It was Gerry who saw Cyril Richards first, stepping out, hurrying in spite of his crutches, twisting his impatient body as he forced himself up the steps from the local station, his kit-bag awkward on his shoulder. Gerry stood staring for a long time, disbelief on his handsome face. He saw a young boy go up to the man and presumably offer to carry his heavy bag, but the quick movement and the rather sharp wave of an arm showed Cyril’s disregard for any help.
“He always was a stubborn so and so, was Cyril Richards,” Gerry muttered. Then he hurried back to the shop where the flour was being delivered and which he had hoped to avoid helping to stack. Best he kept well out of the way for a while, until Marigold’s condition had been accepted. He smiled briefly, Marigold would be all right now, there was no further need for him to keep up the pretence that he had worried about her. He strolled home without a care to crease his smooth brow.
* * *
Marigold was in the back kitchen of their house, leaning over the wash-tub, pushing sheets and towels up and down against the rubbing board. The soapy water was almost cold, her hands wrinkled with long immersion. Outside, the garden was still edged with the frost of the previous night which hadn’t thawed even though there had been a brief sight of the sun.
She heard the gate go and sighed. That was probably her mother. Since being faced with the situation of her daughter’s unwanted pregnancy, Mrs Philpot was a frequent visitor. She came with freshly made soup and the occasional home-made cake, and today she had already called twice. Marigold didn’t look up when the back door opened and someone stood there, she just waited for her mother to speak.
“Marigold, love, it’s me! I’m home! Haven’t you got a welcome for me then?”
She gave a squeal of delight which was followed by churning alarm.
“Cyril! When did you – why didn’t you tell me – Oh, Cyril.” And she began to sob.
He smiled then and walked awkwardly around the washing bath to hug her. The six-month pregnancy showed as she turned away from its sheltering shadow.
“What the hell—?”
“I’ve tried to write to you, to warn you, I… Cyril, it was a ghastly mistake. If you’ll let me explain, I…”
“Explain? Explain how I’ve come home to a bastard? You bitch! What is there to explain?” He turned on his crutches, pushing the doormat aside in his haste and walked back through the door, having been inside less than a minute.
“Cyril, please, wait. At least listen to me.” Sobbing, she followed him to the gate but despite his handicap he had disappeared around the corner of the lane before she reached the gate. Slowly, she went back inside. Now what would happen to her? How would Mam and Dad cope with this new disgrace?
With a shaking hand she wrote a note to Gerry asking him to come and see her. She said nothing of Cyril’s return or of his abandonment of her, for that was what it was. She knew that, proud and stubborn as he was, Cyril would have nothing more to do with her. Gerry had to help her now. He had to.
Gerry read the note. So, Cyril had refused to accept Marigold’s little mistake. Not his mistake, that sort of thing was always down to the woman, wasn’t it?
He left Bessie and Fanny watching the shop, and Gilly measuring up for some fresh floor covering for the half of the shop she hoped to make into a café and, dressing in the new suit his mother had given him the money to buy, he walked towards Marigold’s house. Innate caution made him take a devious route and come up to the front of the house first.
Cyril was standing half hidden behind a straggly privet hedge. Fortunately for Gerry, the man made a slight move, shuffled his feet a little and re-adjusted the crutch on which he leaned. Backing quickly out of sight, Gerry turned and went back to the shop. On the way he saw Ivor wandering along, eating from a bag of pink and white coconut flakes and an idea came to him that seemed to be fun as well as advantageous to himself.
“Ivor,” he called. “Want to earn a shilling?”
Cyril was stiff and the pain in his wound was reaching the point where he desperately needed to take the weight off it for a while, but doggedly he remained at his task. He still had his kitbag with him, the gun he had illegally brought home was hidden among his clothes. For a moment he wanted it in his hand for the power it would give him. He imagined the grip of it tight within his palm and ached for the excuse to fire it. But that could wait. There was plenty of time for doling out punishments.
He shifted restlessly, trying to ease his aching limbs. Marigold must have sent a message to her lover boy by now. If he waited long enough he would come. It might take all night, but there, he had nowhere else to go.
As he waited in the cold of the winter afternoon, listening for the sound of approaching feet, all his confident words to the doctor came back to taunt him and his jaw stiffened. Some one would pay for this. Marigold would get divorce papers as soon as he could get to a solicitor and the other half of the guilty pair would get what was coming to him, too. Whoever he was he’d be sorted good and proper.
Walking down the street he saw Ivor Jenkins, half hidden by a large bunch of chrysanthemums tied with trailing ribbons.
“It can’t be that daft sod,” Cyril muttered and he relaxed his body a little. Then, as the man passed and walked around to the back lane, he changed his mind and followed. He saw Ivor knock on the door and saw his wife open it and take the flowers, searching frantically for a card. She probably thinks they’re from me, Cyril thought bitterly. What does she think I am? Ivor went inside and for twenty minutes Cyril waited, hidden by the gate, his leg making him want to scream in agony. The doctor had told him to go home and get straight to bed. He had joked that that was exactly what he had in mind. Some joke now.
