A Silver Lining (40 page)

‘But if it was your house and your land ...’

‘You don’t understand Russia.’ He shook his head at her naivety. ‘We didn’t know what was coming, and if we had, there would have been nothing that any of us could have done to change it.’

‘But surely you have laws ... police ...’

‘The party’s laws, and the party’s police. It was the police who moved everyone out. I wasn’t even there. Masha was having a baby. I had walked to the next village to get a cot from her brother. When I came back there was nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing,’ he repeated flatly. ‘Most of the old houses had been flattened to the ground. Builders were already at work. Fires burned, fed by our furniture, clothes, things we had valued for years. I asked them where the people had gone and they told me, the East. I went to the station. It was deserted: no trains, no people. I asked questions, so many questions I was arrested, but that was what I wanted. I thought if I was sent East I would find her.’

‘But you didn’t?’ There was the same look of pain and anguish on his face that she had seen in Cardiff.

‘I was put in a prison. I escaped into the woods one day when I was sent out in a work party. It was spring, the snow had melted, there were no tracks for them to follow. I hid in the forest, lived with the nomads and looked for Masha and our child. For four years I looked for them. When the nomads were rounded up by the state militia I volunteered to be a seaman. They didn’t think to check my identity. They simply assumed I was a member of the tribe I had been living with. They sent me to St Petersburg. I got a berth on a steamer to Cardiff.’

‘And there you left the ship?’

‘Jumped ship,’ he corrected. ‘So you see I am wanted for more than one crime in Russia. For escaping from prison, for jumping ship, for asking too many questions. People have been shot for less.’

‘But you never found your wife?’

‘I have never found anyone who knew what happened to her or the people in my village. Russia is not like here. People disappear all the time. Every time a Russian ship docks in Cardiff I try to meet it. I ask every sailor who comes in if he has any news. I have sent letters back with them to my wife’s brother, but there has been no word. And now, even if I should find her, I am here and she would not be allowed to leave.’ He turned his back on her and stared blindly out of the window. ‘Sometimes, just sometimes I think it would have been easier if I had returned to the village and found her dead. I would have known then that I had to mourn. I almost envied Bethan when her son died. I never knew whether Masha had my son or my daughter.’

‘How many years is it since you left your village to get that cot?’ she asked after a long silence.

‘Nine years next month.’ He closed his eyes, and her heart went out to him.

‘You could live out the rest of your life waiting for a reunion that may never happen.’

‘I have no choice. I have nothing to give anyone I ...’

She recalled the old woman’s words: “Recognise your destiny when it comes. Take it, and make the most of it while you can.”

‘You have something to give me,’ she whispered.

‘You don’t understand. I think of Masha all the time. I see her ...’

‘Since you met me?’

‘More often since I met you,’ he acknowledged honestly.

‘You said yourself that you can’t go back.’

‘I can’t,’ he admitted wretchedly.

‘All my life I’ve lived for the here and now, because I’ve been too afraid to look further than the present. For the first time I want to look forward. I want to live with you. Wake up beside you every morning, go to bed with you every night.’

‘You’d live with me after what I’ve just told you?’

‘I’d live with you.’

‘I could marry you. No one here knows about Masha except you, but it would not be legal, and if it was discovered it would be one more crime to lay on my head.’

‘It might be worth risking, especially if we had a child.’

‘I love you, Alma. But you’d have to understand about Masha. She will always be the first one, and my wife.’

‘You’re not my first man, Charlie. There was Ronnie. You know that.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

He kissed her and she kissed him back. Locking her fingers into his she led him quietly towards the door so as not to disturb her mother. They had one another. Tonight he would sleep in her bed, and tomorrow ... Tomorrow they would talk about a marriage –of sorts.

Masha was as much a part of Charlie’s past as Ronnie was of hers. There was no going back for either of them.

When his emotions were less raw he would see that, and understand. They were going to live out the rest of their lives in Pontypridd where nothing ever happened. Masha was in Russia. Ronnie was in Italy. There was no chance of them ever meeting again. No going back...

The pips that preceded the news beeped on the radio. He bent his head to hers and kissed her again. She loved him; that was all that mattered. Not that he had a wife and child somewhere he would never see again. She loved him, and he loved her. There was no going back...

‘I love you, Charlie.’

‘Can you say Feodor?’

‘I love you, Feodor.’

“The Czech crisis deepens as German troops continue to mass on the Czechoslovakian border. Herr Hitler has announced that he has no aggressive intentions ...
”

No going back ...

