A Silver Lining (38 page)

‘Is that a Cossack dance?’ Alma asked Mama Davydova, who’d taken Nicky’s chair.

‘Yes. We are all Cossacks,’ she smiled. ’Nicky especially. Even here he behaves like a Cossack,’ she replied a little sadly.

‘And Charlie?’ William asked. He’d always been curious about Charlie. After three years of living with the man, one in the same room, he knew virtually nothing about him other than he was Russian.

‘Charlie?’ Mama Davydova looked puzzled.

‘Feodor,’ Alma, who’d made a note of the name Nicky had called him, corrected.

‘No, he was a ... how do you say it ... he worked the land.’

‘A farmer?’ Alma hazarded.

‘His father and grandfather were
boyars –
landowners. Their kind didn’t fare too well after the Revolution.’

‘Is that why he came to Wales?’ Alma asked shyly.

‘No.’ The old woman realised that she’d said more than she’d intended. ‘No, that isn’t why he came. You want some blinis? Pancakes,’ she explained in answer to Alma’s puzzled look. ‘Come, get them with me.’

Alma followed her into the kitchen, and helped lay the ready-cooked pancakes on plates covered with hand crocheted lace clothes.

‘You love Feodor,’ Mama Davydova informed her gravely.

‘No.’ Alma reddened in embarrassment. ‘I work for him.’

‘No, you love him,’ the old woman repeated. ‘I have seen the way you look at him, and the way he looks at you. He loves you. But it will be very difficult for him to admit that he can love again. And that will be very hard, for both of you,’ she finished enigmatically, as she picked up a plate and walked down the passage.

The dance had finished and Charlie, his unbuttoned waistcoat hanging loose over his shirt, was standing with Nicky sharing the inevitable vodka bottle.

‘Blinis,
you’re an angel Mama.’ He planted a vodka flavoured kiss on the old woman’s cheek as he helped himself from her plate.

‘You need food, otherwise you will get as drunk as my Nicky.’ She pinched his cheek before sinking into the chair that stood outside the front door. ‘Come you,’ the old woman called to Alma, ‘come and sit next to me. I will tell your fortune.’

‘And mine?’ Diana begged, walking over with Alma.

‘It is only the truly young who want their fortune told,’ the old woman said to Charlie.

‘Those who have lived through more than they bargained for already know their fate,’ he replied in Russian. He looked away from the girls towards the end of the street. Alma followed his line of vision. Just beyond a group of Russians, Africans, and a stolid German shepherding his family of solemn-faced young men and pigtailed daughters, she saw a crowd of sailors.

‘Russian ship’s come in.’ Nicky exchanged a look with Charlie and both of them moved swiftly towards the sailors, pushing their way through a noisy, dancing crowd that had gathered around a jazz band.

‘I had no idea Charlie knew so many people.’ William looked on amazed as his red-faced boss was greeted by the sailors.

‘When they speak it sounds as though they’re all choking,’ Eddie commented.

‘You have hard decisions facing you,’ Mama Davydova said as she gripped Alma’s palm tightly. ‘You have the chance of happiness, but it will only come once, and like all good things it will not last. Recognise your destiny when it comes, take it and make the most of it while you can, my child.’

Alma scarcely followed what the old woman was saying. Her attention was still fixed on Charlie. Even across the length of the street she could see that he had become grave, serious, as though he had heard bad news.

‘Now mine,’ Diana pleaded, laughing at a joke of Eddie’s as she gave the old woman her palm.

Alma left them and walked past a woman who was passing around plates of little meat and fish pies.

‘Dance!’

‘Come on Nicky, Feo!’

The sailors took up the cry. Someone handed Alma a cup of stew, so hot and spicy it burnt the roof of her mouth. The Africans blasted on their brass instruments, the music grew deafening, the atmosphere more and more raucous. She gazed at Charlie, unable to reach him, only watch as he moved in a world she could never hope to understand, let alone enter. Why had it taken Mama Davydova to tell her what she should have known?

Charlie loved her. Why else would he have helped her when she had most needed it? Lending her money, offering her a job, a place to live, saving her from Bobby. And she loved him. But it had taken a party that emphasised their very different worlds to make her realise just how much.

