Love and War (4 page)

‘Give her a discount, man. She’s a friend of mine.’

They’re still arguing while I change back into my grey skirt and green jumper and my navy-blue gaberdine.

In the end, Tremlett Browne takes almost a third off the price. It’s still more, far more, than I’ve ever paid for anything else in my entire life, but I hand over the money readily enough.

After folding the dress very carefully and putting it into a shiny green and white striped bag with Studio Laura on it, Mr Browne hands it to Gwynn Morgan – rather odd – who takes it without protest. And together he and I walk out of the shop and along the front.

‘Did you really cut out all those hundreds of pink leaves?’ I ask him, glancing back at the window.

‘No. 2C did that part. But the grand design was mine.’

‘Like God made the world.’

‘That’s right.’

When we come to the lifeboat station, we stop and look out at the lavender-coloured sea and the gulls wheeling silently overhead. Huge waves advance, one after the other, exploding and crashing and sucking the loosened shingle as they retreat. It’s very cold.

Life is certainly strange. I’ve been bored to the bone for months and months on end, and suddenly I feel as though I’m conducting a great orchestra.

‘Oh, bury me not in the senseless earth. But in the living sea,’ I quote, my voice swelling with emotion, like someone on the wireless.

‘I hope they don’t bury you anywhere for a good long time,’ Gwynn Morgan says, ‘because, frankly, I enjoy looking at you.’

I try to say something, but fail. Behind the fury of the high January tide, I seem to hear the steady beat of a drum.

‘And now I’m going for a pint. I don’t suppose I can persuade you to join me?’

I smile and shake my head. ‘My legs are still trembling,’ I tell him. ‘I’m no good at spending money. It’s my upbringing.’

My whole body is trembling. Can it be the cold?

What a beautiful little town Llanfair is; three streets radiating up the hill from the market square, the posh houses on the front keeping out the rough sea winds. There are three chapels, two churches, eleven pubs and two licensed hotels.

The bigger houses are mostly Georgian, with flat windows, and doors with rounded fanlights. People complain that they’re getting to look shabby, with no fresh paint since the beginning of the war, but I love the peeling grey-white of the walls and the peeling grey-greens of the doors and window frames.

Two

FOR THE REST OF THE DAY, I’m conscious of being surrounded by something heavy and threatening.

What an idiot I am. I can’t let my little adventure with Gwynn Morgan out of my head. God, my mind is in a pathetic state, as well as my body.

But he was so friendly. What made him ask me to have a coffee with him? He really seemed to want my company, smiling so warmly. What made him come after me to Studio Laura?

To be absolutely honest, Gwynn Morgan was once my greatest heart-throb. Of course, I never thought of him as remotely connected with everyday life: other girls had crushes on Spencer Tracy or Robert Taylor, mine was on Gwynn Morgan, Art; it was in the same realm of fantasy. As they cut out glossy pictures from movie magazines, I cut out his picture – smudged black and white – from the local paper or the school gazette. I probably still have one or two somewhere.

I wonder if he remembers how I used to dote on him? He must, surely, have realised that something other than chance was responsible for our frequent meetings on the stairs and in the corridors. ‘Well, Rhian,’ he used to say when we came face to face for the third time in a morning, ‘we really mustn’t go on meeting like this.’ How I used to envy Bethan Morris and Ruth Talbot, who took Art in the Sixth Form, monopolising so much of his time. I cultivated a friendship with Bethan, so that I could join her when she ate her lunchtime sandwiches in the Art Room. (Not that he was present on those occasions, but it made me feel close to him.)

His hair was black in those days.

My heart almost burst with pride when he said he wanted to paint my picture. I think it took about six sittings, two hours each, in the Art Room after school. He used to give me a bar of fruit-and-nut chocolate, I remember, and five minutes’ rest after the first hour. He used to recite little verses to me when he thought I was getting bored, but I wasn’t allowed to smile.

The finished picture was entitled ‘Schoolgirl’. My parents didn’t think it did me justice. ‘He’s given her a cast in the right eye,’ my mother said, ‘and it makes her look a bit simple.’

