The Hills and the Valley (16 page)

Until last night when he had come home for Christmas and seen her through new eyes.

Lying sleepless also Huw relived again the shock of the moments when he had realised it. Last night, when she had come into the kitchen to greet him had been the first. She had stood there framed in the doorway and though her face was as familiar to him as his own, seen every morning in the shaving mirror, he had been shaken by the change in it. Same fair hair, yet had it always curled so enticingly and he had never noticed it? Same blue eyes, yet with a tantalising sparkle. Same rosy cheeks he had seen on a little girl who rode behind him, squealing, on a toboggan in the snow, same mouth, yet somehow curving, sensual, appealing. And her figure. That of a young woman without doubt. Huw had felt the shock waves reverberate through his body as he looked at her. Barbara, yet not Barbara. Not a child. A lovely young woman.

Then there had been today in the garage. All day he had been watching her, trying to equate this strange young beauty with the Barbara he knew. Yet it had still come as yet another shock when they had stood close together in the darkness and he had felt the sudden desire to take her in his arms. He hadn't done it of course. You didn't suddenly grab a girl you had grown up with. That was for pretty strangers who had made it obvious with their flirtatious behaviour that it was exactly what they wanted you to do. Yet never had he felt more inclined to recklessness. Maybe if the others hadn't chosen just that moment to arrive home he would have thrown caution to the winds and kissed her anyway. Maybe …

Perhaps it was just as well he was leaving tomorrow, thought Huw. Back to the familiar world of mess rooms and aeroplane hangars, back to the young men who talked in the RAF jargon that was now familiar to him. Back to the WAAF girls closer to his own age and the beauties of the nearby town who hung around young men in uniform, giggling and blushing and fluttering their eyelashes. To think about Barbara the way he was thinking about her seemed a betrayal of the trust she had in him and of the home that Amy had given him. Yet not even this creeping guilt could lessen the dark desire which had invaded his mind and senses.

Barbara, he thought again, and her name sounded like the haunting echo of some half-remembered melody. Little Barbara,

grown overnight into a woman.
He was still thinking about her when he fell asleep.

‘I'm worried, Ralph,' Amy said.

She could not sleep either, drowsy though she had been when they retired to bed. Then she had been lulled by wine and good food and the warmth, both physical and spiritual, which had been generated by the family gathering around the fire. Now, in the quiet of their bedroom, all the tiny pinpricks of anxiety which she had felt during the day yet been able to ignore gathered their forces to nag her into wakefulness.

‘What's that?' Ralph grunted. He was half asleep already, partly buried under the blankets.

‘Barbara and Huw. Haven't you seen the way they've been looking at one another all day?'

‘No.'

‘Well they have. I know Barbara has always adored Huw but this was different. And he was looking at her as if he had never seen her before.'

‘You're imagining things,' Ralph muttered. He disliked Amy's habit of suddenly launching into full-scale discussions just when he was on the point of going to sleep; it was one of the few things about her that irritated him.

‘I hope so,' Amy said. ‘If there was anything between them I don't know what I'd do. Do you think perhaps we ought to have been more – well, open about things?'

Even now, though there were no secrets between them, there were certain subjects that were never mentioned. Too painful, perhaps, they had been consigned to the background of life, accepted and forgotten.

‘You're worrying about nothing, Amy,' Ralph said, turning over and humping the blankets with him.

‘I don't know. I really don't know.'

‘Well, there is nothing you can do about it tonight. Worry about it if and when the time comes. Which I don't think for one moment it will,' Ralph advised testily. ‘And now, for heaven's sake, let's get some sleep.'

Two minutes later and he was snoring gently so Amy could say no more. But it was a long time, all the same, before she too fell asleep.

At the beginning of February Margaret decided she was fit enough to have Elaine and Marie under her roof again and nothing Harry could say would make her change her mind.

