Second Chance (6 page)

After a while he followed me out to the back-kitchen where I was washing my face and hands before going to bed. ‘I'm going to try to persuade your mother to try for a little job I saw advertised in the
Cambrian News
last week. It's the woman from that big house, red brick with a double garage, next to the surgery in Meadow Lane, who's wanting part-time help. Not too far to walk. Suit your mother down to the ground. You talk to her about it tomorrow. Get her used to the idea. She's looking very well these days. She'll manage fine.' His voice was ordinary again, loud and harsh, and I preferred it like that.

‘I know she's better,' I said. ‘She brushes the floor now and washes the dishes, but I don't think she'd like anyone telling her what to do. And what if the woman started shouting at her? She'd cry and come home. That's what happened when she went down the shop last week and she was still crying when I came home from school.'

‘You leave her to me,' Uncle Ted said, smiling again.

It was the last thing I wanted to do. I went to bed but couldn't sleep until I heard his car driving away and my mother coming upstairs. What had he been saying to her? Why was she humming under her breath? I was disturbed without quite knowing why. I think you almost understand a whole lot of things when you're a child; there's one step missing, but you're almost there.

In the morning I asked her why he'd stayed so long. ‘He's lonely without Jane, I suppose. He was always fond of me, always wanting to hold my hand when he could.'

Was that all he did? Even now, I'm not sure. But he carried on bringing us our groceries and always stayed for an hour or two after I'd gone to bed, and though I wasn't happy about it, had to admit that his visits, all his flirting and sweet talk and possibly more, were doing my mother a great deal of good. She started going to the mobile hairdresser in the village to have her hair cut and set, and began ironing her dresses and finding different things to wear from a chest in the small bedroom where we didn't usually go because of the mice. One day she came to meet me from school in a long silky dress, a lace scarf round her neck and pointy silver shoes on her feet. ‘Was that your mother?' Elinor Rees asked me the next day. ‘She did look a sketch.'

‘She used to be a famous singer,' I said. I think it was about this time, when I was eight or nine, that I started living a second life surrounded by riches and luxury, my parents famous celebrities as in the library book
Alone for the Summer
, which I'd recently been reading and re-reading.

‘You mustn't wear your best clothes to meet me from school,' I told my mother. ‘When shall I wear them, then?' ‘On Saturday evening. I'll put a candle on the table and we'll be two rich ladies
and we'll drink some of Auntie Jane's rhubarb wine.' (The rhubarb
wine was for emergencies only, but I gave her an egg-cupful sometimes. And sometimes a cupful. It made her happy.)

Uncle Ted brought us chocolate every week; a bar of Cadbury's milk for my mother and a Mars Bar for me. I always intended to refuse mine, but when he put it down on the table, I never could.

There are several ways you can eat a Mars Bar. You can cut it into fifteen neat slices and have two every day and three on Sunday, you can eat the two end pieces, thickly coated with ridges of creamy chocolate, and hide the middle part in a cupboard for Saturday – only sometimes your mother finds it first – or if you're in a bad mood and feeling particularly sorry for yourself, you can gobble it all down like a dog with its dinner, hardly stopping to breathe. But you try not to succumb to that because it leaves you feeling greedy and sick.

A knock at the door. God help us, I was crying again. I wiped my eyes and went to answer it. ‘Hello my dear, have I come at a bad time? I'm Mrs Tudor Davies, Top Villa. Lorna told me that you wanted a bit of help for the funeral, but I can easily come back when you're more yourself.'

‘No, I'm fine. And I'll be glad to get it all settled, the food arrangements, I mean. I'll be very grateful if you can see to it for me.'

‘Your mother seemed very well when I saw her recently. It must have been a shock for you. When did you see her last?'

‘She came up to stay with me over Easter.'

‘I remember her mentioning it. I used to see her on a Wednesday afternoon sometimes. You know, the meetings in the village hall, second Wednesday in the month, Merched y Wawr, only sometimes she forgot about them, you know. Her memory.'

