Hearts of Gold Read Free Page A

her was she looked well on his brother’s arm from the rear.
    Before her marriage Elizabeth had possessed a good figure, and she’d known how to dress. But when marriage put an end to her career as an assistant school mistress in Maesycoed junior school, it also put an end to the generous dress allowance that had been her one extravagance. Not that she came to marriage empty-handed. She’d saved a little money of her own to add to the small nest egg her mother had left her, and Evan, generous and self-sacrificing to the last, had urged her to spend that money or at least the interest it accumulated, on herself.
    However, her Baptist minister father had fostered a spirit of sanctity towards savings within the confines of her flat breast that was matched only by the feeling of absolute superiority to the mining classes that he’d engendered in her narrow mind. She would have as soon pawned the family bible as used her deposit account to buy smart or fashionable clothes.
    The marriage, begun as an anomaly, continued in silence.
    Evan never discussed his feelings with anyone, least of all his wife and Elizabeth, disgusted with herself for falling prey to what she privately considered a lapse into “bestial passion” never divulged what had attracted her to Evan.
    Evan was extremely good-looking, even by Pontypridd standards where well set up strongly built colliers were the rule rather than the exception. Six feet three inches in his stocking feet, with an exotic swarthy complexion that he’d inherited from his maternal Spanish grandfather, he was just the type to excite John Joseph Bull’s suspicions.
    John Joseph was Elizabeth’s uncle, the brother of her dead father. A Baptist minister too, he knew, or thought he knew, everything there was to know about lust, as those who heard his sermons soon found out.
    “A devil sent demon to lead the weak and ungodly into a foul world of naked, hairy limbs, lewdness and lechery.”
    Small children sat bemused as he railed against both sexes for their fragile, miserable morals.
    Unlike some of his colleagues he realised that women could fall prey to the temptations of that particular cardinal sin as well as men. As an active revivalist, evangelist and minister of God, his knowledge was not based on experience but on years of watching and noting the depths to which the people who lived within the boundaries of his chapelʼs sphere could sink.
    He ascribed his interest in the human condition to charitable motives. Evan who was considered remarkably well-read even for a miner, called it by another name. Voyeurism.
    John Joseph’s wife Hetty, a small, quiet, mousy woman some twenty years younger than he, had a sense of duty that extended into every aspect of their joyless married life, from the kitchen to the bedroom and the Sunday night ritual during which, after lengthy and suitable prayer, John Joseph lifted her nightdress – the only night of the week he allowed himself to do so.
    Hetty was a paragon but John Joseph saw enough miners’ daughters and wives to know that other kinds existed.
    Some were even brazen enough to eye men when they sat in his chapel pews. He’d caught sight of them after the service, walking off shamelessly, arm in arm with their paramours into the secluded areas of Ynysangharad War Memorial Park, or up Pit Road where they disappeared into the woods around Shoni’s pond.
    The thought of his niece and Evan Powell following either route incensed and disgusted him. But Elizabeth Bull was way past the age when she needed a guardian’s blessing to marry. He could do nothing except voice his disapproval. Which he did long, loud and vociferously, both before and after the ceremony.
    He’d refused to give Elizabeth away on the grounds that he wouldn’t be an active party to her social demise. But his contempt for Evan and the mining classes didn’t prevent him from officiating as minister over the proceedings. It also gave him the opportunity to speak at