A Silver Lining (11 page)

‘Jimmy would. He was only happy when he was outside on the mountain. Remember that time he tried to ride one of Jones’s cows in Penycoedcae.’ They both laughed as they turned into the Parade. ‘I don’t think you should walk me to the door,’ she said falling serious.

‘Why not?’

‘I’m a married woman now, and well, it’s George. You see he can be a bit jealous.’

‘After you’ve only been married four months?’

‘It’s my fault,’ she said earnestly, looking around to make sure the street was deserted. ‘I’m so much younger than him, and as he says, I always want to be off doing things that married women shouldn’t. Like going to the pictures. And dancing ... I really miss those dances in the Catholic Hall in Treforest. Do you?’

‘I still go to them.’ William looked into her eyes, shining with reflected lamplight, and recalled one evening when he and Tina had managed to evade her brothers and they’d gone round the back of the hall only to see Jimmy and Vera, and to quote Tina afterwards, ‘not just kissing’.

‘Oh it is good talking to you about the old days,’ she cried.

‘Vera, you sound as if you’re a hundred years old, not sixteen.’

‘Married to George sometimes I feel I am a hundred. Look,’ she glanced up and down the street again. ‘How about if you go down the lane and come into the house the back way? I’ll leave the door open in the wall so you’ll know which house it is, and I’ll pull the kitchen curtains and stand in front of the window so there’ll be no mistake. That way we can have a cup of tea. Talk some more ...’

‘I thought you said George is the jealous type.’

‘He is. But the card game in the Queen’s never finishes before three in the morning. I should know,’ she added bitterly. ‘He plays there four times a week.’

‘I don’t know ...’

‘Come on, Will,’ she coaxed. ‘It’s been so good talking to you, and the fire will be banked up. My mother sees to that. She lays out a little supper too.’ She touched his hand with the tips of her gloved fingers and his mouth went dry. He loved Tina Ronconi. But then Vera knew that, and she
was
lonely. A cup of tea, a chat, a sandwich –what could be more innocent?

‘All right.’

‘It’s the sixth house down from this end. Give me five minutes and I’ll open the door to the lane.’

‘Five minutes,’ he echoed. If it was all so innocent, why was he perspiring when the air temperature was barely above freezing?

The first thing William noticed as he crept after Vera through the darkened washhouse into the brilliantly lit back kitchen was that she had changed out of her cotton overalls into the same kind of silk dressing gown he’d seen Myrna Loy swanning around in on the screen in the White Palace. It was cream-coloured, pulled in at the waist by a belt that Vera had tied
very
tightly. It clung to the contours of her body, leaving absolutely nothing to his imagination, and once again he was left with the uncomfortable feeling that she was wearing very little, if anything, beneath it.

‘I’ve put the kettle on. Why don’t you sit down?’ She closed, and locked the washhouse door behind him. He looked round the room. The furniture was oak, old but good; the covers on the easy chairs and the lino on the floor new. The bright, clean and long-piled hearth-rug clearly hadn’t seen much coal dust.

‘George said I could change anything I liked in the house. He buys me whatever I ask for in the way of furniture, and, as you can see, clothes.’ She fingered the skirt of her dressing gown, pulling it wide to display an expanse of smooth white thigh that sent William’s pulse soaring. ‘But then I don’t see much point in change simply for the sake of change, do you?’

‘No,’ he agreed thickly, without the faintest idea what she was talking about. He was totally preoccupied with the sight of her long, slim legs, and her full breasts. Were they really that shape? Or was she wearing something that made them point upwards?

‘I know this furniture is old-fashioned, but George is very fond of it. It was his mother’s. She only died last year.’

‘He wasn’t married before?’ By concentrating on a print of Jesus recruiting the fishermen of Galilee that hung over the mantelpiece, William just about managed to get the gist of Vera’s last sentence.

‘George,’ she laughed, clearly amused by the notion. ‘Good Lord, no. My father always used to say that George was a born bachelor. Here, there’s a gap in the curtains. I’d better close them in case someone sees you.’

‘What if George just walks in?’ William asked nervously, suddenly wishing he’d turned a deaf ear to her invitation.

‘He won’t. I’ve locked the front and back doors and bolted them from the inside. No one can walk in.’

‘Won’t that make him suspicious?’ William’s breath quickened as she leaned across his chair.

