Swansea Summer

by Catrin Collier

  ‘He wouldn’t have listened. Not then. And you’re forgetting Helen is every bit as wild as Jack and just as crazy about him as he is about her. Besides, all things considered it’s turned out well. He’s calmed down since you came back and that has to be down to you. And look where he is now, on honeymoon in London with a wife who adores him and a lovely home and a job with prospects to come back to.’

  He offered her his arm, closing his hand round her gloved fingers as she hooked her hand into the crook of his elbow. ‘You’re brilliant at making people feel good about themselves.’

  ‘You’re so hard on yourself it only takes a couple of compliments – no, that’s not the right word – home truths to make you realise you can’t hold yourself responsible for the ills of the entire world.’

  ‘You’re quite something, Lily Sullivan.’ He wondered, yet again, why she was with him, not someone with more education, money and better prospects, like Joe Griffiths.

  ‘You two going to stand there spooning all night, or make a move towards the Mumbles train?’ Adam demanded.

  Martin looked up. While he and Lily had been talking, the others had walked on ahead and were standing on the corner of Verandah and Mansel Streets. ‘We’re with you.’ Taking Lily’s hand, he raced down to join them.

  ‘You remember what happened the last time we went to the Pier Ballroom,’ Robin Watkin Morgan reminded Joe, as they sat drinking beer with whisky chasers in the saloon bar of the Mermaid Hotel in Mumbles.

  ‘Larry Murton Davies made an idiot of himself.’

  ‘And made us look like idiots because we were with him.’

  ‘Seeing as how he’s in Italy now, he can’t make either himself or us look like fools tonight.’

  ‘Which makes you all the more determined to carry on where he left off.’

  ‘You’re being ridiculous,’ Joe retorted irritably.

  ‘You’ve done nothing but talk about Lily Sullivan since she gave you back your engagement ring.’

  ‘She couldn’t give it back to me because I didn’t give it to her in the first place.’

  ‘No need to be so bloody pedantic.’

  ‘You were at the engagement party, you saw …’

  ‘Your intended fiancée’s real mother crawl out of the gutter she touts in, gatecrash the party and put an end to the proceedings,’ Robin interrupted, hoping to avoid yet another exhaustive post-mortem on the event from Joe. ‘You had a narrow escape, the only problem is you can’t see it.’

  ‘I refuse to stand by and watch a girl like Lily throw herself away on a lout.’

  ‘Martin Clay is your brother-in-law, as of this afternoon.’

  ‘The brother of my brother-in-law and that doesn’t make him any less of a lout.’

  Robin reined in his exasperation. He and Joe had met as freshers at Swansea University almost three years before. And apart from an overdeveloped sense of romanticism and a puritanical bourgeois attitude to sex, Joe had proved a good and loyal friend. It was Joe’s coaching that had enabled him to pass examinations with grades beyond his own capabilities and Joe had already been offered a position at the BBC on graduation, an organisation he burned to work for. Given Joe’s extraordinary talents, he had no doubt his friend would rise high and hopefully take him some of the way with him. Which was why he was sitting drinking with him, instead of savouring the delights of a town-centre pub crawl with the rest of their group who had failed to persuade Joe to join them.

  ‘Consider what you’ve just said,’ he suggested patiently. ‘You know as well as I do what most people will think when you say “a girl like Lily”. And before you start on another of your tirades, remember I saw her mother – and in her working clothes. A Tiller girl wears more on stage and the woman who would be your mother-in-law if you persist in going after Lily didn’t have a body any man in his right mind would want to look at. Why can’t you see you’re well rid of the girl?’

  ‘Because I love her.’

  ‘How can you, when her mother trawls the docks every night offering herself to any man with a couple of shillings in his pocket and a stomach strong enough to face getting close to her for however long it takes.’

