Hearts of Gold (37 page)

The staircase that led up to her ward was the worst. The steps were like wedges of sponge. Thick, jelly-like they soaked up her footfalls and gave her no purchase from which to take the next tread. She kept her eyes fixed on the top and made a superhuman effort. The final step grew in size.

It swallowed not only her boot but all of her and she felt herself falling down and ever downwards into the depths of a huge dune like the ones Andrew had taken her to in Porthcawl.

The sand closed over her, soft, warm, comfortingly; blotting the need for effort from her mind.

‘I think she’s coming round.’

Laura’s voice echoed towards her from a great distance. She couldn’t see Laura. Only hear the sound of her voice as it rolled over a landscape of peaked sand dunes like the ones in the Foreign Legion films.

‘I hope you’re right.’ This time it was a man speaking. ‘She gave her head one hell of a mighty crack,’ A man? Could it be Andrew? She struggled over the dunes, her feet still slipping, as she searched the horizon frantically for a glimpse of him.

‘Bethan? Bethan … Can you hear us?’

She ceased to struggle. There was no point. The voice was too coarse, too heavily accented to be Andrew’s. It was Trevor’s.

‘What’s Squeers decided to do?’

‘She’s with Matron now. They’ve sent a message to one of the night sisters who’s taking her day off. Matron says that if the sister can’t take over she’ll cover the ward herself. Trevor, what do you think happened? Did she just trip on the stairs like you told Squeers?’

Trevor knew precisely why Bethan had fallen, but he didn’t intend to tell anyone. Even Laura. He could see the reason for Bethan’s downfall in her flushed cheeks, her cold, clammy hands, her abnormal heartbeat and the odour of eau de cologne on her breath and on her uniform that didn’t quite mask the smell of the brandy. He could have kicked himself for allowing it to happen. He should have seen it coming.

‘I feel sick,’ Bethan moaned pathetically, reluctantly leaving her desert landscape for the antiseptic reality of the hospital bed that Trevor had dumped her in.

‘I’m not surprised.’ Laura rushed to her side with a kidney bowl. She held Bethan’s head between her cool hands, steadying her mouth over the bowl.

Bethan went through the motions, but very little came up. She felt absolutely wretched and ashamed. Hating herself for having to rely on Laura to take care of her. But she had enough common sense left to realise that she was too ill to take care of herself.

‘Didn’t you eat before you came out?’ Trevor asked her sharply, when Laura went to empty the bowl.

‘Yes,’ she mumbled weakly.

‘I don’t believe you,’ he said furiously. ‘If you had, you would have brought up something more than bile.’

‘I haven’t been able to keep any food down for weeks,’ she excused herself miserably.

‘But you’ve been able to keep brandy down all right?’

She opened her eyes. He was looking straight at her. She began to deny his accusation, but there was something in his dark eyes that dared her to continue.

‘For God’s sake, Bethan, you’re a nurse. You of all people can’t plead ignorance, if you won’t think of yourself think of what you might do to a patient when you’re floating around in this condition.’

‘I’m sorry, Trevor. It won’t happen again,’ she apologised abjectly.

‘Too bloody royal it won’t. The first chance I get I’m going to tell Matron that the strain of night duty is too much for you and when you switch back to day shifts Squeer’s will be at your elbow all day long. That should put paid to any secret drinking sessions, at least while you’re on the ward. And before you go looking for the bottle in your handbag, I’ve tipped it away.’

Sudden agonising cramps cut across her abdomen and she curled up on the bed, her face muscles contorting with the effort it cost her to fight the pain.

‘I’m not surprised you’re in this state,’ Trevor lectured heavily. ‘Have you been trying to live on a diet of pure brandy for long?’ He leaned over her, straightened out her legs and laid his hand on her stomach. His face grew serious as he poked and prodded her.

‘Oh God … Beth, I’m so sorry, I had no idea. Does Andrew know?’

‘Know what?’ she gasped as another pain crippled her.

He looked at her closely. ‘I know you’ve been in a stupor since Andrew left, but you must know you’re pregnant. Four or five months by my reckoning.’

She closed her eyes and tried to recall when she’d last bled. She couldn’t even remember. It had been some time before Andrew left. And that had been a lifetime ago. She went cold with fear. She couldn’t have a baby. She simply couldn’t. Not now. It wasn’t possible.

‘Look, I’ll go and bring the car round to the entrance,’ Trevor said, embarrassed by his earlier anger. ‘Then I’ll take you home.’

