The White Dove

‘Yes.’ She was answering both his questions, thinking only of one.

With surprising gentleness for a big man, Nick touched her cheek with his fingertips. Then he grinned at her. ‘Too serious. Much too serious. What d’you say, shall we have another drink?’

‘Trying to get me drunk, is it?’

‘Of course. Then I can have my wicked way with you. A large one, then?’

‘No, thanks. You can buy me that fish dinner instead.’

Later, when they came out again, they turned westwards down the front into the sunshine. They dawdled arm in arm past the shopfronts, examining the displays. In the last shop in the line Nick bought a white china mug with Cymru am Byth gold-lettered on one side and Croeso i Barry on the other over highly coloured views of the resort.

‘To remind you of this elegant excursion,’ he said gravely.

Mari thanked him, equally gravely.

Then they were walking away from the sea front, down to where the road turned into a sandy track and then wound away around a little headland into an empty space of coarse grass and sunny hollows. For a while they walked in silence, listening to the sea and the grass swishing at their ankles. Although they were barely half a mile from the clamour of Barry, they might have been alone in the world.

Nick stopped at a deep hollow, enclosed on three sides by sun-warmed slopes tufted with seagrass, but open to the sea and the sky at the front. ‘Let’s stop for a while,’ he said.

They sat down with their backs against the sand and at once the steep walls insulated them. The sea was no more than a faint whisper, and the only other sound was the cry of a seagull directly overhead.

Mari thought that it was the first time they had ever been properly alone. Nick was lying back with his eyes closed. Without his penetrating stare and with the quick crackle of his talk silenced, he looked younger, softer-faced.

For once Nick wasn’t thinking of anything at all. He was simply relishing the quiet, the clean smell of the salt-scoured air, and the red light of the sun on his eyelids. It was so different from the confined dark, the noise and the often suffocating heat of every day.

When he opened his eyes again it was to look at Mari. She was lying propped up on one elbow, watching the slow trickle of sand grains past her arm. With her rosy cheeks and round brown eyes she looked polished, shiny with health like an apple, and that was an unusual attraction in Nantlas. Nick’s appraisal took in the rest of her. She was slim, but not thin, with a neat waist. And although she was short like the other girls in the valley, she had pretty legs and ankles. It amused Nick that she knew he was looking at her, admiring her, and wouldn’t meet his eyes.

‘Your shoes are full of sand,’ he said softly.

At once Mari sat up. ‘I said I’d take them off, didn’t I?’

She kicked off the shoes and then, deftly and unaffectedly, she unhooked her stockings and rolled them down over her knees and ankles. Her bare skin was very white, and Nick saw that her feet were small and square. Suddenly he was struck by her vulnerability, and his own. He knelt in the sand and kissed the instep of one foot. The skin was smooth and very warm.

He looked up at her and saw that she was smiling.

‘How old are you, Mari?’

‘Nineteen. I told you before.’

‘Do you think that’s old enough?’

He liked her better still because she didn’t pretend to be shocked, or not to know what he meant.

‘Yes. If it’s with you.’

The afternoon sun filled their hollow. As he reached to kiss her mouth Nick saw that the light had tipped her brown eyelashes with gold. Then their eyes closed, and for a long moment they didn’t see or hear anything else. Nick’s hand reached up and fumbled with the buttons of the new blue blouse. They came undone and he slid it off, stroking her shoulders and touching the hollows beside her neck. Then he found the buttons of her skirt and undid those too. Mari sat facing him in her cotton camisole neatly trimmed with cheap lace. Somehow it looked wrong beside the sharp grass and the clean washed sand.

‘Please take it off. I don’t think I can find the right buttons.’

‘Nick.’ She was genuinely scandalized now, wrapping her arms protectively around herself. ‘What if someone sees?’ He laughed delightedly. ‘So, Mari. It’s all right to make love and not be married, and to do it outside in the sunshine, but it’s not all right to take your underclothes off? Look, I’m taking mine off.’

