A Novel

by Sean Pidgeon

Donald can hardly deny the already admitted connection. ‘Not exactly. We’re working together on an archaeological project.’

  Barnabas strikes a match, brings it up to the remnant of a hand-rolled cigarette, eyes narrowing as he inhales, then blows a stream of smoke out to one side. ‘Here in Rhayader?’ There is a note of disbelief in his voice.

  ‘Up in the mountains. We’re looking for a late medieval battle-site that has been lost to the historical record.’ It is a calculated risk, a touch of condescension, not too much.

  Another long pull on the cigarette, which is soon reduced to a small glowing nub. ‘I’m wondering whether you might have been here with the professor when he last came to Rhayader?’

  This feels like dangerous ground, but something in Ralph Barnabas’s line of attack makes Donald want to see where the conversation might lead. He has not forgotten about the explosion at the engineer’s office, the rumour that Bowen’s militant students were behind it. ‘I’ve only known Caradoc Bowen for a few weeks,’ he says.

  ‘But I assume you knew about him before that, what he did in the past?’

  The chess game continues, thinking two moves ahead. ‘I read a book of his a long time ago. I have a copy with me, if you’d like to see it.’ Donald reaches into his bag, takes out the familiar slim blue volume: Notes on the Welsh Rising by C. H. R. Bowen. ‘It’s a history of the rebellion led by Owain Glyn Dŵr in the early fifteenth century. This has been Bowen’s particular area of research.’

  Gareth Williams comes up next to them, a greasy cloth in his hand. ‘Not quite your cup of tea, is it, Ralph, all this rising up against the English?’

  Barnabas drains the last of his beer, gives Williams a look that borders on disgust. ‘Good luck to you,’ he says, nodding in Donald’s direction, then strides out of the pub without a backward glance.

  After he has gone, Gareth Williams lays a familiar hand on Donald’s arm. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, Ralph doesn’t like me very much. He wouldn’t normally be seen dead drinking here, but he was hoping to catch sight of Caradoc Bowen.’

  ‘Why should he care?’

  ‘There’s a long story.’

  ‘I’d like to hear it.’

  Williams gestures peremptorily at the barmaid. ‘Olwen, a refill for our guest, please.’ She draws another pint, pushes it back along the bar, and Williams leads the way to a table in the far corner, draws up a pair of straight-backed wooden chairs and gestures for Donald to sit. ‘Now then, perhaps you knew they were once planning to put a dam across the Cwmhir valley, just out there to the north-east of town, to collect drinking water for the city of Birmingham. Some people thought it wasn’t worth drowning a piece of Wales for that, so they decided to make a bit of noise to try and stop it.’

  ‘I heard about that, the bombing at the engineering works. It all seems a long way in the past.’

  ‘That’s not what Ralph would say. It was his best friend who was killed, and his father, the vicar of St. Clement’s, who had his legs blown off. Just after his mam died, too.’ By now, Gareth Williams is leaning in close, speaking in a low conspiratorial voice. There is a stale smell on his breath. ‘It was officially called an accident, the Reverend Barnabas made sure of that.’

  ‘I’m not quite sure I follow you.’

  ‘He saw who did it, you see. At least, that’s what he said when he first woke up in hospital, though he wouldn’t let on who it was. Ralph was standing there at his bedside when he said it. But Stephen Barnabas is a headstrong man. He told the inquiry something different, claimed he hadn’t seen anyone after all, said it was down to his delirious state of mind after the accident. Now, if you’re thinking that’s maybe a little too convenient, you’d be quite right, but in the end they had to believe the sworn testimony of a man of the church.’

  ‘He could have been telling the truth,’ Donald says. ‘I’m not sure why he would choose to lie about a thing like that.’

  ‘Well, as to his reasons for it, you can decide for yourself, because he’s never going to tell you in this life. There was nobody in the whole of Radnorshire who wanted the dam, except perhaps Dafydd Ellis who was going to get rich from it, but after that there wasn’t much agreement on what to do about it. A great sharp wedge was being driven through the town, the militants against the pacifists, and Stephen Barnabas made it his duty to stop that if he could.’

