The Girl From Seaforth Sands (41 page)

Being only human, however, Ella could not help thinking wistfully how nice it would have been to have Amy near at hand; for the past couple of years the two of them had discussed every aspect of their life and thoughts – and, indeed, their loves – with a frankness that would have astonished most of the people they knew. Now, in a strange house in a strange city, surrounded by people she had met for the first time the previous day, Ella knew once again the sharp pangs of loneliness which had assailed her when she had first come to Liverpool.

But Philip was her friend; he had brought her here and would make sure that she had a good Christmas, even if their relationship never became any closer than it was now.

Vaguely comforted by this thought, Ella continued to make her way up to her room.

It was a small house with a dusty track running along the front of it, dividing it from the river, which at this time of year was in full spate and noisy enough to keep Mary awake at night, although after the first day she was so tired that she could, she thought, have slept on a clothes line.

But hard though the work was, it was done
with such happiness and delighted anticipation that Mary would not have missed it for the world. What was more, she had been impressed by the small town of Mold, set in a cup in the hills which reared around it like inverted green pudding basins; these were not the mountains of Wales but the gentle foothills, grazed by placid sheep and bedecked on their lower slopes by mixed woodland. Mary, who had only known the Liverpool area and the great city of Manchester, thought she had never seen country so beautiful.

She and Haydn had returned to the small market town on the day before Christmas Eve and had spent the intervening time preparing for the Christmas holiday. The children were wildly excited and welcomed Mary with simple delight because she was their father’s friend. They clearly wanted this beautiful golden girl to be their friend also and hung around her, asking questions, telling her of their lives, their school, their friends. Old Mrs Lloyd was equally delighted with her, particularly when she found that Mary meant to take full part in all the work of Christmas, as well as the festivities. Indeed, while they were washing up the dishes on that first evening, she had told Mary that much though she loved her grandsons, she was ‘beginning to be too old to handle them, good though they were’.

When Haydn and Mary had arrived in Mold, the children and old Mrs Lloyd had been settled round the kitchen table with pots of flour-and-water paste, and strips of previously painted newspaper. Under their grandmother’s tuition and with Mary’s help, the strips had been made into garlands, which Haydn pinned to the picture rails, festooning the room. The boys, Emrys and Geraint, were five and
six, attractive, rosy-faced children with identical round, dark-brown eyes, straight fringes of equally dark hair falling across their foreheads and sturdy young bodies. Because Emrys was tall for his age and Geraint rather shorter, Mary could scarcely tell them apart, but she realised that this was only because she did not yet know them very well. They both spoke Welsh as their first language – as, indeed, did Haydn and his mother – but they spoke English at school and courteously tried to speak it whenever they were in Mary’s company. Geraint was fluent, Emrys slightly less so, but Haydn said that the English of both boys would improve over Christmas and since they must speak English in school this was a good thing.

The two small boys had been out in the woods the previous day, and had cut festive greenery and a good clump of mistletoe to decorate the house. Now, the brilliant holly and ivy were wreathed around pictures and door frames, while the mistletoe was tacked to the kitchen ceiling. Haydn kissed all his family beneath it and, when the children were in bed and his mother snoozing before the fire, he kissed Mary, too, with a gentleness which touched her heart.

Preparations for the Christmas feast were already well advanced by Christmas Eve. Mrs Lloyd had baked mince pies, sugar cakes and an apple tart. The Christmas pudding, ceremoniously stirred by one and all and wrapped in its white linen cloth, had been boiled for hours, so that on the following day only a further hour’s cooking would see it ready for the table. The cockerel, which was to be the focus of the meal, had spent a year in a smallish run in the back garden, being fattened on grain gleaned
from the fields, dandelion leaves from the hedgerows which the boys collected on their way home from school, and any leftover scraps from the Lloyds’ table. Mary was grateful that the bird had been slain before her arrival, for she gathered that every year the little boys grew fond of their forthcoming meal and shed bitter tears over his demise.

‘It was not as if it was a friendly bird,’ Mrs Lloyd had grumbled to Mary in her stilted English. ‘Take your finger off soon as look at you, if you poked it through the wire netting. But the boys dug worms for it and thought of it as a pet, so I got Mr Evans from up the road to wring its neck while they was in school; that way, the loss wasn’t so personal, like.’

