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Biarritz, August 1924

Two days after the explosion in Nantlas No. 1, Adeline Lovell was lying on the sun terrace of the Hotel du Palais, Biarritz. There was enough of a cooling breeze to stir the flags on the tall white flagpoles guarding the sea edge of the terrace, and the strong blue light was softening to dove grey around the curve of the bay.

A waiter had brought Adeline a cocktail on a silver tray, but it was untouched on the table beside her white wicker lounge seat. The frosting on the rim of the glass had melted long ago. The English papers, neatly folded, lay close at hand but she didn’t pick them up either. Instead she was staring south, to where the sea and sky melted together over the coast of Spain, but without seeing any of the beauty of the afternoon.

The terrace had been almost deserted when Adeline wandered out in search of company, and she had sunk into the wicker chair with only her own thoughts for entertainment. But now it was the cheerful hour when teacups were replaced with the first drinks of the evening. Svelte women in tennis dresses, their bobbed hair held in place with white bandeaux, were flooding out of the long terrace doors to greet other women in fluttering tea-dresses and the first sprinkling of evening gowns. The colours wove patterns in front of Adeline’s unfocused eyes, eau-de-nil and palest peach, cream and rose-pink and gold. Escorting the women were sun-flushed men in white flannels, blazers or linen jackets and panama hats. Amongst them those who had already changed were like sleek, discreet shadows.

Inside the hotel, under the cream and gilt rococo ceilings of Napoleon and Josephine’s summer palace, the plum-coated barmen were falling into a rhythm with their silver cocktail shakers. And already, from the vast ballroom, there was music. Couples were one-stepping to the band. There would be dancing all evening and late into the night, and sometimes Adeline would wake up in the dawn and still hear the jazz playing.

It was what one came to Biarritz for, she reminded herself now, sitting upright against the cushions. To dance and drink cocktails, to lose money at the Casino and to enjoy oneself.

Adeline reached out for her drink and drained it in one gulp, making a wry face at its temperature. She snapped her fingers at a passing waiter. ‘Encore, garçon.’ Adeline still had her faint, attractive American drawl and it made her awkward French sound even odder.

To enjoy oneself. That was the aim, and the problem. Of course, they should really have gone to the Riviera. Everyone who mattered went there for the summer nowadays, but Gerald wouldn’t hear of it. It was swarming with vulgarians, he said flatly, and he had no desire to mix with them. Biarritz was an awkward compromise. Gerald would have preferred to stay at Chance, or perhaps at the family lodge in Scotland, for the whole of August. France meant Paris and Deauville and no further, to Gerald. Adeline frowned, and drank half of the fresh drink that the waiter had placed discreetly at her elbow.

Gerald belonged to a different generation. He didn’t seem to enjoy anything, any more. He was increasingly withdrawn, critical when he spoke at all, and impatient with his children. He didn’t want to play tennis or cards with Adeline and her friends, or go for motor rides up into the Pyrenees. He certainly didn’t want to dance. He spent most of his time gambling, and losing heavily, at the Casino.

Adeline didn’t care about the losses particularly. She was used to seeing money disappear like water into sand, and believed that was how people of her class should treat it. The Lovell fortunes had been at a low ebb when she had married Gerald, and her love for him made her delighted that it was her money repairing the crumbling fabric and restoring the interiors of Chance. Adeline’s money had saved the Lovell’s town house in Bruton Street from being sold. It was Adeline’s money that supported and nurtured their extravagant way of life. They had arrived for their month in Biarritz with thirty-two pieces of luggage, a valet for his lordship and Adeline’s maid, a nanny-companion for the two girls, and Richard’s tutor. They had taken adjoining suites overlooking the sea. If she had looked up, Adeline could have seen the heavy, looped curtains and gilt tassels at the window of her private drawing room directly overhead.

Since the end of the War the output of the great van Pelt steel mills in Pittsburg had quadrupled, and Adeline had inherited a half-share on her father’s death in 1920. She was a very rich woman now, and the Lovell fortunes were secure again under the terms of her marriage settlement. No, it wasn’t the money Adeline cared about. It was the joylessness of Gerald’s losses, as if he couldn’t even find it in himself to be excited by the reckless gamble, that she couldn’t fathom.

‘Excuse me, my lady?’

Adeline looked round to see her daughters’ companion. Bethan Jones wasn’t quite a nanny any more because the girls didn’t need one, and she definitely didn’t have it in her to double as a governess. Adeline had quite often thought that Bethan should be replaced by a proper maid, someone with a bit more style who could do the girls’ hair properly now that they were growing up. Amy looked a positive hoyden sometimes. But Amy and Isabel were devoted to their plain-faced Bethan, and wouldn’t have heard of it.