‘Not George. I always lock them in the evening when he’s not at home. He calls me a scaredy cat, but I don’t care. It feels so lonely here. Just me rattling around this big house. I get afraid. After living in a houseful of people all my life I’m not used to being by myself.’ She leaned back for a moment, studied the curtains, then reached out again. The ends of her silk belt fell across William’s face, and as he brushed them aside he caught a heady whiff of rose-scented perfume.

‘Don’t you like being tickled?’ she teased, falling forward, laughing, on to his lap.

‘That depends on who’s doing the tickling,’ he whispered, his voice thickening to a hoarse whisper as the weight of her thighs pressed down on his.

‘How about if we try this instead.’ Locking her arms around his neck she pulled his head close to hers and kissed him. A deep, long-drawn-out, sensual-kiss that sent his senses reeling.

He pushed her away. ‘Vera, we shouldn’t be doing this.’ He couldn’t believe what he was saying. Here he was in a warm room with a practically naked, and it seemed all too willing, woman on his lap. She’d assured him there was no likelihood of their being disturbed and he was running scared. Was there something wrong with him? After all, wasn’t this every boy’s dream? According to his cousin Eddie it was. Eddie was three years younger than him, and over a year ago he’d been boasting of his fleshy experiences with a naked chorus girl. The sum total of William’s expertise was two quick kisses stolen from Tina Ronconi on the one occasion she’d escaped her brothers’ vigilance.

But then, experience wasn’t what mattered. At least that’s how he, and his equally unworldly cousin Haydn, had consoled one another. It was the woman who was important. And he loved Tina. He’d told her as much. But...

‘Will.’ Vera slipped from the chair and knelt on the floor in front of him, her hands still resting lightly in his lap. ‘You have no idea what it’s like for me. You see, George ...’ Her eyes looked at him, enormous, trusting pools of innocence. ‘He’s ... he ...’ tears welled into her eyes once more, all the more poignant and pathetic for the dignified silence in which they fell.

‘He what, Vera?’ She looked so young, practically a child. She couldn’t possibly have any idea what she was doing to him; what powers of restraint he was having to call upon as her fingers played restlessly against the front panel of his trousers.

‘I expected so much when we married,’ she murmured softly. ‘I knew he was old, of course, but at the time that seemed to make it all the more exciting. I thought he’d be experienced. That he’d know what to do. I was even looking forward to it in a funny kind of way. You know what I mean, half frightened, half curious, not really knowing what to expect. But all he did on our wedding night, all he ever does –’ a faint blush stole over her cheeks and she averted her gaze, staring down at the floor –’is undress me. Then when I’m completely naked ...’ she looked at him again, ‘I mean completely naked, he makes me lie down and he looks at me. Sometimes he touches me,’ she took William’s hand and pressed it against her breast, ‘here, and-’ she slid his fingers down over the silk to the top of her thighs’- here. It’s awful. Sometimes on a Sunday he won’t allow me to dress at all. He even makes me cook and eat the dinner with no clothes on. And all he ever does is look and stroke. In the same way you’d pet a cat. Nothing more – nothing normal. You have no idea how it upset me at first. For weeks I could not stop crying. My mam doesn’t know what goes on behind our curtains, but she did think that something was wrong. But when I tried to tell her about it, she wouldn’t listen. All she did was remind me that I had made a promise in chapel to obey George, and that meant in every way. I went to the doctor and tried to talk to him, but he said it was my husband’s right to do whatever he wanted with me, and my duty to put up with it. Then I saw my married sister. She said it shouldn’t be like that. That there was something more. Much, much more.’

She lay back on the hearth-rug, watching him as he watched her. Then slowly, very slowly, she undid the knot on her dressing-gown belt. Sighing, she parted the two panels of silk. Heart pounding, paralysed, William felt a certain sympathy with George. He couldn’t have moved at that moment to save his life. He had been right. She was wearing nothing underneath the gown. And she was beautiful. Very beautiful. He gazed, mesmerised by the first naked female form he had seen off a picture postcard.

Her breasts did point upwards; her skin was white, so fine there wasn’t a single blemish to mar the perfection. He coloured as she looked up at him, then very slowly, quite deliberately she parted her thighs.

The word ‘shameless’ sprang to mind as he tried, and failed, to stop himself from staring. Then he remembered the life she led with her old, perverted husband, and felt ashamed of himself. George obviously thought no more of Vera than the boys did of the women who posed naked for the photographs that were handed around the gym’s changing room to the accompaniment of sniggers.

‘Will.’ She lifted her arms. ‘Please. Show me that some men can do more than look.’