Mrs Lloyd had confided this news to Mary on her first night in Mold, when the two of them were sharing Mrs Lloyd’s bed in the tiny room under the eaves. Haydn and the boys slept in the slightly larger room, but Mary, who had made such a fuss about sleeping with her own sisters, was happy to share with Haydn’s mother. She would have been happy, she reflected, to sleep on the living room floor if it meant that she could become a part of this poor but happy family.

That night, before they went off to bed, the children had hung their stockings from the mantelpiece and had urged their father anxiously to make sure the fire was truly dead so that Father Christmas, in his descent down the chimney, did not set his boots or beard on fire. Mary did not think that either child truly expected the stockings to be bulging with presents next day, for they admitted that such a thing had never happened at Christmas before. There had been an orange one year and a tin whistle each, but not a great many gifts. This year,
however, she and Haydn had worked hard either to make or to buy small gifts for the boys, and Mary found herself eagerly anticipating their pleasure on the morrow. There would be nothing expensive, of course, but she had got Albert to whittle her a couple of toy railway engines and had herself painted one green and one scarlet, so that each child would know his own. She had made toffee and coconut ice in the kitchen of a friend and had wrapped them enticingly, and she knew Haydn had visited the penny bazaar whenever he had money to spare. One way and another, therefore, this should be a good Christmas.

When planning for the holiday she had taken Haydn’s advice and had bought Mrs Lloyd several skeins of wool; his mother, Haydn told her, was a great knitter and made all her own shawls, stockings and gloves. For Haydn himself Mary had bought two ounces of pipe tobacco and a clay pipe with a curly stem. She knew he liked to smoke occasionally, but seldom did so since tobacco was so expensive.

The fire was now beginning to die down and Haydn was carefully spreading the ash, so that it would be completely out by morning. The boys’ stockings hung on either side of the fireplace, satisfyingly bulky, and in one corner of the large living kitchen a small Christmas tree stood in its pot, its branches hung with paper ornaments, tinsel and a few home-made crackers. The boys, who had made the crackers in school and therefore must know the contents, were still as excited as though they were a complete novelty and were already arguing over who should have first pick when the great day arrived.

‘I think everything’s ready,’ Haydn said at last,
looking round the kitchen. Every surface gleamed and the lamplight reflected off the newly whitewashed walls, and cast into strong relief the bunches of holly and ivy, and the mistletoe on the ceiling.

Mrs Lloyd had gone to bed an hour previously, so that she and Mary were not trying to undress at the same time in such cramped conditions, and after a last glance around her Mary stood up. ‘Well, I’d best be off to bed myself, because tomorrow’s going to be pretty busy,’ she observed. ‘If we take the bird down to the baker for cooking and then go to church, do you think it will be ready by the time the service is over?’ She did not add, as she had been half tempted to do, that it might seem better if she were to stay at home and keep an eye on things, for the service would be in Welsh and would mean perhaps an hour, but probably longer, of extreme boredom, while the parson rabbited on and the congregation eyed this stranger among them with curiosity, if not antagonism. But she had realised that staying away from the service would lead to awkward questions, and for Haydn’s sake she wanted the day to be one of complete pleasure, so she had agreed to attend.

Haydn put his head on one side and grinned at her. ‘Cooked it will be in that time and probably overcooked,’ he said wryly. ‘You can’t stop a Welshman from preaching, cariad, especially on Christmas Day. But never fear, Roasty Jones knows all about Christmas services and all about sermons as well. He’ll put everyone’s bird in at the same time – and there’ll be a good few of ’em, so I tell you. That way they cooks slower . . .’ he smacked his lips. ‘. . . but taste better,’ he finished.

‘Right you are, then,’ Mary said.

She was turning towards the stairs when Haydn caught hold of her arms and swung her to face him. ‘You’re a good girl, Mary,’ he said. ‘This Christmas would have been nothing but hard work and sad thoughts of past Christmases if it hadn’t been for you. But I want you to know, my lovely girl, that it isn’t of my dear Rhiannon that I’ve been thinking these past couple of days. I loved her very much, but she died soon after Emrys’s birth, and now I’ve done with grieving and can turn back to making a life for myself and the boys. And . . . well, and . . .’ He glanced up at the ceiling and Mary followed his eyes. They were standing directly beneath the bunch of mistletoe. ‘Mary, fach, you’re the sweetest person, the best thing that’s happened in my life for several years,’ he said softly, then turned slightly to look towards the clock on the mantel; it was a few minutes past midnight. ‘Happy Christmas, cariad, and I pray to God we’ll share more of ’em.’