‘Yes? What is it?’

‘Parker sent me down, my lady, to ask what time you would like to dress, and whether she should lay out the grey Chéruit satin?’

Lady Lovell’s maid, on the other hand, was an autocratic creature of the old school who was glad to have Bethan willingly hurrying to and fro for her.

‘Tell her I will be up shortly.’ Mechanically, Adeline decided. ‘Yes, the grey satin for this evening.’

Around her on the terrace were a score of acquaintances whom Adeline could have joined for drinks, made plans with for dinner, and danced with into the small hours. Yet she felt a shiver of loneliness now.

‘Bethan?’

The girl had almost turned away. ‘Yes, my lady?’

‘Where is everyone?’

‘I’m not sure … do you mean the other guests?’ Bethan was uncomfortable, looking around at the thronged terrace.

‘My family,’ Adeline said with a touch of asperity. ‘My daughters. Mr Richard. I haven’t seen anyone all day.’ Bethan relaxed at once, smiling at the mention of the children. ‘Oh no, they’ve all been busy. Mr Richard has been out all day with Mr Hardy. They went straight after breakfast. They took their sketch pads and pencils. They were going to look at some … churches, was it now?’

Adeline stared hard ahead. Of course it was right that Richard should know the difference between Gothic and Perpendicular and Romanesque, or whatever the things were that Hardy considered so important to his education. But little Richard seemed happier and far more relaxed in the company of his pale-faced tutor than he did with his own mother and father. Adeline felt a sudden longing to see him and hug him like a baby.

‘And Miss Isabel and Miss Amy had their tennis coaching, and then they swam in the sea, and afterwards I took them along the front for an ice at Fendi’s. They are in their room now, my lady, if …’

And Adeline had spent the afternoon alone on the terrace. She lifted a hand to cut Bethan short. ‘Please tell them to be down promptly for dinner. We will all dine together this evening. Mr Richard too.’

‘Adeline, darling …’

A shadow fell over her chair. Blinking, she looked up into it and saw Hugh Herbert. She had met him before, at house parties in England, and she had sat next to him in the car on the way to a picnic in the hills three days ago. She had noticed, from across the dance floor, that he danced like a dream.

‘And an empty glass? Let me get you a cocktail at once, immediately. And then perhaps do we have time for one tiny dance?’

His hand was under her elbow. Adeline didn’t particularly want to dance, but she did want another drink. And suddenly she wanted some cheerful company very much indeed. She smiled up into Hugh Herbert’s blue eyes.

‘Only one, Hugh. I’ve absolutely promised to dine en famille tonight.’

Bethan stood respectfully to one side as Adeline and her friend sailed past. Then, looking down automatically to see whether any of her ladyship’s belongings needed to be carried up to her suite, she saw the folded English newspaper beside the chair. As she stooped to pick it up a single word in a paragraph at the foot of a page caught her eye.

Nantlas.

The laughter and bustle on the terrace froze into silence. She looked quickly at the elegant people around her. It was unthinkable to stand here and read the paper as if she was one of them. Bethan slipped through the crowd and back into the hotel. Grossing quickly under the great chandeliers in the foyer, she made for a corridor that took a sharp right-angled turn away towards the kitchens. The only people who would penetrate beyond the corner would be servants like herself.

Leaning breathlessly against the wall, Bethan read the brief report. It was headed ‘Colliery Disaster’. It said only that forty-four miners had been killed following an explosion at the Rhondda and Peris-Hughes Associated Collieries No. 1 Pit, Nantlas, Rhondda. The owner of the pit, Mr Lloyd Peris, had said that the pit would remain closed until it could be made safe. A full inquiry would be made through the usual channels.

She re-read the paragraph three times, as if it might yield something she had not understood at first. But there was nothing else. Bethan looked up and down the deserted corridor, wanting to run but having no idea where to. Her father and two of her brothers worked in Nantlas No. 1, and she was stranded here, a thousand miles and two whole days separating her from her family and the crowd waiting silently at the pit gates.

Bethan fought against the panic. She clenched her fists and frowned, trying to think. She knew no French. She had used the telephone only a handful of times in her life. Her only contact with home was the weekly letters she exchanged with her mother, and even those took days longer to reach her here. She was quite sure that her mother would have no idea how to reach her in Biarritz if the family needed her. Bethan’s mind was blank. She couldn’t possibly turn to Lady Lovell for help, even less his lordship. Isabel was the only one who might know what to do. Fixing quickly on the thought that Isabel was fourteen now, and spoke perfect French, Bethan turned and ran towards the stairs, the newspaper clenched in her hand.

