One Blue Moon (20 page)

Stepping on tiptoe, lest the rubber soles of his shoes squeak on the highly polished linoleum, he stole behind the screen. For the first time since he’d left school, headmasters and canings behind him, he tasted the cold, metallic tang of fear in his mouth. Wiping his clammy hands on his coat, he swallowed hard.

‘Don’t forget, one minute,’ the nurse warned through the closed doors of the ward, as she made her way back from the kitchen to the treatment room. ‘No more.’

The reminder gave him the courage he needed to look at Maud. She was lying, propped up on three pillows, her face as white as the cotton slips behind her head. The gold of her hair and the vivid gem-like blue of her eyes were the only hints of colour in a sea of white sheeting and bedcovers.

‘Ronnie?’

Her voice was faint, barely audible. The room faded, until he focused only on her. A pale golden figure shimmering in a fog of grey, wavering darkness. ‘The nurse told me that you were here, and you’d asked to see me,’ she whispered.

He crept close to the bed and knelt beside it. ‘I couldn’t rest or settle to anything, not without knowing how you were.’ Locking his fingers together he rested his hands on the edge of the bed.

She laid her hand on top of his. It was pale, so white and translucent he could see the pattern of veins beneath the skin, mute evidence of her fragility and mortality. He shuddered, noticing for the first time the mixed odours of decay, disinfectant and death in the atmosphere around him.

‘You don’t think my being here is your fault, do you?’ she asked, giving him a small smile.

‘No! Yes ... I don’t know ...’ he stammered like a nervous schoolboy. ‘If I hadn’t taken you down the café last night ...’

‘I wouldn’t have had a good time,’ she finished for him. The effort it cost her to talk brought on a coughing fit. He sat helplessly as she clutched the inevitable stained, sodden handkerchief to her mouth. He heard a sound in the corridor, and remembered the nurse’s injunction: ‘One minute. No more.’

‘Maud, there’s no easy way to say this,’ he blurted out uneasily, worried that the nurse would return and throw him out before he had a chance to tell Maud anything important. ‘Perhaps if I had more time ... oh, what the hell. I love you and I want to marry you,’ he confessed impatiently, and with a strange lack of eloquence considering the time he’d had to prepare for this momentous occasion in his life. Unnerved by the silence that greeted his outburst, a full minute passed before he dared to raise his eyes to her.

She was staring at him, dumbfounded.

‘I love you,’ he repeated in a softer tone. ‘I’ve been such a fool. I should have realised sooner. I didn’t even think about it until last night. Now I know I want to be with you. Always. I want to marry you ...’

‘Ronnie, I’m ill. The doctor said I’m –’

‘I know what the doctor said,’ he dismissed scornfully. ‘I’ve spoken to Trevor. He’s my brother-in-law, remember. But that doesn’t make him any different from the rest of the pack. All he can talk about is cutting ribs, deflating lungs, and operations.’

‘He said there’s a chance that an operation might work ...’

‘And there’s a chance that it might not.’

Maud looked through a small tear in the screen and saw the stripped and empty bed next to her own, and fell silent.

‘Trevor’s probably right,’ Ronnie conceded grudgingly. ‘An operation would be the best option if you stayed here. But you don’t have to. Everyone knows that people with consumption improve if they’re taken to a healthier climate with clean air. Mountain air,’ he finished triumphantly.

‘There’s nothing but mountains around here,’ she pointed out logically.

‘Mountains but no clean air, the dust on the slagheaps sees to that. Coal isn’t healthy, but there’s no coal mining in Italy,’ he began enthusiastically.

‘Italy!’ she exclaimed incredulously, feeling that he might as well have suggested the moon.

‘Why not? I have grandparents there.’ He omitted to tell her that he hadn’t seen them since he was five and wasn’t at all sure of the reception they’d give him if he turned up on their doorstep, let alone with a consumptive wife. ‘Marry me and we’ll go to Italy. I’ll see to it that we’re on a train before the end of the week. I’ll find your father and ask him for his permission tonight ...’

