The White Dove

As Tony was talking to the operator again a maid brought in a tray. There were dainty tea-things and an incongruous balloon glass of brandy. Seeing Amy’s anxious face, Bethan took the glass but she stared helplessly at it instead of drinking.

The call to Wales took much longer to put through.

There were long silences, and then sharply repeated instructions from Tony. At last he straightened up and looked at them. ‘It’s ringing,’ he said.

The voice that answered the telephone had exactly the same rising note as Bethan’s but it was a young man’s voice, determined and crisp.

Tony asked his brief question. ‘William, David and John Jones.’ Bethan’s knuckles were so white around the fat brandy glass that Amy was sure it would shatter into fragments.

And then, only a second later, Tony was smiling and nodding and they knew that it was all right. Bethan’s face crumpled and the tears came at last.

‘Thank God,’ she said, ‘thank God, thank God,’ over and over again. Tony held out the receiver to her but she shook her head, unable to move.

‘Thank you,’ he said in her place. ‘We’re very grateful. Yes, I’ll tell her that.’

‘I’m glad for her,’ Nick Penry said in the cramped, stuffy office of the Miners’ Welfare. ‘I’m very glad.’

*

Nick was almost smiling when the call ended, the first hint of a smile for two days. He was taking his duty turn in the little office of the Welfare building. Usually the Welfare and Rest Institute was a cheerful place, Nantlas’ social focus, where miners came to talk and drink at the end of their day’s work, or to borrow books from the well-stocked free library, or to attend union meetings. Today was different. It had been one long succession of statements to be taken, punctuated by visits from white-faced wives and families of the dead men asking for help, and money, and comfort, and all the things that were in short supply in Nantlas. To be able to give someone some good news was a rare moment of relief.

‘There you are,’ Tony said to Bethan. ‘The man I spoke to knows your family. None of them was anywhere near the explosion. He says he’ll tell your mother and father that he’s spoken to you, and promises you that there is nothing to worry about.’

Isabel and Amy were relieved to see that Bethan was almost herself again. She rubbed her face with a handkerchief and straightened her neat skirts.

‘I don’t drink, thank you, Mr Hardy, but I will have a cup of tea. Funny, isn’t it? Now I know they’re safe, I can only think of the other poor men. Before, I couldn’t have cared less who might have been down there with them.’

Amy was shaking her head, amazed and horrified now that her concern for Bethan was past. ‘It’s so terrible. So many men, just to die all at once. Has it ever happened before?’

Bethan said sadly, ‘Oh yes. It happens all the time. It’s a rare miner’s family that hasn’t lost someone. My grandfather was killed, and his brother. It’s black, dangerous, dreadful work. There’s not a man who’d do it if he didn’t have to, or starve.’

Tony looked sympathetically at Bethan, and then at the glowing apricot and pink faces of the Lovell girls. So much difference, he thought. Such a huge, unfair and eternally unbridgeable gulf. And then, irrelevantly, he realized that they would both be beauties. Isabel would be a conventional good-looker, but Amy would be something different, and special. Tony didn’t generally find women interesting but he liked Amy Lovell.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘that the average death rate for coal miners in this country, over the last few years, works out at about four per day. Every day of the year, that is. If you’re not going to drink that brandy, Bethan, I think I’ll have it.’

They were late down for dinner, but that didn’t matter because everyone else was too, except for Richard.

He was sitting calmly in his place, expressionlessly watching the other diners. His light hair was watered so that it lay flat to his head, and he was buttoned up to the neck in a stiff white collar and a short jacket. Richard’s appearance was completely unexceptional, but there was something in his face, in the set of his mouth and the light in his green eyes, that was an unexpected challenge from a little boy.

He was watching his father now, as Lord Lovell bore down on the family table. Gerald’s grey eyebrows were drawn together in a heavy line, and his pouchy cheeks were untouched by the sun.

‘Good evening, Father,’ Richard murmured.

God damn it. Why does the boy always irritate me, always, in just the same way? Gerald jerked out his chair and sat down. He didn’t want to have dinner with his white-faced son and the too-clever tutor, or with his daughters, half-frightened and half-choked with giggles. Not even with Adeline, who would be bright-eyed with cocktails and full of silly talk about the half-witted people she spent her days with. Not that he particularly wanted to spend any more hours in the Casino, either.

Gerald wasn’t sure where he wanted to be.

Perhaps at Chance, except that not even Chance meant the same any more.

‘What have you been doing?’ he asked Richard without enthusiasm. ‘Swimming?’

‘I don’t like the water much, you know,’ Richard answered. ‘We went to look at a church. A rather fine one, quite close to here. I made some drawings …’

Airlie had swum like a fish, almost from babyhood. Gerald could see him now, at Richard’s age exactly, swimming in the lake at Chance, his arms and legs flickering sturdily under the skin of green water.

