I Came, I Saw

by Norman Lewis

  ‘Well, if they do, I will.’

  ‘Or even throw something at you.’

  She giggled. ‘Not even relations of yours could be as uncivilized as that.’

  ‘All right then, but don’t say I haven’t warned you.’

  There were two aspects to this particular quandary. The first was the traumatic effect the madhouse in Wellfield Road might have on our relationship. The second was that Ernestina’s unaccommodating personality might endanger any hope of a negotiated settlement with these elderly and unbalanced ladies, consumed as they were with suspicion and paranoia, and inevitably detesters of foreigners of every kind.

  A central legend of the Celtic people is that of the Lady of the Lake: the union between a human being and a fairy who endows her human husband with all manner of material and spiritual benefits, but who leaves him when he objects to her irrational behaviour. There were times in our association when I was reminded of the legend. The fairy at Myddfai startled the human beings among whom she lived by exaggerated displays of feeling, and this sometimes happened with Ernestina too. She had a quick sense of humour which was easily stimulated, and would fall into paroxysms of laughter over some episode that most English people would not have found particularly funny. When listening, on the other hand, to an ex-convict describing in Hyde Park what it was like to suffer the cat-o’-nine-tails, she burst into vociferous weeping. Her rare fury was demonstrated by the occasion of the emerald ring.

  I was convinced that it would not be a good idea at all to take Ernestina with me to Carmarthen, but she refused to be left behind. ‘It sounds quite an adventure,’ she said. ‘I’m going to enjoy it.’

  We drove to Wales, and stayed at the Ivy Bush Hotel in Carmarthen, where I called on a number of distant relatives and made enquiries as to the situation at Wellfield Road. They were able to tell me little. The aunts had become recluses, no longer seen outside the house, which was dirty and neglected-looking and badly in need of a coat of paint.

  Carmarthen too had changed for me, grown smaller, seedier, drained of all the magic it had had for me, even as a captive, when a child. There had been so many freedoms no one had been able to shut out: the little bright snails, pink, yellow and blue, that had come over the walls in their hundreds to deliver themselves into my eager collector’s hands; the cackle of the knowing jackdaws awaiting their cake; the song of the linnets and the goldfinches I trapped; even the freedom expressed in the smell of the country town itself, spreading through all the lanes and entering every window, which was of ferns, and milk and freshly wetted earth. Above all I remembered with nostalgia the great freedom of escape with Aunt Li to the summit of Pen-lan, followed as we trudged up into the mists by the chiming every quarter-hour of the bells of St Peter’s church, which became thinner and sweeter until they were gone, and I heard nothing more but our footfalls and Aunt Li’s sighs.

  Having spied out the land as best I could, there was no point in putting off the evil hour and we found ourselves at the door of the house in Wellfield Road, which was much smaller and greyer than I remembered, set in a garden that had become a tangled thicket in which brambles predominated. A square of cardboard covered a hole in one of the grubby windows, and the jackdaws nudging and jostling each other peered down at us from the roof. One thing remained in all this change and decay that was almost startlingly well cared for. This was the lawn, as immaculate as ever, and at that moment a grey little wraith of a woman, who I understood could be none other than my Aunt Li, was mowing it with an astonishing, almost frenzied vigour. Spotting us she stopped for a moment to treat us to a hostile glare before starting off again.

  I rang the bell and the door opened instantly, and a firm, spruce, smiling man was there, hand outstretched. He introduced himself as Emrys Davies, a Baptist minister, who knew all about us and our projected visit. ‘Your letter was passed on to me,’ he said. He had put less important things aside to be able to welcome us in a proper fashion. Miss Warren Lewis, he said — referring in this way with formal respect to my Aunt Polly — had not been herself for the past few days.

  We were conducted into her presence by someone who clearly had the run of the house. She sat, very small, shrivelled and shapeless, in a large rustic chair at the head of the scrubbed table and, bending down to kiss her cheek, it seemed to me that the squares and oblongs of grafted skin were even more clearly outlined than before. Small, writhing shapes like those left by worms showed on the areas they left uncovered. Her eyes moved and she made a faint sound like a tchk of exasperation, but there was no way of knowing whether she recognized me.

