Beggars and Choosers

by Catrin Collier

  She unpicked the string and showed Sali a pair of knitted sleeves and the back and front of a pullover. ‘They need pressing and making up. Perhaps you could show them to the boys and ask what they want done with them.’

  ‘Or I could make them up and leave them under the tree.’ Sali suggested. She looked at the blue pullover Mrs Evans had made for her youngest son. The stitches were neat and beautifully even, and she imagined the Mrs Evans she had seen in the photographs on the parlour wall, only smaller, darker and frailer, sitting up in bed in the front room, knitting.

  ‘That will be a nice surprise for them. I’m only sorry I didn’t bring them round before now.’

  ‘I’ll put them in my room.’ Sali picked up the parcels and ran upstairs with them. By the time she returned, Megan had made the tea.

  ‘You looking forward to Christmas?’ Megan asked.

  ‘To be honest, I’ve been so busy the last couple of months making Christmas cakes, puddings and biscuits that I haven’t had much time to think about it. But Joey and Victor have managed to get Harry excited, and I am looking forward to seeing his reaction when he sees the horse and cart I bought him under the Christmas tree.’

  ‘I’ve invited Victor to supper on Christmas Day,’ Megan confided.

  ‘Then I’ll see that he doesn’t eat too much for dinner and tea.’

  ‘Victor!’ Megan laughed. ‘I don’t think anyone could curb his appetite.’ Her face fell. ‘He wanted to give me an engagement ring for Christmas.’

  ‘You wouldn’t accept it?’

  ‘It would only create more arguments with my uncle and then he’d write to my father who would threaten to take me back to the farm. It’s hard enough for me to answer my uncle’s questions about Victor’s courtship as it is. And even without my family’s opposition, I can hardly leave my uncle and the children to fend for themselves while I go off and get married.’

  ‘You two are so much in love, things simply have to work out for you,’ Sali sympathised.

  ‘I wish I could believe that. Do you miss your husband?’

  Sali’s heart pounded erratically. Had rumours reached Tonypandy?

  ‘I am sorry, that was tactless of me. It must have been terrible for you to have been widowed so young.’

  Sali suddenly remembered that Megan only knew the story she had told the Evanses when she had first arrived. She sat at the table, pushed the Christmas decorations to one side, sugared her tea and thought of Mansel, of how much she had loved him and persisted in thinking of him as her husband, even after she had married Owen. How the whole time she had lived in Mill Street, she had woven dreams about Mansel and what their life would have been like if he hadn’t disappeared. And what it would be like if he returned and took her away from Owen ...

  Sometime since she had moved to Tonypandy she had ceased to think of Mansel. Was that because of what Harry’s foster mother had told her? Or because she no longer loved him? She found both questions impossible to answer.

  ‘When ... when it happened,’ she concentrated on the weeks after Mansel’s disappearance, ‘I didn’t want to go on living. But what people say is right, it does get easier as time goes on, and,’ she beamed, when she heard Harry’s high-pitched, excited chatter in the basement, ‘I have a wonderful son, a good job working for kind people and a lot to be grateful for.’

  ‘Are you sure that your father asked you to invite Annie, Tonia and me to dinner on Christmas Day?’ Connie asked Lloyd, as he totalled a column of figures in her ledger.

  ‘Yes,’ he murmured absently.

  ‘Do you want us to come?’

  ‘You always have before.’ He marked a figure with his forefinger. She leaned over the desk and dropped a kiss on his forehead, but he didn’t look up from the page.

  ‘We came because your mother invited us.’

  ‘I think that is why my father wants you to come this year. So that the arrangements my mother made when she was alive will continue. Because while they do, she won’t be entirely dead. Not to him.’

  ‘There is life after death, Lloyd.’

  ‘Spare me your religion and I’ll spare you my Marxism.’ He closed the ledger and turned around to face her.

  ‘And my suffrage?’ she asked. ‘This Liberal government of yours is force-feeding helpless women.’

  ‘This Liberal government is most certainly not mine.’ He lifted his jacket from the back of the chair.

  ‘You are not going?’