  Donald says nothing for a moment, picks up his beer glass and examines the contents. ‘So where does Bowen come into the story?’

  ‘He was here with us at the Black Lion. We’ve always had a great respect for Professor Caradoc Bowen in this establishment.’

  ‘That doesn’t quite answer the question, though.’

  The familiar hand is back on Donald’s forearm. ‘Let me put it to you this way,’ Williams says. ‘I am sorry for what happened to Gwyn Edwards and Stephen Barnabas, and I’m not the one to say it was a sacrifice worth making, though some might be entitled to that opinion.’

  Donald pulls his arm away, keeps a tight hold on his patience as he contemplates this strange and almost recklessly plain-speaking man. He is aware that he is being goaded, provoked into some statement he might regret. ‘Why should you think it was the bombing that halted the building of the dam?’ he says. ‘It didn’t stop them at Tryweryn.’

  The half-sneering smile returns to Gareth Williams’ face. ‘You are quite correct, Dr. Gladstone,’ he says, the melody gone from his voice. ‘The bombing at Tryweryn did not stop them drowning the valley, and with it the ancient village of Capel Celyn. Perhaps that is why some bold Welshmen decided it must never happen again. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve some things I need to take care of.’ With this he goes on his way, humming a sombre evening tune. He disappears through a door at the back, leaving Donald to hope fervently that he will not return.

  By ten o’clock, the bar is almost empty, the regulars having mostly finished up and shambled off for home. With nobody left to serve, the barmaid is perfunctorily washing glasses and setting them out to dry. ‘Were you expecting someone?’ she says, with a knowing look and a surprising hint of sympathy in her voice.

  ‘Yes, or at least I thought I was.’ Donald pretends to shrug off his disappointment, picks up his bag and coat and heads for the back staircase. ‘In case anyone happens to be looking for me before closing time, would you please come and find me? I’ll be in my room, catching up on some reading.’

  The floorboards squeak loudly underfoot as he turns the corner at the top of the stairs, treads along the corridor, opens his door and switches on the light. The unshaded bulb impinges harshly on a pale blue bedspread, pink floral wallpaper pasted around the difficult angles of the room. There is a strong smell of lilac and mildew. The curtains have been drawn as far as they will go across the small square window, the narrow gap between them admitting the twinkling illumination of a nearby street lamp. Donald lies down on the bed, staring up at the complex pattern of discoloured stains and cracks on the plaster ceiling, thinking about Julia and what happened at Tintagel. The stolen kiss on the bridge seems long faded into history, an event belonging to some other age of the world. He reaches for the yellow message slip in his coat pocket, sees Tim Watson’s handwriting there and the number for Dyffryn Farm. He might ask to use the telephone downstairs; but it seems too late to call, and in the end he settles on the most straightforward explanation, that Julia has decided not to come.

  For now, he diverts himself by unfolding his father’s geological map. His eye is drawn straight away to a small area outlined in red at the left-hand edge of the map, and the Welsh placename, Rhëydr y Tair Melltith, Three Devil Falls. It is as remote a location as anyone could hope for, very hard to approach by road. He takes out his atlas, opens it to the pages showing central and southern Wales. With pencil in hand, he begins to trace out the most likely route.

  By ten-thirty, he has lost all hope that Julia will come. Still not quite tired enough to sleep, he turns on the bedside lamp, pulls the cord above his head
to switch off the main light, then props himself up on the bed with the two thin pillows behind him. Once settled in modest comfort, he reaches for the book he found at Hay-on-Wye, Giraldus Cambrensis and his irreverent account of his great Welsh journey with his fellow traveller, Archbishop Baldwin. Giraldus provides the good company he is hoping for, the pages turning surprisingly easily until he reaches a passage in which the author, while describing a reluctant crossing of a particular mountainous tract, makes a reference that chills him to the bone.

  A grave-digger at Tregaron told us of a vale which is known to the locals as the thrice-accursed falls on account of the triple cascade that is to be found in its lower reaches. This man shared with us his grandmother’s tale, that the valley is haunted by the magic of the ancient Britons, and that we should climb up there at our peril. We readily dismissed this superstition as a harmless blasphemy, making sure meanwhile to choose another route through the mountain passes.

