Finders and Keepers (3 page)

‘They don't see you as a lump of clay, darling. And most of them may be elderly and a little old-fashioned, but they are truly fond of you. And although it may not always seem like it, they do have your best interests at heart.'

He slipped his arm around her shoulders and gave her an affectionate squeeze. ‘I know, and I also know just how much trouble you had to persuade them to let me spend this next year in Paris.'

‘I think your threat to give up your inheritance if they tried to stop you from going to France had more effect than anything I said.'

‘It's good to know that you are behind me. Most of my friends' parents have insisted that they start in some business or other after three years at Oxford. Anyone would think all we did there was laze around, drink and have parties.'

‘Didn't you?' Sali's question wasn't entirely humorous.

‘I admit I had some jolly good times, but they didn't give me a First for my social life. I had to work for it.'

‘Of course you did, darling.' She sensed she'd touched a raw nerve. ‘And knowing that you wanted to go to art college, not university, made your father and me even prouder of the effort you made. You've dreamed of being an artist for years. It's only right you have the chance to find out if you have what it takes to become one. And now, given the way the food's disappearing, I'd better go and see if Mari needs help in the kitchen.'

Harry noticed Alice Reynolds bearing down on him again. ‘And I need to say hello to her. Come on, Glyn,' he picked up his brother again, ‘let's go and see what goodies Mari's kept back for us in the kitchen.'

‘Welcome home, Master Harry.' Their housekeeper, Mari Williams, who was supervising the colliers' wives Sali had paid to help her in the kitchen, dusted breadcrumbs from her hands, opened her arms and hugged him.

‘How's the most beautiful and best cook in Pontypridd?' Harry handed Glyn to his mother and, despite her bulk, swept Mari off her feet.

‘I can see that degree of yours hasn't changed you, Master Harry.' She heard her helpers giggling. ‘Put me down, you rascal.'

‘Seeing as how you asked nicely, I will.' Harry set her gently back on her feet and kissed her cheek.

‘What are you after?' Mari eyed him suspiciously.

‘Oh, a couple of hours after this party, one of your roasts followed by an iced raspberry bombe would go down a treat, Mari,' he said hopefully.

‘Then it's a pity we're having fricassee of tripe and bread and butter pudding for dinner.' They were the only two dishes Harry wouldn't eat.

Sali saw Alice hovering in the passage behind them and whispered, ‘If you want to return to the library, use the scullery door.' She raised her voice and pretended she'd just seen the girl. ‘Alice, how lovely of you to come and offer to help. There's a tray of cheese patties ready to be carried outside.'

Harry sneaked out of the door and past the stables. A suspicious pall of blue smoke hung above the shrubbery. He crept inside. His Uncle Victor and Aunty Megan's twelve-year-old twins, Tom and Jack, were puffing on a cigarette they were sharing with Eddie, his Uncle Joey's eldest son.

‘Got you!'

Jack's eyes rounded in alarm. ‘You won't tell on us, will you, Harry?'

‘Not if you tell me who you stole this from.' Harry picked up the cigarette Tom had allowed to fall to the ground and held it up in front of them.

‘We didn't steal it. Granddad dropped it accidentally, we just picked it up,' Eddie blurted breathlessly. ‘Honest, Harry, it's the truth.'

‘I believe you, thousands wouldn't. Where's Granddad now?'

‘He was sitting on the seat under the chestnut tree.'

He handed the cigarette back to Tom. ‘If anyone else catches you, or you start being sick, you didn't see me. Right?'

‘Right, Harry,' they chorused.

Harry found his grandfather where the boys said they had last seen him, sitting on the bench under the tree, filling his pipe.

‘Granddad, I've been looking for you.' Knowing the old man would be embarrassed by a hug, Harry sat next to him and shook his hand.

‘I wandered out for some air and caught your cousins trying to smoke dried leaves in bits of newspaper.'

‘So you went back into the house, and cadged a real cigarette for them to practise smoking with,' he guessed, recalling the time when he'd been thirteen and Billy had slipped him a cigarette when he had seen him trying to smoke one of his father's cigars.

