Tiger Ragtime Read online

  ‘It could be cosy every night if you allowed me to talk to your father,’ he reproached.

  ‘To tell him what?’

  ‘That I love you and intend to marry you as soon as you’re free.’

  ‘I’m a married woman and my own person. You don’t need my father’s permission, only mine.’

  ‘Aside from courtesy, you may be married but you’re not twenty-one and, in Peter’s absence, that makes your father your guardian.’

  ‘I suppose it does, but as my present marriage isn’t annulled, and won’t be until Peter signs and returns those papers, which, given that he’s on the other side of the world, could take months, any talk of remarrying is premature.’

  ‘But Peter will be returning them any day now and when he does –’

  ‘Micah, I’ve been thinking,’ she interrupted.

  He flicked opened the beer, poured some into a glass, replaced the rubber-ringed top and closed it again. ‘I don’t like the sound of that.’

  ‘What, me thinking? My brain doesn’t make a noise.’

  ‘Don’t joke, not now, Edyth, please.’ He removed his glasses and stared at her.

  She knew he was acutely short-sighted, but even unfocused his deep blue eyes seemed to bore into hers, reading her thoughts as they formed. ‘If we married, you’d expect me to move into the Norwegian mission with you, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Married people do generally live together,’ he agreed.

  ‘Now who’s not being serious?’ A note of irritation crept into her voice.

  ‘What point are you trying to make?’

  ‘My bakery …’

  ‘If that’s all you’re worried about, you could still run it,’ he said with relief. ‘Judy will be only too happy to carry on living here.’

  ‘It’s not Judy’s bakery, it’s mine. I’m up every morning at four –’ she glanced at the clock on the wall. The hands pointed to ten minutes to four and music was still echoing from the direction of Loudoun Square, ‘– every weekday morning, that is,’ she qualified. ‘That means I go to bed most nights at nine.’

  ‘I know,’ he murmured pointedly.

  Not wanting to get sidetracked into a discussion as to what happened on the nights Micah stayed over when Judy was babysitting for one of her uncles, or away for an audition, she said, ‘How much sleep do you think I would get in the mission with the sailors whose ships are only in for a couple of days sitting up all night, talking, singing, drinking coffee, and eating waffles?’

  ‘Lots if you put cotton wool in your ears. But it’s not sleep you’re worried about, is it?’

  ‘No.’ She poured more sherry into her glass, not because she wanted to fill it but because she couldn’t bring herself to look at him. ‘I was never sure what I wanted to do with my life, and, truth be told, I still don’t know. But I enjoy running the bakery. It’s mine, I own it. Granted, by the grace of my bank manager, and the interest I pay on my business account, but I employ people who rely on me to pay them wages at the end of the week. I don’t want to give that up to run a house or a mission and look after a husband.’

  ‘Marriage doesn’t have to be like that,’ he countered.

  ‘It was with Peter and maybe it wouldn’t be like that with you at first. But in time it would.’

  ‘I’m looking after myself perfectly well now.’

  ‘No, you’re not. And please, let me finish,’ she begged before he had a chance to say another word. ‘Your sister does your laundry and mending; the ladies on the mission committee clean your room when they sweep out and dust the church and the public areas. Whoever’s manning the waffle iron makes your breakfast, the ladies’ committee your lunch, and Moody cooks supper for you most nights when he leaves here.’

  ‘That’s hardly surprising. He lives with my sister and he is her brother-in-law.’

  ‘Micah, all I’m trying to say is that your sister and the other women like looking after you and the seamen who call into the mission. It’s only natural. Most of them have husbands or fathers who are sailors and they miss them. You told me the first time you took me to your church that they like to help out because it pleases them to think that someone is doing the same for their men in whichever port in the world their ships are berthed. But it doesn’t alter the fact that I have a business to run. How could I manage the bakery if I was always worrying about whether or not you had clean underclothes and socks and what I was going to cook you for tea?’

  ‘My sister –’

  ‘And all the other ladies would stop doing your cleaning, cooking, and washing if we were married,’ she declared. ‘They would expect me to take over – and quite rightly so.’

