rarely let it show, however, and he had a sharp eye for alcohol-based trouble in others.
Now Colin Farr supped two inches off the top of his pint and said, ‘University, not school, Pedro. But you’re right. It’s thirsty work, all that talking.’
‘Better than fighting,’ said Pedley, amiably but with a hint of warning. He knew most of his customers better than they knew themselves. Four pints in half an hour was par for the course in some; with young Farr it spelt trouble.
The young man heard the warning and drank again, regarding Pedley over the rim without resentment. The steward still wheezed through the winter, but when Pedro Pedley sallied forth to sort out trouble, those close to it scattered and those safely distant settled down to enjoy the show. When Colin Farr lowered the glass, it was more than half empty.
‘Where’s Maggie?’ he asked.
‘She’ll not be working tonight. She’s badly. This is the day it happened.’
Their eyes met: Pedley’s blank, Farr’s searching.
‘Is that right?’ said Farr. ‘Then naturally she’ll be upset.’
And he went back to his seat moving with easy grace.
He was alone at one of the round formica tables. The Club’s main public room was a cheerless place when almost empty. Full, you couldn’t see the brown and beige tiled floor, or the cafeteria furniture, or the vinyl-upholstered waiting-room bench which ran round the flock-papered walls. Full, the plaster-board ceiling, steel cross-girder and glaring strip-lights were to some extent obscured by the strato-cirrus layer of tobacco smoke. And best of all, full, the whisper of a man’s own disturbing thoughts was almost inaudible beneath the din of loud laughter, seamless chatter, and amplified music.
At the moment Colin Farr’s thoughts were coming through too loud, too clear. He’d gone into the students’ union bar at the University today. Its décor and furnishings had not been all that different from the Club’s. The atmosphere had been just as thick; the voices just as loud, the music just as raucous. Yet he had left very quickly, feeling alien. The reaction had troubled him. It was uncharacteristic. He was not a shy person; he’d been around and hadn’t been much bothered at entering some places where he’d been quite literally a foreigner. But the students’ bar had made him feel so uneasy that he’d fled, and the memory of this uneasiness wouldn’t leave him alone.
It had been self-irritation with his reaction that had made him so sharp with that Mrs Pascoe in the afternoon. Well, partly at least. And partly it had been her. Condescending cow!
He had finished his fourth pint without hardly noticing. He was thinking about getting out of his seat again, though whether to return to the bar or head out into the night he wasn’t sure, when the door burst open and two men came in. One was Farr’s age but looked older. They’d been in the same class at school, but, unlike Farr, Tommy Dickinson’s career down the pit had been continuous since he was fifteen. Chunkily built, he had the beginnings of a substantial beer-gut, and when his broad amiable face split into a grin at the sight of Farr, his teeth were stained brown with tobacco juice.
‘Look what’s here!’ he cried. ‘Hey, Pedro! I thought only working men could get served in this club.’
‘You’d best buy me a pint, then,’ said Farr.
While Dickinson was getting the drinks, the other man sat down at Farr’s table. He was Neil Wardle, in his thirties, a lean taciturn man. His face was as brown and weather-beaten as any countryman’s. In fact, like many of his workmates, as if in reaction against the underworld in which they earned their bread, he spent as much of his spare time as possible roaming the hills around Burrthorpe with his dog and a shotgun. He was charge-man of the team of rippers in which the other two worked.
‘All right, Col?’ he said.
‘All right,’ said Farr.
‘Your mam all right?’
‘Aye. Why shouldn’t she be?’
‘No reason. She didn’t say owt about anyone coming round, asking questions?’
‘No. What sort of questions?’
‘Just questions,’ said Wardle vaguely. Before Farr could press him, Dickinson returned, his broad hands locked round three pint glasses.
‘It’s no use, Col,’ he declared in the booming voice which was his normal speech level. ‘Tha’ll have to play hookey from that school. They sent us that Scotch bugger again today. He can’t even speak proper! Three times he asked me for a chew of baccy and I thought the sod were just coughing!’
Farr’s absence meant that his place had to be filled for that shift by someone ‘on the market’, and men used to working in a regular team did not take readily to a newcomer.
‘There’s worse than Jock,’ said Wardle.
Dickinson rolled his eyes in a parody of disbelief, but he did not pursue the subject. In matters like this, Wardle had the last word, and in any case, most of Dickinson’s complaints were ritualistic rather than real.
‘Teacher didn’t ask you to stay behind to clean her board, then?’ he asked slyly.
Farr wished he hadn’t let on that one of his lecturers was a woman. His friend’s innuendo was not masked by any great subtlety.
‘Not today,’ he said. ‘I’m building up to it.’
‘All right, is she?’
He thought about Ellie Pascoe. A condescending cow was how he’d categorized her to himself earlier. But that had been as ritualistic as Tommy’s pretence that he couldn’t understand Jock Brodie’s accent. However, in-depth analysis was not what Dickinson was after.
‘She’s got nice tits,’ he said. ‘And she doesn’t wear a bra.’
‘Hey up! That’s half the battle, then! Hey, did you hear the one about the lass who’d just got married and next time she met her old dad, he asked her, “What fettle, lass?” and she said, “Dad, can I ask you a question? That bit of skin at the end of my Jack’s thing, what do you call that?” …’
Colin Farr’s mind drifted away from the joke as his gaze drifted round the rapidly filling room. He knew all the men here by face, and most of them by name. Some there were who’d been young men when he’d been a boy. Some had been middle-aged then who were old now. And one or two had always been old and were now much much older. He knew them all, and their wives and their families, to the second and sometimes the third generation. He was looking at the past of a whole community here, traced in lined and scarred faces, in shallow breathing and deep coughs. Was that what was worrying him? He didn’t think so. It was not the fact that he was looking at the past, he suddenly realized. It was rather that he could be looking at the future! It was here, in this room, in this loud talk, and laughter, and argument, in these wreaths of tabacco smoke and these rings of foam on straight glasses.
The bar in the students’ union, there’d been foam rings there too, and tobacco wreaths, argument and laughter and loud talk. What there hadn’t been was any sense that this was anyone’s future. It had been here and now; fun and finite; a launching-pad, not an endless looped tape. No sense there of raising a glass at eighteen and setting it down at eighty with nothing
