The Emerald Valley (9 page)

He pushed aside the covers. The moonlit linoleum was cold to his bare feet, but he hardly noticed as he padded across the floor and went down the steep, scrubbed wood stairs. The door at the foot was open a crack and Harry could see light from the kitchen slanting through. He put out a hand to push it open, but nothing happened; he pushed harder … still the door refused to budge. But the harsh breathing and the moaning was so close now that it might almost have been in his ear and it dawned on Harry that there could be only one reason for the door refusing to open, only one thing jamming it closed.

‘Dad!' he said in an urgent whisper. ‘Dad – are you all right?'

There was no reply, but the moaning grew louder.

‘Oh dear. Oh dear … dear … dear …'

‘Dad! You're there, aren't you? Dad, let me open the door …'

‘James! Are you down there?'

Harry turned, his hand still on the door, to see Charlotte at the top of the stairs. ‘Harry, what's happening?' she asked, her voice rising in panic as she made out the figure of her son.

‘It's Dad,' Harry said urgently. ‘He's been taken worse and I think he's fallen down right in the doorway. I can't get in to find out.'

Charlotte ran down the stairs and added her weight to Harry's.

‘James!' she called. ‘James – move, can't you! Just a bit? We can't get in to you.'

Still there was no response, only a period of quiet before the gasping and its accompanying moans began again.

‘Oh my Lord, whatever shall we do?' Charlotte, who had woken from a deep, exhausted sleep to find the bed empty beside her, was more flustered than Harry could ever remember seeing her. ‘If we can't open the door, we can't get to him.'

‘But he's not that big,' Harry protested wonderingly.

‘No, but he's a dead weight.' Her voice cracked as if she realised what she had said. ‘James, listen, can't you help yourself? Roll – or wriggle? Just enough to let our Harry through.'

Sounds of effort came from the other side of the door, but it remained almost closed. Harry, hating the inaction, turned away.

‘I'll go and see if I can get down out of the window. Then I could go round the outside.'

‘You'd fall,' Charlotte predicted. ‘And anyway, that wouldn't do any good. You'd still have to break a window to get back in. It's all locked up and the key's in the back door.'

Harry swore, using one of the words he had picked up working underground, but in the tension of the moment Charlotte barely noticed.

‘James, can you hear me!' she tried again.

‘Y-ye-yes …' It was jerky, in time with the laboured gasps, but it was the first actual response they had had from him.

‘Listen, you must move a bit,' she went on, speaking clearly as if to a child. ‘We can't get out.'

The muted dragging sound was almost drowned by the heavy breathing, but Charlotte heard it.

‘Push, Harry!' she entreated.

They pushed together and the door opened a little further, though it was still only a crack.

‘Could you get through now, Harry?' she asked.

‘I could try.' He turned sideways on, inching his shoulders through the space and trying to follow with his head. It was tight, very tight and Harry felt glad he was no bigger. A broader man would never make it, but he just might …

For the moment the effort of concentration made him forget his apprehension over what he might find on the other side of the door. But as he squeezed through the full horror hit him again.

James was slumped on the floor, half-sitting, half-lying against the door. His face was ashen, reflecting the look of a man who had found even the smallest movement beyond him. Every ounce of his strength was needed purely for the effort of breathing. And even that appeared to be a losing battle.

‘Dad!' He dropped to his knees beside his father, but the liquid blue eyes seemed not to see him. They gazed into space somewhere over Harry's shoulder.

‘Come on, Dad, we've got to move you,' he said. ‘You can't stay there and Mam can't get out.'

He bent, lifting James's arms and winding them round his neck. Then he tried to straighten, using leverage and the strength that came from dragging putts of coal in narrow seams. It was far from easy, for as Charlotte had said James was a dead weight, but at last he managed to move him far enough for her to push open the door and get into the room. Then she and Harry together were able to get James to his feet and over to the sofa where she propped him up with all the cushions she could find at his back, supporting him against them as he threatened to fall forward.

