by Babs Horton
She stamped her feet impatiently. She just knew that she was going to hate it here; all her mother’s garbled stories on the telephone about how wonderful it was would be a pack of lies. That was the thing her mother did best: tell lies. Her mother must think she was an absolute idiot. The reason she was being sent to stay with these long-lost aunts was nothing to do with it being good for her; it was about her mother getting her own way. Again. She was off gallivanting about in Italy while Catrin was sent here to spend eight weeks in the middle of nowhere.
Why hadn’t her mother ever mentioned these Welsh aunts before, if they were so damned wonderful? Because they wouldn’t be, that’s why. They’d have false teeth which jiggled when they talked, they’d stink of mothballs and perm lotion, and worst of all they’d be stuffy, boring and as old as the hills.
In the dilapidated waiting room a clock ticked spasmodically.
She walked to the door, peeped inside and withdrew her head quickly; there was a strong smell of torn cats and stale tobacco but there was no one waiting for her.
She made her way out of the station, past the unmanned ticket office where a yellowing CLOSED sign hung haphazardly across the cracked window. She brightened. The aunts must have sent a car to pick her up – her mother had said the old gardener used to collect guests who arrived by train and he’d no doubt be waiting patiently outside the station.
The lane was deserted. A high moon wobbled above the swaying treetops and a lone gas lamp spluttered, casting a watery pool of light around her feet. Moths flickered in and out of the light, their fragile wings fluttering feebly against the dusty bowl of the lamp.
Moonlight dappled the lane and a chill breeze made her shiver and pull her school blazer tighter around her.
Surely someone would come soon? After all, they knew she was arriving on the late train.
It seemed an age since Sister Matilde had seen her off at Paddington. Thinking of Sister Matilde brought a lump to her throat. She wished that she could have stayed at school for the summer instead of being sent here to some stuffy old aunts she’d never met and didn’t want to.
If no one came in the next five minutes, she’d damn well find a telephone box and ring her mother. She’d just have to jolly well come down here and pick her up, except that wasn’t possible because her mother was already on her way to Italy. Catrin brushed a tear from her cheek, screwed up her fists, felt anger rising inside her, a thick, tight band in her stomach which pushed against her lungs and made it hard to breathe.
She would love to have gone on holiday to Italy even if it was with her mother. Sister Matilde had told Catrin’s class loads of stories about when she’d stayed in a convent in Italy. She’d described the cool, ancient churches smelling of incense and wild flowers, and how when the church bells clanged, the startled pigeons flew up into the blue summer skies. She’d told them of the beautiful paintings and the marvellous statues she had seen and how she had drunk icy limoncello and eaten marzipan cakes in a shady café in a tree-lined piazza. She had made it feel so real, so enticing, that Catrin could almost smell the lemons and limes stacked in the baskets on the market stalls, could almost breathe in the aroma of thyme and rosemary that filled the air. In her mind’s eye she could see the old women dressed all in black who sold eggs from wicker baskets while chickens pecked the cobbles in search of crumbs.
A bird squawked as it flew overhead and Catrin jumped, all thoughts of Sister Matilde and Italy disappearing.
Hell’s bells, why didn’t somebody come?
It was the first time in her life that she had been out in the dark in a strange place on her own, and she didn’t like it. There were worrying noises everywhere; the cracking of a twig might mean someone was lurking in the bushes waiting to pounce. It was well known that tramps and tinkers prowled around the countryside at night, with sharp knives and black hearts.
At school the doors were always locked and bolted because you never knew who might try to get in. Once a naked man had climbed over the convent wall and chased Sister Lucy through the cabbage patch.
There was a rustle of leaves as a mouse or maybe a rat scurried into the undergrowth. A spider writhed on a dangling thread from the branch of a tree and bats squeaked somewhere beyond the pool of light.
A cloud passed over the moon, the gas light dimmed and it grew so dark that she almost screamed in fright.
