Ravenscliffe (26 page)

‘Perhaps better a Liberal MP than not an MP at all?’ she said.

‘No,’ Amos said emphatically. ‘Better a principled failure than an unprincipled victor.’

‘Everyone says Liberals will win at next general election. Think of it – you could be part of government, not opposition.’

‘Oh aye – an MP in a government I don’t believe in? Not me. There’s working men in Parliament already who’re only there because they toe t’Liberal line – they can’t speak for t’likes o’ Stan Clough or Sam Bamford because t’Liberal whip won’t let ’em. It’s like ’aving a guard dog, then clouting ’im for barking. If I’m to be an MP, I want to be an MP who can stand up and say exactly what I would say at a miners’ meeting in New Mill pit yard.’

‘Very good, very nice. And who will hear your fine, principled opinions if you don’t first get elected to Parliament?’

‘My views are ’eard every time I raise a crowd at a colliery and if it never goes further than that, so be it. I shall fight as a Labour candidate, or not at all. The working poor of Ardington need a poor working man to represent ’em. That’s me.’

She was proud of him, proud of his fierce integrity, but she worried, too, that in spurning the Liberal Party so wholeheartedly, he had gained as many powerful new adversaries as he had admirers. And then one evening in Ardington, on the steps outside the Pheasant Inn in front of a crowd of locals, Amos burnt his bridges, promising his audience that the Labour Party would one day replace the Liberals and hoist the working classes from their present place as an afterthought in the Liberal manifesto, to true prominence in Parliament.

‘That’s torn it,’ said Enoch afterwards.

‘Good.’ Amos, slow to get started, was fast developing his radical public persona. He had always known how to use words, and now he honed the skill, speaking with passion and fury at the betrayal of the ordinary man by the Liberals in Parliament who claimed to speak for them but forgot their interests at every critical vote. Labour had to cut its ties
with the Liberals and plough its own political furrow, he said, so this was the message that Amos, Enoch and Anna – and a small, loyal posse of supporters – took from door to door in the few days before the by-election. Anna walked so far, knocking on doors and preaching the Sykes gospel, that her voice was reduced to a pitiful croak and her feet bled; in the evenings, back in the kitchen at Ravenscliffe, she wincingly forced them into a bowl of warm salt water in the hope that the cruel stinging meant the weals and blisters would heal by morning.

‘You should consider a bicycle,’ Eve said, peering into the bowl and flinching in sympathy. She was back from the mill, back from a day of making and baking a hundred and fifty miniature veal and ham pies for Fortnum & Mason, and she was dog-tired herself, though her feet, at least, were still in one piece. Amos’s political ambitions were taking a heavy toll on her friend: taking a toll, too, on the state of the house. Eve inadvertently let her gaze stray over a pile of unwashed linen, a sink full of dirty pots and Anna, seeing her, said: ‘It’s only until Thursday.’

‘I know,’ Eve said. ‘It’s fine.’ But, anyway, she set to work on the washing-up because she couldn’t bear to sit down while there was work to be done.

‘Is Seth back, then?’ Eve liked to be home to see him, but sometimes it just wasn’t manageable and, in any case, she hardly got two words out of him. It was through Anna and, occasionally, Amos that she had gleaned the few scraps she knew about her son’s first days at New Mill.

‘Mmm. He’s upstairs with his vegetable book.’

‘Good. I’ll go and say g’night then. ’ow did ’e look?’

‘Same. White where he wasn’t spotted with black. He said his ears are ringing.’

Eve shook her head in dismay. Seth was on the screens, and stood his entire long shift at a rattling conveyor belt
picking useless rocks and shale out from the moving mass of coal. The work was mindless and hellishly noisy, so that when the lads were allowed to sit outside and eat their snap they took a few moments to adjust and continued to yell at each other as if they were still trying to be heard above the clank and grind. You could train a monkey to do what Seth was doing, thought Eve. She abandoned the pots in their sudsy water, left Anna to her salt footbath, and climbed the grand wooden staircase to the first floor. Along the landing she paused at the little girls’ bedroom and looked inside. There were two iron beds side by side, but Ellen and Maya were curled up together in only one of them, facing each other, foreheads grazing, their angel faces deadly serious in repose. Next door was Eliza who, though on the edge of sleep, waved from her bed and asked Eve if she’d had a nice day.