‘It must have been all that sitting still,’ my father said. ‘She’s got the look of a rabbit staring at a snake.’

It got a prize anyway, in that exhibition.

The only other time we were together was on Drama Club night. He was responsible for the scenery of the play we put on before Easter every year, but he took an interest in all of it: the preliminary discussions and the acting and directing. His interest and abilities were far more wide-ranging than any of the other teachers at our school; I remember being quite surprised, for instance, at how much Racine and Corneille he could quote. He spoke French well, too, with an enviable accent, someone said he’d once studied drawing in Paris.

I wonder if he really was more interested in me than in any of the others? Some days I used to think so and go to bed faint with happiness.

In my last year I played Rosalind in
As You Like It
. I remember Miss Eira Jenkins, our producer, getting rather annoyed because she thought he was getting too involved in what was, after all, her pigeon. But life could hold no greater delight for me than repeating those love-sick lines to him: ‘I tell thee, Aliena, I cannot be out of sight of Orlando. I’ll go find a shadow and sigh till he come.’

I wonder if he knew that I was speaking directly to him? ‘I cannot be out of the sight of Orlando.’ I suppose he did.

Naturally, I got over all that high romance years ago – when Huw started taking an interest in me, I suppose. With Huw, everyday life took over, and it was time it did. So why do I feel this damp cloud all around me and settling on my chest? Perhaps I’m in for a cold.

Ilona Hughes approves of my dress. ‘Well, it makes you look different anyway, and that’s something,’ but insists that I get a roll-on, now, to wear with it and some wedge-heeled shoes.

When I tell her about my meeting with Gwynn Morgan, she’s even more interested. ‘Gwynn Morgan?’ she says. ‘Yes, I know him quite well. He comes to the Ship most nights. I feel rather sorry for him, though. He’s always got to go home after the one drink, he can never stay more than half an hour, he’s very definitely under his wife’s thumb.’

‘Well, she’s English,’ I say, as though that explains a lot.

‘No, she’s not, she’s French. Convent-educated and all that. Very religious.’

‘Fancy that. And him an atheist.’

‘Atheist? He’s a Catholic, like she is. What made you think he was an atheist?’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes. Denzil sees them in Sant Ioan’s. That’s how I met him. Through Denzil.’

Denzil is her current boyfriend: Liverpool-Irish, a soldier stationed in Tonfaen.

I take my dress back upstairs and hang it in the wardrobe. When will I wear it? To Prize Day, in the summer? To Fflur’s wedding, if she invites me? It seems altogether too worldly for chapel. Why ever did I buy it?

What a strange day it’s been. A Red-Letter day, I suppose. Write a composition entitled A Red-letter Day. ‘I’ve never ’ad one of those, Miss.’ ‘Will one side be enough, Miss?’

A Blue-Dress Day.

Oh, but the way he looked at me when I came back into the shop wearing it. No one ever looked at me in quite that way before: admiring, almost deferential, but troubled at the same time. It set my pulse racing, I can tell you. And if I was completely honest, I’d admit that it was passion I felt in that look, not deference or even homage. ‘The red rose whispers of passion, And the white rose breathes of love. Oh, the red rose is a falcon, And the white rose is a dove. But I send you a cream-white rosebud, With a flush on its petal tips...’

Rubbish, what absolute rubbish. What’s the matter with me? Again I have to remind myself that I’m a respectable married woman, brought up to know the difference between right and wrong, between true and false, between doves and falcons.
Dear Huw, I’m a respectable married woman, but buying this new dress seems to have taken my wits away. I’m sorry. Love, Rhian.

I make myself think of Huw. I go to the window, standing behind the curtains to look out: a moonlit night, the pavements gleaming, the sky pewter-grey but lighter at the horizon, the rim of the sea just visible beyond the huddle of the town.

Will Huw be feeling lonely on this Saturday night? Homesick for Llanfair? Somehow I don’t think so; Huw is an extrovert, ready to make the best of any situation. As long as he’s with his mates – his letters are full of stories about Nobby and Jock, Bill, Sandy, Ginger and Tich Gordon – Huw won’t be too unhappy anywhere. I hope he isn’t unhappy.