After he left she broke out into a cold sweat as fear beset her. She felt sick again, and there was no sign of Laura. She looked around and saw the depressingly familiar walls of the delivery room. Crawling off the bed she made her way into the corridor, passed the bathrooms and went into the toilet. All she could think of was Trevor’s damning diagnosis. She remembered Maisie and the other girls she’d delivered from the “workhouse” side of the homes.

She collapsed on the floor. That was now her. She’d been a fool. A complete and utter fool. This was one disgrace that no one in her family would be able to take.

Desperate for a solution she cast her mind back to the women who’d been admitted after they’d made visits to back street cure alls, old women who operated in their kitchens and washhouses with knitting needles and phials of mercury. She shouldn’t have to resort to them. She was a nurse. If only Megan was within reach. She’d know what to do. Then she recalled something one of the women who’d got rid of a child had said when she’d been brought into the ward.

All she had to do was go home. Trevor might have poured one bottle of brandy away but there was another full bottle wedged behind her drawer in the dressing table. Her mother had used the stove that day, so that meant there had to be hot water. If she waited until everyone went to bed, ran a hot bath and drank the brandy while she was sitting in it she wouldn’t have any more problems.

It would soon be over. And she promised herself that the bottle at the back of her drawer would be the last bottle of brandy she would ever drink. A few more hours that’s all it would take to straighten everything out, and put her life back on course. If it worked, if everything came right, she vowed to God that she’d devote her life to nursing, and never, never commit a sin again. 

Chapter Nineteen

Bethan lay awake in her bed and listened to the sounds of the house closing down for the night. Maud was the first to walk out into the yard. She heard the distant murmur of voices as her sister returned to the kitchen and spoke to her mother. The kitchen door opened and closed. The stairs creaked and Maud stole into the bedroom and switched the light on.

She strained to keep her eyes closed and her breathing soft, regular. Feigning sleep she heard a splash as Maud tipped water into the bowl and washed. That was followed by the thud of flannel petticoats hitting the lino. The light went off. Moments later the bedsprings dipped and creaked as her sister climbed in beside her.

‘Beth, you awake?’ Maud whispered anxiously.

She remained still, log like. Maud turned over. She stayed silent, locked into her own misery, reliving the awful moment when Trevor had brought her home. Seeing again the look of shock and fear on Maud’s face as Trevor and Laura had carried her up the steps and through the front door with the news that she’d had a bad fall. There’d been such a fuss, her mother scolding her and everyone else within earshot. Eddie asking questions that Trevor and Laura pretended not to hear. Her father mouthing platitudes that soothed no one, least of all himself.

And none of them had even guessed at the extent of her true disgrace. That knowledge still remained her and Trevor’s secret. But for how long? How could she have done it? Allowed herself to be taken in by Andrew, to fall in love with him and bring dishonour on her entire family.

She tried to hate him, to blame him for her drinking – for the shameful state she was in, but a cold logical voice of reason rose unbidden from the back of her mind, telling her that if he was guilty of anything, then so was she. He might have made the first move but he’d never forced himself on her and it hadn’t taken her long to become every bit as willing and ardent as him. The truth was that Laura had excited her curiosity and she’d wanted to wear Andrew’s ring, as Laura did Trevor’s.

Had she’d been trapped it was by her own desire to become Andrew’s wife. Her biggest mistake had been in believing that the easiest route to marriage was via the bedroom.

Andrew’d never lied to her. Never promised her anything other than outings and picnics. She’d simply set her sights too high. When he told her he loved her she’d been the one to equate love with marriage, not him.

And now, after what had happened to Megan, it was totally ridiculous of her to imagine that an educated, respectable doctor would involve himself with a family of criminals.

Wallowing in the luxury of self-pity, tears fell thick and fast from her eyes on to the pillow. A cramping pain shot through her foot. She moved it involuntarily and Maud stirred sleepily beside her. She had to remain still. She had to! At least until everyone was asleep. She tried to concentrate on the sounds downstairs.

She heard her mother raking the ashes out from underneath the fire in the oven. There was the dull slam of iron on iron as she damped down the flames with small coal and closed the flue door. Just as well it wasn’t the one night in the week when her mother allowed the fire to burn out so she could give the stove a good cleaning. Six nights a week her mother banked the fire, on the seventh she raked the coals and doused the embers. Had tonight had been that night it wouldn’t have suited her purpose at all.

Elizabeth went out the back before climbing the stairs. Bethan sensed her mother pausing for a moment outside their bedroom. She breathed in deeply, exhaling loudly in a parody of sleep.

