THE WHITE DOVE
Rosie Thomas

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1986

Copyright © Rosie Thomas 1986

Cover design Caroline Young © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Cover images © Alma Gonzalez/Arcangel Images (woman), Shuttershock.com (all other images)

Rosie Thomas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007563302

Ebook Edition © December 2020 ISBN: 9780007560622

Version: 2020-11-27

Dedication

For Caradoc

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Part Two

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Part Three

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Part Four

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Rosie Thomas

About the Publisher

PART ONE

ONE

The cedar tree was four hundred years old; as old as Chance itself. The shade beneath the cedar was more fragrant, cooler and deeper than the shade of any of the other great trees across the park. From its protective circle the family could look into the dazzle of light over the velvet grass, back to the terrace and the grey walls rearing behind it. The splash of the fountain was a deliciously cool note in the heavy heat of that long afternoon of July 1916.

Amy Lovell sat squarely at the tea-table, her chin barely level with the starched white cloth, wide eyes fixed on the sandwiches as fragile as butterflies, tiny circlets of pastry top-heavy with cream and raspberries, melting fingers of her favourite ginger sponge, and enticing dark wedges of rich fruit cake. A long time had passed since nursery lunch at twelve, and Amy was hungry. But she sat perfectly still, her hands folded in her lap, without even a rustle of her frilled petticoats. Her feet, in highly polished boots with intricate buttons and laces, did not nearly touch the grass, but she held them rigid. Only yesterday Papa had banished her from the tea-table for swinging her legs, and she had not even had a sandwich, let alone a ginger sponge finger. Amy allowed herself one sidelong glance at Isabel, six years old to her own four-and-a-bit, and saw that her sister looked as effortlessly still and composed as always.

A flutter of white cloth to the right of the table heralded the silent arrival of Mr Glass, the butler, with another, subsidiary table. This one was laden with silver tea-things.

‘I will pour out myself, Glass, thank you,’ said Amy’s mother in her special, low voice. When Amy first heard the word ‘drawling’ it pleased her, because it sounded exactly like Mama.

‘Very good, my lady.’

Mr Glass retreated across the grass, flanked by the maids with their apron and cap strings fluttering, and left them alone. Amy sighed with satisfaction. It was the best moment of the day, when she and Isabel had Mama and Papa all to themselves.

Lady Lovell stretched out her hand to the silver teapot. Her dark red hair fell in rich, natural waves, and where it was caught up at the nape of her neck beads of perspiration showed on the white skin. Her afternoon dress of pale rose silk was pleated and gathered, but it failed to disguise the ungainly bulk of the last days of pregnancy. Her hand fluttered back to rest over her stomach, and she sighed in the heat.

‘Could you, Gerald? Glass does hover so, and it is so nice to be just ourselves out here.’

‘That is his job, Adeline,’ Lord Lovell reminded her, but without the irritation he would have felt seven years ago.

He had fallen in love with his first sight of the exquisite eighteen-year-old American steel heiress dancing her way through her first London Season. And Adeline van Pelt from Pittsburgh, her head turned by her aristocratic suitor’s ancient title as much as by his formal charm, had agreed to marry him even though he was twice her age.

They had not made an easy beginning of their first months together at Chance. Lord Lovell was a widower, already the father of a twelve-year-old boy. His interests, apart from a well-bred liking for pretty girls, were horses, cards, and his estates. The new Lady Lovell came home with him at the end of the Season with only the barest understanding of what their life together would be like. It had come as an unpleasant shock, after the blaze of parties and admirers, to find herself alone much of the day while Gerald rode, or shot, or saw his farm managers. Yet at night, in her bedroom, he miraculously became everything she could have wanted. It was inexplicable to Adeline that her husband found it necessary to pretend, all day long, to be somebody he clearly wasn’t, and only to let the passion, and the laughter, out at night when they were alone.

To his concern, Gerald found that his wife was easily bored, capricious and unpredictable. She was either yawning with ennui, or filling the house with disreputable people and in a whirlwind of enthusiasm for painting the library in pink faux marble. She romped unsuitably in front of the servants, kissed him in public, and had no idea of what was expected of her as Lady Lovell.

And yet the sceptics who smiled behind their hands at the incongruous match and gave it a year to last, found themselves proved wrong. The Lovells grew happy together. Gerald unbent, and Adeline, to please him, learned to obey some of the rules of English upper-class life. Airlie Lovell, the son from his first marriage, remained Gerald’s adored heir, but the two little girls, with the look of their beautiful mother, were more important to him than he would have thought girl-children could ever be.

He smiled at Adeline now over their red-brown, ringleted heads.

‘Of course I will pour the tea, my darling. Meanwhile Glass can recline in his pantry reading Sporting Life, and all will be well with the world.’

‘Thank you,’ Adeline murmured. Her answering smile was tired. She leaned back in her padded chair and listlessly opened her little ivory fan. Gerald saw that her eyes were shadowed, and even her fan seemed too heavy to hold. Of course her condition wearied her. It would only be a few more days now, please God, and then the baby would be born. Then, soon, he would be welcome in his wife’s bedroom again. At the thought of Adeline’s long, white legs and the weight of her hair over his face Gerald shifted in his seat and put his finger to his collar.

‘Well, little girls,’ he said loudly. ‘What have you been doing with Miss May this afternoon?’

‘Handwriting,’ Amy said promptly. ‘It’s awful. “Press down on the lines, Miss Amy” …’

‘That will do,’ her father said. ‘Are these children really allowed cake before bread and butter, Adeline?’

‘Of course they are. Didn’t you prefer cake at their age?’

Amy, with one ginger sponge securely on her plate and the possibility of at least one more to come, beamed with sticky pleasure.

Then, across the smooth grass, between her mother’s rosepink shoulder and her father’s cream-jacketed arm wielding the teapot, she saw a man on a bicycle. He was riding along the west drive, which meant he had come through the west gates leading from the village. Against the bright sunlight he looked all black, perched on top of his angular black bicycle, and his spidery black legs were pumping round and round as he spun up the driveway.

He must be bringing something for Cook in the kitchen, Amy thought. The butcher’s delivery boy had a bicycle like that, only his had a big basket at the front and a wide, flat tray at the back. All the bicycles from the shops had baskets like that, she remembered, and this one didn’t. So it couldn’t be a delivery. The man was riding too fast, too. And instead of wheeling away to the side of the house and then to the kitchen courtyard, he rode straight on. He disappeared from sight behind the wing that enclosed the wide, paved court at the front of the house. The man on the bicycle had gone straight to the great main door.

Amy frowned slightly, wondering. She had only ever seen carriages and cars sweeping up to the main door. Then she took another bite of her cake and looked at Isabel. It was usually safe to take a lead from Isabel, but her sister did not seem to have noticed the man on the bicycle. And Mama and Papa had not seen him either, of course, because their backs were turned to the west drive.

It couldn’t be anything interesting, then.

Amy had barely given her full attention to her tea once more when something else caught her eye. It was so unexpected that it made her stop short, with her cake halfway to her mouth.

Mr Glass had come out of the tall open doors on to the terrace again. Instead of moving at his usual stately pace, he was almost running. He was down the steps, and covering the width of lawn that separated them from the house. Amy was suddenly aware that the afternoon was almost over, and Glass’s shadow was running ahead of him like a long, black finger pointing at them under the shade of the cedar tree. Isabel was looking curiously past her, and she heard the sharp chink as her mother quickly replaced her cup in its saucer.

But her father was frozen, motionless, as he watched Glass coming over the lawn. The butler was carrying an envelope in one hand, and a silver salver in the other. He hadn’t even given himself time to put the two together. Then he reached the table under the tree.

‘A telegram, my lord,’ he said. Yet he still kept hold of it, stiff-fingered, as if he didn’t want to hand it over. In his other hand the silver salver dangled uselessly at his side.

‘Give it to me,’ Gerald Lovell said quietly.

Slowly, as if it hurt him to do it, Glass held out the buff envelope. Lord Lovell took it, tore it open, and read the message it contained.

The little girls looked from one to the other of the adult faces, mystified by the chill that had crept over the golden afternoon.

‘Thank you, Glass,’ he said quietly. Then, very slowly, he got up and stood with his back to the little group, staring away at the incongruous sun on the grey walls of Chance.

Glass bent his head, and went silently back across the grass.

‘Gerald,’ Adeline said sharply. ‘Please tell me.’

For a long moment, he didn’t move. When at last he turned around to face them again, Amy thought for a terrifying second that this wasn’t her father at all. The square, straight shoulders had sagged and the familiar, stem face had fallen into bewildered hollows and lines. Even the crisp, greying hair seemed to have whitened. But worst of all was his mouth. It was open, in a horrible square shape that was like a scream, but no sound was coming out of it.

‘Oh God,’ Amy heard her mother say. ‘Dear God. Not Airlie.’

At the sound of his son’s name Gerald stumbled forward. His shoulders heaved, and the scream came out of his mouth at last as a low, stricken moan. He dropped to his knees in front of his wife’s chair, and the moan went on and on. Amy saw Isabel put her hands up to her ears, as if to shut the sound out. Her sister’s face had gone dead white, with her eyes dark holes in the whiteness.

‘Hush, my love,’ Adeline said. ‘Oh, Gerald.’

Lord Lovell rocked forward on his knees and put his head in his wife’s lap. The telegram fell on the grass and lay face upwards to the blank sky. Isabel got down from her chair, moving like a stiff-legged little doll. She leant over it, not touching it, and read the words.

2nd Lt The Hon’ble Airlie Lovell killed in action July 1. Deepest regrets. Lt Col. A. J. S. Warren, O/c 2nd Bn Kings Own Rifles.

At last the moaning stopped. ‘My son?’ Lord Lovell said. His head reared up again and he looked into his wife’s face. His tears had left a dark, irregular stain on the rose silk of her skirts.

‘My son,’ he repeated in bewilderment. Then he put his hands on either side of the mound of Adeline’s stomach. ‘Give me a son again,’ he begged her. ‘Give me my son back again.’

Sharply, Isabel turned away. She held out her hand to Amy. ‘Come on,’ she said, and when Amy didn’t respond she whispered urgently, ‘Please come.’

Obediently, even though she was puzzled and afraid, Amy slid off her chair and with Isabel pulling her onwards the two little girls ran hand in hand across the grass to the sun-warmed steps, and into the silent house. In the cool dimness of the long drawing room Isabel hesitated, wondering where to run to next, and in that instant Amy looked back.

The picture she saw was to stay with her for ever. She saw her parents still under the cedar tree, her father almost unrecognizable on his knees with the squareness gone from his shoulders and the line of his straight back bowed and defeated. His face was buried like a child’s in the folds of rose silk and her mother’s head was bent over his, seeing nothing else.

Amy wanted to run back to them and squeeze herself between them, telling them to make everything all right again, but Isabel’s grip on her hand was firm. She mustn’t go to them. Isabel seemed to understand something about this sudden cold in the sun that she couldn’t.

But now Isabel was saying ‘Where can we go?’ in a thin voice that suddenly sounded lost. ‘It’s Nanny’s day off, do you remember? And it’s after four o’clock, so we can’t see Miss May, and Cook doesn’t like us to go in the kitchen in the afternoon …’

Her voice trailed away.

‘Up to the nursery,’ Amy answered with conviction. ‘Everything will be all right there.’

Slowly now but still hand in hand they walked the length of the drawing room, past the sofa where their mother sat before dinner when they came down to kiss her good night on the evenings when there were no guests, through another salon hung with pictures and past spindly gilt furniture, and out into a great space where a wide staircase curved away above their heads. Isabel and Amy turned their backs on the cathedral-like quiet and slipped through a discreet door hidden in the shadows under the stairway. Beyond the door the corridor was narrow and stone-flagged. From somewhere close at hand came the sound of another door banging, hurrying footsteps and an urgently raised voice. They began to walk faster again, making for the stairs leading up to the sanctuary of the nursery wing.

The day nursery was on the west side of the house, and the blinds were half drawn against the light. Long bars of sunshine struck over the polished floor and the familiar worn rugs.

The last time he had been at home, Airlie had draped himself with them, playing bears on his hands and knees, laughing and puffing and telling the girls that the same rugs had been on the floor when he was a baby. When the game was over he had stood up and brushed the fluff from the new uniform he was so proud of. Amy remembered the smell of wool and leather, and the creak of his highly polished Sam Browne belt.

At first sight the nursery seemed empty, but then there was a rustle and the door of one of the tall cupboards swung to. A girl emerged from behind it, round-faced under a white cap, her arms full of folded linen. She saw their stricken faces and let the linen fall in a heap.

‘Miss Isabel, Miss Amy, what’s wrong then?’

Bethan Jones was the new nurserymaid. She was sixteen years old and had come to Chance from her home in the Welsh valleys only a month ago, and the little girls barely knew her except as a quick, aproned figure fetching and carrying for Nanny. Her soft Welsh accent sounded strange to them, but they heard the warmth in her voice now. Amy ran to her at once and Bethan’s arms wrapped round her.

‘There now. Tell Bethan, won’t you?’

Bethan pulled her closer, rocking her, and looked across at Isabel, still standing at the door.

‘What is it, lamb?’

Isabel was torn between what she believed was the right way to behave, and what she really wanted to do, which was to run like Amy and bury herself in Bethan’s arms. She took a deep breath, lifted her chin, and said formally, ‘I am afraid that a telegram came. My brother Airlie has been killed in France.’

Amy felt Bethan flinch as if from a blow, but still she didn’t fully take in the words.

‘The poor boy,’ Bethan said simply. ‘The poor, poor boy.’

She held out her hand and Isabel stopped trying to behave in the right way and ran to shelter beside her sister.

‘What does it mean about Airlie?’ Amy asked, and seeing Isabel’s wet, crumpled face she began dimly to understand that nothing at Chance would ever be the same again.

‘It means that a German soldier shot him with a bullet, and hurt him so much that he’s dead, and we won’t ever see him again,’ Isabel said. ‘Never, never, because they will bury him in the ground.’ Her voice rose, shrill with horror, and her fingers snatched at the blue cotton of the nurserymaid’s uniform skirt.

‘Hush, darling,’ Bethan soothed her. ‘Don’t talk about it like that. Amy, it means that your brother was a brave, brave man and you must be proud of him. It’s a terrible war, but we should be thankful for all the brave soldiers who are fighting for us and pray for it to be over so that they can come safe home again. Do you understand?’

But how could they? Bethan answered herself.

‘Listen,’ she said softly, ‘your brother wanted to go to war to fight for England, and all the things that he believed are right. All good men do. If I was a man, I’d go. My brothers went as soon as they could, and … and my fiancé is in France too. He’s a private in the Welsh Division, the 38th, and when he comes home we’ll be married. It’ll be hard at first, but we’ll manage a place of our own and then you can come and see me, wouldn’t you like that, to come to Wales and see the valleys? There’s nowhere like it, you know. Ah, it’s not beautiful country like this, all cornfields and great trees, but it’s the best place on earth.’ Bethan closed her eyes on the nursery and saw the ranks of tiny grey houses clinging to the steep valley sides, the black slag hills and the skeletal towers of the pit winding-gear, and the sudden moist flashes of green between the laced black fingers of the mine workings. ‘He was doing grand, Dai was, before the War came,’ Bethan whispered. ‘More tonnage out of his pit than ever before, and him with a job at the coal face. There’s none to beat Welsh steam coal, you know. None in the world.’ And she lowered her head so that her cheek was pressed against the little girls’ smooth hair, and cried with them.

When Nanny Macleod came back from her afternoon off she found them still sitting on the nursery floor, and with their three faces identically stained with the runnels of tears.

For three days Chance was as silent as a crypt. Gerald Lovell saw no one. He sat in his library, looking out across the lawns to the trees of the park, his head tilted as if he was listening for a sound that never came. On the third afternoon he went outside, keeping to the shade of the avenues of trees as if he couldn’t bear to feel the sun’s warmth on his head. He walked painfully to the little church enclosed by the estate, and in the shelter of the thick stone walls he read the memorial tablets of Lovells spanning the centuries. Almost every one of them, lords of the manor and their ladies, old men and matriarchs, children dead in infancy, unmarried daughters and weakly younger sons, had been put finally to rest in the family vault. Even that was denied to Airlie. Bitterness rose like nausea in Gerald Lovell. There could be no burial service here for Airlie as there had been for Gerald’s father, as there would be one day for Gerald himself, with the family in heavy mourning in the big, square, screened-off family pew, and the church filled with neighbours, tenants and estate workers paying their dutiful respects. The letter from Airlie’s commanding officer following the telegram praised him for his heroism. Airlie had died beneath Thiepval Ridge and was buried with his comrades. ‘A soldier’s grave for a fine soldier,’ the captain had written as he must do in an attempt to comfort the families of every one of the men dead under his command. There was no comfort in it for Gerald. There could be no fittingly solid coffin for Airlie, made from one of Chance’s own oaks and heaped with flowers from the scented July borders. Airlie had been hastily huddled into the ground with the mutilated bodies of a hundred, perhaps a thousand others.

Gerald lurched against a pew end, the pain like a living thing inside him. His head arched backwards, and over his head he saw the dim, greenish-black folds of an ancient banner. He reached up with a curse and tore the cloth from its staff, the fibres splitting into tiny, dusty fragments that drifted lazily around him. The gold-thread-embroidered letters were tarnished with age, but still legible.

‘Regis defensor,’ Gerald said loud. ‘The King’s Defender.’ His sudden laugh was shockingly loud in the silent church. ‘Is that what he was doing, defending the King? I could have done that just as well. Why wasn’t it me? Oh God, Airlie, why not me instead?’ He lifted his hands above his head and tore the black banner in two, and then again, letting the shreds of it fall around him until only the gold thread remained, and then twining that around his fingers and pulling it so tight that his fingers went as white as candles. Then, just as suddenly, the fit of rage left him and he dropped the thread, turning away from the debris and walking out of the church as if it didn’t exist.

The last time he had held the banner had been the proudest moment of Gerald Lovell’s life. As the trumpets sounded he had stepped forward from the ranks of peers and knelt to wait for the procession. When he lifted his head he saw the slow approach of the archbishops and the bishops, and the swaying canopy held over the King’s head. And he had stood up, and led the long procession forward to the empty throne, the symbolic jewelled gauntlet clasped across his chest ready to throw down as a challenge to anyone who might threaten the King’s safety and happiness. Gerald Lovell’s father had undertaken the same proud, slow walk at the Coronation of Edward VII, and his great-grandfather, in the last month of his life, at Victoria’s. There had been a Lovell marching as the King’s Defender at every coronation since the title had been bestowed on the first Lord by the Black Prince on the battlefield at Crécy. The family had clung proudly to the title ever since, refusing any grander ones.

‘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?’

‘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.

Keeping to the protective shadows, Mari followed him. She felt a smothering sense of relief that the pit was closed and Nick would not be allowed to go down and be swallowed up by the fire.

At the powerhouse door she caught up with him. She pulled at his sleeve and he turned on her, fists clenching again before he saw who it was.

‘Mari?’ He was frowning, blacker-faced than she had ever seen him. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I wanted to be with you. To see you’re … safe.’

‘Don’t be a fool. Is there anyone belonging to you down this pit?’

‘No.’ Like Nick, all Mari’s family worked in Nantlas No. 2.

‘Well, then. Go home out of the way.’ Roughly he pulled her to him and kissed her, and then wrenched her round to face the gates again. Mari wanted to cling to him, dragging him back to her and away from the pit, and her fingers clutched at his Sunday coat.

‘Nick,’ she said desperately, knowing that it was stupid and unable to stop herself, ‘it isn’t a bad omen for us, is it, this happening today?’

‘An omen?’ He was crackling with anger now. ‘Don’t talk such bloody rubbish. More than an omen, isn’t it, for Gath Goch? And Dilys Wyn?’

John Wyn was the miners’ agent for No. 1. He worked with Dicky Goch too, and his fourteen-year-old twin sons as well.

Mari’s arms dropped to her sides. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. Numbly, she began to walk alone back towards the colliery gates.

Nick pushed open the powerhouse doors. He blinked in the light. In the high, red-brick interior the great generators were still humming, keeping the searchlights outside uselessly burning. Polished brass winked proudly back at him. At first glance the cavernous space seemed empty, then Nick looked up to the iron gallery that ran round the walls. A group of men was huddled in front of the air gauges. Most of them were still pit-black, and half a dozen wore the cumbersome back-tanks, coiled tubes and orange webbing of rescue breathing apparatus. Through the generator hum, Nick heard their defeated silence.

He ran to the spiral staircase and took the stairs three at a time, his boots clanging on the iron.

‘Nick.’ The men nodded acknowledgement to him. Among them were their own union representative, Jim Abraham, Nick’s own senior agent from No. 2 pit, and John Wyn’s No. 1 deputy. The shift manager was there too, his face and clothes grimed from his expedition down the shaft.

‘Bad?’ Nick asked, knowing how bad it must be for there to be this silence, this inactivity. When no one spoke he said roughly, ‘What happened, in God’s name?’

One of the men wearing breathing apparatus came wearily forward. In a flat voice he began to tell the story. Nick recognized that it was already becoming a set piece, a tale that would have to be repeated for the Mines Inspector, the manager’s meeting, the inquest. Nick served on the Miners’ Safety Committee, and he had heard half a dozen similar recitals.

‘I went down with Dicky Goch today,’ the miner said. ‘Unofficial, see? It was a normal shift. I was in the last stall, the one next to Dicky, with Rhys there.’ He pointed to one of the other men, also in rescue gear. ‘They were all empty, behind us. The rest of the gang was up ahead.’ Nick nodded, understanding that the official men would have the best places. ‘At ten to six, Dicky came back and told me and Rhys to put up. We were to go back to the main shaft and call through that the rest were coming. We went. We were just passing the junction with two district when we felt the air reversing past us. It was licking the dust up behind us. We knew there was something bad wrong. We ran to the shaft bottom and called through for help. As the cage came down we heard the explosion.’

‘Felt it, more like,’ the other miner corrected him. ‘No noise. Just a shaking and shuddering.’

‘I was on my way down in the lift cage,’ the shift manager put in quickly. He was anxious to convince the men’s representatives that the right things had been done, the right procedures followed. Too eager, too anxious, Nick thought. ‘I met the two men here at the shaft bottom and they told me what had happened. I sent up for the breathing apparatus, collected the other men who had come up meanwhile, and we set off again. The air was rushing past us all the time. It’s a damp seam, the Penmor …’

His voice trailed off uncomfortably.

One of the other men took up the story. ‘We got within fifty yards of the junction of the main haulage road with the road down to Penmor. The fire had taken proper hold. As we stood there, watching like, a great long tongue of blue flame came licking back up towards us. Then it was sucked back again, and the air behind us with it. There was nothing to do. I’ve never seen a fire like it. Trying to fight it with what we had would have been like pissing down into hell.’

There was another long, quiet moment. The generators hummed blindly on.

‘The district was checked today, was it?’ Nick asked softly.

Jim Abraham half-raised his hand to stop him, and then wearily let it fall again. What Nick Penry wanted to know, he found out somehow. And words, whatever they were on either side, could make no difference tonight.

The shift manager, not looking at anyone, said, ‘The report book clearly states that the fireman checked every working stall in the area this morning. There was some gas, but very little. No more than two per cent.’

‘And the empty stalls?’

‘Ah … not today, as it happens. According to the book, that is.’

And so from somewhere, deep in the workings, an outrush of the deadly fire-damp gas had gone undiscovered. It had mixed with the airflow and a tiny spark, perhaps from a cracked safety lamp or even a piece of overheated machinery, had ignited it. And then it had exploded.

