When the last man from under the roof fall had been brought up, word came filtering through to those at the gate that the current rescue team were going to press forward. Carrie and her mother turned as one and stared at each other.
They weren’t there.
The three of them, Sandy, David and Walter, weren’t there. That must mean they were together somewhere surely. So there was still hope. They didn’t say this out loud, it wasn’t necessary - both women were of like mind.
The hours ticked on. Danny and Len finished their stint with the rescue team and joined the two women and Billy, who had come back to the pit gate after a meal and a bath. Matthew went home to bed, declaring he was spent. Carrie was surprised to find she didn’t mind his going; in fact she would have gone further than that and said she was relieved if she had been capable of rationalising how she was feeling. The only people she wanted round her were those as desperate as she was.
At midday, when a weak, watery sun was shining for the first time in days, word came through that they had reached a second fall just yards behind the first and were on the point of breaking through. Because a small section of roof had held between the two falls, the going was more dangerous and slower than ever. The remaining section of roof needed shoring up and propping, and although every man on the team knew time was of the essence, they also knew any mistakes could mean they and their fellow workers were the next victims.
Through all the hours and hours of endless waiting, the time had never crept by so pitilessly as in the next little while. The blizzard had died and the world about the pit gates seemed clean for once. The covering of white on the rooftops and the glistening carpet coating the streets seemed to mock the events of the last forty-eight hours, and among the remaining folk at the gates none was more aware of this than Carrie herself. The cold white brilliance made her tired eyes ache and, ridiculously, she found herself remembering a Sunday the previous summer when she and David had taken a picnic and walked into the surrounding countryside. They had left just as it was growing light and had returned when it was dark, and David had been in his element, showing her figwort, cinquefoil, thyme, wood geranium and all sorts of other flowers and plants.
They bought a drink of milk from a farm. The cowshed was warm and stickily scented with milky magic, and the farmer’s wife, who seemed to take to them, pressed two freshly baked ham pasties into their hands, refusing any payment when they tried to offer her some coins. They ate their picnic in a sun-drenched meadow close to a small pond, and again David brought her alive to the shimmering silver-green and blue dragonflies hovering close to the still surface, when all she had seen at first was murky water. He pointed out water crickets moving in slow motion on long legs, making her laugh when he called them aquatic clowns on stilts.
Oh, David, David. All that love of nature, of life, couldn’t be buried in the tomb of the pit. When he died it ought to be as an old man, and then with the sun and wind on his face or the velvety darkness of a cool night.
They had made love lying on a fragrant bed of grass and wild flowers, and it had been the first time in seventeen years of marriage that she had seen him engorged and erect. She’d seen him naked before when he bathed in the tin bath in front of the fire, but never like that day when he had worshipped her with his body and his mouth. He’d had to persuade her to take her clothes off, but once she had succumbed she’d felt as giddy as a schoolgirl although terribly shy - until, that was, he’d begun to make love to her.
An expectant rustling among the crowd and her mother’s fingers tightening on her arm brought Carrie back to the present. Word had come. They had reached them, and at least one was alive.
She did not think or breathe or move - or so it felt - until one of the rescue leaders was standing in front of them. She knew this man; one of his sons had been in the same class as Matthew at school and another had recently married. The first battered body to be brought to the surface some hours before had been that of the second lad. Carrie stared into the exhausted face, and she couldn’t take it in at first when he said quietly to her mother, ‘Your husband is alive, Mrs McDarmount.’ Then he turned to her. ‘David too, lass.’
‘And Walter?’ It was Billy who spoke.
The man shook his head. ‘I’m sorry.’
Walter would never have to be told about Renee now. Somehow Carrie could more easily comprehend that Walter was gone than that David was alive, perhaps because it was too miraculous, too wonderful to be true. ‘My husband . . .’ Her voice emerged as a croak and she had to clear her throat and try again. ‘My husband and Da. Are they hurt?’
