All That Glitters (2 page)

‘Jane Jones, whatever do you think you’re doing? Just look at yourself. Your hands and face are filthy, and your dress – fresh on only four days ago – is covered in mud.’

It didn’t occur to Jane to protest that it was impossible to scrub outside steps and remain clean. Life hadn’t been fair in either of the orphanages, or the workhouse; and having no other kind of existence to compare it with, she simply accepted injustice as an immutable fact.

‘Get into that washroom this minute and clean yourself up. Six girls are wanted to line up for an employer who’s offering a live-in position. Although what he’ll say to the sight of a filthy ragamuffin like you, Jane Jones, I don’t know.’

Jane walked through the door that led into the ward, past the twin rows of beds each made with unbleached calico sheets and a single grey blanket, and into the tiled washroom. Three girls were washing at the row of sinks opposite the door. She walked past them to the toilet cubicles. Closing the door of the last one in the row, she listened hard. No one was close; she would have heard their breathing if they had been. The toilet in the cubicle was old and cracked. All the women avoided it, except Jane. Standing on the edge of the wooden half-seat she reached up to the cast-iron water tank high above her. The lid was heavy. Very heavy. But she managed to push it aside and open up a gap just wide enough to insert her fingers. Tied to a hook on the inside of the lid was her handkerchief, dripping wet, stained and filled with her precious hoard of coppers. Lifting it out, she returned the lid to its resting place and stepped down on to the floor. The cloth was soaking and slimy, difficult to untie. The sister shouted her name before she had slipped the first knot. She pulled down on the chain. There was no time to replace the handkerchief. She’d have to risk a search and the loss of all she owned. No inmate was allowed to keep money, not when the Board of Guardians needed every penny they could get to pay for the parish paupers’ keep.

She pushed the new penny into the makeshift purse. Lifting her dress she looked for loose threads she could tie the bundle to. Finding a few at the waist, she heaved until they frayed, knotted the ends of the handkerchief securely to them and pulled her dress down. She brushed at the freshest mud spots ineffectually with her fingers as she walked out of the cubicle. The handkerchief banged cold and wet against her naked skin. One of the worst things about the workhouse, and one she hadn’t got used to in two years, was the uniform: rough, wooden clogs, grey flannel dress and nothing else. No stockings, no petticoats, no bloomers, no underclothes. Unlike the children’s homes where winter and summer she had been stuffed into scratchy, itchy flannel knickers, vests, liberty bodices and petticoats. She’d never thought she’d miss them. But she did. Especially when she had to cross the open yards in breezes strong enough to lift her skirt.

‘Hurry,’ Eira Williams, the trainee nurse, urged as Jane washed her hands and face. Jane rubbed a wafer of hard yellow soap vigorously between her hands in a vain attempt to produce a lather. The sister’s voice echoed in through the open window from the yard as she commanded the girls who had already obeyed her summons: ‘Square your shoulders, stand up straight, and get into line.’

‘What’s the job, Nurse Williams?’ Jane knew that the trainee should be addressed as ‘trainee’ not nurse, but hoped that flattery would gain her a few crumbs of knowledge.

‘Something you’ll steer clear of if you’ve any sense.’ Eira walked to the door. Sister was still talking to the Master and only three of the girls ordered to the line-up were in place. There were a few minutes to spare. ‘It’s a dosshouse over in Trallwn. Off Foundry Place. The couple who run it have taken two girls out of here in the last year and both have come back to the unmarrieds’ ward. They say it’s the class of girl we supply them with, but I’ve heard different from the staff on unmarrieds. Poor girls didn’t stand a chance.’

‘Williams! Is that girl ready yet?’

‘Coming, Sister.’

Walking clumsily in her heavy clogs, Jane stumbled outside and into line. She was the last to arrive. Keeping her head low she focused on the ground at her feet just as her housemother in Church Village Homes had taught her.

‘They’re all good workers and strong, healthy girls.’ The Master extolled their virtues as though he were selling livestock. ‘I appreciate you’ve been unlucky with your last two, but I guarantee you won’t have problems with any of these. The first four -’ he nodded towards the end of the line where Jane was standing ‘- are orphans. Born here, and bred in the homes. I can vouch for their religious and moral training.’

