A Novel

by Sean Pidgeon

  ‘I’ve been wondering, though, do you think people really write poetry on their death-beds?’

  ‘Ordinary people do not, I am sure. As Professor Bowen has shown us, however, Siôn Cent was a much deeper mystery than has generally been understood.’

  Abruptly, Gerald Rhys draws the curtain back across the window. Donald takes a last look at the portrait, tries to fix it in his mind, but by now the image of the elusive bard has been lost in the cracks and flakes of the brittle old paint.

  Of Old Welsh Secrets

  THE SIGN ABOVE the window of the ironmongers in Rhayader, Jack Edwards & Son, makes a poignant reminder of the younger Edwards, Gwyn, who would perhaps by now have inherited this business from his father had he not been killed in the explosion at the Ellis engineering works at the age of twenty-two. For Julia, walking past just after opening time on a Saturday morning, it is less a sign over a shop window than the engraved headstone of a tomb.

  She is not surprised to see Ralph Barnabas standing there unkempt in his farmer’s overalls and mud-encrusted boots at the open door of the shop. Gwyn was Ralph’s best friend when they were growing up, and Ralph is often to be found here at the Edwards family shop. He has a dangerous-looking pickaxe in his right hand, holding it as someone else might carry a briefcase or a grocery bag.

  ‘Are you looking to do some damage with that?’ Julia says.

  ‘Maybe, if the right person happens by.’ Ralph’s smile has not much humour in it, the daylight showing up new lines in the reddened, weatherbeaten skin of his face. ‘Short of that, there’s plenty of good Welsh rock needs breaking.’

  Julia reaches for something else to say. ‘How are things at Ty Faenor?’

  ‘You’d have to ask your husband about that.’ Ralph’s shrug is casual, dismissive. ‘He’s sent me away, says he doesn’t need me any more.’

  This is a disturbing thing for Julia to hear, though in a way it is not very surprising. ‘I’m sorry about it, Ralph. I didn’t know.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have, given how it’s only happened yesterday afternoon. We got into an argument, you see, shared a few home truths. It’s been a long time coming.’

  It is more sad than insulting to her, to hear so much bitterness layered into his voice. ‘I wish I could have done something to help.’

  ‘You’re the one who married the man, as I recall.’ Ralph hefts his axe, lifts it over his shoulder. ‘Would you walk with me down to the river? We’ve a few minutes before the rain comes back.’

  The overcast has broken up to form dark shower clouds chased by a brisk north-westerly breeze, mottling the streets in a restless pattern of brightness and shadow. There is a new clarity in the air, buildings and trees glowing faintly as the sun glances across them, thrown back into twilight as the racing clouds cast their dark outlines across the town. They walk to the end of West Street and then to the Rhayader bridge, stop there to watch the rain-swollen river surging over the remains of the once-famous cascade that gave the town its name: Rhaeadr Gwy, falls of the River Wye. The last time she was here with Ralph was on her sixteenth birthday.

  ‘It’s as high as I’ve seen it,’ he says. ‘There’ll be banks overtopped by tomorrow night, with the next storm coming in.’

  Julia finds it almost hypnotic to look down into the dark river water rushing through the arch of the bridge. She searches for the right words to describe the mysterious sound that it makes, the sibilance of a mistuned radio, the hissing of her grandfather’s old gramophone records, the gathered whisperings of a great throng of people: the river telling its old Welsh secrets in a voice that merges almost imperceptibly with the rustling of the wind in the trees. A dead branch is carried through on the flood, making her think of Donald and his sticks thrown into the Trevethey stream. He will be on his way from Oxford by now; she imagines him persuading the Morris along some steep and lonely mountain road.

  ‘It’s beautiful to watch,’ she says.

  ‘Not if it’s your best pasture gone under the flood.’ Julia catches the look on Ralph’s face, just as he casts his eyes to the ground. It is all written there, the feelings he once had for her, the years they have known each other, his disconnectedness from the world she now lives in. At St. Padarn’s primary school in Rhayader, their differentness threw them together early on. They were the two strange kids, always out of the mainstream, Julia with her awkward quirks and precocious insights, Ralph the eternal misfit, rebelling against his father’s impossible standards of virtue and scholarship, the vicar’s wayward son. In time, Julia’s childhood foibles became her greatest gifts, while Ralph could never quite find the right path. What was once a real friendship became a one-sided infatuation, another reason for him to look out with a certain bitterness on a future life whose physical boundaries would be no wider than the Cambrian mountains and the valleys between.

