Tiger Bay Blues (20 page)

It was only then Edyth realised that she was going to turn up on Peter’s doorstep on the worst possible day of his week – Sunday.

Edyth washed and dressed as quickly as she could, given the confines of the small room, and the fact that she had to root in her bag for everything she needed. She tried not to look in the mirror. The scratches had become raised, yellowed, iodine-tinted welts, her face, arms, legs and as much as she could see of her back were black and blue, and she could barely open her right eye. Her scalp was tender to the touch and even a quick comb-through of her waves was agonising.

The frock and petticoat she’d worn the day before were beyond repair. She stuffed both into the bottom of her laundry bag along with her stockings and underclothes, before bundling it into her overnight case. Whatever happened, she couldn’t allow her mother or Mari to see the frock. If they did, she suspected there’d never be an end to their lecturing. She also put the police shirt in the bag. Its presence would take some explaining but she could hardly send it back unlaundered and she had all day to think of a suitable covering story.

She carried her bag and handbag to the corner nearest the door and stripped the bed. The bottom sheet and pillow case proved no problem, but it took her several minutes to wrestle the eiderdown from its cover. Setting the bundle of linen next to her overnight case, she folded the eiderdown neatly on the bed, left the bedroom and, ignoring the appetising smell of frying bacon, walked down the stairs. The office door was open. Micah was sitting at an unvarnished pine desk, writing. He looked up when he heard her step.

‘Good morning. Did you sleep well for what was left of the night?’

‘Very well, thank you,’ she replied. ‘I was too tired to thank you properly last night, but it was kind of you to rescue me from the police station. I wouldn’t have liked to have spent a night in the cells.’

‘You wouldn’t have had much sleep there on a Saturday night after they’d finished collecting the drunks from the street. And Anna and her girls know how to keep the duty officers awake,’ he added wryly. He held up a black ceramic pot. ‘Coffee?’

‘Please.’

‘Sit down.’

She sat on the wooden chair in front of his desk. He filled a mug that matched the pot, and pushed a sugar bowl and cream jug towards her. ‘From the look of the shadows beneath your eyes I’d say you had about half of the recommended eight hours.’

‘Which would be more than you.’ She poured cream into her coffee.

‘I am used to missing a night’s sleep, you are not.’ He sat back in his chair and watched her stir a spoonful of sugar into her mug. ‘I telephoned Peter in the hope I’d catch him before morning service. It’s just as well I did. News travels fast around Tiger Bay. He had already been given an account – with embellishments – of the attack on a young girl in front of his church during the early hours. He will be here as soon as he has finished conducting early communion.’

‘Did you tell him everything that happened?’

‘Everything you told me.’

‘Did he give you any message for me?’ She took care to keep her voice steady but her hand shook as she lifted the spoon from her mug.

‘Only that he would be here as soon as he could.’ Micah lifted the telephone from beside his elbow and, holding the lead carefully so it wouldn’t catch in the coffee mugs, handed it to her. ‘Your parents?’

She hesitated for a fraction of a second before glancing at the clock on the wall behind him. Twenty minutes past seven. Mari would be in the kitchen preparing breakfast. With any luck her mother and father would still be in bed. If her sisters had been to a party or visited the Town Hall the night before, they would almost certainly be sleeping. Glyn would be awake, but he would be playing in his room … What could she say to Mari?
‘Hello Mari, it’s Edyth. I’ve left Swansea and I’m in Cardiff but I’m absolutely fine. Could you please ask Mam
or Dad to telephone this number when they get up? I’ll explain everything to them then.’

She’d have to be quick hanging up.

‘You promised to telephone them first thing,’ Micah reminded her.

‘I was looking for your number in case they’re still in bed and have to telephone back,’ she lied.

‘It’s on the dial.’

‘So it is.’ Furious with herself because she couldn’t think of a single solitary reason to delay, she lifted the receiver to her ear. She avoided meeting Micah’s eye while she spoke to the operator, recited her home number and waited to be connected. However, he made no effort to leave the room, which left her in no doubt that he didn’t trust her keep her word.

‘Lloyd Evans.’

Edyth’s heart sank. Her father frequently worked early in the morning on weekends in order to free a few hours to spend with the family later in the day.

