Sinners and Shadows

by Catrin Collier

  ‘My point exactly.’

  ‘I agree with you, dual standards are unacceptable. It’s appalling that girls are treated differently from boys when it comes to courting, marriage and a million and one other things, like education and jobs. That’s why I’ve joined the suffragettes. But I’m not optimistic enough to think that the world is going to change overnight.’

  ‘You’ve joined the suffragettes?’

  ‘Yes, and we’ll have a long talk about it some other time.’ It was the last thing Sali wanted to discuss at that moment. ‘You knew about Joey’s past before you went out with him. Why should it bother you now?’

  ‘Because it’s now that he’s asked me to marry him.’

  ‘And you’re worried that if you do, he’ll carry on the way he did when he was single?’ she asked perceptively.

  ‘Yes.’ Rhian left the stool and went to the window that overlooked the rose garden. The bushes were in leaf but the wind was giving them such a battering she wondered if they’d survive long enough to flower. ‘You don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to, but did Lloyd have lots of girlfriends before you married him?’

  ‘He was twenty-eight,’ Sali reminded her. ‘And I was hardly a virgin after having Harry. Lloyd forgave me my past and I forgave him his. No – forgave is not the right word,’ she corrected. ‘Lloyd made me see that what happened before we married wasn’t relevant to our life together.’

  ‘The women Lloyd walked out with. Do you know who they are?’

  ‘If you mean Lloyd’s lovers,’ Sali said bluntly, ‘yes. But when Lloyd and I fell in love he told them it was over. I never think about them and I am certain that he doesn’t. But then Lloyd and I trust one another implicitly. If you don’t mind me saying so, it’s obvious that you don’t trust Joey.’

  ‘I’d like to.’

  ‘Have you tried telling him how you feel?’

  ‘Yes.’ Rhian left the window and walked back to the dressing table.

  ‘But Joey Evans’s infamous and irrational temper got in the way.’

  Rhian would have liked to agree with Sali but she felt that it would somehow be disloyal to Joey.

  ‘Try to talk to him again,’ Sali counselled.

  ‘But that would make me sound like a nagging wife before we even marry.’ She picked up her hairbrush and returned it to her bag.

  ‘That sounds to me like you’re seriously considering his offer. And a wife should be able to talk about anything to her husband, even at the risk of being called a nag.’ Sali glanced at the bedside clock. ‘If you’re ready, we’ll go and find Joey. Harry’s probably dragged him off to the stables to see the colt that was born the day before yesterday. He spends so much time down there with Robert, I suspect we’re going to have trouble getting him back to school when the summer term starts.’

  ‘Perhaps Harry could come with us to the show –’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ Sali said. ‘For a start you haven’t a ticket for him and he’s seen it twice already. Lloyd and I took him and Bella, and then my solicitor, Mr Richards, turned up with tickets for himself and Harry. He insisted a client had given them to him but I think he bought them because he wanted to see the show and used Harry as an excuse.’

  ‘You can’t blame him. I’ve heard that it’s very good.’ Rhian checked her hair in the mirror.

  ‘It is, but as it doesn’t start for another hour, I suggest that you and Joey walk very slowly from here to the Malsters’ Field.’

  ‘It’s a ten-minute walk.’

  ‘It will take you the other fifty to sort out your differences.’

  ‘You think I should marry him, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh no.’ Sali smiled. ‘You don’t put that one on me. Whether or not you should marry Joey, or any man come to that, is entirely your decision.’

  ‘But you would like me to marry him,’ Rhian persisted.

  Sali kissed Rhian’s cheek then opened the door. ‘I am blissfully happy with Lloyd and the children but that doesn’t mean I think marriage suits everyone. I have no idea if it will suit you, or Joey. All I want is for both of you to be happy. And the only advice I can give you is to think very carefully before you agree to marry him, or anyone.’

  *……*……*

  ‘Julia, have you heard a single word I’ve said?’ Mabel Larch demanded imperiously.

  Julia looked up from her Palestine Soup. ‘You were telling me that you wished you’d bought the green silk evening gown as well as the blue velvet.’

  ‘The cut was perfect.’ Mabel crumbled her bread roll into small pieces.