‘Alma?’

The music had finished and Charlie was swaying alarmingly on his feet before her. As he staggered she caught him.

‘Take him into the house,’ Nicky suggested, as she almost collapsed beneath Charlie’s weight. ‘Splash his head with cold water.’

‘I warned you, Nicky. Feodor isn’t used to vodka, not the way you drink it, not anymore.’

‘He’ll be all right Mama. You always fuss.’ Nicky flipped the cork from a bottle of vodka that one of the sailors had handed him and drank deeply. ‘Here.’ Putting his shoulder beneath Charlie’s he helped Alma to half carry, half drag him into the house. ‘In the front room,’ he said, his voice slurring thickly. ‘There on the bed.’

‘You’ll stay with him?’ the old woman asked Alma as she walked in behind them.

‘I will.’ There was a flannel next to a huge ewer of cold water on the washstand. Alma wrung it out and laid it on Charlie’s forehead.

‘You won’t be disturbed.’

The door closed, and Alma sat beside Charlie who was struggling to sit up. ‘Do you want water?’ She poured some from a jug into a glass on the stand.

‘No!’ Charlie lashed out and knocked the glass from her hand. It shattered against the wall, water spraying into both their faces. She picked up the jagged pieces and heaped them in the corner. When she turned to face him again she saw pure anguish in his face.

‘Charlie!’ She knelt on the floor before him. ‘What’s the matter?’

He put his hands either side of her face and ran his fingers slowly down her cheeks. She placed her hands over his and he helped her to her feet. Then he rose. Lifting her off her feet, he turned and laid her on the bed.

He was beside her, kissing her, his hands stroking her breasts beneath the flimsy fabric of her dress. He muttered a few Russian words, and she found herself hoping that it wasn’t another woman’s name.

His lip brushed lightly over her earlobes, her throat, her mouth. His weight pressed her down into the mattress as he lifted his arms and pulled off his waistcoat. His shirt was next, wrenched over his head. Then his vest.

‘Alma.’ This time he whispered her name clearly as he ran his fingers through her curls. ‘Alma ...’

A passion she had thought she would never experience again, stirred within her. Her skin flamed where Charlie touched her. A need, a hunger, all-enveloping, all-consuming burned within her. She only knew that she wanted him, here and now, as she had never wanted anything in her life before.

She had no recollection of removing her clothes, only an acute awareness of his naked body as it stretched out alongside hers. His bare thighs moved tantalisingly over her legs, his hands fondled her breasts, teasing, stroking the sensitive skin of her nipples. His tongue was in her mouth. She could taste the cool, clean flavour of vodka on his breath, as he caressed and aroused her to the point where pain and ecstasy seemed to be one and the same, before finally piercing her body with his own.

She cried out, and he thrust into her again, and again, mercilessly driving harder and harder, evoking shameless, intuitive responses.

All inhibition fell away as she allowed herself to be transported into a world of sensuality where nothing mattered except the satisfaction of the urgent cravings he had kindled within her. She clawed the smooth skin on his back, trying to pin him closer to her, so close that their bodies would merge.

Lost in passion, neither Alma nor Charlie heard the door opening nor saw the look on William’s face as he hastily closed it.

‘I think Charlie’s a little the worse for wear,’ he said to Eddie and Diana. ‘If we’re going to take that last bus we should make a move.’

‘But what about Alma?’ Diana protested. ‘We can’t just leave her here.’

‘Alma wants to stay with Charlie.’

‘But her mother will worry –’

‘We will get them home,’ the old woman reassured Diana as she shooed them out of her passage. ’Feodor and his young lady are safe with us. My Nicky will see to it that they get home before morning.’

‘His young lady?’ Diana looked blankly at William. ‘I didn’t know Alma was Charlie’s young lady?’

‘She is now,’ William murmured darkly.

Chapter Twenty-three

‘I’m pregnant, Will.’

Vera had waited until after they’d made love to tell him. She was sitting on the floor of the shed behind the shop, stark naked except for a thick gold chain around her neck and a pair of gypsy hoop earrings. The earrings had cost William every penny of his savings, but the wild, ecstatic thank-you he had received had more than justified the expense.

