The White Dove

Keeping to the protective shadows, Mari followed him. She felt a smothering sense of relief that the pit was closed and Nick would not be allowed to go down and be swallowed up by the fire.

At the powerhouse door she caught up with him. She pulled at his sleeve and he turned on her, fists clenching again before he saw who it was.

‘Mari?’ He was frowning, blacker-faced than she had ever seen him. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I wanted to be with you. To see you’re … safe.’

‘Don’t be a fool. Is there anyone belonging to you down this pit?’

‘No.’ Like Nick, all Mari’s family worked in Nantlas No. 2.

‘Well, then. Go home out of the way.’ Roughly he pulled her to him and kissed her, and then wrenched her round to face the gates again. Mari wanted to cling to him, dragging him back to her and away from the pit, and her fingers clutched at his Sunday coat.

‘Nick,’ she said desperately, knowing that it was stupid and unable to stop herself, ‘it isn’t a bad omen for us, is it, this happening today?’

‘An omen?’ He was crackling with anger now. ‘Don’t talk such bloody rubbish. More than an omen, isn’t it, for Gath Goch? And Dilys Wyn?’

John Wyn was the miners’ agent for No. 1. He worked with Dicky Goch too, and his fourteen-year-old twin sons as well.

Mari’s arms dropped to her sides. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. Numbly, she began to walk alone back towards the colliery gates.

Nick pushed open the powerhouse doors. He blinked in the light. In the high, red-brick interior the great generators were still humming, keeping the searchlights outside uselessly burning. Polished brass winked proudly back at him. At first glance the cavernous space seemed empty, then Nick looked up to the iron gallery that ran round the walls. A group of men was huddled in front of the air gauges. Most of them were still pit-black, and half a dozen wore the cumbersome back-tanks, coiled tubes and orange webbing of rescue breathing apparatus. Through the generator hum, Nick heard their defeated silence.

He ran to the spiral staircase and took the stairs three at a time, his boots clanging on the iron.

‘Nick.’ The men nodded acknowledgement to him. Among them were their own union representative, Jim Abraham, Nick’s own senior agent from No. 2 pit, and John Wyn’s No. 1 deputy. The shift manager was there too, his face and clothes grimed from his expedition down the shaft.

‘Bad?’ Nick asked, knowing how bad it must be for there to be this silence, this inactivity. When no one spoke he said roughly, ‘What happened, in God’s name?’

One of the men wearing breathing apparatus came wearily forward. In a flat voice he began to tell the story. Nick recognized that it was already becoming a set piece, a tale that would have to be repeated for the Mines Inspector, the manager’s meeting, the inquest. Nick served on the Miners’ Safety Committee, and he had heard half a dozen similar recitals.

‘I went down with Dicky Goch today,’ the miner said. ‘Unofficial, see? It was a normal shift. I was in the last stall, the one next to Dicky, with Rhys there.’ He pointed to one of the other men, also in rescue gear. ‘They were all empty, behind us. The rest of the gang was up ahead.’ Nick nodded, understanding that the official men would have the best places. ‘At ten to six, Dicky came back and told me and Rhys to put up. We were to go back to the main shaft and call through that the rest were coming. We went. We were just passing the junction with two district when we felt the air reversing past us. It was licking the dust up behind us. We knew there was something bad wrong. We ran to the shaft bottom and called through for help. As the cage came down we heard the explosion.’

‘Felt it, more like,’ the other miner corrected him. ‘No noise. Just a shaking and shuddering.’

‘I was on my way down in the lift cage,’ the shift manager put in quickly. He was anxious to convince the men’s representatives that the right things had been done, the right procedures followed. Too eager, too anxious, Nick thought. ‘I met the two men here at the shaft bottom and they told me what had happened. I sent up for the breathing apparatus, collected the other men who had come up meanwhile, and we set off again. The air was rushing past us all the time. It’s a damp seam, the Penmor …’

His voice trailed off uncomfortably.

One of the other men took up the story. ‘We got within fifty yards of the junction of the main haulage road with the road down to Penmor. The fire had taken proper hold. As we stood there, watching like, a great long tongue of blue flame came licking back up towards us. Then it was sucked back again, and the air behind us with it. There was nothing to do. I’ve never seen a fire like it. Trying to fight it with what we had would have been like pissing down into hell.’