An excerpt from

ALL THAT GLITTERS

Book Four in the
Hearts of Gold
series
by

CATRIN COLLIER

Chapter One

Haydn Powell tipped his trilby over one eye, slouched back in his seat, and tried to look as though he was used to travelling first class. The performance wasn’t up to the standard of his twice nightly theatrical presentations. Nonchalant, debonair rakes were his speciality. They were easy to play when he was surrounded by an adoring female chorus, but here, in the company of a single glamorous companion, he couldn’t help feeling that the guard was about to arrive in the compartment at any moment and shunt him down to third class where he belonged.

Turning his back on the corridor, he glanced out of the window. Terraces of houses straggled in untidy lines across the mountainside. Above them, ramshackle pigeon-coops and sheds balanced precariously on improvised foundations that looked as though they were ready to relinquish their loads at any second. A puff of grey-black smoke blotted his view momentarily before wafting past on the breeze. He suppressed a smile as the scene re-emerged from the fog. It was all so wonderfully, blessedly familiar. The scrubby mottled green and brown hillside. The glistening black slag heaps. The coal-grimed streets set with gleaming, sun jewelled windows and billowing lace curtains blowing free from open casements. Summer and home! Radyr, Taffs Well and Treforest behind them, next stop Pontypridd. In less than half an hour he’d be in Graig Avenue. Returning in triumph, the way he’d dreamed of when he’d worked Wilf Horton’s second-hand clothes stall on the market. Successful, with a season’s work ahead of him starring in Revue and Variety on the stage of the Town Hall where he’d last worked as a callboy. Money enough in his pocket to live comfortably, and enough to spare to stand treats for all his family. A suitcase full of expensive clothes above him, a good watch on his wrist, and, his smile focused on Rusty, his co-star and bed partner of six weeks, a beautiful, if trifle mature, girlfriend to flaunt in front of his old mates.

‘Is that an “I’m going to miss living in the same house as you Rusty” smile?’ she enquired archly.

‘No, that’s a “Don’t forget to stay behind in the dressing room every night after the show finishes” smile.’ He left his seat and lifted their cases down from the string rack overhead.

‘I wish we could stay in the same digs.’ She reached up and tugged playfully at his tie.

‘Don’t do that. Not unless you want me to drop this case on your head. What the hell have you got in it?’

‘Girl things.’

‘Brick things, by the feel of it.’

‘You sure there’s no room for me in your house?’ she pleaded.

‘I’ve told you, my family are squashed in like cockroaches behind a skirting board. There’s only three and a bit bedrooms. My parents are in one, my sister and cousin share another. Another cousin’s in the box room, and the only way you can stretch out there is to leave your feet behind in the passage, and my brother and I are crammed into the fourth. As if that’s not enough, there’s a lodger in the front room. Once I get there, there’ll be eight of us in the kitchen trying to sit around a table meant for four. The only place we could possibly put you is the ty bach.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The little house in the garden,’ he teased. ‘Every Welsh house has one, they’re about two foot square ...’

‘You,’ she pretended to hit him with her handbag, but not so hard as to disturb the crisp waves in her improbably red hair, or crease the extravagant applications of rouge, lipstick, powder, eye black and blue that proclaimed loudly and clearly to anyone who cared to look that she was ‘on stage’.

‘You’ll be much more comfortable in digs.’

‘Oh yes, in some lodging house run by an old biddy my husband knows, and approves of,’ she added acidly.

‘Which is in Tyfica Road, five minutes’ walk from the theatre and just about the smartest street in town,’ he said flatly, loath to listen to another of her tirades on the inadequacies of her comedian husband who was working on a Blackpool pier. ‘There’ll probably even be an inside bathroom.’

‘You haven’t got one?’ Sometimes, like now, she found it difficult to determine when Haydn was joking.

‘Everyone knows the Welsh don’t wash.’

‘If you move into my digs we could share the bathroom and the bath,’ she murmured seductively.

‘I’ll visit some time.’

‘And perhaps you won’t be welcome,’ she snapped, finally realising that for the first time in the six weeks they’d been together, Haydn wasn’t prepared to allow himself to be persuaded.

‘For a smile I’ll see you off the train as far as the taxi rank.’

‘I suppose you have a girlfriend meeting you?’

‘Sister.’ He was finding it increasingly difficult to keep his temper.

‘Too good for me to meet?’

