Finders and Keepers (39 page)

‘Martha and I had a sugar mouse each for Christmas. Mine was white and hers was pink, but I've never seen brown or cream ones.' He pointed at the row arranged on a shelf at the back of the window.

‘Those are made of chocolate, Matthew. You can get brown and white – or rather cream-coloured – chocolate.' It would have been easy for Harry to go inside and buy two bagsful of sugar and chocolate mice. He was tempted to do that just to see the smile on Matthew's face when he presented them to him. But Toby's words came back to haunt him, as they had done when Mrs Reece Jones had attacked Mary Ellis's reputation in the Colonial Stores.
I think you shouldn't start something you can't finish.

Toby was right. If he bought the Ellis children a bucketful of sweets and they developed a sweet tooth, who would buy sugar mice for them when he was no longer in the valley? He offered Matthew his hand but the boy pretended not to see it and stuck his fists in his pocket.

‘Davy says men don't hold hands, it's sissy.'

‘Sorry. David was almost finished when I left the Colonial Stores. Shall we go and see what he wants to do next? And on the way we can call into the stationer's so I can buy you and Martha some paper and a new pencil each so you can practise your writing.'

‘That would be good, Mr Evans.' Matthew's eyes shone with excitement and Harry trusted that Mary and David wouldn't see pencils as charity. They stopped outside the shop and looked in the window at the goods on display. Notebooks, stacks of writing paper, envelopes, blotting paper, bottles of coloured inks and fans of pencils and pen nibs of various sizes were arranged on narrow shelves alongside expensive boxed fountain pens.

‘Can I have a red pencil, please, Mr Evans?'

‘You can. What colour do you think Martha will like?'

‘Her favourite colour is yellow. We both practised writing our names after you left last night. You will teach us some more today, won't you?'

David's reflection loomed in the glass behind them. ‘If he does it will be after you've done your jobs, Matthew, and helped me with the milking.'

‘I need to buy some writing paper, and I thought I'd get Martha and Matthew pencils as a reward for the hard work they've put in.'

David nodded a silent agreement but there was a surly look in his eye. He followed Harry and Matthew into the shop and watched Harry purchase writing paper, envelopes, ink, the pencils and two cheap notebooks.

‘The price you paid for that lot would keep the chickens in feed for a week,' David grumbled when they left.

Harry decided it would be politic to ignore his comment. ‘Is there anything else that you have to do in town, David?'

‘No. I've been paid for our produce and finished buying our goods. I've already stacked them in your car.'

‘Then you're ready to go back to the farm?' Harry thrust the change the assistant had given him into his pocket.

‘I need to check and fix all the sheep pens on the hills. Winter comes early on the mountains. If you drop Matthew and me off at the top of the road close to the first one we'll get started. But that means that you and Mary will have to unload the goods and feed I bought.'

‘That's not a problem.' Harry didn't offer to help David mend the sheep pens; he didn't know the first thing about dry-stone walling.

He recalled the evil-minded gossip in the shop. From the brash, confident way she'd spoken about him and Mary Ellis in his presence, he assumed she wasn't the first to spread unfounded rumours about his visits to the Ellises and, despite the manager's efforts, he wasn't optimistic enough to believe she'd be the last.

He made a resolution to leave the family to their own devices but only after he'd completed the repairs to the doors and windows on the farmhouse and outbuildings. As David had said, winter was coming and the wood he was replacing wouldn't stand another season of frost, snow and rain. It was essential the buildings be made watertight. And there simply wasn't anyone other than him available to do it.

The next two days passed swiftly and busily for Harry. He went up to the farm after visiting his grandfather, who continued to deteriorate. He worked on his new watercolour until midday, and repaired the doors and windows in the farmyard in the afternoon. He only saw Mary, who was busy in the dairy, and David, who spent all his time out on the hills in the sheep pens, briefly except when he ate tea with them at the end of the day.

Diana had been busy all week studying in preparation for her return to college, but he persuaded her to allow him to take her to Swansea on Friday evening, and although he gave Matthew and Martha lessons on Wednesday and Thursday evenings, he finished working in the farmyard at four o'clock on Friday afternoon in good time to return to the inn and change.

