by Siân James
‘Great Heavens! I hope she reported him to PC Jones.’
‘Don’t make fun of me, Rhian. If he’s not a spy, why isn’t he in the army?’
‘Well, I suppose he could be too old. I should think he’d be about the same age as Gwynn Morgan, Art, who seems to be a friend of his.’
She sighs again as she carries the meat to the table.
‘That Gwynn Morgan. He’s another fine one. Always has to be different, that man. Why doesn’t he dress like a teacher, for a start? Probably fancies himself as one of these artists. And his wife is some sort of foreigner. It wouldn’t surprise me to find that Gwynn Morgan is another of these conchies, like Mr Roberts.’
‘Or a spy. I know for a fact that he’s got a pair of binoculars.’
Huw’s parents have an oppressively ugly house. It’s crammed full of nasty new furniture: a three-piece suite and pouffe in cabbage-green velvet with bronze braiding, tables and chairs and an outsize sideboard in shiny, yellow wood and an Axminster carpet – A1 quality – in autumn’s most vulgar shades. Every flat surface is covered with a display of glass and china ornaments which shiver when you shut a door.
To me, every object seems one too many, but Huw’s mother cherishes each one, tenderly recalling its date of purchase and price, and dusting or polishing or blowing on it every day. Almost every week she’s altered the position of something or other; the double-decker tea-trolley or the brown standard lamp or the large technicolour painting of Cader Idris, and I’m called upon to comment on the result. ‘Oh yes,’ I say, nodding my head sagely and fast to indicate that she’s now got it to a T ... And I’ll be equally enthusiastic when it’s back in its original place the following week.
Huw’s father is proud only of how much it all cost. ‘No one else in Llanfair has got things as expensive as these,’ he says. ‘Well, it’ll all be yours and Huw’s when we’ve gone.’
His wife frowns, none too pleased to be reminded of that day she’ll have to leave even the Al Axminster and the Royal Derby plates behind her.
The house where I was brought up is different, the poverty of generations of my farming family ensuring that nothing was ever replaced. Most of the furniture is scrubbed pine, centuries old, well-worn but still reflecting something of the skill and integrity of the country craftsman who made it. The floor is of blue flagstones.
After Sunday School, I write to Huw.
Dear Huw
It’s been another quiet week here. I wonder where you are and what you’re doing. There are so many rumours. Everyone seems to think we’ll be hearing something as soon as spring comes, something momentous. The papers are full of phrases like ‘the beginning of the end’. Whatever happens, you know that I’ll be thinking of you and praying for your safety.
I bought myself a new dress yesterday, dark blue and quite plain. Well, I thought I needed something to cheer me up, I suppose. I went to the new shop on the prom. It was rather expensive, but luckily I’d happened to meet Mr Morgan, Art, when I was having a coffee in Glyn Owen’s and he said he could get a discount for me because he does the window-dressing there. Anyway, he came with me and the owner, Mr Tremlett Browne, took a third off the price. Mr Morgan asked after you and sends his regards.
Mr Roberts’s sermon this morning was on forgiveness. Your mother was, as usual, annoyed because he prays for all wounded soldiers instead of only ours. Mr Martin, Horeb, is much more patriotic, it seems. She wishes she could go to Horeb for the duration, but your father declares he couldn’t share bed or board with a Methodist so she’ll have to put up with poor Mr Roberts. Anyway, I like him. He may be a bit of a pacifist, but though people like to forget it these days, Christ himself had unfortunate leanings that way.
Your mother cooked a lovely dinner – lamb and mint-sauce (bottled).
I have no more news, so I send you my usual love.
Your wife,
Rhian
I wish I hadn’t bought it, that new dress. All is vanity, sayeth the preacher. I wish I could stop thinking of the way Gwynn Morgan looked at me when he saw me in it. All day I’ve tried hard to think of other things, serious things; war and death, oh, and the moral degeneration which is worse than death. But then I remember that look, that emotion encircling us, and happiness breaks in again. I can’t seem to help myself.