In an even softer, and more dangerous, voice Nick said, ‘General Rules, of which even you as shift manager must be aware, state that daily checking for gas escape in every area of the mine is mandatory …’

‘Save it, Nick,’ someone was murmuring. ‘This isn’t the time.’

Down in the body of the powerhouse, the door opened again. The pit manager came in. At his shoulder was a bulky, middle-aged man in evening dress.

‘Here’s Mr Peris, lads,’ the manager shouted up to them.

The men crowded forward and leaned over the gallery railings. Nick felt the press of them behind him, solid but defeated. Further behind them, unwatched now, were the rows of air gauges with their nil readings. His hands gripped the cold iron. Beneath him, in Lloyd Peris’s upturned face, reddened with food and drink, he read the brazen readiness to bluster out of his responsibilities. Nick felt his throat swell and tighten with the rage inside him.

‘Peris? What happened to the air intake reverse?’ His shout filled the span of the arched roof and echoed back at him. ‘What happened to it, Peris?’

There was no answer. Nick pushed through the men and clanged down the iron stairs again. Cruickshank shrank back a little, but the owner stood his ground squarely.

‘A little too much of the hothead, Penry,’ he said smoothly. ‘It won’t do you or your men any good. Not shouting at me, nor threatening my manager. Now, as you all know’ – he raised his voice so that the men waiting above could hear – ‘there has been a sad accident tonight. I have had a full report from Mr Cruickshank here, who has acted very properly. An unavoidable explosion was followed by an outbreak of fire, which cut off the men’s egress and prevented a rescue party from reaching them. I understand that a number of brave men, led in an exemplary manner by the shift manager, tried to get down there. Thank you for that.’ He smiled, intending a grave, consoling gesture that at the same time took in Nick’s clean face and clothes. The smile looked to Nick like the split in a pumpkin.

‘The intake?’ Nick asked him again, trying to swallow the loathing that was rising inside him as if he was about to vomit.

‘An unfortunate aspect of the accident is the failure of the reversing mechanism,’ Peris added. ‘The trapped men were subject to a negative airflow.’

The redness in front of Nick’s eyes swirled and threatened to blot everything out. He would have reached out to Peris and torn his starched shirt front, and tightened the absurd black bow around his neck until the man’s eyes popped and his tongue swelled between his lips. But Jim Abraham stepped smartly up behind him and locked his arms behind his back. Nick heard his own roaring voice filling his head, the force of it rasping at his throat.

‘They suffocated, man. Why don’t you use the proper words? Make your mouth taste nasty, do they? If the explosion didn’t get them, they suffocated to death, because your safety mechanism never worked. John Wyn told me himself. He said the installation was never completed. You didn’t want to spend the money on it, did you?’

Cut off from the normal air supply by the fire, the trapped men should have been kept alive by a simple switch which would pump in fresh air through the exhaust system. When it had failed, they had been left to die.

Nick twisted to free himself, but Jim Abraham’s grip was like iron.

‘We all know it, Peris. Every man here. It’s your negligence. You murdered forty-four men tonight. You are a common murderer.’

Even as he shouted, Nick knew that his words were a pathetically useless weapon against Lloyd Peris. The owner was already at the powerhouse door.

‘You will have a chance to present your unfounded accusations through the proper channels, Penry. Mr Cruickshank has the duty to inform the relatives of the dead men, with my deepest sympathy. He also has my orders to cap the down air supply. The pit will remain closed until the fire is out and we are sure of its safety. Good night.’

‘Your sympathy?’ Nick was shouting at the closing door, knowing that he sounded like a madman and unable to control himself. ‘Your only sympathy is with yourself because this has disturbed your bloody dinner.’

The heavy door was shut.

Jim Abraham released Nick’s arms. Briefly the older man hugged him, leaving black marks on Nick’s Sunday coat.

‘I know, lad,’ he said gently. ‘We all know. It’s like you want to kill them for it, and not even that would be enough. I was at Senghenydd, remember? Four hundred and thirty-nine men, that day.’

‘I know how many,’ Nick said bitterly. He was suddenly limp, and as defeated with the ebbing of his terrible anger as the ring of men watching him. ‘Forty-four or four hundred, it’s all the same, isn’t it? His fault, and his friends.’

Cruickshank had gone away up the gallery stairs. He had been turning heavy, polished wheels and watching the dials as the pointers flicked and sank back. Now he came to the master switch. He eased it up and the even hum of the generators faltered, dropped in pitch and died away into silence. Outside the searchlights blinked out and the pithead was lit only by the cold, feeble circles of the emergency lights.

Nick had no idea whether it was real or inside his head, but he heard the terrible low cry from the crowd at the gates. There had been no official announcement, but the news would have reached them long ago. They would all know what the sudden dark and quiet meant.

One by one, not looking at each other, the rescue party filed out of the powerhouse. They would go to the families of the dead men, and try to reassure them that they had done all they could.

Nick found himself standing alone in the shadows with the useless machinery towering around him. Wordlessly, numbed by anger that hadn’t yet given way to grief, he made a promise to the men buried in Nantlas No. 1. He promised them that he would fight the greed and callousness and cruelty that had killed them.

Nick shivered. He realized that he had no idea how long he had been standing there. Slowly, moving stiffly, he walked out of the powerhouse and across to the railings. The coal dust crunched with gritty familiarity under his feet. The crowd that had pressed against the railings was gone, taking its grief with it up to the little houses on the hillside. Nick was on his way up too when he saw that not quite everyone was gone. A little way off someone was standing staring back at the pithead. From the torn shirt showing the white glimmer of skin, Nick recognized Bryn Jones. He remembered that he had promised this morning to have a word with Dicky Goch for him. No one would have any more words for Dicky now.

Coming up beside him, Nick saw that Bryn was crying, silent involuntary tears that ran down his face and dripped on to his hopeless chest.

‘All of them, is it?’ Bryn asked.

‘Yes.’ Nick’s arm came briefly around his thin shoulders, hugging him as Jim Abraham had hugged Nick himself. ‘You didn’t get down in time, then? You were lucky today, Bryn.’

‘Call it luck, do you?’ The bitterness was not against Nick, but against all the things that they both knew.

‘Come on,’ Nick told him gently. ‘Don’t stand out in this damp air.’

They turned their backs on the darkened pit and went on up the hill together.

THREE

Biarritz, August 1924

Two days after the explosion in Nantlas No. 1, Adeline Lovell was lying on the sun terrace of the Hotel du Palais, Biarritz. There was enough of a cooling breeze to stir the flags on the tall white flagpoles guarding the sea edge of the terrace, and the strong blue light was softening to dove grey around the curve of the bay.

A waiter had brought Adeline a cocktail on a silver tray, but it was untouched on the table beside her white wicker lounge seat. The frosting on the rim of the glass had melted long ago. The English papers, neatly folded, lay close at hand but she didn’t pick them up either. Instead she was staring south, to where the sea and sky melted together over the coast of Spain, but without seeing any of the beauty of the afternoon.

The terrace had been almost deserted when Adeline wandered out in search of company, and she had sunk into the wicker chair with only her own thoughts for entertainment. But now it was the cheerful hour when teacups were replaced with the first drinks of the evening. Svelte women in tennis dresses, their bobbed hair held in place with white bandeaux, were flooding out of the long terrace doors to greet other women in fluttering tea-dresses and the first sprinkling of evening gowns. The colours wove patterns in front of Adeline’s unfocused eyes, eau-de-nil and palest peach, cream and rose-pink and gold. Escorting the women were sun-flushed men in white flannels, blazers or linen jackets and panama hats. Amongst them those who had already changed were like sleek, discreet shadows.

Inside the hotel, under the cream and gilt rococo ceilings of Napoleon and Josephine’s summer palace, the plum-coated barmen were falling into a rhythm with their silver cocktail shakers. And already, from the vast ballroom, there was music. Couples were one-stepping to the band. There would be dancing all evening and late into the night, and sometimes Adeline would wake up in the dawn and still hear the jazz playing.

It was what one came to Biarritz for, she reminded herself now, sitting upright against the cushions. To dance and drink cocktails, to lose money at the Casino and to enjoy oneself.

Adeline reached out for her drink and drained it in one gulp, making a wry face at its temperature. She snapped her fingers at a passing waiter. ‘Encore, garçon.’ Adeline still had her faint, attractive American drawl and it made her awkward French sound even odder.

To enjoy oneself. That was the aim, and the problem. Of course, they should really have gone to the Riviera. Everyone who mattered went there for the summer nowadays, but Gerald wouldn’t hear of it. It was swarming with vulgarians, he said flatly, and he had no desire to mix with them. Biarritz was an awkward compromise. Gerald would have preferred to stay at Chance, or perhaps at the family lodge in Scotland, for the whole of August. France meant Paris and Deauville and no further, to Gerald. Adeline frowned, and drank half of the fresh drink that the waiter had placed discreetly at her elbow.

Gerald belonged to a different generation. He didn’t seem to enjoy anything, any more. He was increasingly withdrawn, critical when he spoke at all, and impatient with his children. He didn’t want to play tennis or cards with Adeline and her friends, or go for motor rides up into the Pyrenees. He certainly didn’t want to dance. He spent most of his time gambling, and losing heavily, at the Casino.

Adeline didn’t care about the losses particularly. She was used to seeing money disappear like water into sand, and believed that was how people of her class should treat it. The Lovell fortunes had been at a low ebb when she had married Gerald, and her love for him made her delighted that it was her money repairing the crumbling fabric and restoring the interiors of Chance. Adeline’s money had saved the Lovell’s town house in Bruton Street from being sold. It was Adeline’s money that supported and nurtured their extravagant way of life. They had arrived for their month in Biarritz with thirty-two pieces of luggage, a valet for his lordship and Adeline’s maid, a nanny-companion for the two girls, and Richard’s tutor. They had taken adjoining suites overlooking the sea. If she had looked up, Adeline could have seen the heavy, looped curtains and gilt tassels at the window of her private drawing room directly overhead.

Since the end of the War the output of the great van Pelt steel mills in Pittsburg had quadrupled, and Adeline had inherited a half-share on her father’s death in 1920. She was a very rich woman now, and the Lovell fortunes were secure again under the terms of her marriage settlement. No, it wasn’t the money Adeline cared about. It was the joylessness of Gerald’s losses, as if he couldn’t even find it in himself to be excited by the reckless gamble, that she couldn’t fathom.

‘Excuse me, my lady?’

Adeline looked round to see her daughters’ companion. Bethan Jones wasn’t quite a nanny any more because the girls didn’t need one, and she definitely didn’t have it in her to double as a governess. Adeline had quite often thought that Bethan should be replaced by a proper maid, someone with a bit more style who could do the girls’ hair properly now that they were growing up. Amy looked a positive hoyden sometimes. But Amy and Isabel were devoted to their plain-faced Bethan, and wouldn’t have heard of it.

‘Yes? What is it?’

‘Parker sent me down, my lady, to ask what time you would like to dress, and whether she should lay out the grey Chéruit satin?’

Lady Lovell’s maid, on the other hand, was an autocratic creature of the old school who was glad to have Bethan willingly hurrying to and fro for her.

‘Tell her I will be up shortly.’ Mechanically, Adeline decided. ‘Yes, the grey satin for this evening.’

Around her on the terrace were a score of acquaintances whom Adeline could have joined for drinks, made plans with for dinner, and danced with into the small hours. Yet she felt a shiver of loneliness now.

‘Bethan?’

The girl had almost turned away. ‘Yes, my lady?’

‘Where is everyone?’

‘I’m not sure … do you mean the other guests?’ Bethan was uncomfortable, looking around at the thronged terrace.

‘My family,’ Adeline said with a touch of asperity. ‘My daughters. Mr Richard. I haven’t seen anyone all day.’ Bethan relaxed at once, smiling at the mention of the children. ‘Oh no, they’ve all been busy. Mr Richard has been out all day with Mr Hardy. They went straight after breakfast. They took their sketch pads and pencils. They were going to look at some … churches, was it now?’

Adeline stared hard ahead. Of course it was right that Richard should know the difference between Gothic and Perpendicular and Romanesque, or whatever the things were that Hardy considered so important to his education. But little Richard seemed happier and far more relaxed in the company of his pale-faced tutor than he did with his own mother and father. Adeline felt a sudden longing to see him and hug him like a baby.

‘And Miss Isabel and Miss Amy had their tennis coaching, and then they swam in the sea, and afterwards I took them along the front for an ice at Fendi’s. They are in their room now, my lady, if …’

And Adeline had spent the afternoon alone on the terrace. She lifted a hand to cut Bethan short. ‘Please tell them to be down promptly for dinner. We will all dine together this evening. Mr Richard too.’

‘Adeline, darling …’

A shadow fell over her chair. Blinking, she looked up into it and saw Hugh Herbert. She had met him before, at house parties in England, and she had sat next to him in the car on the way to a picnic in the hills three days ago. She had noticed, from across the dance floor, that he danced like a dream.

‘And an empty glass? Let me get you a cocktail at once, immediately. And then perhaps do we have time for one tiny dance?’

His hand was under her elbow. Adeline didn’t particularly want to dance, but she did want another drink. And suddenly she wanted some cheerful company very much indeed. She smiled up into Hugh Herbert’s blue eyes.

‘Only one, Hugh. I’ve absolutely promised to dine en famille tonight.’

Bethan stood respectfully to one side as Adeline and her friend sailed past. Then, looking down automatically to see whether any of her ladyship’s belongings needed to be carried up to her suite, she saw the folded English newspaper beside the chair. As she stooped to pick it up a single word in a paragraph at the foot of a page caught her eye.

Nantlas.

The laughter and bustle on the terrace froze into silence. She looked quickly at the elegant people around her. It was unthinkable to stand here and read the paper as if she was one of them. Bethan slipped through the crowd and back into the hotel. Grossing quickly under the great chandeliers in the foyer, she made for a corridor that took a sharp right-angled turn away towards the kitchens. The only people who would penetrate beyond the corner would be servants like herself.

Leaning breathlessly against the wall, Bethan read the brief report. It was headed ‘Colliery Disaster’. It said only that forty-four miners had been killed following an explosion at the Rhondda and Peris-Hughes Associated Collieries No. 1 Pit, Nantlas, Rhondda. The owner of the pit, Mr Lloyd Peris, had said that the pit would remain closed until it could be made safe. A full inquiry would be made through the usual channels.

She re-read the paragraph three times, as if it might yield something she had not understood at first. But there was nothing else. Bethan looked up and down the deserted corridor, wanting to run but having no idea where to. Her father and two of her brothers worked in Nantlas No. 1, and she was stranded here, a thousand miles and two whole days separating her from her family and the crowd waiting silently at the pit gates.

Bethan fought against the panic. She clenched her fists and frowned, trying to think. She knew no French. She had used the telephone only a handful of times in her life. Her only contact with home was the weekly letters she exchanged with her mother, and even those took days longer to reach her here. She was quite sure that her mother would have no idea how to reach her in Biarritz if the family needed her. Bethan’s mind was blank. She couldn’t possibly turn to Lady Lovell for help, even less his lordship. Isabel was the only one who might know what to do. Fixing quickly on the thought that Isabel was fourteen now, and spoke perfect French, Bethan turned and ran towards the stairs, the newspaper clenched in her hand.

Amy was sitting on the window seat in the pretty sitting-room she shared with her sister. Their suite was at the side of the hotel instead of at the front overlooking the great terrace with its flags and flowers, but Amy thought that it was much superior because it looked south along the curve of coast. At odd times when the haze cleared she could see the blue line of Spain. It was so pretty here, from the height of the hotel, with the town spread out in front of her and the figures moving on the beach. When she was down in the midst of it all Amy felt gawky and ignorant amongst the glittery people, and curious and impatient in equal parts with all the dancing and parties and furious enjoyment that made up a summer in Biarritz. But from up here she could imagine that it belonged to her, and that she was the star in its firmament.

Amy wrapped her arms around her drawn-up knees and stared at the view. Lazily, she thought that she should be changing for dinner, and dismissed the thought at once. Isabel was already in their bedroom, brushing her hair before pinning it up. Isabel was suddenly much more interested in her hair, and her dresses. She could spend an hour rearranging her costume for nothing more interesting than a decorous walk with her sister, and she would sit eagerly over the seasonal fashion sketches sent for Lady Lovell’s approval by her favourite couturiers. But in Isabel’s case it was worth doing, Amy thought loyally, because Isabel was beautiful. Her dark red hair was smooth and shiny where Amy’s was curly and rough, and her skin stayed flawlessly white under the sun when Amy’s turned pink and itchy. Isabel looked ravishing in the plain linen day dresses and simple pastel silks for evening that Adeline insisted they wore. Amy was taller, and she felt that she bulged and sprouted from her clothes like an oversized vegetable.

Not that I care, she told herself firmly. At twelve years old Amy would rather watch the intriguing world around her, or even read a book, than spend time on her appearance. She was particularly proud that she could make herself ready for dinner in exactly six minutes, start to finish.

She was just congratulating herself on the fact, which meant that there was a full half-hour yet before she need move, when Bethan came in. Bethan’s territory was a little square room beside the front door of the suite. Amy couldn’t remember her ever coming into their sitting room without a discreet knock first, although all three of them recognized it as a pure formality.

As soon as she saw Bethan’s face, Amy swung herself off the window seat. ‘Something’s wrong. What is it? Are you going to be sick? Wait, I’ll get a bowl …’

‘No,’ Bethan said. ‘There’s been an accident.’

Amy whirled around again. Isabel was standing in the bedroom doorway, her hairbrush in her hand. ‘Not Richard? Mother?’

‘No. At home. In Wales. A pit explosion.’ She held out the paper to them. Isabel took it, and Amy wrapped her arms protectively around Bethan.

‘I don’t know what to do, see. My dad’s in that pit, and my brothers. I’ve got to telephone …’

The sisters looked at each other. Bethan was usually so calm, and full of dependable common sense; it was very strange to find her turning to them for help instead.

‘Of course you must telephone,’ Isabel soothed her, ‘I’ll go down to the desk. They’ll find us the number. Where … do you think we should ring?’

Bethan shook her head helplessly.

‘We must ask Tony,’ Amy said crisply. ‘He’ll know what to do.’

‘You shouldn’t call him Tony,’ Isabel protested automatically.

‘Why not? It’s his name, isn’t it?’

Richard and his tutor had rooms looking on to the terrace, but on the floor above. Out in the corridor Amy glanced at the lift and saw a knot of languid people waiting for the ornate doors to open. She ran for the stairs instead, taking them two at a time. Raised eyebrows and curious stares followed her. She rapped sharply on Tony Hardy’s door, calling at the same time, ‘It’s me. Something’s happened. We need your help. Please open up.’

Tony was making himself ready for the ordeal of dinner. He had had to go through it a few times before, in Biarritz and at the Lovells’ London house before they all left for France, and they were never comfortable gatherings. Part of the problem was his equivocal position. The tutor was only a family employee, of course, but he was also a gentleman and couldn’t be expected to eat with the servants. He could dine alone, which Tony infinitely preferred to do with a book for company, but there were times like this when his presence was expected.

Tony Hardy was in his first year down from Oxford. His fixed ambition was to work in the publishing business but his father, a regular soldier with a limited income, had no contacts in the book world and Tony had had no luck in pursuing his own. The only suitable employment that Colonel Hardy had been able to suggest apart from the army was a year tutoring the son of Lord Lovell, who was a nodding acquaintance from his club. The tutoring part was easy. Richard Lovell was a clever and interesting boy. It was the rest — being equal but not equal, and living in the tense family atmosphere under its thinly civilized veil that Tony found difficult. Sighing, he rubbed the soap off his face and went to the door with the towel slung around his neck.

Amy Lovell’s vivid face stared back at him.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know you’d be undressed.’

‘I’m not undressed,’ he grinned at her. ‘I just haven’t got my shirt on. What’s the matter?’

Amy told him.

‘Mmm. Is there a telephone in your rooms? I haven’t got one here, of course.’

Amy peered past him at the narrow bed heaped with books and clothes. ‘No, I see. Yes, there is a telephone in our sitting room. We’ve never used it. Who would we ring?’

‘Come on, then. It will be easier to do it from somewhere quiet.’

They ran back downstairs. Bethan was sitting stock-still on a sofa with Isabel beside her, holding her hand. Tony glanced at her and said quietly to Amy, ‘You’d better order up something. Some tea, or perhaps a brandy.’ He knelt down in front of Bethan and said, very gently, ‘What’s your father’s name? And your brothers’?’

‘William Jones. David Jones and John Jones.’

‘Right. Now, it may take me a little time to find out for you. It’s after six o’clock, you see, so the normal places one might try might not be open. Do you want to go away somewhere quiet with Isabel while I do it, or would you rather stay here?’

‘I want to stay.’

‘All right. I’m going to begin by talking to a friend of mine, a union organizer. Not in mining, but he’ll know just who will give us the quickest answer.’

Tony spoke rapidly to the operator. His French was faster and much more idiomatic than the girls’ careful schoolroom language. The three faces watched him from the sofa, Bethan’s white one flanked by the intent Lovells.

‘I want to speak to Jake Silverman, please.’

He was through to England. Amy’s hand reached for Bethan’s and held it.

‘Hello, Jake. It’s Tony Hardy.’ Tony explained succinctly what he wanted. The voice at the other end crackled faintly and then there was a long silence. They waited, not moving, until Tony was speaking again and then scribbling something in his notebook.

‘Thanks, Jake. Yes, I hope so too. Soon, I hope. Adios.’

He replaced the receiver and turned to the girls. ‘We are to ring the Miners’ Welfare Institute in Nantlas. I’ve got the number here.’

Bethan was trembling. ‘I should have known that. I just can’t think. I’m so frightened.’

As Tony was talking to the operator again a maid brought in a tray. There were dainty tea-things and an incongruous balloon glass of brandy. Seeing Amy’s anxious face, Bethan took the glass but she stared helplessly at it instead of drinking.

The call to Wales took much longer to put through.

There were long silences, and then sharply repeated instructions from Tony. At last he straightened up and looked at them. ‘It’s ringing,’ he said.

The voice that answered the telephone had exactly the same rising note as Bethan’s but it was a young man’s voice, determined and crisp.

Tony asked his brief question. ‘William, David and John Jones.’ Bethan’s knuckles were so white around the fat brandy glass that Amy was sure it would shatter into fragments.

And then, only a second later, Tony was smiling and nodding and they knew that it was all right. Bethan’s face crumpled and the tears came at last.

‘Thank God,’ she said, ‘thank God, thank God,’ over and over again. Tony held out the receiver to her but she shook her head, unable to move.

‘Thank you,’ he said in her place. ‘We’re very grateful. Yes, I’ll tell her that.’

‘I’m glad for her,’ Nick Penry said in the cramped, stuffy office of the Miners’ Welfare. ‘I’m very glad.’

*

Nick was almost smiling when the call ended, the first hint of a smile for two days. He was taking his duty turn in the little office of the Welfare building. Usually the Welfare and Rest Institute was a cheerful place, Nantlas’ social focus, where miners came to talk and drink at the end of their day’s work, or to borrow books from the well-stocked free library, or to attend union meetings. Today was different. It had been one long succession of statements to be taken, punctuated by visits from white-faced wives and families of the dead men asking for help, and money, and comfort, and all the things that were in short supply in Nantlas. To be able to give someone some good news was a rare moment of relief.

‘There you are,’ Tony said to Bethan. ‘The man I spoke to knows your family. None of them was anywhere near the explosion. He says he’ll tell your mother and father that he’s spoken to you, and promises you that there is nothing to worry about.’

