Swansea Girls (30 page)

‘It doesn’t bear imagining,’ Joy agreed. ‘But it’s the girls we’ve got to think about now.’

‘They can hardly stay here with Roy. After all it’s not as if he’s a relative of either of them, not by blood.’

‘Katie’s brothers are downstairs.’

‘But the basement isn’t the house. It’s obvious the girls are going to have to move out before people start talking.’

‘What people? Roy is a mature man ...’

‘And they’re innocent young girls. Who knows what could happen if they stay with him?’

‘He’s done a good job of raising Lily so far.’

‘Norah raised Lily, not Roy. There’s no way he would have been allowed to take her in if Norah hadn’t been living with him. It’s not right for a man to be alone in a house with young girls.’

Realising Doris was only saying what most women in the street would soon be thinking, if they weren’t already, Joy decided further objections were best kept to herself.

‘I’d take them in if I could, but with Adam home there’s simply no room. But you and Judy have that great big house to yourselves.’

‘Our basement and attic are let.’

‘That still leaves you with three bedrooms on the first floor. Katie shares with Lily here.’

‘I work – I couldn’t possibly look after the girls.’ Joy racked her brains in an effort to come up with more reasons why she couldn’t take Roy’s foster-daughter and Katie into her home.

‘It’s not as though they are babies who need looking after,’ Doris Jordan protested. ‘They’d be no trouble.’

‘Lily is Roy’s responsibility and Katie has her brothers.’

‘Poor Martin’s only just twenty-one and bringing home an apprentice’s wage. You can’t expect him to take on Katie, or that tearaway brother of his. Mark my words, after this Jack Clay will be back in Borstal before the year is out.’

‘The boys seem to be managing fine.’

‘Only because they don’t have to look after Katie.’

‘Katie has a job, she’s bringing in a wage, she can look after herself.’

‘I doubt it, without Norah. Do you know if Roy and Norah formally adopted Lily?’

‘No.’

‘If Roy didn’t, the courts aren’t going to look kindly on a man of his age looking to adopt an eighteen-year-old after all these years.’

‘I suppose not, but whatever decisions there are to be made it will be Roy who makes them,’ Joy countered, wanting to put an end to the conversation.

‘He’ll need help.’ Doris glanced into the parlour as they reached the hall. ‘Little did Norah think when she sorted that room out earlier that she was doing it for her own funeral.’

‘There’s nothing either of you can do so you may as well go to bed.’ John stood in the doorway of the kitchen, and faced Helen and Joe who were sitting either end of the window seat.

‘We’re not children, Dad.’

‘I know, Joe,’ John agreed patiently.

‘Lily might need me.’

‘I’ve just come from next door. She told Roy she wants to be alone. Given the shock she’s had, I think that’s understandable.’

‘I might be able to help her.’ Helen left the seat.

‘I’m sure you will, Helen, but not right now. Everyone’s left except Judy who is staying the night with Katie. It’s obvious that Roy and Lily would rather come to terms with Norah’s death in their own way and the Clay boys have made it perfectly clear that they would like to be left in peace in their basement.’

‘I’ll say goodnight, then,’ Helen said sharply, peeved at being dismissed.

‘Lily and Katie will probably be glad of a visit tomorrow.’

‘I’m not allowed out,’ Helen reminded.

‘Even before this happened I told your mother that I think you’ve learned your lesson. And now, your friends need you.’

‘You’d let me visit them?’

‘As long as you realise how much pain they’ll both be in.’

‘Yes, Dad.’ Helen only just stopped herself from skipping out of the door by reminding herself that Annie and Norah were dead.

‘I don’t know how close you are to Lily, Joe, but she may appreciate a visit from you too,’ John suggested, as Helen closed the door.

‘I intended to call first thing tomorrow.’

‘Preparation for your final year going all right?’ John filled the kettle. He’d drunk far too much tea as it was, but he felt the need to do something.

‘I’m doing my best.’

‘No one can ask you to do more.’

Joe turned to his father and asked the question uppermost in his mind. ‘Is Mum going to leave?’

‘You’ll have to ask her that, Joe.’

‘But you want her to.’

John hesitated for a fraction of a second before answering. ‘Yes, Joe. Yes, I do.’

‘Helen?’ Joe tapped Helen’s door and tried the handle. It was locked.

