The Emerald Valley (21 page)

The grassed areas were still fresh and green, too. Not yet sullied by the black dust that blew from passing coal-carts, they still matched the steeply rising fields which provided a backdrop to the town.

But if the clear, hot weather was fulfilling the early promise of a good summer, the promises that had been made in rhetoric from the platform at the Whit Tuesday Labour Fete showed no sign of being honoured.

‘The Lord only knows where it will end,' Charlotte said as she settled James in a chair in the scullery doorway. ‘I'm sure I don't.'

James grunted, but could not summon up enough breath to reply. Even with Charlotte half-carrying him, it was as much as he could do to totter to the back door from his permanent bed on the sofa in the living-room, but it was so stiflingly hot there, even with the windows thrown open and the fire banked in as much as possible in order to conserve what coal they had left.

‘Another couple of bucketfuls and it'll be gone,' Charlotte said, checking the coal-house with a practised eye. ‘Then I shall have to send our Harry up to the wood to see what stick he can find.'

‘Well, at least we b'ain't in the cold o'winter,' James managed chestily. All his life he had looked for the best in a situation and he had not changed now, in spite of his infirmity. ‘Worse things happen at sea,' was still the motto he lived by.

It was a maxim that irritated Charlotte at times, though she grudgingly admired him for it and had often relied on it for comfort during the thirty-four years of their marriage. Now she said shortly, ‘If it was winter, maybe the strike would be over sooner. Weather like this, folk can do without coal.'

James wheezed again, unbuttoning the neck of his vest and laying his chest bare to the sunshine.

‘I suppose we do have something to be thankful for,' Charlotte continued, sitting herself down on the wooden form outside the door and spreading her skirts to catch what breeze there was going. ‘We have got a bit put by. But it's not so much people of our age I worry about. It's the young ones with families. Like our Jim. However he's going to manage if it goes on much longer, I don't know.'

‘Like you said though, Lotty, we have a lot to be thankful for,' James maintained. ‘At least he's the only one of ours in that position. We can do what we can to help him out a bit.'

Charlotte clucked impatiently.

‘There's a limit to what we can do though. We could send him some nice fresh stuff out of the garden if we had it, but with you laid up I don't know what it will be like this year. Our Harry's got no interest in the garden at all, and I can't manage it on top of everything else.'

James'rheumy eyes went far away and Charlotte could have bitten her tongue. James had always loved his garden – it was breaking his heart now to see it ‘going to rack and ruin', as he put it.

‘Of course, there's talk of sending the children away while the strike's on,' she said, changing the subject. ‘I told you about that before, didn't I? I saw Jim's Sarah down the street and she mentioned it. Our Alex and May would be eligible to go. But Sarah's not keen. Naturally she doesn't want them to.'

‘Go where?' James had the sneaking suspicion he might have been ‘snooging'when Charlotte had imparted that particular piece of news.

‘Oh I don't know where – away,' Charlotte said vaguely. ‘To stay with people who can afford to look after them, feed them properly and all that. Sarah says it's supposed to be marvellous for them – like a holiday really and with all expenses found. A fund has been set up to pay their train fares and everything – the Lady Something-or-Other Fund – but Sarah doesn't think it would be all it's cracked up to be and I must say I agree with her. I mean, what if they weren't well? The first person they'd want would be their Mam and how could she get to them? She couldn't. Besides, I wouldn't much like the idea of somebody else paying to bring up my child and I know that's how Sarah feels.'

‘So they won't be going, then?' James asked.

‘Well, I couldn't say. Alex is a big boy for twelve and he eats as much as a man. And our May's almost as bad. I don't know if Sarah will be able to afford any say in it. She's not very keen, though, I can tell you, and the children say they're not going anywhere at least until after the bun-fight.'

‘A bun-fight, eh?' James put in. ‘I hadn't heard about that.'

‘Well, a tea anyway, in the recreation field, with sports and that afterwards.'

James shifted slightly in his chair. The effort made him wheeze again and when he recovered he asked, ‘Our Harry will be mixed up in that, I suppose?'

