Gull Island (6 page)

‘Best I go,’ Barbara said at last. ‘Pity we didn’t meet earlier. Got to get them back for supper, see.’

‘Come again soon,’ Luke said. ‘I’m usually here on Sundays.’

‘Soon,’ she promised.

It was with undisguised regret that she turned away from him. She glanced back several times to wave at the thin, lonely figure until it faded and became a part of the shadows, swallowed up by the night.

‘Is he going to be your ’usband, then?’ Richard asked.

‘No, he’s just a friend.’

She wondered why she had never thought of Luke as a prospective husband. It was normal as breathing for girls of her age to consider the possibility with any new acquaintance. Probably because she still grieved for Bernard Stock, but also because the affection Luke showed was of a different kind. He was a loving friend and she doubted if he could ever be anything more. She also realized that for him it was the same. They had struck up an immediate rapport but although love might grow between them it wouldn’t be the kind she had felt for Bernard and never would be.

Too tired to work it out, she said aloud, ‘Luke is the one person I can say
anything to and be sure he understands. Now, sing, all of you, to cheer ourselves and hurry our steps back home.’ They all began to sing with her, ‘Show me the way to go home, I’m tired and I wanna go to bed.’

A strong wind began to blow through the bare hedgerow, and the moon sailed along in a clear sky. It filled and shed a soft light that picked out the frost glittering on the leafless branches. The air was chill and the wind made the best of it, finding gaps in their clothes and whistling around their bare legs.

The children in their thin clothes began to wail. Cold, hungry; what was she thinking about keeping them out so late? Fine mother she’d make! Changing the slow song to a march to keep them more cheerful, she sang, ‘Jolly good luck to the girl who loves a soldier.’ She picked up the youngest, set up the fastest pace the rest could manage and headed once more for the Careys’ poor home.

Luke continued to smile until the small group had dissolved in the
darkness
, the sound of their singing no more than a ghostly echo, then his shoulders drooped and he walked slowly to the cottage. Inside, he lit the paraffin lamp, busied himself making tea then sat in the chintz-covered chair to read his sister’s letter.

His heart was racing as he unfolded the flimsy page, hoping for a message of support but fearing disappointment. He had written to her address on the outskirts of Cardiff asking if he might visit her at Christmas and see her children. The reply was brief, stating baldly that he would not be welcome at Christmastime or at any other.

Turning the lamp low, wanting to hide his sorrow in darkness, he sat for more than an hour wondering if, and how, he should kill himself. He ought to make a will. There was no doubt in his mind who should benefit from everything he owned. Barbara and Rosita should receive whatever money the business achieved.

Too lethargic to even walk across the room to put a match to the fire, he wrote down his wishes briefly and clearly and signed them with his full name and the date. Then he cried as he realized he couldn’t remember her address or her second name. It was Jones, wasn’t it? Or Davies? Or Evans or Thomas? The more he pondered the less he was sure. And didn’t a will need to be witnessed? What a fool he was. The document was useless because he was useless!

He lit a match and was about to burn the paper but stopped, blew out the match and threw the paper into a drawer of the desk. Burning it was too much of an effort, he would have to get up to put the ashes in the embers in the grate and he really couldn’t be bothered.

He sat in his chair and the lamp flickered and went out, leaving only the
unpleasant smell of the burnt oil. He ought to get up and relight it but what was the point? Barbara had friends and didn’t need him, his father hated him and his sister wanted to pretend he didn’t exist.

Discomfort, that sanity restorer, eventually brought him out of his depression and, shivering with cold, his muscles locked in tension, he forced himself to rise. Like an old man, he moved to relight the lamp and put a match to the fire. There was a shuffling among the screwed-up paper under the criss-cross sticks and as the flames began to slowly curl upwards, a mouse jumped out, shook itself and raised its head as if to reprimand him for disturbing its slumber.

The fur on its back was only slightly scorched and it allowed him to pick it up and place it on the table. The creature was dazed but Luke pretended it was tame and was accepting him as a friend. It seemed very important at that moment to be accepted even by this tiny mouse. He sat watching it, while slowly taking a parcel of sandwiches from his pocket then offering the little creature some crumbs. To his delight the mouse sat up and chewed without any sign of fear.

