Sinners and Shadows (31 page)

‘You're not old.'

‘I am nearly fifty but thanks to you I haven't felt so young in years.' He smiled at her. ‘Would you like to go back to the hotel for supper and a nightcap?'

‘I couldn't eat another thing after that dinner.'

‘Not even ice cream? One of those deliciously cold raspberry sundaes covered in whipped cream and nuts?' He mentioned the delicacy on the hotel menu that had become her favourite.

‘I'll burst.'

‘No, you won't, and you can wash it down with an apricot brandy.' They leaned on the rail and gazed down at the sea.

‘I'd seen pictures and postcards of course, and when I lived close to the River Taff I used to pretend it was the sea. But nothing prepared me for the real thing. I never imagined it was so beautiful, especially at night. Always moving, shimmering even in the dark, and the scent.' She breathed in deeply. ‘It's like God packed all the oxygen in the world above it and sprinkled it with salt.'

‘And the aroma of fish,' he laughed. ‘Why didn't you tell me that you'd never seen the sea before we came here?'

‘Because I didn't want you to think that I was ignorant.'

‘Given the number of books you've read and the speed with which you tackle a new one, I could never think that.' He offered her his arm again and they resumed walking.

‘Home tomorrow,' she said wistfully.

‘I'll bring you here again next year,' he promised, ‘and in the meantime we'll have weekends away – lots of them – in places nearer home like Penarth, Porthcawl and Barry Island.'

‘Someone might see us and tell your wife.'

‘I told Mabel that I had a mistress.'

‘But you didn't tell her who I was.'

‘I will when we go back.' He covered her hand with his.

‘Thank you for bringing me here.' She lifted her long skirts in preparation to walk up the short flight of steps to the hotel entrance.

‘And thank you for bringing happiness back to my life.' He kissed her hand. ‘Do you want the ice cream and apricot brandy in the supper room, or our bedroom?'

‘What do you think?' She gave him a smile he had come to know well during the past week.

‘You go on up; I'll order it.'

‘Poor darling.' Lloyd dipped his fingers in the glass of brandy on his bedside cabinet and rubbed them lightly over Edyth's gums. She stopped crying and looked up at him, tears sparkling in her eyelashes, a wan smile on her face.

Sali unbuttoned her blouse and draped it over a chair. ‘You are a wonderful father, Lloyd.'

He chose to ignore her ironic tone. ‘Aren't I?' he echoed smugly from the depths of their four-poster bed, where he was nursing Edyth who had been unusually fractious, even for a teething day.

‘But I wish you'd realize that brandy isn't the cure for every childhood ailment.'

‘Edyth Evans, your mother is a mean spoilsport,' he said solemnly to the baby before lifting her on to his bare shoulder and patting her back.

Sali watched the baby's eyelids droop as she gradually relaxed against Lloyd.

‘Almost ready to put down?' Lloyd whispered.

‘By the time I've finished undressing she will be.' Sali unrolled her stockings and dropped them into the laundry bag.

‘I bet you a pound to a penny she'll sleep through tonight.'

‘The amount of brandy you've given her, she'll probably wake with a hangover in the morning.' She took Edyth from him, and set her down in the cot they'd moved out of the nursery into their bedroom.

‘I doubt she even tasted it.' He held back the bedclothes while she slipped off her drawers and chemise. When she climbed into bed, he lifted his arm, draped it over her shoulders and pulled her close.

‘She tasted it all right. Didn't you see the way she smiled when you rubbed it on to her gums a second time? That was a drunken Evans smile if ever I saw one. And I should know, I've seen it on you, Victor and Joey often enough.'

He reached out with his free hand and turned down the wick on the oil lamp, plunging the room into darkness. The trustees were about to extend the electric lighting circuits to the upstairs of the house, but the work wasn't scheduled to start until after the holidays.

‘You're worried about Joey, aren't you?' Sali asked as he lay back beside her.

‘Only because he hasn't been in touch after he promised my father that he'd send a postcard.'

‘Perhaps one will come tomorrow.'

‘If he hasn't been too busy chasing women to write,' he countered cynically.

‘It will take him a while to get over Rhian.'

