Netherwood (34 page)

O
pening day was to be the twenty-sixth of October – just a fortnight away – and Eve wanted as little ceremony as possible. No red ribbons cut or colliery bands playing, though she had a sinking feeling that Lord Hoyland, with his taste for the big gesture, had something along those lines in mind. Her principal concern at the moment, though, was the training of her staff – the three women hired by her to help in the new venture. She hadn’t advertised the posts, because she had known who she wanted: Alice Buckle, Nellie Kay and Ginger Timpson, competent women who kept a clean home and whose children were all at school or grown. There were other women who Eve knew better – Lilly Pickering and Maud Platt, right there outside her own back door – but she’d need more than a fortnight to coax anything edible out of Lilly, and Maud, though she had a good heart, was sloppy when it came to domestic hygiene. Mucky Maud, Eliza once called her, and ever since Eve had been unable to think of her as anything else.

So Alice, Nellie and Ginger were offered new jobs at a starting rate of 5s a week, when all they’d done was pop out to buy pies from Eve’s front-door shop. Alice, Jonas
Buckle’s shy, plump, likeable little wife, was first to be asked, and though her blue eyes widened with pleasure, she had to ask Jonas first before she could accept. Alice had been Jonas’s child bride – they married on her sixteenth birthday – and the ten-year difference in their ages had skewed the balance of power in the relationship. She was twenty-eight now, and the mother of five boys, but even so she had retained something tenderly youthful about her appearance and her manner, and she deferred to her husband in every matter. When Eve spoke to her about the job, Alice bustled off home to seek permission, then bustled back within the hour, full to bursting with the gift of Jonas’s blessing. Ginger, on the other hand, had no such compunction. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d asked Mervyn’s permission for anything.

‘Why not?’ she had said to Eve, there and then. ‘It’ll be grand to get out more.’

Her name was actually Doreen, but it seemed too lumpish and plain for the vivacious creature she was and now that her parents were dead, no one ever used it. Her hair had softened over the years to the burnished brown of a prize-winning conker, but she’d been Ginger since childhood and always would be. She had a touch of glamour, a rare commodity in Netherwood town; even on wash day you’d never catch her without lipstick or perfectly drawn eyebrows. She liked to sing while she worked, though she was more generously endowed with enthusiasm than with natural talent: Eve hadn’t known this when she hired her, but discovered it soon enough.

Meanwhile Nellie, prim and particular and taking the job offer as entirely her due, deferred agreement until she knew exactly what her hours and duties would be. She had to be certain, she said, that there’d be plenty of time in the day to keep her own house in order. She was a woman of high
standards – her kitchen floor was as fit to eat from as her crockery. Clogs and boots had to be left by the door, and her husband Alf had to bathe at his old mother’s after his shift at Long Martley, to get the worst of the black off before he went home, where there’d be a second bath ready for him. He suffered a good deal of stick from his colleagues over this, but he knew he’d suffer more from Nellie if he didn’t oblige.

Eve, who heaven knows was houseproud enough herself, thought Nellie a perfect tyrant in her own home, but just what she needed in the new venture. And the combination of Alice’s willingness to please, Ginger’s confidence and Nellie’s obsessive cleanliness seemed like a promising package of assets. So this past week all three of them had been presenting themselves at the old mill at half-past eight every day so that Eve could show them the ropes. It was an odd situation. Eve didn’t feel at all like an employer, and certainly didn’t feel remotely qualified to teach these seasoned housewives anything. To her own ear she sounded hollow and foolish as she told them, increasingly hesitantly, what she expected of them. She wished she could keep the apology out of her voice. They all listened obligingly enough, but she feared they were simply hiding the contempt they were actually feeling for her feeble instructions. It struck her that Anna would have made a far better job of it, with that high-handed bossiness she could adopt at the drop of a hat. But Anna was at home with Ellen and Maya and the little shop, which for the time being was still a going concern, though now she was alone in the house, Anna had instigated strict and limited opening hours from which she refused to bend.

‘Four hours open, from ten until midday, and from one until three,’ she said bluntly to Eve. ‘If folk can’t get here, then they go without.’ She sounded almost like a Yorkshire-woman.

‘’ark at you!’ said Eve. ‘You make it sound like you’re doing them a favour.’

‘And so I am,’ Anna said.

Eve, thinking of Hilary Kilney, said, ‘You forget, your position is to serve,’ then ducked before the wet dishcloth made contact with her head.

In fact, there were no seeds of resentment germinating behind the pleasantly attentive faces of Alice, Nellie and Ginger, but that’s not to say they were not growing elsewhere. Personal success and entrepreneurship were rare as hens’ teeth among the mining community in Netherwood. There were, down the years, occasional exceptions: Herbert Roscoe, a miner turned professional boxer, was doing nicely but he wasn’t what you’d call an out-and-out success, with those cauliflower ears and busted nose. And Warren Sylvester, of course, self-employed in his own weaselly fashion, was doing all right. But they were men, by and large masters of their own destinies. Eve Williams, though, was a woman, who prior to Arthur’s death had relied entirely on her husband for support. Never in living memory, no matter who you asked and how long they ruminated, had a miner’s widow turned her fortunes about in the way Eve Williams had. In the Middle Ages, she’d have been drowned for a witch, but as it was, her detractors had to satisfy themselves with peddling idle rumours and peevish gossip.

