by Carys Davies
Well she would not sink under it. No she wouldn’t. She’d experienced other setbacks in her life, other disappointments and shocks of one sort or another. It would be the same with this one, she would endure it like anything else, and wasn’t it true anyway, that in time all things passed? This would too. There was a remedy, in the end, for everything. She just had to find it.
When she and Fowler were inside she told him that Tom had gone into town for salt and oil and needles and wouldn’t be back till nightfall. Fowler nodded and asked if he might tip the water from his hat into her bucket of soapy water.
‘Of course,’ she said—cold, prim, barely polite.
She invited him to sit, and said she would boil the water for some tea.
At the stove she busied herself with the kettle, wondering what he wanted, why he’d come. She wondered if he was going to sit there and look at her in that way of his that made her want to get up and go somewhere away from him, into a different room, behind a door or a wall or a screen, so he couldn’t do it. Somehow it made everything worse, being looked at, especially by someone like Henry Fowler. She’d rarely seen any one who looked as seedy as he did. She wondered if he’d been a convict.
He’d visited them three times before now, once not long after they’d arrived and then again a few months after that, and then a third time just last week. Each time he’d come wearing the same grimy outfit, the same crumpled shirt and ancient sheepskin waistcoat, the same greasy serge pants, the same bit of cotton rag about his thin neck. The only thing she noticed that was different about him today was that he seemed to have brought nothing with him; whenever he’d come to visit them before, he’d always brought some kind of neighbourly gift. The first time it had been a quarter pound of his own butter, the second time a jar of pumpkin seeds. Last time, a loaf. This time his small weather-beaten hands were empty; today Henry Fowler seemed to have brought nothing but himself.
He was forty-five years old—a small, scrawny-looking man with bow legs and rough brown hands no bigger than a woman’s.
At sunrise he’d stood with one of those hands resting on the wooden rail of his rickety veranda at the far end of the valley, watching his new neighbour’s black horse and dray moving slowly along the road in the direction of the town, wondering if the handsome husband was travelling by himself—if the young wife would be alone there today.
It was six months now since he’d watched them come in on the same road with a pile of furniture tied onto the dray. Since then he’d seen her three times. Three times he’d gone over there with a neighbourly gift. Three times he’d walked about outside with the husband, admiring the progress they’d made. The beets and peas and beans, the potatoes and the fat new pigs. The two hundred chickens, the cow. Three times he’d sat with the two of them inside the house drinking tea and for weeks now he’d been spending the evenings sitting on his veranda and looking out across the grassy desert towards their place.
Susan. That was her name. Susan Boyce. For weeks he’d been thinking about her and practically nothing else. Her stiff, cold, proud-looking face, the closed-off, haughty way she had of speaking to him, the way she couldn’t stand him looking at her.
When he could no longer see the dray on the horizon, when it had disappeared completely from view, he went inside for a while and then he laced up his boots and put on his hat and climbed up onto the seat of his high sloping buggy and set off along the track down the valley to her house.
He sat now, at her table, tamping the tobacco into the bowl of his pipe with his little thumb, watching her at the stove.
It’s true that Henry Fowler still had the look of a convict about him. He had the look of an old sailor too, and of a fairground monkey someone had dressed up in a pair of pants and a waistcoat and an old felt hat. He was small and sun-wizened and ugly and as he sat now, listening to the wind and the rain and the snuffling of Thomas Boyce’s pigs and the crackle of the fire in the stove and the simmering of the water in the kettle on top of it, he was sure he could also hear the beating of his own heart.
The fact is, Fowler was even more nervous now that he was here than he’d expected to be.
His sheepskin waistcoat creaked; he didn’t know where to begin. He’d rehearsed everything before he came, had stood for an hour or more before the mirror looking at his own half-naked body, and it had all gone smoothly enough. The words had come without too much difficulty. Now, looking at the other man’s wife standing at the stove with her slender back turned towards him, they escaped him.
He took a few quick puffs on his pipe and decided the best thing to do would be to undress.
He took off his waistcoat and placed it over the back of the chair, unknotted the grimy square of cotton he wore folded around his throat and laid that on top of the waistcoat. He undid the buttons on his crumpled linen shirt until the whole thing was hanging down from the canvas belt that held up his trousers, and at that moment Susan Boyce turned. She turned and screamed and dropped the teapot, and covered her mouth with her hand.
Henry Fowler’s narrow pigeon chest was lumpy and shrivelled like the map of some strange unknown country. It had a kind of raised border all around it that was ropy and pink; inside it the skin had a cooked, roasted look to it—it was blackened and leathery and hard, like a mummy’s, or a creature that has lain for a thousand years in a forgotten bog.
He turned. Three dark triangles the colour of ripe Victoria plums decorated his shoulders; below them and covering most of the rest of his back was another dark shape, also plum-coloured—the puckered print of something large and round. Low on his hip, just above the canvas belt that held up his trousers, there was a firework splatter of a dozen deep, wrinkled divots.
‘My wife,’ said Henry Fowler, the words finally coming to his rescue, ‘was bigger than me.’