Amy was sitting on the window seat in the pretty sitting-room she shared with her sister. Their suite was at the side of the hotel instead of at the front overlooking the great terrace with its flags and flowers, but Amy thought that it was much superior because it looked south along the curve of coast. At odd times when the haze cleared she could see the blue line of Spain. It was so pretty here, from the height of the hotel, with the town spread out in front of her and the figures moving on the beach. When she was down in the midst of it all Amy felt gawky and ignorant amongst the glittery people, and curious and impatient in equal parts with all the dancing and parties and furious enjoyment that made up a summer in Biarritz. But from up here she could imagine that it belonged to her, and that she was the star in its firmament.

Amy wrapped her arms around her drawn-up knees and stared at the view. Lazily, she thought that she should be changing for dinner, and dismissed the thought at once. Isabel was already in their bedroom, brushing her hair before pinning it up. Isabel was suddenly much more interested in her hair, and her dresses. She could spend an hour rearranging her costume for nothing more interesting than a decorous walk with her sister, and she would sit eagerly over the seasonal fashion sketches sent for Lady Lovell’s approval by her favourite couturiers. But in Isabel’s case it was worth doing, Amy thought loyally, because Isabel was beautiful. Her dark red hair was smooth and shiny where Amy’s was curly and rough, and her skin stayed flawlessly white under the sun when Amy’s turned pink and itchy. Isabel looked ravishing in the plain linen day dresses and simple pastel silks for evening that Adeline insisted they wore. Amy was taller, and she felt that she bulged and sprouted from her clothes like an oversized vegetable.

Not that I care, she told herself firmly. At twelve years old Amy would rather watch the intriguing world around her, or even read a book, than spend time on her appearance. She was particularly proud that she could make herself ready for dinner in exactly six minutes, start to finish.

She was just congratulating herself on the fact, which meant that there was a full half-hour yet before she need move, when Bethan came in. Bethan’s territory was a little square room beside the front door of the suite. Amy couldn’t remember her ever coming into their sitting room without a discreet knock first, although all three of them recognized it as a pure formality.

As soon as she saw Bethan’s face, Amy swung herself off the window seat. ‘Something’s wrong. What is it? Are you going to be sick? Wait, I’ll get a bowl …’

‘No,’ Bethan said. ‘There’s been an accident.’

Amy whirled around again. Isabel was standing in the bedroom doorway, her hairbrush in her hand. ‘Not Richard? Mother?’

‘No. At home. In Wales. A pit explosion.’ She held out the paper to them. Isabel took it, and Amy wrapped her arms protectively around Bethan.

‘I don’t know what to do, see. My dad’s in that pit, and my brothers. I’ve got to telephone …’

The sisters looked at each other. Bethan was usually so calm, and full of dependable common sense; it was very strange to find her turning to them for help instead.

‘Of course you must telephone,’ Isabel soothed her, ‘I’ll go down to the desk. They’ll find us the number. Where … do you think we should ring?’

Bethan shook her head helplessly.

‘We must ask Tony,’ Amy said crisply. ‘He’ll know what to do.’

‘You shouldn’t call him Tony,’ Isabel protested automatically.

‘Why not? It’s his name, isn’t it?’

Richard and his tutor had rooms looking on to the terrace, but on the floor above. Out in the corridor Amy glanced at the lift and saw a knot of languid people waiting for the ornate doors to open. She ran for the stairs instead, taking them two at a time. Raised eyebrows and curious stares followed her. She rapped sharply on Tony Hardy’s door, calling at the same time, ‘It’s me. Something’s happened. We need your help. Please open up.’

Tony was making himself ready for the ordeal of dinner. He had had to go through it a few times before, in Biarritz and at the Lovells’ London house before they all left for France, and they were never comfortable gatherings. Part of the problem was his equivocal position. The tutor was only a family employee, of course, but he was also a gentleman and couldn’t be expected to eat with the servants. He could dine alone, which Tony infinitely preferred to do with a book for company, but there were times like this when his presence was expected.

Tony Hardy was in his first year down from Oxford. His fixed ambition was to work in the publishing business but his father, a regular soldier with a limited income, had no contacts in the book world and Tony had had no luck in pursuing his own. The only suitable employment that Colonel Hardy had been able to suggest apart from the army was a year tutoring the son of Lord Lovell, who was a nodding acquaintance from his club. The tutoring part was easy. Richard Lovell was a clever and interesting boy. It was the rest — being equal but not equal, and living in the tense family atmosphere under its thinly civilized veil that Tony found difficult. Sighing, he rubbed the soap off his face and went to the door with the towel slung around his neck.

Amy Lovell’s vivid face stared back at him.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know you’d be undressed.’