‘They can't stay with Mum for ever,' she argued. ‘It was never meant to be anything but a temporary arrangement and she's not a young woman to have all the extra work and worry. She's already wearing herself to a frazzle for the war effort.'

‘She's not the only one,' Harry said pointedly, but Margaret refused to listen.

‘They are my responsibility. It's not fair to push them onto her.'

‘It's darned unfortunate they aren't among the ones who have gone home,' Harry said. As the weeks had passed and no threatened air raids had materialised one after another of the evacuees had returned to London. But Elaine and Marie had not been amongst them. Their mother seemed more than content for them to be off her hands and apart from the occasional letter which was so badly addressed that Margaret was amazed the Post Office was able to deliver it and a small parcel at Christmas they had heard nothing from her.

‘I don't mind having them really,' Margaret had said stubbornly. ‘It's not as if I'm at work now and it gives me something to keep me occupied.'

Harry sighed. It was true that being idle did not suit Margaret. The school board at Sanderley had already appointed a new teacher to take her place before she had had her accident and regretfully the Head had told her it was too late for her to withdraw her notice. But Harry could not imagine that Margaret would have any difficulty finding a new post if she were to look for one. She was an excellent teacher and highly thought of by all who knew her. But she was making no efforts in that direction.

It could be of course that she did not feel up to it, Harry thought. Although Dr Carter had said she had made a marvellous recovery physically, he knew she was still grieving for the baby she had lost. But he could not help feeling this was not the only reason for her preferring to stay at home.

Since the day when their mother had failed to arrive on the ‘Parents Special'train to visit them, Margaret had become more and more protective towards Elaine and Marie and Harry suspected she was channelling some of her own loss and grief into becoming a surrogate mother.

The thought worried him. If she expended too much love on them she would end up by being hurt again for the day would inevitably come when they would return home to their own family, unsatisfactory as it might be. But try telling that to Margaret! She would only snap his nose off and say he was being ridiculous. Since the accident she seemed to snap all too readily.

The answer would be to start another baby of their own, of course, but it was much too early to think of that, Dr Carter had said.

So the children returned and Margaret devoted herself to looking after them and helping them to settle down – a mammoth task which meant she often looked tired and worried though she constantly denied that there was any problem.

One of the things she persuaded them to do was to join the GFS – the Girls Friendly Society – which met every Tuesday in the Church Hall. At first Elaine was prone to complain that the singing games they played were ‘silly'and the first aid lessons ‘boring', but they went along with surprisingly little argument and wore their badges pinned to their jumpers with something suspiciously like reluctant pride.

They were at GFS one evening in early March when Harry came home, later than usual, from a meeting of the Urban District Council. Harry had been a councillor now for more than three years and a member of the Labour Party for a great many more. In fact his dedication to politics had been the reason for the change of direction in his career. He had been all set to become the youngest colliery manager in the district when Sir Richard Spindler had called him to his office one day and issued what had been in effect an ultimatum – leave the Labour Party and take promotion, remain in it and see the chances pass him by. The interview had made Harry furious for he could not see that his politics had any bearing on his ability to do his job well, but Sir Richard had been adamant. The Labour Party was the enemy of management and if Harry persisted with what Sir Richard referred to as ‘this political nonsense'he could not be considered to be serving the best interests of the colliery company. Harry had told him in no uncertain terms that he would not compromise his principles and left with the sick certainty that all the hard work he had put into passing his examinations had been in vain. Then, just when he was feeling at his lowest, Tom Heron, the Miners'Agent, had been forced by a heart attack into early retirement and Harry had applied successfully to succeed him. He enjoyed the new challenge for now he was able to use all his knowledge and expertise to the very end which had always most concerned him getting a better deal for the men who worked the narrow Somerset seams – and it also left him free to work for the community in other ways. When he was elected to the council as one of the ‘Labour Six', he quickly proved his worth and it was not only the people he represented but also his fellow councillors who were privately convinced that Harry Hall would go far.