Isabel and Amy were relieved to see that Bethan was almost herself again. She rubbed her face with a handkerchief and straightened her neat skirts.

‘I don’t drink, thank you, Mr Hardy, but I will have a cup of tea. Funny, isn’t it? Now I know they’re safe, I can only think of the other poor men. Before, I couldn’t have cared less who might have been down there with them.’

Amy was shaking her head, amazed and horrified now that her concern for Bethan was past. ‘It’s so terrible. So many men, just to die all at once. Has it ever happened before?’

Bethan said sadly, ‘Oh yes. It happens all the time. It’s a rare miner’s family that hasn’t lost someone. My grandfather was killed, and his brother. It’s black, dangerous, dreadful work. There’s not a man who’d do it if he didn’t have to, or starve.’

Tony looked sympathetically at Bethan, and then at the glowing apricot and pink faces of the Lovell girls. So much difference, he thought. Such a huge, unfair and eternally unbridgeable gulf. And then, irrelevantly, he realized that they would both be beauties. Isabel would be a conventional good-looker, but Amy would be something different, and special. Tony didn’t generally find women interesting but he liked Amy Lovell.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘that the average death rate for coal miners in this country, over the last few years, works out at about four per day. Every day of the year, that is. If you’re not going to drink that brandy, Bethan, I think I’ll have it.’

They were late down for dinner, but that didn’t matter because everyone else was too, except for Richard.

He was sitting calmly in his place, expressionlessly watching the other diners. His light hair was watered so that it lay flat to his head, and he was buttoned up to the neck in a stiff white collar and a short jacket. Richard’s appearance was completely unexceptional, but there was something in his face, in the set of his mouth and the light in his green eyes, that was an unexpected challenge from a little boy.

He was watching his father now, as Lord Lovell bore down on the family table. Gerald’s grey eyebrows were drawn together in a heavy line, and his pouchy cheeks were untouched by the sun.

‘Good evening, Father,’ Richard murmured.

God damn it. Why does the boy always irritate me, always, in just the same way? Gerald jerked out his chair and sat down. He didn’t want to have dinner with his white-faced son and the too-clever tutor, or with his daughters, half-frightened and half-choked with giggles. Not even with Adeline, who would be bright-eyed with cocktails and full of silly talk about the half-witted people she spent her days with. Not that he particularly wanted to spend any more hours in the Casino, either.

Gerald wasn’t sure where he wanted to be.

Perhaps at Chance, except that not even Chance meant the same any more.

‘What have you been doing?’ he asked Richard without enthusiasm. ‘Swimming?’

‘I don’t like the water much, you know,’ Richard answered. ‘We went to look at a church. A rather fine one, quite close to here. I made some drawings …’

Airlie had swum like a fish, almost from babyhood. Gerald could see him now, at Richard’s age exactly, swimming in the lake at Chance, his arms and legs flickering sturdily under the skin of green water.

‘You should learn,’ Gerald said harshly. ‘You’ll have to start doing things you don’t like at school.’

Richard was to enter Airlie’s old prep school in six months’ time.

‘Yes, I expect I shall,’ he answered.

Adeline came next. The grey Chéruit dress was daringly short, a slither of bias-cut satin that almost showed her knees. She wore it with long ropes of perfect pearls, dangling pearl and jet earrings, and a shot-silk wrap with long floating fringes around her shoulders. She had never cut her luxuriant hair, but it was knotted up at the back of her head so that she looked smooth and sleek. As he stood up Gerald noted that she was at the excited, three-cocktail stage, and that she was still very beautiful.

‘Have you been waiting long, my darlings? I met Hugh Herbert on the terrace, and he was being so amusing.’

In the silence that followed Gerald and Adeline looked at each other, and each of them was wondering what had become of the other.

Isabel and Amy ran as fast as they could to the dining-room doors, and then stopped at the heavy glass panels to catch their breath and compose their faces. Relief for Bethan had made them giggly. They peered through the glass across the acres of tables with their stiff white skirts and little gilt lamps with rosepink silk shades. The tables were separated by clumps of stately palms in pots, and phalanxes of gliding waiters.

‘Are they there?’

‘Yes. Both of them.’

‘Oh, hell. Come on, then.’

‘Amy.’ Isabel’s protest was as automatic as always.

Tony Hardy came up behind them in a dinner suit that had clearly belonged to his father. The door was held open for them by the waiter that Amy had come to think of as her favourite. He was very young, with a dark, almost monkey-like face that split into a huge smile. She grinned sideways at him in answer, and between Isabel and Tony she marched forward to the dinner table.

They slid into their seats, murmuring their apologies. Richard telegraphed them a greeting by dissolving his poker face into a mass of wriggling eyebrows, and then returned immediately to his impassive calm.

It was a dinner just like hundreds of others, Amy thought sadly, as she bent her head over her soup. She wondered why they didn’t feel on the inside as they must look on the outside to the people watching them — happy, and comfortable, and like other families. Like her friend Violet Trent’s family, for example. Amy could remember, just about, times when they had been. Times when her father had smiled more, and when his gruffness had easily dissolved into affection. When Mother had been more … well, just more accessible, and there had been fewer friends and parties and pressing engagements filling her days. Mother was wonderful, of course, she reminded herself. No one else’s mother was anything like her. There just wasn’t enough of her to go around. Isabel minded that she was so busy too, Amy knew that. Yet Mother could always make time for Richard. He was the special one, to her. But that was quite natural too, of course. He would be going away to school all too soon, and they would all miss him dreadfully. And someone had to make up to him for Father being so harsh. Amy wondered if fathers were always like that to their sons, if it was supposed to make them more manly.

She thought of one of the things that had happened, on this very holiday, one of the odd, dark things that she never mentioned afterwards even to Isabel, but which she knew they all still remembered.

They had been sitting beside the hotel swimming pool one morning, sunning themselves, Isabel and herself, with Richard and Tony. Richard was reading a book with Tony. Amy remembered that it was a book of modern poetry with a yellow cover. Tony was explaining it, talking about how the words made pictures with sounds and also meant things that you couldn’t see at first. Mother was still upstairs. She often didn’t come down until just before lunch. But unusually, Father had been there, sitting in a chair close by. He was frowning, not quite looking at his newspaper.

Suddenly he had stood up and gone over to Richard. He had said something like, ‘Come on, my boy, let’s see you do something real for a change.’

Then he had jerked Richard to the edge of the pool. They had balanced there for a second or two, and Richard had gone flailing into the water.

To the other people looking, Amy thought, it must just have looked like a father and son rough-and-tumbling together. But it wasn’t really like that at all. Father had been angry and pleading, both together, and Richard had been defiant. Father wanted him to do something and Richard didn’t want to do it, not now and not ever.

Then when he was in the water he was just a frightened little boy, because he couldn’t swim. There was a moment when they saw his face under the water, turned up with his eyes wide open. And then he was splashing and choking on the surface. It was Tony who slid in beside him and helped him to the poolside, and Father had just watched them with a frozen face. Richard had hauled himself out of the water and gone back to his place without looking at anyone, and no one had ever talked about it again.

Amy could remember other things too, going back over the years, as if Father and Richard had been fighting a silent battle that the rest of them were only aware of for a fraction of the time.

It was peculiar that it should be like that, because Richard was such a funny, likeable boy. He could mimic anybody, from Mr Glass to Violet Trent’s mother, and he often reduced Isabel and herself to helpless laughter. Mother enjoyed his mimicry too, but he never ever did it when Father was around. Richard could be serious and sensible, too. He often talked about things much more intelligently than other children of only eight.

Why not with Father? Richard put on his shuttered face when he was present, and Father went on being scornful and angry with him.

Amy asked Isabel why they didn’t seem to like each other. It wasn’t right, was it, for a father and son?

Isabel had said in her gentle way that she didn’t know for sure, but she thought it was something to do with Airlie having been killed in the War. If Father had loved Airlie very much, as he must have done, perhaps it was hard for him to love Richard in just the same way.

‘He should be glad to have him,’ Amy muttered. ‘Is it why Mother and Father don’t make each other happy?’

Isabel looked at her. They had never quite put it into words before. ‘Perhaps,’ she said, very quietly.

‘When I marry,’ Amy said, ‘it won’t be like that at all. I shall marry a man who is rich and handsome and witty, and who adores me.’

Isabel was laughing. ‘You’ll have to find one, first.’

‘Oh, that will be easy. We’ll both find one. Just wait and see.’

‘Amy, will you stop staring into space like a halfwit? Adeline, these children have no manners.’

Another family dinner, like hundreds before it. At last it was over. Mother had looked beautiful, had smiled at them and asked them what they had been doing, and had listened carefully because she really did want them to enjoy themselves. Father had been silent, except for telling Tony that he thought trailing around empty churches was hardly educational. Tony had politely said that it seemed sensible to encourage Richard in what he was good at, like languages and art, and history and architecture, instead of forcing him to do things that he didn’t enjoy. Amy and Isabel had talked to fill the empty spaces, and they had probably looked the picture of a happy family on holiday together.

Adeline kissed the children good night, with an extra hug for Richard that crushed the shot-silk wrap against his cheek. Hugh Herbert was waiting for her in the cocktail bar. They would have a drink, and then they would dance again. Adeline had been completely exhilarated by their first one. They had swung out over the floor like ice-skaters. Hugh Herbert was charming and flattering. Why not? Adeline asked herself. Gerald had already gone off, unsmiling, with barely a word for her.

Isabel and Amy went upstairs to their suite. They were not allowed to stay downstairs after dinner. They would sit and read or write letters, with Bethan for company, and at ten-thirty they would go to bed and listen to the music coming up from the ballroom.

Tony’s last job of the day was to see Richard up to his room. The boy went uncomplainingly, looking forward to losing himself again in the adventure story waiting beside his bed. A little later Bethan would come up to make sure that he had washed and cleaned his teeth properly, and that his pyjamas were on the right way out. As if it mattered, Richard thought. But then what did matter? It was difficult to decide. Perhaps when you knew just how much importance to give to people and the things that they did, perhaps then you were grown up. Clearly he had a long way to go yet.

Tony Hardy went up to his room and took off his dinner suit, his boiled shirt and his bow tie. He pulled on a jersey and ran his fingers through his hair. Down by the tiny harbour in Biarritz where the fishing fleet came in, there were a couple of little bars where people went to drink vin ordinaire and cognac, to listen to Basque songs, and to talk. The chance to be there and listen, to talk a little himself, made all the rest of this worthwhile. Even dinners like the one he had just sat through.

Tony closed his door softly behind him and ran down the broad, shallow stairs with his mouth pursed in a silent, celebratory whistle.

On the morning of their last day in Biarritz, Amy went out for a last walk along the sea front. She left the red and cream pinnacles of the Hotel du Palais behind her and headed for the narrow cobbled streets climbing up the hilltop to the south.

In the hotel Bethan was busy with their trunks and sheets of crisp white tissue. Isabel was packing too, and they had both begged her to go away. Amy was willing to help, but somehow whenever she packed anything the smooth linens came out ferociously creased, and the fragile underclothes looked as though they had been tied up in knots.

‘Leave it to me, there’s a lamb,’ Bethan said.

Amy was enjoying her solitude. It was a chance to say a private goodbye to the little town. She wasn’t altogether sorry to be leaving, because holidays made the family differences seem more apparent, whether they were Christmasses at Chance or summers away like this one. Soon they would be back in England, living a routine again, and that was much easier. The children spent term-times at the London house, and the girls went to Miss Abbott’s school for young ladies in Knightsbridge. They saw little of Gerald, who spent much of his time alone at Chance. Adeline came and went according to the demands of the Season and Saturday-to-Mondays at the country houses of her friends. But Amy had enjoyed just being in Biarritz. It was further than she had ever travelled before, and it had an exotic, southern feel that wasn’t just French like Deauville or somewhere. It was as if it was on the border between somewhere she knew and understood perfectly well, and somewhere exciting, and mysterious, and completely new.

‘I’ll be back,’ she murmured to herself.

Amy wandered slowly along the wide, white-painted boardwalk between the Casino and the sands. It was busy with couples strolling arm in arm, skipping children, and old men in straw hats taking the sun before the heat became too much for them. The tide was going out, and the sand was smooth and glittering. The great rock in the middle of the bay was uncovered, and on the crest of it Amy could see the silhouettes of people who had climbed it after swimming out there for their morning exercise.

Amy passed an arcade of spruce little shops fronting the walk, with Fendi’s at the corner. She would have liked to buy an ice to eat under one of the fluttering parasols, but didn’t have any money. Instead of walking on round the headland to where the statue of the Virgin on her rock was linked to the shore by a dizzy span of bridge, she turned inland up the steep streets where real Biarritz people rather than those on holiday lived. The little white and grey houses leaned over her on either side, their twisted metal balconies bright with flowers in pots. There were smells of baking and laundry and cooking oil.

Amy was panting slightly from her climb when someone stepped squarely out in front of her.

‘Hello, miss.’

She stopped at once, and smiled.

There was the answering brilliant flash of white in the dark face, and the black eyes shining at her. Now that she had met him, Amy could admit to herself that the real purpose of her walk had been to find Luis and say goodbye to him properly. Luis was the waiter from the hotel who looked like a clever, humorous monkey. The two of them had struck up a tenuous, exciting friendship based on smiles exchanged when Luis served the two girls at their decorous lunches in an obscure corner of the great dining room. When Lord and Lady Lovell were present the head waiter himself served them, and Luis was relegated to distant duties with the trolley. Amy and Luis had talked for the first time when he brought her a glass of fruit juice on the terrace, and they had met once on the beach. Luis had been swimming, and he was wet and shiny like a dark brown seal. He was always looking over his shoulder for his superiors, and then he would melt away into nowhere while Amy was still talking. He was very lively, quite unlike anyone she had ever met, and Amy was fascinated by him.

Luis was Spanish, but they spoke in French. His was very heavily Basque-accented and it bore hardly any relation at all to Amy’s polite English version. Sometimes they used the broken English he had picked up at the hotel. Amy felt that he was the very first friend she had made for herself in the real world, and then yesterday he had whispered that they could not meet again because today was his day off and he would not be in the hotel. So she had set off on her solitary walk, without even admitting to herself that she wanted to say goodbye properly to him.

‘You are walking?’ he asked her now. ‘Without your sister or your maid?’

‘I’m not supposed to leave the boardwalk when I’m by myself,’ Amy answered. ‘But …’ she shrugged in imitation of Luis’s own expressive gesture, and they both laughed.

‘I will walk with you, then. In case of kidnap.’

Still laughing, they turned to walk on up the hill together. Luis was pointing into the shops, explaining to her about the people who lived and worked there. At the corner of the street they came to a cave-like little shop full of rainbow-coloured sweets and tiny, unfamiliar-looking pastries. An ancient woman in a rusty black dress was selling a handful in a twist of paper to a little boy, who was carefully counting out the centimes as he handed them over.

Amy stopped to watch and Luis asked, ‘You would like?’

‘I would love.’

He spoke rapidly in Spanish and the old woman twisted a paper cone for Amy too, scooping one or two of each variety into it. Luis paid her and they walked on, sharing the sweets between them. They were almondy, delicious.

‘If you would like,’ Luis said with sudden gravity, ‘we could visit my family.’

‘Yes, please,’ Amy said.

One street further on they came to a row of houses so steeply perched that they looked as if they were about to topple over. A little girl was sitting on the step of the end house, playing with a stick and four stones. When she saw Luis she jumped up and ran down to him, calling out in Spanish.

‘This is my smallest sister, Isabella.’

Isabella had tight black ringlets and the same eyes as Luis.

‘You have the very same name as my sister,’ Amy told her. Isabella took her hand and pulled her towards the house.

‘Come in.’

Amy followed Luis up the steps and in through the door. The small room was square and windowless. It was cool beyond the shaft of light that fell in through the doorway. When her eyes got used to the dimness, Amy saw that the room seemed full of people. There was an old man with an immense, drooping white moustache, and an equally old woman with a black headdress pulled tight over her head. There was a square-built, strong woman who must be Luis’s mother, and children of all sizes. Luis drew Amy forward. My friend, she heard him saying proudly, over and over again.

Do they all live here? Amy wondered. Where do they sleep? Through the opposite door she could just make out the shape of a big bed covered with a bright blanket.

The little house was scrupulously clean, but almost completely bare. The only ornament was a dim, oily picture of the Holy Family with a little light burning in front of it. Amy thought fleetingly of the suite at the Hotel du Palais with its soft cushions and pretty covers.

She shook hands gravely with each member of the family and felt them touching her gloves gingerly, looking at her pleated dress and her white shoes and stockings.

The señorita was asked if she would take a refreshing drink, and they gave her a coloured glass full of a very sweet, reddish liquid that she drank with difficulty while they watched her.

When it was gone, Luis stood up and said that now he must see his friend back to the safety of the hotel. At once they all stood up, shaking hands once more and smiling now. They ushered her the few feet to the door and watched as she walked down the hill with Luis. At the corner Amy turned back and waved.

When they were finally out of sight, Luis said, ‘Thank you. You did us a great honour.’

That made Amy angry. ‘Don’t say that. I didn’t do anything of the sort. They did me the honour, taking me in, didn’t they? Thank you for letting me meet them. I wish we could have talked to each other. Perhaps next time I will know some Spanish.’

Luis looked at her, drawing his eyebrows together.

‘I like you,’ he said.

‘I like you, too.’ She was silent for a moment and then she said, very tentatively, ‘Your family, are they … do they have what they need?’

He was still looking at her, and she saw that he was amused now. He knew exactly what she was trying to say.

‘If you mean much money, no, none. Not like the people you know. But my father has good job, and I have good job. We are lucky ones.’

Not like the people you know. If you are lucky, Luis, what am I? Amy felt her face going red, hot all the way up into her hair.

They had almost reached the sea front again. Luis took her arm and guided her into a little blind alleyway.

‘I will come no further,’ he said.

‘No. I just wanted to say goodbye, you know. Properly, not like yesterday at the table.’

‘Of course. I understand that.’

Luis came close to her. She looked up and saw his smile, and then he kissed her, a proper kiss. She was still thinking a proper kiss, and how soft his mouth was against hers, when it was over.

‘Perhaps you will come back.’

‘I hope so. I’ll come one day, somehow. Goodbye, Luis.’

‘Goodbye, Amy.’

She walked out of the alley, to the end of the street, and back to the white walk outside Fendi’s. She felt as if she was flying, with wings on her heels. Not only had she made a real friend, but he had kissed her. She wasn’t a little girl any more.

Biarritz, I love you.

It would be thirteen years before she saw it again.

That night, in the Paris sleeper, Amy whispered to Isabel in the bunk below, ‘Are you asleep, Bel?’

‘No.’

‘Do you know, I went up into the town this morning, while you were packing.’

‘I wondered where you’d slipped off to. What were you doing?’

‘I met Luis.’

There was a moment of startled silence. Amy smiled in the darkness.

‘What happened?’ Isabel was intrigued, and envious of the adventure.

‘Oh, he took me home to meet his family. He’s got about a dozen brothers and sisters. The smallest is a little girl called Isabella. Then he walked me back down to the sea front, and he kissed me.’

‘Where?’

‘On the lips, of course.’

Isabel choked with laughter. ‘Oh, of course. Actually I meant where was it, in front of Fendi’s with everyone looking on over their ices?’

‘No. In an alleyway.’

‘Amy, you are priceless. Kissing waiters in alleyways. I’m two whole years older than you, and no one’s ever kissed me.’

‘I expect your turn will come,’ Amy said airily.

When they stopped laughing Isabel said, ‘So, what was it like?’

‘Well, to tell you the truth it was so quick that I hardly realized it was happening.’

‘Mmm.’

They lay in silence for a while, listening to the clickety-clack of the train. Amy liked to think of all the towns and villages they were sweeping past, full of darkened houses and sleeping families.

‘Amy, do you think we’ll always tell each other things?’

‘I hope so. Sisters are closer than friends, aren’t they? I can’t imagine telling Violet Trent about it, for example.’

‘I suppose we should be grateful for that. Good night, little sister.’

‘Not so little, Isabel dear. Good night.’

Even to Isabel, Amy had not mentioned the smallness and bareness of Luis’s home, so full of so many people, or the way he had said We are lucky ones. That was something she wanted to think about for herself.

*

Back at the house in London, Bethan’s weekly letter from her mother was waiting for her. Once the trunks had been brought safely in, the clamour of arrival had died down, and Lady Lovell had gone to her room to rest, Bethan took the letter out of her apron pocket and went upstairs to her room at the top of the house to read it.

The letters were a lifeline, stretching between the valleys and her life in service, holding her to the tight, united community even though she could only spend her two weeks’ holiday a year as a real part of it.

They have had the Inquiry, such as it was. The Mines Inspector found negligence, and Peris and Cruickshank were prosecuted all right. The magistrates fined them the Great Sum of £5.10s. Half-a-crown a man’s life, they’re saying here. There’s terrible feeling about it, but the pit’s still closed and there’s talk that Peris won’t ever open it no more because it costs him less just to run seams in other pits. Those who are in work like your dad are all with them that aren’t but it’s hard to think of another strike coming. Nick Penry from Glasdir Terrace and them are all behind it. Your dad says they’re right, but I can’t see further than no money coming in for weeks on end, myself. Nick Penry’s marrying that Mari Powell that came up from Tonypandy, all in a hurry it seems to me. I don’t doubt I’ll be called up there at the end of six months or so.

Bethan smiled over the cramped, hurried handwriting. Her mother had three men down the pit on different shifts, each one wanting hot water and hot food at different hours of the long day. The tiny back kitchen was steamy with the big pan of water on the fire and the potatoes boiling. In the short night between the end of the last shift and the beginning of the next, an anxious father would often come knocking at the door and Bethan’s mother would struggle out of bed and collect her midwife’s bag. She had no proper training, only what she had learned from experience and her own mother, but she was vital in Nantlas where no one could afford the doctor.

The letter went on. Bethan was frowning now as she read.

Bethan lamb, when will it be your turn? I know you said you never would after Dai was killed, but it’s seven years since 1917. Write and tell me you’re walking out with some nice young man and make me happy. We need some happiness, God knows. Well, cariad, I must close now. William will be back up just now. God bless you. Your loving MAM.

There never will be anyone else, Bethan thought. She had only wanted to marry Dai, and he had died at Pilckheim Ridge, a year after Airlie Lovell. No. She would stay with Amy and Isabel as long as they needed her, and after that, well, she would find something.

Bethan folded her letter carefully into four and replaced it in her apron pocket. Then she went downstairs where thirty-two pieces of luggage were waiting to be unpacked.

PART TWO

FOUR

London, February 1931

Amy was wandering listlessly around the room, picking up a crystal bottle and sniffing at the scent before putting it down again unremarked, then fingering the slither of heavy cream satin that was Isabel’s new robe waiting to be packed at the top of one of the small cases.

It was peculiar to think that tomorrow night Peter Jaspert’s large, scrubbed hands would probably undo this broad sash, and then reach up to slip the satin off his wife’s shoulders. Isabel would be Mrs Peter Jaspert then. Amy wondered whether Isabel was thinking about that too. Didn’t every bride, on the night before her wedding? But it was impossible to judge from Isabel’s face what she was thinking. She looked as calm and serene as she always did. She was sitting patiently in front of her dressing-table mirror while her maid worked on her hair. Isabel had her own maid now, who would travel with her on the honeymoon, and then they would settle into the house that Peter Jaspert had bought in Ebury Street.

Amy and Bethan would be left behind at Lovell House in Bruton Street. The town house didn’t feel as cavernously huge as it had done when Amy was a child, but it could be very quiet and empty, and faintly gloomy. It was all right now, of course, because it was full of preparations for the wedding. But once that was over, what then?

