Evans went to the door of the bedroom and, after a glance inside, came back. He was not going to leave her. He picked up the book of poems, glanced at a page or two and then dropped it back in the trunk.
“Everyone knows,” he said scornfully, “that the Welsh are the founders of all the poetry of Europe.”
She did not hear him. Her face had drained of waking light. She had entered blindly into a dream in which she could hardly drag herself along. She was looking painfully through the album, rocking her head slowly from side to side, her mouth opening a little and closing on the point of speech, a shoulder rising as if she had been hurt, and her back moving and swaying as she felt the clasp of the past like hands on her. She was looking at ten forgotten years of her life, her own life, not her family’s, and she did not laugh when she saw the skirts too long, the top-heavy hats hiding the eyes, her face too full and fat, her plainness so sullen, her prettiness too open-mouthed and loud, her look too grossly sly. In this one, sitting at the café table by the lake when she was nineteen, she looked masterful and at least forty. In this garden picture she was theatrically fancying herself as an ancient Greek in what looked like a nightgown! One of her big toes, she noticed, turned up comically in the sandal she was wearing. Here on a rock by the sea, in a bathing dress, she had got thin again—that was her marriage—and look at her hair! This picture of the girl on skis, sharp-faced, the eyes narrowed—who was that? Herself—yet how could she have looked like that! But she smiled a little at last at the people she had forgotten. This man with the crinkled fair hair, a German—how mad she had been about him. But what pierced her was that in each picture of herself she was just out of reach, flashing and yet dead; and that really it was the things that burned in the light of permanence—the chairs, the tables, the trees, the car outside the café, the motor launch on the lake. These blinked and glittered. They had lasted and were ageless, untouched by time, and she was not. She put the album back into the trunk and pulled out an old tweed coat and skirt. Under it was an exercise book with the word “Diary” written on it in a hand more weakly rounded than the hand she wrote today. Part of a letter fell out of the diary, the second page, it seemed, of a letter of her own. She read it.
“. . . the job at any rate,” she read. “For a whole week he’s forgotten his chest, his foot, his stomach. He’s not dying any more!!! He conde (crossed out) congratulates himself and says it just shows how doctors are all fools. Inner self-confidence is what I need, he tells me!! It means giving up the flat and that’s what I keep thinking—Oxford will be much more difficult for you and me. Women, he says, aren’t happy unless they’re sacrificing themselves. Darling, he doesn’t know; it’s the thought of You that keeps . . .”
She turned over the page. Nothing. She looked through the diary. Nothing. She felt sick and then saw Evans had not gone and was watching her. She quickly put the letter back into the diary.
“Ah,” she said nervously. “I didn’t know you were here. I’ll show you something.” She laughed unnaturally and opened the album until she found the most ludicrous and abashing picture in the book, one that would humiliate her entirely. “Here, look at this.”
There was a see-saw in the foreground surrounded by raucously laughing people wearing paper hats and looking as though they had been dipped in glycerine: she was astride at the higher end of the see-saw, kicking her legs, and on the lower end was a fat young man in a pierrot costume. On her short, fuzzy fair hair was a paper hat. She showed the picture to Evans and picked out the terrible sequin dress from the trunk.
“That’s the dress!” she said, pointing to the picture. “I was engaged to him. Isn’t it terrible?” And she dropped the dress back again. It felt cold and slippery, almost wet. “I didn’t marry him.”
Evans scowled.
“You were naked,” he said with disgust.
“I remember now. I left it all here. I kept that dress for years. I’ll have to go through it all.” And she pulled down the lid.
“This photograph fell out,” he said.
It was the picture of another young man.
“Is this your husband?” Evans asked, studying the man.
“My husband is dead,” she said sharply. “That is a friend.” And she threw the picture back into the trunk. She realised now that Evans had been holding her arm a long time. She stepped away from him abruptly. The careless friendliness, the sense of conspiracy she had felt while they worked together, had all gone. She drew away and said, in the hostile voice of unnecessary explanation:
“I mean,” she said, “my husband died a few years ago. We were divorced. I mustn’t waste any more time.”
“My wife would not condescend to that,” he said.
“She has no reason, I am sure,” said Miss Freshwater’s niece, severely, and returned to the bedroom.
“Now! We can’t waste time like this. You’d better begin with what is on the bed. And when you’ve cleared it you can put the kettle on.”
When Evans had gone downstairs with his load, she went to the landing and glared at the trunk. Her fists were clenched; she wished it was alive and that she could hit it. Glancing over the banisters to be sure she was alone, she opened it again, took out the photograph and the letter from her diary and put them in her handbag. She thought she was going to be sick or faint for the past was drumming, like a train coming nearer and nearer, in her head.
“My God!” she said. And when she saw her head in its turban and her face hardened by shock and grief in her absurd aunt’s dressing-table mirror, she exclaimed with real horror. She was crying. “What a mess,” she said and pulled the scarf off her head. Her fair, thick hair hung round her face untidily. Not once, in all those photographs, had a face so wolfish with bitterness and without laughter looked back at her.
“I’m taking the tea out,” Evans called from below.
