Swansea Girls (11 page)

‘What kind of a state?’ Martin didn’t know why he was asking. He already knew.

‘She said something about your father coming round and her falling against the sink.’

Martin closed his eyes tightly. ‘I should never have left her.’

‘You can’t be with her twenty-four hours a day, boy. Norah has taken her to hospital. Katie was upset by seeing your mother hurt and all this nonsense so I thought it best she spend the night with Lily in our house.’

‘I’ll go to the hospital.’

‘They won’t let you visit at this time of night. Chances are, they’ll have kept your mother in, but if they haven’t, Norah will have made up a bed for her. Best to leave seeing her until the morning.’

‘Thank you, Mr Williams.’

‘Go carefully,’ Roy warned as Martin stepped through the door into the chill early-morning air. Martin knew he wasn’t warning him about what he might meet in the street.

‘Up to bed, both of you,’ John ordered bleakly as he opened the front door.

‘Dad ...’

‘Bed, Joe, I’m in no mood for talking this out now.’

Helen needed no second bidding. Clutching her coat close to her, she ran upstairs. Joe hesitated for a moment, then followed.

John dropped the brown-paper carrier bag that held the ruined dress and closed the front door. He glanced at his watch. Two o’clock and his wife’s camel-hair coat still wasn’t on its hanger on the hallstand. Somehow it was easier not to question the late hours Esme kept when he could pretend to be asleep in his attic bedroom.

Unfastening the buttons on his lightweight Burberry, he tossed it over the newel post at the foot of the stairs and limped into the parlour. He winced as he switched on the lights. Esme had recently redecorated ‘contemporary’ style and he loathed it.

The house had been his grandparents’. He had moved in with them after his parents’ early death and hadn’t realised how much he loved the place until Esme had used the easing of post-war rationing restrictions as an excuse to introduce the latest decor and replace the oversized, solid Victorian furniture with spindle-legged, flimsy fashionable pieces. Perhaps it had been as well that both his grandparents had died before he had married so they hadn’t witnessed his wife’s modernisation of their home.

Refusing to make any concessions to the age or style of the house, Esme had called in a carpenter to board over the doors. Acid-etched and stained-glass panels had disappeared beneath sheets of hardboard nailed to within an inch of the door edge and framed with beading. The carved banisters on the stairs had suffered a similar fate. Then all the woodwork had been painted to ‘complement’ the new multi-primary colour schemes, although he failed to see how bright orange and red skirting boards complemented anything.

The parlour, now renamed ‘lounge’, had undergone the most radical change. It had been on the gloomy side with nets, Rexene-upholstered three-piece suite and a massive chenille-covered table, but it had also been a haven of tranquillity. Now, even the iron-framed and tiled grate he had once toasted bread in had been torn out, replaced by a recessed square set a foot above the floor to house an ugly gas fire. The lino was crimson, the nylon carpet square, green and purple intersected by black lines ‘Picasso style’, and the back-aching three-piece suite upholstered in an itchy grey and black nylon tweed that picked at the skin around his fingernails.

And it wasn’t as though he could sit anywhere other than this newly decorated ‘lounge’. The dining room had suffered the same indignity, the walls painted purple, the furniture replaced by an uncomfortable steel-and-Formica ‘dinette’ suite. Even the old kitchen at the back of the house had lost its range and been transformed into a ‘kitchenette’, ‘ette’ being the new appendage to almost every word that applied to household furnishings.

Occasionally, when he overheard housewives’ conversations in the warehouse he felt as though the whole world had gone diminutive. The only room on this floor that had retained its original name was the scullery, but it had cost him a small fortune to replace his grandmother’s copper boiler and mangle with the latest washing machine and electric wringer.

Esme’s and the children’s bedrooms were also ‘contemporary’. Only the three rooms in the attic, one of which he slept in, had escaped Esme’s thirst for change. The basement, at his insistence, held all the old furniture that he had categorically refused to throw out.

Loosening his bow tie, he went to the cocktail cabinet and pulled down the flap. Lights sparkled on highly polished mirrors, sending infinite rows of gold squiggle decorated glasses into the distance as the tinkle-plonk music-box strains of ‘Stranger in Paradise’ filled the air. Reaching for a bottle of whisky left over from Christmas, he poured himself a stiff measure.

