Story, Volume I

by Dai Smith

Passing down the whole eastern coastline, she had rounded the south end and was a little way past Mallt’s bay on the west. The farmhouse, home, seemed near across the foreshortened fields. Faint light showed in the kitchen window, a warm glow in the grey landscape. It was too early for the other places, Goppa, Pen Isaf, to show signs of life. Field, farm, mountain, sea, and sky. What a simple world. And below, the undercurrents.

  Mechanically she started the engine and raced round to the anchorage through mounting sea spray and needles of rain.

  She made the boat secure against rising wind, then trudged through seaweed and shingle, carrying the supplies up into the boathouse. She loitered inside after putting down the bags of food. Being at last out of the wind, no longer pitched and tumbled on the sea, made her feel that she was in a vacuum. Wind howled and thumped at the walls. Tears of salt water raced down the body of a horse scratched long ago on the window by Alec. Sails stacked under the roof shivered in the draught forced under the slates. She felt that she was spinning wildly in some mad dance. The floor rose and fell as the waves had done. The earth seemed to slide away and come up again under her feet. She leant on the windowsill, her forehead pressed to the pane. Through a crack in the glass wind poured in a cold stream across her cheek. Nausea rose in her against returning to the shore for the last packages. After that there would be almost the length of the Island to walk. At the thought she straightened herself, rubbing the patch of skin on her forehead where pressure on the window had numbed it. She fought her way down to the anchorage. Spume blew across the rocks, covering her sea boots. A piece of wrack was blown into the wet tangle of her hair. Picking up the bag of provisions, she began the return journey. Presently she stopped, put down the bag, and went again to the waves. She had been so long with them that now the thought of going inland was unnerving. Wading out until water swirled round her knees she stood relaxed, bending like a young tree under the wind’s weight. Salt was crusted on her lips and hair. Her feet were sucked by outdrawn shingle. She no longer wished to struggle but to let a wave carry her beyond the world.

  I want sleep, she said to the sea. O God, I am so tired, so tired. The sea sobbed sleep, the wind mourned, sleep.

  Oystercatchers flying in formation, a pattern of black and white and scarlet, screamed; we are St Bride’s birds, we saved Christ, we rescued the Saviour.

  A fox-coloured animal was coming over the weedy rocks of the point. It was the dog, shivering and mist-soaked as if he had been out all night. He must have been lying in a cranny and so missed greeting her when she had landed. He fawned about her feet, barking unhappily.

  They went home together, passing Pen Isaf that slept: Goppa too. It was about four o’clock of a summer daybreak. She picked two mushrooms glowing in their own radiance. Memories came of her first morning’s walk on the Island. There had been a green and lashing sea and gullies of damp rock, and parsley fern among loose stones. Innocent beginning, uncomplicated, shadowless. As if looking on the dead from the pinnacle of experience, she saw herself as she had been.

  She opened the house door: a chair scraped inside. Alec stood in the kitchen white with strain and illness.

  So you did come, he said dully.

  Yes, she said with equal flatness, putting down the bags.

  How sick, how deathly he looked.

  Really, you shouldn’t have sat up all night for me. He stirred the pale ashes; a fine white dust rose.

  Look, there’s still fire, and the kettle’s hot. He coughed. They drank the tea in silence, standing far apart. Her eyes never left his face. And the sea lurched giddily under her braced feet. Alec went and sat before the hearth. Bridget came up behind his chair and pressed her cheek to his head. She let her arms fall slackly round his neck. Her hands hung above his chest. Tears grew in her eyes, brimming the lower lids so that she could not see. They splashed onto his clenched fists. He shuddered a little. Without turning his head, he said: your hair’s wet. You must be so tired.

  Yes, she said, so tired. Almost worn out.

  Come, let us go to bed for an hour or two.

  You go up, she answered, moving away into the back-kitchen; I must take off my wet clothes first.

  Don’t be long. Promise me you won’t be long. He got up out of the wicker chair, feeling stiff and old, to be near her where she leant against the slate table. One of her hands was on the slate, the other was peeling off her oilskin trousers.