Three
WHEN I GO HOME to the farm on Wednesday evening, I find my mother playing the harmonium to her POWs. The lorry taking them back to camp breaks down fairly regularly on the snow-bound hills, so they often have a happy half-hour
like this.
At least, it’s happy for my mother. The POWs have a tired, strained look; if it’s appreciation, it’s the sort too deep for expression.
They’re a strange pair, Gino and Martino: quiet and rather sullen. I don’t mean that there’s anything strange about them being quiet and sullen; after all they are prisoners and hundreds of miles from home. The odd thing, I suppose, is that most of the others are usually bubbling over with mirth and friendliness.
My mother thinks her two come from a backward, rural area where there’s very little culture. I suppose she’d hoped for a tenor and a bass who’d sing Verdi as they drove the plough; these two hardly talk, even to each other. She’s desperately sorry for people who have neither music nor religion – Roman Catholicism being, of course, empty ritual and ceremony – so she tries to make it up to them by playing them Welsh hymns.
‘Buon giorno, buon giorno.’
They turn their meek eyes towards me.
I try to ask them what sort of day they’ve had. Sometimes my terrible Italian raises a smile, but not tonight.
I kiss my mother’s cheek. ‘Don’t stop because I’m here,’ I tell her, knowing there’s little hope of it.
‘Well, I’ll go on till the lorry comes. It shouldn’t be many minutes.’
My mother has never had an hour’s musical tuition in her life, but is able to play any tune as long as it’s a hymn and sad. ‘Why have we always got to be carrying the cross?’ I used to ask her when I was a child. ‘Why is it always our turn?’
It suddenly strikes me that my mother has become almost pretty again; she even seems to have put on a little weight. Of course her skin has been ruined by rough weather and rougher treatment, but her eyebrows are finely marked, her nose is straight and beautiful and she has a lovely delicacy of ear and jaw-bone. Strands of hair which have escaped from her bun are curling around her face in a way I would think contrived if I didn’t know better. My mother is as God made her and it’s not too bad.
It must be admitted that her Italians have been a great help to her. My father died during my last year in college four years ago and our helper, Dafi Blaenhir, who was about twenty years older, died early the following year.
I’ll never forget how Dafi Blaenhir cried at my father’s funeral. My mother and I were calm and tearless. I know I felt rigid with pain, as though all the normally soft and yielding parts of my body had been calcified, so that even to sigh made my lungs creak. Dafi Blaenhir cried for us like a hired mourner.
My mother, noticing his wet cheeks, had given him a large white handkerchief to take to chapel, but he must have forgotten it. Anyway, it would have taken a bath towel to stem the flow; his stiff Sunday collar and his flannel shirt-front were soon limp as dish cloths. He’d never got married; my father, I think, meant more to him than his closest relatives.
My father left school at fourteen but went on studying all his life. I think he bought every Welsh book as it came out, poetry, short stories, essays, criticism, and read them all, slowly and thoroughly. He was a poet too, as many farmers are in this part of the world; the long days of hard but repetitive work and the beauty of hill, field and sky, seeming to make a man eager to struggle with words and prosody. He rarely came home to supper without having a new englyn to recite to us – only a four-lined verse, admittedly, but one of formidable complexity, with set rhythm, rhymes and alliterative pattern. Sometimes the completed verse
wouldn’t rise above the nature of an exercise: something to occupy the mind, something a man cobbled together when alone, finding the knack of it easier with practice. Often, though, it would soar; an englyn, like a sonnet, having some perfection of form which makes the sum of its lines greater than its parts.
When he’d finished, Dafi Blaenhir would gasp his appreciation and my father used to say that that ‘Whew’ meant more to him than all the prizes he won at local or national eisteddfod.
Gino and Martino get to their feet as soon as they hear the lorry arriving, and I can’t say I blame them.
‘Pasta for supper?’ I ask them, miming extravagantly. ‘Spaghetti? Macaroni?’
‘Bara caws,’ Gino says firmly.
