Love and War (7 page)

Tears sting my eyes. Oh God. French, and an artist as well. It doesn’t seem fair.

‘You love her.’ It’s a flat statement, not a question. My voice seems drained of all emotion.

‘Yes. Oh, yes. We’ve been married almost twenty years. And you love Huw, I suppose.’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

Why does he want me to meet his wife? Is it something to do with being open and honest, not wanting me to go into anything with my eyes shut? Oh, what’s it all about? What’s going to happen?

‘You must call round to meet her. Her name’s Celine. You will, won’t you? Shall I tell her you’ll come?’

His voice is suddenly more relaxed. Something has been resolved, I suppose. He touches my hand. ‘You will come?’

Of course I will. Life offers us opportunities and challenges we can’t question or resist. Doors open and we go through them.

‘Yes, I’ll come.’

‘Good. What about next Monday after school? Would that suit you? Perhaps you could come every Monday – I mean, till the portrait’s finished. Could you? Do you think you could?’

‘I suppose so. Shall I come straight from school? Or shall I go home to change first? Shall I wear my new dress? I’ve been wondering when to wear it.’

‘Oh yes, the new dress. She’d be flattered. I told her about it. About my getting a discount for you.’

‘Was she amused?’

I realise that we’re now talking to each other in an affected, insincere way; better perhaps than talking like half-crazed lovers, as we were earlier.

I let myself into the house where I once, for about thirty days and nights, lived with my husband, Huw. I try to think about him, but I can’t. I try to think of him with love, or even with pity or sadness, but I can’t. He’s out of my mind. I’m already deep in sin.

The fire is out and won’t be revived, so I sit in my coat waiting for Ilona Hughes to get back. I boil some water on the gas and make myself a hot drink.

I’m going to his home. I’m going to meet his wife. I feel faint at the prospect. Why should I submit myself to such an ordeal? What if I start to tremble and she notices? She’ll make mincemeat out of me. She looks terrifying, so bold and self-assured.

When Ilona gets back, my heart is beating so loudly that I can hardly hear her speak. I usually go to bed as soon as she comes in, but tonight I rush to make her a cup of cocoa. Perhaps she’ll mention him. Even to hear his name will be balm.

‘Did Gwynn Morgan meet your bus?’ she asks me at last.

‘Yes. Why did you tell him where I was? Why did you mention me to him? I told you not to.’

‘I didn’t. Not a word. He asked after you, came right out with it. “Where’s our little Rhian tonight?” He’s fallen for you, kid. He can’t hide it.’

‘Oh nonsense. He’s only interested in me because his wife wants to do a portrait of me. She’s an artist. She noticed me at the Carol Service and she’s been desperate to paint me ever since. I’m going to their house after school on Monday. Yes, next Monday. So it’ll be your turn to make supper.’

I’ve seldom managed to get the better of Ilona Hughes, but tonight I have. She stares down into the murky depths of her cocoa in the deepest perplexity.

‘How was Denzil?’ I ask her, but she shows no sign of having heard me.

After a minute or two, I get up, fill my hot water bottle and lock the front door. ‘Good night, Ilona.’

‘I don’t like the sound of it,’ she says at last. ‘He’s fallen for you, I know that much, I could hear it in his voice. So why is he taking you home to meet his wife?’

‘Perhaps it’s his way of fighting it.’

‘I don’t like the sound of it,’ she says again.

Four

‘YOU’VE GOT AN UNUSUAL FACE,’ Gwynn Morgan’s wife says. ‘Very nearly beautiful. Your nose is a bit too wide and your jaw is too square, but your cheek bones are good and your eyes are formidable. Formidable. Most Welsh girls are round-faced and pretty, but you’re very nearly beautiful.’

‘Sometimes I feel very nearly ugly.’

She studies me again. ‘No,’ she says. ‘I may call the portrait ‘A Young Woman Very Nearly Beautiful’. That is, if I get it finished. Perhaps you’ll be too bored to come again. I shall probably need at least ten sittings. How do you feel about that?’

