Gull Island

by Grace Thompson

  ‘That’s right, I don’t want half the building site in my kitchen,’ his mother said in mock annoyance. ‘Sit down, bach. Rosita, make us all a cup of tea, will you? You can tell Richard your news while I go to the shop across the road for some biscuits.’

  ‘What news?’ Richard asked as he sat on the sagging old couch. ‘Mam mentioned news. I know! You’ve decided to sell your shops!’ He reached out and held her hand. ‘I hate quarrelling with you. Come out with me tonight? There’s a new restaurant opened on the Cardiff Road.’

  ‘Yes, why not?’ She moved her hand from his, smiling nervously, afraid of how he would take it. ‘You can help me celebrate my news. I’ve bought a fourth shop.’

  ‘You’ve what? Oh, I see. Then my hope of us marrying is just a laugh, is it?’

  ‘I love you, Richard. I want to be your wife but I can’t accept conditions as part of the marriage vows.’

  ‘Yet you’re asking me to do just that.’ He changed his voice to a chant. ‘I promise that our marriage will be based on the promise that you’ll love, honour and obey, except in the small matter of running a business of your own, which will put me and our relationship second!’

  ‘Why is it such a problem? Your mother worked with your father all her life. They’re still together, planning this trip to London – as if it’s a second honeymoon, I suspect.’

  ‘Don’t you see? It’s because Mam had such a hard time of it that I vowed never to let my wife work.’

  ‘So it’s pride, then?’

  ‘Yes, pride!’

  ‘Owning three shops and renting a fourth is hardly on the same level as delivering papers and doing other people’s washing.’

  ‘Don’t demean what Mam did!’

  ‘I’m not. You are.’

  Mrs Carey came in, saw the kettle was still cold and empty and tutted dramatically. ‘You young people. Never heard of organization? Put the kettle on to boil first, and then talk!’

  Rosita put the kettle on to boil on the gas ring. It was always the same. She and Richard were miles apart in their thinking and how could it ever change?

  ‘Going out tonight, Richard, love?’ his mother asked. Rosita tensed herself. Was the invitation to the new restaurant still holding?

  ‘No, Mam,’ he said sadly. ‘Not tonight. Nowhere to go worth dressing up for. I’ll stay in and read.’

  Rosita was so frustrated and angry she stamped out and walked home, forgetting she had taken the car. Smiling despite her misery, she crept back to the Careys house like a criminal, hoping Richard wouldn’t see her getting into it a couple of hours later and driving off. What a stupid thing pride was, and how impossible to ignore.

  On Sunday afternoons, Rosita usually spent the treasured free time relaxing. She managed to deal with the weekly accounts on a daily basis with a few extra hours mid-week on her half day. Sunday afternoons were hers to laze and enjoy. Her shops seemed to be a success but she was aware that her social and personal life was at a standstill. Her friends were as few as in the first year she had left the home, apart from the most important one, Miss Grainger, who had left her so tragically. Where was she going? Could Richard be right? Should she give up her ambitions and marry? Settle down to peaceful domesticity and motherhood – if it wasn’t already too late?

  She tried to imagine it and failed. Then she looked at the tray set for her solitary lunch and felt a shiver of dismay. That was her future; a lonely existence eating alone, sleeping alone, with no one to care whether she laughed or cried. She might become rich, but for what? There might be plenty to share but what was the point with no one to share it with?

  From the window of the flat she looked out towards the houses across the street. The spring day was bright, the sky an amazing blue. It was Sunday, another week had passed, and she was free. But free from what? She felt the approach of melancholy.

  A picture of the beach near Gull Island sprang into her mind. She hadn’t been there for months. That was the place to look up at the sky, not through the curtained window of an upstairs flat. She put on a new two-piece suit in an attractive forest green and a cheerful red polo-necked jumper with a beret to match and picked up her car keys.

