by David Nobbs
‘Oh come on, Stanley, don’t give me a performance. I’m not that naïve.’
‘Listen, Kate, I could tell you weren’t sleeping. I just wanted to see you. I didn’t want to embarrass you. I never dreamt you’d be . . . you’re very beautiful, Kate, and I think maybe I love you, and I thought I’d tell you, think carefully, take your time, you’ve seen me at my worst tonight, but I’m worth ten Arturos. He’s as big a fraud as his name. He can’t paint, you know.’
‘Why don’t you get a girl of your own?’
‘I’m picky. I’m very picky. Good-night, Kate. I’m sorry.’
‘I suppose I have to admit it wasn’t entirely your fault,’ she said. ‘Good-night, Stanley.’
He closed the door as gently as Arturo. She blew out the candle and thought again about Arturo’s paintings. Could he paint? How could she ever know? Did it matter to their relationship?
The door was opening! Which one of them was it? She pulled the nightshirt tight round her throat and lit the candle.
Daphne came towards her slowly and solemnly, like a ghost. She was stark naked. She had rolls of fat on her stomach and a huge bush of pubic hair. She was stroking her nipples gently. She didn’t look a bit like Arturo’s painting of her. ‘I’m sorry about this evening,’ she said. ‘I still think we can be friends.’
Whether Kate would ever have joined the Tregarryn community but for Miss Penkridge cannot be certain. Nor can it be certain whether she would have married Arturo if she hadn’t joined the community. The whole course of her life might have been different but for this formidable lady, with her close-cropped mannish hair, her complete lack of make-up or artifice, her sombre black clothes.
‘You have been seen in what even at my most charitable I can only describe as extremely doubtful company, Miss Thomas,’ said Miss Penkridge, seated behind a desk bare save for an inkwell, a fountain pen, a blotter, an indiarubber, a box of pencils, a bible and a volume of Lamb’s Essays.
Who had sneaked on her, wondered Kate. Miss Carter or Miss Langan? Miss Carter had never referred to the man she had seen Kate kiss. Miss Langan had said, ‘Did that man who kissed you give you the black eye? Was he a Spaniard?’ Kate had replied, ‘Nobody gave me a black eye. I fell into a lamppost in a drunken stupor.’ Miss Langan had gone pink with excitement at the thought of a drunken stupor. ‘Why should you think he was a Spaniard?’ Kate had asked. ‘Spaniards are animals,’ Miss Langan had replied. ‘Have you ever been to Spain?’ ‘No,’ Miss Langan had replied, ‘but I’m going next month.’
Kate realised that she could muse no longer. Miss Penkridge was waiting for a reply.
‘Oh?’ said Kate.
‘Yes. Unfortunately the brother of one of the parents frequents the Turk’s Head. Not a place in which one would expect to find the brother of a parent, but he’s a fisherman.’
‘Are you suggesting that he is therefore beyond the rules of decent society?’ asked Kate.
Miss Penkridge gasped at this boldness. She picked up the copy of Lamb’s Essays and clutched it to what would have been her bosom, had she had one, as if she hoped it might afford her moral protection against this difficult young lady.
‘I know the degree of your sympathy for the lower orders, Miss Thomas,’ she said. ‘I was not being patronising to fishermen. I merely meant that they face more hazards than most, so they need more comforts than most. I daresay I would need the occasional sherry if I braved the Atlantic in a small boat.’
There was a moment’s silence in the sombre study, with its oak-panelled walls. Both women were listening to the gale, and thinking of the perils of the sea. And neither wished to be the next to speak.
Kate was the first to crack.
‘I’m sorry if I was outspoken,’ she said.
‘Don’t be. It’s one of your virtues.’ Kate was astonished by this, and even Miss Penkridge seemed surprised by her generosity, and went slightly pink.
‘A parent, who is a corn chandler, is an occasional customer in the Turk’s Head. No doubt he has to go there to conduct business. He also has seen you in that hostelry, the worse for drink, in the company of people who use bad language, and lack decorum.’
‘They’re artists,’ explained Kate.
‘Well, that is certainly better than criminals,’ said Miss Penkridge, ‘but does it excuse such behaviour?’
