Swansea Girls (20 page)

‘She is so ... so ...’

‘Hot?’ Joe suggested.

‘It was hot in that studio.’ He looked across at Joe. ‘You want a dip?’

‘I don’t want a late night. I have an early start in the morning.’

‘Ah, ha, you’ve been shunted on to
Thought for the Day.
That’ll teach you to be nice to vicars.’

‘It’ll be a new experience.’

‘Working on
Thought for the Day
is the kind of experience I never want to have.’ Robin craned his neck to catch a last glimpse of Geraldine. ‘I don’t have to go in until six o’clock tomorrow evening. One hour from now I intend to be tipsy, two hours from now drunk. Very, very drunk. In fact, so drunk I won’t be able to crawl out of bed until five tomorrow afternoon, that way I might succeed in avoiding my parents for the next twenty-four hours. You wouldn’t believe the lectures I’ve had since Saturday.’

‘You told your parents what happened?’

‘The duty police surgeon was on the phone to my father first thing Sunday morning. God! The sparrows hadn’t even woken up. You can always count on the doctors in this town to tell one another everything. If you want to spread a rumour forget the newspapers, just whisper it into the medical grapevine.’

‘What did he say?’ Joe asked, recalling that Helen had been forced to undergo the indignity of a medical examination.

‘That Larry behaved as no gentleman would and should have been put in the cells and left to rot.’

‘What do you think?’

‘That I’d be doing pigs a disfavour by saying Larry behaved like one. Even allowing that he was drunk and didn’t know Helen was your sister, he shouldn’t have treated any woman the way he treated her. Everyone I’ve talked to has said the same thing. As of Sunday morning, Larry’s been officially, universally and publicly shunned by all who matter, including and especially my people.’

‘You’re not just saying that because Helen is my sister?’

‘We all have sisters. And it’s not only Angie my father is concerned about. I have been expressly forbidden to socialise or even communicate with Larry because Larry has, and I quote, “embraced evil, become embroiled in the devil’s ways and is likely to sway me from the paths of righteousness”, or something along those lines. My father goes in for biblical language when he lectures on moral rectitude.’

‘My father will be pleased to hear that no one wants to know Larry. I think if he had been able to get to him on Saturday night he might have killed him.’

‘And you?’

‘I’ve decided to jump Larry on the first day of term.’

‘Larry’s not worth being sent down for, or the aggravation I’ve been subjected to. Endless, boring lectures from my mother on how to treat females as ladies and it was no better when I escaped to the billiard room. All I got there was my father telling me that no gentleman ever forces his “companionship” on a woman, much less rips off her dress. And then came the worst bit; he poured out the whisky and after a couple of glasses got all chummy and suggested that if I ever have an overwhelming, uncontrollable urge he knows a woman he can fix me up with.’

‘How embarrassing. What did you say?’

‘It’s what I didn’t say. I could have begun with the night we picked up those tarts outside the Museum.’

‘You didn’t tell him about that!’

‘What do you take me for?’ Robin looked sideways at Joe as he slowed the car and changed down a gear. ‘You’ve never talked about that night.’

‘Because I’d rather not.’

‘If you promise to keep your mouth shut, I’ll tell you something.’

‘About Larry?’

‘Me. I paid that woman two pounds but I didn’t let her near me. I couldn’t. She was old, ugly and covered in sores. It was horrible. I couldn’t even bring myself to kiss her.’

Joe burst out laughing. ‘My experience wasn’t any better.’

‘Then you didn’t do anything either?’

‘Not that night.’

‘I’ve been thinking. What Larry did to your sister was foul and he shouldn’t have done it to any woman but forgetting all that, I think it – I mean sex – has to mean something. When all’s said and done we’re not bloody animals.’

‘This coming from the man who was panting after Geraldine five minutes ago?’

Robin sat silently as Joe drove through the gate to the garaging and parking area in front of his house. ‘You ever done it?’ he asked suddenly.

‘What?’

‘Stop being so bloody obtuse. Slept with a girl.’

‘I’ve played around.’

‘We’ve all played around. I got Emily to take off her blouse yesterday.’

Joe stared at him, as much taken aback by the revelation as the fact that Robin got Emily to undress for him.

‘Just her blouse. And I needn’t have bothered. The man who built the vaults in the Bank of England probably designed the corset she was wearing underneath it. Park by the door. As I intend to spend tomorrow in bed nursing my hangover, you may as well borrow the car.’

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘I told you I intend to get drunk and sleep away most of the day. You can pick me up in the evening and drive me to work.’ Robin left the car and slammed the door. He rang the bell. ‘Damn, I forgot.’ He patted his pockets. ‘Pops and Mums have taken Angie to some boring party or other. They gave Mrs John the night off and it looks like I’ve forgotten my keys. Come on, let’s go round the back.’