  He said: don’t cry. I can’t bear it if you cry.

  I’m not, I’m not. Go to bed please.

  I thought you would never get back.

  She took the bundle of letters out of the inner pocket of her coat and put them on the table. She said: there’s one for you from Ceridwen.

  Never mind about the letters. Come quickly to me. She stood naked in the light that spread unwillingly from sea and sky. Little channels of moisture ran down her flanks, water dripped from her hair over the points of her breasts. As she reached for a towel he watched the skin stretch over the fragile ribs. He touched her thigh with his fingers, almost a despairing gesture. She looked at him shyly, and swiftly bending, began to dry her feet. Shaking as if from ague, she thought her heart’s beating would be audible to him.

  He walked abruptly away from her, went upstairs. The boards creaked in his bedroom.

  Standing in the middle of the floor surrounded by wet clothes, she saw through the window how colour was slowly draining back into the world. It came from the sea, into the wild irises near the well, into the withy beds in the corner of the field. Turning, she went upstairs in the brightness of her body.

  He must have fallen asleep as soon as he lay down. His face was bleached, the bones too clearly visible under the flesh. Dark folds of skin lay loosely under his eyes. Now that the eyes were hidden, his face was like a death mask. She crept quietly into bed beside him.

  Through the open window came the lowing of cattle. The cows belonging to Goppa were being driven up for milking. Turning towards the sleeping man, she put her left hand on his hip. He did not stir.

  She cried then as if she would never be able to stop, the tears gushing down from her eyes until the pillow was wet and stained from her weeping.

  What will become of us, what will become of us?

  HOMECOMING

  Nigel Heseltine

  Coming back after a long time overseas, everything is very small and falling to bits. Especially the front gates of big houses with the manorial balls leaning off the posts towards the ditch. My car, by contrast, was very large and well held together, being well-made in the US and about thirty feet long.

  Down in the village nothing stirred because it was ten o’clock in the morning, but the big house was not in earshot of the village and never had been. Nor had there been anything to hear about the big house since Mr Robert was sold up and that was the last of all of them. That is to say, there was an auction at Llwyn-y-brain for the carved-ivory-inlaid-chippendale occasionals and the dirty, dark Dutch pictures: and I believe all Mr Robert rescued was a print of a laughing girl, and the Death of Admiral Lord Nelson, on glass, in red and yellow.

  The rooks stayed. They cawed round the house, built their nests, did a shillingsworth of damage and eighteenpennorth of good, as ever. And in the church they bought the parish magazine under Mr Robert’s uncle’s cross from Flanders, decorated with a button or two from his coat: and above this was Mr Robert’s great grand-uncle’s marble slab: the Admiral RN. 1809.

  These are the humped green hills of Wales of which the exiles in Ohio, and beyond, think. Sound your hooter man and try the gate, I said to myself. But there is no one to open it, and that sort of gate has a joke that if you blow on it it falls on you. The house, too, though I hope not.

  The grand thing, I remembered, about Mr Robert’s disgrace, is that no one knows what it was. Maybe I could ask in the village. But how do I ask in the village? Try asking.

  ‘D’you… of course you’d remember Mr Robert, I mean young Mr Robert?’

  O yes, t
hey remember both Mr Robert, and Mrs Robert. And I remember Mrs Robert, too. Or do I? Or is she the old woman with the swollen leg and the bandage dropping down: and half a petticoat hanging down, and the heels of her shoes worn down, and a torn old fur coat worn down to the skin, and a feathered hat? Yes, she is.

  When I was a little boy I dreamed of lawns and balustrades, lead statues and peacocks like Lord Mum has. Had. Mum’s dead? Dead. My old father used to say he threw coal out of the window to stop the peacocks screeching at four o’clock in the morning. I well remember the coal in the scuttles year after year, for no one ever had a fire in their bedroom so no one used the coal but the cat.

  I have an idea old Mr Robert shot.

  ‘Old Mr Robert now, a good man with the gun now?’

  ‘O ah,’ they’ll say, ‘With the gun,’ and we know who was good with the gun.

  Did young Mr Robert take after old Mr Robert?

  No, he sold up and went.