  Donald keeps on reading, trying not to think too hard about the timeless grievances of the old British gods, until the words finally begin to blur as alcohol and exhaustion do their work.

  HUGH IS THERE in the kitchen at Dyffryn Farm when Julia gets back from Rhayader, sitting in the corner chair with the newspaper and a glass of sherry in his hand while her mother busies herself at the stove. She stops in the doorway, says hello to him as if it were an ordinary day at home, and it seems to her that this is a dream-like scene, twisting sharply away from reality.

  ‘It’s been a while since we had a proper dinner together,’ Cath Llewellyn says with a spirited smile as they take their places at the long oak table. ‘There’s no need for us to stop eating, just because Dai’s not with us.’

  Julia does her best to play along with her mother’s conceit. She can tell that Hugh is trying hard. He has brought a bottle of old claret rescued from the cellar at Ty Faenor after the recent flood, and now offers this as an accompaniment to her mother’s improvised pot-roast. But she shakes her head when he offers to pour her a glass.

  ‘I need to drive into town later on,’ she says, trying not to look at the clock. Her mother notices the gesture, grimaces at her, a small emphatic warning.

  ‘I could give you a lift, if you like?’ Hugh says, innocently enough.

  She does not repeat the thought that comes to her first, that he has already been drinking, that his father and mother were killed when they drove off the side of a road into a disused quarry in the Malvern hills. ‘It’s all right, there’s no need.’

  ‘Who are you going to see?’

  Cath Llewellyn comes to her daughter’s rescue. ‘We’re both going, actually. Olwen Williams has asked us down for a drink later on at the Black Lion. Perhaps you’d like to join us?’

  It is a gamble, but a measured one. Hugh’s antipathy to Gareth Williams’ daughter goes back many years, to the time when he tried to kiss her behind the bar when she was fifteen, and she slapped him hard in the face. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he says, and to Julia he seems suddenly defeated, recognising the conspiracy that is at work against him.

  Still he goes through the motions, and the dinner takes the time it takes, an hour and a half ticking by. Hugh drinks the wine on his own, telling them about his grand plans for Ty Faenor, how he needs to spend more time there to keep the place up. Julia sits mostly silent, thinking this is a strange state they have come to, pretending to have a conversation just because her mother is in the room.

  When they have finished and he is getting ready to leave, she goes to the front door with him. ‘There is one thing I wanted to ask you,’ she says, her resentment edging towards bitterness. ‘Why would you think it would be the right thing to do, to say nothing to me about my father’s involvement in the Rhayader bombing?’

  He looks at her in his cool, measured way. ‘You’ve got it all wrong, Julia.’ There is a kind of sincerity in his voice, a well-practised authenticity made more plausible by the wine he has drunk. But then something in his expression changes, the veneer of composure falls away. ‘If you can’t find a way to change the subject, perhaps you had better not speak to me at all.’

  Julia can tell he regrets these words as soon as he has spoken them, but she cannot help thinking this is the only genuine thing she has heard from him all evening. ‘Drive carefully,’ she says. ‘You’ve had far too much to drink.’ She waits there on the doorstep as he walks back to the Land Rover, starts it up and drives slowly away down the hill.

  Her mother is waiting for her in the front room. ‘It seems to me he’s doing his best, Julia.’

  ‘You’re not the one he’s lying to, Mam.’

  ‘In which case, we’ve all been guilty of the same crime this evening. Maybe you’ve already forgotten, I had to tell a lie on your behalf.’

  Julia feels the full sharp sting of this rebuke. ‘You’re right, and I’m sorry. But I said I would be there, and I’m late, so I had better go.’

