Missing the Moment Read online

  “What if Harriet refuses?”

  “Then I’ll divorce her. Somehow.” Again he stared coldly at his brother. “It’ll take time, but I can wait. I want to be free to marry the woman I’ve found happiness with.”

  Jack recognised Eric Russell the moment he saw him. He had been curious about Peter’s visitor, who had crept in via the goods deliveries entrance, and so he made an excuse and pushed open the office door.

  Sensing rather than seeing his presence in the doorway, Eric looked up and gave a half smile. “Hello, you must be Jack. How are you then?”

  “Startled at seeing you! Does your wife know you’re here?”

  “No, and I don’t want her to. Not until I’ve had a chance to talk with her, right?”

  “She saw you in Barry. I drove her back to check on the address. We all saw you: Harriet, Charlotte, Rhoda, Brian and me.”

  Eric jumped up, startled. “Charlotte and Rhoda know? I wish I could have explained before they found out.”

  “Damn it all.” Peter said, exasperated. “you’ve had seven years to explain!”

  “Not a word about me being here though. Not yet.”

  “That was a terrible thing to do to your family,” Jack said quietly. “You haven’t the look of a lothario, but two women. Duw! If you had to, you could at least have been honest.”

  “What’s it to do with you?” Eric demanded.

  “I’ve seen what it’s done to young Charlotte.”

  “Yes, I suppose it affected her badly.”

  “I can’t say I’m glad to meet you,” Jack added coldly. “You’re a cheating coward, Eric Russell.”

  “I am that. And a very happy one. And,” he emphasized, “I intend things to stay that way, no messing.” Eric’s lips tightened determinedly as he stood to leave. He was a small man, only a little over five feet tall. His grey, absent-minded hair fell in all directions, undecided about where it belonged. He had on a suit that was far from new and his shoes were worn, but well polished. His shirt was snowy and neatly ironed. He looked well cared for, even if a bit shabby.

  * * *

  Eric walked down the hill, glancing only briefly at Mill House. He hurried through the town, trilby hat pulled well down over his face, the collar of his mac pulled up. He didn’t want anyone to stop and speak to him. They might remember, even though seven years was a long time. His heart was racing as he sat on the train taking him back to his home, away from the place he had once thought he would never leave.

  * * *

  On Sunday morning, once the vegetables were prepared for dinner, and Peter was comfortably settled, Charlotte walked down the hill and along Main Street to Joe’s shop. He was already there, the contents of drawers tipped out into cardboard boxes, lists and pencils on every shelf. Stocktaking was underway.

  After greeting her with undisguised relief, Joe explained.

  “Put the total in the first column, the price in the second. I’ll do the additions and fill in the end column later.”

  “Joe Llewellyn, are you suggesting I can’t add up?” she teased and with the light bantering setting the mood, they worked steadily and contentedly for the rest of the morning. Charlotte had been invited to have dinner with Joe’s Auntie Bessie Philpot and at one o’clock they walked along the quiet footpath; arm in arm when it was wide enough, Joe’s hand resting on her shoulder when it was not. The man they saw coming towards them had obviously been in a fight. It took a few seconds for Joe to recognise him.

  “Jack Roberts! What on earth happened, man? You look like you’ve been hit by a train!”

  “It’s nothing. It’s all right. Just a misunderstanding, that’s all.”

  “It wasn’t Eric, was it?” Joe whispered.

  “No, not Eric. It was no one I know,” Jack replied emphatically.

  Joe insisted he came into his aunt’s house to be cleaned up and Jack agreed. “I don’t want to go back to Kath’s like this.”

  “Very thoughtful of you,” Joe said grimly. “But you aren’t going anywhere until you’ve spoken to the police.”

  “No, no,” Jack protested. “I tell you, it’s all right. I was mistaken for someone else, that’s all.”

  “Then that ‘someone else’ will be more than glad if we can get the bloke before he catches up with him. won’t he!”

