by Emlyn Rees
Her eyes blazed defiantly.
‘I think she’s lovely,’ Rachel suddenly said.
She wasn’t laughing, or pulling faces any more. ‘What?’ Bill asked, assuming he must have misheard.
‘Emily: I think she’s lovely. And not flighty. Or tainted. Or anything else that Mum says she is.’
Bill could barely believe his sister was openly backing him up like this.
‘And what would you know?’ snapped their mother. ‘A girl of your age.’
It was a question which Bill had lately been tempted to ask Rachel himself. What did she know? About love? About relationships? More than she once had and that was for sure. More than someone her age perhaps should know. Because he’d noticed the change that had come over her lately. A dreaminess had crept into her eyes and lent a lustre to her cheeks. He’d catch her sometimes, staring at the most mundane of objects around the house or shop – like a box of soap flakes on a shelf, or a cracked tile on the floor – with an inexplicable smile on her face. It was a look he recognised well enough. He’d seen it on Richard Horner’s face when he’d first met Rosie. And in his own reflection as he’d shaved half an hour before in preparation for his date with Emily Jones.
He wondered who it was who’d sent his sister like this. He’d find out soon enough, he supposed. Secrets in Stepmouth never lasted long.
‘You keep your nose out of it and eat your tea,’ Mrs Vale told her.
Rachel opened her mouth to answer back, then thought better of it and instead took a forkful of food.
‘What about me, then, Mum?’ Bill demanded. ‘I was engaged once, too, remember? Does that mean I shouldn’t get a second chance either?’
‘That no-good slut broke it off with you, not the other way round.’
No-good slut. There: she hadn’t been able to resist saying it, had she? That’s how she’d always think of Susan Castle, and probably Emily, too. Because they’d changed their minds.
‘Because I left her, Mum. Because I moved back here.’
His chair scraped loudly across the floor as he stood. He pulled his suit jacket – the black one with the silk lining, his one good suit, which he’d bought for his father’s funeral – from the back of his chair. He walked round the table and stood by his mother. As he leant down to kiss her, she reached up and touched his face. Her fingers smelt of the bitter layers of onions she’d peeled to make their supper.
‘I only want what’s best for you,’ she said.
‘I know.’ He knew, too, how much she’d lost, and how much she wanted to protect what was left of her family. But he didn’t need protecting. Not from Emily Jones. And that was something that his mother would have to learn.
He felt the corridor closing in around him as he walked to the alley door. He took the bunch of wild flowers – violets and bluebells – from the vase next to the hatstand. He’d picked them that morning from the hedgerow up by the allotment, binding them together with a length of parcel string.
‘Wait,’ Rachel said, appearing behind him.
She selected a bluebell from the bunch and slipped it into his buttonhole. She stepped back and smiled.
‘You look wonderful,’ she told him.
He smiled. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘And thanks for sticking up for me back there. I won’t forget it.’
As he stepped out into the alleyway, he pulled the bunch of keys from his trouser pocket and looked up at the window above, which was barred like all the shop’s windows. Locks, locks, locks: at least three on each door. This building had as many as a bank. Or a jail. And that’s what occurred to him now, as he locked the door behind him: that sometimes locks worked both ways; that not only did they keep people out, but sometimes they kept them locked in, too.
Outside the Sea Catch Café, the Jupiter’s engine idled as Bill waited for Emily to join him. A moment before, he’d handed her the bunch of wild flowers.
She’d wanted to put them in water, she’d told him, so that they wouldn’t get spoilt. She’d run back inside so quickly that she’d left him wondering whether he’d inadvertently upset her, and whether the flowers, because they’d cost him nothing, had made him look cheap.
He stared at the small square red leather handbag she’d left on the tan seat beside him. It looked out of place, nothing to do with him, like a piece of lost property he should hand in.
All of a sudden, he felt out of his depth, terrified that he’d made a mistake in asking her out to begin with. Or being asked out by her? (He still wasn’t sure which.) The same went for that kiss. Had it been real, meant for him? Or for Mrs Carver to see? Nothing but scandal for its own sake?