Maud knew he was talking to her because she could see his lips moving, but she could neither hear nor comprehend a word he was saying. She was too busy thinking of the pale, dark girl in the next bed. The cures she’d tried and told her about. The plans she’d been making, even up until that afternoon. Ronnie – she looked at him, seeing him in the light of a potential lover for the first time. It was the pictures come to life. True romance. Better, much better than
It Happened One Night
. His dark, rugged, brooding good looks. Italy, with a husband! For the first time since Diana had brought her back from the Infirmary she had something to think about, something to plan for other than her own funeral. She tried to sit up, then began to cough again. Her body racked by spasms, she reached out unsteadily, picked up the sputum jar and spat in it.

She sensed Ronnie looking at her, and remembered her disgust when her now dead neighbour had done the self-same thing. Had it really only been that morning? Ashamed of her disease-ridden body, she closed her eyes, afraid to look at him lest she see something of the revulsion she felt for herself mirrored in his eyes.

‘This isn’t a romantic disease,’ she said cuttingly. ‘I’m no Greta Garbo, you’re not Robert Taylor. And this,’ – she lifted her pathetically thin hand and waved it close to the sickly green walls of the ward – ‘isn’t Camille,’ she said brutally. ‘People with TB die horribly, messily ...’ she fought for breath, suddenly terrified – of him – of reaching out to take what he offered in case he saw her for what she was, changed his mind and rejected her. ‘They cough up shreds of lungs.’ She opened out her stinking handkerchief to illustrate her words, painting the blackest possible picture of the disease, so he would hold no illusions about what she was trying to tell him.

‘You’re not saying anything I don’t already know,’ he informed her smoothly.

‘How can you possibly love me –’

‘I’ve no idea, especially when you’re in this mood,’ he joked.

‘I don’t think I love you,’ she said slowly, choosing her words with care. ‘To be honest, Ronnie, I’ve never thought of you as anything other than one of Haydn’s and Will’s friends. And Laura’s brother, of course,’ she murmured as an afterthought. ‘You’re so old ...’

‘Not too old for anything that matters,’ he said earnestly. ‘Which I hope you’ll soon find out. And when you marry me –’ he refused even to think of the possibility of ‘if’, ‘– you’ll learn to love me. Until that happens I have more than enough love for both of us. Besides, my parents have always told me that love comes after marriage,’ he grinned wryly, wrapping his huge, thick fingers round her thin, reed-like ones. ‘It must be true. Just look at them, they only saw one another twice before the wedding, and that was in front of both of their entire families. At least we’ve seen more of each other than that, and much more than I’ve seen of any of the Italian girls that Mama and Papa have been trying to marry me off to for the past few years.’

‘Your parents may want you to get married, but I don’t think either of them will be all that happy with the thought of you marrying a girl as sick as me.’

‘What they want isn’t important. Not this time. You’re what I want. All you have to do is say the word. I’ll speak to your father, get you out of here, marry you and take you to Italy ...’

‘You’re mad.’ The idea of marrying anyone, especially Ronnie Ronconi, suddenly seemed so preposterous she wondered if she were dreaming or hallucinating.

‘Very possibly,’ he agreed infuriatingly.

‘Well I’m not mad,’ she stated positively, ‘and neither will I lie to you. I don’t think I love you,’ she said emphatically.

‘I thought we’d already dealt with that point.’

‘But you’re offering me so much. Italy. The girls here were talking about rich people’s cures in Switzerland this afternoon, and –’

‘Italy and Switzerland are next door to each other, they share the same air,’ he urged persuasively.

‘I want to live so much,’ she said fervently.

‘Then live with me.’

Tears welled in the corners of her eyes. He’d seen her cry before. Stood by helplessly while she’d swallowed silent, bitter tears of pain, watched as she’d struggled with hot, fierce tears of anger. This was different. He couldn’t help feeling that she was shedding her first tears of sorrow. He instinctively knew what she was thinking. He was offering her a chance to live, and all she could think of was – how long?