‘It was either that, or risk them poisoning themselves. Besides it's a family tradition. Your father and Victor sneaked their first puffs of tobacco about that age. Your Uncle Joey was an early developer. I caught him with a packet of twopenny tube when he was seven. His mother brought out her carpet-beater when she found out he'd saved his halfpenny-a-week sweet money to buy them. Not that she used it other than to threaten him.'

‘Let's hope Jack, Tom and Eddie don't give the game away by turning green.'

Billy reached for his stick and rose awkwardly to his feet. ‘Sad to see the old house go?' he asked, limping on his artificial leg.

‘Mam and I were just talking about that.' Harry walked alongside his grandfather as he headed for the door closest to the library. ‘It's the sensible thing to do. Are they really going to turn it into a clinic?'

‘I think so.'

‘I'm glad the War Memorial Committee managed to raise the funds to buy the gardens and grounds outright before handing them over to the town. It would have been awful if the park had been burdened by debt.' Harry held the French door open for his grandfather.

‘The people of the town gave every penny they could spare.'

‘They wouldn't have managed to meet the price set by the trustees if you and Dad hadn't persuaded the miners' unions to chip in.' The sale of the grounds had given rise to the first serious argument between Harry and his trustees. If the decision had been his, he would have donated the land and gardens. But nine of the twelve trustees had voted against him and all he had managed to do was set the price at slightly below market value.

‘Joey's right, a free park dedicated to the dead of the Great War and owned by everyone in the town is a more fitting memorial than any number of statues.' Billy looked proudly towards his youngest son, who was talking to Harry's solicitor, Mr Richards. Joey had enlisted in 1914 and fought in France and Mesopotamia for four years before being wounded and invalided out of the army.

‘And here's the man himself, Mr Richards.' Joey buttonholed Harry. ‘We were just talking about you and your trip to Paris. Ooh la la. All those artists' models -'

‘I'm going there to study.' Harry rose to Joey's bait.

‘So you say.' Joey lifted his eyebrows. Away from the influence of his wife, Rhian, his humour tended towards the risqué.

‘You putting your car in storage, Harry?' Victor asked, deliberately changing the subject.

‘Unless Dad or Mam want to drive it.'

‘Not us.' Lloyd handed round a tray of beers. ‘I think you were mad to want an open-topped car given the amount of rain we have in Wales. And before you ask, no one has driven it since you returned to Oxford for the summer term, apart from your mother when she took it up to the new house and picked you up from the station today. We prefer to sit in the dry when we drive.'

‘You have no sense of adventure.'

‘Because we don't want to risk pneumonia?'

‘Dad, come and dance with me?' Joey's eldest daughter, Rachel, stood in the doorway, Edyth behind her, both with pleading looks on their faces.

‘It's times like this I'm glad I have four sons.' Victor watched Lloyd and Joey being dragged into the drawing room as the band struck up ‘I'm Sitting on Top of the World.' ‘Can I get you anything to eat, Dad?'

‘No thanks.' Billy saw Harry slip upstairs and followed him.

The bedrooms had also been stripped of furniture and Harry's footsteps echoed over the floorboards as he walked around the old nursery. He gazed at the seven columns of lines drawn on to the wall next to the fireplace. Each was topped by a name and inscribed with ages and dates in keeping with the family tradition of measuring every child on his or her birthday. All his half-sisters' and -brother's marks started with age one, his with age six, marked by his mother the year they had moved into the house. He fingered his topmost line, his age, twenty-one, his height neatly inscribed in Lloyd's careful writing beside it – 6 ft 2 in.

He stared at the unpolished square of boards, where a rug had been, and recalled the times he had sat, ostensibly reading on the window seat, while secretly watching his sisters hold dolls' tea parties under Bella's bossy tutelage. The scorch marks that marred the tiles of fairy scenes around the fireplace brought back memories of a traumatic Christmas Eve when Edyth had thrown lamp oil onto a sluggish fire and set the chimney ablaze. But that was Edyth; her well-meaning attempts to be helpful invariably ended in catastrophe.

