Finders and Keepers

by Catrin Collier

  ‘Come in.’ Harry began to knot his tie.

  Lloyd saw the grief etched in Harry’s eyes. ‘It’s not too late to change your mind about being a bearer.’

  ‘It seems right for Granddad to be carried to his grave by his sons and his eldest grandson. Although, strictly speaking, I wasn’t -’

  ‘You were,’ Lloyd contradicted.

  ‘Either way, I feel privileged to be able to help you, Uncle Joey and Victor to do that one small last thing for him.’ Harry straightened his collar and peered critically into the mirror.

  Lloyd picked up the gold cufflinks from the dressing table. They had belonged to Sali’s Great-uncle Gwilym James and were part of Harry’s inheritance. Harry only wore them on formal occasions. They were old-fashioned but he didn’t mind, although his allowance would have run to modern, more fashionable replacements.

  ‘Thank you.’ Harry took them from him. ‘Would you mind slipping them into my cuffs?’

  ‘Mari always puts too much starch in our shirts.’ Lloyd finally managed to push one of the links through the glossy, stiffened buttonhole. ‘I feel so guilty,’ he murmured. ‘Dad wouldn’t have been happy at the thought of being buried by Father Kelly. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if he comes back to haunt your uncles and me for allowing it to happen.’

  ‘He knew he’d have a Catholic funeral.’ Harry held out his other cuff.

  ‘He did?’ Lloyd looked at him in amazement.

  ‘He said he’d put up with it for his wife’s sake. He also said that Isabella was such a saint she didn’t need any more prayers, and he was such a sinner that he could do with all the help he could get to try to reach the same place as her.’

  ‘That sounds like Dad.’ Lloyd laughed.

  ‘He also said that Father Kelly would persuade you to go along with him in the end, but that was all right too, because if the man ever found the sense to dump his religion he’d become a decent communist.’

  ‘He and Father Kelly made a strange pair of friends.’ Lloyd saw and looked away from the framed photograph of the entire family taken on Harry’s twenty-first birthday. It hurt to know that no matter how many other family parties they’d have, his father would not be there.

  Harry picked up his black hat, gloves and jacket. ‘Father Kelly knows how Granddad felt about religion.’

  ‘Joey, Victor and I have warned him not to overdo the sermonizing. Oh, I came up to tell you that your friend’s arrived. He’s downstairs.’

  ‘Which friend?’

  ‘The artist from the inn who follows Bella around like a moonstruck lapdog. He turned up with a wreath and asked to see you and Bella so he could offer his condolences.’

  ‘It was good of him to come all this way.’

  ‘I suppose it was.’

  ‘You sound unconvinced.’

  ‘If he’s here to offer his sympathy to you, fine. If it’s Bella he’s after, I might throw a bucket of cold water over him.’

  Lloyd and his brothers had arranged for the funeral to take place on a day and at a time that would allow every miner who wasn’t actually working on shift an opportunity to pay his respects to Billy Evans. Instead of cars, they had hired an old-fashioned glass-sided hearse, and horse-drawn carriages to follow so that pedestrians would be able to keep up with the procession.

  Lloyd, Joey, Victor and Harry carried Billy out of the house for the last time. His coffin was covered with white roses that Megan, Rhian and Sali had picked from their gardens. Lloyd had been forced to hire two more hearses for the flowers that had been arriving all week, sent and brought by neighbours and friends since the day Billy’s coffin had arrived back in Pontypridd.

  Men stopped and bared their heads, and women lowered their eyes, as the funeral cortege wound slowly through Taff Street in Pontypridd and turned up Mill Street towards the Rhondda. It was only when Harry glanced around that he saw that most of the people who had stopped had joined the procession and were walking behind the last carriage.

  He wasn’t prepared for the hundreds who joined the mourners but he was stunned by the sight of the enormous throng waiting at Trealaw Cemetery gates. The hearse turned inside and the driver drove up the narrow lane that cut through the graves, halting at Isabella’s, which had been opened that morning to take Billy’s coffin.

