Black Sheep (6 page)

‘Well, you should have flaming well thought,' John Howker said and fetched Ted such a crack across the side of his head that his ears sang. He had not had such a blow since he was nine years old and it was the humiliation that pained him most.

‘Look at your mother, and you to blame. How did you not think?'

It was long enough since Arthur had walked out and never come back or sent a word for Ted to have truly forgotten, but to his mother, his disappearance for half a day was simply the same terrible loss over again and Arthur's as if it was last week.

He stumbled through telling them where he had been and what he had done but no one listened. His father brushed his words aside and sat down to his tea, his mother put the dishes on the table in between wiping her eyes over and over again, though they were quite dry now. It bewildered him that they could have missed him and been in such a fret over his absence, and now that he was here, appear not to care about him at all, as if his return were the outcome of some trick but his actual presence of no account.

He waited until his father stood up and folded his newspaper, ready for bed. Clive was in from the pit and snoring, Evie packing the next day's bait. And then he told them. At first they thought he had found work for the twelve days of holiday left before the pit and were pleased, even though the question of payment had not been mentioned by William Barnes, so that Ted could not tell them how much he would be bringing home. But then he plucked up enough courage to tell them again.

‘I'll work there for good. Instead of the pit. I'm never going underground, but I don't see how it matters where I work. It's all the same.'

His father's face went black. In the corner, Reuben's head bent further over the Bible and his muttering from Job was like far distant thunder. John Howker tore at his son until Evie pulled them apart.

‘What's the difference?' Ted kept crying out.

‘Difference is this is a pit family and you are one of it, that's the difference.'

‘And Arthur ran away before he'd go down there another time.'

This time the crack across his head almost felled him.

But he got up before light the next morning and left the house without anyone preventing him and that was the beginning of his time working on the hills beyond Mount of Zeal.

WHEN ROSE HAD
been married for two years and there was still no pregnancy, people, as they always did, made remarks and hinted to Evie, and before much longer began to ask one another if all was well, not with Rose's health but with her marriage. Ida Minns commented in this way, first to her husband and daughter, then to several friends. She did not speak to Rose because, in truth, she did not care for her daughter-in-law and had disapproved of the marriage from the outset. But she held Rose's mother in reserve, to speak to if things went on in the same way. And Evie Howker, being proud, would have listened in silence and sent her away and not only because she would not be patronised by the wife of a pithead manager. She had borne her own children without trouble – trouble came later, with too little money and too much grinding work as the backbone to four men. If Rose escaped any of it, even though she would also miss the short-lived joy of each baby, Evie could only envy her. Why Rose had not conceived she did not know and would not ask. Meanwhile, unhappy on her own all day in the empty house, Rose looked for work and found it behind the counter of the shop beside the Institute, from which the previous girl had been sacked and disgraced for thieving.

From the first morning she loved everything about the shop, loved the smells, the way the shelves were crammed with dozens of different items and yet always orderly, loved weighing out and filling up, loved the swish of the sugar into the cone of blue paper and the soft billows of flour, loved the meal sacks and the rattle of the coarse feed into the metal scoop, loved the cotton threads arranged in their colours on a rack and the smell of the balls of string and the shine on the boiled sweets. She felt as if the place behind the counter had been waiting for her to fill it. She had found more than work. People remarked that she looked well, her eyes were bright, her colour up, that she had ‘something about her' and after a short time they forgot that Rose continued to be childless and, like Evie, they envied her.

Charlie Minns had moods when a livid humour weighed him down and to be rid of it he flailed about him, and in flailing, caught Rose on the side of her face. At the end of her first week in the shop he was early home because he had trapped his hand in a pulley, and although not broken, it was deeply bruised, and painful.

‘I don't care for this,' he said. He was sitting at the table looking straight at Rose as she walked in. ‘I like to come in to my food not an empty space and I would have done if you hadn't started as a shopworker.'