This time the kiss was neither soft nor gentle, but held all the hunger and longing a passionate man feels for the woman of his choice. All in a moment Mary knew that he loved her and that she loved him, too. She returned the embrace with a fervour which astonished her, and as his strong arms closed round her the strangest thought entered her head. I need never be alone again, the thought ran – yet Mary had never thought of herself as lonely until this moment of wonderful shared warmth and affection.

‘Mary? Do you . . .? Can you . . . ? I know I’m a pretty ordinary sort of feller and you’re a real little beauty, but I swear to you, you’ll want for nothing I can provide, if only . . . if only . . .’

Mary moved back from him a little and then, taking his face between her hands, she studied it for several breathless seconds.
He was right, he was a pretty ordinary sort of fellow and the only life he could offer her was likely to be a hard one, with a family to provide for before the banns were even called and an old mother dependent on him. Was she really considering marriage with him? Why, he was . . .

Slowly, with half-shut eyes, her mouth went to meet his and Haydn prolonged the kiss, stroking her back in comforting circles as though she had been a child. By the time she opened her eyes again and broke free of him, she knew that she would never see him as plain, let alone ordinary, again. He was her man, the one person in the world she thought she could never live without, and the fact that he came complete with responsibilities . . . well, what did that matter? What mattered most was that they loved one another.

‘Mary? Oh, cariad, I want you . . . but properly, in marriage, not . . .’

‘Dear Haydn,’ Mary whispered, clinging. ‘Oh, darling Haydn! Of course I’ll marry you and as soon as you like.’

Haydn began to smile. He put both arms round her and lifted her off her feet, giving a subdued cheer as he did so. ‘Oh, my lovely girl! What a Christmas this will be!’

‘Amy! It’s morning and you said when morning came . . . oh, Amy,
do
wake up!’

Amy struggled out of a deep and satisfying sleep to find something – or someone – sitting on her stomach while a voice, all the more imperative because it was whispering, bade her to ‘wake up . . . you
promised
, so you did! As soon as it’s morning, you said . . .’

Amy heaved up her middle to form a bridge and Becky, for it was undoubtedly she, rolled off her sister and landed with a plop on the cold linoleum. She also giggled, but then repeated obstinately, ‘But you did promise, Amy, you know you did! As soon as it’s day, you said, and there’s light out there, I can see clouds . . . oh, dear Amy,
do
wake up!’

From the far side of the bed, against the wall, another voice added itself to the monologue. ‘For God’s sweet sake tell that kid to shurrup and go back to sleep. It’s the middle of the bleedin’ night,’ Minnie said in a sleep-blurred voice. ‘Becky, if you want my present when it’s really daytime then you’ll shurrup now, like I said, and let honest folk sleep. Remember, your sister and meself didn’t get home till gone ten, what wi’ one thing and another.’

‘Oh! But Minnie, there’s day on t’other side o’ the curtains, honest to God there is! Wait, I’ll go and pull ’em back so’s you can see.’

There was a brief struggle, then thin grey light invaded the room. Amy groaned and sat up. ‘Look, Becky, any fool could tell you that it isn’t daylight at all, it’s just . . . just that an overcast sky . . . if I let you open one present now, will you go back to sleep until it really is morning? It gets properly light at about eight o’clock I suppose, so . . .’

‘Eight o’clock! But how can I open a present now, Amy? Me stockin’ is downstairs, hung by the fire so’s Father Christmas would find it as soon as he slid down the chimbley. I suppose I could go down on tiptoes, but like as not . . .’

‘If you go over to the washstand you’ll see my spongebag on the window side. Open that and you’ll find a little parcel . . . wait, best light the candle or you won’t know what you’ve got. Oh,
what a pest you are, Becky Logan!’ Amy sat up in bed and reaching for the matches, lit the candle. By its light Becky ran across to the washstand, fumbled in her sister’s spongebag, and presently returned to the bedside with a small parcel in one hand and an expression of great delight written large on her small fair face.