‘It's strange to have tea without Mr Evans,' Matthew commented absently, watching Mary pour the tea as he bit into his bread, butter and blackberry jam.

‘He's not one of the family,' David growled. ‘Although you wouldn't think it from the way he's been living here the past couple of weeks.'

‘He's been kind enough to do jobs for us that should have been done months ago,' Mary said pointedly.

‘He's going out tonight, to Swansea, with Miss Adams.' Martha dropped a sugar lump into her tea cup.

‘Out with Miss Adams?' Mary whispered, stunned by the revelation and her reaction to it. Although when she thought about Mr Evans and Miss Adams, it was obvious they belonged together. Both educated, both rich, both blond. She beautiful, he good-looking. People in chapel would refer to them as a handsome, well-suited couple.

‘I overheard Mr Evans and Mr Ross talking about it when they were taking their painting stuff out of Mr Evans's car,' Martha continued, oblivious to Mary's shock. ‘Mr Evans said he'd booked a table for them in the Mermaid Hotel in Swansea and afterwards he's taking her dancing, to the Patti Pavilion. It must be wonderful to go to a dance with a real orchestra playing real music and see people in their best dancing frocks. I bet the girls even curl their hair and wear scent and jewellery like the young Mrs Williams,' she murmured dreamily.

‘I think dancing's soppy,' Matthew said, although the only dancers he'd ever seen were the clog dancers who entertained shoppers at the Pontardawe Christmas market.

Mary's heart thundered against her ribcage. She remembered all the times she had caught Harry looking at her and she, unable to bear the intensity of his blue-eyed gaze, had looked away.

An image of Diana Adams as she had been the last time she'd visited Martha sprang to mind: ducking as she walked beneath the low lintel on the kitchen door; her fair hair gleaming like spun straw in the small-windowed gloom of the farmhouse, her skirt and blouse glossy with the lustre of freshly laundered, top-quality linen. It had been years since anyone in her family had been able to buy expensive clothes, but that hadn't stopped her mother from taking her into Ben Evans's department store in Swansea and showing her the difference between good and cheap clothes. And everything she'd ever seen Diana Adams wearing had been high-priced.

Even Miss Adams's voice was attractive, musical and so obviously educated. Her hands were long, slim, elegant and clean because she'd never had to scrub out a pigsty or cowshed in her life. Miss Adams was everything she could never aspire to be. If ever she needed to be reminded that she was an ignorant, ugly, illiterate farm girl, all she had to do was think of her. Even her Sunday clothes were rags in comparison. Diana Adams was going to be a doctor. All she was good for was exactly what she had said to Harry Evans – skivvying.

No cultured, wealthy man like Harry Evans, who could teach Martha and Matthew to read and write with a patience she had never thought any man capable of possessing, would ever see someone like her as anything other than a servant and a low one at that.

She recalled the feel of his body close to hers when he had helped her up the hill after she had run into the water and almost drowned, his concern and his kindness after his initial anger and shock had worn off. Then she remembered why she had run into the reservoir.

She was used and damaged, the agent's whore – unfit to be a wife to any man.

‘Mary? Mary!' David repeated impatiently.

She stared at her brother in bewilderment.

‘I was asking if you wanted Matthew and me to move the chicken coops into the shed now that Harry's repaired the door. It would be handy to have the barn back for feed storage. We haven't been able to use it for that since we put the chickens in there because they peck through the sacks.'

‘Yes …' she stammered. ‘I'll give you a hand.'

‘No hurry, we'll do it tomorrow morning.' He gave her a hard look before nodding to Matthew. ‘Time to do the milking.'

Harry stood in the porch of the Adamses' house and rang the bell. It pealed loudly, echoing through the hall, and he heard the clack of high-heeled slippers walking over a wooden floor.

Diana called, ‘It's for me, Sarah.' She opened the front door.

Harry had taken care in dressing. He had arranged for his dinner suit and dress shirt to be sent from Pontypridd and entrusted them to Enfys to be pressed – to his amazement they had been returned in pristine condition. His cologne was the horrendously expensive one he had treated himself to in Harrods the last time he had visited London, and Alf had buffed his dress shoes to a crystal shine.