  ‘I promised I’d be back early to help decorate the tree.’

  ‘Promised Sali?’

  ‘We’ve had all the conversations about my father’s housekeeper that we are going to have, Connie,’ he stated flatly.

  ‘I’m in agreement on that one, darling.’ Her fingers strayed to his flies as she kissed his lips.

  ‘No, Connie.’ He removed her hand and moved away from her.

  ‘My, you are a grumps. You’ll be here tomorrow evening?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘The accounts will need totalling.’

  ‘So long as it is just the accounts,’ he said seriously.

  ‘Nine o’clock, which will give us two hours before I have to get ready for midnight mass.’ She absolutely refused to accept that he wanted to put their relationship on a platonic footing. He was in a bad mood, that was all. Tomorrow would be different. It had to be. ‘If you walk us home after we have dinner with you on Christmas Day, you can give me my present, in private,’ she murmured suggestively.

  ‘You are very sure I have something for you.’

  ‘Very.’ She grasped his arm. ‘Just don’t wrap up too well. A woman can get impatient when there are too many layers to tear off.’

  He pushed her away. ‘Do you mind if I take some of that mistletoe you have in the storeroom in case Victor and Joey didn’t find any up at the farm?’

  ‘I’ll put it on your bill,’ she replied sulkily.

  ‘I’ll expect you to.’ He took his hat from the stand, jammed it on his head, checked his reflection in the mirror and left.

  Connie sat on the sofa in front of the fire and stared into the flames. Lloyd had told her that he loved her several times during the thirteen years they had been lovers, but only in the early years and never since he’d returned from Pontypridd. She had put his reticence down to the uncertainty and clandestine nature of their relationship. But could it really be possible that he no longer loved her?

  As Billy Evans had prophesied, without the dining suite, which he and the boys had carried into the kitchen, the middle room made a reasonably comfortable parlour. Acting on Sali’s suggestion, they had left the bookcases and sideboard and rearranged the chairs and sofa closer to the fireplace. Victor experimented with the Christmas tree, setting it in several different spots before Sali, Joey and Harry unanimously agreed the best place for it was in front of the window. While Sali, Harry and Joey hung their old decorations and some of the sweets and biscuits Sali had made on the branches, Victor laid a fire, ready to be lit on Christmas morning.

  As a final touch, Sali arranged sprigs of holly over the picture frames, filled a vase with more and set it in the centre of the mantelpiece.

  ‘Tomorrow night, we’ll hang our stockings in a row along here,’ Victor informed Harry, running his fingers over the brass rail below the mantelpiece. ‘And, provided we are all good and go to bed early, Father Christmas will park his sleigh on the roof, climb down the chimney and fill them full of nice things.’

  Harry looked to his mother for confirmation.

  ‘Victor is right, darling.’

  ‘I’ll have presents?’

  ‘If you are a good boy.’ She picked him up and swung him on to her back. ‘But now it’s bedtime.’

  ‘Can I have a story?’ he begged.

  ‘Two, as soon as you are curled up in bed, because you have been such a help in decorating the tree and fetching it and the holly from the farm.’

  ‘Not to mention the mistletoe.’ Joey pinned a sprig o
ver the door just as Sali was about to walk through it. ‘Kiss?’

  ‘That only works on Christmas Day.’ Ducking under his arm, she ran into the passage.

  ‘Can Uncle Victor and Uncle Joey listen to the story?’ Harry asked.

  ‘It’s their playtime,’ Sali answered, loud enough for Victor and Joey to hear.

  ‘Will I have playtime in the dark when I’m grown up like them?’

  Joey and Victor’s laughter followed them as they climbed the stairs.

  ‘Not if I can help it, Harry,’ she replied, stifling her own mirth.

  ‘The minute you are old enough, Harry, we’ll take you out to play in the dark, no matter what your mam says,’ Joey shouted up the stairs.

  Sali checked the clock when she returned to the kitchen. Although it felt later, it was only eight o’clock. Victor and Joey wouldn’t be home before ten and Mr Evans never returned from the County Club before a quarter to. For all of Lloyd’s assertions that he would be early, she knew that once he went down to Connie’s to do the accounts he was gone for the evening. She presumed he went on to one of the pubs or the County Club to drink with his father.