Unconcernedly he stripped himself and knelt beside her again. Nick was neither interested in nor ashamed of his own body. For most of the time it was simply an instrument to be worked until it complained, and then in too-rare moments like this it gave him intense pleasure. But Mari was staring in half-abashed fascination, so he waited, trying to be patient with her. She looked at the breadth of his shoulders, and the knots of muscle in his arms. Nick’s skin was white too, but with an unhealthy, underground pallor of hard labour in enclosed places. There were bruises too, old ones fading into yellow and new blue ones. Across his upper arm there was a long puckered scar, blueish under the wrinkled skin as if the wound had not been cleaned properly before healing itself.

‘What’s that?’

‘A shovel,’ he said indifferently. ‘There isn’t a lot of room to work in an uncommon seam, and my arm was in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

‘Oh.’ Mari was looking down to where the sparse dark hair on his chest grew down in a thin line over his belly. Hesitantly, glancing up at him to see if she was doing right, she reached out to touch him.

‘That’s right.’ Nick’s voice was quite different now. ‘Touch me.’

There was another long moment of silence before he asked again. ‘Please. Take that thing off. If there’s anyone anywhere near, they’re doing the same as us. Why should they want to spy?’

Mari raised her arms and slipped the thin cotton off over her head. She sat up straight, lifting her head at the novel sensation of the breeze on her bare skin. She had small, firm breasts with pink nipples. Nick’s dark head bent forward as he touched one, very gently, with his tongue. Then they lay down in each other’s arms, stretching out against each other in the warmth.

‘It feels so lovely,’ Mari said. It was the oddness of another body next to hers, the same skin and heat as her own, but yet so different, and the sun and air on her flesh, and the prickle of the sand beneath her.

‘Here,’ Nick said, lifting her up. ‘Lie on my shirt.’

‘Oh, why? I liked the feel of the sand.’

She felt his deep chuckle in his throat, and suddenly he was the old comical Nick again that she knew quite well from social evenings and dances in the hall of the Miners’ Rest, and snatched half-hours alone in her mam’s front parlour.

‘Because it won’t feel nearly as lovely if we’re both covered in it, believe me.’

Mari was flooded with the sense of her own ignorance and she buried her face against him. ‘Tell me what to do,’ she said.

‘Like this, my love. Like this.’ Nick took her hand, and showed her. Then in his turn he discovered her, a discovery so surprising that it made her forget the sun and the sky, and the sound of the sea, and everything in the world except the two of them. At that moment Mari wouldn’t have known or cared if every man, woman and child in Nantlas had been standing at the lip of the hollow watching them.

Then, much later, she fell asleep with her hair fanned out over the scar on his arm, and his shirt spread over her for covering. Nick lay still, holding her close, and watching the light over them change from bright to pale blue, and then to no colour, at all except for a rim of palest pink.

At last Mari murmured something inaudible, stretched, and opened her eyes. ‘Have I been asleep for very long?’

‘Yes, very long. It was nice, watching you.’

She sat up, shaking the sand out of her hair, and his shirt fell away from her shoulders. At once her hands came up to cover herself.

‘It’s a bit late for that,’ he said, smiling at her.

‘I know that. It’s not you. What if …’ Gingerly she levered herself to peer over the rim of the hollow. The world stretched away ahead, empty except for the sea birds, and she flopped back in relief.

‘Here.’ Nick was holding her clothes out to her, shaken free of sand and folded neatly. He helped her to dress, smoothing the blue cotton and fastening the buttons with surprising dexterity. His hands were rough and cracked, but the fingers were slim for a man’s, and supple. When they were both dressed, they leaned back against the sand. Nick produced a small, slightly crushed bar of chocolate from his pocket and she bit ravenously into it. From another pocket be brought out a green and yellow Gold Flake tin and rolled himself a cigarette, and they sat contentedly together.

‘Nick?’ she asked after a moment. ‘What does it mean? What we … did, just now?’

Nick thought carefully. He had done it quite often before, with different girls, and he had believed that it meant exactly what it seemed to mean. They did it, and they both enjoyed it. He saw to that, because it was important. And then, after they had enjoyed enough of it, they were both free to move on.