‘Busy. You?’

‘We did geography and I stood at t’front and talked about Jamaica. Blanche Marsden said I was making it up.’

Eve smiled.

‘Blanche Marsden doesn’t ’ave an Uncle Silas, so don’t be too ’ard on ’er.’

‘I’m not. Minnie Pickering cried again and went ’ome early.’

‘Oh dear. T’Pickerings are all very sad at t’moment.’

‘When my dad died, it were only ’im, weren’t it?’

Eve nodded.

‘I cried an’ all.’

‘Today?’

‘Aye. With Minnie. She set me off. But it was for my dad, not ’ers. I’m right as rain now, though.’ She smiled, to prove it. ‘I saw your wedding dress.’

‘I ’ope you didn’t touch it wi’ mucky fingers.’

‘No. Anna said she’d chop ’em off if I did.’

‘I should say so.’

‘I wish she’d finish it and make mine.’

‘She’s saving t’best for last. Get some sleep now. You’re a devil for keeping me chatting.’

Eliza smiled ruefully. ‘I can’t ’elp it. There’s such a lot to talk about,’ she said.

‘Night night.’

‘Night. Shall you be in t’kitchen when I get up?’

‘I shall. We can walk to school together tomorrow.’

Her daughter, sublimely easy to please, sighed with pleasure at this happy prospect, then settled back down into her pillow, which clouded up on either side of her face, obscuring her from Eve’s view. In here, Eliza’s bedroom, Anna had used three different paint colours on the wooden floor so that it was pastel-striped like a bathing hut or a deck chair: pale blue, pale pink, pale yellow on each consecutive floorboard. At the window she had hung simple cambric drapes with side-ties of broad navy blue ribbon. The bed had blue and white bunting strung along its length and Eliza’s clothes were folded into a wooden chest onto which the child’s name had been stencilled in dancing capital letters. Her few books and toys – a bear, Mabel the china doll, whose face was fixed like Eliza’s in an expression of wide-eyed wonder, a xylophone and the flower press from Daniel – were arranged in a line along the floor, waiting for a shelf to go up on the white walls. The perfect plainness of these was lifted by Anna’s delicate handiwork: a painted garland of pink, blue and yellow daisies, which looped and twisted around the four walls until it met its beginning. It was all so utterly charming that Eliza had burst into joyful tears when Anna allowed her to have her first peep. It had given the little girl the impression that Anna, already very high in Eliza’s estimation, had magical qualities, fairy powers, a mysterious ability to turn an ordinary bedroom into an enchanted place. Eve, who had never in her life wielded a paintbrush or properly mastered a sewing machine, was inclined to agree.

Further down the hallway Seth’s bedroom door was ajar and a slice of soft light extended from it on to the landing, which meant his lamp was still burning. Eve, encouraged, pushed the door wider and looked inside. In here Anna had spread more magic and begun a mural of a tree whose branches were going to bear an unlikely menagerie – monkeys, parrots, lemurs, hummingbirds, owls, squirrels. This special project was – unbeknownst to Eve – the subject of considerable behind-the-scenes bargaining. Anna had told Seth that her work on the mural was connected directly to his own behaviour towards his mother and Daniel, and this explained its faltering progress: some days even the prospect of a spider monkey hanging by its tail from a branch wasn’t enough to keep a civil tongue in Seth’s head, and on these days, Anna’s paintbrushes would remain in the jar of turpentine. Eve, ignorant of this and standing at the threshold of the room, saw the tree and marvelled at it, as she always did, because to use a wall as a canvas seemed to her such a bold, inventive thing to do. The tree was a great oak, a version of the one that stood outside on the common, perfectly framed by Seth’s bedroom window. He was sound asleep, his vegetable book fanned out on his chest and moving slowly up and down as he breathed. He had washed his face but his hands, spread like two starfish on the counterpane, were filthy, coal dust packed into his bitten fingernails and in the creases of his knuckles. This would once have raised a flash of annoyance in Eve: now, all she felt was sadness. She picked up the book, closed it and placed it on his bedside table, then snuffed out the lamp. She would see him in the morning before he left for work. Leaving the bedroom, stepping softly across the floorboards – unpainted as yet, though they were to be the same bright green as spring grass – she paused again to admire Anna’s oak tree, a shadowy image now in the lampless gloom. From an uppermost bough a wise old tawny owl gazed with amber eyes directly at Seth
in his bed as if trying by the force of its avian will to make the boy see sense. Good luck to you, thought Eve.

