Finders and Keepers (2 page)

‘Miss Prissy Bossy Boots,' Edyth chanted the nickname she and their three younger sisters had invented for Bella. She stuck her thumbs in her ears and wiggled her fingers.

‘Very pretty, Edyth.' Bella settled her handbag squarely on her lap.

Harry listened to his sisters squabbling while he stowed his luggage in the boot of his car. ‘You two make me feel as though I've well and truly arrived home.' He climbed into the driving seat beside his mother and pressed the ignition. The engine roared into life. ‘How is Dad?'

‘Working too hard organizing the miners' strike as well as seeing to his parliamentary duties. I wish he'd take it easy,' Sali answered.

‘He wouldn't be Dad if he did.'

‘You're right.' Sali had married Lloyd Evans when Harry was four years old. Harry had adored Lloyd then, and they had grown even closer after the five girls had been born, sticking together as the ‘men' in the family.

‘Mind you, I never thought the miners would hold out alone for so long after the General Strike was called off in May.' Harry stopped the car so a cart could cross from Taff Street into Market Square in front of them.

‘If there's one thing I've learned in seventeen years of marriage to an Evans, it's that the miners will carry on every fight until the absolute bitter end.' Sali waved to the doorman of Gwilym James as they passed the Taff Street entrance of the store.

Harry heard a slap, and suspected that Bella had finally lost her temper and lashed out at Edyth. He leaned back towards the rear seat, and asked, ‘So who is going to be at this party?'

‘Everyone.' Edyth draped her arms around Sali's neck and rested her head on her mother's shoulder. ‘All the uncles, the aunts, the cousins, heaps of friends. But you'll be sorry to hear that Bella invited Alice Reynolds -'

‘She's a friend,' Bella interrupted.

‘Some friend. She only talks to us because she's stuck on Harry. She clung to him like a slug on lettuce at our Christmas party. All slime and simpering smiles -'

‘Really, Edyth, I don't know where you get your ideas from. Slugs are disgusting creatures,' Bella said.

‘So is Alice Reynolds, and you're beginning to sound more like a schoolmarm every day. I bet you're going to die a dried-up old spinster, Belle.'

‘Edyth, enough!' Sali reverted to the ‘special' voice she used to silence her children whenever their bickering turned ugly.

‘You don't have to worry about me and Alice Reynolds, Edyth, she's a baby.' Harry steered the car through the main gates of the private drive to Ynysangharad House.

‘She's the same age as me,' Bella bristled.

‘Sorry, Belle, but she's nowhere near as mature as you.' Hoping he'd mollified his sister with the compliment, Harry winked at his mother and slowed the car to a walking pace. The afternoon was warm, the garden perfumed with the scent of roses. ‘That music doesn't sound as though it's coming from a gramophone.'

‘Striking miners.' Sali straightened her scarf and eased a wrinkle from one of her kid gloves. ‘A few of them formed a jazz band using instruments donated by the union. Your father asked them to play for us today.'

Harry stopped outside the front door and pulled on the handbrake. Seconds later a sea of family and friends poured out of the house and engulfed the car.

‘Surprise!' Nine-year-old Susie tugged open the driver's door and his three younger sisters piled on to him.

‘Maggie, Beth, Susie.' He kissed each of them in turn.

‘I've learned the Charleston, Harry, so you have to dance with me.'

‘I'm older than you, Susie, so you have to dance with me first, Harry.'

‘And I'm older than both of you, Beth, so that means he'll dance with me first.'

‘Edyth and I are older than the three of you.' Bella took the hand of a boy about her own age, who opened the door for her and helped her out of the car.

Before Harry had a chance to ask Bella to introduce him to her friend, a shrill voice resounded above the chatter.

‘What about me?' Two-year-old Glyn, his only brother and the youngest member of the family, who Lloyd joked was Sali's ‘best ever afterthought', was struggling to escape their father's arms.

‘What about you, little man?' Harry took him from Lloyd, left the car and set him on his shoulders. He shook his father's hand, kissed his aunts and, surrounded by his cousins, went inside. The band had set up in the hall, so they could be heard throughout the house, and they broke into the strains of ‘For He's a Jolly Good Fellow' as soon as Harry walked through the door. Harry stopped and, feeling slightly foolish, stood with Glyn on his shoulders until everyone finished singing.

