Authors: Catrin Collier
‘Only the gardens as a kid, because I wasn’t supposed to.’
‘The pull of the forbidden has always been stronger than duty. Do you want China tea, or some of Jan’s herbal? It is very good, helps the digestion, and is guaranteed to aid a good night’s rest.’
‘I shouldn’t have come.’
‘Nonsense, it’s open house here day and night. It has to be with so many of us living under one roof, and friends are always welcome.’ Erik reached down a wooden box and spooned some dried leaves into a jug. ‘I can guess why you’re here.’
‘You’ve heard about what happened to Diana?’
‘It’s all over town. I told you marriage is no answer for people like us.’
‘Diana’s a nice girl.’
‘So was my wife.’ Erik lit the gas, and took two cigarettes from his pocket. Lighting them both on the flame before putting the kettle on to boil, he handed one to Wyn.
‘I didn’t know you were married?’
‘I was young. My father insisted on it. He saw it as a cure for my “disease”. He picked the prettiest and most well-endowed girl in town. She was also experienced, but he saw that as an advantage. As he couldn’t trust me to do my marital duty, he hoped she would seduce me.’
‘And this girl didn’t mind marrying you?’
‘It was a matter of economics. Her father was poor, mine was rich. Poor father,’ he shook his head fondly, ‘he would have been better off keeping his money. The honeymoon was a disaster. She went off with a lifeguard, I consoled myself with a waiter.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘But of course. Wyn, take the word of someone who has tried and failed. No matter what you do, your marriage to Diana is doomed. You’re like a fish trying to live with a bird. In their own environs birds and fish are perfectly nice creatures, but no matter how fond they are of one another, one needs air to survive, the other water.’ He strained the tea, and handed Wyn a cup. ‘I’m sorry, you came here looking for sympathy and reassurance, and I am not being very helpful.’
‘I just don’t know which way to turn!’ Wyn raged, allowing his anger to surface for the first time since William had met him at the station.
‘Look at it logically. What can you do, except go on the way you are?’
‘And carry on putting up with the taunts, the gossip, the insults to Diana? She deserves better.’
‘And maybe one day she’ll find it. You aren’t the only one who is unhappy, Wyn. I’d rather be fighting in my own country than here. As it is, on a more personal level, I’d like to see more of you, talk to you the way we are now, get to know you better.’
‘So would I. But …’
‘… you made a promise to Diana. So in the meantime you live with your wife, and spend all your free time with her.’
‘At least we can see one another in the factory.’
‘After today I think we should keep it to seeing, not talking. Those bruises do nothing to enhance your appearance.’
‘I’d like to make plans, look ahead, but I can’t see a future for myself, and I’m not just talking about the war. This tea is foul.’ Wyn abandoned his cup. ‘I’m sorry, you have your own problems without listening to mine.’
‘Stop apologising, I’d like to help.’
‘I have to go.’
‘It’s late. Everyone will be asleep in your house. Stay a while. Come into the hall with the others. We could play cards, or chess. You do play chess?’
‘I’m not very good.’
‘Neither am I.’
‘Why don’t I believe you?’
‘You’re right, this is disgusting. Perhaps I made it the wrong way.’ Erik emptied both cups down the sink. ‘Come on, I’ll introduce you to my fellow lodgers. You’ll find that we Europeans are a little more tolerant than most of your countrymen.’
‘Some other time.’ Wyn hesitated at the door. ‘I shouldn’t have disturbed you. I don’t even know why I came.’
‘Loneliness?’
‘That’s all the more reason to stay away.’ He walked out of the room knowing, without looking back, that Erik was watching him leave.
Ronnie had deliberately placed the alarm clock out of reach on the tallboy opposite the bed. It was the only way he could guarantee that he would get up in the morning. When it rang, he reluctantly forced himself into consciousness, folded back the bedcovers and fumbled his way through the blackout. Silencing the bell, he hitched up the cord on his pyjama trousers, pushed the curtains aside and stared out at the murky silhouette of the mountain that flowed down to the back wall of Laura’s house.