  All the ugly, functional kitchen objects were in their places as I remembered them, and a trick of memory brought back the faint bloody reek of pigs’ intestines in a tin bath awaiting their transformation into chitterlings. The Reverend stood behind her, bland as a Buddha, like a man displaying a well-grown vegetable at a show of garden produce.

  ‘Auntie,’ I said. ‘Auntie, we’ve come to see you. How are you, Auntie? It’s been a long time.’

  The stripes of tissue that served for lips parted, to release a faint, scratchy whisper.

  The Reverend Davies translated this. ‘Very happy indeed she is that you and your new wife have come here to see her,’ he said.

  The faint throaty sound went on. At one point Aunt Polly nodded her head in emphasis of whatever she had to say, showing a scarred and polished scalp that was now quite bald.

  ‘A long and arduous journey from London as we all know,’ the Reverend Davies went on. ‘Nice it is to be showing such consideration for your aunts. Better it might have been to postpone your visit for one week, as Miss Lewis has just embarked upon a new treatment for her condition, which recently has shown signs of deterioration. After lunch I always insist on a short nap, which is important to conserve her strength. Your Aunt Elizabeth asks to be excused for one moment until she has completed her task in the garden. But your Aunt Anne will be waiting for you in the breakfast room when you are ready.’

  ‘She’ll frighten you out of your wits,’ I warned Ernestina. ‘She can’t stop laughing, and you’ll probably find she’s dressed up as a pirate.’

  The scene that met our eyes in the breakfast room was quite otherwise. Annie sat on the floor, barefoot and dressed in a grubby shift. The hair hung like grey seaweed over her eyes, and the laughter had dried up. She was absorbed in painting a tiny face which had inherited her vacant smile on an acorn, which would when finished be added to a small pile already painted in this way, and there was no sign that she was aware of our presence. This, the Reverend Davies later explained, was a therapeutic task she had learned in a ‘home’ where she had been confined for some time, and where Li, preceding her, had been kept busy endlessly mowing lawns. So this was the end of Grandfather’s once cherished and protected family, and of the little empire founded on spoiled tea that had brought him the Model T Ford, the house with teak doors, the deaconhood of his chapel, the French mistress, the touch of a king’s fingers.

  ‘Mr Lewis, bach,’ the Reverend Davies’ musical voice sounded over my shoulder. ‘Come you, Mr Lewis bach, and Mrs Lewis. Time now to partake of something to refresh the body. You don’t mind in the kitchen? Miss Lewis is happier there. This is my little kingdom, she sometimes says.’

  He had slipped away while we had been occupied with Aunt Annie, and now, as if by magic, places had been set at the table, with napkins folded intricately and thrust into glasses. The Reverend lifted a chicken in a casserole from the oven. ‘Head cook and bottle-washer I am today,’ he said, cheerily. ‘All I’ll be needing now is a chef’s hat.’ He picked up a small brass bell and dingled it, and Annie shuffled into the room carrying a bowl like an oriental beggar, and he sawed delicately at the chicken’s breast to cut off two slices of meat, which he dropped into the bowl before shooing her away. There was no sign of Li but we could hear the irrepressible click and natter of the mower as she trudged backwards and forwards over the lawn.

  ‘Come now, Mi
ss Lewis. Time for a little nourishment, isn’t it?’ The Reverend Davies had taken up a position behind the chair on which Polly sat like a freshly unwrapped mummy, her features blurred from the old injuries and the tiny, black, motionless eyes veiled in a pinkish webbing which the body had provided in an effort to replace the lost lids. He had placed a fork in the small, clawed-up right hand and with it he helped her to skewer a morsel of chicken and lift it to her mouth. ‘Miss Lewis, fach, eat you now,’ he said, cajoling her in the comfortable country style. ‘Necessary it is to refresh the body, as the soul.’ He snatched a beautifully folded napkin from a glass, unfolded it and dabbed at the corners of her lips.

  When it was all over, Ernestina and I took refuge in the drawing room, shabby and smeared now with the grime of years, where the parrot cage of old still stood, and the crack-throated piano had been left open to bare its yellowed teeth, and the ancient clocks, mysteriously kept wound, still disputed the hour of the day.