‘I’ll miss you so much, Bel,’ Amy said abruptly. Isabel looked at her sister’s reflection in the glass beside her own. She thought that you could tell what Amy was like just by watching her for five minutes. She was so restless, incapable of keeping still so long as there was any new thing to be investigated or assimilated. When there was nothing new or interesting, she was stifled and irritable. Her face reflected it all, always flickering with naked feelings for anyone to read. Isabel herself wasn’t anything like that. Feelings were private things, to be kept hidden or shared only with the closest friends. Amy didn’t care if the taxi driver or butcher’s boy knew when she was in the depths of despair.

She needed a calming influence, and a focus for her days, Isabel decided. A husband and a home would give her that, when the right time came. She smiled at Amy.

‘I’m hardly more than a mile away. We’ll see each other every day, if you would like that. And I’ll be a married woman, remember. We can do all kinds of things together that we couldn’t do before.’

Amy dropped the robe back on to the bed. ‘Go to slightly more risky restaurants for lunch, you mean? To the theatre unescorted? Will that really make any difference? You’ll be gone, and you can’t pretend that anything will ever be the same. That’s what I’m worried about. You’ll be too busy giving little dinners for Peter’s business cronies and his allies from the House, and going to their little dinners, and whenever I come to see you I’ll be just a visitor in your house …’

‘That’s what wives do, Amy,’ Isabel said quietly. ‘You don’t understand that because you’re not ready to marry. And I’m sorry if you feel that my house, and Peter’s house, won’t be just as much a home to you as this one is.’

Amy was contrite immediately.

‘Oh darling, I’m sorry.’ She knelt down beside Isabel’s chair. ‘I shouldn’t go on about my own woes when it’s your big day tomorrow and you’ve got enough to think about. They’re such little woes, anyway.’ She forced the brightness back into her face and hugged her sister. ‘I shall love to come to see you in your pretty house, if Peter will have me, and of course we’ll do all kinds of things together. I hope you’ll be very, very happy, too. If anyone deserves to be made happy it’s you, Isabel Lovell. Mrs Jaspert-to-be.’

Bethan came in, her arms full of the freshly ironed pieces of Isabel’s complicated trousseau. It had taken two months to assemble it. Bethan’s eyes went straight to the robe on the bed.

‘The creases! Amy, is this your doing? Isabel will be taking it out of her bag tomorrow night looking like a rag.’

‘All my doing, Bethan. I’m sorry. I just looked at it. I’ll take it down now and press it again myself.’

Bethan took it out of her hands at once. ‘You’ll do nothing of the kind. A nice scorch mark on the front is all it needs. Just go and get yourself ready for the party.’

‘Do, Amy,’ Isabel said. ‘They’ll need you.’ Her maid had finished wrapping the long red hair up in tight papers, and now she was methodically stroking thick white cream on to the bride’s face. Amy nodded. Isabel meant Gerald and Adeline. Amy blew a kiss from the door and went next door to her own room, wondering if she looked as heavy-hearted as she felt. If she did, she was not going to be a great asset at the pre-wedding party.

Bethan had laid her evening dress out on the bed for her, and in the bathroom across the corridor that she shared with Isabel everything would be put out ready for her bath. But instead of beginning to get ready, Amy sat down in the chair at her writing desk. The curtains were drawn against the February dark, but she stared at them as if she could see through and into the familiar street view. She was thinking that for nineteen years, ever since babyhood, she had shared a room with Isabel, or at least slept in adjoining rooms as they did now. They had hardly ever been separated for more than a night or two. And now they had come to the last night, and tomorrow Isabel would be gone.

It was going to be very lonely without her. It had started already. Usually Isabel and Amy would have prepared for a stiff evening like this one together, and then afterwards they would have laughed about it. But tonight the guests were elderly relatives and old family friends who had come up from the country for the wedding, and the party was to be their introduction to the bridegroom. Because Peter was to be there, the bride had to stay hidden. ‘What archaic rubbish,’ Amy had said, but nobody had paid any attention. The bride was to have a tray in her room, and Amy would have to go down and go through the smiling rituals and the interminable dinner afterwards on her own. There would be Colonel Hawes-Douglas, and the local Master of Foxhounds, and numerous old aunts and second cousins. There wasn’t even Richard to help her out. He was supposed to be coming home from Eton on twenty-four hours’ leave, but he hadn’t put in an appearance yet.

‘Bugger,’ Amy said. ‘Bugger it all.’

She went across the landing and ran her bath, then she plunged into the water and topped it up until it was as hot as she could bear. It would make her face as red as a boiled beetroot, but that was too bad. Perhaps the heat would sap some of the loneliness and frustration and irritation out of her.

If it had been different with Mother and Father, Amy thought, perhaps losing Isabel would have been easier to bear. But it wasn’t different. It was exactly the same as it had been for years and years.

Hugh Herbert had been the first of Adeline’s lovers. It had all been conducted with perfect discretion, and with never a whisper of scandal, but it had been the end of her marriage to Gerald. There could be no question of divorce for Lord and Lady Lovell, but they had simply arranged their lives so that they didn’t meet. When Adeline was in London, or staying in a house party where Hugh was tactfully given a bedroom close to hers, Gerald was at Chance. When Adeline entertained one of her carefully chosen gatherings of amusing people at Chance, Gerald was in London or shooting in Scotland. They were only obliged to meet each other on rare, formal occasions such as family weddings or the girls’ presentations at Court. They were always rigidly polite to one another, as if they had just met, and they would be just the same tonight. It was just that sometimes Amy saw her father look at her mother with a kind of baffled, suppressed longing, and Adeline never noticed it at all. She would say, ‘Gerald, do you think we should move through into dinner?’ but she would never see him properly.

Amy could remember exactly when she had recognized the truth. They had been sitting on the lawn at Chance, under the cedar tree, and a man called Jeremy had been leaning over her mother’s shoulder, pointing to something in the magazine she was holding. His hand had brushed her shoulder, and Adeline had smiled like a young girl. They love each other, she thought, and suddenly she understood the succession of special friends, always men, who took up so much of her mother’s time. She had confided in Isabel, and Isabel had nodded gravely. ‘Yes. I think you’re right. But you must never, ever mention it to anyone.’

That night Amy had committed it all to her journal, under the big black heading PRIVATE. She was fifteen.

Amy sighed now in her over-hot bath. It was making her feel sadder instead of soothing her, and the prospect of the evening was growing steadily blacker. She stood up to break the mood and rubbed herself ferociously with the big white towel that Bethan had put out for her.

Perhaps Richard would have arrived.

It would help to have him here, even though it was Richard who chafed the soreness between their parents. Amy had witnessed it dozens of times, first seeing Gerald flare from silence into scornful rage at some refusal or attitude of Richard’s, and then watching Adeline leap to Richard’s defence. They were the only times that her languid, social mask dropped in family gatherings. Gerald would frown angrily and walk away, but there was something in the way he carried himself that betrayed loneliness to Amy. She had tried sometimes to offer him her company, but he always said something like, ‘Shouldn’t you be in the schoolroom?’ or, more lately, ‘Haven’t you got a party to go to?’

Back in her room Amy put on her dress without enthusiasm. Adeline’s taste in her own clothes was impeccable, and so simple as to be almost stark. Her utterly plain sheath dresses worn with a sequinned blazer were much copied, as were her dramatic strokes like wearing a necklace of wildflowers when every other woman in the room was loaded with diamonds. Adeline always had the best idea first. But she preferred to see her daughters in what she called ‘fresh, pretty clothes’. Isabel would have looked ravishing in these sweet ruffles, but against Amy’s rangy height and firm, high-cheekboned face they were less successful. She hooked the dress up and stared briefly at her reflection.

‘Oh God,’ she said, and then smiled. Well, the effect wasn’t quite so bad when she smiled.

In the long drawing room on the first floor a handful of elderly guests were already peering mistrustfully into their cocktail glasses. A trio of red-faced men were standing with Gerald in a semicircle around the fire, and their wives were perched with Adeline on the daringly modern white-upholstered sofas. Adeline had had the drawing room done over, and had banished all the glowering family portraits and brocaded covers in favour of pale polished wood and white hangings. In the middle of it, in her plain black crêpe, Adeline looked stunning. Amy kissed her cheek.

‘Darling, such a pink face,’ Adeline murmured. ‘Thank God you’re down. Is Isabel all right?’

‘Cool as a cucumber.’

‘That’s something. Where is Richard, the little beast?’

‘I haven’t seen him. He can’t have turned up yet.’

‘That means utter destruction of the dinner placement. I was counting on him to talk nicely to Lady Jaspert.’

‘Probably exactly why he isn’t here. I shouldn’t worry about the table. It’s only family, isn’t it? It’s not as though we’re expecting the Prince of Wales.’

‘No, unfortunately.’

That was a sore point, Amy recalled. Adeline moved on the fringes of the Fort Belvedere set, but HRH had declined the wedding invitation. The Yorks would represent Their Majesties at St Margaret’s, Westminster, tomorrow, but it wasn’t quite the coup for Adeline that the presence of the Prince himself would have been.

‘Do go and talk to people, Amy, before Peter gets into completely full flood.’

Isabel’s fiancé was a bulky, handsome man with a high, English county complexion, very sleek blond hair and bright, shrewd eyes. As the eldest son he would inherit in due course, but he was not attracted by the prospect of following his father into obscurity as another country peer. Peter Jaspert was an ambitious City man. (‘Metals. Manganese or aluminium or something,’ Adeline would say with deliberately affected vagueness. She had long ago given up the cherished dream that Isabel might make the grandest match of all, but still Peter Jaspert wasn’t quite what she had hoped for. There were no possible grounds for objecting to him, but Adeline was faintly disappointed. ‘Her happiness is all that matters. Anything else is up to you now, darling,’ was the only oblique reference she had ever made about it to Amy.)

Peter had also recently fought and won a by-election as the Conservative candidate. He had proposed to Isabel the day after taking his seat in Parliament. He was poised for rapid advancement, and he had chosen Isabel Lovell as the utterly correct wife to help him on his way.

Amy crossed the room to him. He was talking to one of Gerald’s ancient, deaf cousins.

‘What? What?’

‘I said there will certainly have to be a General Election by the end of the year. We can win it, on the National coalition ticket if you like, and then there’s nothing standing in the way of tariff reform. Which is the thing the economy needs, as we all know. Hello, hello, little sister. What a pretty frock. Everything ready for the big day, is it?’

‘Hello, Peter. GOOD EVENING, Uncle Edward.’

The evening was perfectly orchestrated, perfectly predictable and completely dull. Gerald sat at the head of the massive, polished dinner table, separated from his wife by twenty people. Peter Jaspert dutifully made sure that he spoke to every one of the guests who had been invited to meet him. Amy smiled long and hard and reassured a succession of aunts that yes, Isabel was blissfully happy and yes, they did seem to be very much in love.

Richard didn’t put in an appearance at all.

Gerald’s face betrayed a flicker of cold fury when they went through to dinner and he saw that Glass had discreetly rearranged the places, but that was all.

It was past midnight when Glass finally saw the last guests into their cars. He left the huge double doors firmly closed, but not locked, and then he walked silently back across the marble floor where the exquisite arrangements of arum lilies stood ready for tomorrow.

Up in her drawing room Adeline sighed. ‘Well, that was rather a trial. Isabel must be asleep by now, so I won’t disturb her. Good night Gerald, Amy. Let’s pray for not a wisp of fog tomorrow, shall we?’

After she had gone Gerald poured himself a last glass of whisky from the decanter and looked across at Amy.

‘You’ll miss your sister, won’t you?’

She nodded, surprised.

‘Mn. Yes. You’ve been close, the three of you. Things being … as they are.’

Amy waited, wondering if he was going to say anything else. If he was going to ask her where Richard was, even mention him at all. Dimly, she felt that he wanted to but couldn’t begin, and she was clumsily unable to help him. But Gerald turned away, saying irritably, ‘Well. It’ll be your turn next, marrying some damn fool who can’t even wear proper evening clothes like a gentleman.’

‘Everyone wears dinner jackets these days,’ Amy said mildly. ‘Peter’s hardly in the shocking forefront there.’ She felt disappointed, as if something important had almost happened and then been interrupted.

‘Good night,’ Gerald said.

She went to him and kissed his cheek, and felt as she touched him that he was suddenly quite old.

Amy went slowly up the stairs to her room. Her jaw felt cracked with smiling and her head ached. It was a familiar feeling at the end of an evening. She even brought it home with her from debutante dances, when she was supposed to be dancing, and enjoying herself, and falling in love. As Isabel had done, presumably. But Amy doubted that it would ever work for her. Amy had begun her first Season, two years ago now, with all the zest and enthusiasm that she brought to anything new. The dances had seemed amazingly glamorous after the strictures of Miss Abbott’s school, and the men she met had all struck her as sophisticated and witty. But then, so quickly that she was ashamed, the idea of another dance with the same band, and the same food, and the same faces, preceded by the same sort of dinner with a new identical partner whose name was the only thing that distinguished him from the last, had become dull instead of exciting. Amy was puzzled to find that most of the young men bored her, whether they were soldiers, or City men, or just young men who went to dances all the time. The few who didn’t bore her made her shy, and tongue-tied, and they soon drifted on to the vivacious girls whom Amy envied because they always looked as if they were enjoying themselves so much. Isabel had been one of them. She had the ability to look happy and interested, wherever she was, and she had been one of the most popular girls of her year. Peter Jaspert was lucky to have her.

Amy shivered a little and sat down at her writing desk again. She pulled her big, black leather-covered journal towards her. She tried to write something every day, even though the aridity of the last months was more of a reproach than a pleasure. Desultorily, before starting to write, she flicked back through the pages. Here were the early days, full of schoolroom passions and rivalries, and long accounts of hunting at Chance. Two years ago came the explosion of her coming out, with minute descriptions of every dress and every conversation. Here was the night when a subaltern had kissed her in a taxi, and she had felt his collarstud digging into her and the shaved-off prickle of hair at the nape of his neck. She had thought sadly of Luis, and politely let the boy go on kissing her until they reached their destination.

Amy turned to the day of her presentation at Court. At three o’clock in the afternoon she had dressed in a long white satin dress with a train, tight snow-white gloves that came up over her elbows, and Lady Lovell’s maid had secured two white Prince of Wales’ feathers in her hair.

A great day [she had written]. Why was I so nervous? The Mall was one long line of cars to the Palace gates with white feathers nodding in each one. There were people all along the roadside to watch us arriving. Then all at once we were walking down the long red carpets past the flunkeys and there were seven girls in white dresses in front of me, then four, three, two and one, then I heard my name and all I could think was gather the train up, step forward, right foot behind left, head bowed and down, down, count to three and then up again. I didn’t fall over or drop my flowers. And then the King said something about Father at the Coronation …

Someone tapped at Amy’s door.

‘It’s me. Can I come in? I can’t sleep at all.’

Isabel came in wrapped in her old dressing-gown, and sat down on the bed.

‘Are you scared?’ Amy asked, and she shook her head.

‘Not exactly. Just thinking how … important it all is. How did Peter look?’

‘Very handsome,’ Amy said truthfully. ‘And he was wonderful with Uncle Edward and the colonel and all the rest of them.’

‘He is, isn’t he? I look at him sometimes when we’re with people and I feel so proud of him, and yet I feel that I don’t know him at all, and that he isn’t the private kind of man he is when we’re alone together.’

‘Do you know the private man, as you call it?’

Isabel blushed. ‘Not … not altogether physically, if you mean that. Neither of us felt that that was the right thing to do. But I think I do understand him. When he asked me to marry him, everything seemed suddenly simple, and clear, and I knew that I should accept.’

‘I’m glad,’ Amy said softy.

They were silent for a moment, and then Isabel asked in a lighter voice, ‘What are you doing?’

‘Just writing in my diary. Or no, not even that. Looking back, instead of facing up to today. I was reading about the day I was presented. It seemed so important then, and so completely pointless now.’

Isabel laughed. ‘Oh dear, yes. I remember mine. I was directly behind Anne Lacy, who looked so beautiful no one could take their eyes off her. I could have been wearing trousers and a lampshade on my head and no one would have noticed.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. The Prince of Wales danced with you twice, the very same evening.’

‘Oh, do you remember? Mother thought our hour had come at last. Now you’ll have to marry him instead.’

‘Not a chance. I can never think of a word to say. Insipidity personified. I don’t know why Mother doesn’t try for him herself. She’s much more his type.’ They were still laughing, and Amy was thinking Is this the last time we’ll do this? when they heard quick, unsteady footsteps outside.

‘Is this a private party, my sisters, or can anyone join in?’

‘Richard.’

He was still wearing his school change coat, and his hair and trousers were soaked with rain.

‘I walked. From Soho, can you imagine? Tell me quickly, am I disinherited completely?’

‘Nothing was said. Father just gave us one of his white, silent looks when he realized you weren’t coming.’

‘Poor old tyrant. What about Mother?’

‘Worried about the table. You were promised to Lady Jaspert.’

‘Oh, dear God. Well, too late to worry now. And look, I’m not all bad. I’ve brought us this. The little man promised me that it was cold enough. Chilled further, I should think, by being hugged to my icy chest.’

From the recesses of his coat Richard produced a bottle of champagne. ‘Do you have any glasses in your boudoir, Amy, or shall I nip downstairs for some?’

‘You’ll have to go and get some. And change your clothes at the same time or you’ll get pneumonia.’

‘Well now, isn’t this snug?’ Richard reappeared in a thick tartan dressing-gown that made him look like a little boy again. He had rubbed his hair dry so that it stood up in fluffy peaks. He opened the champagne dexterously and poured it without spilling a drop.

‘Where have you been?’ Isabel asked. ‘It doesn’t matter about the party, and I’m glad you’ve turned up for the wedding itself, but you’re much too young to be wandering about in Soho, and drinking. Don’t pretend you haven’t been.’

‘I wouldn’t pretend to pretend,’ Richard said equably. He had developed the habit of looking out at the world under lowered eyelids that still didn’t disguise the quickness of his stare. He raised his glass to his sister. ‘Long life and happiness to you, Isabel. And I suppose that has to include Jaspert too. May his acres remain as broad as his beam and his fortunes in the pink like his face …’

‘Shut up, Richard,’ Amy ordered. ‘Where have you been?’

‘I came up on the four o’clock train like a good little boy. I was going to have tea with Tony Hardy at his publishing house and then come home to change. You remember Tony? As a matter of fact he’s coming to the wedding. I got Mother to ask him. D’you mind him being at your wedding, Bel?’

‘Not in the least.’

‘Good. It will be a help to me, you know, to have an ally amongst the ranks of duchesses. So, I went decorously to meet Tony at Randle & Cates and we talked about an idea I have. Then Tony suggested that we go across to the pub for a drink. Somehow one thing led to another, after that. We had dinner with a jazz singer and a woman who owns a nightclub, and about twenty others. It was a good deal more interesting than school supper and study hour, I can tell you. I lost Tony in the course of it all, and when I finally decided to extricate myself I realized that I had laid out my last farthing on your champagne and had to walk all the way back here in the rain. There you are. Nothing too culpable in that, is there?’

‘Tony Hardy should know better,’ Isabel said.

‘Unlike you, Tony knows that I can perfectly well take care of myself.’

‘I’m jealous,’ Amy told him. ‘I’ve never met a jazz singer in my life. Didn’t you look rather peculiar, a schoolboy amongst all those people?’

‘I was the object of some interest,’ Richard said with satisfaction, ‘but no one thought anything was peculiar. That’s the point, you see. Everything is acceptable, whatever it is.’

‘It’s not exactly the conventional way to behave.’ Isabel was frowning.

‘I’m not conventional. Surely you can’t condemn me for that? I don’t think Amy is, either. But you are, Isabel, and that’s why you’re going to marry Peter Jaspert tomorrow in the family lace and diamonds, in front of half the Royal Family and with your picture in all the dailies.’ Richard stood up and put his glass down with exaggerated care. Then he went and put his arms around his sister and hugged her. ‘I hope you’ll be so happy,’ he said seriously. ‘For ever and ever.’

Isabel smiled at him, her anxiety gone. ‘Thank you.’

They drank their champagne, and Amy made them laugh by recounting the excitements of her evening. ‘Every time Peter mentioned Ramsay MacDonald or the balance of payments or anything unconnected with horses or crops, Uncle Edward would shout “What? What? Can’t understand a thing the boy says.”’

At last Isabel stood up. ‘I’d better try and get some sleep. I think I’ll be able to, now I’ve had something to drink. Clever of you, Richard.’

‘Anything to help. I have to say one serious thing before you go.’

Isabel turned back again, alarm showing in her face.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s a delicate point, but … well, someone ought to raise it. Just in case it’s been overlooked. Are you quite clear on the facts of life? Bees and birds and so forth? It’s just that Jaspert might seem to behave pretty oddly tomorrow night, and you should know why.’

‘Richard, you are horrible. I know everything I need to know, and a good deal more than you.’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure of that,’ he said quietly. ‘Good night, Isabel darling.’ All three of them hugged each other.

After Isabel had gone, Richard said, ‘Will it be all right for her, do you suppose?’

‘I’ve no idea.’ Amy was heavy-hearted again.

‘You’ll still have me, you know,’ Richard reminded her.

‘I don’t think I will, by the sound of things. You’re already overtaking me.’

‘Poor Amy. It must be harder, being a girl. You should do something. Something other than getting measured for frocks and going to lunch, or whatever it is women do all day. The world’s full of girls out there doing things. I saw some in Tony’s offices today.’

‘I know,’ Amy said. ‘Of course I must do something. I don’t think I’m going to find a Peter Jaspert for myself, and I can’t sit about here or at Chance for ever. The question is, what could I do? I’m not any use for anything.’

‘That doesn’t sound very much like you,’ Richard said gently. ‘It’s your life to live, isn’t it? Not anyone else’s.’

Lady Lovell’s prayers had evidently been answered. The morning of Isabel’s wedding was bright, and frosty clear. When Bethan got up she went straight to the window. The pavements were shiny wet, but the sky was the translucent pearly white that would later turn to icy blue. The bare plane trees were motionless. There was no wind, either.

‘Let’s hope it’s the same there,’ Bethan murmured. She looked at the cheap alarm clock beside her bed and saw that there were a few minutes to spare. A quick note dashed off to Mam wouldn’t be quite the same thing as Bethan being there herself, but at least they would know that she was thinking of them.

All ready here, at last [she wrote]. The coming and going, you wouldn’t believe it. Thirty people here for dinner last night, and that just a small party of family to meet Mr Jaspert. Miss Isabel stayed in her room. She is as lovely and calm in the middle of it all as I would have expected her to be. My poor Amy is going to miss her, I know that much. I wish I could have been there with you, Mam, to see Nannon and Gwyn today, but I know you’ll all understand. They would have given me time if I’d asked, I’m sure of that, but with having had my two weeks and with Amy needing me, I felt I should stay here with them. But just the same I will be thinking of you at home.

How sad it is that the minister has gone from Nantlas. I would have liked to think of Nannon walking up to the Chapel in her white dress, on Dad’s arm, and everyone coming out on their steps to wave, like they used to. It’s not so easy to imagine the Ferndale registry.

