The Typewriter Girl (44 page)

She had wrenched off her gloves again; John caught one of her hands to hush her. “Lils. You never considered yourself a parcel in a shipment of goods before, not so I could tell. So what is this?”

“I want you to understand—there would be benefits, should you choose me. Enough benefits, perhaps, to make it worthwhile.”

“Lillian Gilbey, I know you’ve read too much poetry to believe you must settle for a man who marries your fortune.”

Well, and that made her cry. John handed over his handkerchief like an automaton. He was so damn exhausted, every emotion he’d kept at bay these past weeks pressing upon him—his grief for Charlie, yes, and Betsey, too, for he had no other name for
how he missed her, what that cold panic was when he remembered he was without her. The disaster of the fire; Sarah’s accusations, which she didn’t mean but were somehow true; leaving Idensea and all the uncertainty of starting this new life in London—the only thing that felt right and true was that soon, he would be in Wales to bring back Owen and give the boy a new life, one with promise and goodness.

“It—my fortune—is all I have,” she said. John started to scoff, but she shook her head vehemently. “It is. I’m ruined, John. I am ruined, and . . . and with . . . and with child, and I . . .”

John stood, not hearing the rest. John stood, not to walk away, but because his body seemed to demand some confirmation that it was awake and in the world, the real one, not one conjured from dreams.

It was something he would remember the rest of his life, this moment when he realized that, for all his instincts, he really didn’t know a damn thing.

Oh, there was one thing of which he was fairly certain right now. “Noel Dunning,” he said.

Lillian looked up, surprise suspending the flood of tears. But then all John could see was the top of her hat, which seemed to be outfitted with enough netting to capture every cod in the North Sea. A long, fluid feather waved to the rhythm of her heaving shoulders.

He let her weep. A hansom cab made a pass around the square, then exited to a side street for another slow tour of the neighborhood. It would return twice more before John managed to extract all the necessary details from Lillian, whose discomfort with plain speech about the topic hampered communication as much as her fear and embarrassment. But it seemed Dunning had stopped calling on her after
it
—“
it
” being the closest she came to naming the act of intercourse—except for once, a few weeks before her family had left for Idensea.

“Lillian, did he know about the babe?” John asked.

“Of course he knew!” Fresh sobs welled up from her. A bright berry fell loose from her hat and rolled into the swaths of netting.
“But he only told me he was so sorry for
it
, for everything, and I was cold to him—I hadn’t any choice about that—but I—”

“Why not?” John interrupted.

“Why not?” His ignorance apparently bewildered her. “How would it look for me to forgive him, just like that? Didn’t you hear me say he didn’t call for weeks after—after
it
?”

“Bless the bleeding Christ! You meant to punish him.”

“Only that day! Only until I came to Idensea. Except I went, and—and he wasn’t there! He wasn’t there at all!”

Because he is bloody in Vienna,
John thought. He wondered if Dunning had paid that last call before or after he’d known his father was sending him away. In any case, he’d left a pregnant Lillian for his many months of piano lessons. A dark monster dug into John’s gut as he watched Lillian’s feather wave, there to reside until he next set his eyes on Noel Dunning.

He sat back down beside Lillian and allowed her to cry over what she called her foolish, evil choices, the self-evident fact that she was unlovable and easily forgotten, the general faithlessness of all men, and a great many other things he couldn’t quite make out. The brim of her hat swiped his eye as she lifted her face to his to ask him again to consider marriage to her.

“Lillian . . .” The hansom cab was entering the square again. “It is a great thing you ask, a secret like that. To have it with us all the rest of our lives.”

It was one misgiving amongst many. He bowed his head to his fist as Lillian’s tearful noises started up again. “Please stop that,” he said, failing to quash the impatient note in his voice. He heard her gulp, trying to regain control of herself. Trying to be tractable, do just as he asked.

His life was on fire, and here he scrambled on his hands and knees, trying to brush back together the grains of his admiration for Lillian Gilbey, collect them all and see what they amounted to, burning walls all around. He could remember sitting with Tobias and Marta the night after Lillian’s Whitsun visit to Idensea, laying out all the reasons Lillian would make a good wife for him, seeing
if they agreed, having met her. They had, and all those reasons, all those grains, were they not still there?

Plus, now, this: “If we marry,” he said, “you will be a mother even earlier than you imagine.”

Halfway through his explanation of Owen, she began nodding as though her head were on a spring. Of course they should take him in, she would love him as her own, it would be perfect, and oh, wouldn’t she welcome the chance to show how grateful she felt?

A pliable, grateful little wife, his for the taking.

His hand lifted, a gesture of refusal, not taking. It was involuntary, something from his animal brain, and as soon as he noticed it, he distrusted it and folded it away. He had to close his eyes and force himself to remember where he was, how he had come here.

London, his job, forward, upward. There was a path, and it was marked, and it seemed possible he would sleep again after a few irreversible steps.

And Elisabeth.

She had refused him. His life on fire, him knowing what to do, how it needed to be, and she refused him.

“Please,” Lillian begged in a whisper that seemed the echo of his own misery. For all he knew, parallel miseries made a fine enough marital bond.

“If you intend to say no, do it now.”

He didn’t say no. Lillian didn’t cry again, not until she was out of sight and almost out of earshot inside the hansom cab with her aunt. He gave her credit for the effort; it was nearly as much as he himself was able to manage.

•   •   •

The curtains were gone.

The absence of the snow-blue fabric John had sent his mother so long ago, along with the general stillness inside the cottage, disoriented him briefly, made him wonder if he’d ducked into the wrong house. And at the oak table dominating the space that was
kitchen, dining room, and parlor together sat a stranger, peeling potatoes with a dull knife.