The enjoyment part mattered, that was what made the bargain mutual. His first girl had taught him that. Not that she was a girl, exactly. Forty-year-old Mags Jenkin from Mountain Ash had coolly picked him out from a crowd of his seventeen-year-old mates. She was a widow, and nothing special to look at, but she knew all there was to know. ‘I can always tell the ones who’ll be natural at it,’ she had told him after their first time together. It was the first time that he’d stayed out all night, and the first night of his life that he hadn’t slept at all, even though he had to go down the pit just as usual at seven in the morning. ‘Listen,’ Mags had said. ‘The first thing is to make sure that the girl likes it too. It doubles the pleasure of it for you, see? And there’s sense in that, isn’t there?’

Nick had seen the sense of it so clearly that he had pressed her back against the grey blankets yet again, and had been late down at the shaft head for the first time in his life as well.

In due course, as Mags had assured him he would, he had turned his attentions to a younger, prettier girl. Mags had simply picked out another eager seventeen-year-old, and Nick had gone on from there, grateful for what she had taught him and happy with what seemed a satisfactory arrangement for everyone. But Mari Powell was different. Not all that different, he reflected, but it was enough.

‘What would you like it to mean?’ he asked her now, watching the averted pink curve of her face.

‘I’d like …’ She hesitated, and then the words came out in a sudden rush. ‘I’d like it to mean that we’re going to get married.’

I don’t want that. Nick heard his own sharp, inner voice. Do I?

Yet he had brought Mari down here, knowing that he would make love to her in a hollow by the sea, and knowing that it would be something different from the careful, deliberately casual encounters he had had in the past. He had wanted it to be different.

Nick frowned very slightly, and looked around him as if for another, less obvious avenue to move down.

But there was none. Everyone was married. All the men he worked with, almost all his friends. Rapidly, Nick tried to sum up for himself what being married would mean. Not living in his dad’s house any more, but a struggle to find and pay for another, identical house a little way off in one of the terraces. And then there would be Mari, pretty, cheerful Mari to come home to, and warm in bed beside him every night. There would be no other girls, but that would just mean an end to snatched hours in icy front parlours, or out in the cold in some corner of the valley. Mari and he would have their own room, their own bed. A life of their own.

He looked at Mari now, sitting tensely beside him in her blue blouse, apparently intent on the sand trickling out between the fingers of her clenched fist. ‘And would you have me?’

Her fists unclenched at once, and Nick saw the full blaze of delighted surprise in her face. ‘Nick, you know I would.’

He waited for a second, listening to the sea and the wind, and then he said, ‘Will you marry me, Mari?’

‘Yes.’

That was it, then, Nick thought. That was how it happened. You loved someone in a way that wasn’t quite exactly the same as all the others, for her pink cheeks and her smile and the scent of lilacs, and you found yourself marrying her.

To have and to hold. From this day forth for ever more. It wasn’t his voice but a stranger’s, mocking him inside his own head. But before Nick could catch himself up short for his own sourness, Mari’s delight overpowered him. Her arms were round his neck and her mouth was warm against his.

‘I love you, Nick. Oh, I love you.’

Her fervour touched him and made him smile so that he forgot everything else. ‘You sure? Me and the Fed? Me and the pit and Nantlas and the owners?’

‘Curse the whole bloody lot of them. I only love you.’ Her hands reached out to him, touching him and drawing him closer to her. ‘Nick, will you do it again? Please?’ They lay down once more, and the walls of the sand hollow enclosed them all over again.

It was almost dark when they reached the station, and the train for the valleys was waiting at the platform. Nick helped Mari up into the high carriage again, and was amused to find himself possessively smoothing the hem of her skirt so that no one else might catch a glimpse of the smooth whiteness above her knees. As they sat down, side by side on the gritty seats, he smelt the dust and smoke and knew that their holiday was over. Pushing back the thought, he asked her fiercely, ‘Are you mine? Really all mine?’

In the filthy, dimly lit train Mari was beautiful. Her hair was tousled and dark around her face, and her mouth looked fuller, bruised with kissing.

She smiled at him. ‘All. Always. We’re engaged now, aren’t we?’

Their hands were knotted together and Nick rubbed the bare fingers of her left hand with his.

‘I’ll buy you a ring. We’ll go into Cardiff and you can choose one. Does it matter if it isn’t a great diamond?’

‘Doesn’t matter if it’s a brass curtain ring, so long as it’s yours. I’ve got my mug, for now. It’ll have pride of place, you know, when we’re married. In the middle of our parlour mantel. To remind us of today.’