‘Ah, yes. Bread and cheese for us – pasta for you.’ I’m smiling so broadly that it’s beginning to hurt my cheeks.
‘Buon noce.’
‘Nos da,’ they reply as, grave and unsmiling, they make their way to the door.
‘Well, Mam,’ I say when they’ve gone, ‘I don’t know that a smattering of Welsh is going to do them much good when they get back to Italy.’
‘You can be quite sure it’ll do them no harm, anyway. It’s a way of communicating with them, girl, pointing to this and that and offering them the Welsh word. I can’t always remember the English, you know that. And they like people to make a bit of an effort. Old Hetty, now, she always stops for a chat, tells them the names of her thirteen children and where they’re buried, poor things. They’re always glad to see old Hetty.’
I’m restless again and make an excuse to go outside for a breath of air before supper.
The moon hasn’t risen, but the snow casts a sharp, blue light on the track up to Rhydgaled. The hedges are bright with frost. There’s no wind.
We hardly ever have snow in Llanfair; when we do, it never settles. But here, only fourteen miles inland and about a thousand feet up, it’s a different world. I was often unable to go to the County School for a week or two at a time. I’d fight my way down the lane to the main road only to find that the bus driver had already turned back to town, deciding not to risk the last few miles. Stiff with cold I’d wait the required half-hour, then trudge home again to claim a second breakfast. To tell you the truth, I rather liked those days of unofficial holidays, sitting in the kitchen immersed in a book, a blanket over my knees, occasionally having to stop reading to minister to a tiny, half-dead lamb that my father brought in and thrust at me.
I was a dab hand with lambs. My father never let me have one as a pet, though. After a couple of hours, very occasionally a whole day and a night, it would be out again, roughing it with a foster-mother. There’s no room for sentimentality on a farm. I understand that now.
I stumble against a dark, ivy-covered bush, waking some small birds taking shelter there against the long, cold night. They scold sleepily as hens do when disturbed. I realise that I’ve almost forgotten the smell of a hen-house. Perhaps I should have stayed in the country and married a farmer: a rich farmer.
I turn back towards the house and see all the fields flooded with snow. The evening star is bright. Everything is sacred.
But all’s not well here about my heart.
There’s still no word from Huw. And however hard I try, I can’t stop thinking about Gwynn Morgan; whether it would be so dreadfully wrong for me to be just a tiny bit friendly with him.
In school today he asked me whether I ever went to the Ship in the evening. He knows very well that I don’t, I’ve never been to a public house in my life. I wish I could talk to my mother about him, but I can’t. I love her dearly, but I’ve never been able to talk to her and she’s never been able to talk to me. ‘You know what I mean’ is the nearest she ever gets to anything personal. ‘She was a lovely looking woman, but... you know what I mean.’ ‘They had one trouble... you know what I mean.’
The supper is on the table when I get back; bacon broth with carrots and leeks, fresh, home-made bread. As I eat, I’m still fumbling for words. I’ve got an hour before the last bus to Llanfair.
I take a deep, deep breath. ‘Do you remember my old art teacher?’ I ask her. ‘Gwynn Morgan from Nantgoch?’
‘Of course I do, girl. He painted that picture of you, years ago. What about him?’
‘Well... he’s been... quite friendly lately... you know what I mean.’
‘You don’t say. Whatever happened? Whatever did you do? And him with such a fine-looking wife.’
‘The worst of it is, that I myself...’
She looks at me with narrowed eyes. ‘No, no. I’ll never believe that. You’ve never done anything to be ashamed of.’
‘Oh, I haven’t. I’m talking about feelings.’
She sighs. ‘I suppose there’s no answer to feelings,’ she says. ‘We’ve all had those. But if I know anything about it, you’ll come out on the other side with your love for Huw intact and strengthened. The important thing is that you don’t... you know what I mean.’
‘You make it sound so easy.’
‘No, no. Life isn’t easy. I’d never tell anyone that life is easy.’
That seems to be it. She’s spoken. Life isn’t easy.