‘My point exactly. Since the day he was born, my baby brother's always acted before he's thought. You knew how besotted he was with Rhian. There's no saying what losing her will do to him.'

‘I wish I knew where she was. I could explain about Tonia.'

‘My father said the letter Tonia wrote to Rhian explained everything.'

‘Then I can't understand why Rhian called off their wedding.'

‘You can't make the whole world happy, sweetheart,' he dropped a kiss on her forehead, ‘so you'd better just get used to making me and the children happy.'

‘I can't bear the thought of Joey and Rhian being apart. They belong together and no matter what their problems are, I'm sure they could work them out if they went the right way about it. I wonder what they're both doing now.'

‘I have no idea.' He kissed her again. ‘But I know what I would like to be doing, sweetheart. Could you try to put Rhian and Joey's problems out of your mind, just for a little while?'

Rhian lay soaking in hot, violet-scented water in the private bathroom in the luxurious suite Edward had engaged for them. Her hair, cut and set at the beginning of the week by the hotel's hairdresser who had finally succeeded in taming her unruly curls into an elegant style, was loosely knotted on the top of her head. At Edward's instigation, her finger and toenails had been manicured at the same time and she lifted her hands and feet out of the water to admire their perfect oval shapes and glossy French polishing.

She felt privileged, pampered and, after the raspberry sundae and apricot brandy, pleasantly tired, full and relaxed.

Edward wandered in, two brandy glasses in hand. He had taken off his jacket and waistcoat and was in shirtsleeves, his braces dangling over his trousers. ‘Would you like a brandy?'

‘I'll be seeing double if I drink one that size.'

‘It tastes so much better after the glass has been warmed in a bath.' Edward handed one to her. ‘Want me to wash your back?'

‘Please.' She sat up and leaned forward.

He squeezed a sponge in the water, rubbed a bar of purple, violet-scented soap over it and gently massaged her shoulder blades, trickling water down her spine.

‘You said my back,' she protested when he sponged her nipples.

‘A man would have to be made of stone not to stray. And bathing you is like …' A strange expression she couldn't quite decipher clouded his eyes.

‘What?'

‘Like all the dreams and fantasies I had as a young man come true. You're not only beautiful, you're uninhibited. Have you any idea how rare that is in a woman who isn't …' He'd only just stopped himself from saying ‘a whore'.

‘A wife,' she finished for him.

‘Exactly.' Taking her glass from her, he set it together with his own on the window sill, before sliding his hands beneath her and lifting her from the water.

‘Edward, you'll get us both soaking wet.' She laughed as his sodden shirtsleeves dripped rivulets of scented water over both of them.

‘Then we'll play at being sea creatures. I'll be the octopus.' Setting her down on the bath mat, he wrapped a towel around her and blotted her skin as tenderly as if she were a baby. ‘I love seeing you like this.'

‘Naked?'

‘I wish you'd never wear clothes again.'

‘Pass me my robe, please.'

‘Let's stay here a while longer.'

He lowered her to the floor, before stripping off his clothes. She closed her eyes, knotting her fingers gently into his hair, as he smoothed scented cold cream over her skin.

‘I'll be as slippery as a –'

‘Mermaid.' He began to caress and explore her body with his fingertips and lips, teasing and tantalizing her until she began to writhe in unrequited passion.

‘Please, Edward, let's go to bed.'

‘Not yet.'

She returned his caresses with a technique born of intuition and practice. In the last few weeks she had come to know his body well. The touches that roused him and gave him pleasure, the places he liked to be kissed, the responses she could expect to provoke. But she still kept her eyes closed.

Edward was similar to Joey in some ways; in others they couldn't have been more unalike. When it came to lovemaking, Edward felt and tasted different, his cologne was sharper, more astringent, but by shutting her eyes she found it easier to ignore the differences between her two lovers and imagine herself with Joey.

She hoped that a time would come when she would want to stop pretending and that, until that time came, Edward wouldn't discover her deception.

‘My love …'

Guilt prompted her to murmur, ‘Eddie.'

‘Amelia …'

It saddened more than shocked her to realize that she wasn't the only one who was pretending. Edward Larch was considerate, affectionate – and using her to fool himself that his first wife had come back from the grave. But was his self-deception any worse than hers?

