Peaks and Troughs

by Nick Perry

  When I returned I sat with Ros, holding her hand. Anna Westphal had laid her instruments out on the top of the chest of drawers. I offered her a cup of tea which she accepted. As the kettle boiled on the Aga, in walked Gwyn. I hadn’t seen him in over two weeks and I thought he’d lost some weight. There was a look to him that I hadn’t seen before. His face seemed thinner too.

  ‘That stomping around you can hear is Anna Westphal attending to your daughter.’

  ‘Herr Doktor,’ she said as we walked into the bedroom.

  ‘Pa, how nice of you to come,’ said Ros, taking Gwyn’s hand.

  Ros eventually gave birth to a boy, weighing in at seven pounds six ounces. I had stayed downstairs catching up on paperwork, my only role taking up kettles of hot water. But I was with Ros until the birth was imminent.

  When I saw our son for the first time, he looked like an ordinary baby to me. I was stuck for words, searching for something original to say. ‘Seems like a nice chap. Let’s hope he’s good at football.’

  When Sam and Lysta got home from school, they went straight to the bedroom, tiptoeing to their mother and whispering, ‘Is it a boy, Mum?’

  ‘Can we call him Horace?’ said Lysta.

  ‘Where did you get that name from?’ Ros asked.

  ‘He’s the hero in a book I’m reading. He can tame tigers and ride on the back of swans.’

  As Gwyn was leaving I asked him, ‘Are you all right? Are you feeling well?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, dismissing me. ‘Be ready for your mother-in-law. She’s on her way from Harlech.’

  I thanked Anna Westphal for all her help and presented her with a leg of lamb, which was gratefully received. I shooed the geese from the front door and they immediately turned their attention to her front tyres. One day soon they would misjudge it and get run over. They were more irritating than ever, always annoying people. I wondered if I should have a word with Harry, get them ready for the oven.

  I rang my mother and gave her the news. There was no sparkle in her voice. I needed to find some time to talk to her, hear about her trip to Cyprus. Eryl pulled up outside the house with flowers and a box of chocolates. Our eyes meeting, she smiled and kissed me on the cheek. I’d never had a greeting like that before.

  That night in bed, Ros and I listened to Radio Luxembourg, just like we used to. It was Dusty Springfield closing her eyes and counting to ten. I loved it back in ’68, and loved it just as much now.

  10

  Eryl Moves In

  When Eryl announced she was coming to stay for a few days to look after Ros and the baby, I knew this would make or break our relationship. I was going to have to invent a new version of myself that would be acceptable to her. She knew nothing of my habits, the routine of the house, how the farm dictated our lives, what time we were up in the mornings, when we went to bed. She didn’t know I liked to lie on the sofa listening to music every night. I wondered what Gwyn thought about her coming to stay. She was confrontational, and it was me who was going to have to acquiesce to keep the peace.

  We lived in a farmhouse that wasn’t particularly tidy. It was clean enough for us, but mud got carried in on our boots, and often we had to chase chickens out of the kitchen. Moss slept on the sofa. Dewi would turn up unannounced, make himself a cup of tea. There was goose dung in the porch, where the geese gathered when it rained. These were just a few of the things I knew she’d dislike. She lived in a spotless house, with a cleaner coming in twice a week. It wasn’t going to work. What did she mean by a few days? How long is that? I didn’t mention these anxieties to Ros, but arranged with Rob that I’d go to the caravan when I needed a smoke, then clean my teeth, or suck a Mint Imperial. ‘She’ll smell it on your clothes,’ he said. So I’d spray myself with an underarm deodorant.

  Meanwhile my mother too was wanting to play her part, telling me she would come up and make meals, help out where she could. I foresaw an outbreak of granny warfare, the two of them squaring up to each other. I sensed my mother was fragile, and I needed to find out what had happened in Cyprus. Having a new grandson to dote on could be the distraction she needed.

  Sam and Lysta were insisting we name their brother Horace, but we settled on Seth Orion, which they hated.

  It was the end of April, and though the air was still cool Eryl opened all the windows. She said the place was stuffy, smelled of wood smoke, needed a full airing. She got Mrs Reece, her cleaner, to come over with a mop and disinfectant. Our first skirmish was over Moss. ‘Dogs don’t sleep on sofas. Dogs sleep in kennels, outside the house.’

