Read Online Road to Berry Edge, The by Elizabeth Gill - Free Book Online Page A

steel. He liked to watch it being tapped out into ladles and into ingot moulds and seeing it cool and solidify. He liked the care that was taken to make sure that it was the right temperature and the right consistency. He liked to watch the steel running white, orange, red and blinding. He liked the sparks which flew in all directions when the men were making the steel. It was almost like the day he had stolen into the kitchen as a child and watched the cook making cakes, the various ingredients added and mixed to change texture and colourand consistency, finally poured out into tins and put into the oven; except that no cake had ever been so white and so perfect and so exciting to him as when the steel poured in a sleek white stream into the moulds.
    There was an air of defeat hanging over the place; there were not enough orders, there was not sufficient work. Michael McFadden had been right, Harry thought. It was almost a graveyard. The men had lost heart. They were often absent or careless about their work. They took no pride in it because there were no management skills here, there was nobody to make it cohesive. Harry was glad that his father was not there, he hated more than anything in the world to see incompetence.
    Rob was quiet as they walked, watched and studied, and Harry wondered what he was thinking. There was between himself and the men a huge gap of time and respect which could possibly never be bridged, and the fact was that it should have been taken care of all along by a series of skilled and educated men who would have brought the foundry on and even propped it, while the old man was ill and probably before that. The workforce had been let down like a country estate that Harry had once seen, where the son had been killed in a riding accident and the old man had drunk himself to death. It was a kind of monument to heartbreak and despair, as though it was a fist shaken in God’s face, a giving up of the worst kind.
    If Josiah Berkeley had run the place efficiently, Harry thought, there would have been no need for Rob to come home. Perhaps the old man had done it on purpose, perhaps he had even run it down because he had known how much love Rob had had for this place. Perhaps he had even hated his second son sufficiently to destroy it so that he would come back and see the ruins, which the tragedy he had brought on them had made.
    Rob retreated into a silence so complete over those first few days that Harry was afraid of a gulf between thetwo of them, such as had not been there since they first met.
    At first Rob wouldn’t talk, but Harry persisted. Finally, within the big scruffy office put aside for the foundry manager, Rob sat in the chair behind the desk and Harry sat on the empty desk, since there was nowhere else to sit. As Rob brooded, Harry said, ‘It needs an awful lot of money, my father was right, don’t you think? Too much money. What are you going to do, bankrupt yourself over it?’
    â€˜Probably.’ Rob looked up. It was the first time he had looked straight at Harry for days. ‘You don’t have to stay. Go back to Nottingham.’
    â€˜You need financial help. A lot of your money is tied up—’
    â€˜I’m going to untie it.’
    Harry shook his head.
    â€˜I have to do this,’ Rob said.
    â€˜You don’t have to, Robbo. You can take loyalty too far. Why don’t we just go home?’
    â€˜I can’t. You go.’
    â€˜I’m not going anywhere. I’ve only just got away. Besides, I have money—’
    â€˜No! I won’t let you do that.’
    â€˜I want to do it.’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜You can’t ask Awkward Features for any. He’ll just tell you to bugger off, and if you go down he’ll laugh in your face. It’s worse than you thought it was, isn’t it?’
    â€˜Yes, and I don’t want you mixed up in this. Times are hard in this industry. You’d be much better off in