I wonder what you’re doing this minute, Mam? Perhaps you’re sitting by the range with Nannon, brushing her hair. Or no, most likely you’re making the sandwiches. Is the Hall up at the Welfare all decorated with streamers, like they used to do it? At least you’ve got Dad there to help you. Did he understand about the money I sent? I don’t need it for anything here. I wish it could have been more, and of course Nannon should have a reception on her wedding day as fine as anyone in Nantlas. I know how hard it is when there isn’t the work. I’m sure that things will have to get better soon. Pits can’t stay closed for always, can they? I hope Nannon found the bit of money useful too. I’d have got her a present of course, but if she’s going to be living with Gwyn’s family for a bit perhaps she’d rather have it to spend on herself, instead of pots or blankets. Think of my little sister being married. How glad you must be that Gwyn’s in the Co-op and not down the pit. He may be a bit old for her, but he’s a good, kind man and I’m sure he’ll make Nannon happy. I’ll be thinking of you all day, you especially, Mam.

It’s fine and clear here, and I pray it is in Nantlas too.

God BLESS you all, your loving BETHAN.

Bethan folded her letter and put it into the envelope. There would be just enough time to run out to the post with it before going down to Amy.

Mari Penry sat back on her heels and stared at the sullen grate. They had let the fire in the range go out to save coal, and now she couldn’t get it going again with the dusty slack left in the bucket.

‘Are you cold, Dickon?’ she asked the child. He didn’t answer, nor did she expect him to, but she always made sure to include him in everything. Dickon was sitting in his usual place, close to the range in the little low chair that Nick had made for him. Mari pulled her own thin cardigan closer around her and went to feel his hands. The fingers were cold, but his stomach under the layers of woollens was warm enough.

‘Well then,’ she said, hugging him. ‘We’ll wait till your dad comes back, and then we’ll go up to the wedding party and leave the stupid old fire, shall we?’

Dickon looked up at her, and rewarded her with one of his rare smiles that broke his round, solemn face into sudden affection.

‘That’s my boy,’ Mari said. She went through into the front parlour to look out of the window for Nick. It was even colder in here, with a dampness that seemed to cling to the walls and the few pieces of furniture. Mari pulled the lace curtain at the window aside and peered out.

Half a dozen children were playing chasing games from one side of the road to the other, and at the corner a knot of men in scarves and collars turned up against the cold were talking together. There was no sign of Nick in either direction. Mari sighed and straightened the curtain again. She would have liked to make a pot of tea, but without the fire she couldn’t boil the kettle.

‘Mari? You there?’ The back kitchen door banged. Nick must have come the other way, down the back entry. She ran through into the kitchen. Nick had picked Dickon up out of his chair and was swinging him up and down. Dickon was chuckling and pulling at his father’s hair.

‘I thought you’d left home, you’ve been gone so long.’

Gently Nick lowered the boy back into his seat. Dickon’s eyes followed him as he moved around the room.

‘Left home? Hardly,’ Nick said, with the bitterness that rarely faded out of his voice nowadays. He looked around, frowning. ‘It’s too cold in here for Dickon.’

‘I couldn’t get the fire going again, with that.’ Mari pointed to the bucket. ‘He’s all right, under his clothes.’

‘I got half a sack of good stuff. I’ll have the place warm in ten minutes. And I called in at the Co-op. Gwyn Jones is off, of course, but they let me have a loaf and some other bits for now.’

Nick had been up at the shut-down No. 2 pit, picking over the slag heap for lumps of coal. Mr Peris didn’t allow scavenging, as he called it, around his pits but the managers often turned a blind eye. Half the men of Nantlas were out of work now that the second pit was closed, and for many of them it was the only way of keeping their families warm.

Mari watched him busying himself over the fire.

‘I thought we could leave it,’ she said. ‘As we’re going up to the Welfare later.’

Nick shrugged. ‘I’d forgotten that.’

‘You would forget, wouldn’t you? Anything nice that happens, for once? All you can remember is meetings, and committees, and the Federation. Why can’t you leave it? You aren’t even a miner any more, are you?’

Nick seemed not to hear her. He put a match to a tight coil of newspaper, and a yellow tongue of flame shot upwards. Dickon crooned with pleasure at the sight of it.

‘Nick? Please, Nick.’ Mari’s shoulders hunched up, and she didn’t even try to blink the tears out of her eyes. ‘What’s happened to everything?’

Carefully Nick smoothed a sheet of newspaper across the front of the grate and shut the oven doors on it to hold it in place. Behind it the fire flickered up and began to crackle cheerfully. Only when he was sure that it had caught properly did he turn round to Mari.

‘You know what’s happened,’ he said. ‘And you know why. There’s no work for me, or for most of the men in this valley. We’ve eighteen shillings a week to live on, after the rent. The only hope for change in this industry is the lads themselves. We’ve got to win worker control some day, Mari, and the only way to do that is to go on fighting, through all the meetings and committees, as you call them, or starve to death first.’

‘Starve to death, then,’ Mari said, ‘For all the good any of you are doing.’

Nick’s arm shot out and he pulled her around so quickly that her head jerked backwards. ‘Never say that. Never, do you hear?’ Then he saw the tracks of tears on her cheeks, and remembered how rosy her cheeks had been when they were first married. Instead of shaking her, as he had almost done, he pulled her roughly to him. Her head fitted gratefully into the hollow of his shoulder and he kissed her hair. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered. ‘I told you what it was going to be like, that first day down at Barry Island, didn’t I? Perhaps you shouldn’t have said yes. You could have married anyone you wanted. Kept your job up at the Lodge, instead of losing it because of me.’

‘I never wanted anyone else,’ Mari said. She rubbed her face against him, solacing herself with his familiarity. She knew all of him, the grim willpower and the stubborn pride just as well as his face and the set of his shoulders under the old coat, and she still loved him.

‘Mari,’ Nick whispered, ‘let’s go upstairs for half an hour. Dickon will be all right down here in the warm.’

She hesitated for a second, thinking longingly, and then she shook her head. ‘It’s too risky this time of the month. Next week, Nick, it’ll be all right then.’

‘I’ll be careful.’ He kissed her mouth, tracing the shape of it with his own.

She clung to him, his warmth warming her, but she said ‘No, Nick. It isn’t safe.’

I couldn’t go through Dickon again, she wanted to cry to him. Not the day he was born, nor the time after when we were finding out what was wrong. Not another baby. And if one did come, even if it wasn’t like Dickon, how could we care for it, on what we’ve got? There were too many families in Nantlas with hungry children. No more babies in this family. Not while the world was like this.

But Mari didn’t say any more. It was old, well-trodden ground between Nick and herself and she knew from experience that it was less hurtful to let the silence grow between them than to go round in the old, painful circles yet again. Nick let his arms drop to his sides.

‘Well. Put the kettle on, will you, my love? Let’s pretend that a nice pot of tea will do just as much good. And how could a pot of tea make you pregnant?’

Towards the end of the afternoon, when it was already dark in the valley bottom, the Penrys carefully damped down their fire and set off up the hill to the Miners’ Welfare. Dickon could walk almost as well as other children now, although it had taken him years of effort to learn, but he began to whimper with cold halfway up the street and Nick swung him up into his arms without breaking his stride. There were bright lights in the Welfare Hall and groups of people were coming towards it from all directions. Nick and Mari walked in silence, staring straight ahead of them. They quarrelled too often now, and it was growing harder to make up their differences as they would once have done, impulsively.

The Welfare was the heart of Nantlas now that the congregation could no longer afford a minister for the chapel. It was funded by the Federation, and people came to it for company, for books and classes, support and sympathy, and for the occasional celebration like Nannon Jones’s wedding that still managed to happen, somehow. The long, dingy green-painted hall was hung from side to side with paper streamers, salvaged from Christmas decoration boxes and forgotten Gala days. On the stage at the far end were the music stands and instrument cases of the choir and silver band, waiting for the climax of the evening when the singing would start. Beneath the stage on a trestle table covered with a white cloth, the wedding cake was given pride of place. Nannon Jones had baked it herself, and put hours of work into the carefully piped white icing. Down the length of the hall were more trestles decorated with red and green crepe paper, laden with neat plates of sandwiches, pies and cakes. The Welfare tea urns stood ready, and there were barrels of beer as well, and even bottles of sherry bought with the money Bethan had sent.

The bride and groom stood at the hall door with their parents, welcoming the guests. Gwyn Jones was almost forty, shortsighted and weak-chested, but he was a popular manager of the Co-op. You could always get a bit of help from Gwyn when you were short, the Nantlas women said. Local opinion approved of the match, even though Nannon Jones was hardly into her twenties.

‘Well done, well done,’ the older guests murmured to each set of parents as they shuffled past. ‘And a fine spread, too. Well done to you.’

There was much admiration of the feast set out on the tables. Everyone understood the scheming and saving that must have gone into providing it, and appreciated the generosity of offering it to share. There were no whispers about trying to go one better, or making a show. Hardship had drawn the valley communities closer together.

Myfanwy Jones, the village midwife, stood at the door beside her husband. She was beaming with happiness. At least her youngest had found a good, solid man who would look after her and not ask her to live with the fear that he would walk out of the door one morning in his pit clothes and with his snap-box under his arm and never come back.

She greeted the Penrys with extra warmth as they came in. She never forgot any of the babies she delivered, but she was not likely to forget the night of Dickon’s birth.

There had been nothing unusual to start with. Mari’s pains had been coming steadily all evening and into the night, and Myfanwy had been reassuring her that the baby would be born soon. Then she had bent over to listen to the baby’s heartbeat, and it had gone. Mari’s face was suddenly grey against the pillows. The midwife ran to the top of the stairs and shouted to Nick, sitting by the kitchen range. ‘Run! Run up for Dr Owen, ask him if he’ll come down. She needs forceps.’ There had been a flutter from the baby’s heart as she listened again, faint and irregular, and then nothing.

The minutes dragged past.

Into the silence came the stumbling crash of Nick running back up the stairs. ‘He can’t come. His wife says he’s gone up to one of the children at the Lodge. Oh God, look at her. Save her. I don’t care about the baby, if you can save Mari.’

‘I’ll save them both,’ Myfanwy Jones said grimly. It wasn’t the first time that Dr Owen had been unable to come to a house that was unlikely to be able to provide him with his fee. ‘You’ll have to help me. Hold her, will you?’

Myfanwy knew what to do, although only doctors were supposed to practise it. She even had the right instruments ready in her bag, but only when there was no other alternative could she resort to her own skills.

She took the things out, not looking at Nick Penry’s dead white face. ‘Hold her properly,’ she ordered him harshly.

When Dickon was dragged out into the world his face and hands and feet were blue, and he was completely still.

‘She’ll do,’ Myfanwy said after a brief glance at Mari, and she bent over the huddled baby. She cleared the tiny air passages, and then tried everything she knew to make him breathe.

‘Come on, my darling,’ she whispered to him like a lover. ‘Breathe for me.’

At last, after eternities of time, there was a tiny, thin wail. Mari’s eyes opened and fixed on the baby. The blueness began to ebb from Dickon’s face and Myfanwy breathed again herself. Only when Mari was comfortable and the baby was wrapped up in his father’s arms did she say as gently as she could, ‘I think he will be all right for now. But I can’t say for … later. He went a long time without breathing. Do you understand?’

Mari was too weak to take anything in, and she didn’t know whether Nick had even heard her. He sat quite still, with the baby hugged to his chest, staring right through her, right through the wall and out into the street.

Six years ago, that was, Myfanwy remembered. The year after the explosion in No. 1 Pit.

‘Hello, my lamb,’ she said now to Dickon. ‘There’s the big boy.’

The child stared back at her. It was impossible to tell how much he understood.

‘Is he talking much yet?’ she asked Mari.

‘In his way.’ Mari smiled calmly. Nick had already walked past, down to the end of the room where the men were standing in a group at the foot of the stage steps. ‘I will. Thank you,’ she said. Someone was holding a plate out to her. She wasn’t exactly ravenous, they had eaten something before coming out just so that they wouldn’t look too hungry, but paste sandwiches, and cake, were almost forgotten luxuries. Mari took a sandwich and broke it carefully in half for Dickon.

When the food was all gone, and the room was full of a warm, satisfied buzz, Nannon’s father pushed through the crowd and went up on to the stage. The bride, pink-faced, with her husband beside her, stood just below. William Jones held his arms up.

‘Friends. Neighbours and friends. I’m not going to ask you to stop in your enjoyment for too long. Just to join with me in drinking the health of Nannon and Gwyn, and wishing them everything for the future. And in remembering the friends who can’t be with us tonight. My eldest daughter, Bethan. And my boy David, in London too, looking for work. Two boys from the other side of our new family as well, Gareth and Glyn, trying their luck in the Midlands. May they be lucky, and may we start to have some luck here too. Here’s to some better times for all of us. Cheers, now.’

He raised his pint glass, his red face glowing, and tipped his head back to it. There was an uproar of cheering and clapping and stamping on the wooden floorboards before he held up his hand again.

‘Oh yes. One last thing. We’ve got a new big man with us tonight.’

Faces were turning in the crowd, and heads craning. Mari realized with a sudden sinking fear that they were looking at Nick.

‘We’ve just heard now, elected Secretary of the Rhondda Branch of the SWMF. Nick Penry, a good Nantlas boy if ever there was one. Give him a clap now, for all his hard work in the past, and to come.’

Mari listened to the clapping, frozen.

It was an important post, although an honorary one. It meant that Nick would be working at a level in the Federation that represented all the pit lodges in the Rhondda valleys. Beyond that it would give him a voice at the top level, on the main South Wales executive. Mari knew that it was the beginning of real power for him, the beginning of real influence, in the world that he cared about. Nick was a Communist because its importance confronted him every day of his life.

And yet, he had never even mentioned to her the possibility of his election. Had they already drifted so far apart that he was sure of her disapproval, certain that she would not put her support behind him?

Mari was proud of him still, but she had lost the ability to tell him so. Just as Nick in his turn seemed to have lost the ability to sympathize with her fears and anxieties.

Mari bit her lips and looked across the room at him.

‘Speech! Speech!’ Nick was being pushed up on to the stage. She watched him, thinking how much at ease he looked on the platform. He wasn’t red-faced and awkward like William Jones, nor was he over-confident and strident. He was just Nick himself, and he smiled down at them as though they were all old and well-loved friends.

‘I don’t want to make a speech …’

‘Shame! Shame!’

‘Let the man speak, will you?’

‘… and neither do you want to hear one. I just want to say thank you for voting me into a position where I might be able to join in helping us, and the industry, back up off our knees.’

‘That’s it, Nick boy. You tell ‘em.’

‘I’m glad that Nannon and Gwyn Jones have given us something to celebrate together, tonight. This is all we’ve got left now, isn’t it? Staying together, all of us, whether it’s this village, or the Rhondda, or South Wales, or the whole community of miners all over the country. And what’s more …’

The room was quiet now. Everyone was watching Nick.

‘… that’s the only thing that really matters. So long as we’re together, so long as every one of us in this room, and in every pit and Welfare Hall across the country, believes that miners and not millionaires should run our pits, well then, we can win. Then our children can go to school in boots again, and our wives can go out to buy food for our families.’

There was a moment of complete silence before the clapping and cheering broke out again.

Oh yes, Nick, you believe it, Mari thought. It’s all you care about, except perhaps for Dickon. And standing up there, somehow you can make everyone else believe whatever you want. You’ve got a talent, sure enough. And you’re not the kind of man to waste a talent, are you?

The room was full of the warmth of friendliness. Mari lifted her head, watching her husband.

‘There you are,’ he said. ‘I told you I wasn’t going to make a speech. Let’s get on now and dance and sing, and forget everything for a few hours. We’re here to celebrate a wedding, aren’t we? I hope you’ll be very happy, Nannon and Gwyn. I hope you’ll be as happy as Mari and I have been.’

Nick had ducked down from the stage and was pushing his way through the crowd. She saw his head, taller than the others, looking around for her. In Mari’s arms Dickon said ‘Da’ in a pleased voice and held out his arms to him. When Nick reached her side Mari said, without looking at him,

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Would you have wanted to know?’ As he always did, Nick met a challenge with a challenge.

‘Husbands and wives usually mention these things to each other. You make me feel like a stranger, Nick. And why wish that on Nannon and Gwyn? I wouldn’t want anyone else to have to enjoy our kind of happiness.’

‘You still make me happy, Mari,’ he said softly. He put his arms around her and Dickon, and forced her to look up so that he could see her face. ‘I’m sorry if I can’t do the same for you. I’m still the man you married, you know. Just the same.’

Regardless of the crowd around them he kissed her, warm against her cold cheek. ‘I could prove it to you, if you’d only let me. Come on, dance with me. At least then I can hold you close and still look decent.’

‘What about Dickon?’

‘Give him to your mam to hold, for God’s sake. Just this once.’

The band was assembled on the stage, and after the tootlings as they tuned up they swept into a waltz. Couples stepped out on to the creaky floor. Amongst the replete pink faces and careful best clothes there was an atmosphere of revelry almost forgotten in Nantlas.

‘Why do you blame me,’ Nick whispered, ‘for trying to make it possible for nights like this to happen every week?’

‘I don’t blame you, my love.’

Mari carried Dickon over to her mother. The child allowed himself to be handed over uncomplainingly, but he never took his eyes off his parents.

‘That’s better,’ Nick said. ‘And now, may I have the pleasure?’ He looked proud, and happier than she had seen him for a long, long time.

Mari saw his arms held out to her, and she smiled. Her eyes met Nick’s and she caught his happiness. Suddenly, surprisingly, she felt like a young girl again. Their quarrel was all forgotten. The music lifted her spirits higher and she stood for a second swaying in time to it. Then Nick’s arms came around her and they were off across the splintery wooden floor.

Mari tilted her head back so that she could look at him. Nick saw a flush of colour in her cheeks, and a light in her face that turned her back into the pretty, merry Mari he had married. He held her tighter and they spun in the dance together.

‘Nick?’ she whispered.

‘Yes, my love?’

‘I’m still the woman I was, you know. And I’m … glad you’re doing the work you are.’

Nick stopped dancing. His head bent quickly over hers and he kissed her. And all around them the waltzing couples smiled and nodded to each other.

When Mari’s eyes opened again they were sparkling. For a moment the world felt a warm and festive place.

‘Come on, Nick Penry,’ she ordered him. ‘Let’s dance.’

They moved again, holding each other close. Nick was humming to the music. With her head against his shoulder Mari could hear the sound of it, deep in his chest.

It had been a beautiful wedding. There was no need to cry, Amy told herself. Adeline hadn’t cried at all, and the bride’s mother was almost expected to do that. Amy thought of her mother at the front of the packed, flower-massed church, her skin like white silk against the black velvet Cossack coat and her hair flaming red under the shako hat. No, Adeline wouldn’t have cried. Not in front of the Royal Family, and Lady Colefax, and Mr Baldwin. It had been a great day for Adeline and she had orchestrated it perfectly. Nothing as spontaneous as tears would have been allowed to spoil it.

Amy wrung her facecloth out in cold water and pressed it against her eyes. Just five minutes up here in her room, just five minutes to collect herself, and then she would go downstairs again.

The new Mr and Mrs Jaspert had driven away at last, only a few minutes ago, but the party had barely faltered. Adeline’s parties were famous, and the departure of the principals was going to make no difference to this one. Or two, rather, Amy decided. In the huge, long room on the first floor the grandees were dancing stiffly under the chandeliers. There was a buffet supper in the dining room, where the pink claws and ridged shell backs of lobsters stood ferocious guard around the silver bowls filled with black beads of caviar. In the library the tables were set out for cards. But in Adeline’s white drawing room and further up the house, there were noisier, smarter people. Amy had glimpsed a woman in a man’s evening suit, with her hair cropped and brushed flat to her head, and another with her arms loaded from wrist to shoulder with ebony and ivory carved bangles. This party, where the sharp babble of conversation rose to the same crescendos as the jazz, was the one Amy wanted to join. She had been slipping into it, listening to the talk and searching for someone she knew well enough to attach herself to, when Bethan came to whisper to her that Isabel and Peter were leaving. They had gone down to the hall together.

Isabel was standing in a blaze of light while Peter shook the hand of everyone in sight. Her going-away suit was the colour of honey, the ankle-length skirt and slim jacket making her look taller. A cloud of fur framed her face, and a single jaunty feather stuck straight up from the top of her little tilted hat.

‘She looks lovelier than I’ve ever seen her,’ Bethan murmured.

The sisters kissed each other.

‘I’ll be back soon,’ Isabel promised. Amy gripped her arms. Perhaps she was imagining it, but she thought that under the soft stuff of her suit Isabel was trembling.

Lord and Lady Lovell, perfectly correct, were saying goodbye now. Peter Jaspert shook their hands firmly, and kissed Adeline on both cheeks. Then the front doors were open and a gust of cold air swept around them. Peter put his arm around his wife’s shoulders and hurried her out to the car waiting at the foot of the steps. There was a flurry of waving and shouting and then the car roared away. They were gone, and not even Isabel had any idea where Peter was taking her. Glass, his normally impassive face creased by the faintest of smiles, was shutting the doors again. Amy felt a moment of pure, panicky loneliness. She turned round to see that her mother was already on her way up the great curving staircase. Her black dress left her back completely bare, with an impertinent flat bow at the bottom of the deep V. Gerald Lovell, without a backward glance, was on his way to join the card-players in the library. From now on, the party was Adeline’s business.

Amy had run up through the crowded house to her bedroom. The day had gone so quickly, she needed a moment to straighten it out in her head, and to fight back the threatening tears. Even in the silence of her room, she could only see a series of images flashing in front of her eyes. Isabel drifting down the aisle on Gerald’s arm, a column of pure white silk and lace, with points of blue light flashing from the diamonds in the Lovell tiara. Peter at the altar, turning back the lace veil to touch his lips to Isabel’s. Eight tiny bridesmaids and pages in white satin, all blinking at the press photographers clicking at them. Gerald and Adeline, standing stiffly at the head of the stairs to receive the guests, and Richard’s studiedly impassive face winking at her over his starched collar. Isabel’s small hands closed over Peter’s as they pressed the silver knife into the crenellated cake. And Bethan, sobbing quietly in the corner of Isabel’s empty room after the last leather trunk had been carried away. Bethan had cried, on the day when her own sister was being married far away without her.

Amy screwed the facecloth up into a ball and flung it away from her. She faced the mirror and addressed herself squarely.

‘Pull yourself together. Isabel’s married. Of course Isabel was going to marry. Would you have wanted to stop her? What you should do, Amy Lovell, is go downstairs and drink some champagne. Look for someone to dance with. And tomorrow, find something positive to do instead of feeling so sorry for yourself. Is that quite understood?’

The face that looked back at her was still watery-eyed and pink around the nose, but it was less obviously woebegone. Amy shook her head briskly, and her gleaming hair swung in exotic, unfashionable waves around her face. She picked a brush up from the dressing table and whisked some colour on to her cheeks. ‘Much, much better. Someone might actually ask you to dance now.’ As she stood up, Amy thought she caught the faintest drift of Isabel’s flowery perfume. She took up her own crystal bottle and squirted it determinedly around her. Then she shook out the folds of her dress, thinking approvingly that the pale lavender colour actually suited her, and marched to the door.

The white drawing room was packed to the walls.

Amy edged her way slowly into it, listening to the snippets of talk that floated out to her.

‘Ninety per cent pure shit, darling, but ten per cent genius.’

‘A tonal symphony. Poetic asymmetry.’

‘And so we went for a Friday-to-Monday, but there was not a soul there …’

‘Hello.’ Someone pushed out of the crowd and stood squarely in front of her. Amy looked up to see Tony Hardy. He still appeared to have inherited his evening clothes from a misshapen relative.

‘Don’t you remember me?’

‘Tony? Of course I do. Isabel always said I should call you Mr Hardy, not Tony.’

