Beggars and Choosers (26 page)

‘So Tonia can make the same mistake as me and marry a worthless idiot who will gamble away everything we own?'

‘Not all men are like Albert George, Connie.' Lloyd laid his hand over hers, as she leaned on his shoulder.

‘And not all men are principled and honourable like you, your father, and Victor.'

He looked quizzically at her. ‘You've heard about Joey's latest escapade?'

‘I should think everyone in Rhondda Fach, Fawr and South Wales has heard of it by now. Even Tonia came home with a mercifully censored version from the Grammar School. She told me that one of the teachers from the infant school caught Joey climbing out of his wife's bedroom window at eight o'clock in the evening. Fortunately she didn't know that the poor man had come home unexpectedly from a Boys' Brigade meeting because he was feeling ill, and walked in on your brother doing a whole lot more than climbing out of a window. Apparently neither Joey nor his wife had a stitch on, and now the poor woman has been sent back to her family in disgrace and the husband has given notice and is looking for another school – in England. Tonypandy will lose a good teacher and according to the vicar of St Andrew's, the young wives group in his church will never be the same. Mrs Perkins is the fourth young wife Joey has been caught with since he turned sixteen and that's only the Anglicans. Doesn't he realise he is wrecking lives? It would serve him right if one of the husbands beats him to a pulp.'

‘All Joey realises is that his hormones are rampaging. Like mine were at his age.'

‘I don't believe I heard that. You, making excuses for Joey?'

‘I'm not,' Lloyd protested. ‘I told him exactly what I thought of him.'

‘As if that will stop him from seducing every young girl and married woman he takes a fancy to in the Rhondda,' she said angrily. ‘Why is it that when men sleep with women outside marriage, they're regarded as a man's man, a bit of a ram and attract envious sniggers, while women are labelled sluts and whores and thrown on to the street or into the workhouse by their families?'

‘I surrender,' Lloyd shouted, hoping to get a word in edgewise. ‘Do anything you want with me, woman, but spare me the suffragette talk. Just for tonight.'

‘Thank you for the invitation.' Connie left him and locked the door.

‘Connie,' he remonstrated. ‘You know how I feel about this. It's not going anywhere.'

‘Why does it have to go somewhere?' she enquired innocently. ‘What's wrong with lovemaking as a hobby? It's good exercise and nowhere near as corrupting as the music hall.'

‘Says who?' Lloyd watched as she went to the sofa and unbuttoned her dress.

‘Me, darling. How many years have we been doing this now?'

‘Thirteen, as if you didn't know.'

‘And I still have a guilty conscience for leading astray a fifteen-year-old boy half my age.'

‘The fifteen-year-old boy was grateful, at the time,' he added sardonically as her dress fell to the floor. She stepped out of it and hung it on the back of a chair.

‘But the twenty-eight-year-old man isn't?' she challenged.

‘We talked about this after I left Tonypandy for Pontypridd. And again when I came back. I don't regret what happened between us –'

‘That's big of you.'

‘I like you ...'

‘And I like you.'

‘But every time we do this, all I can think about for days afterwards is you.'

‘And that's so bad?'

‘Connie ...'

‘Yes.' She dropped her petticoats and walked towards him in her corset, chemise, drawers and stockings. Kneeling before his chair she unbuttoned his trousers and slid her hand inside his fly, teasing his erection.

‘Not yet.' He pushed her hand aside, left the chair and helped her unlace her corset. ‘This has to be the absolute last –'

She laid a finger over his mouth to prevent him from speaking as she removed her drawers. ‘No lectures on morality, Lloyd.'

He tugged at his tie. Loosening it, he unfastened his collar studs. There had been a time when he had pleaded with Connie to marry him. Fearing his parents' opposition he had waited until his twenty-first birthday to ask her. She had reminded him that they were first cousins. When he had replied that it wasn't illegal for first cousins to marry, she had cited her marriage as an insurmountable obstacle. When he suggested she divorce Albert George, she had told him that the Church didn't recognise divorce and she couldn't bear the ignominy of excommunication.

He had been so in love with her at the time, he had taken whatever crumbs she had thrown his way and been grateful for them. But when he had begun to work for the Watkin Jones Colliery in Pontypridd, his life had changed. He had mixed in, if not the top echelons of society, the middle ranks, where an up-and-coming engineer had been considered a desirable match and courted by the parents of eligible daughters. Although he met no one he could bear to spend more than a couple of evenings with, let alone the rest of his life, it was then that he realised he wanted what his parents had, a loving happy marriage and children.