  It would only take half an hour to heat up two buckets of water on the range. She could have a bath. A luxurious, hot bath, which she hadn’t enjoyed since she had left Danygraig House.

  She ran downstairs, set the water on to boil, then went upstairs to fetch a clean nightgown, robe and the expensive soap and perfume her aunt had given her when she had been in the infirmary. Harry was fast asleep, his arm around Mr Bear. She tucked him and the bear beneath the flannel sheets and returned to the basement. After a moment’s hesitation she slid the bolt home on the door connected to the front of the house. There was little likelihood of her being disturbed, and no one would come round the back of the house at this time of night, but just in case ...

  Lloyd met a miner who had lost his arm in a pit accident outside the Cross Keys pub. He was selling ‘Yule’ logs from an old baby carriage and despite their well-stocked wood shed, Lloyd bought half a dozen for the parlour fire and insisted on standing the man a Christmas drink, which became three when they met another two colliers who had once worked shifts with them.

  Reflecting on his lack of willpower and broken promise to return early, Lloyd carried the logs and the mistletoe round to the back of the house. He burst in through the basement door just as Sali rose, naked from the bath.

  They stared at one another for a single, blindingly awkward moment. Blushing, Sali turned and reached for a towel.

  ‘Sali, your back!’ Appalled at the sight of her scars, he loosened his hold on the logs and they plummeted, crashing on to the flagstones. He retreated outside and stood for a moment in the cold night air staring up at a sliver of moon surrounded by stars. He had assumed the injuries to Sali’s face had been inflicted in a bout of drunken anger. But the scars on her back weren’t the result of a single beating. She had been thrashed systematically and often, and for the first time, he understood her fear of Owen Bull and why she wouldn’t take her son to live with her aunt in the comfort of Ynysangharad House.

  A man capable of stripping the skin from the back of a helpless woman wouldn’t hesitate to attack a frail, elderly woman – or child. Lloyd recalled Harry’s reaction when his father had reached over his head for his cap when the boy had first come to live with them. He burned to destroy the man who had blighted Harry’s babyhood, and transformed Sali Watkin Jones from the happy carefree student with whom he had been slightly acquainted into the terrified, scarred and brow-beaten woman who had applied for the job of their housekeeper.

  He never knew what prompted him to act as he did and he never attempted to analyse his reasons. He only knew that the moment he thought of opening the door and stepping inside, nothing could have stopped him.

  Sali was still standing in the bath clutching the towel around her and fumbling for her nightgown when Lloyd returned. Terrified, frozen, she watched him move towards her and she felt as though time had slowed. It seemed to take hours for him to reach her, and when he did, he cupped her face in his hands and kissed her so tenderly and gently she couldn’t be sure that his lips had touched hers.

  She pulled the towel closer and shivered as he released her. Lifting her from the bath, he carried her to the table, set her on the edge and brushed the towel aside. She thought of her uncle and Owen. The assaults they had made on her body. Crying out in distress she grabbed the towel.

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t understand.’ Lloyd ran his fingertips lightly over the scars on her back.

  ‘It wasn’t just Owen.’ Tears trickled, cold and wet down her cheeks. ‘After Mansel ... after he ... my uncle ...’ The shame and degradation of her uncle’s assault engulfed her in an crushing wave of self-loathing that had lost none of its intensity with the passage of time. She fought for breath, as once again she smelled the sour stench of his pomade, heard his quick panting gasps as he raped her, felt his damp sweating hands around her neck, suffocating, squeezing ...’

  ‘Sali!’

  She opened her eyes and saw Lloyd looking intently at her. He murmured something, but gripped in the trauma of the most devastating night of her life, she didn’t hear a word he said.

  ‘I tried to fight him ... I really tried ...’ Her voice rose hysterically as she pleaded for understanding. ‘He was so strong I couldn’t stop him ... And afterwards ... after what he did to me ... I had to marry Owen or my sister and brothers would suffer because of my shame and Owen ... Owen ... he...’ She dissolved into tears and Lloyd gathered her close to him.

