'What happened?' I cried. Tell me what happened?' I still had hold of her and she began to struggle. Then the door opened and the old woman came in. I let Kitty go and picked up the jug The old woman smiled. I went back to the men's quarters then.
As I scraped at the stubble of my beard I fell to thinking of my mother again. And suddenly I knew I just had to find out the truth of what had happened in those years before the war when Kitty's mother had been killed and my mother had been shut up in that horrible attic room.
I finished shaving and went out into the yard and round to the front door. When I entered Captain Manack's office, the safe door was open and he was feeding papers into the fire. 'Won't be a minute, Pryce,' he said. 'Just checking through things in case.' He gave me a quick, secretive smile. I honestly believed the man enjoyed the situation. 'Have a drink,' he said. A tumbler of cognac stood beside him on the desk. He pushed a bottle with an Italian label across the desk to me. 'Pity to waste it,' he added. 'But we can't leave any of it around now. There's a tumbler on the mantelpiece.'
I helped myself and sat thinking about the girl and the house and the whole incredible set-up whilst Manack went through his safe. One thing I noticed as I sat there; the stack of notes from which he had paid Mulligan was gone. There was no money in the safe, not even my hundred and forty-five pounds.
At last he stood up and closed the safe. 'Okay,' he said. We finished the bottle between us and then went out into the damp blanket of the mist. As we left the house I glanced back at it over my shoulder. The little iron-barred window seemed to be watching us, the panes opaque with the white light of the mist. And at a lower window I caught a glimpse of the old man staring out at us, his bearded face thrust close to the panes. There was something very intense about that face at the window. It made me realise that I and his son were going to destroy what he had spent thirty years to achieve. And he'd offered me two hundred and fifty pounds to clear out.
The house suddenly seemed to recede and become a ghostly outline of a building. Then it disappeared, swallowed up in the mist. It was as though there had never been a house there — as though it were all a nightmare. The air was still and heavy and cold. Beyond the muffled drumming of the sea against the cliffs, I heard the distant moaning of the fog signal at Pendeen Watch, away to the north of us.
Captain Manack led the way down a slippery path where black slugs crawled and bracken stalks stood gaunt and brown between great heaps of broken mine debris. We passed an old engine house, its chimney thrusting a broken brick finger into the swirl of white vapour. Great stone arches were all that was left of the old blowing houses and here and there a coagulated mass of rotting iron marked the grave of once-active machinery. There were old shafts surrounded by circular stone walls and great concrete pits, all broken by frost, where the tin had been washed. The mist thinned as we went down towards the cliff top. From white it turned to gold. It was little more than a thin veil of moisture between us and the sun. The iridescence of it strained the eyes.
We joined a rough track. The tyre treads of heavy trucks had made deep ruts in the mud between the patches of broken stone. The track led us to a huddle of stone-built sheds with galvanised iron roofs. Manack took us into the nearest. It was full of tools and stores. In a corner was a small forge for resharpening drills. He took down an overall and handed it to me. 'Try that,' he said. 'You and my father are about the same size. There's a pair of his gum boots over there. You'll need them. The mine's pretty wet.' They fitted reasonably well and when we had equipped ourselves in overalls, gum boots and miners' helmets, and had primed our lamps, he led me across to the largest shed which housed the hoist. There were wide doors to this shed and the marks of trucks ran right up to the cage. 'We back the lorries in here so that nobody can see what we're loading,' he explained. I think he really enjoyed showing someone the way they worked.
The gig was not there. He rang a bell. 'If nobody answers then it means that the gig's not in use,' he told me. 'If you're using it and somebody rings, you must answer its ring. There's a bell-push inside the gig.' There was no answer to his ring and he pulled over a large lever. Deep down the shaft I heard the sound of water and an instant later the clatter of the gig coming up. 'It's a pretty rickety contraption,' he said. 'Worked by a water wheel. Push the lever over that way and the gig goes down, this way and it comes up. All very Heath Robinson. But it works. My father won't use it. Prefers the ladders. The gig's slow, but it's got plenty of power, and that's what we need for the stuff we have to bring up in it.'
'Where do you get the water to drive it?' I asked.