The train jolted savagely and then shuddered forward. Through the smeared window Nick watched the platform lights dropping behind them and the velvety August night wrapping round the train like a glove.

Quietly, he said, ‘It isn’t going to be easy, my love.’

Mari was too completely happy even to want to listen to his warnings. ‘When has it ever been, for our sort?’

‘Harder, then. Much harder. Worse than 1921, do you remember that? That was only a rehearsal for what’s coming to us.’

Mari remembered 1921. For the four months that the strike had lasted, March to July, neither her dad nor her brothers had worked. She herself had been earning a few pence a week then, doing mending and heavy cleaning for one of the pit managers’ wives, and her mother had taken in some washing. The five of them had lived on that, on bread and potatoes and hoarded tea, and had been luckier than many others.

She sighed now. ‘Why not be grateful for things as they are? Everyone except you says they’re better. They may be bad in other places, but there’s work for everyone who really wants it in the Rhondda now. Forty thousand men. You said so yourself.’

Nick turned away from the window, and the lights of towns strung out along the valley sides like so many necklaces, pretty at this distance.

‘It won’t last. It can’t. We can’t compete, you see. Not with German reparation coal, not with subsidized exports from everywhere. Nor with oil for shipping, and the hydroelectric. Steam coal’s had its day, my love, and so have we. Unless —’ his dark face was suddenly flooded with vivid colour — ‘unless we can change everything. Stop the owners lining their pockets. Nationalize the industry. Invest. Mechanize. Subsidize. And pay a fair wage to the men who do the work.’

Mari stroked his hand, running her fingers over the calluses, soothing him. ‘We’ll manage somehow, you and me. I know we will. You’re strong and willing, and they’ll always give you work while there’s still work to do.’

‘I won’t do it,’ he interrupted her. ‘Not in the old yes-to-me, no-to-him victimizing ways. There has to be work for every man, fair and square. And you’re wrong, in any case. I’ll be the first out, given what I believe in. And I’ll fight for the right for others to believe in too.’

Mari went on stroking his wrist, her voice gentle. It was old ground between them, and she hardly hesitated over it. ‘And I work too, don’t I? If what you’re afraid of does happen, we’ll still have something.’

‘Mari.’ He caught her wrist, almost roughly, stopping the stroking. Then he lifted her hand and rubbed it against his cheek. She felt the prickle of stubble and then his tongue as he kissed her fingers. It brought back the sand hollow and what had happened there, and she blushed. ‘Mari, what will happen when the babies come?’

Her face went bright scarlet. Conscious suddenly of the inquisitive faces around them, she whispered, ‘Will we have babies? Would you like that?’

For once, his grey-green eyes were neither opaque nor seeing beyond her. She was fully there, in the centre of his gaze, and she thought it was the happiest moment she had ever known.

‘Yes,’ Nick said. ‘Oh yes, I would like that. And I’d like to be able to give them something too. Something more than just enough to eat, and boots for their feet.’

‘We’ll do it,’ she promised him. She rested her head against his shoulder and he kissed the top of it protectively.

‘I wish,’ he murmured against her hair, ‘I wish we were married already. I want to take you home with me now, to my own bed. No sand. Just you and me, under the covers in the dark. Or no, in the light. So I can see you.’

‘Nick.’ Mari was stifling her laughter. ‘Hush, now. People can hear.’

Their arms were still wrapped round each other when they stepped off the train at Maerdy. Because they didn’t have eyes for anyone else, they didn’t see the shocked and anxious faces on the platform, nor did they hear the buzz of subdued talk that greeted the other passengers.

Nick surrendered their return tickets to the collector at the barrier without a glance, and they began the walk up the valley, still insulated by their happiness. Later, Mari tried to remember what they had talked about, and couldn’t remember any of it except Nick’s low voice, for no one but herself to hear, his arm around her, and his hand over her breast in the safe cover of darkness.

Then they came to the curve of the road, the point where they had started to run for the train only this morning, and they saw the lights.

