Finders and Keepers (54 page)

‘You don't want to see your father?' Harry had to be sure.

‘Frankly, I wish I could disown him the way some parents do their children. I knew what he was when I was growing up, and I doubt he's changed. There are all sorts of questions I need to ask myself. Like what I would do if I discovered that my late sister played a part in her husband's schemes, and was stealing from people who could least afford it. I'd like to think that she wasn't, but as her widower and my father get along, it looks as though she married a man just like our father. Over the years it's been easier not to think about him than face up to the terrible things he did to try and separate me and your Uncle Victor, and what he succeeded in doing to my mother and brothers.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘Don't be.' Megan gave him a brittle smile. ‘You're just one of many Evanses I count myself lucky to be related to, Harry. I need to think about what you've just told me, and I won't be free to do that until after we have said goodbye to Dad.'

‘This week is going to be a long one.'

‘Isn't it?' She hugged him and kissed his cheek. ‘Thank you for being tactful and being you, Harry. And for taking care of Dad for us. He was so proud of you.'

*……*……*

Saturday morning dawned dry and warm without a cloud in the sky. Harry stood in front of the open window of his bedroom, buttoning his shirt and waistcoat, his black tie slung around his neck. The garden had only been planted in the spring, but already there were roses on the mature bushes his mother had insisted on moving from Ynysangharad House, and the lavender cuttings had taken well, filling the air with their heady, late-summer scent.

It promised to be a hot day, the kind his grandfather had loved, and Harry resented the weather for being perfect when Billy Evans could no longer see the sun or flowers. Rain would have been easier to bear. He pushed in his stud, fastened his collar and looked at himself in the mirror.

‘Harry?' Lloyd knocked the door.

‘Come in.' Harry began to knot his tie.

Lloyd saw the grief etched in Harry's eyes. ‘It's not too late to change your mind about being a bearer.'

‘It seems right for Granddad to be carried to his grave by his sons and his eldest grandson. Although, strictly speaking, I wasn't -'

‘You were,' Lloyd contradicted.

‘Either way, I feel privileged to be able to help you, Uncle Joey and Victor to do that one small last thing for him.' Harry straightened his collar and peered critically into the mirror.

Lloyd picked up the gold cufflinks from the dressing table. They had belonged to Sali's Great-uncle Gwilym James and were part of Harry's inheritance. Harry only wore them on formal occasions. They were old-fashioned but he didn't mind, although his allowance would have run to modern, more fashionable replacements.

‘Thank you.' Harry took them from him. ‘Would you mind slipping them into my cuffs?'

‘Mari always puts too much starch in our shirts.' Lloyd finally managed to push one of the links through the glossy, stiffened buttonhole. ‘I feel so guilty,' he murmured. ‘Dad wouldn't have been happy at the thought of being buried by Father Kelly. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if he comes back to haunt your uncles and me for allowing it to happen.'

‘He knew he'd have a Catholic funeral.' Harry held out his other cuff.

‘He did?' Lloyd looked at him in amazement.

‘He said he'd put up with it for his wife's sake. He also said that Isabella was such a saint she didn't need any more prayers, and he was such a sinner that he could do with all the help he could get to try to reach the same place as her.'

‘That sounds like Dad.' Lloyd laughed.

‘He also said that Father Kelly would persuade you to go along with him in the end, but that was all right too, because if the man ever found the sense to dump his religion he'd become a decent communist.'

‘He and Father Kelly made a strange pair of friends.' Lloyd saw and looked away from the framed photograph of the entire family taken on Harry's twenty-first birthday. It hurt to know that no matter how many other family parties they'd have, his father would not be there.

Harry picked up his black hat, gloves and jacket. ‘Father Kelly knows how Granddad felt about religion.'

‘Joey, Victor and I have warned him not to overdo the sermonizing. Oh, I came up to tell you that your friend's arrived. He's downstairs.'

‘Which friend?'

‘The artist from the inn who follows Bella around like a moonstruck lapdog. He turned up with a wreath and asked to see you and Bella so he could offer his condolences.'