Harry went to the bay, knelt on the window seat and ran his fingers over the names inexpertly carved there. Mansel James, the father he had never known because he had been murdered before his mother even knew she was pregnant. Edyth James had created the nursery for Mansel – her husband's nephew – when he had been orphaned. And, knowing that he was Mansel's illegitimate child, she had bequeathed her estate to him, to be held in trust until his thirtieth birthday. He had chiselled his own name with his penknife below Mansel's. He remembered doing it shortly after his mother and Lloyd had told him about his birth father and his inheritance.

The photographs that remained of Mansel were identical to those of himself. Mansel had also been tall, slim and fine-featured with slender hands, blond hair and blue eyes. And his mother had once mentioned that Mansel had wanted to be an artist. But, unlike him, Mansel had willingly given up his dreams to run Great-Aunt Edyth's businesses.

Was he being selfish in wanting to extend his education beyond the three years he had spent at Oxford by studying art in Paris? He had only read English at the insistence of the trustees, who believed that a degree would prepare him to take control of his affairs. They assumed he wanted nothing more than to make money, which he considered peculiar given that he already had more than one man could reasonably spend in a lifetime.

‘Am I interrupting?' Billy joined him.

‘Not at all, Granddad.' Harry smiled at the old man. ‘I came up to say goodbye to my bedroom but got side-tracked.'

‘It's understandable if you feel miserable. This is the only home you've ever really known.'

‘No, it isn't,' Harry contradicted. ‘I remember moving into your house when Mam was your housekeeper.'

‘You were a scrap of a half-starved boy. The biggest thing about you was your blue eyes.'

‘I was scared to death of you, Uncle Victor, Dad and Uncle Joey. You all seemed so big.'

Billy laughed. ‘You soon came round. I hope it all goes well for you in Paris, Harry.'

‘Thank you for sounding as though you really mean it.'

‘Everyone should have the chance to make their ambition come true.'

‘I know I'm privileged.' Harry was very conscious that if it hadn't been for the trust fund he would have had to go down the pit like so many of the boys he had played with as a child.

‘I'm not having a go at you, just trying to say that it's good to see you doing something you want to. Victor may have been forced out of the pit when management wouldn't take him back after the nineteen-eleven strike, but he should never have gone down there in the first place. He's a born farmer and he loves it. And Joey would never have had the chance to exercise his salesman's charm underground. He's far happier running Gwilym James.'

‘Where I'll be sooner or later.'

‘Only if you want to, Harry,' Billy advised, sensing a hint of bitterness in Harry's pronouncement. ‘Life's too short to waste time doing things you don't want to. Remember that. And now you should rejoin your guests.'

‘And be dragged on to the dance floor again.' Harry made a face.

‘You're determined to be a Harry with a hump today, aren't you?' Billy joked. ‘Since when haven't you liked dancing?'

‘Since I've been surrounded by babies like Alice Reynolds.'

‘Give her a couple of years and she'll be a charming young lady.'

‘Perhaps I'm too impatient to wait.' Harry followed his grandfather to the door. ‘Thanks, Granddad. You've always been there whenever I've needed someone to talk to.'

‘I may have sixteen grandchildren but you're the oldest, and the one I practised on, Harry. You taught me as much as I taught you.'

‘There you are, Harry. We've been looking for you everywhere.' Edyth ran up the stairs when she saw Harry and Billy leaving the nursery. ‘Mari's made a bon voyage cake; it's got a red ribbon round it … Granddad, you all right?'

Harry put his arm around Billy's shoulders when he began to cough, helping him back to the nursery window seat and lowering him on to it. To his alarm, Billy's cough grew sharper and more pronounced, his breathing more laboured. Seeing him fumble in his pocket, Harry produced his own handkerchief.

‘Edyth, run downstairs and get a glass of water.'

His sister stared at them, mesmerized.

‘Edyth!' Harry looked down at his grandfather as his sister backed towards the door. To his horror, bright red blood was pouring from Billy's mouth. He held his handkerchief to Billy's lips. ‘Edyth,' he struggled to keep calm, ‘please, go downstairs. Tell Dad to call a doctor.'

She turned and fled. Seconds later he heard a scream and a series of thuds.

Still coughing blood, Billy tried to rise to his feet. He pushed Harry away from him, then fell back and pointed to the door.