The White Dove

Gerald stood up, frowning and trying to concentrate on the seemingly unintelligible words. He had been looking at photographs. A double row of stiffly posed boys with cricket bats resting against their white flannelled knees stared up at him from the desk top. In the middle of them was Airlie in the Eton eleven of 1915.

‘A boy. My son?’ he asked.

The doctor smiled. ‘Yes. Lady Lovell had a difficult time and is very tired, but she will recover with rest. The baby is well.’

Gerald was on his way, past the doctor and out of the room, the stiffness of his movements betraying how long he had been sitting, hunched over his grief, in the silent library. He took the photograph with him.

Adeline opened her eyes when he came into her room. Gerald was shocked to see the exhaustion in her face. The hovering nurse backed discreetly away and he sat down at the edge of the bed, putting the photograph down on the fresh sheet with its deep lace edging. He covered her hands with his.

‘You’re all right,’ he said softly, and for a moment Adeline thought that after all, they might recover.

‘It’s a boy,’ she whispered. ‘I knew it would be. Look.’

She pointed to the white-ribboned cradle at the side of the bed. Gerald leant over it, slowly, and turned back the cover.

This crimson skin and pucker of features, then, was his son? These clenched, helpless hands and unseeing eyes?

No. Oh no. Airlie was his son. He had no memory of Airlie ever being like this, so tiny and so barely human. His head was full of vivid recollections: of Airlie running across the grass to his first pony and flinging himself across its bare back, of Airlie striding down the pavilion steps with his bat under his arm, of Airlie proud in his uniform with the brass buttons shining. But none of a baby.

Now Airlie was gone, and this little creature wasn’t him. Nor could he ever be. Adeline couldn’t give him his son back. Not Adeline, not anyone.

Gerald smoothed the cover over the baby again and turned back to his wife. Without taking her eyes from his face, Adeline pushed the photograph away from her, further away until it hung at the edge of the bed, and then slid to the floor. Gerald bent at once to retrieve it and she turned her head away from him.

‘I’d like to call him Richard,’ she said.

‘Richard? It’s not a family name …’

‘Does it matter that it’s not a family name? I would like it, Gerald.’

‘Of course. Call him whatever you like.’

Gerald bent over to kiss her. There were tears on her eyelashes and cheeks.

‘Try to rest,’ he said heavily. The floor creaked as he crossed it, and then the door closed behind him. As soon as he was gone Adeline tried to call him back, but the effort was too much for her. Her head fell back against the pile of pillows. The nurse was at her side at once.

‘Try to sleep, milady. The doctor will give you something to help, and we’ll take the baby away now.’

‘No.’

The nurse was startled by the insistence.

‘Please leave him here with me.’

When at last they went away and left her alone, Adeline turned her head to the white cradle. A tiny clenched fist was just visible under the wrappings.

‘Richard …’ she whispered to him, ‘Richard, you’re mine.’

Two (#u06772f86-28c4-5878-8e53-0537b25afed9)

Nantlas, Rhondda Fach, 1924

‘You ready then, Mari?’

Mari Powell stepped back from the tiny mirror over the sink in the back kitchen. She had been the first girl in Nantlas to cut her hair, and although everyone had copied her now, even Ellen Lewis who looked a fright whatever she did to herself, she was still proud of the glossy brown cap and the ripple of careful waves over her right temple.

‘Don’t rush me. Don’t you want me to look nice?’

She smiled over her shoulder at Nick Penry waiting impatiently for her on the doorstep, and bobbed up on her toes in an effort to see the reflection of her new blouse. She had made it herself, from a remnant of bright blue cotton from Howell’s summer clearance in Cardiff. Although her skirt was old she had shortened it daringly, and judged that the effect was almost as good as a completely new outfit.

‘Not a lot of point in looking nice to stay in Nantlas. If you don’t come now it’s either that or walk to Barry.’

