Vera Venti

By Nia Williams

A moment of light and shadow—that's all it takes to change the world. This is the story of Vera Venti, creature of the movies, in all its scandalous detail. It's the story of a journey from Wales to Hollywood and back again, across the turbulent decades of the 20th century. It's a grand, cinematic tale of love and obsession—and all the magic and deception of the moving pictures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gurning Gnome Books
• Release date: Sep 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201879891

Nia Williams

Nia Williams is a freelance writer and musician based in Oxford, UK. She's the author of seven novels, most recently Touched, published in 2021. Other titles include The Pierglass (Honno Modern Fiction, 2001); Persons Living or Dead (Honno Modern Fiction, 2005); The Colour of Grass (Seren Books, 2011); Birdcage (Gurning Gnome, 2013), Hidden Gems (Gurning Gnome, 2014) and Breakage (Gurning Gnome, 2017). Nia's short stories have been published in magazines and anthologies and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and Radio Wales. Her theatre company Three Chairs and a Hat has performed her musicals and drama in theatres around the UK and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and features on award-winning online platform Scenesaver. She also works as an accompanist and musical director, and leads creative music/storytelling workshops. Nia is an Associate Artist with English National Ballet and has worked for Scottish Ballet, National Dance Wales, English Touring Opera and the Royal Academy of Music.

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Nia Williams

© Nia Williams 2021

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

This book is a work of fiction. The characters and incidents portrayed are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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PART ONE

Lily and the Living Pictures

We’re looking down from above. We can see the ridges of land, thin and sinewy, running their parallel courses towards the coast like tendons on the back of a hand. We move closer. Between them, straggling down each valley, a filthy streak of movement and dust. Closer again, narrowing our focus: one valley, cluttered with one town. From this vantage point, above the dustcloud, it’s a brown and grey and sodden green town. The hills are deceptively shallow-sloped, backing away from the main street on the valley floor. Strips of terraced houses are laid along the slopes. Each backyard looks on to the roofs of the next row down. Above the highest terrace, the hills rear up into bare crags, a ragged prison wall. It’s quicker to go north to the high moors, or south to the sea, than to try and get over that wall to the next valley town, only a five-mile’s crowflight away. Now we’re accelerating, over the high street where people move about; accelerating forwards, to the point where the valley begins to widen out—to the pithead, too far below for us to hear its shunt and clank, but the wheel’s turning, so we know this must be a long time ago. On we go, over the road that leaves the valley behind and becomes a high pass, with a sheer cliff to the left and a swoop of open country to the right and we’re veering away—over the muddy fields and torn hedges, over the glimmer of river and BAM! We’re on the tail of a train, slamming onto a new route as the engine gasps round a bend, blinds us with steam, disappears between two wooded outcrops and then emerges again, mercifully dropping its pace, easing up into a loose, languid rhythm, slowing, slowing, and sighing its great, blasting sigh at Platform Number 2.

There she is: Lily Pitts, with her favourite sisters, Evelyn and Ada, piling off the train, all shrieks and elbows and tangled hair, clutching and shoving each other with their secret jokes and dares. It’s 1897 and there’s no-one there, yet, to record and trap their vitality, and frame it with the sadness of passing time. Lily is nearly 15, Evelyn already 18; both are old enough to work in the family shop, but young enough to relish a day at the fair. Ada, only 13, is their excuse.

Pushing through the street, overtaking the fairgoers, they’re trying on different characters as they go. One minute tussling and squawking and sidestepping and skipping; one minute striding single-file in comic, busybody steps; one minute strolling arm in arm, three elegant women on a lazy day’s outing. They reach the field where the fair has set up its stalls. There’s a warm, wiry smell of livestock; a chiming of hawkers’ calls; above the heads of the crowd, an occasional burst of fire and a cry of mockery and awe. Ada tries to run ahead but is blocked by slower-moving spectators. They watch the fire-eater, the tumblers, the farmers’ sons showing off at the Try Your Strength, the prize bull chewing and eyeing its public with bloodshot loathing. They reach the edge of the pitch, butting on to the back of Goat Lane, and they turn back, avoiding the huddle of youths who’ve gathered for a smoke and a catcall among the dregs of fair and town. Evelyn sees a notice, clumsily painted: ‘Moving Pictures’, and an arrow pointing into Morris Benbow’s Yard. There’s a shack at the back of the yard with a tin roof, and more signs pinned and propped about the door:

Animated Photographs!

