A Silver Lining (21 page)

If any mouse was foolhardy enough to enter this house it would probably starve to death along with the occupants.

The dresser held two cups, two saucers and two plates, if there had been more he didn’t doubt they’d been sold or pawned. A single clean but patched saucepan hung upside down on the drying rack above the cold stove. Even the stub of candle Alma had lit was the last on the mantelpiece. A framed photograph stood incongruously next to it. Pushing the candle closer, he studied it.

‘My father.’

Alma was standing in front of the curtain. ‘He died when I was small. Pit accident.’ She walked over to the photograph and picked it up. ‘What I hate more than anything is not being able to remember him. Only the funeral, and my mother crying. Endlessly crying.’

He reached inside his shirt and took out the bag he kept his takings in. Carrying them and the stub of candle over to the table he counted out five pounds.

‘That’s for the rent and the corner shop. I’ll stop by tomorrow with another five.’

He replaced the bag inside his shirt and slipped his arms into the sleeves of his coat. It smelt of the household soap she used and the cooking he associated with Ronconi’s café.

‘I don’t need this much,’ she protested as she looked down at the mixed silver and ten-shilling note on the table.

‘Take it. I’ll see you tomorrow and we’ll make arrangements for you to move into the flat above the shop. Don’t forget to bolt the door behind me.’

She followed him but he stepped outside without a backward glance.

She had been prepared to sleep with him. He’d rejected her, yet he’d given her money. The thought that floated uppermost in her mind as she rammed the bolt home on the door was that at least the women in station yard had the satisfaction of knowing that they’d earned their money.

It was strange how soon life, any life, eventually becomes a routine, Bethan thought as she carried buckets of water from the boiler in the stove to the enormous tub in the washhouse to do the weekly wash. She had been home for over five weeks and already it felt as though she and Edmund had never lived anywhere else. Strange too how, as if by tacit agreement, no one in the house ever brought up the subject of her mother.

Eddie had made a point of going calling for rags in the Rhondda the morning after Elizabeth Powell’s departure and on his return had mentioned that he had seen

Elizabeth beating John Joseph’s mats on his washing line.

Eddie hadn’t attempted to speak to his mother, but then neither had she said a word to him, although she must have heard the sound of his horn.

From that scant piece of information Bethan presumed that Elizabeth had found a home with her uncle. The following day she wrote her mother a letter telling her that she and Eddie were going to try and keep the home going between them.

Elizabeth had never replied, and as the household slipped easily and effortlessly into a new routine that eventually became an established pattern of life, Elizabeth became, if not exactly forgotten, at least relegated to a past that seldom warranted a thought, let alone a mention.

William, Eddie and Diana became more talkative in the days following Elizabeth’s dramatic exit and, although none of them tried to analyse their feelings, they all felt as though a smothering suffocating fog had been blown from the house.

Charlie alone remained as taciturn and preoccupied as ever, but Bethan put that down to the problems connected with opening his shop coupled with the financial loss of a whole pig. She’d lent William ten shillings to cover his carelessness, all that she could afford, but she knew that it went nowhere towards compensating Charlie for the loss of his unsold stock.

Despite Evan’s absence which affected them all, William and Eddie took to whistling as they went about their chores. They filled the coal bucket, cleared the ashes from the stove and carried the vegetable peelings up to the compost heap at the top of the garden without Bethan ever having to nag for their help as Elizabeth had frequently resorted to doing.

They also took to cleaning their shoes over old newspaper in the washhouse instead of the cold yard, ferrying cups of tea up to her and Diana in their bedrooms first thing in the morning, and dunking the biscuits Diana made in the evenings in their tea instead of nibbling them dry. Small things Elizabeth would have severely disapproved of and put a stop to at once.

Bethan knew that although the fabric of the house in Graig Avenue remained unchanged, there were subtle differences in the household as she ran it that her mother would have condemned as examples of degenerate, ungodly behaviour.

For example, not one of them had set foot in a chapel since Elizabeth had left. Bethan had used the baby’s condition as an excuse, but the boys and Diana hadn’t even felt the need to fabricate one. Instead, for the boys and Charlie, Sunday had become a day for working on the shop, something they had the good sense to do quietly, concentrating on cleaning and decorating the back rooms where they couldn’t be seen by the chapel contingent.