I didn't particularly want to discuss my mother with this woman who, according to my new friend, Gwenda Rees, was ‘always ready to run her down'. I sniffed and dried my eyes.

‘You cry, bach, don't mind me. Losing a mother is a terrible blow. “Cledd a min yw claddu mam.” You know that line, I suppose. Lovely piece of cynghanedd, that. And what do you think, Ifor Edwards, Maes yr Haf, had it put down wrong on his mother's grave, beautiful gold lettering on white marble, and the wrong words. “Cledd a min yw
marw
mam.” The sense is the same, perhaps, but where's the poetry? What a shame, and him a solicitor too. Well, half a dozen eight-inch quiches, I was thinking, two dozen small sausage rolls, two large loaves, one white, one brown, for ham sandwiches, a pound and a half of sliced ham and two pounds of cheddar, best tasty, with assorted cheese biscuits. Would that suit you?'

‘That would be fine, I'm sure.'

‘I'll keep you the bills for everything, don't worry.'

‘I won't worry at all about the food. Or the bills.'

‘Or the serving. Lorna and Ceri, my two daughters-in-law, will help with that.'

‘Excellent.'

‘I suppose some of your relatives from Gorsgoch will be there and poor old George Williams as well.'

‘I suppose so.'

‘Because he was very friendly, you know, with your mother in these latter years.'

‘Oh yes. I'll be very pleased to meet poor George Williams.'

‘You know about him then?'

‘Oh yes.'

At last she goes, leaving me with only the order of the service and the hymns to worry about. And what to do with the house and all my mother's clothes. And the fine cat, Arthur, who's at the door demanding to go out. And poor old George Williams, whoever he is.

And where is Paul Farringdon, now that I need him?

Is he ever around when I particularly need him? No, it's his ex-wife, the irresistible Francesca and his beautiful wild daughters who have first claim on his time and attention. Always.

When I'm fairly composed again, I walk down to the village to speak to the Reverend Lewis Owen, my mother's minister, who lives in the manse next door to the redbrick chapel. I'm in no hurry, so for a while I stand on the road opposite the little chapel and examine it. It seems to me beautiful; two nicely proportioned arched windows and an arched door on the ground floor, with exquisitely elaborate brickwork around them and under the steeply pitched roof. The men who built it may not have had many resources, but they certainly made the most of different coloured bricks, cream, yellow and rose-red. I don't think I'd ever looked at it before.

Slowly and reluctantly I cross the road to the manse and raise the knocker on the door, but it's opened before I let it fall. The man at the door is in pullover and jeans and looks like a young student, but before I can ask for his father, he shoots out his hand and tells me he is Lewis Owen, minister of Horeb, and that he's very sorry to hear of my mother's death. ‘Come in,' he says, ‘and you can tell me what to say about her. I know you, of course, from the television, but I didn't know your mother very well. I'm new here, you see.'

I'm shocked by his youth. Does this boy preach sermons about the love and the wrath of God? Does he expect people to listen to him? Doesn't he realise that he should wear a black suit and white dog collar to lend him some dignity? If he was on stage he'd be properly dressed and warned not to run his fingers through his red hair too.

‘Please sit down,' he says, moving copies of the
New Statesman
and
Private Eye
from the largest and most comfortable chair. ‘I'll get you a cup of tea and then we'll have a chat.'

A chat? When I was a child, the minister of Horeb, the Reverend William Pierce, wouldn't have known how to chat. He intoned in a solemn, mellifluous voice, no one else expected to say anything.

Lewis Owen, latterday saint, came back with some tea things on a tray.

‘How old was your mother?' he asked as he poured out a cup of very dark tea and handed it to me. I looked at him coldly. Surely he should have referred to her as ‘your dear mother'. After all, she'd only been dead two days.

‘Sixty-five,' I said.