‘What about this one?’ The obese woman Jane had seen at the gate pointed to a girl in the middle of the line. The sturdily built fair-haired girl began to tremble. Jane had no time for her. The job might be hard work, the man someone no sane woman would want to be left alone with, the woman grotesque, but collectively they offered a way out – an escape route from behind the ten-foot walls that towered over every waking and sleeping moment. She was prepared to do whatever was necessary to gain her freedom after eighteen years lived out behind barred windows. Drawing herself up to her full height, which was barely five foot in her stockinged feet, she raised her eyes and stared at the man in the hope of catching his eye. He was at the other end of the line listening to his companion’s observations on the fair-haired girl.

‘The big ones are too slow,’ he said dismissively. ‘Remember the first one we took in?’ His fleshy, ruddy face contorted as he spat a ball of phlegm on to the yard. Jane wondered if his high colour and broken veins came from too many beers, or too many hours spent toasting in front of a hot fire. She’d had no experience of beer and very little of fires or men, but she had once overheard two porters discussing a third. Perhaps the man had simply gone red and fat with age. His suit had evidently been made for a thinner man, possibly even himself at a younger age. Now, the cloth strained, tighter than skin across his shoulders, and the buttons on his jacket wouldn’t even meet the edge of the cloth let alone the buttonholes. Even his thighs looked like two bloated sausages ready to burst out of the rind of worsted that held them in check. He was big – weightier than any man she’d seen before. It certainly wouldn’t be as easy to knee him in the groin and push him away as she had the boys in the homes. But that was a bridge she’d cross when she came to it. After he’d taken her out through that gate. Wearing her most determined smile, she glanced coyly at him from beneath lowered lashes.

‘What about this one?’ He lumbered towards her, his eyes focusing on the bodice of her shapeless smock. Jane breathed in, and pushed out the small, plum-sized breasts the other girls teased her about.

‘Too skinny.’

‘The skinny ones are generally quick and strong.’

‘I can vouch for that one being a good, hard worker,’ the Master interposed. ‘And she’s not that long out of Church Village Homes.’

‘It doesn’t take long to pick up bad habits, and this place must be rotten with them if our last two girls were anything to go by,’ the woman commented tartly.

‘She’s used to working on her own initiative. Give her a job to do and shell see it through without too much supervision.’ The Master looked to the man, sensing that the decision would ultimately be his.

‘We’ll take her. With us right now, if that suits.’

‘It suits.’ The Master gave a rare, tight smile. The Board of Guardians were always pleased when a pauper was taken for outside work.

‘Salad, steak and chips for Sunday dinner and no husband in sight?’ Haydn looked enquiringly at Bethan as a girl in maid’s uniform carried loaded trays into the dining room.

‘We eat dinner at eight, and you heard Andrew, he has to work.’

‘On a Sunday?’

‘People don’t stay well just because it’s a Sunday. He and Trevor Lewis take it in turns to cover for emergencies, and it’s easier for them to work out of the surgery they’ve opened in town. And then again -’ she pushed the plate of steak across to her brother ‘- he’s trying to be tactful. He thought we might like to talk.’

‘Last time I saw you I didn’t think you’d live with him again. Not even in a place like this.’ He glanced around the large, beautifully proportioned oak-panelled dining room.

‘I love Andrew, and he loves me.’

‘You could have fooled me.’

‘It hasn’t been easy, Haydn, for either of us. There are times, even now, when I think that if we’d known what we were getting ourselves into when we danced together for the first time at that hospital ball, we would have run in opposite directions. Marriage is hard enough when the husband and wife are from the same world. We might have both been born in Pontypridd, but Dad was right when he said there was a lot more than distance between the Graig and the Common.’

‘But you want to live with him now, Beth?’ He laid his hand over hers as she reached for the salad.

‘Most definitely, yes.’ She smiled at him and this time the smile wasn’t strained.

‘So, you decided to kidnap me on my way home to gloat about your new-found happiness, and ask me to be nice to Andrew?’

‘Not exactly,’ She helped herself to a large portion of salad and a smaller one of beefsteak. ‘I wanted to talk to you about the changes at home.’

‘Eddie’s married?’ he joked. There was an edge to his voice. His brother Eddie had filched and, he suspected, slept with his childhood sweetheart Jenny, just before he’d left Pontypridd, giving him good cause to stay away – until now.

‘Of course not. Eddie’s the same as ever.’

‘Boxing?’