  He looked her in the eye. ‘So you don’t want to marry me, not now, or ever. Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘No.’ The long day had finally caught up with her and she felt exhausted. Too drained to think, let alone argue.

  ‘Then when will you marry me?’

  ‘You know I can’t answer that until Peter sends me the annulment papers.’

  ‘And if you receive them tomorrow?’ he pressed.

  ‘That’s not likely to happen,’ she said irritably.

  ‘But if you do?’

  ‘I don’t know, Micah,’ she snapped. ‘Do we have to talk about this now?’

  ‘This is one subject you never want to discuss.’

  ‘You know I love you,’ she pleaded earnestly. ‘Isn’t that enough?’

  ‘It’s a lot, Edyth, but it would be a whole lot more if I could live openly with you.’

  ‘Why can’t you be happy with things the way they are?’

  ‘How can I be, when we have to sneak around and pretend that we are just friends? Don’t you know how terrified I am every time we make love in case I make you pregnant?’

  ‘What if you did? I’m married,’ she retorted unthinkingly.

  ‘Peter left you months ago.’

  ‘The people who matter most – my friends and family wouldn’t care.’

  ‘I think your parents would. And so would I. And so might some of your customers. Is it so unreasonable of me to want my child to bear my name and not Peter’s? I also happen to believe that every child has a right to be brought up in a loving secure home by a mother and a father who live together. As you were,’ he reminded her strongly.

  ‘So do I, Micah, but it’s my life we’re talking about.’ She was furious with him for even thinking that she would consider otherwise. ‘As for the people around here, where else would they buy their bread? There isn’t another decent baker in the Bay.’

  ‘You’re changing the subject again, Edyth, as you always do when I try to talk to you about us.’ Micah finished his beer, rose from his chair and pushed it back under the table.

  Edyth had known Micah less than a year but she could tell when he was angry. Unlike most people he became quieter, more softly spoken, something she found difficult to adjust to after the emotional explosions of her four sisters while they were growing up together in Pontypridd.

  ‘Shall I see you tomorrow, on the Escape?’ she asked in an effort to appease him. They had met every Sunday afternoon on his boat since they had begun their affair. They also frequently stole a few hours during the late afternoons and early evenings in the week.

  ‘It’s where I practise my saxophone after services every Sunday,’ he said shortly. ‘We’ll talk then.’

  He picked up his saxophone case. ‘Micah …’

  ‘There could still be strangers lurking around the Bay. Best lock up behind me.’ He stepped outside and closed the door behind him without giving her his customary goodnight kiss.

  She thrust the bolt home and leaned against the wall. She really was too tired to think. But as she climbed the stairs she wondered why it was so difficult for a married woman to run a business or work outside the home. Her mother had managed it. But then she had worked in Harry’s business and she’d had their dedicated and loving housekeeper to run the house and look after the family in
her absence.

  Even if she found the money to employ a housekeeper to carry out her domestic and family chores – and at the moment she hadn’t a halfpenny to spare – where, in this modern day and age, would she find a woman willing to sacrifice her own life to that of an employer’s?

  David Ellis had never slept in a room with the curtains drawn. Not even when he had shared a bedroom with his younger brother. Since birth he had followed the farmers’ dictate of rising with the sun and if not exactly going to bed when it set, sitting up no more than an hour or two after dark, especially during the long winter nights. More would have been considered a waste of coal and candles and although his family no longer had to practise the stringent economies they had been forced to adhere to before his sister had married Harry, old habits died hard. Despite his late night after the carnival, David left his bed the moment the first cold grey fingers of light highlighted the summits of the eastern hills that towered over the reservoir below the farmhouse. He stood at the window in his pyjama trousers, staring at the view that was so familiar to him he had long since taken it for granted. The Ellis Estate’s eighteenth-century farmhouse and outbuildings had been built in a square that enclosed the farmyard. Situated just below the crest of a hill so the top could shelter it from the worst of the winter snowstorms that swept the Brecon Beacons, the house was as large and substantial as any manor in Wales.