  Auntie Bessie didn’t fuss or try to get explanations; she presumed it was the same ‘madman’ who had attacked her. Bustling about her kitchen, she gathered cloths and hot water and ointment and quickly sorted out the worst of Jack’s injuries, which turned out to be less serious than they looked – most of the mess being mud – then went back to getting the dinner.

  “Did you see the man who hit you?” Joe asked, persisting with his questions. “Was he tall? Young? Brown hair, dark eyes? Heavily built?”

  “I didn’t see a hair of him,” Jack insisted.

  Charlotte was silent. Joe was describing the stranger, with whom she had spent the afternoon on the hill.

  Bessie’s next-door neighbour, Bertha Evans, came to see what had happened, and stayed to listen to Jack’s very brief explanation. Bertha was small, very slim, her grey-green eyes gentle and slow. She was a quiet person who rarely spoke unnecessarily, and her movements were restricted to the minimum. When she sat, she was utterly still and when she listened to someone she flattered them by giving them her whole attention. There was about her an air of calmness and peace and Charlotte always loved to see her.

  Bertha seemed to survive on what she could grow or make herself. She had never worked, and how she managed was a mystery that even Bessie had been unable to untangle. She grew vegetables in the large garden behind the cottage, and the remains of an orchard gave her fruit for bottling and jam-making, some of which she sold. Chickens and ducks, which ran free on the grass near the river, and goats for milk both for use and to sell, gave her sufficient money to buy flour for the bread she baked in her oven twice a week.

  There had to be more money, Bessie reasoned, and she grew more and more discontented when her relentless questioning and devious investigations failed to satisfy her curiosity.

  Bertha’s daughter Lillian, now eighteen, but with the mind of a child more than ten years younger, had tried on countless occasions to get a job. But although the kindly people of Bryn Melinau sympathised with the amiable girl and tried to help, it was soon found to be impossible to employ her, even for the simplest tasks. Very overweight, Lillian enjoyed eating to the exclusion of everything else. When not so employed, she could sit for hours and stare into space, oblivious to boiling pans, crying babies and unwashed floors, and no matter what type of work she tried, she rarely lasted more than three days.

  After listening to Jack’s story, Bertha nodded and said, “Well, Jack, it’s up to you, perhaps you’d be wasting Constable Hardy’s time, but I think he should be told. The same man might have hit Bessie and if you’re the second, well, he must be caught.”

  Jack was adamant and the matter remained a secret between the few people involved. Bessie was most upset, believing the assailant was the same man who had attacked her.

  A further disappointment for Bessie was the news of Eric Russell’s return. In the way of all small communities. Bryn Melinau had ways of rapidly spreading news. Bessie was usually the first to put her expert skills to work but for once she was second in the race to tell everyone. It fanned out via the Russells’ bookbinding factory.

  Jack told Gaynor Edwards who the visitor to Peter’s office that morning had been; Gaynor confided the interesting tidbit of gossip to one of the others in the workroom and before Eric’s train had left the station, a dozen people knew. It only needed a few knocks on doors, a few shared cups of tea, to make it common knowledge that Eric had recovered from his ‘amnesia’. He was back.

  No one mentioned him to Harriet, although conversations ceased on her approach, there were gigggles stifled behind gloved hands and Harriet guessed that her secret was out. She wanted to jump off the nearest cliff, she confid
ed to Rhoda and Brian. “But be sure that if I do I’ll push him off first!”

  They were sitting in the lounge of Mill House while Bessie washed the kitchen floor. They were unaware that the scrubbing brush had ceased its rasping until Bessie came in with a tray of tea.

  “Best you tell him to clear off. You’re happier without him,” Rhoda was saying tearfully. “isn’t she, Bri? We don’t want him coming back and upsetting our lives. Hurt us terribly he did and I for one will never forgive him. No, Mammy, leave things be.”

  “Your Rhoda’s right,” Bessie said, undisguisedly eavesdropping.

  “You wouldn’t say that if he was yours!” Harriet snapped.

  “Wouldn’t I?” Bessie hauled herself to her full height and said, “What makes you think I wouldn’t send him packing?”

