The Pleasure Seekers (9 page)

Otherwise, though, I’m exactly where you left me. Commuting between Finchley Road and Wandsworth. In some ways, the routine of the week helps keep my mind occupied so there isn’t much time to brood. It’s the weekends I dread. And to think – that used to be ‘our’ time, our special time. Ronnie tries to get me to go out on a Friday night, or at least on Saturdays, because I’ve stopped letting her have parties at the flat – mean, I know, but I can’t cope with parties at the moment. The most I can manage is a quiet meal or a movie. Otherwise I spend all my time in the room reading or taking long walks on the Heath. Ronnie has been great, though, my all-in-one support system. She bought me the new Beatles LP the other day
– Abbey Road –
which is fantastic, and has been consoling me no end
.

I miss you, my darling. What can I say? It’s been three long months and I thought it would get easier. I thought knowing I was going to fly over to India in December would settle things down. But there’s so much uncertainty; so much that still needs to be said. I suppose the main issue for me is my parents. They haven’t yet replied to my letter of a month ago, so I’m going to call them this Sunday. I should have called them in the first place. I was just being cowardly, thinking I could ease them into the situation with words. Who knows what they think about all this? They’ve always been so cryptic, anyway, so closed with their emotions. It’s the Calvinist way, I suppose, and they’ve trained me to be the same. But sometimes I just wish we could scream whatever we had to say at the top of our lungs. It would be better instead of all this tight-lipped nonsense
.

I’ve decided to hand in my notice and go to Nercwys as soon as possible. No doubt there will be active attempts once I’m there to change my mind (smallpox reports and Christians killed by tribals and whatnot) but I really want to spend some time with my family before I leave. Who knows when I’ll see them again? I had lunch with Fred yesterday (who sends a big bear hug your way). We went to the Brewer’s Inn – your old haunt – and I even ordered a cheese sandwich and orange juice in your honour! I thought if I’m going to live with your parents in an all-vegetarian household for two whole years, I’d better get some practice in
.

Oh, love! It’s so difficult. So incredibly difficult. I thought I’d be better at this. I mean, I’m the practical one of the two of us, but it’s been impossible. I hear you in the flat all the time. Sometimes, I really think I’m going mad because it sounds like you’re calling me from another room – and of course, I foolishly run to follow the voice only to be confronted with emptiness. More and more emptiness. Whenever the doorbell rings I think it’s you – come back to surprise me, all the way from India. All I have are your letters and the few photographs we took while you were here. My favourite is the Christmas party one. The way you’re holding me – your arms around my waist and your cheeky turbaned head poking over my shoulder, smiling so brightly at the camera. It feels so long ago that you held me, that you were here, and our life was moving beautifully along.

I guess the part that hurts most is how you were wrenched away. How upset your parents must have been to make up a lie about your mother being ill. ALL just to get you home! Taking you away from your studies and work, just to make sure you don’t get more entangled with ME! I can understand their concerns, that they want you to marry someone from the same background and culture – my parents have similar concerns – but still! I do wonder how I’ll fit in when I come to India. I worry about so many things – the language, for a start. I know you said that everyone else speaks English, but it’s your mother I’m going to be spending a lot of time with – and how’s that going to work if we can’t even speak to each other? I suppose I’ll learn a bit of Gujarati along the way if I’m hearing it all the time, but how’s it going to be for your family, who have to open their house to me, who have to like me? It’s just not part of my world, you understand? It all works very differently here, and frankly the idea of living with them is a bit terrifying. It would be OK if we just had to see them once in a while, and if we had our own little place, just for the two of us. But this way there won’t be any relief. I’ll feel like I’m on display all the time . . . Here I go, being negative again. I’ll stop
.

