The White Dove
By Rosie Thomas
3/5
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About this ebook
From the bestselling author of The Kashmir Shawl
Born into an aristocratic family, beautiful Amy Lovell leads a whirlwind life of extravagant parties and debutante balls.
But Amy, curious about the world beyond the narrow confines of her class, is ill-suited to a life of indulgence. Eagerly embracing a nursing career, she is drawn into the radical politics of the day.
As the spectre of war looms, Amy's bittersweet love for the proud miner Nick Penry – a love which defies the differences between them – leads them to the conflict in Spain, where love and pain become inseparable agonies.
Rosie Thomas
Rosie Thomas is the author of a number of celebrated novels, including the bestsellers The Kashmir Shawl, Iris and Ruby and Constance. Once she was established as a writer and her children were grown, she discovered a love of travelling and mountaineering. She has climbed in the Alps and the Himalayas, competed in the Peking to Paris car rally, spent time on a tiny Bulgarian research station in Antarctica and travelled the silk road through Asia. She lives in London.
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Reviews for The White Dove
1 rating1 review
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Amy is a contented child in a wealthy family in 1916. The book is about her growing up, and this plot intertwines with that of a miner struggling to make ends meet in a small village. Some harrowing experiences during the wars, but a hopeful future emerges. Mostly pleasant to read, if nothing special.
Book preview
The White Dove - Rosie Thomas
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