‘It was good of him to come all this way.'

‘I suppose it was.'

‘You sound unconvinced.'

‘If he's here to offer his sympathy to you, fine. If it's Bella he's after, I might throw a bucket of cold water over him.'

Lloyd and his brothers had arranged for the funeral to take place on a day and at a time that would allow every miner who wasn't actually working on shift an opportunity to pay his respects to Billy Evans. Instead of cars, they had hired an old-fashioned glass-sided hearse, and horse-drawn carriages to follow so that pedestrians would be able to keep up with the procession.

Lloyd, Joey, Victor and Harry carried Billy out of the house for the last time. His coffin was covered with white roses that Megan, Rhian and Sali had picked from their gardens. Lloyd had been forced to hire two more hearses for the flowers that had been arriving all week, sent and brought by neighbours and friends since the day Billy's coffin had arrived back in Pontypridd.

Men stopped and bared their heads, and women lowered their eyes, as the funeral cortege wound slowly through Taff Street in Pontypridd and turned up Mill Street towards the Rhondda. It was only when Harry glanced around that he saw that most of the people who had stopped had joined the procession and were walking behind the last carriage.

He wasn't prepared for the hundreds who joined the mourners but he was stunned by the sight of the enormous throng waiting at Trealaw Cemetery gates. The hearse turned inside and the driver drove up the narrow lane that cut through the graves, halting at Isabella's, which had been opened that morning to take Billy's coffin.

Father Kelly and the undertaker stepped down from the hearse, and, with the undertaker's help, Harry, his father and uncles shouldered the coffin and carried it to the spot where Billy had buried his beloved Isabella nineteen years before.

The open grave was covered with green baize. Beneath it, Harry caught a glimpse of a corner of solid oak coffin and he looked away, feeling as though it were something private belonging to his grandfather that he shouldn't see.

They laid the coffin on the ground next to the grave. The undertaker's assistants unloaded the wreaths and cut flowers. Harry stepped back and placed his arms around Bella's shoulders. She had pleaded to be allowed to attend at the graveside and, overriding Lloyd's reservation that the girls were too young to attend a funeral, Sali had given Bella permission, principally because she was still saddened that she had been prevented from going to her own father's funeral in 1904, when she had been only slightly older than Bella was now.

Father Kelly began to speak and, although not a Catholic, Harry recognized that he kept the religious part of the service mercifully brief. After the coffin had been lowered into the ground, the priest stepped forward and looked down at the sea of mourners who filled the cemetery and overflowed out of the gates.

‘Now, if I could get half this number into church on a Sunday I'd be a happy man.'

Harry saw his mother and aunts smile despite their tears. It was the kind of remark Billy had loved to hear Patrick Kelly make.

‘I flatter myself that I knew Billy Evans as well as any man outside of his immediate family,' Father Kelly continued. ‘I also heard him rail against the Church and organized religion more times than I care to remember. Billy Evans would not thank me for saying this, but because he's not here to stop me I will. And loudly. Billy was the most moral man I have ever met. He lived his entire life by principles, good sound principles that he tried to pretend hadn't been laid down by Christ two thousand years ago.

‘He loved his wife, he loved his sons, he loved his daughters-in-law when they joined his family as if they were his own flesh and blood, and he loved their children. He loved his friends, his fellow men and his neighbours. Wherever there was suffering, wherever there was want and wherever there was poverty, you'd find Isabella and Billy Evans. Two people trying to put the entire world to rights with nothing more than their bare hands. And when his Isabella died there was Billy, food basket in one hand, purse with relief money from the miners' union fund in the other and a comic for the children in his pocket.

‘He was a man who terrified the authorities so much they imprisoned him, not because he was a criminal, but because he dared to dream of a world where men would be paid a living wage for their labour. A wage that would enable them to bring up their families in decent houses and to educate their children for a better world than they could hope to live in during their lifetime.

‘Billy, wherever you are, I'm sure of two things: you are with your beloved Isabella and you are still fighting for right. I won't embarrass you with any more prayers for the soul I know you had.'

