Beggars and Choosers (35 page)

As a final touch, Sali arranged sprigs of holly over the picture frames, filled a vase with more and set it in the centre of the mantelpiece.

‘Tomorrow night, we'll hang our stockings in a row along here,' Victor informed Harry, running his fingers over the brass rail below the mantelpiece. ‘And, provided we are all good and go to bed early, Father Christmas will park his sleigh on the roof, climb down the chimney and fill them full of nice things.'

Harry looked to his mother for confirmation.

‘Victor is right, darling.'

‘I'll have presents?'

‘If you are a good boy.' She picked him up and swung him on to her back. ‘But now it's bedtime.'

‘Can I have a story?' he begged.

‘Two, as soon as you are curled up in bed, because you have been such a help in decorating the tree and fetching it and the holly from the farm.'

‘Not to mention the mistletoe.' Joey pinned a sprig over the door just as Sali was about to walk through it. ‘Kiss?'

‘That only works on Christmas Day.' Ducking under his arm, she ran into the passage.

‘Can Uncle Victor and Uncle Joey listen to the story?' Harry asked.

‘It's their playtime,' Sali answered, loud enough for Victor and Joey to hear.

‘Will I have playtime in the dark when I'm grown up like them?'

Joey and Victor's laughter followed them as they climbed the stairs.

‘Not if I can help it, Harry,' she replied, stifling her own mirth.

‘The minute you are old enough, Harry, we'll take you out to play in the dark, no matter what your mam says,' Joey shouted up the stairs.

Sali checked the clock when she returned to the kitchen. Although it felt later, it was only eight o'clock. Victor and Joey wouldn't be home before ten and Mr Evans never returned from the County Club before a quarter to. For all of Lloyd's assertions that he would be early, she knew that once he went down to Connie's to do the accounts he was gone for the evening. She presumed he went on to one of the pubs or the County Club to drink with his father.

It would only take half an hour to heat up two buckets of water on the range. She could have a bath. A luxurious, hot bath, which she hadn't enjoyed since she had left Danygraig House.

She ran downstairs, set the water on to boil, then went upstairs to fetch a clean nightgown, robe and the expensive soap and perfume her aunt had given her when she had been in the infirmary. Harry was fast asleep, his arm around Mr Bear. She tucked him and the bear beneath the flannel sheets and returned to the basement. After a moment's hesitation she slid the bolt home on the door connected to the front of the house. There was little likelihood of her being disturbed, and no one would come round the back of the house at this time of night, but just in case ...

Lloyd met a miner who had lost his arm in a pit accident outside the Cross Keys pub. He was selling ‘Yule' logs from an old baby carriage and despite their well-stocked wood shed, Lloyd bought half a dozen for the parlour fire and insisted on standing the man a Christmas drink, which became three when they met another two colliers who had once worked shifts with them.

Reflecting on his lack of willpower and broken promise to return early, Lloyd carried the logs and the mistletoe round to the back of the house. He burst in through the basement door just as Sali rose, naked from the bath.

They stared at one another for a single, blindingly awkward moment. Blushing, Sali turned and reached for a towel.

‘Sali, your back!' Appalled at the sight of her scars, he loosened his hold on the logs and they plummeted, crashing on to the flagstones. He retreated outside and stood for a moment in the cold night air staring up at a sliver of moon surrounded by stars. He had assumed the injuries to Sali's face had been inflicted in a bout of drunken anger. But the scars on her back weren't the result of a single beating. She had been thrashed systematically and often, and for the first time, he understood her fear of Owen Bull and why she wouldn't take her son to live with her aunt in the comfort of Ynysangharad House.

A man capable of stripping the skin from the back of a helpless woman wouldn't hesitate to attack a frail, elderly woman – or child. Lloyd recalled Harry's reaction when his father had reached over his head for his cap when the boy had first come to live with them. He burned to destroy the man who had blighted Harry's babyhood, and transformed Sali Watkin Jones from the happy carefree student with whom he had been slightly acquainted into the terrified, scarred and brow-beaten woman who had applied for the job of their housekeeper.

