A Novel

by Sean Pidgeon

  ‘It’s a bit late to be worrying about that, wouldn’t you say?’ Julia’s mother smiles bleakly. ‘In any case, I’m sure there’s not much you don’t already know, one way or another.’

  ‘I’d like to hear it from you. We’ve never talked about it properly before.’

  ‘Well, I’m not quite sure where to start. We had known Hugh from a distance, of course, ever since the days when he used to go to St. Clement’s church with his grandpa in the summertime. And of course your father knew of the family long before Hugh came on the scene. When Dai first arrived here from Llangurig forty years ago, Sir Charles Mortimer had recently passed on the management of the family lands to his son Robert, Hugh’s father. Sir Charles lived out his last years at Ty Faenor, and he was always popular in the valley, but Robert was a different story. He was the English aristocrat through and through, with his beloved Melverley estate and his horses and his cellar full of vintage port. He was obsessed with the Mortimer pedigree, even though his father’s baronetcy went to an older brother who ran away to Australia and never came back. On the rare occasions when Robert did visit Ty Faenor, there was always bad blood with the hill-farmers. They used to call him Sir Robert to his face just to rub salt in the wound. So, with all that family history, we were curious to know which sort of Mortimer your Hugh might turn out to be.’

  ‘And?’ Julia says.

  ‘It was neither one nor the other, of course, but certainly Hugh was a surprise to us. Don’t forget, your father was a hot-headed nationalist in his youth, and now here comes this impressive boyfriend of yours, scion of the ancient Mortimers and obviously a blue-blooded Englishman, whatever else you might have told us about him. But then the first thing Hugh says to us is that he prefers to be thought of as a Radnorshire man. He starts talking to your father about Glyn Dŵr and the nationalist cause, even tries a little Welsh on him. Dai brushed it aside at first, thinking Hugh was just trying to charm him. It was only later that Hugh asked him about making contact with Plaid Cymru.’

  Julia has a disorientating sense of old truths shifting under her feet. ‘I thought Dai had broken off with them years before that?’

  ‘Yes, but the nationalists still had a lot of respect for him. This was just after the plans for the dam were made public, and your father was in Rhayader trying to calm things down. There were a few who wanted to paint it differently, saying he was down there making trouble, but that was all just malicious gossip. It’s what destroyed his friendship with Stephen Barnabas.’

  Reaching back for her own memories of that time, Julia recalls only a vague sense of discord in the town, of plans being made behind closed doors, her father doing his best to keep the peace. Hugh was there too, somehow on the fringes of things. ‘Dai went to a meeting at the Black Lion,’ she says. ‘I was away that day in Hereford with Aunt Nia, shopping for the wedding. Do you remember if Hugh went with him?’

  ‘Yes, they went down there together. I remember Hugh saying there were some Oxford people he wanted to see.’

  Julia feels it again, the old familiar landscape swaying beneath her. ‘I don’t think I knew that.’

  ‘You mustn’t read too much into it.’ Her mother touches a gentle hand on her arm. ‘Hugh was unhappy because of Ty Faenor, which would have gone under the flood, so he went to the meeting to hear what was being said. That’s all there was to it. If you want my advice, love, I would leave it there in the past. It’ll do no good to rake it all up.’

  At last the road drops down a long hill towards the hamlet of Abbeycwmhir. They pass a small cluster of houses, a farm, a pub called the Happy Union where Julia has often been with Hugh, though she has never before been struck by the irony of it. A hundred yards farther on, she parks in front of a small stone church.

  ‘I’d like to walk down to the river,’ Julia says. ‘Will you come with me?’

  ‘No, I’ll stay here, love.’ Cath Llewellyn turns her knowing gaze on her daughter. ‘You don’t need me getting in your way.’

  Julia gets out of the car and heads off along the road to a place where a path leads across a muddy field towards the Clywedog River. A plaque tells the story of the ruined stone walls and pillars that lie scattered across the valley floor, the remains of the medieval Cwmhir Abbey. The simple tranquillity of this place, the magnificence of its isolation, commended it to the wandering Cistercian monks who first came here in the twelfth century. For Julia, it has been a favourite destination since childhood, a safe and peaceful refuge, though it seems a lonely enough place on this cool autumn day. The clouds have begun to break up, showing small shifting scraps of pallid blue sky. On either side, the bare flanks of the hills are patched here and there with rough stands of evergreen trees, like threadbare clothing on an ailing child.

