In Another Country

by David Constantine

  When we turned, then I was frightened. The shore looked to be infinitely far away. I couldn’t make out the chapel at all. The distance looked to be quite beyond my strength. But Awen seemed unconcerned. She laughed and looked up at my father and he held her hand very tightly and said nothing to worry about we’d be safe home in no time. My hand he held tightly too, but I felt he hadn’t even noticed how frightened I was because he and Awen were being so jolly together. We were the only people out there, the only upright things in all that flat space. You’d think with your own father if he said nothing to worry about, you’d believe him, wouldn’t you? But I kept looking back, to see if the sea was coming after us, faster than a man could run.

  My father said the chapel out here was the first building and the chapel on the beach just above high water was the second. And the third, he said, was a proper church, at Llandrillo, about a mile inland, on a rocky hill, quite safe from the sea. I knew about that church already. Awen had told me. And I knew something else as well, that she had told me. And suddenly out here on the sands, in English, she told my father the thing I thought was a secret between her and me: that a tunnel went from the church on the hill to the chapel on the beach, an escape way to Ireland, when the old believers were in danger from the new. I heard her tell him that in English when I had kept it secret even though he was my own father and I knew how much it would have interested him. And indeed he was very interested. He stopped dead in his tracks out here on the sands and said, Goodness me, what a thing! We must find it, this tunnel, you must take me and show me where you think it is. We have found the forest together, and we believe there was once a chapel in that forest, and now you tell me there’s a secret tunnel from the chapel on the beach to the church on the hill, so certainly we must go and find that together. I was hurt by Awen. Across him, I said to her in Welsh, You shouldn’t have told him that. It was our secret. Why did you tell him that? But all she answered was, Will if I like. And we set off again, him between us, and I couldn’t get over it and hoped the sea would come at a lick and drown us all.

  Then there was worse. Much worse. My father was very interested in wells and had visited a number of them along the coast and inland. It’s true this area is especially rich in wells. Wishing wells, he said, I’m a great lover of wishing wells. And then Awen said, Wishing wells are one thing. But I know a cursing well. That was the worst. Never in my life, before or since, have I hated anyone as much as I hated my friend Awen when she said in English to my father that she knew a cursing well. The tunnel was one secret. We hadn’t been able to find any likely flagstone in the floor of the chapel, nor any suggestion of an entrance behind its south wall above high water, but we were planning to make a thorough search at Llandrillo, both in the church itself and in the graveyard around. We had hidden torches and a special notebook up there ready, in a grave whose lid was loose, under an elder bush at the bottom of the slope. When she told my father, all the fun went out of that. But the well, the cursing well, was the secret of secrets. We only ever spoke of it in our tongue within the tongue, our speech that nobody on the planet understood but us. And there she was, in broad daylight, in everyday English, ready to tell my father what she knew. Don’t tell him, I said, in the secret tongue. Even in Welsh he would not have understood, but I said it in the secret tongue, to impress on her the seriousness of the matter. But she smiled me a bad smile and grinned up at him and answered me in English just the two words: Why not? The well was on her farm, she told him, at Llanelian-yn-Rhos, under hazels, holly and alders, where the stream started, at the bottom of the steep field, and it was the most famous cursing well in Wales, or had been until the Bishop forbade it and smashed the lovely stone bowl of it a hundred years ago. Now hardly anyone knew of that well and nobody who came looking on his own would ever find it, it was on private land, her land, and hidden away, but she would show him, my father, whenever he liked, since he was so interested in wells.

  She stopped. We’ve come out too far, she said. We must go back in. I don’t know about the tides. I believe we are nearly out where the forest was. The sea is so fast when it turns and starts to come in. He was not so bothered, not about the sea. Did he not believe that tide-flow came faster than a man could run? Perhaps he did, but he was sunk in her, how travailed she was, how girlish and much older than a girl, how it was welling up in her through the deposits of the years, through her eyes and through her mouth. He was beginning to see what love would be like, with her. So he stood, looking neither out to where the sea must arrive from, nor in towards the chapel where they must return, but only at her, at her face, at her standing disconsolate on the flat infinity of wet sand, holding her sandals, wide-eyed and as if in shadow in all the sunlight. I’m frightened, she said. I’m frightened out here. I’m all alone, you know. Some days it’s like a black cloud around me, head and shoulders. You are going to have to look after me. Come in now, let’s go and find the place where we will stay tonight. There’s more, you know, about the cursing well. Above it the air is peculiarly healthful, they say, because the airs that come in off the sea meet there with those that live over the land. And there’s more about what we did at the cursing well together, Awen and I, raising the water to one another’s lips, the way you and I did at the wishing well. Much more. And what I did there and said there and wished there on my own one day, on her private land, unbeknown to her, in that deep hollow out of sight. There’s a lot you don’t know about me. Come back with me now quickly. There are things I can’t say in the daylight, but I will say them in the dark when we have slept together.