  “Because you’ve never had a husband!”

  “And that’s a crime? Look at you then. What an advert for wedded bliss!” She plonked the tray of tea down and pulled off her apron.

  With a haughty expression on her face, Harriet turned to Rhoda. “Pay the woman and ask her to leave, will you?”

  “Don’t worry, I’m going!”

  Rhoda looked at Brian and smiled. These spats were a regular occurrence and always forgotten by the next time Bessie was due. Harriet knew she wouldn’t get anyone else to do what Bessie did, and certainly not for the money she paid her.

  * * *

  Charlotte and Joe were finishing counting the stock one evening when someone tapped on the shop window. It was after six-thirty at night and the windows had been shuttered to show that the place was closed for the day.

  “Can’t they read!” Joe grumbled. getting down from the ladder where he had been checking the contents of boxes on the top shelf. “Shuttered windows, a notice big as a double-decker bus and still they knock.”

  “Sorry I am to disturb you, boy, but is Charlotte there?”

  “Come in Bertha. She’s in the office going through the lists. Can’t miss anything out, not when it’s my last chance to add to the price.” he joked, nodding towards the corner partition.

  “Wondered how poor Mrs Russell is today.” Bertha said. “Got over her terrible shock, has she? Fancy Eric – I mean Mr Russell – turning up like that after all this time.”

  “Eric has never turned up! Well I never!” Joe grinned. feigning ignorance. “Rubbish, woman! Nothing but a lot of ol’ rumour.”

  “Indeed he has,” Bertha said confidentially. “and I’m so worried for Mrs Russell, she doesn’t deserve that, does she, poor dab?” Cupping her mouth to hide her words from Charlotte on the corner, she added. “She found him with a woman calling herself Mrs Eric Russell, and them with a houseful of kids, would you believe?”

  Charlotte didn’t show herself; she didn’t want to discuss the family’s predicament with anyone.

  “I’m surprised at Bertha, coming here for a few more items of gossip,” Charlotte said when the woman had gone. “She doesn’t usually involve herself in tittle-tattle. But there, I suppose this is second only to the election results in national importance: Eric Russell and his notorious vanishing trick! But I wonder why she’s so excited?”

  “Come to make sure it’s true, I expect. But it can’t make any difference to her, can it? He can hardly make her an ‘honest woman’, can he? Him with a wife and daughters plus another woman and a houseful of kids!”

  “What d’you mean, make Bertha an honest woman? What’s Dadda’s reappearance to do with her?”

  “Some say he’s Lillian’s lost father.”

  “Joe!”

  “Well, someone’s been keeping them for the last eighteen years.”

  “Well it isn’t my father! Worse than your Auntie Bessie Philpot you are, Joe Llewellyn! How dare you even think it!”

  “I’m only saying what I’ve heard,” he protested.

  “From your Auntie Bessie Philpot no doubt!”

  Joe saw from Charlotte’s face that a row was imminent and he sighed with relief as Constable Hardy knocked on the door and entered to make sure all was well.

  Chapter Five

  Shocked by Joe’s accusations about her father and Bertha’s slow-witted daughter, Lillian, Charlotte avoided seeing him for several days. How could Joe have told her so casually? He was smiling as he said the hated words, as if the whole thing was a joke.

  She wanted to talk to her father, hear him say it wasn’t true. She hardly left the house, waiting for the phone to ring, hoping to be able to talk to him, hear him explain, tell her it was nothing more than a malicious rumour. But although Charlotte spent a lot of time wandering around the house, waiting for her father’s call, it was Uncle Peter who actually picked up the phone and arranged with Eric the time and day on which he was to meet Harriet and discuss a divorce. Peter passed the message on to his sister-in-law when she and Rhoda returned from the shops.

  Charlotte watched her mother’s face, hoping to see a sign that she was coping, that this wouldn’t mean her leaning more heavily on her daughters. But the white face, upturned eyes, the gradual falling back onto the couch all suggested that as usual, Harriet was going to make as much out of the situation as she possibly could. Ashamed of her coldness with her mother’s genuine difficulties, Charlotte nevertheless thought more about how events would affect herself and Joe.