  ‘Lily didn’t even know she was related to the woman until she turned up at the party. You can’t hold her responsible for someone who abandoned her …’

  ‘Blood’s thicker than water. As my father says to his patients, it’s all in the genes. Hair colouring, eye colouring – character …’

  ‘Rubbish!’ Joe pronounced tersely, thinking of himself and his unknown father as much as Lily. If Robin was right, what had he inherited from the man who had walked away from his eighteen-year-old mother when she was carrying his bastard? A yellow streak of cowardice? His height? His dark hair? God forbid, his talent for writing. He wanted that to be his and his alone, not owed to some stranger who had abandoned him. He finished his pint and downed his whisky in one swallow. ‘Same again?’

  ‘Ever known me refuse?’ Robin followed Joe to the bar. ‘This fixation of yours for Lily Sullivan …’

  ‘I told you …’

  ‘You love her,’ Robin chanted sceptically. ‘I don’t buy this one woman/one man claptrap; that’s for poets and schoolgirls who’ve overdosed on Tennyson and Byron. There’s any number of women out there who’d suit you as well, if not better, if you’d give them a chance. I’ll grant you Lily’s not bad looking but I’ve seen prettier and she hasn’t one tenth of the class of Emily …’

  ‘If by class you mean the money to swan off to Paris to blow a year’s average wages on a shopping trip, you’re right.’ Joe referred to the holiday Robin’s girlfriend Emily and his sister Angela were taking with half a dozen of their wealthier girlfriends.

  ‘It’s not just money,’ Robin unconsciously reiterated his mother’s opinion. ‘It’s knowing how to say the right things. How to cultivate people who matter; how to dress, how to behave …’

  ‘Lily behaves a bloody sight better than Emily,’ Joe defended warmly. ‘She wouldn’t jump into bed with a man after two dates, as Emily did with you.’ Suddenly aware of people staring, he signalled to the barman. ‘Two pints and two whiskies,’ he ordered abruptly, resenting the grin on the man’s face.

  ‘Perhaps if you had taken her to bed, you’d have recovered from what happened at the party and got over her by now,’ Robin replied, refusing to get embarrassed or angry.

  ‘You make Lily sound like a disease.’

  ‘The way you’re carrying on about her I’m beginning to wonder. You know she’s seeing Martin Clay. She could be sleeping with him …’

  From the savage look Joe gave him, Robin wondered afterwards if he would have punched him if it hadn’t been for the barman’s interruption.

  ‘Two pints, two whiskies, sir, that will be five shillings and sixpence.’ The barman eyed Joe as he took his money. ‘You two gentlemen all right?’

  ‘Quite,’ Joe answered brusquely.

  ‘We don’t want any trouble.’

  ‘And there won’t be any.’ Taking his drinks, Joe returned to their table.

  Aware the barman was watching them, Robin smiled. ‘What are your pickled eggs like?’

  ‘We don’t serve bar snacks, sir. If you are hungry, may I recommend our upstairs restaurant?’

  ‘Thank you for reminding me.’ Taking his drinks, Robin carried them over to the table where Joe was sitting.

  ‘Lily’s only going out with Martin Clay to make me jealous,’ Joe snapped pre-emptively as Robin pulled out a chair.

  ‘She told you?’

  ‘All through the wedding reception she watched me while she flirted with him. And it was the same tonight when Martin went to pick her up to take her to the Pier. She knew I was getting into the car, so she kept him on the doorstep to make sure I saw her kissing him. But she only kissed him on the cheek.’

  ‘But you haven’t spoken to her.’

  ‘I don’t have to speak to her to know what she’s thinking. We were – are -’ he corre
cted, ‘that close. There’s no need for words between us. I only have to look into her eyes to feel what she feels …’

  ‘She is your “ever fixed mark – the star to every wand’ring bark.”’

  ‘Mock all you like. I deserve it for expecting a Beano-and-Dandy-reading moron who is incapable of seeing further than the physical, to understand true emotion – or the poetry of the soul.’

  ‘It is just as well some of us live in the real world.’ Robin sipped his beer. ‘Man cannot live by romance alone.’

  ‘Your idea of romance is a tumble between the sheets so Emily can scratch your itch, as you down a decanter of your father’s whisky.’

  ‘Pity you haven’t allowed a girl to scratch your itch. You’re proof of the theory that if you don’t get enough you go mad. And there’s my sister pining …’

  ‘I don’t love Angela.’