‘I didn’t expect to find you up.’ Esme appeared in the doorway, a frothy concoction of feathers and netting perched on her immaculately styled blonde permanent wave, her duster coat open, revealing a narrow brown cocktail frock.

He closed the door of the cabinet. ‘And I didn’t expect you to be so late.’

‘Malcolm organised an end-of-run party. We got talking.’ She shrugged her shoulders in a well-rehearsed gesture. ‘You know how time goes.’

‘Malcolm?’

‘Our new leading man. I have mentioned him, but you obviously weren’t listening. He recently joined the English department at the training college.’ She stood, waiting.

Careful to rest his glass on one of the half-dozen Formica coasters chosen to match the carpet, he helped her out of her coat and carried it into the hall.

‘Hang it up properly; you didn’t get the shoulder seams straight last time,’ she called after him as she unpinned her hat.

He hesitated as he returned, staring at her, while he searched for the right words to tell her about Helen and the police station.

‘When you’ve finished studying me, I’ll have one of those.’ She pointed to his whisky as she reached for the cigarette box set on a side table.

‘I thought you always held your last-night parties at Dot’s.’

‘Malcolm’s bought a place in Belgrave Gardens. It’s more comfortable and convenient than Dot’s flat.’ She crossed one elegant, silk-clad leg over the other as he poured her a drink.

He slammed the cabinet door to silence ‘Stranger in Paradise’. ‘I wish you’d told me where you were going.’

‘It was one of those spontaneous things. None of us knew where we’d be until we were there.’

‘You could have telephoned.’

‘You were in the Mackworth.’

‘Only until eleven.’

‘Don’t tell me you missed me.’

‘I didn’t, the police ...’

‘Police ... Joe!’ She dropped her glass, spilling whisky over the sofa. He watched the stain sink in as it spread, hoping it would ruin the upholstery and provide an excuse to have the suite re-covered.

‘Joe is fine, and Helen – now.’ He couldn’t resist adding the last word or making it sound like a reproach. ‘Helen was taken to the police station. She was attacked.’

‘Attacked!’ Esme dabbed ineffectually at the stain with her handkerchief. ‘My God ...’

‘She wasn’t hurt, not seriously, but she was badly shocked. The police doctor examined her. He confirmed she’s still a virgin.’

‘You allowed a doctor to examine her intimate ...’

‘I had no choice. Helen was hysterical, you were nowhere to be found.’

‘You’re blaming me for this?’

‘No one’s blaming you for anything, Esme. From what I can gather, a boy attacked Helen outside the Pier Ballroom and tore her dress, another boy came to her rescue and stopped him but because the boy who attacked her was Larry Murton Davies ...’

‘Joe was going to a party at the Murton Davieses’ tonight. Larry’s twenty-first. There’s no way Larry would have been down the Pier,’ she contradicted, finally lighting her cigarette.

‘Joe was with him – not when Helen was attacked, of course ...’

‘Joe knows about this?’

‘He went to the station with Helen. There’s no doubt about it, Esme. The boy Helen was with hit Larry Murton Davies and from all accounts saved her from a lot worse than having her dress torn.’

‘What boy?’

‘Jack Clay.’

‘One of the Clays in the street! The one who went to Borstal! My God, the Murton Davieses will never invite Joe to their house again.’

‘Helen was attacked by Larry Murton Davies and all you’re concerned about is whether or not the Murton Davieses invite Joe to their house again? If Joe hasn’t the sense to tell them to go to hell after this, then I’ll do it for him.’

‘You said Helen’s fine, she wasn’t hurt ...’

‘I said she was shocked. It could have been much worse.’

‘But it wasn’t!’ she exclaimed, her voice rising in hysteria. ‘You’ve never grasped that it’s who you know that’s important in this town. Joe had an invitation to a party at the Murton Davieses. He had no need to go down the Pier ...’

‘He went there to pick up Helen and her friends.’

‘You let him have the car?’

‘I wasn’t using it.’

‘Joe – the university, his career – this could affect everything I’ve ... he’s worked for. Why on earth did you allow the police to ...’

It was the first time since their marriage that John had seen his wife flustered. ‘I didn’t allow the police to do anything. I wasn’t even there when Joe and Helen were taken to the station. They sent an officer to the Mackworth to get me.’

‘Then it will be all over town tomorrow that Joe and Helen were arrested. You fool,’ she hissed, needing to blame someone.