As Shown to Immense Acclaim in the Salons of Paris!

New Dramatised Illusion—Gipsy Dance!

A voice is urging passers-by. ‘Living pictures!! Sir, they’re as real as you are, better than the best of the lantern shows, only a penny a time!’

The voice has a strange, elastic quality: it’s a familiar accent, a local accent, but stretched and pulled like toffee into something sweet and exotic. Ada says indifferently, ‘Oh, it’s a cinematograph. Esme Bevan’s brother saw one in Birmingham. Not a patch on story slides, he says.’ The shack looks dark and claustrophobic, and there’s a crowd of mouthy locals gathering. Evelyn would rather wander further, to look for a particular young farmer she knows. Lily says, ‘Go on, then, you two go ahead. Meet you here in a few minutes. I want to see what it’s like.’ She fishes a penny from her purse and nudges her way to the front of the crowd. Alfredo Rossi stretches out one glorious white palm, and widens his black eyes, and says in his unfamiliar-familiar voice,

‘Only a penny, miss, for a moment of magic!’

Lily’s heart batters her ribcage. She has no idea what this means, or what she wants it to mean. A moment of magic. Is that possible? She’s nearly 15. Anything is possible.

The shack is musty, with a vague tang of horse dung. The earth floor is crinkled with light that’s found its way through the cracks in the timber. A white sheet hangs at the back. About 25 people have paid for a moment of magic, mostly men and boys, but Lily sees with relief that two or three neatly dressed women have also come for a look. She sidles into the shelter of their respectability. There are no seats, so they all shuffle about in the half-light and cluster around a tin contraption in the middle of the floor. They wait, listening to the muted sounds of the fair outside. Lily looks at her boots, and breathes in body-heat and tobacco. There’s a commotion at the entrance, people move aside, and he is there. Lily catches a glimpse of his black hair, but she is too far to the side and too far forward, now. She cranes round to see him push his white cap to the back of his head and fiddle with the tin contraption. Then he mutters and motions with his hand to clear a path between the customers. He calls to someone outside the shack, and the door is closed. They wait in near darkness. Nothing happens. Someone laughs a low, smutty laugh. CRASH! The tin machine has collapsed—No: it’s clanking into life. As Lily turns, a rectangle smacks on to the sheet in front of them. It judders and jerks. She can’t make out what it is. Something moving, a twitching, smudge of a thing that gives her a thrill of horror. Several smudges, bobbing and flickering. And suddenly the shadows arrange themselves into an idea. It’s the idea of a form, a human form, of several people, in fact—moving. Pictures, moving—just as they said. A woman sways to and fro—dancing. Two men clap their hands in silent time. As the audience makes sense of the images, a little groan of laughter and ridicule goes up. Clapping and dancing silently, to silent music! Daft. Then something happens: a tussle, maybe, between the two men—Lily is too busy concentrating on the dancer to figure it out. The dancer is a frenzy of skirts and loose hair. Lascivious guffawing from the boys. Lily is flushed from shoulder to hairline. She’s mesmerised by the look on the dancer’s face: a distant look. Ecstatic. Lily feels that she is looking through a secret window. A window that’s been opened by a nameless, monochrome young man, hidden from sight behind the tin contraption but controlling everything. One of the picture-men has dropped to one knee and is taking the silently laughing dancer’s hand. An almighty CLUNK, and the dancer and her companions disappear, leaving a grubby sheet waving gently at the back of Morris Benbow’s shack. The whole thing has lasted just over a minute. Lily’s fingers, her skull, the backs of her legs are tingling. She’d expected a gimmick, a cheap trick. She leaves the shack in a daze, after her 60-second glimpse of spirits from another world.