He watched now, as a curvy silhouette appeared in the brightly lit café doorway. There, in the shadowy enigma of Emily Jones, he’d find his answers.
A shouted goodbye, the door banging shut, and she was hurrying over, her daringly knee-length grey skirt flapping against her legs. He started to get out, so that he could walk round and open the passenger door for her. But she was too quick, already gesturing at him to stay put, then she climbed in, pulling the passenger door closed after her with a thump.
‘So where are you going to take me on this drive?’ she asked breathlessly, adjusting her red shawl around her neck, before twisting round to face him.
He had the tickets to the Barnstaple Plaza Dance already in his hand. He held them up, hoping she’d approve. Buying them had been Rosie’s idea. She’d told Bill they’d be just perfect. Emily plucked them from his fingertips.
‘The Barnstaple Plaza Dance Committee proudly presents Dick Grewcock and his Travelling Trumpeters,’ she read aloud with an amused smile.
It suddenly occurred to Bill how different Emily and Rosie were. ‘We don’t have to go,’ he said. ‘Not if you don’t want to.’
‘No, it sounds great . . .’
He noticed how she’d managed to tame her curly blonde hair, tying it up on her head in a doughnut shape with a single white clip. She flicked the tickets absent-mindedly across the silver necklace which she wore on the outside of her blouse collar.
‘You must be good on your feet, Bill,’ she said, ‘to take a girl out dancing on a first date . . . Do you go dancing a lot?’
Not since university in 1948. Not since he’d danced with Susan Castle, he nearly answered. He’d been dreading it, really, from the moment he’d picked up the tickets from the venue and had seen the photographs on the wall of the men and women twirling one another around like acrobats. All he’d been able to do was imagine what a mess his two left feet would make of Emily’s shoes. He remembered how embarrassing his last attempt at lying to Emily had been and decided instead to risk the truth.
‘No,’ he answered, ‘I’m terrible.’
‘That makes two of us.’
They stared at each other for a second, before bursting out laughing.
‘We could just go and listen to the band,’ he then suggested.
‘Think they’re any good?’
‘I doubt it.’
‘What about Dick Grewcock? He certainly sounds swell . . .’
‘I don’t know anything about –’ Bill started to answer, before her snort of laughter cut him short. ‘Oh,’ he said, suddenly laughing too, ‘his name . . .’
She threaded a cigarette between her lips. He lit it for her with a match. Smoke and sulphur drifted between them.
‘I know,’ she suggested. ‘Let’s do exactly what we planned to in the first place: go for that drive. You know, out of town. Some place else.’
‘But where? It’s dark.’
‘And clear. And bright. And beautiful. I know a place that’ll suit us just fine.’
He took the tickets from her and tore them neatly in half, letting the pieces flutter like leaves on to his lap. It was strange, but now that all his preparations had come to nothing they no longer seemed important. Not with her smiling at him the way she was now.
‘You’re on,’ he said, reaching down and letting the handbrake go.
&
nbsp; As they drove beneath the street lamps of the town, and over South Bridge, and up the steep and inky corridor of the Barnstaple Road, they talked. Or rather, Bill asked questions and Emily answered. It was an arrangement which suited him fine; he had a million questions to ask her, about the millions of moments in her life which he’d already missed.
She told him about her relationship with Buck. About what a wild kid she’d been when she’d met him at a dance during the war.
‘I thought you said you couldn’t dance,’ Bill reminded her.
‘When you find out how much trouble it led to you’ll know why I don’t any more,’ she replied.
She told him how seriously she’d taken herself, too. ‘Honestly, Bill, the way I acted around Buck, you’d have thought we were the first people to have ever fallen in love. We put so much pressure on ourselves. Whatever happens to me from now on and whoever it happens with, I want it to happen at its own pace. Not because it’s been forced. You know, I want the fun to last and not get squeezed out so soon.’
