by Dai Smith
But no one looked in and the voices passed by, blurred and greying in the dulled noon time of a bad March day.
‘Er, come in,’ he answered the knock with an almost convincing tone of surprised reverie: you should study in a study. But the yale was engaged and his pose was broken by the necessity of rising to open the door. It revealed a young woman of twenty-one, too boyish in her check shirt, wearing her hair cropped, to be thought of as a girl, but with an open, smiling face which sent Glyn back into his room bumbling about, setting the chair opposite his desk to rights and shovelling unnecessary books up to the far end until they stockaded his phone.
‘Excuse the mess, Jane. There really is a sort of order here.’
‘Underneath it all, no doubt, Mr Pugh,’ her tone was friendly and familiar for her final year dissertation meant that their tutorials brought her regularly to Glyn’s pokey study on the arts block’s busy ground floor at midday on Thursdays and they had a good working relationship.
The work was going well, but her approach to the poetry of R. S. Thomas was simplistic, seeing the man as some romantic recluse, peering out at the small tragedies of the north Wales hill folk like an eagle, head bunched into moulting neck feathers, beak curled round on itself as if aiming at its own breast.
‘But what about politics, Jane? The suspicion of the English, and their eventual canonisation as Lucifer’s mechanised aggressors bludgeoning the Celt and Celtic nature into a uniformity that’s the real bloody pain of Hell.’
‘I plead innocence and ignorance of all that,’ she replied.
‘And you from Middlesex: acres of the Fallen.’
‘Staines,’ she said.
‘Damned by your own admission.’
‘What’s in a name?’
‘Enough!’ and he held up both hands in mock surrender. ‘But you will have to watch your approach you know, sticking to sensible limits for a 5,000 word essay is essential. And with Thomas, this one as much as his namesake, you’ve got to avoid distractions. Here’s a mystic with his feet in wellingtons and wearing a grey suit.’
They both laughed at the prospect of this vision, Jane easing back into the low armchair he’d sneaked over from the staff room in the Christmas vacation, one of her legs, in jeans just losing blue and fading into the right shade, hooked over the end of the armrest.
‘D’you know, Jane, all we need is a kettle and some coffee and we could have really productive sessions here.’
‘Remember what happened to Miss Jean Brodie though.’
The phone rang and Glyn, before he could get out a ‘I’m in my prime,’ ploughed a hand through the books to lift the receiver.
‘Extension 219, Pugh here. Hello Liz. Yes, well a tutorial really. No that’s OK. Yes. And when did they call? Hospital… Gwili… last night. And they were sure it was the heart? Well why didn’t they phone before? OK. I’ll get back and decide then. Bye, love.’ He replaced the receiver, clumsily failing to fit it cleanly back into the cradle.
‘Look, Jane, I’m afraid I’ll have to cut our hour short. My grandmother’s been taken ill and I’ll need to get home and possibly travel down to Caer. Anyway, now you can ease that hunger with an early lunch.’ He managed a smile as she patted her flat stomach.
When she’d gone, Glyn took a minute in his chair. On the largest wall were Alun’s splashed paint shapes from playschool, and next to the window his favourite: almost becoming figurative, blue, mauve and yellow in a large blob, and underneath, a sheltering shape of paler blue. Paint trickles from these two like legs and beneath an ochre sun, finger marks becoming flowers in the hands. Rorschach. A student that week had seen it as St Francis of Assisi. On the side of his filing cabinet an LP sleeve of Thomas reading his poems: the vicar, hands joined across his waist, low and to the left of a photograph filled with sea and an horizon island humped in blue.
On his way to the car park, Glyn registered that in his room he must have seemed calm and sensible.
He cut across country, using the narrow lanes of the Vale with their high hedges reminding him of Pembrokeshire, to reach the main road west. From Cardiff the A40 pushes beyond Bridgend with stretches of three-lane highway which draw out the most maniac driving from people. The fatalities among time-cutting commuters and overloaded holidaymakers escaping to the west makes the route a battlefield.