‘Joe wasn’t arrested, he was supporting his sister and it’s Helen you should be concerned about.’

‘Helen’s always looking for trouble. And that’s entirely your fault. You spoil her. Where’s Joe?’

‘Upstairs in bed. As is Helen.’

The relief on Esme’s face was palpable. She drew heavily on her cigarette. ‘If you hadn’t given Joe the car, the chances are Larry Murton Davies would have asked him to stay over. He has a sister two years younger than Joe. Emily’s a debutante; she came out in London, has been presented to the queen ...’

‘I couldn’t give a damn about debutantes. We’re talking about Helen.’ He noticed Esme’s hand was shaking and realised Helen wasn’t the only one in shock. ‘In my opinion the police only advised me not to take it any further because of the name Murton Davies.’

‘Knowing Helen, nothing happened. That girl over-dramatizes every situation.’

‘She took a dress from the new winter ball gown collection. The blue beaded strapless ...’

‘You allowed a girl of that age ...’

‘I allowed her to do nothing, Esme. I didn’t even know she had it. It was torn off her – the police would like to believe accidentally, caught on Murton Davies’s watch strap, although I have my doubts. Jack Clay saw her half naked, struggling with Murton Davies, assumed the worst and waded in.’

‘And who is Jack Clay to come to Helen’s defence?’

‘It appears he was with her.’

‘Idiot girl has absolutely no people sense. If I’d had my way we would have moved out of this street years ago and then there would have been no way that Helen would even know Jack Clay. It’s obvious she set out to make an exhibition of herself. And Joe risked everything ...’

Helen hugged her knees to her chest as she crouched against the boarded-in banisters on the first floor and listened as her mother’s voice grew more and more piercing in escalating anger. She could hear every word as clearly as if she had been in the lounge and the tirade confirmed what she had suspected for years. That her mother didn’t love her or care what happened to her – that she only cared about Joe.

‘Helen?’ Joe loomed in the doorway of his room, a shadow only fractionally darker than the gloom of the landing. ‘What are you doing out here?’

‘Listening,’ she confessed wretchedly.

‘They’ll calm down.’

‘Mam won’t, not this time.’ She began to cry, softly, weakly, as the events of the night finally hit home.

‘Come on, back to bed.’ Joe helped her from the floor and led her into her bedroom. ‘It won’t seem as bad in the morning.’

‘Yes, it will. You saw all those people staring. Everyone thinks I’m a slut.’

‘They won’t when I’m around, because I’ll set them straight. And I’ll sort out Larry. Murton Davies or not, he won’t get away with what he did to you tonight.’

‘If you fight him, it will only make things worse. He thought I was one of those girls you can buy. Nothing can change that.’

‘He was drunk; he didn’t know what he was doing. He made a mistake no one will ever make again, I promise you.’

‘You can’t look after me for ever.’

‘I won’t have to. People soon forget gossip, Helen.’

‘Not gossip like this.’

‘Get some sleep. You’ll be able to put everything into perspective in the morning.’ As Joe closed the door on his sister he reflected that unfortunately Helen was right. No one loved a piece of salacious gossip more than Swansea people. The older generation would tut-tut and shake their heads. Young girls would be warned to stay away from Helen – and boys? If his friends’ behaviour was anything to go by, they’d give her a wide berth in public and try to get as close as they could to her when no one was looking, in the hope of seeing even more of her than the crowd had down the Pier.

Silence, grey and intimidating, hung over Carlton Terrace as Brian, Martin and Jack rounded the corner.

‘I don’t start work until Monday,’ Brian began hesitantly as Jack walked on ahead.

‘So?’ Martin whispered, conscious of the noise of their footsteps reverberating over the pavement.

‘Maybe we could do something tomorrow. You could show me Swansea. I have a bike. You could ride pillion.’

‘I don’t know what it’s like in Pontypridd, but round here coppers aren’t everyone’s favourite people. It doesn’t pay to be seen with one.’

‘I thought after Cyprus ...’

‘You thought wrong. Didn’t you see the way your colleagues stared at you when you sat with me tonight? Roy Williams tried to warn you off, but you wouldn’t listen.’

‘We’re mates.’

‘Coppers don’t have mates, especially mates called Clay. If you don’t believe me, look at the way Jack was treated.’

‘We had to be sure of the facts.’