Sensing his embarrassment, Sali guided him towards the French doors in the dining room. They made slow progress as people continually stopped him to offer their congratulations on his degree and wish him well in Paris. Trestle tables had been set up outside on the terrace, and they were covered with plates of savouries, sandwiches, cakes, jellies and blancmanges.

‘Mari's outdone herself.' Harry looked around for their housekeeper.

‘She has, but none of us have succeeded in getting her out of the kitchen.' Sali took Glyn from him and handed the toddler a fairy cake.

‘I've told the others that I'm first and that's all there is to it.' Harry's youngest sister, Susie, who had all the confidence of a girl twice her age, grabbed his hand and pulled him back towards the house when the band struck up ‘Yes, Sir, That's My Baby'.

‘What about Maggie and Beth?' Harry asked when they reached the middle of the drawing room where the dancers had congregated.

‘I told them Mari needed help in the kitchen.'

‘And did she?' Harry resolved to pay the housekeeper a visit as soon as he could get away.

Susie just grinned before waving her hands and kicking her legs in an imitation of the chorus girls at the Town Hall.

‘Sorry you have five sisters,' Lloyd commiserated when Harry managed to escape into the library five dances later to join the men who had laid claim to the room as a refuge and smoking parlour.

‘Sorry Edyth hasn't learned to be more careful with that cast.' He rubbed his arm. ‘I haven't been back in Pontypridd an hour and she's managed to thump me twice. Uncle Joey, thank you.' He took the cigarette his father's youngest brother offered him. ‘And thank you very much for the wallet you sent me when I graduated. I hope you and Aunty Rhian got my letter.'

‘We did.' Joey lit Harry's cigarette.

‘And thank you for the pen, Uncle Victor.' He shook his father's younger brother's hand. ‘It was much appreciated.'

‘First Oxford graduate in the Evans family – you deserve something special. But I don't deserve the thanks, Megan chose it. What would we do without our women?'

‘Have more money in our pockets to get drunk on every night?' Joey suggested. He had been strikingly good-looking before the war but the years in the trenches and serious wounds had taken a toll on his health.

‘It's just as well Rhian knows you don't mean a tenth of what you say.' Victor passed round a plate of sausage rolls he'd filched from one of the tables outside.

‘I won't be the last one in this family to graduate from Oxford. Not with the number of cousins I have.' Harry looked around the room. ‘Isn't Granddad here?'

‘He complained he couldn't breathe in here so he went outside.' Lloyd handed him an ashtray.

‘How is he?' Harry asked. Billy Evans had lost the lower part of one of his legs in a train accident fifteen years before. Forced to leave mining, he hadn't allowed his disability to stop him from moving in with Victor and Megan so he could help Victor out on his farm. But it wasn't only the loss of his leg that had affected his health. Like most miners who had spent twenty or more years underground he had succumbed to ‘miner's lung'.

‘You know Dad.' Victor swallowed a mouthful of sausage roll. ‘He's not one to complain. Even when he's in pain.'

‘You're a brave lady venturing into the men's lair,' Joey said archly to Alice Reynolds, who was standing on tip-toe in the doorway.

‘I'm looking for Harry. It's a lady's excuse me.'

‘Far be it from me to interfere with a lady's wishes.' Joey divested Harry of his cigarette and pushed him towards Alice. Linking her arm into his, Alice led Harry back into the drawing room.

‘Please, not near Edyth,' Harry begged.

Edyth was flinging around her one good arm and both legs under the pretext of teaching her younger sisters the Charleston. Harry felt sorry for Maggie, Beth and Susie, who all received a couple of inadvertent kicks from her. He also noticed Bella dancing a practised and more expert version with the boy who'd helped her from the car.

‘Bella has a boyfriend?' Harry asked his mother as soon as the dance was over and he'd managed to shake off Alice.

‘Gareth Michaels.' Sali glanced across the room at them. ‘He's seventeen and so smitten it's painful to watch the way she treats him.'

‘Isn't she a little young to be going out with boys?'