‘I’m not undressed,’ he grinned at her. ‘I just haven’t got my shirt on. What’s the matter?’

Amy told him.

‘Mmm. Is there a telephone in your rooms? I haven’t got one here, of course.’

Amy peered past him at the narrow bed heaped with books and clothes. ‘No, I see. Yes, there is a telephone in our sitting room. We’ve never used it. Who would we ring?’

‘Come on, then. It will be easier to do it from somewhere quiet.’

They ran back downstairs. Bethan was sitting stock-still on a sofa with Isabel beside her, holding her hand. Tony glanced at her and said quietly to Amy, ‘You’d better order up something. Some tea, or perhaps a brandy.’ He knelt down in front of Bethan and said, very gently, ‘What’s your father’s name? And your brothers’?’

‘William Jones. David Jones and John Jones.’

‘Right. Now, it may take me a little time to find out for you. It’s after six o’clock, you see, so the normal places one might try might not be open. Do you want to go away somewhere quiet with Isabel while I do it, or would you rather stay here?’

‘I want to stay.’

‘All right. I’m going to begin by talking to a friend of mine, a union organizer. Not in mining, but he’ll know just who will give us the quickest answer.’

Tony spoke rapidly to the operator. His French was faster and much more idiomatic than the girls’ careful schoolroom language. The three faces watched him from the sofa, Bethan’s white one flanked by the intent Lovells.

‘I want to speak to Jake Silverman, please.’

He was through to England. Amy’s hand reached for Bethan’s and held it.

‘Hello, Jake. It’s Tony Hardy.’ Tony explained succinctly what he wanted. The voice at the other end crackled faintly and then there was a long silence. They waited, not moving, until Tony was speaking again and then scribbling something in his notebook.

‘Thanks, Jake. Yes, I hope so too. Soon, I hope. Adios.’

He replaced the receiver and turned to the girls. ‘We are to ring the Miners’ Welfare Institute in Nantlas. I’ve got the number here.’

Bethan was trembling. ‘I should have known that. I just can’t think. I’m so frightened.’

As Tony was talking to the operator again a maid brought in a tray. There were dainty tea-things and an incongruous balloon glass of brandy. Seeing Amy’s anxious face, Bethan took the glass but she stared helplessly at it instead of drinking.

The call to Wales took much longer to put through.

There were long silences, and then sharply repeated instructions from Tony. At last he straightened up and looked at them. ‘It’s ringing,’ he said.

The voice that answered the telephone had exactly the same rising note as Bethan’s but it was a young man’s voice, determined and crisp.

Tony asked his brief question. ‘William, David and John Jones.’ Bethan’s knuckles were so white around the fat brandy glass that Amy was sure it would shatter into fragments.

And then, only a second later, Tony was smiling and nodding and they knew that it was all right. Bethan’s face crumpled and the tears came at last.

‘Thank God,’ she said, ‘thank God, thank God,’ over and over again. Tony held out the receiver to her but she shook her head, unable to move.

‘Thank you,’ he said in her place. ‘We’re very grateful. Yes, I’ll tell her that.’

‘I’m glad for her,’ Nick Penry said in the cramped, stuffy office of the Miners’ Welfare. ‘I’m very glad.’

*

Nick was almost smiling when the call ended, the first hint of a smile for two days. He was taking his duty turn in the little office of the Welfare building. Usually the Welfare and Rest Institute was a cheerful place, Nantlas’ social focus, where miners came to talk and drink at the end of their day’s work, or to borrow books from the well-stocked free library, or to attend union meetings. Today was different. It had been one long succession of statements to be taken, punctuated by visits from white-faced wives and families of the dead men asking for help, and money, and comfort, and all the things that were in short supply in Nantlas. To be able to give someone some good news was a rare moment of relief.

‘There you are,’ Tony said to Bethan. ‘The man I spoke to knows your family. None of them was anywhere near the explosion. He says he’ll tell your mother and father that he’s spoken to you, and promises you that there is nothing to worry about.’

Isabel and Amy were relieved to see that Bethan was almost herself again. She rubbed her face with a handkerchief and straightened her neat skirts.

‘I don’t drink, thank you, Mr Hardy, but I will have a cup of tea. Funny, isn’t it? Now I know they’re safe, I can only think of the other poor men. Before, I couldn’t have cared less who might have been down there with them.’

Amy was shaking her head, amazed and horrified now that her concern for Bethan was past. ‘It’s so terrible. So many men, just to die all at once. Has it ever happened before?’

Bethan said sadly, ‘Oh yes. It happens all the time. It’s a rare miner’s family that hasn’t lost someone. My grandfather was killed, and his brother. It’s black, dangerous, dreadful work. There’s not a man who’d do it if he didn’t have to, or starve.’