“I’m just coming,” she called back and hurriedly tried to arrange her hair and then, because she had cried a little, she put on her glasses. Evans gave a keen look at the change in her when she got downstairs and walked through the hall to the door.
He had put the tray on the grass near a yew hedge in the hot corner at the side of the house and was standing a few yards away drinking his tea. In the last two days he had never drunk his tea near her but had chatted from a distance.
In her glasses and with her hair girlishly brushed back, Miss Freshwater’s niece looked cold, tall and grand, like a headmistress.
“I hope we shan’t get any more smoke here,” she said. “Sit down. You look too restless.”
She was very firm, nodding to the exact place on the lawn on which she required him to sit. Taken aback, Evans sat precisely in that place. She sat on the grass and poured herself a cup of tea.
“How many souls came to Jesus last night?” she asked in her lady-like voice. Evans got up and squatted cheerfully, but watchfully, on his heels.
“Seventeen,” he said.
“That’s not very good,” she said. “Do you think you could save mine?”
“Oh, yes,” he said keenly.
“You look like a frog,” she said mocking. He had told her miners always squat in this way after work. “It’s too late,” she went on. “Twenty years too late. Have you always been with the Mission?”
“No,” he said.
“What was it? Were you converted, did you see the light?” she mocked, like a teacher.
“I had a vision,” he said seriously.
“A vision!” she laughed. She waved her hand. “What do you mean— you mean, you—well, where? Up in the sky or something?”
“No,” he said. “It was down the mine.”
“What happened?”
He put down his cup and he moved it away to give himself more room. He squatted there, she thought, not like a frog at all, but like an imp or a devil, very grave and carven-faced. She noticed now how wide his mouth was and how widely it opened and how far the lips drew back when he spoke in his declamatory voice. He st
ared a long time waiting for her to stop fidgeting. Then he began:
“I was a drunkard,” he declaimed, relishing each syllable separately. “I was a liar. I was a hypocrite. I went with women. And married women too!” His voice rose. “I was a fornicator. I was an adulterer. Always at the races, too, gambling, it was senseless. There was no sin the Devil did not lead me into, I was like a fool. I was the most noteworthy sinner in the valley, everyone spoke of it. But I did not know the Lord was lying in wait for me.”
“Yes, but what happened?” she said.
He got to his feet and gazed down at her and she was compelled to look up at him.
“I will tell you,” he said. “It was a miracle.” He changed his manner and after looking round the garden, he said in a hushing and secretive voice:
“There was a disaster in the mine,” he said. “It was in June. I was twenty-three and I was down working and I was thinking of the sunlight and the hills and the evening. There was a young girl called Alys Davies, you know, two or three had been after her and I was thinking I would take her up the rock, that is a quiet place, only an old mountain ram would see you . . .”
“You were in the mine,” she said. “You are getting too excited about this Alys Jones . . .”
“Davies,” he said with a quick grin. “Don’t worry about her. She is married now.” He went back to his solemn voice.
“And suddenly,” he said, “there was a fall, a terrible fall of rock like thunder and all the men shouting. It was at eleven in the morning when we stopped work for our tea. There were three men in there working with me and they had just gone off. I was trapped alone.”
“Were you hurt?” she said anxiously.
“It was a miracle, not a stone touched me. I was in a little black cave. It was like a tomb. I was in that place alone for twelve hours. I could hear them working to get at me but after the first fall there was a second and then I thought I was finished. I could hear nothing.”
“What did you do? I would have gone out of my mind,” she said. “Is that how you got the scar on your nose?”
“That was in a fight,” he said, offhand. “Madness is a terrible thing. I stared into the blackness and I tried to think of one thing to stop my mind wandering but I could not at first for the fear, it was chasing and jumping like a mad dog in my head. I prayed and the more I prayed the more it chased and jumped. And then, suddenly, it stopped. I saw in my mind a picture. I saw the mantelpiece at home and on it a photograph of our family—my father and mother, my four sisters and my brother. And we had an aunt and uncle just married, it was a wedding photograph. I could see it clearly as if I had been in my home. They were standing there looking at me and I kept looking at them and thinking about them. I held on to them. I kept everything else out of my mind; wherever I looked that picture was before my eyes. It was like a vision. It saved me.”
“I have heard people say they hear voices,” said Miss Freshwater’s niece, kindly now.
“Oh, no! They were speechless,” said Evans. “Not a word! I spoke to them,” he said. “Out loud. I promised God in front of all my family that I would cleanse my soul when I got out.”
Evans stood blazing in his trance and then he picked up his cup from the grass and took it to her.
“May I please have some more tea?” he said.
“Of course,” she said. “Sit down.”
He considered where he should sit and then put himself beside her.
“When I saw you looking at your photographs,” he said, “I thought, ‘She is down the mine.’ ”
“I have never been down a mine in my life. I don’t know why. We lived near one once when I was in the north,” she evaded.
“The mine of the past,” he said. “The dark mine of the past.”
“I can see why you are a preacher, Robert,” she smiled. “It’s funny how one cannot get one’s family out of one’s head. I could feel mine inside me for years—but not now.”
She had entirely stopped mocking him.
