Chapter 62

Getting back home from Bristol to Cardiff that afternoon was not the best rail journey we'd ever had, but it was also by no means the worst.

Being a Sunday, there was of course some engineering work going on, this time around Severn Tunnel Junction, so the train crawled along for a few miles before and after the tunnel, and the sunshine coming through the carriage windows made it quite hot and stuffy. At least the slow speed meant that the windows could be wide open to admit a cooling breeze! It was better than having to take a long detour or a coach for part of the journey, which had happened in the past.

Sian and Vee were in the kitchen, talking about what to cook for supper, when Julie and I finally got back to the flat, an hour and a bit later than intended, and absolutely gasping for a cuppa. There's often no buffet car on trains on Sundays as well, and there hadn't been today.

Sian smiled at us as she filled the kettle.

"Well? Are they all ready-steady-go?"

"Yeah, think so. Sheila wants you to 'phone her to tell her what train you'll be on next week, they'd like to travel up with you."

"Okey dokey! How were they?"

Julie chuckled.

"Still recovering from having their Mum staying for ten days!"

"Oh gawd! I'd forgotten about that. I bet Aunt Pamela being there put a real spoke in their love life?"

"She most certainly did! They reckoned that they were both on to a good thing after their Summer Ball concert - they had 'The Who' playing 'Quadrophenia' - but she was waiting up for them, so they couldn't bring their new friends home, or go back to their places either! They were a bit miffed."

"Only a bit miffed? You mean that they were ready to climb the walls?"

"Yeah, more like that. Anyway, we all had a good time this weekend, and they're ready for the summer job."

"Great! The boys are over at their house for a meeting with the other three lads - Chris is leaving Cardiff of course, so they don't know when to advertise for a replacement, now or for Freshers Week. I'm wondering whether to invite Malcolm to move in with me permanently next year, but I haven't mentioned it to him yet."

"Don't you want to wait to see how you get on sharing a room over the summer?"

"No, I'm pretty confident that it'll work; we haven't even had any arguments when we've been camping in the rain, and that's living in very close proximity where you really get to know each other's bad habits! I think we'll be fine together."

We were tactful enough not to look at Vee for her view; her relationship with Fred was still less than a month old, and she'd been pretty brave in asking him to come with us for the summer, working on her gut instinct that he was a nice lad who would treat her right.

There was a slightly awkward silence, not quite a pregnant pause, before Julie slightly changed the subject.

"Now, are you two quite sure that Fred and Malcolm don't have a problem that Jon and I will be sleeping with the twins?"

Sian chuckled.

"If I was honest, I suspect Malcolm is a teeny bit jealous of Jon having two girls on the go, but he's too polite to say so. He understood the argument that it's not fair for my cousins to have to share a room when everybody else is doing the dirty deed around them; and of course I haven't let on that they'd be more than happy if that was the case!"

"Please don't! I do trust Malcolm not to gossip, but if it did get out then their careers would be ruined, and I think that they'd make bloody good doctors! The less people know, the better."

"Oh, you can count on me, I'm not going to tell!"

"No, nor am I. I'm sure that Fred is a little curious about the arrangement; I got Sian to tell him about how you'd helped out with decorating their flat, and that they'd invited you over for a dinner, and he seemed to get the point that you were friends before you were lovers."

"And is he jealous?"

Vee giggled.

"If he is envious, then he's keeping it quiet, or he's being too tactful to suggest that I might not be enough for him. I've been doing my best to wear him out, just in case, so that he hasn't got the energy to even think of looking at anyone else!"

"I can testify to that! The two of them were at it most of last night; I certainly heard the first three or four times!"

Vee didn't look at all upset by her flatmate's comment; in fact she preened herself a little, as if to suggest that a full night of unbridled passion was more a cause for congratulation than for criticism. Julie just giggled. I suspected that she had the same thought that I did – the Sian we both knew wouldn't have wasted the opportunity created by being woken in the middle of the night, either! Fred wouldn't have been the only one being put through his paces.

"Speak of the devil!"

