It was the second week in August, a Tuesday evening, and it was hot. It was funny, George Hannant thought as he mopped his brow with a handkerchief, just how hot it could get on an evening like this. You’d think it would cool down, but instead the heat seemed to close in on you. During the day there had been a breeze, not much of a breeze but a breeze; now there was none, it was still as a painting out there. All the heat of the day, soaked into the earth, was coming out now, coming at you from all sides. Hannant mopped again at his brow, his neck, sipped an iced lemonade, knew that that, too, would soon start to run out of him. It was that kind of weather.
He lived alone not far from the school, but on that side of it away from the mine. The other side would have been too depressing, too oppressive. Tonight he had papers and books to mark up, lessons to plan. He didn’t feel like doing either one of these things, or anything else for that matter. He could use a drink but . . . the pubs would be full of miners in their caps and shirt-sleeves, their voices coarse and guttural. There was a decent film on at the Ritz, but the sound system was deafening at the front and the courting couples in the back rows invariably annoyed him, their sweaty fumblings distracting his attention from the screen. And anyway, he had that marking to do.
Hannant’s home, a semi-detached bungalow on a tiny private estate overlooking the dene and its valley where they narrowed towards the sea, was cut off from the school by the broad swath of a cemetery with its old church, well-kept plots, high perimeter walls. He usually walked through the place to school each morning, back again in the evening. There were benches circling huge, gorgeously-clad horse chestnut trees, their leaves already turning in places. He could always take his books and papers there.
Actually, it wasn’t a bad idea. The occasional old-timer, a pensioned-off survivor of the colliery, would get in there to sit with his dog and stick, chewing baccy or drawing on an old pipe – and spitting, of course. Rotten lungs were a legacy of the pit; rotten lungs and spines like eggshells. But apart from the old lads it was usually quiet in there, away from the village’s centre, the pubs and cinema, the main road. Oh, when the conkers began to fall there’d be kids to contend with, of course; what’s a conker without its child on the end of a length of cord? That was a nice thought and Hannant smiled at it. Someone had once said that from a dog’s point of view, a human was a thing to throw sticks. So why shouldn’t a horse chestnut have a point of view? Which might well be that boys were for whirling them on strings – and for splitting them wide open. One thing seemed certain, boys weren’t for learning maths!
Hannant showered, towelled himself slowly, methodically dry (hurrying would only produce more sweat), put on baggy grey flannels and an open-neck shirt, took up his briefcase and left his home. He walked out of the estate, into the graveyard and along the broad gravel path which bisected it. Squirrels played in the high branches of the brandy-glass-shaped trees, shaking loose the occasional leaf. The sun’s rays came slanting down from across the low hills to the west, where that great brazen ball seemed permanently suspended, as if it never would relinquish the day to night. The day had been beautiful; the evening, despite the heat, was incredibly beautiful; and both of them (Hannant weighed the heavy briefcase in his hand) would have been quite wasted. Or if not wasted, spent fruitlessly – if there was a difference. He snorted mirthlessly, picturing young Johnnie Miller in a couple of years’ time, ‘down the pits’, hewing coal, relieving his boredom and passing his shift by calculating surface areas of circles. What the hell was the point of it?
And as for kids like Harry Keogh – poor little sod -why, he had neither muscles for the mine nor much of a mind for anything else. Well, perhaps a mind, but if so a mind like an iceberg, only its tip showing. As for how much of it lay under the surface – who could say? Hannant only wished he could find a way to capsize the little bugger, while there was still time … He had this feeling about Keogh: that whatever he was going to do or going to be should begin to show in him now. Like watching a strange seed throw up a shoot, and waiting to see what the flower would be.