Reginald Hill - Under World

‘So a young man goes to jail and gets a permanent criminal record pour encourager les autres ?’

‘The record was there already,’ said Pascoe. ‘He had several counts against him during the Strike …’

‘Who the hell didn’t? And they can’t have been all that serious, otherwise he wouldn’t have kept his job under the famous victimization scheme!’

‘True. But beyond and outside the Strike, he’s obviously been a wild lad. Most serious was when he got done for assaulting a Customs officer at Liverpool. Before you ask, no, he wasn’t coming back from holiday. He was a merchant seaman, didn’t you know that? A good teacher should know all about her pupils. Anyway, it didn’t amount to too much, I gather. Farr felt he was being unduly delayed by officialdom and threw the man’s hat into the ocean, then offered to send the man after it. He’s very fond of throwing people around, it seems. But you can see why the magistrate wouldn’t think a mere fine was enough in this last case.’

‘Oh yes,’ grunted Ellie. ‘I suppose he was lucky to escape the strappado.’

‘He only got a week. Five days with remission. He’ll be back for your next class. What’s the topic to be? Law and Order?’

‘Peter, that’s not funny, merely crass,’ snarled Ellie.

Pascoe considered.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ he said quietly. ‘It may not be terribly funny but I don’t think it’s at all crass, not between consenting adults in domestic bliss. As a professional communicator, you should be more careful. Intemperance of language is to thought what drunkenness is to courage: it makes a little go a long way.’

‘Is that original? Or is it a quote from some other prissy, pusillanimous time-server?’

‘Is that live? Or are you miming to the latest hit on the Radical Alliterative label?’

Ellie smiled, with only a little effort.

‘I’ll let you be original if you let me be live,’ she said.

‘Deal.’

He smiled back and went upstairs to see Rose, who was also smiling as she slept.

The difference was, her smile looked as if it went all the way through.

‘Carry your bag, miss?’

For a sliver of a second Ellie’s hand started to proffer the battered old briefcase. She had felt unusually drained after today’s class and had taken her time packing her papers while the cheerful chatter and clatter of the young miners faded down the corridor. When she finally followed them, Colin Farr had emerged from the door of the Gents as she passed. He was dressed in motorcycle leathers and carried a helmet.

‘Real offer or just winding me up, Colin?’ she said.

He fell into step beside her.

‘Depends, miss.’

‘On what?’

‘Whether you think it’s real or winding you up.’

‘But which depends on which?’ she wondered.

She also wondered, but this to herself, if Farr had emerged coincidentally or if he’d been lurking in that doorway.

‘Don’t follow you, miss.’

‘Yes, you do, Colin,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘That’s one game you can stop playing. Another is calling me miss all the time. I told the others last week that if I was going to use their first names, they’d have to use mine. Even though you seemed a little abstracted today, you may have heard one or two of them call me Ellie.’

‘Ell ee. Thought them were your initials, miss. Or mebbe a title.’

He grinned openly as he spoke.

They had reached the central landing. They were on the fourteenth floor of the Ivory Tower, a glass and concrete monument of the expansive and affluent ’sixties whose gnomonic shadow marked the passage of epochal as well as diurnal time on the scatter of redbrick buildings which had survived from the old civic university. Descent was by stair, conventional lift, or paternoster. The stairs were long and exhausting and the lift took an age to arrive, but Ellie usually preferred one or the other.

Farr, however, had made straight for the paternoster. The moving platforms were just large enough for two. He glanced at her, touched her elbow, and stepped forward. She stepped with him but as always the sense of the floor sinking away beneath her was so disconcerting that she gave a slight stagger and leaned against Farr whose arm went round her waist to support her.

‘I’m all right,’ she said, trying to disengage herself. But there was little spare room on the platform and he made no effort to move away.

‘You’d not do to ride the pit,’ he observed.

‘Ride the pit?’ she said brightly, aware of the closeness of his body and aware also that she was slipping beneath a protective carapace of schoolmarminess. ‘Let me see. That means go down the shaft in the Cage, doesn’t it?’

‘Aye. Down or up,’ he said, smiling slightly.

He knows how uncomfortable he’s making me feel, thought Ellie.

She said dismissively, ‘At least the Cage is standing still when you get in.’

‘You’re right. And when it starts going down, you wish it’d stood still for ever.’

His tone was so intense that she forgot her discomfiture and said curiously, ‘You hate it that much, do you?’

Strangely this shift towards conversational intimacy seemed to affect him as the physical contact had affected her. He removed his arm and swayed away from her and said in a much lighter voice, ‘Energetic buggers, these students,’ nodding at the graffiti-scrawled interstitial floor beams. ‘They must’ve had to go round three or four times to get them written.’

‘That sounds like a considerable misdirection of effort,’ said Ellie.

‘Most things are when you look at them straight,’ said Colin Farr. ‘This is us.’

His hand grasped her elbow lightly, its touch chivalric rather than erotic, and they stepped out in a unity of movement worthy of Astaire and Rogers.

Outside in the cool air of the shadowy side of the Ivory Tower, they paused.

‘I’m going over to the crèche,’ said Ellie.

‘The what?’

‘The nursery. Where staff can leave their children while they’re teaching. And students too.’

‘Very democratic. I’m off to the car park. Where staff can leave their cars. But not students.’

‘That’d be a male decision,’ said Ellie. ‘It’s a wonder the attendant doesn’t get you. He’s a terror. It took three phone calls to persuade him I was entitled first time I came.’

‘You should try a motorbike,’ said Farr. ‘You can be round the back of his hut before he notices.’

They stood in silence for a moment. Ellie glanced at her watch.

‘See you next week, then.’

‘Likely,’ said Farr. ‘If I can manage.’

‘Colin, I was sorry to hear about your bit of trouble.’

She did not care to hear herself using the euphemism, but she was treading carefully. No one had mentioned the young man’s week in jail today and she’d taken this as a signal that he didn’t want it mentioned.,

Now he gave her his crooked little near-smile and said, ‘It were nowt. I’ve been in worse places.’

‘The pit, you mean?’

‘Oh aye. That’s worse. But I meant worse jails.’

He grinned openly at her look of surprise.

‘I’ve not just been a miner,’ he said. ‘I’ve been a sailor too. Did you not know that?’

‘How could I?’ prevaricated Ellie. ‘I mean, you’re so young!’

‘Old enough. I went down pit at sixteen like all me mates. But I got a bit restless after a bit and when I was nineteen I jacked it in and went and joined the Merchant Navy. I were in for nearly four years. I came back to Burrthorpe just in time to go on strike for a year!’

‘And will you go back? To sea, I mean.’

‘Mebbe. I can’t say.’