Reginald Hill: Under World

‘I rode up with the next lot and that was the end of my shift and this is the end of my homework.’

‘Thank you, Colin,’ said Ellie Pascoe. ‘That was really very good.’

‘Ee, miss, tha don’t say? Dost really think there’s hope tha can learn an ignorant bugger like me to read and write proper?’

Colin Farr’s accent had broadened beyond parody while his mouth gaped and his eyes bulged into a mask of grotesque gratitude. The others in the group roared with laughter and Ellie found herself flushing with shame at the justified rebuke; but because she was by nature a counter-puncher, she replied, once again without thinking, ‘Perhaps I’ll settle for learning you to stop feeling insecure in unfamiliar situations.’

Farr’s features tightened to their usual expression of amused watchfulness.

‘That’ll be grand,’ he said. ‘As soon as you’ve found the secret, be sure to let me know.’

He’s right, thought Ellie miserably. I’m as insecure as any of them!

She hadn’t anticipated this three weeks earlier when Adam Burnshaw, director of Mid-Yorks University’s extra-mural department, had rung to ask if she could help him out. One of his lecturers had contracted hepatitis in the Urals (Ellie had observed her husband teeter on the edge of a Dalzielesque joke), leaving a gap in a union-sponsored day-release course for miners. Ellie, politically sound, with years of experience as a social science lecturer till de-jobbed by childbirth and redundancy (both fairly voluntary), was the obvious stop-gap. No need to worry about her daughter, Rose. The University crèche was at her disposal.

Ellie had needed little time to think. Though far from housebound, she had started to feel that most of her reasons for going out were short on moral imperative. As for her reason for not going out, the great feminist novel she was supposed to be writing, that had wandered into more dead ends than a walker relying on farmers to maintain rights-of-way.

Preparation had been a bit of a rush, but Ellie had not stinted her time.

‘This is something worthwhile,’ she assured her husband. ‘A real job of real education with real people. I feel privileged.’

Peter Pascoe had wondered over his fourth consecutive meal of tinned tuna and lettuce whether in view of her messianic attitude to her prospective students, she might not be able to contrive something more interesting with leaves and fishes, but it was only a token complaint. Lately he too had started noticing signs of restlessness and he was glad to see Ellie back in harness, particularly in this area. During the recent year-long miners’ strike, when relations between police and pickets came close to open warfare, she had kept as low a profile as she could conscientiously manage. This had cost her much political credibility in her left-wing circles, and this job-offer from academic activist, Burnshaw, was like a ticket of readmittance to the main arena.

But there’s no such thing as a free ticket. The dozen miners who turned up at her first class on Industrial Sociology seemed bent on confirming the judgement of Indignant ( name and address supplied ) in the letter columns of the Evening Post , that such courses were little more than subsidized absenteeism.

At the end of an afternoon of monosyllabic responses to her hard prepared but softly presented material, she had retired in disarray after issuing a schoolmarmly invitation to write an account of a day at work before the next encounter.

That night she served frozen pizza as a change from tuna.

‘How’d it go, then?’ asked Pascoe with a casualness she mistook for indifference.

‘Fine,’ she grunted with a laconicism he mistook for exclusion.

‘Good. Many there?’

‘Just twelve.’

‘Good number for a messiah, but watch out for Judas.’

And here he was, Colin Farr, in his early twenties, his fair clear complexion as yet hardly touched by the tell-tale blue scars marking the other faces, his golden hair springy with Grecian curls, his every movement informed with natural grace. Put him in a tasselled cap and a striped blazer and he’d not win a second glance as he strolled through the Enclosure at Henley, except of admiration and envy.

Oh shit! she thought desperately. How classist can you get? It was wrong to call him Judas. He had merely invited her to betray herself.

At first indeed he had seemed a saviour when, just as she felt herself drowning in the silence which followed her request for a volunteer, he had risen like Adonis from a grassy bank and begun to read. It had been gratitude which had trapped her into that patronizing praise, and guilt which had stung her into that equally patronizing rebuke.

She took a deep breath, decided between inhalation and exhalation that the time was not yet ripe for an open analysis of the group dynamic, and said, ‘Did you think it should have been said?’

‘Eh?’

The change of direction was right. It had taken him by surprise.

‘You said that perhaps it was wrong for someone to make that crack about the deputy’s wife. Is that what you think?’

Slowly Colin Farr smiled. It was a slightly lopsided, devastatingly attractive smile and it seemed to say he now saw exactly what she was doing.

‘What do I think?’ he said. ‘I think either a man can look after his wife or he can’t and it doesn’t matter what any other bugger says. Also I think that deputies deserve all the shit you can throw at them. Just ask these lads here what they reckon and you’ll soon see if I’m right.’

She saw, and that night at dinner (steak and mushroom pie with braised red cabbage, incontrovertibly home-cooked) she attempted to convey both her delight and her surprise, delight that the ice had been broken and surprise at the depth of feeling revealed in the ensuing discussion.

‘It’s positively atavistic,’ she said. ‘These are young men talking as if they were back in the nineteen-twenties.’

‘You always said the Strike had knocked industrial relations back a generation,’ said Pascoe, shovelling another huge forkful of pie into his mouth.

‘This is nothing to do with industrial relations,’ retorted Ellie. ‘It’s tribal. Peter, if you’re going to gobble your food and look at your watch at the same time, you’ll end up putting your eye out. What’s the rush anyway? Not another James Cagney film on telly?’

‘No,’ said Pascoe uneasily. ‘It’s just that I’ve got to go out.’

‘You didn’t say anything,’ said Ellie indignantly.

‘No? Well, I was going to tell you when I got home but somehow …’

‘You mean,’ said Ellie with detective sharpness, ‘that when you got home and instead of the fast food you’ve been moaning about, you saw I’d rushed back from my class and slaved away cooking your favourite dinner, you lost your nerve!’

Pascoe smiled placatingly and said, ‘Well, sort of. I was going to say something, but you were so keen to tell me about your interesting afternoon with the horny-handed sons of toil …’

‘My God, I know who you really are! You’re Indignant ( name and address supplied ), I recognize the style! So, tell me, what’s so important that you prefer it to your favourite nosh, not to mention my intellectual company?’

‘It’s Mr Watmough,’ said Pascoe.

‘Watmough? You mean that creepy sod who’s Deputy Chief Constable? I thought he was leaving?’

‘He is. That’s why I’ve got to go out. The brass will be laying on a farewell dinner, but tonight he’s popping into the Club for a presentation from the plebs. I feel I ought to be there out of courtesy.’

‘Courtesy? To a Social Democrat?’ said Ellie scornfully.

The announcement of Watmough’s resignation had been followed almost immediately by the leaked news that he was shortlisted as a possible SDP candidate for a winnable local seat. It was no secret that he had been bitterly disappointed when he failed to get the recently vacant Chief Constable’s job. He’d been everyone’s favourite, except for Detective-Superintendent Andrew Dalziel, who rated him, to quote, ‘lower than a duck’s arsehole and twice as wet’. How Dalziel could have influenced the result was not clear, but Pascoe had suspicions close to certainties that it had been the fat man’s spade-like hand that had dashed the foaming cup from Watmough’s foaming lips.