  When my mother arrived, Eryl welcomed her warmly. ‘Dinah, how wonderful it is, we’re grandmothers again!’ Their cheeks touched with pretend kisses while their eyes looked away. My mother disappeared upstairs where Ros lay in bed breastfeeding Seth. She appeared unaware of the atmosphere that was already building up in the house.

  Eryl announced supper would be ready at seven, and asked if I could make sure the children were out of the bath by six thirty. ‘Would Dinah like to join us?’

  Harry waltzed in wearing a pair of cowboy boots. Eryl told him immediately to take them off and leave them by the back door. I whisked him out of the kitchen. ‘Don’t say anything, just be polite. She’s only here for a few days.’ He’d come to butcher the meat. We usually had a joint on these occasions (not of meat); he preferred to work through the evening stoned. ‘You can’t tonight, Harry. Go down and have one later with Rob in the caravan.’

  ‘OK, man.’

  Dinah stayed for supper, and after we had eaten I managed to grab a few minutes alone with Ros.

  ‘How’s it going down there?’ she asked.

  I didn’t over dramatise the situation, saying only it was getting difficult. ‘She’s rearranging the house, but apart from that everything is fine.’ Seth lay asleep in a cot beside the bed. He had wispy golden hair, looked like a cherub. ‘Have you any idea how long she’ll be staying?’

  ‘Another day or two. Surely you can put up with her?’

  But the conversation came to an end when Sam and Lysta arrived and got into bed next to their mother. They were gripped by the excitement of the day, and I wondered if there would be any sleep in them tonight. My mother was washing up. There had still not been an opportunity to speak to her and as I dried the dishes I said we would talk tomorrow.

  Eryl went to bed at ten o’clock with a hot chocolate and Tony Jacklin’s autobiography. Leaving the house quietly, I went to see Rob in the caravan. He had a joint rolled and ready waiting for me. Moss would sleep with him until Eryl had gone. My mother-in-law continually turfed her off the sofa. It took all my self-control to button my lip, for no other reason than that I didn’t want to upset Ros. I told Rob that the plain truth was we just didn’t like each other.

  ‘It’s a common thing,’ he said, ‘the mother-in-law problem.’

  I changed the subject. ‘How’s Kate?’ but before he could begin to tell me there was a gentle tapping on the door. It was Jack, then ten minutes later Harry joined us. The four of us spoke quietly, passing the joint to each other. Eryl slept at the front of the house with her window open a few inches. I told them she had a sense of smell like a sniffer dog’s. The light was still on in her bedroom. It would be just our luck if clouds of smoke drifted in through her window. We giggled, whispering like schoolboys in a dormitory. When we tiptoed out into the night, Harry pushing his bike up the drive with Jack and Meg walking beside him, the light was off in Eryl’s room. We’d got away with it.

  Gwyn came over the following day, giving me the time to go to Hendy to talk to my mother. She was indeed unhappy. She said she had been a fool to herself to have believed she and Stavros had a future together. ‘You don’t just marry the man, you marry the whole family,’ she said, and what a large family it was.

  Stavros, being the breadwinner, was away fishing two or three days at a time. My mother could see herself spending her days doing domestic chores, waiting for her man to return from the sea. A
nd when he did, he drank retsina and then slept for twenty-four hours. The women gossiped all day, while the children threw stones at the feral cats. They washed their clothes by hand, talking about their neighbours and menfolk, while the sheets hung beneath the pine trees drying in the Mediterranean sunshine. It had taken her two weeks to realise that nothing was ever going to change, that this was how it would always be if she accepted his proposal of marriage.

  Stavros broke down on hearing the news, then raged and ranted that she had insulted him, let down his family. They all turned against her and she had to go and rent a room in the town to escape their threats. Unable to get an earlier flight, there she remained, eating alone in the tavernas, being ogled by the men while they fiddled with their worry beads and played backgammon. It had been a horrible few days culminating in an embarrassing scene in a café on the seafront, when Stavros came and pleaded with her to change her mind. After her refusal, he hurled a mouthful of abuse at her as the other customers looked on.