  For six months of the year it was a cold, bleak, and cruel place. But in spring and summer it was easy to forget the deep snowdrifts and heavy frosts that blocked the road and killed the weaker animals. Below him, sheep he had watched grow from frisky gambolling lambs to stolid maturity cropped the grassy slopes that tumbled down to the valley floor. Rabbits popped in and out of burrows and half a dozen wild ducks swam peacefully among the reeds at the water’s edge of the reservoir that flooded the valley floor. A pair of kites circled lazily on the same level as his window. It was a quiet, peaceful scene – too peaceful for a man who loved a woman who lived more than sixty miles away.

  He strode purposefully from the window and lifted the suitcase Harry and Mary had bought him last Christmas from the cupboard next to the fireplace. Opening it out on the bed, he emptied a drawer in his chest and packed his cotton summer underclothes. Then he stood back and surveyed his wardrobe. He’d need his three good linen shirts, spare collars, ties, socks, sock suspenders, braces, sports coat, and thick cotton and woollen trousers, but he wouldn’t need the overalls he wore around the farm. Sweaters – would it be hot or cold on board ship? Deciding it could be either, depending on the destination, he folded three of the thickest ones Mary had knitted him on top of his shirts then threw in the wooden box that contained his bone collar studs, silver tiepins and cuff links.

  Boots? He packed his newest pair before dressing in the only suit that fitted him. A grey pinstripe he’d had tailored to replace the navy blue one he’d bought for Harry and Mary’s wedding and outgrown less than a year later.

  He pushed his ‘best’ gold cuff links that Harry’s parents and sisters had given him for his last birthday into his shirt cuffs, fastened his tie with the matching pin and took a last look around his bedroom. Books? He flicked through the selection on top of the cupboard. He hadn’t learned to read and write until he was fifteen and since then he’d developed a taste for adventure stories. But he’d read his small library three times over.

  There would be bookshops and libraries in Cardiff. He smiled at the thought. He’d never wanted to dot ornaments around his bedroom like his sister Martha. But there were a few things he couldn’t leave behind. One was his fountain pen, which he’d bought with the first money Harry had insisted he receive as ‘wages’ for running the farm, another was a framed photograph taken at Harry and Mary’s wedding.

  He had carved the frame himself and Harry had bought the glass for it. It was a formal, posed group photograph. Harry and Mary stood centre stage flanked by groomsmen, bridesmaids and all of Harry’s immediate family. And, to Harry’s right, he stood frozen in time next to Edyth.

  ‘You look smart,’ Mary commented when David joined her and Harry in the kitchen for breakfast. ‘You’ve decided to go to chapel with us this morning?’

  ‘No.’ David took his customary chair at the table and helped himself to two slices of bread.

  ‘There’s a girl in the valley you’re out to impress?’ Even as Harry said it, he knew it was a forlorn hope.

  ‘No.’ David looked around. ‘Where are the others?’

  ‘They finished breakfast half an hour ago. They’ve taken Ruth into the barn to look for eggs.’ Harry folded the copy of the South Wales Echo that he had bought at the station the day before and set it aside. ‘What was all that banging in your room earlier?’

  ‘Nothing.’ David spread butter on his bread.

  ‘Two eggs or three?’ Mary asked from the stove, where she was frying laver bread, bacon and sausages.

  David decided that as he had a long journey ahead of him and an uncertain reception the other end he may as well start with a good meal inside him. ‘Four.’

  ‘All that dancing yesterday has given you an appetite.’ Harry left his chair when the baby started crying. ‘He can’t possibly be hungry after you’ve just fed him, Mary, so I’ll see to him.’ He lifted Will from his day cot in the corner next to the range, laid him against his shoulder and rubbed his tiny back. The baby responded with an enormous burp and a watery smile.

  ‘Well done, young man,’ Harry smiled. ‘I’m getting good at this fathering lark.’