On the way home Evelyn is chatty. She and Ada bumped into Joseph Plant, that particular young farmer, and he was attentive but courteous. Evelyn is satisfied. Ada is bored, watching the scenery rewind through the train window, feeling the burden of ordinary life gain weight with every mile. Everything is the same as before. Only Lily sees its new significance. As the three girls trudge up the hill from Rhydyglo station and climb to the last terrace of houses, Lily watches a flock of starlings and flies with them until they’re no more than a spasm of energy. She breathes quickly through her mouth, reminded of the dancer’s blurred chaos. From a high enough vantage point, she thinks, it should be possible to trace the distance between this street, Penmynydd Street, where Evelyn is rapping on their front door, and the Trylor fair, where a man with black hair and pale skin is packing away sheets and machinery.

Their older sister, Gwyneth, opens the door, aproned and hatchet-faced with envy. ‘Get on’ she says, without having to raise her voice. ‘You’re late.’

‘Who’s minding the shop?’ asks Evelyn.

Someone is always minding the shop. It’s a law of nature: without someone minding Pitts Groceries and Mixed Goods every waking hour, their world would capsize. Their life, their end-of-terrace home, their elevated position above the dust, looking down on the miners’ houses—all that depends on the shop, and on one of the family, or Meinir or Nesta the ‘helps’, minding its business from dawn to well beyond dusk. It’s their duty to Paps, their late father, to his perseverance and sullen pride: it’s the infinite extension of their mourning, as directed and suffered by poor Mam. The girls know full well that—however arrogant Paps was at his worst; however frustrated and martyred their mother—this is how it must be. They are bound forever to the shop—this is what clothes and feeds them, what will clothe and feed their children in turn, what will lift each generation a little further out of the valley.

On this early summer afternoon, Mam herself is in the shop, with the twins, Mary and Siân. The twins are serving, and Mam is sitting in a wicker-backed chair in a corner, and exchanging the odd reluctant pleasantry with the customers.

‘Close today, Mrs Pitts’ says Mrs Morgan-Twice (widow of Dai Morgan and now married to his brother Twm).

‘Too close,’ says Agnes Pitts, fanning herself feebly. ‘Storm coming, mark my words.’

‘Well, you’ll be nice and dry in here, Mrs Pitts’ says Mrs Morgan-Twice.

Agnes Pitts makes a non-committal face. She won’t have anyone thinking it’s a pleasure to run this business—even if it is a relief, sometimes, to get away from the house for an hour or two, until it’s time to drag herself back uphill again, and get away from the shop.

Time and Love in Two Reels

Time passes in the valley town: pages fly off the calendar. Three hundred and sixty-five evening meals fill the house at the top of Penmynydd Street with dank cooking smells. Fifty-two washing days add a slap of carbolic and damp flannel. Lavender water fails over and over again to mask the yellow whiffs of oil lamps and privvy. (It will be another 27 years before shop proceeds can supply an indoor toilet.) Every day a varying combination of sisters clatters down the hill into the dust; every day they labour back up with an etching of coal folded into their clothes and faces. Every Sunday, after chapel, they say grace and eat the hearty meal that God and the shop provide. Then the table is cleared and they all play ‘spin the penny’: the last coin to fall earns a secret wish. The pit wheel turns. The shop till rings. Weekly wishes are made and forgotten. Shift follows shift and the march of grey men, black men, scrubbed-raw-red men echoes up the valley.