He ate too, with a pretence of company, and when the mouse had once more disappeared, he opened the door and stood looking out across the glistening sea to the island. The light from the moon made a path that tempted him once again to think of walking along it to oblivion, away from his misery. It was cold with a rawness that seemed to threaten the very skin on his face and he dug his hands deep into his pockets. His fingers closed on a long, narrow box. The watch. It was to have been his gift to Roy this Christmas. He lifted it again and was about to hurl it into the sea but then held back as an idea occurred to him. Once the war had ended, he would go and find Roy’s grave and bury the watch there with him.

The decision gave him a sense of purpose he had lacked since the news of Roy’s death had reached him and the tenseness around his thin face relaxed as plans began to form. The mouse ran across the floor twice more as he sat quietly in his chair. He slept that night with an odd sense of comfort, knowing he had company.

Mrs Carey was upset. Today she had received the payment from her Christmas savings club. All the year she had been giving sixpence and more when she could, to a woman who called each Friday and marked the amount on a card. Leaving Richard in charge of the children, she had gone to the shops and bought a small gift for each of them – dolls, toy cars, a scarf each for the twins – and with only a few shillings left to buy fruit on Christmas Eve, she had counted and found there was sixpence missing. She was extremely careful with money, always knowing to the halfpenny how
much she owned. She knew it had been taken by one of the children. But which one?

She waited until Barbara had brought them home and they were sitting around the crowded table before demanding to know who had taken the sixpence.

‘I save all the year so we can make Christmas a bit different from the rest of the year and I won’t have you taking more than your share,’ she said, her small figure bristling with anger and hurt.

Barbara looked around at the shocked faces looking for a sign of guilt, but it was Idris, the golden boy, at whom she looked longest. ‘Idris?’ she asked quietly. ‘You were here all day and the others were out. D’you know anything about a missing sixpence?’

‘Barbara!’ Mrs Carey said at once. ‘As if my Idris would take from his own mother!’

‘Sorry, Auntie Molly Carey, I only thought – him being the only one here.…’

‘He wouldn’t take my money, would you,
cariad
? Now …’ She glared around the table again, questioning them all. On Idris’s palm, a round pattern deepened as he gripped the small silver coin tightly. Richard and Barbara watched him, and knew.

The discussion went on for a few minutes, then Idris slid down from his seat next to his mother and crawled across to the hearth. He held up his hand, smiling his beautiful smile, and showed the sixpence he was holding. ‘Look, Mam, it’s here, dropped in the coals.’

Mrs Carey was overjoyed but Barbara stared at Idris, her eyes full of doubt. She puzzled over why she disliked him so much and wondered also if it were possible to see the future character of one so young.

Ten days later, long after midnight had struck and ended Christmas Day, Luke and the mouse dozed in front of a fire of driftwood, having eaten Christmas dinner together, sharing a chicken, some cheese and a loaf of bread. The mouse had found a comfortable place in the cupboard beside the fireplace and Luke felt beholden to his new friend to come as often as he could to warm the house for its comfort.

Two miles away, in a bed already overcrowded, Barbara lay cuddling her small daughter whom she called Rosita. Rosita Jones, born just before midnight on Christmas Day.

‘She’s so small. And her causing so much fuss. And look at those legs! She’s like a doll with half the stuffing missing,’ Barbara said, as she
examined
the perfect child.

Mrs Carey laughed, her eyes tearful with pleasure. ‘Give her time,
fach
. In a month those limbs will be filled out and she’ll be the most beautiful baby the town’s ever seen.’

‘If it had been a boy,’ Barbara said sleepily, ‘I’d have called him Luke.’

Luke heard about the birth of Rosita early in 1918. It was a Tuesday but Richard didn’t complain when Barbara asked him to abandon school and go to the cottage at Gull Island with a note for Luke.

