Finders and Keepers (23 page)

The ward sister left her desk when the lift stopped on the third floor. Harry opened the iron cage but she blocked his path.

‘Good morning, Mr Evans. Doctor Adams informed me that we could expect you. You understand that you can only stay ten minutes.'

‘Yes, Sister.' He would have tried a smile but as it couldn't be seen beneath his mask, he decided it wasn't worth the effort. ‘How is my grandfather?'

‘As well as can be expected,' she answered in a voice devoid of expression. ‘You will leave the door to his room open for the duration of your visit and you will not excite or upset him in any way.'

Harry almost retorted, ‘He is my grandfather', then saw her eyes glittering, hard and intractable, above her mask and restrained himself. ‘Yes, Sister.'

‘This way.'

Harry crossed the corridor behind her. The smell of carbolic and antiseptic was more noticeable than it had been on his first visit. A patient coughed in a room lower down the ward. It was painful to listen to the battle to draw breath and he tried, unsuccessfully, to close out the sound.

‘You have a visitor, Mr Evans.' The sister stopped in front of an open doorway. Harry looked in. There were two beds in the room: one was stripped back to the bare mattress; his grandfather lay on the other, which had been wheeled through the French doors onto the narrow balcony.

‘Harry, what have you done to your face? And why on earth are you still in this wild spot?'

Relieved, Harry fought his initial instinct to rush across the room and hug his grandfather. Unlike the other patients he had seen when Diana had given him a tour of the sanatorium, Billy was sitting propped up in bed, an open book in front of him, and an alert expression in his dark eyes.

‘Because I didn't want to go until I'd seen you and could be sure that you'd recovered from the journey and settled in here.'

‘As you see, I'm being looked after like royalty.' Billy glanced at the chair that had been placed next to his bed; two legs were on the balcony, two in the room. ‘I thought someone might be coming to see me when that appeared this morning. But I had no idea that you'd stayed in the valley. And you still haven't told me how you got those scratches.'

‘A playful dog,' Harry lied. He walked over to the bed. ‘How come you've persuaded them to let you sit up, when every other patient has to lie down? They even put the young children into straitjackets if they do anything other than lie flat on their backs.'

‘It's the pneumoconiosis. If I lie down I can't breathe, so the TB takes second place. Besides it's easier to read sitting up.' He held up his book.
‘Tom Jones
. I've been meaning to get around to it for years.'

Harry glanced over his shoulder and, blocking the view of the bed from the sister who had returned to her desk, grasped his grandfather's hand briefly.

‘They'll shoot you for that,' Billy whispered. ‘Make sure you wash it before you touch anything else.'

‘I'm too fit to catch anything,' Harry mouthed.

‘I thought the same of myself, so be warned. I'd hate you to catch anything because of me.'

‘I won't.' Harry raised his voice to a conversational tone when he sat down. ‘You look better than you did on Saturday.'

‘I was …' Billy turned towards the nurses' station. The sister was writing report cards but he suspected she was listening, so he tempered his language, ‘… on my knees. I don't know why travelling is so exhausting when all you have to do is sit in a railway carriage, but it is. Since then I've done nothing except lie here, eat, drink tea and disgusting oily concoctions, which they insist “will do me good”, and read. Reading time has always been a luxury that I've had to steal from working time. Now that it's the only thing I can do, I intend to make the most of it.'

‘Any complaints?' Harry asked.

‘The food is good,' Billy replied loudly, ‘but like all women, the nurses here fuss too much.'

‘For a man in your condition, you're very vociferous, Mr Evans.' The sister set aside the card she'd been working on, picked up another and dipped her pen in the inkwell.

‘They even let me have a short walk to the bathroom and back this morning.' Billy marked his page with a pipe-cleaner and closed his book. ‘There are other miners here, on a six-bedded ward two doors along the corridor.'

‘Would you have preferred to have had company?' Harry wondered if they had done the right thing in asking for a private room for his grandfather. Billy had been an outgoing, social person all his life. He had been in charge of all the repairmen in the pit before he had retired from mining, and even when he had helped Victor on his farm, most of his free time had been spent working for the Miners' Union in their eternal quest for better conditions for colliery workers.

