Chapter One — The Constraint

Nico was born at the bottom of things, and the bottom had a floor to it, and the floor was the low seam of the Vesta pit, thirty inches of dark a mile out under the moor, and by his sixteenth year he knew it the way other boys know a father's face.

He was a putter. He moved coal. From the place where the hewers won it, lying on their sides in the thirty inches, to the crane where the tubs ran onto the rolley-way, Nico hauled it — belted and chained like a pony where the roof ran too low for a pony to live, on hands and knees in the wet, sixteen runs a shift, twenty when the rates were cut and the only answer to a cut rate was more runs. The chain wore a groove in him, hip and thigh, that he understood would deepen for forty years and then be buried with him, and he was not bitter about it, no more than he was bitter at rain. It was the shape of the work. The work was the shape of the world.

His father had made the same runs, in the same seam, and his father's chain-groove had gone into the ground three years back, along with the rest of a quiet strong man, under sixty yards of roof that came down in the space between one prop and the next.

The Company had paid for the burying. This was set down in the rows as a decency, and Nico's mother still said it so — they buried him handsome — and it was two more years before Nico, who by then could read anything and was beginning to be unable to stop reading things, read the rules of the Field Club in their glazed frame by the bank and understood that the handsome burying had been bought with his father's own sixpences, held back from forty years of his father's own wages. The Company had buried his father with his father's money, and been thanked for it, his own mother thanking them, in her black, at the office door.

He said nothing to her about it. She had the thanking to live on. He had the reading.

They were four in the house on Cinder Row, which was the row below Prosper Row, in a town where even the streets were ranked: Nico; his mother Anja, who worked the screens by day and other families' washing by night; his brother Petr, thirteen, at the screens since nine; and the grandmother, who had outlived two husbands and one pit apiece and now sat by the fire all winter carding wool, with a memory that had lost the middle years and kept the old ones, so that she would tell the boys of pits sixty years gone as if the shift were tomorrow — and that winter the water came up the Delling shaft and took nine, and the viewer wept at the bank, wept like a woman — and the boys had heard every story fifty times and knew, without being told, that they were not stories. They were the family's books. Other houses kept Bibles. Cinder Row kept its dead.

The arithmetic of the house was the arithmetic of every house on the row, and Nico had been able to do it in his head since he was eight: rent held back before wages were paid; the store's book eating what the rent spared; the Club's sixpences out of each man's money, buying the burials in advance. What crossed the table in coin, at the week's end, after a man and a woman and two boys had given the pit their six days, would not have filled the grandmother's carding-comb. It was not that they were robbed. Robbery was an event; this was a condition. The money made a circle — wages to rent to store to Club and home again to the Company that had paid it — and the circle had been drawn so long before Nico's birth that it sat on the valley like the moor itself, a thing you walked on, not a thing anyone had made.

That was the constraint, and Nico did not chafe in it, because there was nothing in his world to chafe against — no edge, no seam, no place where the condition ended and something else began. You cannot want out of a world. The moor road went east over the hill to the market town and beyond, and men walked it and came back, and nobody was chained, and everybody stayed. He was sixteen. He pulled his runs. On Sundays he sat in Marek's schoolroom, and that was all the difference there was between Nico and every other lad on Cinder Row.

It was enough.

Marek was the weigh-clerk of the Vesta, an old man now, grey at the beam, and he kept the chapel school two evenings a week and Sunday afternoons — letters and figures, a penny a month, the penny waived more often than paid. He was a byword in the valley for a careful man. Close as Marek's books, the rows said, of any man who kept his mouth shut.

He had noticed Nico in the second winter of the school. Not for the reading; a dozen lads read well. For a thing Marek had met only once before in forty years, and that time in his own shaving-glass: the boy could not leave a figure alone. Show him a number and he asked what it stood on. Show him a column and he added it unasked, sideways and down, and if the total was wrong somewhere he went after the error like a terrier down a hole, not for praise, but because a wrong figure sat on him like a stone in his boot. Marek set him the school's own accounts to keep, then the chapel's, then — quietly, an old man needing a young eye, nothing said — fair-copy work from the weigh-cabin itself, and watched the boy's hand come on until it was better than his own, a clean, even, careless-of-nothing hand, the kind of hand offices notice.

And one Sunday in March, at the end of the lesson, with the room emptied and the light going, Marek did not give out a new copy-sheet. He sat a while filling his pipe, in the way of a man dealing out a hand he has held long enough to know every card in it, and then said: "The office is asking for a boy. Mr. Fenn's office. A copying boy, to be articled if he suits. They ask me every few years, do I have one." He got the pipe going. "I've said your name."

Nico sat still. The words went through him the way the first cage-drop of a shift went through a new lad: the floor there, and then not.

"There's things to say about it," Marek went on, to the window, "and I'll say the two that matter. First: it's out. It's the one door in this valley that's ever stood open in my lifetime, and it opens for one lad in a generation, and this generation it's thee. A clerk's articles, then a clerk's wage, coin not scrip, and no chain-groove, and thy own roof someday that no Company holds the rent of. Thy mother sleeps easier for the rest of her life. That's the first thing."

He smoked a while.

"And the second?" Nico said.

"Second is a question, and I'll ask it once and never again, and thee needn't answer it now nor ever." The old man turned from the window, and his eyes in the failing light were the eyes Nico had seen bent over forty years of other men's weights. "Every door in this world opens both ways, lad. They're not taking thee out of the rows for thy hand alone; hands are cheap; they could hire hands in the market town. Ask thyself, on the road up, now and again — why does the Company keep a door?"

Nico did not understand the question. He was sixteen, and the door was open, and through it lay everything: coin, a roof, his mother off the screens, Petr — Petr most of all, Petr who was thirteen with his father's quietness and his father's shoulders, bound for the low seam within the year unless money came from somewhere to article him too. Through the door lay the only version of the world where his family were not, all of them, one bad roof from the parish.

"I'll remember it," he said, meaning only politeness.

"Aye," Marek said, in the voice of a man who has planted in November and expects nothing green before spring. "Thee'll remember it."

The letter came down from the office that Thursday, in the fair round hand Nico would come to know better than his own face: the Company being minded to take a boy into the counting-house upon trial, Nicolas of Cinder Row to present himself Monday at the pit office, clean, at seven.

Anja washed his one good shirt twice. The grandmother looked at him a long time over her carding and said something the family put down to her lost middle years, though Nico kept it, the way he kept figures, without choosing to: "They took a lad up to the big house when I was a girl. Delling's time." A pause; the comb going; the fire. "He came back a bailiff."

Petr walked him to the office door in the Monday dark, ahead of his own shift at the screens, and stood grinning in the cold with the coal-dust already settled grey in the down of his upper lip, and punched Nico's shoulder and said the thing that was the whole ambition of Cinder Row, said it laughing, no envy in him anywhere, thirteen years old and delighted at his brother's luck:

"Get up there and stay up, our Nico. Get thee up and pull us after."

That sentence, too, Nico kept.

He knocked. The door opened, warm air came out at him, air with coal burning in a grate and no coal-dust anywhere in it, the first such air of his life; and he stepped through the one open door of the valley, and it closed behind him, softly, on its good office hinges, and did not clash at all, having no need to.

The doors that hold you never clash. He learned that later, at the top, where everything is learned.

They latch.