A Novel

by Sean Pidgeon

  ‘I am in the drawing room, if you would be so kind as to join me here.’

  Julia follows the sound of the voice into a long bright room at the front of the house, where she finds a tall man hunched over in a wheelchair next to an unsatisfying fire of glowing coals gathered parsimoniously in the middle of the grate. She steps cautiously through the doorway.

  ‘Do please come in. Despite what the good people of Rhayader may tell you, I do not bite.’

  Julia has not seen the Reverend Barnabas for some years, and to her he seems almost shockingly aged. Though he can be no older than his mid-sixties, his deeply lined face has an almost deathly pallor to it, and his hair, which she remembers as black shot through with grey, has turned to pure white. The upper half of his body is enveloped in a thick blue woollen cardigan, the lower half in a tartan blanket that reaches to the floor.

  The events that ruined Stephen Barnabas’s life happened within six months of each other. First came the death of his beloved wife, just a few weeks after Julia’s springtime wedding. Then, in the autumn of the same year, he suffered the terrible accident that maimed him physically and also, according to local opinion, destroyed much of what was left of his belief in God and humankind. Though he returned in due course to his ministry, made some practical working accommodation with his damaged faith, he was afterwards known as an embittered and disappointed man. In Rhayader, on days other than a Sunday, his parishioners would give him a wide berth, for fear of becoming targets of his capricious ire. The word in the pubs and sitting rooms was that he would be best changing sides to the Methodist church, where a righteous anger such as his was in high demand.

  The vicar looks up at Julia through bloodshot grey eyes, his gaze meeting hers only briefly before settling on a point somewhere closer to the floor. There is a faint tremor in his hands as they grip the armrests of his wheelchair. ‘It’s Julia Mortimer, isn’t it? I was very sorry to hear about your father. We had many good conversations in our time, Dai Llewellyn and I.’ His voice is closer to what she remembers, with its familiar tone of Welsh clerical condescension, mellifluous and ponderous, perfected by a lifetime of Sunday-morning oratory. But there is also a fractured quality to it, a sense of something once broken and not fully repaired.

  ‘Yes, he told me about that.’ Julia speaks cautiously, unsure of her ground. ‘He said you were very helpful to him when he first came to Rhayader.’

  ‘As was he to me. I greatly regret that I was not able to officiate at his funeral. I have not been in the best of health, as you may see for yourself.’ A smile flickers across the vicar’s face. ‘But you have not come here to listen to my dreary complaints. What may I do for you? If you’re looking for Ralph, I’m afraid he is not here very often these days.’

  ‘I saw him in town this morning. Actually it was you I wanted to speak to.’

  ‘In which case, kindly do me the favour of sitting down, so that we may at least talk face to face.’ Barnabas waves a hand in the direction of an armchair upholstered with fading red and pink roses. ‘How is Hugh, may I ask? I have not seen him in a very long time.’

  Julia has almost forgotten: the vicar has known Hugh from childhood, since the days when Sir Charles Mortimer still lived at Ty Faenor and brought his grandson to Sunday services at St. Clement’s. It is strangely disorientating now to think of the young Hugh sitting there dutifully in the pews, still so tightly bound up in aristocratic convention and obligation.

  ‘Yes, he’s fine, thank you.’

  ‘I am glad to hear it. Now, will you have some tea? There is a housekeeper somewhere, though I suspect she is upstairs with her nose in a romantic novel. That is her usual occupation when she thinks I’m asleep.’

  ‘Please don’t go to any trouble.’ By now, Julia feels deeply ill at ease. Finding herself at a loss, she glances around the room, takes in the formal, upright furniture, Constable’s Dedham Vale on one wall, Richard Wilson’s Lake Avernus on another, dust-motes spiralling in the sunlight through the tall front windows. She feels trapped in some distant moment in time, a perception reinforced by a polished brass carriage clock sitting unwound on the mantelpiece, stopped at ten to three. Beside it is an intricately carved wooden sculpture; something about it strikes her as deeply familiar.

