Tiger Bay Blues

by Catrin Collier

  She didn’t know where she was running to. Harry? Bella? A pain gripped her side. She paused to catch her breath and saw that she was in the street Anna Hughes lived in. A man was walking towards her from the direction of Anna’s house. She recognised him and knew what she would do.

  She would hurt Peter every bit as much as he had hurt her. She rushed up to the man and took his arm. He peered at her and she realised he was drunk.

  ‘Edyth?’

  ‘It is, Charlie.’

  ‘Thought you didn’t like me,’ he slurred.

  ‘I do now, Charlie.’

  He gazed at her through half-closed eyes. ‘What you doing here?’

  ‘Didn’t you know, Charlie? I live here now, and you and me are going to take a walk.’

  ‘Where?’ he asked suspiciously.

  ‘Anna Hughes’s house. Haven’t you heard, Charlie? I’m working for her now. You want me, you can have me.’

  He gave her a stupid drunken smile. ‘How much?’

  ‘How much are you willing to pay?’

  ‘That depends on what you are prepared to give.’

  ‘Whatever you want, Charlie. All you have to do is ask.’

  ‘And pay?’ he checked.

  ‘Whatever you think I’m worth, Charlie.’ She heard a man shout behind her and pulled Charlie forward. ‘Come on, it’s cold out here and we’re wasting time.’

  ‘Mrs Slater, Edyth, I don’t want any trouble …’

  ‘You won’t have any, Anna.’ After weeks of turmoil, during which her problems had seemed insurmountable, Edyth felt amazingly calm. It was as though a veil had lifted and revealed her life for the sham it had been. There was no solution that she could see to the mess that was her marriage, but it was a relief finally to realise just why she had failed as a wife.

  Peter’s refusal to make love to her – his reluctance even to sleep in the same room. Mrs Mack’s rude, overbearing attitude, and the hold she’d had over Peter. The Bishop’s insistence that Peter could only become vicar of the parish if he were married. Harry’s warning to her the night before her wedding: ‘Some men aren’t the marrying kind.’ Alice Beynon’s remark when they had been talking in the garden after Florence had announced that she was moving into Tiger Bay with them: ‘Sons grow up and marry; it’s what normal men do. Although I admit I never expected to see the day that Peter would take a wife …

  If only Harry had been more explicit. But if he had, would she have listened to him? Deciding the answer was probably not, she addressed Anna.

  ‘Tell me which room is free, so Charlie and I can use it.’

  ‘All our rooms are fully booked,’ Anna said forcefully.

  ‘Surely you have one free. Charlie will pay in advance.’ Edyth dug Charlie in the ribs with her elbow. ‘Won’t you, Charlie?’

  ‘What?’ He stared blankly at her.

  ‘Anna wants money.’ Edyth held out her hand.

  ‘Want money, do you …’ He swayed precariously, and Edyth realised he was not only drunk but bordering on comatose. He slipped his hand inside his coat, missed his pocket twice and eventually, after a great deal of fumbling, found his wallet. Holding it out with exaggerated care, he flourished it in front of her eyes before opening it and removing a ten-shilling note.

  ‘Foursh timesh your usualsh pricesh.’ He bowed to Anna. ‘Becaussh I like the ladyssh.’ He stood so far back on his heels he would have toppled over if Edyth hadn’t grabbed his waistcoat and steadied him. He wrapped his arm around her and grinned stupidly.

  ‘We haven’t any rooms,’ Anna snapped. Unfortunately for her, Colleen chose that moment to burst in.

  ‘Bloody man! Gave me two bob, nothing for the extras and kept me for over an hour …’ She picked up on the silence in the room, turned around, and saw Edyth and Charlie standing together. ‘What you doing here, Mrs Vicar?’

  ‘We want a room, I take it yours is empty?’ Edyth filched the money from Charlie’s hand and handed it to Colleen.

  ‘Ten bob!’ Colleen stared at the note before holding it up to the electric light as if she couldn’t believe her luck.

  ‘Which one is it?’ Edyth demanded.

  ‘Don’t take the money, Colleen. I told her all our rooms are fully booked,’ Anna snapped.