Lily hurries through the town with Ada, to catch the train for Trylor and the May Fair of 1898. The shack in Morris Benbow’s yard has been commandeered again—but there are seats, now, and the price has gone up to tuppence. Alfredo Rossi is there, with his black hair and his white teeth, and his lazy, eased-out voice: Come along, ladiesngenlmen, come and see the Big Fight! As if you were there in person!

‘Boxing’ snorts Ada. ‘You’re not going in there.’

No, Lily isn’t going in there, with the farmers’ lads and their cocked-back hats and cigarettes and their nicotined thumbs in their waistbands. She shuffles at the sidelines and watches Rossi peddle his wares to others. She hovers, and sulks, and this is what catches his eye: a mournful girl with a rather thin nose and loose strands of hair, almost white in the weak sunlight, buffeting against the brim of her hat. It’s been showering on and off all morning – good for business, but Alfredo is cold and bored and his shoes are letting in water. He swivels around in the puddled soil, and winks at Lily, and registers her mortified smirk, and understands.

Ada tells Evelyn as soon as they return home, before they’ve taken off their steaming coats:

‘Lily’s going to be in a moving picture. A peddler asked her at the fair and she said yes.’

‘I did not say yes’ Lily protests. It’s true, she hasn’t made any promises, though Alfredo Rossi was persuasive—sober and straightforward, his eyes lead-black and steady. There was no hint of flirtation when he chatted about his partnership with Mr Francis Puckerman, of Puckerman’s Travelling Theatrical Troupe, and their plans to buy a cinecamera, and present two-act dramas of their own.

‘I did not say anything’. Lily seethes at Evelyn’s granite face, and at her own stupid, gauche, reticent fairground self.

Evelyn stares hard. ‘I’m sure Lily’s not such a fool as to listen to a peddler’s tattle.’

Since becoming engaged to Joseph Plant, Evelyn has started to imitate Gwyneth’s tone, and use words such as ‘fool’ and ‘tattle’. Lily has begun to dislike her. She almost resolves to dress up as a medieval princess in Alfredo Rossi’s two-act drama, just to spite Evelyn, though the prospect of play-acting doesn’t really appeal to her. It might break the spell.

Mr Puckerman

‘O! Pure of heart! O! Artless maid

O! dimpled smile that banish’d shade

At simplest of delights!’

The artless maid’s aged father tugs at his false white beard and struggles to retrieve the next line.

‘O, innocence...’ prompts Francis Puckerman. He shifts his weight from one knee to the other and rests his temple against the aged father’s hand. ‘O! Innocence!’ he barks, making his moustache quiver.

‘Oh, yes—’ The aged father hitches his tweed cloak back into place, clears his throat and strikes his breast with his free hand.

‘O! Innocence and hope reviled!

How must I greet this wand’ring child

Who ... who...

Oh, I’ll get it, Mr Puckerman, I’ll get it—’

‘I should say you will, sir’ thunders Puckerman, labouring to his feet and brushing straw and mud from his trousers. ‘I should damn well say you will. In five hours’ time—five, sir, count ‘em down—that market square will be thronging with worthy yeomen, hungering for poetic sustenance.’

‘Sorry, Mr Puckerman’, says the aged father, unhooking his beard and massaging the darker, softer version underneath. ‘It’s very distracting, that’s all, with her ladyship getting the vapours—I can’t concentrate. Begging your pardon, Mr P, but you’re no dimpled maid.’

Puckerman grabs the actor’s hand, presses it to his chest and affects a tremulous falsetto.

‘Father, father, scorn me not!

In truth I never have forgot

The sunlit days of yore ...’

He turns away, his features sliding into shame, his eyes full of tears. The other actors, ranged around the stable-yard, burst into spontaneous applause.

‘My friend,’ rumbles Puckerman, crushing the man’s hand closer, ‘should you be obliged to deliver your lines to a donkey—and heaven knows, it may yet come to that—you must do so with such passion and faith that every paying member of your audience will see in that donkey a sweet young woman who has strayed from the path.’

The first drops of rain slap the yard. Puckerman releases the actor and dismisses the troupe.