She put her hand in her blazer pocket and for comfort took out the holy picture that Sister Matilde had given her. She stepped closer to the lamplight and looked at it in surprise. The nuns usually gave out pictures of sad-faced virgins, horse-faced saints or a sorrowful Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. This was a tiny painting of a large, fat cat sitting beneath a tree on a withered lawn strewn with fallen apples. She looked more closely and realised that they weren’t apples but pomegranates.
It wasn’t a holy picture at all.
Why would Sister Matilde give her a picture of a fat cat?
It wasn’t even a cute cat, but an ugly fierce-looking thing with its mouth opened as if it was snarling. It must be Sister Matilde’s idea of a joke.
She slipped the picture quickly back into her pocket and felt for her rosary.
An owl called, a long and quivering hoot which made her skin erupt with pinpricks of fear. Another owl answered mournfully.
Surely someone must come for her soon.
In the distance a church clock chimed the hour and a dog howled dolefully.
She wasn’t going to hang around a moment longer. She’d grit her teeth and walk down to Kilvenny village, find a blasted telephone box and ring Shrimp’s Hotel.
She walked quickly down the lane, keeping to the middle, out of reach of the long, hairy arms of any bogeymen hiding in the bushes.
The air here in Wales was different from London; there was a heady whiff of stinging nettles, damp earth and coal smoke mingling with the salty tang of the sea. There was no sound of traffic, no cars tooting their horns and no orange streetlights to guide you.
The narrow lane curved round to the left and emerged into a narrow street and signs of civilisation. A hand-painted sign on the side of a house read ‘Cockle Lane’. She looked around hopefully but there was no telephone box and not a person in sight. Kilvenny was like a badly lit ghost town.
The houses on either side of Cockle Lane were the smallest she had ever seen, more suitable for midgets than real people. It would almost be possible to climb down from the upstairs windows into the street without a ladder. The front doors were all firmly closed and the curtains drawn across the tiny windows. Some of the houses were empty, the windows boarded up with wood and corrugated iron.
Crackly gramophone music drifted out into the night and the smell of someone making toast made her stomach ache with longing.
Further down the road there was a war memorial with withered poppy wreaths scattered haphazardly round the base. The weak light of a flickering gas lamp illuminated the list of names.
KILLED IN ACTION 1939-1945
Arthur, David John
Grieve, William John
Grieve, Charles Arthur
Lawrence, Dafydd
Roberts, Ianto
She wondered if William and Charles Grieve were relations of the aunts. There was so little that she knew about her family until her mother had conjured up these aunts, like rabbits from a hat.
On the right-hand side of Cockle Lane there were a few shabby shops. Daniel Watkins, High-Class Butcher and Poulterer didn’t look very high-class with the chipped pottery pigs leering out from behind the greasy window-pane and the green paintwork on the door blistered and peeling. Next to the butcher’s was a tall, narrow building with a washed-out sign hanging above the door, ‘Kilvenny Proprietary Library’. The curtains on the arched window to the left of the door were open and Catrin edged towards it.
She peeped cautiously in through the window, marvelling at the hundreds of old books that lined the walls from floor to ceiling. Then she saw the old man. He was sittin
g in an enormous chair, his feet curled beneath him, oblivious of everything except the book he had his nose stuck firmly into. A fat white cat slumbered in his lap and he looked so content and cosy that for a moment Catrin’s chest filled with rage. How she would like to get in there, tip him out of the chair and rip the book to pieces.
He picked up a cup from a side table, without taking his eyes off his book. He reached out for a biscuit and popped it into his mouth, dropping crumbs down the front of his grey shirt. He took another and another.
Greedy guts. Her mouth watered and she swallowed hard. Gutsy pig. Biscuits were bad for you and they spoiled your appetite.
Suddenly the cat opened one large green eye and stared at her, and she moved stealthily away from the window in case the man looked up and caught her snooping.
In the window of the Café Romana she caught sight of her reflection. She looked like a character just stepped out from an old-fashioned storybook for girls, with her boater hat and old-fashioned uniform.
