He found them both sitting outside their door, eating a meal. The wireless was playing softly from inside and the dogs, who had been sitting waiting hopefully for scraps jumped up at his approach. It was a such a contended scene that he felt a surge of anger that fate had deprived him of something similar. When he spoke, it was that anger that coloured his voice.
‘Dawn has spent a lot of time with you,’ he began and he made it sound like an accusation.
‘What’s wrong with that?’ Nelly demanded, and her raised voice started the dogs barking. ‘Fat lot of company she’d ’ave ’ad if she ’adn’t!’
‘I – I only wanted to say thank you,’ Tad said, but his voice was still sharp. ‘Dawn has enjoyed herself and it’s thanks to you that she didn’t—’
‘Get into any mischief?’ Nelly finished.
Anger flowed as always when Dawn was criticised. He felt that he was to blame for her wrong-doing.
‘No. I didn’t mean that. I was going to say that she might have become bored.’
‘She ain’t never bored, not that one,’ Nelly said.
‘What d’you mean by that?’
George stood up and raised a pacifying hand.
‘I think you two are both defending Dawn and I don’t think either of you have any need, do you?’
Tad did not answer. He lowered his head and studied the cinder path.
‘I only came to thank you,’ he muttered.
‘There ain’t no need,’ Nelly said. ‘Stay an ’ave a cuppa, why don’t yer?’ She went inside and returned with a cup and saucer which she proceeded to fill from the teapot near her chair. Tad came down the path and sat awkwardly on the edge of the lawn on an upturned bucket.
‘I am too defensive,’ he admitted. ‘There have been so many problems that I can’t stand the thought of anyone getting at Dawn. It isn’t her fault her mother died and she has to make do with only me.’
‘There’s something you will ’ave to face,’ Nelly said firmly, ignoring the warning look from George.
Tad looked at her, belligerence in the blue eyes and in the tightening of the thin jaw.
‘And what’s that?’ he asked coldly.
‘She tells lies. Real whoppers an’ all. You should ’ave listened to Delina when she told you what really ’appened in town. She didn’t refuse to ’elp Dawn and you know she wouldn’t really…’
She did not say any more, as Tad rose to his feet, stormed off up the path and slammed the gate behind him.
‘So much for my diplomacy,’ Nelly groaned. ‘Should ’ave kept me big mouth shut a bit longer, shouldn’t I?’
‘No, Nelly, love. Some time, somehow he has to accept the truth, and then perhaps he’ll learn that we aren’t his enemies.’
Tad walked home at a pace that had him breathless. He couldn’t slow down, even when his lungs felt about to burst. He walked past his house and up to the top of the estate, out on the hill behind St Hilda’s Crescent and only stopping where he could look down on the village nestling below him like a toy town. He felt ashamed of himself for allowing his stupid temper to force ill-considered words from him. If only he could calm down and allow time before he spoke.
He should have listened to Nelly. She was certain to have been trying to help Dawn. She would not have given the girl so much of her time if she were not interested in helping her. He wanted to go straight back down and tell Nelly and George how he really felt, listen to what they had to say about Delina. If he had been wrong about her…
He hugged himself in despair. Whatever he did seemed to make things worse and knowing he was his own worst enemy only added to his grief. He had arrived here with a small child and in need of friendship and help, but instead of accepting what had been generously offered, he had allowed pride and stupidity to ruin every chance of a good life here.
His breath was still ragged from the hurried walk up the steep hill as he slowly went back down. If only he could start again. Then his shoulders drooped. He would only make the same mess of things as before. The past couldn’t be changed. If anything altered it had to be himself. There was a smell of freshly cut grass on the air, a richness redolent of warm summer sun and happy days. He walked with his head low, avoiding the friendly stares of people working in their gardens.
When he got home, Dawn was not there. He did not worry, she was often missing when he expected her to be there. He sat and waited for her, the back door open and the kettle simmering on the cooker for her hot drink. After an hour had passed with miserable thoughts running through his mind, he went out to look for her. Anger again grew in him but this time not against himself but against Dawn. Why couldn’t she stay put and do as he asked?