Whatever, whoever . . . Bill wondered if she could possibly mean him.
He asked her about what had happened next and how she came to leave Stepmouth. She relived her mother’s disapproval.
‘“I don’t care how many restaurants his family own, Emily,”’ she said, making Bill laugh with her perfect impersonation of her mother. ‘“You’re too young to be seeing him and that’s final.”’
And she told him about how Buck called her ‘hon’ and ‘doll’ and how he got shot at by a couple of Messerschmitts while flying over Germany.
‘So I ran away to be with him. In the military hospital in Kent. For months I kept writing to Mum and Dad to tell them I was fine but not where I was. In case they came after me to bring me home. Which I know damn well they would have.’
She and Buck had sailed to America after the war. ‘We’d already got married in the hospital in Kent before he’d been invalided out. His CO had arranged it, no questions asked.’
Emily had fallen in love with the States, but out of love with Buck. She listed all the separate reasons – his nights out on the drink, his casual infidelities – which had balled into a big enough reason for her finally to leave.
They were up above the town now, branching off to the west, out across the moor along the old coast road.
‘I would have stayed out there, you know, as well,’ she confided in Bill. ‘Only the collapse of my marriage with Buck . . . the disappearance of the family I’d always thought I’d have with him . . . it made me want to be with my own family. It made me want to come back home. To start over.’
‘No kids then?’
‘No, we were lucky there, although we didn’t think it at the time.’
He didn’t feel so much as a twinge of jealousy over everything she’d gone through with Buck, not like he’d expected. The way she’d spoken about it made it sound like it had happened to someone else entirely.
‘And would you go back? To America, I mean.’
‘Maybe one day. It’s a great country, you know. Full of possibilities. I’d love to go there with the right man.’
They hadn’t seen a single other vehicle since they’d set out, like they’d become the only people on the planet.
‘How did you manage to convince your parents to let you move back in?’ Bill asked. ‘All that anger your mother had . . . all that resentment you must have caused . . . where did it all go? It can’t have just vanished . . .’
She laughed. ‘Having a little money put aside from a divorce didn’t hurt much. Especially when Dad was looking for someone to sell the family business to . . .’ She sighed. ‘Seriously, though,’ she said. ‘Time passes. People forgive. It’s what happens. And that’s a good thing, you know? It’s what keeps the world turning round.’
‘I’m glad you and your parents worked things out,’ he said. ‘I remember how nervous you looked that day you first called into the shop. Knock on wood, you said. For luck . . .’
‘You remember?’ She sounded surprised.
‘A beautiful girl like you walking into the shop,’ he said, ‘it’s not something you forget in a hurry.’
‘You’re a sweet man, Bill Vale,’ she told him, gently kissing him on the cheek. ‘And a good listener, too. I like that in a man.’
They drove another mile, rising now, higher even than Summerglade Hill.
‘Next left,’ she said. ‘There, by that tree.’
The great shadow of a huge horse chestnut loomed up out of the darkness. Bill turned off on to the uneven track, slowing down, wary of getting a puncture. As they drove beneath the tree, the tips of the horse chestnut’s branches scratched like cats’ claws across the Jupiter’s windscreen and roof. Another five yards and Bill turned off the engine. Silence engulfed them. In the distance, they could see the sea, shimmering beneath the half-moon and flicker of the stars.
‘Welcome to Desolation,’ Emily said.
‘What?’
‘That’s what it’s called. The name of this place. I once saw it on a map.’
Desolation . . . It didn’t feel like that, not to Bill. It was the most beautiful place he’d ever been to.
‘Look at the sky,’ she said, peering up through the windscreen.
‘Want a better view?’
‘Always.’ She started to get out.
‘No,’ he said, ‘wait.’
He stepped out of the car and unfastened the folding roof, pulling it back and down, out of sight behind the seat. He got back in and sat beside her.
‘It’s amazing,’ she said, staring up. He felt her sliding along the bench towards him, resting her head on his shoulder.