Later, when he met girls he had wanted to see more of, and brought them home to meet his parents, Connie wormed invitations to the teas his mother laid on in hope of acquiring a daughter-in-law. And somehow, Connie always managed to draw him back to her. Like a drunk who couldn't stay away from pubs, he found himself returning to the sofa in her office, time after time, no matter how often he tried to break off their relationship. He simply couldn't help himself. Just like now.

Connie stripped off her chemise and stood before him naked except for stockings and garters.

‘I suppose you are going to confess this on Sunday?'

‘Of course,' she answered smoothly, refusing to be riled.

‘You and your damned Church ...'

‘In the eyes of the Church, it is you who are damned, my dear Lloyd.' She spread one of the crocheted blankets over the sofa and lay down, folding her arms above her head. ‘Besides, as I keep telling you, it is not done for a boy to love an old woman twice his age.'

‘You are not twice my age any more,' he growled.

‘There will always be fifteen years between us. You are a young virile man of twenty-eight and I am an old woman of forty-three who should spend her evenings knitting by the fireside.'

‘You will never be old.'

‘There will come a time when you will think so.'

Lloyd recognised the attempt to make him feel guilty and was even more irritated with himself for succumbing to her. ‘I've been trying to think so ever since you refused to marry me. But just like a bad penny, I keep coming back.' He hung his jacket on the back of a chair, removed his collar, untied his tie and pulled his shirt over his head.

‘To do the accounts.'

‘The wonderful, blessed accounts. I often wonder what would have happened if we hadn't been able to use them as an excuse for our meetings.' Slipping his braces over his shoulders, he unbuttoned his trousers, took them off and folded them along the creases before laying them on top of his jacket. He stripped off his socks and sock suspenders, unbuttoned his vest and drawers and dropped them on to the desk.

‘Slowly, Lloyd.'

‘How slowly?' He kissed her breasts, the flat of her stomach and the sensitive skin between her thighs.

‘Very slowly and very gently,' she moaned, as his tongue played over her. ‘Make my pleasure last for ever.'

Chapter Fourteen

Connie had been christened Consuela Rodriguez. Like many other young Spaniards of their generation, her father and his younger sister had left their native country in search of work in the newly opened pits in the Welsh Valleys. When a collier's life had taken a toll on his health, he borrowed money from his mother-in-law and leased a small shop in Dunraven Street. Shortly afterwards he changed the family name to Rodney because he thought it sounded more British and he hoped, acceptable to his customers.

Disregarding her parents' opposition, Connie married Albert George on her twenty-first birthday. Albert was handsome and kind, and she had been absolutely and besottedly in love. Charmed by his manners, open-handed nature but most of all, his expertise as a lover, she would have defied anyone who had tried to stop her from following him to the ends of the earth. As it happened, Albert only asked her to move into the rooms above the barber's shop that he had inherited from his late, thrifty and hard-working father.

What Connie didn't know was that Albert's prowess between the sheets had been acquired and honed by making love to every professional and amateur prostitute in the Rhondda. It was an occupation he did not give up after their marriage. At first she loved him so much she pretended she hadn't heard the whispers that circulated about his women. When he returned home late, she didn't question him because she wanted to believe the stories he told her about visiting sick customers in their own homes. She buried her suspicions and didn't challenge him until the day the bailiffs knocked on their door and Albert was forced to tell her not only about his first weakness but also his second – gambling.

Her father already knew all about Albert's faults and the money he had won, staked, and lost again at cards. The discovery that he had spent hundreds of pounds on prostitutes came later, after the bailiffs came for more than their furniture and evicted them because Albert had mortgaged and lost the shop. Connie returned to her father's house on her second wedding anniversary alone and deeply disillusioned.

Although she told Albert that she would never live with him again as his wife, he continued to pursue her. Every time he won at cards, he turned up in the shop with extravagant bunches of flowers, boxes of chocolates and expensive, impractical lingerie. Sometimes, her Latin temper roused, she would fling the gifts back into his face, to her father's customers' entertainment and delight. But there had been one thing that she had been unable to resist.

Albert had aroused Connie's passionate nature, and his lovemaking was like a drug. Desperate, lonely and devastated by her father's death, she allowed him back into her life and bed, but the second honeymoon had ended when she discovered money missing from the till. Without her knowledge, Albert had tried to raise a mortgage on the shop and had been furious when he had been told by the family solicitor that Manuel Rodney had left his entire state to his eldest nephew, Lloyd, then only twelve years old, who was to hold it in trust for his daughter.

