by Dai Smith
After fifty sphincter-exercising minutes we pulled off the dual carriageway onto a slip road that entered the southern end of the town, where the green lung of the park wheezed in the damp under a pall of petrol and diesel fumes. It was a smell that brought to mind the once-a-year pungency of the open-air travelling fairgrounds of my youth: leaf mould, crunched gravel, whirring fuel-induced rides, cheap perfume and the tongue-smarting tang of vinegar-sodden chip paper. All in the mind of course, and about as Proustian a moment as the returning bile in my mouth. I was no more a romantic than my driver, just a tad more resentful. I made him stop at the park’s iron gates. The rain had eased. I would walk through the park to Mal’s house set above the town. My head told me it wouldn’t clear, whatever I did. My heart told my head to shut the fuck up. My guts told them both not to bother.
In the rain the park looked green, almost hopefully so. Hope was relative, neglected and recurring. I heard fat raindrops splatting onto the broken-up concrete at the bottom of the empty swimming pool hidden away behind its faux 1920s hacienda walls, with their red-tiled roofs, terracotta-wet today, and now sheltering only the memory of the echoes of revellers who’d usually been as cold as they were half-naked, and definitely eager to end both states. This was a town of bridges, though only one was worth a second glance. The footbridge crossing the pent-up river which was angrily spitting gobs of white foam over its stone and shopping trolley strewn bed, was decidedly not, but it had its uses. It led straight into the town. I paused at a curve in the High Street and looked up to where bands of terraced housing girdled the town’s encircling hills. In the half-light of a grey, cloud-mopped morning they could almost have been designed. Destined anyway, with the colliers’ rows in locally hewn stone highest up the ascent, leaching down onto the artisan dwellings of colliery officials and clerks and small shopkeepers, all above the necklace of two grander streets, Victorian chokers of dressed stone villas, embellished with red and yellow brick tracings around confident bay windows. The church below them was a cold mid-Victorian exercise in domination. Inside, I remembered, it was a confection of black tiles with scarlet trim and the penny-lantern dazzle of catalogue-ordered stained glass. It still stuck its spire up like a chiding finger above the surrounding pack of chapels barking at it like irrepressible dachshunds. But all that nonconformity, in religion and behaviour which had once energised the town, meant that such Anglican hauteur could never dominate let alone supress. Even its symbolic presence had been pushed aside by a glum and tiered car park which out-muscled and overshadowed the once Established Church as surely as the original workers’ terraced houses were now overlooked from the plateau below the mountain by random patterns of housing that had nothing local about them other than their location. Let it go, I thought. A rash is a rash and you shouldn’t scratch it. But the splurge made me itch. If no one had thought any of this out, well, no surprise there, any more than the blue-black bruise of a Stasi-type police station. New public symbols, beyond any thoughtful purpose, and the official mind was invariably blank. Blank enough usually for someone else to profit. And no one would have been quicker to do that than Maldwyn, whose house, larger than the rest, turreted and screened by monkey puzzle trees, I thought I could glimpse on the lower slopes.
You entered the house via the back entrance. A few steps down off the street and a solid wood-panelled door. New. With a brass knocker, one that was both shiny and new. It doubled as an electric bell push. I pushed. The sound of the National Anthem – the ‘Gwlad! Gwlad!’ bit – jangled electronically from my finger. I let go. The straining choristers were choked off from a reprise, and I heard a dog bark in compensation, or maybe better judgement, in their place. Then a loud chesty coughing. Footsteps and chains being released behind the door. It opened. I expected to see Mal Evans, entrepreneur supreme and my replacement at Bran’s side. Instead I found myself looking down at a very small man, just five foot tall, around sixty, with a puffy red face set on a body whose dimensions, and solidity, resembled a Tate & Lyle sugar cube. He didn’t say a word. From inside the house, past the entrance porch, down a freshly painted passage, a voice reached us.
“Oi! Wheelie, who the fuck is it?”
Wheelie, with me sagely assuming his duties went beyond opening doors to driving the Lexus I had seen parked outside, said nothing. Just looked. I helped out.
