A Family Affair

‘Was it a good show?’ Jake asked pleasantly. ‘One or two have said how good it is.’

‘Oh, it was grand, Pop. You ought to take Mother. You’d both love it.’

‘Hear that, Mary Ann?’ he called. Mary Ann looked up from the washed glasses she was wiping. ‘Clover says as how good the show is at the Opera House this week. She reckons I should tek you to see it.’

‘Oh yes. And who’s going to serve in here while we’m gone?’

‘Well I could, Mother,’ Clover said. ‘And Tom wouldn’t mind helping either, would you, Tom?’

‘I’d be delighted. It could be my penance for keeping Clover out so late, Mrs Tandy.’

‘Is that an apology, since you mention it?’ Mary Ann asked, stone-faced.

Tom smiled steadily, not about to be unnerved. ‘If you honestly feel one is necessary, Mrs Tandy.’

Perceiving dissension, Jake waved it aside. ‘Christ, Mary Ann, anybody’d think the wench was late in,’ he retorted placing a pint of bitter in front of Tom. ‘I’ve told you before, she’s twenty now. This time next year she’ll be of age and able to do as she pleases. She’ll even be able to go and get wed without having to ask you. Think about that. You’d best start letting go of her now.’ He winked at Tom and poured a glass of cider for Clover. ‘Here, have these on me.’

‘As long as she can get up in the morning,’ Mary Ann responded, conceding defeat.

‘Cheers,’ Tom said and raised his glass. ‘Here’s to you, Jake.’

Jake smiled. He’d won another round by reasonableness and good sense.

Tom stayed in the taproom for twenty minutes before deciding it was time to go. Clover went outside with him in the rain to say goodnight and they stood under his umbrella, facing each other, their bodies touching tantalisingly.

‘Thanks for a lovely night,’ she said again. ‘And for squaring it with my mother.’

He put his arm around her waist and gave her a squeeze. ‘Jake did that. Not me.’

She smiled into his eyes then looked at his mouth, so inviting. She had not yet kissed him and the urge to, fuelled by the warmth of his companionship, overwhelmed her. Impulsively, she pursed her lips and turned her face up to reach him, then, standing on tiptoe with her hands behind her back, she planted a kiss on his lips as gentle as a butterfly landing on a petal, lingering just a little.

‘There. I’ve done it,’ she said, as she experienced the eminently palpable thrill shuddering through her. ‘I’ve kissed you. I bet you think I’m a right hussy.’

He laughed with delight. ‘Oh, unquestionably. But I’m pleased you are. When can I see you again?’

‘Friday?’

He smiled with happiness. ‘Yes, please, Clover. Friday.’

The family took turns to take baths when they could fit it in, often between brews when the huge copper boiler on the first storey of the brewery was free to heat up water for cleaning with enough left over. Normal practice was to put the tin bath in the scullery and fill it with hot water, fetched in buckets from the brewery. One Saturday evening in August, Elijah, sweaty and hot from cleaning the mash tun, the coolers and the available fermenting vessels, decided to take a soak himself before getting changed for a night out with Dorcas, which would finish inevitably with some vigorous courting at Jake’s old house afterwards.

In the small brewhouse that housed the mangle that Zillah used on washing day, he lifted the galvanised bath off the whitewashed wall and bore it across the yard to the brewery where he set it on the quarry-tiled floor. He drew off the fresh water that was already heating up, by way of a hose arrangement and, while the bath filled, he returned to the brewhouse to cut himself a cake of soap. On the way back, he fetched a towel from the house and whistled tunelessly as he strutted across the sunlit yard. Back in the brewery he put his fingers in the water to check its temperature. It was too hot so he stemmed the flow of hot water and turned on the cold tap, playing another hose into the bath. He undressed himself, had a good scratch round and dipped his toes in the bath. It was still hot, but bearably so. Having got used to the intense heat of India and enjoying it, bathing in hot water always reminded him of his time there; he liked to get a bit of a sweat up.

He immersed himself in the water, lay back and relaxed. His thoughts drifted back to India and, inevitably, to those beautiful Indian women he’d enjoyed so much there. Such sultry pleasure he’d had in India’s fierce heat with sensuously perspiring, dusky girls with sleek, jet-black hair, dark eyes and wonderful bodies, many of them younger than his niece Ramona. Recalling those times aroused him enormously.

At about the same time that Elijah was getting all steamed up, the tea was ready. Clover had taken pork chops out of the oven all sizzling and succulent and smelling divine, and put them on warmed plates along with fresh-cooked vegetables and steaming gravy. But nobody was around to serve it to. Where was everybody?

Ramona appeared. ‘Do you need any help, Clover?’

‘You wouldn’t like to round everybody up, would you? Mother and Pop are serving in the taproom. Uncle Elijah will still be in the brewery, I daresay.’

‘I’ll go and fetch him,’ Ramona said, wiping her hands.

