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‘That is the end,’ Gerald said, as he came out into the sunshine again. ‘There won’t be any more, after Airlie.’ In that stricken moment he had forgotten his wife as completely as if she had never existed. The son he had begged her for while his tears stained the pink silk of her dress was forgotten with her.
Adeline was lying on the day bed in front of her open bedroom window, and she saw her husband walking back from the church like a man at the onset of paralysis. Since the moments under the cedar tree she had barely seen him, and although she had waited patiently and prayed that he would turn to her with his grief, he had never come.
They had been the loneliest days she had spent since the first weeks of her marriage.
Now the awareness of something other than loss was beginning to force itself on her attention. Adeline heaved herself upright on the day bed to ease the pain in her back, and at once felt a corresponding tightening across her belly.
‘Not long now,’ she whispered into the heavy afternoon heat. She lay back against the satin pillows, pushing the heavy weight of her hair back from her face and looking out into the sunshine. The park was deserted once more. Gerald had shut himself away again, alone.
‘It will be a boy,’ Adeline promised the sultry air. ‘It will be another boy.’
On the fourth day, the outside world intruded itself into the silence that shrouded the house. Early in the morning the local doctor’s little car chugged up the west drive from the village, and the doctor and his midwife were discreetly ushered upstairs. Almost immediately afterwards, Amy and Isabel in the schoolroom heard the purr of another car as the chauffeur drove his lordship’s big black car down to the station to meet Lady Lovell’s fashionable doctor off the fast London train.
The two doctors met at last at opposite sides of the bed, the London man in a morning coat and striped trousers, his wing-collar stiff against his throat, and the overworked local practitioner in the tweed jacket and soft collar that he hadn’t had time to change before the urgent summons came. The two men shook hands and turned to the patient. For all the differences in their appearance, they were agreed in their diagnosis. The baby was not presenting properly. Lady Lovell was about to suffer a long and painful labour and a breech delivery.
‘There now.’ The London doctor straightened up, smiling professionally. ‘You’ll be perfect. Just try and rest between the pains, won’t you?’
‘The baby.’ Her face was white, with dark patches under the eyes. ‘The baby will be all right?’
‘Of course,’ he soothed her. ‘We’ll get you your baby just as soon as we can.’
The morning cool under the trees in the park evaporated, and the sun rose in the relentlessly blue sky. The clockwork smoothness of the household arrangements ticked steadily on through the morning, occupying everyone from the august Mr Glass in his pantry to the humblest maid, but everyone was waiting. Mr Rayner the chauffeur, coming into the kitchen for his lunch, reported that neither of the doctors had ordered his car. Up in the nursery Bethan Jones helped Nanny with the children’s lunch, and shook her head in the privacy of the kitchen cubbyhole. Her mother was the village midwife back in the valley, and she knew the signs.
Gerald Lovell sat on in the library. He didn’t seem to be either waiting or listening, but simply suspended in immobility.
As the afternoon wore on it grew more difficult for the household not to listen. Miss May took the little girls as far from the house as possible for their afternoon walk so that they might not hear their mother screaming. Up in Lady Lovell’s room the two doctors had discarded their distinguishing jackets. They worked side by side in their shirtsleeves.
By the evening the screaming had stopped. Lady Lovell seemed barely conscious except when her head rolled to the side and the pain wrung out an almost inaudible gasp. The midwife and a nurse bathed her face and held her arms. Her eyes were sunk deep into their sockets.
The village doctor leant over for the hundredth time to listen to the baby’s heartbeat.
‘Still strong,’ he said. ‘It’ll make it. If she does.’
‘She’ll make it,’ said the other doctor grimly.
Then, at a few moments before midnight, they told her that it was time. ‘Push now,’ the midwife whispered to her. ‘It’s almost over. Push now, and the baby will be here.’
And Lady Lovell struggled back into the black, pain-filled world and pushed with the last of her strength.
At two minutes to midnight the baby was born, feet first. It was a healthy boy.
They held him up for her to see, and she looked at the bright red folded limbs and the mass of wet black hair. Adeline smiled the tremulous smile of utter exhaustion. ‘A boy,’ she murmured. ‘Please. Tell my husband now.’