  ‘You did say that you disliked the colour,’ Julia ventured.

  ‘I could have had it dyed. I really don’t know why you bothered to come shopping with me, you’re no company and you’ve bought hardly anything.’

  Julia refrained from reminding Mabel that she’d only joined her at her insistence, and then in the hope that it would put her stepmother in a less aggressive mood, and consequently make her father’s life a little easier. ‘I purchased everything I needed.’

  ‘A few sets of exceedingly ugly underwear,’ Mabel said. ‘You should have bought some evening wear. You can’t keep wearing that figured black velvet. It’s positively drab, not to mention years out of date.’

  ‘The necks on all the gowns my size were too low.’ Acutely aware of her lack of cleavage, Julia only wore high collars.

  ‘They were classic styles. I simply don’t understand why you persist in covering yourself neck to toe like a nun. And in mourning! You’re not getting any younger. The way you carry on, you’ll be living with me and your father when you are in your dotage. No one likes an old maid, and that’s what you will be in another year or two. Sometimes, when I look at the way you dress and behave I wonder if you are there already.’

  Aware that her stepmother wanted both her and her brother out of the house, and wishing to avoid an argument on the subject, Julia refrained from biting back.

  ‘It’s a woman’s duty to dress well, and it’s not as if you haven’t the money. Just look at what you’re wearing now. That black drains what little colour you have and there’s more shape to a collier’s cloth cap than that hat you’re wearing. You never put on as much as a dab of perfume …’

  Julia recalled the pressure Mr Watkin Jones had exerted on her fingers when he had helped her into the carriage, the warmth of his smile when he stood watching them drive away and his final words: Hope to see you again, and very soon, Mrs Larch. Miss Larch. It was a pleasure, as always, to wait on you.

  ‘… Of course, he’s heard that you’ve inherited an absolute fortune from your mother.’

  ‘Who?’ Confused, Julia looked across at her stepmother.

  ‘Mr Geraint Watkin Jones. You don’t think he is that attentive to all the customers, do you? He knows you’re wealthy and practically on the shelf. And he’s astute enough to realize that a girl with your looks hasn’t been overwhelmed with suitors.’

  ‘No one with a brain in their head could think that.’ Julia didn’t quite succeed in keeping the bitterness from her voice.

  ‘Mr Watkin Jones may as well pin an advertisement on his back: “Rich wife wanted for gentleman who has fallen on hard times.” Mrs Hadley was only telling me last week in the Ladies’ Circle that she had to ask her husband to speak to him after he started bothering her daughter, Elizabeth.’

  ‘Elizabeth Hadley has a tongue in her head. Couldn’t she tell Mr Watkin Jones to stop bothering her, herself?’

  The irony was lost on Mabel. ‘Geraint Watkin Jones ignored the Hadleys when he had Danygraig House and his fortune. Yet, six months ago, when Elizabeth Hadley celebrated her twenty-first birthday and it was all round the town that she’d inherited her grandfather’s farm and coach-building business, Mr Watkin Jones became exceedingly attentive. He changed pews in St Catherine’s so he could sit behind her in church. He wrote his name against every one of the waltzes on Elizabeth’s dance card at the Christmas Charity Ball. He even ha
d the gall to invite her to the moving pictures, and when Mr Hadley told him that he wouldn’t allow his daughter to step out with a young man she wasn’t acquainted with, Mr Watkin Jones invited the entire Hadley family to dine with him and his mother in the annex of Ynysangharad House. Everyone knows that before she died, his mother hadn’t left her bed in years, and his sister and her family lived entirely separate from them, so it effectively meant that he’d be their host. I ask you, a shop assistant, inviting the Hadleys to dine.’

  ‘But he does live in Ynysangharad House,’ Julia said in Geraint’s defence.

  ‘Not for much longer, according to Mrs Hadley. His sister and the trustees of her son’s estate are anxious to shut up the wing that he and his mother occupied. I can’t say I’m surprised. It’s obvious that they were living on his sister’s or rather nephew’s charity and now the mother’s gone, there’s no earthly reason why he should continue to reside there. Lodgings are good enough for a shop assistant. Mrs Hadley said that the family has gone to the dogs since their uncle lost their money. The eldest girl married to that miner –’

  ‘Mr Evans is an engineer and he does business with Father.’

