‘Your chariot awaits, and someone who wants to talk to you. I picked him up half-way down the Graig hill.’
Ronnie looked behind Trevor and saw his father hovering in the doorway holding his mother’s fox fur coat.
‘I’ll put the cases in the car,’ Trevor said as he took them from Ronnie.
Ronnie walked warily towards his father and extended his hand. He’d feared a rebuff, but his father took it.
‘Twenty years I’ve been wanting to send this to your grandfather, but there’s always been something. Another café to open, or worries about it getting lost in the post, or one of you needing something ...’ He folded a fifty-pound note into Ronnie’s palm. ‘It’s for your grandfather,’ he repeated sternly as though Ronnie was likely to misunderstand him. ‘To buy a white suit and a good horse. All his life he’s wanted a white suit and a good horse. And I promised when I left home that I would buy them for him. And this’, he gave Ronnie another twenty pounds, ‘is for your grandmother and Aunt Theresa to buy new Sunday clothes. You mind you tell them what it’s for.’
‘I will, Papa, but the business won’t stand this money being taken out ...’
‘You’re not the only one who knows how to put a little by,’ his father admonished. ‘And this is for you.’ He gave him one more fifty-pound note. ‘There won’t be enough food put away on the farm to feed two extra mouths until the crops come in. And I won’t have your grandparents and aunt giving you their rations.’
‘Papa –’
‘Maud!’
Ronnie heard the shock in Trevor’s voice and looked behind him. Maud was clinging to the elegantly-carved mahogany banisters as she walked slowly down the stairs.
‘Please don’t be angry,’ she laughed as Ronnie rushed to her side. ‘I wanted to see if I could do it. And I have!’ she announced triumphantly, allowing him to help her as she reached the last step.
‘I told you ...’
‘I know.’
‘This is your wife?’ his father asked, although he’d known Maud since the day she was born.
‘Yes Papa.’
‘This is for you.’ He thrust the fur coat at her. ‘Don’t thank me, it’s none of my doing, it’s Ronnie’s mother’s, and I wouldn’t let her come this morning to give it to you herself. Couldn’t stand any more of her fussing and crying. She won’t wear it, not here where it rains all the time. And it can get cold in Italy in winter.’
‘Mr Ronconi, I can’t take this,’ Maud gasped.
‘None of my doing. Just you see that she wears it, Ronnie. Looks like she needs something to keep her bones warm. There’s no flesh on them to do the job.’
‘Yes Papa,’ he choked back his laughter as he helped Maud into the coat.
‘I’ve got the wedding dress and veil.’ Trevor ran down the stairs with them in his arms. ‘If there’s nothing else we should be on our way.’
‘There’s nothing else.’ Weighing up the austere expression on Mr Ronconi’s face, and balancing it against the twinkle in his eye, Maud stepped towards him and ventured a hug. He kissed the top of her head, then propelled her gently back to Ronnie.
‘I’ve an idea. Why don’t you come to Cardiff with us, Mr Ronconi?’ Trevor asked. ‘You can keep me awake on the way back. I had a night call,’ he explained.
‘As if I can spare the time to stand on railway platforms, when this good-for-nothing son of mine leaves me to run the business on my own. Who’s going to open the cafés in the morning now? That’s what I’d like to know.’
‘Goodbye Papa,’ Ronnie lifted his hand again, but his father clasped him by the shoulders and kissed him on both cheeks.
‘You think you could have found a healthy one,’ he grumbled as Trevor helped Maud to the car.
‘She’s the one I want, Papa.’
‘Then you’d better make her healthy.’
‘I’ll try.’
Ronnie stood on the steps of the New Inn and watched as his father walked away without a backward glance.
‘Laura put a rug and a pillow there for you, Maud,’ Trevor called from the driving seat as Ronnie finally climbed into the back of the car with her. ‘She wants you to take them on the train with you.’ He had to repeat himself twice before Maud and Ronnie answered. They were engrossed in watching the bowed, solitary figure of his father as he made his way through the litter-strewn streets towards the Tumble.
Andrew John stood, arms folded loosely over the barrier in Paddington Station, watching the tides of people as they flowed from the Swansea train. He kept a close eye on those leaving the third– and second-class carriages, searching for a glimpse of Ronnie’s dark, slicked-back hair, or Maud’s blonde curls.