‘We resume in 15 minutes, rain or shine! And remember—’ he adds, as the players dash for cover, ‘tonight we are alchemists! Gold among the cobbles, my good friends!’

Puckerman turns up his coat-collar and hurries through Trylor to the Lamb and Serpent. Waiting at a table with two pints of beer is Alfredo Rossi. He stands as Puckerman approaches, extends his hand and flashes his showman smile. He indicates the drinks.

‘I have taken the liberty’ he says in that strange accent, vowels billowing, consonants slithering like satin.

‘My thanks’ says Puckerman, feeling too large and clumsy as he takes his seat. ‘Theatre is thirsty work.’ He takes a long draught of beer and Alfredo sits to watch him, rubbing his hands.

‘Mr Puckerman’, he starts, ‘you are a man of vision. I know this because I have seen how you are inspiring your actors, how your troupe cast a spell, bring the people from all around to see your plays ...’

‘Market magic, we like to call it, signor Rossi. Gold among the cobbles. It is my absolute passion, sir—to bring the Bard’s words alive, even to the humblest farmhand and the rudest mechanic.’

‘Quite so, Mr Puckerman, and now—now! You can bring the Bard to every farm’and in the land ... in the world, Mr Puckerman! This is what moving pictures can do.’

Puckerman chews his beard. He’s wary. Sceptical.

‘From what I hear, signor’ he says, ‘this is a pretty little trick to be sure ... but in essence little more than a glorified penny peep show.’

‘Ah! Well, my friend, it is true that men will always discover new ways to celebrate charm and beauty ...’ Rossi sips his beer and his eyes follow the rhythmic sway of a barmaid’s buttocks as she makes her way among the tables. Then he shrugs and wipes his lips. ‘But of course, this is the way of the world! They say the very first moving picture—the very first time they show a picture that moves—what was it? A naked woman, Mr Puckerman. A soft, round, naked, jiggling—’

‘Yes, yes!’ barks Puckerman and sits back to wait for the colour to retreat from his face. ‘But this is my very point, sir. My theatrical troupe is no fairground flummery. It has a reputation, it has standards, it is devoted to the furtherance of the noble arts—’

‘Yes, my friend! This is what I say to you! How much more furtherance can you go than this? Forget the village greens and the market squares, signor’—Alfredo sits forward and his voice makes even wilder music. ‘Forget the piled-up carts and the bumpy roads and the stinking inns and the bitter winds ... Bring your Bard to the masses, my friend—put him in a camera and fire him on to a screen!’

Puckerman lifts his pint, then puts it down again.

‘Shakespeare for the masses’ he murmurs, then—’but with no words, Rossi? No words?’

Alfredo’s dark eyes blaze. He’s foreseen this problem and savours his reply.

‘Mr Puckerman. Act the words.’

Puckerman’s chest heaves. He’s beginning to form pictures, to build ideas.

‘Shakespeare on the screen’ he breathes.

‘What a team, Mr Puckerman!’ Alfredo raises his glass in a toast. ‘Your experience, my looks! Your vision, my projector! Your investment, m—our fortune!’

An hour later, Francis Puckerman, director, man of vision, son of a factory worker, an actor since the age of 14, shakes hands with Alfredo Rossi, son of who knows what, a hawker since the age of coherent speech, and Rossi & Puckerman Motion Pictures is born.

‘A momentous day indeed, signor!’ announces Puckerman. ‘Together you and I will bring beauty to the masses!’

Alfredo kisses the signed contract, leaving the inky ghost of his own signature on his lips. He raises another toast.

‘To our fortunes, Mr Puckerman!’ and over his glass he winks a promise at the barmaid.

*

‘Mr Cook!’ bellows Puckerman.

A startled man in a toga and wreath, his face plastered in two-inch make-up, freezes mid-gesture. The machine-gun rattle of the camera crank slows to a halt.

