Tiger Bay Blues (41 page)

‘And the four o’clockers who will be here now.’ Anna added pointedly.

Edyth gathered her coat and handbag from the chair where she had left them.

‘The casuals arrive from six onwards, but the real moneyed crache come down here on a weekend, drunk as lords and looking for the good times they’ve heard they can get in the Bay, which was why we were so pissed off when we saw you standing on the street corner.’

‘Language, Colleen,’ Anna rebuked.

‘Thank you for the coffee and cake, ladies.’ Edyth was strangely reluctant to leave. She would have liked to have heard a few more of Colleen’s stories about the mysteries of sex. Despite the women’s coarse turn of phrase, which she suspected was down to the way they made a living, there was a genuine warmth about them that she found endearing, and she could have stayed in the kitchen for hours listening to them talk about their gentlemen friends – and four bare legs in a bed.

‘You must come to the vicarage for tea,’ she said as Anna walked her to the door.

‘Oh no, Edyth, that won’t do. It’s one thing to allow our kids into Sunday school, quite another to have us in your home, especially as I heard that the Reverend’s mother moved in today.’

‘How did you know?’ Edyth wound her muffler around her neck and unclipped her umbrella.

‘The taxi driver’s a regular. We give him a couple of free ones a week to show our gratitude for the trade he brings in. Thank you for seeing our kids all right in Sunday school. You’re welcome to call round whenever you want a chinwag, but make sure it’s our quiet time.’

‘Thank you for the tea and cake.’ Edyth felt as though she were being thrown out.

‘See you around, Mrs Slater, thanks for the Bible talk, sorry you couldn’t convert any of us,’ Anna said in a loud voice for the benefit of a passer-by.

Edyth heard the door close behind her but there was no ‘click’ of the latch and she suspected that most of the ‘regulars’, as Colleen had called them, simply walked in.

She turned back and looked at the house when she reached the corner. A man was walking through the door. It was Charlie Moore.

Edyth shuddered. Four bare legs in the bed were all well and good – provided you could choose the owner of the other two legs.

She looked around the street. Although it was only just four o’clock, a thick grey twilight had fallen. There had been no let-up in the rain, and it was two hours before she had to be at the meeting in the Norwegian church. She turned towards the vicarage then stopped.

She had a sudden vision of her mother-in-law presiding over the ornate Victorian silver tea service she loathed. Florence was pouring tea, monopolising Peter’s conversation and feeding him the cakes and biscuits that she had bought in the baker’s that morning because she knew she wouldn’t have time to bake that day.

Feeling restless, angry and needing to think, Edyth set her face to the sea and headed down the Bay towards the docks.

Chapter Twenty-one

Edyth turned her back on the canal, where lines of coal barges, waiting their turn to be unloaded at the quays, basked like fat slugs in a cabbage patch. She walked up the street, absorbing the sights and sounds of the place that, she reminded herself, was now ‘home’. A horse snorted and pawed the tarmac when the boy driving it reined it in every few yards for the housewives to come to their door at his cry: ‘Bak-er!’

The fishmonger was standing, leaning on his cart on the corner, his gleaming wares open to the teeming rain while he dropped a handful of coins into a woman’s hand. Eirlys Williams had told her that the tradesman was the unofficial money-lender on the Bay, and frequently ‘subbed’ seamen’s families until the ships came in.

Two women dressed in blackened, flowered overalls were filling buckets from a mound of coal that had been delivered to their front door. Edyth watched them carry it through the house and wondered why it hadn’t been delivered down the lane to the back gate. But then she hadn’t walked at the back of this particular terrace of ‘two-ups, two-downs’ and perhaps, like Pontypridd, only some of the houses had a back yard.

Car engines roared ahead of her in Bute Street as bankers, merchants, businessmen, and their clients drove to and from the imposing offices. In the distance, the faint banging and grinding of wagons crashing into one another resounded from the railway shunting yards.

Inside open doors, toddlers were crawling and watching their mothers negotiate with the delivery men. And down a lane, she spotted a crowd of men, crouched on their haunches, staring intently at the ground. Rain obviously didn’t affect the open-air casinos that abounded in the Bay.

She felt surrounded by noise and people, and she wanted to be alone. That meant circumventing the busiest part of the docks where the large ocean-going vessels were berthed, and the Pier Head where daytrippers embarked on the pleasure boats that sailed across to the Devon port of Ilfracombe and around the Welsh coast, although she knew there was little likelihood of seeing anyone she knew on a wet Monday afternoon in October.

She reached Bute Street and passed cafés filled with Filipino and Somali seamen, talking in their native tongue and playing dominoes and cards to while away the time before they managed to secure a berth on a vessel out of Tiger Bay. She spotted lookouts posted near the doors to warn of approaching policemen, who couldn’t always be counted on to turn a blind eye to illegal gambling. And the whole time she returned the greetings of men, women and children she had seen in church.

Already she felt that she was accepted as a resident of the Bay with a job to do. It was what she had told her father she wanted. But when she had spoken to him, she had assumed that she would have a normal marriage – and be mistress of her own house.