  Along the street a van slowed to a stop and Idris, who was driving, watched as she stepped into the Anglia and drove away. Putting the van into gear he moved after her. If she was meeting his brother he would disturb their privacy and if she was alone she might be amenable to a bit of solace in her loneliness. Either way, the next hour or so could be fun.

  Starting a closer friendship with the cool Rosita now would be well timed with Kate and the girls going to London in a few weeks’ time. He would soon get rid of Hattie if Miss Evans showed any sign of weakening. Their illicit arrangements could be quickly altered.

  Rosita recognized the van as it turned into the narrow lane behind her. At first she thought it was Richard then reasoned that if it had been he would have come up and shown himself, not skulked along behind her like a seedy detective. It had to be Idris. With a sigh for the loss of her planned walk on the lonely beach, she turned right and right again, and went back to the flat. Idris she could do without!

  Idris didn’t get out or even wave. He passed her as she was locking the door of her car, staring straight ahead. He went to the house where he and his family lived. Hattie was the only one in.

  ‘Look at this, Idris,’ she said, handing him a piece of paper. ‘Kate has written instructions down for things I must do while she’s away. I’m supposed to be going away too, for a week in Weston-super-Mare. Yet I’m expected to do all this. She’s treating me more and more like the maiden aunt who everyone depends on. I don’t want to be the old maid she’s trying to make me.’

  ‘Then don’t act like one!’ Idris’s irritability was apparent.

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Minding the kids, doing more than half of the cleaning, offering to do this and see to that. Trying to be indispensable. You’re making a deep rut for yourself and soon you won’t even be able to climb out or even look over the edge and see what you’ve missed. You ought to have more fun while you still can.’

  ‘Fat chance!’

  He turned to look at her. Her features had that heavy look often seen in pictures of peasant workers of a century ago. Bovine, he thought unkindly. The sisters weren’t alike in looks or temperament. Kate was really rather beautiful, but she was prim about sex and he knew from previous experiences that Hattie was not.

  He continued to stare. Earthy. That was the word for Hattie. The description excited him. Earthy, wild, untamed by tedious conventions. Right now, earthy, bovine or whatever, she looked appealing and she was here. Why worry about the prim, cold Miss Evans when he had Hattie living under the same roof and more than willing?

  ‘What are you thinking?’ she asked, her head on one side in an attempt at coquetry. ‘Feeling lonely with Kate out at the Careys’ again? She spends more time at your mam’s house than here. And there’s all them hours at the shop. Never much time for you, these days. Poor, poor Idris.’

  He offered his hand and they walked together up the stairs to her room, where they had been many times before.

  Richard knew he had made a mistake in employing his brother Idris to manage the building site office. He was frequently missing and Richard or Monty would find a line of disgruntled men waiting for materials that hadn’t even been ordered. Employed to work piecework, the delays were enough for several of his best men to walk off site and find other more reliable firms.

  ‘I’ll go back to the office,’ Monty offered. He really preferred the tools to dealing with paper and endless forms, but he knew Richard couldn’t manage it all. ‘It’ll be simpler if I do it. Training someone into our ways takes time and you don’t have enough of that.’

  ‘Just for a while, then. Thanks.’ Richard breathed a sigh of relief. With Monty looking after the office, things would get moving again. And they wouldn’t lose any more of their best workmen. Damn Idris and his idle wa
ys.

  At first Idris complained to his mother about Richard’s unfair treatment of him, but when he realized his brother wasn’t going to sack him, only demote him to store man, he relaxed. Life was easy if you only relaxed and didn’t press for higher status out of false pride. Pride was for enthusiasts or idiots. Idris was enthusiastic, but never about work.

  Monty had found himself a room, where the kindly landlady looked after him well. He was a quiet man who spent a lot of his spare time reading or listening to classical music, a love he had shared with his wife. He also liked to bet on horses, rationing himself to losing no more than five shillings in a week. When he won he would use the money to go to a concert or a variety show in Cardiff.