To his right, in a field adjacent to the road, the area’s TV transmitter thrust a huge needle towards the low clouds, threatening to burst them. Glyn’s eyes turned from the back of the tanker which had forced him to change into second gear and traced the lines of the aerial’s supporting cables down to their bolted hooks and sunken concrete cubes in the meadow grass.
Back in the house his son Alun would be sprawled on the carpet or the settee soaking in the television’s images, resting before an afternoon chasing and kicking and fighting in the garden. Liz would be getting Bethan down in her cot, fingers crossed for an hour’s relief, time off from being Mother before the afternoon swung on towards teatime.
This ordering of the day into tasks and meals, the organisation of each day, each week to roughly the same pattern was one of the things that Glyn sometimes felt was grinding him down. The easiest thing was to let oneself be carried through the year like that; putting all the small acts and decisions into order. That way the pains were small too. You had to live with the claustrophobia of such a life, house-tied, time-tied, family-tied. That was what had caused the first and only period of conflict between himself and Gran. He’d been granny-reared.
They’d lived with her from the beginning—his beginning, for as an only child he’d always had difficulty in imagining his parents living without his presence, just as it now seemed that Bethan and Alun were the gravitational laws without which his life with Liz would fail to make sense. And with his mother going out to work and his father putting in overtime and back shed fiddles it had been Gran who held the timescale in his childhood with her meals. Though he could genuinely remember ration books and toast and dripping, the terraced council house which seemed so pokey and shabby now, had fitted snugly as any home around any child.
There were, though, constant quarrels and bickerings with the neighbours; four years ago, Gran had spoken to Mair Evans for the first time properly since five-year-old Glyn had ended a fight with Mair’s Alwyn by sending a broom-handle past Alwyn’s head and through the Evans’ back-door pane. After twenty years of sour memory the two women had come together over their bins and talked of Mair’s Ron, dead a month back, two years short of retirement. Liz thought that Gran’s concern with the movings of Nott Street, the way she seemed to be able to swivel and catch the passing of anyone on the pavement beyond her low privet hedge, was, if not exactly a raison d’etre, then at least some tangible function of involvement in life, as hers was becoming smaller and tighter.
‘That’s why she’s glued to Coronation Street, Crossroads and the rest of the soapy shows, isn’t it? It’s sublime. An all-seeing camera beats the slit between curtains doesn’t it? At eighty-six d’you think she’d be as sprightly if she’d no one to peer out at and nothing to complain about?’ argued Liz.
‘Well, I’ll only really start worrying about Gran when she doesn’t know what Mrs Rees’ social security cheque is and who’s the real father of her Ruth’s youngest.’
The old woman’s omniscience in her niche of the universe was one of the features of her character. Glyn had never felt deeply involved with the bulk of the members of his family. He would tell apocryphal stories about them over meals at friends’ houses, or whilst teaching King Lear ‘Nothing will come of nothing’, or in a lull in the Friday lunchtime bar. It was a convenient safe fiction as he lived a two-hour drive from the town of his childhood; and anyway, wasn’t a colourful, close family background the one shared Welsh heritage?
He pushed the throttle firmly down and drew away from the tanker and its tail-back as the dual carriageway carried the traffic at speed towards the dull-reddish brown pall in the sky over Port Talb
ot.
All that cosy fiction was slipping away now. She was ill, in grave danger, found collapsed on the path by the privet hedge at dusk the previous evening. A neighbour, old Mrs Matthews from opposite, seeing the front door of No. 34 open to the evening’s damp, had wrapped a raincoat over her bony shoulders and, torch in hand, crossed the road to check. Gran lay prostrate after a heart attack and the cackle of Opportunity Knocks audience was coming from the corner of the front room.
Glyn’s first kiss had been interrupted by Mrs Matthews. It was 1959 in the Palace with a plain girl who limped and hardly spoke a word. He’d been left with her by Bryan Hughes who was nearly fifteen, wore suede shoes, could click all his fingers. He fancied her sister and Glyn was a convenient partner.