‘I came out dead on half past five. Oh, Charlie, what have you done to your hand?'

He pulled it close to him as if he was afraid she would touch it. Rose felt guilt flood through her.

‘I'm sorry, I'd have come home straight away. I'll set the kettle on first. Have you to be off sick?'

‘I'm put in the office only, till it's healed.'

‘Oh, that's good, that's a relief then.'

‘Why? It isn't your hand.'

‘No. I'm sorry.'

Rose had never said that she was sorry as many times in the whole of her past life as she had once she was married to Charlie. She could not get everything right, and some days got nothing at all. He had been spoilt, he had moods, rages and then bouts of hunched-up silence, when he would not look at her or speak. At other times he would be funny, affectionate and kind. She never knew which Charlie to expect.

She had no child simply because none came and neither of them was troubled about it, Charlie because he knew a child would shift him from the centre of her attention, Rose because she had seen her mother worn out with all of them, together with John and Reuben, so the absence of one was not hurtful but the nods and behind-hand remarks were. She had trained herself to hold her head up and close her ears to them.

Now, as Charlie's moods became more melancholy and dispirited, and his behaviour towards her often angry and occasionally violent, she did not know whether to be happy that there was no child to suffer with her or sad because she faced him alone. No one knew what he was like, she spoke to no one and showed nothing on her face or in her responses. But the few days she had spent in the shop had given her a freedom which she knew that she would dread to lose. It did not strike her, in the way it might have done others, as a pathetically small or mean thing, this pleasure in working behind the counter, liking to guess whose face would come round the door as it opened and the bell rang, what they might buy today and what have to leave behind when the total added up to more than the contents of their purse. She only knew she felt happier than she had since early childhood, or on the few occasions when she and Mary had escaped to gossip and share secrets and a cigarette in the back field.

And now Charlie told her she had to give up the shop.

‘I want you here when I come in.'

‘Maybe I could try to change my hours, come home sooner. Yes, I'll ask for that.'

‘I don't like my wife being a shop woman. Give in your notice tomorrow, Rose.'

She stood over him as he sat, mutinous and angry. He was small, his teeth were broken and rotting. His hair clumped greasily to his scalp. Rose shuddered with a realisation that she was bound to him for life, unless she was prepared to go slinking home in disgrace. She caught hold of a scrap of courage and clung to it as to a life belt. She said, ‘I won't do that, Charlie. I don't see the reason why I should.'

‘Reason is, I'm your husband and I'm telling you.'

But Rose's eyes were wide open now and she saw him for the small, ugly, bullying creature he was. She knew why she had married him. He was a manager's son and she had been flattered, and thought it the way to take a step up, as Mary had thought before her. She had wanted the married status they all naturally wanted, for what else was there? She had felt singled out and even important, though she had known so many were scoffing at her choice of man. She had been neither happy nor sorry and she had been spurred on by the thought of her own house and family. When the family did not come, she had still ducked away from facing her real future. Now, it was clear in front of her and she flinched from it.

She prepared their food and they ate it in silence, but now and then Charlie glanced at her sideways, his head low to his plate. It would be Christmas in five weeks and of course they were to go to his family, though Rose longed to be in Lower Terrace again, no matter if the room would be crammed full and Reuben would mumble his way through the Manger and the Shepherds and the Flight into Egypt over and over again. The Christmas and Easter stories were the only ones with the power to draw him away from the smiting and vengeance of the Old Testament.

Rose set down her knife and fork. ‘I want to go home for Christmas,' she said.

‘This is your home.'

‘You know what I'm saying.'

But he did not reply, only scraped his plate round with the last lump of bread.

Rose cleared the table and took the pots out without saying any more.

ON A SUNDAY
night in the hardest winter for twenty years, Ted came out of a mesh of blinding whiteness over dark and could feel neither his hands nor feet and with his face numb. When he tried to breathe, the air in his lungs crackled.