‘We’ll marry, and take whatever time we’re given,’ he declared practically. ‘Anything has to be better than nothing, and if our marriage lasts for years instead of months, I’ll just have to take my chances that you don’t turn into a nagging wife like Laura, and make my life a misery.’

‘That’s another thing,’ she fought to keep her tears in check.

‘Trevor and Laura went out together for ages. They knew all there was to know about one another before they married. You don’t know the first thing about me.’

‘I know everything that’s important.’ Sensing her exhaustion, he rose from his knees and kissed her gently on the forehead. ‘Right, now that’s over and done with, I may as well warn you, you’ll never get me on my knees again. I’ll speak to your father, see about getting you out of here. Then I have to buy some train tickets.’

‘My father –’

‘Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll see to everything. You lie there, conserve your strength and concentrate on falling in love with me. If you can manage it, I’d like it to happen before next Tuesday. I aim to be away by then.’

‘You still here, Mr Ronconi?’ the staff nurse hissed furiously. ‘I said a minute, and you’ve taken ten. Quick, out,’ she ordered, panicking; she’d already had word that the senior night sister was on her rounds.

Ronnie smiled at Maud, and winked at the nurse.

‘Do you have a day off coming to you before Tuesday? Because if you do, you can be bridesmaid,’ he grinned wickedly.

‘Out,’ she pushed him through the door and watched him descend the stairs. She didn’t return to the ward until she heard the click of the door closing behind him.

‘You look happy,’ she commented to Maud as she wheeled the screens away from her bed.

‘I think I am.’ Maud admitted as she wriggled down between the sheets.

‘I can understand that. He’s very good-looking, isn’t he? Funny, his sister said he’d never fall for anyone. “Heart as hard as the brass in the till,” that’s what she said. “Might marry another café, but never a girl.” But then,’ the nurse couldn’t help herself, for all her professional training she responded to Maud’s smile with one of her own, ‘what does a sister ever know about a brother? They say the harder they are, the harder they fall. You’re a lucky girl,’ she said quickly, glossing over Maud’s illness. ‘At least he owns one café, even if you’re not bringing him another. And with a café, you’ll never go hungry.’

‘He’s taking me to Italy,’ Maud murmured sleepily. Excited by the prospect, she didn’t give a thought to the café or the business, or what Ronnie would be giving up to take her away from the valleys. For the first time in months she was looking forward to sleeping. Tonight she wouldn’t dream of wreaths, funerals and headstones in Glyntaff cemetery, but of weddings. Of floating into chapel in the centre of a cloud of white tulle, flowers in her hair, a scented bouquet in her hand, a lace veil covering her head. The only thing that had been a little misty until now was the face of her bridegroom. She thought of Ronnie’s dark, handsome features, the way he’d looked at her when he told her he loved her, and she fitted him into the grey suit with the white buttonhole. She was still smiling in her sleep when the duty sister checked the ward on her rounds an hour later.

Chapter Nineteen

‘You didn’t have to walk me all the way home,’ Jenny said as she led the way around the corner of Llantrisant Road into Factory Lane. She waited outside the six-foot-high wooden door that fitted flush into the eight-foot wall around the back yard of the shop. ‘You’ll be late now for your training session in the Ruperra, and it means making a double trip. You’ll have to walk down the hill and back up again later, won’t you?’ she asked.

‘If you’re serious about boxing you can’t afford to give training a miss. Ever,’ Eddie said gravely.

She turned her umbrella, and was preparing to lower it when she caught sight of him staring at her. She smiled, elated. Haydn might be impervious to her charms, but his brother wasn’t, and that meant she wasn’t wholly unattractive after all. Perhaps given time Haydn might even change his mind about her.