Dawn was still two hours away. He wondered how he’d managed to run the Tumble café nineteen hours a day for all those years before he had married Maud. This was only the second morning he’d had to open up for the early morning tram and train crews, and he felt as though he were sleepwalking.
Allowing the curtain to fall, he switched on the light. The sight of Tony still lying in one half of the double bed irritated him. Pulling back the bedclothes, he folded them over the footboard before picking up his crutch and the dressing gown that had been Eddie’s.
Tony creased his eyes against the light. He began to protest, but as the symptoms of hangover penetrated his awareness, his mumblings turned into a moan.
‘It’s morning,’ Ronnie announced in a deliberately loud voice. Scooping his clothes from the chair next to the bed, he limped to the door.
‘My head hurts like hell.’ Unable to face moving to the bottom of the bed to retrieve the sheet and blankets, Tony curled into the foetal position and pulled the pillow over his head.
‘And so it should after what you drank.’
‘It’s worse than it’s ever been before.’
‘Probably because I hit you.’
Tony lifted the pillow fractionally higher. ‘You hit me?’
‘You needed curbing.’
‘What was I doing?’ Tony sat up and reached across to the washstand. Lifting the huge water jug to his lips he drank deeply.
‘You can’t remember?’
‘Not much. Bloody hell, I thought I was parched enough to drink anything but this water is foul.’
‘It’s been standing there since I arrived.’
‘You haven’t refilled it with fresh?’
‘I prefer to wash downstairs.’ Ronnie opened the door and padded down the stairs on bare feet, wincing as his soles came into contact with the flagstones in the passage. Only the soft glow from the fire illuminated the kitchen. Switching on the light, he picked up the kettle, filled it in the washhouse and put it on the hob to boil.
Leaving his clothes on one of the easy chairs he walked outside to the ty bach. There was a smell of daffodils and bluebells in the air. Summer was following close on the heels of spring, and it occurred to him that it would be the second summer since Maud had died. When he had returned to Wales he had thought everything would remind him of her, but if anything it had been easier to carry on with his life here, than it had in Italy. The longer he stayed in the town the more he realised that most of his good memories of Maud were rooted in Bardi, not Pontypridd.
Back in the washhouse he stripped off his dressing gown and pyjamas, filled the huge Belfast sink with cold water and plunged his head into it. The shock cleared the last vestiges of sleep from his brain.
‘I’ve wet the tea.’ Tony wandered in and sank down on to Laura’s upturned wooden washtub behind him.
‘Do you want a medal?’
‘Did I make a total fool of myself yesterday?’
‘Yes.’
‘There was still no need to thump me,’ Tony complained ruefully, rubbing the crown of his head.
‘Yes there was.’ Ronnie doused a coarse flannel in the water, soaped it and rubbed his chest. ‘At the time you were pushing Diana Powell around.’
‘Did I hit her?’
‘No, but only because I was there to stop you. You also demanded that she hand over Billy to you.’ He rinsed out the flannel and wiped the lather from his skin.
‘Oh hell!’
‘You really don’t remember?’
‘I remember sitting in the park waiting for her, getting angrier and angrier …’
‘And drunk.’
Tony ignored Ronnie’s jibe.
‘You really don’t remember what happened in the café?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Go and pour that tea. We have to talk.’
‘I’ll find Diana this morning and apologise.’
‘Wyn Rees might kill you if you try. You’ve set the whole town talking. What on earth possessed you to say those things?’
‘I was angry because she’d married Wyn. Angry because she didn’t even tell me she was pregnant. So I got plastered.’ Tony went into the kitchen, took two cups down from the dresser and poured out the tea.
‘Sensible men crawl into a corner to get drunk, do it quietly, and then sleep it off,’ Ronnie shouted through the open doorway.
‘I wish I had.’
‘I bet you do.’ Ronnie finished washing, let the water out of the sink, sluiced it down, and walked into the kitchen. He climbed into his underwear, picked up his trousers and put them on, slipping his braces over his vest to keep them from falling down. Sitting on a chair, he glanced at Tony as he rolled on his socks. His brother was hunched over the table, his head in his hands, his pyjama buttons undone. ‘Are you the father of her baby?’