I smile uneasily. She speaks with a faint but distinctive French accent, enunciating every word clearly with slightly trilling ‘r’s. ‘Would you like to see some of my work?’

I’m not sure that I would – as usual, I’m not sure of anything – but I follow her along the black-and-white tiled passage into a back room overlooking the kitchen garden.

‘My studio,’ she says proudly.

If Gwynn had said ‘My studio’ the tone would have been ironic; the Welsh, insecure to a man, protect themselves with a large measure of self-mockery; his wife seems enviably self-assured.

She points at a number of watercolours ranged along the wall opposite the door; two are of a garden in summer, one is a woodland scene and there are three or four of meadows with hills in the distance. They all seem carefully planned and neatly executed, like paintings by a retired infants’ teacher.

‘Don’t say they’re pretty,’ she warns me.

‘Oh, I won’t.’ But any other comment I can think of is either patronising or wildly untrue. Instead of words, I decide on deeply penetrating looks, moving close to the paintings and then backing away, nodding my head and biting my lower lip from time to time. And when, after this base little charade, I turn away, I’m confronted by a large oil-painting of Gwynn, blazing with power and vigour. I can hardly bear to look at it; he looks almost saturnine, the slight cleft in his chin is emphasised, his nostrils flare, his lips curl. The background is tomato red.

‘Very ’orrible, yes?’ his wife says.

Again I’m lost for words, but luckily Mrs Morgan turns it to face the wall, expecting none.

‘I won’t be so cruel to you,’ she says.

I try to put it out of my mind, but I can’t help feeling that she’d wanted me to see it, that it was meant as a warning.

The studio is bare of clutter, almost bare of furniture, a long narrow room with white walls and a big window facing the garden with a row of pine cupboards on the opposite wall. There are two kitchen chairs, one on each side of the bracken-filled fireplace; the room is heated by a small black oil-stove. Mrs Morgan fetches one of the chairs, puts it down by the window, sits on it and motions me to do the same.

‘You’re very tidy. I expected a jumble of canvasses, pots of paints and turps, brushes and old rags. The Art room in school is in a terrible state; the cleaners aren’t allowed inside.’

‘You don’t teach Art?’

‘Heavens, no. I can’t draw at all, not even a rabbit. I go up to see the work occasionally, that’s all. I teach English and Welsh. I did Honours Welsh.’

‘I didn’t know that Welsh was a University subject. I thought it was a dying language.’

‘People do think that. They’ve been thinking it for centuries, but somehow it struggles on. My mother is doing what she can to promulgate a Welsh/Italian interest. There’s already Welsh in Patagonia, Welsh and Spanish, but no English.’ I talk a great deal when I’m nervous.

Mrs Morgan opens her eyes wide and examines me again. I wish she’d start working. So far, she hasn’t produced even a sheet of paper or a stub of pencil.

As though reading my thoughts, she says, ‘I want to discover a little about you before I start.’

‘Of course.’

Great Heavens, what does she mean? What does she want to discover about me?

She studies me and I study her. She’s a large woman with a large, very pale face. She looks as though she’s never been out in the sun or the wind, let alone the Cardiganshire rain.

‘You don’t go out much,’ I say. ‘I’ve hardly ever seen you in town. You come to Prize Day and the Christmas concert, I know, and I know you go to Sant Ioan’s on a Sunday, but I’ve never seen you shopping or walking about in Llanfair.’

‘There is no one to know in Llanfair,’ she says.

She’s quite right, of course.

Of people to know, we only have Mrs Harcourt-Williams and Lady Griffin and they’re too busy nowadays with all their winning-the-war committees to hold garden-parties for the natives as they used to.

I search my brains for some social titbits.

‘Mrs Wynne-Jones, the doctor’s wife, told my mother-in-law a few weeks ago that she and her friends meet for coffee in the Dolphin every Friday morning. Do you know Mrs Wynne-Jones?’

‘The Dolphin Hotel,’ she says, as though with a sour taste in her mouth.