  ‘You don’t have to love a girl to go to bed with her.’ Robin suddenly felt as though he were talking to a small child, not a contemporary.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘There is such a thing as sex for sex’s sake. It’s good healthy exercise and more fun than a cross-country run.’ Robin looked closely at Joe and realised that in the last couple of months his friend had lost weight. His face was leaner, his dark eyes sunk in purplish-black shadows that gave him a slightly crazed appearance. Perhaps he’d hit closer to the truth than he’d realised when he’d mentioned madness.

  ‘I’m not like you, Robin.’ As the passion that had sustained Joe during their argument subsided, his voice softened.

  ‘I never thought you were.’

  ‘Don’t you see, if I don’t go to the Pier, Lily may think I’ve lost interest in her. She knows I overheard her and the others making plans to go there tonight. And she’s with Martin; if he’s anything like his brother Jack …’

  ‘He’ll have the knickers off the gorgeous Lily before you manage to get your leg over.’ Waiting for Joe to bite back, Robin drank half his whisky.

  ‘Why do you always have to bring everything down to a crude level?’

  ‘Because life is crude.’

  ‘I’ll go to the Pier on my own.’

  ‘No you won’t. In your state of mind you need someone with you to stop you from making a complete ass of yourself. And who knows, another couple of these’ – Robin finished the other half of his whisky – ‘might mellow you enough to see sense. God knows why, but my sister’s still keen on you. She’ll be back from Paris on Thursday and although she is my sister, I still say Angela’s a better prospect for you than Lily.’

  Chapter Five

  As the waiter helped her off with her coat, Helen studied the decor of the Italian restaurant the hotel manageress had recommended. It was smaller and far less grand than the upstairs dining room of the Mermaid Hotel in Mumbles and positively downmarket compared with the Mackworth Hotel in High Street. The walls were whitewashed; the tables and chairs simply made from planks of dark wood and the tablecloths and napkins a cheerful red gingham that suggested a country kitchen rather than the impersonal elegance she’d expected to find in a London establishment.

  Her father had made a point of taking her and Joe out to eat at least once a week since he’d considered them old enough to sit at an adult table. As a result she’d never felt intimidated in even the grandest of the hotels her grandmother patronised and invited her and Joe to dine in on family state occasions. But she sensed from the look on Jack’s face as he handed the waiter his coat that he was ill at ease.

  ‘Will this suit, sir?’ The waiter ushered them to a table for two, set in a corner next to the window. As Jack looked to her for confirmation, she gave him a reassuring smile.

  ‘It will do fine.’ She continued to smile at Jack as the waiter pulled out a chair for her, lit the candles on their table and shook her napkin over her lap.

  ‘Would you like to see the wine list, sir?’

  Helen reached for Jack’s hand across the table. ‘I’d love a lemonade, darling.’

  ‘Do you have beer?’ Jack asked tentatively, as the waiter flourished the wine list in front of him. The only places he’d ever eaten out in had been the Italian cafés of the egg, beans and chips variety in Swansea. This place with its black-suited, fawning waiters, elaborately printed menus and wine cellar was completely beyond his experience.

  ‘We have Guinness and Worthington, sir.’

  ‘My wife will have a lemonade and I’ll have a pint of Worthington please.’ Jack tried to look as though he ate out every day of the week as he took the menu the man handed him.

  ‘The manageress of the hotel was right, the prices here aren’t too bad.’ Helen scanned the card, as the waiter went to get their drinks.

  ‘The set dinner is three and sixpence. You can get sausage, eggs, beans and chips in the café by the bus station for one and six.’

  ‘But not tablecloths and waiters.’ She set the menu aside. ‘And this is our honeymoon.’

  Jack ran his finger round the inside of his collar. It suddenly seemed too tight and the restaurant too warm for his liking. ‘What are you going to have?’

  ‘Tomato soup, lamb Italian style, and Italian ice cream, a large one with raspberry sauce. You?’

  ‘What’s lamb Italian style?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ she confessed lightly.

  ‘It could be horrible.’

  ‘And it could be wonderful. I won’t know either way until I try it.’