‘Doctor John?’ Ronnie stood before him, dressed in a good winter-weight overcoat and expensive trilby.
‘Ronnie?’ Andrew shook his hand enthusiastically.
‘It’s very good of you to meet us.’
‘Not at all. After all, we are brothers-in-law now.’
‘So everyone in Pontypridd keeps reminding me.’
‘Where’s Maud?’ Andrew looked over Ronnie’s shoulder for the pert, pretty blonde who’d teased him in Graig Avenue when he’d gone there with Bethan.
‘She’s still in the carriage, I thought it best for her to stay there until I knew where your car was.’
‘It’s over there,’ Andrew waved his hand to the left. ‘When I showed them my bag and told them I was waiting to pick up a semi-invalid they let me park it by the taxi ranks.’
‘I’ll get the porter.’ Ronnie disappeared into the crowd, re-emerging moments later with Maud in his arms and a porter in tow. Andrew rushed to open the car doors. Ronnie deposited Maud tenderly on the back seat before walking around to help Andrew stack the cases in the boot.
‘The boat sails at eleven tonight,’ he murmured, heaving his suitcase next to Maud’s Gladstone.
‘So Trevor told me.’ Andrew slammed the boot shut. ‘Bethan has a meal waiting. She wanted to come, but I wouldn’t let her. Not in her condition in this crush, but she’s desperate to see you.’
‘Me or Maud?’ Ronnie smiled.
‘Both.’ Andrew delved under the front seat for the starting handle. As soon as the car purred into life he removed it quickly and dived into the front seat.
‘Nice car,’ Ronnie commented from the back seat, where he’d sat next to Maud before Andrew had had a chance to greet Bethan’s sister.
‘Nice of you to say so, but it’s not mine,’ Andrew replied as he pushed the car into gear. ‘I borrowed it off my brother-in-law.’
‘Sorry.’
‘So am I,’ Andrew replied drily as he pulled slowly out of the station and up into the light of the street. ‘If it was mine, it would mean that I was doing better than I am.’
‘This is London!’ Maud cried out excitedly, staring round-eyed in wonder at the façades of terraces that were even longer, larger and grander than the ones she’d seen in Cardiff.
‘This is London!’ Andrew steered carefully around a taxi and a bus; as he pulled up at a junction he looked in the mirror and smiled at his sister-in-law. The smile died on his lips. Maud had pulled back the thick blanket and fur coat that Ronnie had wrapped round her when he had carried her from the train to the car, and was sitting forward, poised on the edge of her seat, holding Ronnie’s hand. The sight of her thin, almost skeletal figure reminded him of the line, ‘The skull beneath the skin’, and it took no imagination on his part to place Maud amongst the cadavers that the first-year students in the hospital practised on. Realising that Ronnie was watching him, he pulled the wheel sharply to the left, and concentrated on his driving.
‘Bethan’s so looking forward to seeing you, and getting all the gossip from home.’
‘There’s lots,’ Maud pronounced with an air of bright animation that belied her outward appearance of wan, sickly fragility. ‘But I’ve no intention of telling you any of it in advance.’
‘Same old Maud,’ Andrew gave a rather force
d laugh. ‘Tell me Ronnie, do you think you’ll succeed in turning her into a subservient wife?’
‘A wife, yes,’ Ronnie caught Maud’s hand and pressed it to his lips. ‘Subservient, never.’
‘Beth, this is lovely. Really lovely.’ Maud lay back on Bethan and Andrew’s bed, watching as Bethan sat on her dressing-table stool and combed her hair.
‘You like the flat then?’ Bethan was horror-struck by Maud’s appearance, but well-schooled by her mother in the art of concealing her feelings, she kept her shock hidden. They heard the sound of male laughter coming from the living room, accompanied by the clinking of ice dropping into whisky glasses.
Maud laid her hand on Bethan’s.
‘You’re really happy, aren’t you?’
‘Ecstatic!’ Bethan smiled, patting her enormous stomach proudly.
‘I do envy you. I hope Ronnie and I have a dozen.’
‘I suggest you get well first.’
‘I intend to. So does Ronnie, and he always seems to get his own way.’