Tony looked sympathetically at Bethan, and then at the glowing apricot and pink faces of the Lovell girls. So much difference, he thought. Such a huge, unfair and eternally unbridgeable gulf. And then, irrelevantly, he realized that they would both be beauties. Isabel would be a conventional good-looker, but Amy would be something different, and special. Tony didn’t generally find women interesting but he liked Amy Lovell.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘that the average death rate for coal miners in this country, over the last few years, works out at about four per day. Every day of the year, that is. If you’re not going to drink that brandy, Bethan, I think I’ll have it.’

They were late down for dinner, but that didn’t matter because everyone else was too, except for Richard.

He was sitting calmly in his place, expressionlessly watching the other diners. His light hair was watered so that it lay flat to his head, and he was buttoned up to the neck in a stiff white collar and a short jacket. Richard’s appearance was completely unexceptional, but there was something in his face, in the set of his mouth and the light in his green eyes, that was an unexpected challenge from a little boy.

He was watching his father now, as Lord Lovell bore down on the family table. Gerald’s grey eyebrows were drawn together in a heavy line, and his pouchy cheeks were untouched by the sun.

‘Good evening, Father,’ Richard murmured.

God damn it. Why does the boy always irritate me, always, in just the same way? Gerald jerked out his chair and sat down. He didn’t want to have dinner with his white-faced son and the too-clever tutor, or with his daughters, half-frightened and half-choked with giggles. Not even with Adeline, who would be bright-eyed with cocktails and full of silly talk about the half-witted people she spent her days with. Not that he particularly wanted to spend any more hours in the Casino, either.

Gerald wasn’t sure where he wanted to be.

Perhaps at Chance, except that not even Chance meant the same any more.

‘What have you been doing?’ he asked Richard without enthusiasm. ‘Swimming?’

‘I don’t like the water much, you know,’ Richard answered. ‘We went to look at a church. A rather fine one, quite close to here. I made some drawings …’

Airlie had swum like a fish, almost from babyhood. Gerald could see him now, at Richard’s age exactly, swimming in the lake at Chance, his arms and legs flickering sturdily under the skin of green water.

‘You should learn,’ Gerald said harshly. ‘You’ll have to start doing things you don’t like at school.’

Richard was to enter Airlie’s old prep school in six months’ time.

‘Yes, I expect I shall,’ he answered.

Adeline came next. The grey Chéruit dress was daringly short, a slither of bias-cut satin that almost showed her knees. She wore it with long ropes of perfect pearls, dangling pearl and jet earrings, and a shot-silk wrap with long floating fringes around her shoulders. She had never cut her luxuriant hair, but it was knotted up at the back of her head so that she looked smooth and sleek. As he stood up Gerald noted that she was at the excited, three-cocktail stage, and that she was still very beautiful.

‘Have you been waiting long, my darlings? I met Hugh Herbert on the terrace, and he was being so amusing.’

In the silence that followed Gerald and Adeline looked at each other, and each of them was wondering what had become of the other.

Isabel and Amy ran as fast as they could to the dining-room doors, and then stopped at the heavy glass panels to catch their breath and compose their faces. Relief for Bethan had made them giggly. They peered through the glass across the acres of tables with their stiff white skirts and little gilt lamps with rosepink silk shades. The tables were separated by clumps of stately palms in pots, and phalanxes of gliding waiters.

‘Are they there?’

‘Yes. Both of them.’

‘Oh, hell. Come on, then.’

‘Amy.’ Isabel’s protest was as automatic as always.

Tony Hardy came up behind them in a dinner suit that had clearly belonged to his father. The door was held open for them by the waiter that Amy had come to think of as her favourite. He was very young, with a dark, almost monkey-like face that split into a huge smile. She grinned sideways at him in answer, and between Isabel and Tony she marched forward to the dinner table.

They slid into their seats, murmuring their apologies. Richard telegraphed them a greeting by dissolving his poker face into a mass of wriggling eyebrows, and then returned immediately to his impassive calm.

It was a dinner just like hundreds of others, Amy thought sadly, as she bent her head over her soup. She wondered why they didn’t feel on the inside as they must look on the outside to the people watching them — happy, and comfortable, and like other families. Like her friend Violet Trent’s family, for example. Amy could remember, just about, times when they had been. Times when her father had smiled more, and when his gruffness had easily dissolved into affection. When Mother had been more … well, just more accessible, and there had been fewer friends and parties and pressing engagements filling her days. Mother was wonderful, of course, she reminded herself. No one else’s mother was anything like her. There just wasn’t enough of her to go around. Isabel minded that she was so busy too, Amy knew that. Yet Mother could always make time for Richard. He was the special one, to her. But that was quite natural too, of course. He would be going away to school all too soon, and they would all miss him dreadfully. And someone had to make up to him for Father being so harsh. Amy wondered if fathers were always like that to their sons, if it was supposed to make them more manly.