“Tell him it’s Billy,” I said.
“Billy who?”
I pretended alarm, as if after this length of acquaintance I didn’t expect speech. Not on our first date. Wheelie wasn’t into mockery, whether mine or home-made. He shuffled powerful shoulders and teetered on the balls of his feet. A boxer, then. Certainly a fighter. Wheelie glared. I supplied the cue.
“Just tell him.”
Wheelie reluctantly turned his back to me and snarled down the hall in a voice soaked in paraffin rags and squeezed out to dry. “He says to tell you it’s just Billy.”
There was a moment, a beat, before, on cue too and on time as he would have instinctively felt it, how he always felt it. The voice returned to us.
“Billy, boy. Come on in. Bring him down Wheelie, you daft twat.”
The fresh paint smell was like an inappropriate but expensive perfume. The age was originally Victorian. The makeover was garish art deco. Below the dado rail was a deep turquoise shade on original heavy Lincrusta embossed with roses and trellis; above it was a matt black finish on plastered walls hung with three oval and gilt mirrors on one side and three rectangular silver ones on the other. The floor was carpeted in a beige weave with crimson zigzags, which presumably covered the original quarry-floor tiles, too authentic for the glamour in which Mal had invested. Pine doors led off to the right and left, and there was a turned oak staircase at a right angle just before the final and open door at which the faithful Wheelie stopped and shuffled to the side to let me pass. I smiled as unctuously as my hangover allowed. It must have come out as a grimace.
A dog, a hazelnut-brown Boxer with a white mug, worked me over first. The sniff and slobber were harmless; the bared teeth were all show and no delivery. He moved off. I knew Maldwyn Evans, however, for the real thing. He was sitting on a burgundy red leather brass-studded swivel chair in front of a knee-hole desk. He was staring at the glaring square of a laptop. I stood and waited as the screen faded. He didn’t turn. He just said to sit down wherever I wanted. I stood and looked at his back, at his pink short-sleeved sweater over a red-striped shirt, at his designer jeans and silver and blue trainers. They all bore names. None of them were his. I guessed that’s why he liked them.
Beyond the desk were French windows almost the length of the wall. The other three walls were all tendrilled up in hammered gold and leafy green, with spiky cadmium yellow whorls. There was another mirror, gold leaf on the surround this time, above a black marble fireplace in which plastic fronds of red and green foliage stretched out to their superior wallpaper friends. There was no real friendship between me and Mal. Never had been, even when we’d been friendly. The dislike was more cooperative than mutual. We helped each other out by despising one another.He swivelled his chair around on a dark blue and cream silk Persian rug that filled the room and looked like the only genuine thing in it. “Kosher” would have been Mal’s vernacular. Right and wrong simultaneously, as always. He saw me surveying the surrounding, the porcelain knick-knacks, or figurines, the discreetly lit and extravagantly framed oils of fishing smacks, river banks and jagged mountains, the deep blood-red leather wing chairs and the dimpled sofa. Dimpled and studded, to keep up with the matching decor. He waved. I sat. He gestured proprietorially at all his domestic splendour.
“All right, hey?”
I nodded as obediently as a nodding dog. I’d got into the habit. It beat lying outright. The boxer seemed to approve. Of my nod anyway. The dog sprang up from his spot in front of the fireplace and loped over to an outstretched hand and I caught sight of a shadow fluttering in a pane of the French doors. The driver had not left us entirely alone. I put
on my quizzical face. You could always tell when I did that. It was followed by a question and a thumb jerked over my shoulder.
“You going out for a spin with Wheelie soon, Mal?” I asked.
He frowned back and then laughed like the happy shoulder-clapping best friend he made everyone want to like. At first.
“A spin? You mean him? He’s not a driver, Bill, he used to work on the bins, mun. Wheelie bins. Wheelie, see. Hear that, Wheelie? Billy boy, by here, thinks you’re fucking Stirling Moss! I wouldn’t trust Wheelie in a Robin Reliant, leave alone my Lexus. Mind you, he’s quite useful in other ways. Handy, like, aren’t you, Wheelie? Oi, go and close that door and fuck off, me and Billy here got some catching up to do.”