He found her sitting in the hedge not far from Nelly’s cottage, staring through at where Nelly and George were talking together and laughing. His anger evaporated and he felt for her in her loneliness. He knelt down beside her and whispered softly, ‘Come on, Dawn. Time for bed.’
She turned and hugged him with unaccustomed closeness, her head on his shoulder, her hands fastened tightly behind his neck. He stood up, lifting her in his arms and carried her home.
* * *
After weeks of waiting, and almost giving up hope of hearing from Maurice, Sheila received a letter from Australia. It was not very thick but she prayed silently that it would contain news of a passage for her to join Maurice. The paper was flimsy and crinkled and her fingers fumbled as she separated the leaves and began to read.
The tone at once shattered her hopes of a reunion with her husband and tears threatened. Curtly, he said he had nothing to say to her except to state his regret at the death of her child. Her child, she noted sadly, not theirs. He said he would be moving on and the address she had almost certainly stolen from Delina would no longer find him. It was signed just ‘Maurice’.
She forced herself to continue to get ready for work and determined that no one would know of her bitter disappointment. She walked down the hill to the bus stop, eyes staring at the pavement, feeling exhausted and unwell. Why had he treated her so badly? Forcing her to make love and then abandoning her as soon as he met Delina? Unreasonably, she blamed Delina for everything, including the death of the baby. When she saw her setting off to Llan Gwyn on her bicycle, she wished fervently that the bicycle would swerve under a passing car.
She left the shop at five-thirty and wandered disconsolately towards the bus station. The day was warm but she shivered in her dress and short coat, hugging it around her and wishing she had somewhere to go other than home to Gran and the preparation of an evening meal. Then a voice called her and she looked across the road to see Nigel, and her face forced away its expression of misery. She was not in the mood for flirting with anyone, not even an accountant, but as soon as he crossed the road and smiled at her she shrugged off the unhappiness she had worn like a dark cloak all day and smiled back at him invitingly.
He persuaded her to wait for a later bus and go with him for tea and cakes.
‘What’s the excuse for spoiling me this time?’ she asked. Widening her eyes at him. ‘I’m not complaining, mind.’
‘Something has upset you. No-—’ he stopped her denial with a wave of his hand. ‘No, I can tell. I watched you walking along the road and I knew you were distressed about something.’ He leaned on the table and touched her hands. ‘I think I will always know, Sheila, when you are upset.’
Sheila warmed to his words and the admiration that glowed in his dark eyes. He was rather handsome in spite of his nose being over-long. She had liked dark-haired and brown-eyed men since seeing Cornel Wilde on the screen and using him as a dream-husband. His picture was still on her bedroom wall and she imagined taking it down and replacing it with one of Nigel.
‘What are you thinking about?’ he asked. ‘You look as if you’re in a daze? I hope I’m the cause?’
‘I was thinking of having a picture of you on my bedroom wall,’ she said slowly, ‘instead of the one that’s there at present.’ She didn’t tell
him about the film-star. Add a bit more mystery, she thought as she sank her teeth into a cream cake with obvious enjoyment.
‘Is it of your husband,’ Nigel asked. ‘The picture I mean.’ Slowly she shook her head, still chewing the delicious cake.
‘Perhaps one day you’ll find out,’ she teased, staring at him, wide-eyed and provocative. ‘Perhaps.’
They arranged to meet the following evening and Sheila went home to re-read Maurice’s letter again and again, determined to remove the pain it was causing, by constantly suffering the humiliation of her dislike and disregard until it faded and failed to hurt.
She finally tore it into shreds and went to bed to dream about Nigel and the escape he offered. If she could keep the secret of her marriage long enough for him to fall in love with her, then there was a chance. It would have to be kept a secret from her parents too, or they might consider it their duty to tell him. Oh, to get away from them all.