  ‘Do you recognise the style?’ Barnabas says. ‘Your father made that piece for me many years ago. It depicts the Celtic deities Teutates, Esus, and Taranis. We were arguing about religion—he was not an overly pious man, as you will know—and I think he was trying to make a point about spiritual pluralism. As I recall, his assertion was that the old pagan religions had as much validity in their way as all the accumulated dogma of the Christian church. I suspect, after all, he was right about that, and I wish I might have had an opportunity to tell him so.’

  Julia senses a premeditated quality in the vicar’s telling of this anecdote, as if he is measuring her in some way against her father’s beliefs. ‘How did you first meet him?’ she says, curious now to hear his side of the story.

  The vicar smiles faintly. ‘I remember it very well indeed. Dai turned up one rainy Sunday in my church, not long after he first came to Rhayader. He asked to speak to me afterwards, meaning to contradict what I had said in my sermon about the need to abandon our old enmities with our English neighbours. To me he seemed quite the most interesting man I had met in Rhayader, with a strong intelligence and a head full of wild ideas about Welsh nationhood. I think I saw in him a special challenge to my immature pastoral skills.’

  There is a history here that is half-familiar to Julia, stories she has heard in passing, though she paid little attention to them at the time. ‘My father said you used to stay up talking together late at night.’

  ‘Yes, that’s true. In the years before your mother came on the scene, we would often sit up into the small hours in this very room, deep into a bottle of port and some grand argument over the meaning of the world.’

  A wistful thought comes to Julia now, that she is probably sitting in the same chair her father would have occupied during these long nocturnal debates. ‘I’d like to understand why you fell out with him in the end, when you were once such good friends.’

  Stephen Barnabas gives the faintest of shrugs, as if she is referring to some trifling thing, a regrettable but inevitable circumstance. ‘I suppose there was a natural distance that grew between us over the years. For me, the demands of the church were becoming ever greater, while your father was trying to make a proper go of things out at Dyffryn Farm. And we had our differences from time to time.’

  ‘About the nationalist cause?’

  The vicar’s shifting gaze comes to rest on his hands clasped together in his lap. ‘That was certainly one of our areas of disagreement,’ he says. ‘I had seen what happened in other parts of Wales when the violence came, the terrible divisive bitterness of it, and I did not want the same affliction to visit us here.’

  ‘My father would have agreed with you about that.’ Julia’s statement is blunt, combative. ‘He was passionate about Welsh independence, but he was never a violent man.’

  Barnabas wheels himself a half-step closer to the fire, reaches awkwardly for the poker and uses it to agitate the reluctant fire back into life. ‘Yes, I came to realise much later just how true that was. At first, he was my only real connection to the more militant members of Plaid Cymru, the younger men who would sit there in a corner at the Black Lion on a Friday night, working themselves up into a fervour over the latest English insult. Dai was a calming influence on them—he knew where they had come from, you see, having made the same journey himself. Between us I thought we had the situation well under control, until everything went so very wrong in the autumn after you were married.’

  ‘Because of the Cwmhir dam?’

  ‘Yes, because of the dam, and God knows I was not immune to the feelings that it provoked.’ The grey cat, choosing its moment to enter the room, approaches the wheelchair with the clear intention of jumping up into the vicar�
�s lap. He swipes at it with the poker, startling the poor creature into a hasty retreat. ‘But that was not the worst of it. We might have managed things in our own way, were it not for the rabble-rousers and agitators who descended on Rhayader like carrion-birds after the news about Cwmhir got out.’

  Julia feels calmer now, more in control of the conversation. ‘I heard it was people from Oxford who were behind all the trouble.’

  ‘It was always the academic types who were the worst, forever summoning up the spirit of Owain Glyn Dŵr, as if he could be of any help to us now.’

  An image comes to Julia, Caradoc Bowen holding court in a shadowy corner of the Black Lion pub, his young disciples seated around him: and Hugh there too, hanging on Bowen’s every word. But if Stephen Barnabas is aware of any personal significance for her in his story, his expression does not betray it. ‘You must forgive my melancholic ramblings,’ he says. ‘I am sure this is all much more than you care to hear about.’

  ‘It’s the reason I came here today to speak to you,’ Julia says. ‘I’ve been trying to find out what happened that autumn, but nobody will talk to me about it.’

