What Was Rescued Page 7

  I ventured a look at his face when he came back, but there were no visible signs of trauma. If he was shocked, he was dealing with it pretty well. I had to get him out of there.

  We went for a walk up the mountain and looked out across the valley to the next mountain and the tall tip. Grey sheep nibbled the sparse grass around us, and we sat down in the sunshine. ‘I’m afraid it’s not Capri,’ I said.

  He laughed, and I laughed too.

  ‘You get sheep thrown in here, though,’ I said.

  ‘And mountain air . . . and a pretty girl.’

  My pulse thumped loud in my head and I could feel my cheeks heat up even in the cool air. His arm brushed against mine. I wanted to be wrapped in those arms again, but this time with a strange urgency. It was all I could do not to jump on him. I loved the skin of him, familiar but surprising. The pull of his closeness sparked a startling turbulence in every part of me. He leant over gently and kissed me on the lips.

  Let me say that again: he leant over gently and kissed me on the lips. It was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me. Of course, I’d never been to Capri, but I doubt it could have beaten that kiss on the mountain.

  11

  ARTHUR

  Dora and I wrote to each other for some time, and occasionally we met up. The first time was when I went over to Wales to see her. When she met me off the bus, it was like seeing her for the first time all over again. I had to reacquaint myself with small details I had forgotten: the tilted head, the shy smile with slightly crooked teeth, the blue eyes that disappeared with that smile, the way she had of holding one arm at the elbow, the apologetic shoulders, the milky skin, the slender waist, the utter loveliness of her. I felt oddly tearful when I saw her standing there in the crisp sunshine. I breathed in the fresh air all around her. She was oxygen to me. I wanted to take her in my arms and inhale her. Instead I held out my hand, and she gave me hers to shake awkwardly, cool and soft.

  I liked her parents. They were gentle, modest people. I knew they would be. As soon as they spoke, I was transported back to the exciting moment when I first heard Dora speak with her Welsh accent on the train. It was thick and easy, with a rhythm so foreign and exotic that I had to stop myself from listening to the music of it rather than what was being said.

  Her mother was slim but sturdy, with calves shaped on the steep roads and mountainside. Dora’s father was a short, skinny man, but even so his jacket, fastened tightly with one button, indicated that it had been bought a decade or so earlier for a younger version of himself.

  The house smelt homely, of coal and baking and gas. I liked the frugality of her surroundings, and I was pleased to see where she came from. Dora was made here: unspoilt and practical; she appreciated everything.

  After a few sandwiches in their front room, we decided to go for a walk. Whilst waiting for her to fetch her coat, I stood studying the photographs on the wall in the hallway. There was a picture of a male voice choir in which I spotted her father; a picture of what must have been her maternal family, with a teenage version of her mother; then there was a photograph of two little girls. The smallest one, pretty and grinning, was undoubtedly Dora, but the older one, who had her arm around Dora, was a real beauty. She looked out of the picture with more steadfast confidence than the little one, who appeared so excited that she needed the steadying arm.

  ‘That’s Dora and her sister, Siân,’ said Dora’s mother, coming into the hallway.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t realize she had a sister. Does she live here too?’

  ‘Oh, no. Siân passed away twelve years ago. Diphtheria, it was.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It was a long time ago.’

  ‘But these things don’t go away, do they?’

  ‘Oh, Arthur, bach, have you lost someone too?’

  ‘My brother.’ It felt so easy to say. Just a word to represent a whole person, a whole life. ‘He was never found after the ship . . . after the disaster.’

  ‘Oh, your poor mother!’ She pronounced the word ‘your’ like ‘ewer’, and I was so fascinated that I was distracted for a moment from the truly interesting thing about this remark. She had not consoled me. She had gone straight to my mother. I suppose it was to be expected that she would put herself in another mother’s shoes. Siblings were not expected to feel the great loss with such intensity – and perhaps that’s true – but I could see now that Dora and I had more in common than I thought. I wanted to understand her mother’s thinking.