Eddie was aware only of the darkness – and Jenny. The light from the lamps on the main road didn’t reach as far as the shadows of Factory Lane. Their beams shafted short, over streaks of navy blue, rain filled night air, lending a faint glow to the back of Jenny’s head. Her blonde hair shone like a strip of gold between her high forehead and her umbrella. If it hadn’t been for the long belted mac she was wearing, she could have taken her place amongst the angels in the illustrated Life of Jesus that Maud had won as a school prize. The book he would never have willingly opened if his Uncle John Joseph hadn’t thrown it contemptuously across the room, deploring it as ‘Popish’. He figured that anything that annoyed his uncle had to be worth looking at.

‘Do you know, you’re really pretty,’ he said impulsively.

‘Thank you.’ It wasn’t up to Clark Gable standard, but she knew it was the nearest Eddie would get to uttering poetry, and the most she could expect. He couldn’t stop looking at her. Her eyes were round, enormous, like those of a frightened rabbit. He fought the urge to put his arms around her, forcing himself to remember, not for the first time that evening, that she had been, and might be again, his brother’s girlfriend. But even as he reminded himself, he continued to stare at her, admiring the way her nose tilted up at the end, the rounded softness of her cheeks, the inviting pout of her lips, soft, luscious – just begging to be kissed.

Something of his thoughts must have transmitted themselves to her, because before he realised she’d moved, she was standing on tiptoe before him. Lifting her chin, she kissed him gently on the spot where his mouth ended and his cheek began. The smell of her scent wafted into his nostrils. The proximity of her smooth skinned, curvaceous body was too much – too tempting. He didn’t even wait to glance behind him to ensure no one was watching, before sweeping her into his muscular arms.

Pulling her close, he kissed her hard and brutally on the lips. His bruising, insensitive touch took her breath away. Eddie had none of Haydn’s finesse, or gentleness. His tongue invaded her mouth, exploring, probing, as he clamped his hand on the nape of her neck. Alarmed as much by her own feelings as by what Eddie was doing to her, she struggled to draw back. All she’d intended when she’d met Eddie in Mill Street was to be seen with him in the hope of making Haydn jealous. Perhaps exchange a highly public, flirtatious giggle with him, or a little light banter. She’d never intended things to go this far! But then she hadn’t bargained on Eddie. He’d always been so quiet in the presence of girls, she’d put it down to shyness and inexperience, never suspecting such a passive exterior could conceal so much inner passion. Or how she’d feel if such a passion was unleashed on her.

She shifted position slightly, creating a small gap between them. It was just wide enough for him to manoeuvre his other hand inside her coat. Drunk with kisses, she failed to notice what he was doing until she shivered involuntarily at the cold touch of his fingers against the bare skin of her breast. She clamped her hand firmly over his.

‘You mustn’t!’ she commanded weakly.

‘Sorry,’ he murmured huskily. ‘Got a bit carried away there.’

‘So I see.’ Too embarrassed to meet his eyes she straightened her blouse and buttoned her coat. ‘I always thought you spent all your time in the gym, Eddie Powell,’ she said primly, striving to regain her composure. ‘Wherever did you learn to kiss like that?’

He smiled, remembering one golden drunken afternoon spent in the bushes of Pontypridd Park with a willing, if expensive, chorus girl.

‘Just because I don’t wear my girlfriends on my arm like a badge, it doesn’t mean I’ve never had any,’ he said archly.

‘I’d better be going.’ She reached for the latch on the high wooden door.

He laid his fingers over hers and pressed down hard. The door opened inwards, and he followed her into the small back yard. It was even darker than in the lane. Black as pitch. The only relief was the faint jet gleam of glass outlining the position of the storeroom window.

‘Just one more kiss,’ he begged, pushing her until she was pinned against the house door and could retreat no further. His mouth closed over hers again. She felt as though he was sucking the breath from her body. His hand once more gravitated to the contours of her breast beneath her coat. He squeezed it once, before lifting her skirt and invading her bloomers. The door opened inwards into the stockroom; she didn’t know how, only that she reeled blindly backwards through it, gasping for air, her nerve ends tingling, too stunned and shocked to take in the enormity of what Eddie was doing to her.