The café was shut but a light shone behind the counter and illuminated the room in a soft blue aura. It was an Aladdin’s cave with rows and rows of sweet jars on shelves behind the counter. Humbugs and liquorice twists, sherbet and coconut macaroons. Toasted teacakes and chocolate eclairs. She licked her lips longingly. She’d given up sweets and chocolate for Lent last year and hadn’t eaten any since. Sweets made you fat. What was it they said in the slimming magazines she smuggled into school? A moment on the lips means a lifetime on the hips!
An enormous glittering soda fountain bore the words ‘Sarsaparilla, Lime and Lemon’. Posters advertising Capstan cigarettes and Fry’s Five Boys chocolate hung on the walls, along with faded pictures of mouth-watering ice creams: tutti fruttis, vanilla and chocolate sundaes and gigantic knickerbocker glories.
Her stomach protested noisily, even though she didn’t really like ice cream that much because it was full of fat and sugar.
The last thing she had eaten was a thin piece of toast scraped with margarine at breakfast this morning. She thought of the picnic lunch that she’d thrown away. One greasy Spam sandwich, a small russet apple and a slice of dried fruitcake.
She dragged herself reluctantly away from the café window.
Further down the road she stopped outside Meredith Evans, Photographer for Weddings and Special Occasions.
There were photographs of stiff-lipped bridegrooms and simpering brides. There were dribbling babies and horse-faced young men dressed in their best suits and a wide-eyed little girl sitting underneath a table smiling shyly out at the camera. There were eerie-looking men in top hats and frosty-faced women with parasols and wonky teeth. An owl called, a drawn-out, wavering hoot that gave her goose pimples and she had to bite her lips to stop her teeth chattering.
The sign outside the Old Boot Inn groaned ominously above her head, and the sound of a creaking accordion drifted out through the shuttered windows, along with a smell of warm beer and cigarette smoke which made her stomach turn over.
Sister Lucy had warned them about keeping away from public houses because they were places where the weak-willed went. Decent women should never, ever go into one and only a certain type of woman ever did. They were called loose women and had beehive hair sprayed stiff with lacquer. They wore chipped red nail polish, and painted circles of rouge on their cheeks. They had bosoms which wobbled dangerously, high heels and stockings with ladders in. Mary Donahue said the ladders were for men to climb up at night.
To her left the ruined walls of an ancient castle were silhouetted against the sky, a sky quite unlike the London one she was used to. There were more stars here in Wales than there were in England, millions of them spread out across the heavens like a secret code.
Much of the castle was ruined, but one wing still remained and the latticed windows glittered in the moonlight. Spooky.
Ghosts would walk in there at night. Long-faced women wearing faded velvet dresses, smelling of lilac and sobbing for their lost loves. Ugh.
Down in the dungeons the ghosts of toothless, stinking beggars would clank their chains and beg for stale bread and water.
She hurried on until the road petered out into a concrete slipway which led down to the beach. A lopsided signpost in the shape of a finger pointed across the beach, and she could just make out the writing: IMP’S OTEL’.
A muffled cough startled her and she turned and saw a wooden hut built against the sea wall, a higgledy-piggledy place with a worn, thatched roof and three small windows. A brass sign above the door declared it to be The Fisherman’s Snug. It looked snug, too, with smoke curling up from a tiny chimney and a candle in an enamel holder burning in the middle window. How lovely to be shut up in there on a stormy night, listening to the wild winds and the crashing of the sea. A startled face appeared suddenly at the window, a pale-faced man with eyes as bright as stars.
Their eyes met momentarily and Catrin moved quickly away into the shadows and waited with bated breath. The candle was suddenly blown out and the face disappeared, although she was sure the man was still watching her.
As she hurried across the beach her sandals sank into the soft, wet sand and water seeped up into her cotton ankle socks and made her feet itch uncomfortably. Wearily she climbed the steep steps at the far side of the beach, stumbling as she went, trying to stem the tears of exhaustion.
