The Hills and the Valley (17 page)

‘I think he's leaking information on tenders. In fact I'm damned sure of it. You know when there's a job to be done we invite tenders? Well, quite often just lately we've received one quotation late, right at the last minute after all the others are in. And it's always the lowest. Not by much, mind you, but just enough to win the contract. This time it was delivered a day too late. But Eddie argued that since it was the lowest and we would be saving the council money we should accept it anyway.'

‘I'd agree with that,' Margaret said. ‘After all, it's not the council's money. It's
our
money – the ratepayers. Of course you should economise wherever you can.'

‘Stretching the limit by a day for a fiddling ten shillings?' Harry shook his head. ‘It's one thing if it's fair and above board. But I don't think this is. Of course we want a job done for the lowest possible price. But I don't like to see honest businessmen done out of work because Eddie Roberts happens to have a word in the ear of the opposition once they have submitted their prices. His cronies are undercutting, Marg, and they're doing it in collusion with him, I'm certain of it.'

Margaret pulled a face. ‘I see what you mean. But what proof have you got?'

‘None really. But I was given a wheeze today. Last meeting Thorne Sand and Gravel got the contract for supplying the necessaries to put up new outbuildings at the rear of the council offices. And who do you think was seen delivering building materials to Eddie's own home? None other than Thornes!'

‘What does Eddie want with building materials?' Margaret asked, puzzled.

‘I tackled him about it today. He says he is having an air raid shelter built in his back garden so that his mother will have somewhere to go if Hitler does start bombing.'

Eddie had never married – he still lived at home with his mother.

‘You believe him?' Margaret asked.

‘Oh yes, I dare say that part is true enough. Eddie is just the sort to want to go one better than anybody else.' Harry mopped up his gravy with the thick chunk of bread. ‘What I'd like to know is whether he paid for it.'

‘I see.' Margaret frowned. ‘But it still comes back to whether you have any proof.'

‘Not yet,' Harry said grimly. ‘But I'll get it, Marg. If that's what he's doing, believe me, I'll get it.'

Margaret surveyed him anxiously for a moment. Harry was like her father had been, so straight. He couldn't abide anyone cheating the system. But going against someone like Eddie Roberts who held a lot of sway in the Labour Party could cause a great deal of unpleasantness and be dangerous. If her father had still been alive it would have been different. He would never have stood for it and he would have worked alongside Harry to winkle out the bad apple from the barrel. As it was Eddie could make a good deal of trouble …

‘Be careful, Harry,' she warned.

‘I'll be careful all right – just as long as I can get things straight and above board,' Harry said, laying down his knife and fork. ‘Now – I'm feeling better than I was, but I've still got a corner left. What have we got for pudding?'

In the bedroom of the cottage in the lower reaches of Purldown Alec Hall humped the heavy old wardrobe back across the corner of the room and stood back, sweating.

‘Well, what do you think of that?' he asked.

‘Hmm, yes. It looks quite good there doesn't it? Unless the light might be better on the mirror if it was over there…' Joan Tiley, his fiancee, surveyed the position of the wardrobe, her plump and pretty face thoughtful.

‘I'm not moving it again and that's final.'

Joan pouted. ‘So why bother asking me if it's all right there?'

‘To give you the chance to praise me up once in a while,' Alec said. ‘It would make a nice change is all I can say. Nothing ever seems to be quite right for you.'

‘Oh Alec, that's not true!' Joan objected. ‘I told you what a lovely job you made of decorating the kitchen – and the living room too. You know I did. And if I do make any suggestions it's only because I want things to be just right. Goodness knows we've waited long enough to have a place of our own.'

‘We're lucky to
have
a place of our own. Plenty of people never do.'

‘Alec!' The pout became more pronounced as her pleasure in the arrangement of the bedroom furniture was overtaken by the feeling of anxiety which seemed to be there just below the surface almost all the time these days. ‘Why do you have to be so bad tempered? Don't
you
want our home to be nice?'