Mrs Matthews patrolled the aisles at the Palace like a floating lighthouse, a beacon of vigilance against penknives in the upholstery and groping hands in the dark: the torch lady.
Glyn had no experience of death. His other grandmother had died at the tea table on a visit to Wales, but he’d been a young child, four at most, and that had been a strange dream—running to Mrs John’s back door and babbling for help. She was beyond help though and had faded out of his life as surely as if the train had carried her back to that mill town in Lancashire.
Gran’s sister Rosie had died in the back-bedroom; two deaths in a childhood. She’d become too ill to keep herself in the rough-stone Pembrokshire smallholding and had been persuaded by his father to come up to the market town to rest and recover. Glyn remembered the journey, in an old Alvis built like a tank, the warm softened seat-heater against his bare legs; her moans and grunts coming from the layers of blankets across from him in the back seat. He had left a new Dinky armoured car in the footwell sunk into the great car’s floor behind the driver’s seat. The well was his secret fort on the journey down, and for twenty winding miles back home he’d worried whether the khaki car would be still there, whether Rosie, who smelt of farmyards and bran, would have trod on it.
Away from the geese, the fields and her pining collie, she quickly lost hold on life. Her breathing creased the old parchment of her weathered face, narrowing her eyes and slackening the folds of skin around her neck. When she died they kept him from the room until the men had come for her. Her wooden clogs stood like sentries at the foot of the bed.
Six years back, just after he had started teaching and was full of the new creativity, Glyn tried to write a poem about the tough old woman. There was no suitable ending though, and the mutual irritation there had been between the leathery farmer’s widow and the milk-sopped town boy drove cracks through the structure of his writing.
In health Rosie and Gran could have been twins. The move to town had softened Catherine though over the years. As a girl in her late teens, she had left Jobstone farm which was obviously doomed to pass out of the family with her father’s death and she and her five sisters losing their older brother to the lure of farming fortunes in Canada. Living in the minister’s house as a housemaid had been harsh and illiberal but the Great War had reshuffled society and three years after she married a Berkshire man brought into west Wales by work on the Great Western Railway.
He died a matter of weeks before Glyn’s birth. ‘A life for a life,’ she’d said, peering out of the small panes of the front room window at the drifts of snow: Glyn’s father remembered that. It was one of the coldest winters on record. People froze to death, their heavy, black cars smothered in huge drifts of snow. The thaw revealed hill sheep in crevices and beneath hedges as sodden heaps of dirty wool.
Further west, beyond the great steelworks, the slag heaps of the mines, only an Indian file of high voltage pylons marred the rich green of the fields. Glyn drove down towards Garw. Four miles and two spread, rolling hills away from Caer, past the old mill beside the bridge.
When he was eleven or twelve, he would ride there on the new bike given to him for passing his eleven-plus. The school holidays seemed to stretch open endlessly in the sun. The hedgerows were full of birds and wild herb smells.
It would have been good to have had a grandfather then. A man with time to spare, becoming crotchety perhaps, but on hand to help with fishing ties and punctures.
Sentiment, he thought, I don’t ever remember missing him. What vague feeling of loss there had been was due to the prompting of the grown-ups around me. ‘A shame the old man died, you’d have had some times with him, Glyn boy. Knew all about railways. Well, he travelled every mile of the GWR. Every mile.’
But Ralph Pugh had remained that slightly out of focus, portly man in the sideboard’s photograph, with his younger self in a group picture in the hall. There were posed the bell-ringers of St Mark’s and his grandfather next to the slight figure of the vicar who was one of Toad Hall’s weasels, imagined the boy Glyn.
Around the roundabout and slotting into the line of a dozen or so cars held back by lights. The council had worked on the bridge every year of Glyn’s life, and every summer the stream of holiday coaches, cars and caravans had swollen to grind down at the road’s surface and throb through to the huge foundation slabs buried in the silt and centuries of the Tywi.