‘Dad, it’s me.’

‘Edyth? Has something happened?’

‘I’m fine.’ She was acutely aware that it was the first time she had spoken to her father since the day he had refused to give her permission to marry Peter.

‘You’re not in Swansea.’ It wasn’t a question.

‘No.’

‘When did you leave?’

‘Yesterday afternoon.’

‘After your mother and I returned home?’ There was pain in her father’s voice, pain and concern – no anger.

Edyth had a flashback to childhood. Their Auntie Rhian had made Bella a beautiful pink organdie frock to wear on her fifth birthday. She could still feel the stomach-churning jealousy that had driven her to tell Bella that a duck had hatched a brood on the edge of the ornamental pond in the garden of their old home. Trusting her story, Bella had followed her to the edge of the water and she had pushed her in.

The memory of her sister howling at the top of her voice as she clambered to her knees in the shallow water, her glossy black ringlets wet and bedraggled, dripping with green slime, her party frock blotched with clumps of foul-smelling, stagnant black weed, still had the power to make her squirm.

Instead of the punishment she had expected, her father had sat her on his knee while Mari and her mother had cleaned up Bella, and explained how everyone, even him, occasionally felt jealous when others were the centre of attention. But there was no need to be envious because every single person in the world had their moment of glory. And he was sure that when her birthday came she’d have a frock, if not exactly like Bella’s, equally pretty.

Afterwards she had apologised to Bella – probably her first ever sincere ‘sorry’ and, as though events had conspired to make her feel even more guilty, their Auntie Rhian had presented her and Maggie – it had happened before Beth and Susie had been born – with similar pink fairy tale frocks to Bella’s as ‘the sister of the birthday girl gifts.’

‘Where are you, Edie?’

Her father’s question brought her sharply back to the present. ‘The Norwegian mission church in Tiger Bay with Mr Holsten and his sister.’ Her voice cracked with the emotion that she had managed to keep in check until that moment.

‘Is Mr Holsten there?’

‘Yes.’ She choked on the word.

‘Edyth? Edyth – are you still there?’

‘Yes,’ she whispered.

‘Hand him the receiver.’

Edyth did as her father asked before delving in her pocket for her handkerchief. It was difficult to make out the conversation from hearing only one side, but from Micah’s repeated, ‘It was no trouble, Mr Evans’, ‘of course’, and ‘look forward to seeing you’, she guessed that her father was making arrangements to fetch her.

Micah returned the telephone to its original position on the desk. ‘Your parents will be here as soon as they can.’

‘To take me home?’

‘You’d like to go somewhere else?’ His lips curved in a ghost of a smile.

She blew her nose. ‘I suppose you think I’ve behaved like a fool?’

‘What is it the Americans say? “I’d rather not answer that question on the grounds that it might incriminate me.”’ He pushed his notepad aside and rose to his feet. ‘Let’s have breakfast before Peter and your father and mother arrive, Edyth. I’ve no doubt they’ll have enough to say to you without me putting in my two pennies worth.’

Edyth had cause to remember Micah Holsten’s words when Peter arrived at the mission just after nine o’clock. He was bareheaded, red-faced and breathless, and had obviously run straight from the church. He hadn’t even taken the time to remove his surplice. She had just finished washing the dishes in the small kitchen upstairs after breakfasting with Micah, Helga and Moody in a corner of the public sitting room. Not that she’d eaten much. The thought of seeing her father after their brief telephone conversation and the events of the previous night, had prevented her from swallowing more than a couple of mouthfuls. And even those had stuck in her throat.

Peter burst through the door, startling three seamen who were reading the Sunday papers over coffee. She knew he was angry with her when he barely nodded in her direction. Micah calmly shook Peter’s hand, escorted both of them downstairs and showed them into his office. He closed the door to give them privacy, in contrast to his behaviour earlier, when he had sat and watched her speak to her father on the telephone.

She didn’t dare look into Peter’s face until they were alone. But her hopes for a welcoming smile were dashed when he glared at her, his eyes cold, hard and intractable.