She thought of one of the things that had happened, on this very holiday, one of the odd, dark things that she never mentioned afterwards even to Isabel, but which she knew they all still remembered.

They had been sitting beside the hotel swimming pool one morning, sunning themselves, Isabel and herself, with Richard and Tony. Richard was reading a book with Tony. Amy remembered that it was a book of modern poetry with a yellow cover. Tony was explaining it, talking about how the words made pictures with sounds and also meant things that you couldn’t see at first. Mother was still upstairs. She often didn’t come down until just before lunch. But unusually, Father had been there, sitting in a chair close by. He was frowning, not quite looking at his newspaper.

Suddenly he had stood up and gone over to Richard. He had said something like, ‘Come on, my boy, let’s see you do something real for a change.’

Then he had jerked Richard to the edge of the pool. They had balanced there for a second or two, and Richard had gone flailing into the water.

To the other people looking, Amy thought, it must just have looked like a father and son rough-and-tumbling together. But it wasn’t really like that at all. Father had been angry and pleading, both together, and Richard had been defiant. Father wanted him to do something and Richard didn’t want to do it, not now and not ever.

Then when he was in the water he was just a frightened little boy, because he couldn’t swim. There was a moment when they saw his face under the water, turned up with his eyes wide open. And then he was splashing and choking on the surface. It was Tony who slid in beside him and helped him to the poolside, and Father had just watched them with a frozen face. Richard had hauled himself out of the water and gone back to his place without looking at anyone, and no one had ever talked about it again.

Amy could remember other things too, going back over the years, as if Father and Richard had been fighting a silent battle that the rest of them were only aware of for a fraction of the time.

It was peculiar that it should be like that, because Richard was such a funny, likeable boy. He could mimic anybody, from Mr Glass to Violet Trent’s mother, and he often reduced Isabel and herself to helpless laughter. Mother enjoyed his mimicry too, but he never ever did it when Father was around. Richard could be serious and sensible, too. He often talked about things much more intelligently than other children of only eight.

Why not with Father? Richard put on his shuttered face when he was present, and Father went on being scornful and angry with him.

Amy asked Isabel why they didn’t seem to like each other. It wasn’t right, was it, for a father and son?

Isabel had said in her gentle way that she didn’t know for sure, but she thought it was something to do with Airlie having been killed in the War. If Father had loved Airlie very much, as he must have done, perhaps it was hard for him to love Richard in just the same way.

‘He should be glad to have him,’ Amy muttered. ‘Is it why Mother and Father don’t make each other happy?’

Isabel looked at her. They had never quite put it into words before. ‘Perhaps,’ she said, very quietly.

‘When I marry,’ Amy said, ‘it won’t be like that at all. I shall marry a man who is rich and handsome and witty, and who adores me.’

Isabel was laughing. ‘You’ll have to find one, first.’

‘Oh, that will be easy. We’ll both find one. Just wait and see.’

‘Amy, will you stop staring into space like a halfwit? Adeline, these children have no manners.’

Another family dinner, like hundreds before it. At last it was over. Mother had looked beautiful, had smiled at them and asked them what they had been doing, and had listened carefully because she really did want them to enjoy themselves. Father had been silent, except for telling Tony that he thought trailing around empty churches was hardly educational. Tony had politely said that it seemed sensible to encourage Richard in what he was good at, like languages and art, and history and architecture, instead of forcing him to do things that he didn’t enjoy. Amy and Isabel had talked to fill the empty spaces, and they had probably looked the picture of a happy family on holiday together.

Adeline kissed the children good night, with an extra hug for Richard that crushed the shot-silk wrap against his cheek. Hugh Herbert was waiting for her in the cocktail bar. They would have a drink, and then they would dance again. Adeline had been completely exhilarated by their first one. They had swung out over the floor like ice-skaters. Hugh Herbert was charming and flattering. Why not? Adeline asked herself. Gerald had already gone off, unsmiling, with barely a word for her.

Isabel and Amy went upstairs to their suite. They were not allowed to stay downstairs after dinner. They would sit and read or write letters, with Bethan for company, and at ten-thirty they would go to bed and listen to the music coming up from the ballroom.

