old uns had told Eva to keep it quiet or else they’d turn her out; with Henry just being wed they didn’t want to rock the apple cart. It all came up ‘cos Polly and Michael had said they wanted to get wed ...’
Arnold’s voice trailed away. Nathaniel was shaking his head in the manner of a boxer who was having a job to stay on his feet.
‘Satisfied?’ Luke’s voice was a low hiss.
‘He had a right to know; he’s married to her, isn’t he?’
‘All these years.’ Nathaniel’s voice was so low they could barely hear it. ‘I’ve made allowances, put up with her rages an’ her sulks, an’ all the time ... Her brother, her own brother. Was she willin’?’
He was talking to Luke, and now Luke nodded silently and again Nathaniel shook his head, lowering his chin into his neck.
The parson came out of the cemetery gates in his horse and trap, the gravedigger sitting alongside him, and when Luke took his father’s arm and gently pulled him to the edge of the lane Nathaniel didn’t demur but went as obediently as a child. They stood in silence as the parson passed with an inclination of his head, and remained there while the other mourners dwindled away. There were only a few of them; most men couldn’t afford to lose a day’s work to go to a funeral unless it was someone in the immediate family, and it wasn’t fitting that women should attend without their menfolk.
The rain was heavier now, wetting the ground, which was already claggy with mud, and they had a four-mile walk in front of them, through High Newport and Low Newport until they came to Humbleton Hill and the outskirts of the town of Bishopswearmouth, but neither Luke nor Arnold urged Nathaniel to get moving.
‘By, I’ve bin a fool. Do y‘know that?’ Nathaniel raised his head as he spoke but didn’t look at either one of his sons, his eyes moving aimlessly over the fields surrounding the tiny cemetery. ‘Saw me comin’, old Walter did, an’ I swallowed the story of a travellin’ man takin’ his innocent daughter down. Aye, I swallowed it all right, although I’ve often wondered since if she was willin’. But her own brother!’ His lips came away from his teeth in an expression of disgust.
‘What are you going to do, Da?’ There was something in his father’s reaction — now the initial shock had faded – that was puzzling Luke.
‘Do?’ And now Nathaniel looked at his younger son before he began to walk, Arnold and Luke falling in either side of the smaller figure. ‘I’m goin’ to do somethin’ I should’ve done a while back if I’d had me head screwed on straight, lad, but I think it’s only right I tell your stepmother the glad news first.’
‘You’re not going to do anything silly?’
‘Silly?’ There was a harsh grunt of a laugh that carried no humour. ‘No, I’m not about to do anythin’ silly, lad.’
He could kill Arnold. Luke’s thoughts were hot and fierce as they trudged – silently now – along the narrow lane, passing the Silksworth Colliery after some twenty minutes or so before reaching Tunstall Hills Farm on their right. He needn’t have said anything – they had agreed that after all this time it was pointless to rake up the dirt and perhaps cause their father pain. But because of spite – and it was spite sure enough, for whatever had passed between Arnold and Polly hadn’t pleased his brother – he had wanted to do some damage. Arnold had always been like that, venting his own disappointments and failures on others, and it wasn’t only Luke who recognised his brother’s weaknesses. Arnold wasn’t popular down the pit.
Take last week, for instance, when they had been moving the conveyor belt towards the new face, withdrawing the props from the old face so the roof dropped. Arnold had taken one risk too many and nearly brought the roof down on a few of them, and then he’d wondered why old Gilbert and Neville had given him an ear-bashing for the rest of the shift. And when Neville had come in a couple of days later and said a cat had wrought havoc amongst his prize pigeons, Luke had happened to glance Arnold’s way, and had got the impression the news was of no surprise to his brother. Mind, he could’ve been wrong. Aye, he could have, but he doubted it. Neville had blamed his little lad for leaving the door to the birds’ cage open and had given the bairn a leathering, even though the boy had apparently insisted he’d been nowhere near the enclosure in Neville’s backyard, and his missus had got involved and now Neville and his wife weren’t talking.
The silence between the three men continued right until they passed the smithy at the corner of Southwick Road, and it was Nathaniel who broke it a moment later when he said, ‘Well, lads, likely the eruption that’s goin’ to break in a minute or two’ll be on the lines them poor so-an’-so’s in Italy suffered last week when Mount Vesuvius blew its top, but there’s no need for you two to bear the brunt of it. This is atween me an’ Eva, all right?’
‘Da, you know she’s not well.’
Luke’s voice had been low and Nathaniel looked at him for a second before he said, ‘Makes no difference, lad. What needs to be said needs to be said, an’ likely it’d have happened a while back if I’d had the sense I was born with. I’ve got a good few years in front of me yet an’ I want to enjoy ’em afore they put me six foot under like what we’ve seen today.’ Nathaniel paused in front of his house, his eyes moving out over the lines of regimented terraced dwellings stretching north from Southwick Road. ‘All me life I’ve lived here,’ he mused softly, ‘here in Monkwearmouth, an’ for most of me life I’ve bin down the pit. It took me da an’ two of me brothers in 1870, just a year after the big strike. Mind –’ he turned to Luke now – ‘the upshot of the strike was the establishment of the Durham Miners’ Mutual Association, like I’ve told you afore. You have me da an’ men like him to thank for startin’ the fight, Luke.’