And was it so terrible to use someone if they, in their turn, used you?

Chapter Sixteen

‘Come on, Joe, be a sport,' Frank coaxed.

Because he couldn't bear the thought of any other girl calling him Joey, he had told his new friends in Swansea to call him Joe, with the result that it took him a few seconds to realize that Frank was talking to him and not the barman in the Mermaid Hotel. ‘I'm not putting up with Effie in our room all night, just because you want to sleep with Susie.'

‘We can hardly chuck the poor girl out and expect her to roam the streets until morning,' Frank pleaded. ‘Please, Joe, the landlady's as blind as a bat and deaf as a post. She'll never cotton on if one of us switches with one of the girls. And, unlike you, Effie, Susie and I are leaving in the morning. We've only one night left, and it was bloody uncomfortable on the beach last night. Susie moaned like hell about the places the sand had got into. And I've a rash on my knees from kneeling on seaweed.'

‘The answer is no,' Joey said obdurately.

‘It's not as if I'm asking you to make a great sacrifice. Susie was only telling me tonight that Effie's more than willing to give you a lot more than you've taken so far. She's really disappointed that you haven't made a real play for her. A few kisses are all right, but why stop there when the lot is on offer?'

‘Hasn't it occurred to you that I might not want more of what Effie's offering?' Joey suggested.

‘Is there something wrong with you?' Frank gave Joey a sideways look.

‘Now I have to have something wrong with me, just because I don't want to sleep with a tart?'

‘Quiet, the girls are coming.' Frank smiled as the sisters left the Ladies and headed towards them. Both girls had combed their hair, and, as they came closer, it was obvious that they had split the best part of a bottle of Attar of Roses between them. But their bright red lipstick was smudged and the boot black on Effie's eyelashes had fallen below her eyes, making her look as though she was in the final stages of consumption.

Their trip to the bioscope had been followed by a visit to a Swansea café for a fish and chip supper and more drinks in Swansea's oldest pub, the Cross Keys. The fresh air had hit both girls when they'd taken the train back to Mumbles and, against Joey's advice, Frank had insisted on buying a last drink for everyone in the nearest hotel to their lodgings, which the girls had been angling to visit all week because it was the best and most expensive in Mumbles.

‘They're calling last orders,' Frank said as a bell rang. ‘You two want a gin nightcap or something else?'

‘Any more gin and you'll be wheeling me home.' Susie grabbed the bar for support.

‘Last time I looked, you had legs not wheels under your skirt, Susie,' Joey said with a straight face.

‘Eh?' Susie tried and failed to focus on him.

‘Take no notice of Joe; he's trying to be funny again.' Effie tossed her head in the air. She was cross with Joe. They had spent almost the whole week together and apart from a couple of quick goodnight kisses, he hadn't touched her. Whereas Susie had hit the jackpot with Frank, a working miner who lived with his widowed mother, and knowing Susie's luck, one who'd welcome a daughter-in-law into her ready furnished home. It was Susie who'd suggested she unbutton Joe's flies under cover of the table in the Grand to ‘get him going'. But all she had succeeded in doing was annoying him at the expense of bruised fingers.

The one thing she and Susie wholeheartedly agreed on was that they were sick and tired of service. They had scraped together every penny they could lay their hands on to holiday in Swansea because two chambermaids they knew had met a couple of miners there. They'd had a double wedding less than two months after they'd returned, and, like them, she wanted her own place, her own man and a wedding ring on her finger.

‘You girls find a table. Joe will give me a hand with the drinks.' Frank waved his hand to attract the barman's attention.

‘Get singles for the girls and put plenty of water in them,' Joey advised. ‘Effie's had enough to put her on her back as it is and I'm too tired to carry her to our lodgings.'

‘If you won't spend all night with Effie, how about an hour?' Frank cajoled. ‘Susie's promised me an eyeful, but only if we're in a bedroom.'

‘If you've seen one girl naked you've seen them all, unless she weighs over twenty stone,' Joey replied flippantly.

Frank fell serious. ‘I've never seen one in the buff. Not off a picture postcard.'