  There was one day, early on, when they all came walking out here together. Hugh and Dai had not seen one another for a long time, not since the old days at St. Clement’s, and she remembers how anxious Hugh was to make a good impression, to find common cause with his future father-in-law. Soon enough they were trading stories of Hugh’s famous English and Welsh ancestors who had owned and destroyed this place, stirring tales of Glyn Dŵr and the failure of his rebellion, his fugitive existence and final disappearance somewhere high up in the surrounding hills. There was a dour intensity in that conversation, but it was also a happy moment for Julia, to see the men in her life so comfortable in one another’s company, so full of mutual respect. Now her world has slipped out of balance, her poor father cold in the ground, Hugh on his own at Ty Faenor, Donald Gladstone cast aside as if he means nothing to her at all.

  From where she is standing, a surviving column of the old ruined abbey frames one edge of the modern farmhouse that lies directly behind it. In the back garden, damp washing is flapping and rippling in the breeze, rows of legs and arms making ghostly disembodied children reaching for the ground. Their alter egos can be heard shouting excitedly inside the house. A thin trail of dark-grey smoke from the chimney thickens a little as somebody stokes the fire within, settling the new day into its familiar comfortable course.

  If things had gone to plan, the engineers would have drowned this valley and everything in it. This was to become another of those places that have been erased from the map of Wales, turned into reservoirs for pure English drinking water. Julia can hear her father’s voice, hoarse with emotion as he described to her the bitter story of Capel Celyn in the Tryweryn valley, where the villagers had to dig up their own dead before abandoning their homes to the incoming flood.

  She turns away and heads back towards the road. Her mother is asleep in the passenger seat of the car. Julia leaves her in peace, continues on to the small stone church. Finding the door open and the interior deserted, she walks into the cool, resonant space, sits on a pew in the back row. She stays there for a while shivering faintly, looking up at the stained glass panels in the chancel windows. Their subjects are familiar to her from childhood: The Good Shepherd, The Crucifixion and Resurrection, I am the Light of the World, The Baptism and Agony in the Garden. But she finds no useful advice written for her there.

  IT IS CARADOC Bowen’s formidable secretary, Mrs. Frayne, who answers Donald’s call to Jesus College. ‘Yes, Dr. Gladstone. I believe the professor is busy, but I will check for you.’

  A minute passes before he is put through. ‘Three waterfalls?’ Bowen says, when Donald has finished his story. His voice on the line is thin and querulous. ‘You are an archaeologist, as I recall. Do you have some proper authority for this conjecture?’

  ‘The suggestion came from a colleague of mine. She’s a Welsh language expert at the OED, Julia Llewellyn.’ Donald feels a small twist of guilt at the thought of her. He was able to reach a colleague of Julia’s at the OED, from whom he learned only that she would be away from the office for a few days. It cannot be helped; he would have spoken to her if he could. ‘I believe you know her husband, Hugh Mortimer.’

  ‘Yes, I know the name.’ There is a pause now, a hiss and
crackle of static. ‘We must go and have a look at this place you have described, as soon as can be arranged.’

  ‘I suggest we meet first in Rhayader, and go on from there.’ It is perhaps a reckless idea, to go to Julia’s home town. Donald remembers too late the story she told him about the violence that happened there, the possible involvement of Bowen’s militant nationalist group, Tân y Ddraig.

  ‘Yes, it is as good a starting point as any,’ Bowen says. ‘There is a respectable inn at Rhayader, the Black Lion. Gareth Williams was the proprietor when I last visited the town, many years ago now. I suggest we meet there—shall we say, next Saturday evening? We can stay overnight at the inn, then drive together into the mountains the following morning.’