Will he like my new dress, I wonder. I can’t remember his ever taking much notice of my clothes. How strange he’d looked in his hairy, khaki uniform, the little forage cap tilted over one eye. After the war, he’ll wear ordinary clothes again and I’ll have his Sunday shirt and his workshirts to wash and iron. How odd it will seem to have him living here instead of Ilona Hughes. Will it be better?

Why didn’t Gwynn Morgan admit to being a Catholic? Fancy his having a French wife. Strange they have no children. When she comes to Prize Day or the Saint David’s Day concert, she doesn’t speak to anyone but the Headmaster’s wife. The dress she wore last year was of some thick black material and much too long; I wish I could say she looked dowdy, but she didn’t. She looked strange and different, but definitely not dowdy. She’s quite striking-looking, I suppose. And French as well.

Ilona Hughes is having mackerel for her supper. She offers me some, but I’ve got a piece of vegetable pie left from yesterday. I give her some rhubarb and custard which I’d intended for tomorrow and she eats it as though it’s the only thing she’s had all week. She loves custard, but she’s never got any sugar to make any. She could easily learn to drink tea without sugar – anyone could – but when I suggest it, she almost cries. Sometimes I think she’s not all there.

She finishes off the rhubarb and custard and then scrapes out the bowl and the jug.

‘What are you doing tonight?’ she asks me.

‘I’m going to darn my stockings and listen to Saturday Night Theatre. It’s a nice old-fashioned play with a butler.’

She sighs. ‘Would you like to come to the pictures with Denzil and me?’

‘Heavens, no. I mean, no thank you. I mean, three’s a crowd, isn’t it? I wouldn’t want to spoil your fun.’

She looks relieved. ‘But I don’t like to think of you with a new dress and nowhere to go.’ she says. ‘If I see Gwynn Morgan, I’ll ask him to call round to take you out for a drink.’

‘I hope you’re joking.’

‘I can’t see the harm.’

‘I can manage my own affairs, thank you.’

‘Can you? What affairs? Well, let me know if you change your mind. I don’t suppose you could lend me some lipstick, could you? The Yardley cherry? I seem to have mislaid mine.’

I lend her my lipstick, but can’t bring myself to tell her that Gwynn Morgan wants her as a life-model for five shillings an hour. I’m afraid she’ll accept and fall in love with him, I suppose. I’d certainly object if she started bringing him back here every evening. I wouldn’t be able to bear it.

Our minister gave a really good sermon this morning; I listened attentively for once.

Many of the older people don’t like Mr Roberts because he hasn’t got the eloquence of the great preachers they remember, but I like him the better for it. I’m suspicious of a sermon which grips you by its dramatic intensity rather than by its message. Perhaps the old-type preachers, whose voices pitched and soared, whose hands fluttered like doves or stabbed home a point as though they were driving a nail into a wall, perhaps they had their own integrity. But I can’t help thinking that even if they’d lost all belief, they’d still be able to build up an extraordinary edifice; emotive phrases, rising and falling cadences, rhetorical questions, alliteration and quotation around emptiness.

Mr Roberts is quiet and unemotive and his message is stark: hating the enemy, we sin against a loving God.

The congregation, many with sons, grandsons, brothers or nephews in the forces, don’t want to hear about love and forgiveness but only of the noble fight against aggression, of defending the right to be free. Etc.

Huw’s mother, for instance, thinks the minister is undermining her son’s sacrifice. ‘Is my Huw wicked to fight, tell me that?’ she asks him on the way out.

‘Your Huw is very bravely doing what he conceives to be his duty. I’m not trying to deny the great courage of our soldiers.’

‘You’re dodging the question, Mr Roberts.’

‘Come along to Sunday School this afternoon, Mrs Evans, and we’ll see if we can find some New Testament verses to enlighten us.’

‘No thank you. I’ll stick to my way of thinking and you can stick to yours.’

I’m having dinner with my in-laws and Huw’s mother is still ranting on about poor Mr Roberts as we lay the table.