Moments later Elizabeth opened her own bedroom door and closed it. The sound of curtain rings grating over the pole echoed through the dividing wall closely followed by the screech of china sliding over the marble surface of the washstand. The floorboards protested as Elizabeth moved around the room while she undressed. Bethan waited patiently until she heard the final moan of the bedsprings on her parents’ bed. All she had to do now was wait for her father, the lodger and her brothers.

Footsteps resounded in the street outside. She heard Haydn, Alun and Eddie shout goodnight to Glan. Eddie must have left Leyshon Street and walked down to the Town Hall to pick Haydn up. From there they must have gone to the pub, because that was where Glan and Alun spent most of their evenings.

Eddie laughed, a wild, high-pitched giggle as the front door opened. He only ever laughed like that after he’d been out with Haydn. She didn’t need to see them, or smell the beer on their breath. They’d had a few. She wondered where they’d got the money from. She continued to listen, tense and nervous, waiting for the familiar sequence of events. The latch went on the kitchen door as they took it in turns to go out the back.

She picked up her nurse’s watch from the bedside table and tried to read its hands but the plush curtains were firmly drawn and it was too dark.

She tried to guess the time. Her mother always went to bed at ten. It could have been half an hour, or an hour since.

The latch went on the downstairs room directly below. Alun was going to bed. Soon afterwards the boys with much hushing and shushing climbed the stairs and went into their own bedroom. A loud crash rocked the house. Eddie began to laugh again, and Elizabeth’s voice cut, harsh and reprimanding, from her bedroom. Silence reigned once more. There was only her father to come.

The boys were both snoring when the key turned in the lock of the front door again. The heavy tread of her father’s boots clumped down the passage and out the back. He must have lingered over a pipe in the back kitchen, because it was a long while before he came upstairs.

The bed sighed as he climbed in beside her mother. She listened for the sound of their voices. Neither spoke but that didn’t mean that they slept. Her mother had been so angry earlier in the evening she could be playing doggo.

There was a steady tramp of feet as a late night reveller, or worker, walked beneath her window up the Avenue. Then more silence. Later a dog barked in Phillips Street below them. Someone shouted at it. A cat screeched. And still she waited, holding her breath, rehearsing a hundred times the moment when she’d finally put a foot out of bed. She just had to be sure that no one would be awake.

When she could stand the suspense no longer she rolled over to the very edge of the bed. Slipping her feet out first she slid on to the floor. She crouched on the lino and eased open her dressing table drawer.

It gave a few inches. Then it stuck. She pushed her arm into the small gap, bruising the inside of her elbow as she fumbled around. She couldn’t reach the bottle. The drawer wasn’t pulled out far enough. She tugged at it again. This time it came out with a jerk that sent her flying backwards. But even as she fell, her hand closed over the bottle she’d secreted behind it. Not daring to feel beneath the bed for her slippers or rummage in her wardrobe for her dressing gown, she crawled towards the door, lifted the latch and, keeping her fingers on the metal bar slowly drew it open.

Resting her hands on the banisters and the wall she hopped over the stairs that creaked. She dared not put on the light when she reached the bottom step. Instead she fumbled along the narrow passageway. No longer familiar it took on terrifying twists and turns. Walls stood where there were none in daylight. The edges of the rag rugs curled, waiting to trip her up. Her heart felt as though it was pounding in her mouth when she finally made it into the back kitchen. She closed the door, leaned back against it and switched on the light very conscious that she was directly below her parents’ bedroom.

She’d intended to carry the bath in from the back yard, fill it with boiling water from the stove, and sit in it to drink her bottle of brandy.

Now she’d actually made it as far as the kitchen she realised how impossible that would be. The sound of the washhouse door opening would, in all probability be enough to wake her mother who was a light sleeper at the best of times. There was no way she could lift the bath from the garden wall which was very close to her parents’ open window, without making a noise. And then she would have to refill the boiler once she’d drained it, a noisy operation, even in day time. And aside from her parents above her, there was the lodger sleeping in the next room.

She sank down on one of the kitchen chairs and tried to collect her thoughts. She had to get rid of her problem. Of that much she was certain. She regarded her pregnancy as a problem, not a child. No images of babies crossed her mind. The likes of Baby

Davies tucked up in her cot in the nursery of the Graig Hospital, all curly hair, sweet mouth and peaceful closed eyes above a small round lump of nappy, was as far divorced from the predicament she was in as the Graig mountain from the Common.

All she could think of was destitution. She only had two pounds left of the forty-five Andrew had given her. It was barely enough to rent a room for herself for a month, and that was without taking food into consideration.