  ‘Yes. My mother took it badly.’

  ‘Oh, yes! Poor thing!’ Then she grabbed my arm and said brightly, ‘But she has you!’

  I smiled. ‘It’s funny, though. I never really felt I was enough for her after that.’

  I waited for her reply. It was going to be important. She was going to tell me what my mother truly felt.

  ‘Didn’t you, love?’

  Her face, upturned sideways to mine, was full of feeling, but what it expressed I couldn’t tell for sure. I needed more words.

  Dora came up the stairs from the parlour wearing a dark green coat and a headscarf, and so the next words her mother gave me were, ‘Enjoy yourselves my lovelies! And come back for some tea!’

  Dora’s house was on the side of a mountain. The back looked down into the valley and the front faced up the mountain. We walked up the mountain opposite their front door and looked down at the houses streaming along the valley, their windows edged in white stone against the grey. And we looked across the valley at the opposite mountain, tall and golden with bracken behind the dark coal tip. ‘See those springs and streams along the mountainside?’ she said, pointing. ‘There’s one under that great tip as well. Our Dad’s mad as hell with the Coal Board. Says the tip’ll come down and cover us all one day.’ Along the valley to the left was the giant wheel of the pit-head, and to the right was the only exit, a slim pale horizon down the valley between the walls of the mountains. It was a beautiful early August day, and the stiff breeze seemed to push the sun in and out of the little clouds, so that we were alternately warm and cool in quick succession. Dora took on a new glow for me. As I saw her climb ahead of me, as sure-footed as any of the ragged sheep across our path, I realized that she would have already lost her sister Siân when I first met her in the train compartment, and lost her quite recently too. She would have been sent away to keep her safe, to keep her from dying as well, and that would have been an agonizing decision to make. I recalled the frantic Welsh woman hugging her on the station. Had I been a little envious at the time? Had I wanted more displays of affection from my own mother, whose hugs were largely for Philip (because I would’ve turned away in any case, awkward and ashamed)? And little Dora, sitting there in the compartment alone with strangers, had been feeling just as I did when I got home: not quite enough for her. Loved, but not quite . . . enough.

  The grassy mountainside was covered in sheep pellets, and bleating from all directions reached us from time to time on the wind. We were sitting on our coats and the sun was on us. I felt a sudden rush of tenderness for Dora. I needed to hold her, to give her all the warmth she had been missing, to feel – as if some essence might be transferred from her bones pressed against mine – how she had coped with her need so well.

  The scent of her skin took me straight back to Boat Nine when my arms were wrapped around her and her little limbs were clinging on to mine. As a boy, there had been an instinctive need to hold her and protect her, and I know she was the reason I survived. On that Welsh mountain the smell of her was like coming home. But it was far more powerful than that because we were no longer children. There was something else. I could have drowned in her. I ached for her.

  I leant over and kissed her. It was a wonderful feeling. I had found my woman.

  12

  DORA

  Life at college was pretty dull. I shared a room with a buttoned-up girl called Edith who saw images of Jesus in the pattern of the floor tiles. On the weekends, if I wasn’t seeing Arthu
r, I went to the pictures with another girl called Jenny, a bubbly second-year student who lived out in a flat in a smart part of Cheltenham. She was trying to convince me to join her the following year, as she thought I’d have more fun out of college. One particularly bleak weekend she invited me to a party that her landlord was throwing. Apparently he was young but had his own house and he came from landed gentry or something. I had nothing better to do, so I went along.