The nurse rang the bell, and within seconds Mr Glass tapped at the door. The London doctor put his morning coat on again, fumbled to straighten his collar and went out to him.
‘Would you be so kind as to take me to his lordship? I am sure that he will want to know he has a fine son.’
The library was lit only by a single green-shaded lamp. Gerald Lovell took his head out of his hands as the doctor was ushered in.
‘Congratulations, my lord. A healthy boy.’
Gerald stood up, frowning and trying to concentrate on the seemingly unintelligible words. He had been looking at photographs. A double row of stiffly posed boys with cricket bats resting against their white flannelled knees stared up at him from the desk top. In the middle of them was Airlie in the Eton eleven of 1915.
‘A boy. My son?’ he asked.
The doctor smiled. ‘Yes. Lady Lovell had a difficult time and is very tired, but she will recover with rest. The baby is well.’
Gerald was on his way, past the doctor and out of the room, the stiffness of his movements betraying how long he had been sitting, hunched over his grief, in the silent library. He took the photograph with him.
Adeline opened her eyes when he came into her room. Gerald was shocked to see the exhaustion in her face. The hovering nurse backed discreetly away and he sat down at the edge of the bed, putting the photograph down on the fresh sheet with its deep lace edging. He covered her hands with his.
‘You’re all right,’ he said softly, and for a moment Adeline thought that after all, they might recover.
‘It’s a boy,’ she whispered. ‘I knew it would be. Look.’
She pointed to the white-ribboned cradle at the side of the bed. Gerald leant over it, slowly, and turned back the cover.
This crimson skin and pucker of features, then, was his son? These clenched, helpless hands and unseeing eyes?
No. Oh no. Airlie was his son. He had no memory of Airlie ever being like this, so tiny and so barely human. His head was full of vivid recollections: of Airlie running across the grass to his first pony and flinging himself across its bare back, of Airlie striding down the pavilion steps with his bat under his arm, of Airlie proud in his uniform with the brass buttons shining. But none of a baby.
Now Airlie was gone, and this little creature wasn’t him. Nor could he ever be. Adeline couldn’t give him his son back. Not Adeline, not anyone.
Gerald smoothed the cover over the baby again and turned back to his wife. Without taking her eyes from his face, Adeline pushed the photograph away from her, further away until it hung at the edge of the bed, and then slid to the floor. Gerald bent at once to retrieve it and she turned her head away from him.
‘I’d like to call him Richard,’ she said.
‘Richard? It’s not a family name …’
‘Does it matter that it’s not a family name? I would like it, Gerald.’
‘Of course. Call him whatever you like.’
Gerald bent over to kiss her. There were tears on her eyelashes and cheeks.
‘Try to rest,’ he said heavily. The floor creaked as he crossed it, and then the door closed behind him. As soon as he was gone Adeline tried to call him back, but the effort was too much for her. Her head fell back against the pile of pillows. The nurse was at her side at once.
‘Try to sleep, milady. The doctor will give you something to help, and we’ll take the baby away now.’
‘No.’
The nurse was startled by the insistence.
‘Please leave him here with me.’
When at last they went away and left her alone, Adeline turned her head to the white cradle. A tiny clenched fist was just visible under the wrappings.
‘Richard …’ she whispered to him, ‘Richard, you’re mine.’
TWO
Nantlas, Rhondda Fach, 1924
‘You ready then, Mari?’
Mari Powell stepped back from the tiny mirror over the sink in the back kitchen. She had been the first girl in Nantlas to cut her hair, and although everyone had copied her now, even Ellen Lewis who looked a fright whatever she did to herself, she was still proud of the glossy brown cap and the ripple of careful waves over her right temple.
‘Don’t rush me. Don’t you want me to look nice?’
She smiled over her shoulder at Nick Penry waiting impatiently for her on the doorstep, and bobbed up on her toes in an effort to see the reflection of her new blouse. She had made it herself, from a remnant of bright blue cotton from Howell’s summer clearance in Cardiff. Although her skirt was old she had shortened it daringly, and judged that the effect was almost as good as a completely new outfit.
‘Not a lot of point in looking nice to stay in Nantlas. If you don’t come now it’s either that or walk to Barry.’