Looking down and behind at his own ruined body he explained how he’d got his blackened chest (a jug of boiling water from the copper), the three dark triangles on his back (her smoothing iron), the big round brand beneath them (the frying pan), the divots (the red-hot poker), and then with his voice dropping very low he told Susan Boyce that there was something else too, below his canvas belt, but he would not show her that. No. If she wanted to guess the worst thing a bad-tempered wife might do with a pair of sharp-bladed dressmaking shears, then she would have it.
Susan Boyce said nothing, only looked.
‘She is under the beets,’ said Fowler quietly—one night when she was sleeping he’d stabbed her through the heart with the sharp stubby blade of a paring knife and carried her outside and buried her with all her things: her skirts and her clogs and the pins from her hair, her frying pan and the jug from the old copper, her iron and the poker and the cutting-out shears and everything else she’d ever owned or touched that reminded him of her and might make him think she was coming for him again—anything that might make him think he could hear the clatter of her furious clogs charging towards him across the hard clay floor.
In town, he said, he’d put it about that she’d run off and left him.
Susan Boyce looked at him.
Her face was still, without expression, and Henry Fowler thought to himself, I have made a mistake. I am wrong about it all.
He had been so sure before but now that he was standing in front of her with his waistcoat over the back of the chair and his neck-cloth lying on the seat and his shirt-sleeves hanging down like a skipping rope between his knees Henry Fowler said to himself: I have watched her here in this house, moving about in her shawl and her plain high-necked gown, passing behind his chair and pouring his tea, and I have caught the scent of something that isn’t here, and when he returns tonight she will tell him what I have told her and he will fetch a few of the men from town and they will come with their shovels and dig under the beets and they will look at the marks on me and I will tell them how I got them and they will look at each other and remind themselves that Henry Fowler is nothing but a seedy old convict with a bit of land to hi
s name and they will shake their heads and call me a liar and then they will hang me.
He began to scrabble between his bandy legs for the cuffs of his shirt, telling himself that as soon as he was dressed he would climb up into his old buggy and head off back up the valley and once he was home he would think about what to do, whether he should sit there on his veranda and wait until they came for him, or if he should leave tonight and go somewhere they wouldn’t be able to find him, or if he should come back in the morning and talk to Boyce and explain things to him in his own words so he would understand. He bent to the chair where he’d laid his clothes and picked up his neck-cloth, looped it behind his dipped head and pushed his arms into the sleeves of his dangling shirt, and he would have left then, probably without saying another word, probably just reaching out for his hat and heading for the door, but by the time he’d raised himself again and looked up into the room to where Susan Boyce was standing, she had begun to unhook her bodice.
She was loosening her skirt and pulling her chemise over her head and undoing the tapes of her petticoats and then she was letting the whole lot slide to the floor around her feet on top of the broken remains of the teapot and its lake of cooling water until she was standing before him in nothing but her woollen vest and her cotton drawers, and then she was taking those off too. She did it quickly, hurriedly, as if she thought she might never again get the chance to show him, as if she thought, even now, he might not be on her side.
She looked smaller, without her clothes, different in every possible way, turning in front of him, displaying the split, puffy flesh of her thighs and buttocks, the mottled green, black and yellow of her belly, the long, weeping purplish thing that started under the hair at her neck and ran down the back of her like a half-made ditch. She came towards him, stepping through the puddle of tea and over the piled-up heap of her things. She took his small brown hand and lifted it to her cheek and closed her eyes like someone who hadn’t known till now how tired they were, and then she asked him, would he help her, please, to dig the hole.
ON COMMERCIAL HILL
HE MET HER, my English grandmother, on a chilly summer afternoon on the beach at Southerndown. She was sitting on a rock, on top of her coat, smoking a cigarette and he—I heard this from someone, from Daddy or Mair—was enchanted. He asked her if he could sit down next to her and, no doubt because he was such a big and handsome man, she said yes, and he lit a cigarette of his own and she told him her name, which was Agnes, and he told her his, which was Will.
That day the two of them walked along the road from Southerndown to Ogmore, and from Ogmore over the dunes at Merthyr Mawr to Ewenny, where they watched a pot being fired with a blue treacle glaze, and before she left him to go back to the hotel where she worked, she let him hold her hand.
He came back the next week, and the week after that, and every day that they didn’t see each other they wrote to each other, and at the end of four weeks he brought her home for the first time, up on the train to the valleys, and it was there that she discovered something about him that he hadn’t told her. Perhaps she overheard it somewhere, or maybe someone made a point of telling her, thinking it was something she ought to know. Anyway, when she asked him about it, he waved his hand and told her it was nothing. It was a daft embarrassing thing that had happened a long time ago, a story about him some people still liked to tell, but it wasn’t important and it didn’t mean anything any more—the whole thing was a remnant of his youth, something from so long ago he could hardly believe he’d had anything to do with it. Most people had forgotten it and so had he and if anyone ever mentioned it again she should take no notice because he never did any more, and when she said, ‘Really?’ he said, ‘Yes, really.’
Three months after that they were married.
He was thirty-five years old, quite a bit older than she was, and his full name was William Illtyd Parry.