  I first came across Ralph in photographs. I was standing in the hallway of his Georgian terraced house, and there he was: straining on the oars of a boat, biceps flexed, neck splayed with tendons like the base of tree. There were other young men behind him, and the picture oozed masculinity. It is odd, in retrospect, that this was my first image of him. Rowing requires such commitment and team spirit, and Ralph possessed neither of these qualities. I would later discover that he was only standing in temporarily on the day the photograph was taken, and that he was booted out of the team even before the injured rower he was replacing returned. Next to the rowing photograph was a picture of him standing on a mountaintop, his arms folded, his legs apart. He looked as though he had conquered the world. Again the moulded muscles stood out and flaunted themselves at the camera. In another photograph he stood on a beach, in bathing trunks, with a pipe in his mouth, a trilby on his head and his arms around two girls, and in yet another he playfully appeared to be leaning on the Eiffel Tower, although it was tiny and in the distance whilst he was huge and in the foreground. On the opposite wall to these pictures in the hallway was his framed degree certificate from Cambridge. Although I would return to inspect them later, I first observed all these things quite fleetingly with Jenny, as we made our way upstairs to her ‘flat’.

  There were two bedrooms and a living room with a kitchenette in one corner. The bathroom on the landing was shared with the rest of the house, where, according to Jenny, the landlord lived with assorted glamorous people who came and went. I could not have been more excited at the prospect of securing a room somewhere like this for my next year of college. The shared living room to the flat had a view over a park, in the middle of which was a beautifully painted bandstand. The room was full of light, and I spotted a sewing machine in the corner.

  ‘You sew – like me!’ I heard myself say.

  ‘Do you?’ Jenny’s face lit up. ‘I’m absolutely hopeless!’ She picked up a partly finished dress and showed it to me. ‘Can you do zips?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Okay, Dora, you’re moving in! We’re going to have some fun together, you and I! Come on, that sounded like Ralph coming in. You’d better meet him.’

  ‘Hasn’t he got to approve of me first?’

  ‘He’ll do as I say! I’m afraid we can’t let a good seamstress slip through our fingers. Anyway, you’re pretty. He won’t say no.’

  I was flustered, but I followed Jenny down the stairs and into a huge, high-ceilinged front room, which she entered without knocking. Two young men sat in opposite corners and didn’t stand up when we went in.

  ‘This is Dora. She’d like to move in.’

  The chestnut-haired man she was addressing put down a pile of papers he had been studying and looked directly into my eyes, so intently that I had to look down at the floor. ‘A Dora? I adore her!’ He laughed at his own little joke. ‘And where do you come from, Dora?’ He pronounced my name as if it were something unusual, or a piece of pretentiousness on my part to be its owner.

  ‘Wales,’ I muttered.

  ‘Where in Wales?’

  ‘The Valleys.’ I had learnt never to mention the mining village I grew up in, partly because the pronunciation of it provoked mirth and partly because no one in England had ever heard of it.

  ‘The mining valleys?’

  I nodded.

  ‘A true proletarian,’ he said. ‘You’re in, Dora. Welcome to your new home!’

  This was my first glimpse of real freedom, and I genuinely wanted to move in the following September, but I explained that I was committed to my accommodation at the college for now.

  ‘We’ll have to see if we can persuade you, then.’

  The man in the opposite corner, silent until then, started playing a guitar, and Jenny beckoned me to come and sit down on a sofa to listen. He had bright orange hair and closed his eyes as he played. At first it was jazz, and then he moved on to some Nat King Cole hits, which we sang along to. Despite his skilful playing, he was clearly more modest than his friend, who busied himself with drinks and banter.

  As the daylight faded, more people began to arrive, and soon the high-ceilinged living room was filled with voices growing ever louder above the music. The red-haired guitarist paused for a drink, and someone put on a record player. People began to dance. Now it may seem strange, but it was the first time I’d ever drunk alcohol, and although I’d had only one glass, I was beginning to feel light-headed. Ralph came to sit on the arm of the sofa and said something to me.

  ‘Pardon?’

  He leant in close.

  ‘Have you travelled much?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where have you been?’

  What could I say? Newport, Bristol, here, my aunty’s village in the next valley, Barry Island.

  ‘I set sail for Canada once.’

  ‘Canada! Now there’s somewhere I’ve never been. Not yet, anyway. What was it like?’

  ‘I don’t know. I never got there.’

  He looked confused, and then intrigued. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Ship sank.’