  ‘Unfortunately, business dictates that your father has to deal with all sorts of unsuitable people.’

  ‘Father’s solicitors’ practice makes most of its money from colliery business.’ Julia suppressed the temptation to remind her stepmother that colliery business had paid for the gowns she had just purchased.

  ‘Your father has made many sacrifices for you and your brother. And I think it’s high time you both contributed more to the household expenses now that you have taken possession of your mother’s fortune –’

  Julia stopped listening as her stepmother continued to expound arguments that had become all too familiar. She hadn’t needed Mabel’s warning about Geraint Watkin Jones’s intentions, any more than she’d needed to hear her disparaging judgement on her appearance.

  She wondered if it would be so terrible to have a husband who’d only married her for her money? At least he would have cause to be grateful to her. Geraint Watkin Jones was tall, good-looking and had been brought up as a gentleman, even if he had come down in the world. The fortune she had inherited on her mother’s death, which Mabel so bitterly resented, would enable them to buy a decent house anywhere they chose and fund a comfortable lifestyle. They could have carriages, servants, fine furniture and clothes, and possibly even a social life that included real friends.

  Closing her ears to Mabel’s prattling, she imagined herself walking into a ballroom with her arm resting on Geraint’s, sitting next to him in a theatre box, travelling to a seaside resort in the summer – and lying next to him in bed. She knew about her father’s problems with Mabel. Everyone in the house did, because there was no escaping their increasingly ugly rows. Could sharing a bed with a man possibly be as awful as Mabel said?

  If that was the case, why had her mother never complained? And what about all the other married women she was acquainted with who seemed to be happy? People like Sali Evans, who was always laughing and smiling whenever she appeared with her husband at the town’s social and charitable events.

  She couldn’t help pitying her father, even if it was his own fault that he was tied to Mabel. But then he, like her, had found himself marooned in a terrible emotional wasteland after her mother’s death. They had been too crushed to reach out to one another for comfort, because each had been deeply enmeshed in their own selfish grief. She suspected that he had turned to Mabel because he had been unbearably lonely, and the one thing she understood only too well was the desperation of absolute loneliness.

  Geraint Watkin Jones was kind and attentive, even if he was only after her money, and Mabel was reason enough for her to leave her father’s house. She was of age and able to dictate her own destiny. The only problem was how could she see more of Geraint without exciting Mabel’s suspicions? Because if Mabel discovered what she was up to, she would take great delight in telling her father that his only daughter had developed an interest in an ‘unsuitable’ man.

  She knew her father would realize that Geraint was only after her money, and that would lead to even more arguments in the house, between them, as well as between him and Mabel. If she pretended to shop, Mabel would accompany her, and Geraint Watkin Jones would never dare to invite her anywhere while they remained within Mabel’s earshot. It was up to her. She would have to wait for an opportunity – or make one. And when it came, swallow her pride and risk incurring her stepmother’s wrath by inviting Mr Watkin Jones to spend time with her.

  As Sali had predicted, they found Harry and Joey in the stables with Robert, Ynysangharad House’s groom-cum-chauffeur. Harry was perched on Joey’s shoulders and all three were gazing into the stall where the new foal was tottering around his mother on unsteady legs.

  ‘Come and see Toffee, Auntie Rhian,’ Harry shouted when he spotted her in the doorway with his mother.

  ‘That’s a strange name for a horse.’ Rhian glanced sideways at Joey as she stood alongside them.

  ‘Dad said I could name him and ride him as soon he’s old enough to be broken in. I called him Toffee because of his colour,’ Harry explained.

  ‘The exact same shade as the toffee Mari makes from Golden Syrup.’ Sali stood the other side of Joey and her son. ‘I think you’re more enamoured with the foal than you are with your new sister, young man.’

  ‘All Edyth does is eat, sleep, cry and fill her nappies,’ Harry said with the frankness of a child.

  ‘So did you at her age,’ Sali laughed. ‘But you grew up to be more interesting.’