  ‘Ten bob’s ten bob. Notes like that don’t grow on trees.’ Colleen rolled the money into a tube and pushed it into a button-down pocket on the side of the silk camiknickers she was wearing beneath a sheer muslin robe.

  ‘Colleen, give it back,’ Anna ordered.

  ‘Come on, Anna,’ Colleen wheedled. ‘I’ll give you two bob out of it.’

  ‘I don’t want two bob. I want her and him,’ Anna pointed to Edyth and Charlie, ‘out of here. She’s trouble and he’s sozzled.’

  ‘Charlie’s always three parts to the wind and what’s it to us if the silly bitch wants a thrill? One thing’s for sure, she’s not going to get one from her pretty boy husband. Mind you,’ Colleen looked Charlie up and down. ‘Doubt Charlie’s up for much, state he’s in. Looks like Gertie had the best out of him this afternoon.’

  Shocked, Edyth stared at Colleen.

  ‘Surprised we know your baby-faced vicar’s taste in the bedroom?’ Colleen took a cigarette from an open pack on the mantelpiece, lifted her leg on to a chair, struck a match and lit it. ‘Everyone in the Bay knows, love. Before he carried you over the threshold, there were sailors queuing at his door every night. And they weren’t there for Bible studies.’

  Edyth had heard enough. ‘Which is your room?’

  ‘First door on your right at the top of the stairs. Don’t walk straight ahead or you’ll get an eyeful. Gertie’s got two in with her.’

  Edyth tugged Charlie’s arm. Leering at the expanse of leg Colleen was showing, he ambled out behind her. When they were in the passage Edyth heard Anna speaking low, urgently to someone in the kitchen: ‘Run as fast as you can, straight down to the Norwegian mission. Get Mr Holsten. No one else will do. Micah Holsten, got that? Tell him to get here as quickly as he can.’

  Edyth didn’t wait to hear the reply. It was a good half-hour walk to the mission and back, and by then it would be too late.

  Edyth lay on the bed next to Charlie and stared at the ceiling. Darkness had fallen but she had left the electric light on. The plaster was cracked with a filigree network of grey lines, and there were cobwebs in the corners of the coving. But the neglect didn’t extend to the rest of the room. It was clean and dusted, if cluttered. The thing that had struck her most about Colleen’s bedroom when she’d walked in was how ordinary it was. Just like the kitchen.

  The bedroom suite was cheap, veneered deal, and not particularly well cared for. There were white heat rings and stains on the surfaces of the cabinet and dressing table where cups of tea and perfume and cosmetic bottles had stood. A chair in the corner was heaped to overflowing with frocks, petticoats, silk stockings and robes. Another corner was filled with a pile of slippers, boots and shoes.

  Charlie snorted loudly and began to snore, making more noise than the cows when they calved on her Uncle Victor’s farm. Like her, he was lying on top of the beige satin bedcover. He’d point-blank refused to get into the bed, and had fallen flat on his face on the mattress after shouting, ‘Donsh wansh to get in thosh sheets, donsh know whosh bensh in them.’

  He’d struggled to his feet a few minutes later and tried to unbutton his trousers, only to get so hopelessly tangled in the legs that she’d had to help him pull them off.

  Unable to stand the noise Charlie was making another moment, she sat up, swung her legs to the floor and picked up her stockings from the foot of the bed where she’d left them. She rolled one on then the other, clipped them on to her suspenders, left the bed and went to the tallboy where she’d draped her woollen frock. She pulled it over her head and, by lifting her arms as high as they would go behind her back, managed to fasten the buttons. Her shoes were on the floor beneath the bed, her coat on a hook on the door. Her hat and handbag were s
tacked next to a litter of lipsticks, face powder, cigarettes, ashtrays and empty scent bottles on the dressing table.

  She glanced around the room to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything. Then she looked down at Charlie, sprawled on his back, dressed only in his vest – and still snoring. She felt in her pockets and opened her handbag to look for something she could leave him as a memento. All she could find was a lace handkerchief. She upended her perfume bottle on it and dropped it on his chest. She opened the door quietly, closed it behind her and went downstairs.

  The hall was tiny and, like most two-up two-down terrace houses, the front door was directly opposite the stairs with barely enough room for the door to open inward. She had just closed her hand on the doorknob when she heard, ‘Hello, Edyth.’

