‘No, you’re not. You couldn’t wait to rush off with Kate to phone your mother earlier.’
‘I phoned my mother because I didn’t want to miss out on a seat on the plane. I doubt I’ll have the chance to go to America again at that price.’
‘You want to go to America so you can spend the summer hunting boys with Kate.’
Her temper rose. ‘Where’s that coming from?’
‘I saw the look on your faces when you left the common room. And I suppose you’ll stay on the pill when you’re there, so you can sleep with anyone who takes your fancy.’
‘How dare you!’
He confronted her. ‘But you will stay on the pill?’
‘You know damn well you can’t just stop taking it without risking a pregnancy. You’d have to start using condoms now if I did, and you’d have to use condoms when I came back for at least a month, if not two. You’re the one who hates them. But that’s not the point. The point is – you don’t trust me. That hurts.’
‘Does it?’ he challenged.
‘Yes, it does. You know you’re the only boy I’ve ever slept with.’ She went to the door.
Rich blocked her path. ‘I do trust you, Pen. Can’t you see this stupid argument isn’t about trust or me and you or the pill? It’s Kate. She’s always creating trouble between us and you always take her side.’
‘If I “take sides”, it’s the side of common sense. And you’re wrong. This argument is about us. Being my boyfriend doesn’t give you the right to tell me when I can and can’t take the pill. The next thing you’re going to say is you’re sorry the pill was invented because it gives women too much freedom.’
‘You’re never going to let me forget my father said that, are you?’
‘No, because there are times when you behave just like him.’
‘I’m sorry. I do trust you, Pen, except when you’re with Kate. She needles me …’
‘And you needle her. You know how sensitive she is about her background.’
He shrugged. ‘She did well to get into grammar school.’
She finally erupted. ‘Don’t you dare patronise her. Kate’s my closest friend and she’s where she is because she’s intelligent, works hard, gets a full grant and is willing to do any job she can get to supplement it. Your constant sniping at her is wearing me down.’
‘Kate enjoys annoying me and you know it.’
‘Only because you harp on about her living on a council estate. Given that her father died when she was two, it’s not as though her mother had a choice. And Kate did do well. Do you know how many girls attended the girls’ grammar school from that estate? Two; that’s not in our year, that’s in the entire school of five hundred and something. And the teachers were foul to both. Is it any wonder Kate’s sensitive?’
Rich capitulated but only because Penny’s anger could smoulder for days. ‘You win, Pen, I’ll try to be nice to Kate, but it’s not easy when she takes everything I say the wrong way.’
‘She wouldn’t if you spoke to her with respect.’
He changed the subject, as he always did when he was in danger of losing an argument. ‘Pontypridd won’t be the same without you this summer. We always have fun together, don’t we?’
‘Yes,’ she conceded abruptly.
‘It would have been our last summer before getting married.’
‘I haven’t said yes to an engagement ring yet. And marriage is the last thing I want to think about before my finals.’
‘When I asked you to marry me, you agreed we’d set the date after we left college.’
‘That was when we were still at school.’
‘So now you don’t want to marry me?’ he challenged.
‘I don’t want to know you when you’re in this mood, let alone marry you.’
He pulled the sad clown face that usually amused her. ‘I don’t want to lose you.’
She didn’t move from the window. ‘You will if you carry on like this.’
‘You’re talking about going away for four months.’
‘To work and see a new country.’ As Rich had made the first apologetic move, she felt she had to give him something in return. ‘I may appreciate you all the more when I return.’
‘Is that a promise?’
‘We may have gone to separate schools—’
‘Only because they wouldn’t let me into the girls’ grammar school.’
It was a poor attempt at humour and Penny ignored it. ‘But we haven’t spent more than a couple of hours apart since we came to college. I’d have been happy if you could have come with us, but thinking about it, perhaps it’s not a bad idea to take a break after living in one another’s pockets for the last eighteen months. If only to be absolutely sure of our feelings.’