Slowly, he linked one thought to the next, one sensation to another, until he had a chain that made a pattern and knew where he was – in the farthest, topmost field, at the highest point, against a stony outcrop. It was dark, but the snow was vivid. There was a moon. The frost was like acid and he had his arms round a sheep, whose fleece was knotted into ropelets by the ice. His ears were ringing, the inside of his mouth tasted metallic. He lay still for several minutes with his eyes closed but when he felt himself falling down into icy sleep again he forced himself to look and saw the stars glittering above his head and a ring round the moon. No one was near. The sheep were clumped together in corners, half buried in snowdrifts. He had come out with William Barnes several hours ago, carrying hay, and plunged at once up to their waists in snow. After that, they had struggled against it to try and reach the flock who were farthest away and most deeply buried. The moisture on the bales froze as they moved.

Ted looked round but there was no sign of the farmer nor any other human shape in the shining expanse of snow. He managed to free his hands from the frozen sheep fleece and the animal fell forward into the drift, a dead weight. How many others were dead he had no way of knowing – those clinging to the scribble of hawthorn hedge on the far side might be frozen solid.

He must not let himself close his eyes again, or slip down into the warm hollow his body had formed in the snowdrift. If he did, he would freeze too.

The voices rang across the clear cold air, and then the figures came on, making a slowly moving pencil line across the snow, William Barnes, Joel Barnes, Aseph and Tom, neighbours from over the hill. They reached Ted and shouldered him, wrapping him in horse blankets and sacking, and struggled back through the dells they themselves had made on their way. Ted felt like a child being carried to bed, swaying as the men moved, the air dusting his face with powdery snow thrown up by their movement. By the time they got him into the farm kitchen and beside the fire, he was barely aware of his own body.

The next morning, he was left to sleep, and at ten o'clock in the snow-bright day, Gerda Barnes came up with a tray of tea and bacon. Ted lay in the white glare coming through the small window of the attic, and his limbs felt heavy and sore, his head oddly light. But he was alive and he would be up later.

‘You stop in the house today, there's pots you can wash and potatoes to peel up and after that you'll be fit for nothing save more sleeping. Sheep,' she said with scorn on her way out, ‘dang things are more trouble than they're worth and they're not worth a man's life.'

The winter petered out with little more snow and by February they were lambing. Ted was happy, loving the place, the wildness, the sheep, the work, content to be on his own or with William and Joel. He grew a couple of inches and his shoulders were broader. He changed from being a small, pale child to a young man strong as wire, and every day he woke wanting to be out on the hill, or to the barn with the ewes that had to lamb inside. The weather was kind after that last bout of bitter cold and snow, and the spring grass came fresh and early. He had no time to walk to Mount of Zeal, and no message came up for him, but when the main batch of lambs had arrived, he took a late afternoon off and went home. He heard the blower for the end of the shift as he walked along Paradise. A woman looked out of her door for the men coming up the slope, stared at him and ducked back inside. By the time he reached Lower the file was making its way up the track from the pithead. He saw his father and Clive, then Leonard the neighbour, walking together, and lifted his arm to them. They did not break stride. Ted stopped, troubled that his leaving could chill them towards him. He felt the fold of notes in his pocket.

Evie dished up the moment the men had their boots off and set behind the door. She was not surprised that they said nothing because food and tea came first, second and third, but when the pots were cleared, fresh tea made and John had settled in his chair, still not a word had been said. From the corner, Reuben's faint hoarse whisper read the story of the Tower of Babel. She looked from one man to the other, and not one of them met her eye and then she knew it was something to do with Ted, whose name John had ruled should never be mentioned in the house again. The bitterness hurt her so much that sometimes when she thought of it she could not catch her breath. She did not have words for how she missed her youngest child, the quiet, gentle boy who had spent so many of his days at the window looking out, but the space he had left was a hollow which she tiptoed round and kept warm for him.