Frank's reply took Joey aback. ‘You have to be joking?'

‘It's not that I haven't done it, I have, plenty of times,' Frank boasted. ‘But without somewhere to go, the girls won't take more off than they have to.'

‘You've had girlfriends before Susie?' Joey looked him in the eye. ‘The truth, Frank?'

‘Not before Susie,' Frank muttered shamefaced.

‘And you used a French letter?'

‘A what?'

Joey had a sudden insight into how Lloyd and Victor must have felt when they'd tried to give him advice. ‘A French letter. You put it over the vital part before you go visiting the lady, if you get my meaning. And that way you'll ensure there'll be no little Franks to send Susie scurrying round to your door with a maintenance order nine months from now.'

‘The way she behaves when we're alone, I wouldn't mind if there was a baby,' Frank declared recklessly. ‘It's time I settled down and found a wife.'

‘There's a lot more to marriage than taking a woman's clothes off.' Joey made a face as he saw the irony of him of all people lecturing someone on marriage.

‘I never thought any girl – decent girl that is – would behave like Susie. I could live with a lifetime of that every night.'

‘It doesn't last beyond the honeymoon.'

‘I don't believe you. If anything, she likes it more than me.' Frank reddened when he realized what he'd said.

‘Frank,' Joey shook his head, ‘you're a lost cause.'

The barman leaned over the counter and whispered, ‘If you're after French letters I can sell you a couple for five bob.'

‘How about it, Joe, want to go halves?' Frank asked eagerly.

‘I have no use for one, mate.'

‘Half a crown for one?' Frank added two shillings and sixpence to the coins he'd placed on the bar to pay for the round.

‘Three bob,' the barman snapped.

‘That's a tanner over the odds.' Joey eyed the barman sternly. ‘You're making a tanner profit as it is.'

‘All right, half a crown.' The barman thrust his hand under the counter and handed Frank a small packet.

‘This is no use without the room,' Frank murmured mournfully, pushing the packet into his trouser pocket.

‘You can have our room for one hour,' Joey capitulated. ‘But not one minute longer. I'll go for a walk.'

‘You'll take Effie?'

‘That I draw the line at, but I will see her back to the lodging house. She can go to the girls' room.'

‘Susie did say that Effie's been wondering if there's something wrong with you,' Frank ventured.

‘A lot,' Joey replied with mock seriousness. ‘But nothing that I want to go into. The sooner we get these drinks into the girls the sooner you can get started on the Susie road to heaven.'

Effie watched Frank and Susie run into the house and up the stairs. She closed the porch door behind her and joined Joey on the doorstep. ‘You're not coming in?' She moved in front of him, hoping he'd kiss her.

‘Not yet.'

‘You going somewhere?'

‘For a walk.'

‘I'll come with you.'

‘I wouldn't be good company.'

‘You don't like me, do you?' Effie wailed, the combination of gin and rejection making her tearful.

‘You're a great girl, Effie, just not my type,' Joey answered evasively.

‘I have the same as every other girl and plenty of it. And I know how to use it. I'm not shy about coming forward.'

‘You proved that tonight in the Grand Hotel.'

‘Not that you took advantage of me.' She swayed drunkenly. He grabbed her when she fell backwards into the door. She caught his hand and clamped it on one of the breasts spilling out of her low-cut blouse.

‘No, Effie.' Joey withdrew his hand as if it had been scalded.

‘Why not?' she demanded belligerently.

‘Because, although I like you, I don't want you that way. Can't we just be friends?'

‘You're married, aren't you?' She peered up at him through red-veined eyes. ‘No, you're not,' she frowned as the fug of alcohol lifted slightly from her mind. ‘The married ones can't wait to pull a girl's drawers down.'

Joey knew it was irrational for a man who had been drunk more times than he could count in his life to be revolted by the sight of an inebriated woman, but he couldn't stop himself from feeling disgusted. Or sickened by her crude language and manners, which were so different from Rhian's.

‘So, if you're not married, what's wrong with you?' she demanded when he stepped away from her.

He said the first thing that came into his mind. ‘I have a disease.'

