One Blue Moon (31 page)

‘As if I can spare the time to stand on railway platforms, when this good-for-nothing son of mine leaves me to run the business on my own. Who’s going to open the cafés in the morning now? That’s what I’d like to know.’

‘Goodbye Papa,’ Ronnie lifted his hand again, but his father clasped him by the shoulders and kissed him on both cheeks.

‘You think you could have found a healthy one,’ he grumbled as Trevor helped Maud to the car.

‘She’s the one I want, Papa.’

‘Then you’d better make her healthy.’

‘I’ll try.’

Ronnie stood on the steps of the New Inn and watched as his father walked away without a backward glance.

‘Laura put a rug and a pillow there for you, Maud,’ Trevor called from the driving seat as Ronnie finally climbed into the back of the car with her. ‘She wants you to take them on the train with you.’ He had to repeat himself twice before Maud and Ronnie answered. They were engrossed in watching the bowed, solitary figure of his father as he made his way through the litter-strewn streets towards the Tumble.

Andrew John stood, arms folded loosely over the barrier in Paddington Station, watching the tides of people as they flowed from the Swansea train. He kept a close eye on those leaving the third– and second-class carriages, searching for a glimpse of Ronnie’s dark, slicked-back hair, or Maud’s blonde curls.

‘Doctor John?’ Ronnie stood before him, dressed in a good winter-weight overcoat and expensive trilby.

‘Ronnie?’ Andrew shook his hand enthusiastically.

‘It’s very good of you to meet us.’

‘Not at all. After all, we are brothers-in-law now.’

‘So everyone in Pontypridd keeps reminding me.’

‘Where’s Maud?’ Andrew looked over Ronnie’s shoulder for the pert, pretty blonde who’d teased him in Graig Avenue when he’d gone there with Bethan.

‘She’s still in the carriage, I thought it best for her to stay there until I knew where your car was.’

‘It’s over there,’ Andrew waved his hand to the left. ‘When I showed them my bag and told them I was waiting to pick up a semi-invalid they let me park it by the taxi ranks.’

‘I’ll get the porter.’ Ronnie disappeared into the crowd, re-emerging moments later with Maud in his arms and a porter in tow. Andrew rushed to open the car doors. Ronnie deposited Maud tenderly on the back seat before walking around to help Andrew stack the cases in the boot.

‘The boat sails at eleven tonight,’ he murmured, heaving his suitcase next to Maud’s Gladstone.

‘So Trevor told me.’ Andrew slammed the boot shut. ‘Bethan has a meal waiting. She wanted to come, but I wouldn’t let her. Not in her condition in this crush, but she’s desperate to see you.’

‘Me or Maud?’ Ronnie smiled.

‘Both.’ Andrew delved under the front seat for the starting handle. As soon as the car purred into life he removed it quickly and dived into the front seat.

‘Nice car,’ Ronnie commented from the back seat, where he’d sat next to Maud before Andrew had had a chance to greet Bethan’s sister.

‘Nice of you to say so, but it’s not mine,’ Andrew replied as he pushed the car into gear. ‘I borrowed it off my brother-in-law.’

‘Sorry.’

‘So am I,’ Andrew replied drily as he pulled slowly out of the station and up into the light of the street. ‘If it was mine, it would mean that I was doing better than I am.’

‘This is London!’ Maud cried out excitedly, staring round-eyed in wonder at the façades of terraces that were even longer, larger and grander than the ones she’d seen in Cardiff.

‘This is London!’ Andrew steered carefully around a taxi and a bus; as he pulled up at a junction he looked in the mirror and smiled at his sister-in-law. The smile died on his lips. Maud had pulled back the thick blanket and fur coat that Ronnie had wrapped round her when he had carried her from the train to the car, and was sitting forward, poised on the edge of her seat, holding Ronnie’s hand. The sight of her thin, almost skeletal figure reminded him of the line, ‘The skull beneath the skin’, and it took no imagination on his part to place Maud amongst the cadavers that the first-year students in the hospital practised on. Realising that Ronnie was watching him, he pulled the wheel sharply to the left, and concentrated on his driving.

