Pontypridd 01 - Hearts of Gold

by Catrin Collier

  Andrew sipped his whisky slowly. He could understand his sister’s reluctance to spend an evening by herself. He hadn’t been comfortable in his own company since he’d left Pontypridd. The problem was, he often felt lonelier, more solitary and miserable when he was with someone else. Particularly Anthea. Outings with her had, if anything, sharpened his longing for Bethan. He missed her with a pain that became more acute with each passing day.

  ‘Dinner won’t be long.’ Fiona freshened up his and Anthea’s glasses. ‘Oh, I forgot, there’s a letter for you, Andy.’ She picked up an envelope from the tray and waved it in front of his nose with a sly glance at Anthea. ‘It’s from Pontypridd.’ She lifted her eyebrows suggestively. ‘And it’s not from Daddy or Mummy.’ She sniffed the paper. ‘There’s no perfume. Your little nurse may belong to a den of thieves, but I’m afraid she isn’t in the least bit romantic, dear brother,’ she teased.

  ‘Give me that, Fanny,’ Andrew said irritably.

  ‘My, my, we are a crosspatch aren’t we? What’s the matter, Andy? Finding it difficult to get rid of her? Won’t she take no for an answer?’

  ‘Some women just don’t know when to let go,’ Anthea said, allowing her acid thoughts to reach her tongue for the first time in Andrew’s presence.

  Andrew wasn’t proud of the way he’d left Pontypridd and sought refuge in London, and every time he recalled how he’d taken leave of Bethan his blood ran cold. But Fiona’s constant carping about her was driving him to distraction. He grasped hold of her wrist, making her cry out, then he tore the letter from her hand.

  ‘That hurt,’ she complained petulantly, rubbing her wrist.

  ‘It was meant to.’

  ‘Is it a love letter?’ She tried to sit on the arm of his chair and look over his shoulder at the same time.

  ‘It’s from Trevor Lewis,’ he snapped, flicking through the pages.

  ‘Oh how disappointing.’ Her face fell as she checked the signature. ‘I suppose I should go into the kitchen and chase Cook up about dinner.’

  ‘That might be an idea. I’m starving.’

  ‘Do you want to come?’ she asked Anthea. ‘If we leave grumpy to himself he might change his mood.’

  Rebuffed, glasses in hand, Fiona and Anthea wandered off.

  Andrew read and re-read his letter. There wasn’t a word about Bethan from beginning to end. Most of it concerned the wedding. It was scheduled for the end of October and there was a reminder in the final paragraph that he’d promised to act as best man, but if he couldn’t make it for any reason they would understand and ask Trevor’s brother to take his place.

  The sheet of paper fell from his hand as he refilled his glass.

  Bethan would undoubtedly be there. Laura had always said that she’d wanted her to be her bridesmaid.

  A vivid image of Bethan came to mind, reminding him just how much he loved and wanted – no – needed her.

  He swallowed the whisky and poured another. His father wasn’t always right. Perhaps there was a way for him and Bethan after all. London was a cosmopolitan place – cosmopolitan enough even to swallow a disgraced Welsh nurse and her husband.

  The idea appealed to him. He could go home, see her at Laura and Trevor’s wedding, and ask her to return with him. Accommodation wasn’t a problem. Half of London was up for rent, and if they started off modestly like Trevor and Laura – what the hell – they’d make it through.

  Thousands of other couples did. He didn’t stop to consider that his thinking was a complete turnaround from that of only a few short weeks ago.

  He’d been a fool not to have asked her to marry him when he’d had the chance. And, if his parents kicked up a fuss, so what? He was qualified. So was she. They could both get work. They’d survive without any help. His parents would have to come to terms with his choice of wife.

  Bethan was the only one who mattered. They didn’t even have to marry in Pontypridd, they could marry here. He would go on working at the Cross – go home to her every night instead of Fe and Alec.

  Her aunts’ transgressions were of no interest to anyone in London. No one would give a toss about anything that had occurred in Pontypridd. Most people didn’t even know where it was. And in time she wouldn’t be known by the name of Powell any more. Not even in Wales.

  He finished his whisky and reached for the bottle again. He checked the date of Trevor’s wedding on the letter. It wasn’t that far away. Another five weeks. He frowned as he lifted his glass.