As she stepped into the yard the whine and clatter of a lorry’s engine trespassed into the late afternoon air as it chugged up George Street, and a neighbour’s pig was squealing discontentedly close by. A dog barked in St John’s Street and a flock of pigeons flapped in a great whooshing arc overhead. The door to the brewery was already open and Ramona wondered whether Elijah had left it so to keep the place cool, or whether the breeze had done it. She stepped inside. Just as she was about to call his name, she saw him standing in front of a fermenting vessel, his back toward her, as naked as the day he was born, dripping with water. Her heart went to her mouth and she was suddenly stricken with a strange inertia. His lean, supple, military back looked hard, rippling with masculinity as a shaft of slanting sunlight glinted off the droplets of water that clung jealously to him. The cheeks of his backside were small and tight and muscular and she imagined cupping them in her hands, like she did Sammy’s, to feel how hard and firm they really were. She was mesmerised. Water lapped against the side of the bath tub as he leaned forward to grab the towel that was hanging over one of the water pipes. She beheld, with a healthy womanly curiosity, his scrotum dangling loose between his legs as he bent over, like two eggs hanging from a nest but still attached to it. Slowly, as she watched, becoming reconciled to this unexpected vision, the ability to move returned. As he began towelling himself dry, she slid silently to one side to conceal herself behind a pile of stacked beer barrels. Through the gap caused by the curvature of the barrels she continued to gawp unbelieving at her Uncle Elijah. He turned around, presenting himself in profile and she gasped when she saw how well-blessed he was – and standing up so hard and so proud, all ready for action.

Maybe, naked in the bath, he’d been thinking of all the things he liked to do with Dorcas when they were alone, she thought. No doubt Dorcas was very accommodating in bed. No doubt he was very active there too.

Ramona watched, transfixed as he took the towel and dried his hard, extended rod with gentle care and attention; understandably, for it was such a handsome piece of equipment. But he must not see her watching him. She waited for him to turn away, hardly able to divert her eyes from his very excellent tackle. Deftly, but with great reluctance, she silently side-stepped back through the open door and back onto the yard.

‘God!’ she murmured to herself and smiled impishly as a wayward thought flashed through her mind. ‘Oh, my God! Uncle Elijah! You’re magnificent.’

Back in the scullery the others had all sat down to their meal. Elijah’s was placed in the oven to keep warm. They had been eating for five minutes or so when he returned, his hair plastered down where it was still wet, a sheen of perspiration seeping from his forehead.

‘Your dinner’s in the oven, Elijah,’ Clover said, trimming a piece of fat from her meat.

He grabbed a cloth and pulled the plates, one upturned over the other to keep in the moisture, out of the oven and placed them on the table.

‘You’ve been a while,’ Mary Ann commented as he put the covering plate into the sink.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t realise I’d been so long.’

‘I sent Ramona into the brewery to look for you,’ Clover added innocently.

‘Oh?’ Elijah turned and looked from one to the other, a light of realisation brightening slowly in his eyes at Ramona’s refusal to meet his.

Her face was already rubescent. ‘But I couldn’t find him,’ she was quick to blurt out with a brief but guilty glimpse at her uncle.

‘Well, you didn’t look very bloody hard,’ he said, wilfully catching her glance and evidently finding it amusing.

No, but you did, she wanted to say and lowered her eyes as she ate.

Chapter 7 (#u755eb682-2687-5ddb-88a8-de493a40f4ea)

Next day, Sunday, Tom Doubleday called after dinner for Clover, as he did every Sunday. By this time they had been stepping out together for two months and love was blossoming. Sometimes, they went for a walk around the fields of Oakham, sometimes, a tram ride into Birmingham where they enjoyed window shopping in New Street and Corporation Street. Today, they intended to take a leisurely walk through the Castle Grounds. The weather was settled, although typically humid for August, and they decided they might find some cooling breeze in the shade of the trees that covered the elevated paths to the castle keep. On the way, it was necessary to pass Tom’s studio.

‘I’ve got an idea,’ Tom said, stopping outside it.

Still holding his hand, Clover turned to him in a swirl of sleeveless summer dress with a scalloped neck. ‘What?’

‘You look so beautiful – so fresh and breezy…I feel inspired to take a photograph of you. It’s time I did a really nice one.’

She smiled at his compliment. ‘I don’t mind. If you want to take my picture…’

‘Well, we’ve been courting for ages now, Clover, and it’s a sin that I haven’t got a studio photo of you. And the light is perfect, look. Bright and hazy. No hard shadows.’

‘All right,’ she agreed easily. ‘As long as I can take one of you as well.’

He laughed at that and said she could as he took the key from his pocket and opened the front door. They entered into a small foyer, with examples of his best work hanging in frames from a picture rail, and a small carved counter facing the door where transactions were concluded. Plush velvet curtains hung from a brass rail along the side wall and similar drapes, tied back, adorned the deep window. Tom led her through the door into his studio which was, by now, familiar in any case, since she’d called on him a few times while he was working. Tom had had the room extended in the fashion of a conservatory to make best use of the soft north light, with a glass roof and vertical windows that stretched to the floor. Roller blinds had been fitted to the roof windows to adjust the intensity of light, and rich floral curtains hung from floor to ceiling. Two of the solid walls of the studio were decorated to look like the drawing-room of some stately home, even with a false, but very ornate door and frame let into one wall. Odd pieces of furniture stood randomly; props that could be included in a photo as required. A mahogany whatnot stood with a shiningly healthy aspidistra sitting on top in a brass pot. There was a screen, several armchairs in various styles, all ornate, a variety of occasional tables that subjects might rest their backsides on for a jaunty pose, a music stool, a chaise-longue that looked soft and comfortable, and a soft bearskin rug on the floor.