Last Train to Gloryhole (9 page)

‘Though that mini you squeezed yourself into didn’t harm your chances a lot, I bet,’ I told her with a grin.

‘Yes, perhaps that was the best car the school could have given me, as it turned out,’ she replied oddly. ‘Though the wipers were a lot faster than in this car, and squeaked annoyingly from start to finish.’ She stretched out a bare arm and imitated their accelerated swing so as to illustrate the point.

I had turned round and was staring back into her lovely face and her flashing blue eyes that were a clear image of my own. ‘I was talking about the dress you’ve got on, Rhiannon, not the car,’ I told her, shaking my head from side to side. ‘That damn mini-skirt that you’re barely wearing today. Did you really think it was appropriate under the circumstances?’

‘Well, I guess we’ll never know, will we?’ she responded, taking from the glove-compartment her prized pass-form, and studying it avidly once again, before emitting a high-pitched giggle. ‘Do you know, Dad, I reckon that a lot of older men are so very extraordinary that it might even have been the deciding factor.’

‘Well, knowing Alwyn Lloyd myself - that’s the man who just tested you - I think you may have a good point there, girl,’ I told her. ‘Do you know since his wife ran off to Devon with the Avon girl, his success-record with females has become little short of legendary in these parts. And I don’t just mean in driving-tests, either. But, at the end of the day, I guess we all feel rather sorry for the old bugger more than anything.’ The silence that followed caused me to reflect on my last comment. ‘Of course, I’m not referring to
you
, love. Please don’t you go think I’m insinuating -’

‘I should hope not, too,’ retorted Rhiannon, affecting wounded pride as nobly as her mother invariably did. ‘As you’re always telling me, I’m much too young yet to even
think
of having a boyfriend.’

‘And let’s keep it like that, shall we?’ I told her, turning briefly, and staring deeply into the pair of beautiful, ice-blue eyes she even boasted I had given her. What I saw in them told me all I needed to know at that moment. My lovely daughter had indeed arrived at that dangerous age - that emotional, sexual watershed that all humankind must needs approach, and then traverse - and both her mother and I were fully aware of the fact.

As I walked back to the car from Sam’s grave, and opened the passenger-door to sit, wet and bedraggled, beside a legally driving Rhiannon, I pondered on how she was the blessed fruit of my second marriage, and quite unlike the son I had fathered just a year or so before her with a woman I had long ago lost, and then briefly met and loved again. I mused on how, many years before, Anne and I had attended school together in Aberfan, and even later on at Merthyr County, in the days when grammar schools were slowly turning into comprehensives, and Latin, Woodwork, and Technical Drawing - my favourite subjects at the time - were already being phased-out, and replaced by the likes of Spanish, Design Technology, and Computer Studies.

Though separated when we both left school at eighteen, and she went off to study at Swansea University, I well remember how Anne Morgan frequently filled my thoughts back then. But these days, now that she was married for the second time, and sharing her life with the slightly older Drew, and living up the valley in
Gloryhole
, I normally just ran into her at the check-outs in
Asda
, or on the odd occasion that we happened to be in town at the same time, and I caught sight of her shopping at some clothes-shop in the High Street. But of course I had recently seen her again just days before in this very spot just across from our house, apparently skulking away from my brother’s grave under the cover of semi-darkness, and dashing for the little iron gate that I could very nearly make out, just down the steep hill from there.

I dare say the pain of what had happened back in 1974 still shrouded the lives of those involved in my brother’s untimely death almost as much as it had for those affected by the tragic events at our old primary school in Aberfan just eight short years earlier; and for no one more than myself, perhaps. Would I ever finally begin to forgive? I asked myself. Could I even contemplate attempting it? Even nearly forty years on, I found it was still very much in the balance. I might already be dead and buried, and lying beside the path here, I told myself, before the blame - that was rightly theirs, but which, oddly, I myself now felt - could be finally cast aside, and before the injustice of what happened back then could finally be forgotten

As we approached the cemetery-gate that sat across from our home, Rhiannon suddenly slowed the car down and brought it to a halt. She turned and looked across at me with a genuine loving tenderness that I knew well and could feel in my very bones.