Tony smiled at her. ‘I remember. Should I call you Miss Lovell, now?’

‘Definitely not.’

‘So, Amy, are you looking for someone in particular?’

‘Just someone to talk to. I know quite a lot of these people by sight, and a few of them well enough to say how d’you do, but no one at all to attach myself to and ask why I feel like an ostrich in my own home at my own sister’s wedding. Except for you, that is. Oh, I could go downstairs and dance with Johnny Guild or somebody, and then go out on the balcony and do some damp embracing. But if I stay up here I thought I might be able to step across to where debutantes don’t tread. Like Richard did, last night.’

Amy was conscious that she wasn’t sounding quite rational. It must be the champagne. Another of the day’s images drifted into her head, of the Duchess of York in the church, floating blue feathers framing her face.

Tony was looking at her levelly. ‘You don’t look anything like an ostrich. You look … extremely beautiful. I always thought you would be more beautiful than Isabel, once you grew into yourself.’

Amy stared back at him. He had very light hazel eyes, and eyebrows that went up in peaks. She felt a faint flush of colour rising in her face.

‘Let’s find somewhere to sit down,’ he said. ‘Debutantes never tread anywhere near me, will that do? And I think I can promise that I won’t embrace you, damply or otherwise.’

As she followed him, Amy wondered why that seemed to amuse him.

They found a sofa in an alcove. A tall fern in a white marble urn dipped in front of them like a screen. Tony put a champagne glass into her hand.

‘Now. What’s the matter?’ he asked her.

Amy considered. It was partly losing Isabel, of course, but only partly. There was something bigger than that, less tangible and so more frightening. Amy had the growing sense that she was adrift, directionless and isolated. She had watched Isabel dancing through her successful Seasons, aware of the options open to her and coolly accepting them. Isabel had chosen, and today was the celebration of her continuing to walk on down the broad, comfortable path laid down for her from the day of her birth. Amy had never felt at ease in the way that Isabel seemed to. When she looked at her own version of the path it was flat and uninviting, yet the country on either side of it seemed hostile, or impenetrable, or obscured. She was both bored and apprehensive, disenchanted and anxious, and the combination was uncomfortable.

‘I … don’t quite know what to do. Or how to talk about it,’ she began.

Tony leaned back and lit a cigarette. ‘Is it a love affair of some kind? Or something awkward like a baby? Surely not?’

Amy laughed in spite of herself, and Tony thought that when her face came alive it was enchanting. Most men, he considered, would find her irresistible.

‘No. No, nothing like that. Much less identifiable. I think I’m frightened of not being able to belong. Not to the kind of life that’s offered to me, or even to the kind of life that Mother has created for herself. I don’t want to find myself a scion of the shires, or a bright hope of the Tory Party like Peter. The men I meet are all the same, and they make me feel the same. Rather chilly, and hollow.’

‘Not very enticing,’ Tony agreed.

‘So if I’m not going to marry …’

‘I wouldn’t assume that immediately, you know. How old are you? Nineteen?’

‘Yes. Old enough to know, I think.’

‘Perhaps. Is it likely that you might prefer women?’

Amy held out her glass to have it refilled. She was laughing so much that the froth spilled over her fingers.

‘Tony, what d’you think I am? If not pregnant, then a lesbian?’

‘I don’t know what you are,’ he said equably. ‘You tell me. I’m just eliminating the worst possibilities.’

‘I don’t think I prefer women. A man kissed me once, years and years ago, and that meant more to me than all the men I’ve met and danced with and half-heartedly allowed to kiss me ever since. He was the waiter, Luis, in the hotel in Biarritz, do you remember?’

‘Did he now? Yes, I remember him. Go on.’

Amy took a deep breath. ‘I want something to do. To believe in, if you like. Something real, and valuable. Richard asked me last night what I do all day, and it amounts to shopping, being fitted for clothes, meeting girlfriends and having lunch, going to parties and staying in people’s houses. Helping Father to entertain when Mother isn’t here. At Chance, riding and playing tennis. Seeing neighbours and people on the estate. It isn’t enough.’

‘For many people, you know, it would be more than enough. It would be Paradise.’

Amy’s face went a dull crimson. ‘I know,’ she said humbly. ‘Does that condemn me completely?’

‘No, it doesn’t. Let’s try to think. What could you do?’

‘Richard says that your office was full of girls doing things. I can speak French and German and a little Spanish. I can paint a bit, and a few other useless things. Could I be a secretary? Could I be your secretary?’

Tony tried not to let his smile broaden. ‘I don’t think so. Most secretaries have to be able to type and take shorthand, you know.’

‘I could learn.’

‘Yes. Look, there must be other girls of your class in your position. They must do things to which there could be no possible parental or social opposition. Can’t you think of any?’

‘There’s Welfare work. Charity organizing. That sort of thing.’

‘Wouldn’t that do?’

Amy’s disappointment showed. ‘It means sitting on committees for charity balls, and bazaars. Raising money. Addressing envelopes for appeals. I would have liked an ordinary job, perhaps something that might help people. Whatever they’re doing out there.’ She gestured over the heads of the crowd and beyond the walls with their white silk drapes.

Tony’s eyebrows worked themselves into triangular peaks. ‘Out there? In Bruton Street?’

‘No, damn it. Not Bruton Street.’

‘Amy, how much do you really know about ordinary people and the work they do?’

‘Nothing. I’m asking you to help me find out. Look, you took Richard somewhere last night. Would you take me out sometimes, too? I’d like to meet some people who aren’t anything like these. There isn’t anyone else I can ask. If I mentioned it to Johnny Guild, he’d say, “Oh, I say, Amy, what for? I hate slumming.” If I could broaden my horizons a little, it might help me to know a little bit better what I’d like to do. Is that reasonable?’

Tony sighed. ‘My dear. Downstairs you have the entire British aristocracy. If someone dropped a bomb now we’d have an instant socialist state. Up here is the cream of London’s fashionable intelligentsia. One notorious poet there. Two well-known actresses there, ignoring each other. A beautiful divorcee here with very high connections. What do you imagine you are going to gain by hanging around the Fitzroy Tavern with me? Or making little expeditions to gape at conditions in the East End. Or whatever romantic idea it is you’ve got in your head?’

Amy looked down at her glass. ‘These are Mother’s friends. The people downstairs are here because Father is who he is. The King’s Defender, and all that. I want a life of my own, Tony. A useful, ordinary life with the rewards of satisfaction.’ She was crying again. A tear fell and rolled over her knuckles.

Tony Hardy’s amused impatience evaporated. He thought that Amy had all the naïveté of her age and class, but without the cushioning of complacency. Her sincerity and her unhappiness were clear, and his heart went out to her.

‘Poor Amy. Here, handkerchief. Of course I’ll take you out and introduce you to some new people, if that’s what you would like. Don’t cry any more. Let’s fling ourselves into the throes of this party. There are dozens of people here I wouldn’t get a chance of seeing otherwise. If I arm myself with you, they can hardly cut me dead. Here’s some more champagne, to begin with. And in a week or two, if you would really like to come, we’ll go to a meeting organized by a friend of mine. It’s a political meeting, and it might interest you. Or more likely it’ll bore you to death. But there’s usually a kind of party afterwards, and people are certainly different. Different in the sense that they’re like one or two of the people in this room before they became fashionable or successful enough to be invited here by your mother.’

Amy missed the touch of irony in his voice, or else she chose not to hear it. Her face was alight. She dabbed the tears away with Tony’s handkerchief.

‘Thank you. I’d like that very much. Now, let’s fling ourselves, if that’s what you want to do. Is it the poet you’d like to talk to first? Colum O’Connor comes to Chance for Mother’s house parties sometimes. He used to like me to go for walks with him.’

‘I’m sure he did,’ Tony said drily. ‘Yes, please. Do introduce me.’

Amy went across and touched the poet on the arm. He beamed at her.

‘Well now, little Amy Lovell. Perfectly grown-up.’

‘Hello, Mr O’Connor. How are you? Do you know my friend Tony Hardy?’

Together, they worked their way around the room, greeting and talking. The faces Amy didn’t recognize, Tony did. Between conversations, Tony whispered quick, scurrilous histories to her. Amy was distinctly impressed, and intrigued. He seemed to have a far-reaching knowledge of the more colourful sides of London literary and political life.

After an hour, when they had reached their alcove again, Tony winked at her. ‘Thank you. That was useful. Now, d’you think we’ve earned some supper?’

On the way downstairs Amy asked him, ‘What do you do at Randle & Cates, exactly? Apart from gossip?’

Tony looked sideways at her, appraisingly, and then grinned. ‘Quite right, I do like gossip. I tell myself that it’s part of the job, listening to who thinks what and who’s doing what. I publish books, as you know. Which books I choose, or more often which books I nose out and coax people into doing, depends partly on what I hear, partly on what I believe in, and wholly on what will sell.’

‘Which is?’

‘Some poetry. No Eliots or Sitwells yet, but I’m working on it. Some politics. Not Peter Jaspert’s sort, I’m afraid. And some novels.’

‘What did my brother come to see you about yesterday?’

They came into the supper room. At the far end, at an empty table, was Richard. There was a champagne bottle beside him. His chin was propped on one hand and he was smiling a faint, remote smile.

They paused for a moment. Then Tony said smoothly, ‘He came to me with a proposition. Or rather more than that, a partly completed novel. I told him that he was too young even to think about it, let alone to carry it off properly. I also told him I would be interested to talk about it again in five years’ time. More than that, I don’t think I should say.’

Amy looked across the room at her brother. He waved, exaggeratedly.

‘I didn’t know Richard was writing a novel.’

‘I don’t think it’s the kind of book you would describe to your sister,’ Tony said, inaudibly.

‘Shall we go and join him?’

‘You found each other,’ Richard greeted them. ‘Nobody has found me, as you can see. I have consoled myself with champagne, and with imagining edifices of elaborate insults to every dowager who has strutted past the table. Sit down and keep me company.’

‘Are you drunk?’

‘A little. Just a very little.’

Tony brought them plates of cold lobster and quivering aspic, and the first tender asparagus tips from Chance.

‘Tony is going to take me to a political meeting in a couple of weeks, and to the party afterwards,’ Amy remarked conversationally as they ate.

Richard glanced sharply from one to the other, and then his eyelids drooped again.

‘Is he? How nice. And how nice that you have suddenly developed a political awareness, Amy. I’m sure you’ll fit in amongst the comrades with glove-like ease.’ There was a small, awkward silence. Richard smiled innocently. ‘What have I said? Well now, have we enjoyed the wedding? The tyrants have put on a creditable show, I must say. Look at it all.’ He waved at the long table with chefs in tall white toques behind it, the supper tables crowded with guests, and the endless procession of couples between supper and the ballroom where the music was growing steadily more insistent. ‘Your turn next, Amy, as they say. Have you danced with a dozen officers?’

‘Not one, this evening,’ she answered, determined not to let Richard prickle her in front of Tony. She had seen him in this mood once or twice before. ‘I was hoping Tony might ask me.’

Richard snorted over his glass. ‘Tony doesn’t dance. At least, only in louche clubs where you would be very unlikely to encounter him. There’s a much more likely candidate on his way over here. I’m sure he’ll foxtrot you off your feet.’

Amy looked. Johnny Guild was bustling across the room. He was a captain in a very smart regiment, the same one that Peter Jaspert had once belonged to. Johnny Guild had been part of the guard of honour at St Margaret’s. He was in dress uniform tonight, very tight black trousers with a broad cherry-red stripe down the sides, and a cherry-coloured coat frogged with gold.

‘He looks,’ Richard murmured, ‘as if he’s just walked out of an operetta. D’you think he’s going to sing something in a light but agreeable tenor?’

Amy bit the corners of her mouth, hard. Johnny Guild was the most persistent and most harmless of her admirers.

‘Here you are. I’ve searched high and low. Amy, I was hoping you might have a dance or two left for me. ‘Evening, Lovell.’

Amy looked at Richard and Tony in the hope of rescue, but they stood up politely, clearly expecting her to go. She let Johnny take her arm.

‘I’ll telephone you in a few days, if I may,’ Tony said, ‘about that arrangement we made.’

Johnny led her away to the ballroom.

It seemed to be full of pink faces looming over white ties, tulle skirts that were beginning to droop along with the corsages, and the determined bray of voices against the dance music. Johnny took her in his arms. His hand against her bare skin felt moist and warm.

It was all depressingly familiar.

‘Who was that with your brother?’

Amy considered the possible responses, but in the end she simply said, ‘He used to be my brother’s tutor, years ago.’

‘Oh. Well.’ Nobody at all, she silently supplied for him.

When at last Johnny led her back to the supper room, the far table was empty. Tony and Richard were gone.

In the bathroom of the odd, florid hotel between London and the South Coast that Peter had chosen for their first night together, Isabel wrapped the heavy satin robe around her and tied it carefully. She had brushed her hair until it crackled, dabbed herself with scent, and hung her honey-coloured suit up herself in the fake Empire cupboard. Her maid would rejoin them at Dover tomorrow, before they sailed.

Peter was waiting for her. She had heard the creak of his heavy tread as he moved around the bedroom, but now there was silence.

She breathed in slowly and deeply, trying to ease the hammering of her heart, and walked through into the bedroom.

Peter was already in the wide bed. He had drunk a bottle of wine over their late dinner, and two brandies afterwards. His face looked red against the pillows.

‘I thought you were never going to come,’ he whispered. He held up the covers, beckoning her in beside him. Isabel hesitated. She couldn’t get into bed in her robe, but was he expecting her to take it off?

‘Shall I turn out the lights?’ she asked.

‘No. I want to look at you.’ Peter’s voice was hoarse.

Obediently Isabel unwrapped the robe again, slipped it off and laid it across the foot of the bed. Her silk nightdress, made for her in exactly the same shade, was cut on the bias so it clung to her, with a translucent lace inset from the mock-demure high neck to the top of her breasts. Peter didn’t even glance at it. ‘Come here,’ he said. ‘Get into bed.’

Isabel did as she was told, sliding under the covers and then lying still, trying to make her stiff body relax. Peter’s large hands reached out and moved over her, groping for an opening in the folds of silk.

‘Take this thing off,’ he begged. Isabel sat up again and reached up to undo the tiny pearl buttons. She lifted the nightdress off over her head. Peter groaned, a long Uhhhhn sound that frightened her, making her think that he was ill. But he slid across the bed to her, and put his mouth on her breast. He began biting and gnawing at it, the blond stubble on his chin tearing at her skin. Isabel drew in her breath sharply with shock and disgust, and Peter lifted his head.

‘Like that, do you? That’s good.’

He pushed her backwards so that she was lying flat, and then hung over her. He was naked, and the heat of his heavy, hairy body shocked her again. Peter kissed her, rubbing all over her lips with his mouth and tongue, making little grunting noises under his breath. Isabel’s mouth felt frozen, with a choking sensation at the back of her throat as if she might vomit. This was nothing like the times Peter had kissed her before, gently, so that she had wanted to kiss him back and answer his tongue with her own. He had even touched her breasts before, reverently, with the tips of his fingers. Now he was kneading her as if she belonged to him.

You do belong to him, a cold voice reminded her. You are this man’s lawful wedded wife.

This bristly, panting creature with a sweating, screwed-up face was her handsome, confident husband.

Now Peter moved his hand down between her legs, parting them with his fist. His fingers probed at her, and then he groaned again.

‘Sorry. Can’t hold on,’ he whispered. His breath burned her ear. He heaved himself on top of her. Something bumped and then stabbed, bluntly. Isabel clenched her teeth to stop herself screaming. There was a jolt of pain and then her husband buried himself inside her. He began to rock up and down, tearing at her inside, and moaning in his throat. Isabel tried not to listen or to feel. She tried to retreat into some cold, white, locked place inside her head.

‘Oh God!’ Peter shouted, and then came a roar, so pain-filled that her arms tightened protectively around him. He jerked involuntarily, his face distorted and drops of his sweat falling on her face.

At last the jerking stopped and his full weight sank on top of her, the roar dropping away into a sob.

Isabel stroked his damp shoulders, staring up past him at the curlicued wallpaper on the ceiling. If it wasn’t so horrible, she thought, it would be funny. It was so absurd. And it was pathetic, and hardly human.

Peter slid away, leaving his hot stickiness all over her.

‘Was it all right?’ he whispered, like a child asking for a sweet.

‘Not very,’ Isabel said, longing for him to comfort her.

‘I’m sorry.’ He sounded huffy. ‘I was too excited, and I’d had a bit too much to drink You’ll like it better in the morning.’ He kissed her cheek. ‘Good night, darling. I love you.’

Isabel lay very still, listening to his breathing deepening into snores. When he was properly, deeply asleep, she promised herself, she would get up and wash.

At least it was quick, she consoled herself as she waited. At least it was quick.

FIVE

Appleyard Street, just off Bloomsbury Square. That was where Tony Hardy had said they were going. Amy peered out of the grimy window of the bus as they rumbled past Selfridges. The lit-up windows were full of spring fashions, print frocks and little straw hats, although the daffodils were barely out in Hyde Park and a week’s icy rain and high winds had already flattened them to the grass.

Outside the front doors in Bruton Street, Amy had stood poised on the steps, automatically expecting Tony to wave to a cab. But he had taken her arm and steered her briskly towards Park Lane.

‘Only a twopenny bus ride to Appleyard Street,’ he said.

‘Yes, of course.’

Amy could almost count the number of times she had been on a bus before. Past Selfridges she turned to Tony. He was smoking and frowning over a sheet of typewritten paper.

‘What’s the meeting about, exactly?’

‘Oh, the usual sort of thing. Welcome to new members of the group. A paper, read by one of the old guard. This month’s is entitled “From Dialectic to Daily Practice. A Pan-European Approach”. Then a guest speaker. Tonight’s is Will Easterbrook from the Trades Union Congress Executive. He should be interesting. And then there will be a discussion of arrangements for the hunger march.’

Seeing Amy’s blank stare Tony began to laugh. ‘You did ask to come.’

‘Hunger march?’ she asked quickly. ‘What’s that?’

‘Don’t you know? This one is one of my friend Jake Silverman’s projects. You’ll meet Jake tonight. And you’ll hear plenty about the march.’

Not wanting to betray any more ignorance, Amy went back to studying the Oxford Street windows. The shops were familiar but she felt that she was travelling past them into new territory. It was if by simply stepping on to the bus she had set out in a new direction. She was looking forward to what the evening would bring, with an eagerness that she hadn’t felt for a long time.

When the bus reached High Holborn, Tony rang the bell and they jumped off together.

Amy had never penetrated into this corner of London before. She peered interestedly at the shops, mostly small grocers, and bookshops with pavement display cases emptied and locked up for the night. There was hardly anyone in the streets, and no traffic at all, but the lights behind curtained windows over the shops spoke of tiny flats full of people.

Appleyard Street was exactly like the others. Tony stopped in front of a bookshop with a smeared window crammed full of haphazardly arranged books. A violently lettered poster stuck to the glass commanded UNITE. FIGHT FOR YOUR RIGHTS. Tony rang the side door bell and then pushed the door open. The hallway and steep stairs facing them were completely bare, and lit by a single bulb with a cracked glass shade.

Tony waved her inside with an ironic flourish. ‘Welcome to the Centre for Socialist Studies. First floor. Jake has a flat at the top, where we shall adjourn later. Shall I lead the way?’

Amy nodded. She was very cold, and annoyed to find that she was disconcerted by the bleakness of their destination.

The big first-floor room had three uncurtained windows overlooking the street. It was packed with rows of upright wooden chairs, most of them occupied. At the front was a table covered with a red cloth, with another half-dozen chairs arranged behind it. The room was warm, heated by a glowing gas fire. At the rickety card table beside the door Tony stopped to sign his name in a register. Underneath it he wrote ‘A. Lovell. Guest.’

‘It’s not a public meeting,’ he told her. ‘You have to be a member, or an invited guest.’ Then he guided Amy to a pair of empty chairs, mercifully close to the fire. It welcomed her with a gentle hiss.

Tony smiled at her as they sat down, acknowledging her sense of disorientation, and mocking her a little for it. Amy peeled off her suède gloves and he saw that her fingers were white with cold. ‘Poor Amy! Where have I dragged you to?’ He took her hands and rubbed them in his own warm ones, and Amy was sorry when the circulation was restored to her fingers and he laid them gently back in her lap. She made herself stop looking at the way his fine, rather long hair fell over his ear, and turned her attention to the rest of the room.

Her first reaction was relief that she didn’t look too conspicuous. She had been right not to come in her dinner dress. Amy had dined alone with her father, and as soon as Gerald had left for his club Amy had gone upstairs again and exchanged her dress for a cashmere sweater and a tweed skirt. With a plain woollen coat, low-heeled shoes and a soft hat pulled down to cover her hair, she imagined she looked exactly like any of the girls in Tony’s office. If anything, she thought now, she was conspicuous for her ordinariness. A girl just in front of her was wearing her hair wound up in a brilliant green turban with a big fake emerald pinned to the front. Her eyes were shadowed in the same green as the turban. She was talking to another girl with a mass of black curly hair and big brass earrings that jangled as she shook her head. Her skirt was a tight tube of scarlet flounces and her legs, hooked casually over the chair in front of her, flashed stockings in the same colour. Another woman, grey-haired, in a raincoat and a rakish velvet beret, was smoking a man’s cigar. The men, much more numerous, had nothing in common from their appearance. One or two, in blue suits and stiff collars, might have been bank officials. Others were clearly working men, with red faces and flannel shirts. The rest were like Tony, somewhere between the two, with an occasional touch of flamboyance. Not a single person wore evening clothes, although it was well after nine o’clock.

Amy’s feet were beginning to thaw out, and her interest revived with them. She was looking around the room again when without ceremony a big man stood up and went to the table. He was young, Tony’s age or a little older. He had a full black beard that made his lips look very red, a big nose, and glittering dark eyes. He was wearing a red and black plaid shirt, with a red handkerchief tied at the throat.

‘Comrades,’ he said quietly. Silence fell immediately. ‘The meeting is called to order.’ He nodded at two or three other men, and they filed up to join him behind the table.

Tony nudged Amy. ‘Jacob Silverman,’ he whispered. His manner, and the attention given to him by his audience, told Amy that Jacob Silverman was someone to be reckoned with. He welcomed them all briefly to the meeting, greeted new members by name, and added that other guests were welcome too. As he looked along the rows his eyes fixed briefly on Amy, and she knew that Jake Silverman would miss nothing.

A patter of applause met the first speaker who stood up and began to talk, very fast and rather loudly. He had none of Silverman’s quiet, commanding fluency. Amy tried hard to concentrate, but her attention drifted away to the rest of the audience, and then to Tony beside her. He was frowning a little, and there was a sceptical twist to his mouth that indicated he didn’t think much of the speaker either. It was nice being here with him, Amy thought. The warmth of the room and the monotony of the speaker’s voice grew soporific, and she lost herself in comfortable dreams.

The second speaker was a blunt, brusque little man who launched himself into an analysis of trades union power bases. Amy’s interest quickened again, in spite of the happy reverie she had fallen into. She knew in theory that two or three extra shillings were important enough so that bargaining over them could go on for weeks, but she had never exactly thought what those shillings would mean every week to a man and his family. Much of the talk was beyond her, but it made her think for the first time about the right to work, its rewards, and the deprivation of those who had none. The memory of her own petulant behaviour on the night of Isabel’s wedding made her feel faintly uncomfortable.