‘Bethan’s so looking forward to seeing you, and getting all the gossip from home.’

‘There’s lots,’ Maud pronounced with an air of bright animation that belied her outward appearance of wan, sickly fragility. ‘But I’ve no intention of telling you any of it in advance.’

‘Same old Maud,’ Andrew gave a rather forced laugh. ‘Tell me Ronnie, do you think you’ll succeed in turning her into a subservient wife?’

‘A wife, yes,’ Ronnie caught Maud’s hand and pressed it to his lips. ‘Subservient, never.’

‘Beth, this is lovely. Really lovely.’ Maud lay back on Bethan and Andrew’s bed, watching as Bethan sat on her dressing-table stool and combed her hair.

‘You like the flat then?’ Bethan was horror-struck by Maud’s appearance, but well-schooled by her mother in the art of concealing her feelings, she kept her shock hidden. They heard the sound of male laughter coming from the living room, accompanied by the clinking of ice dropping into whisky glasses.

Maud laid her hand on Bethan’s.

‘You’re really happy, aren’t you?’

‘Ecstatic!’ Bethan smiled, patting her enormous stomach proudly.

‘I do envy you. I hope Ronnie and I have a dozen.’

‘I suggest you get well first.’

‘I intend to. So does Ronnie, and he always seems to get his own way.’

‘With you around, he won’t be doing that for long.’

She washed her hands in the bathroom, and went into the kitchen. Maud followed her and sat on one of the up-to-the minute, art deco beechwood chairs that Andrew had bought in Barker’s in Kensington.

‘And you,’ Bethan asked, looking her sister in the eye. ‘Are you happy with Ronnie?’

‘Yes. He’s wonderful. I never thought of marrying him before he asked me. Well, he always seemed so much older than me. But he’s terribly good-looking, and ... and ...’

‘He swept you off your feet?’

‘Something like that,’ Maud answered shyly. Bethan gave her sister a hug before she began to dish out the food. It was obvious to anyone who looked that Maud was in the first flush of love – or infatuation. For both Ronnie’s and Maud’s sake she hoped it was the former, and of the kind that would last. With what lay ahead, they’d both need it.

‘I’ve found you a porter, he’ll take your cases to your cabin, and I had a word with a customs officer. He’s promised to see you and Maud through as quickly as he can. I’ve also managed to get a chair. God knows how old it is, but it should hold Maud’s weight until you’ve wheeled her to the cabin. You’ve got your tickets and everything?’

‘Everything being our marriage certificate and my original Italian passport. There wasn’t time to see to anything else. But it should be enough. Thank you for a lovely evening and for driving us here.’

Ronnie shook Andrew’s hand. ‘Shall we see if we can prise those two apart?’ He nodded to the car where Bethan and Maud were still locked in conversation.

Andrew and Bethan watched as Ronnie, porter in his wake, wheeled Maud into the customs hall.

‘She’s dying, isn’t she?’ Bethan asked, clinging to her husband.

‘She has advanced tuberculosis, yes,’ he admitted, ‘but Ronnie is doing all he can. And if she doesn’t live, it won’t be for the want of him trying. He’s taking her to the best place. Italy has a wonderful climate. Not too hot, not too cold. Dry, warm, clean air. It just might work.’

‘And it might not.’ She lifted the collar of her coat around her neck and shivered. The air was chill, with a hint of snow in it. He put his arm tenderly round her shoulders.

‘If sheer bloody-mindedness counts for anything in effecting a cure, then Ronnie will have Maud fit, well and working in the fields by the end of the summer,’ he pronounced resolutely. He slipped his fingers beneath her chin and lifted her face to his. ‘How about we go home to bed?’ he murmured huskily, suddenly very grateful for all his blessings.

Chapter Twenty-eight

The crossing was a nightmare. The steward gleefully told Ronnie as he emptied Maud’s sick bowls down the toilet that he hadn’t seen a rougher one in thirty years. And the whole time Maud tossed and turned uncomplainingly in her narrow bunk, Ronnie crouched on his knees beside her, sponging her feverish face with tepid water and holding empty bowls to her mouth. He had to take the coats that he’d hung on the door and fold them on to the bunk he didn’t have time to sleep in, as their alarming swaying from side to side began to affect him too.