Connie threw Albert out and despite his pleadings, refused to take him back even when she gave birth to his daughter nine months later. Instead, she hired Annie O'Leary. For three years they worked hard and long hours, sharing the care of the baby Connie had named Antonia after her dead mother, building and enlarging the customer base of the shop and taking on the leases of four adjoining shops until Rodney's finally became the store her father had dreamed of. Then one day, shortly after his fifteenth birthday, Lloyd had offered to take over the accounts for Connie. He was a bright boy and her aunt and uncle hoped he'd go far. Connie agreed, and two months later they became lovers.

And now ... now, Connie simply couldn't imagine living without Lloyd's visits. They knew one another's bodies as well as they knew their own. She had taken the time and trouble to teach him everything that Albert had taught her; that there could no shame, no embarrassment between lovers, that there were only two rules. First, whatever they did had to bring pleasure to them both, and second, a woman's pleasure was more important than a man's because a woman who did not find fulfilment and delight in lovemaking was unlikely to want to repeat the experience.

William Evans walked into his house at a quarter to ten and smelled baking. The rich, Christmassy smell he associated with fruitcake, underlined by the warm, exotic tang of cinnamon. He walked into the kitchen to find the new housekeeper standing next to the table, closing the lids on the snap boxes.

‘What on earth do you think you're doing, girl?' He lifted his hand intending to hang his cap on the hook on the wall and the girl cowered, clearly terrified.

Shocked by the sight of her waiting for a blow, he softened his voice. ‘Miners have campaigned and won the right to work an eight-hour day, Mrs Jones. I don't expect my housekeeper to work longer hours. It's high time you were in bed.'

‘Yes, Mr Evans. I'll just put these tins in the larder.' Sali left them on the marble slab alongside the cheese and closed the door. Wary of Mr Evans' gruff, off-hand manner, she was glad to leave the kitchen.

‘Goodnight, Mrs Jones, I hope you sleep well.' It was the first thoughtful comment William Evans had made in the six weeks since his wife had died but Sali wasn't to know that.

‘Goodnight,' she echoed diffidently, closing the door behind her.

‘Happy?' Connie asked Lloyd, as she lay naked in his arms on the sofa in front of the fire.

‘No. Just satisfied, momentarily,' he growled, refusing to be placated.

‘Momentarily?' She smiled in amusement. ‘Sometimes, I think you are insatiable.'

‘That's rich coming from you.'

‘Me?' she repeated innocently.

‘You use me, exhaust me and refuse to listen to a word I say.'

‘How can you be so unkind?' She moved her head downwards, kissing his chest, his navel.

‘Because you know I won't find happiness with anyone else until I break free from you.' He locked his fingers in her hair and pulled back her head, forcing her to look at him.

‘So, what do you think of your new housekeeper?' she asked, deliberately changing the subject.

‘She's a timid little thing, and ugly. I know you warned us that she'd had her head shaved and was covered in scars, but she's too afraid to answer a simple question. However,' he cupped her breasts and thumbed her nipples as she slid back up alongside him, ‘she can cook.'

‘Then it's true, the way to a man's heart really is through his stomach,' she laughed.

‘Victor is pleased.'

‘And you, of course, are not.' She ran her nails over his shoulders.

‘Judging by the way my father cleared his plate he was impressed by the meal she made, although he would probably die rather than admit it. She is the first housekeeper we've had, who has had our baths and meal ready when we came in after work. And she cleaned the kitchen. It hasn't looked the way it did tonight since my mother died.'

‘Then she stands a chance of lasting more than two days.'

‘Victor and I will do our best. My father's already slapped Joey down for flirting with her.'

‘Joey made a play for her?' she asked incredulously as he lifted her on top of him.

‘Joey will make a play for anything in a skirt. He calls it practice.' He slipped his hands between her thighs, as she moved over him. ‘You'll be the death of me.'

‘I hope not, I do enough penance for my sins now, darling.'

He kissed her breasts. ‘Damn you.'

‘You mean that?'

‘As soon as I have my clothes back on I will. Can I pick up the books and do the accounts at home from now on?'

‘I hate to let them out of my sight.'

He slid inside her. ‘Right now, I couldn't agree more.'

Lloyd left Connie's shop by the back door at a quarter to ten and walked towards the Theatre Royal. The street was crowded with people who had left the second house, and he cursed himself for not leaving Connie's sooner. If Joey had charmed a woman out on her own for the night, there was no saying whose bed he'd be in by now.

He walked around to the stage door and saw his brother sitting on a step alongside a girl dressed in a bright pink outfit, with a neck so low and a skirt so high it would have given a chapel minister an apoplexy.

‘Hello, Lloyd, meet Binnie.' Joey introduced the girl as if they were at a church social.

‘Hello, Binnie.' Lloyd shook the girl's hand before clamping Joey's shoulder. ‘We have to go.'

‘Binnie's just going to show me around backstage. I'll catch up with you.'