‘A disease.' She slurred the syllables. ‘You mean … Susie! Joe's diseased. I kissed him! I could have caught it!' She barged back through the door and charged up the stairs.

Reflecting that it was just as well that Effie and Susie were leaving first thing in the morning, Joey thrust his hands into his pockets and walked down Mumbles Road.

Music drifted from the Pavilion where Tom Owen's Pierrots played Wednesday and Saturday afternoons and twice nightly. When he drew nearer he recognized the chorus of ‘Rule Britannia' being belted out by the audience as well as the players. He crossed the road and headed for the beach. Lighting a cigarette, he sat on the sea wall and allowed his mind to drift over the past week.

He should never have become involved with Susie, Effie and Frank. He should have stuck to his original plan, remained aloof and holidayed in solitary misery. Eaten all his meals alone, drunk alone, visited the theatre alone and … what? Played the part he was playing now. That of voyeur? A man who spent all his time watching others, because he no longer had a private life.

He looked over the sands towards the sea. The beach was full of shadowy figures merging, separating and melting into the darkness. He could hear the quick short gasps of heavy breaths intermingling with lighter ones. The rustle of linen and cotton accompanied by soft mews of discomfort and pain that he attributed to seaweed and sand after Frank's confession in the Mermaid. A slap rent the air followed by a masculine cry of pain.

A female voice distracted him. ‘All on your own?'

The nearest street lamp was some distance away but even in the darkness he recognized the cheap scent and direct approach of a professional. ‘Waiting for someone,' he answered.

‘I can keep you company until she comes.' She leaned on the wall next to him.

He almost told her he had a disease until he thought of an even better excuse that would keep not only her, but any other watching professional, at bay. ‘You're the wrong sex, love.'

‘I should have known, you pretty ones are always bloody pansies.' She flounced off.

He jumped down from the wall, and walked further up the beach towards a rotting wooden breakwater. The sands had given way to a pebbled foreshore and he stood listening, mesmerized by the sound of the waves sucking in and out of the stones. The moon hung low, an enormous silver-gold orb suspended above a streak of black horizon; its broken reflection dancing and shimmering on the navy-blue surface of the sea.

A party of noisy drunks stumbled along the pavement behind him, singing.

Rule, Britannia!

Britannia, rule the waves.

Britons never never never shall be slaves.

Damned war or ‘damned capitalist war', as his father would say. ‘A war engineered by brainless aristocrats, speculators and arms manufacturers out to make a fortune from young men's blood and wrecked lives.' But then his father was steeped in the rhetoric of workers' rights.

He had talked to enough people besides Frank in the last week to realize that young men were answering Kitchener's call because war offered adventure, escape and a chance to cover themselves with glory, as well as an opportunity to abdicate all personal responsibility and the dreary routine of everyday life. He had no doubt that was why Frank wanted to join up, and probably would, if Susie didn't stick her claws into him first.

The thought occurred to him that if he enlisted he wouldn't have to make another decision for himself until the peace treaties were signed. He wouldn't have to go back to Tonypandy, or sit in the store every day, or come to terms with the fact that Rhian was living and working across the road from him – and sleeping in Edward Larch's bed.

The last few weeks without her had been torture and proof that he was finding it impossible to distance himself emotionally from her. Perhaps it would be less painful if they were separated by hundreds of miles. And it would be so simple. All he'd have to do was pay his bill in his lodgings in the morning, cut his holiday short by a week and head for Pontypridd and the Drill Hall where they recruited soldiers.

It was a tempting prospect. Mulling it over, he walked down a slipway to the beach and headed for the sea.

Sali left the breakfast table and walked into the library where she spent most of her mornings answering correspondence and studying buyers' catalogues. She picked up the post that Mari had placed on her desk and flicked through the letters. She recognized Rhian's writing on an envelope, but the postmark, Brighton, surprised her. With some trepidation she slit it open.

Dear Sali,

This is a hard letter to write, but I wanted to explain why I couldn't marry Joey. I will understand if you don't want to see me again and I am sorry to have put you to all the trouble of organizing a wedding for nothing, but after seeing Tonia in Joey's arms I couldn't stop picturing him with other girls. You know what he's been like …