‘I hope you’re not going to be unkind about the Dolphin. It’s a lovely place, I used to work there when I was a student.’

‘What work did you do?’

‘I was a chambermaid. The bedrooms are gorgeous, all huge mirrors and crystal chandeliers. Of course, it may be different now. I’ve never been there since.’

‘I suppose you prefer to go to the Ship in the evenings?’

‘I don’t go anywhere in the evenings. Well, I go to chapel on Sunday, home to see my mother on Wednesday and sometimes to a school drama meeting on a Friday. That’s about all. Other nights I stay in and save money. I don’t like going to the pictures on my own.’

‘You miss your ’usband? You’re a very faithful wife, yes?’

‘Of course.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘Abroad somewhere. He’s been abroad for almost three years.’

She sighs and closes her eyes. ‘My fiancé was killed in the last war. Jean-Pierre Lamarque. He was a violinist before he became a soldier.’

Her voice has become very sad and gentle. When she opens her eyes I see that they’re not grey as I’d thought, but the washed-out green of old bottles.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I wanted to become a nun, but I was only seventeen and my parents wouldn’t agree to it.’

‘How long was it before you met... Mr Morgan?’

She makes an effort to remember. ‘I don’t know. Oh, it was several years later. When I was twenty I came to England as a governess. I worked in Whiteways House in Surrey, a family related to the Devonshires. They were very good to me.’

The people at the Dolphin Hotel were good to me, too, but I don’t bother to mention it. They weren’t related to anyone, as far as I know.

‘I was treated as one of the family,’ she says.

In my experience, that isn’t altogether a good thing. Treated as family in this part of the world means you work harder than hired help on no pay.

‘They took me to balls at the big ’ouses and to Ascot and Henley.’

‘And where did you meet Mr Morgan?’

She sighs deeply, not seeming eager to leave the delights of her past life. ‘That was when I was back in France on my annual holiday. It was in Rouen – he was lost and I took pity on him. I think I was twenty-three or -four then. We got married almost at once, though he was only a student and very poor.’

How soft and white she is. I can imagine her at twenty-three or -four, very elegantly dressed, pale and plump as a white dove. How besotted the poor, simple art student must have been with her. Jealousy claws at my stomach, almost making me groan. How beautiful Gwynn must have been at twenty, his body slim and boyish, his curly hair black, his gaze straight and clear. Reader, she married him.

‘Where is he this evening?’ I ask, as soon as I can talk fairly normally.

‘Oh, somewhere. Perhaps with his friend Mr Browne at the little dress shop. I never know where he is.’

He’d waited for me outside school to make sure I’d remembered my promise. ‘
She’s expecting you. Don’t be shy. I’ll see you before you leave.
’

‘I’m slow making a start,’ his wife says. ‘I suppose I should make a few sketches. Next time you come, I’ll have the easel set up ready to begin. I think I’d like you with your back to the window, the hills as a background.’

‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,’ I say, for no reason except that I often quote from the psalms. Our Sunday school teacher used to give us threepence for learning a whole psalm so I learnt them all. That’s how I got my first bike.

‘No, you have your back to the hills,’ she says.

Well really! Of course, the Bible doesn’t count for Catholics – only statues and incense and things like that. I think I’ll stick to chapel; I love words even though I don’t always trust them.

‘How did you get your first bike?’ I ask her.

‘You can imagine me on a bicycle?’ she asks, as she pulls out paper and charcoal from one of the cupboards.

No, not really. Not on a bicycle. I can imagine her being driven along Surrey lanes in a long black car. I can imagine her leaning back against a pile of cushions in a boat at Henley, gazing up at a fair-haired young man in shirt-sleeves and boater, who’s keen on her, of course, but doesn’t intend it to become serious, because though she’s treated almost as one of the family, she’s only a governess, and a Frog at that.

‘Did you have many admirers in Surrey?’

‘You’ve had little instruction in the rules of conversation,’ she says.

It’s absolutely true. Six years in the County School, four years at University as well as twenty years of Sunday school, and never a hint on the rules of conversation.