The old retainer phlegmed a grumble to himself and the door was shut. I began to wonder about a drink. There were bottles and silver-chased ice buckets in a glass-fronted cabinet, and a gin and tonic might have rung a cerebral bell or two. But I mistook Maldwyn yet again. I always had. He just came to the point. “I didn’t expect to see you here. Ever, if you know what I mean. Bran told me you’d want to see me and why. About that. But there’s nothing I can do for you. Nothing.”
I waited.
“And, yeah, Gwilym rang too. Not happy. Not happy at all. So I know all about that too, and the crap you’re putting around about papers and deals. Which comes from her, and I don’t have to tell you fuck all. But I will. To get it over with, see. And you out of my life. Again. Permanent, and I mean permanent, this time.”
“So, tell me,” I said.
“Tell you what, exactly, so we’re crystal?”
“Tell me how and why a charitable trust, Tir Werin, is acquiring acres and acres of land above the Valleys. Tip spoil, iron and coal tumps, useless until decontaminated, I guess. But expensive, it seems. Twenty million pounds expensive, it seems.”
“Gwil already told you. A state-of-the-art facility. For conferences. For research. For regeneration for fuck’s sake. And tourism.”
“Tourism?”
“Yeah! Get your head round it, right. What else d’you think can happen round here? Industry? Forget it. Have you seen the empty sheds – hangars more like – we got everywhere? And have you seen the buggers walking the streets, the ones that are left now? The smart ones have either gone, or work south of the motorway. Hi-tech here? Californian monkeys would do better. Tourism means using the only thing left once you’ve got through the streets and the shit to the mountains – a landscape! We can build beyond the valleys and let people come and stay in luxury. And provide jobs for those not too idle to do them.”
“As what? To serve your made-over world?”
“Yes. To bloody well serve. As security, as waitresses, as cleaners, as gardeners, as cooks, as … what-the-fuck-ever. What’s wrong with that? You tell me.”
“Where’s the money coming from, Mal?”
“You know, so don’t give me that. It’s all in the open. European money. Private money. Now or never. And it’s got to be now.”
“Direct to the trust?”
“Yes.”
“Of which Ceri is the leading trustee and public face, and which Gwilym serves as Secretary, when he’s not running his research outfit which fronts up, intellectual credibility and all that, for the trust. The same research park whose board you chair with Gwilym as your chief executive, so to speak.”
“Yeah. So what?”
“And the money from Europe and elswhere goes to Tir Werin, so that the trust can buy this otherwise useless land. And the seller is Valleyscorp, isn’t it Mal?”
“I’m no longer a director.”
“I bet you aren’t.”
“Watch your mouth, Billy.”
“Why? There’s nothing wrong, is there? Nothing wrong with the bank statements that show you were buying this land, and more, for Valleyscorp over fifteen years ago. For tuppence, or less. That you made it over to Bran and Haf when the IT bubble burst and your holdings crashed and you needed to cash in your nest egg, I’d guess, one way or the other.”
He was listening now. The silence was somehow more disruptive than intervention. I was running out of rope, and he knew it.
“You haven’t got a clue, have you, pal. Not a fucking clue.”
It was time to wait again.
“It’s completely set to one side. I have no connections. Not with Valleyscorp,that was doing people a favour anyway, and not with Tir Werin, which is Gwilym and Ceri’s vehicle to get some fucking thing done around here. And I don’t even live with Bran anymore. As you know. I don’t touch no money, see. Get it?”
He knew I didn’t. Not yet, anyway. Besides, he didn’t get what I really wanted. Maybe because I wasn’t too sure about that myself. Not yet anyway. Suddenly, Maldwyn did emollient. He stood up. Six feet plus up with the same broad-shouldered, big-chested flat-stomached look and only a hint of a concession to flesh around his clean-shaven chin. Rugged, I think they call it.
“Come and see my garden. You’ll like it.”