  Where?

  Ah.

  Coming home after a long time abroad I didn’t expect to find the same old faces, though there was Morgan Watkin went into the Bear after eighteen years in Thibet and elsewhere and they said ‘Haven’t seen you lately.’ If young Mr Robert went to Thibet, he went some time ago, because it was about the time I went that it happened.

  Mum’s a great loss, they said: the loss of the head of the tail. And Lord Jones, too, another loss for Wales: another madman the less for poor old Wales. All will long remember the schemes of Lord Jones and the fortunes of time and energy poured out on them; all will recollect the fantastic fetes of Lord Jones and the crop of arterioscelerosis which followed them among the weak. Few will find monuments of lasting worth left after him, for it was for the mountains of paper and cubic yards of wind that Lord Jones was loved. I well remember him in my poor old father’s time, sprawling his stomach across our dinner table at Sunday supper, and my poor father struggling with his breeding and his collar whenever Lloyd George’s name came up, and Lord Jones looking up to heaven whenever he spoke of God’s annointed of the Welsh Nonconformists.

  Mum was a different sort of Lord from Jones, since he looked like one. His heir killed himself out of a red racing car, the chorus-girl was, as usual, unhurt, and the title is extinct.

  It was Mum up there in the Castle entertaining the Prime Minister, and our (Wales’ too) ambassador to Tokyo, that helped us all to look down on the doctors in Trallwm, even when they bought our farms off us out of death and illness: and down too, on the bank managers and their red-haired daughters, and down on the poor, lean-chapped solicitors and their lean wives. And owing to Mum, we never saw the secondary school teachers, nor did a dissenting minister ever fumble at our tables.

  Old Mrs Robert’s dead, too, and after all the lingering on and patching the roof and patching their legs when they fell to bits through the bandages. This gate doesn’t need paint, it needs a new gate. My father said a house is all right till the roof goes, and he should have known.

  There was a time we came to dinner here, through this gate, before Mrs Robert’s leg fell to pieces. My poor father and I came over in the old black car, and my poor mother stayed at home with a cold. And there we sat like gentlemen before a plate of tough mutton, like gentlemen, without our bellies and elbows sprawling on the table before us.

  ‘Idris is he?’ said old Mr Robert, meaning my name, and young Mr Robert would have sniggered at me if he had been at home, which he wasn’t.

  Then there was some joke about Taffy was a thief because Idris was a Welshman, and very loud laughter from my father and old Mr Robert.

  Then I half stood up, half screeched that our name being Brain we should live at Llwyn-y-brain, not somebody called Mr Robert.

  And all the laughter stopped.

  On the way home, my poor old father told me how Mr Robert was the grandson of the heiress of a black-toothed little lawyer who won Llwyn-y-brain at cards from somebody called Devereux Brain in 1790.

  ‘Then whose is the carved stone coat of arms over the door?’ I asked.

  ‘Ours,’ said my poor old father.

  I dare say the people at the Mill might remember about young Mr Robert. I came across the sale bill when I was home from school, and the Mill stuck in my mind since it was held in fief. I had some ideas then about leet courts, and hommagers, and manorial dovecots.

  Seated in the sunlight under the pine trees by this decayed gate, into my mind floated a picture of me standing by my nurse’s side in the dark by some gate, while she warded off a man with her right hand.

  At another time she joked with me that I would one day come and see her in a Rolls-Royce and she would give me tea.

  ‘That is another person I must see if she is alive. Old Hannah.’

  I had several times meant to come home in a large car, and here I was at the gate in a large car. But not my gate.

  My home was down in a hole, faced north. And is it now further down in the hole and used as a cow-house?

  I do not know.

  Nor have I yet asked anyone. There was no one on the road coming up, but an old man I did not know.

  Driving up from the boat, the country looked small enough all set about with hedges; but there people on the roads and pigs and sheep and hens. But here all objects were half-size, and there was no one at all but this old man, and he had gone round the corner.

  There are two ways of visiting my old home: one way is to stumble about the mud which was my poor mother’s garden and about the forage where was our drawing room floor. The other way is not to visit it.