The next instant he was on top of her, his hands exploring every inch of her body, his fingers probing, lingering over the soft skin of her nipples, plunging down between her thighs. She moaned, and he moved back, tearing off his own clothes. His last thought, as he thrust into her, was of Tina. It was better for Tina, for both of them, that he went to their marriage bed with some experience. And with Vera married he wasn’t taking any risks. None at all.

Chapter Six

Huddled into their winter coats and stamping their feet in an effort to keep warm, Charlie and Evan shuffled impatiently along the line of men waiting to go in through the door of the New Town Hall.

‘Mind how you go in there, Evan,’ Constable Huw Davies, his sister-in-law Megan Powell’s brother, called out as they inched their way past the group of policemen who had gathered in front of the closed box-office.

‘I always do, Huw.’ Evan raced up the wide stone steps and down the long, sloping corridor that led into the packed hall.

Unlike variety shows, the seats had been taken on a first-come first-served basis, and although Evan and Charlie had left Graig Avenue at five for the six o’clock political meeting, it obviously hadn’t been early enough.

‘Here?’ Evan suggested, pointing to a bank of four seats still vacant in the centre of the last row of the stalls.

Charlie nodded.

‘Didn’t expect to see you here, Charlie.’ Billy Morris, a miner who had been on Evan’s ‘gang’ when they’d worked in the Maritime pit, commented as Charlie slid into the seat beside him. ‘After all, this isn’t your fight, or even your country.’

‘I said I’d be here.’ Charlie’s voice was ominously restrained.

‘Looks like all the men on the Graig and half the men in the town are here,’ Evan chipped in.

‘Most of them wondering what a man’s got to say that’s worth paying a hundred pounds instead of the usual ten to rent this place on a Sunday night.’ Billy pulled out his tobacco tin and filched a cigarette paper from his top pocket.

‘Red Dai’s stirring it up down the front.’ Evan shifted in his seat, searching for a comfortable position for his long legs.

‘The only thing he’s likely to stir up is trouble.’ Charlie looked around. It was obvious that the audience wasn’t in an attentive frame of mind. He glanced behind him, wondering how many more people would be allowed in. Uniformed constables were filing in through the door, forming a line that effectively sealed off the back of the hall.

A protesting voice that echoed in from the corridor outside was silenced as the door slammed. Metal bolts grated home, sealing in the audience.

Charlie glanced uneasily at Evan. The icy relationship between Evan and his wife had deteriorated even further since Trevor Lewis had brought them the news of their grandchild’s condition. Usually calm and equitable in the face of whatever misfortune life threw at him, Evan had withdrawn into a morose brooding mood that no one, not even Eddie, William or Diana had been able to penetrate.

The hubbub of voices died as the side door nearest to the stage opened, and another small army of men, this time dressed entirely in black, began to enter.

‘Good God, there’s got to be close on a hundred of them,’ Billy gasped, as the door finally shut behind the Blackshirts, who’d lined up facing the audience in front of the stage.

‘What’s the matter, Mosley?’ Red Dai, who’d picked up his nickname because of his loyalty to the Communist party, heckled. ‘Scared to face us without a bodyguard?’ he jeered at the empty stage.

The Blackshirts snapped smartly to attention, their stern, set features glaring beneath their peaked caps towards a point somewhere at the back of the hall.

Charlie turned again. The constables, arms folded, truncheons hooked at their belts, were staring impassively back.

The stage curtains were already open. A grey backcloth had been draped over the back wall and a row of chairs was ranged before it. In front of these stood a box-like stand, topped by a microphone. Muffled clankings and high-pitched screeches resounded from the orchestra pit.

‘What the hell does he want a bloody orchestra for?’ Billy bawled. ‘Is he going to do a tap dance?’

Charlie didn’t answer. He had a very real sense of foreboding. The tense atmosphere had heightened until it smouldered, an emotionally charged time-bomb. The first heated exchange would probably set it off.

The Blackshirts stood at ease to a shouted command from their unit commander. They were an impressive sight. Not one of them under six feet, they were smartly turned out in brushed black shirts fastened by gleaming, polished buttons. They paraded in glaring contrast to the unemployed, shabbily dressed, Communist and Socialist miners who had queued since midday to pack the front rows of the stalls.

Half a dozen men, also in black shirts and trousers, walked on to the stage.

A man Evan recognised as Mosley from newspaper photographs stepped forward and the orchestra struck up the opening bars of ‘God Save the King’.