‘Mr Cook, sir, are you aware that you are giving us Uneasy lies the head from Richard II?’

Mr Cook eyes the camera as if it really might gun him down.

‘Mr Cook! We are filming Julius Caesar! Friends, Romans ...’

‘Sorry Mr Puckerman’ stammers the actor. ‘We’ve done so many, it’s all rather confusing ...’

Alfredo Rossi straightens up behind the camera and stretches the small of his back.

‘Puckerman’ he mutters, ‘it makes no difference what they say. It all looks the same on screen.’

Puckerman glares at him and his colour deepens a shade.

‘Sir, it is enough that we reduce the genius of the Bard to four-minute mummeries. Allow me to insist that every actor in the scene finds himself in the same play as everyone else.’

Rossi rolls his black eyes. More film wasted. More money down the drain. But he shrugs, and lights a cigarette, and calls a five-minute break. Business is going well, for all Puckerman’s foibles. They’ve struck a deal with a company in London, and can now make and profit from all their own films, in return for distribution rights outside their patch. Stories pour through the lens:

The Downfall of Queen Boadicea.

The Rape of the Sabine Women.

The Celebrated Case of the Pontmarch Poisonings.

Rossi saves money on extras by recruiting pretty girls who’ll do it for nothing, for a kiss and a grope, for a laugh. They’re doing well, and Puckerman is besotted with this new art form.

‘The world has changed’ he pontificates to Rossi as they share a drink at the end of another working day. ‘It has ceased to be predictable. Houses change into trees. The moon blows kisses. The fundamental rules of nature are broken. You may call it insanity, or sorcery, if you will. I call it a miracle’.

Alfredo smiles indulgently. ‘Your miracle has already grown old, Puckerman. Pictures are expected to move. But still,’—he pats his partner’s shoulder—’it’s got plenty of life left yet. Plenty of money to be made. Now... if you’ll excuse me, my friend—wouldn’t you say that charming young lady has a look of the innocent nursemaid to you?’

He downs the last of his drink and makes off to introduce himself to the landlord’s daughter. Puckerman watches him go and sighs. Rossi is a liability in many ways. But still ... he pats the chubby wallet in his inside pocket. One can’t deny, the man knows his trade.

Puckerman and Rossi press on with their incongruous alliance. In the valley town, Lily Pitts goes downhill and uphill, minding the shop, arguing with her sisters. And here and there, in London, in Paris, in New York, men test new ground, try new deceptions. Spirits shrink, and grow, and disappear, and fly. In 1900, a giant eye will fill the screen: the first close-up, darting and blinking at the audience, obliterating the distance in between.

Close-Ups

Lily Pitts discovers her own close-ups in May, 1899.

The main attraction of the Fair of ‘99 is a short walk from the fairground, across the street in a derelict barber’s shop. The boarded-up windows are covered with posters—Two Weeks Only! Rossi and Puckerman Motion Picture Theatre—NEW programme of NEW dramatic interludes—Classic Drama, Real Crime and Mystery Re-enacted, in FOUR SCENES, and presenting Puckerman’s Theatrical Players in THE PRINCESS OF THE VALLEY.

Even Gwyneth, even pregnant Evelyn and her new husband, Joseph Plant, are in the audience this year. There’s a fireman on duty at the back. Alfredo Rossi is posted in the doorway. No need to sing his song down the street and across the fields—the customers don’t need cajoling. Lily sits in the last row, only five feet ahead of him: five feet of stale air between them, pressing against her shoulders and the back of her neck. She watches Julius Caesar slain; the Camden Lock Murderer at his grisly work and duly apprehended; a large-eyed, ringleted girl rebuffing her suitor. The stories spill into her head and spin like the Sunday pennies, gathering into their vortex the notion of him, Alfredo Rossi, his black hair, his white shirt. Lily grips the seat of the chair on either side, afraid that she’ll float away. Light and shadow on a screen; cartooned versions of life: painted, puppeted, emptied of colour and substance—this optical trick is better than anything Lily could ever hope to touch or taste or breathe in. How can her life ever match up to this magic? As she leaves the barber’s shop that afternoon, she risks a smile at Alfredo Rossi.