‘More than likely.' Charlotte stretched and got up. ‘If you ask me anything, our Harry is one of the few you could say is enjoying this strike! He's out morning, noon and night with that girl, doing this and that for the Relief Fund. He's even been neglecting his pigeons. Well, not
neglecting
them, but not paying them the attention he used to. I tell you this, James, I'd like to know just what the attraction is!'

James nodded, but as usual refused to be stirred.

‘Oh well, Lotty, just as long as he's happy …'

‘Yes, I suppose so,' Charlotte agreed.

To be happy was after all the very best a mother could wish for her children, even if the path to happiness was totally beyond her understanding. And if Harry was happy, she only wished she could say the same about Amy.

Charlotte sighed. When you had children, you always had something to worry about. What was the old saying? When they're babies they're a weight on your arm, but when they're grown they're a weight on your heart. How true it was! You wanted to do your best for them and yet there were times when you couldn't reach them, when you just had to stay back and let them find their own way. This was one of those times for Amy. She had offered support, done all she could and been painfully aware it was nowhere near enough.

But she'll get through, Charlotte comforted herself. She's tough, is Amy, and maybe in the end she will be the better for it. But oh, the fire was painful, she knew, and it was agony for her too to watch Amy burn.

‘Sometimes I feel so darned tired,' she said now, but James only shook his head thoughtfully.

‘Worse things happen at sea, m'dear. Worse things happen at sea.'

Towards the end of June Ted Hall came home for a few days, breezing in almost unannounced and causing Charlotte to put on her thinking cap as to how to feed and sleep him.

‘If only you'd let me know you were coming!' she chided him.

‘Well, I can always go again,' Ted teased.

‘Nothing you do would surprise me,' Charlotte returned and it was true.

Even as a boy Ted had been the scallywag of the family, always into some mischief or other. When he was twelve he had passed the labour exam and gone to work on the screens in Middle Pit, but it was not long before he was in trouble with the gaffer and he had been transferred to carting underground so that James could keep an eye on him. Then, when war had broken out, he had been quick to join the Somersets, fought in France and been taken prisoner. It was typical that he should have survived almost unscathed while his mates were falling all around him, Charlotte had always thought. The same guardian angel had saved him in a terrible accident underground and taken him out of a pub on the Strand minutes before it received a direct hit from a German bomb. But though he had come through the war with barely a mark on him, his good fortune had not extended to his personal life. On his release, he had come home from the prison camp to find the girl he had loved and left behind dead while he was still alive, and his revenge on the man he held responsible for her death had landed him in court on a murder charge.

Even now Charlotte shuddered as she thought of it. Ted was not the kind who gave his heart easily. He was too fond of the good times, of a drink and a cigarette, a day at the races or a night entertaining with the concert party in which he had been one of the leading lights. But he had idolised Becky Church and sometimes Charlotte felt sure he would never get over her.

True, he had for a while courted Rosa Clements from next door. Rosa, the illegitimate daughter of Walter Clements'first wife Ada and a travelling fair man, was a bewitching if – to Charlotte's mind – strange young woman, and though Charlotte did not personally like her she had almost hoped that Ted would settle down with Rosa.

Rosa loved him, it was plain to see, and always had done from the days when, as a scraggly child in torn petticoats and stockings stuck with burrs from the fields and woods where she spent so many hours, she had followed him everywhere. And in many ways they were two of a kind – both a little wild and unconventional. Yes, little though Charlotte cared for the idea of her son marrying the daughter of a gypsy – and horrified though she had been when for a while Rosa had turned her attentions to Jack, Ted's studious and quiet-natured younger brother – she had resigned herself to Ted and Rosa making a match of it.

But it had not worked out. Ted had drifted off, doing a dozen different jobs in a dozen different places – labouring on a building site in Cardiff, cleaning the windows at Bush House in London, working on a cockle stall at Weymouth – and Rosa had gone to the nearby village of Withydown where she worked (and lived in) at the little Post Office Stores. She and Ted were still in touch, Charlotte knew, and he went to see her whenever he was at home. But Charlotte despaired of him ever settling down. The wanderlust was in his blood now, and she could not imagine it ever leaving him.

