with different girls, and he had believed that it meant exactly what it seemed to mean. They did it, and they both enjoyed it. He saw to that, because it was important. And then, after they had enjoyed enough of it, they were both free to move on.
The enjoyment part mattered, that was what made the bargain mutual. His first girl had taught him that. Not that she was a girl, exactly. Forty-year-old Mags Jenkin from Mountain Ash had coolly picked him out from a crowd of his seventeen-year-old mates. She was a widow, and nothing special to look at, but she knew all there was to know. ‘I can always tell the ones who’ll be natural at it,’ she had told him after their first time together. It was the first time that he’d stayed out all night, and the first night of his life that he hadn’t slept at all, even though he had to go down the pit just as usual at seven in the morning. ‘Listen,’ Mags had said. ‘The first thing is to make sure that the girl likes it too. It doubles the pleasure of it for you, see? And there’s sense in that, isn’t there?’
Nick had seen the sense of it so clearly that he had pressed her back against the grey blankets yet again, and had been late down at the shaft head for the first time in his life as well.
In due course, as Mags had assured him he would, he had turned his attentions to a younger, prettier girl. Mags had simply picked out another eager seventeen-year-old, and Nick had gone on from there, grateful for what she had taught him and happy with what seemed a satisfactory arrangement for everyone. But Mari Powell was different. Not all that different, he reflected, but it was enough.
‘What would you like it to mean?’ he asked her now, watching the averted pink curve of her face.
‘I’d like …’ She hesitated, and then the words came out in a sudden rush. ‘I’d like it to mean that we’re going to get married.’
I don’t want that. Nick heard his own sharp, inner voice. Do I?
Yet he had brought Mari down here, knowing that he would make love to her in a hollow by the sea, and knowing that it would be something different from the careful, deliberately casual encounters he had had in the past. He had wanted it to be different.
Nick frowned very slightly, and looked around him as if for another, less obvious avenue to move down.
But there was none. Everyone was married. All the men he worked with, almost all his friends. Rapidly, Nick tried to sum up for himself what being married would mean. Not living in his dad’s house any more, but a struggle to find and pay for another, identical house a little way off in one of the terraces. And then there would be Mari, pretty, cheerful Mari to come home to, and warm in bed beside him every night. There would be no other girls, but that would just mean an end to snatched hours in icy front parlours, or out in the cold in some corner of the valley. Mari and he would have their own room, their own bed. A life of their own.
He looked at Mari now, sitting tensely beside him in her blue blouse, apparently intent on the sand trickling out between the fingers of her clenched fist. ‘And would you have me?’
Her fists unclenched at once, and Nick saw the full blaze of delighted surprise in her face. ‘Nick, you know I would.’
He waited for a second, listening to the sea and the wind, and then he said, ‘Will you marry me, Mari?’
‘Yes.’
That was it, then, Nick thought. That was how it happened. You loved someone in a way that wasn’t quite exactly the same as all the others, for her pink cheeks and her smile and the scent of lilacs, and you found yourself marrying her.
To have and to hold. From this day forth for ever more. It wasn’t his voice but a stranger’s, mocking him inside his own head. But before Nick could catch himself up short for his own sourness, Mari’s delight overpowered him. Her arms were round his neck and her mouth was warm against his.
‘I love you, Nick. Oh, I love you.’
Her fervour touched him and made him smile so that he forgot everything else. ‘You sure? Me and the Fed? Me and the pit and Nantlas and the owners?’
‘Curse the whole bloody lot of them. I only love you.’ Her hands reached out to him, touching him and drawing him closer to her. ‘Nick, will you do it again? Please?’ They lay down once more, and the walls of the sand hollow enclosed them all over again.
It was almost dark when they reached the station, and the train for the valleys was waiting at the platform. Nick helped Mari up into the high carriage again, and was amused to find himself possessively smoothing the hem of her skirt so that no one else might catch a glimpse of the smooth whiteness above her knees. As they sat down, side by side on the gritty seats, he smelt the dust and smoke and knew that their holiday was over. Pushing back the thought, he asked her fiercely, ‘Are you mine? Really all mine?’
In the filthy, dimly lit train Mari was beautiful. Her hair was tousled and dark around her face, and her mouth looked fuller, bruised with kissing.
She smiled at him. ‘All. Always. We’re engaged now, aren’t we?’
Their hands were knotted together and Nick rubbed the bare fingers of her left hand with his.
‘I’ll buy you a ring. We’ll go into Cardiff and you can choose one. Does it matter if it isn’t a great diamond?’
‘Doesn’t matter if it’s a brass curtain ring, so long as it’s yours. I’ve got my mug, for now. It’ll have pride of place, you know, when we’re married. In the middle of our parlour mantel. To remind us of today.’
The train jolted savagely and then shuddered forward. Through the smeared window Nick watched the platform lights dropping behind them and the velvety August night wrapping round the train like a glove.
Quietly, he said, ‘It isn’t going to be easy, my love.’
Mari was too completely happy even to want to listen to his warnings. ‘When has it ever been, for our sort?’
‘Harder, then. Much harder. Worse than 1921, do you remember that? That was only a rehearsal for what’s coming to us.’
Mari remembered 1921. For the four months that the strike had lasted, March to July, neither her dad nor her brothers had worked. She herself had been earning a few pence a week then, doing mending and heavy cleaning for one of the pit managers’ wives, and her mother had taken in some washing. The five of them had lived on that, on bread and potatoes and hoarded tea, and had been luckier than many others.
She sighed now. ‘Why not be grateful for things as they are? Everyone except you says they’re better. They may be bad in other places, but there’s work for everyone who really wants it in the Rhondda now. Forty thousand men. You said so yourself.’
Nick turned away from the window, and the lights of towns strung out along the valley sides like so many necklaces, pretty at this distance.
‘It won’t last. It can’t. We can’t compete, you see. Not with German reparation coal, not with subsidized exports from everywhere. Nor with oil for shipping, and the hydroelectric. Steam coal’s had its day, my love, and so have we. Unless —’ his dark face was suddenly flooded with vivid colour — ‘unless we can change everything. Stop the owners lining their pockets. Nationalize the industry. Invest. Mechanize. Subsidize. And pay a fair wage to the men who do the work.’
Mari stroked his hand, running her fingers over the calluses,