  She turned. Micah Holsten was standing in the kitchen doorway.

  ‘I heard Anna asking someone to get you. I hoped you wouldn’t come.’

  ‘Someone has to talk sense into you.’ He closed the door behind him and walked towards her.

  ‘Why does it have to be you?’

  ‘I’m an expert at making the wrong sort of friends and being in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ He caught hold of her arm.

  ‘Let me go.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere with you,’ she protested.

  ‘Yes, you are.’

  ‘And if I scream?’

  ‘The police would be amazed if a woman in this house didn’t scream. And I didn’t give you an invitation. It’s an order. For once in your life, you’re going to think of someone besides yourself.’

  ‘You think I’m selfish …’ After everything Peter had done to her, the last thing she wanted to do was listen to someone else’s hard luck stories.

  ‘Peter’s still your husband,’ he reminded her.

  ‘Why should I consider him after what he’s done to me?’

  ‘Because right now, he’s sitting in the vicarage knowing that he has lost everything he has ever worked for: people’s respect, a settled life, marriage – you. And possibly, if the Bishop ever hears what happened tonight, his career.’

  ‘Peter doesn’t give a damn about me.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong, Edyth, He does care for you. Very much.’

  Micah had parked his van outside Anna’s house. He opened the door, pushed Edyth into the passenger seat, walked around to the driver’s side, started the engine and drove down towards the sea. He parked on the quayside overlooking the marina of small boats where the Escape was berthed, switched off the ignition and turned to face her.

  The weather had broken while she had been in Anna’s. Rain was beating down, making rivulets on the windscreen, moving and darting in random patterns, sometimes sideways, sometimes upwards. Edyth found it easier to concentrate on the way the street lights reflected on the drops of water in the darkness, than to look at Micah.

  ‘Peter never loved me.’ She finally broke the silence that hung between them. ‘He only married me to get his damned parish.’

  ‘You’re sure about that?’

  ‘Of course I am.’ She only thought about Micah’s question after she had answered it. Sustained by her anger towards Peter, his mother, the barren, loveless life she had found herself enmeshed in, she blamed Peter entirely for the whole sorry mess of their marriage.

  Logic dictated that she was as much to blame as Peter for rushing up the aisle on such a short acquaintance. But she didn’t want to be logical. Or think how things might have turned out if she’d stayed in Swansea when her parents had taken her to college instead of running to Peter in Tiger Bay.

  ‘As I see it, you were the one who chased after Peter, not the other way around.’ He offered her a cigarette, she took it.

  ‘I didn’t know you smoked.’

  ‘Sometimes.’ He struck a match and lit first her cigarette and then his own. ‘Peter loves you as much as it is possible for a man like him to love a woman.’

  ‘You expect me to believe that?’

  ‘It’s the truth. It’s not Peter’s fault that he is the way he is. He didn’t choose to be a homosexual any more than you chose to be clumsy. He was born that way. Some men love women, some love men. And provided no one is forced to do anything against their will, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.’

  ‘The healthy, liberal, Scandinavian attitude to free love,’ she sneered. ‘I’ve read about your country’s obsession with nudity.’

  ‘Is getting everything out in the open any worse than criminalising a man for something he can’t help, and gaoling him for his passions, as you do in this country?’

  ‘So you think it was all right for Peter to marry me to get his parish?’

  ‘Of course not, Edyth,’ he interrupted. ‘But I believe that Peter felt he had no choice. You were the one who came down the Bay in the middle of the night and stayed until your parents gave you permission to marry him.’

  ‘He’d already asked me to become his wife, because he wanted the parish.’

  ‘I’m only his friend, and a comparatively new one at that, but when Peter first came down the Bay there was a certain amount of, not scandal exactly –’

  ‘Gossip?’ she finished acidly.

  ‘Peter’s reputation preceded him. We have a fair number of men like him living in the Bay – I don’t know what I’m saying; living everywhere, and not just Wales or Britain – the world. And whatever you’ve heard, it’s not a sickness, Edyth.’

  ‘I didn’t say it was,’ she said sullenly.