“I can’t say they ever saved me,” she said. “I think they nearly ruined me. Look at that ugly house and all that rubbish. Did you ever see anything like their furniture? When I was a girl I used to think, Suppose I got to look like that sideboard! And then money was all they ever talked about—and good and nice people, and nice people always had money. It was like that in those days, thank God that has gone. Perhaps it hasn’t. I decided to get away from it and I got married. They ought to have stopped me—all I wanted was to get away—but they thought my husband had money, too. He just had debts and a bad stomach. When he had spent all my money, he just got ill to punish me . . . You don’t know anything about life when you’re young and when you are old it’s too late . . .”
“That’s a commonplace remark,” she went on, putting her cup on the tray and reaching for his. “My mother used to make it.” She picked up her scarf and began to tie it on her head, but as she was tying it Evans quickly reached for it and pulled it off. His hand held the nape of her neck gently.
“You are not old,” he shouted, laughing and sparkling. “Your hair is golden, not a grey one in it, boy.”
“Robert, give me that scarf. It is to keep out the dust,” she said, blushing. She reached for the scarf and he caught her wrist.
“When I saw you standing at the station on Monday, I said, Now, there is a woman! Look at the way she stands, a golden woman, that is the first I have seen in this town, she must be a stranger,” he said.
“You know all the others, I expect,” she said with amusement.
“Oh, indeed, yes I do! All of them!” he said. “I would not look at them twice.”
His other hand slipped from her neck to her waist.
“I can trust myself with them, but not with you,” he said, lowering his voice and speaking down to her neck. “In an empty house,” he whispered, nodding to the house, letting go of her hand and stroking her knee.
“I am far past that sort of thing,” said Miss Freshwater’s niece, choosing a lugubrious tone. She removed his arm from her waist. And she stood up, adroitly picking up the tray, and from behind that defence, looked round the garden. Evans sprang up but instead of coming near her, he jumped a few yards away and squatted on his heels, grinning at her confidently.
“You look like the devil,” she said.
He had placed himself between her and the way to the house.
“It is quiet in the garden, too,” he said with a wink. And then she saw the wheelbarrow which he had left near the fire.
“That barrow ought to go well in the sale,” she said. “It is almost new. How much do you think it will fetch?”
Evans stood up at once and his grin went. An evasive light, almost the light of tears, came into his hot blue eyes and he stared at her with an alarm that drove everything else out of his head.
“They’ll put it with the tools, you will not get much for it.”
“I think every man in the town will be after it,” she said, with malice.
“What price did you want for it?” he said, uncertain of her.
“I don’t know what they cost,” she said carelessly and walked past him very slowly back to the house, maddening him by her walk. He followed her quickly and when she turned, still carrying the tray, to face him in the doorway, she caught his agitation.
“I will take the tray to the kitchen,” he said politely.
“No,” she said, “I will do that. I want you to go upstairs and fetch down all those shoes. And the trunk. It can all go.”
And she turned and walked through the house to the kitchen. He hesitated for a long time; at last she heard him go upstairs and she pottered in the kitchen where the china and pans were stacked on the table, waiting for him to come down. He was a very long time. He came down with the empty trunk.
“It can all go. Burn it all. It’s no good to anyone, damp and rotten. I’ve put aside what I want,” she said.
He looked at her sullenly. He was startled by her manner and by th
e vehemence of her face, for she had put on the scarf and her face looked strong-boned, naked and ruthless. She was startled herself.
His sullenness went; he returned to his old excitement and hurried the barrow to the fire and she stood at the door impatiently waiting for the blaze. When he saw her waiting he came back.
“There it goes,” he said with admiration.
The reflection of the flame danced in points of light in her eyes, her mouth was set, hard and bitter. Presently the flame dropped and greenish smoke came out thickly.
“Ah!” she gasped. Her body relaxed and she smiled at Evans, tempting him again.
“I’ve been thinking about the barrow,” she said. “When we’ve finished up here, I’ll make you a present of it. I would like to give it to you, if you have a use for it?”
She could see the struggle going on inside him as he boldly looked at her; and she saw his boldness pass into a small shrug of independent pride and the pride into pretence and dissembling.
“I don’t know,” he said, “that I have a use—well, I’ll take it off you. I’ll put the shoes in it, it will save bringing the car.” He could not repress his eagerness any longer. “I’ll put the shoes into it this evening. Thank you.” He paused. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said.
It was the first time he had called her ma’am. The word was like a blow. The affair was over. It was, she realised, a dismissal.
An hour later she heard him rumbling the barrow down the path to the gate. The next day he did not come. He had finished with her. He sent his son up for his money.
It took Miss Freshwater’s niece two more days to finish her work at the house. The heavy jobs had been done, except for putting the drawers back into the chests. She could have done with Evans’s help there, and for the sweeping which made her hot but she was glad to be alone because she got on more quickly with the work. She hummed and even sang as she worked, feeling light and astonishingly happy. Once or twice, when she saw the white sheet of the Mission tent distantly through the trees, she laughed:
“He got what he wanted! And I’m evidently not as old as I look.”
Essential Stories Page 15