‘Oh, all right then. I’m coming.’ Mari patted her hair one last time and hurried to the door. For a moment, balanced on the step above Nick, her face was almost level with his. He was smiling back at her, but the look in his eyes disconcerted her, as it had always done. They had known one another for six months now. Nick had come up to the house first on union business, to see her dad, after Dai Powell had moved up from the town of Port Talbot to the Rhondda valley, where the pits clustered thickly together, to work at the Rhondda and Peris-Hughes Associated Collieries No. 2 Nantlas Pit.
Nick Penry was deputy miners’ agent for the pit, one of the men’s elected union representatives, young for it at only twenty-three. Her dad had said to Mari, after Nick had gone, ‘Well. I’m not saying that he hasn’t got the right ideas, because he has. But there’s a lad who’s got his sights set further than the next yard of coal.’
Mari couldn’t have cared less whether or not Nick Penry was fervent enough in his opposition to the hated pit owners, or in his support for the new Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and his Labour government. She simply thought that Nick was the handsomest man she had ever seen. He was tall for a Welshman, black-haired, with dark and quick eyes that could flicker with laughter. He had stared straight at her so that Mari knew he was seeing her, but at the same time looking through her to something beyond. He was there, appraising her, amused and friendly, and yet not there at all.
But a week later he had called again, to ask her to go with him to the dance at the Miners’ Rest. They had been going together ever since.
Mari wobbled on the doorstep, her cheeks pink and her bobbed brown hair shining. Nick put out his arms to catch her. She fell against him willingly, laughing and smelling his holiday smell of strong soap and ironed flannel.
She put her cheek against her shoulder as he swung her down into the dusty entry behind the row of houses. ‘You could give me a kiss if you felt like it.’
‘There’ll be plenty of time for that later. Why d’you think I’m taking you all the way out to Barry, if it isn’t to get you behind a sand-dune?’ But he kissed her just the same, in full view of all the back kitchen windows in the row. His mouth was very warm, and Mari felt the curl of it because he was still smiling. She glowed with pride of possession as he drew her arm firmly through his and they turned to walk up the entry. Nick Penry was all she wanted.
‘Tara, Mam,’ she called up to the little back window. ‘We’re off now. You’ll see us when you see us.’
Out in the steeply cobbled street men in work clothes were straggling home up the hill, still black with pit dirt and with their tin snap boxes under their arms. The shift had changed, and the day men were already at work in Nantlas No. 1 and 2 pits.
Everyone knew Nick. There were friendly waves and greetings as each little group passed them. A big man stopped and grinned at them, tips and tongue and the rims of his eyes very pink in his dust-blackened face.
‘Where are you two off to then, all done up? Not Sunday, is it?’
‘We’re going down to Barry. Mari’s got a whole day off from up at the Lodge, and it’s a holiday for me as well.’
‘Lucky for some,’ the big man called cheerfully after them. Nick took Mari’s hand and began to run, pulling her after him so that her heels clattered on the stones. She was laughing and protesting, and then they heard the ring of heavier boots coming after them, running even faster. Nick looked back over his shoulder and then stopped, frowning.
Flying headlong down the hill was a young man, hardly more than a boy. He was white-faced, with bright, anxious eyes, and his torn shirt showed the hollow chest beneath. Nick caught his arm as the man scrambled by.
‘Late is it, Bryn?’
The runner spun round, trying to jerk his shirtsleeve away from Nick’s grasp. He was gasping for breath.
‘Again. Can’t afford it, neither, on the day money, not like you piece men. But I can’t sleep at nights, and then in the morning I can’t get my eyes open. But mebbe I’ll catch them yet, if I run.’ He was off, down the hill towards the huddle of buildings at the head of Nantlas No. 1.
‘Come and see me after,’ Nick shouted. ‘I’ll see your gang foreman.’
He wasn’t smiling any more, and he didn’t take Mari’s hand again. They began to walk on, soberly now.
‘He hasn’t a chance,’ Nick said. ‘They’ll have gone down long ago. He might as well have stopped in bed. That’s where he should be, anyway.’
Mari glanced sideways. ‘The dicai, is it?’
‘What do you think, looking at him?’
The dicai was the word they used, defiantly and almost lightly, for tuberculosis. The miners’ curse stalked the pits and the damp, crowded little houses down the hillsides.