‘If I feel the need, I'll ask them to move me. But,' Billy glanced fondly at the photographs in the silver frames on his locker, ‘good as it is to talk and meet new people, it's better sometimes to lie here quietly, and remember.'

Harry looked at the photographs. There was one of Billy and his beloved Isabella on their wedding day. He was young and resplendent in a dark suit, the winged collar on his shirt set off by a narrow bow tie. Isabella, her Spanish blood evident in her magnificent dark eyes and hair, could have been his sister Bella's twin. Her dress was an elaborate confection of lace-covered bustle and skirt, her bouquet a formal arrangement of roses. But unlike most wedding photographs of the era, they weren't stiffly posed. Instead they appeared to be looking lovingly into one another's eyes.

The second was also of Isabella, taken when she had been a thinner, older woman, her beauty ravaged by time and the cancer that had killed her. She was sitting on a chair in front of a studio backdrop, her three sons standing behind her. It jolted Harry to see how much Lloyd, Victor and Joey had aged since his childhood. The third photograph brought a smile to his face. Lloyd had hired a photographer for Harry's twenty-first birthday party last Easter, and the picture was of the entire family. Billy sitting centre-stage with Harry on his right, surrounded by the entire family.

Billy saw Harry looking at them. ‘Thank you for your warning. Your father took the negatives of all three down to the photographer and arranged to have them copied so they won't be lost.'

‘I think we must have ordered something like thirty copies of my birthday photograph. Everyone wanted one.'

‘It was a good day.' Billy gazed intently at Harry. ‘I'd rather not do a soft-shoe shuffle around the subject so I hope you won't be embarrassed if I bring it up. And when I've said all I want to, that will be it. No going back and mulling over the morbid details.' He took a deep breath. ‘I've had a good life. A very good life.' He gazed at the photographs. ‘I fell in love with an exceptional, wonderful woman who, miraculously, loved me enough to marry me. She gave me three children who turned out to be better sons and men than any parent has a right to expect. The only thing I regret is their mother didn't live to see their wives, because all three would have been the daughters she'd always wanted. My sixteen grandchildren – and in case you can't count, that includes you, because I'll always regard you as the first – look set to change the world for the better. And the General Strike has proved that it needs changing,' he added drily. ‘Like most men, I've seen and done some things that I would rather have avoided, but I accept that was down to the times and place I lived in.'

‘You, Dad, Uncle Victor and Uncle Joey are the most principled men I've ever met.' Harry struggled to keep his voice on an even keel.

‘It's good to know that you have a high opinion of us,' Billy said seriously. ‘But it's your time now, boy. And the best advice I can give you is to live every day you're given as if it will be your last, because life flashes past at a much faster rate than you think it will. Do what you believe is right and be guided more by your heart than your head because the head is bound by sense, and the sensible course isn't always the right one. If Isabella had followed her head she wouldn't have married a miner. Richer and better men proposed to her but I struck lucky.'

‘From what Dad has told me about you two, so did she.'

‘It's a hard life being a miner's wife and mother. Nothing but washing and scrubbing. Your wife, whoever she will be, won't have that problem. But you have to be vigilant, Harry. I have the feeling that the same luck I had with Isabella will soon come your way. And if you don't recognize the right one when she appears, she may slip through your fingers, just as the right one for your Uncle Joey almost slipped through his. But when he was young he was slow on the uptake in matters of the heart. Fortunately for him, Rhian wasn't. There is nothing like a good marriage.'

‘I promise you, I'm already on the lookout for my Isabella, Granddad.' Harry felt ashamed when he recalled all the transient, meaningless affairs he'd indulged in at college. And the thought occurred to him that Diana might – just might – be his Isabella.

‘There's something else I want to get out of the way, while I have the chance. Your father and uncles know where and how I want to be buried and how I want my estate settled. I told them I don't want any priest canting mumbo-jumbo over me, but I also know they won't get away with holding an atheist funeral in Trealaw Cemetery. Tell them I knew all along that Father Kelly would persuade them to do it his way. And it's all right, because if the man ever has the sense to dump his religious beliefs he'll make a decent communist.'