‘That’s not our bloody national anthem!’ Dai yelled from the front row. ‘Come on boys, let’s give them ours.’ He stepped forward, turned his back to the stage and waved his arms in the air.

The audience, who had determinedly and quite deliberately sat through the orchestral overture of ‘God Save the King’, rose to a man and soon ‘Land of my Fathers’ echoed to the rafters, drowning out the strains of the orchestra and the Fascist voices.

Charlie, whose hearing was more acute than most, heard the sergeant behind him murmur, ‘Steady lads.’

He turned his head. The older policemen like Huw Griffiths were still standing sedately by, truncheons dangling from their belts. The younger ones were not so cool and composed. Most had unclipped their weapons and were holding them in both hands.

‘It’s just a singing contest, boys,’ the sergeant muttered as the audience paused for breath between the first and second verses. ‘You’ve seen them often enough in the bandstand in Ponty Park. Just think of it as the chapel versus the working men’s club choir.’

Huw Griffiths nudged a rookie who’d stepped out of line, and Charlie watched as the boy retreated into the shadows at the back of the hall. The Blackshirts stopped singing. Even the orchestra gave up trying to compete half-way through the second verse, but the men on stage remained on their feet waiting patiently for the audience to finish.

The impromptu choristers, triumphant in their victory, sang their hearts out when they reached the final lines, raising the roof and deafening those, who like Charlie, didn’t know the Welsh words.

Afterwards, the silence brought an uneasy sense of anti-climax. The singers shuffled awkwardly on their feet and looked to Dai for leadership.

He bowed, shouted, ‘Well done boys!’ and returned to his seat. Everyone in the auditorium followed suit, but Mosley wasn’t a party leader for nothing. He stepped up to the microphone, and waited centre stage for absolute quiet.

‘Ladies ...’

‘There are no ladies here,’ Billy yelled. ‘We’ve more bloody sense than to let them loose near a man like you. They’d skin you alive.’

A burst of laughter rocked the auditorium, and again Mosley waited for quiet.

‘Gentlemen ...’

‘Why are we here, listening to the likes of him in a Town Hall that’s been built with blood money earned on the backs of men who’ve given their lives for coal?’ Dai shouted.

‘He’s right,’ another echoed. ‘No Blackshirt’s got a right to come here. There’s nothing that he or any of his henchmen could say that would interest us.’

A crescendo of voices joined in from the auditorium.

‘Everyone has the right to free speech,’ Evan was on his feet shouting as loud as any of them. ‘Without it –’

‘Without it he’d be put in a camp where his bloody mate Hitler is starving and beating the Communists and Jews in Germany,’ a voice to Evan’s left screamed.

‘What about the Jews, Mosley?’ Dai taunted.

‘Fascism means taking a pride in your country. It means a rebirth of nationalism ...’

‘It means torturing Jews!’ Dai stepped threateningly towards the stage and a Blackshirt grabbed him by the collar. The whole of the front row surged forward.

‘Break it up!’ The sergeant’s voice carried above the hubbub as he used the loud-hailer he’d kept hidden at his feet. ‘Break it up.’

The Blackshirt reluctantly released his hold on Dai’s collar.

A dozen policemen moved down the central aisle and motioned Mosley’s bodyguard to the side of the hall.

Half of them moved, dragging their heels to the accompaniment of boos and jeers from the angry crowd.

‘You’re not wanted here. Any of you,’ Billy yelled as the first of the line drew alongside the back row. ‘Why did you bother to come?’

‘You want jobs, don’t you?’ the Blackshirt shouted back in a Cockney accent. ‘A vote for Fascism is a vote for prosperity. Work, houses and cars for all those who are prepared to graft –’

Boos interrupted his impromptu speech. He waited until they died down. ‘What’s the matter?’ he mocked as soon as he could make himself heard. ‘Are the miners of South Wales afraid of hard work? Is that why you’re not even prepared to listen to what we have to say?’

‘You bastard! What do you know about hard work? You ever been underground?’ Billy vaulted over his seat and dived forward in a rugby-style tackle. Catching the Blackshirt off guard, he head-butted him in the chest, bowling him over. Pressing his advantage he thumped his fists into the soft part of the man’s stomach. Seeing the mass of Blackshirts closing in behind Billy, Evan leaped over the back of his seat.

Charlie tried to follow, but found himself jammed in by a solid wall of policemen surging forward from the back. The sight of one of their own in difficulties enraged the Blackshirts.