‘I’m a more likely father than Wyn Rees.’
‘Then why didn’t you marry her?’
Tony shrugged his shoulders.
‘For pity’s sake Tony, you’re not a child and I’m not asking you who stole the last biscuit out of the barrel. If you thought enough of Diana to climb into bed with her, why didn’t you marry her?’
‘You thought enough of Alma to sleep with her all the time she worked for us, yet you never married her.’
‘For which I’m heartily ashamed of myself.’
‘Just as well you didn’t though, isn’t it? Because if you had, you wouldn’t have been able to marry Maud and take her to Italy.’
‘Are you trying to tell me that you were only using Diana until something better came along?’
‘Wasn’t that what you did with Alma?’
Ronnie’s hands closed into fists. Tony backed out of his chair. Slowly, deliberately, Ronnie unclenched his fingers.
‘If you set out to seduce Diana to emulate me, you’ve turned out a sorry mess of a man, Tony. It’s bad enough I made a mistake, without you following in my footsteps.’ Picking up his tea he put it on the mantelpiece. Prising the top from a Vaseline tin he smeared a thin layer on to his fingers, rubbed it through his hair, marked a parting and combed it until it lay flat.
‘I didn’t set out to do anything,’ Tony confessed miserably as he settled into one of the easy chairs. ‘I loved her.’
‘Funny way you had of showing it.’
‘I wanted to marry her. I asked her. We were on the point of buying the rings when she decided to stay behind in the café one night after closing. That’s when I found out I wasn’t the first.’
‘Then you’re not the father …’
‘I’m the father, all right. The first was Ben Springer, and it happened years ago.’
‘Didn’t she work for him in his shoe shop?’
‘For a while, after she and Maud came back from the Infirmary. He raped her.’
‘And that’s why you wouldn’t marry her? Because she had been raped?’
‘A girl can do something besides open her legs. She can fight back.’
‘Did she?’
‘I don’t know. All I know is that after we … afterwards she was sick. I thought … I didn’t know what to think. Before I could ask her about it, she left.’
‘And you didn’t go after her?’
‘You can’t blame me for not wanting another man’s leavings. I’d already joined the army. A few days later I began training.’
‘And you never wrote to her?’
‘What was the point?’
‘You abandoned her. Left her carrying your child?’
Tony had never seen his brother like this before. Grim-faced, darkly serious.
‘I didn’t know about the baby,’ he protested. ‘How could I? She never told me.’
‘All I can say is, thank God she met Wyn Rees.’
‘A queer?’
‘He gave her a name and a roof over her head. What would you rather, your son born in Tyfica Road or the workhouse?’
‘That’s exactly it. Billy is my son. I never thought I’d feel this way about him.’
‘You’ve made a right pig’s ear of your life and hers.’
‘You could have done the same thing. For all you knew Alma might have been carrying your baby. In fact half of Pontypridd thought she was in the family way after you’d gone. She went through hell until Charlie offered her a job and married her, so don’t come the lily-white hero to me, dear brother.’
‘I wasn’t the one who got drunk and screamed that a married woman’s child was mine in the café.’
‘I told you, I’ll go round to Tyfica Road and apologise.’
‘And start another rumour. Like hell you will. You’re out of here on the first train to Birmingham. You’re going to spend the rest of your leave helping Mama with the little ones.’
‘If I apologise …’
‘If you even try, Wyn Rees will knock your block off and justifiably so. And all the sympathy would be on his side. Diana is his wife.’
‘And the kid he thinks is his?’
‘He doesn’t think anything, Tony. He knows. Diana isn’t the kind of girl who’d trick a man into marrying her. Wyn Rees married her because he wanted to.’
‘A man like that wouldn’t know what to do with a wife.’
‘He knows how to take care of one, which is more than you do. This may surprise you, little brother, but there’s a hell of a lot more to marriage than what goes on between the sheets.’ He tipped hot water into his shaving mug. ‘Get dressed, and packed. We’re going down the station to buy that ticket.’