‘What do you want?’ she called from the other side of the door.

‘Just wondered if you felt like a talk.’

‘I’m tired.’

‘In the morning, then.’

‘Perhaps.’

He walked on to his own room. After stripping to his underwear he took one of his set texts from his shelf. Crawling between the sheets, he tried to lose himself in the tragedy of
The Mayor of Casterbridge
but thoughts of Lily kept intruding into his mind. He loved her, he was absolutely certain of it. And after the way she had kissed him on the beach earlier he was almost as certain that she loved him. His body grew warm at the memory of their embraces. He had been looking forward to Sunday – then he remembered Norah and the grief-stricken look on Lily’s face as she had walked away from him, and started guiltily. He and Lily had so many Sundays before them. Norah had none.

Closing the book, he tossed it to the floor and switched off the light. Pre-sleep dreams of Lily and their future together were infinitely preferable to anything Thomas Hardy had written.

Just as he’d finished furnishing their dream living room in blue and cream, he heard a floorboard creak overhead as his father climbed to his bedroom on the top floor. Later he heard the clack of his mother’s high heels as she walked into the lino-floored bathroom down the passageway. Later still he heard a stair creak. Putting it down to the house settling, he turned over and returned to his dreams of Lily – and the green and gold bedroom they would share.

Helen just simply
knew
that Jack would want to see her. Locking her door, she switched off her light, sat on the windowsill of her bedroom and waited. She answered Joe when he called to her, glanced at her alarm clock when she heard her father walk up the attic stairs, and still the lights shone from next door’s back windows over the empty garden. When the luminous hands on her watch pointed to just after eleven she saw Jack, clearly outlined in a shaft of light from Mrs Evans’s kitchen window. He walked down to Roy Williams’ garage and opened the door. Sitting on an old crate, he picked up a tin of polish and a rag, and began to clean his bike.

The hands on her watch had never crawled more slowly. Eventually she heard what she had been waiting for – the sound of her mother opening and closing the front door. Watching intently, willing Jack to stay in the garage, she waited through the longest half-hour of her life. Pulling a thick sweater over her pedal-pusher jeans and striped top, she grabbed her shoes and crept to the door in her socks, opened it a fraction and peeped out.

The house was in silence and darkness. She pushed her door just wide enough to slip out and closed it quickly behind her. Stealing along the landing, she tiptoed down the stairs. The third stair from the bottom creaked loudly enough to wake everyone in the house and set every dog barking in the street – but miraculously it didn’t.

Slipping the latch on the door that opened on to the basement stairs, she edged through it, slid the bolt home behind her, felt her way down the narrow staircase, through the door at the bottom, and fumbled towards the front room. Careful to close the curtains before switching on the light, she turned to the door – and screamed.

‘Quiet!’

‘Jack, you terrified me. How on earth did you get in?’

He opened his hand, revealing a length of wire. ‘Picked the lock. I’m a dab hand at it.’

‘You’re a burglar.’

‘Not any more. I only broke in because I wanted to see you. I was going to your bedroom.’

‘Please, don’t ever, ever do that. If my mother saw you she’d call the police and demand they lock you up. She’d send me away. We’d never see one another again.’ She threw her arms round his neck. ‘And I couldn’t bear for that to happen.’

He drew away from her and she blanched at the whipped expression in his eyes. ‘I’m sorry about your mother. I hardly knew her but she seemed a nice person.’

‘Too bloody nice.’ There was none of his customary rage in his voice, only a heart-rending anguish as if his mother’s death had sapped his spirit. ‘You still got that gin?’

‘It wouldn’t help.’

‘No, it wouldn’t,’ he echoed, remembering his father’s last drunken rage when he had turned up on the doorstep of their basement.

‘My father said I can go out ...’

‘Not with me.’

‘To see your sister and Lily tomorrow. It’s a beginning, Jack.’ His pain was excruciating to watch. She wanted to gather him up and soothe away his anguish with assurances that everything would come right for him again. That he was going to survive his mother’s death and she would do all she could to help him get through it. Then, in a single moment of blinding clarity, she realised his attraction no longer lay in his status as forbidden fruit. Their relationship might have begun that way, but the risks he had been prepared to take in seeking her out at a time like this said more about what he felt for her than all of Shakespeare’s eloquent speeches.