Guess what, though? There is some good news to report. The Polytechnic had their annual award thing the other night and I went along because Bhupen and Mangala said of course I must come, especially since YOU won the gold medal for the term, DESPITE having missed the last two weeks of it! I’m so proud of you, darling. Your professor – John Campbell, was it? The mousy one who’s always smoking? Well, anyway, he came up to me afterwards and raved about you. They announced your name and said you weren’t able to attend as you were out of the country, which made you sound very exotic and important indeed, and Bhupen accepted it on your behalf as you wanted. Anyway, it’s lying in my knicker drawer now, so I’ll be bringing it with me when I come. That should give your father something to smile about.

Let me know if you want me to bring anything else. You left in such a hurry, it’s a shame you didn’t even have time to take presents back for everyone. You must tell me what to get for the girls. I know you said that Meenal’s favourite colour is pink – she sounds like a real ‘girl’ to me, and I think we’ll get along just fine. But what about Dolly? What colour does she like? And what’s she interested in other than playing in your mad neighbour’s garage? She’s seventeen now, surely she must be out of her tomboy phase! And Chotu . . . do you think he’ll be awfully reluctant to share his treasured big brother with a woman? I’ve bought him some of those model aeroplane books that you said to get him, so hopefully that will divert him for a while.

Well, my love, it’s late, and I’m beginning to feel the cold with no one to warm me up. Ronnie is yelling from the kitchen. It’s another baked beans on toast night because neither of us can be bothered to cook. She sends lots of love, by the way, and says that while she may not be able to attend our wedding in India, she’s going to organize a whopping party when we get back! She’s been a real help – the only help, in fact. I’ve had no one to encourage or pamper me. Not like your Ba, who sounds amazing! I can’t wait to meet her. Did she really say that to you the other day? That she thought she could smell me, and that I smelled like freshly cut grass? The Nercwys fields, no doubt. And did you tell her that you thought otherwise – that I smelled like the ocean to you? Maybe I smell of both? Who knows? I do know that if I don’t have a bath and get changed soon, neither of you is going to want to get near me!

All my love always
,

Your Charlie Girl

PS London sends its love too. It’s not the same city without you
.

She waited till four o’clock on Sunday to call. Her parents would be home from church and finished with lunch. Bryn would be sitting in his favourite armchair, contemplating
The Doctrines of Grace
or the crossword. Nerys would be out in the garden if it was a fine day; or if there was a spattering of rain, not unusual for this time of year, she’d be inside with her knitting, muttering to herself between the clack clack of her needles. If her brothers Huw and Owen were home, there’d have been proper Sunday roast with rhubarb crumble for pudding. If not, Nerys and Bryn would have made do with a few pieces of toast with grilled cheese and onion.

Siân tried to picture her parents in Tan-y-Rhos – the house she’d spent her whole life in until Ronnie and she had come away to London. Number 10 Tan-y-Rhos. It sat dead centre on the one street that ran through Nercwys; nothing to distinguish it from any of the other houses except for the front garden full of Nerys’s prize-winning roses. Inside, it was the same as Aunty Blodwyn’s and Aunty Carys’s on either side. Same as Uncle Rhys’s down the street and Aunty Eleri’s at the top of the village. Same sitting room and kitchen plan; same three bedrooms and bath upstairs; same outhouse converted to coal shed in the back yard; same wooden gate; same windows; same view.

Siân had been trying to escape this sameness since 1962, when she’d sneaked off to the dance hall in Mold with her friends Ronnie, Gwenyth and Dee. There had been a band from Liverpool playing that night – four young lads with pageboy haircuts. Siân had danced right up close to them in her new tulle ribboned dress, and one of the singers, the sweet, serious-faced one, had winked at her while singing a song called ‘Love Me Do’. Those boys would later become The Beatles, but for that night, they belonged to Siân. They were like beacons, all four of them – standing on top of a hill, light shining from them, willing her to fly, fly away, and Siân, looking around, had wondered where she could possibly go to.

And that’s when the dream of London began. Because she held her whole life in one clenched fist: the fields and woodland paths, the streams, The White Lion, the post office, the village school, the battalion of aunts and uncles. And it wasn’t enough. It just wasn’t enough any more to let Clive, her red-headed boyfriend, touch the inside of her thigh while they sat at the newly opened Gateway Theatre in Chester, or to smoke hand-rolled Turkish cigarettes with her friends. Something had started growing inside her, something like a huge, teeming city with millions of people milling about in it.

