Mrs Amelia Roberts took a taxi from the station because the hill up to the shops looked much longer and steeper than she remembered. After a freshly cut sandwich and a cup of tea in Sidoli’s (and a visit to their conveniences, which were absolutely spotless) she made straight for the Jaeger shop. She’d neither the patience, nor sadly the spirit to walk through Gullet Passage and Grope Lane, or the other eccentrically named streets and alleys that had once fascinated and invited her curiosity about the first Elizabeth’s times. The assistant, who wore too much make-up, had been perhaps a little too obsequious with her madam this and her madam that. But she’d been helpful, and Amelia Roberts left the shop in the knowledge that the suit – a cashmere and wool mix in mulberry, shot with a magenta silk thread that married the blouse – would be delivered after a minor alteration to the jacket, together with a lavishly elegant hat in navy, with gloves to match. Her shopping all done she felt suddenly weary, and walking to the taxi rank she consciously banished the voice that questioned her extravagance…. Her Glyn deserved the best. Back home and walking to Prince of Wales Crescent with the gay music of the fair ground rides cheering even the gloomiest alleys on all sides, Mrs Amelia Roberts, though quite exhausted by her excursion, brimmed with excitement and confidence, for now she knew she wouldn’t let the boys down.
Sitting in the bay window of her front sitting room with a cup of tea and a slice of the Madeira cake she’d bought at the Cancer Research sale-of-work, Amelia Roberts wondered what she might say at the service. Robert, who’d taken to calling her Anti Mill after she’d sent him letters and cards during those awful months he was in the hospital, had impressed upon her how much it would mean to them both, and naturally she couldn’t refuse him. Of course she understood Robert’s mother’s discomfort too. Hadn’t she tried for years to open Nellie Bet’s mind, when she wouldn’t even let Robert over the doorstep? Amelia Roberts knew well enough that for as long as people were shunned because they were different, their public acts became acts of defiance; for that very reason, what Robert and Glyn were doing was political. She relished the role they’d asked her to play.
After the service, it wasn’t Robert that people had talked about for months after, though he’d been movingly presented in his wheelchair by his mother. Nor was it the Minister, Celia, a middle-aged mother of four who’d blessed the men with unpretentious reverence. It was of Amelia Roberts that people spoke, the elegant old aunt, whose words of congratulation, and encouragement for their life together, had been as vivid and precious as the magenta silk thread in her mulberry suit.
Etienne’s Vineyard
They sat in the garden, an almost empty bottle of red wine on the lawn between their chairs; it was warm now from the afternoon sun, and neither of them wanted the dregs from the bottle. Lowri wondered about fetching the bottle of white from the fridge, but thought better of it once she’d realised the depths to which Hywel had sunk. When she’d suggested that they drank a glass of wine in the garden she’d thought that the six weeks of school holidays he’d spent in France had done him some good, but now she wasn’t so sure.