Miss Purdy's Class (44 page)

Barefoot she went to the door, opening it as quietly as she could manage and crept down the stairs, wincing at every tiny creak. She stopped halfway down and listened. Something wasn’t right. She could hear Shân’s voice down there. Billy was asleep in the front, but Shân must be with Daniel in the kitchen. Gwen cursed under her breath. Curious though, she paused.

She heard Daniel say, ‘What good will it do? That’s the thing, Auntie. What’s past is past.’ He sounded angry and defensive.

‘It’s stayed past because I’ve kept quiet for you,’ Shân said. ‘And God knows there’ve been times it’s weighed heavily on my conscience. There’s ashamed of you I am sometimes – and of myself.’

‘There’s nothing for you to be ashamed of,’ Daniel said.

‘But plenty for you to be.’ This sharp retort was followed by a silence. Then she said, ‘This Gwen girl is very sweet and good-hearted. If you’re serious about her, you can’t keep her in the dark for ever you know, Daniel. Things come back to haunt you . . .’ The rest of what she said was drowned out by a crash of thunder from outside. Gwen clenched her fists, desperately trying to hear.

‘Don’t go on, Auntie.’ Daniel sounded weary, as if they’d had the conversation a number of times before. ‘Digging it up. The damage is done – there’s nothing more I can do about it now!’

‘Nothing more! Daniel, for goodness sake!’ Her voice rose. ‘Sometimes I wonder if you’ve got a heart in your body, truly I do. The party isn’t everything – there’s a life to be led as well . . .’

‘Oh, don’t start on me again, woman . . . I’m going to bed.’ Gwen saw a shadow move on the floor and she fled up the stairs and into her room. Holding the door open a crack she listened and a moment later heard Shân coming upstairs. Gwen slipped quietly into the lumpy feather bed.

She was wide awake now and wretched. She wanted to go down and have it out with Daniel. She felt suddenly as if she didn’t know him at all: he was like a stranger. And after this morning, when they had seemed so close, it was a cold, desolate feeling.

Gwen slept later than she intended the next morning. It was Saturday, and she and Daniel were to travel back that afternoon, so she had wanted to make the most of the day. But it had taken her so long to get to sleep the night before that she did not wake until almost nine. When she went downstairs, Shân was kneeling sweeping dust from the hearth and Billy, already washed and in his chair, lit up at the sight of Gwen. But this was little compensation for Shân telling her that Daniel and Anthony had already gone out.

‘Where’s he gone?’ Gwen asked, trying not to let her disappointment show too much. But she felt tired and close to tears. She needed to see Daniel, for him to hold her again and prove to her he was not the complete stranger he had seemed the night before.

‘They’ve gone off to meet more of the party members at the movement’s offices over in Tredegar. They’re full up with the idea of this march . . .’

‘Tredegar?’ Gwen’s spirits sank even further. Daniel hadn’t thought to invite her to go, and now he wasn’t even in Aberglyn!

Shân turned, hands resting on her knees.

‘This is the life if you marry the party,’ she said gently.

‘Yes, I know,’ Gwen said bleakly. But she thought,
I don’t want to marry the party. I want Daniel
. . . She longed to ask Shân what she had been talking to Daniel about. What was he hiding from her? In another way though, she also did not want to know. Trying not to show how low she felt, she asked, ‘D’you know when they’re coming back?’

‘There’s no knowing with them, once they get on to party business. But Daniel said something about catching an afternoon train.’ Shân got stiffly to her feet. ‘Come on, Gwen
fach
. You know what I think of it all. But let’s make a cup of tea, and you can spend the day with me and Billy. It’s not much to make up for it, though, I know.’

Gwen gave a watery smile, trying to swallow down the lump in her throat. ‘I’d love to spend the day with you both.’

By the time Daniel and his uncle came back that afternoon there was only just time to make it to the valley train. Gwen said fond goodbyes to Shân and Billy, with renewed promises to write to Billy. But as she and Daniel set off she felt tense inside with pent-up hurt and anger.

‘Plans are coming on,’ he said, full of excitement, as they walked down the hill. The day was dull, cooled by the previous night’s rain. ‘They’re thinking about making it October. Nothing’s getting any better here, whatever the out-of-work figures say!’

Gwen nodded, silent.