It was dark and, apart from the occasional sound of a train arriving and leaving the station near by, the night was undisturbed. Few people passed and when one did, Cyril melted into the background and remained unseen.
When Ivor eventually came out of Marigold’s back door, Cyril almost missed him. Darkness was falling. As Ivor opened the gate and stepped into the lane he was held in a choking, half strangling grip from behind. “Now, boy, a little word in your ear,” Cyril whispered sweetly.
* * *
Ivor was howling like a child when he reached home, his man’s face puckered and, between sobs, wearing a look of disbelief at being so badly treated. Bessie saw him first and ran to see what had happened. Behind her, Gerry shook his head at the man, warning him to say nothing.
“Stay in the shop, Bessie, I’ll see to him,” Gerry said, looking with distaste at the stain on Ivor’s trousers. He had wet himself.
He refused to touch Ivor but sat on the edge of the bath and instructed him to remove his clothing and wash himself. The fresh clothes Gerry found in a drawer were handed to the man one by one and it took almost a hour before Ivor was cleaned, dressed, calmed and ready to tell Gerry what had happened.
“Jumped out at me he did. Fierce and growling like a mad animal. Said I was a thief to steal his wife, then he seemed to recognise me and let me go. I fell then, on to the pavement. What was he mad at me for, Gerry? I only took them flowers to Marigold like you said. He wanted to know who they were from but I told him straight. ‘I don’t know,’ I said.”
“You didn’t say I gave them to you?”
“No, no, I said someone else gave them to her but asked me to take them like. That was right, wasn’t it, Gerry?”
Gerry patted Ivor’s shoulder, walked him into the shop and gave him a shilling out of the till. He slid a ten shilling note out for himself, too. Bessie would never miss it.
“Here,” he thrust the shilling coin into Ivor’s hand, “buy yourself some sweets.”
“Thanks, Gerry,” Ivor replied, immediately cheered.
* * *
The following morning, after a night in which they were disturbed by two air-raids, Ivor rose early and walked the streets watching the boys out with their collections of shrapnel, pieces of barrage balloon, and other debris of the r
aids. Like them he searched the gutter for spoils but as he followed behind them, one foot on the pavement, one on the road, he was never successful. Once he had found a small, sharp-edged twisted piece of metal which the expert boys told him was a piece of a bomb. They’d asked him to swap it and when he refused, had pinched it off him.
He saw them exchange one or two items, their eyes shining with pleasure at their new acquisitions, school caps awry, shoes already scuffed and socks wrinkled into ankle-hugging concertinas.
He wandered up to the school gates and waited for the children to arrive. The playground filled early. More and more mothers were finding it a temptation to go out and earn money, using the excuse that they were needed for the war effort to convince their husbands. The children were sent to the comparative safety of the school yard when it was time for the mothers to leave for the factories. Ivor smiled at them as they came through the gate in twos and threes, chattering like a gaggle of geese, heads bent towards each other, necks stuck out, as they shouted to make their opinions heard above the rest. Some smiled back, others poked out a tongue or called him the dope, or worse. Ivor continued to smile, at least they noticed him.
He felt his spirits dwindle as the bell was rung by a teacher and the children formed lines to be let into their classrooms. How he wished he could still attend school. They had been his happiest years. Children were allowed to play and they didn’t have to pretend to be adult.
His almost constant smile widened as he remembered being six or seven. What fun it had been. He had played football and no one minded if his disobedient foot missed the ball and he fell after kicking wildly at the air. They had laughed with him then, not at him.
He felt in his imagination the wind through his hair, the touch of the warm sun on his face and remembered the exhilaration of simply running for the sheer joy of it. Of course he was always the last but that hadn’t mattered, no one expected anything different. He had been allowed to join in with all the activities and if some were aware that he was different from the rest, nothing was said.
He had tried several times to explain to Fanny and Bessie how he felt about the loss of school, but he couldn’t get the words out in the order he wanted, so he had given up.
He put the last of his sweets in his mouth at once and walked away from the newly deserted and silent school yard. From within the red-brick building he could hear them singing a hymn. Something else he used to do with enthusiasm was sing. Now they told him to hush before he’d got the first line out. With envy for the childrens’ simple pleasures causing him to frown, he walked home for some breakfast. Perhaps this morning there’d be an egg!
* * *
Cyril Richards left Ivor sitting, bawling, on the pavement and stood panting with anguish and frustration, sick at heart. Fancy frightening the simple Ivor. As if he could… He shut his eyes, trying not to think of what some other man had done to get Marigold in her present condition. Bitter against the war that had caused their separation and the wreck of the ship that had given him this pain, he stopped and rested against a lamp post. What would he do now? There was nothing for him here any more. He would have to get away from everything familiar and start again, without Marigold.
Despair filled his mind and his head felt that it would burst. He thought of his gun again, it offered a way out. He walked towards the beach, unseeing, unaware even of the intense pain in his leg. He stared at the black sea for a while, the heavy gun in his hand, tempting him with its efficiency, then turned and walked back towards the town.