‘With you around, he won’t be doing that for long.’
She washed her hands in the bathroom, and went into the kitchen. Maud followed her and sat on one of the up-to-the minute, art deco beechwood chairs that Andrew had bought in Barker’s in Kensington.
‘And you,’ Bethan asked, looking her sister in the eye. ‘Are you happy with Ronnie?’
‘Yes. He’s wonderful. I never thought of marrying him before he asked me. Well, he always seemed so much older than me. But he’s terribly good-looking, and ... and ...’
‘He swept you off your feet?’
‘Something like that,’ Maud answered shyly. Bethan gave her sister a hug before she began to dish out the food. It was obvious to anyone who looked that Maud was in the first flush of love – or infatuation. For both Ronnie’s and Maud’s sake she hoped it was the former, and of the kind that would last. With what lay ahead, they’d both need it.
‘I’ve found you a porter, he’ll take your cases to your cabin, and I had a word with a customs officer. He’s promised to see you and Maud through as quickly as he can. I’ve also managed to get a chair. God knows how old it is, but it should hold Maud’s weight until you’ve wheeled her to the cabin. You’ve got your tickets and everything?’
‘Everything being our marriage certificate and my original Italian passport. There wasn’t time to see to anything else. But it should be enough. Thank you for a lovely evening and for driving us here.’
Ronnie shook Andrew’s hand. ‘Shall we see if we can prise those two apart?’ He nodded to the car where Bethan and Maud were still locked in conversation.
Andrew and Bethan watched as Ronnie, porter in his wake, wheeled Maud into the customs hall.
‘She’s dying, isn’t she?’ Bethan asked, clinging to her husband.
‘She has advanced tuberculosis, yes,’ he admitted, ‘but Ronnie is doing all he can. And if she doesn’t live, it won’t be for the want of him trying. He’s taking her to the best place. Italy has a wonderful climate. Not too hot, not too cold. Dry, warm, clean air. It just might work.’
‘And it might not.’ She lifted the collar of her coat around her neck and shivered. The air was chill, with a hint of snow in it. He put his arm tenderly round her shoulders.
‘If sheer bloody-mindedness counts for anything in effecting a cure, then Ronnie will have Maud fit, well and working in the fields by the end of the summer,’ he pronounced resolutely. He slipped his fingers beneath her chin and lifted her face to his. ‘How about we go home to bed?’ he murmured huskily, suddenly very grateful for all his blessings.
Chapter Twenty-eight
The crossing was a nightmare. The steward gleefully told Ronnie as he emptied Maud’s sick bowls down the toilet that he hadn’t seen a rougher one in thirty years. And the whole time Maud tossed and turned uncomplainingly in her narrow bunk, Ronnie crouched on his knees beside her, sponging her feverish face with tepid water and holding empty bowls to her mouth. He had to take the coats that he’d hung on the door and fold them on to the bunk he didn’t have time to sleep in, as their alarming swaying from side to side began to affect him too.
He had cause to remember his glib words to Evan many times over during the course of that interminable crossing: ‘I’ll get a cabin with a berth, then all Maud has to do is sleep until Calais.’ No one slept. Not Maud. Not him, and none of the other passengers if the noises coming from the corridors were anything to go by. And the nightmare didn’t end with the docking of the ship.
Calais was still shrouded in grey misty night when he wheeled Maud off the ship. He peered in the direction that a blue-coated official pointed him in, and just about managed to make out the wavering lights of the customs sheds that punctuated the darkness. The French excise officers were neither as sympathetic nor as understanding as the ones Andrew had spoken to in Tilbury. They shouted at him in harsh guttural French, which they repeated loudly, syllable for syllable, even when he shrugged his shoulders and spoke to them in English and Italian. They made no allowances for Maud’s weakness, insisting that she leave the wheelchair so they could search the folds of the fur coat and blankets, and when Ronnie tried to help her back into the chair when they’d completed their search, he discovered to his fury that someone had taken it. He supported Maud as best he could, while the officers rummaged through her Gladstone and fingered her clothes. All he could do was stand by incensed, watching helplessly as they heaped the silk underwear his sisters had bought Maud on to their rough wooden tables, and opened the packet of contraceptives Trevor had given him. Long before the search was finished Maud fainted, the dead weight of her head lolling weakly against his shoulder.
