Under World. Reginald Hill

sea to get scurvy, do you?’

      ‘Don’t you? Mam, I hope you’re not making that pie for me. I couldn’t face owt more than a cup of tea and mebbe a sandwich.’

      ‘You missed your supper last night and I’ll not have you going to work on an empty stomach.’

      ‘They don’t need their meals regular like us old ones, May,’ said Downey. ‘I bet you often got dragged out of your bunk in the middle of the night when you were at sea, Col, and had to work all day with next to nowt.’

      ‘It weren’t the bloody Cutty Sark I were on!’ exclaimed Farr. ‘All right, Mam, I’ll have some, but not too much, mind.’

      ‘Don’t you miss it, the sea?’ said Downey. ‘I sometimes wish I’d given it a try when I were younger.’

      ‘You’re not old now, Arthur,’ said May Farr, bringing a flush of pleasure to the lanky man’s cheeks.

      ‘No, you ought to sign on as a cabin boy,’ said Farr. ‘Or better still, stow away.’

      Downey laughed and finished his tea.

      ‘I’d best be off,’ he said. ‘See you down the hole, Col. Thanks for the tea, May.’

      After the door closed behind him, May Farr said, ‘Right, my lad, before we go any further, I’ll not have you being rude to Arthur Downey or anyone else I care to invite into my house. Understood?’

      ‘The bugger’s always sniffing round here …’ protested her son.

      ‘You listen, Arthur were a good mate of your dad’s and he’s been good to me since … it happened. He’ll always be welcome in this house as long as I’m here, understand? Besides, he grows best veg in Burrthorpe on that allotment of his.’

      She offered this lightening of tone by way of truce which Colin Farr was happy to accept.

      ‘Aye, it’s not many lasses round here who get bouquets of broccoli,’ he said slyly. ‘You best be careful else you’ll have folk talking.’

      ‘What do you mean?’ she said indignantly as she took the pie from the oven. ‘Has someone been saying something?’

      Her son smiled sweetly.

      ‘There’s not many round here would dare say owt like that to me,’ he said with an easy confidence she found more dismaying than comforting.

      She heaped the pie on to a plate which she set before him. As he ate, he asked casually, ‘Do you think you will get married again, Mam?’

      ‘How should I know? I’ve no one in mind, if that’s what you mean. But this is wrong way round. It’s me as should be asking you when you’re going to get wed and settle down.’

      ‘Me?’ he laughed. ‘Who would I marry when all the best ones are gone?’

      ‘You’re not still moping after Stella, are you?’ she asked in alarm.

      ‘Me run after a married woman? What a thing to say about your own son!’ he mocked. ‘All I meant was, you’re the best, Mam, and they don’t make ’em like you any more.’

      She sat down and regarded him seriously, refusing to respond to his sentimentality.

      ‘What does keep you here then, Col, if you’ve no plans for settling? I know you hate it, always did. And don’t say it’s for my sake. I’m all right now. I’ve got friends, real friends …’

      ‘You mean Red Wendy and her mates in the Women’s Support Group?’ he laughed. ‘With friends like yon, you need a man around the place to keep an eye on you.’

      ‘You see, there you go again, Col, trying to put it down to me. Don’t do that. Don’t keep things hid deep inside you like he did. Yes, Wendy and the others are my friends. It may have ruined the Union, but there’s me and a lot like me who can say thank God for the Strike. It showed me a road I’d not have found on my own. And you, Col; I thought when you started getting involved that mebbe you’d found a road too …’

      ‘Me? Oh, I liked the action and the fighting well enough, but the only road I hope to find in Burrthorpe is the road out of it.’

      ‘Then why don’t you go?’ she asked passionately. ‘And don’t pretend to be hurt, I know all your little acts, remember? You know what I’m saying. I wept the first time you went, after your dad hurt his leg. And I’ll weep if you go again. But I were glad then too, glad that now neither of my men was going to be killed down that hole … Well, I were wrong about one of them, though God knows how …’

      ‘There’s more than God knows,’ interrupted her son fiercely.

      ‘Is that it, Col? Listen, son, he’s dead, he’s gone, does it matter how or why? There’s nothing any of us can do will bring him back, so why waste your life boozing and fighting and causing trouble in the Club, and wandering round them old workings looking for God knows what …’

      ‘Who’s been gabbing? That old woman Downey, is it?’ Farr interrupted once more. ‘Jesus Christ, it’s like living in a fish tank, this place! What do you have to do to get a bit of privacy?’

      ‘Try living quiet, not raising hell wherever you go,’ suggested his mother.

      Colin Farr pushed his plate away and stood up.

      ‘No one ever lived quieter than my dad and they didn’t let him alone, did they?’

      ‘Col, don’t talk like that. What do you mean? What are you trying to do? Col, please, you’ve no idea how it upsets me to see you this way.’

      There were tears on her cheeks. He put his arms round her shoulders and kissed them away. It was a gesture neither awkward nor theatrical. He had a natural grace in his movements which had made him stand out even as a child. He drew back and smiled at her, the smile which had so often won forgiveness instead of punishment, and complicity instead of accusation. Billy had sometimes said she was spoiling him but she knew how deep her husband’s love went too.

      ‘I’ll go soon, Mam,’ he promised. ‘Once I’m sure you’re OK and … once I’m sure. Now I’d best be off to work.’

      She watched him walk away down Clay Street, marvelling as always that from Billy Farr’s seed and her womb a creature of such grace and beauty could have sprung. At the corner he turned and smiled and waved his snap tin. She waved back, then went inside and began to clear the dishes.

      Colin Farr walked on, no longer smiling. The long brick terraces opening directly on to the pavement frowned back at him. They had been built a hundred years ago when Burrthorpe had suffered its first expansion from rustic hamlet to mining village. Perhaps they had looked more cheerful then. He doubted it. There had been other expansions since, most affluently in the late ’sixties and early ’seventies. The low hills to the east, the end furthest from the pit, were chequered with owner-occupied boxes. There were modern shops in the High Street (one with a new plate-glass window) plus a bank and two building societies. The Strike had hit hard, but the natives of Burrthorpe were used to taking and giving hard blows, and they would bring the good days back, if the pit survived.

      Here was the irony which Farr felt every day of his life. It was like being fed by a tyrant you hated, yet if you slew him, you would starve.

      He was in the High Street now, heading west towards the Welfare. The village was built in a blank valley running east to west. It was along the densely wooded southern ridge that the sweet infection of coal had first been detected. Here due to some geological fault the veins were broken and often near the surface, and possibly the uprooting of some ancient tree in a storm revealed the symptoms. There were records at the end of the eighteenth century of frequent disputes between the Burr estate which owned most of the land hereabouts and the locals who, delighted at having such a ready supply of fuel on their doorstep, ran drifts into the scrubby common land which abutted Lord Burr’s woods, and didn’t much care if they trespassed underground. At first His Lordship’s