  I gave her a hug. My mother had been through an unhappy marriage with my father. He ran off after some pretty blonde turned his head, leaving her with four children to bring up in the nineteen fifties. She was young; he was gone before she was thirty. ‘Come on, let’s go for a walk at Dinas. Moss needs a run.’

  That night at Dyffryn the atmosphere had changed because Gwyn was staying for the evening. Eryl was mildly welcoming when I entered the house. Or maybe Ros had said something. No matter what the reason, she had backed off, sitting on the sofa with Sam and Lysta either side of her, the three of them speaking Welsh. Her austerity disappeared when she played with her grandchildren, but Gwyn had a weariness about him, his eyes dull. He wasn’t well, I was sure of it now.

  It was rare for a sow to rear more than twelve good-sized piglets, so it surprised me the next morning when I counted a litter of sixteen. Remarkable that all apart from two were fighting for the teat. It was the mother’s fourth litter, and when I checked the records she had already raised an impressive thirty piglets.

  If all my sows could perform so well I’d be smoking cigars and driving a Ferrari. It was her genes, of course, and it occurred to me that I should keep back her female piglets for breeding stock. They would have to go to a new boar. I couldn’t have Dave shagging his daughters. But now, with the pig herd established, it made sense to hold on to the strong gilts from good mothers rather than continue buying in from Josh Hummel.

  I worked out with a calculator that our average litter size was eight. Not bad. No doubt unimpressive in the world of highly efficient modern units, but up here in the blasted landscape of North Wales it was pretty good. Ros always said I had no regard for detail, but I would dispute that now. There were scraps of paper everywhere with little sums on, my workings out of percentages. Rob was impressed, seeing it as a radical change in my character.

  We had a foothold now in the local community. People knew we produced quality meat and by word of mouth our reputation had spread. It was not unusual for people to ring, or call by and pick up half a pig or a lamb. Our beef was just as popular, but this we sold as joints.

  On the fifth day after Seth’s birth Eryl packed her bags and at last headed back to Trefanai. It had been the longest five days of my life. I exaggerate, but all we had discovered merely reinforced the feeling that we were incompatible.

  She got Mrs Reece to clean the house from top to bottom on her final day, to emphasise that we lived in filth, well below her standard of cleanliness. Every time my mother rang, she told her there was no need to come and help, that everything was under control. I was pleased Dinah came up anyway and sat with Ros, and spent time with Sam and Lysta.

  The night Eryl left, my sense of freedom returned. The house seemed bigger, Moss was able to relax on the sofa and I could lie back and have a roll-up. What’s more, I’d never said anything I might now have regretted. Later, after Sam and Lysta had gone to bed, Ros told me Gwyn was ill and they were awaiting test results from Bangor hospital.

  The police had never turned up at Dyffryn before. The panda car stopped outside the house. Bryn Thomas was a young constable in uniform, stationed in Caernarfon. He could have been the same age as me. He had that unfortunate look the ginger-haired sometimes have. Needing to compensate for a lack of masculinity, he became very serious, trying to defy his inexperience by slipping immediately into the jargon of a TV detective.

  ‘We need to have a word about a case of sheep rustling.’

  He had already got his pencil and notebook out, waiting to take down every word I said. But before I could open my mouth the geese spotted him. They hadn’t seen a uniform before. To them this was more than an ordinary threat. This was a red alert!

  They lined up next to each other and charged. Their wings outstretched, they made an increasing din as they picked up speed, nearly becoming airborne. As they got closer, Moss decided she was having none of it. She got it into her head they were going to attack me. Bryn Thomas fled to his car as Moss tore into them. Suddenly everything became quite brutal. If I hadn’t grabbed a broom, which was enough to scatter them, I feared we might have witnessed a fight to the death. I picked up Moss, who had a mouthful of feathers, and calmed her down. The whole incident lasted less than a minute. Then Bryn Thomas was back in front of me and resumed his questioning. I told him I knew nothing about sheep rustling, but that it didn’t surprise me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do know Arfon Williams, and where he farms. No, I haven’t seen anything suspicious.’ Bryn Thomas was too inexperienced to understand the goings-on in the hills of wild Wales, the scores needing to be settled, the never-ending feuds that ran between families. It would do no good if I said what I really thought, or pointed an accusing finger. He’d only been in the force a year. It was like sending a boy to do a man’s job. If anybody knew anything it would be Dewi. It would come to nothing, nobody would be arrested; the case would go unsolved. As he left I said, ‘By the way, do you have a deep freeze?’