  Under the Dam

  1

  Their first home was under the viaduct. Seth found it. His train slowed and halted, waiting for clearance into the station, and he looked down on the rows, the smoking chimneys, the back alleys, and imagined being down there looking up at a train strung out along the arches in the sky. Next day he went in among the little houses and soon found one to buy for less than it would be to rent a room in nicer places. He fetched Carrie at once, as though this opportunity were a glimpse into the heavens and might at any moment close. The back bedroom had a pretty tiled hearth but Seth was at the window craning up. The arches climbed higher than he could see, the track lay on an upper horizon out of sight. Okay, said Carrie, in a loving wonder at this renewal of his eagerness. A train crawled heavily over and away. The house trembled.

  Now began a good time for both of them; different for each, but equal in its fullness. They would look back on it, separately, and marvel: that was us then! The house was solid; or if it wasn’t, they never worried. The sashes rattled under the heavy trains, once a slate came loose and slithered down; but they only laughed, Seth with a kind of satisfaction. The house was never light, not with daylight, at least—how could it be? But they made it cheerful with lamps, candles, coal fires, bright paint, and with lovely things they had collected on their travels.

  Carrie advertised, and got two or three pupils for the fiddle or the guitar. They came to her and played or listened in the front room, always lit and scented, under the viaduct. When a train passed overhead, they paused and smiled. Seth kept on his job at the art school, only a few hours but just about enough. In his free time he did his own work, still trying for a true style, he said, but with some hope that, if he trusted, he would feel his way. He worked, and looked about him with a lively interest, to see how the things were that he must try to answer.

  Under the arches, where the little streets ended, were strange dens and businesses. Seth and Carrie had a scrap man for a neighbour. He lived behind a wall of old doors, corrugated iron and barbed wire. He was black as coal, except for a grizzly head of hair the colour of ash. He had lost the power of speech. His clients were humped old men pushing bicycles and handcarts. They brought him rolls of lead and lengths of copper piping snapped like the limbs of insects, stuff ripped out of a vacancy before the Council came to board it up. Seth sketched them from his window as they passed. Th
ey were like gleaners on the slag heaps. When Carrie bought a big brass bed and several knobs were missing, Jonah hunted out the exact replacements from a drawer. When she asked what she owed him he raised his arms and tucked down his head, to mime a fiddler. She fetched her fiddle and played him a jig. He capered like a bear, on and on, until she feared for him and paused. Then the energy left him, he slouched off into his shack. Carrie glimpsed his Primus stove and mattress. Seth marvelled. The man lay smack under the tracks!

  They were mostly old people under the viaduct, or who looked old. The young left if they could. The Council accommodated difficult cases there; and one or two incomers, like Seth and Carrie, lodged or settled by choice. A pub had survived very easily, a couple of corner shops by dint of bitter struggle. Carrie soon got the feeling that they were welcome. Their outlandishness was engaging. She felt people look at her and Seth with a sort of hope. Seth did a sketch of the landlord’s little girl, for her birthday. Then one or two others asked him. He did it quickly, for free. They marvelled, and forcibly he had to quell in himself a rising pride. Likeness, however exact, was not enough. He saw the hands of the old miners, the broken nails, the blue-black fragments of the job inhering under the skin like shrapnel; he saw the flaky cast, like talcum powder, over their puffy faces. Then he knew his uselessness and averted his eyes.

  Seth did some research on the subject of the viaduct. He learned the weight it was built to bear, and the weight that nowadays it must. He gazed up, wondering at the difference. All those blackened bricks, arches like a Norman cathedral, the iron road, the thousands of oblivious people travelling north and south. In the pub he edged the talk towards catastrophes. There was one in 1912, coal trucks, the last two in a long line somehow derailed and hanging over the parapet, emptying. Street next to yours, somebody said. Coal through the roof, coal on the bed. Then the iron. The Company rebuilt the houses, paid for the funerals, let them keep the coal. Seth wanted more. He had read of a suicide, a man dangling from the parapet on a rope, discovered in daylight, a crowd of citizens gazing up. All night there, trembling under the trains, tolling in the breeze. Carrie watched his face becoming helpless under the pull of his wish to know. She tried to cover for him, to veil an indecency. She feared for him. But that night, thrusting a poker into the congealed coals and letting the flames out, their warmth and dancing light, he said in the story of the derailment it was the richness that overwhelmed him, the too-sudden, too-abundant giving of the fuel of life. She pulled a face, shook her head. Then he said: We’ll get an allotment, they’re dirt cheap, we’ll grow what we like.

  The streets, yards, rooms were not entirely dark. In summer the morning sun slanted in very beautifully; in fact, like a peculiar gift and grace. There were early mornings of nearly unbearable illumination: sunlight through the rising smoke, a blood-redness being revealed in the substance of the arches, through a century of soot. But the allotments, higher up the dip the houses were gathered in, enjoyed an ample and more ordinary helping of daylight. Seth was given a plot on the slope facing the railway embankment, just below a ruined chapel and a few wrecked graves, just before the viaduct began its stepping over the sunken town. There was an attempt at terracing, almost Mediterranean, he said. He went up there whenever he could and Carrie joined him. He watched for her climbing the path from the houses into the allotments among the sheds and little fences. She brought a flask and a snack. Then they worked side by side. Palpable happiness, real as the heavy earth, as the tools in their hands, as the produce. So it was. She said to herself: Nothing will obliterate this.