The wind came across the sea with a bite and Richard covered up his head by pulling the back of his coat up and over it, his head in the part where his shoulders should be, arms high and sticking out like antennae. His legs were bare apart from socks which fell around his ankles and
disappeared
into the over-large boots, but it felt a little better when the wind didn’t burn his ears and forehead. Crouched at this odd angle, he walked on, giving the appearance of a deformed alien.

Luke’s place seemed empty as he approached the lonely cottage on the isolated shore but as he knocked, then climbed up to look through the window, the door opened and a smiling Luke invited him inside.

‘I brought a note from Barbara,’ Richard explained, digging in his pocket.

‘I thought you might. It’s the baby, is it? The little girl?’

‘Called her Rosita, she has, mind. There’s a name to give a tiddly little squawker.’

‘She’s a squawker, is she, this Rosita? If she makes her presence known so loudly, she’s going to stay. It shows that she’s strong.’

‘Why d’you live here all alone?’ Richard asked. ‘Haven’t you got no family?’

‘None.’ The muscles on Luke’s jaw tightened and he tried to smile. Then he added, ‘Well, there’s my friend, of course. Not really family, more a sort of adopted friend.’ He knelt down and made a squeaking sound with his lips and after a moment the mouse came out and ran over to his outstretched hand.

Richard moved slowly, instinctively careful not to frighten the little
creature
, and to his delight, the mouse accepted him and took food from him. The giving of food, such a basic gesture of friendship, gave pleasure and Luke’s smile became a natural one.

The man and the boy found each other good company, the spurious
adulthood
of Richard giving Luke a protective feeling for the boy, Richard seeing in Luke a rare adult who talked to him as an equal and not down to him.

‘Did you know that I’m six today?’ Richard told him. ‘Mam said I can have the cream off the milk in my cocoa, but I expect I’ll let Blodwen have it, her being in more need of it, like, being so young.’

‘Or Barbara maybe?’ Luke couldn’t help suggesting.

‘She wouldn’t take it, not her. Barbara won’t take more than she has to.’

‘And it’s really your sixth birthday? Well, we ought to make today
something
special. What d’you say to a trip in the boat? We might even catch a small coddling.’

Richard hid his excitement well, nodding briefly and throwing an ‘All right then’ over his shoulder in the most casual way. But Luke saw the glowing eyes and knew the boy was pleased. He found an extra coat and they set off armed with short boat rods and a tin of lug-worms that Luke had gathered earlier in the day.

Richard found the boat an unbelievably thrilling experience. Luke rowed them around the island and they landed for a brief walk on the soft, downy turf and watched as rabbits hopped about with no fear of them. The air had warmed slightly but was still harsh and the thought of anchoring the craft and sitting to wait for fish to swim to their bait quickly lost its appeal, so after Luke had rowed them further across the bay until they were opposite the ruined cottage, they returned to the beach and the warmth of his home with relief.

Defiant of the cold, they didn’t stay inside. Luke made a fire on the shore and they sat in the lee of the boat, draped in blankets, while the flames licked around the driftwood and they talked. They each spoke of their dreams and hopes for a future neither could really imagine.

Luke spoke prosaically of continuing to run his book-selling business without any contact with the family he loved. Richard’s future was filled with hopes of a different kind of life to the present one. He described vividly a time where there was plenty of space and where no one needed to be cold or hungry. A future in which the Carey family didn’t depend on the varied contents of Mr Carey’s pockets.

When the fire died down and shadows began to bring a return of the deepening cold, they went inside and ate several rounds of toast, then they walked along the beach to the cottage Richard and Barbara had once explored.

‘D’you own this?’ Richard asked. ‘You must be rich if you own the other one and rich people always own more than they need.’

‘It belongs to no one. The man who used to live there moved away when I was a child.’

‘There’d be plenty of room for us in that place.’ Richard studied it with his old-young face, one small, skinny leg propped on a rock, leaning forwards, elbow on his raised knee, in the attitude of an ancient philosopher.

‘What?’ Luke laughed aloud. ‘One cough and the lot would be down around you!’

‘It’s strong!’ Richard insisted.

Luke looked at the boy, surprised at the vehemence in his voice. ‘Do you really think so, Richard?’

‘It’s only the front bit that’s falling off.’