There was another long, quiet moment. The generators hummed blindly on.

‘The district was checked today, was it?’ Nick asked softly.

Jim Abraham half-raised his hand to stop him, and then wearily let it fall again. What Nick Penry wanted to know, he found out somehow. And words, whatever they were on either side, could make no difference tonight.

The shift manager, not looking at anyone, said, ‘The report book clearly states that the fireman checked every working stall in the area this morning. There was some gas, but very little. No more than two per cent.’

‘And the empty stalls?’

‘Ah … not today, as it happens. According to the book, that is.’

And so from somewhere, deep in the workings, an outrush of the deadly fire-damp gas had gone undiscovered. It had mixed with the airflow and a tiny spark, perhaps from a cracked safety lamp or even a piece of overheated machinery, had ignited it. And then it had exploded.

In an even softer, and more dangerous, voice Nick said, ‘General Rules, of which even you as shift manager must be aware, state that daily checking for gas escape in every area of the mine is mandatory …’

‘Save it, Nick,’ someone was murmuring. ‘This isn’t the time.’

Down in the body of the powerhouse, the door opened again. The pit manager came in. At his shoulder was a bulky, middle-aged man in evening dress.

‘Here’s Mr Peris, lads,’ the manager shouted up to them.

The men crowded forward and leaned over the gallery railings. Nick felt the press of them behind him, solid but defeated. Further behind them, unwatched now, were the rows of air gauges with their nil readings. His hands gripped the cold iron. Beneath him, in Lloyd Peris’s upturned face, reddened with food and drink, he read the brazen readiness to bluster out of his responsibilities. Nick felt his throat swell and tighten with the rage inside him.

‘Peris? What happened to the air intake reverse?’ His shout filled the span of the arched roof and echoed back at him. ‘What happened to it, Peris?’

There was no answer. Nick pushed through the men and clanged down the iron stairs again. Cruickshank shrank back a little, but the owner stood his ground squarely.

‘A little too much of the hothead, Penry,’ he said smoothly. ‘It won’t do you or your men any good. Not shouting at me, nor threatening my manager. Now, as you all know’ – he raised his voice so that the men waiting above could hear – ‘there has been a sad accident tonight. I have had a full report from Mr Cruickshank here, who has acted very properly. An unavoidable explosion was followed by an outbreak of fire, which cut off the men’s egress and prevented a rescue party from reaching them. I understand that a number of brave men, led in an exemplary manner by the shift manager, tried to get down there. Thank you for that.’ He smiled, intending a grave, consoling gesture that at the same time took in Nick’s clean face and clothes. The smile looked to Nick like the split in a pumpkin.

‘The intake?’ Nick asked him again, trying to swallow the loathing that was rising inside him as if he was about to vomit.

‘An unfortunate aspect of the accident is the failure of the reversing mechanism,’ Peris added. ‘The trapped men were subject to a negative airflow.’

The redness in front of Nick’s eyes swirled and threatened to blot everything out. He would have reached out to Peris and torn his starched shirt front, and tightened the absurd black bow around his neck until the man’s eyes popped and his tongue swelled between his lips. But Jim Abraham stepped smartly up behind him and locked his arms behind his back. Nick heard his own roaring voice filling his head, the force of it rasping at his throat.

‘They suffocated, man. Why don’t you use the proper words? Make your mouth taste nasty, do they? If the explosion didn’t get them, they suffocated to death, because your safety mechanism never worked. John Wyn told me himself. He said the installation was never completed. You didn’t want to spend the money on it, did you?’

Cut off from the normal air supply by the fire, the trapped men should have been kept alive by a simple switch which would pump in fresh air through the exhaust system. When it had failed, they had been left to die.

Nick twisted to free himself, but Jim Abraham’s grip was like iron.

‘We all know it, Peris. Every man here. It’s your negligence. You murdered forty-four men tonight. You are a common murderer.’

Even as he shouted, Nick knew that his words were a pathetically useless weapon against Lloyd Peris. The owner was already at the powerhouse door.

‘You will have a chance to present your unfounded accusations through the proper channels, Penry. Mr Cruickshank has the duty to inform the relatives of the dead men, with my deepest sympathy. He also has my orders to cap the down air supply. The pit will remain closed until the fire is out and we are sure of its safety. Good night.’

