Bobby's Girl (5 page)

She'd picked up her bag. ‘I need to phone home about America. If I plead poverty, my father may cough up the fare. He's always telling us travel broadens the mind.'

‘Travel in Europe maybe,' Rich declared. ‘But I fail to see how travel in America will do anything of the kind. There's no culture …'

‘See you at supper.' She'd pretended not to hear Rich when he called after her but she noticed Kate turning and poking her tongue out at him. 

‘America, darling, what a marvellous opportunity. For four months you said?'

‘June to September.' Penny knew her mother would be pleased at the thought of her travelling with other students.

‘Is Rich going?'

‘He's thinking about it.' Her parents had made it clear they felt she and Rich had become too serious about one another too young. ‘Kate's going.'

‘That's wonderful, Penny, darling. I'll get your father to transfer forty-eight pounds into your account tonight.'

‘It would be better if he sent me a cheque made out to the student's union, Mam.'

‘You're overdrawn again.'

‘Not by much,' she lied.

‘How much is not much?'

‘I'm not sure.' She reflected that that, at least, was the truth.

‘Sort it, darling, and tell me how much you need. And if Kate needs help …'

‘She wouldn't take it, Mam. You know how independent she is.' She glanced over her shoulder into the foyer where Kate was waiting for her.

‘You could try, but be tactful.'

‘I'll ring you again when I know more. Love to you, Dad, and everyone.'

‘I'll pass on the message. You're eating properly and taking care of yourself?'

‘Of course, Mam.'

‘You'd better do some clothes shopping. Depending on where you go in America it could be hot. Shall I ask your father to put a hundred pounds into your account? Or won't that be enough?'

‘I'll make it enough.' She wondered if the Dragon needed another waitress. ‘And, if he does stretch to a hundred pounds, tell him I won't need another sub until the autumn and I won't then, if I get a halfway decent job in America.'

‘Seeing is believing, darling.'

‘You're not cross about the overdraft?'

‘Resigned. You're no worse than Rachel, Ned and Evan.'

‘The advantage of being the youngest is your parents have seen it all before. That's the pips, Mam. I haven't any more money. Love you.' She hoped her mother heard her last words before the line went dead.

‘Well?' Kate asked.

‘My mother's going to ask my father to send me the money.'

‘Lucky you.' There wasn't a trace of envy in Kate's voice. She wasn't sure there wouldn't have been in hers, if their situations had been reversed.

‘We'd better talk to someone about work permits.'

‘And jobs,' Kate echoed.

‘You're really going?'

Rich's question irritated her as much as his attitude towards Kate. ‘I dropped a post-dated cheque into the union office an hour ago.'

They were facing one another across the supper table. The dining room was almost empty. It was Wednesday, the one weekday evening when visits from the opposite sex were officially allowed in the hostels from seven until ten o'clock. Not that the privilege affected the boys' hostel. Their wardens treated them as adults and allowed them to have visitors for as long as they wanted, at any hour of the day or night – and all night if the mood took them. Unlike the elderly female warden the girls had nicknamed ‘Fanny', who supervised the girls' hostel.

Fanny spent her evenings and nights creeping up and down the corridors in soft-soled bedroom slippers, listening at their doors for a masculine voice. If she heard one, the punishment was swift and severe. The visitor's hostess was exiled to selected ‘digs' where the landlady's rules were even stricter than Fanny's.

‘What about me?' Rich asked.

‘What about you?' She dipped a spoon into a bowl of apple pie and custard, decided she wasn't hungry enough to eat it, and pushed it aside.

‘I can't believe you're going to leave me for four months.'

‘We're not married.'

‘We agreed to marry after we qualified. I wanted to buy you an engagement ring for Christmas. You wouldn't let me.'

‘I'm not in the mood to argue with you.' She left the table.

‘Pen,' he followed her into the car park. ‘I'm only upset at the thought of not seeing you for months on end. Come to my room and wait for me while I phone home,' he begged.