Father Kelly was the Catholic priest in Tonypandy, and despite the differences between his philosophy and Billy's, they were closer than most brothers.

‘I'll tell them,' Harry assured him.

‘Good, you can also tell Patrick Kelly that wherever I am, I'll put up with his prayers for Isabella's sake, but she was such a saint she doesn't need them. However, I'm such a sinner I can do with all the help I can get to try to reach the same place as her.' He fell serious. ‘She was a devout Catholic all her life, it's right that there should be a priest present when they open her resting place to put me in. One thing more before we close this subject for good. Knowing your mother, Megan, Rhian and my granddaughters, there'll be a few tears when I'm gone. Remind them that I hated the sound of crying when I was alive. Life's too short to grieve. Tell them to remember the good times, and move on to the good times that lie ahead.'

‘Mr Evans.' A shadow fell into the room. The sister was in the doorway.

‘You'll remember, Harry,' Billy pressed.

‘I'll remember, Granddad. I wish I could explain how much you meant to me when I was growing up.'

‘I already know, boy, so there's no need to discuss it. Go home, don't hang round here.'

‘I'll go home but I'll be back.'

‘The next time you come we'll talk about your painting and what you intend to do with the rest of your life,' Billy replied gruffly.

‘Mr Evans!' The sister's voice grew sharper.

‘Harry,' Billy's voice had weakened, and Harry realized that the ten minutes he'd been allowed was exactly the right amount of time, ‘bring some more strawberries the next time you come; they went down a treat.'

‘I will, Granddad, see you again soon.'

‘Not if you overstay your welcome, you won't,' the sister said firmly. ‘Goodbye, Mr Evans.'

‘Goodbye, Sister.' Harry didn't look back as he walked to the lift. He knew that if he did, his grandfather would see the unshed tears brimming in his eyes.

Chapter Ten

Harry left the sanatorium, drove down to the village and, suspecting that his grandfather had given most of the strawberries he'd bought the day before to the miners he'd mentioned, bought two more baskets.

‘You're beginning to spend more time in this sanatorium than me, Mr Evans,' Dr Adams commented when he saw Harry hand the baskets to a nurse in the porch.

‘I was hoping that I could talk to you for a few minutes, Doctor Adams.'

‘Make it brief.' The doctor went into his office, Harry followed, but Diana's father didn't offer him a seat or close the door. ‘How did you find your grandfather?'

‘Much better than I expected.'

‘He has responded well to our treatment.' Dr Adams sat behind his desk.

‘When can I see him again?'

‘Despite appearances, he is very ill. Any activity that tires him is detrimental. And, although they may deny it, all patients find visits tiring, Mr Evans.'

‘I realize that. But as I said to you earlier, we are a very close family and we would like to visit him as often as we can, even if only for a few minutes at a time.'

‘You've asked me an impossible question, Mr Evans. I could tell you that you can see your grandfather once or twice a week, only to have to turn you away if he should be too weak to cope with a visit.'

‘Mr Ross -'

‘Mr Ross is working on a project with his uncle,' Dr Adams interrupted impatiently. ‘And he is aware that although I allow him to call every morning, I have no compunction about refusing him entry if his uncle is too ill to see him.'

‘Then you would have no objection to my turning up and asking after my grandfather most mornings, even if I can't see him?' Harry asked brightly.

‘You're nothing if not persistent, Mr Evans,' the doctor replied flatly.

‘Your treatment has been more beneficial than we hoped for, Doctor Adams, but we're all very aware that my grandfather doesn't have a great deal of time. And we would like to spend as much of it as possible with him.'

‘Shall we say that you can turn up here and ask after your grandfather no more than three or four times a week, Mr Evans?' the doctor conceded. ‘And always first thing in the morning, because patients are generally at their best if they have had a good night's rest. Also, the maximum number of visitors I will allow at any one time is two.'