Welsh Journals

Oranges Short Story DENYS VAL BAKER IT BEGAN AS A JOKE. There was the usual group of them out for a Saturday night pub crawl; Johnny and his wife Isa, Paul and his girl friend Sophie, and Paul's sister Mel, and her boy friend Terence and Paul and Mel had brought along their young cousin Ray, who was somehow carried along by the family tie, even though she belonged to a different, almost gauche generation. Between the six of them there was the intimacy of many past outings and adventures: drinking, dancing, skylarking together, driving in a car from pub to pub, as tonight and finally coming back to Johnny's big flat in the city centre, bottles under their arms, bright-eyed, ready to push back the chairs, switch on the radiogram, and dance Johnny was like his flat, big, expansive, comfortable, a business man in his early forties with a young look, well kept and handsome, with a tinge of grey in his hair that merely emphasised his attraction. But with all that quiet- quieter than his wife, Isa, a Scottish red-head, fiery like her hair, always on the move, sharp as a razor blade, and clutching hold of life, laughter, love, with an exultant greedy clutch. Paul and Mel were rather alike, Paul tall and gangling, the intellectual type, but evenly tempered: Mel slimmer, more taut as if nerves always on edge-each having chosen for partner a complement. Sophie, soft and cuddly, like a warm little spaniel, and Terence a cheery Irish boy, full of bubbling good humour and fun. And then there was cousin Ray, the odd one out. Johnny had watched her with mixed feelings: for all his bigness and apparent clumsiness he was a surprisingly sensitive man, he was aware at once of her separation from the others. It was more than her youth, though she could not be more than perhaps eighteen or nineteen-it was something beyond that, a curious almost ethereal quality that emphasised her untouched, gazelle-like personality. She looked and spoke and moved with this breathless nervousness so that, watching, one hesitated to move suddenly, lest she wafted away into some other, more delicate world. All this he had sensed when she first came into the pub where they met, hanging back behind the others: and during the evening the impression remained, sank deeper into his mind. He was not a man whose eyes roved