William and Agnes Parry.
They moved into a house on Victoria Street, next to the Co-op, and had three children: the two boys, quickly, first my father Emyr, then my Uncle Tudor, then my Aunty Mair, three years later. I still have a photograph of Will with Mair—at Southerndown again. They are both eating ice-cream. She is wearing a pink ruched bathing suit with a frill around her bottom and he has rolled up his trousers to just below the knee and he is actually wearing a knotted handkerchief on his head. I never knew people really did that till I saw that picture of him. He is holding her hand. He looks happy. He does not look like someone who wants for anything. ‘It is enough for me,’ he seems to be saying with his sunburned face and his big smile, ‘to be standing here on the beach at Southerndown in the sunshine with my baby daughter eating ice-cream.’
He worked at the marshalling yard, and at some point he bought the four-room house on Commercial Hill, the one I visited as a child when Agnes was still living there, and people have told me that when he talked about his life at that time he spoke of good suppers and sweet bathed babies and the peace and quiet of the evening. It gave him joy, he used to say, to walk down the high pavements of the sloping streets and feel the mountain in his back and the closeness of the houses in their long staggered rows, the lighted windows of the shops. He never understood why anyone wouldn’t want to live their whole life there. He could not think of a better place on earth.
And then the day came when he was promoted at the marshalling yard and he was sent off in the evening to the Red Cow for an hour because Agnes and the children were getting a party ready for him—sandwiches and paper decorations and a cake with candles on it because even though it wasn’t his birthday the children begged for candles and Agnes laughed and said, Oh all right then, we can have candles. It was supposed to be a surprise but he knew what they were up to. Mair had spent most of the day behind the settee with a bottle of glue and a pair of scissors and a packet of crêpe paper. All afternoon he’d heard the sound of her trying to be quiet. The boys had shut themselves in the back with Agnes and for hours there’d been a clatter of pans and spoons and jolly shrieks and shouts.
And now he was sitting by himself at one of the brown varnished tables in the lounge bar of the Red Cow when his friends came in, Tom Bara and Cy Fish and Jack Midnight and Will America, all of them looking shifty and serious, and when he said to Tom Bara, ‘What is it then, Tom?’ Tom looked sideways at the others and then at his feet and said, ‘She is back.’
I have often pictured him, nineteen years old, standing there that day in the chapel: dark wavy hair greased neatly in place, neck scrubbed and pink from the bath, starched white collar; waiting. Standing there like an idiot, red-faced and sweating for an hour and a half; everyone whispering and coughing and shuffling their feet and turning their heads to see if she’d arrived yet; some people looking at each other and nodding to indicate that they’d seen it coming, a girl like that. The minister eventually touching his arm and saying, Come on then Will boy, perhaps it’s time to call it a day.
‘Where is she?’ he said now to Tom Bara. Tom shook his head and looked at his feet and then over at the door that divided the lounge bar of the Red Cow from the passage outside.
‘Tell her to bugger off, Will,’ said Tom. ‘Tell her she has come too late.’
At the house Agnes said to Tudor, ‘Go fetch your father, we are ready.’
But Tudor was fussing with the cake, and so was Emyr, both of them trying to fit the last of the candles into its metal flower.
‘You then,’ she called out from the back to Mair, still busy in the front room with her decorations. So it was Mair who ran off up the hill to the Red Cow to call him home; Mair who ran up the hill to the opaque glass door between the outside passage and the lounge bar and found a stranger in a brown hat at the threshold; her father rising slowly from his chair, all his silent friends behind him.
Mair remembers standing there, bits of crêpe paper stuck to her cardigan and her small gluey hands. She remembers that he looked at her and closed his eyes; that a breeze blew in from the passa
geway, lifting a few strands of his hair, which then settled in a slightly different place, lightly across his forehead. And what she also remembers—Mair who is old now, Mair whose grasp of the here-and-now is getting frailer by the day but whose memory of the past is clear and sharp and fierce and abiding—what Mair remembers is him stepping forward in the stone-still room towards the door, opening wide his arms to her and saying, ‘My lovely girl.’
JUBILEE
STANDING NOW AT her shoulder, no longer caring much about his future, Arthur Pritt began to speak.
In a quiet voice he apologised for the tediousness of the day, for the marching bands and the pipers, for the choirs and the speeches and the dreadful cacophony of the morris dancers on the cobbles; for the boring gifts. In a whisper he told her he wished they’d been able to conjure something new for her, something splendid and fascinating and unthought of instead of the dull nonsense she must have seen a thousand times before in a thousand other places.
At ten o’clock he had been at the station with the rest of the town to greet her and had known not to expect a happy smiling face. He’d known to expect something miserable and grim-looking, and with her short neck and her pouchy eyes and her sad downturned mouth she’d reminded him, emerging slowly from her compartment, of a hundred-year-old tortoise he and Alice had once seen at the bottom of a dusty pit at the zoo in Calcutta.
He’d wondered if it was true what people said, that she had her husband’s clothes laid out for him every morning, his stockings and his shoes, his diamond star, his sash and garter, as if she could not let go of the hope that he would come back to her one day from the dead.