‘Of course I do.' But the undertones were still there. ‘Why do you think I've put in so much time doing it up?'

‘I don't know,' Joan said. ‘Sometimes I wonder.'

‘What do you mean by that?'

She hesitated. ‘Sometimes I wonder if you're just putting things off. Six months, you said it would take to do this place up when we first got it. Well, it's getting on for a year and still you keep finding things to do.'

‘You know what a state it was in.'

‘But it's not in a state now. It's a little palace. Anybody would be proud to live here. But have we set a date? No. Every time I suggest it you come up with some excuse or other. I'm beginning to wonder if you really want to marry me at all!'

‘Oh, don't be so stupid!' he retorted.

‘I'm not being stupid. And you're so horrid to me

‘Well, that's it!' he said crossly. ‘I just spent a whole evening rearranging furniture to suit you and you accuse me of being horrid to you. I'm going home.' He crossed the bedroom and picked up his jacket from the bed. ‘Are you coming?' he asked.

‘You see? You're doing it again – snapping my nose off!' she wailed. ‘I just can't seem to even
speak
to you these days. I don't know what's the matter with you.'

Alec did not reply. He was being snappy, he knew, but he couldn't help himself. He
felt
snappy. And she was right really though he would never have admitted it. He was finding excuses to delay setting a date. He'd been doing it one way and another for as long as he'd known her. But it had got worse recently. Partly because he could feel the net closing in and partly because …

Alec, like all the Halls, was a master at shutting out thoughts he did not want to think and he stopped his mind now from forming the words to complete the sentence. But it was there all the same, a feeling he refused to acknowledge and yet could not eradicate. It wasn't just his fear of being tied down that made him delay his marriage to Joan. It also had something to do with the girl who would be their next-door-neighbour when they moved into the cottage.

Alec had only seen her a few times since that first night when they had talked across his bicycle in the back pathway. But he had found it impossible to forget her.

He had lain awake that night not thinking about her exactly but disturbed in a way he had been unable to understand and when he had finally slept, his dreams had been haunted by her once-pretty face disfigured by the marks inflicted by her husband's cruelty.

It wasn't right, he thought, for a man to hit a girl like that, particularly if she was his wife. Her home should be a place of safety with her man there to protect, not injure, her. Anger rose like bile in his throat. He'd like to get hold of that Eric Latcham and show him what a fist in the face felt like. Just wait till he saw him next time …

But of course he had said nothing. The next time he saw Eric Latcham in the garden they passed the time of day as usual though Alec was fuming inwardly. And of Bryda there was no sign. She was hiding her black eye from the world, no doubt.

It was several weeks before he had seen Bryda again. He was across the yard one Saturday afternoon clearing out the rubbish that was piled in the coal house when she came out of the back door with a child in a pushchair. She looked embarrassed to see him, trying to slip quickly by, but he spoke to her all the same.

‘Nice afternoon.'

‘Yes.'

‘Cold though. I bet they're freezing watching the football up at the Town Ground.'

‘Yes. Eric's gone.'

‘To football?'

‘Yes. He always goes to football.'

‘Oh.'

‘I must hurry to the shop and back before he gets home and have a cup of tea and his cockles ready for him. He always like a plate of cockles after football on a Saturday.'

She had hurried off along the path pushing the child in the pushchair, a slight figure in a jacket that looked as if it had seen better days and a scarf tied over her hair. But at least there had been no marks on her face. He hadn't hit her lately – or not where it showed.

Cockles! thought Alec and felt a strange twinge of something between nostalgia and regret. His father always had cockles for tea on a Saturday too, a big plateful swimming in vinegar. But they had been part of the warm scenario of a happy household, eaten in front of a roaring fire while the football results were discussed and the smell of home-baked cake wafted in from the kitchen. He couldn't imagine that sort of atmosphere in a house where a man knocked his wife about.

Sudden anger boiled in him and he had vented it on the rubbish. And when a box blew down over Eric Latcham's garden he had let it go. If Eric tackled him about it it would be a good chance to have a go at him; let him see what he thought of him.