He had cause to remember his glib words to Evan many times over during the course of that interminable crossing: ‘I’ll get a cabin with a berth, then all Maud has to do is sleep until Calais.’ No one slept. Not Maud. Not him, and none of the other passengers if the noises coming from the corridors were anything to go by. And the nightmare didn’t end with the docking of the ship.

Calais was still shrouded in grey misty night when he wheeled Maud off the ship. He peered in the direction that a blue-coated official pointed him in, and just about managed to make out the wavering lights of the customs sheds that punctuated the darkness. The French excise officers were neither as sympathetic nor as understanding as the ones Andrew had spoken to in Tilbury. They shouted at him in harsh guttural French, which they repeated loudly, syllable for syllable, even when he shrugged his shoulders and spoke to them in English and Italian. They made no allowances for Maud’s weakness, insisting that she leave the wheelchair so they could search the folds of the fur coat and blankets, and when Ronnie tried to help her back into the chair when they’d completed their search, he discovered to his fury that someone had taken it. He supported Maud as best he could, while the officers rummaged through her Gladstone and fingered her clothes. All he could do was stand by incensed, watching helplessly as they heaped the silk underwear his sisters had bought Maud on to their rough wooden tables, and opened the packet of contraceptives Trevor had given him. Long before the search was finished Maud fainted, the dead weight of her head lolling weakly against his shoulder.

Eventually the officials moved on to their next victim, leaving him, and an unconscious Maud, to repack their own bags. Fortunately an elderly British couple came to his assistance, the husband going in search of porters while the wife packed for him.

Even then it seemed to take an eternity of shouting, arguing and bad-tempered exchanges before he managed to leave the customs shed. Tipping the porter with an English ten shilling note, the lowest coinage he had, he persuaded the fellow to follow him to the trains. There, only after ten harassed minutes, they managed to locate the carriage that was to take them to Genoa. The Italian steward helped him get Maud aboard, stowed away their suitcases in the stateroom he had booked, pulled down their beds, and offered to heat up some soup for Maud who had still not recovered from her faint.

Pathetically grateful for the steward’s kindness, help and blessedly familiar language, Ronnie gave him a pound, promising the man more if he would help him care for Maud on the journey. As soon as they were alone, Ronnie undressed her and put her between the stiff, starched sheets on the makeshift bed. She lay there like a wax doll, white, silent and just as lifeless.

She came round as dawn was breaking over the horizon of the French countryside. Pushing aside the chicken soup Ronnie tried to feed her, she insisted on sitting up and looking at everything; exclaiming at the red-roofed, greystone French farmhouses, similar yet different from the ones in Wales. The flat country, the level patchwork of fields, the towns, so strange, peculiar and foreign after Pontypridd. Afraid of missing anything, her eyes darted in their sockets as she tried to assimilate all that could be seen from the window. She found something to wonder over with every mile they passed: a windmill, a French peasant woman driving a donkey, a man wearing a beret ... When she began to cough Ronnie fed her three spoonfuls instead of the usual single spoonful of mixture in the hope that it would induce her to rest, but if anything it had the opposite effect. Bright-eyed, feverish, she point-blank refused to lie down.

The steward brought them a meal when Ronnie declined to visit the dining car. Ronnie laid the trays over their knees on the bed. Sitting next to Maud, he tried to force her to eat, slipping morsels of chicken and potato into her mouth as she continued to stare in wonder at her first foreign country. He stayed with her even after the steward removed the trays, propping her against him, holding her while her skin grew first warm, then uncomfortably hot, until it burned his chest through the thick linen of his shirt.

He tried to listen to her enthusiastic cries and make suitable comments, but his mind was elsewhere. Evan had posed the question of what he would do if Maud died on the journey. Had Evan had a premonition of sorts? Had his own stubborn streak set Maud on a course that was going to end here, in this carriage?