  She drives too fast, fifteen minutes door to door in the pouring rain, pulls up at the side of the road a little way short of the Black Lion. There is a dim light on in the back room, where Gareth Williams, long separated from his wife, will hopefully by now have curled himself up on the sofa with his bottle of brandy and the Saturday-night film. Despite Gareth’s long and loyal friendship with her father, Julia has never quite been able to bring herself to like him. From the earliest days, when she first went to the Black Lion as a teenager and he knowingly introduced her to the young Hugh Mortimer, she has felt him looking over her shoulder, watchful and proprietorial, passing judgment on her every move. He is the very last person she wants to see when she walks through the door of the pub. She leaves the wipers running for a few seconds, watching as they continue to sweep away at the glinting watery scene, then turns off the engine, gets out and runs to the door of the pub.

  Olwen Williams is on her own behind the bar. She is an old friend, someone Julia has known her whole life. A few months earlier, she moved back here with her young family, and has now taken over the daily running of the place. ‘Well now, here’s a pretty thing the cat’s dragged in.’ She is diffident as always, but on the edge of a smile. ‘How are you and your mam getting along at the farm?’

  ‘Well enough, I suppose. Olwen, did you happen to see—’

  ‘Did I happen to see an attractive man sitting here waiting for you for two hours? And being driven to distraction by my dear father, who grabbed on to him like a leech? Yes, I did. He’s given up and gone to his room, half an hour ago now. He said to go and fetch him, though, if you got here before closing time.’

  IN DONALD’S DREAM, someone keeps knocking on the outside of his head. It is Mrs. Carwyn, at Trevethey Mill, telling him he has a visitor downstairs. He hears the knocking again, and now he is wide awake and on his feet and Julia is there at the door of his room. She looks a little breathless and quite lovely, it seems to him, with the colour in her cheeks and her hair damp from the rain.

  ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ He ushers her inside, closes the door behind her.

  ‘I’m very late, I’m sorry. Were you asleep?’

  ‘No—well, yes. I couldn’t stay awake. I was trying to read my book.’ He stoops to pick up Giraldus, fallen to the floor in a mess of open pages, sets the book down on the bedside table.

  Julia smiles at him in her half-satirical way, but she seems tentative, unsure of herself. ‘Do you mind if I stay and talk for a while?’

  ‘You can have the chair, if you like.’

  She takes off her coat, hangs it on the hook on the door, then sits down in the small wooden chair in the corner of the room. She runs her hands through her hair, pushes it back from her face. ‘You must think me very selfish.’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Because I ran away from you at Tintagel. Because I didn’t call to tell you what had happened.’

  ‘It’s in the past now. I don’t think you had much choice.’

  ‘No, but it isn’t your fault
that my father died, and my husband came looking for me.’

  The statement falls awkwardly, though Donald knows what she means to say. He smiles, tries to make light of it. ‘I knew you were married. Why should I have been surprised?’

  They fall into silence, Julia staring down at her fingernails. When she looks up at him again, she seems very close to tears. ‘It has all been very unfair to you. That’s what I wanted to tell you.’

  It crosses Donald’s mind that she need not have come quite so far, just to say this. In any case, there is nothing to be gained from continuing the conversation. He reaches for a change of subject. ‘Your mother said you were going to get in touch with Caradoc Bowen.’

  ‘I picked him up at the station this afternoon,’ she says, shrugging in a faintly apologetic way. ‘He invited me to come with you tomorrow.’

  It is hard to understand why she would have gone to meet Bowen, but Donald decides to let it pass. He picks up the geological map from the floor and spreads it out on the bed. ‘I can show you where we’re going, if you like.’ She comes over to sit next to him as he traces out the route. ‘I’m guessing it’s about two hours’ drive, if we’re lucky, although the last part looks a bit difficult.’ He runs his finger along the line of an unmade track next to a small river that comes down from the mountains. ‘It’s probably one of the old drovers’ roads, which were once used to drive livestock down from the hills and on to the lowland markets. They often followed the course of much older paths, ancient greenways that have been travelled since prehistoric times. My father and I once—’

  It is the faintest of touches on Donald’s arm that stops him in mid-sentence. ‘There’s something I want you to know,’ Julia says.

  ‘What is it?’ he says, confused by her sudden intensity.

  ‘I think my marriage is over.’

  He cannot think of the right thing to say. ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  She lays her hand on top of his. ‘So we don’t keep misunderstanding each other.’