  ‘That does not surprise me. It may not be an easy story for you to hear.’

  ‘It’s important to me.’

  ‘In that case, I shall do my best.’ A small grimace crosses the vicar’s face as he reaches to set the poker back in its rack, then straightens himself as far as he can in his wheelchair. ‘It was a difficult year for me, in many ways. The first blow came when my wife passed away in the middle of June. That was not so much of a surprise, after all, but still in my grief I became angry and bitter at the unfairness of the world. I hope it does not shock you to hear me say that?’

  ‘I understand you very well, Reverend Barnabas.’

  ‘Yes of course, I am sure that you do. Well, if you can imagine my state of mind at that time, you may also comprehend how I came to misinterpret your father’s good intentions. The town was in a great ferment over the plans for the dam, and something I overheard convinced me that Dai had got himself involved, that the news of this latest English outrage had tipped him back into his old radical way of thinking. So I stood up at St. Clement’s one Sunday morning and spoke out against those who might think a true Welshman should distinguish himself by fighting wanton destruction with random violence. I was looking at your father as I spoke those words, and the entire congregation was watching me. He never forgave me for it.’

  Julia was not in church that day, but she can imagine it well enough for herself, the cool, austere Victorian space, the sidelong glances in the pews, the murmuring and shuffling of feet as the fiery vicar sends down his denunciation upon Dai Llewellyn standing there with an upright but wounded dignity in the front row. ‘What could possibly make you think he would do such a thing?’

  Stephen Barnabas bows his head, clasps his hands together more tightly in his lap; it is an almost theatrical, prayer-like gesture. ‘I blame my own foolishness, nothing more. The rumour was that the militants were very well organised, that there was a secret ring-leader. I had seen your father in animated conversation with some of the younger men, and I drew entirely the wrong conclusion.’

  ‘Caradoc Bowen was the one who was behind it,’ Julia says, quietly. ‘Not my father.’

  ‘Well, it is true that Wales has produced its share of zealous prophets,’ the vicar says, apparently now lost in his own memories. ‘As I look back on those days, I see my actions as a kind of treachery. I suppose you might say the events of the following autumn were a just retribution.’

  ‘That’s what I wanted to ask you about,’ Julia says, emboldened by her indignation on her father’s behalf. ‘I’d like you to tell me what really happened at the engineering works.’

  Barnabas moves a trembling hand to stroke the cat, which through an exercise of extreme stealth has appeared in his lap and curled itself tightly into a ball. ‘It was a brave thing for you to do, to come here and ask me that question, and so I will do you the courtesy of describing the events as I saw them.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Julia says, the anxiety pressing harder on her now, a heavy weight against her chest. ‘I’m sure it can’t be easy for you.’

  A gust of wind sighs in the chimney, briefly raising the fire to a bright orange glow. The cat uncurls just enough to stretch a paw in the direction of this new radiant warmth. ‘It was a cold autumn day,’ the vicar says, ‘very much like today, I suppose. Since losing Angharad back in June, I had fallen into the habit of taking a walk up in the hills in the late afternoon. On this occasion my departure was delayed by some parish business, and so it was almost dark by the time I set out from the house. I decided to make a shorter circuit than usual, out to the north past St. Clement’s, then just a little way up the valley and back again. My route took me past several small engineering firms whose offices were down by the old railway tracks. One of them, Ellis Engineering, had been awarded a contract by the British government to assist in the work on the Cwmhir dam.’

  By now, Stephen Barnabas has settled his attention on a point in the deep distance, out of the window and beyond the garden wall. ‘I remember it quite well, feeling a certain distaste as I came upon the sign on the gate. Despite all my sermonising, I could scarcely be happy about the involvement of our most prominent local businessman in this unfortunate project, not least because Dafydd Ellis was a grasping sort of man without an ethical bone in his body. He’s long gone now, dead of a heart attack, may he rest in peace.’

  ‘What happened after that?’ Julia says, gently.