She reached the sea and a comparatively deserted area where small boats bobbed alongside their moorings. Further along to her left she could see the dry dock yards. Two massive ships had been winched out of the water and they looked larger beached than she had ever seen a vessel on water.

She stood for a few minutes and admired the graceful, elegant lines of a tall-masted sailing ship moored out in the bay. A lovely relic from a slower, more romantic age that towered, in every sense of the word, over the squat, ugly steam ships spawned by the industrial era. She recalled the stories she had read about ships and sailors, from her childhood favourite,
Treasure Island,
to Richard Henry Dana’s
Two Years Before the Mast,
and imagined herself back in a time where schooners and ships powered solely by the wind were the only ones that sailed the seas.

A resounding catcall shattered her daydream and reminded her that she was within sight of the workmen painting a hull in one of the dry docks. She put her head down, pulled her umbrella even further over her face and continued on her aimless way. A rickety, wooden-planked walkway stretched down from the quay, jutting into the rows of small boats, and she stopped again, mesmerised by the sound of a lone saxophone.

The melody was new to her. Sad and yearning, it captured the essence of the grey day. In it, she could hear the spasmodic rhythm of the rain falling on to the sea; the roll of the small boats as they bobbed in the swell of the tide, abandoned and forlorn, waiting for their captains to bring them to life; the relentless, determined ploughing out to sea of the larger vessels, which had places to go and goods to deliver; and, permeating every tuneful phrase, her own dark, restless mood.

She leaned on a post and continued to listen until the final note was drowned in the rasping blast of a steamer. Three more blasts followed in quick succession, sending the gulls screaming high into the air. Her blood ran cold. The eerie, raucous noise was similar to the colliery sirens in Pontypridd that not only marked the beginning of the colliers’ shifts, but also sounded the alarm whenever there was an accident or fall underground.

She was still standing, staring at the wash of the steamer, when Micah Holsten emerged from below deck of the smallest, shabbiest boat moored off the walkway. He was dressed in a seaman’s dark coat and peaked cap, an instrument case tucked under his arm. He waved to her and she waved back.

‘Edyth, what are you doing in this deserted corner of the docks?’

‘Listening to music. Was that you playing the saxophone?’ she asked when he drew closer.

‘It was,’ he admitted warily. ‘Are you going to report me for cruelty to your ears? Or to a bird society for frightening the gulls?’

‘Neither. It was a lovely piece.’

‘Thank you from the bottom of my heart,’ he rejoined flippantly. ‘I come down here to practise because people complain long, loud, and bitterly if I play in the mission. They say it interferes with their concentration and they can neither read nor play chess. Helga says it curdles the waffle batter and Moody agrees with her. However, I had no idea I had an audience out here.’

‘An appreciative one. What was the piece?’ she asked. ‘I haven’t heard it before.’

‘That’s because you caught the world premiere. I’ve only just written it, and christened it “Rainy Bute Blues”.’

‘I had no idea you composed music.’

‘It’s a hobby. Cheaper than gambling and drinking, and emotionally safer than women.’

‘It’s beautiful, and exactly how I feel.’

‘I hope not. It’s a sad piece.’ He ducked beneath her umbrella. His blue eyes shone warmly into hers; his face, damp and smiling, was so close she could smell the toothpowder on his breath. ‘It’s wet out here.’

‘That’s stating the obvious.’ She returned his smile.

‘Can I tempt you with a cup of coffee?’

She looked around. ‘You could if there was a café. But there’s none in sight.’

‘Oh, but there is, and a very exclusive one.’ He offered her his hand, she took it, and he led her down the walkway. He jumped ahead of her on to the deck of his boat, then reached out and lifted her across. ‘Welcome to my cave.’

‘Your cave looks suspiciously like a boat to me, Pastor.’

‘No, it’s my cave. Like bears, every man needs a retreat, and this is mine.’

Edyth didn’t know anything about boats, but Micah’s was even more dilapidated close up than it had appeared from the quayside. Half-a-dozen people couldn’t have stood on top without elbowing one another dangerously close to the edge. It was also in poor condition. The deck floor was splintered, there was hardly any paint on the surfaces and what little there was had curled back from the sodden wood like the skin of a dried orange.

‘You go to sea in this?’ she asked in concern.

‘I value my life too much. The
Escape –
 aptly named, don’t you think? – floats here, just. But I have a feeling that even if it had an engine, and I managed to set course for the open sea, both I and the boat would end up beneath, not on, the waves.’

‘It doesn’t have an engine?’ she asked in amusement, looking around for sails.

‘I exchanged it and what was left of the ragged sails for a month’s sugar ration for the mission. We don’t get through that much sugar but then it wasn’t a very good engine. But it did have some scrap value.’

‘Was this boat ever seaworthy?’

‘Not that I know of. I inherited it from a friend. He bought it at auction and intended to renovate it, but died a week later. Some say his end was hastened when he realised how much work he had taken on. However, if not luxurious, the cabin is watertight and it gives me what I need: privacy to play my saxophone and think for an hour or two away from the bedlam the mission frequently degenerates into, especially when the Scandinavian ships are in port.’