  “I don’t think I can go.” Harriet said after Rhoda had passed sal volatile under her nose several times. Charlotte sighed inwardly. The arrangement was for three days’ time and Charlotte guessed that those three days would be filled with sobs and recriminations and appeals for support. She knew she would have to listen while her mother went over and over what had happened, giving her version of the events and making sure that no kind thought was spared for her father.

  Charlotte was exhausted by the evening before the proposed meeting. She couldn’t sleep although she was very tired. She still hadn’t seen Joe, deliberately staying away from town and slipping out of the back door when he called. Once the meeting of her estranged parents had taken place, then she could talk to Joe and decide on their future.

  She lay on the bed thinking that the outcome of the following day would affect her as much, if not more, than her mother. If the matter was dealt with calmly and amicably she and Joe might stand a chance of a future together. She sighed. Amicability and her mother couldn’t be considered in the same breath.

  At three in the morning she gave up trying to sleep and got dressed. She spent the next three hours polishing brass and copper, then finished off the last of the silent hours polishing the furniture. When everything was as shiny as it possibly could be, she washed the kitchen flags and put the coconut matting out on the line and beat it until it was practically threadbare.

  The morning was still and beautiful. Below her the town was gradually waking, its outlines bathed in mist, the river a silver streak, curled around the town. The hills in the distance were newly washed as the mist had cleared from them, an amphitheatre waiting for the curtains to rise on the performance of the new day.

  The sun came up suddenly, bursting out from the hills. Surely an omen of good fortune? Whatever happened to her, whatever disappointments she faced, she would always be glad she lived here, in this beautiful place among such contented, caring people.

  Her next task was breakfast. Charlotte dealt with the meals and organised the running of the house, and had done so since she left school. She fed her family well considering the fiddling portions of food they had on ration, she knew that. Four ounces of margarine and five of butter, four ounces of bacon to last a week. You needed to be a magician these days, not a cook! Being helped by Bertha’s off-ration duck eggs helped. Plus her own skills of course. Her meatless pies and fatless sponges were better than most. Didn’t she tease Joe that her cooking was his main reason for wanting to marry her?

  Her mind drifted off from her problems of the day but kept returning with a shock. Her father was meeting them like some businessman with a proposition to their mutual adv
antage. She forced herself to think of dinner. Potatoes mashed with an oxo and a tin of Woppa peas mixed in. Fried in a little bacon fat they’d be pretend rissoles. Everything in my life is pretend, she sighed. Pretend engagement, pretend meals, and now I’m expected to pretend not to mind that my father has an illegitimate daughter, has founded a second family and threatens to throw Mam out of her home!

  * * *

  At ten-thirty they went to the car and Charlotte saw that her mother was literally shaking with anxiety. Charlotte tucked her arm in hers and said brightly, “Let’s pretend it’s an outing, shall we? Going to the seaside for the day we are, a picnic in the bag, dippers in there too in case the sea’s warm enough for a bathe, the promise of fish and chips on the way home. Right?”

  Harriet forced a smile. “Right. Seaside, here we come.”

  The inn where they had arranged to meet was a thatched building, situated on the road close to the sea, dating back to the early fourteenth century. Although modernised to create a comfortable and pleasant ambience, it still retained the air of timelessness and calm beauty that only very old buildings can have. The inside was dark after the strong sunlight and for a moment, the low-ceilinged room seemed empty. Then Eric stood up from a chair near the fire and said:

  “Hello, Harriet my dear. Charlotte, how lovely you’ve grown, and Rhoda, a married woman now, and is this your husband?” He hugged his daughters and shook hands with Brian but to Harriet he only smiled. She had taken a step back, afraid he might be going to hug her as well. She would hit him if he tried but was disappointed when he did not.

  Eric calmly handed drinks around and gestured for them to sit down. “I hope you still like a port and lemon, Harriet. A beer for you, Brian, and soft drinks for you girls as I no longer know your preferences.”