At this point, he should have tutted and said, ‘Sixty-five! That's no age, is it.' But all he did was look out of the window trying to suppress a yawn.

‘A stroke,' he said at last. ‘Yes, I heard that from Lorna yesterday. She warned me that you were expected. I hope you didn't have to leave London in the middle of some television play?'

‘I'm here to talk about my mother.'

‘Of course.'

‘Miriam Rivers.' I stopped as soon as I'd begun. What was there to say about my mother? Lewis Owen was looking at me intently so I struggled on. ‘She wasn't anything of a “character”, not really, just an ordinary woman who'd had a lot of trouble in her life, poverty and so on. Like most women, I suppose – most women around here, anyway. She had a nervous breakdown when I was small and I used to look after her, rather devotedly, I think... But I've neglected her in the last years. Of course, you probably won't want to mention that in your address.'

‘Probably not.'

‘I don't know which her favourite hymns were, but I like the very sad ones; “Hyder” and so on. And “Mor hyfryd yw y rhai drwy ffydd” to finish off.'

‘A real old dirge, that one.'

‘I suppose you like the happy, clappy things that put bums on seats.'

‘Miss Rivers, don't take it out on me. Everyone feels guilty at the death of someone close to them. No one ever feels they've done as much as they should. Except the hypocrites. And I suppose you remember that Jesus Christ forgave the sinners, but chastised the hypocrites.'

I finished my tea and stumbled to my feet. ‘Thank you, Mr Owen. I'll see you on Friday.'

I felt my mother was in good hands.

At one time, Paul and I intended to get married. I don't remember much about our plans for the wedding except that it was to be very low-key; Brixton Register Office and a few friends back to lunch at our new house afterwards. I went as far as buying a very dashing suit, the colour ‘winter white', the fashionable shade that year, and though it was no different from ‘white' or even ‘summer white', it sounded appropriate for January We were going to fly to Scotland for our honeymoon; Paul had promised deep snow, log fires, rugs, grand opera on video and huge meals.

I shouldn't let myself think of those thwarted plans on such a desolate day as today.

Inviting Annabel and Selena was, of course, Paul's idea. He thought it would be a last treat for them before they went back to school after the Christmas holiday: champagne and new people to impress. They accepted the invitation, a long letter with lots of kisses and exclamation marks, but a few days beforehand, Selena was taken ill with what seemed at first to be meningitis. She was rushed to hospital with an alarmingly high fever, Francesca and Paul remaining at her bedside while I looked after a wailing Annabel and cancelled the wedding.

It turned out that Selena's high fever was due to a wisdom tooth coming through, something that Annabel had suspected all along, but by that time I'd convinced myself that Paul, though divorced for over a year, wasn't a free man. I didn't blame him, certainly didn't condemn him for rushing to Selena's side when she'd seemed so ill, but the illness served as a warning: I no longer wanted to marry him. Perhaps he loved me more than he loved Francesca, but Francesca plus his daughters, ‘the terrible trio' as I often thought of them, seemed invincible. And what had changed?

I was crying again as I reached the cottage, and the fact that Arthur turned his head towards me as I let myself in and then immediately turned away again seemed particularly cruel. I lifted him off the best chair and sat in it myself. I was hungry but too dispirited to get myself something to eat.

When I was about nine and starting to grow tall, I was always hungry, so hungry that I used to dream about food, plain food like bread and jam and digestive biscuits. Though I had a school dinner every day there seemed a permanent gnawing pain in my stomach.

Luckily, at this time of great need, I made the acquaintance of Mrs Bevan, Garth Wen. I suppose she'd always been there, working in the garden on sunny days when I passed her house on my way home from school, but perhaps it was at this time that I felt mature enough to start smiling and nodding at her. She was old with thin grey hair and glasses, the skin of her face was crinkled like knitting, but she had a very gentle smile. Hers was the last house in the village. All the other children had already reached their homes and I was alone with another long mile to walk.