For Diana and Bethan it became a day for reading, playing cards, and catching up with the hundred and one small jobs neither of them ever seemed to find time to do in the week.

If Bethan wasn’t happy, she was at least contented, and for that she was grateful. Generally too busy to think about Elizabeth, or even her father, she only had cause to remember them when she dusted their wedding photograph which had been kept out of sight in the sacrosanct front parlour for as long as she could remember. But strangest of all was the way she had managed to banish all thoughts of Andrew from her mind, at least during her waking hours.

Last Friday another money order had been delivered by the postman, accompanied by a brief note:

‘Hope you are well. Best wishes, Andrew.’

She had sent him the pawn ticket for her pendant with a brief explanation, finishing with the line,

‘I am well’,

and, although he hadn’t asked after his son,

‘Edmund is well too. Thank you for the money. Bethan.’

But in the cold, early hours of the morning she truly did miss him. She lay awake in her parents’ great bed yearning for his presence with a need that could only have been soothed by his touch. It was then, when she watched the moon shining down on the back garden through the crack in the curtains as she listened to Edmund’s slow, quiet breathing, that she remembered. The good times!

There had been so many of them. When she had first met Andrew and gone out with him, when she had left Pontypridd to be with him in London. And the last days of her pregnancy when he had cared for her so tenderly and solicitously, in fact right up to the moment of Edmund’s birth.

Pushing the memory of that painful moment from her mind she picked up half of the pile of sheets and pillowcases she had stacked on the floor and threw them into the tub. Five beds and a cot made for a lot of washing. And afterwards there’d be the boys’ shirts and long johns, and her and Diana’s petticoats and blouses, the baby’s nightdresses, and if the water was still warm and clean enough, Charlie’s and William’s butchers’ overalls.

They were so soiled she set them in a bucket of soda to soak overnight and washed them out separately before dumping them in with the rest of the wash prior to boiling and starching.

Bethan picked up the wooden dolly and started pounding. Her new maxim in life was quite simple: keep busy, take each task, and day, as it came. By the time she had cleaned the house, cooked the food, done the washing and shopping with the baby in a shawl wrapped Welsh fashion around him and her, so no one could take more than a sly peek at him, there wasn’t much time left for thinking –all she had to do was try to find a way to sleep at night.

If she succeeded in that, there would be no time for complex desires or introspection.

The dolly slipped in her wet hand and water slopped on to the flagstoned floor. She smiled, imagining the scolding Elizabeth would have doled out, as she tossed the floor cloth over the sudsy mess.

‘Bethan! Bethan!’

‘Mrs Richards, I’m in the washhouse,’ she answered.

Much as she appreciated the love and support of her family around her, she resented the interference of the neighbours more than ever after London, and Mrs Richards was by far and away the worst culprit.

Annoying her by constantly referring to Edmund as ‘that poor mite’, the woman was always trying to peek into the cot as though the child was an exhibit in a freak show.

‘Bethan, what do you think?’ Mrs Richards burst open the door to the washhouse. ‘I saw Billy’s wife down the market and ...’ she paused for breath as she laid her loaded shopping basket on the floor at her feet.

‘And?’ Bethan prompted as she concentrated on her washing.

‘And she told me they’re allowing visitors into Cardiff this Sunday. Your dad is in Cardiff?’

‘Yes,’ Bethan replied shortly.

‘I thought they might have put him somewhere else, what with him getting hard labour and everything.’ She made it sound a far deeper disgrace than mere prison. ‘Where was I? Oh yes, visiting. Well I stopped off to get a message to my Glan in the workhouse. Of course we’ll be going along with Billy’s wife and his old mother, and I thought I should come right up here and tell you. You’ll have to get a message to your mam, wherever she is.’ She looked slyly at Bethan. ’I mean she’ll want to see him, won’t she? It being over a month since they were sent down,’ she babbled, not really knowing, but guessing the cause of Elizabeth’s flight from her home of over twenty years.

‘This Sunday you say, Mrs Richards.’ Bethan pulled the cumbersome free-standing mangle closer to the tub. ‘What time?’

‘Two o’clock. It’s the first time anyone in our family has visited a prison, but it isn’t for you, is it? Your Aunt Megan has been there quite a while now. Over a year?’