‘Are you sure?’ His heart began to pound erratically against his ribs. This was one eventuality that hadn’t crossed his mind.

‘It’s not George’s.’ She turned a miserable face to his. She hated the idea of bearing a child. For her it loomed as a watershed, the dividing line between youth and old age. She’d soon be fat and old like her mother. Vera’s mother had been pregnant at sixteen and had a dozen by the time she was thirty. Vera knew all about morning sickness, varicose veins, stretch marks; bloated, swollen, heavily veined breasts, and smelly whining babies who demanded constant feeding and nappy changes.

‘I know it’s not George’s.’ William pulled on his trousers and reached for his cigarettes.

‘How do ...’

‘You told me when we first met that you never do it with him, not properly anyway,’ William looked across at her.

‘I did?’

‘Don’t you remember?’

‘Yes,’ she lied quickly, resolving to keep a tighter rein on her mouth in future. ‘What am I going to do, Will?’ She rose to her feet and clung to him, genuinely frightened.

‘We could go away,’ he suggested in desperation.

‘Where?’

‘I don’t know.’ He drew impatiently on his cigarette. ‘I’ll have to think about it.’

‘I know what would be easiest, Will.’ Her eyes reminded him of a cornered cat’s.

‘What?’

‘If we got rid of it. There must be ways ...’

‘If there are I don’t know of any.’

‘I’ve heard women say all you need is money. There’s this man and all he wants is twenty pounds ...’

‘Twenty pounds! I can’t get hold of that kind of money, Vera.’

‘Oh, Will!’ She began to sob.

‘Ssh, you don’t want anyone to hear you, do you?’

‘No.’ She took the handkerchief he handed her and dried her tears.

‘You ought to dress.’ He bundled her clothes together and pushed them towards her. Her nakedness suddenly disturbed him, for a new and entirely different reason. Normally at this stage of the afternoon she would have dragged him down on top of her for second helpings, but her news had sapped all his desire. He stared at her flat stomach, imagining a baby growing in its depths – a smaller version of himself. He was beset by the oddest feeling. A peculiar mixture of tenderness and protectiveness. He didn’t love Vera, at least not like he loved Tina, but she was carrying his child and that entitled her to some consideration. And then again, she was good in bed –very good. He could live with a wife who doled out what Vera did, every night of his life.

‘We’ll have to go away together,’ he said finally. ’There’s no other way out. I’ll try and get hold of some money.’

‘Where?’

‘I don’t know yet. I have to think. I don’t suppose you have any ideas?’

‘No.’

‘Wherever we go it’s bound to be hard at first, at least until I get a job, but we’ll make it. Rent a room somewhere

‘Oh Will,’ she ran her fingers inside the waistband of his trousers and kissed him on the mouth. ‘You are good to me. How soon can we go?’

‘Just as soon as I can arrange it.’

‘We could go to London. See all the sights. I’ve always wanted to, and George would never think of looking for us there.’

‘My cousin Bethan says that things there are just as bad as down here. There’s thousands out of work. People are even sleeping in the streets ...’

‘We wouldn’t end up there, would we?’ There was genuine alarm in her voice.

‘Not if I can help it,’ he said grimly. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll find something. Now you’d better go, before Charlie starts looking for me.’

‘All right, Will.’ She clipped on her suspender belt and rolled on a stocking.

Usually he liked to watch her dress. It was always suspender belt and stockings first, followed by wispy bits of lace that revealed more than they concealed. She never wore knickers, and dressed only in her underclothes as she was, to all intents and purposes, as good as naked. Then she’d slip a dress on top and look neat and demure.

Every time William caught sight of her walking around the market his senses were inflamed by the thought of how she’d look if she suddenly lost her dress.

‘Vera?’

‘Yes, Will?’ She smiled at him over her shoulder as she began rolling the second stocking on to her leg.

‘You won’t sleep with George any more, will you? This is my baby and if we’re going away together soon ...’

‘Will, he’s my husband. I live with him.’