  ‘If you’re not going to chapel, Davy, where are you going?’ Mary transferred four slices of bacon, three sausages, and a large portion of fried laver bread mixed with oatmeal on to a plate and carried it over to her brother.

  ‘Cardiff.’ David reached for the salt cellar.

  ‘It’s Sunday service on the trains. You may have trouble getting back tonight,’ Harry warned.

  ‘I’m not coming back. Can I have a lift to the station with you when you take the others to chapel, please, Harry?’

  A dense silence fell over the kitchen. ‘What do you mean, you’re not coming back?’ Mary’s voice wavered with suppressed emotion as she carried the eggs, still in the pan, over to David.

  ‘I’m leaving the farm.’

  Mary stared at her brother. When she saw the expression on his face she almost dropped the frying pan. ‘You can’t be thinking of living in Cardiff.’

  ‘Why not?’ David challenged.

  ‘We have some talking to do. You’d better sit down, Mary,’ Harry advised.

  Mary lifted the eggs on to David’s plate and returned the frying pan to the range. After setting it on one of the covered hot plates she joined Harry and David at the table.

  David sensed them both looking at him, but he began to eat his breakfast although it was sticking in his throat. Unable to bear the tension a moment longer, Harry braved the question uppermost in his mind. ‘What do you intend to do in Cardiff?’

  ‘Go to sea.’

  ‘You don’t know the first thing about sailing a ship,’ Mary pointed out harshly.

  ‘Neither did any sailor until he went to sea. All those ships in the docks must need crew.’

  ‘They do – qualified crew.’ Harry sensed the baby growing limp in his arms. He glanced at him, saw he was asleep and returned him to his day cot.

  ‘How hard can it be to sail a ship?’ David reached for the butter. ‘All right, sailing a ship is skilled work but there’s bound to be all sorts of menial jobs that I can do on board while I learn. Don’t sailors scrub decks –’

  ‘And peel potatoes, empty slop buckets, shovel coal into boilers –’

  ‘There you are then, Mary,’ David broke in triumphantly. ‘That doesn’t sound too different from farm work.’

  ‘Why Cardiff?’ Mary knew the answer but she had to ask the question because she wasn’t sure David would admit to wanting to be close to Edyth.

  ‘Because it’s a port. From there I
can see the world.’

  ‘And the farm?’ Her voice cracked and both Harry and David knew she was close to tears. ‘Who do you think is going to run the farm while you are off seeing the world?’

  ‘You and Mr Jones manage the farm perfectly well now, whether I’m here or not.’

  ‘But Mr Jones works for us, David. He doesn’t own the Ellis Estate. His heart isn’t in the place.’

  David finally gave up on his breakfast and pushed the uneaten food to the side of his plate. He dropped his knife and fork on top and left the table. ‘Neither is mine, Mary.’ He opened the door that led into the farmyard. ‘I’ll find the others and tell them that I’m leaving.’

  Mary left her chair and went after him but Harry grabbed her skirt and held her fast until David had closed the outside door.

  ‘Let him go, darling.’

  ‘David can’t leave. The farm is his. The Ellises have fought for hundreds of years to keep it in the family. His name – David Ellis – is carved over the door …’

  ‘Your ancestor’s name is carved over the door,’ Harry reminded her. ‘The Ellis Estate was his dream, not David’s. David’s young, he’s not sure what he wants from life yet. Please don’t be angry with him for rejecting someone else’s dream.’

  ‘What was the point of all that work, all that sacrifice? My parents and grandparents worked day and night to build the farm so David could inherit it and now,’ she choked back a sob, ‘it’s all been for nothing.’

  He pulled her down on to his lap. ‘It’s not been for nothing. The farm belongs to you and your brothers and sister. And in four years’ time, when I reach thirty and my trust is dissolved, you will own it outright. And if David doesn’t want it then, perhaps Luke or Matthew will when they’re old enough.’

  ‘But it’s always been the eldest son who inherits. I must make David understand …’

  Harry locked his hands around her waist when she tried to climb off him. ‘You can’t tell him anything that he doesn’t already know.’