Daniel continued talking animatedly. His complete obliviousness to her misery made her feel even worse, and once more she found herself on the verge of tears, but she forced them away. How could she ask Daniel anything about what she had heard last night when she wasn’t supposed to have been there to hear it? But how could Daniel just go off for the day like that without her, and not think now to apologize or ask her anything about her day?

Daniel was still distant, but full of talk.
And I’m just a willing audience for it all
, she thought bitterly. By the time they changed trains, she was so tense with hurt she was ready to explode.

They settled into a carriage in which there was only one other person: an old man, asleep by the window. As the train moved off, Daniel turned to her and went to put his arm round her.

‘Don’t!’ she said, affronted. How could he start that, acting as if they were close when it felt as if he had never been further from her?

‘What’s the matter?’

‘What’s the
matter
?’ The conversation was conducted in a venomous hiss so as not to rouse the old man. ‘What d’you mean what’s the matter? You’re so caught up in yourself and so oblivious to anything else going on around you, you can’t even see, can you?’

Gwen got to her feet. This time she couldn’t push the hurt away, pretend she didn’t mind.

‘What . . .?’ Daniel began.

‘Oh, don’t ask me “what” again! I just can’t stand it. And I can’t stand sitting with you for the rest of this journey, either.’

‘Gwen – for heaven’s sake!’ He got up to stop her, but she pushed him forcibly aside and went to the compartment door.

‘Just leave me alone!’

She found another compartment, empty except for a man reading a newspaper. She sat by the window and silently let the tears roll down her cheeks.

Forty

There was a playful breeze tickling his right cheek, and a sudden press of sun rays against his eyelids. He opened his eyes, rolled onto his back on the prickly straw bed and looked up into the high barn. He could hear the dogs, and a moment later a wet nose edged with black and white hair nudged at his face, the tongue licking him.

‘Molly! Ugh – gerroff!’

He sat up, clinging to her. The dog’s eyes seemed to smile into his. She was a shaggy, rumbustious, farm dog and, of all the good things here on Elm Tree Farm, to Joey she was the best.

‘Time to get up, you lot!’ Mr Belcher had swung open the barn door and dusty rays streamed in. Joey could see the man’s round face beneath the brim of his hat, pink in the warmth. ‘Come on – shake a leg!’ They had been on the farm for a week and so far he had said that every morning, nothing more, nothing less.

Joey was stroking Molly, her hot, panting breath on his face, as the men woke around him. He kept touching the soft bit of black fur between her ears. Stroking that velvety spot made him feel nice. Next to him John sat up blearily, straw caught in his beard. Frank always woke very fast, was on his feet and moving within a couple of seconds, body a lean silhouette in the doorway as he went out to relieve himself. Steven lay curled up, as if he hadn’t heard anything. He’d shouted out in his sleep again in the night.

Mr Belcher disappeared and a moment later they heard him whistle Molly, who obeyed instantly, pulling away from Joey.

‘Molly . . .’ he whispered after her hurrying form. He wrapped his arms round his knees.

All that week they had been picking potatoes, gathering them in sacks in the long, sloping field beyond the farmhouse, hands burrowing in the dry soil to uncover the dusty potatoes, the smaller ones pale, like buried eggs. They worked on their knees, sacks under them, to save their backs. Once they’d worked for an hour and a half or so, they gathered with the other farm workers in the yard – only in the house if it was wet – and Mrs Belcher handed out plates of food. The first time Joey saw what they were to have for breakfast, the other men laughed at him.

‘His eyes’re going to pop out of his head!’ one of them teased. ‘You never seen food before, then?’

‘Don’t look like he has to me – ’e’s thin as a stick . . .’

Joey was too busy tucking into the porridge to respond. It was thick and creamy and topped with a spoonful of treacle and he felt it sliding down into his stomach, warm and utterly comforting. He licked every last bit off the big spoon and stared at his face in it, stretched into a funny shape. As if the porridge wasn’t momentous enough, the next thing to appear was a great platter of curling bacon rashers, which they ate on hunks of bread, and white, thick-rimmed cups of tea into which he could put as much sugar as he liked. Joey ate until he thought he would burst. Later his stomach went crampy and he had to go and be sick at the edge of the field. After a couple more hours’ work, one of the men brought round a basket of bread and cheese and more tea, then later every day there was dinner and tea, pies or roast meats with lashings of gravy and mashed potato and vegetables and big, filling puddings with jam or raisins or treacle and custard. Joey had never known there was this much food in the world, that it could taste like this! He was getting used to eating better food and at every meal he bolted down as much as he could possibly manage.