‘No, I don’t think it does. They’re good friends, but I don’t always like the way they carry on. I’ve remonstrated with them about it.’
‘Good.’ Miss Penkridge was sufficiently reassured to put down the volume of Lamb’s Essays.
‘May I ask, Miss Penkridge, what all this has to do with my teaching?’ enquired Kate.
‘It’s a bad example to the girls.’
‘Surely none of my girls frequent the Turk’s Head?’
‘Of course not. Maybe I was a little devious. It is not the way the parents expect the teachers of their children to behave.’
‘I teach the children, Miss Penkridge. I don’t teach their parents.’
Miss Penkridge gasped. A pink spot appeared on each of her cheeks. She looked at the volume of Lamb’s Essays and decided that it was no longer a strong enough crutch. She picked up the bible.
‘I will point out that you have been seen with these unsuitable genii three times,’ she said. ‘I would not have brought an isolated lapse to your attention. Miss Thomas, now that you are here, perhaps we should also discuss something more important. Your teaching methods. How do you think you are doing?’
‘Well,’ said Kate, ‘I think the children like me.’
Miss Penkridge snorted.
‘They adore you!’ she exclaimed. ‘They liked you even before the black eye. Now they adore you.’ She looked embarrassed. ‘Three of them have a crush on you to my knowledge.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Kate. ‘It doesn’t . . . I can’t . . . I don’t give them any encouragement.’
‘You can’t help being beautiful,’ said Miss Penkridge, who could never be beautiful but need not have been plain. ‘It’s a rod you have to bear, and I’m sorry for you, but that isn’t the point and being liked isn’t the point either, is it?’
‘Well, in my desire to teach through collaboration and not confrontation it’s a good first step,’ said Kate. ‘It’s all I feel qualified to claim, which is why I started with it.’
‘I see.’ Miss Penkridge looked out over the playing fields. Herring gulls, tossed inland by the gale, had given up their search for herrings and settled on a safer diet of worms. Their perpetual clamour provided a dismal background to the interview. ‘I see. Do you feel that you are giving the children the facts that they need to pass their exams?’
‘I hope so. I don’t believe history should be taught as an unrelated series of dates and facts, but I realise that it’s my duty to include these within the overall framework of my teaching, and I hope they will be remembered more easily because they’re taught in context. Oh dear, that sounds pompous.’
‘No, it sounds fair. Let’s discuss this framework, shall we? Because you teach in a stimulating manner, because you interest the children, which is, Kate Thomas, little short of a miracle, they discuss their history lessons at home. Even Lily Gardner.’
‘Well, I’m pleased.’
‘Mr and Mrs Gardner aren’t. It seems that you regard history as a great confrontation between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless, an endless battle in which all the improvements that have taken place in the world have been the result of actions and policies carried out by people on the Left of the political spectrum.’
‘I believe that to be largely so. It’s a simplification, of course.’
‘Of course. A dangerous simplification for the Lily Gardners of this world. Not, one would say, a dispassionate view. Wouldn’t you say that as a teacher, Kate, as a teacher of young people, you have a duty to be dispassionate?’
‘Yes, but I hope I have a duty to be passionate also.’
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bsp; ‘Let’s turn to something even more serious. Religion.’ Miss Penkridge gripped the bible more tightly. ‘You seem to have a prejudice against religion.’
‘Not against religion, Miss Penkridge. Against the use that is made of religion. A vast amount of the world’s ills is caused by religious intolerance.’
A herring gull squawked loudly, just outside the window. Miss Penkridge permitted herself a rare, brief smile.
‘Even the herring gull protests at your extremism, Miss Thomas.’
‘I don’t believe it is extremism.’
‘I would not expect the Lily Gardners and Margaret Penhaligons of this world to make the distinction, at their tender age, between religion and man’s use of it. This is not a view of history, however many grains of truth it might possibly contain, that the Governors would wish our pupils to be learning.’
‘I love my pupils, Miss Penkridge. I don’t give a fig for the Governors.’
Miss Penkridge gasped. Even the herring gulls fell silent.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Kate. ‘I shouldn’t have put it so strongly, but I can’t help my feelings.’