‘Your sympathy?’ Nick was shouting at the closing door, knowing that he sounded like a madman and unable to control himself. ‘Your only sympathy is with yourself because this has disturbed your bloody dinner.’

The heavy door was shut.

Jim Abraham released Nick’s arms. Briefly the older man hugged him, leaving black marks on Nick’s Sunday coat.

‘I know, lad,’ he said gently. ‘We all know. It’s like you want to kill them for it, and not even that would be enough. I was at Senghenydd, remember? Four hundred and thirty-nine men, that day.’

‘I know how many,’ Nick said bitterly. He was suddenly limp, and as defeated with the ebbing of his terrible anger as the ring of men watching him. ‘Forty-four or four hundred, it’s all the same, isn’t it? His fault, and his friends.’

Cruickshank had gone away up the gallery stairs. He had been turning heavy, polished wheels and watching the dials as the pointers flicked and sank back. Now he came to the master switch. He eased it up and the even hum of the generators faltered, dropped in pitch and died away into silence. Outside the searchlights blinked out and the pithead was lit only by the cold, feeble circles of the emergency lights.

Nick had no idea whether it was real or inside his head, but he heard the terrible low cry from the crowd at the gates. There had been no official announcement, but the news would have reached them long ago. They would all know what the sudden dark and quiet meant.

One by one, not looking at each other, the rescue party filed out of the powerhouse. They would go to the families of the dead men, and try to reassure them that they had done all they could.

Nick found himself standing alone in the shadows with the useless machinery towering around him. Wordlessly, numbed by anger that hadn’t yet given way to grief, he made a promise to the men buried in Nantlas No. 1. He promised them that he would fight the greed and callousness and cruelty that had killed them.

Nick shivered. He realized that he had no idea how long he had been standing there. Slowly, moving stiffly, he walked out of the powerhouse and across to the railings. The coal dust crunched with gritty familiarity under his feet. The crowd that had pressed against the railings was gone, taking its grief with it up to the little houses on the hillside. Nick was on his way up too when he saw that not quite everyone was gone. A little way off someone was standing staring back at the pithead. From the torn shirt showing the white glimmer of skin, Nick recognized Bryn Jones. He remembered that he had promised this morning to have a word with Dicky Goch for him. No one would have any more words for Dicky now.

Coming up beside him, Nick saw that Bryn was crying, silent involuntary tears that ran down his face and dripped on to his hopeless chest.

‘All of them, is it?’ Bryn asked.

‘Yes.’ Nick’s arm came briefly around his thin shoulders, hugging him as Jim Abraham had hugged Nick himself. ‘You didn’t get down in time, then? You were lucky today, Bryn.’

‘Call it luck, do you?’ The bitterness was not against Nick, but against all the things that they both knew.

‘Come on,’ Nick told him gently. ‘Don’t stand out in this damp air.’

They turned their backs on the darkened pit and went on up the hill together.

THREE

Biarritz, August 1924

Two days after the explosion in Nantlas No. 1, Adeline Lovell was lying on the sun terrace of the Hotel du Palais, Biarritz. There was enough of a cooling breeze to stir the flags on the tall white flagpoles guarding the sea edge of the terrace, and the strong blue light was softening to dove grey around the curve of the bay.

A waiter had brought Adeline a cocktail on a silver tray, but it was untouched on the table beside her white wicker lounge seat. The frosting on the rim of the glass had melted long ago. The English papers, neatly folded, lay close at hand but she didn’t pick them up either. Instead she was staring south, to where the sea and sky melted together over the coast of Spain, but without seeing any of the beauty of the afternoon.

The terrace had been almost deserted when Adeline wandered out in search of company, and she had sunk into the wicker chair with only her own thoughts for entertainment. But now it was the cheerful hour when teacups were replaced with the first drinks of the evening. Svelte women in tennis dresses, their bobbed hair held in place with white bandeaux, were flooding out of the long terrace doors to greet other women in fluttering tea-dresses and the first sprinkling of evening gowns. The colours wove patterns in front of Adeline’s unfocused eyes, eau-de-nil and palest peach, cream and rose-pink and gold. Escorting the women were sun-flushed men in white flannels, blazers or linen jackets and panama hats. Amongst them those who had already changed were like sleek, discreet shadows.