By nightfall she was delirious. Mindful of Ronnie’s large tip and the promise of extra money, the steward produced iced water, soup, and more pillows at regular intervals. Ronnie did what little he could, and sat holding Maud’s hand as her colour heightened and her eyes grew wild.

That night they stopped to take on coal. The steward disappeared, reappearing an hour later with a doctor, who shook his head and gave Ronnie a bottle of laudanum in exchange for an English pound note. Ronnie had no compunction about using it, hoping that the drug would finally compel Maud to rest.

When the train began to move, he lay beside her. As the next dawn broke the steward looked into their room, but he did not raise their blinds, figuring that sleep was better medicine than chicken soup for both the sick young signora and her exhausted husband.

When Maud finally woke again the sun was high, and Ronnie’s eyes were open as he lay, fully dressed, beside her. She smiled, and he breathed again: the smile was one of recognition, not delirium.

Somewhere on that interminable train journey, Maud’s infatuation with Ronnie died. She found it impossible to remain infatuated with a man who sat beside her in shirt-sleeves, braces and no collar, with two days’ growth of black stubble covering his cheeks, feeding her while she lay in bed as weak and helpless as a baby. He washed her, changed her, dressed her in clean clothes, and while he cared for her generously, selflessly, and more tenderly than any nurse the image of the tall, dark, sardonically handsome Ronnie, always dressed immaculately in clean jacket, boiled shirt and stiff white collar as he cracked acidic jokes in the café was replaced by a weary, grey-faced exhausted Ronnie who winced every time she coughed. And as infatuation died, so it was supplanted by a sounder emotion, rooted firmly in his caring, obsessive passion for her.

She forced herself to eat when he spooned food into her mouth, even though she felt food would choke her. She smiled at him, and held his hand, because they were the only ways open to her in which to show her gratitude. But he was too busy nurturing the flame of life that flickered weakly inside her to notice the change. All he knew was that she was mercifully quieter.

‘Genoa, Signor!’

Although he had dressed Maud and repacked their suitcases in preparation for reaching the town, Ronnie had been dreading the end of the rail journey. It meant having to leave the steward’s care and the security of the bedded stateroom that had enabled him to care for Maud with at least the rudiments of comfort to hand.

‘I’ll find you a porter, Signor,’ The steward offered.

‘And a taxi,’ Ronnie pleaded, slipping him two more pounds. ‘I need to get to the Bardi bus. But first I need to change my English money for Italian lire ...’

‘Signor, all the buses leave outside the station. May I make a suggestion? My cousin’s wife runs a small
pensione
here. You can leave your wife with her while you change your money and find your bus.’

‘I’ll do that.’ Ronnie grasped eagerly at the idea of finding another bed for Maud to lie in.

The steward returned with a porter and handed Ronnie a small heap of coins.

‘You paid me much too much, Signor,’ he said gravely. ‘I have already tipped the porter and told him where to take you. Good luck to you and your wife.’

Ronnie shook the man’s hand appreciatively. Picking up Maud, he stepped off the train into an icy blast.

‘Italian winds are just as bloody freezing as Welsh ones,’ he muttered as he gritted his teeth and followed the porter.

‘Did you say something?’ Maud mumbled sleepily. After the excitement of the journey through France and the attack it had precipitated, Ronnie was taking no chances. There’d been more than a spoonful of laudanum in the coffee he’d fed her after their last meal.

It was six o’clock in the evening. The square was full of people hurrying home from work. A sprinkling of travellers lingered in the café waiting for their buses and trains. A few steps and he found himself in the small lodging house. The room the proprietress showed him to actually overlooked the square. It was clean, and the woman friendly. If Maud’s condition was bringing them sympathy and good service, he certainly wasn’t too proud to accept it. He put Maud to bed, and left after asking the woman to keep an eye on her. He had no choice. They needed Italian money, and he had to find out about buses to Bardi.

‘The day after tomorrow!’

‘They only go once a week, Signor. Bardi is not a popular place. Every market day, one bus comes in and one goes out. It will leave at noon.’