‘Aye, aye, I know, Da.’ Luke’s eyes dropped to the doorstep and he was conscious of thinking, It’s looking dingy. First time he could remember it looking that way, but since the incident at the farm Eva had been strange and in a world of her own half the time. His da had been patient to date, sympathetic, because – as he’d said only first thing that morning on the way to the funeral – it was her brother, for crying out loud, and no one deserved to die like that. But Luke had a feeling his da’s patience with his wife was all used up now.
‘Our da when he was alive, an’ Eustace an’ Lonnie an’ Douglas an’ Martin, we all used to be out of here like a dose of salts of a Saturday afternoon an’ over to the football ground in Newcastle Road. By, we had some good afternoons there, lad, but it lost somethin’ when they moved it to Roker Park. Aye, it lost somethin’ all right.’ Nathaniel stood for a moment more, chewing on his lip as he looked back down the years and saw, in his mind’s eye, the figure of his father with five lads of varying ages fleeing pit and cottage to Sunderland AFC’s ground.
And then he straightened and his voice had lost its wistful note when he said, ‘I’m forty-seven years old, lads, an’ you know what I’ve learned today? I’m not goin’ the way of me da an’ our Lonnie an’ Martin without savourin’ somethin’ of life first. An’ I’ve just bin markin’ time the last sixteen years, or the first fifteen of ’em at any rate.’
He’d got a woman
. Why the penny dropped at that precise moment Luke didn’t know, but suddenly his father’s happiness over the last year – which Luke had put down to a mellowing of Nathaniel’s relationship with his wife – took on a whole new meaning. There was amazement on his face, and a slow, dull, red seeping across his cheekbones as he stared at the small, wiry figure at the side of him. When? And who? He continued to stare at his father with new eyes as Nathaniel opened the front door and stepped inside the house, but Luke found he was quite unable to move.
‘What’s the matter with you? Get going.’
Luke couldn’t reply to Arnold’s grunt for a moment. The new knowledge which had burst forth into his consciousness was creating a strange sensation made up of a hundred and one emotions, none of which had precedence except the one of envy. And then, as Arnold made to thrust him roughly aside, Luke turned with a lightning movement of his body and said, ‘Don’t shove me around, Arnold, I’m warning you. You’ve done enough the day already.’
‘Huh!’ It was a small sound in Arnold’s throat; he had read the signs accurately and wasn’t about to press the angry man in front of him any further.
Once inside the house, Luke and Arnold came to a halt in the kitchen. The usually spick and span surroundings were cluttered and untidy, and the kitchen table still held the remains of the men’s breakfasts, which they had got themselves. Eva had still been in bed when they had left the house early that morning for Silksworth; since Henry’s death she had taken to rising long after they had all left for the colliery.
There was a roaring fire burning in the range and Eva had obviously been sitting in front of it before they had arrived home, but she was now standing facing her husband. Nathaniel’s manner was not quiet but neither was it as aggressive as one would expect in the circumstances, and he was saying, ‘So you admit it, then? You don’t deny you’d bin carryin’ on with your own brother?’
‘Why should I?’ For the first time in over a week there was an element of life in Eva’s voice. ‘And let’s call a spade a spade. We were lovers, right from when we was bairns we were lovers. There, you have it. And I loved him, I never stopped loving him.’
‘An’ the travellin’ man?’
‘There was never any travelling man, there was only Henry.’
The exultation in Eva’s voice caused Luke to lower his head and screw up his eyes. The woman was deranged, she had to be.
‘An’ Michael leavin’? He found out?’
‘Aye, he found out.’ Eva’s head was back and her chin was up. ‘And to my mind he ought to be glad Henry was his father and that a weak-kneed little nowt like you had nothing to do with his birth.’
‘You were quick enough to accept all this weak-kneed little nowt gave you.’ Nathaniel had been determined not to lose his temper, but Eva’s reaction had not been what he had expected. If she had shown an element of remorse or any of the brokenness of the last few days he would have tempered his words accordingly, but now his voice was low in his throat as he growled, ‘But rest assured on one thing, woman, I wouldn’t touch you now with a barge pole. You’ve made me life a misery over the years an’ I was dim enough to stand for it, but no more. An’ when I walk out of them doors it’ll be wipin’ the dust off me feet for good.’
‘Walk out, he says.’ Eva turned to the two silent figures watching them, her eyes narrowed and her mouth ugly, before she again looked at her husband. ‘And where do you think you’re going?’ she scoffed tauntingly.
‘I’m goin’ to a good, clean woman who’s worth her weight in gold, that’s where I’m goin’.’ Nathaniel saw the meaning of his words hit Eva full in the face, causing her eyes to widen and her mouth to become slack. ‘Aye, that’s right, I’ve got someone. Now you chew on that.’