  After he hangs up, Donald distracts himself with his preliminary report on the excavations at Amesbury. He asks the switchboard to forward his calls to Tim Watson’s desk, tells Tim to make sure he is not disturbed. The opening sections come easily enough, a summary of the known history and archaeology of the town and its environs, followed by a standard description of the topography and geology of the excavation site. Then comes the crucial process of inventory, every last tarnished scrap of metal to be documented, every sherd of pottery, every sliver of bone. Soon he is working his way laboriously through his detailed field notes, expanding the terse annotations he made on site. Pottery finewares are restricted to three late Romano-British sherds originating in the New Forest (context 103) . . . A fragmentary human skull was recovered from context 104 . . . A brass doorknob c. 1825 was found together with fifteen damaged red clay bricks at the far end of trench 2 (context 205), evidence of late Georgian construction-related infill. It is dull but oddly satisfying work, the minutes ticking comfortably by as he captures for posterity the structure and contents of a muddy Wiltshire field.

  THERE IS A particular quality of Welshness in a Radnorshire house, an unmistakable character that merges architecture and setting in such a way that no one would mistake it for an English dwelling. Ty Faenor, a small seventeenth-century manor house located at the eastern end of the Cwmhir valley, draws so strongly on these qualities that a casual passer-by might scarcely remark on this strongly made, compact stone building, so well does it harmonise with its surroundings. This impression of belonging is heightened by a certain fickleness in the colour of its building stone, which was brought in from the quarries at Llanddulas when it could not be pillaged from the ruins of Cwmhir Abbey. Ty Faenor chooses its moods according to the weather, glowing a rich golden-brown in the sunshine, shading dark and sombre when the clouds move in. The old wood-framed windows have lost any sense of symmetry they may once have had, giving the house a lopsided, watchful expression as it looks out across the fields to the gently rising, tree-clad hills rising on either side of Cwm Cyncoed.

  Julia has the disturbing impression that this curious inanimate scrutiny is focused entirely on her as she walks up to the main entrance of the house. She has always felt a stranger in this place where the weight of Mortimer history lies a little too heavily on the land. It was here in the twelfth century (as Hugh, speaking in a half-apologetic sort of way, is fond of reminding his visitors) that an earlier Hugh Mortimer, Earl of Hereford, drove out the Cistercian monks from their first monastic establishment in the Cwmhir valley. Ty Faenor is Hugh’s perfect retreat, a place he made entirely his own in the years after his father’s death, returning to it some of the dignity it had lost since his grandfather’s day.

  Ordinarily this is a working, bustling farm, though all is strangely quiet now. Julia cannot help noticing something she has not seen before, a creeping dilapidation, repairs not attended to, gates sagging on their hinges, fences in need of a new coat of paint. These small signs of neglect seem to her the symptoms of a gradually spreading sickness, a malaise that is working its way into every human structure on the estate.

  Hugh is there now at the front door, dressed in whatever clothes were to hand, scruffy blue jeans and an old cotton shirt, brown leather boots on his feet with the laces untied. Two day of stubble are showing again on his face. He carries it off with his usual air of untidy elegance; the right kind of smile, Julia thinks, the right turn of phrase, and he might become again the charismatic man she once knew, the man she fell hopelessly in love with in the distant Oxford past.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting you,’ Hugh says. His tone is not unfriendly, but ambiguous; it sets her teeth on edge. ‘I was going to drive over to Dyffryn later on.’

  ‘Can I come in?’ These four simple words are in themselves a confession that any sense of ownership Julia might once have felt here has fallen entirely away.

  Hugh kisses her on the cheek, lays a hand on her shoulder as he guides her gently inside. It seems a finely calibrated gesture, as if rehearsed thoroughly on some imaginary wife, one who is newly bereaved and on the verge of estrangement. He leads her through a narrow entrance hall whose dark beams are gently sagging away from the perpendicular, reinforcing the impression that the house is flowing away downhill.

  ‘Do you mind sitting in here?’ Hugh says, ushering her into the panelled library where an electric heater has been switched on to take the chill out of the air.

  ‘Of course, this is fine. Where is everyone today?’