Tony’s last job of the day was to see Richard up to his room. The boy went uncomplainingly, looking forward to losing himself again in the adventure story waiting beside his bed. A little later Bethan would come up to make sure that he had washed and cleaned his teeth properly, and that his pyjamas were on the right way out. As if it mattered, Richard thought. But then what did matter? It was difficult to decide. Perhaps when you knew just how much importance to give to people and the things that they did, perhaps then you were grown up. Clearly he had a long way to go yet.

Tony Hardy went up to his room and took off his dinner suit, his boiled shirt and his bow tie. He pulled on a jersey and ran his fingers through his hair. Down by the tiny harbour in Biarritz where the fishing fleet came in, there were a couple of little bars where people went to drink vin ordinaire and cognac, to listen to Basque songs, and to talk. The chance to be there and listen, to talk a little himself, made all the rest of this worthwhile. Even dinners like the one he had just sat through.

Tony closed his door softly behind him and ran down the broad, shallow stairs with his mouth pursed in a silent, celebratory whistle.

On the morning of their last day in Biarritz, Amy went out for a last walk along the sea front. She left the red and cream pinnacles of the Hotel du Palais behind her and headed for the narrow cobbled streets climbing up the hilltop to the south.

In the hotel Bethan was busy with their trunks and sheets of crisp white tissue. Isabel was packing too, and they had both begged her to go away. Amy was willing to help, but somehow whenever she packed anything the smooth linens came out ferociously creased, and the fragile underclothes looked as though they had been tied up in knots.

‘Leave it to me, there’s a lamb,’ Bethan said.

Amy was enjoying her solitude. It was a chance to say a private goodbye to the little town. She wasn’t altogether sorry to be leaving, because holidays made the family differences seem more apparent, whether they were Christmasses at Chance or summers away like this one. Soon they would be back in England, living a routine again, and that was much easier. The children spent term-times at the London house, and the girls went to Miss Abbott’s school for young ladies in Knightsbridge. They saw little of Gerald, who spent much of his time alone at Chance. Adeline came and went according to the demands of the Season and Saturday-to-Mondays at the country houses of her friends. But Amy had enjoyed just being in Biarritz. It was further than she had ever travelled before, and it had an exotic, southern feel that wasn’t just French like Deauville or somewhere. It was as if it was on the border between somewhere she knew and understood perfectly well, and somewhere exciting, and mysterious, and completely new.

‘I’ll be back,’ she murmured to herself.

Amy wandered slowly along the wide, white-painted boardwalk between the Casino and the sands. It was busy with couples strolling arm in arm, skipping children, and old men in straw hats taking the sun before the heat became too much for them. The tide was going out, and the sand was smooth and glittering. The great rock in the middle of the bay was uncovered, and on the crest of it Amy could see the silhouettes of people who had climbed it after swimming out there for their morning exercise.

Amy passed an arcade of spruce little shops fronting the walk, with Fendi’s at the corner. She would have liked to buy an ice to eat under one of the fluttering parasols, but didn’t have any money. Instead of walking on round the headland to where the statue of the Virgin on her rock was linked to the shore by a dizzy span of bridge, she turned inland up the steep streets where real Biarritz people rather than those on holiday lived. The little white and grey houses leaned over her on either side, their twisted metal balconies bright with flowers in pots. There were smells of baking and laundry and cooking oil.

Amy was panting slightly from her climb when someone stepped squarely out in front of her.

‘Hello, miss.’

She stopped at once, and smiled.

There was the answering brilliant flash of white in the dark face, and the black eyes shining at her. Now that she had met him, Amy could admit to herself that the real purpose of her walk had been to find Luis and say goodbye to him properly. Luis was the waiter from the hotel who looked like a clever, humorous monkey. The two of them had struck up a tenuous, exciting friendship based on smiles exchanged when Luis served the two girls at their decorous lunches in an obscure corner of the great dining room. When Lord and Lady Lovell were present the head waiter himself served them, and Luis was relegated to distant duties with the trolley. Amy and Luis had talked for the first time when he brought her a glass of fruit juice on the terrace, and they had met once on the beach. Luis had been swimming, and he was wet and shiny like a dark brown seal. He was always looking over his shoulder for his superiors, and then he would melt away into nowhere while Amy was still talking. He was very lively, quite unlike anyone she had ever met, and Amy was fascinated by him.

Luis was Spanish, but they spoke in French. His was very heavily Basque-accented and it bore hardly any relation at all to Amy’s polite English version. Sometimes they used the broken English he had picked up at the hotel. Amy felt that he was the very first friend she had made for herself in the real world, and then yesterday he had whispered that they could not meet again because today was his day off and he would not be in the hotel. So she had set off on her solitary walk, without even admitting to herself that she wanted to say goodbye properly to him.

‘You are walking?’ he asked her now. ‘Without your sister or your maid?’