‘I know what I’m feeling is the real thing. All I want is a chance to persuade you that you can trust your feelings too.’
He left the bed and kissed her slowly, thoroughly and hungrily. They’d come a long way since their first fumbling attempts at lovemaking on her fifteenth birthday.
‘Is the door locked?’ The boys had a disconcerting habit of walking in and out of one another’s rooms at all hours.
He stepped back and turned the key. ‘It is now.’
She pulled off her cardigan and tugged her sleeveless black polo neck skinny-rib over her head.
‘You have such a beautiful body.’ He watched her step out of her tights and grey miniskirt. ‘You can’t blame me for being jealous.’
‘Who else should I blame?’ She unclipped his belt and unzipped his jeans.
‘I’m sorry for being an idiot,’ he nuzzled her neck.
‘Show me how sorry.’
She fell backwards on to the bed and he entered her.
But even during the shattering climax of orgasm, when she dug her fingernails into his back and he breathed heady protestations of love, she found herself wondering if there was more in store for her in America than Rich could give.
Later, with hindsight, she suspected a part of her she’d never allowed to surface hoped there was.
CHAPTER SIX
Pontypridd, May 1987
Penny shifted slightly on the floor, padding the base of the bed with her duvet. When she’d made herself comfortable, she turned to the next photograph, a black and white snap taken with a box Brownie. She and Kate were on the pavement outside the college dressed in jeans, suede boots, thick sweaters and second-hand combat jackets. Their college scarves were draped around their necks. She had a duffel bag and Kate was clutching her ‘haggis’. A sure sign they were about to hitch-hike.
That was something she couldn’t bear the thought of Andy doing.
The standard ironic parental advice: ‘Don’t do as I did, it’s dangerous and you could get hurt.’
It was why she’d allowed her father to buy Andy a car. Her parents and Kate’s mother would have locked them up if they’d known how often she and Kate had disregarded their stern warnings and stood, thumbs extended, at the side of the road.
Given the number of certifiable lunatics in the world, they’d been lucky. The worst that had happened to them in Britain was a Rolls-Royce they’d been given a lift in had broken down on the road outside London.
But that had been before they’d reached America.
London, May 1968
‘We’ll never get through. It’s bedlam.’ Kate dropped her bulging ‘haggis’, a kitbag she’d knitted from odd ends of wool to a bizarre pattern created by her overactive imagination. She was careful to hold on to the drawstring that fastened the top.
They were on the fringe of Grosvenor Square. Mounted police ringed an enormous mob of students who’d linked arms to prove they were in possession of the area and intended to keep it that way. Half the protesters were standing, half sitting and lying on the grass. Their shouts filled the air.
‘Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! We shall fight and we shall win!’
There must have been an American contingent because ‘Hell no,
we won’t go’ had a strong eastern seaboard accent. Just as ‘Make love, not war’ was shouted in very English tones.
Fired by the atmosphere and camaraderie, Penny grabbed Kate’s arm. ‘Let’s join them.’
‘Are you mad?’ Kate, the ever sensible asked. ‘We’re here to get work permits. If we’re arrested for protesting against the Vietnam War and the embassy staff see us, they’ll never give them to us.’
‘Everyone knows the Americans are fighting the entire Vietnamese population,’ she argued. ‘My brother Evan says Communism is the fairest way for the feudal medieval societies of Russia and China to progress to the modern age.’
‘Say that any louder and we definitely won’t get work permits,’ Kate warned.
‘None of the American conscripts want to be there. That’s why so many American boys are in Europe. Evan met dozens of them in music college. They would have preferred to have studied in the States, but if they’d remained they’d have been drafted. They didn’t see why they should die for a cause they don’t understand. It’s not as though the Vietnamese are threatening to invade the States. So what are the Americans doing in Vietnam? Thousands of American boys have been killed. Some of them younger than us. Think, Kate, how would you feel if we were being shipped off to face death—?’