All the lights were blazing at the Nantlas No. 1 pithead, even though the night shift should have been safely down long ago. If all was well, the only lights showing would be in the winding house where the night surface team manned the lifting gear, and in the little square window of the shift manager’s office. Yet tonight every single window was lit up, and there were other lights too, hand-held because they were bobbing about in the blackness.

In the moment that Nick and Mari stood together at the bend in the valley road, two huge searchlights came on and snuffed out the torches.

Nick had seen those lights before. They were brought to the pithead and erected on hastily assembled scaffolding to assist the rescue workers. He was already running.

Mari’s bewilderment lasted only a split second longer. ‘Explosion.’ She caught the word that Nick shouted back at her over his shoulder as no more than an echo of her own shrill scream. She began to run too, slipping and stumbling in the darkness on the rough road.

Nick was way ahead of her, moving much faster, and then she lost sight of him. But when she came gasping up to the silent crowd waiting at the colliery gates she saw him immediately, right up against the gates, his fists clamped on the bars.

He was shouting, and kicking against the solid ironwork. ‘Let me in. Let me in. Cruickshank, is that you? Open these bloody gates. Do you hear? Open them, you bastard.’

Mari elbowed and jostled her way through the crowd and reached Nick’s side just as Cruickshank, the pit manager, appeared beyond the gates.

‘Ah. Nick Penry, is it? Well then, you’d better come in and add your two penn’orth, for all the difference it’ll make.’

The gates creaked open and Mari slipped in behind Nick before they clanged shut again. Neither of the men paid any attention to her whatsoever, and she moved quickly into the shadow of a low wall.

‘How many?’ Nick said.

Cruickshank shrugged awkwardly. ‘Thirty, from the night book. Maybe one or two more, unofficial.’

Even Mari knew what ‘unofficial’ meant. For safety reasons, only an agreed number of men was allowed to work any given seam at any given time. But if extra men were willing to go in, working the awkward places unacknowledged and for less money than their official counterparts, the managers were glad to let them do it and to keep their names off the books. It meant more coal for less money in less time, after all. It was one of the things that Nick was trying to stop, through the Federation, even though his sympathy was with the often desperate men who were forced to do it.

‘One or two?’ Nick’s voice was harsh.

Cruickshank’s was level in response. ‘Well. Forty-four, we’re almost certain, although we haven’t got all the names yet.’

‘When did it happen?’

‘Just before six. Right at the shift end.’

‘Whose gang?’

‘Dicky Goch’s.’

In the shelter of her wall, Mari shivered. Dicky Goch, a red-haired giant with a turbulent family of red-haired children, was a popular figure in Nantlas. He had a fine singing voice, in the Rest on Saturday nights and in chapel on Sundays.

Nick was looking away from Cruickshank, back to the silent, waiting crowd at the gates. Mari knew that he was counting up the friends, fathers of families and boys of thirteen or fourteen, who worked with Dicky Goch. Then he turned sharply towards the pit-top.

‘Who’s gone down for them?’ he asked. ‘I want to go.’

‘Nick …’ Terror clutched at Mari, and her cry came out as a whisper.

Cruickshank said quietly, ‘It isn’t quite that easy. There’s a fire near the friction gear. The men are in number two district, the Penmor seam. The fire’s blocking the road to them.’

‘In Christ’s name, Cruickshank. Why are you standing here? Are the firemen down there?’ Nick loomed over the pit manager who stepped back quickly.

‘Be careful, Penry. This isn’t your pit. We’ve done everything we can. The shift manager went down right away with some men, but the fire was blocking the road. It’s a damp seam, that. There’s every chance of another explosion. I’ve ordered the pit closed.’

‘Closed?’

Mari shivered again at the cold fury in Nick’s face.

‘Closed. Do you want to risk more lives, man? There’s … there’s a problem with the reverse intake.’

Mari didn’t hear Nick’s muttered words, but she saw his fist swing. The manager scuttled backwards to avoid the blow, hands to his mouth. For a moment Nick stood looking at him, his face full of disgust. Then, awkwardly, he rubbed his knuckles although they hadn’t so much as grazed Cruickshank’s face.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said in a low voice. ‘You’re only the manager. What can you do, except what Peris tells you? How does that make you feel, tonight?’ Without waiting to hear if Cruickshank had any more to say Nick swung away towards the pit buildings.