The Quality of Mercy - By Barry Unsworth Page 0,23

the others, a thing desired and dreaded in equal measure.

This morning sleep did not return to him, something increasingly frequent of late. He was afraid of the mine because he knew it was a testing ground; you had to go down before you could become a man. The sound of clanking and hissing came over the fields to him, as if issuing from some monster under the ground clamoring for victims. The fear was not lessened by the return home each day of his father and brothers, because they were bigger and stronger and had stood the test, but perhaps not everybody did. He had a very close friend called Billy Scotland, who was the same age as himself, and he had often wondered if Billy too was troubled by these doubts. But he could not ask because he knew that Billy would deny it, and by asking he would have revealed himself as fainthearted. Recently it had occurred to him that Billy might be keeping quiet for the same reason.

While he lay there, prey to these thoughts, some seventy men and boys set off in the half-dark, walking in loose groups across the pasture fields that led to the eye of the pit. Michael watched for the light, as he did always; it was the only natural light that he would see that day. The sea still slept in the distance, shrouded in darkness. But there was light enough now for him to make out the tufts of sheep’s wool caught in the fences, a soft clogging of the wire, no definite shape to it, only a sort of softness. There were catkins on the hazel trees; he could not distinguish the color, but he could see how the foliage was thickened by them. Colors came out now, as the light slowly strengthened, tints of dawn that would be lost in the full light of day; he made out the reddish gleam on the trunks of the birch trees higher up, at the edges of the fields, a color that had seemed menacing to him as a small child, making him always feel relieved when he had got past.

Deeply familiar things, but they had never grown stale for him. From the age of seven he had walked through these fields in all seasons and weathers, walking behind his father, as he did now, as his father had done at that age, and all the fathers before him that Michael could imagine. From open-cut to shaft, they had been hacking out the coal here for a longer time than anyone could reckon. There was nothing but the mining, no other work for the men. The village of Thorpe was there because of the coal, and for no other reason in the world.

He could distinguish his father’s back now, among the others, in the forward group of twenty or so. He found himself wondering if his father took notice of these changes in the light, these small signs of the changing season. Such things were too intimate to talk about. He sensed the wound of loss in his father, the rage in him, knew of the long-held desire to possess the plot of land by the streamside in the Dene. This had never been openly confessed, but his father had talked of the acreage, the sheltered position, the ease of irrigation. Practical things—it was the nearest he could come to unburdening himself. It was no more than a dream, in any case. He could never hope to buy the land, it would never be offered for sale, he would never have the money. But a dream nursed so stubbornly, over so long, becomes something more.

There was no real hope of saving. There were the three of them, soon to be joined by Percy, who would bring in an extra sixpence a day for the first five years, more after that, maybe double, when he rose to be putter’s lad, as David was now. In four or five years David could hope to be promoted to headsman, taking two-thirds of the earnings of the sledge loads. He himself was twenty-one now; he looked forward to becoming a full pitman, a hewer like his father, with fifteen shillings a week. But the family would lose his wages when he married. There was a girl he liked, Elsie Foster, who lived six doors away from them, though he hadn’t yet taken the decisive step of asking her to walk out with him. He was