‘You enjoyed it?’ he asks, his eyes already drifting towards a prettier customer.

‘Oh, I ... oh, it was ...’ And now his gaze is drawn back to her as she struggles to give words to her rapture. She stands there with her eyes full of tears and her cheeks burning and her hands held up as if the right phrases might fall from the overcast sky. She could be an angel, a bit part in a fresco, glowing and dumbstruck in the back row of the heavenly host. Alfredo is touched. He’s also aroused by the effect of his work—his creation—on this shy, plain girl.

‘Lily’, snaps a woman’s voice, and simultaneously, ‘Come along, Lilian’ snaps another, and he sees two stern women, one with child and fastened to her husband’s arm, standing ahead and glowering their summons.

‘Lily’ he repeats. ‘Pretty name.’

A vicious blush assails Lily from collarbone to crown. She gives a little skip, unable to resist her sisters’ commands but desperate to stay and suffer more of those little shocks his voice sets off in her chest and fingertips. She can smell him, the slightly brackish scent of his skin, mingling with another, artificial scent.

‘LILY!’

There’s no resisting them now. As she moves away he touches her wrist—a light, quick touch that sends a current to every nerve-end and a new, burgeoning sensation in her secret depths. He leans towards her ear and his breath tickles:

‘We need pretty girls like you for a crowd scene. Day after tomorrow, Old Castle Meadow, 8 o’ clock in the morning.’

She stumbles to her sisters, waiting for the words to make sense. Did he really say them? Did she make them up? She risks one last look back, but Evelyn is losing her patience now, and Alfredo is tipping his hat to somebody else.

Lily decides on her way home not to ask permission, not to make excuses, not to tell any lies. Two days later, she simply leaves the house before anyone else is up and walks the six miles to Old Castle Meadow, where other people are gathering and a man with whiskers is shouting instructions and—yes, she can see him—Alfredo Rossi is busying himself with some kind of paraphernalia that, today, holds no interest for her at all.

Somewhere, in a basement or an attic or at the bottom of a trunk, there may exist a flickering image of that long day, of Lily Pitts, in love and rather bored, picking daisies in a field. She doesn’t even know which Rossi and Puckerman melodrama is being filmed: she can’t really see the main action, and can only hear the idle chatter of the other extras distributed around the field, and the occasional distant shout through a megaphone wielded by the whiskered man. After four hours she begins to lose hope of speaking to Alfredo again. She knows what a rumpus there’ll be when she eventually goes home, but she lingers on, making daisy chains, just in case ... until the light softens and ruins the shots, and the megaphone man thanks everyone for their trouble and bids them good day. She gets to her feet and brushes the grass from her skirt and then a firework explodes in her chest—

‘Lily. Thank you for helping us today.’

He offers her his hand. She wishes hers could be less clammy, but his fingers close around it and his eyes look into her soul and he says,

‘Shall we go for a stroll by the river?’

It’s getting dark as she labours up the hill to Penmynydd Street. All the way home she’s been tugging and tucking and smoothing her clothes, wondering whether she looks the same, whether everyone can tell. And then she smiles a private smile and tries again to recreate his face in her mind. But all she can retrieve is the geography of his features, the scent of him, his face so startlingly close, the softness of his eyelashes, the dark movement of his tongue, the swift, practised industry of his hands and body ... Her smile wavers when her memory runs on to the rest, the tangle of garments, the burning pain, the farcical mud-pie sounds, new, liquid smells, and that detached, desperate movement, so devoid of affection, so mechanical ...  She puts that aside, and returns instead to the first intimacy of eyes and hands, the pleading, loving way he said her name—and her smile is there again, despite the inevitability of the front door, and the outrage that waits behind it.