He nodded to the choirmaster of the local colliery who raised his hands.

‘I can think of a no more fitting tribute than this, and I only hope it will give solace to those who loved him most and those he loved in return.'

The colliery choir began to sing, softly at first and then, as they gained confidence, their voices swelled with all those standing around them and the words and music of ‘Bread of Heaven' filled the cemetery, echoing upwards to the blue and perfect sky.

Chapter Twenty-three

‘Chicken and cress sandwich, Master Harry?' Mari offered Harry the plate, and he took it from her.

‘I take it you're hungry?' she commented wryly.

‘It's bedlam in here.' He flattened himself against the wall of the drawing room so a group of elderly matrons could walk through to the dining room where Mari, with Betty Morgan's help, had laid out a buffet. ‘I'm going into the garden.' He signalled across the room to Toby and pointed to the French windows.

‘Would you like me to send one of the girls out to you with some drinks and another plate in ten minutes?' Mari asked.

‘Please, you're a darling.' Harry would have kissed the housekeeper if a party of union men hadn't separated them.

‘I've never seen so many people in one house. Granted it's a large house, but not suitable for the entire town to play sardines in.' Toby joined him in the arbour the gardener had just finished building. Hardy clematis had been planted around its base, but none were more than a foot high, although Sali had great hopes of seeing them flower the following summer.

‘Sandwich?' Harry offered him the plate.

‘Thanks. You haven't seen Bella, have you?' Toby failed to make his enquiry sound casual.

‘She's upstairs with my younger sisters, trying to stop them from crying. Not that she's likely to succeed while all these people are around. Like me she's discovered that endless sympathy, no matter how well meant, is difficult to take.'

‘I know.'

Something in the tone of Toby's voice alerted Harry. ‘Your uncle?'

‘Died early on Thursday morning.'

‘Toby, I am so sorry. Why on earth didn't you telephone me? I would have come at once.'

‘To do what?' Toby asked logically. ‘At least here you could be with your family to offer them some comfort.'

‘And there I could have been with you.'

Toby made a wry face. ‘Be honest, has anything anyone said comforted you?'

‘Not outside of my immediate family,' Harry conceded.

‘I would have given ten years of my life to have had someone to grieve with, someone who knew Frank well enough to make jokes about him the way that Catholic priest did today about your grandfather. Mrs Edwards and Alf did their best, so did Doctor Adams, but in the end their muted whispers irritated more than helped.' He shrugged. ‘I don't need to tell you how I feel.'

‘When is your uncle's funeral?'

‘Yesterday.'

‘Yesterday! That was quick.'

‘And small. Frank wanted it that way,' Toby explained. ‘No fuss, no false tears from people who had only known him as a helpless, bedridden invalid. Last Sunday morning, when you were languishing in a cell, he even accused me of dragging out the illustrations to keep him going. When I showed him your sister's Morgan le Fay before sending it to London on Monday morning, he said it was the best work I'd ever done, and not bad considering it was the first composition I'd put together without his help. That may not sound much to you but it was high praise from Frank. On Wednesday morning the print drafts arrived from London, including a rough of Morgan. They must have pulled out all the stops to do it. Doctor Adams bent the rules and allowed me to show them to him on Wednesday afternoon. Frank looked at them, smiled, murmured, “They're not bad after all. I might make an artist of you yet.” Then he went to sleep and, like your grandfather, never woke up. You should have seen him, Harry. He looked so peaceful in his coffin.'

‘So did my grandfather.' Harry left the plate of sandwiches on the bench, rose to his feet, turned his back to Toby and looked out over the town. ‘So, the book is finished?'

‘I don't have another single line to paint or draw on that commission. No more alterations – nothing. Frank decided my Morgan should be the centrepiece, not Guinevere. So I didn't need the Snow Queen to model for me after all.'

‘When will it be out?'

‘“Le Morte d'Arthur,
illustrated by Frank Ross, will be published in the spring of nineteen twenty-seven. Subscription orders for leather-bound copies are now being taken. Exact date yet to be announced.”' Toby quoted from the publishers' catalogue.