  Ralph shrugs, takes a deliberate step away from the parapet. ‘Would you ask your mother if there’s something I can do for her, up at the farm?’

  ‘Yes, of course I will.’ Ralph has always made an effort to stay in touch with her parents, even after his father fell out with Dai, and she has never thanked him properly for it. ‘I’m sure she’ll be glad of the help.’

  They walk back in a heavy silence to the corner of Bridge Street. Ralph stops there and sets down his pickaxe, makes a play of rubbing his shoulder where the wooden handle has chafed. ‘I’m told there’s Oxford people coming up tonight,’ he says.

  Julia hesitates a moment too long. ‘Where did you hear that?’

  ‘From Jack Edwards. He told me Gareth Williams was bragging about it in the pub. I’m wondering if it’s someone you know.’

  She smiles at him, though the worry is twisting inside her. ‘There are a lot of people in Oxford, Ralph.’

  ‘Bowen’s the name that was given,’ he says, equably enough. ‘Professor Caradoc Bowen. He’s been up this way before, though not many people know it. It was just after you were married, around the time we had that trouble up at Ellis the engineers.’

  The uneasy feeling comes back in full force, solid ground shifting beneath Julia’s feet. She sits down on a small wooden bench at the street corner, bows her head, pulling at a ragged fingernail. Her last conversation with Hugh is still fresh in her mind. ‘How do you think it really happened, Ralph?’

  ‘The explosion, you mean? It was an accident, that’s what my dad will tell you.’ There is something uncomfortable now in the directness of his gaze. ‘I don’t think Dai was behind it, if that’s what you’re asking me, though I can see why some might have believed it.’

  Julia’s world tilts a little further off its axis. ‘Why would you even suggest a thing like that, when you know it’s not true?’

  Ralph picks up his axe, begins to work the pointed end of it into a crack in the paving stones. ‘You should speak to my father. He’s the one who knows the whole story, though I’m not sure he’ll tell it to you.’

  FROM KENTCHURCH, DONALD drives north along the Golden Valley of the River Dore through pleasant, faintly ecclesiastical villages set between undulating lines of pale-green hills. From Abbey Dore to Vowchurch and Peterchurch, the road sweeps him westward to less hallowed ground at Hardwicke, then finally back down to the Welsh border at Hay-on-Wye.

  With time still in hand, he parks close to the site of the old Hay castle and walks into one of the second-hand bookshops for which this Welsh border town has latterly become famous. The shop is comfortably haphazard in its arrangement, its closely spaced shelves making numerous small passageways and cosy reader’s dens, chairs and sofas placed strategically to trap the idle browser. The deep, almost oppressive silence is broken by a persistent mournful whistling that floats out from some hidden recess, It’s a long, long way to Tipperary.

  On the way to the history and archaeology section, Donald finds himself forced to squeeze past an overstuffed armchair in which a rosy-cheeked woman with round tortoiseshell glasses and a knitted Fair Isle cap is turning the pages of an
early edition of Mrs. Beeton, murmuring to herself as she makes various annotations in a small notebook. Just across from her, a youth with scruffy blond hair and sideburns is sipping at something in a thermos flask as he turns casually through the pages of Aesop’s Fables: The Frog and the Ox (‘Self-Conceit May Lead to Self-Destruction’), The Wolf and the Lamb (‘The Unjust Will Not Listen to the Reasoning of the Innocent’). From the untroubled look on his face, it seems that these lessons are not necessarily being taken to heart.