‘Dad - I need to tell you something,’ she began. ‘I know it sounds awful saying this, but I didn’t come up here with you today for Uncle Sam’s sake. Can you forgive me, do you think?’

‘Well, I think I might have guessed that, as it goes, the way you’re all dressed up again, sweet,’ I replied, with a chuckle.

‘No, Dad, you don’t understand what I mean. I brought you with me so that I could tell you something, something important. You see, Dad, I’m going out with a boy these days, and I think - no, I know - that I love him.’

‘But how can that be?’ I asked her, shocked beyond belief. ‘You, in love, Rhiannon! But you’re barely seventeen, for God’s sake.’

‘I know, Dad,’ replied my daughter, ‘but I feel that I already love him like - well, like you say you love our Mam, you know. There, I’ve said it.’ She averted her eyes from mine and started up the engine once again.

‘But Rhiannon, aren’t you going to tell me who this fellow is?’ I asked, turning and staring straight at her. ‘As your father, I have a right to know at least that fact, don’t you think?’

‘No, not necessarily,’ she replied timidly. ‘Because if you knew, Dad, then - then I feel you might try to -’

‘Put a stop to it?’ I asked her. ‘But I wouldn’t want to do that sweetheart, would I? Now why would I want to do that? After all, it’s your decision, isn’t it? And it’s your choice. And, anyway, I know you’d only grow to resent me for it.’

‘No, don’t be silly, Dad,’ retorted Rhiannon. Then, hesitating, she went on, ‘Though it’s true that I might, I suppose.’

‘You’re getting to be a big girl now,’ I told her. ‘Doing so well at school now, passing your test and everything. Perhaps it’s time I let you - we let you - make lots more decisions for yourself, and even make lots of mistakes too, of course. And then you can reflect on them, and perhaps even laugh at them when the time comes, as we all find we do sooner or later. Yes, only in that way will you find you really grow, my love. And I want you to grow, Rhiannon, even if it means, one day, that you grow away from me - away from your mother and me. Like in Gibran’s poem, you know? The living arrows we parents send - no, that the Great Archer dispatches
through us
.’

‘Bless you, Dad,’ my tearful daughter whispered, then leaned across, and softly kissed my damp cheek. I dare say I must have smiled at her gesture just then. But later on I decided that her kiss was probably her way of trying to placate me a little, and of keeping things sound, and together, and even, I guess, of maintaining her silence about the awful, painful secret of who precisely this first lover in her life actually was.

No, my Rhiannon didn’t disclose to me who her young lover was - not then, nor even in the weeks that followed - and by the time her mother and I finally found out, well, it was far too late for us to do anything about it.

The, diminutive, curly-haired, brown-eyed brunette called Gwen Havard was a Roman Catholic when I first met her, and remained one, despite the fact that, in me - her second husband - she married a solid, old
Welsh
c
hapel-man
, although one who, unlike her, believed passionately that you needn’t feel you have to go anywhere special on a Sunday to remain true to your beliefs, and still live your life in the unyielding hope of salvation. Now, after twenty years together, and Sunday mornings having become for us a cherished time of mutual love, extended sleep and tranquillity, Gwen and I gradually developed what was, for us, a way of life that followed the principles of, for want of a better description, the archetypal British Christian belief-system. This, I contend, is founded, simply and succinctly, on a love for God and a love for others, whom we should endeavour to treat just as we would want ourselves to be treated by them.

For Gwen and me family love came first, of course, followed by love and respect for our neighbours, and in this regard, thankfully, the people of Pant were, by and large, the sort of people you would be prepared to walk miles to give your last
Rolo
to, unless, that is, they already had chocolate stains running down their faces, or, just as unlikely, chose to refuse the offer.

Already a divorcee, I happened to have been living alone in a modest two-up-two-down just round the corner from her in Pant Road when I discovered that Gwen Havard was one such neighbour of mine. When I came across her by accident, for the first time since we were teenagers, I found that she was living with her husband Richard in a great big house on Cemetery Road - the house which, with my agreement, she later chose to name
Caerleon
. In the years when he was still working, tall, beefy, Gloucestershire-born, Richard - or Dick as he was more familiarly known - worked as a book-maker during the day, and as a bingo-caller at night. What with Gwen managing her own hair-salon just a mile or so down the road in Dowlais, the couple made more than enough money to comfortably raise a daughter called Sarah Olwen, and also to purchase for themselves the lovely, traditional, four-bedroom villa that she and I now happily share together, and which is located almost opposite to one set of the cemetery-gates.