‘All those stars,’ Bill said. ‘When I was a little boy, my dad used to tell me they were angels. He used to point up there’ – Bill demonstrated now as he raised his arm – ‘and say stuff like, “There’s my Auntie Ada, and that’s Ivor, your grandfather’s brother, who had a real eye for the ladies . . . ”’ Bill cleared his throat and slowly lowered his arm. ‘Only then you go to school, of course, and they tell you they’re just stars, nothing more, and you never look on them the same way again . . .’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘about your father. I’ve been meaning to tell you since I got back. Only I never got a chance. Or I did, but there were always other people around . . .’
Bill’s body began to tighten like a spring. He hated talking about his father, about what had happened to him.
‘My dad wrote to me about it after I’d moved to the States,’ she continued. ‘I’d moved to Kent by the time it happened, you see, to where Buck was recuperating in hospital.’ She rested her hand on Bill’s wrist. ‘I remember your dad from when I was little. He was a lovely, kind man. A lot like you. You must miss him a lot.’
‘I do.’
That tightening again . . . like a weight pressing down on him . . . suddenly, he needed to get it off his chest. ‘I wish you wouldn’t employ him, Keith Glover’s brother,’ he said.
‘You mean Tony.’
Her face was shadowy, hard to read. ‘He’s dangerous,’ Bill stated. ‘You know that’s why he got kicked out of school . . . because he fights . . .’
‘Fought. He doesn’t do it any more.’
‘Only because the last time he did, he got beaten up by Bernie Cunningham.’
‘Who’s twice his size and a drunk and a bully. Sometimes,’ she told him, ‘people deserve a second chance.’
‘And sometimes they don’t.’
They stared at each other.
‘Is that why you drove me up here?’ she then asked. ‘To argue?’
He was thrown by the question. ‘No.’
‘So let’s close this conversation and remember why you did.’
‘But –’
‘I’ll run the café how I want, Bill. And I’ll employ who I want. But believe me: if Tony ever does step out of line,’ she added, ‘then I’ll send him packing the same as I would do anyone else.’ Her eyes were stead
y, uncompromising.
‘Do you swear it?’
‘Yes.’
He knew then that this was as much reassurance as he was ever going to get. ‘We won’t talk about it again,’ he said.
He didn’t know if he was doing the right thing by not trying harder to bring her round to his point of view. What would his mother say? That was easy. That he was wrong. And his father? His father would have liked Emily, he knew, would have respected her the same way Bill did, for her strength. But his father wasn’t around, which left Bill with only his own instinct. And his own instinct told him that he should trust Emily’s judgement. Keith Glover had cost him one girl already. There was no way he was going to let an argument over his younger brother cost him any chance he had with Emily as well.
‘We’ll find plenty of other things to talk about,’ Emily said.
‘I suppose so.’
‘Happy things,’ she said. ‘And life’s so much better when you spend it concentrating on those. I’ve got a good feeling about this,’ she told him. She leant in closer. Then she smiled at him so warmly that it melted all the coldness he felt inside. ‘Or we could just not talk at all,’ she said.
It was the second time she’d kissed him on the lips, but to him it felt like the first. Where before, there in front of Mrs Carver, it had been over with almost before it had begun, now there was no abrupt ending. Now he had time to savour it: the softness of her lips, their gentle separation and the warm, electric flicker of her tongue against his. Warm breath funnelled from her nostrils on to his face. His arms were around her waist, her hands stroking through his hair.
Then a different kind of urgency possessed them, not of breaking apart, but of wanting to be closer still. Her fingers clawed at his hair, pulling him towards her. As she shuffled back along the bench towards the passenger door, he scrambled clumsily after her, first snagging, then ripping his trouser pocket on the handbrake along the way.
Visions flashed through his mind. Of being in church tomorrow morning. Of his mother and Mrs Carver seeing the rip. But then they were gone. Because he didn’t care. Because he wanted this more.