‘We won’t help American conscripts by fighting the police in London,’ Kate broke in. ‘But, if we don’t get our documents we’ll lose forty-eight pounds and can kiss goodbye to a summer in America. You don’t want to work another season in Barry Butlin’s do you?’
‘Not if I can help it.’
The protesters on the outside of the circle linked arms and surged in slow motion towards the mounted police, who began to move just as unhurriedly towards them.
‘This is hopeless. The police will never let us reach the embassy,’ Kate complained.
There was a tap on Penny’s shoulder and she found herself staring up into the cold brown eyes of a grim-faced constable.
She instantly felt dishevelled, grubby and unaccountably guilty. She and Kate had left Swansea that morning at six o’clock and most of the lifts they’d cadged had been in lorries with filthy cabs. Their jeans were crumpled and stained, their army surplus combat jackets had seen better days and they were wearing the instantly recognisable student ‘badge’, a college scarf. An essential accessory for hitch-hiking, but one that wouldn’t endear them to the police.
‘What you got in there, miss?’ The officer eyed her duffle bag.
Penny opened it and he rifled through the contents. Thankfully they were innocuous enough. Her purse, make-up bag, toilet bag with soap and toothbrush, scent, comb, hairbrush, and a bag of mint imperials. When he finished, he turned his attention to Kate’s haggis. It was lumpy and stretched to capacity, over three and a half feet long and eighteen inches wide. Even she’d wondered what Kate was carrying.
‘And you, Miss. What you got in that thing?’ he demanded of Kate.
‘Personal things,’ Kate answered.
Kate might appear calm to someone who didn’t know her but Penny could read the tell-tale signs of stress.
Kate’s lips were compressed, her knuckles white. Just as they’d been every time they’d been sent to the headmistress’s study for a dressing-down – usually over trouble she’d instigated.
‘Show me,’ the officer ordered.
Kate opened the drawstring. The officer peered into the sack. ‘Take out those bags.’
Kate lifted out her toilet and make-up bags and purse and handed them to her friend to hold.
‘And the rest.’
Kate piled her hairbrush, a rolled-up sweater, spare set of underclothes, jeans, socks and a towel into her outstretched arms. Penny wondered what emergency Kate had been preparing for.
‘What’s in the paper bags?’
‘Pasties and sausage rolls,’ Kate answered.
He didn’t ask her to open them, presumably because they were grease-stained and emblazoned with the logo of the Swansea Uplands baker’s shop.
‘The file?’
‘Personal papers.’
A roaring filled the square. A mounted officer cantered along the clear strip of ‘no-man’s-land’ that divided the protesters from the police. He headed for half a dozen students lying flat on the ground.
Realising trouble was about to erupt, the constable didn’t ask Kate to open the file. ‘You two look quiet enough girls,’ he allowed grudgingly. ‘I’d hate to have to arrest you.’
‘You don’t have reason to. We haven’t done anything,’ Kate protested.
‘Yet,’ he qualified. ‘Why are you here?’
‘We’re trying to get into the embassy,’ Penny answered feeling the entire conversation shouldn’t be left to Kate.
The officer stared at them in exasperation. ‘Isn’t there enough trouble for you out here without you two taking it inside?’
‘We need work permits and visas. To work in America. Our college has chartered a plane for a student exchange. We’ve bought our tickets.’ Penny pulled her passport and the forms she’d completed from her duffel bag.
He flicked through them. ‘Given what’s going on here, why didn’t you post them?’
‘We were afraid our passports would get lost in the mail. We’re supposed to leave in four weeks. We tried phoning the embassy but were put on hold or sent around in circles. They kept telling us we couldn’t get a work permit without a visa or a visa without a work permit. It cost us a fortune in calls. So we decided to come here in person,’ she explained.
‘Where you girls from?’
‘Swansea,’ Kate answered. ‘And we’re hoping to get back there tonight.’