‘A floating cave,’ she suggested.

‘Exactly. Climb down into the cabin; there are only a few steps.’ He stood back and she recalled what he’d said about always allowing a lady to go downstairs ahead of a man.

She reached a door no more than five feet high. She opened it and ducked down. She had expected mildew and the sour stench of damp, but the place was clean, if faded, and warm, and smelled of fragrant, freshly ground coffee. Two small sofas set in alcoves on either side of the area took up most of the space. Their cushions were upholstered in oriental tapestry, bleached with age but intact. A table stood between them covered with a green linen cloth. A brown clay bowl filled with wrinkled winter apples and a music stand were set on it.

‘Let me take your coat and umbrella, you’re soaking wet. And your shoes are squelching.’ Before she had time to protest, he had relieved her of her umbrella and placed it in an enamel bucket, removed her coat and hung it on a hook on the back of the door. She took off her hat and brushed it with the back of her sleeve.

‘The lady has diamonds in her hair.’

‘That’s a poetic way of saying my hair is wet, but it will soon dry. It’s warm in here.’

He pointed to a metal brazier in the corner that radiated warmth. ‘I’ve only just smothered the coals. I can’t play with cold fingers. Take off your shoes and stockings.’

‘I couldn’t –’

‘Sit around in wet feet and you will get pneumonia,’ he warned.

She sat on the edge of one of the couches and removed her shoes. He took them from her, tore up a newspaper, scrunched the pieces into balls and stuffed them into the toes before placing them close to the brazier. ‘Now your stockings. ‘

‘They’ll be fine.’

‘Women and their modesty. They will not be fine, but if you won’t take them off, dry your legs as best you can with this.’ He handed her a towel. It was threadbare but clean.

The cushions at her back were the same size as the cushions on the seat of the couch and she guessed that if the table was removed they could be rearranged into a bed.

‘Please, make yourself comfortable.’ The ceiling was too low for Micah to stand upright. He leaned over a scrap of a kitchen area that held a bowl, a spirit heating ring with a kettle balanced on top, and a spirit lamp. He struck a match, lit the ring and the lamp. The cabin was instantly bathed in a soft, golden glow at the expense of a nose-stinging odour of paraffin. He lifted the lid from an enamel jug and filled the kettle with water.

‘What are you doing out on an afternoon like this so far from the vicarage?’

‘Walking.’

‘If you were going to the inter-faith meeting it doesn’t start for over an hour and a half.’

‘I know.’ She watched him unscrew a glass jar. His hands were fine, his fingers long and tapered, his movements slow and deliberate. He spooned ground coffee into an enamel jug, opened a cupboard and removed a tin of evaporated milk, a jar of sugar and two mugs.

‘So, why were you really out in the rain?’ he pressed.

‘I needed fresh air so I thought I’d explore Tiger Bay, seeing as how it’s my new home.’

‘In this downpour?’ he said sceptically.

‘I’ve lived all my life in Wales. If I let rain bother me I’d never go outdoors.’

‘I suppose that’s true enough.’ He didn’t sound convinced.

By dint of breathing in and sliding sideways, she managed to move behind the table. She leaned against the side of the alcove, lifted her legs on to the seat and dried them as best she could.

He set the mugs on the table. ‘I heard your mother-in-law turned up at the vicarage before the fishing boats brought in their catch this morning.’

‘Does everyone know everyone else’s business on the Bay?’ she demanded, allowing her irritation to surface.

‘Pretty much,’ he said easily. ‘Why? Who else has mentioned her arrival?’

‘Anna Hughes.’

He let out a long low whistle. ‘You’ve talked to our Anna Hughes after what she did to you?’

‘Your
Anna Hughes?’

He laughed. ‘If that disapproving glare is intended to make me blush, it’s failed. Anna is not mine specifically,’ his smile broadened at the implication, ‘but the Bay’s in general. She’s quite a character, is our Anna.’

‘I noticed. I had coffee and cream cakes with her and her … ladies before I came down here.’

‘Does Peter know you’ve been hobnobbing with her?’

‘No, but he wouldn’t mind,’ she replied, hoping she sounded more confident than she felt.

‘Someone told me that you had allowed Anna’s and the other women’s children into your Sunday school.’

‘More gossip?’

‘The Bay’s riddled with it. It’s the principal hobby of the residents. You can pick it up and drop it at will. Expend as much or as little time on it as you like. And, if someone takes the trouble to embellish it, rumours can be more entertaining and sensational than a novel. Plus, there’s always the chance that you’ll be able to feel superior at the expense of your neighbours’ failings. If you want to keep up with what’s happening around here, you’ll have to learn to gossip.’

‘So it would seem.’

‘What did Peter say to the new pupils you took on?’

‘Welcome,’ she said shortly. ‘He wants to build up the congregation. He thinks their attendance at Sunday school will benefit the school’s existing pupils as well as them.’

The water began to boil and Micah tipped it on the coffee. ‘Good for Peter, but allowing Anna and the other girls’ children into Sunday school isn’t quite the same as allowing his wife to drink afternoon tea in a brothel.’