But the good life for the family Havard came to an abrupt end soon after Dick was found to be cheating on Gwen with a skinny usherette at Merthyr’s
Castle Cinema
called Vera, who was just half his age, and who had originally been employed there for general duties, such as handing out bingo-cards and checking the toilets for loiterers, but, after just a few weeks, ended up sitting alongside the man himself on-stage, and collecting up and mustering his coloured balls for him in slender, white, fishnet gloves, and slipping them, singly and lovingly, into their allotted positions. Aided no doubt by her long, horsehair mane of sparkling, blond tresses, and by her wider-than-wide, white, euthymolised smile, Vera nightly cast an enchanting spell, no less effectively on her Dick than on the captive, largely superannuated, audience, who marked their cards while gossiping loudly and drinking weak lager at the tables down below them.

With a practised finger-grip, no doubt perfected in a quiet corner of some local cricket-field, Vera made the stream of coloured spheres spin, and cascade, and spill out their rich rewards to hushed acclaim. And so adeptly, and so fruitfully did she effect her magic that the star-prize she quickly claimed for herself were twin boys, born just two bingo-rounds apart. Very like their famous namesakes, after whom they were obviously named, Eric and Ernie shared a bed together and thrived, and they continued to enrich their parents’ lives with a surfeit of love and laughter for many years to come, even after their father earned himself the sack for misappropriation of takings, and the new family were forced to move south temporarily into a damp, poky flat a dozen or so miles down the valley in Pontypridd.

Back in Pant, Gwen unsurprisingly grew to despise her daughter’s father about as quickly as an abandoned woman is entitled to. And not much later, in fact just a few short months after the courts took over where heated negotiations fell short, she divorced his sorry arse in Merthyr Crown Court, soon after being awarded sole custody, not just of Sarah Olwen, but of the salon, the house, and of its only other occupant - the fast-balding budgerigar called Joey - who merrily scattered
Trill
about him and slammed his little, silver bell all the way through it all. And that was where, less than six months later, and with heavy and hesitant tread, I found myself stepping in.

I confess I loved Gwen never more than when she bore me our beautiful, flame-haired daughter. Initially my wife and her mother Doris toyed with the idea of calling the child Philomena, which Gwen told me happened to be her own confirmation name, but I quickly said I wasn’t having it, and, fortuitously, common sense seemed to have won through in the end. ‘We’re certainly not naming my only daughter after your ‘
altar ego
,’ I told her firmly, breaking out in laughter at my spontaneous, yet wholly unintended, quip. Fortunately Gwen saw the funny side, as well as displaying a measure of common sense, and we agreed to name the girl Rhiannon, providing that our next sprog was christened with a name which hailed from Irish legend, rather than Welsh, so as to compensate. To this proposal I gladly agreed, and yet no second issue was forthcoming, though we tried and tried with commendable dedication. And so Rhiannon - the flame-haired girl from
The Mabinogion
- has proved to be our solitary child.

I must admit that I am forever grateful that Rhiannon developed an early aversion for all things pious, and has, to this day, apparently only ventured willingly inside a church, Catholic or otherwise, on secular excursions - usually school journeys, and sundry carol-services at Christmas time. You see it is my view that organised religion, with its false, or at least, questionable, supremacy of high church, and its long out-dated strictures, is something that a sensitive child needs to be incubated from at an early age, in much the same way that we keep puppies safe by preventing them from dashing out into the main road. Churches are, after all, dreadfully stone-cold places, where warm feelings and positive attitudes towards others are not easy things to develop, let alone sustain. Although not a view shared by my wife, naturally, at least this has long been my own contention, and I would go so far as to maintain that the only thing that a church ever gave to me, (crammed full, as they all seem to be, with wooden altars and polished pews,) was an embarrassingly thin, shiny patch in the seat of my suit-trousers. Now I have no doubt that my Gwen would maintain that there was more than one gaping hole in such a thread-bare argument, but, at least, for the twenty or so years that we have lived together as man-and-wife, she has, thankfully, waived her right to contest it.