  In his own quiet corner, Donald runs his eye along a shelf of local history books. Near the end of the row, a title catches his eye: Journey Through Wales, by Giraldus Cambrensis. This zealous Welsh churchman and scholar, who lived a generation after Geoffrey of Monmouth, is familiar to Donald as a rare critic of the fanciful histories of his time, especially those encouraged by Geoffrey’s heroic tales of Arthur and Merlin. Giraldus’s famous travelogue is an account of his expedition through the remoter reaches of Wales in the year 1188 with his distinguished travelling companion, Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury. The translation is an old one that Donald has not seen before, made in the 1840s by the Reverend J. A. Giles of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

  He takes it down from the shelf and turns to the preface, in which the essential details of Giraldus’s life and work are described. As he reads, he experiences the familiar pleasing sensation of connectedness that comes from absorbing these words written long ago by one of the foremost Victorian scholars of medieval history. Giles alludes several times to his subject’s preoccupation with Geoffrey, including a quotation from a long commentary by Giraldus that offers some extraordinary new insights.

  I cannot neglect to tell a story I have heard of one Walter Calenius, Archdeacon of Oxford in the time of King Stephen. This Walter, however commendable in some particulars, was remarkable for his insufferable pride and ambition. Finding his archdeaconry at Oxford wanting in respect of worldly riches, he became a fawning creature of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Theobald of Bec, ready to do the archbishop’s bidding in all matters however large or small, in hope of a swift preferment in the English church. Thus it was that he came to make a journey to north Wales at Theobald’s behest, wherein his charge was to travel to the tiny church of Llan-Elwy, itself built on the site of the monastery established by St. Cyndeyrn some six hundred years before our present time, and there to make an inventory of certain saintly relics held at the church since Cyndeyrn’s day. Walter’s audit was required in preparation for the new Cathedral of St. Asaph, to which the relics were eventually to be transferred.

  It is well known that another grasping man of the church, one Geoffrey who was sometime canon of St. George’s in Oxford and archdeacon of St. Teilo’s church at Llandaff, claimed Walter Calenius as his friend and indeed named Walter as the very instrument of the fame and fortune that attended him upon publication of the fabulous history of British kings for which his name is unjustly on the lips of every scholar in Christendom. For it was Walter who brought him a certain ancient book which he had found in the reliquary at Llan-Elwy church, and which Geoffrey duly translated, as he would have us believe, to make his own stirring tale fit for the entertainment of children, claiming for himself the corrupted histories of the bards and dressing them up as the learning of greater men.

  So far was Geoffrey consumed by the cleverness of his own historical inventions that he began in his later years to believe in their authenticity, revering Walter’s book to such a degree that he found himself drawn to the place of its origin. Thus we have seen that Geoffrey aspired to, and was in due course granted by Archbishop Theobald, the bishopric of St. Asaph. Against the common wisdom I have heard, that Geoffrey failed to visit his new see, dissuaded by the wars of Owain Gywnedd and the consequent dangers of travel through the border country, I must now tell the story that was given to me by an aged deacon at Llandaff who was a subordinate of Geoffrey’s in his time at St. Teilo’s. This man’s tale has it that Geoffrey, in a state of vexation knowing himself to be in failing health, set out from Llandaff disguised in the robes of a Cistercian monk and bearing with him his precious book. By travelling between the religious houses under cover of darkness, he hoped in time to make his way safely to his bishopric, which is to be found in the far north of the country. After many hardships, Geoffrey arrived at a small monastery then recently established at a place called in Welsh ‘Cumhyr’ which means ‘long valley’, in the lordship of Maelienydd and yet no more than half-way to his destination. There he was taken to his bed with a paralytic attack from which he sadly did not awake, and the monks not knowing what else to do buried him in their own crypt.

  As Donald reads and rereads Giraldus’s sly and worldly account of the final days of Geoffrey’s life, he finds himself at first struggling to grasp its full significance. This commentary unearthed by the Reverend Giles has since been lost to, or ignored by, the world of Arthurian scholarship. Certainly he has not come across it in his years of studying the works of Geoffrey of Monmouth.

  It is clear enough that Cumhyr is an earlier form of the placename Cwmhir: given the stated location in Maelienydd, part of modern Radnorshire, there seems little doubt of this. According to Caradoc Bowen, Siôn Cent composed the Song of Lailoken in the same valley, while in hiding at Cwmhir Abbey some two and a half centuries after Geoffrey’s time. If Giraldus’s story is to be believed, it would seem to place Geoffrey and his ancient book in closer geographical proximity to Siôn Cent and the book of Cyndeyrn than could otherwise have been imagined.