‘Yes, you can,’ said Miss Penkridge. ‘You can and you must. I don’t want to lose you, Miss Thomas.’
‘Is that a threat?’
‘No. A fear. I hope you will accept this as a warning, and season your fervour with the salt of common sense, not the pepper of revolution.’
‘You’ve left out the mustard of my hot passion,’ said Kate. ‘I resign. I wish you the condiments of the season.’
A herring gull protested loudly at this cheap crack. Kate half wished that she hadn’t said it, but it was too late.
The wedding took place on a fine May Saturday, in 1924.
Kate spent her wedding eve in the warmth of her family, in the crowded dining-room-cum-sitting-room, the throbbing engine room of the house. They had kippers for tea, with bread and butter and Welsh cakes and bara brith. Bernard, almost sixteen now, quizzed her about Arturo, questions that she didn’t want. Oliver, nearing eighteen and as handsome as a cherub, shone with pleasure at the prospect of her joy. Enid was very quiet, claiming to be fighting the onset of a migraine, but Kate suspected that she was just eaten up with jealousy. Myfanwy laughed and joked lustily, trying to wind Kate into gaiety, and not succeeding. Annie, the orphaned cousin from Llanelli who had come to live with them in 1921, after her mother died, laughed her infectious laugh, and her coarse red cheeks sparkled with excitement. If only Dilys could have been there to complete the family, but of course that was impossible. She would write to Dilys, tell her every little detail, imagine her eyes eagerly devouring her letter in exile in Macclesfield, not a place famous for exile. It had been difficult to tell Arturo about Dilys, she’d been worried that he’d ask too many questions, but she needn’t have worried, he’d been too wrapped up in himself to care much about a twin he’d never met, and accepted her explanation of a family quarrel that ‘we don’t talk about. Her name is not to be mentioned in this house again.’
Arturo had visited the family twice, and had played his part nobly. He had presented himself as a sober young man utterly dedicated to his muse. He had allowed John Thomas Thomas to believe that he created his art in the service of God. But he wasn’t there that wedding eve. Kate wouldn’t see him on her wedding day until the ceremony. Everything was to be done properly, on her day of days.
She didn’t sleep much that night. How could she, when she was sleeping in the same bed, in the same bedroom, watched over by the same damp stag and the same frowning texts, listening to the same chimes of the grandfather clock as on that night? When the clock struck a quarter to twelve, the urge to get up and go and see Gwyn was almost irresistible.
She tossed and turned a great deal that night, trying not to think of Gwyn, trying to think about Arturo, trying to love him as much as she should.
In the morning she had bacon and sausage meat and laverbread and it was as if she’d never been away. Then she sat in the rocking chair in the dark breakfast womb and wished that she could go back, back into her childhood, into her infancy, into her mother’s womb, into a foetus, into an egg, into a nothing.
Bernard looked at her quizzically, and said, ‘Are you all right?’ and she began the long job of pulling herself together.
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Everything’s going to be fine. This is just the storm before the calm.’
Oliver blushed and said, ‘I tell everyone how beautiful my sister is.’
Myfanwy said, ‘Come on. Don’t just sit there. You’re getting married.’
Enid said, ‘If I’m a bit quiet today, Kate darling, it won’t be because I don’t want you to be happy. It’ll be because of my migraine.’
Annie said, ‘I’m lucky just to be part of this family, but to be sitting in the family pew on this day of all days, I just can’t thank you enough for inviting me.’
John Thomas Thomas said, ‘We will all pray for your happiness, Kate,’ in a tone of voice which made her feel more like a serious outbreak of flooding than a human being.
Kate wondered how happy her father was that morning. She knew that he believed that artists drank. He had asked her if she drank and she hadn’t dared say ‘Yes. Quite a lot’, and she hadn’t been brazen enough to say ‘No, never’, so she’d said ‘A bit’, which was a pathetic compromise and useless too, because her father had been just as hurt as he’d have been if she’d said ‘Every night, and to excess’.
‘Come on, then, Kate,’ said her mother, helping her up from the chair and her childhood. ‘Let’s get you looking your loveliest. You’re going to be the toast of Swansea today.’ She looked at her eldest daughter gravely, and said, ‘You are happy, aren’t you?’