  He couldn’t wait that long. Not after the way he’d treated her. He had to write. Tell her he was sorry. That he loved her. That he hadn’t been thinking straight the last time he’d seen her.

  A smile crossed his face for the first time since he’d been in London. His future stretched out before him, cosy with domesticity, glittering with the rewards of career achievement. A future that included love, Bethan, surgical duties in the Cross and a small, but comfortable apartment to return to in the evenings.

  It didn’t once enter his mind that perhaps he’d damaged his relationship with Bethan beyond repair.

  Chapter Twenty

  ‘You sure you’ll be all right?’

  ‘I’ve been fine every day so far, Mam.’ Bethan sat in her father’s easy chair in the kitchen with her feet propped up on a stool Haydn had made. There was a cup of tea at her elbow and a book from Pontypridd lending library that Maud had got for her on her lap. Two walking sticks leaned against the frame of the kitchen stove next to her.

  Her feet had healed enough to allow her to hobble to the yard and back. She was grateful for small mercies. The pain of the walk was infinitely preferable to using the chamber pot her father had brought down from upstairs.

  Elizabeth fixed her hat on firmly with the jet headed pin that had been her mother’s and checked her image in the mirror that hung above the stove. Her grey coat was close on twenty years old and it showed in the threadbare lines around the collar.

  Her black felt hat was even older. Her dress was newer, bought at the market. It was a cheap one that had shrunk in the wash. Its narrow lines skimmed even her thin figure too closely.

  The woman who glared back at her from the glass was wrinkled, lined, old before her time, the result of trying to subsist for too long on air that was heavier on coal dust than oxygen, and on food bought with an eye to cost rather than nourishment.

  Cheap food, cheap housing, cheap clothes, she thought disparagingly, thinking not for the first time since Bethan’s “accident” of the clothes she’d be wearing if she’d managed to succeed where Bethan had failed.

  But even then, unlike Bethan she’d had to struggle through all the physical and mental agonies of a failed abortion attempt with no one to help her, no woman to confide in. No one brought her cups of tea to soothe away her hurt. She’d been left to work through throbbing, pain-filled days. Her only comfort, if it could be called by that name, had been Evan’s reluctant, martyred declaration.

  ‘I’m responsible for your condition, and I’ll do what’s right by you, never fear.’

  She’d felt that she’d had no choice but to accept his sacrifice. She held him to his promise, and married him knowing that he loved Phyllis Harry. That if he and Phyllis hadn’t had a stupid row that fateful night he’d have been with Phyllis still. He never would have got drunk, or made a pass at her after choir practice. A pass that had flattered her into forgetting herself for the first and hopefully last time in her life.

  If she hadn’t given in, been stronger … if … if … Bethan would never have been conceived.

  ‘You all right, Mam?’ Bethan asked concerned.

  ‘Fine.’ Elizabeth picked up her handbag from the chair next to the range. She really had to stop thinking in terms of “what if” twenty years ago. She wasn’t doing anyone, least of all herself, any favours.

  ‘I won’t be long.’

  ‘Give Uncle my regards,’ Bethan muttered from behind her book.

  ‘I will.’ Elizabeth pulled on her shabb
y cotton gloves and left. As she walked down the hill she considered the immediate problem that faced her. Bethan.

  There was only one way out of that situation. She hadn’t discussed it with anyone, and didn’t want to. Gossip spread like wildfire on the Graig. One whisper to a neighbour could spread scandal over the entire hill, but sooner or later she’d have to trust one other person. And that wouldn’t be her uncle. He was too wrapped up in the traumas of his own problems to spare time for the troubles of others.

  John Joseph Bull wasn’t the same minister who’d ruled his wife and his parish with a rod of iron a few weeks before. He was a broken man, totally reliant on the daily trips she made down the hill to clean his house and prepare his food. Without her, he would have been sitting in squalor in front of an empty table.

  She knocked his door. John Joseph’s door, along with the doors of the Leyshons’ large house and that of the vicarage, were the only ones on the Graig that didn’t have keys protruding from the locks.