‘He’s got to go down, Nick. There’s only him and that doolally sister, and his mam’s bad as well now.’
‘Do you think I don’t know? I’ll have to see if I can get something for them from the Fed. He needs to go down the coast, somewhere away from here. Curse it, Mari, and curse them.’
The Fed was the South Wales Miners’ Federation. Mari knew that them could only be the pit owners, and she knew too that there was no point in trying to talk about it now. She slipped her hand back into his and walked quietly beside him, waiting for him to stop glaring ahead at something she couldn’t see, and come back to her.
At last Nick shrugged. They had left Nantlas behind them, and their faces were turned away from the rows of houses lined above the pithead clutter of lifting gear and dust-black brick buildings. They were on the Maerdy road, and the high valley sides were suddenly summer green. The sun was already hot. It was a fine day for the seaside. The river splashed beside the road, and if he didn’t look at it Nick found that he could forget that the water was clogged with coal waste and the bankside grass was more black than green. Across the river the railway track ran up to the pithead, and rows of empty trucks were waiting to be shunted up for loading. Nick turned away from that too. He squeezed Mari’s hand, and then let it go so that he could put his arm around her shoulders. Her skin felt very warm through the crisp blue cotton, and her hair smelt of lilac. He kissed the top of her head and she drew closer under his arm, lengthening her stride comically so that they walked in step with her hip against his thigh.
‘It’s our holiday,’ Nick said softly. ‘Come on, let’s catch that train.’
He was smiling again. The sun was shining, he had twelve shillings in his pocket, and Mari Powell beside him. He liked Mari. She was cheerful and straightforward, and she was also the prettiest girl in the two valleys. Nick was sure of that, because he had been a committed judge of Rhondda girls from the age of sixteen. No, now wasn’t the time to be thinking of the pit, or the South Wales Miners’ Federation, or of Bryn Jones’s torn chest and the bloody iniquities of the owners who had given it to him.
Mari was pointing down the road with her free hand. ‘Look. The train’s in. We’ll have to run for it, now.’
A frantic dash down to the station brought them out on the platform just as the guard was lifting his whistle to his mouth. Nick tore open the nearest door, swung Mari up so that her skirt billowed and he glimpsed the tops of her white cotton stockings, and leapt in beside her. They collapsed into the dusty seats with Mari tugging at her skirt hem and then putting her hands up to smooth her windblown bob. Nick looked at her pink cheeks and round, shining brown eyes.
‘I love you, Mari,’ he said, surprising himself.
Mari wasn’t surprised. ‘I know,’ she said simply. ‘I love you, too.’
Everyone went down to Barry when they had time and money to spend. In the good days before the War it was always bursting with miners and their wives and children, determined to enjoy themselves in the halls and bars and tea-rooms. On summer afternoons the sands were packed with picnicking families down for the day from the valleys.
It wasn’t quite the same in Barry any more, or anywhere across the South Wales coalfields.
Pits were closing because markets were shrinking, and the work wasn’t there any longer. The money wasn’t there either, even for the lucky ones who were in work, since the terrible days of the 1921 strike and the huge wage cuts that had followed it.
Looking round at the sea front, Nick saw how much it had changed from the times of his childhood outings. Everywhere had seemed freshly painted then, glittering with bright lights and tempting things to buy, or just to look at. Today, even though it was the middle of August, almost every other shopfront seemed to be closed up, some with forbidding boards over the windows. Those that were still open were trying hard, offering jugs of fresh pinky-brown shrimps and mounds of shiny blue-black winkles, green and red and gilt paper hats with ‘Barry Island’ printed on them, china mugs and brightly patterned souvenirs, sweets and tin spades and buckets and trays of teas for the beach. But the paint was peeling and the awnings were torn and faded, and there were only straggles of people passing in front of them in place of the old, cheerful crowds.
Beyond the pale green railings edging the front the sand was freshly uncovered, hard and brown and glittering in a thousand tiny points under the sun. The air smelt wonderfully clean and salty. That hadn’t changed, at least.
Mari ran to the railings and hung over them, calling to him. ‘Look at the sea, Nick. Come on, let’s run down to the water now.’