‘William and Diana go to see their mother as often as they can,’ Bethan said flatly in an attempt to shame Mrs Richards out of her tactless cross-examination.

‘According to what Billy’s wife told me, we won’t be able to take much in for them. A few bits of food, that’s all. They won’t let them wear their own clothes or read anything except the one letter a month. They even cut up any cakes you bake, but at least we’ll be able to see how they are for ourselves, won’t we?’

‘Thank you for calling in.’ Bethan heaved the first of the sheets up to the mangle with the end of the wooden dolly. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I must get on with this before the baby wakes for his next feed.’

‘Oh, bless him too, the poor little mite. Will you be going to see your dad?’ Mrs Richards made no attempt to pick up her basket.

‘Probably. I’ll have to talk it over with my brother.’

‘Oh yes of course, Eddie. It must be hard for you at a time like this not to have Haydn around. Such a nice sensible boy, Haydn. But then you must be missing your husband too. I was only saying to our Glan the other day what a good-looking young man Dr John is. Will we be seeing him soon?’

‘Possibly,’ Bethan replied shortly, heaping the first sheet into the sink and starting to wring the second.

‘Oh and I almost forgot in my hurry to tell you about the prison ...’ Mrs Richards leaned back against the wall, still hoping that Bethan would invite her to have a cup of tea so she could get a good look at the baby. A lot of people were wondering what he looked like, and as next-door neighbour, she thought it only fitting she should be the one to tell them. ‘I heard down Griffiths’ shop that Rhiannon Pugh’s not expected to last the night. The poor old thing’s done for. According to the doctor she’s just plain worn out. But then, that’s what comes of having the likes of Phyllis Harry in the house. Rhiannon’s run herself ragged looking after Phyllis’s bastard ...’

‘Rhiannon has been ill for years,’ Bethan interposed quickly. She’d had a soft spot for Phyllis since the days when Phyllis had worked as an usherette in the White Palace and turned a blind eye to younger brothers and sisters who’d been smuggled into the back row of the chicken run through toilet windows; and she was very fond of Rhiannon, who had offered her tea and Welsh cakes –flat cakes baked on a griddle –every time she had used her house in Phillips Street as a short cut on the way to school, town and, later, to her work in the Graig Hospital.

‘I know Rhiannon has been ill for years, but the Good Lord would have spared her for a bit longer if it hadn’t been for all that worry over Phyllis. And now there’s no saying what will happen to Phyllis and the boy. The house is rented in Rhiannon’s name and I can’t see Fred the Dead passing the rent book over to an unmarried mother, even if Phyllis could afford to keep it on, which I doubt she can.’ Mrs Richards crossed her arms as though defying Bethan to tell her any different.

‘She’ll manage somehow, Mrs Richards, most of us do.’

‘We manage. But the question is will we continue to manage inside or outside the workhouse?’

‘Let’s hope it will be outside, for all of us.’ Bethan dumped the last of the sheets into the water.

‘So I pray to God every night.’ Mrs Richards stooped and picked up her basket, finally accepting that she was not going to get a cup of tea, or a peek at the baby. ‘I suppose it’s time I went next door to start on my own washing. You’ve no idea of the state my Glan gets that porter’s uniform of his into.’

‘It’s a nice drying day,’ Bethan commented, hoping to finally edge Mrs Richards out. ‘I’ll see you to the door.’

‘I know the way, dear. You stay and finish what you’re doing.’

‘No trouble, and thank you for the news about the prison.’ Bethan followed Mrs Richards into the kitchen, positioning herself so as to ensure that Mrs Richards couldn’t see Edmund. She opened the door. ‘Thank you for calling in.’

‘See you on Sunday then?’

‘Perhaps.’

Mrs Richards walked down the Powells’ front steps reflecting that although Elizabeth had left Graig Avenue, the welcome in her house was as cold as it had ever been.

Bethan rushed through her washing in record time, finishing it just before the baby woke for his feed. Eddie sometimes came home for dinner if he was calling the streets anywhere near home, but because she wanted him to come that particular day, he didn’t show his face, and the bread and Welsh cakes she’d baked that morning remained locked in their tins in the pantry.