  He opened it himself, and preceded her into the kitchen without a greeting. She noticed that his shoulders were rounded. Hetty’s passing had pitched him from the prime of life into stumbling old age, a transformation she wouldn’t have believed possible in such a short space of time if she hadn’t witnessed it herself. She’d never seen him stoop before, and when he turned to face her, running his fingers through his uncombed hair in an attempt to make himself more presentable, she noticed that the grey hairs at his temples had multiplied. Even his face had altered. It was thinner, more haggard.

  ‘Elizabeth, you don’t have to watch me as though I’m a child.’ he said irritably. ‘The cawl you made yesterday is still good.’

  ‘You haven’t eaten much of it,’ she commented, lifting the lid on the pot and stirring it. She replaced the lid, lifted the pot off the shelf above the stove and put it on the hotplate. Only then did she put down her bag, take off her gloves and hat and hang her coat on a peg at the back of the kitchen door.

  ‘I may as well check on your stove as I’m here,’ She pulled open the door. ‘Look at that,’ she complained, opening it wide so he could see the dying embers. ‘It’s almost out.’

  The coal scuttle hadn’t been touched since she’d filled it the day before. She picked up the tongs and fed the fire with large lumps of coal and a smattering of small coal from the bucket kept next to the scuttle. John Joseph sat in a chair by the table and watched her as she worked.

  ‘Would you like some tea?’ she asked, suspecting from the absence of dirty dishes that he hadn’t eaten since she’d left the house the day before.

  ‘I’ll have a cup if you’re making one.’

  She allowed the remark to pass without comment. She filled the kettle and set it on the range. ‘You promised to watch the fire,’ she reprimanded. Did you put a match to the one I laid in your study?’

  ‘No. The weather’s not cold enough for fires yet. Besides I went out yesterday.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The chapel. Just for a look round.’ he qualified.

  Elizabeth saw the admission as progress. He’d avoided entering the chapel or seeing any of his deacons or parishioners since the day of the funeral. A lay preacher had taken the service every Sunday since Hetty had died.

  ‘I talked to the chapel committee yesterday,’ he volunteered. ‘I think it might be a good idea for me to move. There’s a chapel in Ton Pentre in the Rhondda, or rather two that have no minister. Too poor to afford one. But I won’t need much money now that Hetty’s gone.’

  ‘What did they say to the idea of you leaving?’

  ‘It was decided that I should discuss the matter more fully with the deacons.’

  She took down two old cracked blue and white cups and saucers from Hetty’s dresser and made the tea, bringing in sugar and milk from the pantry.

  ‘Uncle, it won’t be as easy for me to visit you in Ton Pentre,’ she warned.

  ‘I know that. And I thank you for what you’ve done out of charity for me, Elizabeth, but it’s time I moved on,’ he said harshly, his voice wavering with strain. ‘You’ve enough troubles in your own house without coming here to take on mine. Has

  Evan finished in the pit yet?’

  ‘Tomorrow’s his last day,’ she answered curtly.

  ‘How are you going to manage?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She poured the tea, rammed a hand knitted cosy on the pot and sat stiffly across the table from him.

  ‘How’s Bethan?’

  ‘Still unable to work. Doctor says she could be off as long as another month.’ She couldn’t look him in the eye when she spoke about Bethan.

  ‘Stupid thing to do,’ he commented. ‘Knock a bucket of boiling water over when you’re drawing it from the boiler, I don’t understand …’

  ‘I told you, it was easily done. I was there,’ she lied.

  ‘Yes … yes of course, you said,’ he continued impatiently. ‘But if the bucket was balancing on a piece of coal you’d think the girl would have noticed.’

  ‘She didn’t, and there’s no point in talking about it.’

  ‘At least you’ve got Haydn in work.’

  ‘He doesn’t bring in enough to keep himself.’

  ‘Then that husband of yours will have to do something.’

  ‘Easier said than done with all the pits closing.’ She lifted the cosy from the pot, and poured out two more cups of tea, pushing the sugar and milk towards him.

  ‘I’ve something here that may help. It’s not a solution, but you may find it useful.’ He rose unsteadily to his feet and walked over to the cupboard set in the alcove to the right of the stove. He fetched an old chipped jug. Pushing his fingers inside he pulled out a roll of notes held together by an elastic band.