Silas was downstairs when she reappeared in the kitchen and he was sitting at the table nursing a cup of tea between both hands, with his customary comfortable ease, as if he had been there all along, waiting for her. He’d sent no word of his impending return, preferring the mild drama of an unexpected appearance. But it was late for visiting; this, anyway, was what Anna’s expression said. She was cross to have had her salt soak interrupted, cross to have padded to the door with wet, bare feet to find Silas waiting for admittance, when they hadn’t even known he was back from Bristol, and though she was performing the motions of hospitality, slicing cheese and buttering bread for a sandwich, she banged down the things – the loaf, the plate, the knife, the Cheddar – on the worktop a little louder than was necessary.

‘Good grief,’ Eve said. ‘It’s you, out o’ t’blue again.’

He smiled his best, crooked smile. ‘Hello Evie,’ he said. ‘You look—’ He paused, and she jumped in.

‘Tired? I am.’

‘Very lovely, I was going to say. A little pale, perhaps, but it suits you. You look like the Botticelli Venus.’

‘Chutney?’ Anna said brusquely, from where she stood across the kitchen.

‘No fear,’ he said, without looking at her. ‘Never had a taste for vinegar.’

Eve sat down opposite him at the table. ‘So, what do you think?’ she said.

‘About?’

‘Ravenscliffe. ’aven’t we gone up in t’world?’

‘It’s very fine,’ he said, in a voice that conveyed the weight
of his experience of beautiful properties, the difficulties inherent in trying to impress him.

Anna placed his sandwich in front of him and sat down too, next to Eve.

‘Thank you,’ he said, then: ‘They tell me at the Hare and Hounds that Amos is running for Parliament.’

There was a small smile playing about his mouth: it might have been friendly, or it might have been the opposite; Anna couldn’t tell, though she could have made an educated guess. She ignored the question in his statement and said: ‘So, you’re staying there again?’

‘Plenty of room ’ere,’ Eve said, hope and encouragement evident in her voice. Beside her, Anna tensed. They seemed to see him through different eyes, she thought.

He dipped his head apologetically. ‘I’m used to being alone,’ he said. ‘My habits are irregular and I don’t enjoy the restrictions of other people’s domestic timetables. And also I rather like the Hare and Hounds. I like the way the noises and smells of the snug filter up to my quarters.’

Eve, nose wrinkled, said: ‘That’s a good thing?’ and Anna, heady and generous with relief, said, ‘More tea?’

He held up a hand to indicate no, then said with studied casualness: ‘So, I’m buying a small colliery. Dreaton Main.’ He allowed himself a moment to enjoy the looks on their faces before continuing. ‘Coal for my ships, you see. Makes sound sense.’

There was silence, and then: ‘Aren’t there mines closer to Bristol than Dreaton Main?’

This was Anna, who was making a very good point, although he ignored it. His haste and drive to buy a colliery so close to his childhood home was indefensible in business terms. Wales would certainly suit better, geographically speaking; but he wanted one here, where he’d started from nothing. Thumbing his nose, he supposed, at what destiny
had once had in mind for him, at what his life could have been.

‘A pit? You’re buying a pit?’ Eve was utterly bewildered. She hadn’t realised this was possible; did pits come up for sale? Did they change hands, like motorcars or horses?

‘I am indeed.’

‘You’ll be a colliery owner, then?’ She sounded simple, she knew that. But in her experience, colliery owners were dukes and earls, not boys from Grangely. His confidence – the sheer brass neck of him – was breathtaking. She had no idea what she felt: pride, anxiety, amusement, shock. All of these.