‘Don’t start, Rusty.’ The train slowed. Haydn rose from the seat, shrugged his arms into his new, and very expensive camelhair coat, and pushed their cases towards the door with his foot.

‘Doesn’t it worry you that I’ll be lonely?’ she wailed in a last ditch attempt to make him feel guilty.

‘How can you possibly be lonely with twenty other girls close by?’

‘You know what I’m like, Haydn. I feel insecure without a man around. I get frightened.’

‘I’ll ask Billy and Norman to look in on you.’ He picked up their cases.

‘Billy’s more of a girl than me, and Norman scares me to death.’

‘Then go to bed early with a book,’ he suggested impatiently. ‘It’s only for tonight. I’ll see you in rehearsals first thing tomorrow.’

‘And the day after you begin rehearsing for the Summer Variety, leaving me to spend every day in a strange town by myself. I’ll be bored senseless. Not that you care.’

‘If you let me wear you out every night, all you’ll be fit for is sleep.’ Secure in the knowledge that he’d be out of earshot in less than five minutes, he kissed her briefly on the lips before opening the door and stepping down on to the platform. Calling a porter, he lifted their cases out of the carriage, his two matching beige and brown leather grips and Rusty’s three bags, and that was without the two cavernous trunks she’d stowed in the guard’s van.

‘Rusty?’ Judy, the ‘head girl’ in charge of the static Revue nudes waved from further up the platform. ‘Want to share a taxi to your digs? You are next door to Mandy and me, aren’t you?’

‘So you’ve told me a dozen times,’ Rusty answered unpleasantly.

‘Take those down for us, please.’ Haydn gave the porter sixpence, and took secret delight when the man, known throughout Pontypridd as ‘Dai Station’ tipped his cap and went about his business without recognising him. It was good to be home, and even better to be mistaken for ‘crache’.

‘Haydn?’

He whirled around. A tall, dark, elegant woman waved to him from the top of the steps at the end of the platform.

‘See you, Rusty.’ He raced headlong towards his sister; gathering Bethan into his arms he whirled her around.

‘Steady,’ her husband, Andrew warned. ‘She’s pregnant.’

Haydn hadn’t noticed Andrew John, but then he hadn’t been looking for him. The last time he’d been home Bethan had been living there alone. He looked into his sister’s eyes. She was smiling, but he knew Bethan. The smile was superficial. It was hardly surprising; he remembered the baby she’d buried a few months before.

‘It’s good to see you back and looking so well,’ Andrew held out his hand and Haydn shook it for his sister’s sake. He, along with the rest of his family, wasn’t enamoured of Bethan’s choice of husband. ‘The car’s in station yard. Let’s get your cases and go.’

‘We thought you’d like to lunch in our house,’ Bethan took his arm and clung to it. ‘That way you can catch up on all the gossip before going home.’

‘Lunch?’ When he’d left it had been breakfast, dinner, tea and supper. Where had Bethan picked up ‘lunch’? From her crache in-laws who resented her working-class background? They followed Andrew down the wide, steep flight of stone steps into station yard where Andrew opened the boot of a brand new Daimler. Haydn looked, but said nothing. He’d be damned before he’d praise anything that belonged to Dr Andrew John.

‘Haydn, coo-ee.’ Rusty blew him a kiss, the luminous pink, low-cut costume and feathered hat he had admired in Finchley appearing cheap and tacky in contrast to Bethan’s well-cut navy wool coat and green felt cloche. ‘Your cases!’ she screeched, pointing to the porter’s trolley that had emerged from the goods lift.

‘I’ll get them.’ Andrew offered.

‘Careful, those females are maneaters.’

‘That didn’t sound like a joke,’ Bethan said as she climbed into the front passenger seat of the car.

‘It wasn’t meant as one.’

‘There do seem to be an awful lot of girls.’ She watched three crowd into the back of a taxi while the hapless driver tried to cram their cases into his boot to the accompaniment of suggestive innuendoes.

‘Ten static, non-moving, non-dancing nudes,’ Haydn said drily, ‘plus ten fully experienced and trained chorus girls. One comic, Billy Bert, he’s the short one on the end in the bowler hat, and one producer and impresario, Norman Ashe.’ He indicated an imposing man wearing a black trilby and astrakhan coat. ‘He tries, but usually fails to keep the circus in order.’

‘You weren’t joking about them being maneaters.’ Andrew lifted Haydn’s grips into the boot and slammed it shut. ‘I was lucky to get away in one piece.’