Billy was felled to his knees by a well-aimed kick to the back of his leg. Evan reached him just in time to see a uniformed bodyguard swing a punch at Billy’s head. All the pent-up anger and frustration of the past months exploded as Evan looked into the small eyes, pursed lips and fat face of the Blackshirt.

An ardent Communist who had never missed a meeting except for those that had coincided with his shifts when he had been working, Evan fervently believed that the miners of Wales had suffered nothing but injustice at the hands of the English government for years. The pit closures had sapped pride, broken spirits and brought poverty, starvation rations, cold, the means test and the very real threat of the workhouse, to his own and every miner’s family in the valleys. He was angry with everyone and everything: the government, for allowing the Valleys to suffer; the town councillors who had rented Mosley the Town Hall, allowing him to spread his filthy creed in Pontypridd; his wife for her constant sighs of martyrdom and for blaming him for the joyless, daily grind of their existence; and a fate that had brought sorrow to his beloved daughter at what should have been the happiest time of her life.

His temper snapped. He could do nothing to ease the greater miseries of his life, but he could do something about the bastards who were moving in on Billy.

He arced his fist wide, intending to land the Blackshirt immediately behind Billy a punch on the nose. A young policeman, also seeing the threat to Billy, moved in on the Blackshirt, pulling him aside just in time to receive the full force of Evan’s blow on his temple.

Apart from four porters who’d called in for beans on toast before their late shift in the workhouse, Ronconi’s café was empty, unimaginable on any normal Sunday evening. Tony paced restlessly from the counter to the kitchen and back, checking the stock of pies, pasties and Welsh cakes, chivvying Alma to peel more chips, hoping they’d have enough food to meet the demand of the rush he expected at the end of the meeting. He’d just picked up a clean, boiled rag to polish the steam urn when Eddie Powell burst through the door.

‘Is Dad or Charlie here?’ Eddie’s collar was turned up in an attempt to disguise his boxing strip, but it was obvious from the way his coat flapped loosely around him that he had very few clothes on underneath it.

‘No. Why, is the meeting over?’

‘There’s no getting near the Town Hall, Eddie.’ William ran in behind him. ‘The police have blocked off Market Square.’

‘What’s happening?’ Tony asked.

‘Wyn Rees couldn’t get into the Town Hall earlier, so he and a couple of the boys hung around outside for a while,’ William explained. ‘The sergeant moved them on when they sent up to the police station for reinforcements, so Wyn and the others called into the gym ...’

‘Then trouble’s broken out.’

‘And my father and Charlie are in the middle of it.’ Shivering, Eddie pushed his hands into his pockets as he sat down on the nearest chair.

‘Both of them have got enough sense to stay out of any punch-ups.’ Tony poured two teas and carried them over to Eddie’s table. ‘Which is more than I can say for you. I don’t know about your mam, Eddie, but mine would kill me for walking around with no clothes on like that.’

‘I was sparring when Wyn came in. I grabbed my trousers and coat and came here hoping to find Dad.’ Eddie took the tea and sipped it.

‘And I was playing cards in the changing rooms,’ William complained. ’Wyn couldn’t have picked a worse moment. I was just about to take a tanner off Dai Pickles.’

‘Eggs and vinegar Pickles?’ Tony referred to the trader who sold eggs and vinegar on the streets of the town from the back of a horse-drawn cart.

‘That’s the one, and he can well afford a tanner.’

Eddie looked through the window and down the deserted street. ‘You haven’t seen anyone from the meeting then, Tony?’

‘No one’s been in here. It’s been dead all night.’

‘What do you think?’ Eddie looked at William. ‘Go back to Market Square?’

‘I can’t see the coppers changing their minds about letting us through so there’s no point.’

‘Well I’d best go back to the gym and dress. I can’t go around like this all night.’ Eddie finished his tea and pushed his chair beneath the table.

‘Not if you don’t want to get arrested.’ Tony picked up the empty cup. ‘That’ll be a penny.’

‘For what?’

‘The tea.’

‘I thought ...’

‘You thought I was running a charity shop?’

Eddie put his hand into his pocket only to realise he’d left his money, along with the rest of his clothes, in the gym. ‘Will?’ He appealed to his cousin.

‘What am I, a bloody bank?’ Will grumbled.

‘I’ll give it back.’

‘The question is when.’

Eddie opened the door to the café. ‘Crowd coming,’ he shouted excitedly as a solid tide of men, flanked on both sides by police, marched up the centre of the bridge below the New Theatre.