  ‘Oh!’ He leant more emphatically on his arm, which was resting behind me on the sofa. ‘That wasn’t The City of India, was it?’

  I nodded, a little impressed that he remembered it from so long ago.

  ‘I knew someone on that ship.’

  ‘Did you? Who?’

  ‘You probably wouldn’t know her. Philippa Barrington-Hobb. Different deck, I should think.’

  ‘Not Pippa?’ I felt suddenly alert, as if I had just heard some shocking news. ‘There was a Pippa in our group. She did have a double-barrelled name.’

  ‘Dark hair. Amazing green eyes.’

  It was her. I resented the allusion to her eyes. If she could dazzle Ralph, she could dazzle anyone. Why did she keep turning up in my life? I had tried my hardest to bury that particular memory. I didn’t want any trouble. I must have nodded.

  ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ he said. ‘What are the chances? Did you know her well?’

  ‘Well enough.’

  ‘Poor Pippa. She’s had a rough time.’

  Now he really had my attention. I swivelled round to face him.

  ‘What’s happened to her?’

  ‘Didn’t you hear?’ Then he suggested we go somewhere quieter.

  I could hardly say no. We were beginning to bellow at each other. I followed him into the kitchen, which was also high-ceilinged and grand, if a little tatty, but that was also filling up with noisy people pushing for drinks from the large oak table. He opened a French door into a small sunroom. It was dark and cool but suddenly quiet.

  ‘How’s your drink?’

  I looked at my empty glass. ‘I’m fine.’

  He insisted on topping me up. He produced an open bottle of wine from his side, which he must have taken from the table as we passed. ‘There. This is a bit quieter, isn’t it?’

  ‘Tell me about Pippa.’

  ‘Pippa? Ah, well. You knew, presumably, that her family had fallen upon hard times, because that was why she was on that ship, basically.’

  ‘Hard times?’

  ‘Her father ran off with someone-or-other and left her mother with nothing, just the big house to live in. Huge great place, but impossible to run without an income.’

  I pictured this huge great place and found it hard to work up any sympathy. ‘Couldn’t her mother sell it?’

  ‘Lord, no! Ashleycroft Hall is the family estate. You can’t sell that. Anyway, it wasn’t her mother’s to sell.’

  So
I asked what they did, then, and he said that her mother started selling off the paintings. ‘Fetched a fair whack for some of those. Then the poor thing got burgled, and there was no insurance. Bastard had let it run out. So then she sends Pippa off to Canada as a seavacuee, while she shacks up with a millionaire – if she can find one. That was the plan, anyway.’ He was taking swigs straight from the bottle. ‘All goes well for a bit, but he leaves her too. Bit of a hard one, her mother. Have you met her? Bit cold. Beautiful for a woman in her forties, but not going to keep a man around for long. No warmth. A man can soon tell when he’s being used. So it was all down to poor old Philippa. Had to land herself a big fish.’

  ‘You mean marry someone rich?’

  ‘That was the plan. And you’ve seen Pippa. Not difficult, I would say.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘She got her man. Jeremy Finlay-Funny-Fanny or something. Rolling in it. Perfect match. He had the money; she had the blood. New money marries breeding, that sort of thing. Even Pa thought it a good match, and he’s a stickler for good blood. “Best of a bad job!” he said. Anything to keep the stately homes of England from going to the dogs, you see.’

  ‘That makes sense. She was wearing an engagement ring when I saw her the September before last.’

  ‘Oh, you saw her? Oh, well you’ll know then. All went up the spout. Poor Pippa. There she was pretending to be the loaded inheritor of a vast estate, and there was he pretending to be just plain loaded. Which he had been. Owned all these shares in a gold mine in South Africa. Except he didn’t. It had all been gambled away the year before. Just able to borrow enough for the bluster – decent ring and all that. When she found out he’d deceived her, she had to ditch him.’

  ‘But she’d deceived him.’

  Ralph smiled and put his arm around me. ‘Oh, you are delightful.’