Picking up the spare key from its hidey-hole behind a loose brick in the garden wall, Robin unlocked the door to the sun lounge at the rear of the house, switched on the inside and outside lights, pulled off his pullover and slung it on one of the cushioned rattan chairs. He gazed at the long narrow pool that filled the area between the patio and the lawn.

‘Thank God we’ve the place to ourselves. I can’t wait.’ Kicking off his shoes, he left them where they lay. It never ceased to amaze Joe just how carelessly Robin flung his clothes around the house. If he’d done the same his mother would have shouted at him for a week. But then the Watkin Morgans had a live-in housekeeper as well as a maid, while his mother, as she was so fond of telling his father, had to put up with a daily, and an incompetent one at that.

‘Bring the whisky and a couple of glasses, will you,’ Robin shouted, as he dived naked into the deep end of the pool.

Joe didn’t need a second invitation. One of the best things about his friendship with Robin was the Watkin Morgans’ hospitality and the way they encouraged him to treat their home as his own. It had taken him a while to become accustomed to the blasé attitude ex-public schoolboys like Robin had to nudity but now he had no qualms about joining in Robin’s all-male swimming parties.

Tossing his clothes on to a chair in the sun lounge, he dived to the bottom of the pool. As the cool, clean water closed over his head he was filled with gratitude towards Robin. Not only for his friendship but for the way he had dismissed Larry. He hated any kind of unpleasantness and it would be far easier to ignore Larry along with everyone else than to confront him.

Chapter Eleven

‘I don’t have to go to an interview?’

Roy tried not to smile, lest Katie think he were laughing at her. ‘Not in an office, but Mr Griffiths would like a word with you.’

Katie glanced at the clock. ‘Now?’

‘It’s late but not that late.’ Norah knew there was no way Katie would settle until she heard the job was hers from John Griffiths.

‘We walked up from the pub together so he’s in now.’

‘I wouldn’t be disturbing him?’

‘I don’t think so.’ Roy prised the lid off one of Norah’s cake tins and foraged for a rock cake. ‘He said Mrs Griffiths and Joe were out.’

‘I could see Helen while Katie talks to her father.’

Norah frowned at Lily.

‘Just talk, Auntie Norah,’ Lily pleaded. ‘There’s no harm in that. Joe said she wasn’t allowed out. I can’t stop thinking about her. She must be feeling just awful, and lonely,’ she added, sensing her aunt wavering.

‘All right, you can go, but I want both of you back in this house before half past ten. You’ve got work tomorrow, Lily. Katie, take one of the walking sticks out of the stand in the hall. Whatever you do, don’t put any weight on that ankle or you’ll find yourself in bed for a week. And, Lily, not too sympathetic with Helen, please. She did take that dress from her father’s warehouse without asking.’

‘We heard you on the radio, Joe, you too, Robin. The play was good.’

‘Emily, Angie, clear off, we’re not fit to be seen,’ Robin shouted as Emily Murton Davies and his sister walked out of the sun lounge on to the patio that bordered the pool.

‘We listened to every word.’ Angela draped herself elegantly along a deckchair, hiked up her skirt and crossed her long, slim legs to display them to their best advantage. ‘The doorman was wonderful. He spoke completely in character and really made you believe in him as a doorman; the chauffeur, on the other hand, was dreadfully wooden.’

‘I couldn’t give a damn what you thought of the play. Clear off, both of you.’ Robin looked for something he could throw at his sister but seeing nothing within reach, he gave up and swam to the side of the pool to join Joe who was pressing himself rigidly against the side.

‘Neither of you has anything we haven’t seen. We’ve both been to life-drawing classes.’

‘For God’s sake, Angie, I’m your brother.’

‘Joe isn’t.’

‘All the more reason for you to go inside.’ Joe moved closer to Robin as Emily walked down the side of the pool, presumably in the hope of getting a better view.

‘Help! We’re drowning.’

‘There’s no one to hear you, Robin. Mums and Pops are still at the party and from the jolly state of Pops and the way they were both enjoying themselves they won’t be home for hours.’

‘So you intend just to lie there.’ Joe flushed crimson as Angela coolly parried his scowl.

‘Only until you come out of the water.’ She picked up a towel from the deckchair next to hers. ‘Then, I’ll dry you off.’

‘These are my certificates and Miss Crabbe – that’s my teacher in night school – wrote a testimonial.’ Katie’s hand shook as she handed John Griffiths the envelope Richard Thomas had barely glanced at.

‘Thank you, Katie, please, sit down.’