  When I was a boy they told me the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand, and I left home. There followed a time of being in the world and round the world and through the mill and up the tree. Now follows the car thirty feet long and the trip to the home county.

  Cariad.

  I am not young Morris Williams went to America and patented his screw cutter and lives in luxury among the film girls. Nor am I Dicky Pugh became Professor at McGill. Nor poor Gwalchmai the Tailor’s son who made God knows what wheels go round in Sidney.

  No.

  When I was a lad, and leaning on my red leather I looked at the fields and the pleasant shimmer that hung on them this morning, and I thought a farmer was the best sort of man and I wanted to be a farmer. Did they give me a farm? No. They laughed. And they put the money into Buenos Aires Pacific and Malayan Jungles, Ltd. And the roof fell in. But not till I’d gone and so I never had to listen to Mother thanking God my poor old father hadn’t lived to see it.

  I saw my poor old father into his yellow box and under the ground, and I didn’t cry for him until I got drunk and fell down the cellar in Salt Lake City, where poor old Father bought a watch when he went round the world in two years. And I remembered his silver watch and I sat down in that cellar and wept.

  Now if I had the house I could farm all the thirty acres on the finest principles of science. One old horse in a field by himself was the farming I remembered old Mr Robert doing. I might take them for a drink tonight and find out about young Mr Robert. But no one knows anything, and into the pub I see myself going and good fellowship going up the chimney. Did you ever walk into the pub at home when you were a boy and order drinks?

  No.

  Hannah.

  I’m by her and holding her skirt, and all down the dark lane she beats a man with her hand and giggles: beats him off and I crouch down against her leg and clutch.

  Hannah.

  I don’t expect to see much except an old face without any teeth, and grey hairs streaming about on top.

  Where are the Hannah and I who picked oak apples in the August sun?

  I cried because when I was five last summer had gone.

  Mother clutched the radiator in church and looked out of the window in the hymn, and only brightened for the General Confession. We had ‘done those things we ought not to have done.’ We never went inside a chapel, but Hell burned with its flames a few feet below the grass of the fields. And I was afra
id to dig a hole in case I should fall down into Hell.

  Who told us?

  It was in the air and the ground, coming from many pulpits out of earshot. Our mild Mr Bach preached of his duty to our neighbour, and the messages of Christmas and New Year.

  I read of the old fellows like the Lloyds who had a tame parson in the house: a humble sort in a spotted coat down the back of it. And a pied harper with a white face and black eyes. My poor old father used to tell me about the Tenants Dinner at the Canal House every year when they brought the rents, and how they toasted his old father and sang songs.

  ‘Ah,’ said my father, ‘The Banks give them no dinners, now they’ve changed their landlords for the Banks.’

  And every evening when Old Batty Trow brought up the London Times from the station, my poor father read it all through.

  The old boy was sorry we never sent a Conservative to Parliament but a Liberal. I remember the time some of them sounded me, Idris Brain, about that same Parliament. Mr Robert was the sort, the young one, they’d have liked, but he was sold up first.

  If I came back, what sort of men would I get about the place? It takes twenty-five years to make an ‘old retainer’. And if I settle here in the sun, how about the young heiress in the bedroom, and the grooms to muck the stables out, and a man in a yellow waistcoat to look at people through the door? What about the girls in the village? Or is the whole country empty? Away on the deserted fields what stirs but the little haze?

  We had a theory that the land was finished, and I could always get my poor old father talking about all the families that had sold up in his lifetime, and their heirs drunk their peaceful way about the Empire in its service. Also he knew who was the grandson of a Liverpool merchant and a Manchester merchant, and who was in the merchant’s house before him. We were all descended from Brochwell Ysgythrog, with the exception of the Lloyds, who sprang from Cunedda Wledig.

  Mother used to say young Mr Robert had every natural advantage, and on top of it he was in the Guards for a time. It was never clear why he left. Then, it seemed that the Roberts would be in Llwyn-y-brain for ever: though it will be I suppose, the wheel of fortune if I am, and old Devereux Brain will be said to rejoice in his grave, though he’s very dead and very gone.