The town was clustered on the far side of the slow, wide river, like a growth of buildings with the bridge as its stalk. Glyn remembered coming back to Caer after three years away from Wales, he in his mid-twenties, and for the first time realising how small the place was and how fine; the way it held to the hill running up from the river with a rightness that was a form of beauty. The sleepiness of west Wales that had irritated and exasperated him and his fellow sixth-formers was now what the world craved for, getting away from the loud, pressing matters of the world. The projected motorway would mean a fast lane from London to the Celtic Sea linking the colour supplement city of their early ’60s dream with the harsh, vital coastline they’d taken for granted: Carnaby Street to Caldey Island.
To the north-east the river wound back up the broad valley to its source in the mountains. Gwili and the hospital lay in that direction, but when the traffic began to flow again, instead of entering the one-way system and bypassing the narrow shopping streets, Glyn swung the car left and to the west.
He had phoned through to the ward from home whilst Liz packed some sandwiches and a flask.
‘She’s comfortable, and doing as well as we can expect. It’s been a great shock to her system and—’
‘And her independence?’ said Glyn.
‘Yes, Mrs Pugh is a strong-willed woman. She’s taking food and sitting up now. Visiting hours are between seven and seven-thirty.’
The staff nurse had sounded young, but confident in her manner. Coming all that way from the other corner of Wales, he could, she was sure, ignore the strict hours and pop in on his arrival. At eighty-six Mrs Pugh was in less danger there, tucked and resting in bed, than lifting and bending to her chores at home.
Somehow, arriving at Caer, with the sun finally breaking through the turning clouds, he felt the need to take in some of the memories of the place where he’d spent the first thirteen years of his life. He would give himself a half-hour and then drive over to the hospital to arrive after tea and before the visitors.
The curve into town from the dual carriageway going on to the west pulled up towards the mart and Nott Street. To his left was the park where he’d spent almost every summer in from the time he could run. There he had perched on his father’s shoulders and watched the cycle races, afraid for the lean, wiry riders in their skull caps that reminded him of skulls, strapped by the feet to their pedals and pushed off at the time start by men in cloth caps and raincoats. Then thrilled by their cambered speed; there was always the guilty hope that there’d be a crash coming down off the last slope. In that park he’d learnt to tackle, the round ball and the oval, and lastly, to smart-talk to the gang from the Girls’ Gram, who met the lads from his school (as if predestined) on neutral ground; a Garden of Eden with swings, a crumbling bandstand, benches peeling in the sun and rain.
Those last
two summers before they’d moved to Rosie’s old house in Pembrokeshire were formative, his body expanding and contracting by turns in a new awareness that excited and bewildered him. He’d moved away from the family, further into himself. His father had taken to drinking more heavily and his mother returned home smelling of starch from her long hours at the laundry. Gran’s world had shrunk into Nott Street and the Llandeilo Café; tatws a pysgodyn served hot and greasy to the farmers across from the mart auction, ordering double fish in their rough Welsh. By that time she had stopped the Sunday ritual of walking over to Ralph’s grave in St Mark’s. Glyn often went with her, enjoying best the changing of the water for the flowers and the fierce pressure of the tap at the rear of the church. He would pick up handfuls of the white chippings, like crystals, so pure and dead, and trickle them through his hands like fossilised snow. They crunched and squeaked when you put your whole weight down on them and as his grandmother fussed and busied herself around the headstone and vase, the boy pressed his feet into the white surface, wary but defiant of the body beneath. One of his bad dreams was of the chippings erupting, forced upwards in a shower as the dead man lurched back out into the world.
Being there in the graveyard was never frightening though. There was a fir tree near to his grandfather’s plot and he would collect the dropping cones for missiles. From this spot you could see too the backs of the houses in St David’s Street parallel to his own, and beyond, the hills stretching back inland to the remote farms. On windy days clouds would sweep quickly up the river from the bay and move the weather like a clock.
Glyn pulled across the line of traffic coming into town on the back road and drove through the wrought iron gates, parking on the gravel of the V-shaped drive. The church looked smaller and nothing like as old as he’d remembered.
It must be twenty years since I bothered to look at this place, Just drove past every time as if it were nothing at all to do with my life.