And his eyes, as hazel and flecked as the boxer’s, signalled an exit through the French doors. He didn’t wait for an answering signal. The handle turned and he stepped out onto a flagstoned patio below which steps led to the garden. The dog was out and down first. Mal beckoned me on.
The rain had stopped, leaving that peculiar hillside tumble of slotted slate roofscape at its best. Its age glistened back to an early promise and the sun was not too weak to hide the wrinkles, and strong enough to promise better. Fat chance, I thought, but then the unexpectedness of the garden swallowed me whole. From the first stone steps down from the patio’s platform where the whole town lay before you, you stepped onto a lawn, springy, green and turfy, that cushioned you better than any carpet, and was longer and wider than most of the terraced houses. It was held in on three sides by shrubbery mature enough to make me feel frisky, and which at the far end gave way to a screen of trees, a copse almost, that hid the town and all its ways completely. You could sit on that lawn anytime for over a century and not see the labour that had secured its cultivation or hear, except as a murmur, the friction of any human traffic. You could play croquet on that square.
Mal could tell I was moved. He thought I was impressed.
“Nice, huh.” he said. It was a statement more than a question. I gave him one back.
“Whose was it?”
I knew the identikit ilk of the social group if not the singular identity of any previous owners. Coal mine managers. Town clerks. Solicitors. Publicans even. Provision merchants, wholesale and retail, for sure. Butchers. Bakers. Candlestick makers wouldn’t give me a full set, but I had always been a spectator at that particular species of card game.
“Beynons,” he said. And it was enough said. Suppliers of bread to a ravenous workaday town and its feeder villages, from handcarts up and down a valley that had burned its Victorian breeches quicker than a liberated Frankenstein, then buttoned them up tight with Edwardian respectability. The bread was moved from carts to vans, and then to shops. The bakehouses were very local and quite profitable before they were sold on to retail moguls who were more profitable than local in every way. The people who had sat on this lawn and smoked Craven A through ivory cigarette holders, with a whisky soda in the other hand, in the tinkling 1920s or the jarring ’30s, knew London as Town, and school as somewhere away. They had better taste than Maldwyn, too, or, maybe they just interfered less and let what came naturally just naturally come.
We took a stroll through the copse. Me silent, him talking. This idyllic Eden on a dungheap did not end at the lawn’s edge. More terraces of stone and grass, low walls and moss-pocked grey statuary, the usual simpering boys with flutes and attendant dogs, a white-limbed nymph, her marble pudendum discreetly draped. How many wistful adolescent glances had she had, I wondered? The live-in maids, yesteryear teenage girls from the terraced streets, would have been warmer, and dutifully accommodating. The garden fell away in a deceptive arrangement of formal shapes and undulating curves to
a high wall, a wooden door and an embankment above the railway cutting. The town was back in sight and to the right lay the rugby ground’s stand and field on the site of another one of the town’s former collieries, a shaft more than a pit where my mother’s father had worked. I had played on that field, above the seams in which he had clogged up his lungs with dust. Sentiment didn’t even scratch it. I remembered him.
I had to turn Mal away from the trance of his own reverie. Prices. Bargains. Fools. Costs. Where he’d come from. His. Not anyone else’s now. Where he was going. But the only dialogue he would understand would have to be confrontational.
“You’ll need the transfers to be regular, then. Does she make them out to you, or one of your set-aside accounts?” I asked.
“You what?” he replied.
“As far as I can see the money goes into Tir Werin, then out via Gwilym as Secretary, with Ceri’s approval and fixing of the patsies he’s corralled, to Valleyscorp, aka Bran, and then, in dribs and drabs, somehow to you. Only Haf would now have to sign the cheques, too, wouldn’t she? So why shouldn’t she? Or, put in another way, why should Bran pass it on to you if the great divide is as divisive as you suggested?”
“Fuck off” was his not unexpected explanation. I tried another route.
“I’ve come to meet Haf; she wants to see me. But no one seems to know exactly where she is and she’s not on anyone’s call list. I only know about all this other stuff because she provided a paper trail. It’s no big deal to me to see where that leads. Only her.”
“Why?”
I knew he could answer that himself. I waited again.