Tony looked at him sideways. ‘This couldn’t have anything to do with you by any chance? Diana’s a pretty girl. Apart from the colouring, she even looks a little like Maud. They were as close as sisters. You’re not thinking of replacing Maud with -’
Tony didn’t say another word. Ronnie dropped his shaving brush, grabbed the collar of his brother’s pyjama jacket, hoisted him out of the chair and slammed him against the wall.
‘I don’t know what’s got into you, but it’s time someone did some straight talking and as Papa’s dead it falls on me. I picked up the pieces of your mess yesterday, not because of you, but because of Diana. Whatever’s happened to her, she’s a good girl, and they’re rarer than five-bob notes. You had your chance to marry her and lost it. If you have a single shred of decency left, you’ll never set foot in Pontypridd again.’
‘She was used goods.’
‘She was a victim.’
‘You couldn’t expect me to marry a girl who’d been with another man?’
‘Seems to me she didn’t have much choice in the matter. Grow up, Tony. It’s not a woman’s past that’s important but her future. You’ve picked up your morality from the Middle Ages.’
‘If by that you mean I expect my wife to be a virgin on my wedding night, you’re damned right.’
‘After what you did to Diana, she wouldn’t have been that anyway.’
‘I was in the army. I could have been killed. A lot were. Eddie …’
‘Men have been using that excuse since the Trojans fought the Spartans. Have you thought what would have happened to her if you had been killed?’
‘She had her family.’
‘You left her with a baby and the choice of going into the workhouse, or finding a man not quite as picky as you. One who’d settle for “used goods” as you put it, and the responsibility of keeping another man’s child. As I said, thank God for Wyn Rees. He’ll do a better job of bringing up that boy than you would have. Go and pack, Tony, and while you’re at it, stop thinking about yourself, and spare a thought for Billy. He won’t always be a baby. How do you think he’ll feel if he ever finds out that his father abandoned his mother after seducing her?’ Releasing his hold, Ronnie turned aside and retrieved his shaving brush. He was vaguely aware of Tony leaving the room. He didn’t trust himself to go after him.
Diana had made an even bigger mistake than Tony. She’d been naive enough to believe herself in love with a shallow idiot who’d put no more value on her than he would have a whore in station yard. Less in fact, because he would have had to pay for a whore.
After last night, he’d sympathised with Wyn. Now he felt even sorrier for Diana. Trapped in a marriage of convenience with a baby to bring up, what could she possibly know of love and happiness?
‘We’re there.’ Judy Crofter rose to her feet as the train pulled into the sidings of the factory. ‘Come on, lazybones.’ She shook Jenny, who was sitting in the corner of the carriage.
‘I’m not used to getting up in the middle of the night, and I’m not at all sure I want to get used to it,’ Jenny griped as she hoisted herself out of her seat to join the queue of girls jamming the train aisles.
‘It gets better,’ Myrtle said kindly as she moved in behind her.
‘How long have you been working here?’
‘Six months.’
‘I’ll never last that long.’
The train doors opened and cool air blew in. After the close, fetid stuffiness of the carriages it had the bracing effect of an Arctic breeze. They moved forward slowly, shuffling off the train, along the platform and into the huge sheds that housed the changing rooms. Men through one entrance, women another. Jenny had been amazed by the size of the women’s cloakroom which was divided into two sides by a high barrier: a ‘dirty side’ to house their streetwear, and a ‘clean side’ where their work clothes were kept.
The girls ranged up in front of rails of coat-hangers and started undressing. Coats, jackets, skirts, blouses, dresses, shoes and jewellery were hung away in lockers. Jenny let down her waist-length hair, meticulously careful, after heavy warnings about the catastrophic damage just one stray spark from a metal object could cause, to pull out every hairpin. Crossing the barrier to the ‘clean’ side, she took down the trousered, sludge-coloured overalls she’d been issued with on her arrival, pulled them on and fastened the row of rubber buttons. Even the belt had a rubber buckle. The cloth was thick, heavy and itchy like Welsh flannel, and about as glamorous in her eyes. Tying her hair back with ribbons, she tucked it into her equally drab dust hat. The last thing she did was lace up the rubber-soled shoes that looked even more cumbersome than army boots.