‘The protective older brother.' Sali looked amused. ‘So far he's only taken her to the church social. Perhaps I should remind you how old you were when you escorted your first girlfriend to the theatre.'

‘Point taken.' Harry followed Sali back outside. She retrieved Glyn, who was sitting on the grass watching Joey's youngest son and daughters play ball.

‘Too much cake isn't good for one small boy, Glyn.' She took an iced bun from him and wiped the crumbs from his mouth. ‘I hope everyone is enjoying themselves.'

‘Judging by the smiles on their faces, they seem to be. It was a brilliant idea to hold a last party here.' Harry looked up at the house. ‘It's a pity it had to be sold but Dad and the trustees were right – a house this size needs an army of servants to run it. And in this day and age it's simply not practical.' He smiled wryly. ‘Despite Dad's Marxist ideals, we enjoyed the best of the vanishing world of the privileged.'

‘We did.' Sali pressed a plate of sandwiches on a group of colliers who were hanging back diffidently from the table.

‘From that look on your face, I can see that I'm not the only one who's sorry to leave,' Harry commented.

‘We all are. The girls didn't stop crying for days, and although your father would deny it, I caught him wiping away a tear or two.'

‘While you, of course, were indifferent,' Harry teased.

‘You know me. I'm sentimental at the best of times. Don't forget, I knew and loved this house long before we lived in it. Some of my happiest times were spent here with Great-aunt Edyth before you were born.'

‘Is the new house easier to run?'

‘Much,' she said brightly. ‘Mari and I manage it with the help of two dailies, although it has almost as many rooms. But they are a lot smaller. Your father sold two of the houses he owns in the Rhondda and paid the builder to extend the original plans so each of your sisters could have their own bedroom. As he said, it's worth the extra expense to stop their squabbling. Now, when they start, we just say, “Go to your rooms” and peace is instantly restored.'

‘It's good to be home.'

‘You'll be in Paris this time next week.'

‘I'll write,' he promised.

‘Like you did in Oxford? Letters that ignored the questions I asked in mine,' she reproached. ‘You never did tell me how much you drank at the party after your graduation.'

He adopted what he hoped was an innocent expression. ‘Not that much.'

‘You expect me to believe that?'

‘Of course.'

‘And Anna?'

‘Anna?' He looked blank.

‘She's the reason I only allowed two of the girls to drive to the station with me. I thought you might bring her home. You introduced her to us before the ceremony,' she reminded him.

‘Oh, that Anna.'

‘Given the way and the number of times she kissed you, I assumed it was serious between you two.'

‘She's a poet who believes in free love and she's gone to practise her creed with Guy in an artists' commune in Mexico, or perhaps it was Cape Cod. I'm not sure even they knew where they were going,' he said carelessly.

‘Guy, your friend who shared rooms with you?' Sali asked in surprise. ‘Aren't you upset?'

‘About Anna? Good Lord, no. I'm twenty-one, not sixteen, Mam. There have been a few Annas in the last three years.' His mother and stepfather had encouraged him to discuss every aspect of his life openly with them and because they had rarely been disapproving or critical, he told them, if not everything, a great deal more about his life than most of his friends told their parents.

‘Lloyd said you weren't serious about her.' (What Lloyd had actually said was, ‘Don't get your hopes up of seeing Harry walking down the aisle just yet, sweetheart. She's just another one of his aristocratic flibbertigibbets.')

‘Dad was right.'

She changed the subject. ‘The builder is progressing well with the house next door that the trustees have bought as an investment for you. Not that they expect you to move in right away. And we put all the furniture you wanted from here in storage.'

‘The trustees don't expect me to make a successful career as an artist, do they?' he said quietly.

‘I think hope is a better word than expect,' she replied diplomatically.

‘I wish they'd see me as a person, not a lump of clay to be moulded into the ideal owner of Gwilym James stores and associated companies.' In some ways Harry had come to resent the wealth that he would inherit in full at the age of thirty and not only because of the interference of the trustees in what he regarded as his personal decisions. He disliked the privileges it brought him, such as his Oxford education. He would have been happier winning a scholarship to an art college on his own merit, and would have tried to get one, if Lloyd hadn't pointed out that if he succeeded it would be at the expense of a poverty-stricken student who desperately needed the money.