We heard the sound of the front door closing two stories below us, and the noise of two sets of feet coming up the stairs.

"Here they are! We'd better get on with tea. Vee, I'll chop the onions while you start frying the mince. There are lots of tins of tomatoes left, so we'll fill up on those."

There was creaking from the landing floorboards and Fred and Malcolm appeared in the doorway. Sian looked up from the cutlery drawer and beamed at her boyfriend.

"So, what did you all decide?"

"It's all sorted! Chris was talking to some of the first-year PhD people, and one of them has been self-catering in Senghenydd House, and needs to find another place to live pretty sharpish, because the University wants to use all those flats for summer school attendees. He came along to meet us, he seems fine, so we agreed that he'll move in at the end of the week, and pay rent from the first of July. That's also good because it means we can leave more of our stuff there over the summer because Rory will be living there."

"Thank goodness for that! I was worrying about how much we could carry; I thought that I'd have to send a box of stuff home by Red Star, and I didn't fancy lugging it down to the station."

"Is Rory going to be taking over running your pools entry as well?"

Fred snorted.

"The jury is out on that. Okay, so Chris DID pick seven score draws a few weeks ago – sadly, most of the rest of the country managed that as well, so the payout was a whopping four pounds twenty between the five of us. All it means is that we get the next three weeks entries free, not that there's much chance of winning this time of year when they're using the Aussie football results, sorry, I should say SOCCER."

I laughed at the running joke. Their house had a football pools syndicate, submitting half a dozen lines each week, and an expectation that their boat would come in before too long. That wish to have a flutter was understandable enough; it was their certainty that it was just a matter of finding the right method of selecting their prediction to ensure success that I didn't share. They had long discussions each week when they got the coupon from the Littlewoods agent about which matches were most likely to end in draws or away wins, and this seemed to me rather like using history to predict random outcomes.

Their soon-to-depart housemate Chris had an amazing Afro hairstyle and a touching belief (despite his newly attained academic status of a Doctor of Philosophy) that, even if he couldn't scoop a several hundred thousand pounds top 'dividend' with 24 points for eight score-draws on the Treble Chance with Littlewoods, that he'd be able to pick up a few thousand which would set him up in business by himself, rather than having to conform and go and work for a big company, which would mean a suit and a 'short back and sides' haircut!

Fred had complained several times about the difficulty of using 'skill and judgement' to determine the likely outcome of a match between 'Gimpie Diggers' and 'Palm Beach Sharks', or 'Dandenong Warriors' versus 'Geelong', none of whom he'd heard of other than seeing their names on the pools coupon. He'd even voiced the unworthy suspicion that all these teams were fabricated by the pools companies in order to keep their businesses going all year round, and that the 'Pools Panel' thought it a huge joke, like reading the Scottish football results as a tonguetwister – you try saying 'Forfar five, East Fife four' repeatedly.

To me, football pools were like predicting the winner of the Grand National in the local sweepstake – it was pretty much even chances for whoever you picked out of the hat, despite what the bookies' odds were.

(Unless, of course, you pulled out the horse due to be ridden by the Spanish nutter, Beltrán Alfonso Osorio, 18th duke of Alburquerque. He ALWAYS fell off, though I have to admit that this year he'd actually finished the race, in eighth place, despite wearing a plaster cast for a broken collarbone received while training a couple of days earlier. He was a character to be admired for his gritty courage and determination to win the Grand National one day, but he was now in his fifties, and was probably going to get himself killed if he kept on risking his neck. He'd broken pretty much every other bone in his body over the years.)

My Dad had explained the mis-use of the term 'skill and judgement' to me many years ago, when I had first noticed a 'Spot the Ball' competition in the local newspaper. It was an action shot of a football match with the actual football blotted out, and the instructions were to use your 'skill and judgement' to draw an 'X' where the centre of the ball was. Apparently by tracing the direction the players' eyes were looking, it would be a doddle to put your cross in the right place, send the newspaper a postal order for sixpence, and wait for the cheque for two guineas to arrive in the post.