‘My marks were good.’ Katie perched on the edge of the uncomfortable sofa in the Griffithses’ lounge and tried to look anywhere other than at Helen’s father as he scanned her papers. The skin on one side of his face was purplish red, blotched, puckered and heavily scarred, his left hand skeletal and claw-like. She’d never been so close to him before but, strangely, she wasn’t repelled by his disfigurement as she’d expected to be, more fascinated in some peculiar way. Realising most people would react as she was, she made a conscious effort not to stare.

‘Not just good but excellent.’ John replaced the papers in the envelope and handed it back to her.

‘But I have no real experience of office work, only my classes in night school, Mr Griffiths.’

‘You’re not supposed to emphasise your shortcomings when you apply for a job, Katie.’

Unnerved by his cautionary advice and even more by his gentle smile, she fell silent.

‘I gather you have worked,’ John prompted, finding her lack of confidence endearing, particularly when contrasted to his daughter’s surfeit of self-assurance before last Saturday.

‘Just in the cafe, Mr Griffiths, and Mr Thomas from Thomas and Butler’s more or less said that didn’t count. So are you sure you want me to work for you?’

‘I am sure your Miss Crabbe didn’t tell you to ask that question at a job interview, Katie, but as we’re being honest, no, I’m not sure I want you to work for me.’ In an attempt to put her at ease John deliberately left the lounge door open as he sat in a chair opposite her. ‘And I won’t be sure until you have worked alongside my secretary for a few weeks. If you cope you can have her position when she leaves at the end of the month. If you can’t, I’ll find you a place in the warehouse. Is two pounds five shillings a week while you’re training all right?’

‘Yes, Mr Griffiths.’ Katie’s eyes sparkled in the lamplight.

‘Will you be able to start on Monday?’

‘I should think so, but I’ll have to give notice in the cafe.’

‘Let me know. The sooner you start the better from my point of view because there’s a lot for you to learn. I don’t know what you’re used to but we work long hours in the warehouse. Eight till six, five days a week and eight till one on Thursdays. Occasionally, at busy times of the year, like Christmas and the end of the summer school uniform rush, there’ll be overtime but you’ll get an extra hourly rate to compensate.’

‘I wouldn’t mind working on for nothing ...’

‘I’m an employer, Katie, not an exploiter. Would you like to ask me any questions?’

Katie racked her brains in an effort to come up with something intelligent but, too excited to think of anything coherent, she shook her head. ‘I don’t think so but thank you, Mr Griffiths.’

‘Then hopefully I’ll see you next Monday. If you can’t make it, drop in and let me know when you can start.’

‘I’ll call in on my way home from work tomorrow night. I’ll know by then.’

‘By the noise I’d say Helen and Lily are in the kitchen. Why don’t you join them?’

‘Thank you, Mr Griffiths, and thank you for the job.’

As Katie left the room John went to the cocktail cabinet, opening and closing it quickly to minimise ‘Stranger in Paradise’, a tune he was rapidly coming to hate. Taking the whisky bottle and glass he had snatched, he sat back and basked briefly in the warm glow that engulfed him whenever he made a charitable donation or managed to help someone less fortunate than himself. But after a few moments all thoughts of Katie were forgotten as he tried to make sense of the welter of conflicting emotions Esme had generated.

The more he contemplated his marriage, the more he wondered if Esme had ever cared for him, or if he had merely been a solution to a problem. His inability to pinpoint her whereabouts on Saturday night had brought home to him just how far they had drifted apart. Esme had been keeping late hours for years, but it had been humiliating when he’d been forced to admit publicly that he didn’t know where his wife was at one in the morning. And the blame wasn’t entirely hers. He had chosen not to question Esme as to where she went and what she did a long time ago, because it had been easier to continue with the pretence that their marriage was fine rather than confront the reality that she no longer loved him. That’s if she ever had. The only wonder was she had married him at all – but then perhaps there hadn’t been another naive, trusting fool around at the time.

He had been at his most vulnerable. His grandfather and grandmother had died within six weeks of one another. Lonely and totally alone for the first time in his life, he had divided his time between the house and warehouse – domestic and business chores – scarcely thinking about either. Then, like a rainbow breaking over a desolate landscape Esme had burst into his life.

He recalled the first time he had seen her, dressed in school uniform, a ridiculous, pleated gymslip that had made even her slim figure appear plump. She and her aunt had visited the warehouse to look for unseasonable clothes to take them through a cruise her aunt had booked as a reward for Esme’s exceptional performance in the school matriculation examinations. He had shown them to the ladies’ wear section and, after they’d made their choice, Esme had pressed him to buy a ticket to a charity ball her mother had helped organise. Expecting to be ignored, or at best sidelined among her other admirers, he had almost torn up the ticket – but hadn’t.