This thing taking up space in her abdomen continued to grow until it felt to Siân like a sadness, old and displaced from childhood, come back to haunt her, like her brothers running ahead of her on a winter’s night yelling, ‘Come on slow poke,’ leaving her to make her way back in the terrifying dark. She’d been waiting for this thing to reveal itself to her for so long now, for something to happen, for someone to say,
Come, come to where I am. Let’s begin our lives
. And she would go. Because she hadn’t begun her life. Not yet. Not here in Nercwys.

So when the letter of employment finally arrived from Joseph Friedman & Sons after months of conspiring and planning, Siân had been able to sit down with her family at the table and say, ‘I’ve got a proper reason to go now, haven’t I?’

Huw and Owen with their shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows – their bodies short and stocky like Nerys, their faces spitting images of their father. ‘Don’t be daft,’ Huw had said, ‘How’re you going to manage on your own?’ And even Owen, who usually kept his own counsel: ‘You and Ronnie are going to play house in London? This I have to see!’

‘What I don’t understand,’ Nerys chimed in, with that tea-kettle boiling voice of hers that escalated whenever she was extra excited or nervous, ‘is why you’ve got a bee in your bonnet about this, girl. What’s the point?’ And then she turned to Bryn, who had been impassive throughout. ‘You talk to her. She’ll only talk sense to you. Just ask her what’s the point of it all?’

Bryn had seen it coming. For years he’d seen it coming. He hated the idea of Siân going off just as much as anyone, especially to London – a city he imagined to be full of sin and lost souls. He’d wished differently for her, of course, what father wouldn’t have wished for his only daughter to remain in the village and fall in love with one of the local boys – a quarry worker like himself, or even one of those modern men with office jobs who commuted to Mold every day. He’d hoped that she’d get married in the chapel, buy a house nearby and raise children who’d come running to sit in his lap like sunbeams. But it wasn’t going to be that way with Siân, was it? And part of him understood that it had nothing to do with her free will; that it was a grace calling to her.

Bryn understood all about the penalties of mankind’s sin. He knew that the mysteries of being chosen didn’t stem from any individual heart, but from the heart above. He tried convincing his wife that it wasn’t such a bad thing for their only daughter to go out journeying. This had been the natural state of man since his Fall, after all: to seek out his ultimate purpose. And as long as Siân remembered that the primal source of all these things lay in the infinite and immutable love of God, she’d be all right; better still, she’d be saved. So he put his arms around his daughter that evening after supper, saying nothing, but meaning all of these things, giving her the release she needed.

And so she’d gone. Gone off to London and promptly fallen in love with a boy from India.

What was she going to say to them this time? That she’d be back after two years? That she was going to marry a man she’d known for six months? A man whose family had tricked him into going home and were none too pleased about Siân’s existence on the planet. A man she couldn’t imagine living without, but with whom she hadn’t been able to share her fears. She hadn’t told him, for instance, that she got jolted out of bed some nights, as though a charge of electricity were being passed through her – thinking
what if, what if
it is all a terrible mistake? What if she went to him and regretted everything? What if he tried to show her his life and she just couldn’t see it? What if there came a day when she no longer lived inside of him, and she had to return, and there was no place to return to? Wouldn’t it be awful to be saddled together? To have made such a hue and cry, only to let it go? And weren’t they both too proud anyway, to allow people their sanctimonious we-told-you-sos:
We knew it wouldn’t work out in the end. Like chalk and cheese. No chance of that lasting
.

No, there was no easy way to say it except to say it. The only thing to do was to call and hope it wasn’t raining, so Nerys would be outside, and Bryn would have to be the one to raise himself from the armchair and pick up the phone. And then, Bryn, cradling the telephone receiver as though it were a small, dying bird might say something like, ‘But we won’t hardly get to see you, love.’ And this, Siân thought, she could just about bear.