‘If your flies are still buttoned, count yourself fortunate.’

‘I take it that’s the voice of experience talking?’

‘Me?’ Haydn turned an innocent face to Bethan. They exchanged glances and both burst out laughing. ‘So what’s happening in Pontypridd?’ he asked once Andrew was in the driver’s seat.

‘Nothing that can’t wait until we eat,’ Bethan replied evasively. ‘Come on, I’ve been good until now, but I can’t wait another minute. Tell all? What’s it really like being one of only three men working in a Revue of predatory showgirls?’

Trying, and failing, to ignore the chill that seeped up from the concrete into her knees, Jane Jones bent her head over the grey stone steps of the Workhouse Master’s house and scrubbed as though her life depended on the degree of cleanliness she achieved. Above the rasping of bristles on granite she heard the echo of footsteps moving from Courthouse Street, through the main gates of the workhouse behind her. She listened intently. Two sets were slow and heavy, one light. Two men and a woman? The brush slipped in her hand, and she stifled a cry as it dropped into the bucket of cold, scummy water. She examined her palm. An enormous splinter was lodged deep below the skin and she had no means of getting it out. Not until she was back on the ward with Nurse Davies after supper. If –and it always was an ‘if’ with Nurse Davies –she was in a good mood she might try to remove the splinter for her with a needle. Jane winced at the thought.

Since she had left the orphanage for the workhouse two years ago she had spent all her daylight hours scrubbing. And because she was one of the youngest, not even inside floors. Outside steps, paths, yards, and always with cold water liberally laced with a cheap soda that burnt into every crack and hairline cut on her fingers.

The bell on the lodge gate clanged, rousing the slow, measured tread of the porter. As she delved into the bucket to retrieve the brush she risked a sly peek from behind her raised arm. It wasn’t two men and a woman, but one man accompanied by an enormously fat woman and a young girl dressed in the same coarse, grey flannel workhouse garb as herself. Despite the hint of summer warmth in the air the hem of the girl’s dress was quivering. Surely she couldn’t be cold? Not in this weather? Not unless she had been used to warmer temperatures than those of the workhouse, but if that was the case, why was she already dressed in the uniform?

By bending her head low and looking up at an angle as she scrubbed, Jane could see that the girl was crying. So that was it! She wasn’t cold; just upset at the prospect of entering the workhouse. Any sympathy she might have felt evaporated. Only fools whined. Snivelling never won anyone anything. To survive life behind these walls you had to keep your wits sharp and be prepared to grab every opportunity as it came. They did come; not nearly often enough, but they came. A chance to cadge an extra bit of food from the back door of the kitchen, or earn a penny doing a nurse’s or porter’s personal mending.

The bristles of her brush lodged in a crack between the stone step and the wall. Pushing the brush aside, she peered at the obstruction, spying a small sliver of curved copper. A farthing? No, it was too big to be a farthing. A halfpenny, or even a penny. She looked around for something she could use to dig it out. A splinter of slate? There were none. Not even a shard of stone in the flowerbed. She forced the bristles of the brush deep into the crack. The brittle back of the wood dug painfully into her hand, but she persisted, pushing down and dragging- the bristles towards her. The coin moved. It rolled. A few seconds later it was in the bottom of her pail. A penny. A whole penny. She would put it with the others she had scavenged and saved over the years.

She hadn’t squandered a single coin that had come her way. Not even the Christmas penny St Matthew’s parish church gave all the orphans resident in Maesycoed homes. Every one of them was safe, knotted into a handkerchief her house mother had given her as a going-away present when she had left Church Village Homes on her sixteenth birthday. This would make it one and elevenpence she had hidden. And she defied anyone to find her secret place.

‘Jones! Jane Jones!’

‘Yes, sir.’ Keeping her eyes lowered, she dropped her brush, rose to her feet and turned to face the porter who had called her.

‘You’re wanted in the ward right away. Here, I’ll take your bucket.’ He held out his hand, but she shook her head.

‘No. I’m responsible for it. Sister said she’ll have my guts for garters if I lose it.’

‘Have it your own way. Just run to your ward double quick. Or you’ll get us both into trouble.’

He walked away, Jane following at a slower pace watching as his broad-shouldered, athletic figure turned right at the inner gate and headed for the male wards. Struggling with her heavy bucket. she turned left. Pausing outside the door to the female ward she tipped the rim into the drain, straining the filthy water through her fingers until the penny dropped into them.