  Besides the shared responsibilities of building the six houses Richard was contracted to do, the men were close friends, each seeing in the other an honesty and dedication to giving good-quality workmanship. They had come through a number of problems together, Monty calming Richard’s occasional rages, Richard giving Monty the fullness of a busy and exciting life.

  Richard had admitted to the deprivations of his childhood that had forced him to submit to thieving and robbery. He had kept nothing back and knowing his friend understood was a comfort. Richard knew it was best for that part of his life to be forgotten, but things occasionally revived the memories and reminded him of his weaknesses. Or had it been strength, as Monty insisted?

  The one thing the men disagreed on was Idris.

  ‘I’m sorry, Richard, I know he’s your brother, but I don’t like the man and never will. He’s crafty and feathering his own nest is all he’s thinking of. If he wants something he won’t mind who’s got the right to it. Take it he will, and smile while he’s doing it.’

  Richard felt the familiar kick of guilt. How could he criticize? That was how they were brought up, how he had lived as a boy. It was how Richard Carey, House Building and Maintenance, had begun. It wasn’t a Sunday school story, his past. And however much he wanted to, he couldn’t prevent it from jumping out and reminding him of his own lack of respectability at times.

  As though guessing his thoughts, Monty said, ‘What he does is very different from what you, as a small boy, did. You were helping your family to survive.’

  ‘See that someone keeps an eye on what he does, will you, Monty? I’ve dropped his pay to that of a store man but I have to keep him on. He’s Mam’s favourite and there’s Kate and the girls. At least they get a bit of cash from him at the end of each week. I’ll just have to hope he finds something less taxing and better paid somewhere else. From what I’ve heard from that poor wife of his, he rarely stays in a job more than a few weeks. Fancy her having to go out to work.’

  ‘She might enjoy working, mind,’ Monty said pointedly. ‘A lot of women do.’

  A sudden storm caused Rosita to slam shut the window in the back room of her school shop, and the glass shattered. Leaving a tray propped up to prevent the rain coming in, she closed the shop at lunchtime and drove to where Richard was working.

  ‘Richard, I’ve broken a window. D’you think you could send someone to replace it?’ She handed him the measurements and added, ‘I have to go straight back. I don’t like leaving the place with a window missing, in case someone breaks in.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said curtly. ‘I don’t have time until later. Perhaps one of the men will come after they’ve finished work.’

  ‘Don’t bother!’ She snatched the piece of paper back and was about to leave when Monty came out of the temporary site office, a battered old shed that had been set up and taken down more times than a circus tent. ‘Can I help, Richard?’

  ‘Monty!’ Rosita said with a smile. Beside being Richard’s partner, she knew him as a regular early-morning customer.

  ‘Miss Evans. Can I help you?’ He laughed. ‘It’s usually you saying that, not me!’

  ‘There’s trouble with a broken window or something,’ Richard muttered, glaring at Rosita.

  Monty looked at the fighting attitude of the two people and his smile widened. There was tension between them but it wasn’t anger. ‘I’ll deal with your lunchtime appointment with the estate agent. You go and deal with the problem for Miss Evans. All right, Caroline?’

  ‘I’ll get the glass. You’d better get back to your precious shop.’ He held out a hand for the measurements.

  ‘Don’t bother. It’s obviously too much trouble. I’ll go to the glazier.’

  Ignoring the danger of leaving the shop unattended, she drove away and had a huge lunch in a new café in town. When she had cooled down, she returned to the shop to find the window replaced, the mess cleared up and Richard sitting on the step with two early customers.

  ‘I got through the window but I had to wait for you – I couldn’t lock the door.’ He smiled then and she relaxed and returned it as she served the customers.

  ‘Monty thinks you’re a charming person. Efficient, capable and kind. And from what I hear about your Horsey Gang of gamblers, a lot of fun too. I think he was surprised at your display of anger. I told him what a terrible temper you really have, but he doesn’t believe me,’ he said teasingly.

  ‘A man of excellent taste, your Monty.’ She made tea and they sat, between her serving customers, and talked about the forthcoming trip to London arranged for his parents.

