‘I wondered where you’d slipped off to. What were you doing?’
‘I met Luis.’
There was a moment of startled silence. Amy smiled in the darkness.
‘What happened?’ Isabel was intrigued, and envious of the adventure.
‘Oh, he took me home to meet his family. He’s got about a dozen brothers and sisters. The smallest is a little girl called Isabella. Then he walked me back down to the sea front, and he kissed me.’
‘Where?’
‘On the lips, of course.’
Isabel choked with laughter. ‘Oh, of course. Actually I meant where was it, in front of Fendi’s with everyone looking on over their ices?’
‘No. In an alleyway.’
‘Amy, you are priceless. Kissing waiters in alleyways. I’m two whole years older than you, and no one’s ever kissed me.’
‘I expect your turn will come,’ Amy said airily.
When they stopped laughing Isabel said, ‘So, what was it like?’
‘Well, to tell you the truth it was so quick that I hardly realized it was happening.’
‘Mmm.’
They lay in silence for a while, listening to the clickety-clack of the train. Amy liked to think of all the towns and villages they were sweeping past, full of darkened houses and sleeping families.
‘Amy, do you think we’ll always tell each other things?’
‘I hope so. Sisters are closer than friends, aren’t they? I can’t imagine telling Violet Trent about it, for example.’
‘I suppose we should be grateful for that. Good night, little sister.’
‘Not so little, Isabel dear. Good night.’
Even to Isabel, Amy had not mentioned the smallness and bareness of Luis’s home, so full of so many people, or the way he had said We are lucky ones. That was something she wanted to think about for herself.
*
Back at the house in London, Bethan’s weekly letter from her mother was waiting for her. Once the trunks had been brought safely in, the clamour of arrival had died down, and Lady Lovell had gone to her room to rest, Bethan took the letter out of her apron pocket and went upstairs to her room at the top of the house to read it.
The letters were a lifeline, stretching between the valleys and her life in service, holding her to the tight, united community even though she could only spend her two weeks’ holiday a year as a real part of it.
They have had the Inquiry, such as it was. The Mines Inspector found negligence, and Peris and Cruickshank were prosecuted all right. The magistrates fined them the Great Sum of £5.10s. Half-a-crown a man’s life, they’re saying here. There’s terrible feeling about it, but the pit’s still closed and there’s talk that Peris won’t ever open it no more because it costs him less just to run seams in other pits. Those who are in work like your dad are all with them that aren’t but it’s hard to think of another strike coming. Nick Penry from Glasdir Terrace and them are all behind it. Your dad says they’re right, but I can’t see further than no money coming in for weeks on end, myself. Nick Penry’s marrying that Mari Powell that came up from Tonypandy, all in a hurry it seems to me. I don’t doubt I’ll be called up there at the end of six months or so.
Bethan smiled over the cramped, hurried handwriting. Her mother had three men down the pit on different shifts, each one wanting hot water and hot food at different hours of the long day. The tiny back kitchen was steamy with the big pan of water on the fire and the potatoes boiling. In the short night between the end of the last shift and the beginning of the next, an anxious father would often come knocking at the door and Bethan’s mother would struggle out of bed and collect her midwife’s bag. She had no proper training, only what she had learned from experience and her own mother, but she was vital in Nantlas where no one could afford the doctor.
The letter went on. Bethan was frowning now as she read.
Bethan lamb, when will it be your turn? I know you said you never would after Dai was killed, but it’s seven years since 1917. Write and tell me you’re walking out with some nice young man and make me happy. We need some happiness, God knows. Well, cariad, I must close now. William will be back up just now. God bless you. Your loving MAM.
There never will be anyone else, Bethan thought. She had only wanted to marry Dai, and he had died at Pilckheim Ridge, a year after Airlie Lovell. No. She would stay with Amy and Isabel as long as they needed her, and after that, well, she would find something.
Bethan folded her letter carefully into four and replaced it in her apron pocket. Then she went downstairs where thirty-two pieces of luggage were waiting to be unpacked.
London, February 1931
Amy was wandering listlessly around the room, picking up a crystal bottle and sniffing at the scent before putting it down again unremarked, then fingering the slither of heavy cream satin that was Isabel’s new robe waiting to be packed at the top of one of the small cases.
It was peculiar to think that tomorrow night Peter Jaspert’s large, scrubbed hands would probably undo this broad sash, and then reach up to slip the satin off his wife’s shoulders. Isabel would be Mrs Peter Jaspert then. Amy wondered whether Isabel was thinking about that too. Didn’t every bride, on the night before her wedding? But it was impossible to judge from Isabel’s face what she was thinking. She looked as calm and serene as she always did. She was sitting patiently in front of her dressing-table mirror while her maid worked on her hair. Isabel had her own maid now, who would travel with her on the honeymoon, and then they would settle into the house that Peter Jaspert had bought in Ebury Street.
Amy and Bethan would be left behind at Lovell House in Bruton Street. The town house didn’t feel as cavernously huge as it had done when Amy was a child, but it could be very quiet and empty, and faintly gloomy. It was all right now, of course, because it was full of preparations for the wedding. But once that was over, what then?
‘I’ll miss you so much, Bel,’ Amy said abruptly. Isabel looked at her sister’s reflection in the glass beside her own. She thought that you could tell what Amy was like just by watching her for five minutes. She was so restless, incapable of keeping still so long as there was any new thing to be investigated or assimilated. When there was nothing new or interesting, she was stifled and irritable. Her face reflected it all, always flickering with naked feelings for anyone to read. Isabel herself wasn’t anything like that. Feelings were private things, to be kept hidden or shared only with the closest friends. Amy didn’t care if the taxi driver or butcher’s boy knew when she was in the depths of despair.
She needed a calming influence, and a focus for her days, Isabel decided. A husband and a home would give her that, when the right time came. She smiled at Amy.
‘I’m hardly more than a mile away. We’ll see each other every day, if you would like that. And I’ll be a married woman, remember. We can do all kinds of things together that we couldn’t do before.’
Amy dropped the robe back on to the bed. ‘Go to slightly more risky restaurants for lunch, you mean? To the theatre unescorted? Will that really make any difference? You’ll be gone, and you can’t pretend that anything will ever be the same. That’s what I’m worried about. You’ll be too busy giving little dinners for Peter’s business cronies and his allies from the House, and going to their little dinners, and whenever I come to see you I’ll be just a visitor in your house …’
‘That’s