  ‘Ralph took them up to work on the top fields this morning.’ He makes to follow her into the room, then changes his mind. ‘Give me a few minutes, would you?’

  Julia casts her eye about the library, the tall, mostly empty shelves where the Ty Faenor collection was housed for several hundred years before Hugh donated the manuscripts to the Bodleian. It was Caradoc Bowen who made the arrangements for the removal of the books after the plans for the Cwmhir dam were announced.

  There are several heavy box files marked ‘Mortimer’ lying out on a table, sequentially numbered, full of materials for Hugh’s family history. They are covered with a film of greyish dust. Walking over to a shelf that has been repopulated with books, Julia takes down a volume at random, a collection of early farming photographs published by the Royal Welsh Agricultural Society. The inscription on the flyleaf is written in a graceful old-fashioned script: To Hugh, on his tenth birthday. From his affectionate grandfather, C.J.M. Although she never met Sir Charles Mortimer, her strong impression of him from Hugh’s stories is of a kindly but reclusive man who felt a strong and abiding kinship with this house. It was here that Hugh would visit his grandfather in his last years; and it was here that Sir Charles first explained to Hugh, at the impressionable age of fourteen, that his red-blooded Welsh ancestry drawn from the line of Glyn Dŵr was at least as powerful as his Anglo-Norman Mortimer descent.

  The creaking of the door alerts Julia to Hugh’s return. He has showered and shaved, nicking himself twice on the chin. ‘I’ve just put those books back on the shelf,’ he says. ‘I had them all boxed up and taken off to storage years ago, the ones that didn’t go to the Bodleian.’

  It is a tenuous enough opening, but Julia seizes on it. ‘Because of the dam, do you mean? Could they really have made you abandon the house?’

  ‘Bowen was quite sure of it.’ Hugh looks at her in his steady, unreadable way. ‘When I first met him, he was standing just where you are now. I came into the room to find him scouring the shelves for some book or other. He had discovered the Siôn Cent manuscript here many years before, and he would come back every so often, at my grandfather’s invitation, to see what else he could find. I was only a small boy, and it was terrifying to run into him unexpectedly like that, the way he turned and stared at me.’

  Julia has a feeling that she is being manipulated, set up for some confession or revelation to follow. ‘What made you think of that?’

  ‘I had a telephone call from Caradoc Bowen this morning, out of the blue. Have you spoken to him recently, by any chance?’

  In the long, quiet moment that follows, Julia runs helplessly through the possibilities. It is not hard to see what must have happened. Donald’s conversation with Bowen has somehow raised the g
host of the professor’s long-dead relationship with Hugh. A faint, creeping nausea begins to take hold. ‘Why would I do that?’

  ‘I’m not quite sure, Julia.’ His voice is calm, measured, as if he is making some commonplace observation. ‘Maybe it’s because you can’t leave the past alone, because you want to strip away the disappointing, middle-aged Hugh Mortimer, the one you don’t like so much, to see if you can get back to the much better Hugh from the old days when everything was so much simpler. Am I close to the mark?’

  Julia walks away to the other side of the room. She feels surprisingly self-assured, confident in what she is about say. ‘I haven’t spoken to Bowen since before we were married,’ she says. ‘But since you brought it up, here’s what I think, Hugh. I think you lied to me about what happened in Rhayader that autumn. I think you got yourself caught up in it somehow, despite all your promises to me. On your own, you might have stayed away, but Caradoc Bowen forced you into it. Now I want to know what really happened.’

  Hugh takes half a step towards her. Seeing the competing emotions in his face, she wonders whether he means to reach out for her hand, draw her into some desperate embrace. But he stops himself short, steadies himself, as if correcting a momentary loss of balance. ‘There are some things you just can’t ask me, Julia. Can you please try to understand?’ He lingers there, waiting for her answer, but she has nothing more to say to him.

  DONALD’S WORK ON the Amesbury report is interrupted by the arrival of Tim Watson, hands thrust awkwardly in his pockets. ‘Sorry, boss, I know you didn’t want to be disturbed, but there’s a rather persistent female visitor waiting for you downstairs. Unwelcome, if I had to guess.’