Mothers and Daughters

When Gwyneth Pitts started her periods she thought she was going to die. Meinir the Help heard her sobbing in the privvy and tapped on the door.

‘Gwyneth? Are you all right?’

The sobs stopped abruptly, then escaped again in staccato bursts along with her words:

‘Some-thing ... ter-ri-ble ... is ... ha-ppen-ing ...’

Outside the privvy, Meinir rolled her eyes. That mother of theirs, forever fretting about the shop, when she should have been preparing her girls for the long and unspeakable ordeal ahead, what her own mother called the secrets of blood and moon.

‘Never you mind, out you come’ she ordered. ‘I’ll get you mopped up and tell you what to do.’

From then on, as soon as each Pitts girl began to show pebble breasts and a curve of hip, she was led to the back yard by an older sister, who imparted the mysteries of womanhood with grim pride. Gwyneth told Evelyn. Evelyn told Lily. Lily and Ada spluttered and giggled together, and Ada got halfway through her speech before being dismissed by the twins, who knew all about it anyway, and started menstruating within 24 hours of each other at the age of 12.

Now Lily and Evelyn are facing each other in the yard again, but this time it’s Lily who’s summoned the meeting. They stand between the coal bucket and a black-speckled potted fern and Lily’s eyes dart about for eavesdroppers as she whispers:

‘I think there might be a ... a blockage.’

‘A blockage? What are you talking about?’ demands Evelyn at the top of her voice. Lily’s eyes widen and her face contorts as she flaps at her sister to quieten down. She takes two steps closer, so that she’s almost touching the swell of Evelyn’s belly.

‘My friend hasn’t — you know, hasn’t paid her visit—’

‘For how long?’ snaps Evelyn, almost as loudly as before. Lily holds her hand and extends three trembling fingers.

‘Three months? Three months?’ Now even Evelyn’s voice drops to an undertone. She stares at Lily, plain little Lily, so white-faced and pale-haired that she all but fades out of view. The stare goes on, and gradually Lily’s pale face grows pink, and the colour deepens, and her own, desperate gaze lowers, and the story is told by her treacherous self, with no need for any more words, however quiet. And little by little Evelyn’s stare changes from puzzlement to incredulity to realisation and horror. The silence, and the stare, continue, and Lily, studying her boots and the smears of coaldust on the paving stones, wonders whether they might stay like this forever, caught between one life and another. But eventually she hears two words escape like a breath of fire:

‘You didn’t!’

The quality of silence shifts as Evelyn calculates times and dates in her mind, and then her whole body jolts as she makes the connection.

‘That day you ran away to see them make a moving picture ...’

‘I didn’t run away’ mumbles Lily automatically. Calculations are still underway above her head. She lifts her eyes as far as the wilting fern.

‘That hawker ...’ says Evelyn, as if spitting out something poisonous. She takes a step back to look Lily properly up and down. ‘You, and that hawker ...  Well.’ Suddenly her fury becomes efficient. ‘You’ll have to tell Mam.’

‘No’, wails Lily, finally looking her in the face again. She grips Evelyn’s arm but Evelyn twists it free.

‘You’ll have to, won’t you? And we’ll have to make arrangements.’ Then in a climax of disgust: ‘I suppose the shop will pay the bill.’

Lily watches her sister turn on her heel and stalk back into the house. She tries to make sense of it all. She knows, since her backyard initiation, what to expect once a month and what to do about it. But the initiation never went further than that. Lily still isn’t entirely clear how the blockage is connected with Alfredo and her riverside adventure. But the whole episode was so alarmingly intimate, so intrusive, perhaps he passed on some disease or condition, and the shop will pay for the cure.

The twins have always seemed set apart from the rest of the family. As toddlers they spoke a private language and shared secrets and codes, were constantly triggered by some in-joke into simultaneous hysterics while everyone around them looked on, confounded. They go everywhere