What I Know I Cannot Say

by What I Know I Cannot Say (retail) (epub)

  * * * * *

  He sat, disconsolate, on the shabby pink candlewick counterpane of the room’s single bed. He spread out the works, drawings and paintings, which had once unlocked the closure of past memory. He knew what had been unlocked had given him a different space to locate himself in between the harsh lines of his early drawings and the depthless abstraction that would come later. It was how the horror had been faced down. This is what he needed Bran, or someone, to know – and that it was key. He decided to try to explain that the scorn they all felt from his tongue during the last strike was not from anger, but from love. This was the bullion of his values, he wanted to say, not some kind of promissory political note to cash in via a Utopian treasury of ideology. That he had been shown how to live. That this could extend beyond the personal, but in any case existed even if it failed to do so. Not activism. Not even consciousness. Not enough so, anyway. That what he had once learned was, for him, the only true justification of that final strike’s ultimate thrashing about in a death throe of common dismay. That it was a convulsion of rebellion. A testament of love for some ways of living that had once been glimpsed and sometimes enacted. And that he knew it was being betrayed, that dream of reality, by themselves as they role-played it into oblivion.

  He would need to tell her about Mona. He did not know how he could. He had failed to tell his own son. If he tried it all came in cameos of truthfulness that were also meaningless. She had, as everyone said who knew them then in the immediate years after the war, saved him. From what? From himself, they’d say. He had drifted back, almost despite himself, to the coalfield. A different valley. A different town. Fierce drinking in the dozens of pubs that winked at you over such a few miles, walking from lodgings to the pit to the town and its villages, to a dance, to a meeting hall. He went through the alphabet to recall them all from A to Z, from the Albion Hotel to the Zetetics Tavern, where they drank bitter and whiskey on the weekend – men only except for the jug-and-bottle siderooms for women fetching and quaffing milk stout, the colliers standing at the bar in battledress and berets, safety helmets scorned underground by these men, coal dirt and grime scrubbed off – and into affiliated clubs on Sundays when the pubs were shut, girls fed port-and-lemon in the lounge bars and taken outside, later, into back lane gwlis or abandoned mountainside quarries.

  More pubs than chapels. More drinkers than believers. More standing room for boozers than pews for worshippers. He had sunk into his own oblivion, and relished it. He would never have met Mona nor have wanted to meet anyone like her, until, that is, he did. Bran would assume he meant passion or sex or perhaps love, but it was not any of those things, at least not in themselves. It was instead the possibility he saw that he would no longer need to be alive for himself alone. It was, Mona had said, his vulnerability, not his strength, which had drawn her to him. The strength, she’d said, was all-too-bloody obvious and came out in him as unflinching, sullen and isolate. There was, she said, no connective tissue, as if all his nerve-ends had been burned out. She set out to reignite him.

  He was thirty-three when they met in 1948. She was ten years younger, a trained primary school teacher and the niece of a fellow coal-face worker, a bachelor who’d casually invited him, after a Sunday lunchtime session in the Albion, to his younger sister’s home for “a cooked dinner”. Mona had been there, small and pert, her hair dark and short, her tongue quick and vivid. Her parents, William and Maggie Roberts, miner and housewife, were lively talkers, too, and active in the Communist Party branch. Neither he later nor Mona then ever joined the Party as such, less out of negative conviction but more out of an acceptance that fell short of a formal political allegiance; but both were absorbed by its wider culture. He remembered the issues, the debates, the quarrels, that turn-of-the-tide which they first expected and then anticipated flowing on into the next decade, even long after it had ebbed away. Looking back, the detail of intent was still sharply defined. Then, all blurred and stalled. An empty echo, because there was no conceivable effectiveness to conjure up anymore. What had been ensured for him, though, was the desire he had found to fulfill himself. But only for her, so that the physical bond could become, beyond inevitable change, an unbreakable emotion.

  For Bran to begin to grasp what he had gained and what was lost in the years after the war, she would need to feel how the limitations of his world and of himself became distant horizons to be reached, not personalised boundaries to be broached. This was what love with Mona had become. And when they made love or sated all the impossible, ravenous hunger which makes lovers, for a time anyway, immortal and the actual business of living immaterial, then they embodied the future they would, so unexpectedly, share.

  What others would depict as the dull monotony of the fifties, a conformist decade sandwiched between the upheaval of the forties and the release of the sixties, he had felt as fulfillment. For him and, he suspected, others of his kind – and generationally there were many – domesticity was revolutionary. What might be seen as routine, for men as much as for women, was revelatory: the world could, in instances, be put on hold. Between the bedlam of war and the narcissism of plentifulness they nestled, safe and quiet, from all discontents. If he thought, carefully, back to what had been lost, it was this momentary stasis which haunted him most. And if he could no longer, with any certainty of sensation, taste the soft and cool freshness of her skin or scent the delicate air which surrounded her, he could still see the spiral of green apple skin which she could pare expertly away from the flesh of the fruit they would share, and could look again in memory at the curl and tuft of her hair as it bunched at the nape of a neck he could still see himself, awake more than in any dream, bending down to kiss. His few years with Mona were brief, but their very brevity weighted them, one by one and moment by moment, with an intensity that bore down on him. He made a dry-point etching for each year they had had together. Always a fern, or rather the imprint of a fern. A fossil preserved inside a lump of shining coal and crushed beneath the earth for eons of time. Crack open the coal lump and there it was, each frond and tendril as it once was and will always now be. He made the imprint into an ethereal, ghostly tracing, a defiant whisper of what was a presence yet, despite all time. Even so it was only a hint of what he knew he had been once promised, shown and given, as an exit from the ruins.