His dad’s new wife since June, three months after the first one had passed.

Dilys, his sister of fifteen, apologized for no one having written him. Nearly everything John knew of his family since he’d left home had come from his mother’s twice-monthly letters. He’d made excuses for no one else taking up the practice yet since her death, but this . . .

“I know it is quick,” Dilys whispered to him later while his stepmother—not a stranger, quite, but a girl he’d known in school—tended the pot in the hearth, and John cleaned and sharpened all the knives of the household. He drew blades over the steel in resolute strokes and listened to Dilys explain it was for the best, as she would be marrying Emrys Morgan as soon as she passed her sixteenth birthday in October. There were still three young ones at home; someone had to see to the housekeeping and child rearing she herself had been doing since their mother had fallen ill. As for the new Mrs. Rhys-Jones, she was the daughter of Gavin Pritchard, explanation enough for why she’d be happy to leave home to be second wife to a man more than twice her years.

The degree of her happiness seemed to John a difficult reckoning. He apologized as he distributed the gifts he’d brought, telling her he would have brought a wedding gift had he known. She shrank back, a picture of herself in school days long past, Mared Pritchard, a year or so behind him, venturing a tap on his brother Davey’s shoulder, then looking like a washed-out sheet when Davey turned round to her. “Generous you’ve been already,” she said, and John supposed she meant the portion of his wages he sent each month.

Dilys and she seemed to get on rather the way Mrs. Seiler got on with the new girls on her staff at the hotel. The three little ones—eleven-year-old Janny; Briallen, seven; and little Owen—tended to appeal to Dilys for their needs, even though Dilys told them, “Ask your mam.”

“Mam” always glanced over their heads to Dilys before making any answer.

Not long before she would be bearing her own children, John guessed. Better for her to have Owen out of the way. He’d send for the little girls within a year, he decided during this first evening home, until he remembered there was Lillian to consult on the matter. Miss Gilbey, his fiancée.

Let go of the lever and the pointer will slip back to zero.

—How to Become Expert in Type-writing

W
ith time before his father was due home from the quarry, John headed for the churchyard, discovering along the way Briallen and Owen trailing after him, both of them licking the sticks of rock he had brought from Idensea. For a moment, he didn’t know he wanted the company, but Briallen, with Owen in tow, looked as sturdy and determined as her mother used to, and John let them come along.

“Who sees to the grave?” John asked her, in Welsh, when they arrived. The gravestone, of the purple slate mined from the quarry, hadn’t been in place when he’d been here for the funeral. Beside it, a heliotrope still had a fresh-planted look to it, and the trimmed grass seemed tender despite the growth of a spring and summer. A bouquet of meadowsweet tied with string lay before the stone. “
Anwyliaid,
” read the inscription below the name and dates.
Beloved.

Kneeling, Briallen picked up the bouquet and began to pinch off the wilting blooms. “Everyone,” she answered.

A fullness in John’s throat tripped up his smile. Briallen’s encompassing response was probably not so great an exaggeration, considering how the village had loved his mother. Briallen tucked back one corner of her mouth, studying him.

“You’re not used to missing her?”

“I am not, little one. Are you?”

She shook her head and replaced the bunch of meadowsweet. “But you’ve been far off a great long time.”

“One sort of missing that is, being far off. Another sort to have her in heaven.”

“Mam is with the brothers,” Owen said suddenly. He was lining pebbles atop the footstone that marked both brothers’ graves: Davey, gone at age thirteen, and Gildas, the babe John had never seen.

“Do you think it’s so?” Briallen asked John.

“I do. And look at you.” He sat back on his heels and bade her stand before him so they could look each other full on. He held her little waist. “A good deal of herself she’s left behind in you, Briallen-my-girl, and glad it makes my heart to see it.” He rocked her lightly, laughing at her pleased smile. “What think you, Owen-my-boy?” he said, noticing Owen watching them.

“Her arms are little. She can’t hold me strong in her lap.”

Briallen’s smile slipped. John clutched her to him. His other arm invited Owen. Owen hesitated, and once more, John grieved his decision last March to leave without saying good-bye to the boy. He’d been hoping to save Owen some tears, but what if he’d only created distrust between them?

“Come, you,” he said, his voice a rasp, and Owen did and let John rough his hair and fold him in next to his sister. “Bri’s arms will grow strong, you know. They will grow strong.”

And his own were strong already.

•   •   •

The cottage needed attention before winter came upon it. After Mared timidly showed him a small area where the thatch had begun to rot, John ordered enough slate from the quarry to replace the entire roof. He borrowed an Irish-car and a horse to pull it, gathered up the children, and crossed the bridge to Cardigan
to buy a new pane of glass. The children he charged with an errand to buy the widest variety of sweets they could with the coins he gave them, and then he went alone to order wedding gifts, a tea service for Dilys, a pair of chairs for his father’s house. They would be a surprise, delivered weeks after he had left.

He’d never spent so much money in a single day. He signed bills of sale and did not know if his scruples were for his prodigality with his savings, or that it felt mean to have such savings in the first place.

Climbing a ladder the following morning, he reminded himself, either way, it little mattered. He was going back to a good position and a wealthy wife and a fine house her father would pay for. Every damn thing he wanted was waiting for him back in London, so what difference if he spent every shilling he had?

Roofing was hazardous work. It put you above, it put you alone. He was glad when the children were out of doors, playing and calling up to him, helping him sort tiles and watching him drill holes in the slate. Passing neighbors provided occasional relief. When there was no one, he fitted tiles with ardent care. He pounded pegs with vehement concentration. The task, as John performed it, did not permit introspection.