IV
F
ather’s
funeral took place on a damp windy day, in the afternoon, when evening was already creeping across a sky made lurid by the glow from the furnaces. A vicious wind whipped our black weeds behind us as we stood on the rising ground and we made a sad picture. We women stood weeping by the grave but Tom, the new head of the family, put on a brave face and saw our father to his resting-place with resolution in his heavy jaw. Elijah was not there; indeed I had heard that his broken ankle was a more complicated accident than had been imagined at first and at the time of the funeral he was lying in Walsall Infirmary.
I told Tom as much of the story as I thought he should know but it was in his suspicious mind that Elijah’s accident was a fabrication. He seemed to think that Elijah