  The year before he married Mona, eight years after Cassino, one year before the gadarene goggling at the Coronation, six years before she would die haemorrhaging unstoppably while giving birth to Billy, he had made a small oil painting on board. His work in those years, after the pit and into the adult education classes that had led to art school, was mostly in watercolour and mostly landscapes, swirling and swoony arabesques of road and hill and buildings. It was a different kind of mapping of the places he knew. He ingested their undeniable shapes, often grotesque and unwieldy as places for people to inhabit, and, with what he had come to know, he digested their meaning as to how they had shaped a latent aspiration. He believed in this, and he believed in the wider values which love had, at last, caused him to embrace. The oil painting, though, was different again. He had not intended it for storytelling, but when it was done, he had seen immediately how numinous it was in its placing of people within its frame.

  The summation was in the title he had given to the work. It was just a name – yet it was, he knew in 1952, a name as closed off and threatening as it was beckoning and seductive. The name was “Glamorgan”, and the painting was, in its effect at least, a bridge. From its depths it led the eye out of the expressed connotations of that name, its very history, and through and up into an imaginary sense of its being. Wherever you looked, the literal properties of that past sprung up from the shadowplay of its painterly evoking. And the deeper and wider you looked into the picture, the more three-dimensional and solid were its church spires and its chapel frontages, and the more rounded and perpendicularly thrusting were its chimneys, the more substantial the terraced housing and artisan villas. All that wor
ld of work and ownership and settlement and riches and faith was signalled to the eye by the smoke of its industry and by the smudge of black tip waste on the bumped out curves of the squat hills. In the centre of the frame there was an excavation, inexplicable in any bland reality; a void in which the houses on its rim above were inverted so that they floated as if in a shimmering expanse of water. Outlying lucent greens and tawny ochres yielded to blues and violet hues and the pinks of a dropping dusk. A road climbed, winding and steep, from the clustered townships, wending up and around and across the picture. At the road’s summit, walls and façades were falsities, one brick thick, with glassless windows blown out. An older man, a father perhaps, stood to one side beneath a lamppost that gave no light. A woman, a mother once perhaps, peered out from behind a wall and, in stiff repose, made no gesture of embrace from the fate of her entrapment. Only two lovers, caught between all else but animated, together, seemed to promise still to follow the road out, escaping walls and ruins and the cruciform pole and crossbars of the gas lamp standing sentinel over the slaughterhouse that had been his Glamorgan.

  When he had finished looking back and inwards, he put everything back into the suitcase and carried it downstairs to the warmth and light of his knock-through living room. He sat, perfectly still, in his armchair. He closed his eyes and, with ease, he slept.

  * * * * *

  When he did not answer to her light knock, Bran tried the knob of the unlocked door and let herself in. He was still asleep. On the table in the centre of the room she saw her recorder. She picked it up. She saw that the tape had wound to an end. She switched the tape-recorder’s button to “off” and put the machine in a pocket of her jacket. She placed a bottle of Irish whiskey – Bushmills, his favourite – in the centre of the table. She walked towards him, seeing the small suitcase upright at his feet. She reached down to shake his shoulders, and gave them a gentle push. He stirred and half-opened his eyes. “I let myself in”, she said, as if he required an explanation for her being there. She tapped, with one finger, the tape recorder in her pocket. She said, “I want to thank you. Very much, Dai. For this. And for what you’ve been able to tell me. Thank you.” He appeared startled, dazed from the sleep. She smiled at him and said, bending down to pick up her crumpled questionnaire from the carpet, “And for following instructions, eh?” Bran laughed when she said this bent over and kissed him on his forehead.

  “Look, Bran”, he said, and leaned forward in his chair as she stood up in front of him, “Look, I don’t think I can help you.” She said he wasn’t to be daft. He said that the thing was he was sure he couldn’t say what she wanted – needed – him to say. She shook her head at his foolishness. Her bunched hair swayed around her neck, glinting as blue as it was black as it was caught in the last light of the day. But, he said, she was to have the suitcase – this case, he said – and, if she liked, she could look at the things in it, ask him other questions perhaps, or give it to Billy if he ever came back and if he, himself, had gone. He told her, and he could not hide the catch in his voice, that it was from Mona, for them both, as well as from him. Tired, more than he had felt for a long time, exhausted by effort, he wiped a hand across his eyes. He blinked with their wetness.

  “You’re a lovely old bugger, you know,” Bran told him. “Please, Dai, don’t cry. Not now.” She kneeled before him and held his head between her hands. She stroked his cheek. She put her two hands behind his head and pulled it downwards, towards her. She said, “This is for Billy, eh?”, and moved her face closer and kissed him on his lips, and he raised his head slowly, as if in a dream.

  * * * * *

  In her car, driving back down and out of the valley to the city, she hoped he would have no regrets. He deserved it, she thought. Both him and Billy. In both senses. She had placed the tape recorder on the passenger seat and had pressed the rewind button before she’d set off so that she could listen to the tape as she drove. Now, she pressed the “Play” button, and the sound was of silence, other than the working noise of the machine itself, just a wordless silence. She rewound and pressed “Play” again. Except for the sound of the spools which whirred and whirred beside her, there was only his silence.

  Parthian, Cardigan SA43 1ED

  www.parthianbooks.com

  First published in 2016

  © Dai Smith 2016

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN: e-pub: 9781912109616, mobi: 9781912109609

  Cover images: Ozi Rhys Osmond, The Meeting / Study for the Meeting

  Cover design: Robert Harries

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