  One of Carrie’s pupils was a boy of seventeen or so. He was called Benjamin and had no home to speak of. He came to their house under the viaduct, said he wanted to learn the guitar, but had no money. Could he do odd jobs for them instead? Carrie said yes. He spoke a thick vernacular. He had black eyes that seemed to be seeing things he hadn’t the words to utter. Seth saw how it would be and to all that he foresaw, like Carrie, he said yes. Soon Benjamin was in love with her, muffled and bewildered by it, but with the steady helpless gaze of a passionate certitude. The best he could ever say, including both of them, but turning back helplessly to Carrie, was: You’re not like people round here. Seth watched Carrie shift so almost imperceptibly in her feelings that at no point was there reason enough to halt. From pity for the incoherent child—he wrings my heart—she passed through the troubling satisfaction of being loved by him into loving him, in her fashion, in return. Seth came home once and saw them in the music room together. Benjamin was making his best attempt at the accompaniment of a familiar song. He was bent down and away from the door, anxiously watching his own fingers. Carrie was singing, and watching him. Seth saw how far along she was in the changing of her feelings. She met his eyes and knew that he knew. Afterwards she said: It doesn’t make any difference. I know that, he said; but felt a difference, of a kind he could not fathom. And she added: Whatever you ask, I will always tell and whatever I tell you it will be the truth.

  Seth had been planning to restore the kitchen range. It should heat, like the back boiler, from the open fire, and once would have cooked and baked for a family. But all its intricate system of flues and draughts was blocked and useless, one door hung loose, a cast iron hob below it was cracked and tilted. For weeks Seth had been brooding on his project with a secret satisfaction, as though it were the promise of a breakthrough in his drawing and painting and he must bide his time, gather his energies, make a space, and finally set to. It was all his own, all his own dreaming, that he would act on when he chose. It amazed him therefore, one afternoon when Benjamin came in from the lesson, that without thinking he took him by the arm, stood him before the hearth and said: Know anything about ranges? Benjamin blushed. Here was a large opportunity. Aye, he said. Same make as my mother’s. I always did hers till my stepfather moved in. And he went on his knees before it, opened the loose door, rattled gently at the damper. No worse than you’d expect, he said. He looked up at Seth, then quickly away. In the firelight on his looks Seth saw clearly how Carrie must love him. He said: I had a mind to get it working again. You could give me a hand. His project, disclosed, shared, made over to someone else. Suddenly he was deferring to the boy, who was local and knew about these things, knew better. He tested his feelings for regret and could find none. Benjamin was rolling up his sleeves. No time like the present. There should be a rake somewhere, and wire brushes. They’re out the back, said Seth. In secret he had been making his preparations. He fetched the tools, a dust sheet, a tin bucket, overalls for them both. Soon he was taking out a pail of rust and soot. Thinking Benjamin had already left, it shocked Carrie to see him in Seth’s overalls, crouched close to the fire, intently working at the blocked airways. Seth came in. We’ve made a start, he said. Feel. She put her hand into the open oven. The warmth was coming through. A long way off baking bread, but a start. Like cleaning a spring and the water beginning again. Ben’s the man, said Seth. You both look the part, said Carrie, bringing tea, their filthy hands closing round the mugs, eyes whitened through a faint mask of soot, eyebrows, hairs on the wrists lightly touched up with dirt. She felt her own cleanness like an attraction, almost too blatant. She said: Why don’t I go and ask Jonah for a new door? It’s the hinge, Benjamin said. The door’s okay. Well, a hinge, said Carrie. Why don’t you? said Seth. And to Benjamin, as she left the room: She likes asking Jonah. Five minutes later Carrie was back, with Jonah himself. Couldn’t remember the make. Thought he’d better see it. His appearance in their living room was astonishing, as though an order of things had been undone. He bulked much larger, blacker, more grizzled, more indifferent to any usual manners. He glanced and nodded, tapped the cracked hob with his boot, nodded again, departed. It’s sunny out, said Carrie. Strange irrelevance. Under the viaduct they seemed to be making a life that would be all interior, by lamplight, intimate. Their feelings wanted sleet and hail, early dusk, the long nights. The fire would roar, the oven would heat up tremendously, Ca
rrie would bake a batch of loaves, there would be a kettle whispering on the hob.

  They were in a hurry to finish, but it took some days. Seth would only work at it with Benjamin, at which Carrie smiled. She went to Jonah for the hinge, he had found a likely hob as well, also a battered kettle that might polish up. He beckoned her into his shack and pointed to a can of WD-40 on the table. There was a notepad by it, to do his talking. He scrawled: FOR THE RUSTY NUTS AND BOLTS. And after that: YOU PLAY ME A TUNE? His oily hand had smudged the cheap lined paper. Carrie kissed him on both cheeks. A baker’s dozen of tunes, she said. In town she bought the substance necessary for loosening rusty nuts and bolts, and a tin of the proper stove paint, glossy black.