  Father Kelly and the undertaker stepped down from the hearse, and, with the undertaker’s help, Harry, his father and uncles shouldered the coffin and carried it to the spot where Billy had buried his beloved Isabella nineteen years before.

  The open grave was covered with green baize. Beneath it, Harry caught a glimpse of a corner of solid oak coffin and he looked away, feeling as though it were something private belonging to his grandfather that he shouldn’t see.

  They laid the coffin on the ground next to the grave. The undertaker’s assistants unloaded the wreaths and cut flowers. Harry stepped back and placed his arms around Bella’s shoulders. She had pleaded to be allowed to attend at the graveside and, overriding Lloyd’s reservation that the girls were too young to attend a funeral, Sali had given Bella permission, principally because she was still saddened that she had been prevented from going to her own father’s funeral in 1904, when she had been only slightly older than Bella was now.

  Father Kelly began to speak and, although not a Catholic, Harry recognized that he kept the religious part of the service mercifully brief. After the coffin had been lowered into the ground, the priest stepped forward and looked down at the sea of mourners who filled the cemetery and overflowed out of the gates.

  ‘Now, if I could get half this number into church on a Sunday I’d be a happy man.’

  Harry saw his mother and aunts smile despite their tears. It was the kind of remark Billy had loved to hear Patrick Kelly make.

  ‘I flatter myself that I knew Billy Evans as well as any man outside of his immediate family,’ Father Kelly continued. ‘I also heard him rail against the Church and organized religion more times than I care to remember. Billy Evans would not thank me for saying this, but because he’s not here to stop me I will. And loudly. Billy was the most moral man I have ever met. He lived his entire life by principles, good sound principles that he tried to pretend hadn’t been laid down by Christ two thousand years ago.

  ‘He loved his wife, he loved his sons, he loved his daughters-in-law when they joined his family as if they were his own flesh and blood, and he loved their children. He loved his friends, his fellow men and his neighbours. Wherever there was suffering, wherever there was want and wherever there was poverty, you’d find Isabella and Billy Evans. Two people trying to put the entire world to rights with nothing more than their bare hands. And when his Isabella died there was Billy, food basket in one hand, purse with relief money from the miners’ union fund in the other and a comic for the children in his pocket.

  ‘He was a man who terrified the authorities so much they imprisoned him, not because he was a criminal, but because he dared to dream of a world where men would be paid a living wage for their labour. A wage that would enable them to bring up their families in decent houses and to educate their children for a better world than they could hope to live in during their lifetime.

  ‘Billy, wherever you are, I’m sure of two things: you are with your beloved Isabella and you are still fighting for right. I won’t embarrass you with any more prayers for the soul I know you had.’

  He nodded to the choirmaster of the local colliery who raised his hands.

  ‘I can think of a no more fitting tribute than this, and I only hope it will give solace to those who loved him most and those he loved in return.’

  The colliery choir began to sing, softly at first and then, as they gained confidence, their voices swelled with all those standing around them and the words and music of ‘Bread of Heaven’ filled the cemetery, echoing upwards to the blue and perfect sky.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  ‘Chicken and cress sandwich, Master Harry?’ Mari offered Harry the plate, and he took
it from her.

  ‘I take it you’re hungry?’ she commented wryly.

  ‘It’s bedlam in here.’ He flattened himself against the wall of the drawing room so a group of elderly matrons could walk through to the dining room where Mari, with Betty Morgan’s help, had laid out a buffet. ‘I’m going into the garden.’ He signalled across the room to Toby and pointed to the French windows.

  ‘Would you like me to send one of the girls out to you with some drinks and another plate in ten minutes?’ Mari asked.

  ‘Please, you’re a darling.’ Harry would have kissed the housekeeper if a party of union men hadn’t separated them.

  ‘I’ve never seen so many people in one house. Granted it’s a large house, but not suitable for the entire town to play sardines in.’ Toby joined him in the arbour the gardener had just finished building. Hardy clematis had been planted around its base, but none were more than a foot high, although Sali had great hopes of seeing them flower the following summer.

  ‘Sandwich?’ Harry offered him the plate.

  ‘Thanks. You haven’t seen Bella, have you?’ Toby failed to make his enquiry sound casual.

