Authors: Catrin Collier
All That Glitters (46 page)
‘Then I’ll tell Papa we’re getting married.’
‘No, please. Not until after tomorrow.’
‘Then we’ll tell everyone the day after tomorrow. We’ll buy the ring then. This isn’t just about... about you staying on at the café,’ he stammered in embarrassment. ‘I want to marry you.’
‘I know, Tony,’ she echoed, hoping and praying he’d still feel the same way about her and marriage – after tomorrow night.
As the radio concert of Tchaikovsky’s sixth symphony drew to a close, Alma Raschenko looked up from her knitting at her husband, who was sitting in an easy chair across the hearth from her.
‘You haven’t told me how it went in the recruiting office.’ By nature, Charlie was a silent uncommunicative man, and it had taken Alma months to become accustomed to his ways, and to understand that the silences between them didn’t necessarily mean that he was unhappy, troubled, angry, or that he loved her any the less. But there was a considerable difference between his silences and the full-blown argument that had flared between them last night when he had told her of his intention to join the Welsh Guards. Feeling betrayed, abandoned and resentful, she hadn’t exchanged a word with him above the absolutely essential since he had returned to the shop with William Powell early that afternoon.
A frown creased his forehead as his white-blond hair fell low over his eyes. ‘It went as I expected it to.’ He folded the newspaper he’d been reading.
‘They signed you up along with the boys?’
‘They signed up the boys. They didn’t want an alien.’
She tensed the muscles in her face, forcing them to remain rigid. They didn’t want him! She suppressed the instinct to fling herself into his arms and cover his face with kisses. That meant he’d stay with her, here in Pontypridd, and continue to run his shop for the duration. Of course the war would make a difference, especially to their profits, but she’d been poor before and survived the experience. Poverty held no terrors for her in comparison to Charlie’s absence.
He left his chair and walked to the window that looked out over Taff Street.
‘The blackout,’ she warned as he laid his hand on the curtain.
‘I forgot.’
Sticking her needles into the wool, she left it on the chair and joined him. ‘Feodor,’ she murmured. He liked to hear the sound of his Russian name, and she was the only one who used it. The rest of Pontypridd, even old friends like Evan Powell and his nephew William who worked for them, called him Charlie, as she had quite deliberately done since their argument last night. ‘Don’t let this alien business upset you. People aren’t boycotting the shop, trade is as good as it ever was. Everyone in the town thinks of you as one of us -’
‘But I’m not one of you,’ he burst in harshly. ‘I am one of the same breed who marched into Poland.’
‘No,’ she countered firmly. ‘You’re my husband. You took on my nationality when you married me. This is your home now.’
‘A home I cannot leave between ten-thirty at night and six in the morning.’ He walked away from the window and went to the fire, kicking down the coals with the heel of his boot.
‘What difference does that make?’ she asked practically. ‘We’re up too early to go out late at night.’
‘Before this, I could have if I’d wanted to,’ he retorted testily. ‘This country gets more like Russia every day.’
‘Only because we’re at war.’ She picked up her knitting and stowed it in the brass slipper box next to her chair. He had told her a little – a very little – of his past in Russia: just enough for her to guess at what he had suffered there. She knew that he had lost everything to the Communist regime. Home, family, wife and unborn child, and her greatest fear since he’d told her of his wife’s existence was that one day he’d go back to try to find her. The remote possibility had loomed a more likely spectre since the outbreak of war. Her geography was shaky, but she knew that Britain was separated from France by the English Channel, and there was no strip of water to divide France from Russia. But when she had tried to confide her fears to Feodor last night, he had laughed and tried to tell her just how great a distance separated France from Russia. She hadn’t wanted to listen. The continent was the continent, and her husband had another wife there, and if that wife was alive she would undoubtedly want him back. Because anyone who had known and lived with Charlie simply couldn’t help loving him.
‘You tried, darling,’ she consoled, trying not to allow her relief to show. ‘If they don’t want you, there’s nothing you can do about it.’
There was an abstracted look in his eyes. ‘They didn’t say they didn’t want me, only that they wanted to interview me again. In Cardiff, on Monday.’
‘But why?’
‘They wouldn’t say.’
‘Is it something to do with Russia invading Poland along with Germany? Could they be secret allies?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Everyone is saying that it’s better for the Poles to be living under the red flag of Communism than under the heel of the jackboot.’
For the first time in two days a glimmer of a smile crossed his face. ‘Who’s been telling you that?’
‘Evan.’
‘Ah, the Red Miners’ brigade.’ He wrapped a heavily muscled arm around her waist. ‘They ought to be careful what they ask for. If they are ever forced to live under the red flag, they’ll discover the reality of Communism is very different from the ideology.’ He looked down at her. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have been angry with you yesterday. But joining the Guards is important to me.’
‘Because you feel the need to be more Welsh than the Welsh?’
‘You understand me so well. I’m sorry I can’t be a better husband.’
‘You’re a perfect husband, which is why I don’t want to lose you.’
‘You won’t.’
‘I might if you join the army.’
‘I have too much to live for to get in the way of any bullets.’
‘Feodor …’
‘Enough talk, let’s go to bed.’ He hooked the guard in front of the fire and opened the door. She glanced around the living room before she switched off the light. She had a great deal to be grateful for. Feodor had spared no expense on the flat above the shop. The living room was comfortable and carpeted, and there was even a tiled bathroom with hot water on tap, fed from the range in the kitchen. Her mother, who was frail and blind, lived with them and Charlie had taken special care with her room, furnishing it with padded, upholstered furniture so she wouldn’t hurt herself even if she did get the odd knock, taking it for granted that his wife’s mother was a part of their small family, never once complaining about her presence or about having to shoulder the responsibility of another mouth to feed.
She was happy, and not only because life was comfortable for her and her mother for the first time in their lives. Charlie’s shop, the flat and their high standard of living were only the trimmings. She could survive without them. But Charlie was the bedrock of her existence, and she would sooner not live at all than without him.
As she lay awake in the blacked-out bedroom, her hand resting on Charlie’s chest, monitoring the quiet, measured beat of his heart, she was struck by a paralysing panic attack. It carried the same spine-chilling dread as the fear of death she’d experienced as a child, when she’d first discovered that she too was mortal and would one day lie in a grave like her father. She simply couldn’t, and didn’t want to, imagine a life where Charlie wouldn’t sleep beside her each and every night.
‘The war won’t last for ever. If they let me go, I’ll be back.’
She recovered enough to tighten her hold on him, but her blood continued to run cold at the thought of the interview on Monday. An interview conducted by men who didn’t know – or care – what Charlie meant to her.
‘I promise you, Alma, no matter what, if they let me go, I’ll be back.’
As he moved towards her, kissed her lips, her hair, her breasts, she tried to immerse herself in the sweet familiarity of his lovemaking and quell the logic that led her to question the value of such a promise from any man who actually wanted to go to war.