Her coat joined his on the floor. He lifted her pullover and with it her blouse and underclothes. She lay back on the boxes, where she had lain so many nights with Haydn, digging her fingernails into Eddie’s back as he caressed her breasts and nipples. His fingers were replaced by his lips as his hands delved into the soft, sensitive area between her thighs.

He removed her bloomers and pulled her skirt to her waist but she was too far gone down the road of hunger and desire that he had aroused within her to protest. If they had been lying on the bandstand in Pontypridd Park, on view to the whole world, she wouldn’t have cared less. She was aware only of the sensations he engendered. The thrill, the excitement, of his lovemaking. The desires he had kindled. Of wanting him to touch her naked body. Again and again and again!

He ran his hands up her sides from her thighs to her breasts and she tore her clothes off, over her head. She lay back on the boxes, stark naked before him, arms uplifted, legs spread wide, gratefully receiving the caresses and thrusts he bestowed on her, electric touches that obliterated everything, even thoughts of Haydn, from her mind.

When it was over he did not linger long. She was aware of him moving swiftly away from her in the blackness, heard the whispers of cloth rustling, and knew that he was dressing. A cold draught blew across her exposed body, the latch slipped. She opened her eyes just in time to see his shadow disappearing out into the night. He didn’t even turn back to look at her. Didn’t say one single word – of endearment – of anything.

An eternity passed during which she recalled Haydn’s tenderness, his gentle, sensuous touch, and his sweet, lingering kisses. He had always left her craving for more – much, much more. She’d always assumed that the ‘more’ would come with marriage.

Eddie had left her feeling weak, battered and wasted, but to her horror she realised that Eddie had given her what her body had craved for, and never got from Haydn. Pure physical passion.

But she loved Haydn. Didn’t she? Of course she did. She was sure of that much. But one thing was certain now: he wouldn’t want her. Not after this. She loved Haydn and had only wanted Eddie. Had wanted him enough to forget everything that Haydn had ever been to her.

Only her ridiculous pride had prevented her from going to Haydn after that stupid quarrel. She had wanted to tell him she was sorry for precipitating the argument. She had longed for a chance to make it up to him. To make him forget that she could behave childishly, jealously, over nothing. Now she realised she would never do that. What had happened between her and Eddie would prevent her; would estrange her from Haydn once and for all.

She began to pick up her clothes slowly, all the while shedding silent tears for what she had lost. A sweet first love that was now, irrevocably, consigned to her past.

There were many rooms in the Unemployment Institute in Mill Street. Large workshops where unemployed boys and men could learn carpentry and cobbling. Smaller rooms which had been handed over to the more intellectual contingent, who used them as meeting places, to talk, play chess, and remodel the world – especially Wales – along fairer, more equal, and socialist if not communist-inspired lines.

Unused to comfort in their homes, the members scarcely noticed the cold or discomfort in the rooms of the Institute. The furniture, if it could be graced with that name, was a motley collection of old chairs, sofas and scarred and broken tables that had been donated by those in the town rich enough to replace their belongings when they wore out. A few pieces showed signs of clumsy, ineffectual attempts at renovation by the boys who frequented the carpentry workshops. Those with whole, unbroken springs tended to gravitate towards what was grandly referred to as the ‘Reading Room’, where most of the books read were borrowed from the Pontypridd Lending Library. All the Institute had on offer was a meagre, donated store of well-thumbed magazines, dog-eared copies of Dickens and a bound edition of the complete works of Karl Marx, presented courtesy of the Miners’ Union.

As Ronnie walked purposefully through the front door in the hope of finding Evan, he heard the deep, melodious tones of a choir practising somewhere at the back of the building. The sweet sounds blended uneasily with the strident barking of a retired sergeant-major who was putting the younger element through their exercises in the gym, in the hope that the Institute team would win their next rugby match.

‘Seen Evan Powell?’ he asked a wizened old man whose arms were crammed with political pamphlets.