  ‘Owen said I was a whore,’ she sobbed. ‘That he did horrible things to me because I was full of sin and made him do them ... That I wasn’t fit to be with decent people ...’

  ‘And you believed him?’ Lloyd slipped his fingers beneath her chin lifting her head until she met his steady gaze. ‘Decent men don’t rape women or flay the skin from their back, Sali.’

  ‘I’m sorry ...’

  ‘You have nothing to be sorry for. If there is such a thing as sin, you were the innocent sinned against.’ He kissed her again, lightly on the forehead intending to release her, but she clung to him, burying her head in his chest in the hope that he wouldn’t see her tears.

  He stroked her face gently with the back of his hand, smoothing the damp hair away from her forehead with his fingertips. His touch was light, loving, so chaste and gentle she could almost believe that she was a child again. She wished with all her heart that she was an innocent and precious child cosseted and cared for in the safety of the nursery of Danygraig House.

  ‘Put the past behind you, Sali. None of it was your fault.’ He turned her head and kissed away her tears. She gazed at him in wonder, realising for the first time that a grown man could be capable of tenderness.

  His lips sought hers, and slowly, tentatively she returned his embrace. Almost before she realised what was happening they were kissing again, a heady, intense kiss that percolated through her lips to her entire body, setting her skin and nerve endings tingling and the blood scorching through her veins.

  Weak, dizzy, she gazed into his eyes as softly and delicately he continued to explore her body, first with his fingertips, then later, after he had lowered her back on to the table, with his lips and tongue, evoking strange new sensations and desires she had never suspected herself of possessing.

  He reached for something in his pocket and stripped off his clothes. Moments later, they were both lost. Immersed and absorbed in an intense new world where nothing existed outside of the fierce hunger they had aroused within one another. But even then, his movements were unhurried and leisurely as he controlled his ardour and taught her to subsume hers, until the shattering instant they climaxed in a sweeping wave of emotion that left her spent, exhausted and yet, calm, fulfilled and more alive than she had ever felt in her entire life.

  Sali felt cold and bereft when Lloyd withdrew from her, and went to the tap. She fled to the other side of the basement
. Turning her back to him she returned to the bath, washed and slipped her nightgown over her head, put on her robe and picked up her soap and perfume.

  ‘I didn’t mean for that to happen.’

  She looked up and saw him watching her. She was devastated by his confession. He had used her, just like Mansel, her uncle, Owen ... no, not like her uncle and Owen, nothing at all like them!

  ‘We have to talk, but not now. My father and brothers will be in any minute. Leave that,’ he ordered, as she went to lift the bath by the handles. ‘I’ll clean up here. You go to bed. I’ll see you tomorrow after work. We can take Harry for a walk around the town.’

  She pushed her feet into her slippers.

  ‘Goodnight, Sali,’ he called after her, as she ran up the stairs.

  She snapped two fingernails to the quick in her impatience to pull back the bolt. She heard water running downstairs as he rinsed out the bath followed by the scrape of zinc against stone as he hung it back on the wall.

  Terrified of meeting Victor, Joey or Mr Evans lest they see her and guess something had happened, she ran up the stairs, dived into her room and closed the door.

  How could she have been so foolish as to risk her and Harry’s home? Was it simply as Owen and her uncle had said? Was she was a whore, a woman who liked to do sinful things?

  And she was married! She had stood in chapel and sworn before God to take Owen Bull and forsake all others.

  She sat on the bed in the freezing cold room, hating herself for what she had done and wishing she still believed in God so she could get down on her knees and pray for forgiveness.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Me, Connie.’

  ‘Lloyd?’ Connie opened her private door set beside the shop entrance and peered outside to see Lloyd’s tall figure framed in the light of the gas lamp behind him.

  ‘There’s something wrong with the figures I added up this evening,’ he fabricated, seeing Annie O’Leary’s tall thin figure, and Antonia’s more curvaceous form move behind Connie in the hallway.

  ‘And you came round at this hour?’