‘Oh, all right then. I’m coming.’ Mari patted her hair one last time and hurried to the door. For a moment, balanced on the step above Nick, her face was almost level with his. He was smiling back at her, but the look in his eyes disconcerted her, as it had always done. They had known one another for six months now. Nick had come up to the house first on union business, to see her dad, after Dai Powell had moved up from the town of Port Talbot to the Rhondda valley, where the pits clustered thickly together, to work at the Rhondda and Peris-Hughes Associated Collieries No. 2 Nantlas Pit.

Nick Penry was deputy miners’ agent for the pit, one of the men’s elected union representatives, young for it at only twenty-three. Her dad had said to Mari, after Nick had gone, ‘Well. I’m not saying that he hasn’t got the right ideas, because he has. But there’s a lad who’s got his sights set further than the next yard of coal.’

Mari couldn’t have cared less whether or not Nick Penry was fervent enough in his opposition to the hated pit owners, or in his support for the new Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and his Labour government. She simply thought that Nick was the handsomest man she had ever seen. He was tall for a Welshman, black-haired, with dark and quick eyes that could flicker with laughter. He had stared straight at her so that Mari knew he was seeing her, but at the same time looking through her to something beyond. He was there, appraising her, amused and friendly, and yet not there at all.

But a week later he had called again, to ask her to go with him to the dance at the Miners’ Rest. They had been going together ever since.

Mari wobbled on the doorstep, her cheeks pink and her bobbed brown hair shining. Nick put out his arms to catch her. She fell against him willingly, laughing and smelling his holiday smell of strong soap and ironed flannel.

She put her cheek against her shoulder as he swung her down into the dusty entry behind the row of houses. ‘You could give me a kiss if you felt like it.’

‘There’ll be plenty of time for that later. Why d’you think I’m taking you all the way out to Barry, if it isn’t to get you behind a sand-dune?’ But he kissed her just the same, in full view of all the back kitchen windows in the row. His mouth was very warm, and Mari felt the curl of it because he was still smiling. She glowed with pride of possession as he drew her arm firmly through his and they turned to walk up the entry. Nick Penry was all she wanted.

‘Tara, Mam,’ she called up to the little back window. ‘We’re off now. You’ll see us when you see us.’

Out in the steeply cobbled street men in work clothes were straggling home up the hill, still black with pit dirt and with their tin snap boxes under their arms. The shift had changed, and the day men were already at work in Nantlas No. 1 and 2 pits.

Everyone knew Nick. There were friendly waves and greetings as each little group passed them. A big man stopped and grinned at them, tips and tongue and the rims of his eyes very pink in his dust-blackened face.

‘Where are you two off to then, all done up? Not Sunday, is it?’

‘We’re going down to Barry. Mari’s got a whole day off from up at the Lodge, and it’s a holiday for me as well.’

‘Lucky for some,’ the big man called cheerfully after them. Nick took Mari’s hand and began to run, pulling her after him so that her heels clattered on the stones. She was laughing and protesting, and then they heard the ring of heavier boots coming after them, running even faster. Nick looked back over his shoulder and then stopped, frowning.

Flying headlong down the hill was a young man, hardly more than a boy. He was white-faced, with bright, anxious eyes, and his torn shirt showed the hollow chest beneath. Nick caught his arm as the man scrambled by.

‘Late is it, Bryn?’

The runner spun round, trying to jerk his shirtsleeve away from Nick’s grasp. He was gasping for breath.

‘Again. Can’t afford it, neither, on the day money, not like you piece men. But I can’t sleep at nights, and then in the morning I can’t get my eyes open. But mebbe I’ll catch them yet, if I run.’ He was off, down the hill towards the huddle of buildings at the head of Nantlas No. 1.

‘Come and see me after,’ Nick shouted. ‘I’ll see your gang foreman.’

He wasn’t smiling any more, and he didn’t take Mari’s hand again. They began to walk on, soberly now.