take them off,’ she said, mock-daringly, and then added, ‘Or no, later perhaps.’
They walked down to the water’s edge where the wavelets turned over themselves and the fringe of foam was swallowed up by the wet sand. There were two or three tiny flawless pink shells amongst the crushed white and grey fragments of larger ones at the tideline. Nick picked them up and closed them in the palm of Mari’s hand, seeing how the skin was rough and reddened from the washing and mending she did for Mrs Peris up at the Lodge.
‘Aren’t they pretty?’ Mari said. ‘Like little pink pearls.’
‘I’d give you real pearls, if I could,’ Nick said. There was something about today that put a rough edge in his voice. It was a happy day, a beautiful day, but it hurt him too.
‘That would be nice,’ Mari answered. ‘But I don’t need pearls, do I? I’m happy just as I am. Here, this minute.’
For a long, long moment they looked at each other.
In the end it was Nick who turned away, his back to the glitter of the sun on the sea, to look back at the rows of roofs and windows along the front. It looked better from here. The colours seemed no more than faded and softened by the salt wind, and the blank eyes of windows were less noticeable. In the centre was a red-brick public house, Victorian mock-Gothic with fantastic turrets and spires, topped by a gilded cockerel on a weather vane.
‘What would you like to do?’ he asked her formally. ‘Shall we have a drink at the Cock? Or are you hungry? We can have a fish dinner right away, if you want.’
‘Oh, a drink first, please. Then something to eat, and then we can go for a walk afterwards.’
They sat side by side on the hard, shiny red leather seats in the Cock, looking at the other holidaymakers. Nick drank two pints of beer, and Mari had two glasses of dark, sweet sherry. After the second her cheeks went even pinker and she found it doubly difficult to listen to what Nick was saying.
He was talking about the Miners’ Federation, and how important it was that every miner should be committed to it and its leaders, so that they could stand together and fight the bosses.
‘Nothing like 1921 must ever happen again,’ he said. ‘No more Black Fridays.’
Mari sighed. It was a part of Nick that she didn’t understand. Of course there should be a union, and of course all working men should belong to it. But all his talk of fights, and power bases, and nationalization and public ownership, and radicalization, and the Sankey Commission, she didn’t understand that at all.
There always would be bosses, and they never would want to pay the men the proper wage. Nor would they want to put their profits into mechanizing the mines and making them safer to work in, not while there were still plenty of men more than willing to go down them just as they were and for less and less money.
Secretly, Mari didn’t believe that all the unions in the world would ever change anything. There always would be men like Mr Peris who owned the third biggest colliery group in South Wales, and his wife who gave her handmade silk underwear away to her maid after two or three wearings, and there would be men and women like Nick and herself. If the men came out on strike, obedient to Nick and his kind who truly believed in the possibility of change, then the bosses just sent in the police and the troops and the strike-breakers, the miners got angrier and hungrier, and then when they couldn’t hold out against the hunger and the cold any longer, they went back down for less money than before. It would be just the same, Mari thought, if she told Mrs Peris’s housekeeper up at the Lodge that she rather thought she wouldn’t do quite so much of the heavy washing any more, but would like an extra two shillings a week just the same. She would simply find herself replaced by another Nantlas girl who would be glad to do what Mari Powell did, and without making any trouble about it.
Nick had stopped talking now, and he was looking at her with the same queer light in his eyes. Nick had unusual eyes, grey-green and pale against his dark skin and hair.
‘You don’t understand any of this, do you?’ he said.
‘Of course I do,’ Mari protested rapidly. ‘I understand, and I agree with you. So there’s no need to lecture me like one of your miners’ lodge meetings.’ She tried to look indignant, but at the same time she slid closer to him on the hard, slippery seat. ‘I don’t much want to talk about it, that’s all, not today. I’d rather have you to myself, not share you with every collier in Nantlas as well as the South Wales Miners’ Federation.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, contrite. ‘Let’s forget it at once.’ But before he put his arm around her shoulders again he said, as if he was warning her, ‘It’s important, Mari. Not just to me, but to all of us. I just want you to understand that if … if you have me, if you want me, you have the fight too. Do you?’
‘Yes.’ She was answering both his questions, thinking only of one.
With surprising gentleness for a big man, Nick touched her cheek with his fingertips. Then he grinned at her. ‘Too serious. Much too serious. What d’you say, shall we have another drink?’
‘Trying to get me drunk, is it?’
‘Of course. Then I can have my wicked way with you. A large one, then?’
‘No, thanks. You can buy me that fish dinner instead.’
Later, when they came out again, they turned westwards down the front into the sunshine. They dawdled arm in arm past the shopfronts, examining the displays. In the last shop in the line Nick bought a white china mug with Cymru am Byth gold-lettered on one side and Croeso i Barry on the other over highly coloured views of the resort.
‘To remind you of this elegant excursion,’ he said gravely.
Mari thanked him, equally gravely.
Then they were walking away from the sea front, down to where the road turned into a sandy track and then wound away around a little headland into an empty space of coarse grass and sunny hollows. For a while they walked in silence, listening to the sea and the grass swishing at their ankles. Although they were barely half a mile from the clamour of Barry, they might have been alone in the world.
Nick stopped at a deep hollow, enclosed on three sides by sun-warmed slopes tufted with seagrass, but open to the sea and the sky at the front. ‘Let’s stop for a while,’ he said.
They sat down with their backs against the sand and at once the steep walls insulated them. The sea was no more than a faint whisper, and the only other sound was the cry of a seagull directly overhead.
Mari thought that it was the first time they had ever been properly alone. Nick was lying back with his eyes closed. Without his penetrating stare and with the quick crackle of his talk silenced, he looked younger, softer-faced.
For once Nick wasn’t thinking of anything at all. He was simply relishing the quiet, the clean smell of the salt-scoured air, and the red light of the sun on his eyelids. It was so different from the confined dark, the noise and the often suffocating heat of every day.
When he opened his eyes again it was to look at Mari. She was lying propped up on one elbow, watching the slow trickle of sand grains past her arm. With her rosy cheeks and round brown eyes she looked polished, shiny with health like an apple, and that was an unusual attraction in Nantlas. Nick’s appraisal took in the rest of her. She was
