Story, Volume I

by Dai Smith

  And now for the first time doubts were being thrown on the child’s father and it was even said that Lewis John would have a solicitor to defend himself, though everyone knew where the money would come from. And as that young man could believe anything he wanted to believe he was very nearly a party to it. Let it be said to his credit that it did not go any farther. Though stubborn to the end, he suffered an order to be made on him in the court.

  ‘The Ty Newydd folk!’ said Wili Owain again, wiping his mouth. ‘And as for Blodwen, she is a silly bitch – nothing more nor less.’

  ‘Now, now.’

  ‘…and she can have what is coming to her, for that sort of thing doesn’t pay, boys bach.’

  He looked around him with the same glare of righteousness and smacked a fist into the palm of his hand.

  ‘Uffern! Here she comes,’ someone whispered, and his mouth stayed open in the midst of speech. Into the uneasy quiet that descended on them old John Shad’s voice was raised in nonchalant greeting:

  ‘And how does Mrs Blodwen say she is on this fine summer morning? Come in – come in and let us see you.’

  He waved her towards them with his shears. The woman in the doorway was getting on for thirty, though the long, sullen face and big eyes, the passionate pout of the thick, childish mouth, made her look younger. She had long, thin, neurotic hands that were never at rest, pulling and unpulling at her gloves, and all the time she was moving from one foot to the other. She was dressed well but without real taste and her pale face was touched with scarlet in a way that one does not expect in the country, giving a ghoulish look to her brittle type of prettiness.

  ‘Oh, I only… is Lewis John about?’

  The old man waved his hands to the outside.

  ‘He was,’ he ventured.

  ‘Was!’

  And then the wide, staring eyes were flecked with panic. She jerked her head around her, unbelieving, and then tugged at her gloves again.

  ‘Where… where has he gone, then?’ she got out, trying to keep the voice steady.

  ‘Well, Blodwen fach, where would he go, think you?’ He held her with his drooping, shadowed eyes as though peering into her very heart. And then, after the cruel pause, with no more than a hint of the coming smile: ‘To no harm, surely? A breath of fresh air to cool that hot young head of his would be fairly near the mark.’

  The held breath let itself out in the relief.

  ‘Oh, I… I see.’

  Yet she was not sure. She looked around them again, looked in the dumb, polite faces for some answer that would never come.

  ‘Any message?’ went on the old man, in the same casual way.

  ‘No – I’ll call again.’

  And then she had picked her way across the muddy yard, holding her tailored coat down over her knees in answer to the rude wind always blowing. A moment later they heard the little car rattle off along the lane.

  ‘Myn ufferni – she is afraid of letting him out of her sight – and you know why!’

  Wili Owain, come back to speech, nodded in his disgust.

  And then old John Shad took up again:

  ‘Well, she is wiser than you think; she knows what Lewis John has done once he can do again. And though Gwenna has had her lesson you know how they say: it is easy to light a fire in an old hearth. And somehow I don’t think those two would be long in striking up the tinder, boys bach: though she is too good for him – made of tougher stuff.’

  And he let his mind wander off to the little thing she had been, wild and headstrong with her bit lip and her triumphant, tossing head, the black hair flung loose in defiance.

  ‘Dai Jim, where did you get this little heifer with you?’ was his standing joke with her old grandfather, and the old man always had some answer ready. He would give her away for nothing, or for half a crown, depending on how she had behaved herself that day.

  As his mind wandered off to her and then to the old grandfather and then to the whole brood of the Vaughans he lifted his weathered face, with the no longer merry eyes, and a sad, hurt smile went over it.

  ‘Silly to themselves,’ he said almost aloud and he shook his white, unruly head grimly and his lean mouth puckered up as though under a blow. For his mind had gone off from them to life and all its hard bargaining and he was sorry for them, sorry as for no one else in this world. They were not the people for that: it was as though they were laughing at life, sometimes grimly enough but always laughing, and that nothing would ever bring them face to face with its awful seriousness. Well, they had paid for it and perhaps it was only right that they should. And yet it hurt him that it had to be so: all that big family in a four-roomed cottage and old Dai Jim, with a few years left him, still at work in the quarry: come back, he had, from the pits in South Wales when his only son was killed, so that he could give the children a fresh start.

  And then at the same time he felt an old joy warm him and his hand quivered over the fleece as though stricken, joy to think that in some way they were never down, that nothing in this life could ever make them less than what they were.

  ‘Poor old Dai Jim, it is a hard thing to stomach all the same,’ he ventured as he let his thoughts wander on. He could feel for the old man; of all the children left on his hands Gwenna was the one: the old man’s spirit and the old man’s wit had gone on to her – yes, and the old man’s innocence, as though to level things up.

  Old Dai Jim was going to give the lad a thrashing – paternity orders he did not understand. He understood asking a man outright what he was going to do, and knocking some sense into him if there was any nonsense. He had a sack over his bent shoulders and he was off down the village when he was first told. The neighbours, however, had warned the minister and he was there to stop him.

  ‘Dai Jim, your old fighting days are over: you have been called to the Lord.’