‘A small thank you for everything you have done for my grandfather, and,' conscious of the maid and her parents in the house, Harry lowered his voice to a whisper, ‘me.'

She took the boxed flower from him. ‘An orchid! How wonderful and extravagant. Did you have to send to Swansea for it?'

‘Yes.'

‘Then it should be very happy to return there. Would you like to say good evening to my parents?'

Given Dr Adams's usual brusqueness, Harry would have preferred not to, but he stepped over the doorstep and followed Diana into the drawing room he remembered so well, and pretended never to have set eyes on before.

‘Good evening, Mrs Adams.' Harry bowed slightly to Diana's mother, an older, thinner and more wrinkled version of her daughter.

‘Good evening, Mr Evans.' She glanced up momentarily from the newspaper she was reading, but remained seated in her armchair.

‘Good evening, Doctor Adams.'

‘Mr Evans.' The doctor rose and, to Harry's surprise, offered him his hand. ‘I trust you and Diana will have a good time this evening.' He shook Harry's hand firmly. ‘There is no risk of contracting infection in this house, Mr Evans. Diana and I are meticulous about washing and changing our clothes after we leave the sanatorium.'

‘Yes, sir. As for the good time, I have booked a table for half past seven at the hotel.'

‘Then you had better be on your way. I trust that you will drive carefully, Mr Evans.'

‘I always endeavour to, Doctor Adams.'

‘Martha Ellis might say different.'

‘Father, you know that accident wasn't Harry's fault. There was a thick mist.' Diana handed Harry her white evening coat, which was trimmed with ostrich feathers. He held it out and helped her on with it, watching while she pinned the orchid to her left shoulder. ‘Expect me when you see me.' She kissed her mother's, then her father's cheek.

Harry held the door open and they left the house. ‘No directives about what time you have to be home?'

‘I'm over twenty-one. And my parents trust me. Don't yours?'

‘I'm a boy, so that doesn't count. Besides, I've lived in college for the last three years.'

‘As have I.' She waited until he opened the passenger door of the car for her. ‘What about your sister?'

‘You only met the eldest. I have five.'

‘And your father is stricter with them than with you?'

‘Much.' He picked up the feather-trimmed hem of her coat and draped it around her slim, silk-stockinged legs. ‘Careful, you don't want to catch that in the door.'

‘No, I don't, thank you. And I pity your sister. I would hate to be sixteen again. If you'd called to take me out when I'd been that age, my father would have demanded that you brought me home by eight o'clock.'

‘You're joking.'

‘I am not.'

He started the car, and she pulled her cloche hat over her bob to keep it in place.

‘I could put up the hood,' he offered.

‘No, don't, I like the feel of the wind in my face.'

‘It seems it's not only your patients who are used to fresh air.' He drove out on to the main road.

Their conversation on the journey down to Swansea was intermittent, and he realized it was the longest they had been together without taking off their clothes. Their lovemaking had been so sensational it came as a shock to recognize that outside of passion they had little in common. They both made fairly banal observations on the beauty of the upper Swansea Valley compared to the industry-ravaged lower. But when Diana touched on the miners' determination to continue the General Strike single-handedly, Harry changed the subject.

He respected and loved Lloyd, and knew better than to embark on such a discussion with a privileged, middle-class woman like Diana Adams when his stepfather saw the strike as an essential weapon in the miners' interminable fight for a fair deal from the colliery owners. Instead, he mentioned current topics he'd read about in the newspapers in the hope they'd interest her, like his admiration for Gertrude Ederle, the American woman who had just swum the Channel. They went on to talk about sport in general, and tennis and Wimbledon in particular. With the result that when he drew up outside the hotel he knew that Diana played a fair game of tennis but not much else.

He had enjoyed her company, made love to her, and yet there was a gulf between them that was of her making. Given her determination to follow her chosen career, he sensed she would keep that distance between her and every man – however much she liked him. Just in case ‘like' spilled over into a love that would sway her from her resolve to follow in her father's footsteps.