One Blue Moon by Catrin Collier Read Free Book Online Page B

with her mam. Her mother had merely smiled wanly as she’d strained to catch the punch line of a joke. During the subsequent laughter of the radio audience, she’d murmured that she simply couldn’t understand why Jenny should want a boyfriend at all. Jenny had dropped the subject. At eight years old she’d caused great amusement in the playground of Maesycoed junior school by innocently mentioning her parents’ separate bedrooms. That casual remark had made her the laughing stock of the girls’ yard. Glan Richards’ sister Annie had taken her to one side and told her in graphic and fearsome detail exactly what married men and women did when they went to bed together, and as if that wasn’t enough, Annie had concluded by telling Jenny that her own father didn’t want to do it to her mother because he did it every night to Megan Powell, William and Diana Powell’s widowed mother.
    She’d called Annie a liar and hit her, but Annie was bigger than her, and pushed her over. She went home that day with a bloodied nose and a torn pinafore, but when she answered her mother’s probing questions, telling her precisely and truthfully what had happened, her mother slapped her legs hard and told her never to repeat such wicked stories again. And she’d learned to do just that.
    Five years later she’d noticed Haydn Powell. All the girls had, with his handsome regular features, shining blond hair and piercingly blue eyes. The miracle was, he’d noticed her right back. When she knew him well enough, she told him the story and he laughed. But her mother hadn’t laughed when she found out that Haydn was ‘walking out’ with her daughter. Instead she’d taken Jenny into her own prim, virginal bedroom, shut the door, sat with her back to it, and told her in words every bit as cold, clinical and sordidly detailed as the ones Annie Richards had used, what marriage and lovemaking really meant.
    Only by then Jenny knew better. She’d spied on her father, peeping through her bedroom curtains as he stepped lightly along the street and in through the door late at night. She’d heard him whistling as he walked up the stairs after his evening visits to Megan Powell’s house, and she’d seen Megan. A happy, plump, good-humoured woman who had a hug and a kiss for everyone. So different from her mother, who for all of her smiles, flinched from physical contact even with her own daughter, and especially with her husband.
    So Jenny had watched, listened, learned how to return Haydn’s kisses, and drew her own conclusions about the way relationships should progress. Most nights she stole downstairs after her parents went to their separate rooms. Slipping the latch against a piece of woollen cloth to muffle the click, she sat on the boxes of tinned sardines, cocoa and tomatoes in the back storeroom, and waited for Haydn to call in on his way home. And when the months of their courtship turned into years, she allowed him a few ‘liberties’ as befitting his status of long-standing boyfriend. Afterwards she lay on the boxes of canned and dried goods and revelled in his whispered protestations of true, single-minded and everlasting devotion. But now ... now had she had destroyed all that?
    But while Haydn worked endless evening shifts, it was what she wanted, wasn’t it? The freedom to find a real and devoted boyfriend who could be by her side all the time.
    She tried to remember if she had ever been happy with the situation. In the beginning perhaps, before Haydn had begun to work in the Town Hall. Even later it hadn’t been so bad, not just after he had got the job. The worm of discontent had only really begun to gnaw when Laura Ronconi had married Doctor Trevor Lewis, and Bethan, Haydn’s sister, had run away to London with a posh doctor. Laura and Bethan were only two years older than her. And after Laura’s wedding it hadn’t been enough for Haydn to tell her that he loved her. She’d wanted him to declare it publicly, and