  And the old man surveyed his great gnarled hands that in his days down south had battered their way through three valleys, emblem of the sorrow and pride of the old-time triumphs when he was any man’s man for a quart.

  ‘Myn ufferni – pity I left my tools behind!’

  And there was the same quick flash of a smile that took off his temper, and a moment later he was talked back into reasonableness, as they knew he would be.

  He went on hoping that some sign of manliness in Lewis John would show itself. And he kept on hoping when Gwenna was brought to bed. There was not much Lewis John could do then but show his face: but that was what was expected of him, for it was a near thing. When the district nurse after twelve hours of it sent for the doctor the old women on the doorsteps began to nod their heads gravely.

  ‘It’s up to her now,’ they said, wondering whether her strength would hold. And old Dai Jim never moved from the range, staring into the red, sullen glow and wiping off the sweat that stood out like dew on his great battered head, his mouth trying to fashion some rough prayer that should not be sounded. When the feeling got too much for him he would let go a breath like a steam escaping and then raise his head quickly as though nothing had happened. It was not his way to show what he felt.

  It was the longest day he had ever known. The roads were all snowbound, the topmost bits of hawthorn on the hedges showed up out of the drifts like black rush clumps: over all the mountainside the piled stone walls ran like faint pencil markings in the billowing white. Yet the doctor, who was one of the old school, did get through.

  ‘She is bred the right way, Dai Jim,’ was all he said as he came downstairs.

  The old man got up and grasped his hand and then flung his head aside.

  ‘There is a cup of tea waiting,’ he said with a wave to the table.

  Old Dai Jim liked the lad: he made all allowances. One had to come to it of one’s own accord and though it was a bad beginning, two young people who were fond of one another would get over that. And they were fond of one another. The whole village knew it. It was not somebody he had picked up on a Fair Day night.

  And then he heard o
f this other wedding to be and he seemed to break up overnight. He could not understand it and they had to tell him over and over again; he could not believe that such things were.

  And so to that last wretched stage of all – the court. They could do what they liked now, for once it got there it was the end of everything.

  But it would place the child’s father beyond all doubt, they argued, and now that the Richardses were behind Lewis John it was just as well. It was their doing that the whole thing had got to the court at all.

  And it was soon over. The chairman of the Bench made one last plea for them to come together, turning his wide, sorrowful eyes from one to another: the silent lad, stiff with a hurt pride, and the woman to whom he dared not raise his eyes, filling the magistrate’s sad heart with the wonder of all unspoilt things.

  ‘It is a great pity to see young people… like this.’

  He raised his head once more and turned his eyes to the lad as though to implore him.

  ‘Is there no way at all?’

  Lewis John looked up from his feet and shook his head.

  ‘No sir – none at all.’

  Gwenna gripped on to the witness box, stiffening as she stood. It was as though a lash had struck her in the face. Was it for this, then, that she had been persuaded to come, so that Lewis John could tell the world that he had finished with her? For a moment the dark, brimming eyes went wider as though unbelieving and then she knew that it was true. It was beyond her understanding but it was true. Things had happened in these few short months that seemed no part of life at all, as though everyone had, in some way, gone out of their minds. So they could talk if they wanted. And a moment later she had flung up her head, with the old spirit shining in the straight, set eyes. They were harder now than they had been, but she was learning a great deal that she had never thought to learn.

  That was all, except that her solicitor rose and explained:

  ‘I’m afraid there is an explanation, sir. This young man’s affections, for reasons best known to himself, have been transferred elsewhere.’

  And the people in the court turned as one, with neck-craning stares, to where Blodwen and her mother sat, staring stolidly into the glum silence.

  That was the last time that they were face to face. And who would ever say that they would meet again? Even Blodwen told herself now that it could not, would not, happen. And yet she was not sure. There was the child and there was Gwenna – a shawl around in the old Welsh way of nursing – whenever she went into the village. She had always been a lovely girl but, with that quiet, incommunicable pride of the young mother as though a bud were slowly widening out into life, she was lovelier than ever. It seemed as though this girl was the wife and it seemed sometimes as though the girl knew it. And Blodwen’s jealous nature would not let it rest. It began in a small way and seemed to gather to itself fresh torments. She was making herself ill and sometimes she feared for her reason. What was not there she invented: she knew now that it was bound to happen for she had told herself so until at last she was sure of it, as of nothing else in this world. And like in some lurid, edgeless dream she tortured herself to be able to see what she dreaded seeing.

  ‘You are not looking too well these days, Blodwen fach.’

  The old woman in the village shop, like a great black bird slowly sunning itself, heaved out a sigh and her black stuff blouse rose and fell with it. Dear me – there was plenty of trouble in the world, she seemed to say, without having to listen to the old, old story all over again. And then, more gruffly than she meant:

  ‘Why are you so silly?’

  But the next moment she was hobbling round the counter for the young wife had fallen into a chair and was near hysterics.

  ‘Oh God – why was I born?’ she kept repeating, dabbing her eyes as though to hide out the light of day. She said it in so hopeless a way, so dry and empty a voice, that the old woman, who knew all the wretched story, found her heart touched in spite of herself.