‘I’m not supposed to leave the boardwalk when I’m by myself,’ Amy answered. ‘But …’ she shrugged in imitation of Luis’s own expressive gesture, and they both laughed.

‘I will walk with you, then. In case of kidnap.’

Still laughing, they turned to walk on up the hill together. Luis was pointing into the shops, explaining to her about the people who lived and worked there. At the corner of the street they came to a cave-like little shop full of rainbow-coloured sweets and tiny, unfamiliar-looking pastries. An ancient woman in a rusty black dress was selling a handful in a twist of paper to a little boy, who was carefully counting out the centimes as he handed them over.

Amy stopped to watch and Luis asked, ‘You would like?’

‘I would love.’

He spoke rapidly in Spanish and the old woman twisted a paper cone for Amy too, scooping one or two of each variety into it. Luis paid her and they walked on, sharing the sweets between them. They were almondy, delicious.

‘If you would like,’ Luis said with sudden gravity, ‘we could visit my family.’

‘Yes, please,’ Amy said.

One street further on they came to a row of houses so steeply perched that they looked as if they were about to topple over. A little girl was sitting on the step of the end house, playing with a stick and four stones. When she saw Luis she jumped up and ran down to him, calling out in Spanish.

‘This is my smallest sister, Isabella.’

Isabella had tight black ringlets and the same eyes as Luis.

‘You have the very same name as my sister,’ Amy told her. Isabella took her hand and pulled her towards the house.

‘Come in.’

Amy followed Luis up the steps and in through the door. The small room was square and windowless. It was cool beyond the shaft of light that fell in through the doorway. When her eyes got used to the dimness, Amy saw that the room seemed full of people. There was an old man with an immense, drooping white moustache, and an equally old woman with a black headdress pulled tight over her head. There was a square-built, strong woman who must be Luis’s mother, and children of all sizes. Luis drew Amy forward. My friend, she heard him saying proudly, over and over again.

Do they all live here? Amy wondered. Where do they sleep? Through the opposite door she could just make out the shape of a big bed covered with a bright blanket.

The little house was scrupulously clean, but almost completely bare. The only ornament was a dim, oily picture of the Holy Family with a little light burning in front of it. Amy thought fleetingly of the suite at the Hotel du Palais with its soft cushions and pretty covers.

She shook hands gravely with each member of the family and felt them touching her gloves gingerly, looking at her pleated dress and her white shoes and stockings.

The señorita was asked if she would take a refreshing drink, and they gave her a coloured glass full of a very sweet, reddish liquid that she drank with difficulty while they watched her.

When it was gone, Luis stood up and said that now he must see his friend back to the safety of the hotel. At once they all stood up, shaking hands once more and smiling now. They ushered her the few feet to the door and watched as she walked down the hill with Luis. At the corner Amy turned back and waved.

When they were finally out of sight, Luis said, ‘Thank you. You did us a great honour.’

That made Amy angry. ‘Don’t say that. I didn’t do anything of the sort. They did me the honour, taking me in, didn’t they? Thank you for letting me meet them. I wish we could have talked to each other. Perhaps next time I will know some Spanish.’

Luis looked at her, drawing his eyebrows together.

‘I like you,’ he said.

‘I like you, too.’ She was silent for a moment and then she said, very tentatively, ‘Your family, are they … do they have what they need?’

He was still looking at her, and she saw that he was amused now. He knew exactly what she was trying to say.

‘If you mean much money, no, none. Not like the people you know. But my father has good job, and I have good job. We are lucky ones.’

Not like the people you know. If you are lucky, Luis, what am I? Amy felt her face going red, hot all the way up into her hair.

They had almost reached the sea front again. Luis took her arm and guided her into a little blind alleyway.

‘I will come no further,’ he said.

‘No. I just wanted to say goodbye, you know. Properly, not like yesterday at the table.’

‘Of course. I understand that.’

Luis came close to her. She looked up and saw his smile, and then he kissed her, a proper kiss. She was still thinking a proper kiss, and how soft his mouth was against hers, when it was over.

‘Perhaps you will come back.’

‘I hope so. I’ll come one day, somehow. Goodbye, Luis.’

‘Goodbye, Amy.’

She walked out of the alley, to the end of the street, and back to the white walk outside Fendi’s. She felt as if she was flying, with wings on her heels. Not only had she made a real friend, but he had kissed her. She wasn’t a little girl any more.

Biarritz, I love you.

It would be thirteen years before she saw it again.

That night, in the Paris sleeper, Amy whispered to Isabel in the bunk below, ‘Are you asleep, Bel?’

‘No.’

‘Do you know, I went up into the town this morning, while you were packing.’

‘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.