‘Chess room.’ The man pointed down a narrow passageway lit by a single, weak, unadorned light bulb. There was only one door at the end; once green, its paint was now dry and flaking. Half glazed with grimy, bubbled glass, it shed a brighter light into the corridor but no images of what lay within. Ronnie pushed it, and it juddered alarmingly over swollen floorboards.

A foul-smelling pall of cheap tobacco smoke hung thickly in a foggy atmosphere redolent with the unhealthy warmth of unwashed bodies packed into a confined space.

‘Shut that bleeding door.’ Ronnie recognised Viv Richards’ voice, but he couldn’t see him. He did as Viv asked, scanning the packed room for Evan Powell. He spotted him at last, at the far end of the room. If he’d been a fly he could have walked across the ceiling to get to Evan, but as it was, he stood little chance of reaching him without disturbing the entire room. So much for discretion! Every available inch of space was filled with broken chairs, men’s legs and bodies.

Evan didn’t see Ronnie standing by the door. His attention was fixed on a chess set laid out on an upturned packing case between him and Charlie, but he was playing in a half-hearted, desultory fashion, preoccupied with thoughts of Maud.

‘And I tell you we can’t allow this man to hold a meeting in our Town Hall!’ A fist crashed noisily on a rickety table.

‘What do you want us to do then, Dai?’ Viv sniped. ‘Take over the Town Hall from the Council to keep him out?’

‘You’re worrying over nothing, Dai. Mosley won’t come to Ponty,’ a skeletally thin man shouted. ‘The councillors might be crache, but they know what’s what. I’ve heard tell if he wants the place, he’s going to have to pay ten times the going rate. That’ll be too much, even for the likes of him.’

‘Four times,’ a disembodied voice corrected. ‘Our May works in the council offices, and she’s had it from the horse’s mouth.’

‘If the man wants to hold his meeting badly enough, he’ll pay the asking price whatever it is,’ Evan commented as he moved his rook forward two places to threaten Charlie’s queen.

‘I agree with Evan,’ Dai shouted angrily. ‘And what I’m saying is, when he comes we’ve got to do something about it.’

‘Like what?’ Viv demanded truculently. ‘What the hell do you expect the likes of us to do about a man like that?’

‘Infiltrate his meeting,’ Dai said darkly.

‘Be reasonable, man,’ Evan snapped. ‘You can’t infiltrate a public meeting.’

‘You can when you’re a marked man,’ Dai crowed, proud of the outlaw status that his active, paid-up membership of the Communist party conferred on him.

‘Here we go again,’ Viv moaned. ‘Communist goodies against Fascist baddies.’

‘The Communists are the only ones with the ideology, dedication and strength of purpose to oppose the Fascists. And Oswald Mosley,’ Dai lectured in soapbox mode, ‘is Mussolini and Hitler’s henchman. You heard the lady in the last meeting same as me. Mosley will heap the same indignities on British Jews as Hitler is heaping right now on the Jews in Germany.’

‘Since when have you worried about the Jews, Dai?’ Viv sneered.

‘They’re our brothers ...’ Dai began heavily.

‘They’re our rich bloody brothers if you ask me,’ Viv spat a gob of phlegm to the floor. ‘And they only help their own, never them that needs it like us. When did you last see a Jew with the arse hanging out of his pants like it hangs out of mine?’

‘That’s it, Viv, bring everything down to crude basics,’ Dai jeered. ‘People like you have sold the working classes down the river for years. As long as you’re comfortable, with enough in your pocket to put food on the table, a dress on your wife’s back, coal on the fire and a pint in your belly, you’re all right Jack and to hell with the rest of the world. If Hitler marched into Ponty right now and gave you a job, you’d shout “Sieg Heil” along with the rest of the poor deluded sods, wouldn’t you?’

‘Too bloody right. And it’s not just jobs that Hitler’s giving out. I’ve heard he’s building houses, proper houses with electric light upstairs, and bathrooms for his workers. And that he intends for every man to have a car –’

‘Give over, Viv,’ Evan said calmly, trying to defuse the argument. ‘You sound like a Mosley pamphlet.’