The speaker moved on to talk about the power wielded by strikers, making Amy think back to her vague memories of the General Strike. Adeline had gone out in her silliest hat to serve soup to the strike-breakers. The sons of family friends had driven buses, and it had all been regarded as tremendously good fun. Tonight, surrounded by these intent faces, she saw it in a different light. Her feeling of discomfort deepened into shame, and she wriggled lower in her seat. Suddenly she was conscious of the diamond clip fastening the soft brim of her hat.

Before the last part of the meeting, Tony turned to grin at her. Amy saw that he was challenging her, and that the whole evening’s expedition was a challenge. He was more or less expecting her to be bored and uncomprehending. How would he judge her when he discovered that she wasn’t? Amy was aware that her perceptions were shifting slightly. She wanted Tony to approve of her, but she also wanted to know more about what she had heard tonight for its own sake.

Jake Silverman stood up again.

‘Thank you, Comrade Easterbrook,’ he said. ‘Now. I want to call for the meeting’s help in connection with the hunger march. The response from workers between South Wales and here has been excellent. The march will last twelve days, and we have been able to plan overnight stops in places where a school hall or something similar will be made available for the marchers to sleep in. The problem, ironically, arises when they reach London. Accommodation for men without money is harder to come by in this great city of ours. There will be several hundred men by the time the march reaches here, possibly a thousand or more. Even if every comrade here and in the movement offered his home, there would be barely enough room.’

‘Kingsway Hall?’ someone suggested.

‘Salvation Army hostels?’ another man said.

‘They deserve proper accommodation, and a reception after the petition has been presented,’ someone else shouted.

‘There’s time to raise the money,’ the girl in the turban called. ‘Let’s do them proud.’

Jake Silverman was beaming. He produced a hat and waved it. ‘Very well. We’ll begin here and now.’

‘There’s nothing Jake likes better,’ Tony whispered, ‘than orchestrating enthusiasm.’

The hat was passed along the rows and money clinked into it. When it reached the end of their row Amy fumbled in her crocodile-skin bag for her purse. There were two pounds in it. Never, Adeline said, leave yourself without money for a cab ride home. The hat reached her and she stuffed the notes into it.

‘Will you see me home?’ she asked Tony.

He winked at her. ‘Of course. It’s only a twopenny bus ride back to Bruton Street, after all.’

The meeting proceeded to heated discussions of where the marchers could be most comfortably and honourably accommodated, and how the money was to be raised to do it.

At last Jake Silverman waved his red and black plaid arms. ‘Thank you, all of you, very much. Our comrades in the South Wales Miners’ Federation deserve every effort. The meeting is closed now. Join us upstairs, if you can.’

At once, the crowd began to surge out of the room, which had grown uncomfortably hot. Amy had been engrossed and hadn’t noticed it, but now she pulled her hat off and shook out her hair. She saw the girl with the brass earrings looking at her.

Some people were clumping back down the stairs to the street door, but most of them were heading for the flat above. Tony and Amy were carried along with them.

Jake Silverman’s flat was a series of small, low rooms crowded with books, pamphlets and people. The jabber of talk hit them at the door. Hands were waving and gesticulating, voices were shouting each other down and clamouring to make a point before anyone else could refute it. Amy edged through the crowd in Tony’s wake and came to the kitchen. Jake Silverman was standing in the middle brandishing a wine bottle.

‘Come and get it,’ he shouted and a forest of empty glasses was thrust at him. He looked across at Tony. ‘Wield a corkscrew, Tony, will you?’

‘Jake, this is my friend Amy Lovell.’

Jake put down the bottle. ‘Pour it yourselves,’ he called out, and held out a hand to Amy. ‘Any friend of Tony’s is welcome here,’ he said simply, and took her hand in his large, warm one. Amy could almost believe that she felt the crackle as he touched her, he was so charged with energy. Jake’s arm enveloped her shoulders and he turned her to where the girl with the scarlet stockings and the earrings was frying sausages over a corner gas ring.

‘This is Kay Cooper.’ Jake kissed Kay enthusiastically on the mouth. ‘And Angel Mack.’ That was the turban girl. ‘This is Tony’s friend, Amy Lovell.’

Kay waved her sausage fork, and Angel said, ‘Hmm. Tony’s friend, eh? What did you think of the meeting?’

Amy glanced from one to the other. ‘Just that. It made me think.’

Suddenly, both the girls were smiling at her.

‘Have a sausage.’

‘And a glass of wine. Guaranteed to turn your tongue jet black.’

‘Thank you. I will.’ Armed with food and drink, Tony took Amy away into the throng. He introduced her to everyone in sight.

‘Wait!’ she protested. ‘I’ll never remember who everyone is.’

‘You wanted to meet different people,’ he reminded her. ‘What do you think so far? Changed your social perceptions, has it?’

He was teasing her again, but Amy looked straight back at him.

‘Do you know, I think it has, a little.’

She was enjoying the smoky, crowded rooms and the lively babble of talk more than the grandest society party she had ever been to. She thought that she had never met such opinionated people in her life. Or no, that wasn’t quite true. Peter Jaspert was opinionated too, but his opinions stood at the opposite pole from those expressed here. She had never found Peter Jaspert particularly congenial, yet she felt perfectly at home here tonight.

Was this, then, where her sympathies lay? For some reason the idea excited her. By listening very carefully to the talk, and by putting it together with what she already knew from newspaper reports, Amy understood that the hunger marchers were miners from the Rhondda, out of work now, who were marching on London to deliver a petition at Downing Street. Sixty per cent of men were out of work in the valleys.

Amy stared at Kay, whose black curls shook with her passionate recital.

‘This Depression can only get worse. We’re cushioned from it here, you and me and all the rest of us, by our education and because we live in prosperous London. But out there, in the mines and the rest of industry, people are suffering every day.’

Amy thought, who could be more cushioned than me? Bethan came from the valleys, but she had never so much as mentioned these terrible things. How much more don’t I know about? How much more have I never thought about, or bothered to enquire about?

‘Hello again.’ It was Angel Mack, with a jug of wine. ‘More of this stuff? Or there’s beer, if you’d rather. No cocktails or champagne, I’m afraid.’

Was it really so transparently obvious where she came from, then? Amy wondered.

‘Wine, thank you,’ Amy said firmly.

‘I’ve never been to a party like this before,’ she added. ‘Where everyone seems to have so much to say to everyone else.’

Angel laughed. ‘Oh yes, there’s always plenty of talk. That’s half the trouble with armchair comrades like us. Too busy talking about what’ll happen when the revolution comes to actually do anything about making it happen.’

‘Can it happen without you?’

‘Most definitely,’ Angel said. ‘And what about you? Are you on our side?’

Amy thought suddenly of Chance and the cedar tree shading the cool grass, and of the hunger marchers sleeping in village halls on their endless walk to London. And then of Peter Jaspert and his fluent talk of trade tariffs.

‘I’m not on the other side,’ Amy said at last. ‘Although I’ve only just discovered that.’ At once, she felt that she was a traitor to everything she knew. Quickly, to cover up her own uncertainty, she asked, ‘Does Tony Hardy come here a lot?’

Angel glanced curiously at her. ‘Tony comes and goes. Got his own fish to fry, as they say. As far as all this goes, he’s less committed than some but his heart’s in the right place. Does that tell you what you want to know?’

Amy wasn’t sure what she wanted to know.

‘What about Jake Silverman?’

‘Yes, everyone always wants to know about Jake. He’s probably much more like you than you would think. His father and the rest of his family are in the garment trade, rather prosperously so. Jake turned his back on all that when he was eighteen. I think he’d describe himself as a full-time political activist now. He supports himself by working in the Left Bookshop downstairs, and writing the odd article for the quarterlies. He lives here with Kay.’

‘Kay’s his wife?’

‘No,’ Angel said coolly, ‘not his wife. Kay doesn’t believe in marriage.’

Amy began to laugh, so that Angel stared at her even harder. She was thinking of Johnny Guild and his friends, and Peter and Isabel in St Margaret’s, Westminster.

‘I don’t think I do, either,’ Amy said.

‘I imagine not, if you’re going about with Tony Hardy. Here he comes now, looking for you.’

In the next room, someone was piling records on to the ancient gramophone. The music was very loud and very crackly, and there was hardly room to move, let alone to dance. Tony bowed gravely and held out his arms.

At once Amy lost track of the evening’s progress. She had the impression that the party was in full and noisy swing, and that a telephone had been ringing insistently somewhere. She was startled when Jake crossed the room and turned the music off.

‘Sorry, everyone.’ Jake grinned at them. ‘Complaints department. Either the row stops or the police arrive.’

Tony found Amy’s coat for her, and the hat that had been rolled up and stuffed in one of the pockets.

‘Good night,’ Jake boomed from the top of the stairs. ‘See you next time, Tony. And you, Amy Lovell, whoever you are.’

Amy smiled to herself. She wanted to come again. She definitely wanted to come again, and not just because of Tony Hardy.

Out in the darkness she began to walk briskly the way they had come, back towards the bus stop. Then she realized that Tony was still standing at the kerb, and that he was laughing at her.

‘D’you imagine that we’re going to catch a bus at one in the morning? This way. We’ll have to look for a cab towards Oxford Street.’

‘You’ll have to pay,’ Amy reminded him. ‘I put my taxi money in the hunger hat.’

‘I think I can manage. You may do it next time.’

They found a cab, and Tony handed her into it. In the familiar stuffy interior Amy leaned back in her seat. The wine she had drunk and the relaxed atmosphere between them made her ask, without thinking very hard, ‘Angel Mack said something odd. I told her I didn’t think I believed in marriage, and she said something like “I’m not surprised, if you’re going about with Tony Hardy.” What did she mean?’

Amy thought she saw Tony’s head jerk round, silhouetted against the street lights rolling past outside. But then he was so still that she thought she had imagined it.

‘I’ve no idea,’ he said smoothly. ‘Possibly pique because I’ve never made a play for her myself. Practically everyone else has. But I shouldn’t pay too much attention to what Angel says. She works very hard at being modern and hardboiled, and a good deal of it is just for effect.’

‘I liked her,’ Amy said.

‘I like her too. But it doesn’t mean I have to trust her, or believe what she says.’

The silence that followed was awkward, and Amy wished fervently that she had kept Angel’s remark to herself. In the end Tony said, with his old lightness, ‘My views on marriage are the same as yours. So we don’t need to mention it again, do we?’

‘No. Why should we?’

But neither of them could find anything else to say, and the cab rumbled to a stop in Bruton Street. Tony paid the driver, and they got out and watched it rattle away again.

‘Don’t you need him to take you home?’ Amy asked. ‘I don’t even know where you live,’ she added sadly.

‘Not far from Appleyard Street. I’ll walk back. I like walking at night. It’s my thinking time.’

In the shadow of the front doors, Amy fumbled in her handbag.

‘Don’t you have to ring to be let in?’

‘Not after midnight. I agreed it with Mother. It isn’t fair to Glass and the footmen. I’ve got my own key. Father doesn’t know.’

Tony put the key in the lock for her, and the door swung open. He didn’t even glance inside at the cavernous hallway.

‘You do have quite a lot of freedom, you know. You shouldn’t complain.’

‘I’m not, any more. Good night, Tony. Thank you for this evening.’

Amy turned to him, and Tony saw the curve of her cheek, and the shadow of her eyelashes under her hat brim. He kissed her, very quickly, just brushing the corner of her mouth with his own.

‘Good night,’ he answered.

Amy felt a faint, vanishing flicker of disappointment. But what else could she expect from him here in the front doorway?

‘Next time I take you out,’ he added, ‘we’ll do something more orthodox. Dinner, perhaps?’

‘Yes, please.’

He was turning away when Amy called after him.

‘Tony? Are you a Communist?’

He chuckled. ‘There are a number of shades of opinion to the left of Peter Jaspert, you know. No, I’m not a Party member. I belong to the ILP. The Independent Labour Party. Good night, Amy Lovell.’

Amy closed the big door quietly behind her, and made sure that the bolts were secure. Then she walked slowly up the great curve of staircase. On the first floor, where in the daytime a high glass dome brought light spilling down into the well of the house, she stopped under a line of portraits. The King’s Defenders, back over the centuries. Would Gerald, she wondered, take up the ceremonial sword to defend his Sovereign against Jake Silverman, and Kay and Angel and even Tony Hardy, when their revolution came? And on which side of the barricades would Amy Lovell be standing?

‘I’ve no idea,’ she said aloud to the row of impassive faces. ‘I’ve no idea at all. I should start thinking about it, shouldn’t I?’

Upstairs, Amy saw that the light was still on in the old night nursery. Bethan was sitting in an armchair beside the fire, knitting. She pursed her lips when Amy came in.

‘It’s very late, lamb. I was beginning to worry.’

Amy knelt down beside her and put her head on Bethan’s shoulder. Bethan hugged her as she used to do when Amy was little.

‘Don’t worry about me so much. Bethan … I wanted to ask you something.’ The thought of the Rhondda, and the things that Kay Cooper had told her about the way people were living there, was vivid in her mind.

‘What’s that, then?’ Bethan was rolling up her knitting. Usually Bethan looked to Amy exactly as she had done for fifteen years, ever since she had come to Chance as a sixteen-year-old nurserymaid. She was plumper now, but her round, plain face was as cheerful as it had always been, and she moved with the same quick energy. But tonight Amy saw that her eyes were heavy and dark, and her shoulders sagged. It was almost two in the morning, and Bethan was exhausted with waiting up for her. She realized that she had never glimpsed that tiredness before, and she frowned at the recognition of her own selfishness.

‘It doesn’t matter tonight,’ Amy said quickly. ‘You go to bed now. I don’t need anything. Bethan?’ The maid stopped in the doorway. ‘Thank you for looking after us all.’

‘Go on with you now.’

Nick Penry reached up for the old khaki kitbag that had been stowed away on top of the wardrobe. He shook it out, and began carelessly stuffing a few pieces of clothing into it.

Mari had been watching in silence, her chapped hands gripping the brass bed-rail, but now she said, ‘Let me do that. You’ll mix everything up.’

Silently he handed the bag to her. Mari refolded the two shirts and the darned pullover and socks. Her eyes were blurred with tears and she shook her head angrily to clear them. Nick sat down on the edge of the bed, staring at the faded linoleum with his hands hanging loosely between his knees.

They had been arguing again.

They had always argued, right from the beginning, but they had always been able to make it up again, fiercely or gently, in bed.

But they couldn’t do that now, or almost never. Mari had changed from the rosy-cheeked provocative girl she had been when she married into a white, frightened woman. She was afraid of anything worse happening to them, afraid of anything that might disturb the fragile equilibrium they lived by. She was afraid of another handicapped baby. She was afraid for Dickon, now and in the future when the two of them wouldn’t be here to care for him any longer. She was afraid of Nick turning on the Means Test man, who came to peer insultingly at their back kitchen in search of any unexplained luxuries that might point to money coming in beyond the bare minimum they existed on. If there was any hint that they earned money elsewhere, their tiny unemployment benefit would be cut off. She was afraid of any of them falling ill, because there was nothing spare to pay for that. And she was newly afraid of Nick’s convictions, the flaring beliefs that made him revile the soft options, the ‘company unionism’ that was threatening to spread in the hard times, and despise the owners and the government for their agreement that increased the miners’ hours to eight a day underground again, instead of seven and a half. She was afraid that Nick would never get a job again. He had stepped too far out of line. His name was known to the owners and their agents.

And all her fear seemed to trigger off the very opposite in Nick, as if he had to stand firm for both of them. He clung harder to what he believed in, to the socialist ideals that earned the nickname ‘Little Moscow’ for their corner of the bleak, depopulated valleys. It made him angrier, and more determined, and somehow less knowable. It didn’t make him any easier to love. And now he was setting off to march to London, and she was afraid of being without him.

With a sob, she dropped the bag and went to sit beside him. He put his arm around her, warm and protective.

‘Have you got to go?’

‘You know I do. If I don’t, why should anyone else bother? It’s something we can do to make people across the country look at us, and think about us. If we can just get public opinion with us, Mari. The Miners’ executive are meeting MacDonald again, to try to win him over, make him understood what we want, and why. He’s not to be trusted, but Henderson is on our side. The march might make the difference.’

Mari’s face was wet with tears. She hated the words. They were too familiar, too impersonal.

‘Can’t you let the others go for once? Stay here with Dickon and me. We need you more than they do.’

Gently Nick let her go. ‘You know I can’t do that. It’ll only be two weeks. I’ll get a ride back somehow.’

He took up a blanket wrapped in a gabardine cape that had belonged to his father. He strapped it beneath the bag, then swung the bag on to his back. It hung there, tellingly almost empty.

‘Best to be travelling light,’ Nick said. ‘It’s time to be going, love.’

They left the room in silence. It was very early, hardly light yet, and Dickon was still asleep in the other bedroom, no more than a cupboard at the stairhead. Nick stooped in the doorway and knelt by the low bed to kiss him. When the child was asleep he looked like any other little boy, the liveliness briefly rubbed out of his face by oblivion. Nick looked at him for a long moment, hopelessly wishing.

‘You’d better have something before you go,’ Mari said flatly.

She went down to the icy kitchen and stirred the fire under its blanket of coal dust. With a horseshoe of solidly twisted newspaper she coaxed up a brief blaze and set the kettle on it. Then she brought the heel of a loaf out of the pantry and sliced it, spreading it carefully with thick dripping out of a blue-glazed bowl.

‘I don’t need that,’ Nick said. ‘You and the boy have it.’

‘You’ve left us more than enough money,’ Mari said.

That was true. Nick was setting out to walk to London with hardly more than a shilling in his pocket. He sat down in the armchair to pull his boots on, glancing first at the oval patches worn almost through, and the split already gaping between the sole and the upper.

‘You could have done with new boots,’ Mari said.

He smiled at her suddenly. ‘So could every man setting out this morning, I dare say.’

Mari handed him his tea, in the precious china mug that he had bought for her long ago at Barry Island. The tea was sweetened with a hoarded tin of condensed milk. Dickon could finish the rest. He loved licking the thick yellow stuff off a spoon.

Nick drank gratefully, looking at her over the rim of the mug. ‘Remember that day?’ he asked, and she nodded. It had been their day together, and the day of the explosion too. There was no happiness without an equal or deeper seam of sadness, Mari thought bitterly. Even if he were to walk twice round the world, Nick couldn’t change that.

He was anxious to be off now, like a small boy before an adventure. He bit impatiently into one piece of bread and dripping and wrapped up the other to go into his bag.

‘Here,’ Mari said. From a drawer she produced two flat bars of chocolate and slipped them into the bag too. She had put by the money for them secretly, buying less food for the week and doing without when Nick was out of the house. Nick didn’t try to protest. He understood the gesture and the price of it. He smiled crookedly instead, then put his arms round her and kissed her.

‘I’ll eat a square a day, and think of you,’ he promised. She felt light in his arms, birdlike, and small for the weight of responsibility that he felt towards her and Dickon, dependent on him. Nick suddenly thought of saying that he wouldn’t go after all, that he would stay because she wanted him to. But the men were waiting for him at the bottom of the hill. He had to go. He had to act on what be believed in, otherwise how could he justify the belief?

‘I won’t come down with you,’ she whispered. ‘Because of Dickon.’

Nick kissed her again and they shivered, held against one another. Then he lifted the bag and the blanket bumped awkwardly.

‘Two weeks,’ he promised, and walked out into the dark, dripping entry. Someone had scratched WORK, NOT WALKS on the bricks.

Mari listened to his steps receding into silence, and then stared round the kitchen at his empty mug, and the imprint of him in the armchair where he had bent to lace his worn boots.

It was so cheerless without him that she was almost crying again. When he was here they quarrelled, repetitively and wearyingly, and when he was gone she couldn’t bear it.

Upstairs Dickon began calling her. ‘Mam. Maa-am.’ He had only a few proper words. The others that he used most were ‘Dad’ and ‘More’. Even Dickon was beginning to understand that there usually wasn’t any more, but his endless repetition of it was one of the day’s painful refrains. Mari sighed.

‘I’m coming, love,’ she called up to him.

Nick squared his shoulders beneath the straps and set off down the hill. The wet slate roofs of the houses shone like mirrors, and smoke from the chimneys already hung like greasy bunting over them. The air smelt of coal as it always did, gritty and rough at the top of his lungs, cut through with the rival scents of damp and, very faintly, of frying food. The streets were deserted. Those who had work were already there, and it was too early yet for the knots of aimless men to gather and talk on the street corners.

The arranged meeting point for the Nantlas marchers was the old pit gates. It had never reopened after the explosion, and the heavy padlocks and chains on the gates were rusted over.

As Nick came over the humped iron bridge spanning the railway and the river, he saw that most of the twenty-odd marchers from the village were already there, waiting for him.

Two or three of them waved cheerfully at him, and called out greetings.

‘Feeling in good leg are you, Nick boy?’

‘Pack up your troubles in your old kitbag …’ someone else sang in a fine, resonant tenor, and there was a ripple of ironic laughter.

Nick was counting the heads. Two more men joined them, making the full complement. He took a deep breath. It was the setting-off point at last. There had been weeks of planning, with the Fed at first wary of then, finally, co-operative with the National Unemployed Workers Movement and with the idealistic young men of Appleyard Street, London. Letters of encouragement had come from Jake Silverman, and funds had been sent by the Communist Party of Great Britain. Jake Silverman had even followed his letters to the Rhondda, and Nick had listened to him talking about the coming of the glorious revolution to a roomful of unemployed miners.

His colleagues on the Federation executive recognized that the hunger marches were as good a way as any of drawing public attention to the mass of unemployed. But Nick himself was more interested in marching the one hundred and fifty miles straight to London and confronting the Prime Minister with the Federation’s demands. He had volunteered himself as a march organizer unhesitatingly, with that goal in mind. He had been proud of the idea that he would be part of the deputation of miners that would march on from Trafalgar Square to Downing Street. And yet, now that the moment had come, he felt the wrench of leaving Mari and Dickon. The crowd of men was growing restive. They jostled one another and called out their impatience.

Nick lifted up his arms to quieten them again.

‘That’s it, lads. Shall we make a start? Don’t want to keep them waiting down the valley, do we?’

They shuffled awkwardly into a column. Half of the men had fought in the War, and remembered the discipline of marches. The rest lined up behind them, grinning in embarrassment. There was a ragged cheer of encouragement from the wives, children and old men who had gathered against the railings to watch them go.

‘Good luck, boys. You tell ‘em, up in London.’

Amidst the renewed cheers, the uncertain column began to wind away along the valley road. At the back of the line two boys were carrying a roll of canvas. They looked at the waving hands, and the erect shoulders in front of them, and then glanced at each other. At once they dropped the canvas roll and unwrapped it. Inside was a green silk banner. It was gaudy with gold threads and the scarlet of a huge dragon, its tail curling back over its head. Nantlas, Rhondda was embroidered on it in big gold letters, and the initials SWMF. They slotted the supporting poles quickly together and hoisted the banner between them. The wind tugged at the gold fringes and the silk bellied out, making a riveting splash of colour amongst the drab greys.

It was like a signal. From windows and doors up the terraces heads appeared and the cheering was carried up the hillside in thin, insistent waves. Nick glanced back from the head of the line and saw the banner glaring bravely behind him. The march, setting out in hunger and despair, was suddenly festive, like the Galas of the old days. He lengthened his stride and the marchers swung along behind him in the pride of the moment.

The singer was next to him. He looked back too, smiling, and then began to sing again.

Hello, Piccadilly, Hello, Leicester Square,

It’s a long, long road up from the valleys,

But we’ll march, right there.

Nick joined in, and the song was taken up all along the line until they were singing and marching and the waving and cheering followed them all along the road until the corner took them round the fold of the hillside and out of sight.