He never knew what prompted him to act as he did and he never attempted to analyse his reasons. He only knew that the moment he thought of opening the door and stepping inside, nothing could have stopped him.

Sali was still standing in the bath clutching the towel around her and fumbling for her nightgown when Lloyd returned. Terrified, frozen, she watched him move towards her and she felt as though time had slowed. It seemed to take hours for him to reach her, and when he did, he cupped her face in his hands and kissed her so tenderly and gently she couldn't be sure that his lips had touched hers.

She pulled the towel closer and shivered as he released her. Lifting her from the bath, he carried her to the table, set her on the edge and brushed the towel aside. She thought of her uncle and Owen. The assaults they had made on her body. Crying out in distress she grabbed the towel.

‘I'm sorry. I didn't understand.' Lloyd ran his fingertips lightly over the scars on her back.

‘It wasn't just Owen.' Tears trickled, cold and wet down her cheeks. ‘After Mansel ... after he ... my uncle ...' The shame and degradation of her uncle's assault engulfed her in an crushing wave of self-loathing that had lost none of its intensity with the passage of time. She fought for breath, as once again she smelled the sour stench of his pomade, heard his quick panting gasps as he raped her, felt his damp sweating hands around her neck, suffocating, squeezing ...'

‘Sali!'

She opened her eyes and saw Lloyd looking intently at her. He murmured something, but gripped in the trauma of the most devastating night of her life, she didn't hear a word he said.

‘I tried to fight him ... I really tried ...' Her voice rose hysterically as she pleaded for understanding. ‘He was so strong I couldn't stop him ... And afterwards ... after what he did to me ... I had to marry Owen or my sister and brothers would suffer because of my shame and Owen ... Owen ... he...' She dissolved into tears and Lloyd gathered her close to him.

‘Owen said I was a whore,' she sobbed. ‘That he did horrible things to me because I was full of sin and made him do them ... That I wasn't fit to be with decent people ...'

‘And you believed him?' Lloyd slipped his fingers beneath her chin lifting her head until she met his steady gaze. ‘Decent men don't rape women or flay the skin from their back, Sali.'

‘I'm sorry ...'

‘You have nothing to be sorry for. If there is such a thing as sin, you were the innocent sinned against.' He kissed her again, lightly on the forehead intending to release her, but she clung to him, burying her head in his chest in the hope that he wouldn't see her tears.

He stroked her face gently with the back of his hand, smoothing the damp hair away from her forehead with his fingertips. His touch was light, loving, so chaste and gentle she could almost believe that she was a child again. She wished with all her heart that she was an innocent and precious child cosseted and cared for in the safety of the nursery of Danygraig House.

‘Put the past behind you, Sali. None of it was your fault.' He turned her head and kissed away her tears. She gazed at him in wonder, realising for the first time that a grown man could be capable of tenderness.

His lips sought hers, and slowly, tentatively she returned his embrace. Almost before she realised what was happening they were kissing again, a heady, intense kiss that percolated through her lips to her entire body, setting her skin and nerve endings tingling and the blood scorching through her veins.

Weak, dizzy, she gazed into his eyes as softly and delicately he continued to explore her body, first with his fingertips, then later, after he had lowered her back on to the table, with his lips and tongue, evoking strange new sensations and desires she had never suspected herself of possessing.

He reached for something in his pocket and stripped off his clothes. Moments later, they were both lost. Immersed and absorbed in an intense new world where nothing existed outside of the fierce hunger they had aroused within one another. But even then, his movements were unhurried and leisurely as he controlled his ardour and taught her to subsume hers, until the shattering instant they climaxed in a sweeping wave of emotion that left her spent, exhausted and yet, calm, fulfilled and more alive than she had ever felt in her entire life.

Sali felt cold and bereft when Lloyd withdrew from her, and went to the tap. She fled to the other side of the basement. Turning her back to him she returned to the bath, washed and slipped her nightgown over her head, put on her robe and picked up her soap and perfume.

‘I didn't mean for that to happen.'

She looked up and saw him watching her. She was devastated by his confession. He had used her, just like Mansel, her uncle, Owen ... no, not like her uncle and Owen, nothing at all like them!