‘You're going to ask your father if he'll let you off working on your grandfather's farm this summer,' she guessed.

‘After I've spoken to my brother.'

‘Clever move. Get Jack to argue your case for you.'

Rich's elder brother was a postgraduate research student in London. Much to their geography teacher father's disgust he'd chosen to study philosophy. Jack, too, helped out on their grandfather's farm. When it came to family arguments, Jack always fought in their mother's best interests as she was self-effacing and their father overbearing. Jack also did his best to protect his younger brother from their father's volatile temper and arrogance, traits she was beginning to suspect Rich had inherited.

Rich held out his hand. ‘I'm sorry.'

She capitulated and took it.

‘Forgiven?'

‘I'll think about it while I wait for you.'

They crossed the lawn. Rich went to the payphone in the foyer and she took the lift to his top-floor room. Even the corridors in the boys' hostel smelt differently from the girls'. Mixed odours of male sweat, stale beer and burnt toast hung unpleasantly in the air, and Rich's room had a distinct ‘dirty sports socks, gym changing room' atmosphere. She opened the window. Shivering, she gazed out at the view of Swansea Bay.

The curve of the shore was highlighted by street lamps that burnt golden in the misty twilight. Boats bobbed on their moorings at the Mumbles end of the bay but all she could think about was America.

She'd plenty of time to dream of New York and art galleries. As the minutes ticked past she stopped looking at her watch. She'd seen Joe Hunt when she'd dropped her cheque off at the union office. He'd given her a photocopied list of summer camps that employed students as counsellors but she'd set her sights elsewhere. She intended to find a job in the city. Waiting tables or working in a bar in Greenwich Village in the evenings so she could spend her days visiting the centres of culture she had read about. The Guggenheim, the Metropolitan, the Museum of Modern Art …

Penny heard the lift whirr upwards. The doors opened, footsteps echoed down the corridor and Rich strode in. She asked the question, although she already
knew the answer from the expression on his face.

‘What did your brother and father say?'

‘Jack was great. He always is. He phoned my father for me but the brute wouldn't even consider it. He said Granddad needs all the help he can get this summer. The old man says he wants to sell the farm in a year or two and needs to get it in good shape. That means repairing and repainting the farmhouse, all the outbuildings, and rebuilding the drystone walls. He can afford to get in professionals. But his grandsons are cheaper. Never mind that they have their own lives to live. And I don't believe for one minute he's serious about selling. They'll carry him out of that farmhouse, feet first. I tried phoning my father after I talked to Jack but …'

‘But?' she prompted when he hesitated.

‘I never want to see or speak to the bastard again.' Rich threw himself on the bed and crossed his arms behind his head.

‘That's your father you're talking about.'

‘He's an unreasonable sod. I wish I had yours.'

‘I'm lucky.' She kept her relief in check. Ever since Kate had suggested that Rich would ‘cramp our style' she'd been imagining the two of them wandering around America, sharing experiences, making new friends – and without Rich's watchful and jealous eye – of both sexes. ‘I'm sorry.'

‘No, you're not. You couldn't wait to rush off with Kate to phone your mother earlier.'

‘I phoned my mother because I didn't want to miss out on a seat on the plane. I doubt I'll have the chance to go to America again at that price.'

‘You want to go to America so you can spend the summer hunting boys with Kate.'

Her temper rose. ‘Where's that coming from?'

‘I saw the look on your faces when you left the common room. And I suppose you'll stay on the pill when you're there, so you can sleep with anyone who takes your fancy.'

‘How dare you!'

He confronted her. ‘But you will stay on the pill?'

‘You know damn well you can't just stop taking it without risking a pregnancy. You'd have to start using condoms now if I did, and you'd have to use condoms when I came back for at least a month, if not two. You're the one who hates them. But that's not the point. The point is – you don't trust me. That hurts.'

‘Does it?' he challenged.

‘Yes, it does. You know you're the only boy I've ever slept with.' She went to the door.