  ‘She’s upstairs with my younger sisters, trying to stop them from crying. Not that she’s likely to succeed while all these people are around. Like me she’s discovered that endless sympathy, no matter how well meant, is difficult to take.’

  ‘I know.’

  Something in the tone of Toby’s voice alerted Harry. ‘Your uncle?’

  ‘Died early on Thursday morning.’

  ‘Toby, I am so sorry. Why on earth didn’t you telephone me? I would have come at once.’

  ‘To do what?’ Toby asked logically. ‘At least here you could be with your family to offer them some comfort.’

  ‘And there I could have been with you.’

  Toby made a wry face. ‘Be honest, has anything anyone said comforted you?’

  ‘Not outside of my immediate family,’ Harry conceded.

  ‘I would have given ten years of my life to have had someone to grieve with, someone who knew Frank well enough to make jokes about him the way that Catholic priest did today about your grandfather. Mrs Edwards and Alf did their best, so did Doctor Adams, but in the end their muted whispers irritated more than helped.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t need to tell you how I feel.’

  ‘When is your uncle’s funeral?’

  ‘Yesterday.’

  ‘Yesterday! That was quick.’

  ‘And small. Frank wanted it that way,’ Toby explained. ‘No fuss, no false tears from people who had only known him as a helpless, bedridden invalid. Last Sunday morning, when you were languishing in a cell, he even accused me of dragging out the illustrations to keep him going. When I showed him your sister’s Morgan le Fay before sending it to London on Monday morning, he said it was the best work I’d ever done, and not bad considering it was the first composition I’d put together without his help. That may not sound much to you but it was high praise from Frank. On Wednesday morning the print drafts arrived from London, including a rough of Morgan. They must have pulled out all the stops to do it. Doctor Adams bent the rules and allowed me to show them to him on Wednesday afternoon. Frank looked at them, smiled, murmured, “They’re not bad after all. I might make an artist of you yet.” Then he went to sleep and, like your grandfather, never woke up. You should have seen him, Harry. He looked so peaceful in his coffin.’

  ‘So did my grandfather.’ Harry left the plate of sandwiches on the bench, rose to his feet, turned his back to Toby and looked out over the town. ‘So, the book is finished?’

  ‘I don’t have another single line to paint or draw on that commission. No more alterations – nothing. Frank decided my Morgan should be the centrepiece, not Guinevere. So I didn’t need the Snow Queen to model for me after all.’

  ‘When will it be out?’

  ‘“Le Morte d’Arthur, illustrated by Frank Ross, will be published in the spring of nineteen twenty-seven. Subscription orders for leather-bound copies are now being taken. Exact date yet to be announced.”’ Toby quoted from the publishers’ catalogue.

  ‘I’d like to order twenty.’

  ‘There’s no need to do that, Harry. Books illustrated by Frank always sell,’ Toby took another sandwich.

  Harry turned and faced him. ‘Bella’s in it. Six will make great birthday presents for my brothers and sisters next year. Then there’s one for me, one for my parents, two for my uncles and aunts, and nine for my cousins who will fight if I don’t give them one each.’

  Toby did a quick calculation. ‘That’s nineteen.’

  ‘And one for the Ellises. They’d like to see their Arthurian lake. And it may encourage Martha and Matthew to persevere with their reading.’

  ‘They won’t allow them to keep it in the workhouse.’

  ‘I know, and that’s just one more reason why I have to get them out.’

  Toby allowed Harry’s comment to pass – for the moment. ‘Frank left some papers besides his will, which, incidentally, left everything to me. Doctor Adams confiscated the originals in case they harboured germs, so I couldn’t take them out of the sanatorium, but Frank planned his funeral down to the last detail. Unbeknown to me, he’d asked to see the local vicar, bought a plot in the churchyard in the valley and asked him to conduct a funeral within twenty-four hours of his death. Said he didn’t want to leave me hanging about in the back end of beyond. The only mourners were myself, Doctor Adams, the beautiful Diana, who left for London an hour afterwards, the nurses who weren’t on duty and Mrs Edwards and Alf. Frank made me write to the publishers months ago when he was first diagnosed. He said he had no objection to a memorial service, provided it was a happy occasion that would coincide with the publication of the book. And that is exactly what they are arranging, a memorial service followed by a party at the Ritz. Perhaps they should rename the book Le Morte de Frank Ross.’