‘I think not, little brother. We're expected at home.'

Joey knew there was no point in arguing with Lloyd when he was one of his intractable moods, so he kissed Binnie's hand. ‘How about we take that tour tomorrow, between the houses?'

She giggled throatily, ran her fingers through his hair, kissed his cheek and whispered something in his ear before disappearing up the steps.

‘I take it she likes your idea,' Lloyd suggested cuttingly, as Joey fell into step alongside him.

‘Jealous, big brother?'

‘Of that little tart? When are you going to find yourself a decent girl and stop playing around with loose girls and married woman?'

‘Never,' Joey replied. ‘Because a hour's fun with a decent girl leads to irate fathers, her growing a big belly and a forced march to the altar. If I slip up with a tart or a married woman I can always stand before the bench and truthfully say, I wasn't the only one, Milord.'

‘You're disgusting.'

‘Because unlike you and Victor I don't live like a monk,' Joey bit back. ‘At least Victor has his dogs and Megan next door to moon over. Sometimes I wonder if you have ice water in your veins instead of blood.'

Lloyd fell silent. He and Connie had been careful to keep their relationship secret. He had loved her once, but now he had the uncomfortable feeling that he was using her and she him in exactly the same way that Joey was using the bored wives and Binnies of this world. And every time he thought of his parents' loving marriage, he knew there had to be more. Much, much more if only he could break free from Connie long enough to look for it.

When Lloyd and Joey walked into the house through the basement door, they paused, mesmerised by the sight that greeted them. The mountain of washing had been sorted into piles and all four baths and the washtub were full of clothes, bedding and linen, soaking in water and soda. The floor had been washed and the range cleaned.

‘Someone's been busy.' Joey stripped off his shirt and pushed it into a tub of whites.

‘There's no need to make extra work,' Lloyd admonished. ‘You've only had that on for a couple of hours.'

‘It stinks of cheap scent and lipstick, and I need to wash before the old man gets a whiff. You know what his nose is like.' Joey picked up a bar of soap, went to the tap, turned it on and stood, legs on either side of the drain, so the water wouldn't splash his trousers.

Lloyd climbed the steps into the kitchen. His father was sitting, reading Dostoevsky's
Crime and Punishment
in his chair by the fire.

‘Have you seen downstairs?' Lloyd asked.

‘Yes. Where's Joey?'

‘In the
ty bach,
he'll be up now.'

‘Has he been behaving himself?'

‘So far as I know. I met him outside the Theatre Royal,' Lloyd replied vaguely.

‘Tea's brewed and there are cheese sandwiches under the plate on the table for both of you, and fruitcake, scones and cinnamon biscuits in the tins. She's also cut the snap boxes and Victor came down after he went to bed to tell me that all the beds have been changed.'

‘She couldn't have stopped except to eat her meal after she walked through the door.'

‘No, she couldn't have.' Billy Evans knocked his pipe against the range, scattering ashes over the newly cleaned hearth.

‘Connie asked if I thought she'd do.'

‘It's early days,' Billy commented evasively as he rose to his feet. ‘Let's see how she is at the end of the month.'

Sali left her bed the minute she heard the alarm clock ring in Mr Evans's downstairs bedroom at four the next morning, and assumed she was the first up. But after she had laid the table and was turning bacon, black pudding, sausages and lava bread in the frying pans, Joey walked up the basement steps with two buckets.

‘It's my job to see to the coal and wood for the fires,' he said, as he filled the brass scuttles next to the range.

‘I could do that.' She chipped salt from a block and sprinkled it over the eggs she'd beaten.

‘My father wouldn't hear of it. In this house the men do the heavy work. I also fill the water jugs and empty the slop pails in our bedrooms before we go on shift, but I won't be doing yours. My father won't allow me to go into the housekeeper's bedroom.' He gave her a charming smile full of innuendo.

Sali was relieved at only having to carry one pail and jug of water up and down two flights of stairs as opposed to the ten or twelve buckets she had hauled up and down the stairs in Mill Street every day. She poured the eggs she'd beaten into a pan and stirred them.

Joey piled the empty buckets one inside the other and went to the sink to wash his hands. ‘Victor and my father see to the garden, and Victor cleans the hen and dog runs and collects the eggs every morning. He's down there now. Lloyd empties and cleans the baths every night, chops the sticks and carries in the coal when it's delivered, so don't you dare do it. My father would be angry.'

‘I'll remember.' Sali trembled at the thought of igniting Mr Evans senior's anger.

‘My father does the household accounts, paints and papers the house when it needs it, with our help, and we clean our own boots.'

She glanced at the clock. It was almost half past four. ‘Breakfast is ready, shall I put yours on the table?'