Kate had to say something, so she said, ‘I was thinking about Dilys,’ despising herself for saying it, because it wasn’t true, but she couldn’t say, ‘I may be making the greatest mistake of my life.’
‘I didn’t know if you still miss her,’ said her mother.
‘Oh yes,’ said Kate. ‘I still miss her.’
Her mother kissed her then. How lovely to be kissed by her mother. Her mother had never kissed her as much as she’d wanted her to, or, she suspected, as much as her mother wanted to. John Thomas Thomas frowned on outward displays of emotion.
The fashion in the early 1920s was for straight women. Curves were regarded as fat. Kate insisted on wearing as straight a dress as possible, though it was difficult and, her mother thought, very sad that she should want to hide her lovely curves. But she must be a modern girl and there must be something of the look of the flapper in her long wedding dress. She wore white, of course, for only Arturo among those present knew that she was not a virgin.
She was driven to the chapel by horse and carriage, her father stiff and solemn beside her, handsome in his morning dress. People stood at their doors to wave and smile, and Kate waved and smiled back, feeling sick.
The chapel was crowded. All the family were there from all over South Wales, uncles and aunts and nieces and nephews; the two cousins called Herbert Herbert, who were always known as Herbert Herbert Cricket and Herbert Herbert Politics, so that there could be no doubt to which of them one was referring; Cousin Nancy from the Vale of Towy, as warm as a new-laid egg; and the great-aunts, who always wore black and were tiny and sat shivering beside black ranges with not enough fuel on the fire in tiny houses in Pontardulais and Ammanford, and Kate had to visit them every Christmas, and they gave her a penny, and she was made to kiss them, and their cheeks were as cold as marble.
Miss Penkridge was there, astounded to be invited, but surely delighted? Miss Carter was there with the insurance salesman to whom she had still not got engaged. Miss Langan was there, on her own. She had been to Spain and nobody had behaved like an animal towards her, although she had given them every encouragement.
Several girls from Kate’s childhood were there, Arbel Meredith and Glenys Edwards whom she liked, and Caitlin Price-Evans, whom she didn’t like, but she
had a hyphen and would add tone and so Kate had invited her to please the family. Tone was important at a wedding in Wales. Kate could still remember the devastating comment of Mrs Herbert Herbert Politics on returning from an obscure family wedding in Tony-pandy. ‘There wasn’t a single pair of gloves on the bride’s side.’
No boys from Kate’s childhood were there. She had only known one boy, and he was dead.
All the faces turned to look at her as her father led her down the aisle. His face was stern and grim, she hoped her smile didn’t look set in concrete.
In her high heels she seemed at least four inches taller than Arturo. She hadn’t wanted to wear high heels, but had bowed to the inevitable. A queen has her responsibilities.
She squeezed Arturo’s arm and hoped he wasn’t feeling as awful as she was. He must be finding the massed ranks of the Welsh daunting. He had brought so few people of his own. The members of the community, of course, Stanley Wainwright, who was his best man; solemn Daniel Begelman, who was truly happy for them both; pale frail devoted Olga who was absolutely miserable because she’d left Ruth with friends and it was her very first time without her; and rouged, outrageous Daphne Stoneyhurst. Apart from that there were just six assorted relatives from the Fens, to none of whom he was particularly close, and his sister Cicely, whose only consolation for having a streaming cold on this great day could be that her nose matched her red outfit perfectly. His parents were dead. He’d been an orphan since the age of eleven.
Kate had an awful fear that she wouldn’t be able to survive the ceremony without fainting, that she would suddenly go clattering to the unyielding floor of the chapel.
Swansea was Gwyn’s town still. Kate willed herself back to Tregarryn, the terraced garden, the narrow valley, the great gull-wheeled cliffs and the long Atlantic breakers. And it worked. There was just one bad moment, when she feared that someone might object to the wedding, and that it might be her. How easy it would be to say ‘I object. I don’t love him quite enough’, but then she thought of him as he had been when she had kissed him outside the school, dressed all in purple and waving his blackthorn stick, and she thought, Yes, I can love him enough.