Second Chance Read Online Free PDF Page B

pleased I wasn’t his partner; when Isabel failed to return a shot he scowled at her whereas Edward smiled forgivingly at my frequent mistakes. We only played for an hour or so. For a long time, though, I remembered the way Rhydian looked up at me before smashing the ball in my direction – the way his shoulders turned, the way his eyes blazed.
    He and Edward didn’t stay for tea. ‘Rhydian is gorgeous, isn’t he,’ Isabel said after they’d rushed off somewhere. ‘He’s not too bad,’ I replied, tossing my hair back, a gesture I’d been practising in my bedroom mirror.
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    I wondered if any of them would be at my mother’s funeral. Rhydian had been running Gorsgoch farm for years; his wife, Grace, had been to see my mother several times; I couldn’t remember whether they had two children or three. Iestyn was a geography teacher somewhere and Bleddyn had stayed on at Oxford, still being brilliant, it seemed.
    Perhaps my mother had some photographs of them at graduation or wedding. I’d rarely thought of them over the years, but now they were back in my mind – ‘the dark cloud’ as the Head had once called them.
    I took several boxes, chocolate boxes tied with Christmas ribbon, out of the cupboard by the fireplace, but found I wasn’t, after all, ready to open them. I was sure my mother wouldn’t have many secrets, all the same, it seemed too soon to be going through her things. I put them back. Then I got myself another coffee and sat down to make a list of things I had to do. But suddenly I didn’t seem to have the energy or the will to do anything. For the first time since I got the news I was overtaken by grief, not so much for my mother’s death as for all the sadness of her life.
    Once, for all too brief a time, she’d been happy. She used to tell me over and over again about the time she’d first met my father and fallen in love with him. I could hear her voice, her young voice, in my head. ‘He was different from every other boy I’d ever met. He used to dress like a toff. I didn’t want to marry a farmer’s lad, and who else was there up here? I was only a shop girl, but your father worked in a bank. He had lovely fingernails, long and shiny as a girl’s. I stopped biting mine when he started to take me out. In those days, when boys took girls out, it was always to the pictures, to the back row of the one-and-nines, but he took me to the Rendevous Restaurant in St David’s Road and we used to have mixed grills and chocolate ice cream after. It was ever so expensive because it was such a swanky place with candles on the tables and little vases of flowers. And he always left sixpence under the plate for the waitress, too. Oh, I was proud to be with him.’
    Her voice would become more and more dreamy. ‘I bought an angora-wool dress – eau de nil, the lady in D.C. Lewis said it was, a sort of pale green – with a tight navy-blue leather belt. It cost me a month’s wages, that dress, but it was worth every penny, because the very first time I wore it he asked me to be engaged to him. That was the best evening of my life. When I went home on the bus after, I was still in a daze. I offered the conductor my fare twice over and I remember him saying, “You don’t have to pay every time I come round, love.” That was the state I was in, my mind in some sort of shimmering, like getting up at first light on a snowy day. He didn’t buy me a ring because he wanted to save to get married, but I didn’t mind because Ted had bought Jane a diamond solitaire and she used to let me take it to show the girls at work, because she couldn’t wear it on the farm. Jane was always a good friend to me.’
    I could hear her voice, all the hope and disappointment in it. I found myself crying – I very seldom cry – and was soon sobbing hard. And then Arthur jumped up on my