  ‘I’m going to get myself a six-gun like Broncho Bill, and race Toffee round the fields, lassoing the other horses and ponies and chasing off the Indians.’

  ‘Not that there are many Indians in Pontypridd,’ Sali said practically. ‘I think two visits to the Wild West Exhibition was one too many for you, Harry.’

  ‘Do you want to stroke Toffee again before I go to clean the car, Master Harry?’ Robert asked.

  ‘Yes, please, Robert.’

  Joey continued to stand, taciturn and self-contained, after he lifted Harry from his shoulders.

  ‘Time you two were on your way if you want to get a good seat at the exhibition,’ Sali hinted.

  ‘I have booked the best seats,’ Joey snapped.

  ‘So did Lloyd, but they aren’t numbered and there are six rows in the section. The one nearest to the ring gets filled first because it has the best view.’ Sali leaned over the half-door and watched the foal nuzzle Harry’s hand.

  ‘He already knows you, Master Harry.’ Robert freshened the water bucket and set it beside the mare.

  ‘Thanks to your tutoring, Robert,’ Sali said gratefully.

  Feeling as though Sali couldn’t wait to get rid of him and Rhian, Joey buttoned his coat, pulled his gloves from his pocket and put them on. ‘Do you have to go back into the house?’ he asked Rhian.

  ‘No. You?’

  ‘No,’ he answered emphatically.

  ‘Why don’t you come back here for tea after the exhibition?’ Sali invited, aware that Joey was annoyed with her for suggesting they leave.

  ‘I have to call into the Pontypridd store.’ Joey adjusted his hat.

  ‘It’s your day off.’

  ‘We’re missing an order of men’s boots. They may have been delivered to Market Square by mistake.’

  ‘Surely you could have sorted that by telephone.’ Sali held out her hand to Harry when Robert opened the stable door.

  ‘If I sort things personally, I know they’re done. Thank you for the lunch, Sali. Say goodbye to Mari for me. See you soon, Harry.’ Joey pretended to shadow-box Harry but even that was a half-hearted gesture. ‘Bye, Robert.’

  ‘Thank you for lunch and the talk.’ Rhian kissed Sali’s cheek. ‘See you soon.’ Drawing strength from Sali’s look of sympathy, she shook Harry’s hand and said goodbye to Robert before following Joey down the drive.
>
  ‘If you don’t want to sit next to me at the exhibition, you don’t have to,’ Joey snarled when she drew alongside him.

  ‘That would be childish.’ Braving rejection, she took his arm. ‘I talked to Sali.’

  ‘About us?’ He gave her a withering look.

  ‘I needed advice. I don’t have anyone else to turn to except Mrs Williams. And we both know what she thinks of you.’

  ‘And Sali’s view of me is so different to your Mrs Williams’s?’ he said acidly.

  ‘Sali loves you like a brother and you know it.’

  ‘I bet her love didn’t extend to recommending that you accept my proposal.’ Shaking her hand from his arm, he adjusted his muffler.

  ‘She suggested that I try talking to you, but I can see it’s useless while you remain in this mood. And the longer you do, the more convinced I’ll be that I’ve made the right decision.’ She finally allowed her own anger to surface. ‘You’re behaving like a small boy who’s throwing a tantrum because he can’t have all the sweets in the shop.’

  ‘I have a right to be upset.’

  ‘With me, but not with Sali, Harry, Bella and Mari. You were unbearable at lunch.’

  He spotted a bench set in a shrubbery on the edge of the croquet lawn. ‘If you’re determined to carry on punishing me, we can spare ten minutes for you to have a real go.’

  ‘I am not punishing you,’ she said crossly, walking across to the bench with him. ‘Just because I didn’t go all dewy-eyed and gasp, “Oh yes, please, Joey,” when you asked me to marry you –’

  Without warning, he pulled her into the shelter of the trees and silenced her by kissing her a second time. When he released her he looked down into her eyes. ‘Why are you so angry with me?’

  ‘Because you are angry with me.’

  ‘Just answer me one question. Could you love me?’

  ‘I already do,’ she confessed.

  ‘Then forgive me and marry me,’ he pressed.

  ‘Sali said it’s best not to forgive but rather forget what happened before you marry someone.’