  Donald sets the book to one side, digs in his bag for his road atlas. Rather than follow Giraldus’s long coastal perambulation of 1188, via St. David’s and Cardigan Bay, he traces a simpler journey up the valley of the River Wye, through the heart of Wales to Builth Wells and then Rhayader. Anxious now to be on the road, he makes his way back out of the labyrinth and rings the bell at the desk.

  The source of the persistent doleful whistling becomes apparent as a large man with his head shaved to camouflage his baldness emerges loudly from a back room. ‘Can I help you, sir?’ he says, wiping his hands on a green towel emblazoned with the red dragon of Wales. A strong strain of north London in his voice belies any close allegiance to this flag.

  Donald hands him Giraldus’s Journey through Wales. ‘Just this, thanks.’

  ‘Not sure I’d recommend it, myself,’ the proprietor says, nevertheless carefully checking the price in the front of the book before taking Donald’s five-pound note and making change from a small wooden drawer. ‘Wales, that is.’ He underlines this emphatic statement with a westerly jerk of his thumb, alluding to the Celtic wilderness on whose very edge his cosy establishment is perched: a latter-day Barliman Butterbur at the Prancing Pony. ‘Between you and me, mate,’ he says, lowering his voice conspiratorially, ‘I’d always think twice before trusting a Welshman.’

  ‘I’ll try to remember.’ Donald smiles agreeably, takes his book in its brown-paper bag and raises his hand in farewell as he heads for the door.

  THE INTERTWINED HISTORIES of the Barnabas and Llewellyn families are very much in Julia’s mind as she forces open the front gate of the vicarage past the mass of ivy that threatens to overwhelm it. From the time she first set eyes on this house as a seven-year-old girl at St. Padarn’s junior school across the road, she has thought of it as a remote, even a frightening place. Some of its mystique in those days no doubt derived from the exalted status of the Reverend Dr. Stephen Barnabas, vicar of Rhayader parish, who was as unapproachable to a child as should be expected in a distinguished member of the Welsh clergy. The intimidating aura of the house was compounded by the common knowledge amongst the schoolchildren that the vicar’s wife, who was never seen in public, suffered from a debilitating illness that confined her to a room upstairs in the east wing. It was generally supposed that she shared her solitude with the aged and equally elusive Uncle Hywel Barnabas, a highly accomplished church organist who was said to have been driven to the edge of madness by his wa
rtime experiences in the Welsh Guards. Certainly the young Ralph Barnabas was never known to speak of what it was like to live at the vicarage in those days.

  An overgrown front path leads alongside a neglected shrubbery to a gap in a screen of tall conifers, beyond which the house comes fully into view. It is a large Victorian structure built of red brick with a white stucco facing, tall and elegant windows on the lower floors and a row of small dormers on the top floor suggesting cramped, poorly lit bedrooms once intended for a household staff. Julia reads a sadness in its expression, the loneliness of a once-bustling residence now fallen on solitary times. She grips the lion’s-head knocker, raps on the front door, counts twenty heartbeats as she waits. She knocks again, listens for any sign of life, reaches twenty again before turning away.

  Her disappointment is tempered by her sense of relief at avoiding what would have been a difficult conversation. At one time, Stephen Barnabas was a close friend of her father’s, though their relationship was later damaged beyond repair. As Dai told the story, the vicar was the first man to notice him when he came to Rhayader from Llangurig, a lost sheep in search of a new fold. A quarter of a century later, it was the Reverend Barnabas who presided over Julia and Hugh’s wedding ceremony at St. Clement’s church. That was also the year in which the Barnabas family was visited twice by tragedy.

  ‘The door is open, please let yourself in.’ This hoarsely delivered command comes faintly through an open window, just as Julia is walking away. She does as she is told, turns the door handle and walks uneasily through to a dim, draughty hallway. There is an impression of faded yellow and brown, the sweet and musty smell of apples and old newspapers. The Persian rugs on the floor are tired and worn, the peeling wallpaper now only faintly advertising its once-charming floral design. A thin grey cat emerges from some nook or cranny, yawns and stretches itself, jumps lightly up to a sun-drenched window-sill.