The road ran on in front of them, flanking the railway line with its empty, rust-red trucks shunted into deserted sidings. The slag mountains towered on either side of them, and the black scars of the workings bit into the green hillsides. No one glanced at the scenery. Strung out down the valley were more towns and villages like Nantlas. More men would join them from all these places, and they would march on to meet the miners who had come down from Rhondda Fawr, and the others from across the entire stricken coalfield. At Newport, when they were all together, they would turn on to the London road.

And they would walk and walk until they reached Downing Street. It was a long way.

Around him, Nick heard the singing dying away as one voice after another was silenced by the road stretching ahead. They were solemn now, and the sudden burst of high spirits was over. The two boys in the rear let the banner drop again and wrapped it in its protective canvas before running to catch up once more.

‘We’re on our way, then,’ Nick said quietly.

‘May it bring us something more than blistered feet,’ the singer said beside him, with an absence of expectation that was ominous to Nick.

Tony was as good as his promise. He took Amy out to dinner in Soho, to a cheerful restaurant where Italian waiters with striped aprons wriggled between the close-packed tables, and the owner came out with his magnificent moustaches to sit at the tables of the most favoured customers. Amy ate the highly flavoured food from the thick white plates with clear enjoyment, and drank quantities of Chianti from bottles wrapped in a raffia shell.

A trio of violinists in red shirts came and played insistently between the tables, and Tony and Amy winced and laughed at each other before Amy put a shilling into their held-out plate to make them go a little further away.

‘I like this place,’ she told him, and Tony smiled.

‘I like taking you out. You have the knack of enjoying uncomplicated things. Rather unusual for a girl like you, I should think. I had imagined it would be hopeless if I didn’t know where to buy orchid corsages or belong to exclusive clubs.’

‘Does that mean you’ll go on doing it?’ she asked him. ‘I’d like to go to Appleyard Street again.’

Tony looked at her. ‘I don’t know,’ he said with deliberate vagueness. He had been evasive when she had mentioned Appleyard Street before.

‘When?’ she pressed him, and he sighed.

‘Look, Amy. Appleyard Street isn’t really a suitable place for you. I took you as a once-off expedition for interest’s sake. See how the other half, and all that. If I’d thought a bit harder, I wouldn’t have done it at all.’

‘Why can’t I go there?’

‘Peers’ daughters with connections like yours don’t generally mix with Communist sympathizers. It would make a nice little item for some newsman. Think of it from your father’s point of view. Or your brother-in-law’s.’

Peter Jaspert. Isabel and he would be back in two weeks’ time. Amy had begun to admit to herself that she was hurt by the stilted quality of the letters and cards from her sister. She told herself that of course she wasn’t expecting detailed descriptions of married life, but she still felt that the closeness that had always existed between them was being denied by the pages of guidebook enthusiasm for Tuscan hillsides or Michelangelos.

The truth was that she was missing Isabel badly. If she saw more of Richard, Amy thought with a touch of sadness, perhaps she wouldn’t feel it so much. But even when Richard was home from Eton, although he was as amusing and affectionate as always when they did meet, he was increasingly busy with his own mysterious affairs and he seemed to have no time to spare for Amy. ‘Haven’t you got a dozen Guards officers to take you dancing?’ he would grin at her.

When she protested that she didn’t care for officers he would stare at her, mock-surprised.

‘Don’t you?’

She sighed now and turned her attention back to Tony and the question of Appleyard Street. ‘Yes. I see that you can’t be responsible for taking me there. Sorry. It’s odd, you know. I felt … comfortable, there.’

‘You made an impression. Angel Mack was asking about you the other day. I didn’t tell her anything, of course. Never mind, Amy.’ Seeing her face, Tony reached out and covered her hand with his own. ‘We’ll go somewhere else. Poetry and music at the Wigmore Hall next week? One of my poets is reciting his work. Very avant-garde, I promise you.’

‘Can I come with you to the hunger march?’ she persisted.

‘No. For different reasons, but definitely not. It might not be safe, for one thing. What about the Wigmore Hall?’

Amy submitted to the diversion. She could perfectly well see the hunger marchers alone, after all.

‘All right,’ she grinned at him. ‘Avant-garde verse it shall be.’

His hand rested lightly over hers. Amy liked him touching her. It was odd that she disliked what other men tried to do to her, yet she definitely wanted Tony to kiss her and he never even tried to. It wasn’t because of who she was, Amy was sure of that. They were friends, on a clear footing that had nothing to do with social position.

She looked at him now across the table. Tony leaned back in his chair and the sputtering candlelight made dark shadows under his cheekbones. Amy thought that he looked intriguing. Not handsome, but romantic, and clever, and enigmatic.

She was suddenly breathless, and she opened her mouth to breathe more easily. Tony looked back at her, as if he was waiting for her to say something.

Daringly, she tried out the words in her head. Tony, I love you. Did you know? At once she felt her cheeks redden. She turned her hand so that her fingers laced with Tony’s and pressed them.

He returned the pressure lightly and then laid her hand gently back on the cloth. She felt scattered breadcrumbs rough under her wrist.

‘Time to go,’ Tony said.

Outside the restaurant the night air was cool.

With his hand at her elbow Tony steered her to the kerb and into a cab. They sat side by side in the darkness watching the lights flick past. Amy’s face was turned away and Tony saw the disappointed hunch of her shoulders.

‘What can I do?’ he asked, wishing there was something.

‘Kiss me,’ Amy answered without hesitation.

‘Oh, Amy.’ There was a faint breath of exasperation in his voice and something worse, amusement. But he leant forward and touched her mouth with his own.

I didn’t mean like that, Amy thought miserably.

She looked away again, out into the street. At the beginning she had been interested in Tony for the doors that he promised to open. But now he attracted her in a different way that made her feel hot, and awkward, and unsure of herself. He was certainly fending her off. The realization embarrassed her, and she felt her face grow even hotter.

Tony said, ‘You aren’t very happy, are you? What is it?’

Amy shrugged. She couldn’t, in her embarrassment, recite her loneliness for Isabel and Richard and her feeling of uselessness to the world.

‘I told you at the wedding,’ she said, as lightly as she could. ‘I feel a little lost. But I should solve that for myself. Don’t you agree?’

The cab was turning in at the end of Bruton Street. Amy looked and saw the warmly lit windows of her home. Adeline had been giving a dinner party tonight, but by now they would all have moved on to the Embassy Club.

‘I hope you will find some way of being happy,’ Tony said, with odd formality.

The cab drew up. The driver sat stolidly behind his glass panel, collar up and cap pulled well down over his ears.

‘Isabel will be back in a day or so, won’t she?’

‘Yes,’ Amy answered. ‘Isabel will be back.’

‘Until next week, then. At the Wigmore Hall.’

They said their good nights, and Amy went up the steps and into the house alone.

Isabel’s new home in Ebury Street looked as clean and shiny as if it had just been unwrapped, Amy thought. The maid showed her into Isabel’s drawing room on the first floor. It was full of pretty pale chintzes and bowls of fresh flowers. There were tranquil watercolours on the blue walls, and a tidy little fire in the polished grate. Silver-framed pictures of Peter’s family and of herself and Isabel as children stood on the grand piano at one end of the room.

The door opened and there was Isabel. Amy ran to her.

‘Oh, Bel, I’ve missed you so much.’ The girls hugged each other, smiling wordlessly.

Then Amy stood back, holding her sister at arm’s length. Isabel was wearing a pale blue dress that matched her room, and her hair waved flatteringly over her ears and was caught up at the back of her head. She looked more elegant than ever, but there were faint, blue shadows under her eyes.

‘Bad journey?’ Amy asked sympathetically.

‘Oh, the night sleeper isn’t so bad. But we were glad to be home.’

‘Where’s Peter?’

‘He went to his office for a couple of hours. I think he might be back now. He’s probably dressing. Lucky the House is in recess, or he’d have dashed off there too. He was getting very restless, the last few days.’

Amy sat down on one of the sofas near the fire, and Isabel settled herself opposite.

‘Well?’ Amy asked. ‘How was it?’

‘Would you like a drink?’ Isabel reached out for the bell. The maid came in with the tray, and the sight of Isabel enjoying her hostess role made Amy feel more cheerful for a moment or two.

When they were alone again she said, ‘Tell me about it. You’ve been away for six weeks.’

‘Didn’t I, in my letters?’

‘Not really. I could have got exactly the same news from the Guide Michelin. Are you happy, Bel?’

Surprisingly, Isabel laughed and the shadows disappeared. ‘Oh, I’ve missed you too. Amy the insistent. Yes, darling, of course I’m happy.’

‘Is it what you expected?’

‘Rather early to say, after only six weeks. And not very typical wedded weeks, either. It’s more than I expected, I think.’ Isabel looked down at her wrist, turning her bracelet so that the stones caught the light. ‘And it takes a little getting used to, you know. You’ll find out for yourself, when the time comes.’

‘I expect so,’ Amy said noncommittally. She was relieved, in a sense, that Isabel wasn’t making wild claims of perfect happiness. Marriage would take some getting used to. Isabel looked tired, and she seemed a little withdrawn, but she appeared to be reacting with all her old calm, common sense. Perhaps the fears that her letters had aroused in Amy were unfounded, after all. Isabel was moving gracefully around the drawing room now, using the refilling of their glasses as a pretext for adjusting an ornament and straightening a cushion. Suddenly she looked every inch the proud new wife, and Amy smiled.

‘Not a lot has happened to me. I’ve been out two or three times with Tony Hardy.’

‘Mmm? I saw him briefly at the wedding. I didn’t know he was a friend of yours.’

‘I think he is, now. He took me to a political meeting because I was complaining that I never met anyone different. Almost everyone was a Communist.’

‘Amy, for God’s sake don’t say anything about that to Peter. He thinks they should all be clapped into prison.’

They looked at each other apprehensively and then they started to laugh, just as they had always been able to do.

Peter came in. His hair was brushed flat and sleek and he looked even healthier than he usually did, if that was possible.

‘Oh dear,’ he said genially, ‘the terrible twins. Giggling, just like always. How are you, Amy m’dear?’

‘In the pink, thank you Peter.’

There was the faintest of suppressed snorts from Isabel.

‘I really don’t understand you two, you know,’ Peter said. He poured himself a whisky in a crystal tumbler and splashed soda into it from a siphon on the tray. He crossed the room to where Isabel was sitting and stood behind her sofa, one hand resting on her shoulder. Amy saw her sister glance up at her husband. It occurred to her that there was a kind of wary anxiety in the look.

Whatever there was, Peter didn’t see it.

‘Have you had a good day, darling?’ Isabel asked him. His hand moved, lightly, to stroke her neck.

‘An excellent day.’

They faced Amy now, both smiling, and she thought how handsome they looked. Mr and Mrs Jaspert, comfortably at home.

Amy felt a frown gathering behind her eyes with the sense, still persistent, that everything was not quite right, for all the external harmony. But Isabel went on smiling and Peter’s hand tightened affectionately on her shoulder before he moved away again.

They were extolling the beauties of Tuscany, reminding one another of sights and improving on one another’s descriptions, when the maid appeared to show in the other guests. Two couples came into the room, exclaiming conventionally at its prettiness. There was another Tory MP, senior to Peter, and his ambitious wife, and a sharp-eyed City man with whom Peter went into a huddle at one end of the room while his wife talked about horses at the other.

A moment or two later Amy’s partner for the evening arrived.

She had been vaguely expecting someone in the Johnny Guild mould and the blond young man who shook her hand surprised her a little. He looked hardly older than herself, twenty or perhaps twenty-one. He had a gentle, unassuming manner and Amy could see that he was shy in Peter Jaspert’s house. But when, at length, his eyes did meet hers his blue, direct glance seemed at odds with the rest of him.

‘Amy, may I introduce Charles Carew? Charles, this is Miss Lovell, Isabel’s sister.’

They found themselves sitting together on the sofa, isolated by the conversations on either side of them. Glancing up, Amy saw Isabel talking animatedly to one of the wives about the arrangement of her drawing room. She looked proud and happy, and Amy felt her anxiety dissolving. Following her gaze Charles Carew said quietly, ‘It must be strange, finding oneself married.’

His perception startled her and she asked, absurdly, ‘So you aren’t married, Mr Carew?’

He laughed, and then tried to smother the sound. For a moment he was so like one of the ‘suitable’ boys who had been invited as dancing partners to Miss Abbott’s school that Amy looked down, half-expecting to see Charles Carew’s knobby, adolescent wrists protruding from his shirt cuffs in just the way that theirs had done. But his cuffs were long enough to hide his wrists. She saw that his hands were well scrubbed with long, square-ended fingers.

‘No,’ he said, his amusement under control. ‘I’m a doctor.’

He must be older than he looks, then, Amy thought.

‘I’m almost entirely dependent on my father. Surgery is a long training. A wife and family’s a long way in the future. If it happens at all, that is.’

They found themselves smiling at each other.

‘I think I feel the same,’ Amy confided.

When they went down to dinner, Charles took Amy’s arm politely, with old-fashioned manners.

The dining room was filled with more flowers. Isabel must have spent the whole day arranging them. The table was a polished oval reflecting the candlelight and the pink, white and gold of Isabel’s wedding china, and the faces around it looked pleased and relaxed. Isabel herself was beaming with pleasure at the success of her arrangements.

Amy felt herself relaxing too, with the laughter and talk and Peter’s elegant claret. Suddenly she was enjoying being in Isabel’s house, amongst her own generation. It was quite different from being at Bruton Street, or Chance, or one of the formal dinners before a dance. And because of his seeming youth, and his shyness, and the memories that he’d stirred in her, Charles Carew seemed more like a childhood ally than a dinner partner.

Amy looked from Isabel at one end of the table to Peter at the other. Perhaps this was what marriage was. Being in your own house, with your own friends. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising at all that Isabel looked strained after six weeks’ travelling. Being at home would make all the difference.

If I marry, will it be like this? Amy asked herself. She tried to imagine Tony Hardy at the other end of the polished table, but the picture eluded her. Chianti and sardines at Appleyard Street were the things that went with Tony. The thought of him made her smile.

‘Will you share the joke with me?’ Charles Carew asked her softly. He had been watching her, she realized.

‘I’m sorry, that was rude of me. I was just thinking of a friend of mine and trying to imagine him here.’

‘And could you?’

‘Not really.’ The idea was irresistibly funny, but Amy suppressed it because it seemed inappropriate to be talking about Tony, however obliquely, to this shy, polite boy. To deflect him, she asked, ‘Are you an old friend of Peter’s?’

‘My father was in India with his, years ago. The Jasperts came home when Peter’s grandfather died whereas we stayed, but the families have kept in touch. Otherwise my world doesn’t exactly touch on Peter’s.’

‘What is your world?’

‘Medicine,’ Charles said, as if he was surprised at her need to ask. ‘Once I’m qualified as a surgeon I’m going straight back to India. I can be useful there, you see. There’s a lot to be done.’ The mild expression had vanished.

‘I envy you,’ Amy said simply, and once again she was aware of Charles Carew’s appraising, direct gaze.

She had to turn away, then. On her other side the MP, Archer Cole, was asking her something.

It wasn’t until the end of the evening that Amy and Charles spoke directly to each other again. Charles was the first to leave, and he came across the room to say good night to her. They exchanged good wishes and then, thinking of her vacant days, on impulse Amy asked him, ‘Would you be free to come and have tea with me at Bruton Street one day?’

She was still thinking of him as a family friend, and also perhaps imagining that he would fill in, in a brotherly way, some of the emptiness that Richard’s elusiveness created.

Charles thought for a moment. Then he said, ‘I’d like to, very much, but I don’t think I can. I’m doing my theatre practice in the afternoons, you see. I have surgery lectures all morning, and at night there’s cramming to do. I don’t have any free time, really.’

‘Never mind,’ Amy said cheerfully. ‘I’m sure we’ll bump into each other again.’

They shook hands. Peter was waiting, and Charles followed him out of the room and the door closed behind them.

Amy didn’t think about him again.

Amy was the last to leave. She had stayed behind after the others had gone to have a nightcap with Peter and Isabel.

‘I did enjoy myself,’ she told them, stretching out on the sofa with a sigh of pleasure. They beamed their satisfaction back at her. Peter took Isabel’s hand and held it, and Isabel murmured, ‘I thought it went rather well, too. I must tell Cook how pleased we were.’

The fire had sunk to a red glow, warming their faces and making the silver picture frames reflect back a coppery light.

Isabel let her head rest against Peter’s shoulder. Her eyes were closed and Amy couldn’t guess what she was thinking, but her face was smooth.

It’s all right, Amy thought.

She wanted to slip away and let the maid see her out, but they jumped up when she stood up to go, and insisted on coming downstairs with her.

At the street door Peter hailed a taxi for her.

‘I hope there will be hundreds more Ebury Street evenings like this one,’ Amy said.

‘Of course there will,’ Peter answered, and Isabel echoed him. ‘Of course there will.’

As the cab pulled away Amy looked back at them. They stood side by side framed by the light that spilled out of their front door and down the steps. They lifted their hands and waved to her, in unison.

There was a wonderful, tantalizing smell filling the dusty hall.

The men came filing in, too tired to joke any longer or even to talk, and dropped their bundles against the walls without looking at them. But the smell drew them to cluster round the open door at the end of the hall.

‘This way, lads. That’s right.’ It was the catering contingent who had gone on ahead of the marchers from stop to stop, and had been waiting for them with hot food at the end of every day. Silverman and his friends on the Organizing Council had done well, Nick thought. The soup was being ladled out of big pans into a medley of cups and bowls. Nick was ravenous, but he waited until he had seen all his Nantlas contingent into the line before joining the end of it himself with the other march leaders.

It was the last night.

They had reached the outskirts of London, where new factories were springing up along the Great West Road and rows of neat, suburban houses in their square gardens stretched to the north and south of them. On every street corner here there was a little grocer’s shop or a tobacconist’s, windows and walls bright with coloured signs. The long column of dirty, exhausted men had tramped silently past the homeward-bound workers, men coming out of the shops with the evening newspaper under their arm and packets of cigarettes in their pockets, and women in bright, spring-like clothes carrying baskets of food.

There had been cheering supporters lining the route, more tonight than on any of the others because the London Workers had turned out to greet them. But in the tranquil streets behind them the ordinary people going about their business had stared in surprise. London looked prosperous, different from any of the other places they had been through. Nantlas with its empty shops, grey streets and hollow-faced men and women, might have been on another continent. Another world, even.

The soup queue in the parish hall inched slowly forward. All around, men were sitting on wooden chairs, intent on their steaming bowls. When he reached the table at last one of the catering volunteers filled Nick’s bowl for him, and gave him two generous hunks of bread. It was vegetable soup, thick and delicious. Nick carried his away to a corner as carefully as if it was a bowl of molten gold. The first spoonfuls, so hot in his mouth that they almost burned him, spread warmth all through him.

Along the endless road, and in the villages and towns where they had stopped, there had been surprising support. During the day the farmworkers in the fields and most of the drivers of the cars and lorries that rumbled past them, splashing them with filthy water from the potholes in the roads, had stared and then, when they understood, there had been encouragement and coins dropped into the bags marked ‘March for Work. March for Food.’

At nights, when they stopped dead tired in the town halls and even, once, in a huge barn still stacked with hay bales, people had brought food. Sometimes it had been local union representatives, bringing cash donations and messages of support as well as thick sandwiches and urns of strong, sweet tea. But sometimes it was different people, prosperous, middle-class and not workers, as the miners described them. These people looked shocked and sympathetic, and murmured ‘We must all do what we can to help,’ and they brought exotic pies with rich, crumbly pastry and, on one memorable night, a huge baked ham. He had been eating much better than Mari and Dickon would be doing back in Nantlas, Nick thought painfully.

He finished his soup and the last of the bread, and then reached into his rucksack. He had given most of the chocolate to a boy with a terrible cough who had been struggling to keep up almost ever since they had left Wales, but there was one square left. He had been keeping it to have as a celebration when they reached London, and he unwrapped it now and ate it slowly, thinking about Mari.

It was right that he had come, even though he had had to leave her, Nick was sure of that. The march was running under its own momentum now, already a success. Out of the seven hundred men who had left Newport eleven days ago, only a handful had dropped out, in spite of the official labour movement predictions that the miners would never make it. Even those men had had to be ordered to stop marching because their torn feet or exhaustion were holding up progress. Their dogged determination to reach London was a testament in itself, because the marchers had deliberately been chosen, by Nick and the other organizers, from the poorest and weakest of all the thousands of unemployed men across the coalfield who had wanted to march. Any man still receiving the meagre unemployed benefit or the Poor Law relief had been excluded, because no one could guarantee that he would be able to claim the money again on his return. None of the march organizers wanted to claim the responsibility for another destitute family.

Only those who had nothing were chosen, just because they had nothing to forfeit. Nick put aside the thought that he stood to lose his own benefit. That was something he would have to reckon with if and when it happened. It would have been impossible to act as a spur to the other men and not to march himself.

And the march was a success. People were with them, no one could deny that. The food, and the money in the fighting fund proved it. Best of all was the support that had come not only from workers, often in defiance of their own right-wing unions, but from the secure, middle-class people who need never have bothered to think about unemployed miners. If we can reach them, Nick thought, not the politicians, or the coal-owners, but ordinary decent people with money in their pockets, then perhaps we can get something done for us all.

He unstrapped his blanket once more and found a space to unroll it. The floor was draughty bare boards, but to Nick it felt as welcoming and comfortable as a feather bed. He wasn’t hard with working muscle any more after the months of enforced idleness, and the general shortage of food had taken its toll, but he was still fit and strong enough. Yet his legs ached all the way up into his back, and his calves and feet felt leaden with the endless walking. He rubbed the complaining muscles and reminded himself that he was comfortable compared with the older men suffering from pneumoconiosis, and the thin boys transparent with undernourishment from babyhood.

Nick carefully unlaced his boots, afraid that they might fall apart if he handled them too roughly. The sole of the left one had parted company from the upper and the two halves were bound together with rag. Yet some men didn’t even have that, and their progress had slowed to a shuffle that threatened to hold up the whole march.

He smiled suddenly. They had looked like the last tattered remnants of a defeated army long before reaching London, but the fire of spirit had burned stronger and stronger all the way. At first the sheer distance had overwhelmed them, but as the days and miles slid past they had begun to sing again, the old songs remembered from Flanders and the Somme, and the favourite hymns from the chapels in the valleys. They had talked, too, endless fiery discussions of political theory, literature, and even philosophy. Most of the men had brought books in their packs. Reading seemed to satisfy a kind of hunger when there wasn’t any food.

Nick himself had brought a fat, black volume of Paradise Lost borrowed from the Miners’ Welfare library. The magnificent, stately rhythms of the verse soothed him even though the thread of meaning was sometimes lost to him. He took the book out now, thinking that he would read a little while there was still light. But he had hardly begun when from down the crowded hall came a low, bass humming, rising and falling like the sea. Nick put his book away again. There would be singing tonight, instead.

The visiting vicar sat down on one of his wooden chairs, and the men in the kitchen stopped clanking the pans and crockery. The hall grew dark while the singing went on, and somebody brought in oil lamps flaring behind their smoky gas mantles.

The final hymn was the one that was always left until last. The singing rose and filled the hall, and drifted beyond it out into the suburban night.

Bread of Heaven, Bread of Heaven,

Feed me till I want no more,

want no more,

Feed me till I want no more.

There was no more, after that. The hall was just a crowded, stuffy room full of tired men turning on their thin blankets ready for sleep.

Nick was smiling when he fell asleep. Tomorrow they would do what they had come to do, and then they could go home.

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