‘Couldn’t you move in with your mother for a while?’ Vera thought of her mother’s cramped house. She wouldn’t have a bed to herself, or wardrobe space for her clothes. And she’d have to go back to eating bread and dripping instead of the best cuts of meat and cream cakes she bought with George’s money. ‘I can’t go home Will,’ she protested.

‘Why?’

‘Just think about it, sweetheart.’ She turned to face him, her breasts and thighs still bare. ‘If I moved out of George’s house into my mother’s he’d realise something was wrong.’

‘You’ve been unhappy with him for a long time. Tell him you’ve had enough of his perverted ways.’

‘Don’t you see, he might suspect us if I moved out. He’d come after me and then heaven only knows what he’d do.’

‘But I can’t let you carry on living with him. Look if I get some money together you could go up to Ynysybwl.’

‘Ynysybwl?’ She stared at him in stunned amazement.

Ynysybwl was a small, quiet village. Even more of a backwater than Pontypridd, and only a few miles up the road.

‘Mate of mine lives there. If I explain to his missus he’d put you up until I arrange something. You could share a room with his kids.’

‘No, Will,’ she said firmly.

‘I can’t bear the thought of you and him ...’

‘Then I’ll move into the spare room.’

‘Promise?’

‘I promise,’ she murmured, suddenly realising just how much she’d lose if she left George. The trips to Cardiff, the clothes. The van at her disposal- and the car as soon as he got round to buying it ...

‘Vera?’

‘You’re right, Will. I must go.’ She tweaked a clump of black curling hair on his chest.

‘And George?’

‘How many times do I have to tell you that I never do the things I do with you, with George.’

‘You sleep in the same bed with him, that’s enough.’

‘For what he does he may as well be my sister.’

‘He looks at you.’

‘He’s my husband.’

‘Not for much longer.’

‘Will, don’t tell me you’re going to get jealous like him?’

‘When you’re living with me,’ he patted her naked buttocks, ‘you bet, Vera.’ He looked away quickly, as a sick feeling rose in his stomach and an image of Tina flooded into his mind.

Alma dropped the heavy tray on to the table. Thursday afternoon baking sessions had become a real chore. Charlie was already looking around for someone to help out part time with the cooking, or so he’d made a point of telling William within her earshot. He’d avoided speaking to her directly since that Sunday in Cardiff.

Nicky had asked one of his friends, a taxi driver, to take them home to Pontypridd, and they had reached the shop at four in the morning. Just in time to start the baking. They had set to work, and at the end of the day he had apologised to her for his behaviour, hurrying out before she had a chance to reply. Since then he’d kept communication between them to a bare minimum, and she noticed that he went to great lengths to avoid being left alone with her, even for a moment. She wondered just how much –if anything – he remembered of that night.

She thought of it often, without any feeling of shame or embarrassment, simply a sense of loss that she would never again experience the wonder of that passionate abandon with Charlie again.

The old Russian woman had been right: happiness
was
fragile, and tenuous. Every time she reached out to grasp it, it crumbled to dust in her hands.

Alma went back to the oven to bring out the second tray. Superficially her life was running smoothly for the first time since her father’s death. She’d managed to put the traumatic events of last Christmas behind her.

Charlie had been right: as time went on and there was no sign of her producing the bastard that half the town’s population had expected, people had not only stopped talking about her but had started to give her sympathetic looks.

Most went out of their way to be pleasant when they called into the shop, and even her mother had finally settled into the flat, arranging things so she could find her way around, sending for one of Betty Lane’s children every day after school so she could walk in the park.

Laura had been paid back, so the only money they owed was to Charlie, and although they had money enough –just –to pay him back he wouldn’t take it. So she had left their small nest egg in the Post Office savings bank, and looked on the extra two shillings a week she would get in nine months’ time almost as a pay rise.

Both she and her mother had a warm place to live in, enough to eat, and an indoor bathroom.

Outwardly life was good, so good, that occasionally she had nightmares that it was all a dream and she’d wake up back in Morgan Street, her security, her calm quiet days, her restored reputation, all taken from her.

‘Hello Alma. Sorry to trouble you. Is your Mam in?’