Rich blocked her path. ‘I do trust you, Pen. Can't you see this stupid argument isn't about trust or me and you or the pill? It's Kate. She's always creating trouble between us and you always take her side.'

‘If I “take sides”, it's the side of common sense. And you're wrong. This argument
is
about us. Being my boyfriend doesn't give you the right to tell me when I can and can't take the pill. The next thing you're going to say is you're sorry the pill was invented because it gives women too much freedom.'

‘You're never going to let me forget my father said that, are you?'

‘No, because there are times when you behave just like him.'

‘I'm sorry. I do trust you, Pen, except when you're with Kate. She needles me …'

‘And you needle her. You know how sensitive she is about her background.'

He shrugged. ‘She did well to get into grammar school.'

She finally erupted. ‘Don't you
dare
patronise her. Kate's my closest friend and she's where she is because she's intelligent, works hard, gets a full grant and is willing to do any job she can get to supplement it. Your constant sniping at her is wearing me down.'

‘Kate enjoys annoying me and you know it.'

‘Only because you harp on about her living on a council estate. Given that her father died when she was two, it's not as though her mother had a choice. And Kate
did
do well. Do you know how many girls attended the girls' grammar school from that estate? Two; that's not in our year, that's in the entire school of five hundred and something. And the teachers were foul to both. Is it any wonder Kate's sensitive?'

Rich capitulated but only because Penny's anger could smoulder for days. ‘You win, Pen, I'll try to be nice to Kate, but it's not easy when she takes everything I say the wrong way.'

‘She wouldn't if you spoke to her with respect.'

He changed the subject, as he always did when he was in danger of losing an argument. ‘Pontypridd won't be the same without you this summer. We always have fun together, don't we?'

‘Yes,' she conceded abruptly.

‘It would have been our last summer before getting married.'

‘I haven't said yes to an engagement ring yet. And marriage is the last thing I want to think about before my finals.'

‘When I asked you to marry me, you agreed we'd set the date after we left college.'

‘That was when we were still at school.'

‘So now you don't want to marry me?' he challenged.

‘I don't want to
know
you when you're in this mood, let alone marry you.'

He pulled the sad clown face that usually amused her. ‘I don't want to lose you.'

She didn't move from the window. ‘You will if you carry on like this.'

‘You're talking about going away for four months.'

‘To work and see a new country.' As Rich had made the first apologetic move, she felt she had to give him something in return. ‘I may appreciate you all the more when I return.'

‘Is that a promise?'

‘We may have gone to separate schools—'

‘Only because they wouldn't let me into the girls' grammar school.'

It was a poor attempt at humour and Penny ignored it. ‘But we haven't spent more than a couple of hours apart since we came to college. I'd have been happy if you could have come with us, but thinking about it, perhaps it's not a bad idea to take a break after living in one another's pockets for the last eighteen months. If only to be absolutely sure of our feelings.'

‘I know what I'm feeling is the real thing. All I want is a chance to persuade you that you can trust your feelings too.'

He left the bed and kissed her slowly, thoroughly and hungrily. They'd come a long way since their first fumbling attempts at lovemaking on her fifteenth birthday.

‘Is the door locked?' The boys had a disconcerting habit of walking in and out of one another's rooms at all hours.

He stepped back and turned the key. ‘It is now.'

She pulled off her cardigan and tugged her sleeveless black polo neck skinny-rib over her head.

‘You have such a beautiful body.' He watched her step out of her tights and grey miniskirt. ‘You can't blame me for being jealous.'

‘Who else should I blame?' She unclipped his belt and unzipped his jeans.

‘I'm sorry for being an idiot,' he nuzzled her neck.

‘Show me how sorry.'

She fell backwards on to the bed and he entered her.

But even during the shattering climax of orgasm, when she dug her fingernails into his back and he breathed heady protestations of love, she found herself wondering if there was more in store for her in America than Rich could give.

Later, with hindsight, she suspected a part of her she'd never allowed to surface hoped there was.