Reaching the main road with its boarded up shops, he heard someone singing, invisible in the blackness of the night and, as the singer approached, he recognised old Megan Moxon. It was somehow reassuring to know that some things hadn’t changed: Gerry’s Aunt Megan, singing at the top of her voice and without a care in the world. For a moment he thought of doing what she did to blank out his unhappiness and loneliness. There were plenty of pubs open. Behind their blacked out windows there would be company and laughter.
Megan passed him and waved a small hat in the air, staggering as she tried to concentrate on walking and waving at the same time. “’Ello sailor,” she slurred.
Walking slowly in her wake, he went to his parents’ house. His mother opened the door and seeing him began to hug him and shout for his father to come and see, but he stumbled past her and stretching full length on the settee near the fire he collapsed into sleep.
Arms around each other, his parents looked at him in sorrow. “He knows, Daddy,” his mother said “The boy knows.”
Chapter Eight
The new outlet for her accessories seemed to be the start of good fortune for Lucy and Polly. In their small room they spent every evening listening to the radio and working. Throughout the day, Lucy was either helping her mother finish off an order or out visiting shops to find more customers.
Their two helpers were efficient and reliable and delivered their work regularly and were paid upon completion. Having extra pairs of hands gave Lucy the confidence to accept larger and larger orders and the money began to flow in. The largest order yet received was going to take them a month to fill and would see most of their diminished savings recouped.
Struggling in the small room was no longer a cause for dismay, the time was fast approaching when they could look for something better; a flat instead of the solitary room and with a bathroom of their own. Lucy could see further ahead than that, to the day when she opened work premises, when she would have a store-house packed with goods for sale and assistants to pack and deliver the orders as she phoned them in. What had seemed a futile hope a few months ago was beginning to become a reality.
She had had moments of doubt and had quite recently almost accepted defeat and applied for another cleaning job. But now her belief in herself was paying off, she was becoming a business woman. On reflection, Mr Slade, with his fumbling hands and his slippery wet lips, had done her a favour, although she couldn’t find it in her heart to be grateful!
One day a young girl knocked at their door and, running down to answer it, Lucy found a pretty young girl looking very apprehensively at the address written on a piece of paper in her hand.
“Miss Lewis? She asked. “Of Lucy Designs?”
“I’m Lucy Lewis, can I help you?”
“I wondered if you would make something special for my wedding in two weeks’ time.”
“Come in. You’ll have to excuse the room. My Mother and I are busy helping out the workers with a rush order,” she said, to explain their poky premises.
“My husband-to-be is going into the army soon and we’ve decided, all of a rush, to get married.” Unconsciously, Lucy’s gaze dropped to the girl’s slim waist. “No,” the girl smiled wryly. “I’m not expecting. It’s just that, well, everyone thinks we ought to wait ’til after the war and we suddenly thought that there might not be an after-the-war for either of us. So we’re getting married in a registry office and I want you to design something to make it look as if we’ve taken some trouble.”
Lucy was flattered by the request, especially after being told that the idea had come from Teifion. He was a neighbour of the girl and had suggested she called to discuss her wedding with an expert designer from Lucy Designs. The young woman had brought a wedding dress that had been used before and asked if Lucy could make it look different and special. After discussing it with Polly and learning that the husband-to-be was a gardener, they decided on a flower motif.
“The flowers of summer,” Polly said. “Roses and pansies and daisies in the palest of shades, all scattered down the dress as if sprinkled from above. Trust us, it will be perfect.”
They did the wedding dress themselves, pausing in between finishing the large order to make the dress ready in plenty of time. Individually crafted flowers were stitched onto the head-dress and went cascading down the bodice to the billowing fullness of the hem. Polly crotcheted a single red rose which she sewed onto a frivilous blue garter and gave it to the bride secretly
, “Just for fun,” Polly smiled.
“Tell all your friends about us,” Lucy asked, “but be assured we’ll never make a dress like this one again. Yours is a one-off design.”
When she met Teifion later in the week Lucy thanked him but refused to tell him what they had done to the wedding dress. “If she’s a neighbour of yours, your family might be invited to the wedding. I don’t want to spoil her day by people knowing what she’s wearing. The surprise of the dress is a part of the day.”
“It’s probably best that you don’t,” he admitted. “I’ll be at the wedding and if I knew my mother would get the secret out of me, I’m certain, so don’t tell me.”
Lucy took a deep breath. The next few moments might tell her something she already suspected and which she didn’t want confirmed. She watched his face carefully as she said lightly, “I might see you, then. And your parents. I’ve been invited, too.”
She hoped he would look pleased, hoped her suspicion was false, but to her dismay, he frowned. “D’you think that’s a good idea, mixing socially with your clients?” he asked, trying to give himself time to think.
“Of course!” She forced herself to smile. “I’m flattered that she wants me to share in her happy day. Aren’t you pleased, too? We never go anywhere except in the dark. With you not liking to dance and us both working every day it will be a treat to see each other in the daylight!”
She had guessed, he was certain of it. She would have been a fool not to. Passing her by in Cardiff and not explaining why, she’d have to be simple not to guess that he didn’t want others to know about their meeting.
He pulled her into a doorway. The black-out meant there were plenty of places to hide from passers-by.
Family Pride Page 15