‘Upstairs.’ She smiled at the minister who’d baptised Betty Lane’s children. Primed by Betty’s stories of Lena and Alma’s misfortunes he’d welcomed both of them into his flock with open arms. ‘You wouldn’t like to take a couple of pasties up with you?’ she asked.

‘Not this time, not unless your mam wants them.’ He returned her smile rather sheepishly. He was young, and unmarried, and he called in on Mrs Moore far more often than he needed to. But with a warm welcome and food guaranteed every time, it was hard to pass by. ‘I’ve come to take your mam to the Mothers’ Union lunch. The ladies have been hard at it all morning in the parish hall.’

‘That is kind of you. She looks forward to chapel events.’

‘We enjoy having her. I’ll bring her back this afternoon, safe and sound.’

‘I know you will.’

‘Whisking Mrs Moore off again to the high life, Mr Jones?’ William walked in with a ham on each shoulder.

‘Something like that.’ Will’s joking always made the minister feel a little uneasy. ‘Well I must be off.’

Charlie followed in behind William with a side of beef and a leg of pork.

‘Thank you for your donation to the fund for the poor, Charlie,’ the minister called out loudly. ‘Due to the generosity of the town’s traders everyone on our books will have an Easter dinner.’

‘If you preach to your parishioners to shop here, trade will go up and I’ll be able to donate more at Christmas,’ Charlie replied drily.

‘I don’t think advertisements would go down very well from the pulpit, Charlie, but I’ll see what I can do. Goodbye everybody.’ He backed out of the door.

‘Doesn’t that man understand a joke?’ Eddie asked as he came in with a tray full of pigs’ heads and trotters.

‘His heart’s in the right place,’ Alma said, grateful because he’d steered her mother out of the depression that had marred their early days in the flat. ‘Do you want this beef spiced, pressed or roast, Charlie?’

‘Roast, but as soon as the shop’s closed we’ll take a break, and start cooking early this afternoon.’

She nodded, served the last customer and clanged the door shut, locking it firmly and leaving the keys in the lock.

William walked in through the Penuel Lane entrance with a dozen and a half baps that he’d bought from the baker.

‘Make mine ham, Alma,’ he called as he dumped the rolls on the shop counter.

‘Eddie? Charlie?’ she asked as she began cutting the bread rolls open.

‘Pork,’ Eddie called back.

‘Beef,’ Charlie replied quietly.

A picnic-style lunch had become a ritual every Thursday, the one day when all four of them could eat together. Not that William joined them often; he usually took his rolls outside to eat in the park. With Tina, Charlie presumed.

Alma knew better.

She lifted down three of the smallest serving plates and set out the rolls: five each for William, Eddie and Charlie, two for herself. The kettle was already boiling for tea.

‘See you in half an hour, Charlie,’ William murmured as he grabbed his plate of rolls. ‘Mind if I listen to your radio upstairs, Alma?’

Charlie had bought two radios to pacify Frank Clayton next door. He’d put one in the back kitchen in Graig Avenue, and the other in Alma’s living room, using the excuse that it would be a distraction in the shop, and Alma’s mother could come down and tell them if anything important was on.

It was the first time William had asked if he could use the flat. Alma suspected he wouldn’t have asked at all if her mother had been in, which meant that Vera Collins would be coming through the door.

‘Don’t go moving anything up there, Will,’ she warned sternly, ‘or my mother will be falling over when she gets back.’

‘I’ll sit on the floor in front of the set and won’t move.’

‘There are chairs up there.’

He left just as Charlie and Eddie came in to wash their hands in the back.

‘Want company, Will?" Eddie shouted after him.

‘No thanks. I know you’re bored rigid by cricket, and I want to listen to the scores, not you gabbling.’

‘Since when has Will taken to listening to cricket?’ Eddie asked innocently.

Alma shrugged her shoulders. She heard the front door that led to the upstairs flat open and close quietly. She knew Vera only by sight, but her middle-aged husband, coupled with her flashy dress sense and thick layers of make-up, was enough to make Alma suspicious of Vera’s motives for carrying on with William. And she couldn’t help feeling sorry for Will; he bore all the hallmarks of a man besotted. Just like her, she thought resentfully as she sat across the table from Charlie to eat her own rolls.