‘Harry – you'd better go for the doctor,' Charlotte said. She was slowly regaining her ability to take charge of a situation.

‘But Mam …' he hesitated, unwilling to leave them.

‘Don't argue, just do as I say.'

He ran up the stairs to his room, pulling on his clothes with the kind of haste usually reserved for mornings when he had overslept. But his fingers were trembling, so it took a long while to fasten the buttons and he was still fiddling with them as he clattered back down the stairs.

‘Make haste, now,' Charlotte instructed as he took one last fearful look at James and let himself out. As he ran along the Rank, his hobnailed boots echoed on the stones. The doctor lived in one of the big houses in South Hill on the other side of the valley; it was quite a step, and Harry thought it would take him at least a quarter of an hour to get there, even if he ran all the way. Then he still had to persuade the doctor to come – and Harry had the uncomfortable feeling that there was not a great deal he could do, anyway. When James had a really bad turn, Charlotte invariably called the doctor, but from a conversation he had once overheard between his mother and Peggy Yelling, he suspected this had more to do with simplifying the formalities if this ‘turn'should prove to be fatal than with expecting the doctor to be able to provide a miracle cure. For the miner who had spent his life at the face, breathing in the thickly-polluted air, there was no cure.

‘And does anybody give a bugger?' Harry asked himself, unconsciously echoing what Ewart Brixey had said earlier in the Miners'Arms. ‘Not likely!'

On the sofa in Greenslade Terrace his father could be gasping his last but no one cared – certainly not the nobs who owned the mines. They had grown rich on the efforts of men like James – the life-blood of the miners in their employ paid for the upkeep of their grand houses and bought the fine feather pillows and beds upon which right now they would be taking their rest. If their breathing was rough it would probably be from the effects of too many cigars – not too much coal-dust – and any aches and pains they might experience would be more likely the result of overeating and a drop too much to drink, Harry thought. It wasn't fair. It just wasn't fair.

His own legs were aching now, but it was nothing to the fierce tightness in his chest that jarred with every jolting step he took. His father could be dying – might be dead, before he got back – and there was nothing he could do about it. Even when he had been there at his side, he had been powerless to help. Hating the way that made him feel, the anger drove him on through the empty streets of the sleeping town and up South Hill, where the miners had marched in force during the 1921 strike with the intention of tarring and feathering the general manager of the time. Climbing the hill took the last of his remaining breath and he was forced to a walk that seemed like a crawl as he turned into one of the steep drives leading to a house built in the side of the hill. Then, with no regard for the rest of the doctor's household, he began pulling on the doorbell with all the urgency the situation demanded.

Through years of practice, the doctor was a light sleeper. Within minutes he was opening his window to call out.

‘It's all right, you can stop ringing now. I'm coming down.'

Harry waited, stamping with impatience, until the doctor appeared – a big, bluff man with a grey flannel dressing-gown straining across his rugby-player's chest.

‘All right, lad, what the devil is it?'

‘It's my Dad.' A small core of Harry's anger directed itself at the doctor, but he knew better than to show it. ‘He's really bad – he can't breathe – he fell down and we couldn't get him up again …'

Dr Vezey snorted. ‘Couldn't it have waited until morning?'

‘I don't know … Mam said to get you …'

‘Well, there's precious little I can do about it,' the doctor said testily. He had already had two broken nights this week – and with private patients too, not the sort who could be put off. ‘Short of giving him a new pair of lungs, there's precious little
anyone
can do.'

Harry, terrified by a sudden vision of having run all the way home again to report that the doctor refused to attend, dug in his heels.

‘But he's really bad – you must come!' He searched around for the worst thing he could think of. ‘If he dies and you don't come, it'll be your fault!'

