Hammond Innes: Golden Soak

The stone skeleton of the old Wheal Garth engine housing came at me out of the dark, its chimney pointing a gaunt finger at the night. It was there for an instant, glimpsed in the headlights, and then it was gone and there was nothing but the road and the moor and the slanting rain. That derelict mine building stayed etched on the sodden retina of my mind, a symbol — my world in ruins, and all because of that stupid, bloody meeting. I was driving too fast, feeling vicious after all the solitary drinking I had done since I’d walked out on them that morning. Trevenick shouldn’t have said it. He shouldn’t have called me a crooked thieving bastard. What had he ever contributed to the company, jumping on my band-wagon just because his father had left him a fortune? I sucked at my knuckles where the skin was broken. Too bad my temper had got the better of me again. A bunch of land-owners, all of them, who wouldn’t recognize a mother lode if they saw one. And before that, facing me with the mine foreman, as if I didn’t know we’d run into granite over six months ago.

‘Australia! You won’t get me going to Australia.’

I could hear her voice, remote and hostile above the noise of the engine, the splash of the wheels as they ploughed through water. But what else — what was the alternative?

‘You should have thought of that before.’

I could see her face, white in the rods of driving rain, her beautiful, soft-lipped, childish face. My wife, my darling bitch of a wife, sitting there at the breakfast table in her dressing gown, accusing me of deceiving her. ‘All your big talk — I never realized …’ But she’d known. She’d known all along.

My foot was hard down on the accelerator, the moors and the rain streaming by and the swish-swish of the windscreen wipers, my mind recalling every word. Maybe I had talked big. But Rosa liked it that way. A big house, a big car, clothes, parties, jaunts to London, with the sense always of riding the crest of a wave; but when it came to the pinch, when the tin gave out and we’d nothing to live on but hope, that was different. She wouldn’t even write to that cousin of hers who owned a mine and 200,000 acres in Western Australia. Oh no, the Garretys weren’t her sort of people — not smart enough. And she didn’t care a damn about Golden Soak, or any other Australian mining prospect for that matter.

The Standing Stone rushed past, a druidical milestone on the way home, and I was thinking of our honeymoon, how I’d made love to her in the dry adit of Balavedra, where my grandfather had worked as a miner, and then gone on alone to discover that damned vein of mother tin staring at me in the torchlight beyond a recent fall of rock. Two years we’d had, the world at our feet, until that wild wet day, with the wind blowing in gale force gusts off the sea when the mine foreman had broken the news to me in his broad Cornish. After that nothing had gone right. We were into solid granite, no vestige of tin or any other mineral. And then Trevenick smelling a rat and calling a board meeting.

I needed a new start, a new country, and Australia was the obvious choice for a man with my qualifications. And when I told her I’d written to Kadek almost a fortnight ago, she’d rounded on me — ‘If you can’t keep me without turning crook, there are other men who can.’ She was scared, of course, but that didn’t make it sound any nicer.

I told her to go to hell, stalking out to the car and driving straight to that meeting in the stuffy little office we rented in St Just. If I hadn’t left then I’d have belted her.

I was off the moors now, on the long dip down to Drym, the first bend coming up fast. I braked, remembering how I’d walked out of the meeting, promising to pay them back by the end of the month. I’d braked too hard, I knew that, still seeing their faces, the three older ones hostile and Trevenick sitting on the floor looking dazed. The skid started as I recalled Captain Benthall’s words, my hands correcting automatically, the shriek of tyres on wet tarmac — ‘We’ll give you till the end of the month, Falls. Now get out,’ — his voice sounding as though he were giving orders to a naval rating, and then the headlights spinning and the car crashing sideways through old fencing, rolling gently against a bank of heather.

I wasn’t far from home, but still far enough in the rain to get soaked and chilled, reaction setting in. I was shaken, nothing more, only now the crash had started a new train of thought.

They said afterwards that I looked like death, alone there at the bar — that they weren’t a bit surprised. It was all in the papers, the landlord’s comments, an interview with Rosa. But they didn’t understand. I hadn’t been drinking because it was the end of the road, I’d been drinking because I didn’t know what the hell to do about my wife. And though I’d got it all worked out, every step, so that it would look spontaneous and quite natural, I still didn’t know how I was going to cope with her.

But the house, when I reached it, was in darkness. Stumbling up the drive in the rain, it looked much as it had done that first time we’d seen it, in the dark, walking hand-in-hand between the laurels and laughing excitedly because she’d found a house to match the fortune I’d discovered underground. It nestled deep in a hollow, surrounded by the dark of cedars and the blue of Abies nobilis, its nice Georgian front ruined by a Victorian brick addition of extreme ugliness. But that was what had kept it on the market, and it had looked a lot better when we’d torn down the rusting iron verandah and the rotten conservatory at the end, painted the bricks a warm shade of pink and rooted out the laurel shrubberies. It still had a slightly dilapidated air, but it was home — the only home I’d known since my parents died in a plane crash when I was studying at the Royal School of Mines in London.

I fumbled the key into the lock, sober now, but my hands still trembling with shock. I called to her as I switched on the light ‘Rosalind!’ No answer. The house silent and watchful, hostile even. ‘Rosa. Where are you?’ Did the old walls know what I planned to do? ‘Rosalind?’ Still no reply, the stillness all about me, communicating the emptiness. I switched on more lights and climbed the stairs to our room, wearily and with a feeling of loneliness. I knew she had gone.

The room was empty, but with a special emptiness, a sort of desecration as though a burglar had been there, the dressing table bare, the drawers still open where she had rootled for clothes and costume jewellery, the personal things that added up to our two years of marriage. And the suitcase gone that she used for London.

I went back down the stairs, slowly and in a daze, searching the drawing room first, the study, then the dining room. I ended up in the hall, staring at the oak chest which had been her latest success in a local sale. No note, nothing conventional like that. Not that I expected it — she wasn’t that sort of person. I went into the study, to the big court cupboard we used as a bar, and poured myself a Scotch, not bothering about water. I took it to the desk, drinking it slowly, slumped in the red leather chair she had given me on our first anniversary when everything was rosy, with tin high, the mine a bomb, our future assured. The keys were in the drawer where I had been hoarding cash against the day when we’d have to get out. It was a long time before I nerved myself to open it.

But it was all right. The money was still there — four hundred and thirty-six pounds. I counted it carefully, my hands trembling. No question of an assisted passage now. It would have to be Naples or the Piraeus, and though an emigrant ship, I’d have to pay my passage. The money was my lifeline and if she’d taken it … But she hadn’t, though she’d taken her passport. And no note to say she was sorry. Yet she’d still put the afternoon’s post neatly on the desk and there was a vase of late roses that hadn’t been there the night before.