  He stared down at the bewildering array of cutlery in front of him. His mother never had money enough to set more than one course on the table while he’d been growing up and generally there hadn’t been enough of that to satisfy his, Martin’s and Katie’s appetites.

  ‘I’m starving.’ Helen squeezed his hand as the waiter arrived with their drinks. ‘Besides,’ she whispered into his ear so the waiter couldn’t hear, ‘I’ll need to keep up my strength if your performance today is an indication of what the rest of our honeymoon is going to be like.’

  Drawing confidence from her composure in these strange surroundings, Jack looked the waiter in the eye as he gave him Helen’s order and, after a moment’s hesitation, asked him to bring everything for two.

  ‘I thought you didn’t want to risk the lamb.’ Helen stirred her lemonade, sending the slice of lemon and ice cubes swirling around the tall glass.

  ‘I can’t have the waiter thinking my wife is braver than me.’ He sipped his Worthington. It was colder than any beer he’d drunk before.

  ‘It is only a restaurant.’

  ‘My experience of restaurants is standing outside and reading the menu, and as I could never afford more than a plate of bread and butter in one, the café always seemed to be a better bet.’

  ‘The way you work in the warehouse you won’t ever have to count the pennies again.’

  ‘We won’t be able to eat out very often,’ he warned.

  ‘It could be our treat, say once a month.’

  ‘And when the baby is born?’

  ‘I’ll want to stay in and look after him – and you until – he’s old enough to join us.’ Resting her chin on her hand, she gazed at him. ‘This is wonderful. Us, eating out alone in London, with fourteen whole days to do exactly as we please ahead of us.’

  ‘And where do you want to go tomorrow?’

  ‘The Tower.’

  ‘And if it’s on the way, back to the hotel via Harrods.’ He returned her smile.

  ‘Admit it, you’re as curious about the place as I am.’

  ‘Worried more than curious. Their prices are supposed to be out of this world.’

  ‘I promise not to spend more than … five shillings? How’s that?’

  ‘And what do you intend to buy for five shillings?’

  She felt his hand fumbling for hers beneath the cover of the tablecloth. ‘A tie for my husband.’

  ‘What’s wrong with the one I’m wearing?’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  He shook his head.

&n
bsp; ‘That’s exactly why I need to buy you a new one. To start developing your taste.’

  ‘Are you trying to change me already, Mrs Clay?’ he asked seriously.

  ‘And if I am?’ Her blue eyes glittered in the candlelight.

  ‘I’d expect a reward for submitting to your bullying.’ He leaned back as the waiter brought their soup, along with a basket of small brown bread rolls.

  ‘Perhaps I’ll give you one when we get back to the hotel.’

  ‘If it’s anything like the reward you gave me when we arrived, you can make that extravagance ten shillings.’

  ‘I’ll hold you to that.’

  He watched her take a bread roll and set it on her side plate before picking up her spoon. After carefully taking note of where she’d lifted it from, he followed suit.

  ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but what would you do, if I did give up my job in London and come back to Swansea?’ Judy asked, as Brian slid a tray of drinks on to their table and handed her a bottle of Babycham and an empty glass holding a cocktail cherry speared on a toothpick.

  ‘What wrong way is there to take it?’ He moved his chair, sat down and pretended to study the couples on the dance floor.

  ‘Like I said earlier, you’d be the first to know if I do decide to take my mother up on her offer.’

  ‘So, you are still thinking about it.’ He reached for his pint of beer.

  ‘I told you I’d give London a chance.’

  ‘But you’re not sure you want to.’ He finally looked at her.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I have absolutely no idea.’

  Her temper rose as she glared at him. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I have absolutely no idea what I’d do if you came back here,’ he explained, refusing to rise to her bait.

  ‘You wouldn’t return with me.’ She was suddenly alarmed at the thought.

  ‘To do what?’ He lowered his glass back on to the table.

  ‘Take your old job back.’

  ‘I wouldn’t get it. The brass aren’t too fond of policemen who switch from one force to the other every five minutes. And if we talk any more about this tonight, we’ll argue, so let’s not.’