‘What on earth possessed you to visit me so late at night?’ he demanded without any preliminaries. ‘You’re the talk of the Bay. Do you know what those women are? The police assumed you were one of them. My fiancé a –’

‘They made it obvious what they thought I was,’ she interrupted. His anger hit her with the force of a body blow and she leaned on the back of a chair for support.

‘Given the time of night that they picked up you in Bute Street, can you blame them?’

‘It wasn’t that late when I left Swansea. I should have arrived at the vicarage before ten o’clock but my train was held up outside Bridgend.’

‘If you had written or telephoned I would have talked you out of rushing down here. I simply can’t understand what you hoped to accomplish by doing something so stupid.’ He finally turned and looked her in the eye. ‘Given your injuries there’s no chance that we’ll manage to keep this quiet. One look at your face and everyone who has heard the gossip will know that it was you brawling with those women at two in the morning.’

‘It wasn’t that long after midnight.’

‘It was late, and that’s what matters. Didn’t you think how it would look? You knocking on my door at that hour of the night? We’re not even officially engaged, Edyth. And even if you had arrived earlier, you hadn’t made any arrangements to rent a room or stay anywhere respectable.’

‘You said in your letters that the Reverend Richards had a housekeeper. I assumed she lived in.’

‘She does,’ he concurred irritably. ‘But she is an elderly widow. It’s one thing for her to sleep in a bachelor household, quite another for a young girl like yourself.’

‘She could have chaperoned me. I needed to see you, Peter.’ She softened her voice in an attempt to diffuse his anger.

‘You had the telephone number of the vicarage. You could have spoken to me any time you wanted. You haven’t telephoned me once since I’ve been here,’ he reproached. ‘And then to come down here on a whim and get yourself arrested –’

‘It wasn’t easy to talk to you on the telephone at home. My parents and my sisters were always around, I didn’t want them listening in on our conversation. Besides, I wanted to tell you face-to-face that I had decided not to take the place I’d been offered at college.’

‘For pity’s sake, Edyth, I knew you didn’t want to go to college. We’d discussed it before I left Pontypridd and in our letters since.’ He closed his hand into a fist and placed it over his mouth as though he were trying to keep his exasperation in check.

‘But you didn’t know that I was prepared to defy my parents to help you get your own parish.’

‘Well, you’re not in a position to help me, or anyone else, now that your reputation is ruined.’

‘Hardly ruined, Peter,’ she remonstrated.

‘No?’ he queried angrily. ‘I hadn’t even returned to the vicarage this morning from Mr Marchant’s deathbed when I heard that a young woman had knocked the door after midnight last night asking for me. And when the housekeeper, quite rightly, refused to admit her, she started … started …’

‘Started what, Peter?’ she enquired coldly, furious at his insistence that her reputation was ruined.

‘Accosting men in the street.’

‘That is not true.’

‘No?’ he questioned acidly.

‘No,’ she reiterated forcefully. ‘After your housekeeper refused to let me into the vicarage, I decided to sit and wait for you in the church. But before I could reach the door those women attacked me.’

‘Because they mistook you for one of them,’ he snapped. ‘A woman prepared to sell herself to any man prepared to pay for an hour or two of her favours. A woman with no morals or modesty. And, a reasonable mistake to make on their part, given that you were out alone at that time in the morning, talking to Negroes.’

‘I was not talking to them, leastways, not until after they rescued me. They pulled the women off me. The police didn’t come until later,’ she explained. But Peter was in no mood to listen to her account of events.

‘After hearing what happened from some of my parishioners this morning, you certainly appeared to have behaved like a loose woman, talking to strange men, brawling with strumpets –’

‘All I’m guilty of is standing in the street after midnight. Any “brawling”, as you put it, that I did was a useless attempt to defend myself. As you see from the state of my face and arms, I made a pathetic job of it. And the only men I spoke to were the ones who pulled the women off me. Not surprisingly, I thanked them. But what hurts more – much, much more than my injuries – is that you prefer to believe gossip rather than me.’

He ran his hands through his hair. ‘Edyth, you don’t seem to understand the gravity of what you’ve done.’

‘Peter, you said that you love me.’ She paused for a moment, hoping that he would tell her again. When he didn’t, she continued. ‘If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have asked me to marry you. So why do you give a damn what people say about me?’