‘We have to talk, but not now. My father and brothers will be in any minute. Leave that,' he ordered, as she went to lift the bath by the handles. ‘I'll clean up here. You go to bed. I'll see you tomorrow after work. We can take Harry for a walk around the town.'

She pushed her feet into her slippers.

‘Goodnight, Sali,' he called after her, as she ran up the stairs.

She snapped two fingernails to the quick in her impatience to pull back the bolt. She heard water running downstairs as he rinsed out the bath followed by the scrape of zinc against stone as he hung it back on the wall.

Terrified of meeting Victor, Joey or Mr Evans lest they see her and guess something had happened, she ran up the stairs, dived into her room and closed the door.

How could she have been so foolish as to risk her and Harry's home? Was it simply as Owen and her uncle had said? Was she was a whore, a woman who liked to do sinful things?

And she was married! She had stood in chapel and sworn before God to take Owen Bull and forsake all others.

She sat on the bed in the freezing cold room, hating herself for what she had done and wishing she still believed in God so she could get down on her knees and pray for forgiveness.

‘Who is it?'

‘Me, Connie.'

‘Lloyd?' Connie opened her private door set beside the shop entrance and peered outside to see Lloyd's tall figure framed in the light of the gas lamp behind him.

‘There's something wrong with the figures I added up this evening,' he fabricated, seeing Annie O'Leary's tall thin figure, and Antonia's more curvaceous form move behind Connie in the hallway.

‘And you came round at this hour?'

‘It's serious, Connie. I didn't want you to start trading tomorrow until I sorted it.'

She opened the door. ‘Go into the office. I'll be down as soon as I've put some clothes on.'

Lloyd sat in the chair behind the desk, flicked through the ledger he had left there, rose and went to the fireplace. Leaning on the mantelpiece, he stared down at the dying embers of the fire. Unable to stay still, he paced uneasily from the hearthrug to the window and back.

‘There isn't really an error in the accounts, is there?' Connie was in the doorway, her long dark hair hanging loose, framing her face, a navy blue woollen robe belted tightly at her waist.

‘No,' he answered quietly.

She closed the door and stepped into the room. ‘Something's happened to you and, by that look on your face, I'd say it's happened with another woman.'

‘How do you know?'

‘I've been waiting for you to say something ever since the bruises faded on that pretty face of hers, Lloyd.'

‘It was that obvious?'

‘I've never seen you together, but from the way you have been talking about her, or rather refusing to talk about her, I guessed.' She was unable to keep the bitterness from her voice.

‘I didn't know until tonight.'

‘You made love to her?' She sat on the sofa and linked her hands around her knees, holding herself rigidly upright so he wouldn't see her trembling. From the fixed expression on his face she realised that no amount of angry raving on her part would have the slightest impact on his resolution. The fact that he was visiting her openly, and at this hour of the night spoke volumes for his state of mind. Steeling herself, she muttered, ‘I wish you well, Lloyd.'

‘You mean that?' He stared at her.

‘I do,' she replied insincerely, forcing a smile. ‘We've been good friends. Good, loving friends. Please, let it remain that way.'

‘Without the loving, Connie,' he warned. ‘There can never be any more of that.'

‘Pity. That, I'm going to miss. You were exceptionally good at it, and believe me, I'm an expert judge.'

‘You never told me.'

‘You were so considerate and anxious to please I didn't want you to get overconfident. She's a lucky girl, Lloyd, and I'll tell her so the next time I meet her.'

‘Please don't.'

‘You haven't told her that you love her?'

He went to the door. ‘If you want me to carry on doing your books, I'll do them at home.'

‘I'd prefer to hire a bookkeeper.'

‘It might be for the best.'

‘Go.' Hysteria welled within her and she rose to her feet, pushing him away from her. ‘Go, before you have me crying. You know how I hate sentimentality.'

After he left, she heard someone lock and bolt the front door. A draught set the fire flickering again, and she looked to the door. Annie was standing behind her, her hair in rags, her red flannel robe wound tightly around her thin frame.