Secrets were never easy to keep in a small place like Hen Carw Parc. News of Sheila’s new boyfriend travelled fast through the village, first on the tongue of the postman who reported in to Nelly as he brought her a letter one morning. He threw his sack down over the handlebars of his bicycles and settled in the chair near her door in the hope of a cup of tea.
‘Heard the latest, then?’ he asked, his finger rubbing the side of his nose in a conspiratorial gesture that presaged a confidence.
‘Griff Evans ’as paid ’is debts!’ she said sarcastically.
‘No, no. Sheila, my poor little sister-in-law, has got herself a new boyfriend. Works as an accountant, so I’m told, daft about her too.’
‘’Ave to be daft to risk flirting with that one,’ Nelly grumbled. ‘What else is new?’
‘Well, I shouldn’t say this, but Archie says he’s seen Griff coming out of the back door of the fish-an’-chip shop late at night.’
‘So what? Probably passin’ on a message fer ’is wife. Hilda works there, doesn’t she?’
‘Yes, but this was when Hilda was away visiting her mother in Cardiff for the weekend.’
‘Phil Davies, you’re a wicked old gossip,’ Nelly laughed. ‘But tell me more!’
They sat drinking tea and eating some of the cakes Nelly had just taken out of the oven, while he reported all the current gossip about Griff and the daughter of Milly Toogood.
* * *
Ignoring the smattering of talk she had heard, Sheila began meeting Nigel regularly, and managed not to explain about her wedding ring and the lack of a husband. He seemed to presume she had been recently widowed and she allowed the untruth to become accepted simply by not denying it, and without ever have to state the lie herself.
She was pleased to see the admiration on the faces of the other girls in the salon when they saw him waiting outside the window for her. She delighted in appearing casual about his attentions. Twice he brought her flowers and then she would sigh as she looked through the plate-glass window and tell them how very much in love with her he was and how hard it was for her to stay detached.
‘I can’t risk falling in love again so soon,’ she said dramatically to the younger girls. ‘Another disaster would make me run to the nearest convent. I’ve suffered so much at the hands of men, you know.’
Her late arrival at home was a constant source of annoyance to her parents, who still refused to treat her like the twenty-one-year-old who had been through the trauma of having and losing a child, as well as the embarrassment of the marriage that wasn’t. They would watch from the window of the flat above the shop and study the passengers alighting from the buses from Llan Gwyn, anxious to see Sheila crossing the road and walk up Sheepy Lane. Often, when more than two buses had pulled away without her appearing, they would be at her grandmother’s, both standing with disapproval on their faces and wanting an explanation and a minute-by-minute account of her lost hours.
‘Treat me like a school-girl, you do! As if I can come to any harm in an hour or two in Llan Gwyn!’ Sheila would complain with exasperation.
On the evening she and Nigel had gone to the pictures, she marched in, eyes glaring, daring them to say a word.
‘I told you I’d be late and I told you where I was going. What more do you expect, for goodness sake?’
‘Who’s this young man?’ her father said. ‘I think it’s time we met him.’
‘What young man?’
‘Don’t take us for fools. Everybody in the village knows you’ve been going out with a man from Llan Gwyn,’ Mavis snapped.
‘What business is it of yours?’
‘I want to be sure he knows the facts about you,’ her father said.
‘You want? You want to protect him from me?’
‘No, of course not,’ Mavis said quickly, glaring at Ralph. ‘We just want everything to be straight and above-board.’
‘Mam, if you don’t keep out of my life I’ll leave.’
‘You can’t, Sheila,’ Ralph said mildly. ‘You don’t have a place to go and you don’t earn enough to find anywhere. Be sensible.’
The complacency in his voice was the end. Sheila ran upstairs and began to throw some of her clothes into a suitcase. Mavis was beside her, begging her not to be foolish.
‘Don’t take any notice of your father, love. He talks before he thinks. We don’t want to drive you away, really we don’t. I can see how frustrating it must be with us constantly watching you but—’
‘It’s for my own good?’ Sheila snapped. ‘See where your concern got me before. You make me do things just to defy you. You make it clear you don’t trust me. No wonder I rebelled and went out to find a bit of affection!’