The strike went home. Dr Vezey drew himself up; he was not used to being spoken to in that tone by a patient. Most of them were so in awe of ‘the doctor'that the women put on their best apron and the men doffed their caps before addressing him in reverential tones. As for the ‘private patients' – the ones who would consider themselves his social equal – they had such preferential treatment they had no cause for complaint. They were always seen first and their medicines dispensed to them in neatly-wrapped packages. Most of them did not even come to the surgery, but were attended by him in their own homes, where he quite often took a glass of sherry with them after his diagnosis was completed. It was all very civilised, so that although he had been well-known as a terror on the rugby field in his younger days, Dr Frank Vezey was totally unused to confrontation off the field and in daily life. And now here was this young whipper-snapper, not even a ‘panel patient' but one of those who belonged to ‘the club', actually daring to threaten him!

‘All right, lad, if he's as bad as you say, I'd better come,' he said, his tone implying that if Harry had been exaggerating he had better look out. ‘How did you get here?'

‘On shanks's pony,' Harry said. He was offended and angered by the doctor's attitude and it showed in his tone. ‘I ran.'

‘Hmm.' Dr Vezey considered. ‘Well, if you'd like to wait, you can ride back with me in my motor.'

Harry was tempted to tell him what he could do with his motor, that he would run all the way back again before letting this conceited nob do him any favours. But before he could say anything, the doctor went on, ‘Yes, you can show me which house it is – save me disturbing the rest of Hillsbridge. It is the middle of the night, you know.'

At last the doctor was ready and Harry felt a choking nervousness returning as he rattled through the sleeping town in the front passenger seat of Dr Vezey's Model T Ford. Suppose they were too late? Suppose his father had been unable to last out?

The light burning in the downstairs window of No. 11, Greenslade Terrace shone out like a beacon in the night and Harry experienced a sudden fierce longing for the days when he had been a little boy and his brothers and sisters had lived at home. He remembered how his mother had once taken him on a day trip to Cheddar and an engine problem with the charabanc had meant it was dark before they got home again. There had been a magic in being out later than he had ever been out before, but the sight of that window pouring out brightness into the night had made a warm place inside him, and when his mother had opened the door and pushed him, yawning and blinking, inside, the welcoming safety that came from being part of a family had enveloped him. His three brothers had been there, Ted, Jack – and Fred, who had been killed in the war – and Dad too, all sitting up to the table for a bread and cheese supper. And Amy had been there, already undressed for bed, curled up on the sofa with her legs drawn up inside her nightdress and her hair in curling rags – she had persuaded James to let her stay up until Mam and Harry got home.

The memory was a fleeting one only and what had happened next he did not recall. It was the warmth and the safety that he remembered and craved. For the others had all left home now and he was the only one remaining. And in times of crisis such as this, the burden of being the man of the house fell onto his shoulders alone.

The doctor stopped the car and turned off the engine. Harry jumped out and as he opened the back door the loud rasp of his father's breathing came out to meet him. For once it was a welcome sound. Silence would have been ominous.

‘In here, doctor,' he said, and had a quick glimpse of his father's rheumy blue eyes and ashen face, flushed now by the high spots of feverish colour, before being banished to the scullery while the examination took place.

From the other side of the door the murmur of voices – too low to understand – seemed to go on forever. Then, after what seemed a lifetime, the door opened again and Dr Vezey came out, Charlotte following.

‘Good night then, doctor, and thank you. I'm sorry to have called you out …'

The doctor snorted and left without bidding good night to either mother or son. As the door closed after him, Harry turned to Charlotte anxiously.

‘Well?'

Charlotte's face was drawn, the soft lamplight etching deep lines between nose and mouth.

‘He didn't like the look of your father, I could tell. He's given me a prescription for cough mixture we can get in the morning and we're to try a steam kettle or two to get it loose. He's to be kept warm, but moved about frequently. I'll have to make up a bed for him here, of course. It won't be the first time, but …' She broke off, bending her head and covering her face with her hands.

Harry hovered awkwardly. It wasn't like her to show emotion.