The Black Diamond

by Francis Brett Young

He would not answer her.

‘Whatever’s up with you?’ she said. ‘You’m all moithered.’ And then, with a laugh, she answered her own question by another: ‘Too much sweethearting?’ in a tone that pretended to be merely bantering but in reality carried a sting. He knew that faint touch of malice in her so well that it made him flare up at once with: ‘I don’t want no bloody girls.’ It didn’t strike him that her malice might be taken as a compliment, and when she laughed at his reply he walked out of the house in a temper.

He didn’t know where to go; but taking his father’s example he wandered down to the Royal Oak, where he sat drinking pint after pint with one of his football friends and a couple of women. At closing time the whole party were turned out together and walked down into Halesby. It was nearly daybreak when he returned to Hackett’s Cottages, still the worse for liquor, and blundered upstairs to bed. He slept so heavily that he did not hear the Mawne bull in the morning. At ten o’clock a feeling that some one was in the room aroused him. He opened his eyes to a blinding light and saw that Alice had placed a cup of hot tea at his bedside. He drank it so eagerly that he scalded his mouth.

The Fifth Chapter

This sudden outburst was sufficiently violent to satisfy Abner that for the present he could do without liquor or women. It wasn’t very difficult to forget Susan, for she had really been more trouble than she was worth. The affair would never have begun but for her provocation, and since she hadn’t the pluck to go through with it, Abner satisfied himself by exaggerating her insipidity in his own mind.

After the first sting of malice with which she had sent him off on the drink, Alice showed her repentance, first symbolised by the waiting cup of tea, in a hundred attentions and kindnesses. He never told her about his affair with Susan, but she appeared to understand more or less what had happened and even to sympathise with him in his violent methods of getting over it. She made him so comfortable at Hackett’s Cottages that there was no more talk of his finding other lodgings. In the early days of her married life the responsibilities of the house and its two male inhabitants had been too much for her inexperience, and the coming of the baby in the first year had made her abandon all attempts to keep pace with domestic demands. In the second year she regained her strength and a great deal of the physical charm that had originally attracted John Fellows. The baby, a normal, healthy child, had also prospered, and now that he was weaned slept away most of the day on his mother’s bed upstairs or in his cradle in the kitchen. Nothing marred the smoothness of domestic life at Number Eleven but the uncertainty of John Fellows’s temper and his periodical bouts of drinking; and even in these emergencies Alice’s increasing knowledge of life and her absorption in the care of Abner and her baby sustained her.

The strangest part of the whole business was that Abner and his father never fell foul of one another. Since that one dangerous moment on the morning of the baby’s birth there had never been any danger of this. It was as if they had agreed to go on their own ways. Abner kept clear of his father because his natural love of peace and increasing concern for the convenience of Alice made him anxious to avoid a quarrel; and John Fellows condoned his son’s unreasonable abstinence from liquor on the grounds of his success in the football field. Although he never said so he was proud of Abner’s prowess, gathering indeed a little reflected glory from it among his mates at the pit and his boon companions at the pub.

It was fortunate for Alice that her family was so small; for it meant not only that she was unburdened with housework, but also that the question of money never troubled her. John Fellows never did anything by halves. He worked as hard as he drank, and since all colliers are paid by piecework, he earned enough to keep the house going and himself in liquor. Abner also was well paid for the work he did at Mawne, and in addition to this received a pound a week from the United Football Club during the season. Out of these earnings he paid Alice eighteen shillings for his board and keep, and this, together with her husband’s weekly allowance, enabled her to make the house exactly what she wanted. There seemed to be no reason why this happy state of affairs should not go on for ever, or, at any rate, until Abner found some other wretched girl who took his fancy. This was the event that Alice dreaded most, and for the present Abner’s life was too full of work and training to make it probable.

They spent most of their evenings together while John Fellows was down at the Royal Oak and the baby placidly sleeping in its cradle. They were the happiest of Alice’s life, for they realised all her ideals of what domesticity should be. The little room was cheerful with firelight and always warm, for John Fellows had the privilege of buying coal for next to nothing at the pit. On the table she used to spread a cloth of bright red chequers. A lamp in the middle of it cast a mild and homely light. Alice would sit on one side of the fire, knitting woollen vests for the baby or mending the men’s clothes. She sat in her rocking chair, enthroned with content, glancing from time to time at the sleeping baby, at the shining brass, on which she particularly prided herself, at all the tokens of comfort with which she was surrounded. The door of Number Eleven was ill-made or warped with age so that a draught blew in beneath it towards the fire; but Abner had arranged a curtain of red rep on a running string above it, so that the draught was not felt and the swaying of the curtain only emphasised the contrast between the winter without and that glowing cosiness within. All these things that surrounded her were her own, her world. She would not have changed one of them. The glances that she gave to them were proprietary and richly satisfied.

Sometimes, in the same way, she would let her eyes fall on Abner: a big, loose-limbed fellow, over six feet high, with the closely cropped hair of the footballer and a yellow moustache. In the evenings at home he wore no collar and the firelight played on his powerful neck and lit the fair down on his arm when he sat in his shirtsleeves. Even with him her glance was proprietary. He also belonged to her, and she mended his clothes with the same delight and devotion that she experienced in making the ridiculous garments of her son. She rejoiced in his beauty and in his strength. Perhaps, sometimes, the physical comparison that he suggested with John Fellows made her admiration more poignant.