‘Sheila, we’ve always loved you. You’ve never lacked love, you can’t say that!’
‘But it’s true, Mam, and in case you’re worrying about what people will think, you can tell them I’m going to live in town, probably with a man called Nigel Knighton.’
It was midnight before Sheila went to bed: Gran had gone earlier, leaving Mavis and Ralph arguing with their daughter and trying to persuade her to stay. As she had no intention of going, Sheila enjoyed the battle of words and, when she went to bed, leaving her parents to walk home exhausted, she was smiling. Perhaps now they would leave her alone.
The following evening, she had made no arrangements to meet Nigel but she did not catch the early bus. Instead, she went to a smart cafe and sat for an hour over a cup of tea and some sandwiches, then joined the queue for the pictures where she sat through the second film once and the first film twice before catching the late bus home.
Her parents had again been to the house; she knew that from the slightly disarranged plates. She wondered how long they had waited before giving up and going back to their flat to continue their vigil of watching each bus as it unloaded its passengers. She took a cup of cocoa to her grandmother and told her where she had been, inventing a companion for the evening. Describing him in detail to a worried Gran, Sheila hoped that every word would find its way into her mother’s ear and cause her more concern. Serve her right, she whispered to the photograph on her wall, where one day she might hang a picture of Nigel Knighton.
She was unable to sleep, and the thought of the pieces of paper, torn up in a corner of her drawer, still waiting to be relegated to the ash bin, came to her mind. In the darkness, she felt her way to the drawer and took out Maurice’s letters: the one to her and the one he had written to Delina. She knew his address off by heart, but she pieced the thin letter together and read it again, before writing it out, in the light of a torch so as not to disturb Gran, on a fresh piece of paper.
Tomorrow she would call and see Ethel Davies and give it to her. She would tell her Maurice had written but she had not opened it, but before tearing it up she had saved the address for her: a mother should always know where her son is. Yes, Ethel would be pleased with that story.
* * *
In the woods above Nelly’s cottage a figure moved swiftly through the trees like a shadow driven by the win
d. He did not carry a gun but he was intent on poaching. He went to where a mound of earth revealed the ancient rabbit warren, and set up his nets. Taking a ferret from his pocket, he sent the supple creature down one of the holes and waited.
Soon the nets were twisting with the struggles of the rabbits trying in vain to escape. He went from one hole to another, attended to the terrified creatures and put the still-jerking bodies into a sack. When he had captured and killed them all, the ferret came back to his whistle and was replaced in his pocket. Taking the load to a motorbike, he pushed the machine for some distance before mounting and riding off.
His keen ears and eyes were those of a man of the woods and fields, but he did not see the small figure who stood trembling, watching him as he worked, nor heard the click of the shutter as the camera was raised to frame him in the tiny lens.
Dawn followed the man for a while, her small feet making hardly a sound. When she heard the bike start up she was disappointed and held back, but the bike stopped again after a short distance. She edged carefully forward, her eyes and ears alert for the slightest danger. She saw the man hand over the bag of dead rabbits and receive money in exchange. Then the person he met disappeared and the man with the motorbike stood for a long time, silent and perfectly still.
Dawn’s curiosity started to turn to discomfort. She wanted to go to the toilet, her feet were cold and she was becoming so edgy that she almost moved to end the terrifying stillness in which she imagined that the man knew she was there and was waiting for her to give herself away.
When he moved, it was towards her and she had to force herself to remain still. Then he went at an angle from her, towards the castle. She found that her leg muscles were knotted and stiff as she at last moved away.
Passing the uneven walls of the castle with the strange shadows and eerie atmosphere she felt scared. Alone she was rarely frightened, but knowing the man was there she needed to keep him in her sight. She followed, staying within hearing of his footsteps as he waded through the long grass, and walked almost silently through the narrow animal paths.
The Changing Valley Page 30