  ‘Your mother made me promise to look after you,’ she said with a wry grin. ‘She thinks you’re incapable.’

  ‘So she told me!’

  ‘She’s convinced that without a bit of looking after, you’ll collapse with hunger and neglect before the week’s out.’

  ‘If she knew how I lived in the years I was away she wouldn’t believe it. I had to put every penny I could spare into the business. It’s been quite a struggle.’

  ‘Nothing worthwhile comes easy. You probably have nightmares about losing it all. You wouldn’t want to have it taken from you, would you? Not having come so far.’

  ‘No, I couldn’t face seeing all my work slip away. To see it all go would be like losing a part of myself and—’ He glared at her smiling face, realizing that she was making a point. He was too edgy to joke, refusing to accept she was teasing him. He stood up and said, ‘Oh, and that’s how you feel, is it? All the years of struggle to get the shops and I’m asking you to give it all up?’

  ‘What’s the difference, Richard? You of all people should know how I feel about parting with something I’ve built so painfully over all these years.’

  He put the empty cup and saucer on the counter and stormed out. She called after him, pleading with him to come back and talk, but his large form moved fast and he was soon out of sight.

  After the shop closed she totalled the money and dropped the bag in the night-safe then drove to the beach at Gull Island. Why couldn’t she be patient and allow Richard to see in his own time how important it was for her to be a person in her own right? Unless, she thought with that familiar squiggle of fear, he found someone else first.

  The island was bathed in the late-evening sun, the day having been sunny and mild. Leaves were slowly showing their tips on the hawthorn along the lanes and blackthorn blossoms were still decorating the hedges like confetti at a wedding. The excitement of spring was in the air as she walked along the rocky shore.

  As she passed the uninhabited cottage, she saw a low sports car parked at the side. A man stepped out of it and wished her a ‘good evening’. He was dressed in a neat and obviously expensive suit with polished shoes on his feet. Under his arm was a briefcase bulging with papers. Small and slim, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, he smiled before going into the cottage. She felt disappointed. It would have been nice to have someone to talk to for a few minutes. Turning away, she found a sheltered corner that was still warm from the sun and sat down.

  It was the cottage once owned by the man called Luke, she vaguely remembered. He had probably sold it and made a life for himself in France. If, she thought with a shudder, he had survived the war.

  Ten minutes later,
the dapper man reappeared, bearing a tray on which there were two cups of tea.

  ‘Would you mind if I joined you?’ he asked politely. ‘I quite understand if you want to be alone. This is a place in which to enjoy solitude, isn’t it?’

  She looked at his face, smooth, as if he had no need to shave. It looked too small for the heavy glasses. Taking the tea, she noted how unworkmanlike his hands were. So different from Richard’s calloused ones. He obviously worked with his head and not his hands.

  Luke had left behind the rebelliousness of youth, sobered by the events he had witnessed in two wars, and the passing years. His long beard was gone, as was the almost obsessional necessity to abandon at once the trappings of business the moment he arrived at the cottage. He had taken off his jacket and replaced it with a good-quality pullover, but the expensive shoes were the same ones in which he had arrived.

  ‘Have you lived here long?’ Rosita asked.

  ‘I’ve lived around here on and off since I was a child. I was born in that big house behind the trees.’ He pointed back to where the mock Tudor house was partially visible through the branches. ‘A long time. More than half a century, in fact.’

  ‘I’ve always loved it here. I come when I have a problem to sort out. There’s so much sky, so much space, it makes irritations and frustrations seem less important.’

  ‘And what problems can you have? A pretty young woman like you shouldn’t have a moment’s unhappiness.’

  She smiled at him; there was something comfortably familiar about him. ‘I had nothing but unhappiness in my childhood. A stepfather who beat me and a mother who abandoned me to a home for waifs and strays when I was five years old.’ She looked away and didn’t see the smile widen on Luke’s face. ‘Since I’ve learned that you make your own luck, things have improved dramatically. Now there’s nothing I can’t deal with on my own.’