But Eric did not tackle him about it. A man like that only picks on someone too weak to hit back, Alec thought in disgust.

Each time he saw Bryda it was the same. A few brief exchanged words and she was gone. Yet he found himself thinking of her more and more, working outside as long as it was daylight in the hope of seeing her, glancing out of the window when he heard the door slam. Once he saw her scurrying by with her scarf pulled well across her face and wondered if she was again trying to hide the fact that Eric had been up to his old tricks. But if there were rows he did not hear them.

Now he shrugged into his jacket and turned to Joan.

‘Are you coming? Or are you staying here all night?'

‘Oh Alec!' She looked at him uncertainly then ran to him, burying her face in his chest. ‘Don't let's quarrel, please.'

For a moment he remained stiff and unyielding, then he put his arms around her, overcome with guilt. It wasn't her fault that he felt so unsettled and edgy.

‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘I didn't mean to upset you.'

Her hair tickled his chin, her body pressed close to his; nice hair, soft and springy, a nice body, plump and curvy, yet firm with youth. The irritation which continually needled at him these days began to fade, replaced by a warm glow of desire. She raised her face and he saw the tears welling in her eyes. Oh hell, he thought, he hadn't meant to make her cry. He kissed her, gently at first, then more deeply and as she responded his hands moved to caress the swell of her breast and her bottom, full and rounded beneath her flared serge skirt.

‘Did I ever tell you you've got a smashing bottom?' he whispered.

For answer she pressed closer, her kisses becoming more frantic, and he pushed her back towards the bed. The mattress was bare, covered only by an old blanket Joan's mother had given them for although there was a stack of new linen in her ‘bottom drawer' Joan was afraid to make up the bed until the house was lived in for fear that it might get damp. As the iron frame of the bed touched the back of their knees he urged her down so they were sitting on it, still kissing, and slid his hand up under her skirt.

This was the point when Joan usually stopped him – so far, no further. ‘Behave yourself!' she would say severely and refuse to kiss him any more until his hands were safely back where she wanted them. But tonight she made no protest. Above the tops of her stockings her thighs were plump and firm; as he explored all thoughts of Bryda, all anxieties about his future, all fears of the ‘marriage trap' fled from his mind. He could think of nothing but Joan's body, her nearness and how he wanted her. Gently, he pushed her back on the mattress and she did not resist. Her skirt was rucked up to her waist now and those glorious plump thighs enveloped him. Carefully, he unbuttoned her blouse burying his face in her breasts and feeling her hands on his bare back; she had pulled his shirt out of his trousers and he had not even noticed it. He proceeded cautiously now for he was afraid that the next move on his part would be the one which would make her pull back, scolding him for his impertinence. Then desire lent him courage and he took her all of a rush and though he heard her moan softly she did not protest.

Too soon it was over, a brief snatched spasm of activity which had excited his body yet left him feeling strangely detached from her. Physically satisfied yet at the same time disappointed by the sense of something missing, he felt the first stab of guilt.

‘Joan – I'm sorry …'

She moved beneath him. He rolled off her, propping himself up on one elbow, and saw the lazy smile curve her mouth.

‘It's all right. After all, we're going to get married aren't we? In fact I think we ought to set a date pretty quickly
now.
'

The moment she said the
‘now'
, the way she said it, he knew. He had thought he had been the aggressor and the instigator. Suddenly he knew different. He'd been caught well and truly, trapped by a nice pair of plump thighs just like many men before him.

No, be fair, he said to himself. She hasn't trapped you. You are supposed to be engaged to her after all. But all the same, now, knowing what he had done …

‘Yes, I suppose we'd better,' he said. ‘When do you want it – Easter?'

Her smile became broader.

‘Oh yes, Easter would be lovely!'

She reached for him again pulling him back towards her and he held her. But there was no stirring of desire now, nothing but a heaviness inside. Over her shoulder Alec stared at the wardrobe that had started it all and wished that he could begin this evening over again.