The mustard and white charabanc arrived, an old fashioned thing. She tried to see if anyone she knew had scratched their names on the backs of the chairs as the driver started to load people’s bags into the hold. She wouldn’t let him touch her luggage. There was no way a stranger was handling her family’s stuff.
Soon the vehicle was full and people were impatient to be setting off. No sign of Arthur and Lawrence. Shell stood by the front doors and scrutinised the road. She’d specified the time. She’d definitely told them.
Wolton was on the other side of the pit, smaller than Litten but larger than Strepley. Shielding her eyes, Shell could see Brantford’s headgear, the stilled winder and the corner of the massive hopper, the dust-slaked cableway that ran skips of spoil to the looming heaps on the other side of the valley. Although the pit wasn’t operating, the smell of methane, sulphur and coal smoke still lingered, and Shell could feel the prickle of coal dust on her skin. She glanced at the coach and spotted some nosy hag staring at her, which was all she needed. She stormed over and knocked on the window. “I know very well the time,” she called. “Think I can’t see you crowing there, you old bat?”
She spat on the kerb weeds and sparked a fag. Fluctuating light refracted off the windshield of the coach, reflected no son, no husband and certainly no apology. The driver asked if she was coming or not. They’d to get a move on if they were to miss the traffic. Shell said she’d be with him, her family had been held up.
“Would you mind giving us another minute?”
“I’ll give you two.”
Shell barged into the WMC. One for the synapses, the place reeked of bleach, had a pine-effect tiled dancefloor, seating round its edges and a tan haemorrhage staining the ceiling, from either damp or cigarette tar, Shell wasn’t sure which. A pair of dart boards were hung on a wall. Shell tripped on one of the board’s rubber runways in her hurry to ask the barmaid if she could leave a message in case anyone called for her.
Another repeat of them showing her up. She was getting that laddered feeling again and had to breathe through her nose as she wrote:
Dear Lawrence and Arthur
I’ve gone on my own
Sort tea yourselves
Mam.
The nib of the pencil broke as Shell drove it into the paper to impress the full stop. “Two blokes, about yea big,” she told the barmaid. “Same face, one grey, one a boy: hesitant buggers when they want to be.”
She handed the girl the note.
“Tell ’em I were here. Give them that.”
People clapped her onto the coach and the engine battled into life. Shell shoved her things down the aisle and propped them in her lap as she dropped into the only available seat and tipped her head back to catch her breath. She was so angry and disappointed she could cry.
“You look flustered.”
It was Het.
“Well shift over and let me chase my breath then,” Shell managed to say, then stood up so he couldn’t see her face.
She hoisted her belongings into the overhead compartment then sat once she’d composed herself. Het fit uneasily into the space next to her. He looked as cramped as a Great Dane in a Wendy house.
“I’ve Racing Post if you need a fan,” he said.
“Must be desperate times if you’re resorting to that.”
“It were already on the seat.” Het smiled, handing it over.
Shell wafted herself with the paper. It had been spilled on so was crinkled funny. “When did you get here, anyway?” she said.
“About a minute before you.”
“Did you see us name on t’lists or summat?”
Het didn’t answer. As he took the bag Shell hadn’t been able to fit into the overhead compartment and set it on the floor between his feet, Shell grit her teeth. Her mouth wanted sewing shut sometimes.
“Just a shock to see you,” she said.
“Been an age since I’ve seen the beach,” Het replied, changing the subject. “And as I can’t picket, I thought why not.”
“I only just heard.”
“Don’t worry,” he said swiftly. “I’ve been looking forward to this actually. Bit of sunshine.” He might have lost weight, and his hair had less wax in it. “You not wi-?”
“No.”
“Well you’ve brought enough stuff.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
They were as bad as each other. The coach departed, and in almost no time Shell felt all resistance slip away. She rested her head on Het’s shoulder as the ignorant, selfish wilderness drifted by. They’d be through Gainsborough soon enough, traversing Louth and the Lincolnshire Wolds. Then they’d reach the shifting metal sea, where, how did that W.H. Auden one from Arthur’s anthology go again? Where all that you are not, looks back on all that you are.
Something like that, anyway.
The charabanc’s windows wouldn’t open so it was an uncomfortable journey whenever they hit traffic; they might as well have been sitting in a greenhouse. Shell feigned sleep but the other passengers were making too much noise for her to pull it off convincingly. The youngsters especially. They were all kinds of excitable after being treated to spending money by the union, who had funded the trip with money raised from a Trades Council gala earlier that summer. Everyone was terrifically excited by the first break they’d enjoyed in months. Thankfully the noise meant it was hard to talk over the racket. Shell simply watched Het point out a few sights: the Scarborough Hotel she knew he’d once stayed in; the site where Seeley House used to be, the former miners’ convalescent home.
Last off the coach, they headed to the sand, where already the mining families had dispersed amid their handsome happiness. Shell could see the shrieking scaffold of the roller coaster and the bulb-studded spokes of the Ferris wheel in the amusement park. Men had their trousers rolled to the knee and shirts removed to reveal dimpled, onion-white flesh. One old boy had twisted his hankie at the corners to cover a sensitive head.
Het carried the bags as they wandered through. “Shall we sit a bit?” he said, content to stop anywhere.
“In fact can we go along?” Shell replied. She wanted to be alone on the marzipan, watch the breakers and the mudflats, listen to the waves smash themselves apart.
Along they went. All the way Het gave Shell goosebumps, or at least something did. Maybe this was how she could finally define love, or at least what she felt when she was alone with her husband’s brother. She wanted to confide in Het. She wanted to show him her mind’s vaulting outlays, the false peaks and promontories where her thoughts seemed to sprout oily wings and stare crazily back at her. She had never let Arthur see any of that.
Skegness, so bracing. Shell wanted well away from all the Butlin’s, Jolly Fisherman shit. People were tearing into their ice creams like cows with salt licks. Long burgundy tongues flicking Mr Whippy. She walked on, worrying about this sort of imagery, the caustic analogies that sprang so readily to her mind. What was wrong with her that in a heartbeat she thought this way, summoning a head full of alley cats, Whitsun slags and chimneypots full of ash? To think as she did. It was cruel to doubt her marriage, cruel on Lawrence and cruel on Het, who she’d all but strung along these months, refusing to acknowledge what was between them or perhaps spending too much time acknowledging it on some subconscious level, and not wanting to flag it up to her responsible self because the moment that she did it would have to stop.
Until today. She didn’t know if she could rein in her tendencies anymore. She and Het strolled by the ocean, took their shoes off and waded in time through the freezing, fizzing water. After a while the crowds were gone. It was just them by a dune, which they descended so they could pitch the windbreaker up.