The market bus. He had a sudden memory of that bus. Packed with gnarled old countrywomen laden with chickens and geese, the whole shrieking every time the ancient, battered vehicle jerked over pot-holes that speckled the unmade roads, like currants in Welsh cakes.

‘There’s no other way? A car, perhaps?’

‘A car! To Bardi? No, Signor.’ The driver laughed at his naivety.

There was nothing for it. He returned to the
pensione
, lay next to Maud on the bed and waited. Perhaps it was just as well she could rest before the worst part of their journey began. And their landlady proved as kind as she was friendly, doing their washing for them and bringing rich minestrone soups and omelettes to their room to tempt Maud’s non-existent appetite.

The Signora had a cousin who knew the driver. At her injunction he kept seats for Ronnie and Maud close to the front of the bus, where they could receive some benefit from the warmth of the engine. They needed it. The Signora’s husband carried their cases on board, and Ronnie carried Maud.

The journey from Genoa to Bardi was every bit as hellish as Ronnie had feared. They bumped and rocked their way painfully over dirt roads, stopping at every out of the way hamlet and farmstead, and all he could do was hold Maud suspended on his lap and hope that the cheeses and live chickens stowed overhead on the string racks next to their suitcases wouldn’t fall on to their heads.

They eventually reached the square in Bardi at five in the afternoon, and even Ronnie was cold, tired and exhausted. He left Maud slumped in her seat and carried the suitcases off first, then he went back for her. He stood feeling totally lost and bewildered in the darkening square, holding a sick and barely conscious Maud in his arms.

He couldn’t remember anything. Not even the road out of the town to his grandfather’s farm.

‘You look as though you need help, Signor.’ The man was old, bent and grey. A busybody. A blessed busybody who might know everyone in the village – and outside.

‘I need to get to Signor Ronconi’s house,’ Ronnie blurted out urgently, worried about the darkness and the rapidly dropping temperature. ‘My wife is sick.’

The man studied him thoughtfully in the lamplight.

‘You are related to Signor Ronconi, perhaps?’

‘His grandson.’

‘Ah, now I see, you are Giacomo’s son?’

‘I am Giacomo too.’

‘Come, we will go to Mama Conti. She will look after you, please follow me.’ The man led the way to a large house on the edge of the square. Trusting to fate to look after their cases, Ronnie followed him. Mama Conti, a large and warm-hearted Italian housewife, asked no questions – at first. She opened her door, took them in, sat Maud by the fire and spoonfed her minestrone soup – which Ronnie was beginning to think was the Italian cure for all ills.

Bit by bit he told his story, and a boy was dispatched to the square to pick up their cases. An ox was found which would draw a wheel-less sled to his grandparent’s farm, both to carry their luggage and bring news of their arrival, and later, much later, when they were both fed and rested and after much discussion as to the best way of conveying Maud there, they were allowed to leave with a guide who promised to show Ronnie the way to their new home. He carried Maud. It seemed the easiest solution to the problem. Too weak to sit on a horse, even if one could be found, and far too delicate to withstand the bumping of the local sleds, the only solution seemed to lie in Ronnie’s strong arms.

He had been warned it was eight kilometres. He had remembered it as five, but when he finally saw the oil lamp flickering in his grandfather’s kitchen window he would have believed anyone who had told him it was twelve.

Maud was taken from him, and carried upstairs by his aunt and a neighbour who had been summoned to help. His grandparents embraced him, sat him by the fire in the only chair that boasted both a cushioned seat and back and fed him minestrone soup and wine that was so raw it hurt his throat. They asked only one question: ‘Are you here to stay?’

When he said yes, they nodded and smiled so broadly he felt that he really had come home.

Maud was sunk deeply into a fluffy feather bed that had enveloped itself around her. She felt warm, cosy, sheltered and very, very comfortable. She opened her eyes. The first thing she saw was her own arm, encased in the sleeve of an unfamiliar linen nightdress, the wrist ornamented by thick, crunchy cotton lace. She looked up. A candle flickered on a pine chest next to the bed she was lying in. Two brown faces looked down at her, both smiling, one old and wrinkled, the other impossibly ancient. There was a single moment of blind, urgent panic.