‘Your da’s relatively unscathed, cuts and bruises and the like. David’s leg’s in a bad way and he has a nasty cut on the back of his head. He’s lost a lot of blood but he’s young and strong. He’ll pull through, lass.’
She was being given a second chance. Her world had exploded into hundreds of pieces but against all the odds she was being given a second chance.
And at that moment Olive said behind them, ‘Well! And no one thought to tell me what was going on then! If it wasn’t for them talking in the queue when we were waiting at the butchers I’d be none the wiser even now.’
Carrie heard her mother give an audible groan. She bit her lower lip before she turned and said, ‘Hello, Mam.’
‘Don’t you “Hello, Mam” me like butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth. Why wasn’t I told about this?’ Olive’s head was poking forward, her green eyes, as round as aniseed balls, alive with hate as she stared at the object of all her venom. Carrie looked back steadily and for a moment she wondered if she should tell this terrible woman that the rest of the family, even her beloved Matthew, had agreed they didn’t want her at the pit gates. She shrugged. ‘Everyone knows. We assumed you’d hear and please yourself if you came or not.’
‘If?
If?
Why wouldn’t I want to be here? David and Walter are my lads, in case you’d forgotten.’
‘Do you want to know what the news is on “your lads”?’ It was Carrie’s mother who spoke, anguish for the loss of Renee making her voice sharp with the woman she saw as an unnatural mother.
Olive’s sallow face took on a pinker tinge. By, they were upstarts, the McDarmounts, every last one of them. She could remember a time when you could set your clock by Sandy McDarmount acting the cuddy on a Friday night when he’d had a drop. Dancing and singing enough to wake the dead, he’d be, and now here was Joan acting as though she was Lady Muck. She hoped Sandy had got his just deserts in this little lot; here’s one who wouldn’t miss him. Scumbags, the lot of them.
‘Well?’ Olive looked Joan in the eye. ‘What is the news?’
‘David and my da are all right,’ Carrie said quietly, ‘but Walter . . . I’m sorry, Mam.’
Olive blinked. So her firstborn was dead. She knew she would be considered odd if she admitted to the fact that she felt very little one way or the other. In truth Walter had irritated her from the moment he could toddle. He had been his da all over, that was the thing, and David perhaps more so. Maybe if she had married the sort of man she felt she had been destined for, someone who appreciated her taste for the finer things of life and who would have given her her own home, bought and paid for, and a good going on, she might have felt differently about her bairns. As it was, the more she had come to despise Ned for the weak-livered nowt he was, the more the feeling had rubbed off on his bairns somehow. Except Alec. Alec had been hers from the moment he had been born. Even after this little baggage in front of her with the angelic face and loose ways had beguiled him, Alec had still been her boy.
Olive raised her pointed chin, her eyes like cold green glass. ‘It’s no secret Walter and I didn’t see eye to eye,’ she said stiffly, ‘but he was my bairn, Joan.’ Then, glancing about her, she added spitefully, ‘And where’s your Renee? Shouldn’t she be here, at least playing at being the good wife?’
‘Don’t you dare talk about my sister like that.’ Carrie’s eyes were flashing now. ‘Renee can’t be here, there was a fire at the house and--’ She found she couldn’t go on; her heart was crying, oh, Renee, Renee. I can’t believe I’ll never see you again. Renee had been so full of life, so vibrant. And then all other thoughts faded as she caught sight of her father in the distance. He walked out of the yard flanked by two of the rescue workers, and she and Joan flew to his side. He put an arm round each of them and said, ‘All right, all right, don’t take on so. Here I am, right as rain.’
Joan was sobbing into his chest, oblivious of the arid smell of sweat and coal dust, and over her mother’s head, Carrie said, ‘David?’
‘He’s coming, lass, but prepare yourself. His leg’s pretty bad. We thought he’d just broken it but it’s a bit of a mess. He passed out when we moved him and it’s probably the best thing. The doctor’s with him and they’re taking him straight to the infirmary. You can go with him if you want.’