She had been nineteen, cool, blonde and stunningly beautiful in a white silk gown and her mother’s pearls; he had been seventeen, crippled and ugly, yet, to his amazement, from the moment of his arrival in the Mackworth Hotel, she had singled him out. Flattered, scarcely daring to believe his good fortune, by the end of the evening he would have done anything she asked of him. He could no longer recall their courtship, the exact sequence of events or how it had happened, but within a month he had found himself a married man and six months later the father of a premature baby boy.

Fortunately he’d had no close relatives to question Joseph’s paternity but his few friends and neighbours hadn’t been slow in suggesting that Esme had used him. Apart from their stinging remarks and attitude to Esme, he genuinely hadn’t minded. His disfigurement had tempered his romantic nature, forcing him to become a realist. On the few occasions during adolescence when he had dared to dream of marriage and children, the reflection staring back at him from the mirror every morning had shattered his fantasies. By the time Esme entered his life he had long been convinced that all women – and men – found him repulsive. And yet against the odds, he had found himself married to a beautiful and intelligent woman.

It didn’t take him long to discover she wasn’t easy to live with, but everyone he spoke to said the same thing. It was difficult to adjust to married life after free and easy bachelorhood. His single life had been brief and anything but easy. However, he’d reasoned Esme’s might have been better and he almost persuaded himself she had to feel something for him. After all, she had chosen him to be the father of her child.

For almost two years Esme had been home to greet him at the end of every working day. She had cooked his meals, cleaned the house, washed his clothes and even shared his bed. Shy, diffident, he had hoped she found their lovemaking as satisfying as he did, but he had never found the courage to broach the subject. Looking back, those years between Joe’s birth and Helen’s conception had been the sum total of their marriage. Joseph had been a happy and contented baby he had been proud to acknowledge as his son. But when Esme returned from hospital with Helen in her arms she asked him to move out of their bedroom until she recuperated from the birth.

Sensitive to her needs, he had agreed and carried his clothes up to one of the attic bedrooms. When he had tentatively suggested that he move back a year later, Esme had protested she was still unwell. He left the matter for six months, by which time Esme announced that the doctor had warned her another pregnancy would kill her. When he had tried to bring up the subject of birth control, she closed every discussion with the insistence that none was one hundred per cent reliable. Helen had been two years old the last time he had tried to discuss anything resembling a personal life with his wife.

Esme had continued to keep the house in apple-pie order and, as the business flourished, improved their lives. She employed a daily to relieve her of the housework, and her involvement with the Little Theatre and her nights out with Dot – a feature from the day they returned from their fortnight’s honeymoon in London – increased from one or two a month to three or four and sometimes even more a week as well as most of the weekends. Publicly and privately she was polite, mannered – and distant – towards him. He missed the intimacy of their early married life but made excuses for her absences to their children and himself on the pretext that, as she worked so hard in the house all day, she was entitled to pursue her hobby in her free time.

But after Saturday night he didn’t doubt that rumours would spread from the police station throughout the entire town, that’s if they hadn’t already. The question was, should he carry on ignoring Esme’s absences and nights out, allowing every friend, acquaintance and business contact to laugh, mock and pity him, or confront her and risk hearing her confirm his worst suspicions, perhaps shattering his life and their children’s irrevocably?

‘Angie, if you and Emily don’t go into the house this instant I’ll tell Mums about this.’

‘No, you won’t, because you’d have to admit you were swimming in the buff and you know she doesn’t like it.’ Angie lay back in the deckchair and filched a cigarette from a box on the table next to her. ‘Em, pour yourself a drink and get one for me, please, while you’re at it.’

‘Babycham?’ Emily took two bottles from the rattan cocktail cabinet in the sun lounge and held them up, either side of her face.

‘I’d
love
a Babycham.’ Angie parodied the advertisement.

‘And we’d love you two to disappear into the house,’ Robin called from the pool. ‘It’s bloody freezing in here.’

‘Especially when you can’t move a muscle,’ Joe added heatedly.

‘I wouldn’t have invited Joe back here if I’d known you were going to tease him.’

‘We’re not teasing. The male nude is part of our art course and we’re searching out as many examples as we can to carry out an in-depth study.’ Angie took the drink Emily handed her.

‘If I stay here a minute longer my examples are going to freeze and drop off, so study away.’ Heaving himself up on his arms, Robin left the pool. Emily screamed. Angie tossed him a cushion from one of the chairs. Holding it in front of himself, Robin threw a towel into the water close to Joe. ‘As these are no ladies you don’t have to behave like a gentleman. Right, Emily, do you want to make a detailed sketch right now?’ Lurching towards her, he laughed as she ran off into the hall. ‘That proves it,’ he called after her. ‘You’re all bluff.’