At the top of the steps she put down her suitcase and looked with dismay at the meadow of waving grass she would need to cross. Away beyond the meadow a large house loomed up stark as a cardboard cut-out against the sky. At last. Shrimp’s Hotel.
Moonlight silvered the meadow and the long grass shivered in the breeze as she made her way tentatively forward, the grass tickling her bare legs, the heads of silken poppies brushing against her goose-pimpled skin. She was afraid and yet filled with a curious excitement which sent a peculiar shiver tootling up her backbone.
Shrimp’s Hotel was all in darkness, but hopefully the aunts would still be up. The thought of a warm bed and a long sleep spurred her on despite her aching legs and the suitcase almost pulling her arm out of its socket.
She struggled on, stopping by an oak tree where a lop-sided swing dangled from a large branch.
There were swings in the park near the school but they were only allowed on them if no one was around, and even then Sister Lucy made them tuck their dresses firmly round their knees so that they wouldn’t show their underwear. Men could go mad if they caught a glimpse of women’s underwear.
Sister Lucy said men were sorry creatures who didn’t have any self-control where young girls were concerned. Good Catholic girls must never flaunt themselves in front of eejits and dirty-minded young men.
Once, in the playground, a wasp flew up the frock of a senior girl and she screamed and lifted her skirts to get it out and Sister Lucy had accused her of being a wanton hussy and taken all her merit marks away in one go.
Catrin looked longingly at the swing and wondered what it would feel like to sail through the air in the dark.
It would be daft. Wonderful.
What if someone should see her?
She climbed tentatively on to the wooden seat, leant back and pushed against the ground with her feet. The swing moved, slowly at first and then faster and faster. Higher and higher she went until she felt as though she was leaving the earth and merging with the stars.
She heard a mouse rustling through the grass. An owl called, unseen but close.
She was unafraid. Flying.
She giggled. If Sister Lucy could see her now she’d have a blue fit: “Have you taken leave of your senses, Catrin Grieve? Showing your washing to the whole wide world. Get down from there this instant.”
Catrin threw back her head and laughed, felt the breeze, deliciously cool on her face, lifting her dress above her bony knees.
There was a creaking as the swing lurched, the rope crossed over and the swing twisted round in the air.
Round and round she went, faster and faster, until t
he world was out of control. Trees and house, moon and sea. Stars spinning above the tower of the ruined castle.
The rope snapped and she was thrown high into the air.
Her feet were above her head, stars twinkling above her brown crepe-soled sandals.
She hit the ground, rolled over and over, brambles ripping at her bare legs until finally she came to rest. She lay on her back struggling to catch her breath. Her heart was beating fast, the blood rushing to her head, and a drumming sound echoed in her ears. When the shock began to subside, her breath came in scratchy gasps.
Whatever had she been thinking of?
She could have killed herself falling like that and yet she was fine, although she’d be bound to have a few bruises to show for her madness in the morning. If anyone at Shrimp’s had seen her they’d think she was some kind of simpleton.
The hairs on the nape of her neck twitched, a million antennae warning her that someone out there in the darkness was watching her. What if there were dangerous halfwits wandering around in the dark? Lunatics broken out from asylums?
She ran now, the suitcase banging painfully against her legs, until she reached the front door of the hotel and looked up at the darkened windows.
There must be some terrible mistake. She dropped the suitcase and hastily made the sign of the cross.
6
Meredith Evans closed the door to his dark room and shuffled through into the parlour. He heard the church clock chime the hour, switched on a side lamp, poured himself a full tumbler of whisky, drank it down, smacked his lips appreciatively and turned on the wireless. A crackling filled the room, followed by an ear-splitting whistling punctuated by the familiar voice of the weatherman, who sounded as if he were at the far end of the world and talking through a pipe. He turned the dial with impatience but the whistling got louder so he turned it off, poured another tumbler of whisky and went out into the front of the shop.