  ‘Well, what do you think of it all?’ I asked Ernestina and she shook her head.

  I told her in a quick mutter that I’d summed Davies up by voice and manner as a one-time hell-raiser who’d won the battle for the Lord in the hills where sin meant unnatural conduct with animals before moving down to Carmarthen where the devil set up heavier targets.

  A moment later, the Reverend joined us again, more breezy and self-confident and a little less bland in these fusty surroundings than he had been in the kitchen.

  ‘Mr Lewis, far be it from me to wish to pry, but I would like to ask you if you will be visiting your Aunt Margaret in Llanstephan on this occasion?’

  ‘I expect to see a number of my relations. As many as I can. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Will you have heard that there has been a split between the two branches of the family?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard that.’

  ‘Mr David Warren Lewis was a member of my congregation for some years,’ said the Reverend Davies and, studying his face again, I realized that he was probably twenty years older than I had taken him to be, a man comforted by certainties that had kept him young. ‘The Miss Lewises are among my most cherished friends. I can hardly express my admiration for the courage with which they have faced certain afflictions.’

  ‘They’re very brave,’ I said.

  ‘It is my sincere hope that this quarrel that has arisen can be kept within bounds. A pity it would be to upset the delicate process of conciliation.’

  ‘Mr Davies,’ I said, ‘I shall take the opportunity to see a solicitor while I’m here but I hadn’t heard there’d been any conciliation. As I’ve been told this was a take-it-or-leave-it situation. And seeing the state my aunts appear to be in I don’t see that they’re capable of taking such a decision — or any other decision, for that matter — for themselves.’

  ‘They’re not, Mr Lewis, bach. That’s the fact of it. They are obliged to lean upon their friends.’

  ‘Including you.’

  ‘Well naturally, as their pastor, including me.’

  ‘Mr Davies, what are you trying to say? I can’t see quite where all this is leading to. What do you expect me to do?’

  ‘Well, since you put it that way, my advice would be to refrain from raising false hopes in Mrs Margaret Lewis’s bosom. That is what I’m saying to you.’

  ‘And you think I’m likely to do that?’

  ‘Everything is possible. I know Mrs Margaret Lewis well. She’s a very persuasive lady. To be absolutely frank, I would like to reach an agreement with you. Some very small concession might be possible. I can’t promise it. If Mrs Lewis renounces any claims, I’m saying.’

  ‘Much as I appreciate your kindness and your assistance, Mr Davies, this is a matter arising between my aunts. The most I can do is give them my advice. You talk about reaching an agreement with me; but I don’t see where you come into it?’

  Smiling and unruffled as ever, he reached in his pocket, took out a paper and handed it to me. Without reading it, I knew that it was a power of attorney.

  Turning our backs on the depressing situation at Wellfield Road, we drove to Llanstephan to consult with my Aunt Margaret — always my favourite relative — a glowing, pink-cheeked woman who had had the misfortune to marry into the Lewises, and thereafter waste her sweetness on the desert air. She had been a pretty girl apprenticed to a master baker in Lammas Street when my Uncle John had first spotted her. Such essential occupations as bakery, with its sacramental undertones, conferred little prestige in Carmarthen as elsewhere by comparison with parasitic employment, and the scornful nickname Maggie the Bun stuck to her for the rest of her life. When I had lived in Wellfield Road as a child I had sometimes been allowed, as a concession, to visit my warm and hospitable Aunt Margaret in her own home, but she was clearly never welcome in my grandfather’s house. In terms of all the human qualities, particularly of dignity, she was enormously superior to my uncle, and it was a shame that she had been forced by a pregnancy to marry him.

  In Llanstephan they no longer stoned holiday-making miners, and ten years had gone since Mr Williams had put up his placard for the last time warning Sunday visitors to keep holy the Sabbath day, but a tight rein was still kept on religious belief, the social life of the village being firmly bound up with the chapel which took a hard-line fundamentalist approach in matters of faith.