With Megan in prison there was no saviour on her horizon to support her in the same way Rhiannon Pugh was supporting Phyllis.

Once Elizabeth became aware of the baby’s existence, daughter or not she’d throw her out on the street. Left to his own devices her father might have taken a more charitable view, but it was her mother, not her father who laid down the rules of the house.

Her Uncle John Bull would see that she was never accepted in his or any other chapel again. She’d be shunned, perhaps even stoned like Phyllis.

Her only recourse would be the unmarrieds ward in the workhouse, where she’d have to wear the grey flannel workhouse dress. She wouldn’t even be allowed to keep or wear her own underwear. She’d be forced to scrub floors and yards for her keep until her child was born and afterwards she’d have to live in the homes until someone either adopted it or took pity on her and gave her a job as a live in maid.

Even then she’d have to hand over whatever she earned for her own and her baby’s keep. That would be her life. She’d have no opportunity to save anything for a better one. There wouldn’t even be any hope. She’d be like Maisie Crockett.

She shook herself free from the bleak picture she’d painted of her future and looked at the clock. The hands pointed to three. Her mother always rose at five. Two hours. That was all the time she had. Tomorrow Trevor would return. He could slip up, say something untoward. Her mother might guess. She daren’t risk putting off what had to be done for another day. Cradling the bottle of brandy on her lap, she considered the alternatives to a hot bath. Epsom salts … placing her feet in a bowl of scalding water … knitting needles – she caught sight of her mother’s steel pins crammed into an empty jam jar on the windowsill, and shuddered. The hands on the clock pointed to ten minutes past three. Steam rose gently from the water boiler in the stove. If she was going to do something she’d have to do it now. But not here.

Anyone passing through on their way to the back yard would see her and if Alun and her brothers had been drinking that could be in the next few moments.

There was only one room in the house that was shut off – the front parlour. She tiptoed back down the passage. A full moon shone in through the lace curtains that hung at the bay window, creating a beautiful pattern of shadows on the floor. She rolled the rug back lest she soil it and stood the bottle of brandy on the linoleum next to the couch. Returning to the kitchen she fetched one of the old sheets from the back of the washhouse that her mother kept to use as dust sheets when she was spring cleaning.

She had to risk the sound of running water, but not a bathful. A bucketful would have to be enough.

She rinsed out the enamel bucket from under the sink and filled it with boiling water from the stove. It came out bubbling. It took two trips to refill the boiler with her mother’s enamel jug. Switching off the light and closing all the doors she carried the steaming bucket into the parlour and set it and herself, down on the dust sheet.

She skimmed her fingers across the surface of the water and only just stopped herself from screaming. It was scalding hot.

She touched everything she’d gathered around her. The dust sheet, hot water, brandy – what if she passed out with the pain, or was sick? Deciding she couldn’t risk either, she sat on the Rexine-covered sofa and pulled the dust sheet up beneath her nightgown.

Then, closing her mouth around the brandy bottle she began to drink. She didn’t find the courage to lower her feet into the water until the bottle was half empty.

Elizabeth rose before five as she did every day. She liked to black lead and clean the oven, and boil the water for tea before Evan and Alun rose at half past. She dressed in her bedroom, putting on a grubby house overall, only stopping to wash her hands and face and brush her hair. She would have a good wash later, when all the dirty household chores had been completed and she had the house to herself.

The first thing she did on entering the kitchen was check the stove. She poked up the fire, breaking the crust of small coal she’d laid the night before. Then she raked the ashes out on to the hearth.

Fetching the ash bucket from the washhouse she shovelled the residue on top of yesterday’s, picking out any bits that weren’t burned to dust to put back on the fire. When the grey dirt had been swept up and deposited in the bucket she built up the fire with fresh coal and sticks from the scuttle that Evan had refilled before going to bed. Recollecting the events of yesterday evening she was even more parsimonious than usual, resolutely replacing five lumps of coal and a handful of sticks from her normal morning’s allowance. Soon even Evan’s reduced coal allowance would be gone. And she couldn’t begin to think how they would afford twenty five shillings for a load of coal with no man’s wages coming into the house.

She went to the washhouse to fetch the bucket. She spent five minutes hunting high and low for it before eventually making do with the bowl she kept for soaking Evan’s pit clothes. By five thirty she’d washed the hearth and cleaned and black leaded the top of the stove. While the kettle boiled she scrubbed her hands and arms under the cold tap in the washhouse. When she’d finished the water had boiled, and steam was just beginning to rise from the porridge oats she’d mixed with water in her mother’s old fish kettle and set on the range.