  ‘I’ll come to the memorial service and party with you, if I may.’

  ‘I was hoping you would.’ He dared to add, ‘And Bella in her best party frock – chaperoned by your parents, of course. You’ve seen me at my worst, Harry. Usually I’m happy-go-lucky, and I have lots of friends to prove it. But when Frank was taken ill, they sort of melted away. I have no doubt that when I go back to London they will materialize again but …’ Toby fell silent.

  ‘The Swansea Valley is a difficult place to get to,’ Harry consoled clumsily.

  ‘It has a railway, so don’t go making excuses for them. I feel I’ve grown close to you and I hope we will remain friends – and before you say anything, that’s not just because of Bella. I know it’s partly because we’ve suffered the same experience, watching people we love inch towards death, trying to fight a disease that had already won the battle. But it’s not all we have in common. Those evenings we spent together in the pub kept me sane. Those talks about life, love, art-’

  ‘And the drinking.’

  ‘That too.’ Toby smiled.

  ‘I hope we remain good friends for the rest of our lives.’ Harry waved to a young maid who had carried a tray of drinks and cakes from the house and was standing looking around the garden.

  She walked towards them. ‘From Mari, Mr Harry.’

  ‘Thank her for me, Ruby.’ Harry took the tray from her. ‘I won’t tell anyone if you return to the house the long way round.’

  ‘The long way, sir?’

  ‘Walk around the garden three times, then go in through the kitchen door.’

  ‘I couldn’t do that, sir, not with the number of people waiting to be served,’ she giggled, and ran back inside the house.

  ‘Four glasses of wine.’ Toby took one. ‘And perfectly chilled too.’

  ‘Mari’s not only an expert housekeeper, she knows me better than I know myself.’ Harry sipped his wine. ‘When are you leaving Wales?’

  ‘The inn, a week Monday. I have already given Mrs Edwards notice. I need to sort out Frank’s headstone and make arrangements for t
he grave to be maintained before I move on.’

  ‘To where?’

  ‘I don’t know, not yet. Did I mention that the publishers sent me a letter with the proof illustrations?’ Toby murmured diffidently. ‘They’ve offered me a commission, in my own name.’

  ‘You know damn well you didn’t mention it. Congratulations!’ Harry set his wine glass on the bench and shook Toby’s hand enthusiastically. ‘I told you, you’re brilliant. You deserve it after the work you put in on the Morte. Is it an entire book?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How many illustrations?’

  ‘Fifteen colour plates, eight black and white.’ A note of pride crept into Toby’s voice.

  ‘Do I have to drag the name out of you?’

  ‘Aesop’s Fables, so I’ll be looking at animals. The hare, the tortoise, the fox, the crow, the lion … perhaps I ought to consider moving next door to a zoo.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘I must admit the idea doesn’t appeal. But a zoo couldn’t be a worse neighbour than some of the others Frank and I have had over the years.’

  ‘You said you had no settled home.’

  ‘Not since my parents drowned. Frank rented a studio in Paris but he sold the lease when he was diagnosed with TB. He owns – owned,’ Toby corrected himself sharply, ‘a house in Chelsea. I suppose it’s mine now, but it’s never been home, not in the true sense of the word, like this place.’ Toby looked wistfully at the villa. ‘It was just a base he used whenever he exhibited in London. After my parents died, I joined Frank every school holiday, but we lived like nomads, wandering from one rented house to another. Most were in Cornwall because he liked the sea. The closest I have to a home are the boxes in storage in Frank’s attic. What about you? Will you live here now with your family?’ He deliberately switched the conversation away from himself.

  Harry looked over the garden wall to the house next door. The roof was finished and, as far as he could see, the windows were too. ‘The trustees of my estate have bought that house for me.’

  ‘Trustees – don’t tell you me that you are heir to a fortune?’ Toby laughed.