Much of it was harmless, generated by women such as Lilly and Maud, who knew no better or couldn’t help themselves. Eve Williams was getting fat on her own pies. Clem Waterdine had eaten one of her faggots and spent all day Saturday on the privy. Seth, Eliza and Ellen were calling Anna Rabinovich ‘Mam’. Madge Medlicott had threatened to leave Percy if he
spent so much as a farthing more on Eve Williams’s food. None of it was true, and none of it – when it worked its inevitable way back to Eve – was particularly hurtful. But there was other, more vicious tale-telling that had its roots in genuine bad feeling, and the chief exponent among the ill-wishers was Harry Tideaway.

The publican’s own star had fallen since his loose tongue had put him out of favour with the earl. Not that Lord Hoyland had spoken of his feelings after the encounter with Harry on that Sunday afternoon back in June – it was, after all, very much in the earl’s interests to say as little as possible on the subject, since it principally concerned his feckless son. But Jem Arkwright, land agent and avenging angel, made sure that Harry was made to pay for his indiscretion. A quiet word here and there and most of the regulars were easily persuaded to drink at the Hare and Hounds or the Cross Keys. It was a very simple equation: Jem was highly regarded in the town, while Harry was hardly regarded at all.

With his trade and profits whirlpooling down the drain, Harry had ample time to nurture his resentment against Eve and it combined with his naturally savage streak, which for the past twelve months had been confined to occasional acts of violence towards Agnes behind locked doors. He began to pass on to anyone who would give him the time of day that Eve Williams was servicing the earl in the bedroom, for which sexual favours he had paid generously by setting her up in the old flour mill. The day she stopped lifting her skirt for Lord Hoyland would be the day she went out of business. It was God’s honest truth, he said.

Nobody really believed him, but plenty of people passed it on, though most of them had the good sense to keep it from Amos Sykes. Except, that is, for Barry Stevens, who at the end of a shift at New Mill, when Amos had angered him with his prudish refusal to find him funny, decided to get a rise
out of him with the details of Eve Williams’s dodgy business arrangement. They had just stepped into the cage for the ride up to the top, so Amos didn’t hear first time and said, ‘What’s tha’ say?’

Barry put his mouth closer to Amos’s ear.

‘Ah said, Teddy ’oyland’s stickin’ ’is dick into Eve Williams.’ He paused to snigger. ‘What d’yer think’s put that smile on ’er face? It’s not thi bloody veg plot, that’s for certain.’

The cage burst through into daylight and lurched to a standstill. The banksman hauled open the doors and collected the brass checks as the men stepped out. Barry’s face wore a familiar smile, sly and triumphant; he’d floored Sykes, the smug bastard. Head down, he walked off at a lick, but Amos was right there, by his side.

‘An’ who told you that shite?’ he said.

‘That’s fo’ me to know,’ said Barry, and suddenly found himself backed up against the brick wall of the lamp room, his throat in the vice of Amos’s clenched fist.

‘Who told you that shite?’ said Amos again. By God, it’s like goading a bull, thought Barry.

‘It were a joke,’ said Barry, with difficulty. ‘I were ’avin you on.’

‘Who told you that fuckin’ shite,’ Amos said. He knew Barry Stevens well enough to know when he was lying.

‘If ah tell yer tha’ll let me go, right?’ Barry was all mouth, but he was no fighter.

‘Aye, yer miserable bastard,’ Amos said. ‘I’ll let thi go.’

‘It were ’arry Tideaway,’ Barry said, his voice strangulated, his eyes bulging.

Amos relaxed his grip and Barry thought he’d got away with it, but he was wrong because although Amos did let him go, it was only to free up his right fist for a powerful uppercut which split the skin on contact and opened up a gash through which the white of the jawbone was just visible. He left,
without so much as a backwards glance, tossing his helmet in through the open door of the lamp room, and stalking out of the pit yard at a pace fired by fury. At the Hoyland Arms he stopped, took a few deep breaths, rearranged his face, and walked in.

The pub was empty except for Harry, who had his till open and was counting his pitiful takings. He looked at Amos with surprise. ‘I’ve called time,’ he said.

‘Shame,’ said Amos. ‘Ah well, ni’ mind.’

They regarded each other across the bar, Harry wary and Amos working hard to keep his expression unreadable.

‘Just ’eard summat interestin’ from Barry Stevens,’ he said, as if he was merely passing time.

‘Oh aye?’ said Harry, perking up. If he’d lived longer in Netherwood – and hadn’t been so much of a scoundrel – he might have sensed treacherous waters.

‘Aye. Eve Williams and Lord ’oyland. Y’ know.’ Amos nodded suggestively. He couldn’t bring himself to frame the words. ‘Probably not true, mind,’ he said.

‘Every word, true as I’m stood ’ere,’ Harry said, sealing his fate. ‘Mind you, who wouldn’t shaft ’er, given t’chance?’

He laughed a deep, fat man’s laugh that shook his jowls and his belly, a dirty, lascivious laugh that provoked in Amos such a fierce rush of pure hatred that, small though he was, he found the strength to reach over and haul Harry up and across the top of the bar, the buttons of his waistcoat scratching the mahogany as he travelled. Then, when Amos had him where he wanted him, he punched Harry twice, square in the face and shoved him backwards against the panelling where he slid down the wall and slumped like a sack of coal on the floor.

Amos snarled, more beast than man. ‘One more word about Eve Williams from your wicked mouth, an’ tha dead,’ he said.

Harry couldn’t speak, even if he’d had anything to say. His
flesh was swelling above the left eye, and blood ran in a steady stream from his nose into his open mouth. He was immobile. He watched Amos Sykes leave the pub then sat there in his wretched stupor, waiting for Agnes to come back from the butcher’s. She’d feel the back of his hand if she was late.