‘Every spare minute. And he and William are both working full time on the meat stall and in the cooked-meat shop Charlie’s opened.’

‘Good to have an affluent lodger.’

‘Charlie doesn’t lodge with Dad any more. He married Alma Moore a couple of weeks ago. They’re living on top of his shop.’

‘Charlie married Alma? You’ve got to be joking?’

‘I’m not. They seem very happy together.’

‘Good for Charlie. I never thought he had it in him.’

‘William and Diana are still lodging with Dad of course,’ she said, referring to their cousins. ‘Diana’s working for Wyn Rees in his High Street sweet shop.’

‘So I heard the last time I came home.’ He put down his knife and fork and stared at her. ‘You’re building up to something, Beth. Come on, out with it. Has Dad done something to get himself put back behind bars?’

‘I don’t think he’ll ever swing a punch at a policeman again.’

‘Then it has to be Mam. Despite all the names she called Dad when she walked out on him, now he’s been released she’s come back from Uncle Bull’s to give him a hard time?’

‘Mam won’t come back. Not now.’

‘That’s not so terrible is it, Beth?’ He heaped his plate high with chips, sprinkled them liberally with vinegar and began to eat. ‘It’s not as if they were ever really happy together. When we were kids …’

‘That’s just the point. They never were happy together. Not for one minute. But they are now. Or at least Dad is. Haydn, there’s no way to tell you this except straight out. Dad wanted to write, but he kept putting it off, so when we got your letter saying that you were coming back I offered to tell you for him.’ Taking a deep breath she looked her brother squarely in the eye. ‘He’s living with Phyllis Harry. They share the same bedroom,’ she added, making sure there could be no misunderstanding.

‘Phyllis? But she had a baby a year or so back …’

‘It’s Dad’s, Haydn. Our half-brother.’

‘Half-brother?’

‘His name is Brian. He’s the image of our Eddie when he was small,’ she continued, taking advantage of his stunned silence. ‘You’ll like him. Phyllis too, when you get to know her. She’s good for Dad. They suit one another. They’re happy.’

‘Happy!’ He threw back his head and laughed. A brittle, mirthless laugh that set Bethan’s teeth on edge. ‘That’s absolutely bloody priceless.’

‘You just said he was never happy,’ she protested, allowing his swearing to pass without comment. ‘And neither was Mam. Well now they’ve both got what they want. Mam’s back teaching, and he’s -’

‘He’s living in sin with his bit on the side and his bastard.’

‘It’s not like that!’ she exclaimed angrily.

‘Then what is it like? My God, when I think of all those lectures on clean living, going to church, staying out of theatres …’

That was Mam, never Dad, and you know it.’

‘Just tell me one thing,’ He picked up the bottle of beer the maid had placed next to his plate and poured it into his glass with an unsteady hand. ‘What do your precious, respectable husband and in-laws think about our father living in sin with the mother of his bastard?’ He laid an emphasis on the last word that made her flinch.

‘Andrew knows about Phyllis, he likes her. Dad and Phyllis often visit with Brian, just as the rest of the family do.’

‘But not Mam?’

‘After she walked out she didn’t want anything to do with any of us. She didn’t even answer my letters.’

‘She turned up at your son’s funeral.’

‘To tell me that Edmund’s death was God’s retribution for my sins. Haydn, what’s the matter with you? I never expected you, of all people, to react like this.’

‘Like what, Beth?’ He drank his beer. ‘Can’t you see that I’m overjoyed at the thought of sharing my home with a bastard and a … what do we call her?’

‘Try Phyllis. Look, if that’s the way you feel you don’t have to live at home. You can stay here. We have more than enough room.’

‘And miss the opportunity of living in the bosom of my father’s new-found family. Oh no, not for worlds.’

‘Haydn …’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll be polite. You won’t be able to fault a word I say. Just one thing.’ He jabbed his fork in the air. ‘I won’t answer for what I’ll do to anyone in the family or outside who dares criticise the way I live. If I choose to sleep with every girl in the Revue and the town, and get drunk twice a night, I’ll regard it as entirely my own business.’

Exhausted and defeated, Bethan stared at her plate. It was difficult enough trying to engineer the fairy-tale happy ending for herself and Andrew without bringing her entire family into the scenario. Haydn and her father would have to work out their problems just as she and Andrew were trying to do. She’d done all she could – for now.