Eventually the officials moved on to their next victim, leaving him, and an unconscious Maud, to repack their own bags. Fortunately an elderly British couple came to his assistance, the husband going in search of porters while the wife packed for him.
Even then it seemed to take an eternity of shouting, arguing and bad-tempered exchanges before he managed to leave the customs shed. Tipping the porter with an English ten shilling note, the lowest coinage he had, he persuaded the fellow to follow him to the trains. There, only after ten harassed minutes, they managed to locate the carriage that was to take them to Genoa. The Italian steward helped him get Maud aboard, stowed away their suitcases in the stateroom he had booked, pulled down their beds, and offered to heat up some soup for Maud who had still not recovered from her faint.
Pathetically grateful for the steward’s kindness, help and blessedly familiar language, Ronnie gave him a pound, promising the man more if he would help him care for Maud on the journey. As soon as they were alone, Ronnie undressed her and put her between the stiff, starched sheets on the makeshift bed. She lay there like a wax doll, white, silent and just as lifeless.
She came round as dawn was breaking over the horizon of the French countryside. Pushing aside the chicken soup Ronnie tried to feed her, she insisted on sitting up and looking at everything; exclaiming at the red-roofed, greystone French farmhouses, similar yet different from the ones in Wales. The flat country, the level patchwork of fields, the towns, so strange, peculiar and foreign after Pontypridd. Afraid of missing anything, her eyes darted in their sockets as she tried to assimilate all that could be seen from the window. She found something to wonder over with every mile they passed: a windmill, a French peasant woman driving a donkey, a man wearing a beret ... When she began to cough Ronnie fed her three spoonfuls instead of the usual single spoonful of mixture in the hope that it would induce her to rest, but if anything it had the opposite effect. Bright-eyed, feverish, she point-blank refused to lie down.
The steward brought them a meal when Ronnie declined to visit the dining car. Ronnie laid the trays over their knees on the bed. Sitting next to Maud, he tried to force her to eat, slipping morsels of chicken and potato into her mouth as she continued to stare in wonder at her first foreign country. He stayed with her even after the steward removed the
trays, propping her against him, holding her while her skin grew first warm, then uncomfortably hot, until it burned his chest through the thick linen of his shirt.
He tried to listen to her enthusiastic cries and make suitable comments, but his mind was elsewhere. Evan had posed the question of what he would do if Maud died on the journey. Had Evan had a premonition of sorts? Had his own stubborn streak set Maud on a course that was going to end here, in this carriage?
By nightfall she was delirious. Mindful of Ronnie’s large tip and the promise of extra money, the steward produced iced water, soup, and more pillows at regular intervals. Ronnie did what little he could, and sat holding Maud’s hand as her colour heightened and her eyes grew wild.
That night they stopped to take on coal. The steward disappeared, reappearing an hour later with a doctor, who shook his head and gave Ronnie a bottle of laudanum in exchange for an English pound note. Ronnie had no compunction about using it, hoping that the drug would finally compel Maud to rest.
When the train began to move, he lay beside her. As the next dawn broke the steward looked into their room, but he did not raise their blinds, figuring that sleep was better medicine than chicken soup for both the sick young signora and her exhausted husband.
When Maud finally woke again the sun was high, and Ronnie’s eyes were open as he lay, fully dressed, beside her. She smiled, and he breathed again: the smile was one of recognition, not delirium.
Somewhere on that interminable train journey, Maud’s infatuation with Ronnie died. She found it impossible to remain infatuated with a man who sat beside her in shirt-sleeves, braces and no collar, with two days’ growth of black stubble covering his cheeks, feeding her while she lay in bed as weak and helpless as a baby. He washed her, changed her, dressed her in clean clothes, and while he cared for her generously, selflessly, and more tenderly than any nurse the image of the tall, dark, sardonically handsome Ronnie, always dressed immaculately in clean jacket, boiled shirt and stiff white collar as he cracked acidic jokes in the café was replaced by a weary, grey-faced exhausted Ronnie who winced every time she coughed. And as infatuation died, so it was supplanted by a sounder emotion, rooted firmly in his caring, obsessive passion for her.
Pontypridd 02 - One Blue Moon Page 37