Had Charlotte but known it, her doubts were all shared by Rosa herself.

You must be crazy, Rosa would tell herself as she sold stamps and envelopes, postal orders and glue. Crazy to go on hoping for him to change, crazy to be here, ready and waiting, whenever he takes it into his head to come and look you up.

But all the while she knew she
would
go on waiting for him, until the ends of the earth if needs be. She had loved him for too long – there could never be anyone else for her now.

Not that it's for lack of chances, Rosa consoled herself.

Even in this day and age, with too many of the young men dead in the war and too many women left hopeless old maids, Rosa had not lacked suitors. Her looks – dark sloe, eyes in a narrow face which maturity had turned beautiful, and a body lissom yet curved in all the right places – made sure of that.

But Rosa did not give a fig for any of them. She had fallen in love with Ted when she was no more than a scruffy urchin and her feelings had never wavered. Even now she could picture herself as a child of twelve, watching from the window on the day Jim had married Sarah – her round-eyed wonder at the loveliness of the bride in her cream silk dress with orange blossom in her hair, and her swelling love for Ted, so fair and handsome as he rode in the horse-drawn wagonette with the rest of the Hall family. She had dreamed even then that one day it might be her turn to ride in the wagonette with orange blossom in her hair and Ted, scrubbed and handsome, at her side, and nothing had ever come along to match that dream.

In those days she had made spells to try to bring him to just as she had later made spells to keep him safe during the war and, to her undying shame, to send Becky Church away. She had been convinced in those long-ago days that she was a witch; knowing she was different from the rest of her family, it had been an explanation which had pleased and excited her, giving her a mystery that was all her own and raising her above the shame she might otherwise have felt. ‘I'm a witch-child,' she used to say, as she went to the woods to pick onion flowers and mutter over knotted ropes. But that was one more illusion she had lost along the way. Charlotte Hall had told her the truth about herself – and her father – in a moment of anger. From that day on Rosa had never ‘made a spell', though sometimes she thought with awe of the outcome of some of her efforts and wondered if it was possible that, witch-child or not, there might have been something in it.

And sometimes too she was prone to flashes of premonition. These came at the most unexpected of moments and usually concerned Ted. For instance, Rosa knew almost without exception when he was going to make one of his visits – an unscheduled entry into her world for a few crazy, wonderful days. There was no pattern to her ‘feelings'as she called them; she just
knew
with a knowledge that went deeper than hoping and she would think: ‘Ted's coming, today,' or ‘When I get home, there'll be a letter from Ted,' and the joy would sing in her veins like a bubbling, cascading mountain stream. And it did not matter that in a few days he would be gone again – for the time being this did not even enter her head. Rosa knew how to live for the moment, not spoiling it with anxieties about the future.

And at least he did keep in touch. Ever since she had gone to court and given evidence for him when he had been up on that dreadful murder charge – perjured herself, in fact – there had been a bond between them which surpassed mere physical attraction. She had known all the time that he was innocent, of course, but because of his loyalty to Becky he had refused to give the evidence which would clear him; with that same unfailing intuition, she had also known that he would be found guilty unless someone did something to save him. She had been that someone and had gladly traded her reputation for his freedom. She had done it without hope of gain, simply because she loved him, and the relationship that had grown between them had been a bonus. She had even allowed herself to hope it might deepen and develop. But Ted had still been too unsettled by Becky's death, too restless. The grief had driven him away and now, five years later, he seemed no nearer settling down than ever he had.

But at least, Rosa consoled herself, he had not settled down with anyone else either. Whether there were girls in the towns where he worked she neither knew nor wanted to know. Her only concern was that when he came home it was to her, and the meetings were explosive and rewarding, enough to satisfy her until the next time – and the next. Between whiles she went on with her own life, as she was doing that June afternoon when she had the sudden joyous feeling that Ted was near again.