Mrs Belcher was a blunt, comforting person, with muddy-coloured plaits coiled round her head. Joey never saw her without a huge apron on, either white or made out of colourful flowery cotton.

‘Why’s this little ’un on the road with you, then?’ she asked John on the first day. Joey and John had limped along the rutted track to the farmhouse and asked for food and water. She looked doubtfully at John with his filthy black clothes and wild beard, but then her gaze fastened on him. Joey saw a horrified expression in her eyes.

‘He’s with me,’ was all John would say in his wooden way.

‘Is he your boy then?’

‘He comes with me.’

‘Dear God – he’s all skin and bone.’ Joey saw her make a face when she came closer to John, though Joey could see she didn’t mean to. Joey was used to John’s stink. ‘Are you hungry, boy?’

Slowly, Joey nodded. When was he ever not hungry?

‘You’d better come on with me then.’

She had sat them down at a long wooden table in the kitchen, where there was a large range and lots of huge pots and a kettle bigger than Joey had ever seen. She fed them tea and bread and butter. On the table in front of them was a dish of brown eggs. She didn’t ask any more questions. They needed help bringing the potatoes in, she said. And there was haymaking to do. They could sleep in the barn with the other men who were helping out.

‘Wait there, before you go out.’ She disappeared upstairs and appeared with clothes for Joey.

‘These were my son’s – don’t fit him no more. They’ll be too big on you, but you can’t go round dressed like that! Give me them rags of yours and we’ll put ’em on the fire. Here – you’ll need a bit of twine to keep them trousers up.’

In the barn, Joey changed into the trousers. They were made of brown corduroy, well worn so that they were almost bald from thigh to knee, and were capaciously too large. Even tying them round the waist was not adequate – two or three Joeys could have fitted into them. John managed to rig them up by using the thick twine crossed over Joey’s shoulders so that the trousers reached halfway up his chest, and turning the bottoms up. There was a blue-and-white checked shirt that reached below his knees and he rolled the sleeves up almost to the shoulder. The clothes felt heavy and awkward after the threadbare remnants he had been wearing and when he started work in the trousers he kept having to adjust the string on his shoulders. The farm workers started to call him Coco the Clown.

Later that day they’d met the two other migrant workers who had been taken on for the time being. Frank was a tall, lean, ginger-headed man who, Joey noticed, talked like Christie and had two fingers missing from his left hand, the little finger and the one next to it. All that remained were stumps with no nail and the flesh was stretched and shiny. Joey kept looking at them when they all sat at table together. When Frank used the rest of the fingers on that hand they looked like hooks. He had a scar on the side of his face next to his left eye. He joked with Joey, called him the ‘little fella’ like Christie had done. Sometimes he picked Joey up and spun him in the air. He was stringy thin, had prominent cheekbones and vivid blue eyes and Joey didn’t feel safe with him. His eyes were hard, whereas Christie’s had been soft and kind.

Steven was older, balding, with large, deep brown eyes. Frank called him ‘the toff’ as he had a soft, well-spoken voice. He was gentle and nervous and had bad dreams, crying out, screaming in the night. The first time it happened, a high, unearthly shriek out of the pitch black, it woke Joey and left him trembling with fear. Then Frank’s voice came, blearily, ‘Give it a rest now, Steven. It’s all right, pal.’

Other things shrieked at night: owls, and rats which pattered and rustled through the straw. Joey lay on the soft stalky bed, stomach distended with Mrs Belcher’s food, his back aching, limbs twitching with exhaustion after a day of hard work and sunshine. His face and arms, at first a raw pink, were turning brown. Occasionally at night the men walked three miles to the nearest pub, but usually they were too tired and sat outside the barn smoking. Joey would hear the rise and fall of their voices. Sometimes he heard them talking about life on the road, comparing spikes – the dirt-cheap doss houses – and characters they’d run into. John barely said anything and was always the first to come in. Joey knew, though nothing was said, that he didn’t like Frank. He called him, ‘that Frank’. Frank was always talking about Ireland and about guns and fighting, and he had a short temper which could whip out in a flash. Sometimes, as he drifted into sleep, Frank’s voice would get muddled in his head with Christie’s and Joey would have an ache in him to know why Christie had left them and where he had gone, and Siobhan too. And then he wouldn’t think about it any more. Nor about his mother, nor Miss Purdy. He tried not to see their faces. In the daytime he didn’t think about them.