Inside the hotel, under the cream and gilt rococo ceilings of Napoleon and Josephine’s summer palace, the plum-coated barmen were falling into a rhythm with their silver cocktail shakers. And already, from the vast ballroom, there was music. Couples were one-stepping to the band. There would be dancing all evening and late into the night, and sometimes Adeline would wake up in the dawn and still hear the jazz playing.

It was what one came to Biarritz for, she reminded herself now, sitting upright against the cushions. To dance and drink cocktails, to lose money at the Casino and to enjoy oneself.

Adeline reached out for her drink and drained it in one gulp, making a wry face at its temperature. She snapped her fingers at a passing waiter. ‘Encore, garçon.’ Adeline still had her faint, attractive American drawl and it made her awkward French sound even odder.

To enjoy oneself. That was the aim, and the problem. Of course, they should really have gone to the Riviera. Everyone who mattered went there for the summer nowadays, but Gerald wouldn’t hear of it. It was swarming with vulgarians, he said flatly, and he had no desire to mix with them. Biarritz was an awkward compromise. Gerald would have preferred to stay at Chance, or perhaps at the family lodge in Scotland, for the whole of August. France meant Paris and Deauville and no further, to Gerald. Adeline frowned, and drank half of the fresh drink that the waiter had placed discreetly at her elbow.

Gerald belonged to a different generation. He didn’t seem to enjoy anything, any more. He was increasingly withdrawn, critical when he spoke at all, and impatient with his children. He didn’t want to play tennis or cards with Adeline and her friends, or go for motor rides up into the Pyrenees. He certainly didn’t want to dance. He spent most of his time gambling, and losing heavily, at the Casino.

Adeline didn’t care about the losses particularly. She was used to seeing money disappear like water into sand, and believed that was how people of her class should treat it. The Lovell fortunes had been at a low ebb when she had married Gerald, and her love for him made her delighted that it was her money repairing the crumbling fabric and restoring the interiors of Chance. Adeline’s money had saved the Lovell’s town house in Bruton Street from being sold. It was Adeline’s money that supported and nurtured their extravagant way of life. They had arrived for their month in Biarritz with thirty-two pieces of luggage, a valet for his lordship and Adeline’s maid, a nanny-companion for the two girls, and Richard’s tutor. They had taken adjoining suites overlooking the sea. If she had looked up, Adeline could have seen the heavy, looped curtains and gilt tassels at the window of her private drawing room directly overhead.

Since the end of the War the output of the great van Pelt steel mills in Pittsburg had quadrupled, and Adeline had inherited a half-share on her father’s death in 1920. She was a very rich woman now, and the Lovell fortunes were secure again under the terms of her marriage settlement. No, it wasn’t the money Adeline cared about. It was the joylessness of Gerald’s losses, as if he couldn’t even find it in himself to be excited by the reckless gamble, that she couldn’t fathom.

‘Excuse me, my lady?’

Adeline looked round to see her daughters’ companion. Bethan Jones wasn’t quite a nanny any more because the girls didn’t need one, and she definitely didn’t have it in her to double as a governess. Adeline had quite often thought that Bethan should be replaced by a proper maid, someone with a bit more style who could do the girls’ hair properly now that they were growing up. Amy looked a positive hoyden sometimes. But Amy and Isabel were devoted to their plain-faced Bethan, and wouldn’t have heard of it.

‘Yes? What is it?’

‘Parker sent me down, my lady, to ask what time you would like to dress, and whether she should lay out the grey Chéruit satin?’

Lady Lovell’s maid, on the other hand, was an autocratic creature of the old school who was glad to have Bethan willingly hurrying to and fro for her.

‘Tell her I will be up shortly.’ Mechanically, Adeline decided. ‘Yes, the grey satin for this evening.’

Around her on the terrace were a score of acquaintances whom Adeline could have joined for drinks, made plans with for dinner, and danced with into the small hours. Yet she felt a shiver of loneliness now.

‘Bethan?’

The girl had almost turned away. ‘Yes, my lady?’

‘Where is everyone?’

‘I’m not sure … do you mean the other guests?’ Bethan was uncomfortable, looking around at the thronged terrace.