‘Follow me.’ He escorted them around the protesters to the embassy door.
Two hours later they were back in the square, their work permits and visas tucked into their bags.
‘That was almost too easy,’ Penny commented.
‘The constable who took us to the door is watching us,’ Kate warned.
‘I know.’ She made a ‘thumbs up’ to let him know they’d been successful, followed by a friendly wave, but he didn’t wave back. ‘Pity he’s watching, I’d like to have joined the protesters; it would have been something to tell my grandchildren.’
‘You ever thought what your and Rich’s kids will be like?’
‘Why do I know you’re about to say something horrid about Rich?’
‘I wasn’t.’
Feeling slightly guilty about leaving Rich for four months, she changed the subject. ‘Let’s find somewhere to eat before we head out.’
‘We have pasties and sausage rolls,’ Kate reminded her.
‘Bought yesterday. They’ll be stale. Stand you egg and chips in a café,’ she offered.
‘I can’t afford egg and chips and I refuse to sponge off you.’
‘It wouldn’t be sponging. It would be a thank you for hitch-hiking with me. You know my parents hate me doing it.’
‘They hate you doing it with or without anyone. Almost as much as my mother hates the thought of me getting into a stranger’s car.’
High-pitched shrieks, screams and a roar accompanied by the thunder of horses’ hooves filled the square. Without warning, the mounted police charged the protesters. A tide of students swirled, changing direction before surging towards them at speed. Kate flattened herself against a wall. Penny wasn’t so lucky.
A punch between her shoulder blades sent her flying sideways out of the path of a police horse. She stretched out her hands to save herself and landed on concrete, skinning her palms and, by the feel of it, her knees. Before she could catch her breath she was hauled unceremoniously to her feet by the collar of her combat jacket and dragged to the edge of the crowd.
Furious, she looked up into a pair of deep-blue eyes. ‘You pushed me over.’
‘To save your ass.’ The blue eyes were topped by unfashionably curly black hair and accompanied by the most seductive American accent she’d heard away from a TV screen. I
n fact, the first American accent she’d heard in reality. But she was in no mood to be seduced.
‘If I hadn’t pushed you, you’d have been squished.’
‘What kind of a word is “squished”?’
‘A New England one.’ The American gave her a broad toothpaste advert smile. She noticed he was tall – very tall. Her two brothers and father were all over six feet and he was a couple of inches above them.
A police officer moved in behind the American. He grabbed both his arms and twisted them high behind his back. ‘You knocked off my helmet, son. Where is it?’
‘Not me, sir. I haven’t touched anyone’s helmet.’ When the policeman didn’t say anything in response, he added, ‘You must have mixed me up with someone else, sir.’
The officer twisted the American’s arms higher until he winced. ‘Assaulting a police officer is a serious charge, son.’
‘I didn’t assault anyone.’
She noticed two officers closing in on her. One pushed his face a scant couple of inches from hers. ‘Why did you throw yourself in front of that horse, miss?’
‘I didn’t.’ Even as she declared her innocence she felt colour flooding her cheeks.
‘You all right, Pen?’ Kate ran up to her, saw her hands were bloody and offered her a handkerchief.
‘You know these two, miss?’ the officer who’d spoken to Penny asked Kate.
‘Penny and I travelled up from Swansea together today.’ Kate tried to pass her the handkerchief but the policeman closed his fist over Penny’s upper arm and yanked her back, out of Kate’s reach.
‘You were protesting with them?’ the officer who was holding Penny asked Kate.
‘The girls weren’t protesting. They were just standing outside the embassy,’ the American interrupted.
‘This isn’t the first time I’ve picked you up, is it, son?’ The officer holding the American eyed him suspiciously.
‘The girls aren’t with me.’
‘That’s not what I asked you.’
‘Yes, you’ve picked me up before,’ the American answered irritably. ‘And no, these girls aren’t with me.’
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