‘You’re cold. Let’s push the cushions to the top of the sofa and cover ourselves with blankets.’ Lighting the small lamp, she switched off the overhead light.

He made no objection as she pulled the striped blankets from the easy chairs and tucked them around both of them. Lying with her back to the sofa cushions, she circled her arms round his chest and laid her head on his shoulder. In an attempt to stop him shaking, she drew her body along the length of his, covering his legs with her own, caressing his face with the tips of her fingers. ‘I love you, Jack,’ she murmured, throwing all caution to the wind as he kissed her.

‘Where’s Jack?’ Brian asked, as he walked into the basement to find Martin sitting alone at the table, a stone-cold cup of tea in front of him.

‘In the garage polishing his bike. He said he needed to think. I know just how he feels.’ Martin turned a white, strained face to Brian. ‘I don’t seem to have had a minute to myself since Roy Williams told me Mam died. And now this, with the old man. What’s going to happen to him?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Powell, you’re a policeman. You must have some idea,’ Martin shouted furiously.

‘He’s been charged with breaking and entering, criminal damage and assaulting a police officer. He didn’t steal anything so it’s just forced entry and a broken door, and as I’m not hurt beyond a few cuts and scratches he could get away with a fine or, given a tough magistrate, a couple of weeks prison.’

‘Mrs Evans is dead.’

‘Of a heart attack, which is natural causes. When I left the station the brass were toying with the idea of trying a manslaughter charge but I doubt it will stick. It’s my guess they’ll keep him in the cells for as long as they can ...’

‘I can’t believe he’s going to get away with what he’s done. My mother ...’

‘Never made a complaint.’ Brian unbuttoned his tunic, sat on a chair and unlaced his boots.

‘My father killed my mother and Mrs Evans just as surely as if he’d kicked them to death.’

‘Morally, you’re right, Marty. Legally is another matter. And the courts are only interested in the law. Constable Williams has applied for a restraining order to keep him away from this house, street and area, so he shouldn’t be round again.’

‘And when he gets too drunk to know where he is?’

‘We’ll arrest him. Breaking a restraining order is an offence.’

‘I can’t believe you won’t do anything.’

‘Not won’t, can’t. There’s a difference.’ Kicking off his boots, Brian took Martin’s cup, poured the cold tea down the sink, filled the kettle and put it on to boil. ‘Have you any idea what time it is?’

Martin looked at him blankly.

‘It’s two in the morning. Why don’t you try to get some sleep?’

‘Mrs Evans and Constable Williams take us three in when my father batters my mother senseless. My mother dies as a result of the battering, my father kills Mrs Evans and you expect me to sleep?’

‘Nothing that happened today is your fault.’

‘No?’

‘No, Marty,’ Brian countered forcefully, reaching for the teapot. ‘And with all the arrangements that have to be made tomorrow, someone has to be on the ball. I can’t see Constable Williams or Lily up to it. That leaves you, me and Jack. How long has he been in the garage?’

Martin looked at the clock but nothing registered. ‘Ten minutes, maybe an hour, I don’t know.’

Brian made the tea and poured Martin a cup. ‘Take this to bed, I’ll get him.’

Walking out into the garden, Brian went to the garage. He opened the door and switched on the light. Jack’s motorbike, battered but gleaming, was parked where he usually left it. Relieved that Jack hadn’t ridden off like a lunatic to wrap himself round the nearest lamp-post, Brian closed the door. As he started back up the path he noticed a dim light burning in the basement window of the Griffithses’ house. Perhaps there were other paths of destruction just as dangerous and more certain than a late-night motorbike ride after all.

Helen held Jack for what seemed like hours until he finally stopped shivering. Sliding his hands to her waist, he pulled up her sweater. She sat up and helped him remove her sweater and top, waiting until he slipped the hooks on the back of her brassiere. When he removed his own pullover, shirt and vest, she tossed their clothes on to a chair before snuggling back down beside him. She had done no more than the last time they had been alone together, but she still gasped at the sensation of his bare skin against hers. It was such a wonderfully warm, intimate and deliciously illicit feeling. As he thumbed her nipples, teasing them to hard, scrunched peaks, he kissed her with a ferocity that left her reeling.