We sit silently then, thinking about wars and poverty and illness, about the shortness of life, the certainty of death. My father was old before he was fifty. How long will my mother last here on her own, carrying every drop of water from the pump outside, tending her fowls and her animals, digging the garden, making her own bread, working sixteen or seventeen hours a day like her mother and grandmother before her?
I think of the word delight.
Bus journeys are such a nuisance, all that jolting about giving you... feelings... you know what I mean.
It isn’t right to be twenty-four and living like a nun. I’m thinking about Huw, how it was for us. Very awkward, that first time. He didn’t like to admit that he was inexperienced too; men don’t, I suppose, especially when they’re four years older. Oh, it was pretty awful. If only we could have laughed about it, but that night it seemed the most serious matter in the world.
After the first few times it improved. Well, it had to, it couldn’t have got worse.
After the first few times, I quite liked it. Having him on top of me, that weight. Oh happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony. Ilona Hughes says that where sex is concerned, a woman has to take charge, but I don’t understand what she means and I don’t like to ask. Does she mean that a woman has to decide whether she wants to have sex or not? If so, I agree with her, of course. But once it’s all started, I don’t see how a woman can be much in charge. Oh, I’m so inexperienced. I didn’t really like being turned this way and that, but I suppose it could have been wonderful. And how do you know unless you try?
Great Heavens, now I’m at least halfway to committing adultery with Gwynn Morgan, Art. And in that particular way I didn’t even like with Huw. And, oh, it’s quite thrilling. ‘This can’t be me – it’s just my body being thrown about on this broken-down country bus. Only another couple of miles. I’m pressing my thighs together and my nipples are hard as peas.
A woman sitting in the front turns round and stares at me. Can she know what’s going in in my mind? Oh, now I’ve admitted that my mind is also involved. Adultery is a frightening concept.
The little staring woman is lurching back along the bus towards me. I recognise her. She’s Miriam somebody and she goes to our chapel at home. Miriam Lloyd, I think.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘and how did you find your mother? I’d have come to sit by you straight away, only I didn’t recognise you in your beret. It was the conductor, Wil Aberbanc, who told me who you were.’
I don’t make any reply. I’m finding it as much as I can do to breathe slowly and evenly.
‘She’s much better at last, isn’t she? It’s taken her a long time, poor thing. Four years isn’t it, since your poor father passed away and left her with those 25 acres and no help. But now... well, who can blame her, I say. I mean, it’s been more tha
n a decent interval, hasn’t it?’
Gwynn Morgan slips away as I try to fathom what this round-faced, curly-haired little busybody is trying to tell me.
I confirm that it is indeed four years since my father’s death and suddenly recall how much prettier and younger my mother was looking. Who can possibly be responsible? Who is there? I try to think of some middle-aged widower or bachelor somewhere in the neighbourhood, there’s certainly no one in our chapel, and where would she meet anyone else?
‘Tell me, now, have you met him, yet?’ she asks me. ‘Being a scholar, I suppose you’d be able to talk to him in his own language.’
Rather prettily, I disclaim all pretensions to scholarship, but decline to offer any other information. She’ll get nothing out of me. Even if I knew anything, she’d get nothing out of me.
I think of Gino and Martino, docile as a pair of sheep in the front parlour. My mother did buy them a scarf each for Christmas.
‘Well, here we are back in town,’ I exclaim in a high artificial voice which I hardly recognise. ‘I’m so glad you came to sit by me. I did enjoy our little chat.’
I smile brilliantly in her direction and hurry off the bus.
The depot is almost opposite the Ship and I’ve never felt so tempted to go in. I can’t see that going to a public house is so sinful. Ilona Hughes and Denzil are sure to be there and there’ll be people smoking and chatting, perhaps even laughing. People do laugh in Llanfair, though not usually when I’m around.
A tall man looms out of the darkness, comes towards me and takes my elbow. It’s Gwynn Morgan. Thank goodness it’s dark and he can’t see how my cheeks are burning.
‘Ilona Hughes said you’d been up to see your mother,’ he says, ‘so I thought I’d meet the bus and walk home with you.’