  And in the back room, with a cup of tea to revive her, she turned up her hollow eyes in a helpless plea.

  ‘He’s not there. I was in the barn just now and he’s not there!’

  She went on wringing the tiny knot of handkerchief until the blood left the helpless hands. She had said too much: she bowed her head in shame. A tiny stretch of colour came into the white face. She had never been as bad as this before: she was getting worse and worse.

  ‘And you know what Lewis John is? With a bit of skirt about.’

  The old woman raised her head and pushed the steel spectacles up from the old ringed-around eyes that had now gone hard with a warning glare. She held her white-boned hands up so that there should be no mistake. ‘Now that is quite enough of that.’

  The wife, sensing the change, got up stiffly from the little wicker chair, preening herself in a new pride.

  ‘She just happened to be there, like,’ she got in.

  ‘Good gracious, woman!’ The old shopkeeper’s softly chewing chaps set in anger. And then she stopped herself. ‘Indeed, truth, if you go on like this you will throw them into one another’s arms and it will be your doing, my girl.’

  It was no good talking, as she knew. Instead she drew in a deep breath and sighed once more, as she heard the shop door slam. Where on earth she was off to now no one knew except that she was not going home. To the barn again no doubt.

  ‘Dir annwyl – there will be some doings before the day is out,’ she said out loud.

  The old woman waved her hands in the same forlorn way: she was too old now, she seemed to say, for this sort of thing.

  But in the barn the men were busy. Like grasshoppers in chorus the steel clippers went on, the rumble of voices or a sharp angry rebuke, the sudden commotion of a bolting sheep loosed too soon. The fleeces, folded and packed tight into parcels of wool, stood in an ever-towering heap in the middle, and out in the by-take and beyond that again, in the lower skirt of the mountain, the new-white sheep were straggling up in a thin line.

  After a time Lewis John had come back and taken his old place on the bench. He sat there drumming on his knees waiting for them to bring him a sheep. For some time no one spoke – it was difficult to make a place for him after the outburst. Once the intimate note had gone it was hard to sound again.

  But at last old John Shad, with no show of interest:

  ‘Your missis has been here, Lewis John.’

  ‘And what the hell has that got to do with you, then?’

  ‘Tut, tut, tut!’ The old man made a noise with his mouth and wagged his hands deploringly. He had meant it as a gesture of friendship, he seemed to say, and look what return he had had.

  ‘I only said she had been here – surely a man can open his mouth?’

  ‘Not your sort of mouth, John Shad.’

  The lad nodded towards him in a tight-lipped threat and the old man, finding it hard to stomach the insult:

  ‘If she was to put a bit of rope around you… but leave him alone and he’ll come home, wagging his tail behind him.’

  The lad jumped up, sending the bench flying to the wall. He held his clenched fists trembling at his sides.

  ‘Iesu mawr,’ he got out through his clenched teeth and swung his arms about him in an empty rage. Then, reaching a taut finger at the old man:

  ‘Only for your age, John Shad, I would… oh…’

  He ended up on a note of glory and bent his arms up with the still trembling fists.

  ‘Age, indeed! They are always either too young or too old for you, Lewis bach.’

  This was a reference to Gwenna: those around looked up with a quick, anxious glance. One or two of them ran between the men, but old John Shad sat there with the dignity age gave.

  ‘I have thrashed better men than Lewis John – when they were men.’

  He made a heave towards the old man, struggling to free himself from the men who held him.

  At that moment the barn filled with shadow and they all instinctively looked to the door.
His wife was there. The men let go their hold, let their hands fall down sheepishly beside them. Old John Shad heaved himself round in his seat and craned his neck to see the cause of the sudden transformation. And then, with an old courtesy that was part of him:

  ‘Come in, Mrs Williams,’ and he beckoned her away from the draughty door.

  She stood there on one foot and held on to the lintels while her mouth moved as though in a search for words. It was no place for words.

  Lewis John had flung himself free. He strode over to her his eyes hard, fists clenched, and stood there before her in a gibber of rage.

  ‘I must see you, Lewis,’ she cried out, and made a frantic move towards him.

  Then restraint went, like a taut cord bursting. He raised his clenched hands above him and then crashed them down on his head.

  ‘Get out! GET OUT! Oh for Christ’s sake…’

  He flung his knotted fists towards her, as though to destroy the sight before him, and then ended in a hoarse moan. He stumbled back into the barn and brought a bare forearm across his wet brow, and sank slowly onto a bench.

  Outside, they could hear the short, hysterical crying and then that, too, had gone. And within no word: the shears had stopped, a sheep coughed, a bench creaked, a boot scraped over the slate floor. At last the old man’s voice, like the gathered voice of all come in judgment:

  ‘Lewis John Williams – you are falling very far short of what you… were.’

  The lad lifted his head numbly under the chastisement and then lowered his eyes to the floor. He knew that, too. He wanted to tell himself, more than to tell them, that it was not true, that something had happened to him lately and he did not know what it was.