Since the war had started Council meetings had been held in the afternoons – to save having to buy blackout for the Council Chamber had been the official reason, but since the blackout had appeared anyway Harry had the sneaking feeling that the change had been pushed through by some of the members who preferred to miss half a day's work and be paid for it rather than having to give up an evening of their own time once a month.

Today, the meeting had gone on longer than it sometimes did thanks mainly to Eddie Roberts who had objected strenuously to one of the resolutions and Harry was still fuming as he sat at the table watching Margaret resurrect the plate of dinner which she had put back over a saucepan of water on the stove to keep warm for him.

‘Eddie Roberts is a pain in the proverbial backside,' he said, making angry patterns on the tablecloth with the handle of his knife. ‘He's a self-opinionated pompous blithering idiot. I can't stand him.'

Margaret stirred the skin off the gravy she had saved for Harry in the china gravy boat and looked around at him in surprise.

She knew Harry didn't like Eddie and knew too that the dislike was mutual. There had never been any love lost between Amy's brother-in-law and the Hall family since he had tried to cheat Amy out of the business when Llew, her first husband and Eddie's brother, had died. And though they were both members of the Labour party and so theoretically should have supported one another in council meetings there was often friction between the two men. But it was unlike Harry to wax so vehement about anyone, even Eddie.

‘What has he done now?' she asked.

‘To begin with he did his best to stop us suspending the building of some of the new council houses at South Hill although we've been asked by central government to avoid any extra expense for the time being. Then, if you please, he tried to veto the wage rises for coucil employees which they desperately need to keep in line with the increase in the cost of living.'

‘I hope this isn't too dried up,' Margaret said, putting the plate down in front of Harry. ‘It was lovely when we had it.'

‘It'll be fine. Quite honestly, I'm so hungry I wouldn't notice the difference anway,' Harry said, shaking salt onto the potatoes. ‘What a meeting! Sometimes I wonder why I bother!'

‘You bother because you care about getting things done.' Margaret sat down in the chair opposite him, resting her chin on her hand and regarding him seriously. ‘You mustn't let Eddie upset you. He's just a lot of hot air.'

‘Hmm. If only it was just that,' Harry said, tucking in. ‘The trouble is I'm not so sure.'

‘What do you mean?' Margaret asked.

‘I don't trust him. I think he's doing his eye good.'

‘Eddie? Oh surely not! I mean, I know he's out for his own good but surely he wouldn't do anything dishonest.'

‘I'm not so sure.' Harry piled cabbage on his fork. ‘I think he might be taking backhanders. Take his objections to holding back the building work to begin with. With the situation as it is he didn't really have a leg to stand on yet he argued black was white to try to get us to finish all ten of the houses. Then there have been several contracts handed out that have surprised me a bit. Unnecessary expense jobs pushed through, usually resulting in extra work for people Eddie has some connection with or benefitting them in some way. I noticed it first last year. There was that new building site at Riddicks Cross. Welsh's from South Compton were developing it and they applied to the council to have a new drainage system put in linking them to the main sewerage. Bloody cheek, really, but Eddie argued for them that they had thought that side of things had been taken care of by the council and hadn't catered for it. The whole development could have been jeopardised if they ran out of money because of the extra expense and he reckoned it was the council's responsibility anyway. So it went through.'

‘Sounds fair enough to me,' Margaret said.

‘But it's not. Their surveyors should have looked into it before they ever started the schemes. It's elementary,' Harry, himself a trained surveyor, argued. ‘And when you look into it what do you find? Adam Welsh and Eddie Roberts are as thick as thieves. They do all their insurance through him and they often have a drink together in the George.'

‘Oh,' Margaret said.

‘And that's just one instance.' Harry paused. ‘Have we got any bread?'

‘Yes, of course.' Margaret fetched the loaf and cut a thick slice. ‘What else then? What else has he been up to?'