  ‘But the Bishop thinks it is. And he and the Dean forced Peter, under threat of losing his job, to go and see a doctor. What he did to Peter was barbaric.’

  ‘What did he do?’ she asked, needing to know.

  ‘They call it electric shock aversion therapy. The use of pain, or in some people’s opinion, including mine, torture. It’s designed to make men conform to the pattern laid down by the Church and modern society. Just when Peter decided that he couldn’t take any more of the Church’s prescribed “treatment,” the doctor declared him “cured” and told him to go off and get married to make sure he’d never stray again. Believe what you want to, Edyth, but I know that Peter married you loving you more than any other woman he’d ever met.’

  She considered what Micah said. Recalled Peter’s nervousness whenever she kissed him, his insistence they wait to consummate their marriage. The more she thought about their courtship and honeymoon, the more she saw anxiety in every move Peter had made.

  ‘Edyth, you’re kind and compassionate, you want to help the world and already you’ve made a difference to some people’s lives in the Bay. You, not Peter, welcomed Anna and the other girls’ children into Sunday school. You opened your home and your heart to Judy when she needed a home and a job.’

  ‘It was those qualities that led me to marry Peter.’ She was unable to keep the bitterness from her voice.

  ‘Think about what he must be feeling now. Knowing what you have seen and that he has lost your respect –’

  ‘How do you know what I saw?’

  ‘Because I went to see Peter.’

  ‘When?’ she demanded.

  ‘When Anna sent for me, I went straight to her house. You were upstairs. I didn’t want to interrupt you, so I walked to the vicarage.’ For the first time she detected emotion in his voice – anger and condemnation – and much as she would have liked to pretend it didn’t affect her, it did. If Micah had any respect left for her after she had kissed him, it had certainly evaporated now.

  ‘You told Peter where I was? What I’d done?’

  ‘I told him you were safe with friends. He was in his study, worried sick about where you’d gone. I have never seen a man looking so lost or broken. Think what it must have been like for him to have lived a lie all this time, Edyth. Knowing that if he went out and sought a lover he could be sent to gaol. You do know that men can be imprisoned, even if they both consent and they make love in private.’

&nbs
p; ‘I read the papers.’

  ‘Do you still love Peter?’

  ‘How can I? At the moment I feel that I have never really known him.’ She recalled Bella’s wedding, how envious she had been of Toby’s love for Bella. How she had wished for a man who would love her as Toby loved her sister. And then she had seen Peter: young, good-looking, charming …

  Had she fitted Peter into a Prince Charming mould to suit herself? Fallen in love with the idea of being in love, not with Peter himself? It had all happened so quickly between them. Even the night before they had married, she was conscious of how little time they had spent together. How little she knew him.

  She had assumed it was pre-wedding nerves. How much heartache could she have avoided if she had listened to Harry and called off the wedding?

  ‘Peter was terrified of hurting you. That’s why he kept Mrs Mack on. She saw him with Constable Jones the day after the Reverend Richards went to hospital. She threatened to go to the police and tell you if he didn’t raise her wages and allow her to carry on working as housekeeper in the vicarage.’

  ‘He told her to pack her bags and go just before I left for Anna’s,’ she murmured.

  ‘Then let’s hope her next stop is in Scotland. Do you feel anything for Peter now?’

  ‘Sorry for him.’ She pulled the ashtray out of the dashboard and rested her cigarette on it.

  ‘Then tell him just that. It would mean a great deal to him if you could forgive him for marrying you, Edyth.’

  ‘If he thought he was “cured” it was hardly his fault.’ She laughed suddenly, surprising even herself. ‘When you think of it, Micah, Peter and I made quite a pair. The naive schoolgirl and the almost-equally-naive vicar thinking that all he needed was a wedding certificate to change his life.’

  ‘Can I drive you back to the vicarage?’

  ‘Yes.’ She stubbed out her cigarette and closed the ashtray.

  ‘Just one more thing, Edyth. He doesn’t need to know about you and Charlie.’

  ‘No one needs to know about me and Charlie.’

  ‘You needn’t worry, Anna and the girls won’t tell anyone about it. I checked.’

  ‘Unless someone comes looking for the vicar’s wife,’ she said drily.