  ‘Yes. Why do you ask?’

  By chance I saw Arfon the next day on the Carmel road. The radiator had blown on his Land Rover and I offered to tow him back to his farm. He was reluctant to accept my help, something I could tell he was uncomfortable with, but I insisted this time.

  We tied a rope round my tow bar and slowly we crawled to Henbant. He lived in an old rundown farmhouse, curtains drawn across the windows, paint flaking from the woodwork. A rusting Fordson Major and a muck-spreader without tyres stood in the yard, in the Dutch barn a few bales of hay. Penned at the far end were a handful of Welsh Black calves. What keeps him going, I wondered. We untied the Land Rover and I waited to hear what words would come from those thin lips. At first just a faint smile, then ‘Diolch yn fawr’ (Thank you very much). If there was ever a time when I wanted a man to open up and for God’s sake speak to me it was now. To give something of himself, break the silence, spit out the truth of who he was. What was this feud with Gethin all about?

  ‘Duw, Duw, I’m too old for all this now,’ he said, sitting on the bumper of the Land Rover. ‘Do me a favour, boy, on the dashboard, get me the bottle of blue pills.’ I handed them to him and he chewed them before swallowing. ‘Don’t judge me by the state of the place. I haven’t laid a finger on it for years. Not since she died.’

  He farmed above Dyffryn and looking down I could see the sloping fields criss-crossed with stone walls, the pylons stretching away towards Caernarfon. I’d not been up here before; his view was broader than the one Rob and I saw when we leaned over the gate and had a smoke after the day’s work was done. The place had an abandoned atmosphere, as if no life was being lived here any longer.

  ‘It’s not how I wanted it to be,’ he said. Beyond him I could see a recess in the wall, the metal chain that once tethered a dog. The wind rattled loose corrugated sheeting on the roof of the barn. ‘When we worked it together, it was all tidy then. It was she who cared for the look of the farm.’

  A bank of cloud had thickened on the horizon; a
black cat slunk down from the straw bales in the lean-to.

  ‘I said to her when she was taking her last breaths, I would leave it as it was.’ All around the yard were half-dismantled machines, never to be put together again. The formaldehyde bath the sheep used to run through, full of leaves. The whole place felt it belonged in the past. As he raised himself up he said, ‘I can’t remember the last man who walked through the door of my house, but come in and let us take a drink.’

  We went together into a dark kitchen, he sometimes leaning on me, or stretching out his hands for support. I found the light switch.

  ‘Don’t bother with that. All the bulbs have blown; I haven’t replaced them.’ He made his way to the cupboard, pulling out a bottle of whisky.

  ‘Say what you will, boy. I know what you’re thinking.’

  Through the cracked walls, spindly plants were creeping over the damp surfaces like withered fingers. Grass was pushing up between the flagstones under my feet. A spider’s web clung to a lampshade. Broken crockery lay strewn across the floor; in the corner a dustbin full of empty whisky bottles. He filled two glasses.

  ‘Have it out with me, then.’

  Have what out with him, I asked myself. What was I meant to be saying? The black cat ran into the house and I heard the scream of a kill in the next room. Arfon filled his glass again. Then I asked him what I always wanted to know, the question that could never be asked, nor maybe answered.

  ‘What about him over at Cae Uchaf?’ I said, waiting for an explosion of anger, half expecting his body to rise up in fury and fall across the table and that would be the end of him. But he swigged back another measure before he replied.

  ‘Him over at Cae Uchaf, you say?’

  ‘Tell me what happened there.’

  He was getting drunk now. ‘Go back to our fathers, for that is where it begins,’ he said, emptying the bottle. ‘Two brothers who fell out over each other’s wives.’ He became silent, with the vacant look that too much alcohol can give you, holding his glass before his mouth, staring as if reliving the horror of a dark secret.