  ‘Perhaps you already know the rest of the story. It was common knowledge in the town that there were explosives stored in Ellis’s yard, ready for the blasting work at Cwmhir. As you may read for yourself in the report of the official inquiry, it was faulty wiring that caused the accident. All it took was a small electrical spark. I lost my legs in the explosion, traded them in for a piece of metal the size of a penny lodged close to my lower spine. This is why I am as you see me now. But it was better for me than it was for Gwyn Edwards the ironmonger’s boy, who had recently signed on with Ellis as a junior engineer. He had stayed late that day, you see, to catch up on his work. He never stood a chance.’

  ‘Gwyn had a lot of friends in town,’ Julia says, struggling to steady her voice as the memory of it comes back to her. ‘It was hard to believe what happened to him.’

  ‘Yes indeed, and as to why he of all people should have deserved it, all I can suggest to you is that—as William Cowper tells us—God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform.’

  Julia once again has a troubling sense that the truth is slipping from her grasp. ‘There’s one other thing I need to ask you,’ she says. ‘You’ve been honest with me about what happened back then, but I’m wondering why everyone else is still avoiding the subject. My husband—Hugh refuses to talk to me about it. Do you know why that might be?’

  Another grimace crosses Stephen Barnabas’s face, and he reaches a hand to rub at the lower part of his back. ‘I am sorry. It is not your question that causes me pain, though it is a difficult one. If you asked me to guess at the answer, I should say that it is out of loyalty to your family that Hugh prefers not to speak of these events. As you may recall, he came to church a few times in the weeks leading up to your wedding, and he was in the congregation when I foolishly accused your father of stirring up the mood of violence that had fallen on the town. I remember thinking afterwards that I must find a way to speak to Hugh, but I never did so. Perhaps he went away believing that what I said was true.’

  A sound like distant thunder from the upper part of the house resolves itself gradually into heavy footfalls on the stairs. ‘That will be Megan,’ Barnabas says, sucking in his breath through a further spasm of pain. ‘Having finished her novel, no doubt, she has remembered that I still exist. I’m afraid I have been sitting for far too long in this chair. If you don’t mind, perhaps we might continue our conversation another day?’

  As Ju
lia makes her hurried farewell, fragments of failed conversations with Hugh come crowding in in her. I’d rather not talk about it any more. There are some things you just can’t ask me, can you please try to understand? By the time she reaches the front gate of the vicarage, securing it behind her and glancing uneasily back through the trees at the house now restored to its habitual blankness, she has convinced herself that she has recklessly misinterpreted Hugh’s intentions. His silence on the Rhayader bombing has been meant only to protect her, to avoid a discussion that might implicate her father in the attack that maimed the Reverend Stephen Barnabas and took the life of Gwyn Edwards, the ironmonger’s son.

  The Sign of the Black Lion

  DONALD TAKES THE back route out of Hay, urging the Morris through narrow lanes boxed in by hedges as high as London buses. Beyond Llanbedr, the road becomes easier as it drops back down towards the River Wye and the main northerly route to Builth Wells. Taller hills are rising now, pale green with patches of faded bracken turned to purplish brown in the sunshine on the highest slopes. The river is a steady companion on his right-hand side, the dark waters descended from the wilderness of Plynlimon now touched by a gleaming silvery light. Donald drives on with the windows wound down and a half-remembered mythology ringing like a dissonant poetry in his ears. I flew north to Plynlimon Hill, where Cai and Bedwyr sat on a cairn in the strongest wind the world had ever seen. The cool mountain air carries with it the rarefied crying of far-off sheep, countless white dots studded across the improbably steep hillsides.

  Dusk is falling on the banks of the Wye by the time he reaches the long easterly loop of the river that runs beneath the wooded slopes of Gwastedyn Hill on the approach to Rhayader. It is a majestic setting, the small grey market town encircled by sweeping escarpments whose lower slopes shelter dense stands of oak and beech. It was into this high country that Owain Glyn Dŵr fled with his son Maredudd and his closest companions after the fall of Harlech Castle. As Donald looks up towards the higher ground now hidden by a descending layer of cloud, he pictures Glyn Dŵr and his followers climbing up above the trees, higher and higher, until they vanish into the mist.