‘And get sand all over your shoes and those lovely white stockings?’ he teased her.
‘I’ll take them off,’ she said, mock-daringly, and then added, ‘Or no, later perhaps.’
They walked down to the water’s edge where the wavelets turned over themselves and the fringe of foam was swallowed up by the wet sand. There were two or three tiny flawless pink shells amongst the crushed white and grey fragments of larger ones at the tideline. Nick picked them up and closed them in the palm of Mari’s hand, seeing how the skin was rough and reddened from the washing and mending she did for Mrs Peris up at the Lodge.
‘Aren’t they pretty?’ Mari said. ‘Like little pink pearls.’
‘I’d give you real pearls, if I could,’ Nick said. There was something about today that put a rough edge in his voice. It was a happy day, a beautiful day, but it hurt him too.
‘That would be nice,’ Mari answered. ‘But I don’t need pearls, do I? I’m happy just as I am. Here, this minute.’
For a long, long moment they looked at each other.
In the end it was Nick who turned away, his back to the glitter of the sun on the sea, to look back at the rows of roofs and windows along the front. It looked better from here. The colours seemed no more than faded and softened by the salt wind, and the blank eyes of windows were less noticeable. In the centre was a red-brick public house, Victorian mock-Gothic with fantastic turrets and spires, topped by a gilded cockerel on a weather vane.
‘What would you like to do?’ he asked her formally. ‘Shall we have a drink at the Cock? Or are you hungry? We can have a fish dinner right away, if you want.’
‘Oh, a drink first, please. Then something to eat, and then we can go for a walk afterwards.’
They sat side by side on the hard, shiny red leather seats in the Cock, looking at the other holidaymakers. Nick drank two pints of beer, and Mari had two glasses of dark, sweet sherry. After the second her cheeks went even pinker and she found it doubly difficult to listen to what Nick was saying.
He was talking about the Miners’ Federation, and how important it was that every miner should be committed to it and its leaders, so that they could stand together and fight the bosses.
‘Nothing like 1921 must ever happen again,’ he said. ‘No more Black Fridays.’
Mari sighed. It was a part of Nick that she didn’t understand. Of course there should be a union, and of course all working men should belong to it. But all his talk of fights, and power bases, and nationalization and public ownership, and radicalization, and the Sankey Commission, she didn’t understand that at all.
There always would be bosses, and they never would want to pay the men the proper wage. Nor would they want to put their profits into mechanizing the mines and making them safer to work in, not while there were still plenty of men more than willing to go down them just as they were and for less and less money.
Secretly, Mari didn’t believe that all the unions in the world would ever change anything. There always would be men like Mr Peris who owned the third biggest colliery group in South Wales, and his wife who gave her handmade silk underwear away to her maid after two or three wearings, and there would be men and women like Nick and herself. If the men came out on strike, obedient to Nick and his kind who truly believed in the possibility of change, then the bosses just sent in the police and the troops and the strike-breakers, the miners got angrier and hungrier, and then when they couldn’t hold out against the hunger and the cold any longer, they went back down for less money than before. It would be just the same, Mari thought, if she told Mrs Peris’s housekeeper up at the Lodge that she rather thought she wouldn’t do quite so much of the heavy washing any more, but would like an extra two shillings a week just the same. She would simply find herself replaced by another Nantlas girl who would be glad to do what Mari Powell did, and without making any trouble about it.
Nick had stopped talking now, and he was looking at her with the same queer light in his eyes. Nick had unusual eyes, grey-green and pale against his dark skin and hair.
‘You don’t understand any of this, do you?’ he said.
‘Of course I do,’ Mari protested rapidly. ‘I understand, and I agree with you. So there’s no need to lecture me like one of your miners’ lodge meetings.’ She tried to look indignant, but at the same time she slid closer to him on the hard, slippery seat. ‘I don’t much want to talk about it, that’s all, not today. I’d rather have you to myself, not share you with every collier in Nantlas as well as the South Wales Miners’ Federation.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, contrite. ‘Let’s forget it at once.’ But before he put his arm around her shoulders again he said, as if he was warning her, ‘It’s important, Mari. Not just to me, but to all of us. I just want you to understand that if … if you have me, if you want me, you have the fight too. Do you?’