If she wanted? ‘Oh, Da.’ She reached out and touched her father’s face. ‘I’m so glad he was with you if this had to happen. And poor Walter.’
‘Aye, poor Walter.’
‘Sandy, we’ve lost Renee.’ Joan hadn’t planned to tell him like this but she found she needed him to know and she couldn’t wait. ‘It was an accident, a fire in the home. They . . . they think it started in her front room.’
Sandy’s jaw bones worked against his skin before he said, ‘Our Renee? Oh, lass, lass.’
Carrie froze as a stretcher was carried through into the yard, with a doctor walking by the side. For a second she felt unable to move, and then she made to push past into the yard. A policeman who was on duty at the gates caught at her arm. ‘Sorry, lass, but you can’t go in there.’ She yanked her arm away with such force he had to steady himself as she slipped past him and ran to David.
The policeman must have followed her because she heard one of the rescue team say, ‘Leave her be, it’s her husband.’ Her whole being was caught up with the man lying so deathly still. It was David and yet not David, because even in sleep or when he was resting or reading one of his botany or wildlife books, life emanated from him. ‘He’ll be all right?’ Her voice was high as she looked at the doctor.
‘Yes, yes, don’t worry. I’ve given him something to make him more comfortable for the journey to the infirmary, that’s all.’ Carrie was kneeling in the snow beside the stretcher, stroking David’s hair back from his brow, the tears coursing down her face, and the doctor said, ‘Come along, my dear. The sooner we get him there, the sooner we can begin to mend that leg of his. I assume you’re coming with us.’
Carrie did not answer because David had begun to stir. He opened his eyes very slowly as if it was a great effort. He stared at her, almost as though he didn’t believe what he was seeing, and when she said, ‘Oh my love, my love,’ his reply bore this out because he murmured, ‘I didn’t think you were real.’
‘I’m real.’ Oblivious of everyone, she took his face into her hands and kissed him gently on the lips. Her tears wet his cheeks as she whispered, ‘I love you, I love you,’ over and over again.
He lifted his hand to her and she grasped it with both of hers, frightened by the whiteness of his face beneath its coating of coal dust. ‘I’m coming with you, I’m never going to let you leave my side for a second again,’ she whispered fiercely.
The corners of his mouth lifted slightly. ‘That’s going to make for some interesting times ahead,’ he murmured. His heavy lids closed again although his hand continued to hold hers tightly.
Chapter Twenty-three
Olive Sutton sat rigidly in the ambulance, her gaze fixed on Carrie as she sat looking down at David. David had not opened his eyes again, nor had he spoken, but when Carrie had tried to withdraw her hand from his to climb into the ambulance, his grip had tightened until it hurt, and so they had remained joined together.
As for Olive, it wasn’t maternal feeling that had made her insist on being allowed to accompany her son and his wife to the infirmary. She had already worked herself up into a cold fury at being ostracised before she reached the colliery, but the altercation at the gates followed by the sight of Carrie and David’s reunion had maddened her. She was consumed by burning resentment and rage at her daughter-in-law. She had told herself so often that Carrie McDarmount was the cause of her losing her home and everything she had ever wanted that she now believed it totally.
Blubbing all over him as though she had never looked at another man in her life! Olive’s teeth were clenched together so tightly her jaw was paining her. And him, daft as a brush about her, the low, common, brazen hussy. Well, he wouldn’t have his rose-tinted spectacles on much longer if she had anything to do with it, Olive told herself grimly. She had always promised herself she would see her day with the McDarmount sisters, and it appeared God wouldn’t be mocked. He had taken Renee to her just deserts, and now it was up to her to do her bit and see Carrie got what was coming to her. And she would do it, by, she would. There was talk of the war ending soon and she wanted the baggage long since gone by the time Alec came home. David might be a fool, but when he knew Carrie had tricked him into marriage and that he had been playing da to his brother’s child for eighteen years, that would be the end.