‘My family,’ Adeline said with a touch of asperity. ‘My daughters. Mr Richard. I haven’t seen anyone all day.’ Bethan relaxed at once, smiling at the mention of the children. ‘Oh no, they’ve all been busy. Mr Richard has been out all day with Mr Hardy. They went straight after breakfast. They took their sketch pads and pencils. They were going to look at some … churches, was it now?’

Adeline stared hard ahead. Of course it was right that Richard should know the difference between Gothic and Perpendicular and Romanesque, or whatever the things were that Hardy considered so important to his education. But little Richard seemed happier and far more relaxed in the company of his pale-faced tutor than he did with his own mother and father. Adeline felt a sudden longing to see him and hug him like a baby.

‘And Miss Isabel and Miss Amy had their tennis coaching, and then they swam in the sea, and afterwards I took them along the front for an ice at Fendi’s. They are in their room now, my lady, if …’

And Adeline had spent the afternoon alone on the terrace. She lifted a hand to cut Bethan short. ‘Please tell them to be down promptly for dinner. We will all dine together this evening. Mr Richard too.’

‘Adeline, darling …’

A shadow fell over her chair. Blinking, she looked up into it and saw Hugh Herbert. She had met him before, at house parties in England, and she had sat next to him in the car on the way to a picnic in the hills three days ago. She had noticed, from across the dance floor, that he danced like a dream.

‘And an empty glass? Let me get you a cocktail at once, immediately. And then perhaps do we have time for one tiny dance?’

His hand was under her elbow. Adeline didn’t particularly want to dance, but she did want another drink. And suddenly she wanted some cheerful company very much indeed. She smiled up into Hugh Herbert’s blue eyes.

‘Only one, Hugh. I’ve absolutely promised to dine en famille tonight.’

Bethan stood respectfully to one side as Adeline and her friend sailed past. Then, looking down automatically to see whether any of her ladyship’s belongings needed to be carried up to her suite, she saw the folded English newspaper beside the chair. As she stooped to pick it up a single word in a paragraph at the foot of a page caught her eye.

Nantlas.

The laughter and bustle on the terrace froze into silence. She looked quickly at the elegant people around her. It was unthinkable to stand here and read the paper as if she was one of them. Bethan slipped through the crowd and back into the hotel. Grossing quickly under the great chandeliers in the foyer, she made for a corridor that took a sharp right-angled turn away towards the kitchens. The only people who would penetrate beyond the corner would be servants like herself.

Leaning breathlessly against the wall, Bethan read the brief report. It was headed ‘Colliery Disaster’. It said only that forty-four miners had been killed following an explosion at the Rhondda and Peris-Hughes Associated Collieries No. 1 Pit, Nantlas, Rhondda. The owner of the pit, Mr Lloyd Peris, had said that the pit would remain closed until it could be made safe. A full inquiry would be made through the usual channels.

She re-read the paragraph three times, as if it might yield something she had not understood at first. But there was nothing else. Bethan looked up and down the deserted corridor, wanting to run but having no idea where to. Her father and two of her brothers worked in Nantlas No. 1, and she was stranded here, a thousand miles and two whole days separating her from her family and the crowd waiting silently at the pit gates.

Bethan fought against the panic. She clenched her fists and frowned, trying to think. She knew no French. She had used the telephone only a handful of times in her life. Her only contact with home was the weekly letters she exchanged with her mother, and even those took days longer to reach her here. She was quite sure that her mother would have no idea how to reach her in Biarritz if the family needed her. Bethan’s mind was blank. She couldn’t possibly turn to Lady Lovell for help, even less his lordship. Isabel was the only one who might know what to do. Fixing quickly on the thought that Isabel was fourteen now, and spoke perfect French, Bethan turned and ran towards the stairs, the newspaper clenched in her hand.

Amy was sitting on the window seat in the pretty sitting-room she shared with her sister. Their suite was at the side of the hotel instead of at the front overlooking the great terrace with its flags and flowers, but Amy thought that it was much superior because it looked south along the curve of coast. At odd times when the haze cleared she could see the blue line of Spain. It was so pretty here, from the height of the hotel, with the town spread out in front of her and the figures moving on the beach. When she was down in the midst of it all Amy felt gawky and ignorant amongst the glittery people, and curious and impatient in equal parts with all the dancing and parties and furious enjoyment that made up a summer in Biarritz. But from up here she could imagine that it belonged to her, and that she was the star in its firmament.