‘You should learn,’ Gerald said harshly. ‘You’ll have to start doing things you don’t like at school.’

Richard was to enter Airlie’s old prep school in six months’ time.

‘Yes, I expect I shall,’ he answered.

Adeline came next. The grey Chéruit dress was daringly short, a slither of bias-cut satin that almost showed her knees. She wore it with long ropes of perfect pearls, dangling pearl and jet earrings, and a shot-silk wrap with long floating fringes around her shoulders. She had never cut her luxuriant hair, but it was knotted up at the back of her head so that she looked smooth and sleek. As he stood up Gerald noted that she was at the excited, three-cocktail stage, and that she was still very beautiful.

‘Have you been waiting long, my darlings? I met Hugh Herbert on the terrace, and he was being so amusing.’

In the silence that followed Gerald and Adeline looked at each other, and each of them was wondering what had become of the other.

Isabel and Amy ran as fast as they could to the dining-room doors, and then stopped at the heavy glass panels to catch their breath and compose their faces. Relief for Bethan had made them giggly. They peered through the glass across the acres of tables with their stiff white skirts and little gilt lamps with rosepink silk shades. The tables were separated by clumps of stately palms in pots, and phalanxes of gliding waiters.

‘Are they there?’

‘Yes. Both of them.’

‘Oh, hell. Come on, then.’

‘Amy.’ Isabel’s protest was as automatic as always.

Tony Hardy came up behind them in a dinner suit that had clearly belonged to his father. The door was held open for them by the waiter that Amy had come to think of as her favourite. He was very young, with a dark, almost monkey-like face that split into a huge smile. She grinned sideways at him in answer, and between Isabel and Tony she marched forward to the dinner table.

They slid into their seats, murmuring their apologies. Richard telegraphed them a greeting by dissolving his poker face into a mass of wriggling eyebrows, and then returned immediately to his impassive calm.

It was a dinner just like hundreds of others, Amy thought sadly, as she bent her head over her soup. She wondered why they didn’t feel on the inside as they must look on the outside to the people watching them — happy, and comfortable, and like other families. Like her friend Violet Trent’s family, for example. Amy could remember, just about, times when they had been. Times when her father had smiled more, and when his gruffness had easily dissolved into affection. When Mother had been more … well, just more accessible, and there had been fewer friends and parties and pressing engagements filling her days. Mother was wonderful, of course, she reminded herself. No one else’s mother was anything like her. There just wasn’t enough of her to go around. Isabel minded that she was so busy too, Amy knew that. Yet Mother could always make time for Richard. He was the special one, to her. But that was quite natural too, of course. He would be going away to school all too soon, and they would all miss him dreadfully. And someone had to make up to him for Father being so harsh. Amy wondered if fathers were always like that to their sons, if it was supposed to make them more manly.

She thought of one of the things that had happened, on this very holiday, one of the odd, dark things that she never mentioned afterwards even to Isabel, but which she knew they all still remembered.

They had been sitting beside the hotel swimming pool one morning, sunning themselves, Isabel and herself, with Richard and Tony. Richard was reading a book with Tony. Amy remembered that it was a book of modern poetry with a yellow cover. Tony was explaining it, talking about how the words made pictures with sounds and also meant things that you couldn’t see at first. Mother was still upstairs. She often didn’t come down until just before lunch. But unusually, Father had been there, sitting in a chair close by. He was frowning, not quite looking at his newspaper.

Suddenly he had stood up and gone over to Richard. He had said something like, ‘Come on, my boy, let’s see you do something real for a change.’

Then he had jerked Richard to the edge of the pool. They had balanced there for a second or two, and Richard had gone flailing into the water.

To the other people looking, Amy thought, it must just have looked like a father and son rough-and-tumbling together. But it wasn’t really like that at all. Father had been angry and pleading, both together, and Richard had been defiant. Father wanted him to do something and Richard didn’t want to do it, not now and not ever.

Then when he was in the water he was just a frightened little boy, because he couldn’t swim. There was a moment when they saw his face under the water, turned up with his eyes wide open. And then he was splashing and choking on the surface. It was Tony who slid in beside him and helped him to the poolside, and Father had just watched them with a frozen face. Richard had hauled himself out of the water and gone back to his place without looking at anyone, and no one had ever talked about it again.

Amy could remember other things too, going back over the years, as if Father and Richard had been fighting a silent battle that the rest of them were only aware of for a fraction of the time.

It was peculiar that it should be like that, because Richard was such a funny, likeable boy. He could mimic anybody, from Mr Glass to Violet Trent’s mother, and he often reduced Isabel and herself to helpless laughter. Mother enjoyed his mimicry too, but he never ever did it when Father was around. Richard could be serious and sensible, too. He often talked about things much more intelligently than other children of only eight.