  ‘I found a bank book amongst the things in Hetty’s drawer when I was clearing it out. I didn’t even know she had money of her own. Probably her father gave it to her when she married. She certainly hadn’t put anything into the account for years.’ He thrust the bundle at Elizabeth. ‘I couldn’t use it. Not Hetty’s money. You were always kind to her, Elizabeth. She would have wanted you to have it. Particularly now with Evan unemployed.’

  ‘I couldn’t …’ Elizabeth began half-heartedly. Money would solve so many problems. Especially now.

  ‘Take it.’ He pushed the roll into her hand as he sat down. ‘I feel it’s tainted,’ he declared, negating any notions she might have had about his generosity. ‘It brought no happiness to Hetty. And it’s not enough to bring you happiness either. I think you’ll need a great deal more than the seventy pounds in that roll for that. But it’s enough to pay something off your mortgage.’

  Elizabeth stared at the bundle of five pound notes in her hands. She hadn’t touched a five pound note since she’d given up teaching.

  ‘I suppose I could use it to pay some bills.’ She walked over to the door where she’d left her handbag, opened the clasp and secreted the roll in the bottom.

  ‘Of course if you’d prefer to open a Post Office account for each of the children and put something in it for them to remember their aunt by that will be all right by me too. Only don’t tell them otherwise they’ll spend it before they need it. Especially Bethan and Haydn. Those two dress far too smart for my taste.’

  ‘I won’t tell them, uncle.’ She looked at the notes one last time before closing her handbag. Her mind worked feverishly. Hetty’s money could be used to buy Bethan respectability. She could think of no better use for it than that.

  * * *

  ‘Mam, no!’ Bethan protested tearfully.

  ‘You have no choice in the matter, girl,’ Elizabeth pronounced firmly. ‘As I see it there’s only three roads open to you. Either you go into the homes like Maisie Crockett, become a pariah and outcast like Phyllis or marry. And I can think of no other man who’ll take you with the doctor’s bastard growing bigger inside you every day.’ Elizabeth painted the options as bluntly and as crudely as she was capable of, hoping to shock Bethan into
submission.

  ‘But I hardly know him. I don’t even like him. He’s old; he has bad teeth … he drinks.’

  ‘He’s only thirty five, and he’s a good, God fearing, Christian, chapel going man. And if he does take a drink I’m sure it’s not more than your father does from time to time,’ Elizabeth added acidly.

  Bethan remembered something her Aunt Megan had said one morning after she’d finished working in the Graig Hotel.

  ‘Damned North Walian. Swept him and that widow of his out with the slops again this morning. There’s more than a touch of your uncle’s hell fire and damnation about that one, only he isn’t even honest about it. All chapel on Sunday, and boozing when he thinks no one is looking. This is not the first morning I’ve put him out of the Graig Hotel when your mother thought he was staying with friends. Give me my heathen lodgers any day of the week.’ Bethan shuddered.

  ‘Have you anyone else in mind?’ Elizabeth asked nastily.

  ‘No,’ Bethan admitted.

  ‘Then we have no choice. Just for once in your selfish life think of someone other than yourself. This would kill your father if he got to know about it. Eddie and Haydn would feel duty bound to tackle the man, and to what end? To one of them getting hurt? Killed even, knowing what Eddie’s like when he’s roused to a temper. And what about Maud? Have you considered what her reputation will be when this little lot becomes the property of every rumour monger and gossip on the Graig? She’ll be known as the sister of a whore.’ Elizabeth spat out the final word.

  The speech had the desired effect. Bethan’s raw nerve had always been her brothers and Maud. She’d spent her life playing the role of the protective older sister. She couldn’t abandon it now. She stared-down at her bandaged feet, resting on the stool.

  ‘Do what you think best, Mam. You always do in the end,’ she added bitterly. But the bitterness was lost on Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth picked her time. After the evening meal Evan helped Bethan upstairs to her bedroom then left for a union meeting.

  Maud went to jazz band practice with the Dan-y-Lan coons, and Eddie walked down the hill to the gym. She hadn’t seen Haydn since midday when he’d gone to Griffiths’ shop. By now he’d be working.