  Ernestina had fallen silent after Wellfield Road, but her spirits revived at the edge of this salty wilderness. Madonna lilies spread their faint, sweet deathliness in every garden. It had rained earlier and now the sound arose everywhere around us of the flinty chuckle of pebbles moved by water in the bright rivulets on the beach. These were the scents and the sounds, and for the eye there was nothing but the healing vision of the great smooth hump of the Silk Back over the water, and in it one last blackened spar of the old wreck, like a finger crooked at eternity. No one here could drag themselves clear from the past. In a nearby cottage curtains were lifted by unseen hands, then let fall, and presently two tall thin women in black, wearing flat wide-brimmed hats of the generation before, came out and began to walk very slowly and in step away from us, as if at the head of an invisible procession. A man with a donkey cart selling cockles and illegally netted sewin had turned the corner. Not a bad place for a widow to retire to, one would have said, after the drab terrace house in Carmarthen.

  ‘Pretty it is, yes indeed,’ my aunt agreed with enthusiasm. We sat in her trellised rose arbour, sipping the slightly salted Lewis tea. Wearied of beauty, she had placed herself with her back to the great seascape. ‘But there’s a sameness, isn’t it?’ she said. She was a philosophic old lady, never a one to complain, and now she faced the reality that there was faint hope of a civilized arrangement with her sisters-in-law or their advisers with profound resignation.

  The problem that troubled her was the encroaching shadow of loneliness. Since she was likely to spend her remaining days in the village, acceptance into the local community was essential, and to do this she would have to become a member and a regular attender of a chapel where services were conducted in Welsh. This, as a townswoman, she spoke in a defective fashion, and was therefore placed at a great disadvantage. The minister had listened sympathetically and proposed a kind of associate membership during a period when she would be expected to learn some biblical texts and essential responses in classical Welsh. On the Sunday when this formal induction into the chapel and the life of the community was to take place, Aunt Margaret, full of hope and enthusiasm, had risen early, collected a large bunch of flowers, put them into a vase, and taken them to the chapel, to be interrupted as she was about to place them at the foot of the pulpit by the minister who rushed in, arms thrown out and shrieking in horror. ‘Paganiad, Mrs Lewis, fach. Paganiad.’

  Aunt Margaret’s paganism would have to be publicly acknowledged and repented in an act of contrition to be spoken in Welsh. It was a proposal that daunted her, but she could expect to be cold-shouldered by the village until she had gone through w
ith it. The inhumanity of her treatment by her sisters-in-law and their legal and spiritual advisers was the least of her problems.

  Chapter Nine

  THERE WAS SOMETHING IN the atmosphere that forbade all reference to our recent experience on the drive back to London, although the conversation was lively enough upon other topics. I suspected with Ernestina that this was an occasion as with a young child when calamity is dismissed without comment. A little to my surprise she seemed anxious to get home. The journey to Wales was to have been part of a larger sight-seeing excursion. She had seen nothing of the country, and I suggested we might make a good start with Bath. But the projected side-trip seemed to have been forgotten. England was failing to live up to her expectations and, if not the English, almost certainly the Welsh too.

  This small misadventure had happened at a time when Ernestina gave the impression of wishing to move further and further out of her father’s orbit, and as a first step we had left London and rented a cottage in a wood at Iver in Buckinghamshire. It was the property of a noblewoman we never met who had filled it with majestic, decrepit beds, with imperial eagles embroidered on their silk counterpanes, and with drinking vessels of all shapes and colours, more than fifty varieties of them, designed to contain every known alcoholic liquor. Here we had lived in the deep shade of the pines for some weeks before Ernestina decided that the countryside no longer held any attraction for her and we found ourselves back in Gordon Street once more.

  The day after our return from Wales Ernestina went through what I was now beginning to recognize as a recurrent phase. She was a girl who needed to laugh, and there were times when she would commit herself to an orgy of laughter, provoked in any way she could find. She had found that the easiest way out was to visit one or more of the so-called news cinemas that had recently opened in London to provide a short programme of news-reels interspersed with cartoons and knockabout comedy items. The first day back in London was spent in entertainments of this kind to which I did not accompany her. Apart from that she settled to reread old favourites from a collection of humorous writings she possessed, including much of Wodehouse, Jerome K. Jerome, and a prized hoard of excellent comic papers sent to her from America. After two days of this treatment she had quite recovered from whatever it was she had suffered, her giggles subsided and she could cope with the normal solemnity of the world.